sofa in there, Roe, the one where he sits to watch television, and he’s just all… he’s… and Mama is upstairs in the guest bedroom on the floor by the bed.”
I held her as tightly as I could and she bent and clung to me.
“I shouldn’t have had to see them like that,” she whispered.
“No.”
Then she lapsed into silence.
I had to call the police.
I stood up like an old woman, and I felt like one. I turned to face the door Lizanne had shut behind her, and reached out like someone in a dream and opened it.
There was blood everywhere, sprayed in trails across the wall. Lizanne was right; blood on the walls. And the ceilings. And the television set.
Arnie Buckley was visible from the front door, which opened opposite the doorway into the den. I supposed it was Arnie. It was the right size and was lying in Arnie’s house, on his couch. His face had been obliterated.
I wanted to scream until someone knocked me out with a good strong shot. Nothing would get me to set one foot further into this house. More than I ever wanted anything, I wanted to walk back across the street, get in my car, and leave without looking back. It seemed I was always opening doors to look at dead people, hacked people, beaten people. I managed to shut this door, this white-painted suburban front door with the brass knocker, and as I plodded across the Buckleys’ lawn to the nearest neighbors, I looked longingly at my Chevette.
I couldn’t face calling myself, and I can’t remember what I said to the lady next door. I only know that I plodded back to sit by Lizanne on the steps.
She spoke once, asking me in bewilderment why her folks had been killed. I told her, honestly, that they’d been killed by the same person who’d killed Mamie Wright. I hoped she wouldn’t ask me why it had to be her parents. Her parents had been picked because she had been named Elizabeth, because she was unmarried, because her “Mama” was not really her mama by blood. This was the pattern of Lizanne’s life that loosely fit the Fall River, Massachusetts, murders; the murders committed in 1893 in an ugly, inconvenient, atmospherically tense home in a middle-class neighborhood, almost certainly committed by Mr. Andrew Borden’s younger daughter, Lizzie.
But I don’t think Lizanne ever heard anything I said, and that’s just as well. I kept my arm around her so something human and warm would be there, and the smell continued to sicken me. I continued to do it because it was all I could do.
Jack Burns got out of the squad car that pulled up on the lawn. He actually had a doctor with him, a local surgeon, and I found out later that they’d been having lunch together when the call came. The doctor looked at Lizanne, at me, and hesitated, but Jack Burns stepped around us and gestured his friend into the house. The sergeant of detectives looked inside and then looked down at me with burning eyes. I was not the object of this look, just in its path. But it scorched me, the fury in those dark eyes.
“Don’t touch anything! Be careful how you walk!” he ordered the doctor.
“Well, of course, he’s dead,” came the doctor’s voice. “If you just need me to pronounce him dead, I can sure do that.”
“Any more?” Burns spat at me. He could see Lizanne wouldn’t answer, I suppose.
“She said her stepmother is dead, upstairs,” I told him very quietly, though I don’t think Lizanne would have heard me if I’d screamed it.
“Upstairs, Doc!” he ordered.
The doctor probably trotted right up, but I wouldn’t have gone with him if a gun had been at my head.
“Dead up here, too,” he called down the stairs.
“Then get your ass out of there and let us go over this house,” Burns said violently.
The doctor trotted out the door and after thinking for a moment, simply walked down the street. He was not about to ask Jack Burns for a ride back to the restaurant. Burns went inside but I could not hear him walking over the wooden floor. He must be standing, looking. At least he pushed the door partly closed behind him so there was something between me and the horror.
Police cars were pulling up behind Burns’s, the routine about to begin. Lynn Liggett got out of the first one. She immediately began giving orders to the uniformed men who spilled out of the next car.
“How did you happen to be here?” Lynn asked without any preliminaries.
“Did you call an ambulance yet for Lizanne?” I asked. I was beginning to shake off my lethargy, my odd dreaminess.
“Yes, there’s one on the way.”
“Okay. I was just driving to work. She came out of the front door like this. She spoke to me a little and then I opened the door and looked in. I went next door to call the police.”
Lynn Liggett pushed open the door and looked in. I kept my eyes resolutely forward. Her fair skin took on a greenish tinge and her lips pressed together so hard they whitened.
The ambulance pulled up then, and I was glad to see it, because Lizanne’s face was even waxier, and her hands were losing coordination. Her breathing seemed irregular and shallow. She was leaning on me heavily by the time the stretcher came up to the front steps, and she didn’t acknowledge the presence of the ambulance drivers. They loaded her on the stretcher with quick efficiency. I walked by her down to the street, holding her hand, but she didn’t know I was there, and by the time the stretcher was pushed into the back of the ambulance she seemed unconscious.
I watched the orange and white ambulance pull away from the curb. I didn’t suppose I could leave. I rested on the hood of Lynn’s car for what seemed like a long time, staring aimlessly ahead and thinking of as little as possible. Then I became aware Lynn Liggett was beside me.
“There’s no question of Lizanne being blamed, is there?” I asked finally. I fully expected the detective to tell me to get lost and it was none of my business, but something had mellowed the woman since last I’d seen her. We had shared something terrible.
“No,” Detective Liggett said. “Her neighbor says she heard Lizanne hammer on the back door and then she saw her walk around to the front and unlock the house, something so unusual that the neighbor already considered calling the police. It would take more than seven minutes to do that and clean up afterward. And it’s fairly easy to see that her folks had already been dead about an hour by the time she got there.”
“Mr. Buckley was due to come in to work at the library today at 2:00, and we were going to share night duty tomorrow night,” I said.
“Yes, it’s written on the calendar in the kitchen in the house.”
For some reason that gave me the cold shudders. Her job included looking at dead people’s calendars while they lay right there in their own blood. Appointments that would never be kept. I revised my attitude about Lynn Liggett right then and there.
“You know what this is just like.”
“The Borden case.”
I jerked my head around to look at her in surprise.
“Arthur’s inside,” she explained. “He told me about it.”
Arthur came out of the house then, with that same whitey-green pinched look Liggett had had. He nodded at me, not questioning my presence.
“John Queensland-from Real Murders?” I said. Arthur nodded. “Well, he’s a Borden expert.”
“I remembered. I’ll get in touch with him this afternoon.”
I thought about the sweet old couple I’d seen having a good time at the restaurant the night before. I thought about having to tell the Crandalls their best friends had been hacked to death. Then I realized I should tell the detectives where I’d seen the Buckleys last night, in case for some reason it was important. After I’d explained to Arthur and Lynn, and Lynn had written down the Crandalls’ names and the time I’d seen them the previous evening, I wanted to reach over to Arthur, pat or hug him, establish warm living contact with him. But I couldn’t.
“It’s the worst thing I hope I ever see. They really don’t look much like people anymore,” Arthur said suddenly. He shoved his hands in his pockets. It was up to his fellow detectives to help him over this one, I realized. I was excluded from this bad moment, and truly, I was thankful.
I thought of a lot of things to say, but they were futile things. It was time for me to go. I got in my car and without considering what I was doing, I drove to work. I went to tell Mr. Clerrick that our volunteer wouldn’t be
