Trixie came in, took off her red-and-white striped robe, and stepped trustfully into the tub without even testing the temperature of the water.
"Mademoiselle, the bath is yours," he said, going to the door. "Daddy, when Charley drowned in the swimming pool, did he stand on his feet on the bottom, too?"
"I don't know, honey, I wasn't there."
"Sure you were there!" she said, her blond eyebrows scowling suddenly.
"Well, I couldn't see under the water," Vic replied.
"Didn't you push him down feet first?"
"Well, I—I don't think I even 'touched' the man!" Vic said, half joking and half serious.
"Sure you did! Janey says you did and so does Eddie and Duncan and—and Gracie and Petey and everybody I know!" "Good lord, really? Why, that's terrible!"
Trixie giggled. "You're kidding me!"
"No, I'm not kidding you," Vic said seriously, realizing that he had often kidded her in this manner, however. "Now, how do your little friends know this?"
"They heard it."
"From whom?"
"From—their mothers and daddies."
"Who? All of them?"
"Yes," Trixie said, looking at him the way she did on those rare occasions when she told lies, because she didn't believe what she was saying and wasn't at all sure that he would.
"I don't believe it," Vic said."Some of them. Then you kids pass it all around." You shouldn't do that, he wanted to say, but he knew that Trixie wouldn't obey, and he didn't want to sound, either to her or to himself, frightened enough to admonish her about the story.
"They all ask me to tell them how you did it," Trixie said.
Vic leaned over and turned off the water, which was nearly up to Trixie's shoulders. "But I didn't do it, darling. If I'd done it I'd be put in prison. Don't you know that? Don't you know that killing somebody is punishable by death?" He spoke in a whisper, both to impress her and because Melinda might have been able to hear them from the hall, now that the water was turned off.
Trixie stared at him with serious eyes for a moment, then her eyes slurred off, very like Melinda's, in the direction of her sunken diver. She didn't want to believe that he hadn't done it. In that little blond head was no moral standard whatsoever, at least not about a matter as big as murder. She wouldn't so much as steal a piece of chalk from school, Vic knew, but murder was something he saw it or heard of it in the comic books every day, saw it on television at Janey's house, and it was something exciting and even heroic when the good cowboys did it in westerns. She wanted him to be a hero, a good guy, somebody who wasn't afraid. And he had just cut himself down by several inches, he realized.
Trixie lifted her head. "I still think you drowned him. You're just telling me you didn't," she said.
The next afternoon, Vic and Trixie bought a male boxer puppy for $75 from the kennel on the East Lyme road. The puppy had just had his ears clipped, and they were fastened together with a bandage and a piece of adhesive tape that stood up a little above his head. His pedigree name was Roger-of-the-Woods. It pleased Vic very much that Trixie had singled Roger out from the other pups mainly because of the lugubrious expression on his small, monkeylike face, and because of his bandage. At the kennel, he had bumped his ears against something twice, yelped, and his face had looked sadder than ever. Trixie rode home with the puppy in her lap and her arm around his neck, happier than Vic had ever seen her at any Christmas.
Melinda stared at the dog and might have made an unpleasant remark if she had not seen that Trixie was so delighted with him. Vic found a big cardboard box in the kitchen that would do for a bed, cut it down to ten inches deep and cut a door in one side for the puppy to walk through. Then he put a couple of Trixie's baby coverlets in the bottom and set the box in Trixie's room.
Vic had bought packages of dog biscuits and baby cereal and cans of a certain kind of dog food prescribed by the kennel man. The puppy had a good appetite, and after he had eaten that evening he wagged his tail and his expression seemed a little more cheerful. He also played with a rubber ball that Trixie rolled around on the floor for him.
"The house is beginning to take on some life," Vic remarked to Melinda, but there was no answer.
Chapter 18
Vic and Melinda went to another dance at the club in November, the "Leaf Night" dance that yearly celebrated autumn in Little Wesley. Vic had not wanted to go when the club's invitation had arrived, but this attitude had lasted hardly more than fifteen seconds. It was the right thing to do to go, and Vic did usually try to do the right thing in the community. His first negative reaction to the club announcement had been caused by two or three factors, he thought: One was that the relationship between him and Melinda had been so much better at the time of the Fourth of July dance and he did not want to contrast the present with that happier period four months ago. Secondly, he was deep in the perusal of a manuscript in Italian—or rather a Sicilian dialect—which he was devoting all his evenings to and from which he did not wish to be
