'So?'
'Say what you like, but you can't convince me that a jury box of poverty-level Vermonters would have the remotest bit of pity for four college students on trial for murdering one of their neighbors.'
'People in I lampden have been hoping tor years that something like this would happen,' said Francis, lighting a new cigar ette off the end of the old one. 'We wouldn't be getting off on any manslaughter charges. We'd be lucky if we didn't go to the chair.'
'Imagine how it would look,' Henry said. 'We're all young, well educated, reasonably well off; perhaps most importantly, not Vermonters. And I suppose that any equitable judge might make allowances for our youth, and the fact that it was an accident and so forth '
'Four rich college kids?' said Francis. 'Drunk? On drugs? On this guy's land in the middle of the night?'
'You were on his land?'
'Well, apparently,' said Henry. 'That's where the papers said his body was found.'
I hadn't been in Vermont very long, but I'd been there long enough to know what any Vermonter worth his salt would think of that. Trespassing on someone's land was tantamount to breaking into his house. 'Oh, God,' I said.
'That's not the half of it, either,' said Francis. 'For Christ's sake, we were wearing bed sheets. Barefoot. Soaked in blood.
Stinking drunk. Can you imagine if we'd trailed down to the sheriff's office and tried to explain all that'?'
'Not that we were in any condition to explain,' Henry said dreamily. 'Really. I wonder if you understand what sort of state we were in. Scarcely an hour before, we'd all been really, truly out of our minds. And it may be a superhuman effort to lose oneself so completely, but that's nothing compared to the effort of getting oneself back again.'
'It certainly wasn't as if something snapped and there we were, our jolly old selves,' said Francis. 'Believe me. We might as well have had shock treatments.'
'I really don't know how we got home without being seen,'
Henry said.
'No way could we have patched together a plausible story from this. Good Lord. Tt was weeks before I got over it. Camilla couldn't even talk for three days.'
With a small chill, I remembered: Camilla, her throat wrapped in a red muffler, unable to speak. Laryngitis, they'd said.
'Yes, that was very strange,' said Henry. 'She was thinking clearly enough, but the words wouldn't come out right. As if she'd had a stroke. When she started to speak again, her high school French came back before her English or her Greek.
Nursery words. I remember sitting by her bed, listening to her count to ten, watching her point to lafenetre, la chaise Francis laughed. 'She was so funny,' he said. 'When I asked her how she felt she said, 'Je me sens eomme Helene Keller, man vieux,''
'Did she go to the doctor?'
'Are you kidding?'
'What if she hadn't got any better?'
'Well, the same thing happened to all of us,' said Henry. 'Only it more or less wore off in a couple of hours.'
'You couldn't talk?'
'Bitten and scratched to pieces?' Francis said. 'Tongue-tied?
Half mad? If we'd gone to the police they would have charged us with every unsolved death in New England for the last five years.' He held up an imaginary newspaper. ' 'Crazed Hippies Indicted for Rural Thrill-Killing.'
'Cult Slaying of Old Abe So and-So.''
'Teen Satanists Murder Longtime Vermont Resident,' said Henry, lighting a cigarette.
Francis started to laugh.
'It would be one thing if we had even a chance at a decent hearing,' said Henry. 'But we don't.'
'And I personally can't imagine much worse than being tried for my life by a Vermont circuit-court judge and a jury box full of telephone operators.'
'Things aren't marvelous,' said Henry, 'but they could certainly be worse. The big problem now is Bunny.'
'What's wrong with him?'
'Nothing's wrong with him.'
Then what's the problem?'
'He just can't keep his mouth shut, that's all.'
'Haven't you talked to him?'
'About ten million times,' Francis said.
'Has he tried to go to the police?'
'If he goes on like this,' said Henry, 'he won't have to. They'll come right to us. Reasoning with him does no good. He just doesn't grasp what a serious business this is.'
'Surely he doesn't want to see you go to jail.'
'If he thought about it, I'm sure he'd realize he didn't,' said Henry evenly. 'And I'm sure he'd realize that he doesn't particularly want to go to jail himself, either.'
'Bunny? But why?'
'Because he's known about this since November and he hasn't gone to the police,' Francis said.
'But that's beside the point,' said Henry. 'Even he has sense enough not to turn us in. He doesn't have much of an alibi for the night of the murder, and if it ever came to prison for the rest of us I think he must know that I, at least, would do everything in my power to see he came along with us.' He stubbed out his cigarette. 'The problem is he's just a fool, and sooner or later he's going to say the wrong thing to the wrong person,' he said.
'Perhaps not intentionally, but I can't pretend to be too concerned with motive at this point. You heard him this morning. He'd be in quite a spot himself if this got back to the police but of course he thinks those ghastly jokes are all terribly subtle and clever and over everyone's head,' 'He's only just smart enough to realize what a mistake turning us in would be,' said Francis, pausing to pour himself another drink. 'But we can't seem to pound it into him that it's even more in his own self-interest not to go around talking like he does. And, really, I'm not at nil sure he won't just come out and tell someone, when he's in one of these confessional moods.'
'Tell someone? Like who?'
'Marion. His father. The Dean of Studies.' He shuddered.
'Gives me the creeps just to think about it. He's just the sort who always stands up in the back of the courtroom during the last five minutes of 'Perry Mason.''
'Bunny Corcoran, Boy Detective,' said Henry dryly.
'How did he find out? He wasn't with you, was he?'
'As a matter of fact,' said Francis, 'he was with you.' He glanced at Henry, and to my surprise the two of them began to laugh.
'What? What's so funny?' I said, alarmed.
This sent them into fresh peals of laughter. 'Nothing,' said Francis at last.
'Really, it is nothing,' said Henry, with a bemused little sigh.
'The oddest things make me laugh these days.' He lit another cigarette. 'He was with you that night, early in the evening, anyway. Remember? You went to the movies.'
'The Thirty-Nine Steps,' Francis said.
With something of a start, I did remember: a windy autumn night, full moon obscured by dusty rags of cloud. I'd worked late in the library and hadn't gone to dinner. Walking home, a sandwich from the snack bar in my pocket, and the dry leaves skittering and dancing on the path before me, I'd run into Bunny on his way to the Hitchcock series, which the Film Society was showing in the auditorium.
We were late and there were no seats left so we sat on the carpeted stairs, Bunny leaning back on his elbows with his legs stretched in front of him, cracking pensively with his rear molars at a little Dum-Dum sucker. The high wind rattled the flimsy walls; a door banged open and shut until somebody propped it open with a brick. On the screen, locomotives screaming across a black-and-white nightmare of iron-bridged chasms.
'We had a drink afterwards,' I said. 'Then he went to his room.'
