“Are you saying your brother killed these people? Are you leading up to telling me that LeBay killed his own daughter?”
“Not that he killed her, Dennis—never think that. She choked to death. What I am suggesting is that he may have let her die.”
“You said he turned her over—punched her—tried to make her vomit
“That’s what Rollie told me at the funeral,” George said.
“Then what—”
“Marcia and I talked it over later. Only that once, you understand. Over dinner that night. Rollie told me, “I picked her up by her Buster Browns and tried to whack that sonofabitch out of there, Georgie. But it was stuck down fast.” And what Veronica told Marcia was, “Rollie picked her up by her shoes and tried to whack whatever was choking her out of there, but it was stuck down fast.” They told exactly the same story, in exactly the same words. And do you know what that made me think of?”
“No.”
“It made me think of Rollie climbing in the bedroom window and whispering to me, “If you tell, Georgie, I’ll kill you.”
“But… why? Why would he—?”
“Later, Veronica wrote Marcia a letter and hinted that Rollie had made no real effort to save their daughter. And that, at the very end, he put her back in the car. So she would be out of the sun, he said. But in her letter, Veronica said she thought Rollie wanted her to die in the car.” I didn’t want to say it, but I had to.
“Are you suggesting that your brother offered his daughter up as some kind of a human sacrifice?”
There was a long, thinking, dreadful pause.
“Not in any conscious way, no,” LeBay said. “Not any more than I am suggesting that he consciously murdered her. If you had known my brother, you would know how ridiculous it is to suspect him of witchcraft or sorcery or trafficking with demons. He believed in nothing beyond his own senses… except, I suppose, for his own will. I am suggesting that he might have had some… some intuition… or that he might have been directed to do what he did.
“My mother said he was a changeling.”
“And Veronica?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “The police verdict was suicide, even though there was no note. It may well have been. But the poor woman had made some friends in town, and I have often wondered if perhaps she had hinted to some of them, as she had to Marcia, that Rita’s death was not quite as she and Rollie had reported it. I have wondered if Rollie found out. If you tell, Georgie, I’ll kill you. There’s no proof one way or the other, of course. But I’ve wondered why she would do it the way she did—and I’ve wondered how a woman who didn’t know the slightest thing about cars would know enough to get the hose and attach it to the exhaust pipe and put it in through the window. I try not to wonder about those things. They keep me awake at night.”
I thought about what he had said, and about the things he hadn’t said—the things he had left between the lines. Intuitive, he had said. So single-minded in his few simple purposes, he had said. Suppose Roland LeBay had understood in some way he wouldn’t even admit to himself that he was investing his Plymouth with some supernatural power? And suppose he had only been waiting for the right inheritor to come along… and now…
“Does that answer your questions, Dennis?”
“I think it does,” I said slowly.
“What are you going to do?”
“I think you know that.”
“Destroy the car?”
“I’m going to try,” I said, and then looked over at my crutches, leaning against the wall. My goddam crutches.
“You may destroy your friend, as well.”
“I may save him,” I said.
Quietly, George LeBay said, “I wonder if that is still possible.”
47
THE BETRAYAL
There was blood and glass all over,
And there was nobody there but me.
As the rain tumbled down, hard and cold,
I seen a young man lyin by the side of the road,
He cried, “Mister, won’t you help me, please?”
I kissed her.
Her arms slipped around my neck. One of her cool hands pressed lightly against the back of my head. There was no more question for me about what was going on; and when she pulled slightly away from me, her eyes half-closed, I could see there was no question for her, either.
“Dennis,” she murmured, and I kissed her again. Our tongues touched gently. For a moment her kiss intensified; I could feel the passion those high cheekbones hinted at. Then she gasped a little and drew back. “That’s enough,” she said. “We’ll be arrested for indecent exposure, or something.”
It was January 18th. We were parked in the lot behind the local Kentucky Fried, the remains of a pretty decent chicken dinner spread around us. We were in my Duster, and that alone was something of an occasion for me—it was my first time behind the wheel since the accident. Just that morning, the doctor had removed the huge cast on my left leg and replaced it with a brace. His warning to stay off it was stern, but I could tell he was feeling good about the way things were going for me. My recovery was about a month ahead of schedule. He put it down to superior techniques; my mother to positive thinking and chicken soup; Coach Puffer to rosehips.
Me, I thought Leigh Cabot had a lot to do with it.
“We have to talk,” she said.
“No, let’s make out some more,” I said.
“Talk now. Make out later.”
“Has he started again?”
She nodded.
In the almost two weeks since my telephone conversation with LeBay, the first two weeks of winter term, Arnie had been working at making a rapprochement with Leigh working at it with an intensity that scared both of us. I had told her about my talk with George LeBay (but not, as I’ve said, about my terrible ride home on New Year’s morning) and made it as clear as I could that on no account should she simply cut him off. That would drive him into a fury, and these days, when Arnie was furious with someone, unpleasant things happened to them.
“That makes it like cheating on him,” she said.
“I know,” I said, more sharply than I had intended. “I don’t like it, but I don’t want that car rolling again.”
“So?”
And I shook my head,
In truth, I was starting to feel like Prince Hamlet, delaying and delaying. I knew what had to be done, of course; Christine had to be destroyed. Leigh and I had looked into ways of doing it.
The first idea had been Leigh’s—Molotov cocktails. We would, she said, fill some wine-bottles with gasoline, take them to the Cunningham house in the early-morning hours, light the wicks ('Wicks? What wicks?” I asked. “Kotex ought to do just fine,” she answered promptly, causing me to wonder again about her high-cheekboned forebears), and toss them in through Christine’s windows.
“What if the windows are rolled up and the doors are locked?” I asked her. “That’s the way it’s apt to be,
