“Yes, sir.”
“Well, I found some car tracks down there,” Sheriff Stone said. “And the thing is, Gates was on foot. His car had been repossessed a few days before it happened. So, what I’m getting at, it couldn’t have been his car that made those tracks.”
I said nothing.
Sheriff Stone drew his hat from his head and rolled it slowly in his blunt hands. “So what I’m wondering is, can you think of anybody else that might have wanted to hurt Kelli?”
“No, sir.”
“Besides Gates, I mean,” he added.
“No, sir, I can’t think of anybody else,” I told him firmly.
“Well, don’t say no too fast, son. Dwell on it a minute. Just anybody around town who might have had bad feelings for her.”
“I can’t think of anybody.”
“How about around the school?” Stone asked. “Any of the boys been bothering her?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”
“How about her boyfriend, what’s his name?”
I felt my heart squeeze together as I pronounced his name. “Todd Jeffries.”
“That’s right. She been having any trouble with him?”
I saw Kelli press her face softly against Todd’s chest, saw his arms enfold her gently. “No, sir,” I said. “They weren’t having any trouble.”
“So as far as you know, nobody else was having a problem with her?” Sheriff Stone asked. “Nobody but Lyle Gates?”
I didn’t answer. In my mind I saw Kelli turn to me as she had in the corridor outside the office, heard her voice again.
Sheriff Stone noted my silence, then repeated his question, this time more emphatically. “Just Lyle Gates? He the only fellow that might have had something against Kelli?”
“Yeah, just Lyle Gates,” I said.
He watched me a moment, then said something startling. “What about a girl?”
“A girl?”
“A girl that might have had some reason to hurt Kelli. Girls get bad feelings for each other, don’t they?”
“Yes.”
“And since there was no rape, or anything like that,” Sheriff Stone added, “we have to look at that possibility.”
I said nothing.
“To tell you the truth, Ben, we don’t quite know what happened up there. The details, I mean. We found a rock, you know, with some blood on it, but it was way down there near the old mining road, pretty far from where we found Kelli herself. And besides, it was way too big for somebody to pick up and hit her with.” He sighed softly. “So we think maybe she fell on it, then tried to run away, back up the hill, something like that.” He eyed me carefully, trying to gauge the effect of his words. “She was blind by then, you know.”
I felt my soul empty. “Blind?”
“That’s what Dr. McCoy thinks,” Sheriff Stone said. “In the last stage, you know, when she was still able to run. Losing strength, of course, but still able to run. Crawling at the end of it.” His eyes drifted down toward the photograph. “At least that’s what we think, from the look of her dress.” He glanced up at me. “One thing’s for sure, she got hit in the face real hard.”
I remained silent.
Sheriff Stone looped his thumbs over his belt. “So, what about it, Ben? Can you think of anybody that might have wanted to hurt Kelli?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know of anybody.”
He seemed distrustful of my answer. “You don’t?”
“No.”
“Well, you were at the play rehearsals, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t notice anything?”
“No.”
Sheriff Stone watched me closely, his eyes narrowing, then said, “What about Mary Diehl?”
I knew then that Miss Carver had told him everything, all that she had seen and heard over the last four weeks while Kelli had rehearsed her Juliet, and Todd his Romeo, and Mary Diehl had sat in the shadowy back corner of the auditorium, chewing her nails and watching helplessly as the only love she’d ever known slipped irrecoverably from her grasp. I remembered seeing her there, a motionless figure in the murky light, silent, staring, curiously grim, her sweetness melting from her face like candle wax.
“I understand that there was quite a bit of bad feeling between the Diehl girl and Kelli,” Sheriff Stone said. “Were you aware of that?”
I nodded mutely, felt the dark finger’s touch again and thought,
“What was all that about,” Sheriff Stone asked, “the trouble between Kelli and Mary Diehl?”
I heard Kelli’s voice sound softly in my mind, and answered as she had answered only two weeks before, my lips forming the only word that could be used to tell the truth. “Love,” I said.
CHAPTER 18
IT HAD HAPPENED RIGHT BEFORE MY EYES. LOVE. AND I HAD watched it happen just as helplessly as Mary had watched it, though possibly from an even closer vantage point.
After the first rehearsal Miss Carver had come to me and more or less demanded that I work on the play, although not as an actor. Instead, I was to carry out the far less glamorous task of cuing the actors, helping with the sets and opening and closing the curtain at the appropriate times. It was not a job I wanted, but at the same time I knew that it was a way to be near Kelli, and I know now that despite everything, some part of me had still not been willing to set her free. I had longed to get rid of the grim feeling of ugliness and inadequacy that arose in me when I was near her, and for that reason I had welcomed closing the basement office only a week before. But at the same time I found that I could not let go of the hope, anguished though it had become, that I might still break through to her, win her over, make my life with her, the village doctor and his wife.
And so only a few days after closing the office, I agreed to help with the play, and on the following afternoon, from my place just offstage, I watched as Kelli and Todd went through their lines for the first time, Kelli on a bare stage, mounted on a metal chair, with Todd below her, lifting his arms as he spoke:
And yet, even on that first occasion, when he began to read his lines to her, and no doubt feeling terribly awkward and self-conscious as he did so, I believe that Todd began to tell Kelli who he was, and who he was not, casting aside his athletic feats, his local renown, and offering something else in their place, a strange loneliness and vulnerability that seemed to rise toward her as his arms rose toward her, empty and imploring, and which were directed to Kelli alone.
Standing only a few feet away, my hands tightening around the rope I used to raise and lower the curtain, I watched that first scene between them with the same mounting dread that Mary Diehl must have felt as she sat in the dark corner of the auditorium only a few yards away. It was a sense that the worst possible calamity had struck, a tidal wave of mutual attraction so mysterious and elemental that you were powerless against it, that
