furiously.
For a few seconds he looked at me with a tense, questioning stare. It was the same look he would give me the afternoon he raced into my yard, choking on his words as he struggled to tell me that “something bad” had happened to Kelli Troy. It was a look I would see often from then on.
“Are you all right, Ben?” he asked.
I nodded crisply, but said nothing. My mind was still fixed on Kelli with a murderous concentration, and I should have known at that moment how fiercely I still longed for her, how mingled my longing had become with violence, how much, if I could not have Kelli Troy, I wanted to destroy her.
CHAPTER 19
BUT I WAS NOT THE ONLY ONE, AS SHERIFF STONE LATER learned, for during the next two weeks Mary Diehl came to see, and at last confront, what I had already seen the night Todd drove Kelli home. Perhaps she had seen it even earlier, but had decided to let it go, hoping it would pass, then realized finally that it was not passing, but, rather, that it was deepening by the hour.
When I remember Mary at this time, I see her as strangely frail, and certainly confused. A wounded bafflement hovered around her like a delicate mist, one which never really left her after that. It was still in her face the day she brought Raymond into my office, and later still when Raymond, now a grown man, led her slowly to my car, the rain mercilessly beating down upon her, as it had seemed to me at that moment, just as it had beaten down upon Lyle Gates as he’d been led down the courthouse steps almost thirty years before.
There was no doubt good reason for her puzzlement, both in middle age and much earlier, when she was still a girl. For she’d been beautiful, after all, and so it could not have been Kelli’s beauty that had made the difference between them. In her own way, Mary was smart enough, and certainly she was kind and dutiful. She had done as her mother had carefully instructed her, found someone to love, honor and obey, someone with whom she wished to share her life, and to whom she offered the gift of an absolute service and fidelity, neither of which, as it turned out, were ever returned to her. “Mary deserved better than Todd,” Luke told me sardonically on the day I took her away.
It rained bitterly that day, a cold rain, almost sleet. Mary wore a dark brown coat as Raymond led her down the driveway of the house in Turtle Grove. Several days before, she had tried to cut off her hair, and it now lay in unsightly layers, clipped here, long there, a wild confusion of jagged angles, with nothing to give it unity but its mottled iron-gray shade. Raymond walked beside her, holding her by the arm, mute and sullen, his eyes little more than thin, reptilian slits.
“
I looked toward the house and saw Todd standing at the large window that looked out onto the yard. He was slovenly and overweight, with thin blond hair swept back over his head, his shoulders slumped and defeated beneath a faded lime-green sweater. His hands were sunk deep into the pockets of his trousers, and there was a terrible bleakness in his face, a sense of having watched helplessly as everything in his life, both his marriage and his fatherhood, collapsed.
“It wasn’t her fault,” Raymond said as he led Mary to the back door of my car. He was talking to Sheila Cameron, Mary’s oldest friend. “She didn’t mean to do it. She was running from him when it happened. She was just trying to get away.”
For a moment, I saw it all as Raymond must have seen it: his mother desperately fleeing the house, fleeing her husband’s unfathomable rage and violence, rushing through the rain to her car, then into it and away, speeding down the rainswept street in a haze of dread and misery, staring at the road through swollen eyes as she plunged toward the curb where little Rosie Cameron stood impatiently waiting for her school bus, her small body draped in a bright yellow rainslick.
“My mother loved Rosie,” Raymond said. “She would never have …”
“I know that, Raymond,” Sheila said softly. Then, given how much she had suffered, how deep was her loss, and at whose hands, Sheila did the kindest thing I have ever seen a human being do. She drew Mary into her arms and kissed her wet cheek. “I love you, Mary,” she said. Then she stepped back into the rain and let Raymond ease his mother into the back seat of my car. “Drive carefully, Ben,” she said to me as I closed the door.
“I will.”
It was a long drive to Tuscaloosa, and from time to time as I drove, I glanced back at Mary. She sat with her hands resting motionlessly in her lap, her face locked in a strangely hunted expression despite the fact that the actual range of her feelings had been hideously reduced by then. She was extremely thin, almost skeletal, with hollow cheeks, and her eyes sunk so deeply into their sockets that they seemed to stare out from the shadowy depths of an unlighted cave. Only the immaculate whiteness of her skin still suggested the beauty that had once been hers.
“I’ve seen pictures of my mother when she was in high school,” Raymond said, as if reading my mind. “She looked happy back then.”
“She was, Raymond,” I said.
He shook his head. “But not after she married my father, she wasn’t. Never for one day after that.”
I locked my eyes on the road ahead.
“He never loved her, you know. I don’t know why he married her.” The whole tormented course of his parents’ marriage seemed to pass through his mind. “It was like he resented her in some way.” He watched the rain. “I think there was someone else. Another woman, I mean.”
I said nothing.
“And I don’t mean just an affair, either,” Raymond went on. “Some girl from his office, something like that. I mean someone that my father loved.”
In the rearview mirror I could see his eyes drift over toward his mother. “I heard her say it to his face one night. ‘You’re still in love with her.’ That’s what she told him.” He drew his eyes back toward me. “My mother knew who she was, the other woman.” He seemed to consider his next question. Then, almost plaintively, as if her identity might solve the mystery of his father’s wrath, he asked, “Do you know who she was, Dr. Wade?”
“No, I don’t, Raymond,” I told him.
But I did, and at that moment I felt my mind spin back to the single incident that Miss Carver later told Sheriff Stone about, the brutal moment when Mary had confronted Kelli Troy.
It had happened so suddenly that I would always believe that Mary had simply broken under the strain of all she had observed since the first rehearsal, the lines she’d heard Todd and Kelli exchange so passionately on the stage of the school auditorium, the glances she’d seen them give each other, the long rides to Kelli’s house after they’d dropped her off in Turtle Grove, and even those things she had probably imagined as clearly as I had imagined them, whispered intimacies and feverish kisses.
It was a Friday night. The heat of the approaching summer was clearly upon us by then, and the rehearsal had just ended. Todd had not been able to attend that night, and so Miss Carver had concentrated on other students, working through scenes with Eddie, Sheila and Noreen. It had not gone well, and Miss Carver had finally dismissed us early with a frustrated wave of her hand.
Most of the students left right away, but Kelli lingered, talking to Miss Carver. I remained onstage, busying myself with the few props we had collected. After that, I closed the curtain and shut off the lights.
Kelli and Miss Carver were already headed toward the faculty parking lot by the time I’d locked the front door of the auditorium. I could see them walking toward Miss Carver’s old Buick, perhaps still talking about the play, with Miss Carver pointing here and there as she spoke, as if giving stage directions.
Then, suddenly, a third figure emerged from behind the high wall of a shrub. At first she remained in the shadows, but after a moment she took a single step into the light of the parking lot’s only streetlamp, and I saw that it was Mary Diehl.
Mary said: “I need to talk to you, Kelli.”
“Well, I have to go with Miss Carver right now,” Kelli answered. “She’s driving me home.” She sounded slightly strained, as if Mary had taken her by surprise.
“No,” Mary told her in a voice that was unmistakably hard. “No, you have to talk to me. You have to. Right
