A Kiss Before Dying (8 page)

PART TWO

Girls’ Dormitory

Stoddard University

Blue River, Iowa

5 March 1951

Dear Mr Kingship,

I suppose you are wondering who I am, unless you remember my name from the newspapers. I am the young woman who loaned a belt to your daughter Dorothy last April. I was the last person to speak to her. I would not bring up this subject as I am sure it must be a very painful subject to you, except that I have a good reason.

As you may recall Dorothy and I had the same green suit. She came to my room and asked to borrow my belt. I loaned it to her and later the police found it (or what I thought was it) in her room. They kept it for over a month until they got around to returning it to me. By that time it was quite late in the season so I did not wear the green suit again last year.

Now spring is approaching again and last night I tried on my spring clothes. I tried on my green suit and it fitted perfectly. But when I put on the belt I found to my surprise that it was Dorothy’s belt all along. You see, the notch that is marked from the buckle is two notches too big for my waist. Dorothy was quite slender but I am even more so. In fact to be frank I am quite thin. I
know
that I certainly did not lose any weight because the suit still fits me perfectly, as I said above, so the belt must be Dorothy’s. When the police first showed it to me I thought it was mine because the gold finish on the tooth of the buckle was rubbed off. I should have realized that since both suits were made by the same manufacturer the finish would have come
off both
buckles.

So now it seems that Dorothy could not wear her own belt for some reason, even though it was not broken at all, and took mine instead. I cannot understand it. At the time I thought she only pretended to need my belt because she wanted to speak to me.

Now that I know the belt is Dorothy’s I would feel funny wearing it. I am not superstitious, but after all it does not belong to me and it did belong to poor Dorothy. I thought of throwing it away but I would feel funny doing that also, so I am sending it to you in a separate package and you can keep it or dispose of it as you see fit.

I can still wear the suit because all the girls here are wearing wide leather belts this year anyway.

Yours truly,

Annabelle Koch

8 March 1951

My dear Ellen,

I received your last letter and am sorry not to have replied sooner, but the demands of business have been especially pressing of late.

Yesterday being Wednesday, Marion came here to dinner. She is not looking too well. I showed her a letter which I received yesterday and she suggested that I send it on to you. You will find it enclosed. Read it now, and then continue with my letter.

Now that you have read Miss Koch’s letter, I will explain why I forwarded it.

Marion tells me that ever since Dorothy’s death you have been rebuking yourself for your imagined callousness to her. Miss Koch’s unfortunate story of Dorothy’s ‘desperate need for someone to talk with’ made you feel, according to Marion, that that someone should have been you and would have been you, had you not pushed Dorothy out on her own too soon. You believe, although this is something which Marion has only deduced from your letters, that had there been a difference in your attitude towards Dorothy, she might not have chosen the path she did.

I credit what Marion says since it explains your wishful thinking, for I can only call it that, of last April, when you stubbornly refused to believe that Dorothy’s death had been a suicide, despite the incontestable evidence of the note which you yourself received. You felt that if Dorothy had committed suicide you were in some way responsible, and so it was several weeks before you were able to accept her death for what it was, and accept also the burden of an imagined responsibility.

This letter from Miss Koch makes it clear that Dorothy went to the girl because, for some peculiar reason of her own, she did want her belt; she was
not
in desperate need of someone to whom she could talk. She had made up her mind to do what she was going to do, and there is absolutely no reason for you to believe that she would have come to you first if you two had not had that argument the previous Christmas. (And don’t forget it was
she
who was in a sullen mood and started the argument.) As for the initial coldness on Dorothy’s part, remember that I agreed with you that she should go to Stoddard rather than Caldwell, where she would only have become more dependent on you. True, if she had followed you to Caldwell the tragedy would not have happened, but ‘if’ is the biggest word in the world. Dorothy’s punishment may have been excessively severe, but she was the one who chose it. I am not responsible, you are not responsible; no one is but Dorothy herself.

The knowledge that Miss Koch’s original interpretation of Dorothy’s behaviour was erroneous will I hope, rid you of any feelings of self-recrimination that may remain.

Your loving,

Father

PS. Please excuse my indecipherable handwriting. thought this letter too personal to dictate to Miss Richardson.   

12 March 1951

8.35 a.m.

Dear Bud,

Here I sit in the club car with a Coke (at this hour – ugh!) and a pen and paper, trying to keep my writing hand steady against the motion of the train and trying to give a ‘lucid if not brilliant’ explanation – as Prof Mulholland would say – of why I am making this trip to Blue River.

I’m sorry about tonight’s basketball game, but I’m sure Connie or Jane will be glad to go in my place, and you can think of me between the halves.

Now first of all, this trip is
not
impulsive! I thought about it all last night. You’d think I was running off to Cairo, Egypt! Second of all, I
will not
be missing work, because
you
are going to take complete notes in each class, and anyway I doubt if I’ll be gone more than a week. And besides, since when do they flunk seniors for overcuts? Third of all, I won’t be wasting my time, because I’ll never know until I’ve tried, and until I try I’ll never have a moment’s peace.

Now that the objections are out of the way, let me explain why I am going. I’ll fill in a little background first.

From the letter I received from my father Saturday morning, you know that Dorothy originally wanted to come to Caldwell and I opposed her for her own good, or so I convinced myself at the time. Since her death I’ve wondered whether it wasn’t pure selfishness on my part. My life at home had been restrained both by my father’s strictness and Dorothy’s dependence on me, although I didn’t realize it at the time. So when I got to Caldwell I really let go. During my first three years I was the rah-rah girl; beer parties, hanging around with the Big Wheels, etc. You wouldn’t recognize me. So, as I say, I’m not sure whether I prevented Dorothy from coming in order to encourage her independence or to avoid losing mine, Caldwell being the everybody-knows-what-everybody-else-is-doing-type place that it is.

My father’s analysis (probably second-hand via Marion) of my reaction to Dorothy’s death is absolutely right. I didn’t want to admit it was suicide because that meant that I was partly responsible. I thought I had other reasons for doubt besides emotional ones however. The note she sent me, for instance. It was her handwriting – I can’t deny that – but it didn’t sound like her. It sounded kind of stilted, and she addressed me as ‘Darling’, when before it had always been ‘Dear Ellen’ or ‘Dearest Ellen’. mentioned that to the police, but they said that naturally she was under a strain when she wrote the note and couldn’t be expected to sound her usual self, which I had to admit seemed logical. The fact that she carried her birth certificate with her also bothered me, but they explained that away too. A suicide will often take pains to make sure he is immediately identified, they said. The fact that other things which she always carried in her wallet (Stoddard registration card, etc) would have been sufficient identification didn’t seem to make any impression on them. And when I told them that she just wasn’t the suicidal type, they didn’t even bother to answer me. They swept away every point I raised.

So there I was. Of course I finally had to accept the fact that Dorothy committed suicide – and that I was partly to blame. Annabelle Koch’s story was only the clincher. The motive for Dorothy’s suicide made me even more responsible, for rational girls today do not kill themselves if they become pregnant – not, I thought, unless they have been brought up to depend on someone else and then that someone else suddenly isn’t there.

But Dorothy’s pregnancy meant that another person had deserted her too – the man. If I knew anything about Dorothy it was that she did not treat sex lightly. She wasn’t the kind for quick flings. The fact that she was pregnant meant that there was one man whom she had loved and had intended to marry some day.

Now early in the December before her death, Dorothy had written me about a man she had met in her English class. She had been going out with him for quite some time, and this was the Real Thing. She said she would give me all the details over Christmas vacation. But we had an argument during Christmas, and after that she wouldn’t even give me the right time. And when we returned to school our letters were almost like business letters. So I never even learned his name. All I knew about him was what she had mentioned in that letter; that he had been in her English class in the fall, and that he was handsome and somewhat like Len Vernon – he is the husband of a cousin of ours – which meant that Dorothy’s man was tall, blond, and blue-eyed.

I told my father about this man, urging him to find out who he was and punish him somehow. He refused, saying that it would be impossible to prove he was the one who had got Dorothy into trouble, and futile even if we could prove it. She had punished herself for her sins; it was a closed case as far as he was concerned.

That’s how things stood until Saturday, when I received my father’s letter with the one from Annabelle Koch enclosed. Which brings us to my big scene.

The letters did not have the effect my father had hoped for – not at first – because, as I said, Annabelle Koch’s story was far from the sole cause of my melancholy. But then I began to wonder: if Dorothy’s belt was in perfect condition, why had she lied about it and taken An-nabelle’s instead? Why couldn’t Dorothy wear her own belt? My father was content to let it pass, saying she had ‘some peculiar reason of her own’, but I wanted to know what that reason was, because there were three other seemingly inconsequential things which Dorothy did on the day of her death that puzzled me then and that still puzzled me. Here they are:

1. At 10.15 that morning she bought an inexpensive pair of white cloth gloves in a shop across the street from her dormitory. (The owner reported it to the police after seeing her picture in the papers.) First she asked for a pair of stockings, but because of a rush of business for the Spring Dance scheduled for the following night, they were out of her size. She then asked for gloves, and bought a pair for $1.50. She was wearing them when she died, yet in the bureau in her room was a beautiful pair of hand-made white cloth gloves, perfectly spotless, that Marion had given her the previous Christmas. Why didn’t she wear those?

2. Dorothy was a careful dresser. She was wearing her green suit when she died. With it she wore an inexpensive white silk blouse whose floppy out-of-style bow was all wrong for the lines of the suit. Yet in her closet was a white silk blouse, also perfectly spotless, which had been
specially made
to go with the suit. Why didn’t she wear that blouse?

3. Dorothy was wearing dark green, with brown and white accessories. Yet the handkerchief in her purse was bright turquoise, as wrong as could be for the outfit she wore. In her room were at least a dozen handkerchiefs that would have matched her outfit perfectly. Why didn’t she take one of those?

At the time of her death I mentioned these points to the police. They dismissed them as quickly as they had dismissed the others I brought up. She was distracted. It was ridiculous to expect her to dress with her ordinary care. I pointed out that the glove incident was the reverse of carelessness; she had gone out of her way to get them. If there was conscious preparation behind one incident, it wasn’t unreasonable to assume that all three had some kind of purpose; their comeback was, ‘You can’t figure a suicide.’

Annabelle Koch’s letter added a fourth incident which followed the pattern of the other three. Her own belt was perfectly all right, but Dorothy wore Annabelle’s instead. In each case she rejected an appropriate item for one that was less appropriate. Why?

I batted that problem around in my head all day Saturday, and Saturday night too. Don’t ask me what I expected to prove. I felt that there had to be some kind of meaning to it all, and I wanted to find out as much as I could about Dorothy’s state of mind at the time. Like poking a bad tooth with your tongue, I guess.

I’d have to write reams to tell you all the mental steps I went through, searching for some relationship among the four rejected items. Price, where they came from, and a thousand other thoughts, but nothing made sense. The same thing happened when I tried to get common characteristics in the wrong things she had actually worn. I even took sheets of paper and headed them Glove, Handkerchief, Blouse and Belt, and put down everything I knew about each, looking for a meaning. Apparently, there just wasn’t a meaning. Size, age, ownership, cost, colour, quality, place of purchase – none of the significant characteristics appeared on all four lists. I tore up the papers and went to bed. You can’t figure a suicide.

It came to me about an hour later, so startlingly that I shot up straight in bed, suddenly cold. The out-of-style blouse, the gloves she’d bought that morning, Annabelle Koch’s belt, the turquoise handkerchief – Something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.

It might – I keep telling myself – be a coincidence. But in my heart I don’t believe that.

Dorothy went to the Municipal Building, not because it is the tallest building in Blue River, but because a Municipal Building is where you go when you want to get married. She wore something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue – poor romantic Dorothy – and she carried her birth certificate with her to prove she was over eighteen. And you don’t make a trip like that alone. Dorothy can only have gone with one person – the man who made her pregnant, the man she’d been going with for a long time, the man she loved – the handsome blue-eyed blond of her fall English class. He got her up to the roof somehow. I’m almost certain that’s the way it was.

The note? All it said was ‘I hope you will forgive me for the unhappiness I will cause. There is nothing else that I can do.’ Where is there mention of suicide? She was referring to the marriage! She knew Father would disapprove of a hasty step like that, but there was nothing else she could do because she was pregnant. The police were right when they said the stilted tone was the result of strain, only it was the strain of an eloping bride, not of a person contemplating suicide.

‘Something old, something new’ was enough to set me going, but it would never be enough to make the police re-classify a suicide with note as an unsolved murder, especially when they would be prejudiced against me – the crank who pestered them last year. You know that’s true. So I’m going to find this man and do some
very cautious
Sherlocking. As soon as I turn up anything that supports my suspicions, anything strong enough to interest the police, I promise to go straight to them. I’ve seen too many movies where the heroine accuses the murderer in his sound-proof penthouse and he says ‘Yes, I did it, but you’ll never live to tell the tale.’ So don’t worry about me, and don’t get impatient, and don’t write my father as he would probably explode. Maybe it is ‘crazy and impulsive’ to rush into it this way, but how can I sit and wait when I know what has to be done and there is no one else to do it?

Perfect timing. We’re just entering Blue River now. I can see the Municipal Building from the window.

I’ll wind this letter up later in the day, when I’ll be able to tell you where I’m staying and what progress, if any, I’ve made. Even though Stoddard is ten times as big as Caldwell, I have a pretty good idea of how to begin. Wish me luck …