A Secret Rage (16 page)

She said hastily, ‘No, no! I didn’t mean he could have done it! I mean that she’d open the door if someone told her something had happened to Ray.’

‘Or to her mother,’ Cully suggested.

‘Not even for that. She’d have been suspicious right off the bat. Her mother lives with Alicia’s older brother, and the brother would’ve called if anything was wrong with Miss Celia. It
had
to be something about Ray. She’s always been scared to death he’d have a wreck on one of his sales trips.’

‘Even then,’ I said slowly, ‘I think it would have to be someone she knew. Or a policeman. Even if the man at the door said he was from the police, when she went to the door she wouldn’t have seen a uniform through the peephole. So she wouldn’t have opened the door, right?’

‘Not if he said he was a detective,’ Cully said.

I thought instantly of John Tendall.

‘I think she would’ve been suspicious of any stranger, no matter what he told her he was,’ Mimi said firmly. ‘She had a good head on her shoulders, even though she didn’t sound like she did half the time. She was very much on the alert, remember? She was really scared. She’d have been on the lookout for a ruse like that, I’m sure. Maybe not; maybe at the words “Ray is hurt, he had an accident, let’s go to the hospital,” she would’ve thrown open the door to anyone. But I don’t think so. I think the only thing that would have made Alicia open that door was recognizing someone she knew.’

Chilled and frightened, we hunched on the bed. The picture in my mind was in their minds, too: ‘Alicia, honey, I just hate to tell you this, but Ray’s been in a wreck just out of town. I happened to go by and the police asked me if I’d get you to the hospital.’ Yes. The combination of a familiar face and an urgent summons would have added up to enough to make Alicia open the door.

‘Okay. Recap,’ Cully said briskly to break the mood. ‘The access to each of you varied in difficulty.’

Yes, Professor. We nodded.

‘You don’t have physical traits in common. Not all blonde, not all blue-eyed, for example. One married; the rest single. But you’re all connected with the college. Two students, one teacher, and one committee woman.’

‘Yes, I guess you could call Alicia “connected with the college,” ’ Mimi said slowly.

But so, to some extent, was everyone on the list. ‘All white. All kind of upper middle class,’ I offered.

‘That’s the loosest tie imaginable,’ Cully said.

‘But it’s something. It looks like the Miss Beacham connection goes down the drain with Barbara,’ Mimi said, ‘but I’ll ask Theo to check Heidi’s record sometime next week to make sure she didn’t go there.’ She scrambled to her feet. The talk had done her good, as I had hoped. Positive action, mental or physical, healed Mimi like aloe on a burn.

Cully slipped his arm around me. I leaned against him. Mimi looked from one of us to the other. ‘It finally happened, huh?’

I caught myself actually ducking my head, and Cully (I peered at him sideways) looked embarrassed.

‘It’s about time,’ she said brusquely. ‘Well, I better go get dressed. What time’s the inquest Cully?’

‘In a couple of hours.’

She patted me on the arm and whisked out of the room. We looked at each other a little shyly.

‘Well,’ he said finally, in a tone almost as brusque as Mimi’s, ‘I’m scared to death of you, you know that? Rachel bruised me pretty thoroughly. It won’t be easy for me, for a while. But I can’t be less brave than you.’

Not exactly a romantic declaration. But I was satisfied our night together hadn’t been a fluke triggered by emotional overload.

From the thunder of the pipes I could tell Mimi was running a bath upstairs. Cully’s hand touched the nape of my neck, brushed it with long fingers. He rose and shut the door.

THE NEXT DAY
Barbara and I had another grim little meeting. This time I went to her apartment. Like her office, it was crammed, but even more pleasantly – full of plants and books and clear, mild colors.

‘Do you like it here?’ I asked as she made some hot chocolate in her tiny kitchen. The building was a four-unit cube tucked in between private homes on a dead-end street. Someone with an empty lot had decided to make a little extra money – pre-zoning, of course!

‘It’s okay,’ she said as she got mugs from a cabinet. ‘I like having other people in the same building, now. I never liked that before.’

We settled in the little living room with our steaming mugs. We talked of this and that, awkwardly. Apparently Barbara was as reluctant as I to buckle down to our task.

‘I’m getting almost too frightened to go on with this, Nickie,’ she said abruptly. ‘I don’t know if fear douses the rage or just replaces it. I can only hold so much.’

‘I’ve about reached my capacity, too,’ I admitted. ‘Everything’s changed since Alicia was murdered.’

‘We’d better do it before we lose our courage. Let’s try to take one more step.’

We seemed to gather ourselves in unison before we hauled out our creased bits of paper.

‘The list,’ Barbara said as clearly as if she were reciting poetry. ‘Jeff Simmons. Charles Seward. Don Houghton. Randy Marquette. Theo Cochran. Ray Merritt. Dan Kirby. John Tendall. J. R. Smith.’

‘What happened to Jeffrey Tabor?’

‘I remembered Jeffrey was definitely out of town the night of Mimi’s party. That’s why he couldn’t come to it. I didn’t just take his word for it,’ Barbara said with a faint smile. ‘I asked his friend who shares his apartment.’

‘So that leaves nine.’

‘Did Alicia know J.R., Dan, or Randy?’ Barbara asked.

‘I don’t know, Barbara. How could we find out?’

She looked rather daunted. ‘Well, we can’t ask them, can we? Gosh.’

‘Let’s see. Dan’s new at Houghton, and he commutes from Hill Run, he told me. He just got out of the army. I think his wife’s family is in Hill Run. He’s from Arkansas. So the chances are very slim that Alicia knew him.’

Barbara weighed that. Then, after an emphatic shove at her glasses, she crossed Dan Kirby’s name off her list.

‘Minus Dan,’ she said. ‘Eight.’

I scooted down in my armchair and laced my fingers over my stomach. Barbara twirled her pencil between her fingers as though it was a miniature baton. We both brooded over other possible eliminators. So suddenly that I jumped, Barbara grabbed her telephone and dialed.

‘Hi, J.R.,’ she said. ‘This is Barbara Tucker. Fine, thanks . . . and you? Good, good. Listen, how’d you come out in that poker game?’

J.R. answered at length. Barbara rolled her eyes in exasperation, then instantly switched to a smile so the words would come out right when she spoke. ‘Great! Thirty-four dollars, huh? Did Randy play? Oh. Oh, Cindy won’t like that, you’re right!’ Barbara widened her eyes at me significantly. ‘You played that late?’ she burbled into the phone in a very un-Barbara-like manner. Again a mumble from the other end. Then Barbara was nodding at me vehemently, and I took the list from the coffee table and drew lines through two more names.

‘No, I don’t want to learn to play right now. Just curious, you’d talked about it so much. Right. Well – sure, give me a call sometime. We’ll do it. Sounds like fun. English professors need all the extra income they can get, right? Bye, now.’

J. R. Smith was a jovial individual who taught me Archetypes in the English Novel with a kind of infectious zest. I was glad he was apparently cleared. I looked at Barbara expectantly.

She was a little pink in the face. ‘I guess I’m going to have to learn how to play poker,’ she said, and looked not unwilling. ‘I remembered J.R. was having a bachelor party for Randy Marquette Thursday night, since Randy’s marrying – well, he married – Cindy from the admissions office Friday night. The poker playing was over when Randy fell asleep on J.R.’s couch at four in the morning. Considering the liquor, I don’t think either of them could’ve gotten back up to go out after that. And there were only six men there, since not everyone’s willing to meet Friday classes with two hours’ sleep and an A-one hangover. So I think that if one of them had slipped out for any length of time it would have been noticed.’

‘Sounds like it,’ I agreed. ‘Besides, there would have been blood, with Alicia. To clean off.’ I took a deep breath. ‘So,’ I said as evenly as I could. ‘Six.’

For a full hour we tried to think of other qualifiers that would eliminate one of the six. We couldn’t come up with any. We even left Ray on the list.

‘By the way,’ Barbara said as she walked with me to my borrowed car, ‘I take it you haven’t mentioned this project of ours to anyone?’

‘Not
hardly
,’ I said, like one of my young classmates. ‘The only people I would tell are Cully and Mimi. And since their own father is on the list . . .’

She nodded. ‘Not that I really think for a minute that someone sweet like Don Houghton, or for that matter someone as dignified as Jeff Simmons, our mighty college president, for God’s sake, could ever do something like what was done to us.’

‘That’s just it! Do we know
anyone
on that list who acts anything like the disgusting beast who did that to us? Who could knife Alicia to death?’

Barbara knew the answer too well to say it out loud. If we were right, the beast had to be there, lurking beneath a civilized skin that covered someone we knew.

We looked up at the clear cool sky. It was sweater weather in the afternoon, coat weather in the morning – my favorite season. This would have been one of the best years of my life, if only . . . For a second the filth was magically washed away. I drank in freedom with the air. Then I tensed my forefinger against my thumb and thwanged my cheek. No point in going down
that
dead-end street. Hip-pity hop, back to wonderful old reality.

Barbara was too used to my habits by now to comment on my cheek-thumping. ‘Six,’ I reminded her before I drove away.

She just looked forlorn.

* * * *

Probably because of her family’s far-flung influence, Alicia’s autopsy had been concluded and her body released to her family – and Grace Funeral Home – on Sunday. We decided to pay our respects the next evening.

I was dressed and ready, and Cully was in the shower, when Mimi caught me alone in the living room. She looked uncharacteristically drab in the plain dark dress she saved for funerals and funeral home visits.

‘Don’t tell Cully my idea about Charles,’ she said without preamble. ‘It’s not like we really know anything. And to tell you the truth, Nickie, I’m worried about what Cully would do if he believed Charles was the rapist.’

Cully the rational, a vigilante? Farfetched. I stared at Mimi with dismay and a crawling suspicion. This was awfully like manipulation. Was she using Cully as a lever to keep me quiet, to protect her lawyer?

I didn’t suspect Charles because of that bizarre episode in the kitchen the previous Saturday. I suspected Charles because he was on the list. But I couldn’t tell her that, and I also wanted to find out what she was aiming for. ‘What if it
is
Charles, Mimi? We can’t possibly let him do it again. Think of what this man has done.’

‘We don’t
know
anything,’ she hissed. The shower had been cut off; Cully would hear us if we didn’t keep our voices down. ‘I may have just gotten scared Saturday morning for nothing. If Charles gets hauled in on suspicion and he’s innocent, the mud will stick and he’ll be ruined. Besides, don’t you see, I know Charles. And I can tell you don’t like him, even though you’ve tried not to say anything.’

My heart plummeted. This was the fruit of those years before I’d gained more tact, more wisdom, in my relationship with Mimi. She couldn’t discuss her feelings for Charles with me with complete honesty. There was some mystery here that she didn’t think she could share with me, because it was between her and a man she loved.

‘I know he couldn’t, wouldn’t, do that to a human being.’ How often had Barbara and I thought of that, in scanning the names of the men on our list? ‘Besides, if he was the rapist, he wouldn’t have just tussled with me in the car. He would’ve raped me. I couldn’t have stopped him. Nick, I’ve thought about it ever since. We were just scared and maybe hysterical that morning. That was my fault. That whole weird little episode was something we made up.’ She twisted her fingers together. She looked at me and said, sadly, ‘Don’t ask me to tell you what I know, Nick. But since from the look on your face I can’t persuade you any other way, I have to tell you that I
know
Charles didn’t do it.’

That crawling suspicion came a little further out of its hole. Mimi had never, never lied to me, in fourteen years. But she was acting so strangely. I was totally bewildered by this whole scene. I couldn’t have answered her if I’d known what to say. To my relief Cully entered the living room then, with the car keys in his hand.

As we rode through the dark streets of Knolls, I pondered. All Mimi was asking was that we keep those moments when Charles was standing at the door from Cully’s knowledge. Maybe she did fear that now Cully and I were lovers he would feel obliged, in true southern fashion, to avenge his womenfolk’s ordeal if he knew the identity of the rapist; for the ordeal had very much been Mimi’s as well as mine. I had deep doubts about Cully ascribing to that attitude.

There really was no hard evidence indicating Charles was my assailant. There was no hard evidence against anyone, unless the police had dug up something; and they were hardly likely to tell me if they had. All I had was the list. And Mimi was definitely right about another thing: The panic we’d felt that morning when Charles came to the door could easily be written off to the tension and fear that had permeated our lives for so long.

So whatever she knew or didn’t know, Mimi was right. I would not tell Cully about that stupid little incident. As we drove through the night silently, I whittled away at the knot of pain and confusion she had caused me, until it was only a canker of uneasiness.

I looked across the front seat at Cully. He glanced my way at the same time. The normal austerity of his face vanished in a smile that made him irresistible. I hoped I wasn’t using Cully as a kind of emotional aspirin. He would be willing. He was, after all, a wound healer.