A Secret Rage (21 page)

‘He didn’t say,’ I managed to get out, feeling worse and worse.

‘Let’s see . . .’ Don thought, his fork poised in midair. Elaine waited patiently, her face turned to him with apparent interest. ‘I think I’m just plain old type O, universal donor,’ Don decided. ‘So Orrin must be something else, since the hospital surely wouldn’t run out of O.’ He was really sad at missing the opportunity to help his friend. My heart sank. Another type O.

‘Aren’t we all?’ said Cully. ‘I know I am.’

‘Oh, it’s been so long since I had you two, that’s the only time I had mine typed,’ Elaine reflected. ‘Your daddy and I had to find out about that Rh factor. You know, it causes trouble for the baby if the parents are different.’

Mimi nodded to show she was listening, but she looked faintly bored. Then she brightened. ‘Charles,’ she said happily, ‘can’t give blood. He faints at the sight of it.’ She seemed happy just to say his name.

During the inevitable exclamations this quirk of Charles’s engendered, I told myself rapidly that even if Don did have O blood, so did John Tendall. And probably Theo, too. But that peculiarity of Charles’s bore out Mimi’s assertion that Charles could not be the rapist. All of us had bled to some extent.

‘Is it just his own blood, Mimi? Or anyone’s?’ I asked, just to be sure.

‘Oh, anyone’s. It’s been embarrassing to him for years because he likes to hunt so much, and if someone he’s with cuts himself, Charles has to look the other way.’

Why the hell hadn’t Mimi told me that earlier, instead of going through all that hocus-pocus about swearing not to tell Cully we’d suspected Charles? Then I caught on. She’d come out with this quirk of Charles’s so unselfconsciously that I had to conclude she herself hadn’t made the connection between Charles’s horror of blood and his now-certain innocence. She’d been thinking of some other exculpating fact earlier, something she wanted to keep secret. Of course, the result was the same; Barbara and I could scratch Charles from our list. That left three, and one of those three was Don. The odds that he was the rapist had just leaped appreciably.

As Mimi and I cleared the table, I tried to keep my mind blank. I was able to join in the conversation just enough to keep my preoccupation under wraps. But after an hour, when we were all in the living room and Elaine was carrying in coffee and dessert, an awful line of logic insisted on screaming out in my mind.

Mimi had thought – briefly, and for whatever reason – that Charles might be the rapist. So she wouldn’t see him. Now Mimi would see Charles. So he wasn’t the rapist; Mimi said she
knew
he wasn’t guilty.

How could Mimi know he wasn’t the rapist?

She knew who
was
.

But why would she keep silent about it? Who on earth would Mimi protect from such a charge?

Her father, Don.

* * * *

The whole room blurred before I caught myself. I felt sweat break out on the palms of my hands. I set down my coffee cup with a loud chink. Elaine glanced at me reprovingly before she resumed her conversation with Mimi. She didn’t know how lucky she was; I’d almost dumped both cup and coffee on the carpet. I grabbed control of myself with a tremendous effort. I shot a quick look at Don, sitting on a love seat beside Mimi, opposite me.

I was thinking, quickly and desperately. I was probing the raw gash, trying to remember. Trying to dig out fragments so the wound could be closed. What could I remember? I’d told the police I didn’t know anything about my attacker. I hadn’t seen him. But I had to be able to remember something, something else, something that might eliminate Don. Okay. Calm, now. Calm.

I remembered. He’d been heavier and shorter than, say, Cully; but that category included many men besides Cully’s father.

He hadn’t really been very strong. Otherwise, the damage inflicted would have been worse, far worse. I touched my face; I remembered. Don was hardly in good shape, and he must be at least fifty-five, probably older.

No beard on the attacker. None of the men on our list had one.

I had to yank myself out of the stream of my memory. Cully was eyeing me in a dubious way, his dark eyebrows humped together. I found I was on the verge of bursting into a laugh that would have been very unpleasant to hear; I’d wildly imagined asking Don to lie on top of me to see if it felt familiar. I mashed that laughter into a smile and offered it to Cully. He looked startled, as well he might; it must have been ghastly.

The worst thing about these few minutes of horror was that they passed in Elaine’s living room. Everything in the room was civilized, conventional, expensive. The man who fit into this room simply couldn’t do such a thing.

In a kind of suspended animation, I turned to Cully and asked him to give me some details about the party we’d been asked to for the night before Thanksgiving.

‘One of the psych professors is throwing it,’ he said, relief evident in his voice. He was grateful to me for apparently snapping out of a bad mood. ‘He lives just three blocks away from Mimi’s. It’s a costume party.’

‘What? Right after Halloween?’

‘It was going to be on Halloween, but he caught the flu or something.’

‘What on earth can we go as?’ It was wonderful to work out this little problem. I had managed once again. I was on top of this situation. I could do it. Maybe Cully’s father had raped me and killed Alicia, and I was trying to think of a costume to wear to a party. Hell, I could do anything.

‘I think you ought to go as either the Sugar Plum Fairy or Wonder Woman,’ Cully said. It was such an amazing thing for Cully to say, and the smile he gave me was so crinkled and sweet, that I almost kissed him.

‘Grandmother’s trunks are still in the attic, and heaven knows what’s in them,’ Mimi called from across the room.

It dawned on Elaine that Cully and I were going to a party together, that I was his date. Her eyes narrowed in irritation and jumped sharply from her son to me and back again. Cully caught the look, casually took my hand, and with a bland face continued the discussion of what was likely to be unearthed in the attic.

I shuddered to think.

* * * *

I got through the rest of the evening. It was so unreal to think that a person I knew and loved could have raped me that I couldn’t accept it either emotionally or intellectually.

I shot secret looks at Don every now and then, and on the outside he was just as nice as always. His face was just as amiable, his bald patch just as shiny. His conversation was certainly just as bland. As he discussed the vital need for a new traffic light at one of Knolls’s intersections, I couldn’t remotely imagine that mouth uttering the foul words I remembered.

I was more confused than I had ever been in my life.

I will never know how I did it. I don’t think all of me was in my body that night. I think part of me just got up and left. What remained handled it. I did get through the rest of the evening.

WHAT COULD I
tell Barbara? I didn’t think I’d see her until Monday. She had a date with her fellow professor, J. R. Smith, on Saturday. She really was going to learn how to play poker. Cully and I were going to a nearby state park on Sunday, to shuffle through the falling leaves and have a change of scene.

I surprised Cully with the enthusiasm of my leaf shuffling. I bounded, I sang, I talked about my classes, I told him I thought my mother was improving. I was a one-woman band all day. Cully was obviously a little puzzled by my frenetic mood, but he tried gamely to enter in. I even tried to lose myself in passion; and for an amazing hour among the leaves I succeeded.

I told myself over and over that Don was leaving town Monday night, for a whole week. If nothing happened before he left, I’d have a week to think, a week to decide what I must do and who I should keep faith with – Mimi or Barbara.

I lay awake most of Sunday night, waiting. Those hours of torment were the penalty for my indecisiveness. Every second Monday morning, as I sat through my classes or walked down the halls, I was terrified that someone would come up to me and begin, ‘Oh, Nickie, did you hear about the girl last night . . .’

By midmorning, when Barbara met me in the student center to tell me Theo was type O like Don and Detective Tendall, it hardly seemed to matter. I was glad she was in a hurry to get to a conference with a student. To preserve at least a partial faith, I told her about Charles’s weak head for blood. But I didn’t mention Don.

At three o’clock I knew the Houghtons’ flight had taken off from the Memphis airport. I was sitting in the library snapping the point off my pencil and sharpening it again, to the discomfort of the students around me. Their faces became even more guarded when I shut my eyes and said a brief and silent thanksgiving.

Now I had time.

That night, I buried myself in the paper due that week, and in studying for one remaining test. I finished the paper. Cully laughed at my reading glasses and typed my paper for me while I studied.

‘Your handwriting is terrible, but your paper is very good,’ he told me, and I felt myself turn pink with pleasure. I dived back into my books, as much to dodge thinking as to make a good grade.

* * * *

I trudged home after Tuesday’s test, my eyes watering in the sharp wind, and found Detective Markowitz waiting on the front steps. It was almost as if I’d conjured him up. With the test out of the way, my mind had been running around and around my dilemma.

‘You’re looking better,’ he said approvingly. ‘How you feel, darlin’?’

‘I feel a lot better, too,’ I lied. It would have been the truth a few days ago. I smiled at him. He still looked tired and world-weary, but there was an air of cheer about him that I enjoyed. It was quite a change.

‘I swear, I had no idea you was such a beauty,’ he testified as I unlocked the front door. I told him to come on in.

After he refused coffee or cola, I perched on the couch and asked him what I could do for him. ‘Something new?’ I said hopefully.

‘Well, not much, but something,’ he said. I had known there was a reason for that cheer.

‘Fact is, we’ve eliminated a mighty lot of people. Now, you might not think that’s much,’ he said as he saw my face fall, ‘but in police work, that’s a lot. It’s not like in the books. The sooner we get suspects out of the way, false suspects, the sooner we can get at the real one. And I’ve worked so hard and so long on these cases that I just decided I’d be happy about that.’

Even as he told me this, his little manufactured happiness vanished. ‘I’ve got a daughter myself, you know,’ he said quietly. ‘We’re doing everything we possibly can, honey. So I decided to drop by, again; I know it’s hard on you, having to think about it—’

What else had I been doing?

‘—but I thought I’d ask, one more time, if there was anything,
any tiny thing
, you’ve recalled since we last talked to you. The last time I saw you, it was still just a week after. I thought maybe you might have thought of something by now, now you’ve had time to calm a little.’

‘Well,’ I said hesitantly.

He pounced. ‘Something?’

I knew I was going to let him down. ‘This is going to sound stupid,’ I began. ‘I don’t remember anything specific, but I do know there’s something to remember. It hasn’t come to me yet, though.’

‘I see,’ he said doubtfully.

‘There’s an impression I got,’ I blundered on. ‘But it won’t come to mind yet. I told you this was going to sound stupid.’

‘No, no,’ he said politely. ‘Call me, any hour, any day. I’m in the book. If you remember. Now, as long as I’m here, would you feel like going over the thing with me again?’

There was nothing I felt less like doing. But of course I said I would.

‘I couldn’t tell how tall, because he was bending over the bed,’ I started out. ‘But not extremely tall, I think.’ I looked at my feet to concentrate better. Markowitz’s brown eyes were too eager. He was on edge and desperate to get something definite out of me. I didn’t have anything to give him.

‘He was pretty heavy,’ I said. I bit my lip. ‘He was white. He didn’t sound very young. Not a kid’s voice.’ I rummaged through my memory. I had thought my film was so exact, but it had been skipping things lately, thank God. ‘Nothing else,’ I said finally. ‘I just can’t form any other conclusions. It was so dark, and with the pillow over my face . . .’

‘Sure, sure,’ Markowitz said hastily. He didn’t want me crying on him. He reached up to check his Jerry Lee Lewis hairdo. It was a weary gesture.

Then I had it.

‘He was
bald
!’ I shouted.

The detective’s head snapped up. His brown eyes glittered from that blank face. ‘What?’ he said intently.

‘He was bald,’ I said more slowly. I had it now; I remembered. That nagging feeling, like an itch beneath a cast, was gone.

Markowitz looked as though he wanted to turn me upside down and shake the information loose. ‘How do you know?’

‘My arms . . . when he . . .’ I took a deep breath to brace myself. ‘When he lay on top of me, my arms were crossed over my bosom, and the top of his head brushed them, and I felt scalp, not hair.’

The detective actually grabbed my arm. ‘Are you sure?’ His voice was little more than a whisper.

‘Yes.’

Markowitz leapt to his feet. Excitement was jolting through him like an amphetamine. He walked to a window, ran a hand over his hair again, put both hands in his pockets, took them out. His hair was so carefully waved that it looked like a toupee. I wondered suddenly if his partner Tendall did indeed wear a toupee. That thick gray hair, so carefully styled . . .

‘How bald?’ He swung to face me.

‘What?’

‘Completely bald? Or just a little hair combed across the scalp? Or bald on top, with hair around the sides of his head?’

I tried to make the memory more specific. I closed my eyes. I actually crossed my arms over my breasts.

‘I don’t know. I can’t remember any more than that,’ I said finally.

Markowitz accepted my word, to my surprise. It seemed he was so excited at finally having a real clue that he could barely wait to get back to the police station to tell his partner Tendall. And he was proud, I could tell. He’d come back to see me that one additional time, without real hope, just because he was a good cop, and a desperate cop. I didn’t tell him that if he hadn’t had the habit of running his hand over his hair, I never would have remembered.