Deep Water (18 page)

       "Why, I didn't notice any upset," June said, smiling.

       "Oh, it's one damned thing after another," Melinda said.

       The Wilsons trickled out of the door, with backward glances from June and promises to telephone very soon. Vic was glad that June considered the cocktail visit a success, but she wouldn't, of course, after her husband had told her their conversation. Probably Don wouldn't tell her that conversation. He'd just tell her that he thought Vic Van Allen was cracked, judging from the snails in the garage and from his insane enthusiasm for glaciers.

       "Doesn't he ever talk?" Vic asked.

       "Who?" Melinda had got herself another drink, straight on the rocks.

       "Don Wilson. I couldn't get a word out of him."

       "No?"

       "No. Shouldn't I call up the Carters? What's his first name?" "I don't know. They live in Marlboro Heights."

       Vic made the call. Trixie was fine and wanted to spend the night. Vic talked to her and made her promise to go to bed by nine o'clock, though he didn't think she would stick to it.

       "She's fine," Vic said to Melinda."Mrs. Carter said they'd drive her over sometime tomorrow morning."

       "What're you so merry about?" Melinda asked.

       "Why shouldn't I be? Wasn't it a pleasant evening?"

       June Wilson bores me stiff."

       "Don bores me. We should've switched around. Say, it isn't very late. Why don't we drive over to Wesley and have dinner at the Golden Pheasant? Wouldn't you like that?" He knew she would, and knew she would hate admitting that she would, hate going with him instead of with some imaginary man, whom she was probably even then imagining.

       "I'd rather stay home," Melinda said.

       "No, you wouldn't," Vic said kindly. "Go and put on your blouse with the gold thread. I think the skirt is fine."

       She was wearing a green velvet skirt, but as if to show her insolence toward him or perhaps June Wilson, she had topped the skirt with her old brown sweater, sleeves pushed up, and nothing around her neck. Comparable to Don's old trousers, Vic thought. He sighed, waiting for her inevitable turning away to go to her room, to put on the new blouse with the gold thread, just as he had suggested. Melinda swayed a little, her greenish eyes staring at him, and then she turned away, pulling her sweater over her head before she was even out of the room.

       Why did he really do it, Vic asked himself, when he would have preferred staying home with a book? Or working on Trixie's bookcase? Patiently, with unflagging good humor, he tried to draw her out at the restaurant, tried to get a smile from her by describing twelve methods of summoning a waiter. Melinda only stared off into space—though she was staring around at other people, Vic knew. Melinda derived a great deal of pleasure from watching other people. Or was she looking to see if her detective was here? Not very likely, since he had proposed the Golden Pheasant and he didn't think the detective, if any, would trouble to follow their car at night. A detective would be hired to worm what he could out of their friends, he supposed. So far, no stranger had turned up in their set. Vic thought the Mellers or the Cowans would have mentioned a curious stranger if they had been questioned by one. No, Melinda was only staring at other people. She had a faculty which he really admired of being able to dream, to live vicariously for a while, in other people. He might have said something about this to her, but he was afraid that tonight she would take it as an insult. Or she would say, "What else can I do with the life I've got?" So he talked of something else, of the possibility of going to Canada before the weather got cold. They might make some arrangement for Trixie to stay with the Petersons for ten days, Vic said.

       "Oh, I don't think I'd care for that," Melinda said, with a cool smile.

       "This summer's gone by without a real vacation for either of us," he said.

       "Let it go by. I'm sick of it."

       "The winter's going to be even more boring—without a break somewhere," he said.

       "Oh, I don't think it's going to be boring," she said. He smiled. "Is that a threat?"

       "Take it the way you like."

       "Are you going to put arsenic in my food?"

       "I don't think arsenic could kill you."

       It was a charming evening. Before they went home Vic stopped at Wesley's biggest drugstore to look over the book rack. He bought a couple of Penguin books, one on insects, the other on the installation of stained glass in church windows. Melinda went into a phone booth and made a very long call to someone Vic could hear the murmur of her voice, but he made no effort to hear what she was saying.

Chapter 13

Trixie entered the Highland School on September 7 and was put into the third grade because she could read so well. Vic was very proud of her. The school called him and Melinda in to discuss the matter of putting her into the third grade: she would need some extra help in arithmetic, geography, and probably also penmanship, and the school wanted to know if they could count on her parents to tutor her a bit at home. Vic said that he would be happy to tutor her and that he had plenty of time for it. Even Melinda gave an affirmative answer. So it was settled. As a surprise present and a reward, Vic gave Trixie the bookcase he had made, and filled its upper two shelves with new books for her, putting her old favorites in the two lower shelves. He was to tutor her two hours on Saturday and two hours on Sunday, come hell or high water, he told her, and she seemed to be fairly impressed. The tutoring began at the end of her first week in school. Half an hour of arithmetic, half an hour of penmanship on the living room cocktail table, then a fifteen-minute break and an hour of geography, which was not quite such a mental strain on Trixie because Vic could make geography very funny.

       Vic very much enjoyed tutoring Trixie. He had been looking forward to it for years, to helping her first with arithmetic and algebra and geometry, then perhaps trig and calculus. It had always seemed the essence of parenthood and domesticity, the older generation passing down the wisdom of the race to the offspring, as birds taught their young to fly. And yet the tutoring brought into focus certain uncomfortable facts, made him realize more acutely that he was leading two lives and that the friendships he now enjoyed with Horace and Phil, for instance, existed because they did not know the truth about him. He felt more guilt about that than he had felt for killing De Lisle.

       He thought about such things as he watched Trixie's plump, uncomfortable hand trying to make a row of 'b''s, or 'q''s or 'g''s. "Aye bee see dee ee eff 'gee-ee', aitch eye jay kay ellemeno 'pee-ee'," Trixie chanted periodically to rest from the penmanship labors, because she had known the alphabet for years. Vic tried to answer the question he had not been able to answer for the past four or five years:

       where were things going with Melinda and where did he want them to go? He wanted her to himself, but she was not attractive to him as a woman; that he realized, too. Neither was she repellent. He simply felt that he could get along without her, or any other woman, physically, for the rest of his life. And had he known that before he killed De Lisle? He couldn't answer that, he couldn't remember. De Lisle's murder was like a caesura in his experience, and it was strangely hard to remember, emotionally, before that time. He remembered a knot, a dark, hard knot of repressions and resentments in himself, and it was as if his murdering De Lisle had untied the knot. He was more relaxed now and, to be perfectly honest, happier. He couldn't see himself as a criminal, a psychopath. It was, indeed, much as he had foreseen the evening he had made the shocking statement to Joel Nash. He had indulged in a fantasy that night of having killed McRae himself, assuming that McRae had provoked him sufficiently, and Vic remembered that he had started to 'feel' better immediately. A discharge of repressed hatred, perhaps that was a better metaphor than the untying of a knot. But just what had pushed him across the line from fantasy to fact that night in the Cowans' swimming pool? And would it happen again under the right circumstances? He hoped not. Obviously, it was better to let off steam here and there rather than let it build up to explosive proportions. He smiled at the simple logic of it. He could imagine many things, but he could not imagine himself very angry, as most people became angry, raising their voices and banging their fists on tables. But perhaps he should set himself to try.

       "Get some corners on those 'r''s," Vic said to Trixie. "You're making a string of croquet wickets."

       Trixie giggled, her concentration running out. "Let's play croquet!"

       "After you get through the 'r''s."

       Phil and Horace could never exactly condone his murder of De Lisle, Vic thought, so he was doomed to hypocrisy. But he could not keep himself from taking some comfort in the thought that Phil or Horace or any other man might have killed him, too, under similar circumstances. They simply wouldn't have done it in a swimming pool, probably. They might have chosen De Lisle's house, one afternoon when their wife was there. And perhaps they, too, might have felt better afterward—perhaps. The whole house reflected Vic's happier state of mind. He had repainted the garage in a cheerful yellow, set out a little maple tree in one of the hydrangea holes and filled in the other hole and seeded it. The living room looked as if happy people lived in it now, even if happy people didn't. He thought he had lost at least fifteen pounds—he had an aversion to weighing himself—and he hardly ever took a drink any more. He whistled more often. Or did he whistle just to annoy Melinda, just because she generally asked him to stop?

       Melinda drove up in her car while Vic and Trixie were playing a rather unorthodox game of croquet on the lawn. There was a man with her, a man Vic had never seen before. Vic calmly bent over and finished his shot—a fifteen-foot shot over convex ground that bumped Trixie's ball lightly and left his sitting where hers had been, directly in front of the wicket. Trixie let out a wail and jumped up and down and stamped, letting off steam as if she had a big stake in the game, though Trixie's sole objective in croquet seemed to be to knock the ball as far as possible. Vic turned toward the driveway as Melinda and the man approached. He was a tall, broad-shouldered blond man of about thirty-two, in tweed jacket and slacks. His serious face smiled a little as he neared Vic.

       "Vic, this is Mr. Carpenter," Melinda said. "Mr. Carpenter, my husband."

       "How do you do?" Vic said, extending his hand.

       "How do you do?" Mr. Carpenter said, with a firm grip. "Your wife's just been showing me around the town. I'm looking for a place to live."

       "Oh. To rent or to buy?" Vic asked.

       "To rent," he replied.

       "Mr. Carpenter's a psychotherapist," Melinda said."He's going to be working at Kennington for a few months. I found him asking questions in the drugstore, so I thought I'd give him a tour of the town. None of the real estate places are open on Sunday around here."

       That gave Vic his first suspicion. Melinda was explaining a little too carefully. Mr. Carpenter's eyes were lingering on him with just a little too much interest, even for a psychotherapist. "Did you tell him about the Derby place?" Vic asked.

       "Showed it to him," Melinda said. "That's a little too barnlike. He wants more of something like Charley had, maybe in the woods, but comfortable."

       "Well, it's a good time of the year to be looking. Summer people giving up their houses. What about Charley's place?" Vic asked, going her one better. "Wouldn't that be free now?"

       Mr. Carpenter was looking at Melinda, and there was nothing about his expression that would have betrayed that he had ever heard of Charley.

       "Y-yes," Melinda said thoughtfully. "We might ask about that.

       The owners should be in today, too." She glanced toward the house, as if the telephone had crossed her mind.

       But she wasn't going to telephone the owners just now, Vic knew, and probably not tomorrow either. "Wouldn't you care to come in, Mr. Carpenter?" Vic asked. "Or are you in a hurry?" Mr. Carpenter indicated with a smile and a little bow that he would be happy to come in. They all walked toward the house,

       Trixie trailing them and staring at the newcomer.

       "What do you think of Kennington?" Vic asked as they went into the house. Kennington was a psychiatric institute outside of Wesley, with about a hundred in- and out-patients. It was famous for its small, distinguished staff and for its homelike atmosphere. The long, low white building sat on a green hill and looked like a well-kept country home.

       "Well, I only got there yesterday," Mr. Carpenter said pleasantly. "The people are very nice. I expected that. I'm sure I'll enjoy my work."

       Vic did not think he should ask him exactly what he would be doing. That would show too much curiosity.

       "Would you care for a drink?" Melinda asked. "Or some coffee?"

       "Oh, no, thank you. I'll just have a cigarette. Then I ought to be getting back to my car."

       "Oh, yes. He left his car in front of the drugstore, unlocked," Melinda said, smiling. "He's afraid somebody's going to steal it." "Not much of that around here," Vic said genially.

       "Certainly isn't like New York," Mr. Carpenter agreed, looking around the room as he spoke.

       Vic was looking at his loose tweed jacket, wondering if the bulge under his arm could be a gun in a shoulder holster, or if it was a bulge at all. It might have been just a fold in the cloth. His heavy features wore a half-bored expression now that was deliberate, Vic felt. There was a certain veneer of the scholar about him, but only a veneer. He had the face of a man of action. Vic filled his pipe. He had a great taste for his pipe lately.

       "Where're you staying now?" Vic asked.