Secrecy (34 page)

“And you,” Bill said, “you being wheeled on the gurney into the operating room. I saw that too. I saw your little pigtail.… And in a flash they came, those pictures. He was a savage, a brute. Those girls, the one whose nose he broke—he threatened them both if they should ever tell. The fool! How did he think she could hide her nose?”

The old wicker chair creaked when he stood up and switched on a light. He handed Charlotte a magazine.

“Here, look at this tabloid trash. Big article about Ted Marple:
ACCUSED RAPIST TRAILED TO SOUTHEAST ASIA
. Et cetera, et cetera. Damned idiots! Nothing better to do with their time than to fabricate sensational yarns. Want to read it?”

“No. I can imagine it.”

Bill sat down again, choosing this time a rocker that creaked even more loudly as he moved and mourned.

“Claudia used to say to me sometimes, ‘I’m so ashamed of what my son did. How can I look you in the face?’ Poor woman. She used to tell me how ‘large minded,’ how forgiving, I was. And all the while I knew what I had done. It was locked up in
here.” He held his fist to his chest. “A big, hard knot of conscience. Whenever Cliff told me how she longed to see her son again and how she hoped to ‘reform’ him, and whenever another foolish, mistaken report of sightings was heard, the knot grew bigger.”

He knew, too, Charlotte thought, how I dreaded Ted’s return, how terrified I was. “Don’t worry, you’ll never need see him,” he used to tell me, wishing only, I’m sure, he could tell me the truth instead.

Abruptly, Bill stood again. Plainly unable to be still, he walked to the edge of the porch and, with his back to Charlotte, spoke into the air.

“I’ve often thought I should just report the whole thing. And then I never did it. Cowardly, I suppose. And still I hadn’t thought of myself as a coward. In the army …” The words drifted away.

“You’re not a coward, Dad. You’re also not a murderer. But they would not have believed you.”

“I know that. But what I really feared was the fallout, the damage to Claudia and to your mother. I tried to protect them.… I tried to protect you.”

“I know.”

In the lamplight his smile now turned to her. “You understand that?”

“Elena told me you said you would be all right because you had to take care of me.”

“How is she? I should have asked you before.”

“Very well, lively as ever.” There was no point in reporting Elena’s current situation.

“No, liveliness was never her problem.”

Her father’s expression puzzled her. Was it bitterness or ruefulness that she was seeing and hearing?

“Did you mean that literally? Does Mama have a problem?”

Indeed, Mama had very obvious problems. But those were not the ones Charlotte meant.

“I would think so. Whatever it was, she kept it to herself, as people do. We hardly knew each other when we were married, and when she left us, I still didn’t know her.”

The sadness, thought Charlotte, Elena’s, and Bill’s, and mine. It hung heavily upon the air. She felt the chill of it on her skin.

“I hope,” she said, “that you aren’t angry at her for telling me all this.”

“No, in a way it has even clarified things. You can see now, I hope, that I am not simply an unreasonable fool about this property.”

“Yes, I see.”

“If they dredge, they will find him.”

“With your money clip and your shoes.”

“There’s more. My shirt was almost ripped off when we fought. When I got back from the airport late that afternoon, I had to stop for gas in town. ‘You’ve had a long day,’ Eddie said. ‘I was opening up this morning when I saw you driving down the mill road, out to the highway. You got up ahead of the chickens.’ I said, yes, I’d gone to Boston and back. I remember being worried about my ripped shirt and hoping he hadn’t noticed it. But of course, he must have. He’s a nosy type, notices everything.”

It appeared in Charlotte’s mind to be a tenuous
case. But she was no lawyer, and it might not be so tenuous after all. A skillful prosecutor, or an unscrupulous one—depending upon your point of view—might use those scraps of information to turn Bill Dawes into a vengeful murderer. And Elena had been with him. That man might have seen her. There could be no predicting the outcome. In any event the connection with the rape cases would fill headlines and talk shows to infinity.

Her gentle father. He, a country dweller who had never shot and could never shoot a deer. The thought of him exposed to the criminal courts, to that inevitable cruel glare, was unbearable. And sitting there in the suddenly fallen silence she had a quick vision of Bill’s years; moving pictures fled past her; she saw his disappointing marriage, his failing business and lost esteem, his devoted fatherhood, and last, the lonely years since her own departure from their home. One would expect him to have found a woman to love; but then, with this threat hanging over him, he must have been hardly in the mood.

His voice cut into the silence. “Cliff and your Roger have been after me to change my mind. Roger even brought a lawyer and one of the investors from Boston. Heavy artillery.”

“I know. They think you’re being a damn fool.”

“I can’t blame them.”

“Dad, I thought so too. But now I’m sorry I was so nasty on the telephone before I went to Italy.”

“You were entitled to be angry. My arguments don’t make any sense. They sound fanatical.”

He paused. Seeing him there in such distress, it
was hard to believe that a man of his strength and bulk could actually seem frail.

“This means so much to you. And Roger. He’ll be so terribly disappointed. You’ve both put your hearts into this.”

Hearts, thought Charlotte, my own is thudding in my ears. Regardless of what he says, Dad can’t understand what this truly means to Roger and to me. A whole year’s work gone down the drain!
Disappointment
was hardly the right word.

It was late. The night air carried a first faint harbinger of summer’s nearing end. Bill said, “It’s late and you must have jet lag. Let’s go in.”

“Yes, I want to leave early tomorrow. Good night, Dad. I hope you won’t worry too much.”

And wasn’t that an impossible hope! After the abandonment of the project, the wreck of the mill would still stand with its dreary acres around it, and ruination would return.

In the morning as Charlotte approached the site, she slowed the car for a last look. Surveyors’ stakes were planted where Dawes Square was to rise beside the riverwalk. They looked jaunty there, like a little troop of marchers on their determined way. And with a sinking spirit she thought of Roger.

But the body that lay beneath the ground behind Dawes Square was the determinant. Nothing mattered but to keep that body’s silence. No happy inspiration, no ambition, no money, pride, or satisfaction could possibly be measured against the value of that silence.

*   *   *

“When I got your message, at first I didn’t know what to think,” Roger said. “Then I thought something must have happened over in Italy, and that’s why you came back and went rushing up to Kingsley.”

He himself had come rushing in to “their” hamburger place down the street and was out of breath.

“No, Italy was lovely. But I was lonesome, and I wanted to be home with you.” All day she had been mulling over what to say and how to begin it. The absolute necessity of lying to Roger was terribly painful; it frightened her, increasing her heartbeat and muddling her speech. “Then there were things—personal affairs of my father’s—he had telephoned me—I felt I had to go see him.”

“What is it? Is he sick?”

“Well, not exactly, not physically. It’s—it’s things on his mind.”

“I should think so,” said Roger with a grimace. “We were up there while you were away. We laid everything flat out on the table. Old man Jessup, who’d brought in three more investors, a total of over three million dollars, was burnt up. He didn’t spare any language, I’ll tell you that. Even Cliff didn’t know what to make of his brother. All we got out of him was the same totally inane and inaccurate argument about the wetland.”

Charlotte took her time eating food that her stomach did not want to accept. Using up more time, she took a long drink of water. A reply of some sort was expected, and trying to think of one, she floundered.

“Yes. Yes, it’s very hard.”

Curiously, with an edge of impatience, Roger regarded her. “What’s hard? If you mean trying to deal with the man, it sure as hell is. What’s his trouble? And what has it got to do with the project, anyway?”

“It’s hard,” she repeated. “Hard to say. It’s a very personal matter, and I can’t talk about it. I wish I could, but I can’t.”

Roger nodded. “Confidential.”

And Charlotte nodded. “Yes, very. Darling, I’m sorry I can’t say any more. I’m so sorry.”

“But what can be confidential that’s connected with the project?”

It occurred to her that she had clumsily confused the issue, and she answered, “I didn’t say it was connected.”

He considered that for a moment, and said then, “In that case the existence of a private problem need not affect Kingsley Village. I’m sorry that your dad’s having troubles, because as you know, I like him. But that’s no reason why I can’t straighten him out about our project. I’m arranging to bring a group of ecological scientists from the universities, maybe three or four people, to straighten out his thinking so we can stop this foolishness. I’m sure it’ll do the trick.”

A committee to face her father! Again she saw him as she had never seen him before, propped against the porch railing, bewildered and frail—frail, at six feet four! Alarm made her cry almost piteously, “Oh, don’t do that! Please don’t, Roger. He mustn’t have to handle anything like that right now.”

“When, then? We can’t wait forever. Everything’s ready to go—money, lawyers, corporate papers, filings,
zoning, you name it. Do I have to describe it to you, of all people?”

There was such a lump in her throat that she could not possibly pretend to be eating a normal meal or to be under full control of her voice.

“I’m in a very difficult position,” she said, “and I hate it. Can’t you see how I am?”

“Yes,” he replied as he studied her face. “I do see, and it scares me. What is it? Is it about yourself? Is it that you’re sick and you don’t want to tell me?”

“Darling, no, I’m perfectly well and I would tell you in a second if I were not. This concerns my father and not me.”

Reaching across the table, he laid his hand over hers and gently urged, “You saw your mother in Italy and she told you something. Isn’t that so?”

My God, he is clairvoyant, Charlotte thought, replying only with a shake of the head and a whispered “No.”

“I don’t understand why you can’t speak freely to me,” he urged, still gently.

“I could,” she replied with emphasis on the I, “but I’m not speaking for myself.”

“Don’t tell me your father’s robbed a bank and he’s in hiding,” Roger said as if some jocularity would ease her.

But far from easing, it tightened every nerve instead, so that she clapped her hands to her face, crying, “Please, please. Do we have to?”

“Well, I suppose we don’t have to do anything,” Roger said, turning instantly serious, “since you have no doubt worked out in your mind just how we are
going to retreat from what’s been started without leaving a bunch of bleeding bodies on the field.”

For a moment she saw the boardrooms, the long tables, and the long, dour faces of the moneymen; and she saw whiskered old gentlemen in carved gold frames, walls of tan books, and stacks of smooth white papers to be signed and witnessed in the halls of the law. She knew exactly what Roger meant.

“So you must have it all worked out,” he repeated.

His tone had become ever so slightly sharp. He was sparring with her. A mutual frustration was growing. They were, for the first time, on the verge of annoyance with each other.

“No,” she said. “I see that it will be very hard, and I wish I could prevent it.”

“Your beautiful idea going to smash! How can you accept that so easily?”

“I’m not accepting it so easily, but I am accepting it, since neither I nor anyone else can change my father’s mind.”

The silence between them was eerie, a silence that comes while people await portentous news. It did not last very long, probably because it was too painful for both of them.

“May we talk about this tomorrow?” she asked.

He stood at once. “Of course. You will have time overnight to relax and give it more thought. Anyway, you must be feeling jet lag. I’ll sleep at my place.”

A sketch of the most recent ground plan for Kingsley Village was propped against a pile of books next
to the telephone. There was no way when using the telephone that Charlotte could avoid being stabbed by the sight of it. Yet she still had not put it away.

She was staring at it while her father’s anxious voice rang into her left ear.

“So you got back all right, Charlotte? Did you have a chance to see Roger today? I’m so worried about you.… The situation’s impossible. How did you explain it?”

The barrage of questions was exhausting. A five-mile jog or a complete housecleaning would be nothing compared with this total drain of energy.

She said calmly, “I saw Roger for only a few minutes. He wants to bring some experts to convince you that you’re wrong about the wetlands. I asked him please not to do it because you have these personal problems and shouldn’t be troubled right now.”

“Problems like what, for heaven’s sake? Not terminal cancer, or a clinical depression?”

“No illness at all. Of course not. Just something personal.”

“It was a big mistake to bring up any ‘personal problem’ business, Charlotte.”

“I had to explain why I went to see you the minute I got back from Europe, didn’t I?”

“You needn’t have told him you had been here.”

“I don’t want to lie to Roger.”

“Well, all right, let it go. But why object to his bringing some experts to change my mind? Let them come.”

“But I wanted to spare you.”

“I understand, and it was thoughtful of you, but I think you must let them come. I can listen and still not change my mind.”