The Outrage - Edge Series 3 (27 page)

. . ‘ She swallowed hard and looked totally dejected. ‘And in truth I can’t rightly say why I wrote those things.’ She hung her head and the straggly yellow hair obscured her face.

‘In the letter to me you say that the Quinn house was like a bordello,’ Edge said impatiently. ‘Why? What made you write that, lady?’

‘Did I really write that to you?’ She did not sound so perplexed as she meant to and there was a hint of artfulness in her tone and her narrowed green eyes. Sarah prompted grimly: ‘Like the one my sister used to run in New Orleans you said in the letter to me.’

In a less forceful tone Edge said: ‘You damn well know you did, lady.’ He picked up both letters. ‘You want me to read them aloud to you?’

She sighed and shook her head. ‘It was something to say. After it came out about Nancy acting the wanton way she did at the old mill’

‘Something else you wrote.’ Edge had no need to look at the letter to quote from it.
‘No
good will come of it, mark my words,
is what your letter said. And then:
Even if it is natural.
What did you mean by that, lady?’ He was aware of Sarah’s sudden interest in an aspect of the exchange that was outside of the reason for her mounting revulsion for Muriel Mandrell.

‘It was just something that came to me,’ the yellow haired woman defended flatly as she gazed into the almost dead embers of the fire.

Edge warned: ‘If you lie, lady, the letters won’t burn. And like Miss Farmer said if folks around here have the stomach for reading them then – ‘

She shuddered as if suddenly cold then blurted: ‘All right! It was what Blanche told me about Nancy Quinn, mister! We were talking here one night. About that family. And I let it slip how much I liked Mr Quinn. And how I thought sometimes he liked me. And then Blanche said something about if the father was anything like his daughter then a woman didn’t have no chance with him . . . that way.’

‘Edge?’ Sarah’s voice had a tremor in it.

He said: ‘I need to confirm what I’ve already been told.’

Muriel Mandrell looked him straight in the eye. ‘All right, mister. That girl was a . . . Nancy Quinn liked women instead of men. I reckon that’s what you’ve already been told, ain’t that right, mister?’

Sarah exclaimed incredulously: ‘Nancy was a lesbian?’

Edge pressed on: ‘You said your daughter told you? How did she know?’

The sound deadening quality of the solidly built old house was proved when the door from the hallway swung open and Blanche Mandrell appeared on the threshold of the room. The blue eyed, raven haired twenty year old had approached the house and let herself inside without being heard: but it was clear from her expression she had been able to eavesdrop at the parlour door as her mother demanded in a strained tone:

‘How long have you been listening, girl?’

Edge caught a pleading look from the distraught mother and shielded his actions with his body as he picked up both letters and put them in a jacket pocket.

‘I just got in.’ The girl, who was still plump with adolescent puppy fat, did not look so much like her mother now the pair were not wearing the black dresses and gingham aprons they did in the coffee shop. She seemed to be simply intrigued by the presence of the visitors in the house and the subject of the talk she had overheard: not disturbed by any of it. ‘I saw the horses outside and got scared,’ she explained. ‘At this time of night I thought you might be being robbed or something, ma. I heard voices and so I listened to find out what was going on.’

She shrugged and remained on the threshold like the claustrophobic atmosphere of the overcrowded room also affected her as her mother said: ‘Mr Edge was asking some questions about Nancy Quinn, Blanche.’

‘I heard what he was asking. Why, mister? Why do you want to know all that personal stuff about her being the way she couldn’t help being?’ She peered intently into the middle distance like she was studying images of far off events. ‘Nancy’s dead now! And whatever she was can’t be changed by folks talking about how she was when she was alive.’

Edge began: ‘I figure the way she was has something to do with why she and her mother were murdered.’

Blanche altered the focus of her gaze and hardened her tone as she suddenly recalled a puzzling aspect of what she had overheard. ‘Why do you think my ma can tell you anything about Nancy being strange that way, mister?’

Sarah said: ‘I don’t think that need concern you, young lady.’

The girl snarled: ‘I wasn’t asking you!’

‘Blanche!’ Her anxious mother was clearly worried that Sarah might be angered by the girl’s attitude into breaking the promise Edge had made about burning the letters.’

Edge lied: ‘I recalled something your ma said when she was cleaning at the Quinn house this morning. It didn’t mean much at the time. But after I talked with Eddie Sawyer it did.’

Blanche chewed her lower lip while she mulled this over for stretched seconds then tossed her head and murmured her satisfaction with the falsehood.

Her mother turned away to conceal the degree of relief she felt that Blanche had not overheard the exchanges concerning the letters now concealed in Edge’s shirt pocket. The girl shot a suspicious glance at her and asked: ‘But she didn’t say I told her about Nancy being that way?’

‘No, she didn’t say that then or tonight.’

Blanche looked quizzically at her mother now and received a curt nod of approval to tell what needed to be said. And the girl drew in a deep breath and again gazed into a remembered place where bad things had happened a long way from this room then said slowly and carefully: ‘I told her about the night Nancy and me got really drunk. Not long before Christmas last year it was. I passed out cold from drinking too much whiskey and when I came to I was all but naked.’ She quickened the pace of what she was saying. ‘And Nancy was standing over me, tearing off her clothes.’

She had been staring fixedly down at the floor but now she lifted her gaze to peer briefly at each of the three people waiting for her to continue. But could not maintain eye contact with any of them for more than a moment. ‘I was more scared that I ever had been in my life before,’ she went on thickly, staring into the past again. ‘Nancy, she had this . . . She had this thing and . . .’

‘It’s all right, Blanche dear,’ Muriel Mandrell encouraged soothingly. ‘You go right ahead and tell Mr Edge and Miss Farmer everything you told me. There’s no reason at all for you to feel ashamed over any of it. It was that disgusting Nancy Quinn who was responsible for – ‘

‘Edge?’ Sarah pleaded, swallowed hard and looked sick to her stomach.

He said to the apprehensive young girl: ‘It’s okay, Blanche. You don’t have to go into all the sordid the details. I reckon I’ve got the dirty picture.’

CHAPTER • 17

___________________________________________________________________________

A FEW minutes after hearing Blanche Mandrell confirm from first hand experience
that there was a secret dark side to Nancy Quinn’s character, Edge and Sarah Farmer sat their unhitched and unmoving horses outside the small house on Hill Road: neither of them conscious of the lengthening silence between them. For his part Edge’s reflective silence was caused by surprise with himself at how deeply he was affected by what the girl had said. For he had always considered himself a man of the world.

She had revealed nothing graphically explicit about that night some six months ago but what she did say left little doubt about what would have taken place between her and Nancy Quinn if she had been agreeable. Blanche had not given in and Nancy became tearfully apologetic to her friend and blamed her drunken state for what she had done. And Blanche told her she should not be concerned over the attempt to lure her into experimenting with an experience she had contemplated but never had the nerve to try.

‘I wonder if that’s right?’ Edge murmured after he and Sarah had sat their saddles in reflective silence for two minutes or so.

‘Was what right?’

He realised he had unwittingly voiced a rhetorical question he had not intended to speak aloud and explained: ‘After the girl admitted it was something she had wanted to try she said she reckoned most girls do at one time or another.’

Sarah shrugged. ‘In a way, I suppose. As I remember it from when I was their age it was something I heard some girls talk about sometimes - what it would be like.’ She chewed her lower lip pensively then added: ‘A part of the growing up process I guess. Don’t young men have the same curiosity?’

‘I sure as hell didn’t!’ he snapped and had a fleeting but vivid recollection of a man under his command for a time during his service with the Union Army in the Civil War – a New Englander named Bob Rhett. But he shook his head to dismiss from his mind the memory of the effeminate trooper and returned his thoughts to the more immediate past. In the overcrowded, occasionally oppressively hot small parlour where Blanche Mandrell had told how, after Nancy left her she had rushed home, torn off her clothing and submersed her shaking body in a tub of soapy water. Had felt dirty even thought the two girls had not laid a hand on each other. How for several days afterwards the humiliation of what had nearly happened tormented her mind. Reached a degree of deep shame that did not start to expunge itself until she asked some friends what they thought of such an act that went against nature. When she learned that two other girls had considered experimenting but neither had actually tried to satisfy their curiosity. And these and some others had named Nancy Quinn as one they suspected might have stronger inclinations that most to indulge in
such awful things.
In the cramped and crowded parlour of the Mandrell house it was Sarah who had the presence of mind to ask which girls she had talked to. And at first Blanche claimed she could not remember but then she saw something in the older woman’s commanding gaze that disturbed her more than she was already before her mother warned that she should not lie about anything. Then the girl said adamantly that she refused to name these particular friends. Insisted her own experience, about which she had told the complete truth, should be proof enough of how Nancy was inclined
that way.

She did allow that none of the other girls said Nancy had approached them: that it was just
certain things
Nancy had told them that set a couple of them to thinking. Others suspected her of being strange because of what boys told them of her behaviour: how she could be fun to be with until they reached the spooning stage of a date.

‘Then she’d go stiff as a fence post is what one of them told his girl,’ Blanche explained.

‘Another one said it was like Nancy really wanted to enjoy being romanced. Sometimes she even led a boy on. But when he wanted to go further Nancy got really mad and put a full stop to it.’

‘But ain’t that what any decent young girl is supposed to do . . . ‘ Edge began to point out then realised he was defending a lost cause because he had already accepted the fact that Nancy Quinn was a lesbian. And recalled that a time ago he had heard of such strange relationships between females - but none were ever as young as Nancy Quinn had been. Blanche told him earnestly: ‘That’s exactly what most of the boys she treated that way reckoned, mister. It just seemed like she was frightened of going too far. Like most girls are scared that way, just as you said. But Nancy was a lot harder on them than other girls. She got a lot madder at them.’

Edge said: ‘It seems the Sawyer kid didn’t think of her like that.’

Blanche’s adolescent features formed into a grimace of disgust for Sawyer. ‘Did that . .

? Was Eddie Sawyer the one who told you she was . . . that Nancy was strange, mister?’

‘He told me he was sure she liked girls better than she liked boys.’

Her grimace hardened and then she sighed before she acknowledged with a shrug.

‘Well, at least he didn’t spread stories around while Nancy was alive. And I’ve got to admit that what he spoke was only the truth. Other boys could have said the same. The ones I told you about? But they wouldn’t. They’re too nice. Eddie Sawyer is just a jerk. Hardly anybody likes him.’ She shook her head ruefully. ‘For awhile Nancy pretended to think he was okay. Same as she did with Alvin Ivers and a few of the other not so nice guys around Springdale. That was while she was going through that wild patch that I guess you must have heard about?’

Edge nodded in response to her questioning gaze.

‘Nancy told me all about that, after we got back to being friends again. She said she still couldn’t be really sure if she was truly what she was scared she might be. And she was sure she went out of her mind – really crazy in the head – for awhile. But then she got back with Matt Colman again. And it was serious between them. Nancy was sure he was going to ask her to marry him.’ The overweight with puppy-fat girl was suddenly morose and shrugged as she concluded: ‘Until the night before she was killed when that new craziness happened out at the old mill.’