The Secret History (30 page)

“So?”

“Say what you like, but you can’t convince me that a jury box of poverty-level Vermonters would have the remotest bit of pity for four college students on trial for murdering one of their neighbors.”

“People in Hampden have been hoping for years that something like this would happen,” said Francis, lighting a new cigarette off the end of the old one. “We wouldn’t be getting off on any manslaughter charges. We’d be lucky if we didn’t go to the chair.”

“Imagine how it would look,” Henry said. “We’re all young, well educated, reasonably well off; and, perhaps most importantly, not Vermonters. And I suppose that any equitable judge might make allowances for our youth, and the fact that it was an accident and so forth, but—”

“Four rich college kids?” said Francis. “Drunk? On drugs? On this guy’s land in the middle of the night?”

“You were on his land?”

“Well, apparently,” said Henry. “That’s where the papers said his body was found.”

I hadn’t been in Vermont very long, but I’d been there long enough to know what any Vermonter worth his salt would think of
that
. Trespassing on someone’s land was tantamount to breaking into his house. “Oh, God,” I said.

“That’s not the half of it, either,” said Francis. “For Christ’s sake, we were wearing
bed
sheets. Barefoot. Soaked in blood.
Stinking drunk. Can you imagine if we’d trailed down to the sheriff’s office and tried to explain all
that?
”

“Not that we were in any condition to explain,” Henry said dreamily. “Really. I wonder if you understand what sort of state we were in. Scarcely an hour before, we’d all been really, truly
out of our minds
. And it may be a superhuman effort to lose oneself so completely, but that’s nothing compared to the effort of getting oneself
back
again.”

“It certainly wasn’t as if something snapped and there we were, our jolly old selves,” said Francis. “Believe me. We might as well have had shock treatments.”

“I really don’t know how we got home without being seen,” Henry said.

“No way could we have patched together a plausible story from this. Good Lord. It was weeks before I got over it. Camilla couldn’t even talk for three days.”

With a small chill, I remembered: Camilla, her throat wrapped in a red muffler, unable to speak. Laryngitis, they’d said.

“Yes, that was very strange,” said Henry. “She was thinking clearly enough, but the words wouldn’t come out right. As if she’d had a stroke. When she started to speak again, her high-school French came back before her English
or
her Greek. Nursery words. I remember sitting by her bed, listening to her count to ten, watching her point to
la fenêtre, la chaise …
”

Francis laughed. “She was so funny,” he said. “When I asked her how she felt she said, ‘
Je me sens comme Hélène Keller, mon vieux
.’ ”

“Did she go to the doctor?”

“Are you kidding?”

“What if she hadn’t got any better?”

“Well, the same thing happened to all of us,” said Henry. “Only it more or less wore off in a couple of hours.”

“You couldn’t talk?”

“Bitten and scratched to pieces?” Francis said. “Tongue-tied? Half mad? If we’d gone to the police they would have charged us with every unsolved death in New England for the last five years.” He held up an imaginary newspaper. “ ‘Crazed Hippies Indicted for Rural Thrill-Killing.’ ‘Cult Slaying of Old Abe So-and-So.’ ”

“Teen Satanists Murder Longtime Vermont Resident,” said Henry, lighting a cigarette.

Francis started to laugh.

“It would be one thing if we had even a chance at a decent hearing,” said Henry. “But we don’t.”

“And I personally can’t imagine much worse than being tried for my life by a Vermont circuit-court judge and a jury box full of telephone operators.”

“Things aren’t marvelous,” said Henry, “but they could certainly be worse. The big problem now is Bunny.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Nothing’s
wrong
with him.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“He just can’t keep his mouth shut, that’s all.”

“Haven’t you talked to him?”

“About ten million times,” Francis said.

“Has he tried to go to the police?”

“If he goes on like this,” said Henry, “he won’t have to. They’ll come right to us. Reasoning with him does no good. He just doesn’t grasp what a serious business this is.”

“Surely he doesn’t want to see you go to jail.”

“If he thought about it, I’m sure he’d realize he didn’t,” said Henry evenly. “And I’m sure he’d realize that he doesn’t particularly want to go to jail himself, either.”

“Bunny? But why—?”

“Because he’s known about this since November and he hasn’t gone to the police,” Francis said.

“But that’s beside the point,” said Henry. “Even he has sense enough not to turn us in. He doesn’t have much of an alibi for the night of the murder, and if it ever came to prison for the rest of us I think he must know that I, at least, would do everything in my power to see he came along with us.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “The problem is he’s just a fool, and sooner or later he’s going to say the wrong thing to the wrong person,” he said. “Perhaps not intentionally, but I can’t pretend to be too concerned with motive at this point. You heard him this morning. He’d be in quite a spot himself if this got back to the police but of course he thinks those ghastly jokes are all terribly subtle and clever and over everyone’s head.”

“He’s only just smart enough to realize what a mistake turning us in would be,” said Francis, pausing to pour himself another drink. “But we can’t seem to pound it into him that it’s even more in his own self-interest not to go around talking like he
does. And, really, I’m not at all sure he won’t just come out and
tell
someone, when he’s in one of these confessional moods.”

“Tell someone? Like who?”

“Marion. His father. The Dean of Studies.” He shuddered. “Gives me the creeps just to think about it. He’s just the sort who always stands up in the back of the courtroom during the last five minutes of Terry Mason.’ ”

“Bunny Corcoran, Boy Detective,” said Henry dryly.

“How did he find out? He wasn’t with you, was he?”

“As a matter of fact,” said Francis, “he was with
you.
” He glanced at Henry, and to my surprise the two of them began to laugh.

“What? What’s so funny?” I said, alarmed.

This sent them into fresh peals of laughter. “Nothing,” said Francis at last.

“Really, it is nothing,” said Henry, with a bemused little sigh. “The oddest things make me laugh these days.” He lit another cigarette. “He was with you that night, early in the evening, anyway. Remember? You went to the movies.”

“
The Thirty-Nine Steps,
” Francis said.

With something of a start, I did remember: a windy autumn night, full moon obscured by dusty rags of cloud. I’d worked late in the library and hadn’t gone to dinner. Walking home, a sandwich from the snack bar in my pocket, and the dry leaves skittering and dancing on the path before me, I’d run into Bunny on his way to the Hitchcock series, which the Film Society was showing in the auditorium.

We were late and there were no seats left so we sat on the carpeted stairs, Bunny leaning back on his elbows with his legs stretched in front of him, cracking pensively with his rear molars at a little Dum-Dum sucker. The high wind rattled the flimsy walls; a door banged open and shut until somebody propped it open with a brick. On the screen, locomotives screaming across a black-and-white nightmare of iron-bridged chasms.

“We had a drink afterwards,” I said. “Then he went to his room.”

Henry sighed. “I wish he had,” he said.

“He kept asking if I knew where you were.”

“He knew himself, very well. We’d threatened half a dozen times to leave him at home if he didn’t behave.”

“So he got the bright idea of coming around to Henry’s to scare him,” said Francis, pouring himself another drink.

“I was so angry about that,” said Henry abruptly. “Even if nothing had happened, it was a sneaky thing to do. He knew where the spare key was, and he just got it and let himself in.”

“Even so, nothing might have happened. It was just a horrible string of coincidences. If we’d stopped in the country to get rid of our clothes, if we’d come here or to the twins’, if Bunny only hadn’t fallen asleep …”

“He was asleep?”

“Yes, or otherwise he would have got discouraged and left,” Henry said. “We didn’t get back to Hampden until six in the morning. It was a miracle we found our way to the car, over all those fields and things in the dark.… Well, it
was
foolish to drive to North Hampden in those bloody clothes. The police could have pulled us over, we could have had a wreck, anything. But I felt ill, and I wasn’t thinking clearly, and I suppose I drove to my own apartment by instinct.”

“He left my room around midnight.”

“Well, then, he was alone in my apartment from about twelve-thirty to six a.m. And the coroner reckoned the time of death between one and four. That’s one of the few decent cards fate dealt us in the whole hand. Though Bunny wasn’t with us, he’d have a hard time proving he wasn’t. Unfortunately, that’s not a card we can play except in the direst circumstances.” He shrugged. “If only he’d left the lamp on, anything to tip us off.”

“But that was going to be the big surprise, you see. Jumping out at us from the dark.”

“We walked in and turned on the light, and then it was too late. He woke up instantly. And there we were—”

“—all white robes and bloody like something from Edgar Allan Poe,” Francis said gloomily.

“Jesus, what did he do?”

“What do you think? We scared him half to death.”

“It served him right,” said Henry.

“Tell him about the ice cream.”

“Really, this was the last straw,” Henry said crossly. “He took a quart of ice cream out of my freezer to eat while he waited—he couldn’t bother to get a bowl of it, you understand, he had to have the whole quart—and when he fell asleep it melted all over him
and
on my chair and on that nice little Oriental rug
I used to have. Well. It was quite a good antique, that rug, but the dry cleaners said there was nothing they could do. It came back in shreds. And my
chair.
” He reached for a cigarette. “He screamed like a banshee when he saw us—”

“—and he would not shut up,” said Francis. “Remember, it was six o’clock in the morning, the neighbors sleeping …” He shook his head. “I remember Charles taking a step towards him, trying to talk to him, and Bunny yelling bloody murder. After a minute or two—”

“It was only a few seconds,” Henry said.

“—after a minute, Camilla picked up a glass ashtray and threw it at him and hit him square in the chest.”

“It wasn’t a hard blow,” said Henry thoughtfully, “but it was quite judiciously timed. Instantly he shut up and stared at her and I said to him, ‘Bunny, shut up. You’ll wake the neighbors. We’ve hit a deer in the road on the way home.’ ”

“So then,” said Francis, “he wiped his brow and rolled his eyes and went through the whole Bunny routine—boy you guys scared me and must’ve been half-asleep and just on and on and on—”

“And meanwhile,” Henry said, “the four of us were standing there in the bloody sheets, the lights on, no curtains, in full view of anyone who might happen to drive by. He was talking so loudly, and the lights were so bright, and I felt so faint with exhaustion and shock that I couldn’t do much more than stare at him. My God—we were covered with this man’s blood, we’d tracked it into the house, the sun was coming up, and here, to top it all off, was Bunny. I couldn’t force myself to think what to do. Then Camilla, quite sensibly, flicked off the light and all of a sudden I realized no matter how it looked, no matter who was there, we had to get out of our clothes and wash up without losing another second.”

“I practically had to rip the sheet off,” said Francis. “The blood had dried and it was stuck to me. By the time I’d managed that, Henry and the others were in the bathroom. Spray was flying; the water in the bathtub was backed up red; rusty splashes on the tile. It was a nightmare.”

“I can’t tell you how unfortunate it was that Bunny happened to be there,” said Henry, shaking his head. “But for heaven’s sake, we couldn’t just stand around and wait for him to leave. There was blood everywhere, the neighbors would soon be up,
for all I knew the police would be pounding at the door any second.…”

“Well, it was too bad we alarmed him, but then, it wasn’t like we thought we were doing this in front of J. Edgar Hoover, either,” said Francis.

“Exactly,” said Henry. “I don’t want to convey the impression that Bunny’s presence seemed like a tremendous
menace
at that point. It was just a nuisance, because I knew he wondered what was going on, but at the moment he was the least of our troubles. If there’d been time, I would have sat him down and explained things to him the instant we got in. But there wasn’t time.”

“Good God,” Francis said, and shuddered. “I still can’t go in Henry’s bathroom. Blood smeared on the porcelain. Henry’s straight razor swinging from a peg. We were bruised and scratched to pieces.”

“Charles was the worst by far.”

“Oh, my God. Thorns stuck all over him.”

“And that
bite.
”

“You’ve never seen anything like it,” said Francis. “Four inches around and the teeth marks just gouged in. Remember what Bunny said?”

Henry laughed. “Yes,” he said. “Tell him.”

“Well, there we all were, and Charles was turning to get the soap—I didn’t even know Bunny was there, I suppose he was looking in the door—when all of a sudden I heard him say, in this weird businesslike way, ‘Looks like that deer took a plug out of your
arm
, Charles.’ ”

“He was standing there for part of the time, making comments of various sorts,” said Henry, “but the next thing I knew he wasn’t. I was disturbed by how suddenly he’d left but glad he was out of the way. We had a great deal to do and not too much time.”

“Weren’t you afraid he’d tell somebody?”