A Secret Rage Read online

  ‘He was with me when you were raped, Barbara.’

  ‘Oh. Okay.’ A line, thank God.

  At last she threw down her pen and lifted her glasses to rub her eyes.

  ‘How many?’ I asked anxiously.

  ‘Nine,’ she said. ‘Just nine. That match.’

  I hadn’t thought the list could be narrowed so quickly. At first I felt elated. Then I felt sick.

  ‘Let’s check before we meet again, to see if either of us forgot anyone. For example, did you include your postman?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said slowly. ‘Mr McCluskey. No.’

  ‘But I don’t know him. So he cancels out. Anyone else?’ I shook my head.

  ‘Then let’s stop. I can’t stand much more of this.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’ It had its own peculiar ghastliness, our little project. I began to gather up my things. I asked, ‘Did you know the dectectives before?’

  Barbara’s hand froze in the act of passing my marked-down list back to me. ‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘I knew John Tendall. Yes.’

  ‘I met him at a security lecture he gives at every orientation,’ I told her bleakly. ‘I just now remembered.’

  Barbara rubbed her forehead. She added John Tendall to both our lists. Ten names.

  Jeff Simmons, college president

  Jeffrey Tabor, cashier

  Don Houghton, businessman

  Charles Seward, lawyer

  Ray Merritt, salesman

  Theo Cochran, registrar

  Randy Marquette, English professor

  J. R. Smith, English professor

  Dan Kirby, student

  John Tendall, detective

  ‘We’ve both got to think,’ she said, as I stuffed the piece of paper in my purse. ‘We’re doing the best we can,’ she added obscurely.

  ‘I’ll call you as soon as I’m sure I’ve got every single name on there,’ I said.

  She smiled up at me. She looked small and frail behind her big littered desk. The deep auburn of her hair made her face seem even whiter.

  ‘We’re doing the best we can,’ I agreed. And it did seem to me quite an achievement. In thirty-odd minutes we’d managed to establish that our assailant was one of ten men. In making those sweeping eliminations we were able to do what the police could not, because we both were convinced that the man who raped us knew us. Now we couldn’t even try to persuade the detectives who were handling our cases. One of them was on the list.

  * * * *

  In fact, what the town was doing at this time was figuratively holding its breath and waiting for the next rape, though none of us realized it until afterward. Heidi Edmonds had been raped in early August. Barbara had been raped in early September. I had been raped in the latter part of October. And there were the rumors from Cully’s policeman friend, rumors of at least two victims who hadn’t gone to the police. Cully confirmed one rumor on a night when Mimi and I were wondering out loud if the attacks were evenly spaced.

  ‘There was one in late August,’ he said, and gave each of us a look to assure our silence.

  ‘He must be counseling her,’ Mimi murmured over the after-supper dishes. We would never mention it to Cully again. But among his books I noticed several new ones on rape and the treatment of offenders and victims. So it was true that Barbara, myself, and Heidi Edmonds had an unknown companion or two – or three, or even four.

  ‘We should form a club,’ I told Barbara bitterly one day as we sat in damned-together closeness at a table in the noisy student center. ‘Think how we could narrow down the list!’ The count still stood at ten, though we’d rummaged our brains for men we might have forgotten initially.

  Barbara didn’t answer. Stan Haskell had just come in, and her eyes were following him with a mixture of anger and grief. He was with a young anthropology professor who had the kind of quiet pleasant looks Barbara had. Stan picked women of a type. Surely the rapist did too? Perhaps Barbara and I should concentrate on what we had in common, what our near-fatal attraction was, rather than on our list. There was a pattern, I was convinced. There had to be a pattern, a reason. But maybe we two were too close to see our similarity. It might take a less involved person to spot it.

  As I walked home a few minutes later I was praying, an infrequent activity for me until recently. I was praying that some nice man would ask Barbara out. Then, self-engrossed human that I am, my thoughts shifted to some reading I had to do, and from there to a letter I’d gotten the day before from my mother. She’d hinted heavily that she and Jay Chalmers weren’t getting along too well. And she’d written it sober, I could tell. A couple of months ago, she’d been able to hold off until after church. I had already written her back, the longest letter I’d sent Mother in years. I hoped. I was afraid to hope.

  I climbed the stone steps to the front yard, then the wooden steps to the front porch, with an ease and absence of pain that pleased me. Almost well.

  ‘Mimi?’ I called. She sometimes came home to lunch, walking for the exercise; so she might be in the house even if her car wasn’t there. I hadn’t glimpsed the bumper from the street, as I could if the car was parked behind the house.

  ‘I’m up here,’ she called from her floor of the house. She came down in a clatter, dark hair bouncing on her shoulders. She was carrying Attila by his middle, so she was angry. The cat had a guilty, smirky look about him. His big green eyes went from my face to Mimi’s with false affection: I adore you, don’t punish me.

  ‘This durn cat turned over my bath powder, and now I’m late,’ she said breathlessly. She handed the culprit to me. I gave him a severe shake, but then I hugged him. I’m a born sucker.

  ‘You want me to get it up off the floor?’ I offered.

  ‘No, I got it. That’s why I’m late. I’m going to run over to Alicia’s instead of walking back to the college. She’s due at the same meeting in’ – Mimi glanced at her tiny silver watch – ‘five minutes. I’ve got to run. I’ll cut through the backyards, maybe I can catch her going out the door.’

  Carrying a straggling Attila, I followed Mimi through the kitchen. I put the cat out and then opened the refrigerator to see if there were any pears left.

  ‘Her car’s still there!’ Mimi called back triumphantly. She thudded down the back steps. She would cross through old Mrs Harbison’s yard to Alicia’s back door.

  I’d washed a pear, dried it, and turned to lock the back door behind Mimi when I heard the sound. I knew immediately it was coming from Mimi, though I’d never heard her scream before. I dropped the pear, ran out the back door, flew down the steps, and crashed through the hedge. I glimpsed Mrs Harbison looking out her kitchen window as I sped across her grass. ‘Call the police!’ I shouted, and saw her begin to turn.

  Mimi was screaming no longer: She was stock-still on the steps to Alicia’s glassed-in back porch. She was holding the door open with one hand. The door was smeared with something like rust.

  I didn’t want to see what Mimi was seeing. I checked my pace abruptly and stood gasping four feet away. Mimi’s head turned slowly and her eyes met mine. The brown of her irises stood out shockingly in her face, which had turned a dirty gray. I felt my scalp prickle. Against my will, my feet moved until I stood beside my friend.

  Alicia’s eyes were also wide and staring. Her face was even grayer. She lay in a crucified sprawl on the floor of the porch. We didn’t need to check her pulse or breathing; even I could tell she had been dead for hours. Because I couldn’t bear to look at her, I raised my eyes and stared through the length of the house. As though I was locked in a dream, I slowly recorded the fact that Alicia’s front door was ajar, its dead bolts pulled back. And I thought, Barbara and I are right. Alicia knew him, too. She let him in.

  * * * *

  We had to wait for the police. When the patrolmen arrived, they asked Mimi to check briefly to see if anything was missing. I didn’t suppose for a minute that the police really thought the killer had been a panicked burglar. But I guess they had to be su
re. After all, it was the first time the rapist had actually killed anyone.

  The sunshine was horribly bright in Alicia’s living room. It shone with autumn gilding on the blood spots on the pale gray carpet traced with golden color the rusty handprint on the newel post. I wondered how this house, lavished with Alicia’s care, could tolerate her death so easily; how the sun could bathe the evidence of her last moments with such gracious light. Her mortal fear, the annihilating terror I knew so well, had remained behind her: I felt it.

  She had fought for her life every inch of the way. She had almost made it. Almost.

  The trail of her last moments led through the house. Spots of blood on the carpet inside that open front door. The handprint on the newel. One of her slippers. A knife scar from a thrust that had missed her and scored the wall. Splotches of blood trailing through the kitchen. And finally her body, collapsed inside the back door, blood from her hands smeared beside the locks as she’d fumbled to work them; had unlatched them but had not been able to get out that door. Alicia had nearly made it out into the yard, where she could have hidden in the shrubs until her screams brought help.

  I had seen Alicia’s intact underwear under her bathrobe, pinned askew by her fall. So she’d been spared rape but she’d lost her life, oh Alicia! Her terror and desperation were as thick in the house as a fog. I was frightened for myself, in the part of me capable of selfish thought. It was too soon for me to tolerate this. But I had to, since Mimi was still upstairs.

  My old companions Tendall and Markowitz appeared at the back door, surveying what lay there before crunching around to the front door on the gravel of the driveway. Then Alicia’s body was hidden from my view by the police technicians who gathered around her.

  She would have hated them seeing her as she was.

  The detectives came in the front door, taking care not to touch the knob or sill. They weren’t surprised to see me. Someone must have filled them in. They nodded but were too engrossed in their job to pay me much mind. I stared at John Tendall to watch his reaction, so I could report to Barbara; he was on the list. He simply looked preoccupied and professional. He had thick gray hair, meticulously groomed. With his deep tan and flashy sports jacket, he looked like a smalltime hood rather than a police detective. Markowitz was just as finicky with his hair – he favored sculpted waves of the Jerry Lee Lewis school. He was beefy and pale, with sharp eyes staring from a blank face. They were both workmen absorbed in a technically tricky job.

  I was increasingly concerned about Mimi. The police shouldn’t be keeping her so long. She needed to get out of this house. Just as I rose to look for her, she appeared on the stairs. Her face was a horrible color now, even her lips; white as the dresses we’d worn when we graduated from Miss Beacham’s – Mimi, Alicia, and I. Mimi was shaking so hard she looked like she had palsy. One of the patrolmen had to help her down the stairs. I instantly got myself to the foot and waited there with arms uplifted, as if to receive an infant. I had no more grief to spare for the handprint on the newel post. Alicia was dead. Mimi was alive, and Mimi was going to collapse very soon.

  Even as I had my arm around her and we turned to go, Markowitz was asking if Mimi knew how they could get in touch with Ray.

  ‘Call Ray’s mother, Mrs Ralph Merritt,’ I said briefly. Later I wondered how I’d managed to dredge up that long-buried name.

  We had to leave by the front door, of course. There were neighbors standing on their front porches looking at the police cars. People in Knolls were as curious as people anywhere, but they were ashamed of it. For a few seconds no one came to help me – not out of fear of involvement but for fear of seeming nosy and meddlesome. Finally old Mrs Harbison (who could consider herself a member of the situation, so to speak, since she’d called the police) hobbled down to give me what assistance she could. It was enough. As soon as the old lady saw I could manage and that Mimi was safely deposited on one of the couches, she left after one quiet question.

  ‘Is Alicia dead?’

  I nodded silently. I remembered what I’d long ago learned from Mimi: Alicia had given Mrs Harbison a ride to church every week. Alicia had called the old lady every time she went to the grocery store, to see if Mrs Harbison needed anything. Now the old lady was shaking her head from side to side, and tears began trickling through the papery wrinkles as she turned to leave.

  Mimi was crying convulsively, unable to speak or move. When I thought I could leave her, I called Cully at the college. Ten minutes later he came into the house like a whirlwind. He folded his long arms around his sister and held her to him.

  I was unnecessary, and I needed to be by myself. I sat in the kitchen breakfast nook with my hands folded and my legs tight. I stared out the bay window into that lovely serene yard, at the last blowsy rose blooms. The blooms bent their heads waiting for the executioner frost. Time passed.

  Cully came to sit opposite me. He blocked my view of the roses. ‘I found some tranquilizers left over from her breakup with Richard,’ he told me.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘She’s asleep.’

  ‘Good.’

  I poured Cully a cup of coffee heated up from the morning. I put it in front of him gracelessly and sat down again. He stared blankly for a moment at the steam rising from the cup, as if he couldn’t identify the drink. He lit a cigarette and smoked it, and drank the coffee.

  After a while I got a cup for myself.

  ‘She fought hard,’ I commented. I imagined a pin lying in front of me; I would pick it up, if I could, and stick myself with it, to raise some feeling. I was only a loose-knit bag of perishable bones and skin.

  Cully’s hand covered mine, which lay fisted on the table. I looked at the black hair that grew in a pattern on the back of his hand. If I was ever called on to identify Cully’s body, I thought, I would know it by that pattern.

  ‘She fought, that’s why she died,’ I said. ‘I was too scared to lift a finger, so I lived. He knew her. He knows me.

  I was so alone. I opened my mouth and words came out, but I didn’t know what they would be. The cool clean autumn air came through the window over the sink. It was polluted with the scent of those last rotting roses. That smell would be with me for the rest of my life.

  ‘Look at me, Cully,’ I said, though he had been looking at me all along. It was I whose eyes were lowered. I raised them now. ‘I’m not beautiful anymore, Cully. Look at my face.’

  His own face was full of pain. He looked paler than ever, the lines from nose to mouth deeper.

  ‘It could’ve been me lying there, Cully.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Dead, Cully.’

  He was on his feet and he hauled me off the bench with a violent yank. He kissed me. His fingers wound in my hair as he pulled my head back.

  While, two doors away, the ambulance came to cart off what remained of Alicia, while Ray Merritt drove home to find his wife butchered, while the police took pictures and scattered fingerprint dust over Alicia’s beautiful furniture, while Mimi slept a silent drugged sleep, Cully and I made sure we were alive, alive, alive.

  * * * *

  On Saturday morning, when Mimi got up after sleeping in spells throughout the previous afternoon and night, Cully had left to get some warmer clothes from his apartment. The bite in the air that morning was a definite warning of winter. I got one of my heavy blankets out of the hall closet and put it on the end of the bed, after I’d pulled on my new winter bathrobe. My emotions were in chaos, a nauseating mixture of joy, grief, and fear. The joy was temporarily banished by the sight of Mimi’s face when she stumbled down the stairs and asked me for some coffee.

  She was shivering with cold and looked white and drained; but Ray Merritt was as close a friend as Alicia had been, and Mimi was convinced she should rush to his side. It took me a long time to dissuade her. I think her own weakness finally did the trick. I could tell there was something pressing her, something besides grief and shock; but I wasn’t about to ask her what it was. She
would tell me when she chose.

  After two hours and four cups of coffee, Mimi quite abruptly told me she thought Charles Seward, her young lawyer, was the rapist. ‘Because,’ she explained wearily, ‘when we went out on a date last week, and then one time before you were raped, we really had a wrestling match in the car. I hate to talk about it. It sounds so – high school. But this thing last week. When he stopped in front of the house, he just – grabbed me, and then he was just all over me.’

  Charles Seward was on our list.

  ‘Ah – you didn’t want to do it?’ I asked hesitantly.

  ‘Not in front of the house.’ Mimi summoned some outrage. ‘Not in the damn car. I mean, I’ve always assumed that sooner or later I’d sleep with Charles, but not then. I’ve been jittery about what happened to you and Barbara, and when he grabbed me like that, I got scared all of a sudden. I kind of yanked backwards, and he grabbed harder. It was much worse than the little tussle we’d had before, right before you . . . anyway, I really got scared. I hauled off with my free arm and whacked him in the face. That calmed him down. Which was good for him. Because next I was going to grab for his balls!’ Mimi managed a shaky smile, and I did too.

  ‘Mimi, did he ever say anything about what was happening?’

  ‘Not then, because I got that car door open and got into the house as fast as my legs could go,’ she said flatly. ‘He called me the next day, and I hung up on him. I’m sure he has plenty to say; I don’t know if I want to listen.’

  We eyed each other. ‘Do you think – really, truly – that it might be Charles?’ I asked dubiously. If Alicia had lived to help Barbara and me, he would have been on her list, too.

  ‘I was scared to death,’ she answered indirectly. ‘My God, what if it is? A man I’ve been dating for months, someone I really care for. What kind of person does that make me, by the way, that someone that creepy would want to date me?’

  Mimi’s nose turned red, her eyes watered, and a couple of tears trickled forlornly down her cheeks. She used her napkin to blot them. She resembled an abandoned kitten far more than the lioness her mane of hair usually suggested. Mao jumped in her lap and wailed for attention. Mimi hugged the little cat with a passion that startled the animal, and turned all her attention to tickling Mao’s chin.