A Secret Rage Page 16

  ‘Are you all right?’ Cully asked me. ‘After this morning, I mean.’

  His concerned face reminded me of the awful flashback. ‘I’m fine,’ I said firmly. ‘There may be something else lurking in the woodwork for me; I don’t know. But to tell you the truth, I feel better now than I have since it happened.’

  ‘I hated to leave you today. I’ll make it up to you tonight.’ There was a slight hint of conspiratorial wickedness in his thin mobile lips that made me tingle.

  I gave him a parody of a lewd wink; he laughed.

  ‘Are you going to be around this evening?’ I asked as he began clearing the table. Since he was gone so often in the evening, tending to his private practice, he’d slipped into the habit of clearing the table and putting the left-overs away, so all the dishes were lined up to wash and dry.

  ‘No, two appointments. I should be home around nine.’

  Mimi didn’t get off the phone until Cully had been gone about ten minutes. She went directly to the sink, turning on the water with unnecessary force.

  ‘What are your folks doing for the holidays, Mimi?’ I asked, after I’d told her about our Friday night dinner at their home.

  ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you. Ever since Cully and I graduated from college and went our own way, they’ve been spending Thanksgiving in the Bahamas. It’s a yearly rite now. They thought about canceling their reservation after we both got divorced, but when Mother mentioned it a few weeks ago I told her they should go on and go. She and Daddy were looking forward to it, and we can perfectly well have our own Thanksgiving.’

  Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday, so I was glad to have dinner with Elaine Friday night instead of sacrificing the big feast. Mimi seemed to be in one of her ‘fond of Mother’ moods, so I didn’t voice my relief. It occurred to me that Mimi might be so fond of her mother right now just because she wouldn’t have to spend Thanksgiving with her. I’d have been jumpy about spending a whole day with Don, anyway, since he was on the list. I hadn’t seen him since the weird scene over Alicia’s coffin. I shuddered when I thought about it, and told my thoughts to move right along.

  I went on drying dishes mindlessly, content not to think for a while. Gradually I became aware that Mimi was quiet, too. We usually talked during this unpleasant chore, to make it go faster. Things had gone so well between us that afternoon that it had almost seemed as though nothing had ever gone wrong.

  ‘Cully gone to an evening appointment?’ Mimi asked.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘He’s probably meeting another woman on the sly,’ she said bitterly.

  That kind of nastiness, out of the blue, wasn’t typical of Mimi. It was so ugly and unexpected that I put down my towel and stared at her. Surely she wasn’t brooding any longer about Richard’s defection to the long-haired lady in Albuquerque?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said curtly. ‘Male junkies.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I once heard a lecture by a woman who worked for Ms,’ she explained, ‘and she called women in our culture “male junkies.” She said most women’s magazines were about how to attract, keep, and entertain men. Or – having caught and kept – how to entertain and feed those men’s children.’

  ‘Was that back when you were in college?’

  ‘Yes, but we still are, Nick. We still are! Look at the way we were brought up. Every woman, but especially southern women. All brought up that way. You remember teen magazines? Everything down to how to tie your hair ribbon – for your date. If you disagreed with him, you were supposed to keep your mouth shut. Unless the dis-agreement was about whether he could stick his hand up your skirt. Then, and only then, you were supposed to disagree. That was why you had to carry change in your purse, to call your folks when he dumped you out of the car for resisting him.’

  This was the woman who’d saved four pair of white gloves? ‘From the magazines I’ve read lately, that seems to have modified quite a bit,’ I said mildly.

  ‘Yes, maybe. But the old way is almost impossible to shake. You have to fight it all the time.’ Mimi scrubbed the pot she was holding as if she were indeed fighting it.

  ‘It’s been impossible for me to uproot, just like monkey grass when you let it take over the garden. You pull it up one place, it comes back another. Propitiate, manipulate, never confront. And forgive, forgive, forgive! It’s like a knee-jerk reflex!’

  ‘Yeah, but you know what you do in a knee-jerk reflex, don’t you? You kick at the guy with the hammer!’

  That made her laugh. But I could still see the traces of regret around her mouth when I went to my desk to start studying. I’d known that Mimi’s two aspects warred between themselves, but I’d never seen it get this intense. I was worried about her. But I concluded that, as always, Mimi would tell me what was on her mind when she chose. I couldn’t figure out if she was angry with someone else or with herself. Both, I decided.

  Barbara called about eight-thirty. ‘I didn’t have a chance to tell you this afternoon, but Jeff Simmons’s blood type is AB,’ she announced. ‘It took me thirty minutes’ conversation to work around to blood types in some semblance of a normal manner.’

  ‘So. Four,’ I said slowly. ‘I thought you might’ve found out Theo’s from Sarah Chase.’

  ‘It seemed like an abuse of hospitality,’ Barbara said. ‘If we’d met anywhere else but her house. I just couldn’t.’

  ‘I see what you mean,’ I said. But I wondered if we’d make any more progress if we let the smaller scruples stand in our way. I listened to Mimi’s footsteps moving around her bedroom overhead.

  ‘Are you really determined?’ Barbara asked suddenly.

  ‘I was just wondering if I could ask you the same question.’

  ‘It’s more awful, isn’t it, the more we go on? Sometimes I’m tired of being so angry. Sometimes I just want to put it all away in a drawer somewhere. But then, when I really remember . . .’

  ‘I know.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Should we go on?’ I honestly didn’t know how I felt. One day, one moment, I was up, hot on the trail. The next I was down, wanting only, as Barbara said, to shut it all away in a drawer, to begin to forget.

  ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’

  ‘Maybe we should finish what we’ve started,’ I said.

  ‘Like cleaning our plate of something we don’t like to eat?’ There was the faintest tinge of amusement in Barbara’s voice.

  Maybe I was being childishly stubborn. I pulled off my reading glasses and rubbed my eyelids. I searched around for a principle on which I could base a decision. Instead, I thought of Mimi, who in this continuing siege of fear and suspicion was being driven further and further away from me. It would put the nail in the coffin of our friendship if Barbara and I discovered somehow that Mimi’s father or the man she loved was a rapist and a murderer. On the other hand (and I rubbed my eyes until I saw flashes), if Theo or John Tendall were to attack Mimi – after all, she was the same kind of woman . . .

  I had a glimmering, then, but I let it slide away as I slogged down my original muddy path of thought.

  . . . and if she got raped, then . . .

  So I found the principle. ‘Other women,’ I said succinctly.

  ‘Sure,’ said Barbara. ‘How could we live with our-selves?’

  ‘So that settles that.’ I wasn’t exactly pleased with our final decision, but I was relieved to have it over with.

  ‘What if all the rest really do have O positive? I was just joking this morning, but they might turn out to. What do we do then?’

  ‘Hell, I don’t know. We line them up and ask them to drop their pants.’

  Dreadfully, we both began snickering.

  ‘That was pretty sick,’ Barbara said when she’d wound down. ‘But we’d have a chance of recognizing the one.’

  ‘Like you said today, I take a laugh where I can find it, now.’ I heard Mimi at the head of the stairs. ‘So you’ve got one more to go, and I’ve got two. Let’s get to work,’ I
said hurriedly. ‘See you.’ I hung up.

  ‘Nick, I’m going out for a while,’ Mimi said. Suddenly she seemed to recall something, and looked concerned. ‘When’s Cully coming home?’

  I glanced at my watch. ‘He should be here any time. He said about nine, and it’s almost that now.’ I realized what she was worried about. ‘Hey, I can be alone and not go to pieces,’ I told her gently.

  ‘Oh. You figured it out.’ She grinned. ‘We thought we were being so clever about it.’

  ‘It took me a while,’ I assured her, and grinned back.

  ‘Nick, you know how – well, I’m sort of proud.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Mimi Houghton.’ I was still smiling, but I could feel my smile begin to wane. Her face had turned completely sober.

  ‘You know I told you I knew Charles isn’t involved in all this.’ She gestured with her hand to indicate me and the direction in which Alicia’s house lay.

  I nodded, trying to keep my face expressionless.

  ‘I did that all wrong, but what I said is true. I’ll tell you all about it, when I can stand to.’

  ‘Okay, Mimi.’ What else could I say?

  Then she was out the back door to her car. I was shaking my head as I locked the door behind her.

  * * * *

  The Houghtons’ dining room had changed very little since the night I’d met Cully more than fourteen years before. Elaine bought the best and took care of it. Just as she’d picked the best husband for her and had taken excellent care of him, I decided during the delicious dinner. I could have carried the idea further and further and my understanding of the family would have profited from it, but I called myself to order and reminded myself of my mission.

  It wasn’t easy to find an opening into which I could insert the odd subject of blood types. The gleaming wood of the table, the heavy sheen of the silver, the flowers in the crystal bowl, all reproached me for my tawdry problem. It hardly seemed possible that the rich striped upholstery of Elaine’s chairs would consent to hold the bottom of a woman who had been raped. But that was just as real as the table or the silver, I told myself sternly. I braced and waited for the right opening in the conversation. Don himself provided it.

  ‘Honey, have you heard how Orrin Sherwood is?’ he asked Elaine.

  ‘Not too good,’ she answered with that ominous little shake of the head that means death is in the offing. ‘That wreck was just a terrible thing. His wife won’t even leave the hospital to lie down at home for an hour or two. She says Orrin’s got to see her face if he opens his eyes, Miss Pearlie told me.’

  ‘I didn’t hear about that! What happened?’ Cully asked. ‘Orrin’s worked for Father for, oh, twenty years,’ he told me. Elaine frowned slightly.

  Don proceeded to describe the circumstances of the wreck, which I barely heard, poised as I was to spring.

  ‘. . . and he’d lost a lot of blood, way too much.’

  Thanks, Don. Ready, set, go. ‘I guess that’s what they wanted the blood for the other day,’ I interjected. ‘They called this boy in one of my classes, he was telling me. The hospital was short of that blood type. He went in and gave.’

  ‘Gosh, if I’d known that, I’d have given some,’ Don said with deep chagrin. ‘I do wish they’d said something while I was at the hospital! Orrin and I were in the army together, and it seems to me we found out then that we had the same blood type. What type was the boy, the one who told you this, Nickie?’

  ‘He didn’t say,’ I managed to get out, feeling worse and worse.

  ‘Let’s see . . .’ Don thought, his fork poised in midair. Elaine waited patiently, her face turned to him with apparent interest. ‘I think I’m just plain old type O, universal donor,’ Don decided. ‘So Orrin must be something else, since the hospital surely wouldn’t run out of O.’ He was really sad at missing the opportunity to help his friend. My heart sank. Another type O.

  ‘Aren’t we all?’ said Cully. ‘I know I am.’

  ‘Oh, it’s been so long since I had you two, that’s the only time I had mine typed,’ Elaine reflected. ‘Your daddy and I had to find out about that Rh factor. You know, it causes trouble for the baby if the parents are different.’

  Mimi nodded to show she was listening, but she looked faintly bored. Then she brightened. ‘Charles,’ she said happily, ‘can’t give blood. He faints at the sight of it.’ She seemed happy just to say his name.

  During the inevitable exclamations this quirk of Charles’s engendered, I told myself rapidly that even if Don did have O blood, so did John Tendall. And probably Theo, too. But that peculiarity of Charles’s bore out Mimi’s assertion that Charles could not be the rapist. All of us had bled to some extent.

  ‘Is it just his own blood, Mimi? Or anyone’s?’ I asked, just to be sure.

  ‘Oh, anyone’s. It’s been embarrassing to him for years because he likes to hunt so much, and if someone he’s with cuts himself, Charles has to look the other way.’

  Why the hell hadn’t Mimi told me that earlier, instead of going through all that hocus-pocus about swearing not to tell Cully we’d suspected Charles? Then I caught on. She’d come out with this quirk of Charles’s so unselfconsciously that I had to conclude she herself hadn’t made the connection between Charles’s horror of blood and his now-certain innocence. She’d been thinking of some other exculpating fact earlier, something she wanted to keep secret. Of course, the result was the same; Barbara and I could scratch Charles from our list. That left three, and one of those three was Don. The odds that he was the rapist had just leaped appreciably.

  As Mimi and I cleared the table, I tried to keep my mind blank. I was able to join in the conversation just enough to keep my preoccupation under wraps. But after an hour, when we were all in the living room and Elaine was carrying in coffee and dessert, an awful line of logic insisted on screaming out in my mind.

  Mimi had thought – briefly, and for whatever reason – that Charles might be the rapist. So she wouldn’t see him. Now Mimi would see Charles. So he wasn’t the rapist; Mimi said she knew he wasn’t guilty.

  How could Mimi know he wasn’t the rapist?

  She knew who was.

  But why would she keep silent about it? Who on earth would Mimi protect from such a charge?

  Her father, Don.

  * * * *

  The whole room blurred before I caught myself. I felt sweat break out on the palms of my hands. I set down my coffee cup with a loud chink. Elaine glanced at me reprovingly before she resumed her conversation with Mimi. She didn’t know how lucky she was; I’d almost dumped both cup and coffee on the carpet. I grabbed control of myself with a tremendous effort. I shot a quick look at Don, sitting on a love seat beside Mimi, opposite me.

  I was thinking, quickly and desperately. I was probing the raw gash, trying to remember. Trying to dig out fragments so the wound could be closed. What could I remember? I’d told the police I didn’t know anything about my attacker. I hadn’t seen him. But I had to be able to remember something, something else, something that might eliminate Don. Okay. Calm, now. Calm.

  I remembered. He’d been heavier and shorter than, say, Cully; but that category included many men besides Cully’s father.

  He hadn’t really been very strong. Otherwise, the damage inflicted would have been worse, far worse. I touched my face; I remembered. Don was hardly in good shape, and he must be at least fifty-five, probably older.

  No beard on the attacker. None of the men on our list had one.

  I had to yank myself out of the stream of my memory. Cully was eyeing me in a dubious way, his dark eyebrows humped together. I found I was on the verge of bursting into a laugh that would have been very unpleasant to hear; I’d wildly imagined asking Don to lie on top of me to see if it felt familiar. I mashed that laughter into a smile and offered it to Cully. He looked startled, as well he might; it must have been ghastly.

  The worst thing about these few minutes of horror was that they passed in Elaine’s living room. Everyth
ing in the room was civilized, conventional, expensive. The man who fit into this room simply couldn’t do such a thing.

  In a kind of suspended animation, I turned to Cully and asked him to give me some details about the party we’d been asked to for the night before Thanksgiving.

  ‘One of the psych professors is throwing it,’ he said, relief evident in his voice. He was grateful to me for apparently snapping out of a bad mood. ‘He lives just three blocks away from Mimi’s. It’s a costume party.’

  ‘What? Right after Halloween?’

  ‘It was going to be on Halloween, but he caught the flu or something.’

  ‘What on earth can we go as?’ It was wonderful to work out this little problem. I had managed once again. I was on top of this situation. I could do it. Maybe Cully’s father had raped me and killed Alicia, and I was trying to think of a costume to wear to a party. Hell, I could do anything.

  ‘I think you ought to go as either the Sugar Plum Fairy or Wonder Woman,’ Cully said. It was such an amazing thing for Cully to say, and the smile he gave me was so crinkled and sweet, that I almost kissed him.

  ‘Grandmother’s trunks are still in the attic, and heaven knows what’s in them,’ Mimi called from across the room.

  It dawned on Elaine that Cully and I were going to a party together, that I was his date. Her eyes narrowed in irritation and jumped sharply from her son to me and back again. Cully caught the look, casually took my hand, and with a bland face continued the discussion of what was likely to be unearthed in the attic.

  I shuddered to think.

  * * * *

  I got through the rest of the evening. It was so unreal to think that a person I knew and loved could have raped me that I couldn’t accept it either emotionally or intellectually.

  I shot secret looks at Don every now and then, and on the outside he was just as nice as always. His face was just as amiable, his bald patch just as shiny. His conversation was certainly just as bland. As he discussed the vital need for a new traffic light at one of Knolls’s intersections, I couldn’t remotely imagine that mouth uttering the foul words I remembered.