A Penny for the Hangman (23 page)

“I wish you could stay longer,” he said, “but you can always come back. Are you—are you planning to marry Jim?”

“I don’t know. We haven’t really talked about it.”

“But you love him?”

She laughed. “Fatherly concern? Yes, I love him. But we’re getting away from the subject. Mom told me my father was dead, but sometimes, when I was little, I’d pretend he was alive somewhere. I always thought I’d have a lot of questions for him if I ever actually met him, but I never imagined the first question would be ‘Did you really kill those people?’ ”

She smiled when she said this, and she emitted another nervous little laugh. Wulf Anderman did not laugh. He stared at her a moment, then looked away. He gazed over at the handmade chess service on the table in the corner. When he spoke, his voice was low.

“You’re right, of course. I didn’t kill anyone, not even my father. You see, Roddy had this plan. He first told me about it months before, and I laughed at the idea. I thought he was joking. When he mentioned it again, when he told me he’d actually begun to work out the particulars, I think I took a new interest in it. I say I
think
I did because I’m not really sure. I’ve had years to think, long years in tiny cells, but I just don’t remember much. It’s mostly a blur, but I remember thinking that he was right, that killing them was the only way to be free of—of what was happening to me. My father—your grandfather, I’m sorry to say—was a very disturbed man. When he drank, he—he’d come to my room. I’ll spare you the details, but it’s one part of my childhood I remember clearly.”

Karen watched him. When it became apparent that he wasn’t going to continue, she decided to prompt him. “Did your mother know about the abuse?”

He shook his head. “No. She knew about his other activities with men. She wrote a letter to a friend in Denmark shortly before it happened, and the friend later showed the letter to a Danish reporter. It was widely reprinted; perhaps you saw it in your research. It’s clear from the letter that she didn’t know what he was doing to me. But I didn’t kill him. Roddy did. He killed them all.”

Karen leaned forward. “Why didn’t you simply tell them that? You let everyone believe the two of you did it together.”

He raised a hand to cover his eyes briefly, then lowered it. “Because I was
there
. Don’t you see? I went there that night, waited with him behind a tree near the patio, watching them all drop off to sleep from the drugs he’d put in the gin. I stood there for what seemed like hours, clutching Mr. Vance’s knife in my hand. And then, when it was time, I went to the veranda. I stood over my father, looking down at that face so like my own, the blond hair, the cigarette that still smoldered between his fingers. I actually raised the knife up over him. Roddy whispered in my ear then. ‘Do it!
Do it,
Wulfie! Aim for his heart and sink it in.
Kill the miserable bastard!
’ ”

Anderman had risen to his feet as he remembered, and he was leaning forward over the coffee table, his right hand gripping an imaginary weapon. Karen stared up at him, fascinated. As she watched, he blinked and shook his head, apparently clearing it of the vision. Then he sank back down onto the couch.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, and he uttered a mirthless laugh. “Oh dear, I really should have spent more quality time with those prison psychiatrists. Whenever I remember that night, it turns into a bad production of
Macbeth
!”

Karen continued to study him: the flush on his cheeks, the dilated pupils, the shallow breathing. This man was her father, and she should be alarmed or disgusted or something other than merely curious, but she felt only the familiar detachment of the journalist getting a good story. That and exhaustion; she wanted to sleep again. She knew it was important that he tell her the truth now, tonight. She had to hear the rest.

“Last night you told Don Price and me that you stabbed your father. Why perpetuate a lie like that? Why didn’t you just tell us the truth then?”

He stood again and wandered over to the painting on the wall, looking up at it, his back to her.

“The truth was not for Mr. Don Price,” he said. “I wasn’t sure, last night, that it was even for you. I hadn’t made up my mind whether to tell you about—about your mother and me. I invited you down here with the intention of telling you, but then you arrived, and I lost my nerve. You seemed so happy, such a carefree young woman. By the time you went to bed last night, I’d almost settled on keeping my secret. For
your
sake, of course. I’d decided you’d be better off not knowing.”

She stared at his back across the room, remembering the sounds of weeping from the office upstairs in the dead of night.

“What changed your mind?” she asked him now.

He turned from the painting to face her, and she saw fresh tears in his eyes. “You did. This morning, after we watched the film. I think if I’d been sitting beside almost anyone else I’ve ever met—even Carl Graves, my old cellmate—I would have felt their judgment, their recrimination. But you didn’t react as I expected. Instead, you were annoyed with me, angry that I still wasn’t telling you everything. You sat there next to me and watched those actors hacking away at those other actors with knives and machetes, and all you wanted to know afterward was how
I
felt about it!” He shook his head in apparent wonder. “The test of a true daughter.”

Karen smiled. “At least you’re not doing
Macbeth
anymore. Now you’re playing
King Lear
.”

He nodded. “And you’re my Cordelia. That’s why I told you who I am—who
you
are. That’s why I’m telling you this now: The Harper/And
erman murders were simply the Harper murders. You and I are the only people on earth who know that.”

“Actually,” she said, “we’re not.”

He stared at her a moment, then turned his attention back to the painting. “Ah, yes. Roddy.”

Something else was bothering her, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Something about his face just now, when he’d turned from the painting to look at her. She regarded his back as he stared at the picture, and her gaze traveled up from the real man to the portrait of the long-ago boy. She studied the face on the canvas: the head thrown back, the teeth, the laughing eyes. With a thrill of discovery, she suddenly recognized herself. She, Karen, sometimes did that when she was feeling exuberant: She’d throw her head back and give herself over to her amusement. The face on the canvas was practically a mirror, a male version of her own. She hadn’t seen it before because she hadn’t been looking for it. Why should she, after all? The thought of such a bizarre connection was fantastic, beyond her capacity to imagine. But now, knowing what she knew, she could see the strong resemblance. The laughing boy in the painting was obviously her father.

What’s wrong with this picture? she thought. The boy in the painting, and the old man here in the room with her…

At this moment, as Karen was wondering how to form the question, Mrs. Graves came in with the coffee. The woman crept into the room and arrived before her, bending over to deposit the silver tray on the table between them. Karen smiled up at her, an instinctive gesture of lifelong politeness, but her smile faded when she noticed the look on the woman’s face. Molly Graves was leaning down over the table, her face mere inches from Karen’s, staring directly into her eyes with an intense expression Karen could only interpret as fear. Karen opened her mouth to speak, to ask the woman if everything was all right, when Mrs. Graves raised one finger to her own lips. As Karen stared, the woman extended her other hand to Karen’s own hand. She dropped a tightly folded slip of paper on Karen’s palm, then swiftly closed Karen’s fingers around it.

“Here you are, miss,” the woman said in a loud tone of false heartiness. “Your coffee, and you must try these Danish cookies. We got them special for you.”

Karen glanced beyond the woman: Her father still had his back to them. She slid the paper into the cleavage of her dress, tucking it under an edge of her bra. She looked back at the woman and nodded.

“Thank you, Mrs. Graves. And dinner was delicious—
where did you learn that recipe for Dover sole?”

The woman was already moving back toward the archway. “In Charlotte, not so far from Dover—well, the Dover in America, anyway. Will there be anyth—”

“Thank you, Molly,” Wulf Anderman said, pulling his attention from the portrait. “That will be all.”

After another brief glance at Karen, Mrs. Graves vanished.

Karen poured coffee for the two of them and picked up a cookie, feeling the raspy lump of the folded paper pressing against her breast. What on earth? she thought. But now her father was limping back to resume his seat on the couch across from her, so she smiled at him and handed him his cup.

“I hope you don’t mind if I don’t drink all of this,” she said to him. “I’m feeling tired. But we’ll have more time in the morning to talk. I hope this storm is over by then.”

“I’m sure it will be,” he said. “It’s already lasted longer than most. It’ll be on its way by morning.”

As if to argue his statement, there was a particularly loud crack of thunder at that moment. They laughed.

“Well, it
should
be on its way,” he amended. “We’ll just have half a cup, and then we’ll go up. I’m rather tired tonight myself. ‘
We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep
.’ ”

“From Macbeth to Lear to Prospero in one evening!” Karen said. “But I suppose
The Tempest
is the most suitable for us.”

He nodded. “Absolutely. A father, a daughter, a remote island, and a storm. Carl will call for the boat tomorrow and have it here by—two o’clock? How does that sound?”

“Fine.” Then she added, “But if the phone is still down, how will Carl get in touch with Gabby?”

“By radio. He has an old shortwave radio in his rooms—that’s how he and Gabby communicate.”

“Oh,” Karen said, wondering why no one had offered her this means of getting a message to Jim. It didn’t matter; she’d be back at the Reef by four o’clock tomorrow afternoon.

She sipped her coffee and ate another butter cookie, and then they went upstairs. They parted on the gallery again, as they had the previous night, and again he placed his hands on her arms, but this time he kissed her cheek.

She waited on the gallery until he disappeared inside his room, then hurried to her own. She locked the door behind her, wondering why she bothered—a
nyone with a key could get in from the outside. But she locked it just the same. She sat on the edge of the bed, glanced at her watch—10:5
5—and pulled out the little square of folded paper. Why would the housekeeper go to all the trouble of smuggling a secret message to her in such a dramatic way? As the rain continued to pelt the windows, she unfolded the paper and held it up to the light.