Death Trap (6 page)

She gave me a rare look of directness. “Do you love her?”

“Yes. And when I left before, I thought I’d never see her again. I gave her a bad time.”

Her eyes widened. “You’re
that
one!”

“Then you know about it.”

“Not much about it. Just some things Al said. You made her unhappy. He said you took the life out of her.”

“I’ve been sorry ever since, Nancy. Now I’m trying to help her.”

She had me placed, and she seemed more at ease. “I don’t see how anybody can change it now, Mr. Mac-Reedy.”

“I don’t see how either. But I’m not closing my mind the way you are.”

“I came here, didn’t I? I’m willing to talk to you.”

“It’s good to see you mad instead of scared.”

“I’m not scared.”

“Then we’ll talk. We’ll talk like friends, Nancy. Maybe if you can act like a grownup we can be friends. You’re eighteen years old. You aren’t a child. I want us to talk together like a man and a woman. And I want us both to make one major assumption before we start. Let’s assume Al is innocent.”

“But—”

“It’s the attitude a court of law is supposed to have. I think if we start that way, we may get farther. Forget that this town considers him some sort of a monster. You don’t have to think that way because they do. Now—can you pretend?”

“I know the meaning of the word assumption,” she said haughtily.

“Then we can start?”

She nodded nervously, and looked down at her hands. She seemed to relax a little, but not as much as I would have expected of a girl of eighteen. There was an odd wariness about her.

“You were in love with Alister.”

“I—I thought I was.”

“Your father explained to you how you really weren’t.”

“I guess so.”

“And he told you you are too young to know what real love is.”

“Y-Yes.”

“But you don’t really think he’s right, do you?”

“I don’t know. I guess so.”

“Stop fencing, Nancy. What did you think of Alister?”

“He’s—strange. He’s not like other boys. He doesn’t have any kind of line or anything. I—I met him in our back yard. He was watching a bird. He sort of wandered over, following it when it went from tree to tree. He was shy. He’s very smart. It could scare you, the things he knows and how quick he learns things, but he wouldn’t scare you the other way.”

“What other way?”

“I mean he—he was different. Usually we had a good time. Only sometimes he’d get angry. I guess I’m not too bright. Not with his kind of brains. He needed somebody.”

“Don’t you think he still does?”

“But—”

“Nancy. Listen to me. Listen carefully. Can you really imagine him murdering Jane Ann?”

“My father says you can’t ever tell—”

“A book by its cover. The hell with your father.” She jumped as though I had slapped her. “I want to know what you think. What Nancy Paulson thinks. Do you think he had something twisted inside him that would let him do a terrible thing like that?”

“Well—Jane Ann was always teasing him.”

“How?”

“Oh, in little ways. You know. Making him blush and get all confused. She was like that. She liked to do that to shy boys. Leaning up against them. Saying things that were almost dirty but not quite, and then laughing in a sort of wise way.”

“So he could kill her because she teased him.”

“Well, I kept thinking that maybe she sort of led him on. You know. And he got thinking about her. And then he was mad at me and he saw her walking and he picked her up and—Well, my father says that some men go out of their heads when they—”

“Did Alister ever kiss you?”

She looked at me and looked away, and her blush was really Victorian. “Yes,” she said in a small voice. “Lots of times. But that was all.”

“Did he act like he was going to go out of his head?”

“No. He wasn’t like that. And he was polite. He didn’t get—funny or anything.”

“You’re a better looking girl than your sister was. You’re a more exciting looking woman.”

“Don’t—Please don’t say things like that.”

“Most girls like to hear that sort of thing.”

“I don’t. If you talk like that I’m going home.”

“I’m not making any pass at you. I’m trying to figure you out. If kissing you didn’t make Alister lose control, is it likely to think he’d lose control kissing your sister?”

“She was different.”

“How do you feel about her? I mean what did you think about the way she acted with boys?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, though I knew she understood me.

“I don’t know what you kids call it. When I was in high school we’d call her a girl that went all the way.”

“Don’t talk dirty like that.”

“Look, Nancy. I am
not
talking dirty. Somebody killed your sister. We’re pretending it wasn’t Alister. And we know it wasn’t some person just passing through. The blood on the car and the buried knife and purse rule that out. What did you think about the way she acted, the things she did?”

Nancy lowered her head. I had to move closer to hear her. “I thought it was awful. It made me ashamed, all the time. It made the boys worse because they thought I was the same way. I never was. I never will be. I don’t want to do nasty things. Al didn’t either. We talked about her. He said it wasn’t really the way she was. He said it was a protest. She was so nice when she was little. We had so much fun. Then it all changed. I guess I’m terrible. Now everybody pretends they can’t remember the way she was with boys. And it’s like a weight off me. I can’t feel as bad about her as I ought to feel. She was my sister. I don’t want to be glad she’s dead. But she was going to keep right on doing terrible things. My father beat her. It didn’t change anything. He’d beat her so hard it would scare mother and me. But she’d go out a window. She’d sneak out. It didn’t matter to her. She’d cry when he hurt her and afterward she’d laugh. Nothing mattered. She’d talk dirty to me until I was so ashamed I’d cry, and then she’d laugh at me. In school I knew everybody was looking at me when I walked down the hall, and I was ashamed.”

“When did she start being like that?”

“It was in the summer. Let me try to remember when. She would have been seventeen this last summer. So it was five summers ago. When she was twelve. At the lake. Morgan’s Lake. We’ve always gone there. The Mackins own half of it. They live just down the street from us—on the corner of Oak and Venture. There’s a boathouse and a sort of upstairs to it. You get up there by a ladder. My father and Mr. Mackin keep gear up there. My father went up there after something and Jane Ann and a boy were up there.” She lowered her head and flushed. “They had taken their swim suits off. Even when she was twelve Jane Ann was—you know. Big.” And she half indicated what she meant by the fragment of a gesture toward her own breasts. “The boy was from across the lake. His name was Danny something. She said they were playing doctor. My father whipped the boy so bad there was a lot of trouble about it, but everybody knew he was right to do it. He whipped Jane Ann too. And made her stay inside the camp for a whole month. She cried a lot at first and then she got mean. I think that was when she started to change.”

“And after a while your father couldn’t do anything with her.”

“That’s right. They talked—my mother and father—about sending her to one of those schools. Mr. Score, the Chief of Police, said they should after that time she stayed at that fraternity house, but my father said it would have been a disgrace to the family.”

“There was a boy you went with when you were up there at the lake, wasn’t there?”

She turned her head quickly and looked directly at me. It was a look of alarm. “Robby. Robby Howard. They said I was too young to have a boy friend. I was sixteen. He was nice. He was like—”

“Like Alister?”

“I was going to say that. Yes. Like Alister, I guess. Shy, and he didn’t try to get funny or anything. And he was drowned. It took a whole day to find him. They tried to make me look away but I saw him on the dock before they covered him up. He was black, his skin.” She shuddered visibly.

“How did he drown?”

“They thought it was a cramp. He was a wonderful swimmer. Nobody saw him and they didn’t know where it happened and that’s why it took so long to find him. It is a little lake. I used to have to sneak away to see him. It made me feel guilty and funny. Like I was being like Jane Ann.”

“You were serious about him?”

“I thought all of the world had ended. We had a crazy idea. We talked about it. About running away. He was seventeen. He knew all about radios. He had built a lot of them. He looked older than seventeen, we thought. He could get a job in a repair shop. He found out you can get married in Georgia when you’re sixteen without anybody’s permission. They didn’t want me to see him, and we thought it was the only thing we could do.”

“Had you thought of marrying Alister?”

“We sort of took it for granted. We talked about it like it was going to happen. I don’t know when we decided we would exactly. It was going to happen after he graduated. The University of Illinois was going to give him a research fellowship thing. I could take my last year of high school there, and then go into the university. He wanted me to do that, and I said I would but I didn’t see why I should.”

“Did your family know about the plan?”

“Oh, no!”

“What do you think they would have thought of it?”

“My father would have said no. And all that time I was wondering if I had the courage to do it anyway. I think I would have.”

“Did you think at all about the physical side of marriage?”

“I don’t want you to talk like that.”

“Nancy, please. I’m not trying to play games. This all may be important. I don’t know just how, but it may be a factor in this whole thing. I’m a stranger. You probably won’t see me again. I’m not making any kind of a pass. I’m in love with Vicky Landy, and I’ve done enough living to know that any other girl from here on in is of no use to me in any physical sense. I asked you this question. What did you think about the physical side of marriage?”

“I—I thought about it. A lot, I guess. I didn’t know how it would be. I mean I know what happens, but I couldn’t imagine it being done to me. It scared me. It seems so—so nasty. A terrible thing. Jane Ann kept wanting to do it. I couldn’t understand how she could want that. She said it was fun; but I don’t think it was really for her, because so many times she would be so sour and moody. I—guess I just hoped that Alister would be gentle and not scare me and not want to do it very often, so maybe then I could pretend to him it was all right.”

“Nancy, I’m not criticizing you, really. But that isn’t a healthy or normal way to think. There are a lot of girls and women who think the way you do. And a few men. Something must have caused that attitude.”

“You’re not right. The other kind of people are dirty.”

“They’re normal, honey. How do your parents feel about all this?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it.”

“You weren’t found under a cabbage leaf, you know.”

“Stop it! I don’t let myself think about that.”

“Because it’s nasty, I suppose. Has your mother lectured you about this nastiness?”

“No. Never.”

I studied her closely and decided that she was not lying. This girl would make someone a wonderfully frigid wife. The emotional block was so pronounced that only superhuman patience could ever create a natural relationship. An initial queasiness had perhaps been intensified by the waywardness of the sister, by the severity of the beatings her sister was given, by the aura of innuendo in her social contacts with her contemporaries. Yet this did not seem enough. Had Jane Ann been the elder sister, it would seem more reasonable. Many nuns are the younger sisters of dissolute women. And the children of drunkards are often highly moral. I could not decide what had twisted this girl. And, also, I could not help but think, in the romantic tradition—or perhaps hope is the better word—that the kink in her emotions was something, that could be unknotted by the right word, the right gesture. As in the sexual symbolism of Sleeping Beauty.

She took advantage of my silence to say, “I don’t see how this has anything to do with whether Alister did it.”

“Perhaps it doesn’t. Let’s try another approach. It came out at the trial that you and Alister had quarreled on Thursday night. Did you have a date with him for Friday?”

“Yes, but we broke it after the fight.”

“Was it a bad fight?”

“Not very bad. It was mostly silly. He started talking about this town in that funny way of his, saying how it was such an awful, narrow, little place, full of prejudice and jealousies and tribal rites. I said it was my home and I liked it. He said if I couldn’t see it for what it was, I was blind or stupid or both. We—went on from there.”

“Did your parents approve of your dating him two nights in a row?”

“I don’t think my father liked it. I heard him and my mother arguing. She said I was eighteen and he couldn’t keep me locked up. I don’t think they had anything against him. He was always polite to them. But I knew him better and I could see that it was—like a pose. Like he was playing a game. Like he was trying to be the kind of boy they wanted me to go with.”

“How about other boys? Were there any others?”

“Oh, no! Just Robby and Alister.”

“But other boys must have tried to date you.”

“They try all the time. But they’re a different kind. I know what they’re thinking about all the time. Now we’re talking about
that
again. I don’t like to. It makes me feel all crawly.”

“Then we’ll change quick. Would Jane Ann have gotten into a car with a stranger?”

“I don’t know. Even though she was the way she was, I don’t think so. But maybe if he was young and it was a nice car—you know.”

“Was there anybody around town who was after her? Maybe somebody older and pretty unattractive. Maybe a village idiot type.”

“No. There wasn’t anybody like that. I don’t know of anybody like that.”

“What happened to her things afterward? Maybe she had a diary or letters or something.”

“The police looked for things like that when she was missing, before they found her. They thought she had run away. I think my father thought so too. But I didn’t think so.”