Miss Lizzie (19 page)

“Repression?”

“If you'd already read your Freud, you'd know all about it.”

“My Froyd?”

He smiled smugly again. “Sigmund Freud,” he said. “He's a German doctor who's discovered everything there is to know about the subconscious.” He crossed his legs like a professor about to elucidate an especially thorny problem to a well-intentioned if somewhat dense undergraduate. “The human mind, see, is divided into these three parts. There's the libido, which is your primitive, animalistic energy. There's your ego, which is what you get from your parents. And then there's your superego, which is what you get from society. Now, if your superego's too strong, then your libido gets blocked, okay? Your natural impulses get twisted, and you get hysteria and craziness and in some cases even murder.”

“He's a doctor, this Sigmund Freud?”

“One of the greatest who ever lived. He's revolutionized psychology.”

“He sounds like a screwball to me.”

“That,” he announced, “is because you don't know what you're talking about.” Roger, alas, was definitely out of the running as a spousal candidate.

“This superego thing,” I said. “Just how do you get it from society?”

He shrugged. “From the rules and codes of the social group.”

“So it's like a conscience.”

“Well, yeah,” he said. “Sort of. But naturally it's a lot more complicated than that.”

“But how does it become a part of your mind?”

Impatiently, he waved his hand. “That's not important, Amanda.” He uncrossed his legs and leaned toward me once again, his forearms resting on his knees. He
did
have nice long fingers; it was a pity he was such a dope. “The important thing is that repression leads to violence. And your friend Lizzie Borden is repressed. She's been repressed all her life. She never got married, she was a thirty-two-year-old spinster when she killed her parents.”

“She
didn't
kill her parents. Roger, there are
thousands
of thirty-two-year-old spinsters,
millions
of them, probably, and they don't all go killing their parents.”

He shrugged again. “Some of them just can't stand the strain.”

“How many of them kill their parents?”

“Geeze, Amanda, it only takes one, you know. Look, there's no question she did it.”

“There is for me.”

He sat back and shook his head, disgusted. “You don't get it, do you?”

“No,” I said. “I don't.”

Once more he leaned toward me. His dark eyes peered intently into mine, Svengali-like. “Listen to me, Amanda.
Listen
to me. Did you know that your house next door is almost identical to the Bordens' house in Fall River? The same number of rooms? The same arrangement?”

“So what?”

“So
listen
. Your stepmother was killed in August, on the hottest day of the year. Did you know that Lizzie Borden's mother wasn't really her mother? She was her
stepmother
. And did you know that she was murdered upstairs, in the front room on the left side of the house? The
guest room
, Amanda. And
your
stepmother was killed in the guest room.”

“Oh, Roger,
really
. You're not saying—”

He nodded. “Yes I am, Amanda. She killed your stepmother.”

FOURTEEN

“THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE,” I said.

“It was the heat, Amanda. It got to her, it brought her back to Fall River thirty years ago, and she just went berserk.”

“Roger, she didn't even know my stepmother.”

“So it would have been
easier
for her to kill her. Don't you see? I mean, she knew her parents and she killed
them
.” The logic of this escaped me, but Roger was fervent now, folded forward and jabbing his finger at me. “Look, the police searched all over your house, right? Next door? And they couldn't find the weapon. But did they search this place?”

“Of course not. They didn't have any reason to.”

“Oh, they've got reason to, but it's not good enough yet to get a warrant. But I'll bet you, Amanda, I'll bet you that hatchet is lying right around here somewhere.” He glanced around the room as though he might spot it on the end table, tucked beside the cloisonne vase. He looked back tome. “And the thing is, she could go berserk again any minute, you know. The weather's still hot, the temperature's still over ninety-eight point six. She could go off any time, like a bomb.”

“Roger,” I said, “I think
you're
a psychopath.”

He sat back. “Hey, I'm not the one living in a house with an axe-murderer. Understand? You're not safe here, Amanda. You could be next.”

I cocked my head. “Is that why you came over here? To warn me?” Wrongheaded as he was, his heart, at least, might be in the right place.

“Partly,” he said.

I hid my disappointment. (And yet why, I asked myself, would I be disappointed? The boy was a boob.) “What other reason?”

“I'm doing an article for the paper.” I had forgotten that he was a journalism student. He grinned, excited, proud. “This'll be my first real scoop, Amanda. I'll get a byline and everything.”

“But you can't do that!” I said. “Mr. Slocum, the lawyer, he promised Chief Da Silva that none of us would talk to the newspapers.”

He waved an airy hand. “I've already interviewed Da Silva. He knows what I'm doing.”

“Yes, and he's letting you do it because he knows you'll write what he wants you to.”

“Hey,” he said, affronted, “I don't write what anyone
wants
me to. I write the truth as I see it.” Even at eighteen, he was able to make this vibrate with the dreary self-righteousness of the crusader.

“Well, you can't write anything
I
said,” I told him. “I won't let you.”

“Amanda,” he replied, in the now-familiar tone of patient superiority, “it's a free press, part of a democratic society.”

“If you write anything bad about Miss Lizzie, she'll sue you, you know. And the newspaper. For slander. How many articles do you think they'll let you write then?”

“Slander is spoken,” he said. “Libel is written.” But the pedantry was distracted, automatic; and he was frowning.

Once again sensing an advantage—a thirteen-year-old girl can be as ruthless as a Mongol—I pressed it. “You'll probably never be able to write anything for anybody, ever. None of the newspapers will touch you with a ten-foot pole.”

“No one can stop a free press,” he said, and I think he meant it to sound like a ringing declaration, but it came out strained and querulous, almost petulant.

“Well,” I said—and just then came the sound of someone knocking at the front door. Miss Lizzie was upstairs; I would have to answer it myself.

“Well,” I snapped at him as I stood, “you just remember that the free press won't have you as a part of it if you write anything bad about Miss Lizzie.” And I turned and flounced from the room, having got the last word and very well pleased with myself.

At the front door, I held my face against it as I had seen Miss Lizzie do. “Who is it?”

“Darryl Slocum.”

I unlocked the door, opened it; the lawyer and Mr. Boyle passed by me into the entranceway. Mr. Slocum was wearing another stylish linen suit, this one pearl gray; the Pinkerton man wore the same rumpled brown thing he had been wearing yesterday.

“Miss Lizzie's upstairs,” I told them. “I'll go get her.”

As I was closing the door, Roger emerged from the parlor. “I've got to be going,” he said to me. He spoke rapidly, uneasily, a small boy nearly caught with his hand in the jam jar.

“Hello, Roger,” said Mr. Slocum. “How's your father?”

“Fine, Mr. Slocum. Excuse me, I've—”

“Roger,” I said to Mr. Slocum with an innocence as sweet and genuine as saccharine, “is going to write an article about Miss Lizzie for the newspaper.”

Mr. Slocum smiled. “Good for you, Roger.”

Roger scowled at me, then said to Mr. Slocum, “Well, sir, it's not all that big a deal—”

“Roger thinks,” I said, still with that heartless innocence, “that Miss Lizzie killed Audrey.”

“Does he now,” said Mr. Slocum, raising an eyebrow. “Well, Roger, you're entitled to your own opinion, of course. Opinions are wonderful things, like collar stays. Everyone should have a few. But you want to be careful with them, you know. Don't want to poke yourself.”

“Yes sir,” said Roger, and laughed. A bit shakily, I was pleased to note. There were also a few gratifying beads of sweat along his upper lip. “That's a good one, sir. Ha-ha. Collar stays. I'll have to use that some time.”

Smiling, Mr. Slocum bowed his head. “Consider it yours.”

“Yes sir, thank you. Well, yeah, I guess I better be going. Good-bye, sir.” He turned and nodded uncertainly toward Boyle, to whom he had not been introduced, then turned to glare at me. “Good-bye, Amanda.” Coldly, flatly.

“So long, Roger,” I said pleasantly, holding the door open for him. “Do come again, whenever you can.”

He scowled, then slipped through the door. I shut it behind him, smiling.

Boyle turned to Mr. Slocum. “Looks a little young for Richard Harding Davis.”

“Oh, Roger's all right,” said Mr. Slocum. “A tad overenthusiastic, maybe. I'll have a word with Benedict, the owner of the
Sun
, and make sure he and his people understand the merits of discretion.” He turned to me. “Well, Amanda, how are you today?”

“Fine,” I said. “And you?” He was certainly an extremely handsome man.

“Not at all bad. Do you think you could find Miss Borden for us? Our prize witnesses should be arriving soon to rake in their just deserts.”

“I'll get her.” And then, remembering my manners, I said to Boyle, who was digging a pack of Fatimas from his shirt pocket, “How are you, Mr. Boyle?”

“Swell, kid. You holding up okay?”

I told him I was, and went off for Miss Lizzie.

The witnesses—three of them—were waiting in the sitting room. Mr. Slocum, Boyle, and Miss Lizzie would interview them one by one in the parlor, behind closed doors. I was merely a supernumary, a witness to their witnessing.

The first of them, led in by Mr. Slocum, was a stocky woman carrying a gray carpetbag and wearing a flowing white silk dress that reached almost to the soles of what looked like white satin ballet slippers. It was an unusual dress, a composite that resembled an ancient Greek gown, Empire waisted, onto which a seamstress with nothing better to do had stitched a pair of loose triangular sleeves. It gave her a vaguely hieratical air and might have made her seem almost imposing, had she not been shorter than I and nearly as short as Miss Mullavey, the police stenographer. When she sat, draping the carpetbag across her ample lap, her plump tiny feet hovered just above the floor.

She did not seem, initially, an attractive person. A helmet of brown hair, laced with gray, lay close to her scalp in tight determined curls. Beneath a broad forehead and bracketing a slightly upturned nose, her small brown eyes were deeply set between horizontal folds of flesh. On either side of her wide meaty mouth were slack jowls that, in conjunction with her bright-red lipstick and bright-red rouge, gave her rather the look of an effeminate bulldog.

But her smile, when Mr. Slocum introduced her, was one of those, like Miss Lizzie's, that immediately transforms the face from which it shines, making it younger and sweeter and causing a flicker of guilty confusion in the observer. And her voice, as she said her
hellos
, was low and musical; disconcertingly so, when what one half-expected was a canine growl. Her name was Mrs. Helene Archer.

“Now, Mrs. Archer,” said Mr. Slocum, “I understand you have some information about the death of Mrs. Audrey Burton.”