Miss Lizzie (39 page)

By two o'clock, we had not yet heard from Father. Boyle had called from Boston, at one, and told Miss Lizzie that he had been unable to locate Mrs. Archer before leaving town. He had, however, spoken with someone in the New York office of the Pinkertons, and he expected some information from them by this evening.

Having finished lunch, Miss Lizzie and I were sitting out on the porch, drinking our tea. Although the sky was still overcast, the breeze had died and the air was motionless and hot and very damp. It left a thin film of moisture on everything, like the trail of a snail.

“Maybe I should go up to the police station,” I suggested.

“I don't think it would help, dear.”

“But maybe they're beating him up or something.”

She smiled. “I suspect that the police seldom beat up people who can afford lawyers. He may be having a difficult time of it, but I doubt that they're physically harming him.”

“Why would he be having a difficult time?”

“The police, I think, tend to feel that when you haven't told them the entire truth, you've committed a major offense against the universe. Of whom they, of course, are the local representatives.”

“But you don't think they'll hurt him?”

“No, not at all. And, as he told you, they apparently haven't enough evidence to hold him for anything.”

“Yes, but they're still going to think he did it.”

She sipped at her tea. “Perhaps. We really don't know what they'll think.”

“Everybody else is going to think so too. Aren't they?”

“Whom do you mean?”

“Everybody. Here in town. And back in Boston.”

She smiled. “Do you mean the people who gathered out in the street a few days ago? That everybody?”

“Well, yes. But everybody else too. All his friends in Boston. The people he works with.”

“If they're actually his friends,” she said, “they won't judge him. That's what friendship is, I believe. Not judging someone. If they know him, and like him, they're not going to care what the police in some tiny little town might think. And besides, I'm still convinced we'll be able to determine who actually committed the crime.”

“Yes, well, maybe, but I'm awfully glad we don't really live in this town.”

She sipped at her tea. “Yes. I can understand that.”

It occurred to me then—and for the first time, I think—that after her trial, Miss Lizzie had lived out the rest of her life in Fall River, despite her knowing that many, perhaps most, of the people around her believed she had actually been guilty. For nearly thirty years she had lived in a town that was convinced she had murdered her parents.

Why had she not left? She had money; she could have gone anywhere in the country, or out of it. She could have gone back to Paris. Why had she stayed in Fall River?

“Miss Lizzie?”

“Yes?”

Suddenly I heard a knocking at the front door.

I said, “Maybe that's Father!”

She smiled, sipped at her tea. “Perhaps you'd better find out.”

I scooted off the chair and ran down the hallway to the foyer. I tugged on the handle and swung the door open.

And standing on the front porch, wearing a seersucker suit and a wide toothy grin, was William.

THIRTY

“HE'S REALLY OKAY,” William said. “They're only asking him questions. The lawyer's with him, Mr. Spencer.”

Now all three of us were out on the porch. After introductions, Miss Lizzie had poured William a cup of tea.

“You're sure, William?” I asked him.

“Positive.”

“And they just let you out, and that was that?”

“More or less, yeah. Dad and Chief Da Silva came into the jail, and Dad just says, ‘William, I know you saw Susan St. Clair and me last Tuesday. I want you to know that by the time I got to the house, Audrey was already dead.' And Da Silva says to me, ‘William, did you see your father outside town on Tuesday morning, at approximately ten o'clock?' And I look at Dad, and he nods, and I tell Da Silva,
yes
, and he says, ‘Would you like to retract your confession?' You know the way he is, no expression at all, like a rock or something. And I tell him,
yes
, and he just nods and goes away.”

“And then what?”

“Then Dad tells me I was dumb to confess to something I didn't do, but that he understood. We shook hands and stuff.” He blinked and looked away for an instant. “And so then Da Silva comes back with the key and he unlocks the cell. And he says to Dad, ‘You've got a few minutes together. When you're done, come to my office.' And that was it.”

“And you're sure Father's all right?”

“Really, he's fine. He said I should come and tell you not to worry.”

We talked for a while longer, perhaps another half an hour, and William told us about his past few days, the bugs, the smells, the dullard of a jailer. Already, at seventeen, he had acquired the exasperating masculine habit of speaking about a past misery as though it were merely an amusing inconvenience.

At three o'clock, there was another knocking at the door.

William stopped talking and looked at Miss Lizzie, who looked at me. “Would you like to get that, Amanda?”

It was Father. He smiled down at me and said, “I've got the car. Why don't the three of us go out for a drive?”

We went to Mortimer's. Father drank a scotch and water, William had a beer, I had coffee. William was exuberant, laughing and grinning at nothing at all; Father was only a little less so.

I, on the other hand, felt curiously flat and deflated. I was glad enough that William had been released, and pleased that the police had not held Father; but it seemed to me that both of them, in the pleasure of their freedom, had forgotten that neither the police nor Mr. Boyle had any idea who had actually killed Audrey. And until that person was found, suspicion would be directed at my father and my brother and perhaps even at me.

And, too, I suspect that working somewhere deep inside me, at a level below consciousness, was the knowledge that Father had not only lied to me but that he had, as he admitted, left me to find Audrey's shattered body. Consciously, by a deliberate effort, I avoided the thought: He was my father, and I loved him. But the knowledge was there, and I believe it goes some way toward explaining my listlessness.

I was not unaware either that Father had let William spend another night in jail while he himself stayed in Boston, probably with Susan St. Clair. Perhaps he believed it might be their last night together; I still resented it.

Decades can pass sometimes, and even entire lives, before we forgive our parents their humanity.

But, sitting there, I smiled and nodded and pretended to share their happiness. (I was learning how to be a grownup, a skill that today, I am glad to say, I have long since lost.)

Mr. Mortimer came to our table and made a fuss over William, clapping him on the back and asking him about the food in the “pokey.” After buying us another round of drinks, he lumbered off, grinning, to the bar.

We left around five o'clock and went to the Fairview. Father called Miss Lizzie from there, to tell her I would be having an early dinner with him and William. When we finished, William went upstairs to take a bath and Father drove me back to Miss Lizzie's. By this time, about six-thirty, a light rain was falling, a sad slow drizzle, and a fog was beginning to roll in off the ocean. Pale tendrils of mist slowly whirled across the road, curled against the streetlamps. They scattered as we passed, whipped away by the passage of Father's Studebaker.

Father told me, when he dropped me off, that he would come by in the morning, at nine, to pick me up for church; a reminder, unknown to him, that God and I had so far failed to resolve our dilemma.

Miss Lizzie and I were in the parlor, working on the Nikola system, when the telephone rang at eight o'clock. Miss Lizzie answered it.

“Yes.… Hello, how are you? … Yes? … Good, good. I'm pleased to hear it.” She began to relate the story of William's release, and I realized that she must be talking to Boyle.

“Yes,” she said. “It does.… Yes. So there's no question about it? He was in Boston on Tuesday morning? … I see.… Did they? And what might that be? Indeed.… Indeed.… It was never solved, then? … Yes. I agree.… And they're certain it's the same person? … No doubt at all. Yes, I understand.… I spoke with him this afternoon.… Yes, he will.… Yes. Thanks very much. You've done a wonderful job.… Good-bye.”

She hung up the phone and returned to her chair, across the coffee table from my perch on the sofa. “Mr. Boyle,” she said. “He was quite a fund of information.”

“What did he say?”

“Well, first, he talked to the Norton man, and he's obtained a signed statement from him that verifies William's story. He admits that he picked your brother up just a little after ten o'clock.”

“But the police have already let William go.”

“Every little bit helps, I should think. Second, he spoke with the people Mr. Chatsworth had mentioned. Apparently Mr. Chatsworth was telling the truth. He was in Boston on Tuesday. Mr. Boyle says there's no question about it.”

“So he couldn't have been the one who killed Audrey.”

“Evidently not. But Mr. Boyle has received some information from the Pinkerton office in New York City.”

“Yes?”

For some reason, Miss Lizzie frowned. “Yes. It seems that five years ago, in Manhattan, Mrs. Helene Archer was arrested for the murder of her husband.”

I just sat there, stupefied, while Miss Lizzie, still frowning, looked thoughtfully down at the cards arranged on the coffee table.

Finally I said, “She killed her husband? Mrs. Archer did?”

Miss Lizzie looked up. “She was arrested, but the case never came to trial. According to Mr. Boyle's Pinkerton associates, the police were convinced she was guilty, but they never found the evidence they needed.”

“But the police can be wrong.”