The Dain Curse (22 page)
Fitzstephan said that he did not think Alice Leggett's account of the killing of her sister Lily was the truth, that he thought she-Alice-had done the killing herself and had lied to hurt Gabrielle. Everybody took it for granted that he was right-everybody, including Gabrielle-though he didn't have any evidence to support what was after all only his guess. I was tempted to have the agency's Paris correspondent see what he could dig up on that early affair, but decided not to. It was nobody's business except Gabnielle's, and she seemed happy enough with what had already been dug up.
She was in the Collinsons' hands now. They had come to Quesada for her as soon as the newspapers put out their first extra accusing Fitzstephan of Eric's murder. The Collinsons hadn't had to be crude about it-to admit that they'd ever suspected her of anything: when Andrews had surrendered his letters testamentary, and another administrator-Walter Fielding-had been appointed, the Collinsons had simply seemed to pick her up, as was their right as her closest relations, where Andrews had put her down.
Two months in the mountains topped off her cure, and she came back to the city looking like nothing that she had been. The difference was not only in appearance.
"I can't really make myself believe that all that actually happened to me," she told me one noon when she, Laurence Collinson, and I were lunching together between morning and afternoon court-sessions. "Is it, do you think, because there was so much of it that I became callous?"
"No. Remember you were going around coked up most of the time. That saved you from the sharp edge. Lucky for you you were. Stay away from the morphine now and it'll always be a hazy sort of dream. Any time you want to bring it back clear and vivid, take a jolt."
"I won't, I won't, ever," she said; "not even to give you the-the fun of bullying me through a cure again. He enjoyed himself awfully," she told Laurence Collinson. "He used to curse me, ridicule me, threaten me with the most terrible things, and then, at the last, I think he tried to seduce me. And if I'm uncouth at times, Laurence, you'll have to blame him: he positively hadn't a refining influence."
She seemed to have come back far enough.
Laurence Collinson laughed with us, but not from any farther down than his chin. I had an idea he thought I hadn't a refining influence.
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30/08/2007
LRS to LRF parser v.0.9; Mikhail Sharonov, 2006; msh-tools.com/ebook/