The Secret History (93 page)

I must have fallen asleep on the couch, and I don’t know how much later it was—not a whole lot later, because it was still light out—when Francis shook me awake, not too gently.

“Richard,” he said. “Richard, you’ve got to wake up. Charles is gone.”

I sat up, rubbed my eyes. “Gone?” I said. “But where could he go?”

“I don’t know. He’s not in the house.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ve looked everywhere.”

“He’s got to be around somewhere. Maybe he’s in the yard.”

“I can’t find him.”

“Maybe he’s hiding.”

“Get up and help me look.”

I went upstairs. Francis ran outside. The screen door slammed behind him.

Charles’s room was in disarray and a half-empty bottle of Bombay gin—from the liquor cabinet in the library—was on the night table. None of his things were gone.

I went through all the upstairs rooms, then up to the attic. Lampshades and picture frames, organdy party dresses yellowed with age. Gray wide-plank floors, so worn they were almost fuzzy. A shaft of dusty cathedral light filtered through the stained-glass porthole that faced the front of the house.

I went down the back staircase—low and claustrophobic, scarcely three feet wide—through the kitchen and butler’s pantry, and out onto the back porch. Some distance away, Francis and Mr. Hatch were standing in the driveway. Mr. Hatch was talking to Francis. I had never heard Mr. Hatch say much of anything to anyone and he was plainly uncomfortable. He kept running a hand over his scalp. His manner was cringing and apologetic.

I met Francis on his way back to the house.

“Well,” he said, “this is a hell of a note.” He looked a bit
stunned. “Mr. Hatch says he gave Charles the keys to his truck about an hour and a half ago.”

“
What?
”

“He said Charles came looking for him and said he had to run an errand. He promised to have the truck back in fifteen minutes.”

We looked at each other.

“Where do you think he went?” I said.

“How should I know?”

“Do you think he just took off?”

“Looks that way, doesn’t it?”

We went back in the house—dim now with twilight—and sat by the window on a long davenport that had a sheet thrown over it. The warm air smelled like lilac. Across the lawn, we could hear Mr. Hatch trying to get the lawn mower started up again.

Francis had his arms folded across the back of the davenport and his chin resting on his arms. He was looking out the window. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “He’s stolen that truck, you know.”

“Maybe he’ll be back.”

“I’m afraid he’ll have a wreck. Or a cop will pull him over. I’ll bet you anything he’s plastered. That’s all he needs, getting stopped for drunk driving.”

“Shouldn’t we go look for him?”

“I wouldn’t know where to start. He could be halfway to Boston for all we know.”

“What else can we do? Sit around and wait for the phone to ring?”

First we tried the bars: the Farmer’s Inn, the Villager, the Boulder Tap and the Notty Pine. The Notch. The Four Squires. The Man of Kent. It was a hazy, gorgeous summer twilight and the gravel parking lots were packed with trucks but none of the trucks was Mr. Hatch’s.

Just for the hell of it, we drove by the State Liquor Store. The aisles were bright and empty, splashy rum displays (“Tropical Island Sweepstakes!”) competing with somber, medicinal rows of vodka and gin. A cardboard cutout advertising wine coolers twirled from the ceiling. There were no customers, and a fat old Vermonter with a naked woman tattooed on his forearm was leaning against the cash register, passing time with a kid who worked at the Mini-Mart next door.

“So then,” I heard him say in an undertone, “so then the guy pulls out a sawed-off shotgun. Emmett’s standing here beside me, right where I am now. ‘We don’t have the key to the cashbox,’ he says. And the guy pulls the trigger and I seen Emmett’s brains”—he gestured—“splatter all over that wall back there.…”

We drove to campus, to the library (“He’s not there,” said Francis, “I’ll bet a million dollars”) and back to the bars again.

“He’s left town,” said Francis. “I know it.”

“Do you think Mr. Hatch will call the police?”

“What would you do? If it was your truck? He won’t do anything without talking to me, but if Charles isn’t back, say, by tomorrow afternoon.…”

We decided to drive by the Albemarle. Henry’s car was parked out front. Francis and I went in the lobby cautiously, not knowing quite how we were going to deal with the innkeeper, but, miraculously, there was no one at the desk.

We went upstairs to 3-A. Camilla let us in. She and Henry were eating their dinner, from room service—lamb chops, bottle of burgundy, yellow rose in a bud vase.

Henry was not pleased to see us. “What can I do for you?” he said, putting down his fork.

“It’s Charles,” said Francis. “He’s gone AWOL.”

He told them about the truck. I sat down beside Camilla. I was hungry and her lamb chops looked pretty good. She saw me looking at them and pushed the plate at me distractedly. “Here, have some,” she said.

I did, and a glass of wine, too. Henry ate steadily as he listened. “Where do you think he’s gone?” he said when Francis had finished.

“How the hell should I know?”

“You can keep Mr. Hatch from pressing charges, can’t you?”

“Not if he doesn’t get the truck back. Or if Charles cracks it up”

“How much could a truck like that possibly cost? Assuming your aunt didn’t buy it for him in the first place.”

“That’s beside the point.”

Henry wiped his mouth with a napkin and reached in his pocket for a cigarette. “Charles is getting to be quite a problem,” he said. “You know what I’ve been thinking? I wonder how much it would cost to hire a private nurse.”

“To get him off drink, you mean?”

“Of course. We can’t send him to the hospital, obviously. Perhaps if we got a hotel room—not here, of course, but somewhere—and if we found some trustworthy person, maybe someone who didn’t speak English all that well.…”

Camilla looked ill. She was slumped back in her chair. She said: “Henry, what are you going to do? Kidnap him?”

“
Kidnap
is not the word that I would use.”

“I’m afraid he’ll have a wreck. I think we ought to go look for him.”

“We’ve looked all over town,” said Francis. “I don’t think he’s in Hampden.”

“Have you called the hospital?”

“No.”

“What I think we really ought to do,” said Henry, “is call the police. Ask if there have been any traffic accidents. Do you think Mr. Hatch will agree to say that he lent Charles the truck?”

“He did lend Charles the truck.”

“In that case,” said Henry, “there should be no problem. Unless, of course, he gets stopped for drunk driving.”

“Or unless we can’t find him.”

“From my point of view,” said Henry, “the best thing that Charles could do right now is to disappear entirely from the face of the earth.”

Suddenly there was a loud, frenetic banging at the door. We looked at one other.

Camilla’s face had gone blank with relief. “Charles,” she said, “
Charles,
” and she jumped up from her chair and started to the door; but no one had locked it behind us, and before she got there it flew open with a crash.

It was Charles. He stood in the doorway, blinking drunkenly around the room, and I was so surprised and glad to see him that it was a moment before I realized that he had a gun.

He stepped inside and kicked the door shut behind him. It was the little Beretta that Francis’s aunt kept in the night table, the one we’d used for target practice the fall before. We stared at him, thunderstruck.

At last Camilla said, and in a voice which was fairly steady: “Charles, what do you think you are doing?”

“Out of the way,” said Charles. He was very drunk.

“So you’ve come to kill me?” said Henry. He was still holding his cigarette. He was remarkably composed. “Is that it?”

“Yes.”

“And what do you suppose that will solve?”

“You’ve ruined my life, you son of a bitch.” He had the gun pointed at Henry’s chest. With a sinking feeling, I remembered what an expert shot he was, how he’d broken the rows of mason jars one by one.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Henry snapped; and I felt the first prickle of real panic at the back of my neck. This belligerent, bullying tone might work with Francis, maybe even with me, but it was a disastrous tack to take with Charles. “If anyone’s to blame for your problems, it’s you.”

I wanted to tell him to shut up, but before I could say anything Charles lurched abruptly to the side, to clear his shot. Camilla stepped into his path. “Charles, give me the gun,” she said.

He pushed the hair from his eyes with his forearm, holding the gun remarkably steady with his other hand. “I’m telling you, Milly.” It was a pet name he had for her, one he seldom used. “You better get out of the way.”

“Charles,” said Francis. He was white as a ghost. “Sit down. Have some wine. Let’s just forget about this.”

The window was open and the chirrup of the crickets washed in harsh and strong.

“You bastard,” said Charles, reeling backwards, and it was a moment before I realized, startled, that he was speaking not to Francis or Henry but to me. “I trusted you. You told him where I was.”

I was too petrified to answer. I blinked at him.

“I knew where you were,” said Henry coolly. “If you want to shoot me, Charles, go ahead and do it. It’ll be the stupidest thing you ever did in your life.”

“The stupidest thing I ever did in my life was listening to you,” Charles said.

What happened next took place in an instant. Charles raised his arm; and quick as a flash, Francis, who was standing closest to him, threw a glass of wine in his face. At the same time Henry sprang from his chair and rushed in. There were four pops in rapid succession, like a cap gun. With the second pop, I heard a windowpane shatter. And with the third I was conscious of a warm, stinging sensation in my abdomen, to the left of my navel.

Henry was holding Charles’s right forearm above his head with both hands, bending him backward; Charles was struggling
to get the gun with his left hand, but Henry twisted it from his wrist and it dropped to the carpet. Charles dove for it but Henry was too quick.

I was still standing.
I’m shot
, I thought,
I’m shot
. I reached down and touched my stomach. Blood. There was a small hole, slightly charred, in my white shirt:
my Paul Smith shirt
, I thought, with a pang of anguish. I’d paid a week’s salary for it in San Francisco. My stomach felt very hot. Waves of heat radiating from the bull’s-eye.

Henry had the gun. He twisted Charles’s arm behind his back—Charles fighting, thrashing wildly about—and, nosing the pistol into his spine, shoved him away from the door.

I still hadn’t quite grasped what had happened.
Maybe I should sit down
, I thought. Was the bullet still in me? Was I going to die? The thought was ridiculous; it didn’t seem possible. My stomach burned but I felt oddly calm. Getting shot, I’d always thought, would hurt a lot more than this. Carefully, I stepped back, and felt the back of the chair I had been sitting in bump against my legs. I sat down.

Charles, despite having one arm pinned behind him, was trying to elbow Henry in the stomach with the other. Henry pushed him, staggering, across the room and into a chair. “Sit down,” he said.

Charles tried to get up. Henry mashed him back down. He tried to get up a second time and Henry slapped him across the face with his open hand with a whack that was louder than the gunshots. Then, with the pistol on him, he stepped to the windows and drew the shades.

I put my hand over the hole in my shirt. Bending forward slightly, I felt a sharp pain. I expected everyone to stop and look at me. No one did. I wondered if I should call it to their attention.

Charles’s head was rolled against the back of the chair. I noticed that there was blood on his mouth. His eyes were glassy.

Awkwardly—he was holding the gun in his good hand—Henry reached up and took off his spectacles and rubbed them on the front of his shirt. Then he hooked them over his ears again. “Well, Charles,” he said. “You’ve done it now.”

I heard some kind of commotion downstairs, through the open window—footsteps, voices, a door slamming.

“Do you think anybody heard?” said Francis anxiously.

“I should think they did,” Henry said.

Camilla went over to Charles. Drunkenly, he made as if to push her away.

“Get away from him,” Henry said.

“What are we going to do about this window?” said Francis.

“What are we going to do about
me?
” I said.

They all turned and looked at me.

“He
shot
me.”

Somehow, this remark did not elicit the dramatic response I expected. Before I had the chance to elaborate, there were footsteps on the stairs and somebody banged at the door.

“What’s going on in there?” I recognized the innkeeper’s voice. “What’s happening?”

Francis put his face in his hands. “Oh, shit,” he said.