“No.”
“Did he know about us?”
“I don’t think so. But he must have assumed I was having an affair with somebody.”
“Because of the pregnancy, you mean.”
“Yes. I don’t think he suspected anything before then. And I don’t think he knows who specifically I had the affair with.”
“You don’t think he knows it was me?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m not so sure. The look he gave me at the funeral. Of course I may have been projecting, reading things into it. I wasn’t too steady myself that afternoon.”
“I can’t believe he would kill Caleb.”
“I can’t believe it myself, Bobbie, in the sense of putting any real credence in the notion. But it’s not utterly impossible. I can imagine his resenting raising another man’s child as his own. Then you woke up screaming, and he was half asleep still and half in the bag, too, from what you said—”
“He always has a lot to drink before he goes to sleep. The way some people take sleeping pills, I suppose. I don’t know that he was drunk.”
“People who drink heavily in order to sleep do it because it gets them drunk. He’s probably an alcoholic, or close to it.”
“Oh, I really don’t think so.”
He shrugged. “It’s academic. Anyway, he’s half asleep and about half lit, and you’ve just put in his head the idea that something might have happened to the baby. And because he’s not entirely conscious a lot of his automatic mental defenses aren’t in place. He goes into Caleb’s room and the kid’s sleeping soundly and the first thing he thinks is that the baby really is dead, and then he touches him and determines that he’s warm and breathing, and then — well, it’s a pretty simple matter to kill a sleeping infant. It’s a lot easier than drowning kittens.”
“God—”
His hand covered hers, squeezed. “Easy,” he said soothingly. “I’m not saying it happened that way. I don’t think it did. David never struck me as a particularly homicidal sort. But what’s interesting is that it never occurred to you to suspect him.”
“Why is that interesting?”
“Because it did occur to you to suspect someone else.”
“Oh.”
“You suspect Ariel, don’t you?”
She looked at him, her face drawn. “How could I suspect her?” she demanded. “She’s a child.”
“Are children capable of evil?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do children kill?”
“I—?
“You do suspect her, don’t you, Bobbie?”
“It’s not a suspicion,” she said doggedly. “It’s a... feeling, I suppose. I’ll tell you something. It’s been driving me crazy—”
“Because you can’t accept the thought and you can’t get rid of it.”
“That’s it exactly. What kind of a mother could think such a thing about her child? That’s the tape that keeps running in my head. But I can’t—”
He held up a hand. “Let’s try something,” he suggested. “You’re the prosecuting attorney and I’m the impartial judge and you’re presenting evidence. Not necessarily hard evidence but whatever comes to mind. Don’t worry about telling me how your feelings are really foolish. Just tell me why you think she killed her brother.”
“I don’t think she did it. I just—”
“Don’t split hairs. Let’s just have all the evidence against Ariel.”
“It’s not evidence, really. It’s just—” His look stopped her in mid-sentence. “All right,” she said. “All right. I think she hated him.”
“Why?”
“Because I stopped loving her when he was born.”
“Because she thinks it or because it’s true?”
“Both. Oh, maybe I stopped loving her earlier, maybe I never loved her. God knows I tried, Jeff. I was the one who really pushed for adoption. David was a little hesitant.” She laughed harshly. “He pointed out that you never know what you’re getting. I didn’t pay any attention. It never seemed possible to me that I could bring up a child as my own and fail to love it.”
“But that’s what happened?”
She hesitated, then gave a quick nod. “I tried to fake it,” she said. “I denied my real feelings and played the fulfilled young mother number all the way. But when Caleb came along the old denial mechanism got short-circuited. It was just too obvious to me that what I felt for Caleb was categorically different from anything I ever felt for Ariel.”
“Obvious to you, maybe. Are you sure it was obvious to her?”
“I think so. I tried to act the same as always, but — well, she’s not a stupid child. She’s a strange child and I sometimes have the feeling she was born on another planet, that she’s just visiting from outer space. But there’s nothing stupid about her.”
“How did she act toward Caleb?”
“Like a loving sister.”
“Always?”
“Always.”
“Then—”
“That’s how she acted. But maybe that’s what it was. An act.”
“Any reasons to think it might be?”
“Nothing solid. Just a vibration she gave off. She used to play her flute for him. Did I tell you about that flute of hers?”
“Yes. You’ve got me wondering what it sounds like.”
“You’re better off wondering than listening to it. Trust me. She would stand in Caleb’s room and play for him.” She sighed. “That doesn’t sound particularly malicious, does it?”
“What else is there about her?”
“The woman in the shawl looked like her.”
“That may be more of an indication of where you’re coming from than hard evidence against Ariel.”
“That’s true. All right, here’s what keeps echoing around in my head and I’ve never mentioned to anyone. When I went into Caleb’s room and found him dead, she was waiting in the hallway when I came out. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t even think straight. And she didn’t have to be told. She knew he was dead—”
“You sensed this, Bobbie?”
“The hell I did. I was numb clear through, I couldn’t have sensed a hot coal under my foot. She said, ’Something’s wrong with Caleb, isn’t it? He’s dead, isn’t he?’ ”
“Of course she could tell something was wrong. She was reading you.”
“No.”
“The state you must have been in—”
She shook her head. “No,” she insisted. “Of course I thought of that. But I swear she already knew. Why on earth would she leap to that particular conclusion? No matter what expression I had on my face, how could she take one look at me and immediately assume her baby brother was dead.”
“Unless she killed him.”
“I don’t like to think that. But I can’t help it.”
He drove for a mile or two in silence. Then he said, “There are all sorts of explanations, you know.”
“Oh?”
“Maybe Ariel went into his room earlier. Not to kill him but just to see if he was awake or to play her flute or God knows why. Maybe she touched him and he was cold and wouldn’t wake up and she didn’t know what to do so she went back to her room. Then you discovered him for yourself and that made the whole experience real for her, and of course she knew he was dead, and that’s why she reacted as she did.”
“You’d make a good defense lawyer.”
“It’s possible, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so. And it never occurred to me.”
“It’s not the only possibility. You woke up and saw a ghost, or whatever the hell it was that you saw. The woman in the shawl. The first two nights you didn’t know what significance to attach to the sight, but the third time it happened you saw it as a threat to your son.”
“Because she was holding a baby in her arms. Carrying him away with her.”
“Right. What makes you think you were the only person in the house who had an experience along those lines? You’ve described Ariel as a spooky kind of a kid, almost of another world. From the description, she sounds as though she’d be far more likely to have an occult experience than you would. Maybe she’s a little fey. Maybe she has some psychic ability. And maybe she had some sort of experience during the night, an apparition or a nightmare or God knows what, which she interpreted as a threat to her brother. Then, when she saw you come out of his room and got a look at the expression on your face, she made what wasn’t such a great leap after all. If she was already worried about Caleb, it wasn’t terribly farfetched for her to intuit that he was dead.”