Finally, Kelli emerged, and for the first time I felt myself begin to breathe again. Through a screen of coiling vines, I saw her walk to the front of the car, then wait as Todd got out, too. They walked toward the house together, two figures bathed in the yellow light from the front windows, moving slowly, stopping, talking awhile, moving again, stopping again, reluctant, as I knew they had become, to part.
At last, they walked up the stairs together and disappeared into the darkness of the porch. I waited for the front door to open, a shaft of light to sweep over them, but as the minutes passed, the darkness remained in place, a thick veil covering them, black and dense and impossible for me to pierce.
For a time, I hovered beside the road, a crouching figure hidden by a twisting swirl of vines. I remember that at one point I even closed my eyes tightly, trying to imagine myself in the same darkness they were in, to imagine myself with Kelli in that darkness, as Todd was.
When I opened them again, Todd was coming down the stairs, and Kelli was standing at the window, waving to him as she had never waved to me.
I rushed to my car, suddenly breathing heavily, and drove home at what must have been a thunderous speed. Later, in my bedroom, I stared at the ceiling above my bed until nearly dawn, when I finally sunk into a restless, agitated sleep.
Early the next morning, Luke came by. We’d planned to play tennis, and he’d brought racquets for us both. When I opened the door, he said, “Damn, Ben, you look like you was rode hard and put up wet.”
“I didn’t sleep very well.”
He grinned. “Well, a game of tennis will fix you up.”
I nodded dully. “Yeah, okay,” I said.
I got dressed, then we both got into his truck and headed for the park. “How’s the play going?” Luke asked as we drifted past Cuffy’s.
“Okay, I guess.”
“I hear Kelli’s real good.”
“Yeah.”
“I heard Todd’s doing pretty good, too.”
The mention of their names brought back the previous night, and once again I saw them disappear into the covering darkness at the top of the stairs.
At the park, we got out of the truck and walked down to the tennis courts together. Neither of us said anything more about Kelli that morning, but she was with me at every instant of the game, with me so fiercely that for over an hour I returned the ball to Luke with a force and deadliness that shocked him. Again and again, as I thought about Kelli, imagining her in the humid darkness with Todd, he no doubt so close to her that he had felt her breath in his hair, I slammed the ball toward Luke with a steadily building fury. I can remember the handle of the racquet as I clutched it ferociously within my fist, the electric hiss of the air as I swept it toward the ball, then the hard, murderous thump as it made contact. Again and again, Luke returned the ball to me, and again and again I knocked it back, each time more brutally, each time imagining Todd and Kelli in the darkness of her front porch, imagining their hands touching, their fingers entwining, their bodies pressing ever more closely until they came together in the shuttering excitement of that first deep kiss, all of this orchestrated by the whir of the racquet through the fiery summer air, the merciless thud of my assault, the whizzing flight of the ball back across the sagging, lifeless net.
“You’ve really learned to swing that racquet,” Luke said as we headed toward Cuffy’s. Although he’d meant it as a compliment, he seemed disturbed by the way I’d played, but unable to guess why I had swung at the ball so furiously.
For a few seconds he looked at me with a tense, questioning stare. It was the same look he would give me the afternoon he raced into my yard, choking on his words as he struggled to tell me that “something bad” had happened to Kelli Troy. It was a look I would see often from then on.
“Are you all right, Ben?” he asked.
I nodded crisply, but said nothing. My mind was still fixed on Kelli with a murderous concentration, and I should have known at that moment how fiercely I still longed for her, how mingled my longing had become with violence, how much, if I could not have Kelli Troy, I wanted to destroy her.
CHAPTER 19
BUT I WAS NOT THE ONLY ONE, AS SHERIFF STONE LATER learned, for during the next two weeks Mary Diehl came to see, and at last confront, what I had already seen the night Todd drove Kelli home. Perhaps she had seen it even earlier, but had decided to let it go, hoping it would pass, then realized finally that it was not passing, but, rather, that it was deepening by the hour.
When I remember Mary at this time, I see her as strangely frail, and certainly confused. A wounded bafflement hovered around her like a delicate mist, one which never really left her after that. It was still in her face the day she brought Raymond into my office, and later still when Raymond, now a grown man, led her slowly to my car, the rain mercilessly beating down upon her, as it had seemed to me at that moment, just as it had beaten down upon Lyle Gates as he’d been led down the courthouse steps almost thirty years before.
There was no doubt good reason for her puzzlement, both in middle age and much earlier, when she was still a girl. For she’d been beautiful, after all, and so it could not have been Kelli’s beauty that had made the difference between them. In her own way, Mary was smart enough, and certainly she was kind and dutiful. She had done as her mother had carefully instructed her, found someone to love, honor and obey, someone with whom she wished to share her life, and to whom she offered the gift of an absolute service and fidelity, neither of which, as it turned out, were ever returned to her. “Mary deserved better than Todd,” Luke told me sardonically on the day I took her away.
It rained bitterly that day, a cold rain, almost sleet. Mary wore a dark brown coat as Raymond led her down the driveway of the house in Turtle Grove. Several days before, she had tried to cut off her hair, and it now lay in unsightly layers, clipped here, long there, a wild confusion of jagged angles, with nothing to give it unity but its mottled iron-gray shade. Raymond walked beside her, holding her by the arm, mute and sullen, his eyes little more than thin, reptilian slits.
“He did this,” he snapped as he led his mother toward me. Then he turned and pointed toward the house. “Him.”
I looked toward the house and saw Todd standing at the large window that looked out onto the yard. He was slovenly and overweight, with thin blond hair swept back over his head, his shoulders slumped and defeated beneath a faded lime-green sweater. His hands were sunk deep into the pockets of his trousers, and there was a terrible bleakness in his face, a sense of having watched helplessly as everything in his life, both his marriage and his fatherhood, collapsed.
“It wasn’t her fault,” Raymond said as he led Mary to the back door of my car. He was talking to Sheila Cameron, Mary’s oldest friend. “She didn’t mean to do it. She was running from him when it happened. She was just trying to get away.”
For a moment, I saw it all as Raymond must have seen it: his mother desperately fleeing the house, fleeing her husband’s unfathomable rage and violence, rushing through the rain to her car, then into it and away, speeding down the rainswept street in a haze of dread and misery, staring at the road through swollen eyes as she plunged toward the curb where little Rosie Cameron stood impatiently waiting for her school bus, her small body draped in a bright yellow rainslick.
“My mother loved Rosie,” Raymond said. “She would never have …”