“I know that, Raymond,” Sheila said softly. Then, given how much she had suffered, how deep was her loss, and at whose hands, Sheila did the kindest thing I have ever seen a human being do. She drew Mary into her arms and kissed her wet cheek. “I love you, Mary,” she said. Then she stepped back into the rain and let Raymond ease his mother into the back seat of my car. “Drive carefully, Ben,” she said to me as I closed the door.
“I will.”
It was a long drive to Tuscaloosa, and from time to time as I drove, I glanced back at Mary. She sat with her hands resting motionlessly in her lap, her face locked in a strangely hunted expression despite the fact that the actual range of her feelings had been hideously reduced by then. She was extremely thin, almost skeletal, with hollow cheeks, and her eyes sunk so deeply into their sockets that they seemed to stare out from the shadowy depths of an unlighted cave. Only the immaculate whiteness of her skin still suggested the beauty that had once been hers.
“I’ve seen pictures of my mother when she was in high school,” Raymond said, as if reading my mind. “She looked happy back then.”
“She was, Raymond,” I said.
He shook his head. “But not after she married my father, she wasn’t. Never for one day after that.”
I locked my eyes on the road ahead.
“He never loved her, you know. I don’t know why he married her.” The whole tormented course of his parents’ marriage seemed to pass through his mind. “It was like he resented her in some way.” He watched the rain. “I think there was someone else. Another woman, I mean.”
I said nothing.
“And I don’t mean just an affair, either,” Raymond went on. “Some girl from his office, something like that. I mean someone that my father loved.”
In the rearview mirror I could see his eyes drift over toward his mother. “I heard her say it to his face one night. ‘You’re still in love with her.’ That’s what she told him.” He drew his eyes back toward me. “My mother knew who she was, the other woman.” He seemed to consider his next question. Then, almost plaintively, as if her identity might solve the mystery of his father’s wrath, he asked, “Do you know who she was, Dr. Wade?”
“No, I don’t, Raymond,” I told him.
But I did, and at that moment I felt my mind spin back to the single incident that Miss Carver later told Sheriff Stone about, the brutal moment when Mary had confronted Kelli Troy.
It had happened so suddenly that I would always believe that Mary had simply broken under the strain of all she had observed since the first rehearsal, the lines she’d heard Todd and Kelli exchange so passionately on the stage of the school auditorium, the glances she’d seen them give each other, the long rides to Kelli’s house after they’d dropped her off in Turtle Grove, and even those things she had probably imagined as clearly as I had imagined them, whispered intimacies and feverish kisses.
It was a Friday night. The heat of the approaching summer was clearly upon us by then, and the rehearsal had just ended. Todd had not been able to attend that night, and so Miss Carver had concentrated on other students, working through scenes with Eddie, Sheila and Noreen. It had not gone well, and Miss Carver had finally dismissed us early with a frustrated wave of her hand.
Most of the students left right away, but Kelli lingered, talking to Miss Carver. I remained onstage, busying myself with the few props we had collected. After that, I closed the curtain and shut off the lights.
Kelli and Miss Carver were already headed toward the faculty parking lot by the time I’d locked the front door of the auditorium. I could see them walking toward Miss Carver’s old Buick, perhaps still talking about the play, with Miss Carver pointing here and there as she spoke, as if giving stage directions.
Then, suddenly, a third figure emerged from behind the high wall of a shrub. At first she remained in the shadows, but after a moment she took a single step into the light of the parking lot’s only streetlamp, and I saw that it was Mary Diehl.
Mary said: “I need to talk to you, Kelli.”
“Well, I have to go with Miss Carver right now,” Kelli answered. “She’s driving me home.” She sounded slightly strained, as if Mary had taken her by surprise.
“No,” Mary told her in a voice that was unmistakably hard. “No, you have to talk to me. You have to. Right now.”
When Kelli spoke again, I could hear the tension in her voice. “Maybe tomorrow, Mary,” she said. “We could talk tomorrow.”
I saw Mary’s long hair toss right and left as she shook her head. “No,” she said. “I can’t wait till tomorrow. I have to talk to you now.”
Miss Carver must have caught on to what was happening by then, because she tried to intervene, her voice very gentle, coaxing. “Mary, maybe you should just let Kelli get on home tonight. It’s awfully late, and I—”
“No,” Mary blurted out. She crossed her arms over her chest and stared fixedly at Miss Carver. “I want to talk to Kelli right now,” she said, the words coming rapidly, almost frantic. “I don’t want to wait. I have to know what’s going on.” Her head jerked to the left so that I knew she was now staring directly at Kelli. “Between you and Todd,” she said bluntly.
Kelli glanced nervously at Miss Carver, then back at Mary. “What do you want to know?” she asked, her voice suddenly calm and full of resolution, ready for whatever might happen, the voice of someone who had long ago determined not to be a coward.
Mary seemed momentarily silenced by the question, unable to respond. “Well, I mean … I just want …” she sputtered. “I just want to know what it is … what’s going on between you and Todd.”
Kelli did not hesitate in her answer, and even though I’d already guessed what was “going on” between Kelli and Todd, the frankness of her answer, the sheer candid admission she made at that moment, emptied me as nothing ever had or ever would again.
“Love,” she said.
The word struck me like a bullet in the head. I physically slumped against the wall of the auditorium when I heard her say it. Mary must have felt something similar, because her body stiffened, and the words she fired at Kelli were taut and bitter. “I wish you were dead,” she said.
Without consciously willing it, or even being able to control it, I heard my mind respond in a vehement hiss: So do I.
THAT IS WHAT MISS CARVER SAW, AND THAT IS WHAT SHE told Sheriff Stone when he came to talk to her at Choctaw High. But I am sure that she saw something else, too, saw not only the violent nature of Mary’s feelings toward Kelli, but my own simmering rage, the poisonous mood that came over me during the last two weeks of rehearsals, and perhaps even the way I sometimes looked at Kelli, as if I were trying to strangle her with my eyes. For I know that there were times when I stood offstage, watching Kelli go through her lines, when I must have fixed upon her with a murderous gaze, as if taking aim. I know it must have happened often, and I know that standing just across the stage from me, Miss Carver must have seen it. And so she spoke to me two weeks after Kelli had been found on Breakheart Hill, the two of us alone in her empty classroom, the windows open, a hot summer breeze rattling the metal blinds.
Lyle Gates had already been arrested, and the whole town knew about the incident at Cuffy’s, the name he’d called her there, then later how Luke had seen him walking up the mountain road only minutes after he’d dropped Kelli off at the crest of Breakheart Hill, and how later still Edith Sparks had seen him coming out of the woods at the crest of Breakheart Hill, wiping blood from his right hand, and finally how Sheriff Stone had found scratches on that same right hand when he’d come to talk to him a few days after Kelli had been found, scratches Lyle swore he’d made by hitting the side of an old woodshed after arguing on the phone with his wife, an act for which he could provide no witnesses.