“Why is he here again?” she whispered sharply.
Maggie said nothing.
Outside, the women were negotiating for the purchase of the pond lilies now, selecting them from the tub at the back of the wagon. The pale young man kept watching them boldly, his elbow on the south post of the gateway, his head idly tilted onto his supporting hand.
“Get outside,” she said. “Tell him to go away. Tell him never to come back.”
“Outside?” Maggie said numbly.
“And then finish your windows.”
“My windows?”
“Am I speaking English?”
Maggie went out the front door. Lizzie watched from the window while she engaged the man in brief conversation. Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Hart were gone now. The carriage with its water lilies was plodding its way up the sunlit street. The man smiled, touched his hand to his forehead in a reluctant farewell salute and then began walking away. Maggie stood at the gatepost another moment, glanced nervously up and down the street, and then disappeared around the corner of the house. Lizzie went into the front entry, locked the door again and went upstairs to her bedroom. She put on the same clothing she’d worn earlier, thrown in haste on the bedroom floor: the white underdrawers and chemise, the white petticoat, the black chintz dress with its tiny floral pattern, the felt slippers. She looked at herself in the mirror. When she went out onto the landing again, she saw Mrs. Borden’s green dress lying on the floor where she’d dropped it. She picked it up without so much as glancing into the guest room, carried it to the closet at the top of the stairs and hung it carefully on a padded hanger.
She went downstairs swiftly, walking directly into the parlor and looking out at the street. Maggie was washing the windows at the front of the house, the pail and dipper at her feet, the long brush in her hands. Mr. Pettee, who years ago used to live as a tenant in the upper part of the house, was strolling past. He glanced at Maggie and then turned his head away. Downtown she could hear the City Hall clock striking the hour. She counted the strokes: it was ten o’clock sharp. Depending on what business her father had in town, he could be home at any moment. Was he stopping at the post office, as he’d suggested he might? What would she say to him when he returned? What could she possibly say?
And suddenly the enormity of what she had done overwhelmed her. Until this moment she had reacted calmly and dispassionately, discounting as a reality the body of the woman who lay upstairs in a widening pool of her own blood, removing herself from the act of violence that had caused her stepmother’s death. But now the body upstairs assumed dimension and shape in her mind, the crushed skull, the matted hair in the blood on the floor, and she willed the body to be gone, prayed desperately that it would not be there when next she looked into that room, would somehow miraculously have disappeared so that she would not have to explain it to her father. But how explain? How describe the necessity of the act without revealing the very thing that had provoked it, the discovery of herself and Maggie naked in her room, the fear that her father would be told she was—
A monster.
An unnatural thing.
Remembering the candlestick, she went swiftly into the pantry, picked it up, examined it again for blood, and then carried it with her into the dining room, wondering where she might put it, knowing she could not possibly take it upstairs to the guest room again where it would be discovered and suspected. She wandered into the sitting room, trying the candlestick on the mantelpiece where already there stood a lamp, carrying it at last into the dining room and setting it on the buffet against the wall. It looked quite natural there. Innocuous. Safe.
She went into the kitchen and looked at the clock.
What would she tell her father when he returned?
Nothing, she decided.
We know nothing of upstairs. We heard nothing, we saw nothing. We were going about our normal business, we know nothing. Maggie was outside washing the windows, I was in the dining room, ironing; neither of us—
She tested her flats again, spitting on the bottom of one of them and causing not so much as a sizzle. She wanted to be ironing when he came home, innocently occupied with a mundane household chore. She thought of adding more coal to the stove, decided that wood would provide a faster, hotter fire, and discovered there was no kindling in the scuttle. She went immediately into the cellar and found several old pieces of board near the woodpile, dry and covered with flaking paint, perfect for the instant fire she wanted. She found the hatchet in its usual place, stuck in the chopping block near the furnace. There were other axes and hatchets in the cellar, but this was the only one with a decent chopping edge. The claw-hammer hatchet was as dull as butter, and a third hatchet lay discarded in a box someplace, covered with the crude ashes her father had rubbed on it in an attempt to free it of rust, testing it at last on the chopping block, its handle breaking from the force of his blows.
She started to chop one of the boards into narrow strips, almost nicked her finger in the uncertain light, thought again of her father’s surely imminent return and hurried upstairs again carrying the boards and the hatchet. Standing first one board and then the next on the stovetop, she chopped them lengthwise into kindling, put the hatchet into the coal scuttle, and then knelt to feed the wood into the firebox. The coals there had dwindled almost to ashes; small wonder that her flats had never properly heated. Wondering if there was heat enough left to ignite the wood, she closed the door to the firebox, stood watching the stove for a moment and then looked up at the clock again.
From the kitchen closet, she took the small ironing board and carried it into the dining room. She was setting it on the dining-room table when she heard the sound of a carriage outside — had he hired a hack to take him home? She rushed to the window to look out at the street. She saw only Dr. Handy riding by, his head craned over his shoulder for a look up the street toward the Kelly house and Mr. Wade’s store. In almost that same instant she heard the screen door opening and then clattering shut again, and she turned toward the kitchen with a start, expecting it to be her father, totally uprepared for him, relieved when she saw that it was only Maggie. Her heart leaped again when she saw the look on Maggie’s face.
“He’s here,” Maggie said breathlessly.
“My father!”
“The one you had me send away,” Maggie said, shaking her head. “He’s up the street, across the street. My God, could he have seen?”
“Seen? Seen what?”
“What you done upstairs,” Maggie said. “He was about the house outside...”
“The shutters were closed.”
“Then why’s he come back?”
“Are you sure it’s...”
“The same light suit of clothes, yes, the same necktie. Oh my God, if he spied what you done...”
“He couldn’t have!”
“But if he did!”
“No one did!”
“He’s acting funny. Swaying...”
“Then he’s drunk,” Lizzie said flatly. “He’s been drinking because you sent him away. Don’t go outside again. Stay in here, do the windows inside. I want you in here when...”
“I don’t want to be in here,” Maggie said, shaking her head again. “I don’t want to see your father. Not with her lying up there dead.”
“We know of no one upstairs. Dead or otherwise.”
“She’s dead up there, you killed her!”
“Fetch your handbasin. Wash the sitting-room windows. Nothing has happened, nothing that we know of. They’ll ask us where we were and what we were doing. We were going about our normal business, do you understand? We heard nothing...”