“Matthew!” she called.
He did not answer. She listened for a moment and heard an odd sound behind the house, a scraping sound, coming from out back near the brook. A frown came onto her forehead. She quickened her pace and went around the house.
He was standing silhouetted against the slope of the land, beside the brook, a shovel in his hands, digging silently. She walked to where he was working.
“Hello, Amanda,” he said. He put the shovel down and looked at her, and then very softly said, “Beverly’s dead. I think she got hold of some poison.”
Amanda nodded. She could not think of anything to say to him.
“I was just burying her,” he said. “I thought this would be a good spot, here by the brook.”
“Yes, that’s a good spot, Matthew,” she said.
He picked up the shovel and began digging again. He had wrapped the dog in a tarpaulin, and she lay beside the half-dug grave as he worked.
“I went for a drive,” Amanda said.
“Yes, I did, too.”
He had been crying, she could see that. His eyes were puffed and red-rimmed, there were streaks on his face. She wanted suddenly to touch his face.
“Matthew,” she said, “do you love me?”
She asked the question as if it had been on her mind for a very long time. The words sounded curiously young in the stillness of the day. The brook was the only other sound as Matthew worked with the shovel, and heard her words, and stopped digging, and looked up at her suddenly and with surprise, surprise at her question, and then another curious sort of surprise as he gave his answer, as if his answer were unexpected and startling even to himself.
“Amanda, I love you more than anything in this world,” he said.
She nodded as if she had always known. She lowered her eyes.
“Didn’t you know that, Amanda?” he asked.
She did not answer. She kept looking at the ground. When he stooped to pick up the dog, she said quickly, “Let me help you.”
She took one end of the tarpaulin, and together they lowered the dog gently into the shallow grave. Matthew gave a curious, uncompleted shrug, and then began shoveling the earth back again.
“Where will we go, Matthew?” she asked.
“Wherever we want to,” he said.
“Because... I’d like to go, Matthew. I’d like very much to go with you,” she said.
The trip didn’t matter any more, it didn’t seem as important any more, but he took her hand and smiled limply and said, “All right, Amanda.”
She began shivering in the automobile.
The top was down, and the Talmadge countryside blurred by on either side of the road, and overhead the giant old trees arced, and wind rushed past the car and over it, and she began trembling.
She said, “What am I doing wrong, Mrs. Regan? I don’t understand, I don’t understand.”
And Julia, sitting beside her, driving in the direction of Lake Abundance, took one hand off the wheel and patted her gently on the knee, and tried to console her. The sky overhead had turned a clear startling blue, cloudless. The countryside was rich and orderly, the old homes, the wide vista of lawns, a peacefulness seemed to pervade the landscape, and in the car a young girl trembled and an old woman tried to understand what was happening.
“She said ‘daughter,’” Kate said. “‘Daughter’ and I felt hatred. Why should... why is she pushing me this way? I don’t want to! I want to live my own... my own... daughter! I hate that word! If she’s my mother, why doesn’t she understand?”
“She was trying to understand,” Julia said. “I’m sure she’s only thinking of what’s best for you.”
“It’s best to leave me alone!” Kate said. There was anger and desperation in her voice. “If she were my mother, if she...”
“She is your mother,” Julia said.
“Then why can’t we... she sat there, she sat there like a rock and she said, ‘I want, I want, I want!’ Well, what about what I want? Me! Isn’t that important? I’m getting... my head is burning, it’s... everything is rushing inside. I feel as if...”
“Kate, now stop it!”
“She hit him,” Kate said. “She hit him, and then she sat like a rock and told me what to do, told me cold and... I didn’t know her, she was... her face was different. I looked at her, and I didn’t recognize her, she was just another... another woman sitting there, cold, cold, nothing... my father... they ran, everybody ran... there’s no one there, I feel... oh, everything burning! Oh!” She covered her face with her hands. She would not let the tears come, confusion, everything was confusion, she knew she would lose her mind, she knew without doubt.
The car raced along the Talmadge roads, Julia’s foot pressed tight to the accelerator as if absorbing Kate’s tension and translating it to speed. She sat beside Kate, and she thought, This is what it’s like to have a daughter, and she took one hand from the wheel and squeezed Kate’s hand, and then recovered the wheel again immediately when she saw the car ahead of her. Kate looked up and through the windshield as Julia prepared to overtake and pass.
“There’s a curve ahead,” she said.
“I see it,” Julia answered, and she signaled and swung the car out, and the nightmare began.
The milk truck filled the road, filled the sky, appeared monstrous and metallic as the small sports car rounded the bend. Kate could see the face of the driver as his eyes opened wide, could hear the terrifying bleat of the truck’s horn, an explosion of sight and sound. “Oh my God!” Julia said beside her and wrenched the wheel of the car, skidding into a tight sharp turn as the sleek silvered sides of the truck rumbled past in a horn-blasting rush of air and sound and reflected sunlight, the name of the milk company etched itself into her mind, black letters on the silver truck, the car swerving in a screech of burning rubber, the milk truck gone, the car Julia had passed swinging by on the left, the small Alfa rumbling into a ditch, she thought she heard Julia say, “Renato,” and then the countryside was silent again. She sat still and silent, trembling, unable to speak. The other car hadn’t even bothered to stop. The truck had not turned back. She sat trembling and hating them. She could hear birds chirping in the woods alongside the road. The Alfa was tilted at an angle, the front wheel in the drainage ditch. She suddenly realized she was covered with a cold sweat.
“Mrs. Regan?” she said. She had spoken too softly; her voice was barely a whisper. She turned her head. Julia was sitting erect behind the wheel, as if in shock, staring through the windshield.
“Are you all right?” Kate asked.
Julia did not answer. Her hands clung to the wheel tightly. She kept staring through the windshield.
“Mrs. Regan?” Kate said.
She turned on the seat.
“Mrs. Regan?”
She reached out to touch her.
“Mrs. Regan?”
And then her hand touched Julia’s shoulder, and the scream burst from her mouth in terror as Julia fell over in seeming slow-motion, bending stiffly from the waist as Kate’s hand touched her, falling onto the wheel, her forehead hitting the wheel with a dull hollow thud.
“Mrs. Regan!” she screamed, and knew she was dead, knew those staring eyes meant death, and was suddenly gripped with a cold knifing fear and a desperately urgent need to get out of that small car. She threw open the door and stumbled into the ditch. Her eyes wide, she ran blindly into the woods.
The experts in death surrounded the small car, two state troopers, a reporter from the Talmadge Courier, and Dr. Milton Anderson, who arrived in his automobile and pushed his way through the crowd and pronounced Julia Regan dead after looking at her for only an instant.