“I don’t see what for.”
“You’ve given me a very clear account of the murder. I want to try and relate it to the physical layout.”
She said doubtfully: “I don’t have much more time, and frankly I don’t know how much more of this I can stand. My sister was very dear to me.”
“I know.”
“What are you trying to prove?”
“Nothing. I just want to understand what happened. It’s my job.”
A job and its imperatives meant something to her. She got up, opened the front door, and pointed out the place just inside it where her sister’s body had lain. There was of course no trace of the ten-year-old crime on the braided rag rug in the hall. No trace of it anywhere, except for the blind red smear it had left in Dolly’s mind, and possibly in her aunt’s.
I was struck by the fact that Dolly’s mother and her friend Helen had both been shot at the front door of their homes by the same caliber gun, possibly held by the same person. I didn’t mention this to Miss Jenks. It would only bring on another outburst against her brother-in-law McGee.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” she said unexpectedly.
“No thanks.”
“Or coffee? I use instant. It won’t take long.”
“All right. You’re very kind.”
She left me in the living room. It was divided by sliding doors from the dining room, and furnished with stiff old dark pieces reminiscent of a nineteenth-century parlor. There were mottoes on the walls instead of pictures, and one of them brought back with a rush and a pang my grandmother’s house in Martinez. It said: “He is the Silent Listener at Every Conversation.” My grandmother had hand-embroidered the same motto and hung it in her bedroom. She always whispered.
An upright grand piano with a closed keyboard stood in one corner of the room. I tried to open it, but it was locked. A photograph of two women and a child stood in the place of honor on the piano top. One of the women was Miss Jenks, younger but just as stout and overbearing. The other woman was still younger and much prettier. She held herself with the naive sophistication of a small-town belle. The child between them, with one hand in each of theirs, was Dolly aged about ten.
Miss Jenks had come through the sliding doors with a coffee tray. “That’s the three of us.” As if two women and a little girl made a complete family. “And that’s my sister’s piano. She played beautifully. I never could master the instrument myself.”
She wiped her glasses. I didn’t know whether they were clouded by emotion or by the steam from the coffee. Over it she related some of Constance’s girlhood triumphs. She had won a prize for piano, another for voice. She did extremely well in high school, especially in French, and she was all set to go to college, as Alice had gone before her, when that smoothtalking devil of a Tom McGee –
I left most of my coffee and went out into the hallway. It smelled of the mold that invades old houses. I caught a glimpse of myself in the clouded mirror beside the deer-horn hatrack. I looked like a ghost from the present haunting a bloody moment in the past. Even the woman behind me had an insubstantial quality, as if her large body was a husk or shell from which the essential being had departed. I found myself associating the smell of mold with her.
A rubber-treaded staircase rose at the rear of the hall. I was moving toward it as I said:
“Do you mind if I look at the room Dolly occupied?”
She allowed my momentum to carry her along and up the stairs. “It’s my room now.”
“I won’t disturb anything.”
The blinds were drawn, and she turned on the overhead light for me. It had a pink shade which suffused the room with pinkness. The floor was thickly carpeted with a soft loose pink material. A pink decorator spread covered the queen-sized bed. The elaborate three-mirrored dressing-table was trimmed with pink silk flounces, and so was the upholstered chair in front of it.
A quilted pink long chair stood by the window with an open magazine across its foot. Miss Jenks picked up the magazine and rolled it in her hands so that its cover wasn’t visible. But I knew a True Romance when I saw one.
I crossed the room, sinking to the ankles in the deep pink pile of her fantasy, and raised the blind over the front window. I could see the wide flat second-story porch, and through its railings the pepper tree, and my car in the street. The three Mexican boys came by on their bicycle, one on the handlebars, one on the seat, one on the carrier, trailed by a red mongrel which had joined the act.
“They have no right to be riding like that,” Miss Jenks said at my shoulder. “I have a good mind to report them to the deputy. And that dog shouldn’t be running around loose.”
“He’s doing no harm.”
“Maybe not, but we had a case of hydrophobia two years ago.”
“I’m more interested in ten years ago. How tall was your niece at that time?”
“She was a good big girl for her age. About four feet and a half. Why?”
I adjusted my height by getting down on my knees. From this position I could see the lacy branches of the pepper tree, and through them most of my car, but nothing nearer. A man leaving the house would scarcely be visible until he passed the pepper tree, at least forty feet away. A gun in his hand could not be seen until he reached the street. It was a hasty and haphazard experiment, but its result underlined the question in my mind.
I got up off my knees. “Was it dark that night?”
She knew which night I meant. “Yes. It was dark.”
“I don’t see any street lights.”
“No. We have none. This is a poor town, Mr. Archer.”
“Was there a moon?”
“No. I don’t believe so. But my niece has excellent eyesight. She can spot the markings on a bird–”
“At night?”
“There’s always some light. Anyway, she’d know her own father.” Miss Jenks corrected herself: “She knew her own father.”
“Did she tell you this?”
“Yes. I was the first one she told.”
“Did you question her about it in any detail?”
“I didn’t, no. She was quite broken up, naturally. I didn’t want to subject her to the strain.”
“But you didn’t mind subjecting her to the strain of testifying to these things in court.”
“It was necessary, necessary to the prosecution’s case. And it did her no harm.”
“Dr. Godwin thinks it did her a lot of harm, that the strain she went through then is partly responsible for her breakdown.”
“Dr. Godwin has his ideas and I have mine. If you want my opinion, he’s a dangerous man, a troublemaker. He has no respect for authority, and I have no respect for a man like that.”
“You used to respect him. You sent your niece to him for treatment.”
“I know more about him now than I did then.”
“Do you mind telling me why she needed treatment?”
“No. I don’t mind.” She was still trying to preserve a friendly surface, though we were both conscious of the disagreement simmering under it. “Dolly wasn’t doing well in school. She wasn’t happy or popular. Which was natural enough with her parents – I mean, her father, making a shambles of their home together.”
“This isn’t the backwoods,” she said as if she suspected maybe it was, “and I thought the least I could do was see that she got a little help. Even the people on welfare get family counseling when they need it. So I persuaded my sister to take her into Pacific Point to see Dr. Godwin. He was the best we had at that time. Constance drove her in every Saturday morning for about a year. The child showed considerable improvement, I’ll say that much for Godwin. So did Constance. She seemed brighter and happier and surer of herself.”