Closer than the Bones (21 page)

Alice was moving about without the assistance of her walker, which I noticed several feet away, abandoned. In fact, she was walking upright, moving without any evidence of stiffness or pain.

I must have made another, more audible sound of surprise. She whirled around, and her face blanched upon seeing me.

She stumbled, with a cry, and sank down into a chair. Miss McElroy’s chair.

But it was too late. I had caught her, and by the look on her face, she knew it.

Chapter Fourteen

“How long have you been faking?” I asked as I strode into the room, thrusting the door shut behind me.

“You startled me!” Alice said, her voice hostile.

“And you’ve been lying to everyone,” I said, trying real hard to hold on to my temper. “How long have you been faking?”

She tossed her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I laughed in derision. “Don’t put on that fake innocent act with me, sister! I just caught you, walking around this room. You weren’t using your walker or being assisted by anyone. Your back is straight, you don’t seem to be in pain. So, I’ll ask you one more time, how long have you been faking?”

“Bitch,” she responded, almost spitting the word at me.

“Maybe,” I said, “but I think Jack Preston is going to be very interested in the fact that you can get around a lot better than anyone realized.”

Her nostrils flared, and her eyes grew wild. “You wouldn’t! You can’t tell him!” She was almost wailing.

“Like hell I won’t,” I said, my voice rough. “I hadn’t given you much thought as a possible murderer. I’ll admit, despite the fact that you’re a vicious, unpleasant cow. I figured it had to be someone more mobile, someone who could get up and down stairs quickly and easily. Or out to the summerhouse and back without anyone noticing.” I grinned, making it as evil as I knew how. “But now I know the truth about you, and I figure you're as good a suspect as anybody in this house.”

“You’re insane,” Alice said, affecting a hauteur that was laughable in the circumstances. “What possible reason would I have for killing any of these people?”

I snorted. “Please. Every chance you’ve had, you’ve said something nasty about each and every one of them. You can’t possibly imagine that anyone is going to buy this Little Miss Innocent act. You can’t possibly be that naive, though you might be that stupid.”

I’ll admit I was doing my best to provoke her. Cajoling her wouldn’t work, but I figured getting her dander up was the best strategy for making her talk.

“You have some kind of nerve talking to me like that!” Evidently I had laid the final straw, because she cut loose with a flood of invective that would have done a sailor proud.

When she paused for breath, I interjected a comment. “You know they say that reliance on an excessive use of profanity is a sign of a severely limited imagination.” I couldn’t help myself. This was turning into a catfight, largely instigated by me, but there was something about this woman that just brought out the worst in me.

Abruptly, she became calmer. “Who the hell are you to sit in judgment on me? You don’t know the first thing about my life. You haven’t had to put up with what I’ve endured for the last thirty-five years.”

“Oh, my, I’m sure you’ve had such a tough life,” I said, my voice oozing false sympathy. “The wife of a best-selling novelist, a man who is considered one of the great American writers of the century. You’ve been invited to dinner at the White House by two or three presidents, you have a nice big house in Memphis, with servants to take care of you, so you never have to lift a finger for yourself. At least, according to
Southern Living
magazine. I could go on, but I think you get the picture. You live a life of such deprivation, it’s cruel.”

“Can you possibly be as naive as that?” Alice turned my words back upon me. “Or maybe you’re just that damn stupid, yourself.” She laughed bitterly. “Yes, I’m married to one of the outstanding men of American letters. I’m also married to a first-class shit who can’t keep his pants zipped, whenever there’s a young woman around making eyes at him, just begging him to read her work, to tell her that she’s going to be the next Joyce Carol Oates or Ellen Gilchrist.”

“So he’s an adulterer,” I said, unimpressed. “Ever heard of divorce?”

She laughed again. “Oh, that’s a good one. You think I’d let him off the hook that easily, after all he’s done to me?”

“Just what has he done, besides cheat on you?”

“He killed our only child,” she said. The stark simplicity of that statement took my breath away, and I collapsed onto the sofa nearest me.

“Good heavens,” I said, when I finally found my voice. “What happened?” I now dimly recalled having read, in the pile of documents my librarian friend had compiled for me, something about a tragic accident involving the Bertrams’ only son, but the article had been skimpy on details.

“Bobby was only three,” Alice said, her voice soft and sad, the force of her anger dulled. “He was a beautiful child, bright, loving. Busy, active—you couldn’t take your eyes off him for a minute because he was into everything. I left him with his father for a few days because I had to go down to Florida to check on my mother. She’d had a stroke, and she needed some help. I didn’t take Bobby with me, of course. We didn’t have servants in those days, and I thought he’d be safe with his father.” She stopped, her face deathly pale.

After a moment, she went on. “Russell was screwing around again. Some bimbo in one of his classes. He was still teaching then. He invited her to our house for a little fun. He put Bobby down for a nap while they were carrying on in our bedroom, but Bobby woke up and somehow got out of the house. He loved to go ’sploring, as he called it.” The pain in her face was so intense it was like a knife through my heart.

“He wandered out into the street. He was fearless, and impulsive. He was hit by a car. He died right there, on the street in front of our house.” She looked at me. “He would have been twenty-six last month."

I did the only thing I could think of to do, to answer the naked pain in her voice and in her face. I got up from the sofa, walked over to her, and knelt on the floor. I wrapped my arms around her, and she clutched at me as the sobs racked her body.

I have no idea how long we stayed that way, but my knees were aching by the time the storm of grief had begun to pass. The sobs diminished into quiet tears, and I gently disengaged myself and stood up. I went to the drinks tray and poured a tot of brandy for each of us. I handed her the glass, and she took it without protest. We sipped at the warming, restorative liquor, and I examined her with newly aware eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I said, knowing how vastly inadequate those two words were in the face of such soul-wrenching pain, the likes of which I could only imagine.

“Thank you,” she said. The episode had left her drained, but somehow more at peace. She held out the glass, now empty, and I poured her more brandy. As she continued to sip at it, the color slowly seeped back into her tear-stained face.

“Maybe if we’d been able to have other children, I could have forgiven him,” she said eventually. “But I suffered complications from Bobby’s birth that left me barren. I could never forgive him for what happened. He couldn’t forgive himself either. I went a little crazy for a while, and Russell never left my side. He was attentive, loving, more like the man I had married. But eventually he began to drift again. That’s when I discovered that the only thing that would keep him in line was my being ill. The more I suffered, the more he paid attention to me, the less liable he was to wander.”

She said it simply, with no hint of irony or self-accusation. The nature of their unhealthy relationship revolted me, but at the same time I couldn’t help but feel enormous sympathy for her. The loss of a child is the most horrifying thing a mother can endure, it seems to me, and I couldn’t find it in my heart to judge her any longer for what she had done to herself and her husband in the time since her son’s tragic death.

Though I could now see her in an entirely different light, that didn’t change some of the facts.
But how,
I asked myself,
can I possibly badger her now, in the face of what she’s just revealed to me?

She saved me the trouble. “I hated Sukey Lytton,” she said, her voice hardening. She looked me square in the face as she said it. “She was one more of Russ’s little conquests. But for the first time in his whole miserable career as a philanderer, he hit on a girl who actually had some talent outside the bedroom. He was going through a rough patch when he was involved with her. Hadn’t been able to write anything decent for nearly three years, and she suggested that they work on something together.”

Alice laughed. “Sukey did all the work, probably. Then Russ had the nerve to submit it as entirely his own. That was before Sukey had any reputation to speak of. I’m surprised the grasping little bitch didn’t try to sue him, but he talked her out of it somehow, when she found out about it.” She laughed again. “She was fit to be tied, like one of the Furies raging, right there in our house. I left them to it, so I don’t know exactly how he got her calmed down.”

Russell Bertram a plagiarist. That thought didn’t sit well with me. Intellectual theft was as abhorrent to me as material theft, and I could never look at the man with any kind of respect after this.

“Do you think she wrote about all that in this mysterious novel of hers?” I asked.

“I’d be willing to bet on it,” Alice said. “She was vicious, and conniving, and downright nasty. I’m not saying that Russ doesn’t deserve it for what he did to her, but if that novel is ever published, he’ll become a laughingstock. She’s dead, and there’s no way now he could ever prove that he wrote that story himself.”

“You realize that this gives him a very strong motive for murder,” I said.

She nodded, her face bleak. “I tell myself that he isn’t really capable of it. He’s a shell of the man he used to be. I don’t think he has the guts to be a multiple murderer.” She shuddered as she said the words. “But the hell of it is, I just don’t know.”

“You can’t give him an alibi for any of the murders?”

She shrugged. “Maybe when we’re told more about when they occurred. It’s just possible he might have been with me, but most of the time, I’ve been alone in our room. He goes off somewhere in the house to write, or so he says. Up on the third floor, in one of the unused bedrooms. Frankly, I think he was trying to get his hands up the skirt of that girl who was murdered.” The thought of it sickened her. Her face twisted in loathing. “She was the type he liked. Young, pretty, not too bright. Impressed by an older man who was so famous.”

I hesitated to fracture the curious rapport that now existed between us, but I felt I had to be straight with her. “Alice, you need to talk to Jack Preston about all of this. He has to know.”

She drew a deep, ragged breath. “I know.” She got up from her chair and went to stand by her walker. She stared at it for a long moment. “I can’t hide any longer. And I can’t protect him. If he’s responsible for these murders, he’s going to have to pay for them.”

She came back toward me. She held out a hand, and I grasped it. Her fingers were ice-cold and trembling. “Would you get rid of that thing for me?” She jerked her head in the direction of her abandoned walker. “There’s no point in using it anymore.”

I nodded.

“Thank you,” she said. Without looking back, she walked out of the room. I hoped she was going to talk to Jack. The sooner she did so, the better.

Closing my eyes, feeling completely drained, I sat there for a while, trying to gather my thoughts. I had no idea what had happened to Miss McElroy or Morwell Phillips. They were supposed to be in this room with Alice and her husband, or so I had been told. I had never even thought to ask Alice where the others might be.

Russell Bertram now loomed large as my favorite suspect for the murders. He had cheated on his wife with the first victim, Sukey Lytton, with disastrous results. Because of that, and his plagiarism, he had a powerful motive to murder Sukey. The other two murders stemmed from that first one, surely. Hamilton Packer claimed possession of a manuscript that, if published, could damage the lives and reputations of almost everyone in this house. And poor, silly, none-too- bright Katie had perhaps seen something, and an attempt at blackmail had ensured her fate.

But does that manuscript really exist?
I wondered, not for the first time. I had the nagging sense that I was overlooking something. Was the pile of blank paper that I had found in my room simply a blind? Or even a mistake on my part? What if the manuscript was still here, somewhere in the house?

That didn’t seem likely, however. Jack and his men had searched pretty thoroughly. Surely, if it was still here, they would have found it by now.

Maybe I needed to go hibernate in my room for a while. Sit at the desk and jot down things. Make lists. That kind of thing. Maybe it would make me feel like I was doing something to earn the fee that Miss McElroy was paying me. Sitting here staring at Miss McElroy’s chair wasn’t accomplishing anything.

Then it hit me. What I was overlooking. When I had first peeked inside this room, I saw Alice Bertram moving around without her walker. That revelation had stunned me so that I had forgotten what she was doing while she was moving around the room.

She had been searching the room. Picking up things, looking underneath and behind them.

But what had she been looking for?

Maybe she had lost an earring or some other piece of jewelry. I thought about that, but I couldn’t remember her wearing earrings, and the one ring I had seen her wear had been on her finger when she left the room just minutes ago.

I’d be willing to bet she was looking for that blasted manuscript. Did she know something about it that she hadn’t told anyone? Or maybe she knew something about hiding places in the house that no one had told Jack or his men about. Surely a house this old had some hidey-holes.

I decided I’d better ask Jack about that, before I went off, half-cocked, doing a Nancy Drew routine, searching for hidden staircases and the like. If such things existed in this house Miss McElroy or Morwell Phillips would have told him.