Dolores Claiborne (28 page)

“Ayuh,” I says.

“That you and he had sat down on the porch to watch the eclipse, and there commenced an argument.”

“Ayuh.”

“And what, may I ask, was the argument about?”

“Money on top,” I says, “booze underneath.”

“But you yourself bought him the liquor he got drunk on that day, Mrs. St. George! Isna that right?”

“Ayuh,” I says. I could feel myself wantin to say somethin more, to explain myself, but I didn’t, even though I could. That’s what McAuliffe wanted, you see—for me to go on rushin ahead. To explain myself right into a jail-cell someplace.

At last he give up waitin. He twiddled his fingers like he was annoyed, then fixed those lighthouse eyes of his on me again. “After the choking incident, you left your husband; you went up to Russian Meadow, on the way to East Head, to watch the eclipse by yourself.”

“Ayuh.”

He leaned forward all of a sudden, his little hands on his little knees, and says, “Mrs. St. George, do you know what direction the wind was from that day?”

It was like the day in November of ’62, when I almost found the old well by fallin into it—I seemed to hear the same crackin noise, and I thought, “You be careful, Dolores Claiborne; you be oh so careful. There’s wells everywhere today, and this man knows where every goddam one of em is.”

“No,” I says, “I don’t. And when I don’t know where the wind’s quarterin from, that usually means the day’s calm.”

“Actually wasn’t much more than a breeze—” Garrett started to say, but McAuliffe raised his hand n cut him off like a knife-blade.

“It was out of the west,” he said. “A west wind, a west
breeze,
if you so prefer, seven to nine miles an hour, with gusts up to fifteen. It seems strange to me, Mrs. St. George, that that wind didna bring your husband’s cries to you as you stood in Russian Meadow, not half a mile away.”

I didn’t say anything for at least three seconds. I’d made up my mind that I’d count to three inside my head before I answered
any
of his questions. Doin that might keep me from movin too quick and payin for it by fallin into one of the pits he’d dug for me. But McAuliffe musta thought he had me confused from the word go, because he leaned forward in his chair, and I’ll declare and vow that for one or two seconds there, his eyes went from blue-hot to white-hot.

“It don’t surprise me,” I says. “For one thing, seven miles an hour ain’t much more’n a puff of air on a muggy day. For another, there were about a thousand boats out on the reach, all tootin to each other. And how do you know he called out at all?
You
sure as hell didn’t hear him.”

He sat back, lookin a little disappointed. “It’s a reasonable deduction to make,” he says. “We know the fall itself didna kill him, and the forensic evidence strongly suggests that he had at least one extended period of consciousness. Mrs. St. George, if
you
fell into a disused well and found yourself with a broken shin, a broken ankle, four broken ribs, and a sprained wrist, wouldn’t
you
call for aid and succor?”

I gave it three seconds with a my-pretty-pony between each one, n then said, “It wasn’t me who fell down the well, Dr. McAuliffe. It was Joe, and he’d been drinkin.”

“Yes,” Dr. McAuliffe comes back. “You bought him a bottle of Scotch whiskey, even though everyone I’ve spoken to says you hated it when he drank, even though he became unpleasant and argumentative when he drank; you bought him a bottle of Scotch, and he had not just been drinking, he was drunk. He was
verra
drunk. His mouth was also filled wi’ bluid, and his shirt was matted wi’ bluid all the way down to his belt-buckle. When you combine the fact o’ this bluid wi’ a knowledge of the broken ribs and the concomitant lung injuries he had sustained, do ye know what that suggests?”

One, my-pretty-pony ... two, my-pretty-pony ...three, my-pretty-pony. “Nope,” I says.

“Several of the fractured ribs had punctured his lungs. Such injuries always result in bleeding, but rarely bleeding this extensive. Bleeding of this sort was probably caused, I deduce, by the deceased crying repeatedly for riscue.” That was how he said it, Andy—riscue.

It wasn’t a question, but I counted three all the same before sayin, “You think he was down there callin for help. That’s what it all comes to, ain’t it?”

“No, madam,” he says. “I do na just think so; I have a moral
sairtainty.”

This time I didn’t take no wait. “Dr. McAuliffe,” I says, “do you think I pushed my husband down into that well?”

That shook him up a little. Those lighthouse eyes of his not only blinked, for a few seconds there they dulled right over. He fiddled n diddled with his pipe some more, then stuck it back in his mouth n drew on it, all the time tryin to decide how he should handle
that.

Before he could, Garrett spoke up. His face had gone as red as a radish. “Dolores,” he says, “I’m sure no one thinks... that is to say, that no one has even
considered
the idea that—”

“Aye,” McAuliffe breaks in. I’d put his train of thought off on a sidin for a few seconds, but I saw he’d got it back onto the main line without no real trouble. “I’ve considered it. Ye’ll understand, Mrs. St. George, that part of my job—”

“Oh, never mind no more Mrs. St. George,” I says. “If you’re gonna accuse me of first pushin my husband down the well n then standin over him while he screamed for help, you go right on ahead n call me Dolores.”

I wasn’t exactly
tryin
to plink him that time, Andy, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t do it, anyway—second time in as many minutes. I doubt if he’d been used that hard since medical school.

“Nobody is
accusing
you of anything, Mrs. St. George,” he says all stiff-like, and what I seen in his eyes was “Not yet, anyway.”

“Well, that’s good,” I says. “Because the idear of me pushin Joe down the well is just silly, you know. He outweighed me by at least fifty pounds —prob‘ly a fairish bit more. He larded up considerable the last few years. Also, he wa’ant afraid to use his fists if somebody crossed him or got in his way. I’m tellin you that as his wife of sixteen years, and you’ll find plenty of people who’ll tell you the same thing.”

Accourse Joe hadn’t hit me in a long while, but I’d never tried to correct the general impression on the island that he made a pretty steady business of it, and right then, with McAuliffe’s blue eyes tryin to bore in through my forehead, I was damned glad of it.

“Nobody is saying you pushed him into the well,” the Scotsman said. He was backin up fast now. I could see by his face that he knew he was, but didn’t have no idear how it had happened. His face said that I was the one who was supposed to be backin up. “But he must have been crying out, you know. He must have done it for some time—hours, perhaps—and quite loudly, too.”

One, my-pretty-pony ... two, my-pretty-pony . . . three. “Maybe I’m gettin you now,” I says. “Maybe you think he fell into the well by accident, and I heard him yellin n just turned a deaf ear. Is that what you been gettin at?”

I seen by his face that that was exactly what he’d been gettin at. I also seen he was mad things weren’t goin the way he’d expected em to go, the way they’d always gone before when he had these little interviews. A tiny ball of bright red color had showed up in each of his cheeks. I was glad to see em, because I wanted him mad. A man like McAuliffe is easier to handle when he’s mad, because men like him are used to keepin their composure while other people lose theirs.

“Mrs. St. George, it will be verra difficult to accomplish anything of value here if you keep responding to my questions with questions of your own.”

“Why, you didn’t
ask
a question, Dr. McAuliffe,” I says, poppin my eyes wide n innocent. “You told me Joe must have been yellin—‘cryin out’ was what you actually said—so I just ast if—”

“All right, all right,” he says, and put his pipe down in Garrett’s brass ashtray hard enough to make it clang. Now his eyes were blazin, and he’d grown a red stripe acrost his forehead to go along with the balls of color in his cheeks. “Did you hear him calling for help, Mrs. St. George?”

One, my-pretty-pony ... two, my-pretty-pony ...

“John, I hardly think there’s any call to badger the woman,” Garrett broke in, soundin more uncomfortable than ever, and damn if it didn’t break that little bandbox Scotsman’s concentration
again.
.I almost laughed right out loud. It woulda been bad for me if I had, I don’t doubt it, but it was a near thing, all the same.

McAuliffe whipped around and says to Garrett, “You agreed to let me handle this.”

Poor old Garrett jerked back in his chair s’fast he almost tipped it over, and I’m sure he gave himself a whiplash. “Okay, okay, no need to get hot under the collar,” he mumbles.

McAuliffe turned back to me, ready to repeat the question, but I didn’t bother lettin him. By then I’d had time to count to ten, pretty near.

“No,” I says. “I didn’t hear nothing but people out on the reach, tootin their boat-horns and yellin their fool heads off once they could see the eclipse had started to happen.”

He waited for me to say some more—his old trick of bein quiet and lettin people rush ahead into the puckerbrush—and the silence spun out between us. I just kep my hands folded on top of my handbag and let her spin. He looked at me and I looked back at him.

“You’re gonna talk to me, woman,” his eyes said.

“You’re going to tell me everything I want to hear ... twice, if that’s the way I want it.”

And my own eyes were sayin back, “No I ain’t, chummy. You can sit there drillin on me with those diamond-bit baby-blues of yours until hell’s a skatin rink and you won’t get another word outta me unless you open your mouth n ask for it.”

We went on that way for damned near a full minute, duellin with our eyes, y’might say, and toward the end of it I could feel myself weakenin, wantin to say somethin to him, even if it was only “Didn’t your Ma ever teach you it ain’t polite to stare?” Then Garrett spoke up—or rather his stomach did. It let out a long
goiiiinnnnggg
sound.

McAuliffe looked at him, disgusted as hell, and Garrett got out his pocket-knife and started to clean under his fingernails. McAuliffe pulled a notebook from the inside pocket of his wool coat (
wool!
in
July!),
looked at somethin in it, then put it back.

“He tried to climb out,” he says at last, as casual as a man might say “I’ve got a lunch appointment.”

It felt like somebody’d jabbed a meatfork into my lower back, where Joe hit me with the stovelength that time, but I tried not to show it. “Oh, ayuh?” I says.

“Yes,” McAuliffe says. “The shaft of the well is lined with large stones (only he said ”stanes,” Andy, like they do), and we found bluidy hand-prints on several of them. It appears that he gained his feet, then slowly began to make his way up, hand over hand. It must have been a Herculean effort, made despite a pain more excruciating than I can imagine.”

“I’m sorry to hear he suffered,” I said. My voice was as calm as ever—at least I think it was—but I could feel the sweat startin to break in my arm-pits, and I remember bein scairt it’d spring out on my brow or in the little hollows of my temples where he could see it. “Poor old Joe.”

“Yes indaid,” McAuliffe says, his lighthouse eyes borin n flashin away. “Poor ... auld... Joe. I think he might have actually gotten out on his own. He probably would have died soon after even if he had, but yes; I think he might have gotten out. Something prevented him from doing so, however.”

“What was it?” I ast.

“He suffered a fractured skull,” McAuliffe said. His eyes were as bright as ever, but his voice’d become as soft as a purrin cat. “We found a large rock between his legs. It was covered wi’your husband’s bluid, Mrs. St. George. And in that bluid we found a small number of porcelain fragments. Do you know what I deduce from them?”

One... two... three.

“Sounds like that rock must have busted his false teeth as well’s his head,” I says. “Too bad—Joe was partial to em, and I don’t know how Lucien Mercier’s gonna make him look just right for the viewin without em.”

McAuliffe’s lips drew back when I said that n I got a good look at
his
teeth. No dentures there. I s’pose he meant it to look like a smile, but it didn’t. Not a bit.

“Yes,” he says, showin me both rows of his neat little teeth all the way to the gumline. “Yes, that’s my conclusion, as well—those porcelain shards are from his lower plate. Now, Mrs. St. George—do you have any idea of how that rock might have come to strike your husband just as he was on the verge of escaping the well?”

One... two... three.

“Nope,” I says. “Do you?”

“Yes,” he says. “I rather suspect someone pulled it out of the earth and smashed it cruelly and wi’ malice aforethought into his upturned, pleading face.”

Wasn’t nobody said anything after that. I
wanted
to, God knows; I wanted to jump in as quick as ever I could n say, “It wasn’t me. Maybe somebody did it, but it wasn’t me.” I couldn’t, though, because I was back in the blackberry tangles and this time there was friggin wells everyplace.

Instead of talkin I just sat there lookin at him, but I could feel the sweat tryin to break out on me again and I could feel my clasped hands wantin to lock down on each other. The fingernails’d turn white if they did that... and he’d notice. McAuliffe was a man
built
to notice such things; it’d be another chink to shine his version of the Battiscan Light into. I tried to think of Vera, and how she woulda looked at him—as if he was only a little dab of dogshit on one of her shoes—but with his eyes borin into me like they was just then, it didn’t seem to do any good. Before, it’d been like she was almost there in the room with me, but it wasn’t like that anymore. Now there was no one there but me n that neat little Scots doctor, who probably fancied himself just like the amateur detectives in the magazine stories (and whose testimony had already sent over a dozen people up n down the coast to jail, I found out later), and I could feel myself gettin closer n closer to openin my mouth n blurtin somethin out. And the hell of it was, Andy, I didn’t have the slightest idear what it’d be when it finally came. I could hear the clock on Garrett’s desk tickin—it had a big hollow sound.