The Interpretation Of Murder (31 page)

    Clara Banwell didn't show any of the
discomfort I felt under Nora's frozen gaze. Filling the air with an easy flow
of words, she said her good-byes, acting for all the world as if she and I had
not been caught standing several inches too close together. She extended her
hand to me, kissed Nora on the cheek, and thoughtfully added that we need not
see her to the door; she didn't want to delay Nora's treatment a moment longer.
Seconds later, I heard the front door close behind her.

    Nora stood in the same spot Mrs
Banwell had occupied minutes before. I had no business noticing her looks,
given the harrowing events of the night before, but I couldn't help myself. It
was absurd. One could walk for miles in New York City - as I had that morning -
or spend a month at the Grand Central Station, and never see a single woman of
surpassing physical grace. Yet in the space of five minutes, two had stood
before me in the Actons' sitting room. But what a contrast between them.

    Nora wore no adornments, no jewelry,
no embroidered fabric. She carried no parasol; she had no veil. She wore a
simple white blouse, its sleeves ending at the elbow, tucked at her impossibly
narrow waist into a sky-blue pleated skirt. The top of her shirt was gently scooped,
revealing the delicate structure of her collarbone and her long, lovely neck.
This neck was now almost unblemished, the bruises faded. Her blond hair was
pulled back as always into a braid reaching almost to her waist. She was only,
as Mrs Banwell had said, a girl. Her youth cried out from every plane and curve
of her, especially in the high color of her cheeks and eyes, which radiated
with youth's hope, its freshness, and, I should add, its fury.

    'I hate you more than anyone else I
have ever known,' she said to me.

    So: I was now, more than ever,
hoisted into the position of her father. As if led by some inexorable fate, she
had come upon me and Clara Banwell closeted in a study just as she had come
upon her father and Clara Banwell consorting in another study three years ago.
The signal difference - that there was nothing between Mrs Banwell and myself -
was evidently lost on her. That was unsurprising. It was not I she was staring
angrily at now. It was her father, dressed in my clothes. Had I been seeking to
cement the analytic transference, I could not have devised a better stratagem.
Had I been hoping to bring her analysis to a climax, I could not have asked for
a luckier conspiracy of events. I now had the opportunity - and the duty - to try
to show Nora the erroneous transposition occurring in her mind, so that she
could recognize how the rage she imagined she felt toward me was actually the
misdirected anger she harbored for her father.

    In other words, I was obliged to bury
my own emotion. I had to conceal the least shred of feeling I had for her, no
matter how genuine, no matter how overpowering. 'Then I am at a disadvantage,
Miss Acton,' I replied, 'because I love you more than anyone else I have ever
known.'

    A perfect silence enveloped us for
several heartbeats.

    'You do?' she asked.

    'Yes.'

    'But you and Clara were -'

    'We weren't. I swear it.'

    'You weren't?' •No."

    Nora began to breathe hard. Too hard:
her outer clothes were not tight, but she seemed to be wearing something
underneath that was. Her respiration was entirely concentrated in the upper
part of her torso. Concerned she might faint, I guided her to the front door
and opened it. She needed air. Across the street was the dappled grove of
Gramercy Park. Nora stepped outside. I suggested that her parents ought to know
if she was going out.

    'Why?' she asked me. 'We could just
go to the park.'

    We crossed the street and, at one of
the wrought-iron gates, Nora produced from her purse a gold and black key.
There was an awkward moment when I helped her through the gate: a decision had
to be made about whether I would offer her my arm as we walked. I managed not
to.

    Therapeutically speaking, I was in a
great deal of trouble. I did not fear for myself, although it was remarkable
that my feelings for this girl seemed impervious to the fact that she might
well be unstable or even mentally ill. If Nora had actually burned herself,
there were two possibilities. Either she did it with full conscious deliberation
and was lying to the world, or she did it in a dissociated state, hypnoid or
somnambulistic, which was shut off from the rest of her consciousness. On the
whole, I think I preferred the former alternative, but neither one was
attractive.

    I did not regret having confessed my
feelings to her. The circumstances forced my hand. But while declaring my love
for her might have been honorable, acting on it would be the opposite. The
lowest-bred cur would not take advantage of a girl in her condition. I had to
find a way to let her know this. I had to extricate myself from the role of
lover into which I had just stumbled and try to become her physician again.

    'Miss Acton,' I said.

    'Won't you call me Nora, Doctor?'

    'No.'

    'Why?'

    'Because I am still your doctor. You
can't be Nora to me. You are my patient.' I wasn't sure how she would take
that, but I went on. 'Tell me what happened last night. No, wait: you said in
the hotel yesterday that your memory of Monday's attack had come back to you.
Tell me first what you remember about that.'

    'Must I?'

    'Yes.'

    She asked if we could sit, and we
found a bench in a secluded corner. She still did not know, she said, how it
all began or how she got there. That part of her memory remained missing. What
she remembered was being tied up in the dark in her parents' bedroom. She was
standing, bound by the wrists to something overhead. She was wearing only her
slip. All the curtains and blinds were drawn.

    The man was behind her. He had tied a
soft piece of fabric - perhaps silk - around her throat and was pulling it so
tight she couldn't breathe, much less call out. He was also hitting her with a
strap or crop of some kind. It stung but it was not unbearable - more like a
spanking. It was the silk around her throat that scared her; she thought he
meant to kill her. But every time she was on the verge of passing out, he would
relax the stranglehold ever so slightly, just enough to let her catch her
breath.

    He began to strike her much harder.
It became so painful she thought she couldn't stand it. Then he dropped the
whip, stepped behind her, so close she could feel his harsh breath on her
shoulders, and put a hand on her. She didn't say where; I didn't ask. At the
same time, a part of his body - 'a hard part,' she said - came into contact
with her hip. The man made an ugly sound, and then he made a mistake; the tie
around her throat suddenly went slack. She took a deep breath and screamed - screamed
as hard and as long as she could. She must have passed out. The next thing she
knew, Mrs Biggs was by her side.

    Nora maintained her composure while
recounting all this, her hands folded in her lap. Without changing attitude,
she asked, 'Are you disgusted by me?'

    'No,' I said. 'In your memory of the
attack, was the man Banwell?'

    'I thought so. But the mayor said -'

    'The mayor said Banwell was with him
Sunday night, when the
other
girl was murdered. If you remember Banwell
being your attacker, you must say so.'

    'I don't know,' said Nora
plaintively. 'I think so. I don't know. He was behind me the whole time.'

    'Tell me about last night,' I said.

    She poured out the story of the
intruder in her bedroom. This time, she said, she was certain it was Banwell.
Toward the end, however, she turned away from me once more. Was there something
she wasn't saying? 'I don't even own any lipstick,' she concluded earnestly.
'And that horrible thing they found in my closet. Where am I supposed to have
gotten that?'