Honeyville (35 page)

‘We never found it,’ Xavier says, turning back to us, his handsome friend having been sent on his way. ‘Presumably it was in the auto. We never saw her car again either. Vanished without a trace … I often think,’ he adds, after a pause, ‘how lucky we were that they left us a body. If it’s not too macabre to say so. At least now we know what became of her.’

‘Well,’ says Max. ‘But I’m not so sure that we
do
know, do we? That is to say …’ He looks to me to pick up.

‘Max has read the letter,’ I tell Xavier. ‘He says it doesn’t make sense.’

‘Sure it makes sense,’ Xavier chips in. ‘You have to take into account the situation when she was writing it. Maybe it’s a little hysterical. But it makes perfect sense.’ He stops, as the waiter delivers our martinis.

‘Max isn’t talking about the tone, Xavier. He’s saying the letter doesn’t make any sense because he
says
…’ I shoot Max a look, as hostile as I feel. Max opens his mouth to defend himself, but I talk through him. ‘Max
claims
that he showed his article to Inez before she died, and that she adored it.’

‘Oh really
?’
says Xavier, excessively polite.

‘I tell you she adored it!’ cries Max.

‘He also claims that he and Inez were never lovers.’

‘Nor were we,’ Max nods.

Xavier looks from one of us to the other, swallows half his drink in a single gulp. ‘Well that’s absurd,’ he says at last. But I can hear a note of something in his voice. There is hesitation. Not the astonishment and outrage I had been expecting. As if this isn’t the first time the idea has crossed his mind.

‘You bet it’s absurd!’ I say. ‘Inez told us. Don’t you remember?’

Slowly, he says, ‘No, Dora darling. She told you. And quite rightly assumed that you would tell me. Remember?’

‘The letter doesn’t make any sense,’ Max says irritably, yet again. He picks it up, opens it, starts to read it one more time. ‘This is her blood. Is it?’ he asks, looking at the smears with delicate horror.

‘Of course it is,’ I reply.

‘Not that it’s any of our business,’ Xavier says, ‘but perhaps you could explain to us, Max – why in hell Inez would have told Dora that you and she were lovers if you weren’t?’

Max lays the letter back down on the table. ‘Well, I would have thought that was obvious.’

‘Far from it,’ Xavier says. ‘Is it obvious to you, Dora?’

‘Not at all. She was moving to New York to be with you.’

‘She was moving to New York,’ Max says impatiently, as if
we
were the fools, ‘to be with Lawrence O’Neill.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘That’s not possible. He didn’t live in New York. You did. She was in love with you.’

‘She was not in love with me.’ Max is sounding quite irritable now. ‘She was in love with O’Neill. And, so far as I knew, he was moving to New York. And, by the way, on the few occasions I saw them together—’

‘When did you see them together?’ Xavier asks him. ‘When could you possibly have seen them together?’

‘Well – of course I saw them together. I already told Dora – O’Neill took a room at the Corinado. She was with him constantly. They couldn’t be seen in public. But they used to come to my rooms often, ask me how my story was going, and so on. O’Neill used to give me leads. He arranged one or two introductions – although there were reasons I never did take them up. In any case, Inez was smitten with O’Neill – there was no doubt about that. And I would have said that the feeling was mutual. O’Neill adored her.’ Max pauses. ‘What man didn’t adore her, of course? We all adored her. But O’Neill was smitten too. Absolutely. You must at least have realized that?’ Max looks at me.

I picture Lawrence’s face in the hallway at Plum Street, the day he came to tell me she was dead. I picture him at the Toltec, when he came over to introduce himself to Max, his hand brushing on the back of her neck, and Inez seeming not to notice it; his standing so close to the back of her chair. I picture him in the tearoom, asking me over and again if she was all right. ‘Yes … I guess so,’ I said. ‘Yes, I knew
he
was smitten. But Inez had moved on. She said so. Why would she bother to lie?’

Max shrugs. He opens his mouth to say something and then seems to think better of it.

‘For heaven’s sake Max,’ Xavier says. ‘If there’s something you know, that might shed some light – just spit it out, won’t you? We’ve waited long enough.’

‘Very well,’ Max says carefully. ‘It may shed no light whatsoever, of course. After all this time I’m not certain anything will. But I remember Inez mentioned she had been terribly ill shortly before we all arrived in Trinidad. There had been a riot involving Mother Jones, and Inez was put in the cells for a night.’

‘Not quite a night,’ I nod. ‘But yes. For a few hours.’

‘Fair enough,’ Max says. ‘Inez told me it was a whole night but Inez was prone to exaggeration. It doesn’t matter, in any case. It was long enough for the munitions – the stash of Colt-Brownings in her basement to have been stolen. And, after that, from what I understood, everything became nigh on impossible for them both. It was imperative, for both their sakes, that no one should see them together. You two – and the young lad, Cody, of course – were the only people in Trinidad who had any idea there had ever been any friendship between them. Except for me. But I hardly counted. I was only passing through. And, in any case, as you can see, they needed a cover. Inez couldn’t write poetry.’ He glances at the bloodstained letter lying open on the table between them. ‘Or prose, for that matter. But she was a lot smarter than I think any of us took her for.’

‘But you misunderstand. The weaponry,’ says Xavier quietly, ‘the Colt-Brownings – they weren’t stolen from her cellar. They were simply moved to another safe house.’

‘That’s the reason—’ He stops, stares at Xavier, and then at me. He’s looking at us with a mixture of embarrassment, astonishment – and pity. ‘Well
of course
the stuff was stolen! It was
stolen
while Inez was in the cells. When you went by the cottage and she was lying sick in the maid’s room at Plum Street, the cellar was empty, correct? Everything had been removed, yes?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘
Removed
. Nobody said anything about being stolen.’

Max takes a moment to absorb this – the depth of our ignorance. And so do we. Xavier reaches for the letter again. He clutches at it.
The blood is real. The paper is real. The handwriting is hers.

‘The same Colt-Brownings that were in her cellar,’ Max says carefully, ‘they weren’t simply any old rifles, that’s the thing. They turned up at Ludlow.’

‘Of course they turned up at Ludlow!’ I say. I have to stop myself from shouting. ‘Where else would they have gone?’

‘But not in the Union’s hands. Don’t you see? The company guards had them! The general’s men! When Inez and I went out to Ludlow – you remember? The day we arrived in Trinidad? It was the
company
guards
who were holding them … Colt-Browning, automatic rifles. “Potato diggers”, she used to call them. I forget why … Inez could have told you. Something about the mechanism made them unusual. But the rifles were unusual. That’s the point. Inez had made a study of them. She knew them. And
she identified them that afternoon.
We were in the middle of negotiating with one of the guards. She was trying to get a bunch of us reporters into the ruined camp. She was being her delightful self, and I reckoned, the way the guard was melting, we were as good as in. Suddenly, she stopped dead. He was
holding
one of the rifles … And she knew it. It was as if she had seen a ghost. She simply
stopped talking
. She couldn’t take her eyes off the damn gun.’

‘How do you know that was what stopped her?’ I ask him. ‘She might have suddenly simply found the horror of the camp too unbearable, the smell and the smoke and the bodies being brought out … What makes you so sure it was—’

‘Because she told me.’

‘That the guns had been stolen?’

‘What? No! Not right then. A couple of days later. She told me the gun he was holding had been taken from her cellar, and it was why she had fallen silent. That she recognized it.’

‘And you believed her?’ I ask. I turn to Xavier but he is buried in the letter again, scowling over the words as if they might yet offer up an answer. ‘Xavier, are you listening to this?’

‘Of course,’ he mutters. ‘And it’s a good question. Given my sister’s somewhat fanciful approach to life … Why did you believe her?’

‘Because of the way she stopped mid-sentence. As I say, she looked as if she had seen a ghost. If you had seen the change in her, you wouldn’t have been in any doubt either.’

‘And did you get the impression – when she saw the guard holding the gun, was she already aware that the arsenal had been
stolen
from her cellar? Or had she been under the impression, as we have been, all this time, that it had simply been removed by the Union to a safer hiding place?’

‘She said she had no idea it had been stolen,’ says Max. He is silent for a long time. Finally, he says, ‘But I didn’t believe her. I think she knew very well that the weaponry had been stolen, and I think she knew by whom. And I think that those same guns were then almost certainly turned on the very people she thought she was fighting for … It’s not something any of us would much want to confront, is it? … I suspect that she couldn’t allow herself to confront it either. She couldn’t accept it. She couldn’t bear it. So she raced around like a dervish, keeping herself busy, righting wrongs, fighting the cause, burying her head in the sand. I think she—’

Xavier gasps. He’s not listening.

‘No, I think it makes sense,’ Max glances at Xavier, and continues more emphatically. ‘She was in love with O’Neill. He was going to New York. He had some kind of job, he said. I don’t remember what, but maybe he was leaving the Union, maybe he wasn’t. From what I understood, he was never anything more than a brute-for-hire, who just happened to have been hired by the Union side. But Inez was in love with O’Neill. She wanted to believe the best of him. Added to which – leaving aside her own stubbornly unacknowledged fears about him, she knew that
no one
would have allowed her to leave town with him. It would have been out of the question. Her aunt and uncle –
your
aunt and uncle of course,’ he says, nodding to Xavier, ‘would have cut off her money supply. They would never have forgiven her.’ He stops, shrugs. ‘At any rate, that’s what she told me.’

But Xavier still isn’t listening. He is hunched over the damn letter, pulling on his eyeglasses, holding Inez’s bloodstained letter up to the sunlight. And then slowly, softly, he begins to laugh. ‘…
Dora!
’he whispers. ‘Darling Dora, how long have we carried this ludicrous letter around with us? How many times, between us, have we gazed at this darned thing?
How could we not have seen?
It’s so damnably … so utterly, wonderfully, gloriously
like Inez
…’

‘What?’ I ask him. ‘For heaven’s sake – what is so gloriously like Inez that we haven’t seen these twenty years?’

‘Oh my sister,’ he says. And he is half laughing, half crying. ‘God, how I miss that girl.
Look!
’

He is still holding the letter up to the light. His finger is pointing to the top right-hand corner of the sheet. There is a dark smudge of old, brown blood. And behind it, what looks like a faint ink mark. A scribble of some sort. Max and I crane forward to see it more closely.

‘Is it an F?’ asks Max doubtfully.

‘It
is
an F!’ cries Xavier. ‘A single, solitary F at the top of the page … Come on, Dora! Don’t you remember? You
must
remember! For a while, it was almost the only thing she would talk about. The swordstick … And the little gun purse … and that idiotic device for listening to people in the room next door, which never worked. Don’t you remember she tested it on us?’

‘And the invisible ink!’ I shout. ‘An F! It’s an F! Xavier – we are fools! How can we have been so stupid?’ I throw my arms around him, and we hold each other, both of us half laughing and half crying, unwilling to let each other go.

‘When you’ve quite finished,’ Max says, sounding put out, ‘you might be kind enough to remember that I too am sitting here …’

We giggle like a pair of children, and apologize.

Max continues, ‘Perhaps you’ll be kind enough to explain what in hell you are talking about? An F? An F stands for what?’

40

‘F stands for
FIRE
!’ Xavier and I cry at once.

‘Listen,’ I say to Max. ‘There are two types of invisible ink.’

‘There is “Organic”,’ Xavier says, ‘And—’

‘Sympathetic,’ I continue. ‘Did Inez not tell you this? She must have told you! How could you have spent more than an hour in her company without the subject coming up? Well, I suppose by the time you arrived, everything had become so much more serious. Cody was already dead. And Ludlow … In any case the invisible ink came with the rest of the junk she ordered from the detective store. There was the invisible ink hidden in a bottle of hair tonic, but that was the chemical type. “Sympathetic”, as Xavier calls it … Are you sure that’s right, Xavie? Not synthetic? I always thought it was synthetic.’

‘Definitely sympathetic,’ Xavier says.

Max waves it aside.

‘The point is,’ I continue, ‘we are lucky there isn’t an “S” up there in the blood … It’s
not
an S, is it? It’s definitely an F.’

The men look again. We agree that yes, the mark we have missed for all these years, is indeed an F.

‘If it were an S, we would need to locate the “re-agent”, which would have been made specifically for this particular invisible ink. And, honestly, after so many years, Gosh only knows where we would find it …’

‘
Organic
invisible ink, on the other hand,’ Xavier continues, ‘alters the fibres of the paper it is written on, making the fibres burn at a lower temperature than the rest of the paper.’