Miss Lizzie (41 page)

I did not stop to consider what Mr. Foley might have been doing outside Miss Lizzie's house. I only ran. Out of the parlor, down the hallway, into the kitchen, over to the cutlery drawer. I heaved it open with such force that it jumped from the cabinet and sent knives flying across the room, scattering along the floor. I saw the long French carving knife smack against the base of the stove. Throwing the drawer aside, I scurried over, grabbed it.

Just as I did, the kitchen door began to rattle, the door to the back porch. It rattled violently, loudly, insanely: someone out there fighting with the doorknob. I could not see through the lace curtains, but It could see in. The Thing was on the porch, less than six feet away.

What I should have done, of course, was run for the front door. I believe I would have escaped. Once outside, I could run downtown; if It followed, I could hide in the fog.

But the image of Mr. Foley lying out there, soaked in blood, those blind white eyes swimming up at me through the fog, made it impossible. Without really thinking, knife in hand, I darted up the stairs. Behind me I heard the crash and tinkle of breaking glass.

I raced down the hall. My bedroom door had no lock; I dashed into Miss Lizzie's room, slammed the door, turned the lock, switched on the light.

The lock looked too flimsy to hold for long. Quickly, frantically, I glanced around the room. I had to move something against the door, form a barricade.

The makeup dresser.

I ran to it, tossed the knife onto it, wrapped my fingers around its far corner, and pulled. It was solid teak; it would not budge.

I heard steps on the stairway.

With a gasp, using all my strength, I tugged again at the dresser. It moved. Only an inch or two, but it moved.

Out in the hall, floorboards creaked.

My nightgown was soaked with sweat; my hair, cold and damp, stuck to my forehead. I tugged again, crying out with the effort. The sharp edge bit into my fingers, and the dresser moved. But again only an inch.

The doorknob turned. Someone pounded once, very hard, at the door, and the wood shook.

The window.
Get out
.

The screen was in place. My fingers, slick and trembling, slipped on the latches. They had been painted over, they would never open. I clawed my nails at the mesh, saw it was useless, ran back to the dresser and seized the knife.

A huge
crash
as something hit the door. A long thin splinter of wood popped off.

I slashed the knife across the screen.

Another
crash
. The wood split, and the head of the hatchet lanced through, black with rust.

I ripped at the screening with my fingers, tore it from the frame.

Crash!
A large ragged chunk of wood was sent spinning through the air and left a hole in the door, and a hand appeared there, fingers curled like talons, groping for the lock.

Using both hands, I raised the knife high overhead, ran at the door and, with all the power I possessed, putting all my weight behind it, I slammed the knife down into the hand.

It sliced through flesh and bone and dug into the wood and then, from beyond the door, came a wild, shrill, unearthly shriek.

Panting, sickened, I let go of the knife and stepped back.

And the hand clenched into a fist and jerked downward, and the knife snapped free and fell. The hand moved to the lock, the fingers found it, turned it, and then the door flew open and Mrs. Mortimer stood there in a long black dripping raincoat, her hair dank with fog and rain and sweat, her eyes wide and crazed.

“
Bitch!
” she screamed at me, and the cords in her neck were taut.

I could not move.

“
Bitch!
” she screamed, and she stepped into the room.

She held the hatchet raised in her left hand. The right hand hung limp at her side, blood spilling from it and spattering on the wooden floor.

I backed away.

She curled back her upper lip. “You knew all the time, you filthy little bitch. She told you, the fat momma bitch, she told you about me and Kevin. And you knew about the coffee. How'd you know, bitch? Who'd you tell?”

I felt the wall against my back; I had moved away as far as I could. I gasped. “Mrs. Mortimer—”

She took another step toward me. There was a long pool now of bright-red blood spreading along the floor. “Filthy little bitch, slut bitch, you're going to die, bitch, I'm sending you to hell so you can be with your fat bitch momma bitch.”

The bed was to my left. I sprang onto it, rolled across the silk comforter, landed in an awkward clatter on my hands and knees. I stumbled to my feet and Mrs. Mortimer began to walk around the bed, inexorable, inescapable.

“Fucking
bitch
,” she hissed. “Fucking bitch, you're not going to ruin
my
life, oh no, I'm going to
smash
you, bitch. I'm going to smash your fucking face in.”

She took another step and then there was a movement off to my right, at the doorway, and I saw—and I realized that all along I had been expecting this, praying for this—that it was Miss Lizzie.

She wore, like Mrs. Mortimer, a black raincoat that dripped water; and she was holding, as Mrs. Mortimer was, a double-bladed hatchet.

She said, “
Get away from her
.”

Mrs. Mortimer wheeled around, her coat swirling like a cape.

“
You!
” she said.

“
Get away from her
.” Miss Lizzie stepped into the room, her eyes narrowed, the mouth set in a line as thin as a knife edge.

Mrs. Mortimer, her back to me, took a step toward Miss Lizzie. “Did you come home to help your little dyke friend?” She laughed, a high-pitched lunatic bark, frayed at the edges. “Did you come to give her a wet dyke kiss? Did you? You wicked wicked fucking
bitch
dyke.”

And suddenly, arm above her head, she ran at Miss Lizzie and swung her hatchet.

Quickly, backhanded, her entire body twisting with the blow, Miss Lizzie brought up her own hatchet. The two blades collided with a loud brittle
clang
, and both women, rocked by the impact, staggered back.

Miss Lizzie was the first to recover. Her teeth bared, the hatchet at her shoulder, she leaped toward Mrs. Mortimer. She swung, and Mrs. Mortimer drew swiftly away, and I heard the
swoosh
of the hatchet as it swept through empty air.

Mrs. Mortimer's hatchet came flying at Miss Lizzie's neck. Miss Lizzie jerked back, and the hatchet whistled past.

They began to circle each other, Mrs. Mortimer moving to her left. Beyond them, in the wide mirror atop the dressing table, another Miss Lizzie and another Mrs. Mortimer performed the same wary, lethal dance.

This could not go on much longer. Miss Lizzie was an old woman, and overweight; Mrs. Mortimer was still losing blood. But each of them seemed fiercely determined, each eyed the other with a frightening, savage intensity. Mrs. Mortimer's lips were still drawn back in that malign, maniacal grin. Miss Lizzie's face was mottled, blotched with purple bruises, exactly as it had been in her speechless fury after confronting the mob.

As they completed a full circle, I saw Mrs. Mortimer's glance dart toward me. A kind of calculation suddenly glittered in her mad eyes. All at once she flailed out at Miss Lizzie, wildly. As Miss Lizzie jumped back, Mrs. Mortimer spun about and rushed round the bed, directly at me.

I think she intended not to kill me, not just then, but to use me as a hostage, as a means of forcing Miss Lizzie to yield.

I stumbled back, away from her, but she moved too quickly. Hatchet high in her left hand, she snatched at me with her bloodied right. It should have been impossible for her to use that hand. Bones had been split, tendons severed. But she was possessed, driven by rage and madness, and I felt her fingernails slice through my nightgown and knife into my shoulder.

I struck out at her in a rush of horror, smashing the back of my knuckles against her eye. Her face twitched back and her fingers loosened, and I grabbed her hand, my fingers sliding in the blood, and as hard as I could I twisted it, wrenched it away. And, mouth awry, eyes astounded, the woman
squealed
, a sound that even then, in the midst of my terror, seemed childlike and pathetic. And then she was swerving, turning to meet Miss Lizzie, but there was not enough time, not for Mrs. Mortimer, for Miss Lizzie was already there, and Miss Lizzie's hatchet swooped down, overwhelming, inevitable, and the curved blade sank into her forehead with a sudden, final, liquid
crunch
.

She sagged to her knees like a marionette whose strings have been clipped, and then she toppled, face forward, to the floor. Miss Lizzie stood over her, staring down, swaying slightly and breathing through her mouth. She still held the dripping hatchet.

She looked at me. I swallowed, unable to speak. She brought up her hand, looked down for a moment at the hatchet, then lowered the hand and opened her fingers. The hatchet fell and banged against the floor.

She said to me, “Are you all right?” Her voice was raspy, distant.

I nodded. “Yes … yes.”

She reached out to touch me and I moved to her, and then she was holding me and I could smell the citrus smell of her and I could hear, even through her raincoat, the thud of her heart.

I said, “Is it over now? Is it all over?”

She stroked my hair and she said, “Yes. It's all over.”

EPILOGUE

BUT OF COURSE it was not all over. There remained the small matters of motive, means, and opportunity: as the legal profession, and Chief Da Silva, liked to call them.

If this were a mystery novel and not a sort of memoir, a kind of extended and much belated
What I Did Last Summer
, I suppose I could gather all the characters in the library and have them sit there, rapt, over Stilton and amontillado, while Miss Lizzie (a Miss Marple with a hatchet) primly explained what had actually happened over the course of the past few days, below the surface of what had appeared to.

Unfortunately, things did not proceed that way. Some time passed before the truth became known, and, even then, the verifiable facts were few. A truth and a fact, thank goodness, are not the same.

Not that Miss Lizzie, Marple-like, had not determined, and early on, who the murderer was. From the beginning, she had believed it was Mrs. Mortimer.

“The key,” she told me on Monday, two days after Mrs. Mortimer's death. I had just come from the coroner's inquest into Audrey's death. “The missing key. There was really no one else who could've taken it, or who had any reason to.”

“Why did she want the key?” I asked her.

Smiling, she looked at me over her pince-nez. “What does one usually do with a key?”

I shrugged. “Open a lock.”

She nodded. “Your stepmother kept the front door locked. In order for Mrs. Mortimer to get into the house and kill her, she needed a key. She'd been planning this for some time, I believe, and she was just waiting for the proper opportunity. She found that when you and Audrey were out on the back porch that morning. She simply lifted the key from the hook and pocketed it.”

“And then later”—I nodded—”when Audrey and I were asleep, she came back and used it to unlock the front door.” (And used it to lock the door again when she left, perhaps out of habit, perhaps further to confuse the police.)

“Yes,” said Miss Lizzie. “I imagine she called out, for you or for Audrey, when she got inside. If either one of you answered, you could say that she'd picked up the key by mistake and that she'd come back to return it. She could say she'd knocked at the door, no one answered, and she'd come in to put the key back on the hook.”

“No one answered because we were both unconscious from the chloral hydrate.”

Miss Lizzie said, “She had no reason to believe you were in the house. No reason to believe you'd been drugged. I imagine that when she discovered, later, that you'd been there, she was horrified. She had no way of knowing what you might've seen or heard.”

It had been Chief Da Silva, not Miss Lizzie, who had worked out the chloral hydrate. Although there was no proof, it appeared more than likely that Mrs. Mortimer, before or after stealing the key, had put the drug in Audrey's coffee that Tuesday, to make certain she took her usual guest-room nap. Mr. Mortimer had admitted to Da Silva that he kept the chemical in his house and that his wife had access to it.

My taking chloral hydrate, in the few sips of coffee I stole from Audrey's cup, would explain why I had slept through Audrey's murder and, shortly afterward, Father's visit.

By mentioning the stolen coffee to Mrs. Mortimer, and later that same day asking her husband, purely by coincidence, about chloral hydrate, I had caused her to believe that I knew what she had done. Presumably, this is what she meant when she babbled about “the coffee” during that dreadful scene in Miss Lizzie's bedroom.

In Da Silva's opinion, Mrs. Mortimer had believed herself safe so long as William was in prison. The moment he was released, she realized that the police would once again start searching for the murderer. And I had shown—or so she thought—that I knew about the chloral hydrate, which suggested that the murderer was she. She decided to kill me, using a hatchet, as she had on Audrey, to throw suspicion on Miss Lizzie. That Saturday night she telephoned Miss Lizzie from the Fair-view, anonymously, promising information about the killing, luring her out of the house so she herself could get in and reach me.

She was quite mad, I believe.

If she had not been insane before, then worry over her safety had surely driven her insane by Saturday night. Otherwise, I doubt she would have killed Mr. Foley, the Pinkerton man.

Mr. Foley was out there that night because Boyle could not be. Ever since the police guard had departed, Boyle had been watching over me like a guardian angel. Miss Lizzie, knowing that I had been in the murder-house at the time of the killing, and feeling that Mrs. Mortimer might see me as a threat, had wanted someone to keep an eye on me. She had given Boyle the job.