The Flying Circus (31 page)

But neither happened. The family came home at dusk and went into the house, chattering and happy. Henry watched them from the barn door. No one even looked his way, except Johanna. She stood there for a long while, looking brokenhearted. Henry felt horrible for disappointing her, but now wasn’t the time to show his face. Not until he got a better gauge on what Emmaline was up to, and how careful he needed to be.

“T
hat’s when I realized how far Emmaline was willing to go to ruin me,” Henry said, looking into Cora’s eyes. “She might not have gone through with it that day. But, I knew, one day soon, she would.”

Cora said, “Why do you figure she didn’t go through with it right then?”

“I honestly don’t know. Maybe she worried that she’d be asked questions she didn’t want to answer about why she was out there in the first place. But the way she looked at me”—Henry’s blood ran cold with the recollection—“with more hate than I thought any single person could hold. I mean, I admit, I hated her like I’d never hated anyone. But there was something, I don’t know . . . evil in her eyes. She’d been filling her
papa’s head with ideas about me having wicked intentions toward her. It’s like she was setting me up. Just waiting for the right opportunity.”

“From what you’ve said, I’m sure telling her father any of this would have backfired on you.”

He shook his head, the sickness in his stomach like a raging fire. “It couldn’t have turned out any worse than it did. She was killed the next day.” He was shaking. He closed his eyes, trying to get the gruesome image out of his mind. “I’m wanted for her murder. That’s why I changed my name. That’s why I ran.” There. It was out. No taking it back.

Her hand fell from his face. She sat there staring at him with her lips parted and her eyes wide.

He stopped breathing. But his heart kept beating. Each
thub-dub
absurdly loud in his ears. If only it would stop. Before she denounced him.

Finally she stood, an abrupt, jerky movement. Henry felt as if their lives had been momentarily frozen and they were now back in sickening motion.

“That’s ridiculous!” She held her forehead. “You couldn’t have done it!”

“How can you know that?” His own doubt had grown as he’d told the story. He wanted Cora to see it all now; he didn’t want it creeping up on her later when she had time to think, to remember and analyze. Get this over once and for all. “After everything I just told you about her and how much I hated her? After I lied to you from the very first day? After I
ran
? I was there. I had her blood on my hands.”

Suddenly his heart slowed. The shaking stopped. A peculiar calm washed over him. If she hated him, if she condemned him, it was better than being suffocated by the knowledge that he was betraying her trust every single day. He felt a small loosening of the tangles in the tight ball of tension that had gotten worse with each deceitful day. “I’m not the person you think I am.” And that was the most horrible truth. She had not seen the monster in the cellar.

“I
do
know you!”

“Everyone in Delaware County thinks they know me, too. And they’re certain that I did do it.”

She looked at him steadily when she asked, “All right, if you insist, I’ll ask the question directly. Did you?”

“I can’t say for certain.”

Her face clouded. “That makes no sense.”

“It’s the truth. I don’t think I did. It doesn’t
feel
like I did.”

“Stop talking in riddles and tell me exactly what happened.” She sat back down, but not on the bed next to him, on the straight-backed chair. Her eyes were intent on his. Was she looking for a sign, truth or lie? “Leave nothing out.”

Henry asked for a glass of water and organized his thoughts while she went to get it. After he drained the glass, he did what he’d done a million times in his head over the past months. He relived that day.

T
hat morning had begun with a screaming argument between Emmaline and one of her sisters, Henry couldn’t tell which one, streaming out of the upstairs windows. Emmaline had been meaner than usual since her sister Violet’s wedding. But that was to be expected; jealousy ran thick in Emmaline’s blood. Any attention directed toward others was an insult to her. Henry had been extra careful to steer clear of her, which she seemed to take exception to, twisting the truth when she complained to her father, “Henry’s been following me.” He supposed she could hardly have complained that he’d been
avoiding
her. Emmaline’s dearest pleasure was enforcing her will upon him. The incident near the Chautauqua grounds the previous day had been the most damning evidence of that.

Several days before, Mr. Dahlgren had confronted Henry about his bothering Emmaline, watching her, following her. Henry felt he’d been convincing in his denial. Of course he hadn’t said he’d been avoiding her the way he would a brown recluse spider. Pa had always counseled it was better to hold one’s tongue than to turn slights and slanders back on their issuers; it made a man sound weak and petty.
Henry should have told Mr. Dahlgren right then about how Emmaline had been disappearing into the woods more and more often, sometimes for hours—a sign of something for certain as Emmaline hated being outdoors. But he hadn’t. Mostly because it could lend credence to Emmaline’s claim; how would he have noticed her comings and goings if he hadn’t been watching her?—which he had, but for quite the opposite reason.

Henry was hilling the rows in the potato patch down in the bottoms when he heard Emmaline yelling, “Stop following me,
J-J-J-J
ohanna! I’ll have you sent off to the f-f-f-freak show where you belong!”

“I’m j-j-just looking for my k-k-kitten.”

“I killed it. Now go back to the house.”

Henry’s knuckles went white on the hoe handle. Why did she have to be so cruel to poor Johanna? He took five or six wild swings with his hoe, driving it deep into the ground, hard enough to hurt his shoulder and leave his breath heaving. Once he was back under control, it took several minutes before he could go back to work. Even then, his insides still quivered with anger.

Sometime later he heard a quick, sharp shout. Emmaline. Farther away.

He stopped to listen for Johanna, but didn’t hear anything more. She didn’t usually challenge her sister. Most likely she’d gone back to the house. He’d help her look for her kitten when he got back to the barn.

Then moments later, a shrill scream was cut off abruptly.

Henry broke into a run, his body flashing hot, fury pumping his legs.

There was no path. Branches gouged his face, brambles tore at his hands.

He reached the river, looked frantically around. No one. “Johanna!”

Then he caught sight of a blue hair ribbon snagged on a branch, fluttering in the breeze a few yards upstream.

Fear and anger were lightning in his blood. He hurried toward the ribbon, nearer the water. He reached out—

The next thing he knew, he was lying facedown in the mud, pushing himself up on trembling arms, his head throbbing, his vision blurry.

Then he saw her. Head and shoulders in the river. Emmaline’s blond hair stained red, floating around her head like sunburst petals on the water.

“I
lifted her from the water and turned her over,” Henry said, the vision in his head as vivid now as it had been those months ago. Why couldn’t he remember those moments in between? “Her eyes were open, lifeless as two blue marbles. That’s the image that makes my blood run cold, her eyes. I couldn’t help thinking they weren’t all that different from when there’d been life behind them.” He looked at Cora. “Doesn’t that seem strange, that I would have thought that?”

She just took his hand and held it tight.

“Those eyes.” He shook his head. “They’re what I see when I close my own. Not the bloody gash in the back of her head.” He took a deep breath. “That comes back as a feeling, not a sight.” He held his hand up and looked at it, his fingers remembering the sensation of gravel where solid rock should have been. “When I cradled her head in my hand, there was a sickening shift of crumbled bone.”

Cora’s gasp drew his eyes away from his hand and back to her. “Oh, Henry. How horrible. And you’ve had to carry this around alone.”

“Sometimes I feel like I’ve kept myself on such a short chain that it’s done something to me deep inside. Bottled up all of my anger until it rages like a torrent of water through a broken dam. Maybe that’s what happened.”

“Of course that’s not what happened.”

“I appreciate your faith in me, Cora. But I have to be realistic. I
could
have done it. I was so angry over her treatment of Johanna. And if I did, I need to know it. I’ll pay the consequences.”

“What about Johanna? Where was she?”

“I didn’t see her. She usually didn’t go against Emmaline, so she probably had turned back. It had been ten or so minutes between when I heard them arguing and the scream.

“The fact that I can’t say with absolute certainty that I
didn’t
do it . . . that’s what really scares me.” He took a breath and pressed on to the end. “I heard someone coming and stood. Violet took one look at me, scratched and clawed with blood on my hands, standing in the water over her dead sister, and took off screaming,
‘He killed her! Oh my God! Henry killed her! Papa! Papa!’
And I ran.”

“Blood on your hands? From when you picked her up?”

“I don’t know. It could have been there when I came to.”

“Surely Mr. Dahlgren didn’t just take Violet’s hysterics as proof. Maybe they aren’t even hunting for you.” The hope in her voice warmed Henry’s chilled heart. “Maybe they discovered the real killer.”

“I
ran
,
Cora! My history with that girl. A witness seeing me with blood on my hands. And I fucking ran. What more proof did they need? They didn’t
look
for anyone.”

“But you don’t
know
they’re looking for you. Maybe someone saw something that led them to the real killer.”

He looked her in the eye. “What if I am the real killer, Cora?” He wanted her to really think about it. Right now.

“I’ll believe you are when you remember crushing that woman’s skull. That’s when I’ll believe it.”

“The manhunt is for me. It was in the Noblesville newspaper. Name, description, and all. And now that newsreel is out there. It’s only a matter of time before they find me. I have to go back by my own choice. If I wait for them to come and get me, there’s no hope anyone will believe anything but I killed her. I need questions asked if I’m going to figure out what happened.”

“But it’s been months. They could already have found the real murderer by now.”

“They had no reason to look for anyone else. If for some reason they found him”—Henry shrugged—“I’ll find out when I get there.”

“Him?”

He looked up. “What?”

“You said ‘if they’ve found
him
.’ You’re sure it isn’t a woman?”

“I have no idea who it is! Otherwise I’d have been doing something about it.”

“So it could be a woman.”

“No! I guess.” He flung a hand in the air. “It could have been a man, a woman, a band of gypsies, an avenging angel from God for all I know. I. Didn’t. See. Anyone. So it most likely was
me
.”

“Did you see any footprints in the mud near her body?” Cora asked, not at all ruffled by his outburst. “That could tell us gender.”

“I don’t know!” He took a deep breath and answered more calmly, “I can’t recall.”

“Henry, you told me you live this in your head every day. Close your eyes and move through your memories slowly, not in the rush of reality. There are probably a lot of things you saw that are buried in there. Maybe the reason you said
him
was because you saw something that made you think that. Your answer was instant. You were adamant when you said it couldn’t be a woman.
Then
you questioned it. First impulses are usually right.”

Henry doubted that. His first impulse had been to run. That obviously hadn’t been right. He buried his face in his hands and willed away the urge to throw up.

“Start with Emmaline and Johanna’s voices,” Cora suggested. “Concentrate on all of your senses, not just sight. Were there any other sounds—maybe so quiet you didn’t consider them important? And when you get to where you see her, think of the bigger picture, not just the hair in the water. She was wearing blue.”

“She was?” He realized he didn’t even remember the color of her dress. His memory was so sparse, how was he going to argue his innocence?

“She was. Or at least it had a lot of blue in it. You said her hair ribbon was blue.”

He focused on the image in his mind: the blood, the hair, shoulders
in the water. “She was wearing blue! Sky blue.” With dark spatters of blood down the back.

“There! It’s working already. Sometimes thinking about what you heard will help, too, or what you smelled. Those things trigger memory.”

“How do you know?”

“It happens all the time. You smell oranges and think of Christmas. Or you hear a church bell and think of the end of the war. Whenever I smell the exhaust from the motorcycle, I think of Jonathan. I see his cocky grin, his green eyes. Every time. Even now.”

Henry nodded. Hope’s sails filled with the recollection of the dress. Then he closed his eyes and went through his memories again. Starting with how hot the sun was on the back of his neck. The sound of the hoe hitting and then shifting the dirt. But once started, the memories came in a flood, one falling over the other. He didn’t even recall the color of the dress; that only came when conscious thought kicked in. “Nothing more.”

“You’re probably trying too hard. Try it again as you’re falling asleep. Maybe that’ll help. For now, we’re going to assume it was a man because that was your inclination.”

“Probably because I can’t imagine a woman committing a bloody murder.”

“Then you clearly don’t know women very well, Henry.”

He couldn’t argue that.

“But until you remember . . .” She got up and began to pace the room.