The Secret History (54 page)
Read The Secret History Online
Authors: Donna Tartt
After dinner, I went back to my room. I dreaded the thought of the night ahead, but not for the reasons one might expect—that I was worried about the police, or that my conscience bothered me, or anything of the sort. Quite the contrary. By that time, by some purely subconscious means, I had developed a successful mental block about the murder and everything pertaining to it. I talked about it in select company but seldom thought of it when alone.
What I did experience when alone was a sort of general neurotic horror, a common attack of nerves and self-loathing magnified to the power of ten. Every cruel or fatuous thing I’d ever said came back to me with an amplified clarity, no matter how I talked to myself or jerked my head to shake the thoughts away: old insults and guilts and embarrassments stretching clear back to childhood—the crippled boy I’d made fun of, the Easter chick I’d squeezed to death—paraded before me one by one, in vivid and mordant splendor.
I tried to work on Greek but it wasn’t much good. I would look up a word in the lexicon only to forget it when I turned to write it down; my noun cases, my verb forms, had left me utterly. Around midnight I went downstairs and called the twins. Camilla answered the phone. She was sleepy, a little drunk and getting ready for bed.
“Tell me a funny story,” I said.
“I can’t think of any funny stories.”
“
Any
story.”
“Cinderella? The Three Bears?”
“Tell me something that happened to you when you were little.”
So she told me about the only time she remembered seeing her father, before he and her mother were killed. It was snowing, she said, and Charles was asleep, and she was standing in her crib looking out the window. Her father was out in the yard in an old gray sweater, throwing snowballs against the side of the
fence. “It must have been about the middle of the afternoon. I don’t know what he was doing there. All I know is that I saw him, and I wanted to go out
so
bad, and I was trying to climb out of my crib and go to him. Then my grandmother came in and put the bars up so I couldn’t get out, and I started to cry. My uncle Hilary—he was my grandmother’s brother, he lived with us when we were little—came in the room and saw me crying. ‘Poor little girl,’ he said. He rummaged around in his pockets, and finally he found a tape measure and gave it to me to play with.”
“A tape measure?”
“Yes. You know, the ones that snap in when you push a button. Charles and I used to fight over it all the time. It’s still at home somewhere.”
Late the next morning I woke with an unpleasant start to a knock at my door.
I opened it to find Camilla, who looked as if she’d dressed in a hurry. She came in and locked the door behind her while I stood blinking sleepily in my bathrobe. “Have you been outside today?” she said.
A spider of anxiety crawled up the back of my neck. I sat down on the side of my bed. “No,” I said. “Why?”
“I don’t know
what’s
going on. The police are talking to Charles and Henry, and I don’t even know where Francis is.”
“What?”
“A policeman came by and asked for Charles around seven this morning. He didn’t say what he wanted. Charles got dressed and they went off together and then, at eight, I got a call from Henry. He asked if I’d mind if he was a little late this morning? And I asked what he was talking about, because we hadn’t planned to meet. ‘Oh, thanks,’ he said, ‘I knew you’d understand, the police are here about Bunny, you see, and they want to ask some questions.’ ”
“I’m sure it’ll be all right.”
She ran a hand through her hair, in an exasperated gesture reminiscent of her brother. “But it’s not just that,” she said. “There are people all over the place. Reporters. Police. It’s like a madhouse.”
“Are they looking for him?”
“I don’t know
what
they’re doing. They seem to be headed up towards Mount Cataract.”
“Maybe we should leave campus for a while.”
Her pale, silvery glance skittered anxiously around my room. “Maybe,” she said. “Get dressed and we’ll decide what to do.”
I was in the bathroom scraping a quick razor over my face when Judy Poovey came in and rushed over so fast I cut my cheek. “Richard,” she said, her hand on my arm. “Have you heard?”
I touched my face and looked at the blood on my fingertips, then glanced at her, annoyed. “Heard what?”
“About Bunny,” she said, her voice hushed and her eyes wide.
I stared at her, not knowing what she was going to say.
“Jack Teitelbaum told me. Cloke was talking to him about it last night. I never heard of anybody just, like,
vanishing
. It’s too weird. And Jack was saying, well, if they haven’t found him by now.… I mean, I’m sure he’s all right and everything,” she said when she saw the way I was looking at her.
I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“If you want to stop by or anything, I’ll be at home.”
“Sure.”
“I mean, if you want to talk or something. I’m always there. Just stop by.”
“Thanks,” I said, a little too abruptly.
She looked up at me, her eyes large with compassion, with understanding of the solitude and incivility of grief. “It’ll be okay,” she said, giving my arm a squeeze, and then she left, pausing in the door for a sorrowful backwards glance.
Despite what Camilla had said, I was unprepared for the riot of activity outside. The parking lot was full and people from Hampden town were everywhere—factory workers mostly, from the looks of them, some with lunch boxes, others with children-beating the ground with sticks and making their way towards Mount Cataract in broad, straggling lines as students milled about and looked at them curiously. There were policemen, deputies, a state trooper or two; on the lawn, parked beside a couple of official-looking vehicles, was a remote radio-station hookup, a concessions truck, and a van from ActionNews Twelve.
“What are all these people doing here?” I said.
“Look,” she said. “Is that Francis?”
Far away, in the busy multitude, I saw a flash of red hair, the conspicuous line of muffled throat and black greatcoat. Camilla stuck up her hand and yelled to him.
He shouldered his way through a bunch of cafeteria workers who had come outside to see what was going on. He was smoking a cigarette; there was a newspaper tucked under his arm. “Hello,” he said. “Can you believe this?”
“What’s going on?”
“A treasure hunt.”
“What?”
“The Corcorans put up a big reward in the night. All the factories in Hampden are closed. Anybody want some coffee? I have a dollar.”
We picked our way to the concessions truck, through a sparse, gloomy gathering of janitors and maintenance men.
“Three coffees, two with milk, please,” said Francis to the fat woman behind the counter.
“No milk, just Cremora.”
“Well, then, just black, I guess.” He turned to us. “Have you seen the paper this morning?”
It was a late edition of the Hampden
Examiner
. In a column on the first page was a blurry, recent photograph of Bunny and under it this caption:
POLICE, KIN, SEEK YOUTH, 24, MISSING IN HAMPDEN
.
“Twenty-four?” I said, startled. The twins and I were twenty years old, and Henry and Francis were twenty-one.
“He failed a grade or two in elementary school,” said Camilla. “Ahh.”
Sunday afternoon Edmund Corcoran, a Hampden College student known to his family and friends as “Bunny,” attended a campus party which he apparently left some time in the middle of the afternoon in order to meet his girlfriend Marion Barnbridge of Rye, New York, also a student at Hampden. That was the last that anyone has seen of Bunny Corcoran.
The concerned Barnbridge, along with friends of Corcoran’s, yesterday alerted state and local police, who put out a Missing Persons Bulletin. Today the search begins in the Hampden area. The missing youth is described as
(See p. 5)
“Are you finished?” I asked Camilla.
“Yes. Turn the page.”
being six-feet, three inches tall, weighing 190 pounds, with sandy blond hair and blue eyes. He wears glasses, and when last seen was wearing a gray tweed sports coat, khaki pants, and a yellow rain slicker.
“Here’s your coffee, Richard,” said Francis, turning gingerly with a cup in either hand.
At St. Jerome’s preparatory school in College Falls, Massachusetts, Corcoran was active in varsity sports, lettering in hockey, lacrosse and crew and leading his football team, the Wolverines, to a state championship when he captained during senior year. At Hampden Corcoran served as a volunteer fire marshall. He studied literature and languages, with a concentration in Classics, and was described by fellow students as “a scholar.”
“Ha,” said Camilla.
Cloke Rayburn, a school friend of Corcoran’s and one of those who first notified police, said that Corcoran “is a real straight guy—definitely not mixed up in drugs or anything like that.”
Yesterday afternoon, after growing suspicious, he broke into Corcoran’s dormitory room, and subsequently notified police.
“That’s not right,” Camilla said. “He didn’t call them.”
“There’s not a word about Charles.”
“
Thank God,
” she said, in Greek.
Corcoran’s parents, Macdonald and Katherine Corcoran of Shady Brook, Connecticut, arrive in Hampden today to assist in the search for the youngest of their five children. (See “A Family Prays,” p. 10.) In a telephone interview Mr. Corcoran, who is president of the Bingham Bank and Trust Company and a member of the Board of Directors of the First National Bank of Connecticut, said, “There’s not much we can do down here. We want to assist if we can.” He said that he had spoken to his son by telephone a week before the disappearance and had noticed nothing unusual.
Of her son, Katherine Corcoran said: “Edmund is a very family-oriented type person. If anything was wrong I know he would have told Mack or myself.”
A reward of fifty thousand dollars is being offered for information leading to the whereabouts of Edmund Corcoran, provided through contributions from the Corcoran family, the Bingham Bank and Trust Company, and the Highland Heights Lodge of the Loyal Order of the Moose.
The wind was blowing. With Camilla’s help, I folded the newspaper and handed it back to Francis. “Fifty thousand dollars,” I said. “That’s a lot of money.”
“And you wonder why you see all these people from Hampden town up here this morning?” said Francis, taking a sip of his coffee. “Gosh, it’s cold out here.”
We turned and started back towards Commons. Camilla said to Francis: “You know about Charles and Henry, don’t you?”
“Well, they told Charles they might want to talk to him, didn’t they?”
“But Henry?”
“I wouldn’t waste my time worrying about him.”
Commons was overheated and surprisingly empty. The three of us sat on a clammy, black vinyl couch and drank our coffee. People drifted in and out, bringing blasts of cold air from outdoors; some of them came over to ask if there was any news. Jud “Party Pig” MacKenna, as Vice-president of the Student Council, came over with his empty paint can to ask if we would like to donate to an emergency search fund. Between us, we contributed a dollar in change.
