Wreck the Halls (11 page)

Then: “I won’t gossip,” Kenty repeated determinedly, pouring tea from a china pot with a tremulous, freckled hand. “I’m not going to talk.”

Au contraire. But Kenty, I’d heard, wasn’t the sort of gossip who came on too strong, right off the bat. First I would have to make a show of persuading her, so she could tell herself she hadn’t volunteered anything; that instead I had inveigled it from her.

The hot, strong tea worked its magic swiftly, and the room's temperature was a good ten degrees above what I was used to at home; I began thawing as Kenty put her hands in her lap like a child awaiting a scolding. I got the message: I was to persuade, but not waste time doing it.

“Kenty,” I began in the stern, loving tone I’d once used on Sam. It hadn’t worked, but at the time he hadn’t so much wanted it to.

She began to cry. “Oh, it was horrible,” she gasped, wiping her eyes with an embroidered linen handkerchief from her skirt pocket. “It went on and on, every other day, practically. The shouting, the cursing. Him screaming and threatening her. I told her, I said, Faye Anne, next time I’m going to call the police.”

“But you never did.” There had not, to my knowledge, ever been an official complaint about Merle Carmody.

“She begged me not to. Said it would go much worse for her later, if I did.”

It was the excuse we’d all given ourselves, the one Faye Anne had pressed upon us. Kenty peered at me in appeal through her glasses, their lenses’ lower halves thick as Coke-bottle bottoms. So heavy they made Ellie's heavy-duty prescription seem like clear glass, they were the kind worn by people who have had old-fashioned cataract surgery. Behind them her watery grey eyes had a wobbly, gelatinlike appearance.

“So I didn’t. I never called.”

The room smelled of sweet tea and furniture polish tinctured with a hint of liniment, and the furnishings themselves were the sort of New England heirlooms you see in museums: a slant-topped secretary, a brass-handled highboy, a sideboard with bird's-eye-maple drawer fronts. At one end of the tea table were a clutch of small, often-used items: a box of tisssues, the TV remote wand, a needlepointed eyeglass case, prescription eye drops, and three orange plastic pharmacy bottles.

“But I should have,” she added wretchedly.

A wonderful old Persian rug spread a rich, red pattern over the floor. These were things from another time in her life, when she had been busy, important, and social. In the bookcases stood rows of books on horticulture, several of them written by Kenty herself, and on the sideboard stood a silver tray with glasses and a decanter, empty now.

The only exception to the elegant theme was a Laz-E-Boy recliner looming like an elephant among the gazelles, where in the evenings she probably watched TV instead of appearing on it as she once had. I saw the word nitroglycerine on one pill bottle, digitalis on another.

I couldn’t make out the third label. “What I should have done,” she said with sudden venom, “was kill him, myself. I’m an old woman, what can they do to me?”

Her change of mood startled me.

“They can’t scare me. Old age,” she grinned, “is scary enough.”

Which made me begin thinking that maybe Kenty was a little scary, herself. Oh, she was sharp enough, and her costume, a pink plaid housedress, thick stockings, and soft shoes, was clean and neat, properly belted and buttoned. Her hairdo was a perfect blue-white clip-job with a fresh permanent wave set into it, above pearl earrings.

But I had doubts, now, about what she could have seen:
the thick glasses. And about how accurately she might report it, too.

Her grey eyes filled with tears magnified by the cataract lenses. “That poor child,” she mourned quaveringly.

So emotional… “Kenty, the night it happened. When's the last time you saw Merle alive? Someone must’ve already asked you that, right?”

She nodded grimly. “Those men. Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”

The state guys, she meant; they’d mentioned interviewing the neighbors. I repressed a smile as she went on: “I told them. I saw Merle that afternoon. Saw him go out, come back. Maybe,” she went on, sounding confused, “Faye Anne was right in there waiting for him, right that minute.”

But then she looked calculating. “No. That couldn’t be.”

“Why not?” She was bewilderingly changeable; as if she weren’t sure, herself, what she might say or do in the next moment. But her answering words were certain, not at all confused.

“Because I went over there that evening. I didn’t see him, but I heard him. He was alive. Be sure and say that, dear, will you?”

My turn to be confused: say it to whom?

Then: “Dear, would you like to see my new babies?”

An inward sigh. Sure, Kenty; and after that let's just the two of us hop down the rabbit hole, pay a call on the Cheshire Cat. If we’re lucky we’ll find something to drink that will make us very small. Or large.

I didn’t know Kenty very well; her social circle, such as it was, consisted of women and a few men who would have been my parents’ age. But this was so disappointing. She crossed the room in halting steps.

“Come and see them. I’ve been nursing them along.”

What I wanted to know was whether Kenty had seen anyone going in or out of the Carmody house, other than

Merle or Faye Anne. But now I wasn’t sure if there was any point to asking her anything.

She gestured impatiently at me, her expression eager; humoring her, I obeyed. She was a sweet person but the sad truth was that she’d gotten a little batty.

In the next few minutes, however, my impression of her was turned upside down yet again. “Here they are,” she announced proudly. Under a fluorescent light fixture stood a tray of a dozen two-inch plastic pots. In each, a plant so small it looked embryonic put up leaves no bigger than the nail on my little finger. A plastic stick bore each plant's varietal name: Victorian Velvet. Rodeo Clown. Coral Sunset.

“Oh,” I breathed, amazed. The tray was a collection of tiny miracles.

“People say African violets don’t root well in water, but mine always do,” Kenty said. “I use little pimento jars to get them started in, and they do fine. Of course, it is quite a trick to manage to eat up all those pimentos.”

Her chuckle sounded thoroughly sane, now; this was eerie, like a Jekyll-and-Hyde act. “But about the other night,” she recounted briskly. “I went over there to borrow some sugar for some cookies I was baking. Only it was a garden club night, so Faye Anne was out. The other garden club, I mean.”

Everyone called it that, even its own members. All except Melinda, of course. Meanwhile as Kenty spoke, I began getting the uncomfortable feeling that she was telling me this for some reason.

Other than to get it off her chest, I mean. But that was silly; especially given her general frailty, what reason could there be?

“I don’t know why Melinda insisted on moving the meeting night to Sunday. She's a foolish girl anyway. Do you know she never wears a coat?”

I did. I also thought I knew why she’d moved the day of
the club meetings: Monday night was football night, and talk around town was that Melinda's brother, a guy no one knew well at all, had come to live with her a few months earlier.

And Melinda was the kind of snob who didn’t want you to know she even owned a television, much less that football was ever displayed on it. More to the point, though, Melinda had said that Faye Anne wasn’t at the meeting. Or Peter Christie, either. “What happened then?” I asked Kenty.

“I knocked, got no answer, walked in and called for Faye Anne,” she replied. In the bluish winter light from the parlor window you could see how lovely she had been, once: high forehead and swanlike throat that even now was only a little crepey, and her cheekbones were still to die for.

She preened a little under my admiring glance. “Then I remembered where she must be,” she went on. “But I knew where the sugar was, so I got it, and called out once more. That time, he did answer me.”

Kenty's lips tightened. “He sounded grumpy, as usual, and also a little drunk, of course. So I didn’t go out to the shop to say hello, as I might have otherwise.”

I glanced questioningly at her; greeting Merle wasn’t the high point of anyone's day or evening. “I tried to keep on civil terms with him,” she explained. “For Faye Anne's sake.”

“And that was the last time you saw him. Heard him, I mean. And you did not see Faye Anne at all.”

Something else was wrong about all this, too, but at that moment I couldn’t quite figure out what.

Kenty turned from fiddling with one of the plantlets. “Oh, no. I saw them both later that evening. After I’d done my baking I went back with the sugar and a plate of cookies. Faye Anne was home, by then, and everything seemed fine. Nothing amiss.”

She drew back from the plants. “Nothing was wrong, for once. And that was the last I saw them.”

“What about Peter Christie? Ever see him hanging around when he shouldn’t be? Faye Anne mentioned she had the feeling someone was watching her. And he said he was keeping an eye on her, because he was worried about her. So I’m assuming it was him, but…”

Her gaze darkened. The glasses made her eyes huge, as if they were the eyes of some other kind of creature entirely: strange and intensely vulnerable.

“If it was him, he was doing more than watching,” she said. “Faye Anne told me she was getting phone calls. Somebody just waited until she answered, then hung up. She even asked the phone company to put some sort of a tracer on the calls, but it turned out they couldn’t.”

Out in the parlor, Monday sighed contentedly. I hated to make her go, but Kenty was moving me expertly toward the hall, having accomplished, apparently, whatever she had intended. “Because it seems…” she began.

By now she sounded fully in command of her wits, her emotions, and anything else that could possibly have needed commanding; it was as if a magic wand had somehow been waved over Kenty Dalrymple. Witnessing this transformation, I found myself wondering if maybe something out of that third pill bottle had kicked in, suddenly and beneficially.

“… it seems,” she concluded, serene and in control, “that it's still very difficult, even nowadays, to trace a cell-phone call.”

On the way
home I thought over the rest of what Kenty said, as she’d ushered me out: that to her knowledge no one else had entered the Carmody house the whole day and evening before Merle was found dead in it. She’d sounded certain, not a bit quavery.

Or batty. “But would she have seen them?” Ellie wanted to know when I found her back at my house, working in the kitchen.

Monday started shivering as we went up the porch steps. I had to lure her in with a biscuit, after which she wormed her way under the kitchen table and curled up with the chair legs.

Ellie was cutting candied fruit. A dozen empty coffee cans stood on the drainboard with a bottle of brandy, a roll of waxed paper, baking ingredients, and a mixing bowl big enough to mix a load of concrete in.

“Kenty says she would have. What she wanted me to know, though, was that she didn’t. And she seemed particularly intent on making sure that I would tell other people so, too.”

Once upon a time this kitchen had held a woodstove, an icebox, and a soapstone sink, and it was not much more modern now. But the preheating oven, the board-and-batten wainscoting, and Ellie's calm competence made it feel cozier, if a bit less convenient, than any up-to-date kitchen I’d ever been in, much less owned.

I peered at the things Ellie had assembled.

“Fruitcake,” I said. “Oh, good.” I think fruitcake makes an excellent doorstop. “But isn’t it a little late to be baking them? I thought you had to leave them in the brandy a long time. Months, even. To mummify, or whatever they do.”

Ellie turned from cutting an orchard's worth of candied cherries. Pouring me a mug of hot coffee, she opened the brandy bottle and added a generous dollop. “Here. It’ll make you feel better.”

Just breathing the fumes made me feel better. I swallowed some. That made me feel better, too.

A lot better. “You know what? Something's rotten in Denmark.” On the kitchen table with more coffee cans and

Ellie's handbag lay an old photo album; she must have brought it.

“These cakes are for next year,” she said, returning to her work.

“Did you hear what I said?” I opened the album.

“Rotten. Yes. I agree.” In another bowl she’d already beaten what looked like a dozen eggs. The microwave beeped; she removed the butter she’d been softening and added white and brown sugar. Next came the eggs, flour, and a tree-load of chopped walnuts, plus raisins and the candied fruit: pineapple, citron, cherries, and some green things that I didn’t know what they were, exactly, only that they were the color of something left over from St. Patrick's Day.

Looking down, I glanced at the album photos, then gazed at them. Some were of Faye Anne Carmody, only not the Faye Anne I’d known. In one photograph—a class picnic, I thought, or a party—she wore a long skirt, slim knit shirt, and strappy sandals, her long hair flying behind her as Ellie pushed her high on a swing. They were both about seventeen, then, it looked to me, laughing and long-limbed.

Next photo: Faye Anne perched on a high rock overlooking the water, one graceful foot outstretched as if daring gravity to take her. Not believing, though, that it ever could. Her blithe confidence, wide grin, and upturned face, nearly arrogant in its happiness, were all new to me; the Faye Anne I’d known was a cautious, hunched creature, scuttling and shy, with an anxious giggle in place of a laugh and shoulders habitually tensed as if readied for the inevitable next blow.

In the final shot of her, Merle stood beside her, she gazing up at him as if he’d just recently descended from heaven, he in the act of crushing a beer can in one fist, the other ropy, muscular arm looped possessively around her and his grin leering, already smeary with drink.

She didn’t see that part, though. Not yet; to her, Merle Carmody would have seemed merely a walk on the wild
side, one she could return from without lasting harm whenever she liked. In her wide, innocent eyes I could read all that Faye Anne had hoped for, all she’d expected on that sunny, long-ago day.