Chapter 5

CHAPTER

5

WHEN THE LIGHTS came on, and the circle of darkness leaped back into the mundane and familiar boundaries of the living room—

cluttered desk; low, lumpy sofa; the dusty and modishly cut draperies that had fallen to Francis after one of his mother’s decorating purges

—it was as if I’d switched on the lamp after a long bad dream; blinking, I was relieved to discover that the doors and windows were still where they were supposed to be and that the furniture hadn’t rearranged itself, by diabolical magic, in the dark.

The bolt turned. Francis stepped in from the dark hall. He was breathing hard, pulling with dispirited jerks at the fingertips of a glove.

“Jesus, Henry,” he said. “What a night.”

I was out of his line of vision. Henry glanced at me and cleared his throat discreetly. Francis wheeled around.

I thought I looked back at him casually enough, but evidently I didn’t. It must have been all over my face.

He stared at me for a long time, the glove half on, half off, dangling limply from his hand.

“Oh, no,” he said at last, without moving his eyes away from mine.

“Henry. You didn’t.”

“I’m afraid I did,” Henry said.

Francis squeezed his eyes tight shut, then reopened them. He had got very white, his pallor dry and talcumy as a chalk drawing on

rough paper. For a moment I wondered if he might faint.

“It’s all right,” said Henry.

Francis didn’t move.

“Really, Francis,” Henry said, a trifle peevishly, “it’s all right. Sit down.”

Breathing hard, he made his way across the room and fell heavily into an armchair, where he rummaged in his pocket for a cigarette.

“He knew,” said Henry. “I told you so.”

Francis looked up at me, the unlit cigarette trembling in his fingertips. “Did you?”

I didn’t answer. For a moment I found myself wondering if this was all some monstrous practical joke. Francis dragged a hand down the side of his face.

“I suppose everybody knows now,” he said. “I don’t even know why I feel bad about it.”

Henry had stepped into the kitchen for a glass. Now he poured some Scotch in it and handed it to Francis. “Deprendi miserum est,”

he said.

To my surprise Francis laughed, a humorless little snort.

“Good Lord,” he said, and took a long drink. “What a nightmare. I can’t imagine what you must think of us, Richard.”

“It doesn’t matter.” I said this without thinking, but as soon as I had, I realized, with something of a jolt, that it was true; it really didn’t matter that much, at least not in the preconceived way that one would expect.

“Well, I guess you could say we’re in quite a fix,” said Francis, rubbing his eyes with thumb and forefinger. “I don’t know what we’re going to do with Bunny. I wanted to slap him when we were standing in line for that damned movie.”

“You took him to Manchester?” Henry said.

“Yes. But people are so nosy and you never do really know who might be sitting behind you, do you? It wasn’t even a good movie.”

“What was it?”

“Some nonsense about a bachelor party. I just want to take a sleeping pill and go to bed.” He drank off the rest of his Scotch and

poured himself another inch. “Jesus,” he said to me. “You’re being so nice about this. I feel awfully embarrassed by this whole thing.”

There was a long silence.

Finally I said: “What are you going to do?”

Francis sighed. “We didn’t mean to do anything,” he said. “I know it sounds kind of bad, but what can we do about it now?”

The resigned note in his voice simultaneously angered and distressed me. “I don’t know,” I said. “Why for God’s sake didn’t you go to the police?”

“Surely you’re joking,” said Henry dryly.

“Tell them you don’t know what happened? That you found him lying out in the woods? Or, God, I don’t know, that you hit him with the car, that he ran out in front of you or something?”

“That would have been a very foolish thing to do,” Henry said. “It was an unfortunate incident and I am sorry that it happened, but frankly I do not see how well either the taxpayers’ interests or my own would be served by my spending sixty or seventy years in a Vermont jail.”

“But it was an accident. You said so yourself.”

Henry shrugged.

“If you’d gone right in, you could’ve got off on some minor charge.

Maybe nothing would have happened at all.”

“Maybe not,” Henry said agreeably. “But remember, this is Vermont.”

“What the hell difference does that make?”

“It makes a great deal of difference, unfortunately. If the thing went to trial, we’d be tried here. And not, I might add, by a jury of our peers.”

“So?”

“Say what you like, but you can’t convince me that a jury box of poverty-level Vermonters would have the remotest bit of pity for four college students on trial for murdering one of their neighbors.”

“People in Hampden have been hoping for years that something like this would happen,” said Francis, lighting a new cigarette off the end of the old one. “We wouldn’t be getting off on any manslaughter charges. We’d be lucky if we didn’t go to the chair.”

“Imagine how it would look,” Henry said. “We’re all young, well educated, reasonably well off; and, perhaps most importantly, not Vermonters. And I suppose that any equitable judge might make allowances for our youth, and the fact that it was an accident and so forth, but—”

“Four rich college kids?” said Francis. “Drunk? On drugs? On this guy’s land in the middle of the night?”

“You were on his land?”

“Well, apparently,” said Henry. “That’s where the papers said his body was found.”

I hadn’t been in Vermont very long, but I’d been there long enough to know what any Vermonter worth his salt would think of that.

Trespassing on someone’s land was tantamount to breaking into his house. “Oh, God,” I said.

“That’s not the half of it, either,” said Francis. “For Christ’s sake, we were wearing bed sheets. Barefoot. Soaked in blood. Stinking drunk. Can you imagine if we’d trailed down to the sheriff’s office and tried to explain all that? ”

“Not that we were in any condition to explain,” Henry said dreamily. “Really. I wonder if you understand what sort of state we were in. Scarcely an hour before, we’d all been really, truly out of our minds. And it may be a superhuman effort to lose oneself so completely, but that’s nothing compared to the effort of getting oneself back again.”

“It certainly wasn’t as if something snapped and there we were, our jolly old selves,” said Francis. “Believe me. We might as well have had shock treatments.”

“I really don’t know how we got home without being seen,” Henry said.

“No way could we have patched together a plausible story from this. Good Lord. It was weeks before I got over it. Camilla couldn’t even talk for three days.”

With a small chill, I remembered: Camilla, her throat wrapped in a red muffler, unable to speak. Laryngitis, they’d said.

“Yes, that was very strange,” said Henry. “She was thinking clearly enough, but the words wouldn’t come out right. As if she’d had a

stroke. When she started to speak again, her high-school French came back before her English or her Greek. Nursery words. I remember sitting by her bed, listening to her count to ten, watching her point to la fenêtre, la chaise …”

Francis laughed. “She was so funny,” he said. “When I asked her how she felt she said, ‘ Je me sens comme Hélène Keller, mon vieux.’ ”

“Did she go to the doctor?”

“Are you kidding?”

“What if she hadn’t got any better?”

“Well, the same thing happened to all of us,” said Henry. “Only it more or less wore off in a couple of hours.”

“You couldn’t talk?”

“Bitten and scratched to pieces?” Francis said. “Tongue-tied? Half mad? If we’d gone to the police they would have charged us with every unsolved death in New England for the last five years.” He held up an imaginary newspaper. “ ‘Crazed Hippies Indicted for Rural Thrill-Killing.’ ‘Cult Slaying of Old Abe So-and-So.’ ”

“Teen Satanists Murder Longtime Vermont Resident,” said Henry, lighting a cigarette.

Francis started to laugh.

“It would be one thing if we had even a chance at a decent hearing,” said Henry. “But we don’t.”

“And I personally can’t imagine much worse than being tried for my life by a Vermont circuit-court judge and a jury box full of telephone operators.”

“Things aren’t marvelous,” said Henry, “but they could certainly be worse. The big problem now is Bunny.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Nothing’s wrong with him.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“He just can’t keep his mouth shut, that’s all.”

“Haven’t you talked to him?”

“About ten million times,” Francis said.

“Has he tried to go to the police?”

“If he goes on like this,” said Henry, “he won’t have to. They’ll come right to us. Reasoning with him does no good. He just doesn’t grasp what a serious business this is.”

“Surely he doesn’t want to see you go to jail.”

“If he thought about it, I’m sure he’d realize he didn’t,” said Henry evenly. “And I’m sure he’d realize that he doesn’t particularly want to go to jail himself, either.”

“Bunny? But why—?”

“Because he’s known about this since November and he hasn’t gone to the police,” Francis said.

“But that’s beside the point,” said Henry. “Even he has sense enough not to turn us in. He doesn’t have much of an alibi for the night of the murder, and if it ever came to prison for the rest of us I think he must know that I, at least, would do everything in my power to see he came along with us.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “The problem is he’s just a fool, and sooner or later he’s going to say the wrong thing to the wrong person,” he said. “Perhaps not intentionally, but I can’t pretend to be too concerned with motive at this point. You heard him this morning. He’d be in quite a spot himself if this got back to the police but of course he thinks those ghastly jokes are all terribly subtle and clever and over everyone’s head.”

“He’s only just smart enough to realize what a mistake turning us in would be,” said Francis, pausing to pour himself another drink.

“But we can’t seem to pound it into him that it’s even more in his own self-interest not to go around talking like he does. And, really, I’m not at all sure he won’t just come out and tell someone, when he’s in one of these confessional moods.”

“Tell someone? Like who?”

“Marion. His father. The Dean of Studies.” He shuddered. “Gives me the creeps just to think about it. He’s just the sort who always stands up in the back of the courtroom during the last five minutes of Terry Mason.’ ”

“Bunny Corcoran, Boy Detective,” said Henry dryly.

“How did he find out? He wasn’t with you, was he?”

“As a matter of fact,” said Francis, “he was with you. ” He glanced at Henry, and to my surprise the two of them began to laugh.

“What? What’s so funny?” I said, alarmed.

This sent them into fresh peals of laughter. “Nothing,” said Francis at last.

“Really, it is nothing,” said Henry, with a bemused little sigh. “The oddest things make me laugh these days.” He lit another cigarette.

“He was with you that night, early in the evening, anyway.

Remember? You went to the movies.”

“The Thirty-Nine Steps, ” Francis said.

With something of a start, I did remember: a windy autumn night, full moon obscured by dusty rags of cloud. I’d worked late in the library and hadn’t gone to dinner. Walking home, a sandwich from the snack bar in my pocket, and the dry leaves skittering and dancing on the path before me, I’d run into Bunny on his way to the Hitchcock series, which the Film Society was showing in the auditorium.

We were late and there were no seats left so we sat on the carpeted stairs, Bunny leaning back on his elbows with his legs stretched in front of him, cracking pensively with his rear molars at a little Dum-Dum sucker. The high wind rattled the flimsy walls; a door banged open and shut until somebody propped it open with a brick.

On the screen, locomotives screaming across a black-and-white nightmare of iron-bridged chasms.

“We had a drink afterwards,” I said. “Then he went to his room.”

Henry sighed. “I wish he had,” he said.

“He kept asking if I knew where you were.”

“He knew himself, very well. We’d threatened half a dozen times to leave him at home if he didn’t behave.”

“So he got the bright idea of coming around to Henry’s to scare him,” said Francis, pouring himself another drink.

“I was so angry about that,” said Henry abruptly. “Even if nothing had happened, it was a sneaky thing to do. He knew where the spare key was, and he just got it and let himself in.”

“Even so, nothing might have happened. It was just a horrible string of coincidences. If we’d stopped in the country to get rid of our clothes, if we’d come here or to the twins’, if Bunny only hadn’t fallen asleep …”

“He was asleep?”

“Yes, or otherwise he would have got discouraged and left,” Henry said. “We didn’t get back to Hampden until six in the morning. It was a miracle we found our way to the car, over all those fields and things in the dark.… Well, it was foolish to drive to North Hampden in those bloody clothes. The police could have pulled us over, we could have had a wreck, anything. But I felt ill, and I wasn’t thinking clearly, and I suppose I drove to my own apartment by instinct.”

“He left my room around midnight.”

“Well, then, he was alone in my apartment from about twelve-thirty to six a.m. And the coroner reckoned the time of death between one and four. That’s one of the few decent cards fate dealt us in the whole hand. Though Bunny wasn’t with us, he’d have a hard time proving he wasn’t. Unfortunately, that’s not a card we can play except in the direst circumstances.” He shrugged. “If only he’d left the lamp on, anything to tip us off.”

“But that was going to be the big surprise, you see. Jumping out at us from the dark.”

“We walked in and turned on the light, and then it was too late. He woke up instantly. And there we were—”

“—all white robes and bloody like something from Edgar Allan Poe,” Francis said gloomily.

“Jesus, what did he do?”

“What do you think? We scared him half to death.”

“It served him right,” said Henry.

“Tell him about the ice cream.”

“Really, this was the last straw,” Henry said crossly. “He took a quart of ice cream out of my freezer to eat while he waited—he couldn’t bother to get a bowl of it, you understand, he had to have the whole quart—and when he fell asleep it melted all over him and on my chair and on that nice little Oriental rug I used to have. Well. It was quite a good antique, that rug, but the dry cleaners said there was nothing they could do. It came back in shreds. And my chair. ”

He reached for a cigarette. “He screamed like a banshee when he saw us—”

“—and he would not shut up,” said Francis. “Remember, it was six o’clock in the morning, the neighbors sleeping …” He shook his head. “I remember Charles taking a step towards him, trying to talk to him, and Bunny yelling bloody murder. After a minute or two—”

“It was only a few seconds,” Henry said.

“—after a minute, Camilla picked up a glass ashtray and threw it at him and hit him square in the chest.”

“It wasn’t a hard blow,” said Henry thoughtfully, “but it was quite judiciously timed. Instantly he shut up and stared at her and I said to him, ‘Bunny, shut up. You’ll wake the neighbors. We’ve hit a deer in the road on the way home.’ ”

“So then,” said Francis, “he wiped his brow and rolled his eyes and went through the whole Bunny routine—boy you guys scared me and must’ve been half-asleep and just on and on and on—”

“And meanwhile,” Henry said, “the four of us were standing there in the bloody sheets, the lights on, no curtains, in full view of anyone who might happen to drive by. He was talking so loudly, and the lights were so bright, and I felt so faint with exhaustion and shock that I couldn’t do much more than stare at him. My God—we were covered with this man’s blood, we’d tracked it into the house, the sun was coming up, and here, to top it all off, was Bunny. I couldn’t force myself to think what to do. Then Camilla, quite sensibly, flicked off the light and all of a sudden I realized no matter how it looked, no matter who was there, we had to get out of our clothes and wash up without losing another second.”

“I practically had to rip the sheet off,” said Francis. “The blood had dried and it was stuck to me. By the time I’d managed that, Henry and the others were in the bathroom. Spray was flying; the water in the bathtub was backed up red; rusty splashes on the tile. It was a nightmare.”

“I can’t tell you how unfortunate it was that Bunny happened to be there,” said Henry, shaking his head. “But for heaven’s sake, we couldn’t just stand around and wait for him to leave. There was blood everywhere, the neighbors would soon be up, for all I knew the police would be pounding at the door any second.…”

“Well, it was too bad we alarmed him, but then, it wasn’t like we thought we were doing this in front of J. Edgar Hoover, either,” said Francis.

“Exactly,” said Henry. “I don’t want to convey the impression that Bunny’s presence seemed like a tremendous menace at that point. It was just a nuisance, because I knew he wondered what was going on, but at the moment he was the least of our troubles. If there’d been time, I would have sat him down and explained things to him the instant we got in. But there wasn’t time.”

“Good God,” Francis said, and shuddered. “I still can’t go in Henry’s bathroom. Blood smeared on the porcelain. Henry’s straight razor swinging from a peg. We were bruised and scratched to pieces.”

“Charles was the worst by far.”

“Oh, my God. Thorns stuck all over him.”

“And that bite. ”

“You’ve never seen anything like it,” said Francis. “Four inches around and the teeth marks just gouged in. Remember what Bunny said?”

Henry laughed. “Yes,” he said. “Tell him.”

“Well, there we all were, and Charles was turning to get the soap

—I didn’t even know Bunny was there, I suppose he was looking in the door—when all of a sudden I heard him say, in this weird businesslike way, ‘Looks like that deer took a plug out of your arm, Charles.’ ”

“He was standing there for part of the time, making comments of various sorts,” said Henry, “but the next thing I knew he wasn’t. I was disturbed by how suddenly he’d left but glad he was out of the way.

We had a great deal to do and not too much time.”

“Weren’t you afraid he’d tell somebody?”

Henry looked at me blankly. “Who?”

“Me. Marion. Anybody.”

“No. At that point I had no reason to think he’d do anything of the sort. He’d been with us on previous tries, you understand, so our appearance didn’t seem as extraordinary to him as it might have to you. The whole thing was deadly secret. He’d been involved in it with

us for months. How could he have told anyone without explaining the whole thing and making himself look foolish? Julian knew what we were trying to do, but I was still pretty certain Bunny wouldn’t talk to him without checking it with us first. And, as it happened, I was right.”

He paused and lit a cigarette. “It was almost daybreak, and things were still a dreadful mess—bloody footprints on the porch, the chitons lying where we’d dropped them. The twins put on some old clothes of mine and went out to take care of the porch and the inside of the car. The chitons, I knew, should be burnt, but I didn’t want to start a big fire in the back yard; nor did I want to burn them inside and risk setting off the fire alarm. My landlady is constantly warning me not to use the fireplace, but I’d always suspected it worked. I took a chance and as luck would have it, it did.”

“I was no help at all,” said Francis.

“No, you certainly weren’t,” said Henry crossly.

“I couldn’t help it. I thought I was going to throw up. I went back to Henry’s room and went to sleep.”

“I think we all would have liked to go to sleep but somebody had to clean up,” Henry said. “The twins came in around seven. I was still having a terrible time with the bathroom. Charles’s back was stuck full of thorns like a pincushion. For a while Camilla and I worked on him with a pair of tweezers; then I went back in the bathroom to finish up. The worst of it was over, but I was so tired I couldn’t keep my eyes open. The towels weren’t so bad—we’d pretty much avoided using them—but there were stains on some of them so I put them in the washing machine and dumped in some soap. The twins were asleep, on that fold-out bed in the back room, and I shoved Charles over and was out like a light.”

“Fourteen hours,” said Francis. “I’ve never slept that long in my life.”

“Nor have I. Like a dead man. No dreams.”

“I can’t tell you how disorienting this was,” Francis said. “The sun was coming up when I went to sleep, and it seemed like I’d just closed my eyes when I opened them again, and it was dark, and a phone was ringing, and I had no idea where I was. It kept ringing and

ringing, and finally I got up and found my way into the hall.

Somebody said don’t answer it but—”

“I’ve never seen anybody like you for answering a phone,” said Henry. “Even in somebody else’s house.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do? Just let it ring? Anyway, I picked it up, and it was Bunny, cheery as a lark. Boy, the four of us had really been messed up, and were we turning into a bunch of nudists or what, and how about if we all went to the Brasserie and had some dinner?”

I sat up in my chair. “Wait,” I said. “Was that the night—?”

Henry nodded. “You came too,” he said. “Remember?”

“Of course,” I said, unaccountably excited that the story was at last beginning to dovetail with my own experience. “Of course. I met Bunny on his way to your place.”

“If you don’t mind my saying so, we were all a little surprised when he showed up with you,” said Francis.

“Well, I suppose eventually he wanted to get us alone and find out what happened, but it was nothing that couldn’t wait,” said Henry.

“You’ll recall that our appearance wouldn’t have seemed so odd to him as it might. He’d been with us before, you know, on nights very nearly as—what is the word I’m looking for?”

“—when we’d been sick all over the place,” said Francis, “and fallen in mud, and didn’t get home till dawn. There was the blood—

he might have wondered exactly how we’d killed that deer—but still.”

Uncomfortably, I thought of the Bacchae: hooves and bloody ribs, scraps dangling from the fir trees. There was a word for it in Greek: omophagia. Suddenly it came back to me: walking into Henry’s apartment, all those tired faces, Bunny’s snide greeting of “Khairei, deerslayers!”

They’d been quiet that evening, quiet and pale, though not more than seemed remarkable for people suffering particularly bad hangovers. Only Camilla’s laryngitis seemed unusual. They’d been drunk the night before, they told me, drunk as bandicoots; Camilla had left her sweater at home and caught cold on the walk back to North Hampden. Outside, it was dark and raining hard. Henry gave me the car keys and asked me to drive.

It was a Friday night, but the weather was so bad the Brasserie was nearly deserted. We ate Welsh rarebits and listened to the rain beating down in gusts on the roof. Bunny and I drank whiskey and hot water; the others had tea.

“Feeling queasy, bakchoi? ” said Bunny slyly after the waiter took our drink orders.

Camilla made a face at him.

When we went out to the car after dinner Bunny walked around it, inspected the headlights, kicked at the tires. “This the one you were in last night?” he said, blinking in the rain.

“Yes.”

He brushed the damp hair from his eyes and bent to examine the fender. “German cars,” he said. “Hate to say it but I think the Krauts have got Detroit metal beat. I don’t see a scratch.”

I asked him what he meant.

“Aw, they were driving around drunk. Making a nuisance of themselves on the public road. Hit a deer. Did you kill it?” he asked Henry.

Walking around to the passenger’s side, Henry looked up. “What’s that?”

“The deer. Didja kill it?”

Henry opened the door. “It looked pretty dead to me,” he had said.

There was a long silence. My eyes were smarting from all the smoke. A thick gray haze of it hung near the ceiling.

“So what’s the problem?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“What happened? Did you tell him about it or not?”

Henry took a deep breath. “No,” he said. “We might have, but obviously the fewer people who knew the better. When I first saw him alone, I broached it carefully, but he seemed satisfied with the deer story and I let it go at that. If he hadn’t figured it out on his own there was certainly no reason to tell him. The fellow’s body was found, an article ran in the Hampden Examiner, no problem at all.

But then—by some rotten stroke of luck—I suppose in Hampden

they don’t get many stories like this—they published a follow-up story two weeks later. ‘Mysterious Death in Battenkill County.’ And that was the one Bunny saw.”

“It was the stupidest thing,” Francis said. “He never reads the newspaper. None of this would have happened if it wasn’t for that blasted Marion.”

“She has a subscription, something to do with the Early Childhood Center,” said Henry, rubbing his eyes. “Bunny was with her in Commons before lunch. She was talking to one of her friends—

Marion, that is—and Bunny I suppose had got bored and started to read her paper. The twins and I went up to say hello and the first thing he said, practically across the room, was ‘Look here, you guys, some chicken farmer got killed out by Francis’s house.’ Then he read a bit of the article out loud. Fractured skull, no murder weapon, no motive, no leads. I was trying to think of some way to change the subject when he said: ‘Hey. November tenth? That’s the night you guys were out at Francis’s. The night you ran over that deer.’ ”

“ ‘I don’t see,’ I said, ‘how that could be right.’

“ ‘It was the tenth. I remember because it was the day before my mom’s birthday. That’s really something, isn’t it?’

“ ‘Why yes,’ we said, ‘it certainly is.’

“ ‘If I had a suspicious mind,’ he said, ‘I’d guess you’d done it, Henry, coming back from Battenkill County that night with blood from head to toe.’ ”

He lit another cigarette. “You have to remember that it was lunch time, Commons was packed, Marion and her friend were listening to every word, and besides, you know how his voice carries.… We laughed, naturally, and Charles said something funny, and we’d just managed to get him off the topic when he looked at the paper again.

‘I can’t believe this, guys,’ he said. ‘An honest-to-God murder, out in the woods too, not three miles from where you were. You know, if the cops had pulled you over that night, you’d probably be in jail right now. There’s a phone number to call if anybody’s got any information. If I wanted to, I bet I could get you guys in a heck of a lot of trouble …’ et cetera, et cetera.

“Of course, I didn’t know what to think. Was he joking, did he really suspect? Eventually I got him to drop it but still I had an awful feeling that he’d felt how uneasy he’d made me. He knows me so well—he has a sixth sense about that kind of thing. And I was uneasy.

Goodness. It was right before lunch, all these security guards were standing around, half of them are connected with the police force in Hampden … I mean, there was no way our story could stand up to even peremptory examination and I knew it. Obviously we hadn’t hit a deer. There wasn’t a scratch on either of the cars. And if anyone made even a casual connection between us and the dead man … So, as I say, I was glad when he dropped it. But even then I had a feeling we hadn’t heard the last of it. He teased us about it—

quite innocently, I believe, but in public as well as private—for the rest of the term. You know how he is. Once he gets something like that on the brain he won’t give it up.”

I did know. Bunny had an uncanny ability to ferret out topics of conversation that made his listener uneasy and to dwell upon them with ferocity once he had. In all the months I’d known him he’d never ceased to tease me, for instance, about that jacket I’d worn to lunch with him that first day, and about what he saw as my flimsy and tastelessly Californian style of dress. To an impartial eye, my clothes were in fact not at all dissimilar from his own but his snide remarks upon the subject were so inexhaustible and tireless, I think, because in spite of my good-natured laughter he must have been dimly aware that he was touching a nerve, that I was in fact incredibly selfconscious about these virtually imperceptible differences of dress and of the rather less imperceptible differences of manner and bearing between myself and the rest of them. I am gifted at blending myself into any given milieu—you’ve never seen such a typical California teenager as I was, nor such a dissolute and callous premed student—but somehow, despite my efforts, I am never able to blend myself in entirely and remain in some respects quite distinct from my surroundings, in the same way that a green chameleon remains a distinct entity from the green leaf upon which it sits, no matter how perfectly it has approximated the subtleties of the particular shade. Whenever Bunny, rudely and in public, accused me

of wearing a shirt which contained a polyester blend, or remarked critically that my perfectly ordinary trousers, indistinguishable from his own, bore the taint of something he called a “Western cut,” a large portion of the pleasure this sport afforded him was derived from his unerring and bloodhoundish sense that this, of all topics, was the one which made me most truly uncomfortable. He could not have failed to notice what a sore spot his mention of the murder had touched in Henry; nor, once he sensed its existence, could he have restrained himself from continuing to jab at it.

“Of course, he didn’t know a thing,” Francis said. “Really, he didn’t.

It was all a big joke to him. He liked to throw out references to that farmer we’d gone and murdered, just to see me jump. One day he told me he’d seen a policeman out in front of my house, asking my landlady questions.”

“He did that to me, too,” said Henry. “He was always joking about calling the tips number in the newspaper, and the five of us splitting the reward money. Picking up the telephone. Pretending to dial.”

“You can understand how thin that wore after a time. My God.

Some of the things he said in front of you—The terrible thing was, you could never tell when it was coming. Right before school let out he stuck a copy of that newspaper article under the windshield wiper of my car. ‘Mysterious Death in Battenkill County.’ It was horrible to know that he’d saved it in the first place, and kept it all that time.”

“Worst of all,” said Henry, “there was absolutely nothing we could do. For a while we even thought of telling him outright, throwing ourselves on his mercy so to speak, but then we realized, at that late date, it was impossible to predict how he’d react. He was grouchy, and sick, and worried about his grades. And the term was nearly over too. It seemed that the best thing to do was to stay on his good side until the Christmas break—take him places, buy him things, pay a lot of attention to him—and hope it would blow over during the winter.” He sighed. “At the end of virtually every school term I’ve been through with Bunny, he’s suggested that the two of us go on a trip, meaning by this that we go to some place of his choosing and that I pay for it. He hasn’t the money to get to Manchester on his own. And when the subject came up, as I knew it would, about a

week or two before school was out, I thought: why not? In this way, at least, one of us could keep an eye on him over the winter; and perhaps a change of scenery might prove beneficial. I should also note that it didn’t seem to be such a bad thing if he were to feel a bit under obligation to me. He wanted to go to either Italy or Jamaica. I knew I couldn’t bear Jamaica, so I bought two tickets for Rome and arranged for some rooms not far from the Piazza di Spagna.”

“And you gave him money for clothes and all those useless Italian books.”

“Yes. All in all it was a considerable outlay of money but it seemed like a good investment. I even thought it might be a bit of fun. But never, in my wildest dreams.… Really, I don’t know where to begin. I remember when he saw our rooms—actually, they were quite charming, with a frescoed ceiling, beautiful old balcony, glorious view, I was rather proud of myself for having found them—he was incensed, and began to complain that it was shabby, that it was too cold and the plumbing was bad; and, in short, that the place was completely unsuitable and he wondered how I had been duped into taking it. He’d thought I knew better than to stumble into a lousy tourist trap, but he guessed that he was wrong. He insinuated that our throats would be cut in the night. At that point, I was more amenable to his whims. I asked him, if he didn’t like the rooms, where would he prefer to stay? and he suggested why didn’t we just go down and get a suite—not a room, you understand, but a suite—

in the Grand Hotel?

“He kept on, and finally I told him we would do nothing of the sort.

For one thing, the exchange rate was bad and the rooms—besides being paid in advance, and with my money—were already rather more than I could afford. He sulked for days, feigning asthma attacks, moping around and honking at his inhaler and nagging me constantly—accusing me of being cheap, and so forth, and when he traveled he liked to do it right—and finally I lost my temper. I told him that if the rooms were satisfactory to me, they were certainly better than what he was used to—I mean, my God, it was a palazzo, it belonged to a countess, I’d paid a fortune for it—and, in short, there

was no possibility of my paying 500,000 lire a night for the company of American tourists and a couple of sheets of hotel stationery.

“So we stayed on at the Piazza di Spagna, which he proceeded to transform into a simulacrum of Hell. He needled me ceaselessly—

about the carpet, about the pipes, about what he felt was his insufficient supply of pocket money. We were living just a few steps from the Via Condotti, the most expensive shopping street in Rome. I was lucky, he said. No wonder I was having such a good time, since I could buy whatever I wanted, while all he could do was lie wheezing in the garret like a poor stepchild. I did what I could to placate him, but the more I bought him, the more he wanted.

Besides which, he would hardly let me out of his sight. He complained if I left him alone for even a few minutes; but if I asked him to come along with me, to a museum or a church—my God, we were in Rome—he was dreadfully bored and kept at me constantly to leave. It got so I couldn’t even read a book without his sailing in.

Goodness. He’d stand outside the door and jabber at me while I was having my bath. I caught him going through my suitcase. I mean—”

he paused delicately—“it’s slightly annoying to have even an unobtrusive person sharing such close quarters with one. Perhaps I’d only forgotten what it was like when we lived together freshman year, or perhaps I’ve simply become more accustomed to living alone, but after a week or two of this I was a nervous wreck. I could hardly bear the sight of him. And I was worried about other things as well. You know, don’t you,” he said abruptly to me, “that sometimes I get headaches, rather bad ones?”

I did know. Bunny—fond of recounting his own illnesses and those of others—had described them in an awed whisper: Henry, flat on his back in a dark room, ice packs on his head and a handkerchief tied over his eyes.

“I don’t get them so often as I once did. When I was thirteen or fourteen I had them all the time. But now it seems that when they do come—sometimes only once a year—they’re much worse. And after I’d been a few weeks in Italy, I felt one coming on. Unmistakable.

Noises get louder; objects shimmer; my peripheral vision darkens and I see all sorts of unpleasant things hovering at its edges. There’s

a terrible pressure in the air. I’ll look at a street sign and not be able to read it, not understand the simplest spoken sentence. There’s not much that can be done when it comes to that but I did what I could—

stayed in my room with the shades pulled, took medicine, tried to keep quiet. At last I realized I would have to cable my doctor in the States. The drugs they give me are too powerful to dispense in prescription form; generally I go to the emergency room for a shot. I wasn’t sure what an Italian doctor would do if I showed up gasping at his office, an American tourist, asking for an injection of phenobarbital.

“But by then it was too late. The headache was on me in a matter of hours and after that, I was quite incapable either of finding my way to a doctor or making myself understood if I had. I don’t know if Bunny tried to get me one or not. His Italian is so bad that when he tried to speak to anyone he would generally just end up insulting them. The American Express office was not far from where we lived, and I’m sure they could have given him the name of an English-speaking doctor, but of course that’s not the sort of thing that would occur to Bunny.

“I hardly know what happened for the next few days. I lay in my room with the shades down and sheets of newspaper taped over the shades. It was impossible even to have any ice sent up-all one could get were lukewarm pitchers of acqua semplice—but then I had a hard time talking in English, much less Italian. God knows where Bunny was. I have no memory of seeing him, nor much of anything else.

“Anyway. For a few days I lay flat on my back, hardly able to blink without feeling like my forehead was splitting open, and everything sick and black. I swung in and out of consciousness until finally I became aware of a thin seam of light burning at the edge of the shade. How long I’d been looking at it I don’t know, but gradually I became aware that it was morning, that the pain had receded somewhat, and that I could move around without awful difficulty. I also realized that I was extraordinarily thirsty. There was no water in my pitcher, so I got up and put on my dressing gown and went to get a drink.

“My room and Bunny’s opened from opposite ends to a rather grand central room—fifteen-foot ceilings, with a fresco in the manner of Carracci; glorious sculptured-stuccoed framework; French doors leading to the balcony. I was almost blinded by the morning light, but I made out a shape which I took to be Bunny, bent over some books and papers at my desk. I waited until my eyes cleared, one hand on the doorknob to steady myself, and then I said, ‘Good morning, Bun.’

“Well, he leapt up as if he’d been scalded, and scrabbled in the papers as if to hide something, and all of a sudden I realized what he had. I went over and snatched it from him. It was my diary. He was always nosing around trying to get a look at it; I’d hidden it behind a radiator but I suppose he’d come digging in my room while I was ill.

He’d found it once before, but since I write in Latin I don’t suppose he was able to make much sense of it. I didn’t even use his real name. Cuniculus molestus, I thought, denoted him quite well. And he’d never figure that out without a lexicon.

“Unfortunately, while I was ill, he’d had ample chance to avail himself of one. A lexicon, that is. And I know we make fun of Bunny for being such a dreadful Latinist, but he’d managed to eke out a pretty competent little English translation of the more recent entries. I must say, I never dreamed he was capable of such a thing. It must have taken him days.

“I wasn’t even angry. I was too stunned. I stared at the translation

—it was sitting right there—and then at him, and then, all of a sudden, he pushed back his chair and began to bellow at me. We had killed that fellow, he said, killed him in cold blood and didn’t even bother to tell him about it, but he knew there was something fishy all along, and where did I get off calling him Rabbit, and he had half a mind to go right down to the American consulate and have them send over some police.… Then—this was foolish of me—I slapped him in the face, hard as I could.” He sighed. “I shouldn’t have done that. I didn’t even do it from anger, but frustration. I was sick and exhausted; I was afraid someone would hear him; I just didn’t think I could stand it another second.