Breakheart Hill

CHAPTER 19

BUT I WAS NOT THE ONLY ONE, AS SHERIFF STONE LATER learned, for during the next two weeks Mary Diehl came to see, and at last confront, what I had already seen the night Todd drove Kelli home. Perhaps she had seen it even earlier, but had decided to let it go, hoping it would pass, then realized finally that it was not passing, but, rather, that it was deepening by the hour.

When I remember Mary at this time, I see her as strangely frail, and certainly confused. A wounded bafflement hovered around her like a delicate mist, one which never really left her after that. It was still in her face the day she brought Raymond into my office, and later still when Raymond, now a grown man, led her slowly to my car, the rain mercilessly beating down upon her, as it had seemed to me at that moment, just as it had beaten down upon Lyle Gates as he’d been led down the courthouse steps almost thirty years before.

There was no doubt good reason for her puzzlement, both in middle age and much earlier, when she was still a girl. For she’d been beautiful, after all, and so it could not have been Kelli’s beauty that had made the difference between them. In her own way, Mary was smart enough, and certainly she was kind and dutiful. She had done as her mother had carefully instructed her, found someone to love, honor and obey, someone with whom she wished to share her life, and to whom she offered the gift of an absolute service and fidelity, neither of which, as it turned out, were ever returned to her. “Mary deserved better than Todd,” Luke told me sardonically on the day I took her away.

It rained bitterly that day, a cold rain, almost sleet. Mary wore a dark brown coat as Raymond led her down the driveway of the house in Turtle Grove. Several days before, she had tried to cut off her hair, and it now lay in unsightly layers, clipped here, long there, a wild confusion of jagged angles, with nothing to give it unity but its mottled iron-gray shade. Raymond walked beside her, holding her by the arm, mute and sullen, his eyes little more than thin, reptilian slits.

“He did this,” he snapped as he led his mother toward me. Then he turned and pointed toward the house. “Him.”

I looked toward the house and saw Todd standing at the large window that looked out onto the yard. He was slovenly and overweight, with thin blond hair swept back over his head, his shoulders slumped and defeated beneath a faded lime-green sweater. His hands were sunk deep into the pockets of his trousers, and there was a terrible bleakness in his face, a sense of having watched helplessly as everything in his life, both his marriage and his fatherhood, collapsed.

“It wasn’t her fault,” Raymond said as he led Mary to the back door of my car. He was talking to Sheila Cameron, Mary’s oldest friend. “She didn’t mean to do it. She was running from him when it happened. She was just trying to get away.”

For a moment, I saw it all as Raymond must have seen it: his mother desperately fleeing the house, fleeing her husband’s unfathomable rage and violence, rushing through the rain to her car, then into it and away, speeding down the rainswept street in a haze of dread and misery, staring at the road through swollen eyes as she plunged toward the curb where little Rosie Cameron stood impatiently waiting for her school bus, her small body draped in a bright yellow rainslick.

“My mother loved Rosie,” Raymond said. “She would never have …”

“I know that, Raymond,” Sheila said softly. Then, given how much she had suffered, how deep was her loss, and at whose hands, Sheila did the kindest thing I have ever seen a human being do. She drew Mary into her arms and kissed her wet cheek. “I love you, Mary,” she said. Then she stepped back into the rain and let Raymond ease his mother into the back seat of my car. “Drive carefully, Ben,” she said to me as I closed the door.

“I will.”

It was a long drive to Tuscaloosa, and from time to time as I drove, I glanced back at Mary. She sat with her hands resting motionlessly in her lap, her face locked in a strangely hunted expression despite the fact that the actual range of her feelings had been hideously reduced by then. She was extremely thin, almost skeletal, with hollow cheeks, and her eyes sunk so deeply into their sockets that they seemed to stare out from the shadowy depths of an unlighted cave. Only the immaculate whiteness of her skin still suggested the beauty that had once been hers.

“I’ve seen pictures of my mother when she was in high school,” Raymond said, as if reading my mind. “She looked happy back then.”

“She was, Raymond,” I said.

He shook his head. “But not after she married my father, she wasn’t. Never for one day after that.”

I locked my eyes on the road ahead.

“He never loved her, you know. I don’t know why he married her.” The whole tormented course of his parents’ marriage seemed to pass through his mind. “It was like he resented her in some way.” He watched the rain. “I think there was someone else. Another woman, I mean.”

I said nothing.

“And I don’t mean just an affair, either,” Raymond went on. “Some girl from his office, something like that. I mean someone that my father loved.”

In the rearview mirror I could see his eyes drift over toward his mother. “I heard her say it to his face one night. ‘You’re still in love with her.’ That’s what she told him.” He drew his eyes back toward me. “My mother knew who she was, the other woman.” He seemed to consider his next question. Then, almost plaintively, as if her identity might solve the mystery of his father’s wrath, he asked, “Do you know who she was, Dr. Wade?”

“No, I don’t, Raymond,” I told him.

But I did, and at that moment I felt my mind spin back to the single incident that Miss Carver later told Sheriff Stone about, the brutal moment when Mary had confronted Kelli Troy.

It had happened so suddenly that I would always believe that Mary had simply broken under the strain of all she had observed since the first rehearsal, the lines she’d heard Todd and Kelli exchange so passionately on the stage of the school auditorium, the glances she’d seen them give each other, the long rides to Kelli’s house after they’d dropped her off in Turtle Grove, and even those things she had probably imagined as clearly as I had imagined them, whispered intimacies and feverish kisses.

It was a Friday night. The heat of the approaching summer was clearly upon us by then, and the rehearsal had just ended. Todd had not been able to attend that night, and so Miss Carver had concentrated on other students, working through scenes with Eddie, Sheila and Noreen. It had not gone well, and Miss Carver had finally dismissed us early with a frustrated wave of her hand.

Most of the students left right away, but Kelli lingered, talking to Miss Carver. I remained onstage, busying myself with the few props we had collected. After that, I closed the curtain and shut off the lights.

Kelli and Miss Carver were already headed toward the faculty parking lot by the time I’d locked the front door of the auditorium. I could see them walking toward Miss Carver’s old Buick, perhaps still talking about the play, with Miss Carver pointing here and there as she spoke, as if giving stage directions.

Then, suddenly, a third figure emerged from behind the high wall of a shrub. At first she remained in the shadows, but after a moment she took a single step into the light of the parking lot’s only streetlamp, and I saw that it was Mary Diehl.

Mary said: “I need to talk to you, Kelli.”

“Well, I have to go with Miss Carver right now,” Kelli answered. “She’s driving me home.” She sounded slightly strained, as if Mary had taken her by surprise.

“No,” Mary told her in a voice that was unmistakably hard. “No, you have to talk to me. You have to. Right now.”

When Kelli spoke again, I could hear the tension in her voice. “Maybe tomorrow, Mary,” she said. “We could talk tomorrow.”

I saw Mary’s long hair toss right and left as she shook her head. “No,” she said. “I can’t wait till tomorrow. I have to talk to you now.”

Miss Carver must have caught on to what was happening by then, because she tried to intervene, her voice very gentle, coaxing. “Mary, maybe you should just let Kelli get on home tonight. It’s awfully late, and I—”

“No,” Mary blurted out. She crossed her arms over her chest and stared fixedly at Miss Carver. “I want to talk to Kelli right now,” she said, the words coming rapidly, almost frantic. “I don’t want to wait. I have to know what’s going on.” Her head jerked to the left so that I knew she was now staring directly at Kelli. “Between you and Todd,” she said bluntly.

Kelli glanced nervously at Miss Carver, then back at Mary. “What do you want to know?” she asked, her voice suddenly calm and full of resolution, ready for whatever might happen, the voice of someone who had long ago determined not to be a coward.

Mary seemed momentarily silenced by the question, unable to respond. “Well, I mean … I just want …” she sputtered. “I just want to know what it is … what’s going on between you and Todd.”

Kelli did not hesitate in her answer, and even though I’d already guessed what was “going on” between Kelli and Todd, the frankness of her answer, the sheer candid admission she made at that moment, emptied me as nothing ever had or ever would again.

“Love,” she said.

The word struck me like a bullet in the head. I physically slumped against the wall of the auditorium when I heard her say it. Mary must have felt something similar, because her body stiffened, and the words she fired at Kelli were taut and bitter. “I wish you were dead,” she said.

Without consciously willing it, or even being able to control it, I heard my mind respond in a vehement hiss: So do I.

THAT IS WHAT MISS CARVER SAW, AND THAT IS WHAT SHE told Sheriff Stone when he came to talk to her at Choctaw High. But I am sure that she saw something else, too, saw not only the violent nature of Mary’s feelings toward Kelli, but my own simmering rage, the poisonous mood that came over me during the last two weeks of rehearsals, and perhaps even the way I sometimes looked at Kelli, as if I were trying to strangle her with my eyes. For I know that there were times when I stood offstage, watching Kelli go through her lines, when I must have fixed upon her with a murderous gaze, as if taking aim. I know it must have happened often, and I know that standing just across the stage from me, Miss Carver must have seen it. And so she spoke to me two weeks after Kelli had been found on Breakheart Hill, the two of us alone in her empty classroom, the windows open, a hot summer breeze rattling the metal blinds.

Lyle Gates had already been arrested, and the whole town knew about the incident at Cuffy’s, the name he’d called her there, then later how Luke had seen him walking up the mountain road only minutes after he’d dropped Kelli off at the crest of Breakheart Hill, and how later still Edith Sparks had seen him coming out of the woods at the crest of Breakheart Hill, wiping blood from his right hand, and finally how Sheriff Stone had found scratches on that same right hand when he’d come to talk to him a few days after Kelli had been found, scratches Lyle swore he’d made by hitting the side of an old woodshed after arguing on the phone with his wife, an act for which he could provide no witnesses.

We had a student assembly at the end of school that day, and Mr. Avery spoke about what had happened to Kelli, how terrible it was, what a “promising future” she’d had, and even about how dangerous it was for young girls to be in the woods alone.

When it was over I walked out of the auditorium with the other students, but before I made it down the stairs I heard Miss Carver calling me.

She was standing at the side door of the school, watching me stonily, as if she’d determined to go through with something she’d been considering for several days.

“I’d like to talk to you for a minute or two, Ben,” she said.

I stepped over to her. “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“In my classroom,” Miss Carver told me. Then she turned briskly and led me up the stairs.

It was late in the afternoon by then, and the heavy shadows of the empty desks and chairs spread like dark stains across the old wooden floor.

I walked to the front window and stared out. Far below me, I could see Todd Jeffries slumped against his car. He was shaking slightly, jerking his head left and right. Mary Diehl was at his side, as she had been continually for the last few days, valiantly trying to calm him down.

I heard the classroom door close softly behind me, then turned to see Miss Carver standing in front of it, as if determined to prevent me from suddenly bolting from the room. She was dressed in somber colors, her hair pulled back and pinned in a tight bun, and for the first time she looked like the lonely matron she was destined to become.

She said, “I guess you know that that man, Lyle Gates, has been arrested.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I understand from Sheriff Stone that he has denied everything.” I nodded.

“He says he heard someone moaning in the woods, went to see about it and found Kelli.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Miss Carver stared at me grimly, and I could tell that she was stalling, unsure not so much as to what she wanted to say, but how best to say it. “I think Sheriff Stone has a few doubts,” she said. “About whether Mr. Gates is really the one who did it, I mean.”

I remained silent, and for a moment Miss Carver let me dwell in that silence. “He can’t find much of a motive, except that incident at Cuffy’s. But that was over, wasn’t it, Ben?”

“I thought it was,” I told her.

“But what could have made it flare up again?” Miss Carver asked emphatically. “What could have made him go after Kelli again after all that time?”

I felt my fingers tighten, as if around the gray rope Kelli had handed to me that last time. “I don’t know,” I said.

Miss Carver seemed hardly to have heard my answer. “Sheriff Stone thinks Kelli was going to meet someone else that day. Someone who drove a car up that mining road at the bottom of Breakheart Hill.”

I remained silent.

“Someone she knew,” Miss Carver added pointedly, “someone who had more of a reason to hurt her than Lyle Gates did.” Her eyes darted toward the window, as if to prevent me from seeing the grim suspicion she could not keep out of them. “If you knew anything about what happened to Kelli, you’d tell the sheriff, wouldn’t you, Ben?”

In my mind, I saw Kelli turn toward me, her back to the dark green curtain, her eyes peering out over my shoulder, focused on someone else, with myself invisible to her. Then, in an instant, she was gone, and it was Eddie Smathers staring at me, his face floating bodilessly, like a pale leaf in a pool of black water, his eyes wide in amazement, his voice carrying the same astonishment. Did she tell you that, Ben?

“Wouldn’t you, Ben?” Miss Carver repeated, this time more insistently, with a hint of the suspicion that never left her in all the years to come. “If you knew anything about who might have done it, or why, you’d tell Sheriff Stone, wouldn’t you?”

I couldn’t answer, and so I simply stood motionlessly before her, my mind frantically searching for some way out. I could feel the rope in my hand again, the one Kelli had thrust toward me, Here, hold this, and I know that some part of me desperately wanted to tell Miss Carver everything in a single, anguished flood of confession.

But I couldn’t do it.

“You would tell Sheriff Stone everything, wouldn’t you, Ben?” Miss Carver repeated.

I knew that I had to answer her, that I would not be able to get out of that room until I did. “Yes, ma’am, I would,” I said.

She did not believe me, and she made no effort to conceal that fact. Her eyes bored into me, and I saw the left corner of her mouth jerk down slightly in a look of absolute repudiation and contempt. “Mr. Gates says that he recognized Kelli, and since he’d had that run-in with you and her at Cuffy’s, he was afraid of being blamed.”

I said nothing.

“And so he just left her there,” Miss Carver added. She waited for me to answer her in some way, and when I didn’t she said, “Fine, then.” She said it stiffly, then added in a voice that carried the arctic formality with which she was to treat me forever after this moment, “You may go.”

I walked out of the room, down the stairs and out of the building. In the parking lot, I could see Todd still slumped against his car, with Mary next to him, her face pressed worriedly against his arm. She was staring down at the ground, but Todd faced northward, his eyes lifted toward the mountain, trained with a terrible precision, as I realized, on the upper slope of Breakheart Hill. I had never seen a more tormented face. Nor have I ever since that time.

After a while, Mary urged him into the passenger seat of his car, then got behind the wheel herself and pulled away. She did not wave at me as she drifted past, the car moving at a slow, funereal pace.

Normally I would have gone home, but the thought of sitting in the living room, watching my father shake his head in bafflement at the cruelty of man, was more than I could bear. And so I remained pressed against my car, watching the air grow steadily darker.

Night had fallen before I finally returned home. The lights were on in the living room, and as I pulled into the driveway, I could see my father under the lamp, sleeping in his chair, the newspaper spread over his lap. He had never looked more innocent, nor had innocence ever looked more threatening.

I got out of the car and walked to the front door, but I didn’t open it. Instead, I turned away, headed out into the yard and stood alone in the darkness.

I remained there a long time before I saw a car cruise up the street, then turn into the driveway, the beams of its headlights briefly sweeping over me before they blinked off.

It was Noreen who got out of the car. She came toward me slowly, her red dress like a stain upon the darkness.

“I called you before,” she said when she reached me. “Your father said you hadn’t come home yet.”

“I stayed at school awhile.”

She drew closer to me, her eyes watching me with an odd concentration. “I needed to talk to you,” she said, her voice thin, intense, full of the same urgency I could see in her eyes. She hesitated, as if unsure as to how she should begin, then said, “She called me, Ben.”

“Who did?”

“Kelli.”

I felt as if my skin had suddenly been pricked by a million tiny needles.

“The day it happened,” Noreen added. “She called me that day.”

“What did she want?”

She seemed reluctant to answer. “You, Ben,” she said finally. “She was looking for you.”

I felt my breath catch in my throat.

“She didn’t say why she was looking for you,” Noreen added quickly.

A wave of relief swept over me. “Well, maybe she just wanted me to give her a ride up to Breakheart Hill,” I said weakly. “She was always calling me for a ride.”

Noreen stared at me evenly. “Then why didn’t she ask me for a ride?”

I had no answer for her, and admitted it.

Noreen paused a moment, and in that brief interval I knew that there was more.

“When she called me, she sounded like she’d been crying,” she said.

Instantly, I saw Kelli’s face, saw her eyes, the dread that must have been in them, a black net descending.

“Why would she have been upset like that, Ben?” Noreen asked.

For the first time in my life, I felt truth not as something valuable, to be sought after, a shining light, but as a knife at my throat. And so I lied.

“I don’t know, Noreen,” I said.

She gazed at me closely, like a doctor examining a body, looking for the source of its malignancy. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

She watched me silently, as if making a decision for all time, a choice she would have to live with forever. “Okay,” she said at last. Then she touched my hand with a single outstretched finger. “Sheriff Stone talked to me. You know, like he’s talked to everybody at school.”

I nodded.

“But I didn’t tell him about Kelli’s call,” she said. “Or that she was looking for you that day, or anything like that.”

I said nothing.

She looked at me significantly, as if swearing a grave oath. “And I never will,” she said.

For a moment we stood facing each other silently. Then her arms lifted toward me, gathered me into a firm embrace. When she spoke, her voice was low, its tone unmistakably collusive. “What do we do now?”

I felt her arms tighten around me, and I knew that I would never be loved more powerfully than this by anyone. And it struck me that over time I might offer loyalty in return, devotion through the years, perhaps even come to feel it as a kind of passion.