Charlie Adair brought in the mail, five minutes after Perdita arrived to speak with Harry.
Charlie had his own play to put on. He intended to find the body gone this morning and to tell Gilbert that the body had been Richard. But what he saw instead, through the hall doors into the dining room, was delicate, edgy intimacy: Gilbert was gone from the breakfast room for the moment, Harry was not yet up, and Perdita and Reisden were having breakfast together. Perdita was bringing food for both of them. When she gave Reisden his plate she sat next to him, as if it were natural, as though there were no other chairs anyplace around that whole large table. “Do you want coffee?” Reisden asked her quietly. “It will help with being sleepy.” Charlie’s heart contracted with a pain that was not all physical. They both looked tired, both relaxed, but Reisden was wary of her, and Charlie knew what he was seeing.
“Child, you must learn to drink coffee.” Reisden looked across at her with the wry look that a grownup gives a child. He had debauched her all the same, Charlie thought, and was debauching her now with those eyes that could not leave her, those tired and hungry and wary eyes, looking at her as if he wanted to eat her, slowly, with the salt of her new experiences. The two of them had done something; the question was only how much. More than Charlie had seen at the dance? He thought so. Was it over completely for her? Reisden had a look of holding himself back from her; ah, it didn’t mean he had held back then. So many didn’t, and then left the girls to pay.
Heaven save her and let her have her goodness still.
Charlie turned away. Inside his jacket pocket, over his strained and burning heart, he felt the sharp pricking of the letter that said This body is Richard. Charlie had to sit on a hall chair. His chest was bursting; his muscles pained him all up and down his arms. It was like when he had been backing away from Jay French, trying to focus the gun on something that would stop Jay, not wanting to hurt Jay but simply to stop him, the gun going pop, pop, pop, but he knew that he could not stop anything at all. He could not stop Reisden now.
But he had stopped Jay.
The pain passed and left Charlie limp in the chair. He could not stop Reisden, because he knew only one way to do it. The gun was still in his closet, wrapped in the blanket behind the shelf that the hot-air pipe made.
Not me. Not me.
He sat in the hall for minutes with his head in his hands, trying not to understand what he might do. He wanted salvation, love and friendship, a quiet old age. Lord, let this cup pass from me, Charlie prayed humbly, a murderer quoting God’s words.
And who needed them more, who needed mercy more?