TWENTY-TWO

I left the parking lot driving too fast until I forced myself to slow down and think. But it was almost by instinct that I stopped at a telephone booth and called Jason Cantwell’s.

No one answered. Cradling the still-ringing phone, I checked my watch and read one-thirty. I had less than three hours to decide what I could tell Rayfield. Nora Culhane would have to wait. I drove to Jason’s and parked a half-block away.

An hour passed in the heat of the car before the woman appeared, striding loose-limbed with a grocery bag slung on her hip, hair bouncing as she walked. I waited until she was inside the building, then took the stairs up and knocked.

When the door unlatched, her wide, turquoise eyes peered frightenedly through a three-inch crack with a chain across. “I need to talk to you,” I said.

She shrank back. “Jason might come home.”

“I won’t take long. Please, you might save someone from being hurt. Maybe you.”

She hesitated for what seemed minutes. Then she unhooked the chain to let me in. She had changed to cutoffs and a thin T-shirt that showed her nipples. Her legs were long and tan, and she reminded me of when I was fourteen and read Erskine Caldwell, and the southern girls of my imagination were ripe and knowing and carried mysteries inside them. I was older now and hadn’t read Caldwell for a while; the girl seemed young.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Terry Kyle. What happened to your face?”

“Nothing with Jason.”

She watched me from in front of the door. I moved away from her to the couch and sat looking up. Softly I said, “There are things about this I don’t understand. I’m afraid.”

She waited silently. “I’m afraid of Jason,” I said with more emphasis. “For you and for my wife.”

Her mouth parted. “Why your wife?”

“Before we fought he said things about Kris Ann. The way he said them—how he looked and sounded—was more than getting back at me.”

She turned away as if hurt. Then she went to a chair across the living room and sat with the coffee table between us. “He hates you,” she said sadly.

I stared at her. “He hardly knows me.”

“It doesn’t matter.” She kneaded one slim wrist with the fingers of the other hand, staring at a half-finished needlepoint cat which lay by the chair. “He has this thing about Kris Ann Cade.” She looked at me with unhappy candor. “People are never with the people they want, are they?”

“Not always.”

“Not Jason, always. Maybe sometimes. I think with Kris Ann it’s just from being messed up when he was young.”

“What do you mean?”

She shook her head. “Look, I’m telling you this so you’ll leave, okay? It’s not good you being here.”

“I can’t leave yet. There are things I have to know, for my wife’s sake and for Jason’s father.”

“But that makes it worse.” Her frightened voice ran words together. “I know ‘Old Henry’s’ your friend and all, but he was no good for Jason—almost shunned him. Jason even used to pretend Henry Cantwell wasn’t his real father, that the real one was a tall man who watched him whenever he went outside, to see that he was safe.”

“He told you that?”

She nodded shyly. “He tells me everything.”

“How does that relate to Kris Ann?”

Her glance ran to the door and then back to me. “You’re all mixed up in it, don’t you see? After that fight he told me Henry saw you as a son, not him.” The words rushed out now. “It’s all a mess. One night when we were smoking dope with the lights turned out he started telling me, like he could only say it when I couldn’t see him and he was stoned. About how when he was fourteen, looking at Kris Ann made him feel tight in his throat, all strange. He would think about her alone in his room—like maybe he did things to himself.” She blushed. “I shouldn’t say that. It’s just that he wanted to believe they were close somehow—like she had no mother and he didn’t really have a father so they should have each other. But then she did something to spoil it, he said, something about a garden, I don’t know what. I’ve been afraid to ask—you know, when he was straight.” She looked at me. “Kris Ann loves you and so does his daddy. So he’s got to hate all of you, understand? He can’t handle it any other way.”

“That doesn’t scare you?”

She gazed down at the needlepoint cat, catlike herself: darting eyes clear, then opaque. In a low voice, she said, “Sometimes I hate her, too.”

“Krissy’s no one to hate,” I answered gently. “She’s as confused as you or I, only her looks don’t ask for help. That makes it harder.”

She seemed suddenly not to hear me, but to be listening outside. Footsteps echoed in the tile corridor, moving toward us. We listened like mutes as they came closer and stopped outside. Keys jangled. She turned to me, pleading. I rose, and then the neighbor’s door opened and shut.

In silence like a caught breath I asked, “For God’s sake, why do you stay with him?”

She sagged in her chair. “He loves me,” she said finally. “I’m not from fancy people. I’m no one special. But I can help him. He’s not like he seems; the reason his daddy hurt him so is that he’s a gentle boy who went begging for love. That’s all he needs.”

It sounded like a litany of faith. “The Florence Nightingale route is a hard one, Terry.”

“What’s that?”

“The notion that if you just love someone a little more, ignore what they are, you’ll undo things that happened so young that they’re part of them.”

“But you don’t understand.” She said it with youthful stubbornness, clinging to what she hoped she knew. Her face—soft, unlined, yet to be written on—was still that of a woman yet to happen. In a fierce, scared undertone, she pleaded, “Let me alone with him. Please, just leave.”

“I can’t. The night before last, someone left a picture of Kris Ann on my windshield. It was mutilated like Jason’s mother’s.”

She stiffened. “Jason wouldn’t have done that to his mother.”

“But what if she weren’t raped, if she’d slept with someone first: a lover. Jason could have killed her.”

“He couldn’t have,” she insisted.

“Terry, if you were alone that night then he might not only have killed Lydia, he may kill Kris Ann, or you.”

She shook her head, looking away. “I told the police he was here with me, remember?”

“Then you may be accessory to a murder.”

She stood abruptly and went to the door. “Please, go before he comes home.”

I got up, catching her by the wrist. “Terry, he might kill someone. You have to tell the truth.”

She turned, frightened, and then her eyes went blank. I heard footsteps again, becoming louder, felt her trembling. When the door opened I still held her wrist.

Jason stood in the doorway.

“Jason. It’s all right.”

Terry’s voice was a thin wire of fear. He looked from her to me almost glassily, flushed and swallowing. I dropped her arm. “Hold on, man.”

His face went rigid. He threw the door closed behind him and stalked between us to the bedroom. We froze watching the bedroom door. Jason came though it pointing a black revolver.

It followed me as I moved away from Terry. “I don’t like guns,” I said in a low voice.

“Jason.” She was panicky now. “Don’t.”

He didn’t seem to hear. As he came closer the small black hole of the revolver moved upward toward my face, stopping two inches from my mouth. His black eyes watched me over the gun. Terry moved next to him. “Jason, please …”

His boot jackknifed into my groin. I doubled retching as sickness numbed me and the girl screamed. Then the gun butt smashed my temple.

I was crawling on my stomach through a black hole with white flashes and a wooden door at the end while someone grappled behind me. A girl’s voice panted, “Don’t shoot him.” My head swelled and shrank. With two hands I reached grasping toward a doorknob and wrenched myself up. I couldn’t walk. A long dark moment later I fell face first down a flight of stairs, out of the universe.