Ed Gorman: Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool

I felt the crush of all that history as I heard light footsteps beyond the door. And felt it still as the porch light came on in the smoky autumn night. And there stood Amy Kelly.

“Why, hello, Sam. You timed it just right.

Emma made a cake this afternoon. C’mon in.”

I went inside and everything had changed. It was no longer a cozy, bright little home. I’d never noticed before how long and dark the shadows were, how stained the wallpaper was, how threadbare the area rugs looked. And how lumpy and beaten the furnishings were.

Most of all, their faces had changed. Emma came in and stood next to Amy. And their faces were grotesque. Not in the monster-movie way but in the way their eyes regarded me-cold, alien eyes-^the saintly women who were not saintly at all.

They tried, of course, to pretend we were still living inside that Norman Rockwell painting this house and these women had always inhabited. To those who didn’t really know them, anyway. Including me.

Emma, as you would expect, sensed my real business here long before her sister did.

Amy said, “Would you like a couple spoons of ice cream with your cake, Sam? It’s chocolate cake. And vanilla ice cream.”

Emma said, in a voice both strained and harsh, “He isn’t here for cake and ice cream, sister.

Now please be quiet.”

Amy started to say something else-she looked shocked at the sudden change in her sister’s mood -but her sister said, “Go upstairs, Amy.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“I said to go upstairs.” She grabbed Amy’s arm with her left hand and gave her a little push on the back with her right. “Go upstairs now and play some music on the radio in your room. I want to hear that music and want you in your room.”

Amy turned to me for explanation and support.

“What’s going on here, Sam?”

“I think Emma’s right, Amy. Why don’t you go upstairs?”

I’d wondered if it had been both of them.

Now I knew better.

Amy started reluctantly, almost as if she’d forgotten how to walk, to the staircase.

“Don’t you think one of you owes me an explanation? This is my house, too, you know.”

“Get up there, sister. And no more dawdling.”

The child had been ordered, once and for all, to her room. The child was smart enough, finally, to go.

She put a hand on the banister, swept her housedress about her as if she were Scarlett O’Hara, and disappeared on the second tier of the stairway.

“Why don’t we sit in the kitchen and drink a little Irish coffee?” She sounded friendlier now.

Amy’s leaving had apparently freed her somehow.

And so we did.

“You want a full shot in it?”

“Half,” I said. “I’m no drinker.”

She smiled. “Neither am I. Not until lately, anyway.” For the first time I heard sorrow and perhaps fear in her voice. “But then everything’s changed now, hasn’t it?” She put a full shot in her coffee.

We sat at a small table that smelled of its oilcloth covering. The ancient refrigerator throbbed. The faucet dripped. The Jesus of the kitchen lithograph looked just as sad as I felt.

“You know what’s funny?”

“What?”

“I never liked him.”

“That surprises me.”

“Right from the start he was moody and angry and belligerent. And he started stealing from us when he wasn’t even quite seven years old. I even thought of sending him to an orphanage-Lord knows we didn’t have the money to send him to some private school-but Amy wouldn’t hear of it. He was Amy’s boy. No matter what he did, she found some way of excusing it. If I was hard with him, she’d sneak into his room and give him money, to make him feel better. She never saw the way he used her. So she let him get away with everything.”

I lit a cigarette. The kitchen had never seemed this small, this oppressive before. I wondered if it felt the same way to her.

Emma smiled as radio music came on upstairs. Dance band music from the thirties.

“Poor Amy. I treat her so bad sometimes.”

“I’ve been trying to put this together, Emma.

From what you just told me, I can see why you have lost your temper with David. But why Sara?”

“You’re not that good at it, Sam. David killed Sara, I didn’t. Right in the backyard here. They’d been upstairs arguing for half an hour at least. Her parents thought she was home.

But she snuck out and came over here. David said they were going out. She looked very embarrassed about all the arguing. He killed her in the car right out there in the backyard, like I said. I watched him put her in the trunk. When he came home that night, I told him I was going to the police.

I made him tell me everything. He put her body in the Coyles’ gazebo so Cliffie would think that Jack Coyle had killed her. I guess they’d been having some kind of unholy affair-Lord, a man of that age. Then after he dumped the body, he tore out to Brenda’s house. She was drunk, of course.

He’d convinced her that he’d been there for an hour longer than he actually was. He told me that he was going to pretend to save her reputation by not telling Cliffie who he’d been with. Then at the last minute, he’d tell Cliffie her name and he’d have his alibi.”

“Then you went ahead and cut his brake line.”

She sighed. Dropped her eyes to the worked and wrinkled hands that surrounded her coffee cup.

“I’m going to have a hard time telling Father Laymon that in confession.”

“And then Brenda,” I said quietly.

A sip of her coffee. A hand at the back of her neck, as if she were having pain. And a deep ragged sigh.

“She wanted money to leave her husband-j run out on him. She wanted two thousand dollars from me. Can you imagine that? Where would somebody like me get two thousand dollars?”

“She was blackmailing you?”

“Trying to. She called me three different times. She was drunker every time she called. She’d figured out that David had tricked her into giving him an alibi. She said that the way things stood, a lot of people thought David had just committed suicide. That he didn’t have nerve enough to do it the way most people do. So he cut his brake line.

He wouldn’t know when or where or how it would happen. He’d just get in a drag race and-”

She raised her gaze to me directly. “She was so miserable, I probably did her a favor.

That’s a horrible thing to say. But it’s true. I don’t think much of her husband-the way he’s always swaggering around like he’s still the big sports hero-but he deserved a better wife than her.

I almost felt sorry for her.”

Her gaze shifted past me and she smiled then at something I couldn’t see. “You’re getting sneaky in your old age, sister.”

I turned and saw Amy in the doorway. In little more than a whisper, she said, “You should’ve talked to me, Emma. I could’ve helped you.

I’d never desert you, Emma. I want to go where you go.”

Just before she moved away from the kitchen door, sobbing, everything in the house took on its old, comfortable self. I liked all the old mismatched furnishings, and the thrum of that damned refrigerator motor, and the smell of the oilcloth.

We listened as Amy, still sobbing, ran up the stairs, slamming her door when she reached her room.

“She’s never going to forgive me, Sam.”

“Maybe never forgive you. But she’ll understand you. Someday.”

“At my age, I don’t have a lot of somedays left, Sam.”

I let her cry for a while and then I went around the table and raised her to her feet and took her in my arms. She had the bones of old age, so fragile and yet so sharp, and flesh that was dried freckled tissue covering the lean meat of mortality.