Mary Clark - I 've Heard That Song Before

Alone in this great, sprawling house from which, hundreds of years ago, in another country, a priest had been dragged out and hacked to death on the lawn. As I lay on the bed in our suite, I, too, felt like I had been hacked to pieces.

Was it possible, I asked myself, that my husband, Peter Carrington, had rushed me to the altar because he needed to make sure I could never testify against him?

Was it possible that all his declarations of love were merely the calculations of a cold-blooded killer who, rather than take the chance of murdering me, married me instead?”

I thought of Peter standing in that holding cell, looking at me, with eyes that were alive with his love for me. Behind that expression, had he been mocking me, Kay Lansing, daughter of the landscaper, who had the colossal stupidity to think that he had fallen in love with her at first sight?

There are none so blind as those who will not see, I reminded myself.

I put my hand on my abdomen, a gesture that was becoming almost a reflex reaction to thoughts or situations I did not want to deal with. I was sure the baby was a boy, not because I preferred to have a boy rather than a girl, but because I just knew it was a boy. I was sure I was carrying Peter’s son.

Peter does love me, I told myself fiercely. There is no other answer.

Am I deluding myself? No. No. No.

Hold fast to what you have, for it is happiness. Who said that? I forget. But I shall and will hold fast to my love for Peter, and to his belief in me. I must, because every instinct tells me that this is truth. This is what is real.

I eventually felt myself calming down. I guess I even dozed a little, because the ring of the phone on the bedside table startled me awake. It was Elaine.

“Kay,” she said, I could hear a quivering in her voice.

“Yes, Elaine.” I was hoping that if she was in her house, she didn’t want to drop in on me.

“Kay, I must talk with you. It’s desperately important. May I come over in five minutes?”

I clearly had no choice but to tell her to come. I got up and dashed some cold water on my face, then touched my lashes with mascara and my lips with a light touch of color, and went downstairs. It may sound silly that I bothered to go to that trouble for Peter’s stepmother, but I had a growing sense of a looming turf battle between me and Elaine. With Peter in jail and me so new on the scene, she had been getting in the habit of walking in and out of the house as if it were once again her home.

When she came in this evening, however, there was nothing of the lady of the manor reestablishing her position about her. Elaine was ghastly pale, and her hands were trembling. There was no question that she was nervous and terribly upset. I noticed that she was carrying a plastic bag under one arm.

She didn’t even give me a chance to greet her before she said, “Kay, Richard is in terrible trouble. He’s been gambling again. I must have a million dollars right away.”

A million dollars! That was more money than I would have made if I had worked my entire life at the library. “Elaine,” I protested, “first of all, I don’t have anything like that kind of money, and it’s useless to ask Peter for it. He has told me he thinks you’re very foolish to keep bailing Richard out. He said that the day you refuse to pay his gambling debt is the day Richard is finally going to have to do something about his addiction to gambling.”

“If Richard doesn’t pay this debt, he won’t be alive long enough to do anything about his addiction.” Elaine said. She was clearly on the verge of hysteria. “Listen to me, Kay. I’ve been protecting Peter for nearly twenty-three years. I saw him come home the night he killed Susan. He was sleepwalking, and there was blood on his shirt. I didn’t know what kind of trouble he was in, but I knew I had to protect him. I took that shirt out of the hamper so that the maid wouldn’t see it. If you think I’m lying, look at this.”

She dropped the plastic bag she was carrying on the coffee table and pulled something out of it. It was a man’s white dress shirt. She held it up for me to see. There were dark smudges on the collar and around the top three buttons. “Do you understand what this is?” she asked.

A wave of dizziness made me sink down onto the couch. Yes, I understood what she was holding. I did not doubt for a single instance that it was Peter’s shirt, or that the dark stains were Susan Althorp’s blood.

“Have the money for me tomorrow morning, Kay,” Elaine said.

My mind was suddenly filled with the image of Peter hurting Susan. The antopsy report showed that she had suffered a severe blow to her mouth. That was the way he had flailed out at the cop. My God, I thought, my God. There is no hope for him.

“Did you see Peter come home that night?” I asked.

“Yes, I did.”

“You’re sure he was sleepwalking?”

“I am positive. He walked past me in the corridor and never even saw me.”

“What time did he come in?”

“At two o’clock.”

“Why were you in the corridor at that time?”

“Peter’s father was still ranting about the cost of the party, so I decided to go to one of the other bedrooms. That’s when I saw Peter coming up the stairs.”

“And then you went into Peter’s bathroom to get the shirt. Suppose he had seen you, Elaine. What then?”

“I would have told him that I knew he’d been sleepwalking, and was concerned that he went safely back to bed. But he didn’t wake up. Thank God I took the shirt with me. If it had been found in the hamper the next morning, he’d have been arrested and convicted. He’d probably still be in prison.”

Elaine started to look relieved. I guess she realized that I would get the money for her. She folded the shirt neatly and put it back in the plastic bag, as though she were a clerk in a department store, completing a sale.

“If you were really trying to help Peter, wouldn’t it have been a good idea to get rid of the shirt?” I challenged her.

“No, because it was proof that I did see Peter that night.”

A kind of insurance policy, I thought. Something tucked away against a rainy day. “I’ll get you the money, Elaine,” I promised, “but only if you give that shirt to me.”

“I will. Kay, I’m sorry to do this. I’ve protected Peter because I love him. Now I have to protect my son. That’s why I’m here bargaining with you. When you have a child of your own, you’ll understand.”

Maybe I do already, I thought. I had not told anyone except the lawyers that I was pregnant. It was too soon, and besides, I didn’t want it leaked to the press. I certainly was not going to tell Elaine about the baby now, I thought bitterly, not when I was bargaining to buy the bloody shirt that proved its father was a killer.

Vincent Slater had attended a business dinner in Manhattan and was not home in time to respond to Kay’s urgent request to call him. “If you don’t get back to me this evening, be sure to call first thing in the morning,” she told his answering machine.

It was 11:30 P.M. when he got the message. He knew Kay went to bed fairly early, so he wouldn’t try to call her now. But what could be so urgent? he wondered. That night, even though he was usually a sound sleeper, he found himself waking up several times.

His phone rang at seven A.M. It was Kay. “I don’t want to talk over the phone,” she said. “Be sure to stop by here on your way to the city.”

“I’m up and dressed already,” he said. “I’ll be right there.”

When he got to the mansion, Kay brought him back to the kitchen, where she had been having a cup of coffee. “I wanted to see you before Jane gets here at eight o’clock,” she said. “Last month, that first morning after we got back from our honeymoon, Peter and I went jogging early. I made coffee for us before we went out. It was fun being just the two of us, Mr. and Mrs. Newlywed living in suburbia. It seems a lifetime ago.”