Evan Hunter - Lizzie

Behind her, she heard Maggie’s muffled scream.

Breathlessly she sucked in great gulps of air, sitting astride her stepmother, the candlestick still clutched tightly in her fist, droplets of blood on her hand and her wrist. She was drenched with sweat, her hair matted against her blood-spattered forehead. She kept trying to breathe — if only she could catch her breath — her chest and her shoulders heaving, her mouth open. In the doorway Maggie was whimpering now, small snuffling sounds like those a frightened animal might make. Lizzie’s breathing became more normal. She looked down at her stepmother’s shattered skull. She looked over her shoulder to where Maggie, fully dressed, stood in the doorway. She got to her feet. The white candle lay near the dressing case, broken in half, its separate segments held loosely together by the connecting spinal cord of the wick.

“Am I covered with blood?” she asked numbly.

“Some, ” Maggie said. Her knuckles were pressed to her mouth; she seemed unable to stop whimpering.

“Fetch me some towels,” she said. “The bottom drawer of my dresser.”

Maggie hesitated, and then turned from the doorway.

She stood exactly where she was, looking down at her stepmother, feeling nothing, knowing only that she must clean herself now, thinking ahead only to that and no further, holding the blood-smeared candlestick in her hand, loosely at her side. When. Maggie returned with the towels, she wiped the blood first from the candlestick and then from her hands and her breasts, and then looked at the towels and wondered what she should do with them now. She kept staring at the towels. “The slop pail,” she said at last. “In the kitchen. Would you fetch it, please?”

Maggie ran out onto the landing. She heard her footfalls as she scurried down the stairs. She stood where she was only another moment, and then went into her bedroom and wiped the blood from her face and her shoulders and her hair where it was matted to her forehead, looking at herself in the glass, studying her own pale eyes until Maggie returned. She looked at her blankly, and then dropped the soiled towels into the slop pail.

“I shall need to wash,” she said.

“Your father...” Maggie said.

Lizzie glanced at the clock.

“Yes,” she said, “but I shall need to wash.”

She put the candlestick into the slop pail, cushioning its base on the towels, and went down the steps into the sitting room, Maggie following her, and through the kitchen and into the pantry. At the pantry sink she washed her face and her hands and her shoulders and her breasts, studying herself for any vagrant blood spots, ascertaining from Maggie that there were none, and then drying herself with yet another menstrual towel which she dropped into the pail. She washed the candlestick as well, the silky feel of it, cleansing it of any blood, leaving it on the pantry counter, and then carrying the slop pail with its towels down to the cellar and over to the wash sink, where she emptied it into the pail containing the towel she had left there earlier this morning.

When she came upstairs again, the pantry and the kitchen were empty. The clock on the kitchen wall read a quarter of ten. She found Maggie in the parlor at the front of the house, nervously peering through the window at the street outside.

“What is it?” Lizzie asked at once. “My father? Is he home?”

Maggie shook her head.

She went to the window, stood a trifle behind her so that she could not be seen from outside, and saw first the carriage standing by the north gate between here and the Churchill house next door, the team of horses motionless in the bright sunlight, and then the pond lilies at the back of the carriage, and then Mrs. Manley who lived up the street, and Mrs. Hart who lived in Tiverton but whose sister lived nearby. And then she saw, standing in the gateway, his left arm leaning on the gatepost—

“Why is he here again?” she whispered sharply.

Maggie said nothing.

Outside, the women were negotiating for the purchase of the pond lilies now, selecting them from the tub at the back of the wagon. The pale young man kept watching them boldly, his elbow on the south post of the gateway, his head idly tilted onto his supporting hand.

“Get outside,” she said. “Tell him to go away. Tell him never to come back.”

“Outside?” Maggie said numbly.

“And then finish your windows.”

“My windows?”

“Am I speaking English?”

Maggie went out the front door. Lizzie watched from the window while she engaged the man in brief conversation. Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Hart were gone now. The carriage with its water lilies was plodding its way up the sunlit street. The man smiled, touched his hand to his forehead in a reluctant farewell salute and then began walking away. Maggie stood at the gatepost another moment, glanced nervously up and down the street, and then disappeared around the corner of the house. Lizzie went into the front entry, locked the door again and went upstairs to her bedroom. She put on the same clothing she’d worn earlier, thrown in haste on the bedroom floor: the white underdrawers and chemise, the white petticoat, the black chintz dress with its tiny floral pattern, the felt slippers. She looked at herself in the mirror. When she went out onto the landing again, she saw Mrs. Borden’s green dress lying on the floor where she’d dropped it. She picked it up without so much as glancing into the guest room, carried it to the closet at the top of the stairs and hung it carefully on a padded hanger.

She went downstairs swiftly, walking directly into the parlor and looking out at the street. Maggie was washing the windows at the front of the house, the pail and dipper at her feet, the long brush in her hands. Mr. Pettee, who years ago used to live as a tenant in the upper part of the house, was strolling past. He glanced at Maggie and then turned his head away. Downtown she could hear the City Hall clock striking the hour. She counted the strokes: it was ten o’clock sharp. Depending on what business her father had in town, he could be home at any moment. Was he stopping at the post office, as he’d suggested he might? What would she say to him when he returned? What could she possibly say ?

And suddenly the enormity of what she had done overwhelmed her. Until this moment she had reacted calmly and dispassionately, discounting as a reality the body of the woman who lay upstairs in a widening pool of her own blood, removing herself from the act of violence that had caused her stepmother’s death. But now the body upstairs assumed dimension and shape in her mind, the crushed skull, the matted hair in the blood on the floor, and she willed the body to be gone, prayed desperately that it would not be there when next she looked into that room, would somehow miraculously have disappeared so that she would not have to explain it to her father. But how explain? How describe the necessity of the act without revealing the very thing that had provoked it, the discovery of herself and Maggie naked in her room, the fear that her father would be told she was—

A monster.

An unnatural thing.

Remembering the candlestick, she went swiftly into the pantry, picked it up, examined it again for blood, and then carried it with her into the dining room, wondering where she might put it, knowing she could not possibly take it upstairs to the guest room again where it would be discovered and suspected. She wandered into the sitting room, trying the candlestick on the mantelpiece where already there stood a lamp, carrying it at last into the dining room and setting it on the buffet against the wall. It looked quite natural there. Innocuous. Safe.

She went into the kitchen and looked at the clock.