Donna Tartt - The Secret History

'So when Charles came back with Camilla, we just left. Which, in retrospect, was the smartest thing we could have done. It's not as if teams of expert coroners are crawling all over upstate Vermont. It's a primitive place. People die violent natural deaths all the time. We didn't even know who the man was; there was nothing to tie us to him. All we had to worry about was finding the car and then making our way home without anyone seeing us.' He leaned over and poured himself some more Scotch.

'Which is exactly what we did.'

I poured myself another glass, too, and we sat without speaking for a minute or more.

'Henry,' I said at last. 'Good God.'

He raised an eyebrow. 'Really, it was more upsetting than you can imagine,' he said. 'Once I hit a deer with my car. It was a beautiful creature and to see it struggling, blood everywhere, legs broken… And this was even more distressing but at least I thought it was over. I never dreamed we'd hear anything else about it.' He took a drink of his Scotch. 'Unfortunately, that is not the case,' he said. 'Bunny has seen to that.'

'What do you mean?'

'You saw him this morning. He's driven us half mad over this.

I am very nearly at the end of my rope.'

There was the sound of a key being turned in the lock. I lenry brought up his glass and drank the rest of his whiskey in a long swallow. That'll be Francis,' he said, and turned on the overhead light.

When the lights came on, and the circle of darkness leapt back into the mundane and familiar boundaries of the living room cluttered desk; low, lumpy sofa; the dusty and modishly cut draperies that had fallen to Francis after one of his mother's decorating purges – it was as if I'd switched on the lamp after a long bad dream; blinking, I was relieved to discover that the doors and windows were still where they were supposed to be and that the furniture hadn't rearranged itself, by diabolical magic, in the dark.

The bolt turned. Francis stepped in from the dark hall. He was breathing hard, pulling with dispirited jerks at the fingertips of a glove.

'Jesus, Henry,' he said. 'What a night.'

I was out of his line of vision. Henry glanced at me and cleared his throat discreetly. Francis wheeled around.

I thought I looked back at him casually enough, but evidently I didn't. It must have been all over my face.

He stared at me for a long time, the glove half on, half off, dangling limply from his hand.

'Oh, no,' he said at last, without moving his eyes away from mine. 'Henry. You didn't.'

Tm afraid I did,' Henry said.

Francis squeezed his eyes tight shut, then reopened them.

He had got very white, his pallor dry and talcumy as a chalk drawing on rough paper. For a moment I wondered if he might faint.

'It's all right,' said Henry.

Francis didn't move.

'Really, Francis,' Henry said, a trifle peevishly, 'it's all right.

Sit down.'

Breathing hard, he made his way across the room and fell heavily into an armchair, where he rummaged in his pocket for a cigarette.

'He knew,' said Henry. 'I told you so.'

Francis looked up at me, the unlit cigarette trembling in his fingertips. 'Did you?'

I didn't answer. For a moment I found myself wondering if this was all some monstrous practical joke. Francis dragged a hand down the side of his face.

'I suppose everybody knows now,' he said. 'I don't even know why I feel bad about it.'

Henry had stepped into the kitchen for a glass. Now he poured some Scotch in it and handed it to Francis. 'Deprendi miserum est,' he said.

To my surprise Francis laughed, a humorless little snort.

'Good Lord,' he said, and took a long drink. 'What a nightmare.

I can't imagine what you must think of us, Richard.'

'It doesn't matter.' I said this without thinking, but as soon as I had, I realized, with something of a jolt, that it was true; it really didn't matter that much, at least not in the preconceived way that one would expect.

'Well, I guess you could say we're in quite a fix,' said Francis, rubbing his eyes with thumb and forefinger. 'I don't know what we're going to do with Bunny. I wanted to slap him when we were standing in line for that damned movie.'

'You took him to Manchester?' Henry said.

'Yes. But people are so nosy and you never do really know who might be sitting behind you, do you? It wasn't even a good movie.'

'What was it?'

'Some nonsense about a bachelor party. I just want to take a sleeping pill and go to bed.' He drank off the rest of his Scotch and poured himself another inch. 'Jesus,' he said to me. 'You're being so nice about this. The feel awfully embarrassed by this whole thing.'

There was a long silence.

Finally I said: 'What are you going to do?'

Francis sighed. 'We didn't mean to do anything,' he said. 'I know it sounds kind of bad, but what can we do about it now?'

The resigned note in his voice simultaneously angered and distressed me.7 don't know,' I said. 'Why for God's sake didn't you go to the police?'

'Surely you're joking,' said Henry dryly.

'Tell them you don't know what happened? That you found him lying out in the woods? Or, God, I don't know, that you hit him with the car, that he ran out in front of you or something?'

'That would have been a very foolish thing to do,' Henry said.

'It was an unfortunate incident and I am sorry that it happened, but frankly I do not see how well either the taxpayers' interests or my own would be served by my spending sixty or seventy years in a Vermont jail.'

'But it was an accident. You said so yourself.'

Henry shrugged.

'If you'd gone right in, you could've got off on some minor charge. Maybe nothing would have happened at all.'

'Maybe not,' Henry said agreeably. 'But remember, this is Vermont.'

'What the hell difference does that make?'

'It makes a great deal of difference, unfortunately. If the thing went to trial, we'd be tried here. And not, I might add, by a jury of our peers.'

'So?'

'Say what you like, but you can't convince me that a jury box of poverty-level Vermonters would have the remotest bit of pity for four college students on trial for murdering one of their neighbors.'

'People in I lampden have been hoping tor years that something like this would happen,' said Francis, lighting a new cigar ette off the end of the old one. 'We wouldn't be getting off on any manslaughter charges. We'd be lucky if we didn't go to the chair.'

'Imagine how it would look,' Henry said. 'We're all young, well educated, reasonably well off; perhaps most importantly, not Vermonters. And I suppose that any equitable judge might make allowances for our youth, and the fact that it was an accident and so forth '

'Four rich college kids?' said Francis. 'Drunk? On drugs? On this guy's land in the middle of the night?'

'You were on his land?'

'Well, apparently,' said Henry. 'That's where the papers said his body was found.'

I hadn't been in Vermont very long, but I'd been there long enough to know what any Vermonter worth his salt would think of that. Trespassing on someone's land was tantamount to breaking into his house. 'Oh, God,' I said.

'That's not the half of it, either,' said Francis. 'For Christ's sake, we were wearing bed sheets. Barefoot. Soaked in blood.

Stinking drunk. Can you imagine if we'd trailed down to the sheriff's office and tried to explain all that'?'

'Not that we were in any condition to explain,' Henry said dreamily. 'Really. I wonder if you understand what sort of state we were in. Scarcely an hour before, we'd all been really, truly out of our minds. And it may be a superhuman effort to lose oneself so completely, but that's nothing compared to the effort of getting oneself back again.'