Donna Tartt - The Secret History

'It certainly wasn't as if something snapped and there we were, our jolly old selves,' said Francis. 'Believe me. We might as well have had shock treatments.'

'I really don't know how we got home without being seen,'

Henry said.

'No way could we have patched together a plausible story from this. Good Lord. Tt was weeks before I got over it. Camilla couldn't even talk for three days.'

With a small chill, I remembered: Camilla, her throat wrapped in a red muffler, unable to speak. Laryngitis, they'd said.

'Yes, that was very strange,' said Henry. 'She was thinking clearly enough, but the words wouldn't come out right. As if she'd had a stroke. When she started to speak again, her high school French came back before her English or her Greek.

Nursery words. I remember sitting by her bed, listening to her count to ten, watching her point to lafenetre, la chaise Francis laughed. 'She was so funny,' he said. 'When I asked her how she felt she said, "Je me sens eomme Helene Keller, man vieux,"'

'Did she go to the doctor?'

'Are you kidding?'

'What if she hadn't got any better?'

'Well, the same thing happened to all of us,' said Henry. 'Only it more or less wore off in a couple of hours.'

'You couldn't talk?'

'Bitten and scratched to pieces?' Francis said. 'Tongue-tied?

Half mad? If we'd gone to the police they would have charged us with every unsolved death in New England for the last five years.' He held up an imaginary newspaper. ' "Crazed Hippies Indicted for Rural Thrill-Killing."

"Cult Slaying of Old Abe So and-So."'

'Teen Satanists Murder Longtime Vermont Resident,' said Henry, lighting a cigarette.

Francis started to laugh.

'It would be one thing if we had even a chance at a decent hearing,' said Henry. 'But we don't.'

'And I personally can't imagine much worse than being tried for my life by a Vermont circuit-court judge and a jury box full of telephone operators.'

'Things aren't marvelous,' said Henry, 'but they could certainly be worse. The big problem now is Bunny.'

'What's wrong with him?'

'Nothing's wrong with him.'

Then what's the problem?'

'He just can't keep his mouth shut, that's all.'

'Haven't you talked to him?'

'About ten million times,' Francis said.

'Has he tried to go to the police?'

'If he goes on like this,' said Henry, 'he won't have to. They'll come right to us. Reasoning with him does no good. He just doesn't grasp what a serious business this is.'

'Surely he doesn't want to see you go to jail.'

'If he thought about it, I'm sure he'd realize he didn't,' said Henry evenly. 'And I'm sure he'd realize that he doesn't particularly want to go to jail himself, either.'

'Bunny? But why?'

'Because he's known about this since November and he hasn't gone to the police,' Francis said.

'But that's beside the point,' said Henry. 'Even he has sense enough not to turn us in. He doesn't have much of an alibi for the night of the murder, and if it ever came to prison for the rest of us I think he must know that I, at least, would do everything in my power to see he came along with us.' He stubbed out his cigarette. 'The problem is he's just a fool, and sooner or later he's going to say the wrong thing to the wrong person,' he said.

'Perhaps not intentionally, but I can't pretend to be too concerned with motive at this point. You heard him this morning. He'd be in quite a spot himself if this got back to the police but of course he thinks those ghastly jokes are all terribly subtle and clever and over everyone's head,' 'He's only just smart enough to realize what a mistake turning us in would be,' said Francis, pausing to pour himself another drink. 'But we can't seem to pound it into him that it's even more in his own self-interest not to go around talking like he does. And, really, I'm not at nil sure he won't just come out and tell someone, when he's in one of these confessional moods.'

'Tell someone? Like who?'

'Marion. His father. The Dean of Studies.' He shuddered.

'Gives me the creeps just to think about it. He's just the sort who always stands up in the back of the courtroom during the last five minutes of "Perry Mason.'"

'Bunny Corcoran, Boy Detective,' said Henry dryly.

'How did he find out? He wasn't with you, was he?'

'As a matter of fact,' said Francis, 'he was with you.' He glanced at Henry, and to my surprise the two of them began to laugh.

'What? What's so funny?' I said, alarmed.

This sent them into fresh peals of laughter. 'Nothing,' said Francis at last.

'Really, it is nothing,' said Henry, with a bemused little sigh.

'The oddest things make me laugh these days.' He lit another cigarette. 'He was with you that night, early in the evening, anyway. Remember? You went to the movies.'

'The Thirty-Nine Steps,' Francis said.

With something of a start, I did remember: a windy autumn night, full moon obscured by dusty rags of cloud. I'd worked late in the library and hadn't gone to dinner. Walking home, a sandwich from the snack bar in my pocket, and the dry leaves skittering and dancing on the path before me, I'd run into Bunny on his way to the Hitchcock series, which the Film Society was showing in the auditorium.

We were late and there were no seats left so we sat on the carpeted stairs, Bunny leaning back on his elbows with his legs stretched in front of him, cracking pensively with his rear molars at a little Dum-Dum sucker. The high wind rattled the flimsy walls; a door banged open and shut until somebody propped it open with a brick. On the screen, locomotives screaming across a black-and-white nightmare of iron-bridged chasms.

'We had a drink afterwards,' I said. 'Then he went to his room.'

Henry sighed. 'I wish he had,' he said.

'He kept asking if I knew where you were.'

'He knew himself, very well. We'd threatened half a dozen times to leave him at home if he didn't behave.'

'So he got the bright idea of coming around to Henry's to scare him,' said Francis, pouring himself another drink.

'I was so angry about that,' said Henry abruptly. 'Even if nothing had happened, it was a sneaky thing to do. He knew where the spare key was, and he just got it and let himself in.'

'Even so, nothing might have happened. It was just a horrible string of coincidences. If we'd stopped in the country to get rid of our clothes, if we'd come here or to the twins', if Bunny only hadn't fallen asleep 'He was asleep?'

'Yes, or otherwise he would have got discouraged and left,'

Henry said. 'We didn't get back to Hampden until six in the morning. It was a miracle we found our way to the car, over all those fields and things in the dark… Well, it was foolish to drive to North Hampden in those bloody clothes. The police could have pulled us over, we could have had a wreck, anything. But I felt ill, and I wasn't thinking clearly, and I suppose I drove to my own apartment by instinct.'

'He left my room around midnight.'

'Well, then, he was alone in my apartment from about twelve thirty to six a. m. And the coroner reckoned the time of death between one and four. That's one of the few decent cards fate dealt us in the whole hand. Though Bunny wasn't with us, he'd have a hard time proving he wasn't. Unfortunately, that's not a card we can play except in the direst circumstances.' He shrugged.

'If only he'd left the lamp on, anything to tip us off.'

'But that was going to be the big surprise, you see. Jumping out at us from the dark.'

'We walked in and turned on the light, and then it was too late. He woke up instantly. And there we were '

'- all white robes and bloody like something from Edgar Allan Poe,' Francis said gloomily.

'Jesus, what did he do?'

'What do you think? We scared him half to death.'