Лоуренс Блок - Ariel

“There’s plenty of room in front. Or were you concerned about my good name?”

“I thought it would be just as easy to park down the street.”

She nodded. “Well, let’s take your car, okay?”

“Fine.”

“Because I don’t want to have to concentrate on driving. I just want to put my head back and talk a blue streak.”

She talked for a long time. He drove through town, then hooked up with the Interstate and stayed on it to the second interchange. Then they were driving in the country, taking a series of back roads, passing small subsistence farms with their little plots of corn and tobacco and tomatoes and okra, some flanked by immobile house trailers, others by tarpaper shacks straight out of Tobacco Road.

Were there ghosts that walked by night in tarpaper shacks? Babies out here didn’t sleep in cribs. They generally made do with a bureau drawer. Did they ever die in their sleep, just close their eyes and never wake up?

She closed her own eyes and went on talking. It had always been easy for her to talk to Jeff Channing and it was no harder now. She had the feeling she could tell him absolutely anything, and at the same time she knew he was paying close attention to every word she spoke. Now and then he would ask her to clarify a point, drawing her out on one thing or another, and rather than interrupt her train of thought it seemed to increase the flow of her words.

Finally she was through. She sat for a moment, waiting to see if there was anything else. Off to the right, two men in bib overalls were fussing over a fire fueled with ruined auto and truck tires. The air reeked of burning rubber and she asked Jeff why they didn’t just throw the tires away.

He laughed. “Slaughtering time,” he said.

“I don’t understand.”

“You burn tires when you slaughter a hog. You have to scald the hog so the bristles loosen from the skin, and to do that you have to heat a huge iron kettle, and you need a hot fire, and nothing burns hotter than rubber. You thought they were just burning the tires to get rid of them?”

“Well, I’m a city girl.”

“Uh-huh. Who do you think that woman was, Bobbie?”

“In the shawl? I don’t know. I don’t know if she just appeared to me or what. I don’t understand ghosts.”

“Neither do I. Did she look like anyone?”

“I think so. But maybe it’s a false memory. I didn’t make the connection at the time.”

“Who did she look like?”

“Can’t you guess?”

“Like Ariel?”

She nodded. “I didn’t want to say it. That pale face and the shape of her head. But I don’t know if I saw her clearly enough for there to be a resemblance. Maybe I don’t even know how her head was shaped. She was wrapped in a shawl, don’t forget.”

“I’m not likely to forget. I feel as though I could close my eyes and see her myself.”

“Don’t do that. We’d go off the road.”

“I’ll try to control myself. What do you think happened to Caleb, Bobbie?”

“I know what happened to him. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Crib death. It’s even been known to happen to kids three or four years old, although it’s most common in the first year.”

“I know all that. I’ve done a little studying on the subject, as a matter of fact. But that’s not what I’m talking about.”

“Oh?”

“That’s what you know happened to Caleb. But what do you think happened to him?”

“Oh,” she said.

“Forget logic and common sense for a few minutes. Forget reality and a sane universe. Talk about what’s inside of you for a change.”

“All right.”

“Do you think the woman in the shawl killed him?”

She worried her forehead with the tips of her fingers. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I feel crazy talking like this, but I see what you mean, and I’m just going to go ahead and feel crazy if I have to. The woman in the shawl — I think the woman in the shawl was some sort of spirit letting me know what was going to happen, that Caleb was going to be taken from me. I think that was her purpose in coming and that’s why I haven’t seen her since. The sense I have of her — well, I don’t know if she’s evil or not, I don’t have a sense of that one way or the other, but I don’t think of her as capable of killing someone.”

“But you think someone killed Caleb.”

“Someone or something.”

“Who?”

She shook her head.

“You don’t know what you think or you’re afraid to say it out loud?”

“Maybe a little of both.”

“David woke up the third time the ghost appeared, didn’t he?”

“Yes, but not until she vanished. He didn’t see her.”

“That’s not what I’m getting at. You sent him down the hall to check on Caleb.”

“That’s right, and he said he was all right. But he must have been already dead, don’t you think? If I saw the woman taking him away he must have been dead already. Unless that’s not the way ghosts do things.” She laughed dryly. “I should have paid more attention when they told spooky stories around the campfire at Girl Scouts. I never realized all that lore would come in handy someday.”

“You think he was dead when David checked him?”

“He must have been, wouldn’t you say? Maybe he was still warm because it had just happened. Or maybe David was just humoring me. He may have opened the door and looked in, and why take a chance on waking the baby? The only reason he went in the first place was to set my mind to rest.”

“So maybe he just opened the door, assumed the baby was all right, and closed it again.”

“Right.”

“Or maybe he went into Caleb’s room, smothered the baby in his crib, and came back and told you everything was fine.”

“My God.”

“Don’t tell me the possibility never occurred to you.”

“Never.” More dry laughter. “That’s a sketch,” she said. “Maybe I’m not as paranoid as I thought. What a crazy idea, Jeff. I wake up screaming and my loyal husband goes to check the baby, and while he’s at it he has a go at infanticide. Why on earth would he do a thing like that?”

“Did David think Caleb was his son?”

She waited a moment before answering. Then she said, “People tend to believe what they want to believe.”

“Caleb was my son, wasn’t he? No question in your mind?”

“None.”

“David’s not stupid by nature. Adoption sometimes triggers fertility — you adopt a kid and then have one of your own. But not after twelve years.”

“No.”

“Did he know about us?”

“I don’t think so. But he must have assumed I was having an affair with somebody.”

“Because of the pregnancy, you mean.”

“Yes. I don’t think he suspected anything before then. And I don’t think he knows who specifically I had the affair with.”

“You don’t think he knows it was me?”

“No.”

“Well, I’m not so sure. The look he gave me at the funeral. Of course I may have been projecting, reading things into it. I wasn’t too steady myself that afternoon.”

“I can’t believe he would kill Caleb.”

“I can’t believe it myself, Bobbie, in the sense of putting any real credence in the notion. But it’s not utterly impossible. I can imagine his resenting raising another man’s child as his own. Then you woke up screaming, and he was half asleep still and half in the bag, too, from what you said—”

“He always has a lot to drink before he goes to sleep. The way some people take sleeping pills, I suppose. I don’t know that he was drunk.”

“People who drink heavily in order to sleep do it because it gets them drunk. He’s probably an alcoholic, or close to it.”