Лоуренс Блок - Ariel

“Weird.” He chewed on a knuckle. “What do you figure happened? You didn’t really think I did it, did you?”

“I didn’t know. I thought maybe you would fool around like that not knowing it would cause her to have a fit. But if you say you didn’t—”

“I swear I didn’t, Ariel.”

“I believe you. Maybe she did it herself. I’ll tell you something, I think she’s crazy enough.”

“Why would she do it?”

“Why do crazy people do things? I don’t know.”

“Maybe David did it.”

“Sure. He’s just the type. Maybe the bogeyman did it.”

“That’s a good idea,” he said. “I should have thought of that myself. Maybe the bogeyman did it.”

“Always a possibility.”

“Maybe Graham Littlefield did it. He strained himself tearing the room apart and that’s how he ruptured his spleen. Then the Funeral Man hit him with the car as a punishment.”

“We’ll have to tell that to Roberta... Maybe Veronica did it.”

He shook his head. “Not Veronica. Maybe Aunt Rhoda did it.”

“You mean Aunt Rhody.”

“Right, Aunt Rhody. Maybe the old gray goose did it”

“No, the goose is dead.”

“That’s the way it goes. And maybe the fucking wind did it, did anybody have the brains to think of that?”

“That’s what David said. But it couldn’t have happened that way. Everything was tossed around, the way Roberta described it. It would have taken a hurricane. No, somebody actually went and did it. Roberta thinks it’s me and if it wasn’t me it must have been the house.”

“Huh?”

“I told you she’s crazy. ‘The house is evil and it makes things happen.’ Quote unquote. You wouldn’t believe how crazy she is. Your parents are a pain in the ass—”

“No kidding.”

“—but they’re not crazy the way she is.”

“Well, maybe she’s right. Maybe the house did it.”

“Sure... Maybe—”

“Maybe what?”

She squeezed her hands together. “Maybe I did it,” she said softly.

“You...?”

“Maybe in a dream,” she said. “Maybe in my sleep.”

“I don’t think that makes any sense, Ariel.”

“Don’t you? I don’t know if it does or not. Sometimes I do things in my sleep that are weird.”

“You mean in a dream?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then how?”

“I can’t explain it.”

“Well, what kind of things do you do?”

“I don’t want to say.”

“Great.”

“I just don’t want to say, all right? Nothing worth talking about. Just weird things that I do during the night.”

“Now I’m really getting interested.”

“Well, don’t. And I have strange dreams. I don’t know. Maybe I got up one night to go to the bathroom and I went into Caleb’s room and did something and then went back to bed without knowing it. And when I woke up in the morning I didn’t remember anything about it. That’s possible, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so. But why would you do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then—”

“Well, somebody did it. Roberta said—”

“Maybe she did it herself,” he suggested.

“Who, Roberta?”

“Why not, if she’s as crazy as you say. You just said it was possible. And that makes as much sense as maybe you did it in your sleep. Maybe she did it in her sleep.”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s see what’s on the radio, huh? I’m getting a headache from this conversation.”

“Okay,” she said...

And later she said, “Channing, the Funeral Man. Remember how we thought he was a detective?”

“Before I found out he was a lawyer.”

“I thought he was investigating me for murdering Caleb. I don’t know if I really thought that. But she thinks I killed him. She really thinks that.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

He cocked his head, interested. “Well? Did you?”

“What?”

“Did you do it?” he said patiently. “Ariel Jardell, you have sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Did you, Ariel Jardell, murder your innocent baby brother?”

“Oh, sure,” she said. “I did it in my sleep.” They looked at each other for a moment, and then they both began to laugh.

In Dr. Reuben Gintzler’s office one sat on neither couch nor chair. The diminutive psychiatrist provided his patients with a tufted yellow chaise lounge, an uncomfortable piece of furniture on which one could not quite sit and not quite lie down. Roberta had occasionally entertained the thought that this was all according to the man’s master plan — he wanted to keep you off-balance. At other times she decided he was not so much calculating as he was oblivious to such matters.

She was on the chaise now, had been on it for half an hour. She’d been guarded at first, her monolog punctuated by long silences, but then her guard had slipped some and she’d let herself run off in several directions at once, talking about the state of her marriage and the death of her son, about Jeff and Ariel and the picture from the attic and the mysterious attack upon Caleb’s room. She found herself tugging at a conversational thread, drawing it out until it hit a snag, then switching abruptly to another and repeating the process.

She became silent now, her eyes lowered and half-lidded. There was no sound in the room but the ticking of Gintzler’s wall clock, a Regulator pendulum-type in an unvarnished oak case. Clocks like that had hung in schoolrooms when Roberta was a girl, and she wondered if they were there still. Perhaps they had all been rescued to tick out their lives in shrinks’ offices, letting neurotics know when their fifty minutes were up.

“Mrs. Jardell?”

She turned to look at Gintzler. He was poking at a pipe with a wire cleaner, running it through the stem and shank. He never smoked the pipes, only played with them incessantly.

“You are very scattered today,” he said. “Your thoughts run all over the place. Your son, your daughter, your husband, your lover. You came here as if you were at a crisis, and indeed you behave as though this were so, but instead you discuss a great many areas of concern without touching on any crisis. I wonder why.”

She shrugged, said nothing.

“I wonder what really bothers you, Mrs. Jardell.”

“All of the things I’ve been talking about.”

“Oh? I wonder if this is really so. You have mentioned so many unrealistic concerns. Ghosts which form in the corners of rooms. An old black woman who mutters occult secrets in dialect. A painting which seems to have some arcane significance. A mysterious spirit which haunts your gas range and extinguishes its burners. A flute which evidently is not to your liking musically. A curious force, no doubt a poltergeist, which rearranges articles in your dead son’s room. Stairs which creak, windowpanes which rattle. It would seem—”

“It would seem as though I’m crazy,” she said. “So I guess I’m in the right place.”

“It would seem as though you are using all of these phenomena to mask what is really bothering you.”

“And what would that be?”

“Can’t you tell me, Mrs. Jardell?”

And then she was talking about Ariel again, talking about Jeff’s attempt to learn more about her parentage, defending her desire to know Ariel’s ancestry. “Environment isn’t everything, is it?” she demanded. “Don’t genes count for anything? They determine what a person looks like. Why shouldn’t they have a lot to do with what’s on the inside?”

“This is a recent concern, Mrs. Jardell?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I have never heard you allude to it before.”

“No.”