Chapter 16

Roderick catapulted Alice into the room with an underhand slap across her backside. Bessy was lying flat on her back on the couch, Fay and Clara stood over her in attendance. The three women turned to gape at Roderick.

'What are you two doing here?' Bessy brought out at last, though weakly. Her face glistened with sweat. She seemed to be ill.

'I could ask you the same question,' Roderick said. 'I thought you were going away on the midnight bus? What happened?'

Bessy moaned and shook her head.

'We tried to,' Clara said, while she patted Bessy's brow with a washcloth. 'But when we got to the damned bus station, ole Bessy came down with some kind of fit and said we had to come back here. In any case, she wasn't fit to be taking no trip then. She's better now than she was, though, and the taxi's coming to take us to the station again. There's a 3.30 bus. But you still ain't said what you're doing here—and where you found our little Dinah. Welcome home, Dinah.'

'She was hitch-hiking on the highway out of town. It's a good thing I found her there, because the damn brat knows everything. One of you has got some explaining to do.'

'What you know?' Bessy asked in a sorrowful voice, turning her head sideways on the armrest of the sofa. Alice bit her lip and made no reply. 'Well, with you carrying on this way and bringing her round here, she sure enough knows everything now?

'I tell you I'd practically got her back to Baltimore, when it all spilled out. One of you told her I was in on her kidnapping.'

'Don't look at me, mister,' Clara growled. 'I don't know nothing of what this is all about, and I don't want to know nothing. You two kidnappers talk this over by yourselves and leave me and Fay out of it. First minute I saw that little piece, I knew she was gonna be bad luck.'

Roderick's eyes locked with Clara's in a communion of hatred. There was something about the girl's ugly, angular face, something about the way she stabbed out her cigarette, as though it were no ashtray she used, but the palm of his hand

... something...

'I told you before,' Alice explained in a small voice, 'that nobody told me. I figured it out by myself. Actually, Daddy, there were all sorts of clues.'

He slapped her across the face. He couldn't stand the way she pronounced 'clues'.

'You'd better take her upstairs and lock her up,' he commanded, pushing her across the room to Bessy. 'Then we can discuss what we're going to do.'

Bessy seemed to welcome the opportunity to leave the room. 'Come along, Dinah,' she said, taking Alice by the hand. She was more than usually slow up the stairs, and her breath wheezed and whistled like a toy accordion.

Clara kept on regarding Roderick with the same disquieting fixity, as though she hoped, by staring hard enough, to nail him to the wall. He avoided her gaze now.

'Trying to remember who I am?' she asked, jutting her teeth forward like a belligerent weasel. 'Can't place me?'

'No, I'm afraid ... not...'

'I know!' Fay said, with a dazzling, whiter-than-white smile. 'You're Clara !'

Roderick had backed into a corner, where he toyed with the broken forty-five phonograph, spinning the little turntable with one finger.

'I 'spect I've changed some since the last time you saw me. But then I 'spect all niggers probably look just the same to you, don't they? Don't they?' Her eyes narrowed. She walked to within a few inches of him and whispered:'I held her down. Now do you remember?'

'Shut up! For the love of ... for the love of ...' The three-legged end-table rocked away from the wall that had been supporting it. Waving its single arm, the phonograph crashed to the floor.

'I guess you do,' Clara said.

'No!' said Roderick emphatically. He walked into the kitchen. It was strange how after all this time the kitchen still seemed familiar, not to say homey. Though it was seedier than he'd remembered.

No. He didn't remember.

When Bessy came into the kitchen he was draining a carton of milk, in gargantuan swallows. The milk trickled down from the corners of his mouth.

'I remember,' he said, when the milk was gone, 'that you used to serve coffee in here. You made me drink it black.' 

'You all right, Roderick?'

'I thought they'd killed her. I thought she was dead.' He sounded disappointed.

'Clara? They damn near did. They came round in white robes, so I suppose they must of been Klansmen. Though I would guess college boys, more likely, judging by their voices. After all, why should the Klan be concerned? She wasn't no white girl. Police never did a thing, of course. Took Clara to the hospital and fixed up the bones that were broken. She's got a silver plate in her head to this day. She can't sleep on account of it, that's what she says. So when she gets mean, I try and take into account what she's been through.'

'You're a fool, keeping her on after what happened. No wonder this dump has gone downhill and you don't have any more business.'

'It ain't Clara that's to blame,' Bessy said, sighing and sitting. 'She brings in more than her share of regular customers. Klansmen, especially. We got them cutting their meetings short some nights just to come here and be with Clara. Kladds and Kludds and Kleagles. She's become sort of famous. They call her Ku Klux Klara.'

'I don't think it's funny.'

Bessy shrugged. After an awkward silence, she asked, 'What you meaning to do with little Dinah?'

'Maybe you should take her away with you and keep her.' He began to collapse the empty milk carton. 'For a while.'

'How long a while?'

Till I can get good and lost. Of course, I'll give you some more money.'

'It ain't the money I care about. It's the trouble I'm getting into. When she escaped I thought, "Well, that's it, Bessy McKay. You've had it." If you hadn't found her, I might be in jail now—and you would be, sure enough.'

Then why did you come back here? Why didn't you leave on the bus when you had the chance?'

Bessy shook her head slowly. Tears trembled at the corners of her eyes. 'Oh, you whitened sepulchre! You old Pharisee! How can you sit there cold as stone and talk to me after what you been doing?'

'What have I been doing?'

'It's on the front page of the newspaper. The morning paper

comes out at eleven o'clock. I saw it at the bus station. You damn fool!' She went into the living-room and returned with the paper. News about the Civil Rights protests and the Klan had squeezed the headline—kidnap suspects found murdered—into the two columns on the left side of the front page. Beneath the headline were two photos: a prison portrait of Dorman and a picture of Alice in her St. Arnobia's pinafore. He skimmed the text:

'Ordinary, Va. Two men believed to have abducted Alice Raleigh of Baltimore, the eleven-year-old heiress to the Duquesne fortune, were discovered dead yesterday in a cabin a few miles outside of town. They were identified tentatively as Harry Dorman, white, and James Bittle, Negro. Dorman, who was implicated in the famous Larpenter kidnapping case, was recently released from a Federal penitentiary after serving sixteen years

The article had little to say about the actual kidnapping, and nothing concerning Roderick himself. The F.B.I. (who had taken the credit for the discovery) were evidently doing their best to keep the newspapers out of the case as long as possible.

'It says here,' Roderick pointed out, 'that they may have killed each other.'

'And it says that it don't seem very likely. And it don't.'

'Well, if I killed Harry—and mind you, I'm not saying I did—I would have had a good reason. He sent me a letter asking for more money. He wanted half for himself. Otherwise he was going to let the police know about my share in the kidnapping. That's blackmail, Bessy. If I'd given him what he asked for, do you think he would have been content with half? Not on your life!'

There was two of them.'

The boy, you mean? Yes, it was too bad about young Bittle. But he was in with Dorman. They were both going to blackmail me. But that's no reason for you to cry your eyes out, is it? Harry Dorman was a rat, and Jim Bittle was another. The two of us are a lot safer with them out of the way.'

'Jim Bittle was my son, Roderick.'

'Christ Almighty, Bessy, why didn't you ever say so? I didn't know!'

'Don't make no difference now.' But this explicit stoicism was belied by her tears.

'Bessy, I'm sorry. I'm sincerely sorry.' This, somehow, did not seem quite adequate, and he expressed his sincere

compassion directly by pouring her out a glass of gin from the bottle for which she'd been reaching. Then he poured a glass for himself.

'I don't blame you, Roderick. It's my own goddamned fault. My fault for letting him get mixed up in this business. I thought I'd be doing him a good turn, making up to him for never having been a mother to him. He grew up in an orphanage, you know, my Jimmy. I was glad to get him off my hands then. It was the war, and the money was rolling in. His Daddy died on one of those islands out there. We was married, but I never told that to the people at the orphanage. I tried to get an abortion at first, but I wouldn't go through with it. I did get an abortion the next time. That's why I couldn't ever have a baby after that. Funny thing—it's like that's what I done, after all. It's like he was an abortion too, but I just had to wait all this time to do it.'

Roderick had stopped listening to her drunken croaking. Bessy, for her part, was not really narrating for his benefit, but more as a sort of elegy. He was thinking about the first time he had ever held his own daughter in his arms. The bundle of pink blankets about the tiny pink face. The two-month-old blue eyes. The tiny hands clasping at air. Looking at those little eyes he'd wished his wife had had an abortion, a course to which he had often urged her. Delphinia had mever agreed that he'd been right until after the reading of her father's will. Then it had been too late.

The sun was just coming up before Roderick was drunk enough to be able to suggest what he had in mind, and even then it was Bessy who had to take the initiative: 'How come, Roderick, that you come back here!  Seeing as how you say you thought we'd be gone away on the bus already.'

Roderick didn't reply directly. Instead, after allowing time for her question to dissolve into the hazy morning light of the tide-water, he said, 'I've got a bargain, Bessy. I've got a deal to make with you.'

'Don't want to make no more deals. They don't get me nothing but misery.'

'I'm sorry about Jim, Bessy. Really I am. If there was some way I could make it up to you, I would. I can see that the money doesn't mean anything to you. You can't put a price-tag on a human life. No, there's only one fair exchange for what I took from you. How does the Good Book put it? An

eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth? If you understand me.'

Bessy looked at him with revulsion: Then that's why you came back here! You was going to kill her, and then make it look like it was me!'

'I might have had such an idea, but I realise now that I would never have had the heart to carry it out. Basically, I'm too much of a sentimentalist. I could never have lifted a hand to hurt my own dear little Alice. But you.. .'

'You want me to...'

Roderick smiled an inveigling, Erroll-Flynn smile (the smile his wife had fallen in love with). 'If you would, I'd appreciate it very much.'