Ricky sneezed violently, and Sears said, "It happened in 1929-October of 1929. That was a long time ago. When Ricky asked John about the worst thing he'd ever done, all that we could think about was your Uncle Edward-it was only a week after his death. Eva Galli was the last thing on our minds."
"Well, now we have truly crossed the Rubicon," said Ricky. "Up until you said the name, I still wasn't sure that we'd tell it. But now that we're here we'd better go on without stopping. Whatever Peter Barnes told you had better wait until we're done-if after that you still want to stay in the same room with us. And I suppose that somehow what happened to him must be related to the Eva Galli affair. Now; I've said it too."
"Ricky never wanted you to know about Eva Galli," said Sears. "Way back when I wrote to you, he thought it would be a mistake to rake it all up again. I guess we agreed with him. I certainly did."
"Thought it would muddy the waters," Ricky said through his cold. "Thought it couldn't possibly have anything to do with our problem. Spook stories. Nightmares. Premonitions. Just four old fools losing their marbles. Thought it was irrelevant. It was all so mixed up anyhow. Should have known better when that girl came looking for a job. And now with Lewis gone…"
"You know something?" Sears said. "We never even gave Lewis John's cufflinks."
"Slipped our minds," Ricky said, and drank some of his Old Parr. He and Sears were already deep in the well of their story, concentrated on it so wholly that Don, seated near them, felt invisible.
"Well, what happened to Eva Galli?" he asked.
Sears and Ricky glanced at each other; then Ricky's eyes went to his glass and Sears's to the fire. "Surely that's obvious," Sears said. "We killed her."
"The two of you?" Don asked, thrown off balance it was not the answer he had expected.
"All of us," Ricky answered. "The Chowder Society. Your uncle, John Jaffrey, Lewis, and Sears and myself. In October, 1929. Three weeks after Black Monday, when the stock market collapsed. Even here in Milburn, you could see the beginnings of the panic. Lou Price's father, who was also a broker, shot himself in his office. And we killed a girl named Eva Galli. Not murder- not outright murder. We'd never have been convicted of anything-maybe not even of manslaughter. But there would have been a scandal."
"And we couldn't face that," Sears said. "Ricky and I had just started out as lawyers, working in his father's firm. John had qualified as a doctor only the year before. Lewis was the son of a clergyman. We were all in the same fix. We would have been ruined. Slowly, if not immediately."
"That was why we decided on what we tried to do," said Ricky.
"Yes," said Sears. "We did an obscene thing. If we'd been thirty-three instead of twenty-three, we would probably have gone to the police and taken our chances. But we were so young-Lewis wasn't even out of his teens. So we tried to conceal it. And then at the end-"
"At the end," Ricky said, "we were like characters in one of our stories. Or in your novel. I've been reliving the last ten minutes for two months now. I even hear our voices, the things we said when we put her in Warren Scales's car…"
"Let's start at the beginning," Sears said.
"Let's start at the beginning. Yes."
"All right," Ricky said. "It begins with Stringer Dedham. He was going to marry her. Eva Galli hadn't been in town two weeks when Stringer set his cap for her. He was older than Sears and myself, thirty-one or two, I imagine, and he was in a position to marry. He ran the Colonel's old farm and stables with the girls' help, and Stringer worked hard and had good ideas. In short, he was a prosperous, well-thought-of fellow, and made a good catch for any of the local girls. Good-looking fellow too. My wife says he was the handsomest man she'd ever seen. All the girls above school age were after him. But when Eva Galli came to town with all her money and her metropolitan manners and her good looks, Stringer was sandbagged. She knocked him off his pins. She bought that house on Montgomery Street-"
"Which house on Montgomery Street?" Don asked. "The one Freddy Robinson lived in?"
"Why yes. The one across the street from John's house. Miss Mostyn's house. She bought that house, and set it up with new furniture and a piano and a gramophone. And she smoked cigarettes and drank cocktails, and she wore her hair short-a real John Held girl."
"Not entirely," Sears said. "She was no bubble-headed flapper. The time for those had passed, anyhow. And she was educated. She read quite widely. She could speak intelligently. Eva Galli was an enchanting woman. How would you describe the way she looked, Ricky?"
"Like a nineteen-twenties Claire Bloom," Ricky said immediately.
"Typical Ricky Hawthorne. Ask him to describe someone, and he names a movie star. I guess you can take it as an accurate description. Eva Galli had all this exciting modernity about her, what was modernity for Milburn at any rate, but there was also a refinement about her-an air of grace."
"That's true," said Ricky. "And a certain mysteriousness we found terribly attractive. Like your Anna Mobley. We knew nothing about her but what she hinted-she had lived in New York, she had apparently spent some time in Hollywood as an actress in silents. She did a small part in a romance called China Pearl. A Richard Barthelmess movie."
Don took a piece of paper from his pocket and wrote down the name of the film.
"And she was obviously partly of Italian ancestry, but she told Stringer at one point that her maternal grandparents were English. Her father had been a man of considerable substance, one gathered, but she had been orphaned when just a child and was raised by relatives in California. That was all we knew about her. She said that she had come here for peace and seclusion."
"The women tried to take her under their wing," Sears said. "She was a catch for them too, remember. A wealthy girl who had turned her back on Hollywood, sophisticated and refined-every woman of position in Milburn sent her an invitation. The little societies women here had in those days all wanted her. I think that what they wanted was to tame her."
"To make her identifiable," Ricky said. "Yes. To tame her. Because with all her qualities, there was something else. Something fey. Lewis had a romantic imagination then, and he told me that Eva Galli was like an aristocrat, a princess or some such, who had turned her back on the court and gone off to the country to die."
"Yes, she affected us too," said Sears. "Of course, for us she was out of reach. We idealized her. We saw her from time to time-"
"We paid court," Ricky said.
"Absolutely. We paid court to her. She had politely refused all the ladies' invitations, but she had no objections to five gangling young men showing up on her doorstep on a Saturday or Sunday. Your uncle Edward was the first of us. He had more daring than we other four. By this time, everybody knew that Stringer Dedham had lost his head over her, so in a sense she was seen as under Stringer's patronage-as if she always had a ghostly duenna by her side. Edward slipped between the cracks of convention. He paid a call on her, she was dazzlingly charming to him, and soon we all got into the habit of calling on her. Stringer didn't seem to mind. He liked us, though he was in a different world."
"The adult world," Ricky said. "As Eva was. Even though she could only have been two or three years older than us, she might have been twenty. Nothing could have been more proper than our visits. Of course some of the elderly women thought they were scandalous. Lewis's father thought so too. But we had just enough social leeway to get away with it. We paid our visits in a group, after Edward had broken the ground, about once every two weeks. We were far too jealous to allow any one of us to go alone. Our visits were extraordinary. It was like slipping out of time altogether. Nothing exceptional happened, even the conversation was ordinary, but for those few hours we spent with her, we were in the realm of magic. She swept us off our feet. And that she was known to be Stringer's fiancée made it safe."