When I came up onto the porch she was on her feet and smiling, but there was no warmth or light in the smile. It was nothing more than a narrow stretching and upturning, like the stitched grin on the face of a rag doll. A pale-skinned rag doll with hollow cheeks and spectral eyes.
“You made good time,” she said with false cheerfulness. “I’ve only been here two or three minutes.”
“Not much traffic.”
“We can talk inside or out here...”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Out here, then. The weather’s been so nice the past couple of days.” She sat down again in a padded redwood armchair. I leaned a hip against the porch railing; I didn’t feel like sitting. “Spring has always been my favorite time of year.
I had no comment on that.
“I hope this won’t take long, I can’t take more than an hour for lunch and it’s twelve-thirty already—” She broke off abruptly, and the stitched grin vanished and the shape of her expression changed, darkened. “Oh God,” she said, “I knew when you started asking all those questions it would come to this. The five hundred dollars, the psychologist, the emergency room doctor...”
“He was abusing you, wasn’t he, Bobbie Jean?”
The question seemed to hang in the air between us. She sat still so long it was as if the essence of her had gone away, leaving nothing but the shell of her body. Then, not quite looking at me, “How did you know?”
The way you moved at the funeral, stiff and slow — the same way Sondra Nelson moved that day at Woolfox’s ranch. The labored breathing, the winces — as if there might be bruises under your clothing, too. But all I said was, “How long?”
“Physically? Not long.”
“Weeks, months?”
“A few weeks. Before that, it was all words, looks, gestures... you know.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“It wasn’t much at first. A shove, a slap, a poke in the arm. But then it was happening every time he drank too much, every time we had a cross word about alcohol or money or any of the other things we fought over. He grew angrier, and the slaps and pokes harder and harder. I could see he was losing control. Of his work, his life, everything.”
“What did you do about it?”
“Tried to convince him to stop drinking, join AA, see a doctor. I threatened to leave him. Once I even threatened him with legal action. None of it did any good. It only made matters worse.”
“You could have left him.”
“I tried that, too. More than once I had my mind made up and my bags packed. The only time I actually put them in the car, he came after me and begged me to stay. Down on his knees, crying like a little boy, telling me how much he needed me. I couldn’t turn my back on him. I should have, I know that, but I couldn’t.”
Foul taste in my mouth again; I worked saliva through it before I asked, “What happened that last Sunday night, two weeks ago? The night you ended up in the hospital?”
“Another argument, a whole flock of vicious words between us. I was also drinking, I’d been drinking too much myself. I thought... I don’t know what I thought. We were both drunk. He slapped me and I slapped him back, the first time I ever hit him. His second slap was so hard my ears rang. It made me wild enough to try to knee him. He grabbed me, threw me on the floor, started yelling and kicking me. Half a dozen kicks in the side and hips.”
“Hard enough to break two of your ribs.”
“The last kick... I think I screamed before I passed out.” Her voice was brittle, without emotion. She was like a sponge that had had all moisture wrung out of it and been left to dessicate, curl inward at the edges until it was little more than compressed dust. “When I woke up I was in his car, he’d carried me out and was driving me to the hospital. Crying the whole way, telling me how sorry he was, how much he loved me and that he’d never hurt me again.”
“And after Dr. Caslon treated you, he talked to Eb and told him he’d better get counseling and gave him Richard Disney’s name.”
“Yes. He would’ve agreed to anything that night.”
“Including you paying the hospital bill. The records are in your name.”
“He had no choice then.”
“Not until Sunday night, when he caught the thief at the O’Hanlon Brothers warehouse. Instead of turning him in, he extorted five hundred dollars from him. Received the full amount the next night, deposited it in his account Tuesday morning.”
“Is that how he got the money? I knew it had to be something like that. He said he borrowed it, but I didn’t believe him.”
“The check he wrote was to you,” I said. “To pay you back for the hospital bill.”
“Yes.”
“What’d you do with it?”
“Tore it up and threw the pieces in his face. A mistake... but I couldn’t stand to take dirty money from him.”
“When did that happen?”
“Tuesday evening, after I came home from work.”
And later Eberhardt had gone back to Bolt Street. Not to stake out the warehouse; not to gouge any more wages out of T. K. O’Hanlon under false pretenses. Because he’d picked it as his dying place. Gone too far finally, so far he couldn’t come back. I’ve had enough. I can’t keep hurting anymore. Himself or Bobbie Jean. And the trigger wasn’t one thing but a chain reaction: him breaking her ribs, her having to pay the hospital bill, him sinking low enough to shake down Danny Forbes, and the last link, her tearing up his check and flinging the pieces in his face. You won’t believe this Bobbie Jean but I love you.
“Wednesday A.M.,” I said. “Tell me what happened.”
“He died,” she said.
“But not alone.”
“No. Not alone.”
A UPS van went rumbling by on the street. A couple of houses away, two boys — home for lunch or playing hooky — began yelling and performing loops and wheelies on their racing bikes. I listened to them while I watched Bobbie Jean, waiting for her to go on. But she just sat there in that gone-away posture, for so long that I had to prod her with words like barbs. Making them into a question because this was the part I wasn’t sure of, the part I hoped I was wrong about.
“Did he kill himself, or did you do it?”
She heard me because she made a sound in her throat, low and inarticulate. But she didn’t answer.
“Bobbie Jean. Did you kill Eb?”
“No,” she said. “Yes,” she said.
“Which is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t play games with me.”
“I’m not. I swear I don’t know. You’ll have to tell me.”
“How can I tell you? I wasn’t there.”
Mutely she shook her head.
“He called you at two-forty that morning,” I said. “On his cell phone.” The last call of his life. And the record of it — to his home number, along with the exact time — right there on the final Cellular One bill, staring me in the face every time I looked at it.
“Yes.”
“To say good-bye? Or was he still on the fence and wanted to be talked out of it?” One or both of the reasons he’d called me the week before, maybe. But more likely he’d been bitter and vindictive enough to want to lay a little of the blame on me. Leave me a legacy of hurt.
“Neither one. Help, my help.”
“Make sense, Bobbie Jean.”
“I’m trying to. I’ve been trying to make sense of what happened ever since that night.”
“What did he say when he called?”
“He was drunk. So drunk I could scarcely understand him. He said he was going to kill himself, that he’d been thinking about it a long time and it was the only way. He said he’d been sitting there for an hour with the gun in his hand. He said he... needed me.”