I said desperately, ‘Maybe it wasn’t worth destroying it.’
Stern leaned forward and pointed his pipe at me. ‘ It was because it made you do what you did. After the fact, maybe things look different. But when you were moved to do it, the important thing was to destroy Miss Kew and regain this thing you’d had before. I don’t see why and neither do you.’
‘How are we going to find out?’
‘Well, let’s get to the most unpleasant part, if you’re up to it.’
I lay down. ‘I’m ready.’
‘All right. Tell me everything that happened just before you killed her.’
I fumbled through that last day, trying to taste the food, hear the voices. A thing came and went and came again: it was the crisp feeling of the sheets. I thrust it away because it was at the beginning of that day, but it came back again, and I realized it was at the end, instead.
I said, ‘What I just told you, all that about the children doing things other people’s way instead of their own, and Baby not talking, and everyone happy about it, and finally that I had to kill Miss Kew. It took a long time to get to that, and a long time to start doing it. I guess I lay in bed and thought for four hours before I got up again. It was dark and quiet. I went out of the room and down the hall and into Miss Kew’s bedroom and killed her.’
‘How?’
‘That’s all there is!’ I shouted, as loud as I could. Then I quieted down. ‘It was awful dark… it still is. I don’t know. I don’t want to know. She did love us. I know she did. But I had to kill her.’
‘All right, all right,’ Stern said, ‘I guess there’s no need to get too gruesome about this. You’re—‘
‘What?’
‘You’re quite strong for your age, aren’t you, Gerard?’
‘I guess so. Strong enough, anyway.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘I still don’t see that logic you were talking about.’ I began to hammer on the couch with my fist, hard, once for each word: ‘Why—did—I—have—to—go—and—do—that?’
‘Cut that out,’ he said. ‘You’ll hurt yourself.’
‘I ought to get hurt,’ I said.
‘Ah?’ said Stern.
I got up and went to the desk and got some water. ‘What am I going to do?’
‘Tell me what you did after you killed her, right up until the time you came here.’
‘Not much,’ I said. ‘It was only last night. I took her cheque-book. I went back to my room, sort of numb. I put all my clothes on except my shoes. I carried them. I went out. Walked a long time, trying to think, went to the bank when it opened. Cashed a cheque for eleven hundred bucks. Got the idea of getting some help from a psychiatrist, spent most of the day looking for one, came here. That’s all.’
‘Didn’t you have any trouble cashing the cheque?’
‘I never have any trouble making people do what I want them to do.’
He gave a surprised grunt.
‘I know what you’re thinking—I couldn’t make Miss Kew do what I wanted.’
‘That’s part of it,’ he admitted.
‘If I had of done that,’ I told him, ‘she wouldn’t of been Miss Kew any more. Now the banker—all I made him do was be a banker.’
I looked at him and suddenly realized why he fooled with the pipe all the time. It was so he could look down at it and you wouldn’t be able to see his eyes.
‘You killed her,’ he said—and I knew he was changing the subject—‘and destroyed something that was valuable to you. It must have been less valuable to you than the chance to rebuild this thing you used to have with the other kids. And you’re not sure of the value of that.’ He looked up. ‘Does that describe your main trouble?’
‘Just about.’
‘You know the single thing that makes people kill?’ When I didn’t answer, he said, ‘Survival. To save the self or something which identifies with the self. And in this case that doesn’t apply, because your setup with Miss Kew had far more survival value for you, singly and as a group, than the other.’
‘So maybe I just didn’t have a good enough reason to kill her.’
‘You had, because you did it. We just haven’t located it yet. I mean we have the reason, but we don’t know why it was important enough. The answer is somewhere in you.’
‘Where?’
He got up and walked some. ‘We have a pretty consecutive life-story here. There’s fantasy mixed with the fact, of course, and there are areas in which we have no detailed information, but we have a beginning and a middle and an end. Now I can’t say for sure, but the answer may be in that bridge you refused to cross a while back. Remember?’
I remembered all right. I said, ‘Why that? Why can’t we try something else?’
He quietly pointed out, ‘Because you just said it. Why are you shying away from it?’
‘Don’t go making big ones out of little ones,’ I said. Sometimes the guy annoyed me. ‘That bothers me. I don’t know why, but it does.’
‘Something’s lying hidden in there and you’re bothering it so it’s fighting back. Anything that fights to stay concealed is very possibly the thing we’re after. Your trouble is concealed, isn’t it?’
‘Well, yes,’ I said, and I felt that sickness and faintness again, and again I pushed it away. Suddenly I wasn’t going to be stopped any more. ‘Let’s go get it.’ I lay down.
He let me watch the ceiling and listen to silence for a while, and then he said, ‘You’re in the library. You’ve just met Miss Kew. She’s talking to you; you’re telling her about the children.’
I lay very still. Nothing happened. Yes, it did; I got tense inside all over, from the bones out, more and more. When it got as bad as it could, still nothing happened.
I heard him get up and cross the room to the desk. He fumbled there for a while; things clicked and hummed. Suddenly I heard my own voice:
‘Well, there’s Janie, she’s eleven like me. And Bonnie and Beanie are eight, they’re twins, and Baby. Baby is three.’
And the sound of my own scream—
And nothingness.
Sputtering out of the darkness, I came up flailing with my fists. Strong hands caught my wrists. They didn’t check my arms; they just grabbed and rode. I opened my eyes. I was soaking wet. The thermos lay on its side on the rug. Stern was crouched beside me, holding my wrists. I quit struggling.
‘What happened?’
He let me go and stood back watchfully. ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘what a charge!’
I held my head and moaned. He threw me a hand-towel and I used it. ‘What hit me?’
‘I’ve had you on tape the whole time,’ he explained. ‘When you wouldn’t get into the recollection, I tried to nudge you into it by using your own voice as you recounted it before. It works wonders sometimes.’
‘It worked wonders this time,’ I growled. ‘I think I blew a fuse.’
‘In effect, you did. You were on the trembling verge of going into the thing you don’t want to remember, and you let yourself go unconscious rather than do it.’
‘What are you so pleased about?’
‘Last-ditch defence,’ he said tersely. ‘We’ve got it now. Just one more try.’
‘Now hold on. The last-ditch defence is that I drop dead.’
‘You won’t. You’ve contained this episode in your subconscious mind for a long time and it hasn’t hurt you.’
‘Hasn’t it?’
‘Not in terms of killing you.’