Breakheart Hill

  I felt my soul empty. “Blind?”

  “That’s what Dr. McCoy thinks,” Sheriff Stone said. “In the last stage, you know, when she was still able to run. Losing strength, of course, but still able to run. Crawling at the end of it.” His eyes drifted down toward the photograph. “At least that’s what we think, from the look of her dress.” He glanced up at me. “One thing’s for sure, she got hit in the face real hard.”

  I remained silent.

  Sheriff Stone looped his thumbs over his belt. “So, what about it, Ben? Can you think of anybody that might have wanted to hurt Kelli?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know of anybody.”

  He seemed distrustful of my answer. “You don’t?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you were at the play rehearsals, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t notice anything?”

  “No.”

  Sheriff Stone watched me closely, his eyes narrowing, then said, “What about Mary Diehl?”

  I knew then that Miss Carver had told him everything, all that she had seen and heard over the last four weeks while Kelli had rehearsed her Juliet, and Todd his Romeo, and Mary Diehl had sat in the shadowy back corner of the auditorium, chewing her nails and watching helplessly as the only love she’d ever known slipped irrecoverably from her grasp. I remembered seeing her there, a motionless figure in the murky light, silent, staring, curiously grim, her sweetness melting from her face like candle wax.

  “I understand that there was quite a bit of bad feeling between the Diehl girl and Kelli,” Sheriff Stone said. “Were you aware of that?”

  I nodded mutely, felt the dark finger’s touch again and thought, Mary, too? How far will this go? Where will it end?

  “What was all that about,” Sheriff Stone asked, “the trouble between Kelli and Mary Diehl?”

  I heard Kelli’s voice sound softly in my mind, and answered as she had answered only two weeks before, my lips forming the only word that could be used to tell the truth. “Love,” I said.

  CHAPTER 18

  IT HAD HAPPENED RIGHT BEFORE MY EYES. LOVE. AND I HAD watched it happen just as helplessly as Mary had watched it, though possibly from an even closer vantage point.

  After the first rehearsal Miss Carver had come to me and more or less demanded that I work on the play, although not as an actor. Instead, I was to carry out the far less glamorous task of cuing the actors, helping with the sets and opening and closing the curtain at the appropriate times. It was not a job I wanted, but at the same time I knew that it was a way to be near Kelli, and I know now that despite everything, some part of me had still not been willing to set her free. I had longed to get rid of the grim feeling of ugliness and inadequacy that arose in me when I was near her, and for that reason I had welcomed closing the basement office only a week before. But at the same time I found that I could not let go of the hope, anguished though it had become, that I might still break through to her, win her over, make my life with her, the village doctor and his wife.

  And so only a few days after closing the office, I agreed to help with the play, and on the following afternoon, from my place just offstage, I watched as Kelli and Todd went through their lines for the first time, Kelli on a bare stage, mounted on a metal chair, with Todd below her, lifting his arms as he spoke:

  By a name

  I know not how to tell thee who I am.

  And yet, even on that first occasion, when he began to read his lines to her, and no doubt feeling terribly awkward and self-conscious as he did so, I believe that Todd began to tell Kelli who he was, and who he was not, casting aside his athletic feats, his local renown, and offering something else in their place, a strange loneliness and vulnerability that seemed to rise toward her as his arms rose toward her, empty and imploring, and which were directed to Kelli alone.

  I have night’s cloak to hide me from their eyes.

  And but thou love me, let them find me here.

  Standing only a few feet away, my hands tightening around the rope I used to raise and lower the curtain, I watched that first scene between them with the same mounting dread that Mary Diehl must have felt as she sat in the dark corner of the auditorium only a few yards away. It was a sense that the worst possible calamity had struck, a tidal wave of mutual attraction so mysterious and elemental that you were powerless against it, that neither your goodness nor your labor nor all your love and devotion could make any difference whatsoever, because, in the end, the ardor that Mary and I could see flame between Todd and Kelli had struck in the same sudden, fatal way that dime-store valentines have always portrayed it, an arrow through the heart.

  It was already dark when the first rehearsal ended, but the cast members lingered on the auditorium steps before going home. Mary sat next to Todd, the rest of us scattered here and there on the steps around them, Kelli next to Eddie Smathers, Noreen and Sheila on the step below them, and I, slumped against the wall, sullenly staring down at the rest of them.

  “It went pretty well,” Mary said, the cheeriness still in her voice, but an unmistakable apprehensiveness in her manner nonetheless. “Don’t you think so, Todd?”

  Todd nodded. “The lines are hard, though,” he said.

  “And stupid, too,” Eddie added with a quick laugh. “I don’t know half of what I’m saying.”

  “You should ask Miss Carver to explain it to you, then,” Noreen told him.

  Eddie plucked a copy of the play from his back pocket and opened it. “I mean, what the hell does this mean?” he asked. “ ‘The earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb. What is her burying grave, that is her womb.’ ” He looked up from the book, utterly baffled. “Can anybody figure that out?”

  Kelli answered right away. “It means that the earth is everything. It gives life and takes life. It’s the place where we are born and where we die, our womb and our tomb.” She glanced toward Todd. “And that as far as nature is concerned, it’s all the same, life and death.”

  Todd nodded. “That’s right,” he said quietly, “and I guess it’s true, too.” Then, in a sudden spontaneous movement he reached down and gently brushed back a curl of hair that had fallen over Kelli’s eye.

  Standing above them, leaning grimly against the hard brick wall of the auditorium, I saw with terrible clarity that she did not pull away from Todd Jeffries’s touch as she had from mine. Instead, she leaned toward him slightly, as if to offer more.

  They talked on about the play after that, but a few minutes later I left them and trudged to my car. I got in, turned on the engine and headed toward my house. But I found that I could not go home. Something continually drew me back toward the school, toward the dark stairs where Kelli still sat, as it seemed to me, at the feet of Todd Jeffries.

  I was already halfway home when I swung around, made a long turn in a deserted grocery store parking lot and headed back to the school. I didn’t know exactly what I intended to do when I got there, but as I neared the school, I saw an alley that ran between the gymnasium and a line of small wooden houses, backed into it, and from that shadowy distance watched the little group still clustered on the cement steps.

  Almost an hour passed before it broke up, and a few minutes after that I saw Todd’s car sweep by the alley. I waited until it was nearly a block away, and then, like a common stalker, I fell in behind it.

  I maintained a cautious distance as I followed Todd’s car, slowing as he slowed. There were three people in the car. Todd was at the wheel, with Mary beside him, and Kelli beside her, pressed tightly against the passenger door. At Choctaw’s main street Todd swung to the right, moving past the long line of small shops that led north out of town, and at last to Turtle Grove. He stopped at 417 Maple Way, got out and walked Mary to her door. From my place nearly half a block away, I saw him kiss her lightly on the mouth, then bound back down the driveway to where Kelli waited for him in the car.

  For the next few minutes I followed them back through Choctaw, movin
g farther south and finally down the deserted country road that led to Kelli’s house. He drove slowly, his head constantly turning toward Kelli as they talked.

  It was nearly nine when he pulled into the driveway at Kelli’s house. I wheeled my car over to the side of the road so that it was half concealed by a growth of summer vine, and waited. I could see the car in the distance, and I expected Kelli to get out immediately, but she didn’t.

  She was lingering with him in the car, just as she had lingered with me from time to time, although I knew that the atmosphere between them was entirely different, dense and sensual, charged with an edgy tension.

  I got out of my car and moved closer to them, walking in the gully that ran alongside the road, until I finally stopped, a figure crouching behind a tangled growth of weeds and vines, but near enough so that I could see the two of them as they remained in the car. Kelli had turned toward Todd in a posture I recognized from those many evenings and afternoons that we had sat together, talking quietly before she’d finally gone into the house. I knew that she’d drawn her feet up under her, that her shoes had probably been eased off and now lay casually on the floorboard, that her bare arm rested languidly across the back seat, her long, brown fingers nearly touching Todd’s right shoulder, and that as she gazed at him, her eyes shone with a dark radiance, as if lighted from within.

  I wanted to leave, to turn away from all of this, but I found that I couldn’t, that some inexpressibly aching force held me in place, locking my eyes on the two silhouettes as they inched somewhat closer to each other, though never actually touched.

  Finally, Kelli emerged, and for the first time I felt myself begin to breathe again. Through a screen of coiling vines, I saw her walk to the front of the car, then wait as Todd got out, too. They walked toward the house together, two figures bathed in the yellow light from the front windows, moving slowly, stopping, talking awhile, moving again, stopping again, reluctant, as I knew they had become, to part.

  At last, they walked up the stairs together and disappeared into the darkness of the porch. I waited for the front door to open, a shaft of light to sweep over them, but as the minutes passed, the darkness remained in place, a thick veil covering them, black and dense and impossible for me to pierce.

  For a time, I hovered beside the road, a crouching figure hidden by a twisting swirl of vines. I remember that at one point I even closed my eyes tightly, trying to imagine myself in the same darkness they were in, to imagine myself with Kelli in that darkness, as Todd was.

  When I opened them again, Todd was coming down the stairs, and Kelli was standing at the window, waving to him as she had never waved to me.

  I rushed to my car, suddenly breathing heavily, and drove home at what must have been a thunderous speed. Later, in my bedroom, I stared at the ceiling above my bed until nearly dawn, when I finally sunk into a restless, agitated sleep.

  Early the next morning, Luke came by. We’d planned to play tennis, and he’d brought racquets for us both. When I opened the door, he said, “Damn, Ben, you look like you was rode hard and put up wet.”

  “I didn’t sleep very well.”

  He grinned. “Well, a game of tennis will fix you up.”

  I nodded dully. “Yeah, okay,” I said.

  I got dressed, then we both got into his truck and headed for the park. “How’s the play going?” Luke asked as we drifted past Cuffy’s.

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “I hear Kelli’s real good.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I heard Todd’s doing pretty good, too.”

  The mention of their names brought back the previous night, and once again I saw them disappear into the covering darkness at the top of the stairs.

  At the park, we got out of the truck and walked down to the tennis courts together. Neither of us said anything more about Kelli that morning, but she was with me at every instant of the game, with me so fiercely that for over an hour I returned the ball to Luke with a force and deadliness that shocked him. Again and again, as I thought about Kelli, imagining her in the humid darkness with Todd, he no doubt so close to her that he had felt her breath in his hair, I slammed the ball toward Luke with a steadily building fury. I can remember the handle of the racquet as I clutched it ferociously within my fist, the electric hiss of the air as I swept it toward the ball, then the hard, murderous thump as it made contact. Again and again, Luke returned the ball to me, and again and again I knocked it back, each time more brutally, each time imagining Todd and Kelli in the darkness of her front porch, imagining their hands touching, their fingers entwining, their bodies pressing ever more closely until they came together in the shuttering excitement of that first deep kiss, all of this orchestrated by the whir of the racquet through the fiery summer air, the merciless thud of my assault, the whizzing flight of the ball back across the sagging, lifeless net.

  “You’ve really learned to swing that racquet,” Luke said as we headed toward Cuffy’s. Although he’d meant it as a compliment, he seemed disturbed by the way I’d played, but unable to guess why I had swung at the ball so furiously.

  For a few seconds he looked at me with a tense, questioning stare. It was the same look he would give me the afternoon he raced into my yard, choking on his words as he struggled to tell me that “something bad” had happened to Kelli Troy. It was a look I would see often from then on.

  “Are you all right, Ben?” he asked.

  I nodded crisply, but said nothing. My mind was still fixed on Kelli with a murderous concentration, and I should have known at that moment how fiercely I still longed for her, how mingled my longing had become with violence, how much, if I could not have Kelli Troy, I wanted to destroy her.

  CHAPTER 19

  BUT I WAS NOT THE ONLY ONE, AS SHERIFF STONE LATER learned, for during the next two weeks Mary Diehl came to see, and at last confront, what I had already seen the night Todd drove Kelli home. Perhaps she had seen it even earlier, but had decided to let it go, hoping it would pass, then realized finally that it was not passing, but, rather, that it was deepening by the hour.

  When I remember Mary at this time, I see her as strangely frail, and certainly confused. A wounded bafflement hovered around her like a delicate mist, one which never really left her after that. It was still in her face the day she brought Raymond into my office, and later still when Raymond, now a grown man, led her slowly to my car, the rain mercilessly beating down upon her, as it had seemed to me at that moment, just as it had beaten down upon Lyle Gates as he’d been led down the courthouse steps almost thirty years before.

  There was no doubt good reason for her puzzlement, both in middle age and much earlier, when she was still a girl. For she’d been beautiful, after all, and so it could not have been Kelli’s beauty that had made the difference between them. In her own way, Mary was smart enough, and certainly she was kind and dutiful. She had done as her mother had carefully instructed her, found someone to love, honor and obey, someone with whom she wished to share her life, and to whom she offered the gift of an absolute service and fidelity, neither of which, as it turned out, were ever returned to her. “Mary deserved better than Todd,” Luke told me sardonically on the day I took her away.

  It rained bitterly that day, a cold rain, almost sleet. Mary wore a dark brown coat as Raymond led her down the driveway of the house in Turtle Grove. Several days before, she had tried to cut off her hair, and it now lay in unsightly layers, clipped here, long there, a wild confusion of jagged angles, with nothing to give it unity but its mottled iron-gray shade. Raymond walked beside her, holding her by the arm, mute and sullen, his eyes little more than thin, reptilian slits.

  “He did this,” he snapped as he led his mother toward me. Then he turned and pointed toward the house. “Him.”

  I looked toward the house and saw Todd standing at the large window that looked out onto the yard. He was slovenly and overweight, with thin blond hair swept back over his head, his shoulders slumped and defeated beneath a faded li
me-green sweater. His hands were sunk deep into the pockets of his trousers, and there was a terrible bleakness in his face, a sense of having watched helplessly as everything in his life, both his marriage and his fatherhood, collapsed.

  “It wasn’t her fault,” Raymond said as he led Mary to the back door of my car. He was talking to Sheila Cameron, Mary’s oldest friend. “She didn’t mean to do it. She was running from him when it happened. She was just trying to get away.”

  For a moment, I saw it all as Raymond must have seen it: his mother desperately fleeing the house, fleeing her husband’s unfathomable rage and violence, rushing through the rain to her car, then into it and away, speeding down the rainswept street in a haze of dread and misery, staring at the road through swollen eyes as she plunged toward the curb where little Rosie Cameron stood impatiently waiting for her school bus, her small body draped in a bright yellow rainslick.

  “My mother loved Rosie,” Raymond said. “She would never have …”

  “I know that, Raymond,” Sheila said softly. Then, given how much she had suffered, how deep was her loss, and at whose hands, Sheila did the kindest thing I have ever seen a human being do. She drew Mary into her arms and kissed her wet cheek. “I love you, Mary,” she said. Then she stepped back into the rain and let Raymond ease his mother into the back seat of my car. “Drive carefully, Ben,” she said to me as I closed the door.

  “I will.”

  It was a long drive to Tuscaloosa, and from time to time as I drove, I glanced back at Mary. She sat with her hands resting motionlessly in her lap, her face locked in a strangely hunted expression despite the fact that the actual range of her feelings had been hideously reduced by then. She was extremely thin, almost skeletal, with hollow cheeks, and her eyes sunk so deeply into their sockets that they seemed to stare out from the shadowy depths of an unlighted cave. Only the immaculate whiteness of her skin still suggested the beauty that had once been hers.