Chain of Fools - Stevenson Richard - Страница 33

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I said, "That's a powerful expression of sentiment on your father's part, but it's not an admission of guilt."

"It's as much of an admission as I need," Osborne said laconically. "I know my father. That's the other fucking reason I'm telling you this, as a matter of fact. I can't tell all this to the prosecutors or they'll go after Dan. I don't want that—at least not yet. It depends on what my radical cousin did with the jewels. If he gave the jewels to some fucking coffee-pickers' liberation front somewhere—which he has been known to do with Osborne family money—I am going to be extremely pissed off. But I'll wait to hear about that. While you're on Janet's tit, you can go ahead and clear it up for me as to just what became of the goddamn jewels. And the other thing you can do for me, Strachey, is you can fucking nail Chester Osborne for Eric's murder. That's what you can do for me and for the entire human race."

I sat looking at him and wondering how much of what Osborne had told me was true, how much of it lies, how much of it fantasy fed by his boiling need for revenge.

I said, "Have you told anyone else, Craig, the story you've told me here this morning?"

He said, "Just my mother. I called her up on Wednesday and told her there were some things about her husband I thought she needed to know."

18

Back in Edensburg just after four, I drove directly to Ruth Osborne's house. Now that I had the goods—or what I confidently believed closely resembled the goods—on Dan, I was eager to confront him.

"He's gone," Timmy said. "Arlene too."

"They left a note," Dale said. "It just said 'Don't worry about us.' But they didn't say where they went or when they'd be back."

Timmy and Dale were seated across from each other at the dinner table on the back porch. I could hear Elsie moving about in the kitchen nearby, and Ruth Osborne was outside, fifty feet away, snipping something with a scissors into a basket in the herb garden. Timmy and Dale were in the midst of a game of Scrabble and acted distracted and vaguely annoyed by my interruption.

"When did they leave?" I asked.

"It must have been not long after you did," Timmy said "We were all still asleep. What time did you leave for Attica?"

"Six-thirty."

"I was up at seven," Dale said, "and they were out of here by then. They left the note here on the table "

"Would you like some iced tea?" Timmy asked, indicating a perspiring crystal pitcher and a tray of glasses.

Helping myself, I said, "Where's the note?"

It appeared to be Dale's turn in the Scrabble game, so it was Timmy who glanced around the room in search of Dan's note. "Here it is." He turned over the sheet of typing paper their Scrabble scores were

written on—Dale was leading, 180 to 167—and on the other side was the scrawled note: "Don't worry about us—Dan."

I said, "Is that Dan's handwriting?"

"I think so," Dale said, not looking up from her letter holder. "Janet saw it, and she didn't say it wasn't Dan's handwriting."

"Did the phone ring, that anybody knows of, before they left? Could they have received a call from someone?"

"I didn't hear it," Timmy said. "And there's a phone in our room."

"Ours too," Dale said. "But it's only rung once all day. That was around noon, when Pauline called for Janet."

"Was Janet here?"

"Yes, she came home for lunch," Timmy said. Now both Dale and Timmy were furiously rearranging the letter squares on their holders.

"Did Janet say why Pauline called her?"

Dale ignored this, and Timmy shook his head and said, "Nnn-nnn."

"Janet didn't say anything about Pauline still being upset after the way she held a gun on me yesterday?"

"Nnn-nnn."

Leaning against a nearby wicker settee were Timmy's wooden crutches, and my impulse was to pick one of them up and sweep all the letter squares off the Scrabble board and onto the players' laps. Instead, I said, "Aren't you two curious to hear about my meeting with Craig out at Attica? It was eventful."

Not looking up, Timmy said, "Absolutely."

"Yes, Donald," Dale said, "but if you don't mind keeping your dick in your pants until we're through with this game, that'll be just too, too groovy."

I picked up one of the crutches, played with it, put it back.

"It might look as if we've got our priorities screwed up," Timmy said, "but this game is more important than it may seem. Each word that Dale places on the board is meant to offer a clue about what it is I once did that makes me a moral slug in her eyes."

"And each word that Timothy plays shows his reaction to the word I last played," Dale said.

I studied the board. Among the words snaking this way and that way, up and down the board, were these: fib, ill, liar, retch, cuffed, ducky,

CURT, UMBRAGE, KNEED, EEL, DORKY, RIPRAP.

I said, "Is 'riprap' a clue or a response?"

"Neither, exactly," Timmy said. "But it got me a triple-letter score. That was the response I felt like expressing at the time."

"Which was not following the agreed-upon rules of the game," Dale said. "When he played that word, Timothy was not keeping his word— as usual."

Timmy frowned deeply as Dale spelled out "pimp."

I left them and walked outside across the broad back lawn, aromatic and abuzz with bees, to the herb garden. Ruth Osborne had placed a low flat basket on the ground beside the spot where she was bending over. The basket contained eight perfect sun-ripened tomatoes that must have come from the vegetable garden in the southeast corner of the yard. Mrs. Osborne had snipped off a small bunch of basil sprigs, and their perfume in the heat of the late afternoon was strong and transporting. Scientists who know the geography of the human brain say the olfactory and memory centers are located next to each other, and that's why smells can trigger such powerful memories. Basil set off a welter of memories for me, all of them good. Among them were my grandmother's vegetable garden in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, and beside her herb patch a hidden pathway through the brush down to the banks of the Delaware River. Then it was on to lunches with Timmy at our pensione in Fiesoli, and on and on in a fraction of a second.

"Smells wonderful," I said.

Mrs. Osborne straightened up slowly and said, "This is the season I'll miss when I'm dead. It isn't even a season—just a week or two in August when the tomatoes are at their peak and the basil hasn't begun to wilt and the local corn is sweetest. What luck it is for a person to be up and around and conscious in Edensburg in August!"

I said, "It's one of the times of the year when we remember why we live in this part of the country."

"Oh, I live in Edensburg because I came back here and married Tom Osborne," she said, "instead of marrying one of the boys from Yale who came up to Mount Holyoke on weekends. If I'd married Ogden Winsted of Philadelphia, I'd have gone off with him to darkest Chestnut Hill and never been heard of again. Or if I'd accepted Lew McAl-ister's proposal of marriage, I'd probably still be in the Cameroons shining Christ's light on the heathen. Either locale would have left me a long way from Edensburg.

"There were other offers, too, some of them worth considering. But

I loved Tom Osborne from the time he was a sixth-grade . . . 'patrol boy' was what the school crossing guards were called back then, and I was a frightened first grader, and Tom held my hand every day when I crossed Third Street on the way to Stuyvesant Grammar.

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