Killed with a Passion Page 2

  Dan just wouldn’t leave Sewanka as long as Debbie was there. He wouldn’t give up. And Debbie led him on.

  I talked about Debbie’s attractions before. Dan, in all the world, I think, saw something in Debbie besides looks, money, and a magical voice. He was embarrassed to talk about it, but then he always was when it came to things he cared about. One time, though, he let something slip. Debbie had just canceled out on something Dan had been looking forward to for a month, to go off with some guy her mother thought should be shown around.

  Dan put down the phone, looked at me, and said, “God, Matt, that stupid bitch. I bet she doesn’t even know how rotten that is. She deserves—I mean, I deserve—better, goddammit.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I wasn’t so sure Dan hadn’t said what he’d meant the first time. He saw all these wonderful qualities in the girl, actual and potential, and it drove him crazy that, in his eyes at least, Debbie refused to live up to herself.

  That’s probably why Debbie kept stringing him along. It’s nice to have someone think you’re wonderful (or so I would suppose), and Debbie was perfectly capable of hanging on to Dan because of the way he always showered her with approval and affection.

  Another part of it was that Debbie’s father hated the idea of his little girl sleeping with, and worse, considering marrying, someone not of Their Set. A. Lawrence Whitten was an old-fashioned possessive father, and tragedy had only made him worse. He’d lost his son to leukemia, and that led him to spoil his daughters even more than he would have normally. Brenda, the other Whitten daughter, was much younger than Debbie (I figured she’d be about sixteen now) and had lost a leg in the same auto accident that killed her mother. Despite the difference in ages (thirteen years or so), the competition between the two girls was fierce.

  Dan made a handy weapon. When Daddy started worrying too much about his poor crippled Brenda, Debbie could distract his attention by letting him think he would lose her to a Jew.

  Dan knew all this; he had to know it—I kept telling him, for one thing. But he hung on. Always there, always available when Debbie got tired of one or another of the rich boys her family was always fixing her up with. Seven years’ worth and more.

  Then, two years ago, something drastic had happened. Debbie and her latest fix-up, a human Ken doll named Grant Sewall, had become engaged, much to Dan’s chagrin. Then they had had some sort of enormous fight at the tail end of their engagement party. She’d run, as always, to Dan.

  I got a phone call in the middle of the night. I’d left the party early because I was going to drive back to New York the next day. It was Dan calling; Debbie was going to marry him instead. I pretended to be happy for him, because I’m not at my best in the middle of the night and I couldn’t think of a way to talk him out of it on such short notice.

  It turned out I didn’t need to. The new engagement was over in two months. Dan came to visit me in New York for the first time since college. He got drunk, and watched Rick and Jane’s TV for three days. Then he slept for seventeen hours, got up, and headed back to Sewanka; and while I’d phoned him occasionally, I hadn’t seen him since.

  That had been over a year and a half ago. Now Debbie, who’d decided to marry Grant as originally advertised, was telling me how happy Dan would be to have me up there.

  I fought it, I really did, but the words would not be denied. I swallowed. “Dan?” I said. “What does Dan have to do with this, Debbie?” My voice was very tight.

  “Oh, Dan’s part of the wedding party. Grant’s asked him to be best man. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said, or something equally diplomatic.

  In talking about Debbie, I hope I haven’t given the impression she was stupid. She was not. But she liked to play stupid.

  “Is anything wrong, Matt?” she asked, and her voice was sweetness and innocence, and if I could have reached her neck, I would have strangled her.

  “No, Debbie,” I said bitterly. “Nothing’s wrong. Not a thing.” As if she didn’t know how just plain rotten it was to exact that last love tribute from Dan, to make him stand up on that altar and smile as the woman he loved and seven years of his life were lost to him forever. After he had once thought he was home free.

  Okay, maybe there was some excuse to ditch him. I’d always felt that his relationship with Debbie was doomed anyway, and seven years or not, Dan would be better off forgetting her, if he could. But to rub his nose in it like that...

  “All right, Matt,” Debbie said. Her voice was still musical, but the brass had come in much more strongly behind the woodwinds. Debbie was playing dumb no longer.

  “Listen,” Debbie went on. “I know you care about Dan. So do I.”

  I said, “Mmm.”

  “I do, damn you!” She was angry now. “And if Dan can be a good sport about it. I’d like to know why you can’t, too!”

  A good sport, for God’s sake. “Dan loves you, Debbie.”

  “But you don’t like me at all, do you, Matt?” She was very sad now. “You never have liked me, have you? I wish you would tell me why.”

  She probably thought she meant that. “Don’t put words in my mouth. How’s the old town?”

  “Quiet but fine.” She seemed as glad to change the subject as I was. I asked her how Brenda was; she said the doctor had decided Brenda was near enough to full grown to be fitted with her absolute ultimate artificial leg. “She told me, now that I think of it, that she wants to dance with you at the reception.”

  “Tell her it’s a deal. If I’m still invited, that is.”

  “Don’t be stupid. Of course you’re still invited.” Debbie sounded weary. “When can I expect you? I’ll have the VIP kennel ready for Spot. Or, if he likes it better, we’ll let him stay in the house.”

  “I’m not sure yet when I can make it. I’ve got some business up there. Tuesday or Wednesday, I guess.”

  “All right,” she sang. Everything was apparently hunky-dory again. “The sooner, the better.”

  Right, I thought, as I said good-bye and hung up. The sooner, the better. Dan was going to need a friend.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Where am I?”

  “In the Village.”

  —Patrick McGoohan, Leo McKern, et al., “The Prisoner” (CBS)

  I DROVE ALONG ROUTE 17, through what is called the Southern Tier of New York State, though it’s miles north of New York City. Somewhere off to my left, amid the rich greens of late spring, New York bumped into Pennsylvania. On this particular stretch of road, I could see little silvery curls of rivers through the gaps in the green.

  To my right, I could see the fluffy whiteness of Spot’s back. Spot hadn’t had this long a trip in an automobile since he’d been brought from Sewanka to New York in the first place, and he was enjoying every minute of it. He’d gone a full fifty miles with his face out the window before I got too cold and closed the car up. Spot was still getting enjoyment from watching the scenery go by.

  Since this was the kind of mission where I had to be grateful for small favors, I took a few seconds to be glad I was heading toward a place where everyone already knew the joke.

  It was Rick Sloan’s joke. A Samoyed is a breed of medium-to-large Siberian sled dog, with a perpetually grinning face, pointy ears, and a huge cloud of pure white fur. When someone wonders why anyone would name such a dog “Spot” (and believe me, they always do), I have to explain he’s named for the gigantic white spot that covers his entire body. It was cute the first hundred times.

  The traffic thinned out west of Elmira; we went on west for an hour or so, then headed north. Sewanka is a pretty town; sometime around the end of World War II, all the builders and architects got together and said, “Push Tudor.” There had been lots of building since, of course, and Sewanka had its share of steel and glass, but somehow the modern look never got so dominant that a person got the feeling he was living in a giant phone booth, the way you sometimes do in New York.

  The ugliest architect
ure in town belonged to Whitten College. There was a lot of mid-fifties brick among the ivy-covered limestone. Still, the ivy had made a pretty good start on the brick, and eventually it would all look as academic and cozy and venerable as Harvard.

  I dropped my suitcase off at the Sewanka Inn (actually a pretty sizable hotel—they’d donated their conference room for the cable TV hearings), then got back in the car and headed out to the Whitten estate, north of town.

  It rains a lot in Sewanka, but when the sun is out, the way it was that Tuesday, the sky is enormous. It would have to be to hold those incredible clouds—huge packs of Samoyeds in the sky. We never look at the sky in New York; it’s always a backdrop for something—a building, a ship, a fire. It was nice to get away from that for a while.

  I was feeling good I was, in fact, glad I had come. I felt that way for at least a half hour. I mention that now, because it became so hard to believe in light of later events.

  I was even happy to be driving one of the Network dinosaurs. The energy crisis has affected everyone in the world except the Network motor pool. Still, outside city traffic, it was nice to have the land-based equivalent of the QE2 around to smooth out the bumps.

  The tires made a satisfying crunch on the gravel drive of the Whitten estate. The place is big. It’s got as much lawn as a golf course and a decent amount of wilderness, too, including its own waterfall. I drove for five minutes before I could even see the house.

  It was hard for me to believe I used to spend a lot of time in that house. Every time I saw it, I’d start to hear the music from Gone With the Wind. It was a huge sprawl of white, with a three-story front (columned, of course) and wings of two stories on either side.

  Brenda Whitten and somebody else were playing baseball on the front yard. The late afternoon sun gleamed from the fittings of her new leg from the aluminum bat she held in her hands, and from the stainless steel crutches that lay crossed on the grass.

  The new leg must be very good, I reflected. I’d never seen her so far from those crutches before. Those steel tubes with the foam-rubber-padded curves at the top and the black rubber handles jutting out about a third of the way down had always been a part of her, like a pair of glasses.

  But Brenda was standing without them now, hitting out at the soft underhand lobs her companion was serving up. Doing a good job of it, too. It was her right leg that was missing, and she was a left-handed batter, so she couldn’t stride into the pitch, but she shifted her weight forward effectively enough, and she had a good eye. She was getting solid wood—okay, metal—on about three pitches out of five and sending line drives in the direction of the house.

  As I got closer, I noticed two things. Brenda had become as much a beauty as her sister. Her shorts and top showed off a young, strong figure that had lost a lot of the baby fat it used to carry, and her pretty face was flushed with determination and pride. It was good to see her.

  The other thing I noticed was that it was Dan who was pitching to her. He’d grown a beard since I’d seen him last, short but thick, and it hid all of his face from about an inch below his cheekbones. Nobody was going to see his mouth tremble as long as that beard was in place. He was still in great shape. Dan was the classic mesomorph, slightly below average height but having a body made of wedges of muscle of various sizes. I had seen him tear a license plate in half. I am eight inches taller than Dan and have by no means gone to seed, but I couldn’t do that.

  I stopped the car and honked at them. It was gratifying to see their faces light up as I got out, although I admit it could have been for Spot.

  I waved to them and started walking across the lawn. It felt like a carpet under my feet, only cooler. Brenda scampered over to her crutches, picked them up, and started out to meet me. Dan came along, being careful not to go faster than Brenda could. With a big grin shining in the middle of his beard, he looked a lot more like himself.

  “Hello, Matthew,” Dan said. He decided a handshake wasn’t enough and clasped me around the shoulder with a strong right arm. I reciprocated. Spot danced around and yipped happily. Brenda stood by, looking amused.

  “I can stand here longer than you can ignore me,” she declared. I laughed as I turned to look at her. I liked what I saw. There was a lot of strength in her, in her body, and more importantly, in her young face.

  “Hello, Brenda,” I said.

  “Hello, Matt.” She stood smiling, suddenly at a loss for words. She took the sweatband off and wrung it out. When she let her arm fall, Spot snatched the band out of her hand and ran off with it.

  “Spot!” I called. He slowed down and looked back over his shoulder at the old spoilsport. “Come! Now!”

  Spot didn’t like it, but he came. He also knew he was in trouble by the tone of my voice. He walked slowly, hanging his head all the way.

  Brenda said, “Oh, let him keep it. I’ve got dozens of them.”

  I shook my head. “Can’t let him get away with stuff like that. You people raise dogs here, you should know that.” Spot had returned. I took the sweatband from him, tapped him gently on the snout, and told him he was a bad dog.

  “That’s one thing I remember about you,” Brenda said. “Can’t be anywhere for five minutes without giving someone a lecture.”

  I couldn’t really deny that, so I just grinned. “I’m tickled to see you, too, Junebug.”

  The old nickname made her smile. “Well, are you just going to stand there admiring my shapely leg, or are you going to hug my sweaty body? Give me a little kiss? Uncle Matt?”

  “Of course.” Her idea of a little kiss was bigger than my idea of one. When she let me have my mouth back, I told her I liked her batting eye.

  “No big deal,” she said, but I could see pride in her eyes. “Maybe I could hire somebody to run the bases for me.”

  “At least hire somebody to run away when you start breaking the front windows of the house. Or face the other way.”

  Dan handed her her crutches, and we walked back to the main house. Brenda was taking the week off from school. “I can catch up, I know that. Besides, that place is the pits. All girls. Country Day School. What a lot of shit.”

  I saw her look at me sideways to see if I’d been shocked. She seemed disappointed I hadn’t.

  When we got up to the house, Dan volunteered to bring Spot around to the VIP quarters that awaited him in the famous Whitten kennels, while Brenda brought me inside. Then, when we’d reached the top of the small flight of stairs that led to the big white door, Dan called me back down. He asked me some foolish question about Spot’s mealtimes, then looked me deep in the eyes and said, “I’m glad you’re here, Matthew. I really am.”

  The pain of all seven years was in his voice, but there was more. Something was Going On. I hate it when things are Going On, but I swallowed hard and said I was glad to be there, too.

  It wasn’t exactly a lie.

  CHAPTER 4

  “Welcome to my house.

  Come freely. Go safely.

  And leave something of

  the happiness you bring.”

  —Louis Jourdan, Dracula (PBS)

  AT BRENDA’S COMMAND, I opened the door and walked in. There was none of this nonsense about waiting while a servant was sent to fetch the family to meet me, which I thought was very democratic in a house I had always hesitated to enter without my library card.

  The Whittens and young Mr. Sewall were in the great hall or the parlor or whatever it was. Debbie was busily instructing tradespeople how the room was to be arranged if it rained and the wedding had to be moved indoors. She had floor plans that looked like diagrams for a major amphibious landing. Cousin Joan went here, Uncle Harry was not talking to Uncle Albert, and so on.

  “Touching,” Brenda grumbled at my side. We stood in the doorway as everybody but Grant Sewall continued to bustle. Grant was sitting in a black velvet easy chair looking at an issue of Modern Bride magazine exactly as though he expected to find the secret of eternal life in it.

&
nbsp; I began to wonder how long it was going to take for them to notice us.

  The bride-to-be looked at her plan, looked at the furniture, looked at her plan again, and said, “This is impossible! And the weatherman said forty per cent chance of rain Saturday. I’ve got to get this right.”

  Grant spoke without looking up from his magazine. “It won’t rain.”

  Debbie said, “How do you know?”

  “It just won’t.” He was still buried in the magazine. It would have been interesting to see if his face looked as smug as his voice sounded. “I forbid it.”

  Debbie turned an exasperated look at him. “Grant, darling, if you can’t be helpful, at least get out of the way. All right?”

  “You’re worrying too much. Darling. Rain or shine, we’ll be married. That’s the important part, isn’t it?”

  Debbie played her musical voice pizzicato. “I wonder sometimes. This should be the most beautiful day of our lives.” She paused with her head tilted, as if testing the phrase for corniness. Apparently it failed, because the next thing she said was, “Well, it should. And you don’t seem to care at all. You just—”

  Grant looked up from his magazine. Like I said, a Ken doll. Blond hair, never rumpled. Blue eyes. Square jaw with the tiniest hint of a dimple in it. The only other person I ever saw Grant’s age who was that handsome and that well groomed used to sing hymns on “The Lawrence Welk Show.”

  He looked at his fiancée. “You know how much I care, Debbie.” He said it with no inflection whatever. It could have been a touching declaration of love or a nice vicious piece of satirical ambiguity.

  Debbie was voting with the latter. “I know, all right, damn you. You walked out on me once, made me a laughingstock in front of the whole world! Why I took you back—”