Nemesis Page 26

  Maggie said, “Your sister … where is she now?”

  “Now? She’s at home. Waiting.”

  Maggie tasted cold. “Waiting … for what?”

  One of Calvin’s eyelids was distinctly lower than the other. He was drunk, or nearly; Maggie had never seen him in such a state and did not know if this made him more, or less, dangerous. Yet he seemed, as he spoke, to be appealing to her, staring at her as he was with an expression of pity, sympathy, regret. Could he bring himself to kill her? After so exposing himself to her? Maggie raised her glass of Scotch shakily to her lips and forced herself to take a small swallow. It is precisely because he has exposed himself to you that he will kill you. As he killed Nicholas Reickmann.

  Calvin Gould, suddenly restless, got to his feet. He swayed for a moment, then regained his balance. Maggie’s eye had been drawn, during his monologue, to a vase on her piano; a beautiful milk-glass heirloom vase about fifteen inches high, thicker than it appeared, and heavier. In her desperation that was a kind of calm, Maggie wondered if she might leap for the vase, take it up, strike Calvin Gould with it … knock him unconscious … and so escape, to the house next door. But was this a realistic hope? If she failed to strike Calvin unconscious with the first blow, he would simply overpower her; he might be unable to stop until he hurt her very badly indeed. She guessed that he was preparing to commit an act of extreme desperation himself, without quite knowing, at the moment, what it might be. Did she have the strength to hit him that hard with the vase? And what if the vase merely shattered? And had she truly the will to strike him, to hurt another person, even in the defense of her own life?

  Calvin said, “You … said you were in love with me, Maggie? Did you mean it?”

  Maggie said, “Yes. I meant it.”

  “But you didn’t know me.”

  “I … I loved the person I knew. I knew you, certainly, in a way.”

  “But it was a deluded way.”

  Maggie shook her head, her eyes welling suddenly with tears.

  “I don’t want to hurt you: if only I could trust you.”

  “Calvin, please, you can—”

  “But she would know, too. And she’s jealous.”

  “You can trust me.”

  “No, you’d turn me in. As soon as I let you go, as soon as … this ended … you’d run to the telephone, or next door to the neighbors … of course.” Calvin had begun to pace about the room again, flexing and unflexing his fingers. When his back was turned for a moment Maggie steeled herself and made a quick, tentative move … but he whipped back immediately toward her, like an athlete so keenly attuned to his reflexes he has no need of thinking, or even of seeing in the usual way.

  Maggie’s heart was beating so violently, with the rush of adrenaline and hope, she came very near to fainting.

  Gravely, Calvin Gould said, looming over her, “We might both go for a drive. That would be an answer.”

  Maggie could not speak.

  “A way of making an end.” Calvin contemplated her. “And she would be left then, and … and I wouldn’t know of her. Not a thing of her … after forty years! Everything erased! You know, my parents hadn’t wanted children at all. We were born by accident. My mother was forty-one, my father was fifty-three, they were eccentric people, strong-willed, opinionated, both of them were hypochondriacs but also often ill … my mother always insisted she didn’t know how the pregnancy had happened; she had been blameless herself. That was her word, ‘blameless.’” Calvin laughed as if genuinely amused. “When Caroline and I were very small, both our parents confused us, the one for the other, and it had a strange effect upon us … made us wild, euphoric. You can’t know, if you don’t have a twin, what happiness it is—it’s something you can virtually taste—to be mistaken for someone else, and to be in two places at once.” Calvin laughed again. Spittle gleamed at the corners of his mouth. “Both my parents, our parents, were fearful of us, but especially my father. He was a truly eccentric man: he had money but never spent it; he owned a small insurance company in Bangor and was convinced his clients and his office staff were trying to cheat him; much of the time he and my mother weren’t on speaking terms, and he slept in his office downtown. Caroline and I conspired against them even before we could talk. Before we were out of the crib. Those fools, those idiots! Trying to control us! We were both energetic and rebellious, but Caroline had a condition, I think, what’s diagnosed today as hyperkinesis; sugar would set her off, she’d run wild, fly into temper tantrums, smash things, hit and kick and cry uncontrollably … once, in fourth grade, she even attacked our teacher. During these spells she was a furious little animal, but at other times she could be … almost tractable. And smart. And watchful, and shrewd. Of the two of us it should have been Caroline who grew up … superior.”

  Calvin paused, grimacing. Maggie, wanting him to keep talking, asked, hesitantly, “Was she musical, like you?”

  Calvin didn’t reply for so long that Maggie thought he hadn’t heard her question. Then he said, slowly, “Caroline did have musical talent. In fact she had perfect pitch—which I don’t. Maybe she still does, I don’t know. When we were both very small, three or four years old, she seemed more talented than I, singing and dancing and sitting at the piano; but when we began lessons, at the age of ten, Caroline was too restless to practice scales and too impatient with mistakes; she’d fly into a rage … she simply lacked the discipline. So she stopped taking lessons. And resented my continuing. Sometimes when I was playing piano Caroline would rush into the room laughing and strike the keyboard with her fists.… My parents must have known that there was something seriously wrong with her, but to my knowledge they never took her to a specialist. Our family doctor dismissed her behavior, which he hadn’t, in any case, witnessed, as high-strung or spoiled.

  “I was desperate to detach myself from my sister, but I didn’t know how to do it until I was older. I wouldn’t have understood that that was what I wanted: detachment. To be myself, not our two selves. And we were drawn together, of course; there was a sort of crazed outlaw happiness between us, like a grass fire burning wild, because we were united against other people: our parents most of all, but also our classmates, our teachers. Anything I was feeling, without knowing what I felt, she would feel too … and know how to kindle it in me. I suppose there has been nothing in my adult life, certainly not my marriage, to compare with it.… But by the time we were twelve I was drawing away from her, or trying to, and she felt it and resented it; she was always trying to lure me back into childish behavior, with our secret language, our codes and signals, our hiding places, our games. We played in the woods out behind our house, in abandoned buildings, in vacant lots.

  “One day Caroline dared me to follow her up onto the tin roof of an old canning factory about a mile from our house; she was taunting ‘Cal-vin, Cal-vin’ almost the way Christensen would do a few years later, I wanted to leave her there and go back without her but somehow I couldn’t; I was afraid to leave her though I was afraid to follow her too; I climbed up onto the roof after her and crawled along on my hands and knees; I remember the sun blinding me, and Caroline walking erect, or nearly, and I yelled something at her, and started after her, and she stepped back off the roof … and fell. She screamed, and fell, and I thought she must be dead. I climbed down to the ground and tried to wake her: she’d struck her head and was bleeding; it looked as if her shoulder was broken; I was terrified she was dying but at the same time I suspected she was only pretending. ‘Come on, Caroline, wake up,’ I said, ‘God damn you, wake up.’ But she didn’t wake up. So finally I ran toward home to get help. My head was pounding and I couldn’t see very well; there was a sort of red haze over my vision. I was running but I was running slower and slower. Then I was being wakened, where I’d passed out on someone’s lawn … a woman found me. By the time an ambulance came for my sister she’d been unconscious almost an hour.

  “She had to have emergency neurosurgery to remove a blood clot in her br
ain. A year later she had another operation. She had to relearn everything: walking, feeding and dressing herself, speech, reading. She has never really learned to write but she can draw and paint … to a degree. She isn’t autistic and she isn’t schizophrenic but she sometimes sees and hears things no one else does; and, conversely—or perversely—she doesn’t always see and hear things others do. I can shout into her face and she won’t hear. Or I can say nothing at all, I can lock myself away in my own room, and she will hear … she’ll know. Sometimes I’m convinced she knows everything about me, things I don’t know myself. For years she attended a school for the ‘mentally handicapped,’ as they’re called; she has been hospitalized a dozen times; and though she is capable of normal behavior today, anyone talking with her can sense almost immediately that there’s something not quite right about her … it’s the way she enunciates her words, the way she holds her head, the alignment of her eyes. People are frightened of her without knowing why, but … I know why.” Calvin laughed. He had been speaking with increasing belligerence.

  He was standing, swaying on his feet, glaring not at but toward Maggie Blackburn, who sat in a corner of the sofa, tense, coiled, steeled against him. He said, “I hate people staring at her, I hate the thoughts they think. About her, and about me. D’you hear? I hate your goddamned pity. All of you.”

  Maggie said quickly, “I don’t pity you, Calvin. I don’t pity either of you.”

  For the past several minutes she had been listening transfixed to Calvin Gould’s words, even as, with another part of her mind, she understood that time was running out for her.

  Calvin didn’t hear; or, hearing, paid no heed. He said, his voice rising, “You should never have intruded. You betrayed me. Saying you loved me—and you betrayed me! Did you think I would ever incriminate her?” He spoke wildly, in disgust and anger; his words, though incoherent, were perfectly intelligible. “She had nothing to do with it. With either. No one can prove she did. I killed them both. I killed them both.”

  It could have been no more than a fraction of a second that he was turned away, not quite facing Maggie; and in that instant Maggie, long poised to make her desperate leap, did leap, across an abyss of several feet—seizing the heavy white vase in both hands and swinging it in a clumsy arc, managing to strike Calvin Gould a stunning blow to the side of the head. Taken wholly by surprise, Calvin cried out like a stricken animal, and stumbled, and began to fall; Maggie dropped the vase and ran, ran out of the living room and into the front hall, her legs dazed beneath her, her feet in their woolen socks skidding on the hardwood floor, and then she was at the door and outside, in the freezing air that did not impede her but seemed to bear her aloft, drawing breath to scream except in the radiance of terror she was unable to scream and the man in close pursuit grabbed hold of her and pulled her back, yanking her it seemed out of the very air and throwing her off her feet with no more effort than if she were a life-sized rag doll, and even as she fell he began to strike her with his fists, in a delirium which Maggie would recall afterward only in fragments like a crudely cut film in which “Maggie Blackburn” performed at a distance, unable to scream even now, as if paralyzed, nor could she hear the sounds her assailant uttered, words of anguish, despair, rage as he dragged her back into the house and struck her several more blows, not with his fists now but with the flat of his hand, stooping over her, panting into her face.

  But Maggie did not see him. Maggie had ceased seeing.

  26

  I killed them both. One for personal reasons, the other for reasons of expediency.

  Otherwise, lacking this note, his death might have been reconstructed as “accidental.”

  27

  From a distance, Maggie Blackburn heard her name being called.

  It was a melancholy hollow sound, as of a voice echoing in a deep well.

  For hours she had lain unresisting, neither conscious nor unconscious, awaiting the next, the fatal, blow. She did not know that she had suffered a head concussion, as it would be called; nor even that she was bleeding from facial cuts; the music in her head had retreated, shrunk, to a dim buzzing core, barely audible. And now she heard her name being called. And she was too exhausted to respond.

  Yet she opened her eyes, which were strangely swollen, the lashes crusted with blood, and she saw, through a haze of tears, a face so familiar as to require no act of naming: a youthful face, forehead lined, eyeglasses glittering, set in an expression of extreme concern.

  “M-Maggie? Oh, my God—Maggie?”

  He knelt beside her. He lifted her awkwardly in his arms.

  It was 7:20 A.M. of February 23, 1989, a wintry morning, sunless, glaring with white. Brendan Bauer had taken a taxi to Maggie Blackburn’s house because she had failed to answer his several telephone calls, the first of which he’d made at 6:30. He rang the front doorbell, there was no answer, so he opened the door, which was unlocked, and discovered Maggie in her blood-splattered black sweater and slacks, shoeless, arms flung outward, lying unconscious just inside the front door.

  By the time the ambulance arrived, Calvin Gould had been dead for nearly six hours and Brendan Bauer was no longer a suspect in a murder case. But neither Brendan Bauer nor Maggie Blackburn would know that fact until later in the day.

  As for Maggie: as soon as Brendan arrived and knelt over her, to wake her, she understood that she had not died. Now he was here, he would take care of her; she felt the unanticipated strength of his arms, she heard the desperation in his voice. And she shut her eyes in sheer gratitude. Floating.

  She was never to articulate the thought that, had Calvin Gould meant to seriously harm her, Brendan Bauer would have arrived hours too late.

  Dear Brendan!

  Epilogue

  By late September, seven months after the death of Calvin Gould on an icy stretch of Route 1 north of Forest Park, in the early hours of February 23, the amazed talk in and about the Forest Park Conservatory of Music was of a new, though hardly equivalent, surprise: the young graduate student and composer Brendan Bauer had not only accompanied Maggie Blackburn to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where Maggie had accepted an associate professorship in the Music Department of the University of Minnesota, but was believed to be living in Maggie’s very house.

  How was this possible? Were the two lovers? Or was the arrangement merely expedient, of mutual benefit?

  Portia MacLeod, who would have claimed to be Maggie Blackburn’s closest friend and the person of all the world who might lay claim to Maggie’s confidence, expressed an air of hurt as well as simple astonishment. “Living … in your house? The house you’ve just rented? But what does that mean, Maggie?” she asked.

  “I don’t know that it means anything, Portia,” Maggie said. The friends were speaking over the telephone: Maggie was twelve hundred miles away now, living in a residential section of Minneapolis contiguous with the university. “Except what it is.”

  And that coolly ambiguous reply Portia was left to interpret for herself, and to bear about Forest Park, to proffer for interpretation.

  As it happened, Maggie Blackburn had not died. But only because Calvin Gould had decided not to kill her.

  This fact, on its surface so self-evident, otherwise so obscure, Maggie often contemplated. And when she was not actively contemplating it she was yet aware of it, as one is aware of one’s breath, one’s heartbeat, the pulsing of one’s blood. That rhythmic beat that is life, indefinable.

  So in a way (though Maggie could not speak of this to anyone) she was forever in Calvin’s debt … though her fine, delicate skin bore tiny scars, particularly about her eyes, as a result of the beating he’d inflicted upon her.

  Perhaps the man had been mad, at the last. He had certainly been a killer.

  But he had not killed her.

  In the end he must have decided, Maggie thought, to choose me over her. Her waiting for him in their house.

  Within forty-eight hours of Calvin Gould’s suicide, while Maggie was still on the
critical list in the Forest Park Medical Center, it was known through the community that the woman whom everyone had accepted as Naomi Gould, Calvin Gould’s wife, was in fact Caroline Gould, Calvin Gould’s twin sister, who had a history of neurological and emotional disorders dating back to childhood … and though the immediate speculation followed that perhaps this eccentric woman might have been involved in one or both of the murders, no proof was ever offered; if police questioned Caroline Gould, their findings were never made public. As soon as Caroline learned of her brother Calvin’s death she had become, it was said, totally incapacitated: in a state of delusional mania, alternating with periods of suicidal depression; the unhappy woman was likely to be hospitalized for the rest of her life.

  So Calvin has punished both himself and his twin, Maggie thought.

  He had his revenge. And he’d escaped.

  “Why didn’t you telephone me sooner, if you suspected him?”