I carried the bones in a plastic bag through his backyard and up the far side of his house; then it was just a few feet to the brush.. .no one saw me that time. I was so sure whoever had taken the skull would call the police. I waited. Then I realized whoever had the skull just wanted... to have it. For me to squirm. I had almost forgotten that trouble about the tree. Jane was so ladylike. I never believed..."
"And he never told me about it," said Marcia, to his left. "He never let me worry, too." She looked at him fondly.
"So, what did you do it for?" I asked Torrance. "Did he make a pass at Marcia?"
"Well...," said Torrance hesitantly.
"Oh, honey," Marcia said reproving. She leaned over to me, smiling a little at a man's silly gesture. "He didn't do it," she told me. "I did it." "You killed Mark Kaplan and buried him out in the yard?"
"Oh, Torrance buried him when I told him what I'd done." "Oh," I said inadequately, swallowed by her wide blue eyes. "You killed him because - ?"
"He came over while Torrance was gone." She shook her head sadly as she told me.
"And I had thought he was such a nice person. But he wasn't. He was very dirty."
I nodded, just to be responding somehow.
"Mike Osland, too," Marcia ran on, still shaking her head at the perfidy of men.
I felt suddenly very, very cold. Torrance closed his eyes in profound weariness.
"Mike," I murmured interrogatively.
"He's under the sun deck, that's why Torrance built it, I think," Marcia said earnestly. "Jane didn't know about him."
"She's confessing," said an incredulous hoarse voice. I turned from Marcia's mesmerizing eyes to see that Jack Burns was sitting on his haunches in front of me.
"Did she just confess to a murder?" he asked me.
"Two," I said.
"Two murders," he repeated. He took his turn at head shaking. I would have to find someone at whom I could shake my head incredulously. "She just confessed two murders to you. How do you do if?"
Faced by his round, hot eyes, I became aware that I was in a torn and disheveled and rather skimpy-at-the-top nightgown that had become quite soiled in the course of the night. I was definitely reminded that I was not Jack Burns's favorite person. I wondered how much Lynn would remember of what she'd overheard while she was having the baby - was it possible she would remember my telling Torrance that I knew the whereabouts of the skull? Lynn was being carried out on a stretcher now. I presumed that the afterbirth had been delivered and disposed of. I hoped I wouldn't find it on the bathroom floor or something.
"This man," I told Jack Burns, as I pointed to Torrance, "broke into my house tonight."
"Are you hurt?" asked Sergeant Burns, with reluctant professional solicitude.
I turned to look in Torrance Rideout's eyes. "No," I said clearly. "Not at all.
And I have no idea why he broke in here or what he was looking for." Torrance's eyes showed a slow recognition. And, to my amazement, he winked at me when Jack Burns turned away to call his cohorts over. After an eternity, every single person was gone from Jane's house but me, its owner. What do you do after a night you've had a burglary, been battered, delivered a baby, and nearly been mown down by the entire detective force of Lawrenceton, Georgia? Also, I continued enumerating as I hauled the remains of the nightgown over my head, heard a confession of double murder and had your scarcely covered bosom ogled by the same detectives who had been about to mow you down minutes earlier?
Well. I was going to take a hot, hot bath to soak my bruises and strains. I was going to calm a nearly berserk Madeleine, who was crouching in a corner of the bedroom closet hoping she was concealed underneath a blanket I'd thrown in there. Madeleine, as it happened, did not react well to home invasion. Then, possibly, I could put my tired carcass back between the cool sheets and sleep a little.
There'd be hell to pay in the morning.
My mother would call.
But I only slept four hours. When I woke it was eight o'clock, and I lay in bed and thought for a moment.
Then I was up and brushing my teeth, pulling back on my shorts set from the night before. I managed to get a brush through my hair, which