legacy?” asked Susan, when he had calmed down again.
“The legacy,” he said.
She saw the letter, on the coffee table in front of him, was half soaked in water. It was no good anymore, she thought, and felt a curious sadness.
The old letter was gone.
“I’m sorry, the—?”
“That actress, what was her name, she had—oh, who was it—I heard that Buddy showed it to her . . .”
“Time for your doctor visit,” interrupted the nurse. “We have a checkup downstairs.” She was pushing a wheelchair.
“May I walk with you, then?” asked Susan.
The nurse held one of his elbows as he rose, steering him to the chair. His other hand pointed waveringly at the record player, so Susan went over and lifted the needle, trying for delicacy. In the silence after the ffft she could hear the whine of a car alarm cycling outside but the apartment itself seemed airless and sealed.
“You were saying,” she urged gently, walking beside the nurse over the carpet. The wheelchair squeaked slightly under Chip’s weight.
“Saying?” he asked.
“What was the legacy?”
“Wasn’t allowed to go in. Not in the inner circle anymore. Bitsy was very softhearted, you see, she didn’t like the hunting and so forth . . . that was where all his fortune went . . .”
“Where, though?”
No use.
The apartment door closed behind them and they were on the catwalk now, the car alarm shrieking louder and nearer. She had to squeeze in beside them due to the narrow passage. He looked up at her and smiled broadly and she thought, with a lift of hope, that he would say something oracular. He pointed past her and she turned and looked: a small plane passing over the ocean, pulling a yellow aerial banner. But there was nothing on it, or if there was the words were facing out to sea.
Later she half wished she’d asked for the picture of her uncle or even slipped it surreptitiously out of the scrapbook—what were the chances Chip would ever have noticed it missing? Instead of a constant reference point she had a new ghost image of her great-uncle Buddy that moved along beside her: a thin man in a white dinner jacket with Brylcreem stiffening his hair.
It was better than nothing.
To resolve the guilt she tried to be frank with herself. She was a murderer when she got up, a murderer when she walked, a murderer whenever she was moving. It was only during the quiet times that she tried not to think of the new title. With momentum behind her she could embrace her status: a murderer without a prison sentence, without a trial or a defense attorney, a secret and sure-footed murderer ranging beyond the confines of the penal colony. But when she was trying to get to sleep it was more difficult to reconcile. Doubts intruded. At first, before she knew she was a murderer, they had been doubts about her innocence. Now that those doubts were answered with the certainty of her guilt she thought she should be sure of everything. She should be past equivocation and bargains, now that she had embraced the murdering. Yet tensions still arose. It wasn’t enough, in the dark, to know your own sin. It wasn’t enough to admit it. There was still the silence that followed the admission.
When she felt restless in the night she got up from her bed, pulled on a fleece sweater and went down the hall, touching a switch to bring on the dim lights of the sconces. She went to the carnivore rooms usually; she found their open mouths in the dim light, their dark maws studded with the white teeth, and rubbed the points of canines with a finger. She slung her arms around the musty fur of their necks. There was something she should be learning from them, but she didn’t know what. The hawk was no more to blame than the rabbit, right? She’d done her own killing in the passage of daily life, not because she wished to inflict pain. The cats and the wolves only did it for food: they looked cruel but they weren’t, she told herself. By contrast she looked innocuous and that was equally deceptive. She’d been greedy, she’d been selfish: maybe greed was her sin, or the variant of it that was lust. She was irreligious but sin was a neat description: lust, gluttony, avarice and pride. In the end all of the sins seemed the same to her, softer and harder forms of the