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By Root 2624 0

white scarves fluttered jauntily in the breeze; a girl as bewitching, and clever, as any girl who ever lived. But strange and marvelous as she was, a wisp of silk in a forest of black wool, she was not at all the fragile creature one would have her seem. In many ways she was as cool and competent as Henry; tough-minded and solitary in her habits, and in many ways as aloof. Out in the country it was not uncommon to discover that she had slipped away, alone, out to the lake, maybe, or down to the cellar, where once I found her sitting in the big marooned sleigh, reading, her fur coat thrown over her knees. Things would have been terribly strange and unbalanced without her. She was the Queen who finished out the suit of dark Jacks, dark King, and Joker.

If I found the twins so fascinating, I think it was because there was something a tiny bit inexplicable about them, something I was often on the verge of grasping but never quite did. Charles, kind and slightly ethereal soul that he was, was something of an enigma but Camilla was the real mystery, the safe I could never crack. I was never sure what she thought about anything, and I knew that Bunny found her even harder to read than I did. In good times he’d often offended her clumsily, without meaning to; as soon as they turned bad, he tried to insult and belittle her in a variety of ways, most of which struck wide of the mark. She was impervious to slights about her appearance; met his eye, unblinking, as he told the most vulgar and humiliating jokes; laughed if he attempted to insult her taste or intelligence; ignored his frequent discourses, peppered with erudite misquotations he must have gone to great trouble to dig up, all to the effect that all women were categorically inferior to himself: not designed—as he was—for Philosophy, and Art, and Higher Reasoning, but to attract a husband and to Tend the Home.

Only once did I ever see him get to her. It was over at the twins’ apartment, very late. Charles, fortunately, was out with Henry getting ice; he’d had a lot to drink and if he’d been around things would almost certainly have gotten out of hand. Bunny was so drunk he could hardly sit up. For most of the evening, he’d been in a passable mood, but then, without warning, he turned to Camilla and said: “How come you kids live together?”

She shrugged, in that odd, one-shouldered way the twins had.

“Huh?”

“It’s convenient,” said Camilla. “Cheap.”

“Well, I think it’s pretty damned peculiar.”

“I’ve lived with Charles all my life.”

“Not much privacy, is there? Little place like this? On top of each other all the time?”

“It’s a two-bedroom apartment.”

“And when you get lonesome in the middle of the night?”

There was a brief silence.

“I don’t know what you’re trying to say,” she said icily.

“Sure you do,” said Bunny. “Convenient as hell. Kinda classical, too. Those Greeks carried on with their brothers and sisters like nobody’s—whoops,” he said, retrieving the whiskey glass which was about to fall off the arm of his chair. “Sure, it’s against the law and stuff,” he said. “But what’s that to you. Break one, you might as well break ’em all, eh?”

I was stunned. Francis and I gaped at him as he unconcernedly drained his glass and reached for the bottle again.

To my utter, utter surprise, Camilla said tartly: “You mustn’t think I’m sleeping with my brother just because I won’t sleep with you.”

Bunny laughed a low, nasty laugh. “You couldn’t pay me to sleep with you, girlie,” he said. “Not for all the tea in China.”

She looked at him with absolutely no expression in her pale eyes. Then she got up and went into the kitchen, leaving Francis and me to one of the more tortuous silences I have ever experienced.

Religious slurs, temper tantrums, insults, coercion, debt: all petty things, really, irritants—too minor, it would seem, to move five reasonable people to murder. But, if I dare say it, it wasn’t until I had helped to kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive. To ascribe