The Secret History - Donna Tartt [137]
He looked at me in the rear-view mirror. “We need to talk a minute,” he said.
“What is it?”
“When did you leave your room?”
“About a quarter of three.”
“Did anyone see you?”
“Not really. Not that I know of.”
Cooling down after its long drive, the car ticked and hissed and settled contentedly on its frame. Henry was silent for a moment, and he was about to speak when Francis suddenly pointed out the window. “Look,” he said. “Is that snow?”
The twins leaned low to see. Henry, biting his lower lip, paid no attention. “The four of us,” he said, at last, “were at a matinee at the Orpheum in town—a double feature that ran from one o’clock to four-fifty-five. Afterwards we went on a short drive, returning—” he checked his watch—“at five-fifteen. That accounts for us, all right. I’m not sure what to do about you.”
“Why can’t I say I was with you?”
“Because you weren’t.”
“Who’ll know the difference?”
“The ticket girl at the Orpheum, that’s who. We went down and bought tickets for the afternoon show, paid for them with a hundred-dollar bill. She remembers us, I can assure you of that. We sat in the balcony and slipped out the emergency exit about fifteen minutes into the first movie.”
“Why couldn’t I have met you there?”
“You could have, except you don’t have a car. And you can’t say you took a cab because that can be easily checked. Besides, you were out walking around. You say you were in Commons before you met us?”
“Yes.”
“Then I suppose there’s nothing you can say except that you went straight home. It’s not an ideal story, but at this point you don’t have any alternative to speak of. We’ll have to imagine you met up with us at some point after the movie, in the quite likely event that someone has seen you. Say we called you at five o’clock and met you in the parking lot. You rode with us to Francis’s—really, this doesn’t follow very smoothly, but it’ll have to do—and walked home again.”
“All right.”
“When you get home, check downstairs in case any phone messages were left for you between three-thirty and five. If there were, we’ll have to think of some reason why you didn’t take the calls.”
“Look, you guys,” Charles said. “It’s really snowing.”
Tiny flakes, just visible at the tops of the pines.
“One more thing,” said Henry. “We don’t want to behave as if we’re waiting around to hear some momentous piece of news. Go home. Read a book. I don’t think we ought to try to contact one another tonight—unless, of course, it’s absolutely necessary.”
“I’ve never seen it snow this late in the year.” Francis was looking out the window. “Yesterday it was nearly seventy degrees.”
“Were they predicting that?” Charles said.
“Not that I heard.”
“Christ. Look at this. It’s almost Easter.”
“I don’t see why you’re so excited,” Henry said crossly. He had a pragmatic, farmer-like knowledge of how weather conditions affected growth, germination, blooming times, et cetera. “It’s just going to kill all the flowers.”
I walked home fast, because I was cold. A November stillness was settling like a deadly oxymoron on the April landscape. Snow was falling in earnest now—big silent petals drifting through the springtime woods, white bouquets segueing into snowy dark: a nightmarish topsy-turvy land, something from a story book. My path took me beneath a row of apple trees, full-blown and luminous, shivering in the twilight like an avenue of pale umbrellas. The big white flakes wafted through them, dreamy and soft. I did not stop to look, however, only hurried beneath them even faster. My winter in Hampden had given me a horror of snow.
There were no messages for me downstairs. I went up to my room, changed my clothes, couldn’t decide what to do with the ones I’d taken off, thought of washing them, wondered if it might look suspicious, finally stuffed them all at the very bottom of my laundry bag. Then I sat down on my bed and looked at the clock.
It was time for dinner and I hadn’t eaten all day but I wasn’t hungry. I went to the window and watched the snowflakes whirl in the high arcs of light above the tennis courts,