The Secret History - Donna Tartt [167]
“Did you?”
“No. But if they’d asked me something a little touchier, and I was kind of scared … You don’t realize what it’s like. There are two of them, and only one of you, and you don’t have much time to think.… I know, I know,” he said despairingly. “But it’s not like the police. These small-town cops don’t actually expect to find anything. They’d be shocked to know the truth, probably wouldn’t believe it if you told them. But these guys …” He shuddered. “I never realized, you know, how much we rely on appearances,” he said. “It’s not that we’re so smart, it’s just that we don’t look like we did it. We might as well be a bunch of Sunday-school teachers as far as everyone else is concerned. But these guys won’t be taken in by that.” He picked up his glass and took a drink. “By the way,” he said, “they asked a million questions about your trip to Italy.”
Henry glanced up, startled. “Did they ask at all about the finances? Who paid for it?”
“No.” Charles finished off the glass and rattled the ice around for a moment. “I was terrified they would. But I think they were kind of overly impressed by the Corcorans. I think if I told them that Bunny never wore the same pair of underpants twice they would probably believe me.”
“What about that Vermonter?” Francis said. “The one on television last night?”
“I don’t know. They were a lot more interested in Cloke than anything else, it seemed to me. Maybe they just wanted to make sure his story matched up with mine, but there were a couple of really strange questions that—I don’t know. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s going around telling people this theory of his, that Bunny was kidnapped by drug dealers.”
“Certainly not,” said Francis.
“Well, he told us, and we’re not even his friends. Though the FBI men seem to think he and I are on intimate terms.”
“I hope you took pains to correct them,” said Henry, lighting a cigarette.
“I’m sure Cloke would have set them straight on that account.”
“Not necessarily,” said Henry. He shook out his match and threw it in an ashtray; then he inhaled deeply on his cigarette. “You know,” he said, “I thought at first that this association with Cloke was a great misfortune. Now I see it’s one of the best things that could have happened to us.”
Before anyone could ask him what he meant, he glanced at his watch. “Goodness,” he said. “We’d better go. It’s almost six.”
On the way to Francis’s, a pregnant dog ran across the road in front of us.
“That,” said Henry, “is a very bad omen.”
But of what he wouldn’t say.
The news was just beginning. The anchorman glanced up from his papers, looking grave but at the same time very pleased. “The frantic search—thus far a fruitless one—continues, for missing Hampden College student Edward Corcoran.”
“Gosh,” said Camilla, reaching into her brother’s coat pocket for a cigarette. “You’d think they’d get his name right, don’t you?”
The picture cut to an aerial shot of snowy hills, dotted like a war map with pinprick figures, Mount Cataract looming lopsided and huge in the foreground.
“An estimated three hundred searchers,” said the voice-over, “including National Guard, police, Hampden firefighters and Central Vermont Public Service employees, combed the hard-to-reach area on this, Day Two of the search. In addition, the FBI has launched an investigation of its own in Hampden today.”
The picture wobbled, then switched abruptly to a lean, white-haired man in a cowboy hat who the caption informed us was Dick Postonkill, Hampden County sheriff. He was talking, but no sound came from his mouth; searchers milled curiously in the snowy background, raising on tiptoe to jeer silently at the camera.
After a few moments, the audio lurched on with a jerky, garbled sound. The sheriff was in the middle of a sentence.
“—to remind hikers,” he said, “to go out in groups, stay on the trail, leave a projected itinerary and carry plenty of warm clothing in case of sudden drops in temperature.”
“That was Hampden County sheriff Dick Postonkill,” said the anchorman brightly, “with