The Secret History - Donna Tartt [194]
It was I killed the old pawnbroker woman and her sister Lizaveta with an axe and robbed them.
Laughter, vertigo. Strangers kept wandering up and talking at me. I disengaged myself from one of Bunny’s teenaged cousins—who, upon hearing I was from California, had begun to ask me a lot of very complicated questions about surfing—and, swimming through the bobbling crowd, found Henry. He was standing by himself in front of some glass doors, his back to the room, smoking a cigarette.
I stood beside him. He didn’t look at me or speak. The doors faced out on a barren, floodlit terrace—black cinder, privet in concrete urns, a statue artfully broken in white pieces on the ground. Rain slanted in the lights, which were angled to cast long, dramatic shadows. The effect was fashionable, post-nuclear but ancient, too, like some pumice-strewn courtyard from Pompeii.
“That is the ugliest garden I have ever seen,” I said.
“Yes,” said Henry. He was very pale. “Rubble and ash.”
People laughed and talked behind us. The lights, through the rain-spattered window, cast a pattern of droplets trickling down his face.
“Maybe you’d better lie down,” I said after a while.
He bit his lip. The ash on his cigarette was about an inch long. “I don’t have any more medicine,” he said.
I looked at the side of his face. “Can you get along?”
“I guess I’ll have to, won’t I?” he said without moving.
Camilla locked the door of the bathroom behind us and the two of us, on our hands and knees, began to rummage through the mess of prescription bottles under the sink.
“ ‘For high blood pressure,’ ” she read.
“No.”
“ ‘For asthma.’ ”
There was a knock on the door.
“Somebody’s in here,” I yelled.
Camilla’s head was wedged all the way in the cabinet by the water pipes, so that her rear end stuck out. I could hear the medicine bottles clinking. “ ‘Inner ear?’ ” she said, her voice muffled. “ ‘One cap twice daily’?”
“Let’s see.”
She handed me some antibiotics, at least ten years old.
“This won’t do,” I said, edging closer. “Do you see anything with a no-refill sticker? From a dentist, maybe?”
“No.”
“ ‘May Cause Drowsiness’? ‘Do Not Drive or Operate Heavy Machinery’?”
Someone knocked on the door again and rattled the knob. I knocked back, then reached up and turned on both taps full-blast.
Our findings were not good. If Henry had been suffering from poison ivy, hay fever, rheumatism, pinkeye, we would have been in luck but the only painkiller they had was Excedrin. Out of sheer desperation I took a handful, also two ambiguous capsules that had a Drowsiness sticker but which I suspected of being antihistamines.
I’d thought our mystery guest had left, but venturing out I was annoyed to find Cloke lurking outside. He gave me a contemptuous look that turned to a stare when Camilla—hair tousled, tugging at her skirt—stepped out behind me.
If she was surprised to see him, she didn’t show it. “Oh, hello,” she said to him, reaching down to dust off her knees.
“Hi.” He glanced away in a studied, offhanded manner. We all knew Cloke was sort of interested in her, but even if he hadn’t been, Camilla was not exactly the sort of girl one expected to find making out with someone in a locked bathroom.
She brushed past us and headed downstairs. I started down, too, but Cloke coughed in a significant manner and I turned around.
He leaned back against the wall, looking at me as if he’d had me figured out from the day I was born. “So,” he said. His shirt was unironed and his shirttails were out; and though his eyes were red, I didn’t know if he was stoned or just tired. “How’s it going?”
I paused on the landing. Camilla was at the foot of the steps, out of earshot. “All right,” I said.
“What’s the story?”
“What?”
“Better not let Kathy catch you guys screwing around in her bathroom. She’ll make you walk to the bus station.”
His tone was neutral. Still, I was reminded of the business with Mona’s boyfriend the week before. Cloke, however, presented