The Secret History - Donna Tartt [84]
“Charles tells a different story. He remembers seeing me by the body. But he says he also has a memory of struggling with something, pulling as hard as he could, and all of a sudden becoming aware that what he was pulling at was a man’s arm, with his foot braced in the armpit. Francis—well, I can’t say. Every time you talk to him, he remembers something different.”
“And Camilla?”
Henry sighed. “I suppose we’ll never know what really happened,” he said. “We didn’t find her until a good bit later. She was sitting quietly on the bank of a stream with her feet in the water, her robe perfectly white, and no blood anywhere except for her hair. It was dark and clotted, completely soaked. As if she’d tried to dye it red.”
“How could that have happened?”
“We don’t know.” He lit another cigarette. “Anyway, the man was dead. And there we were in the middle of the woods, half-naked and covered with mud with this body on the ground in front of us. We were all in a daze. I was fading in and out, nearly went to sleep; but then Francis went over for a closer look and had a pretty violent attack of the dry heaves. Something about that brought me to my senses. I told Charles to find Camilla and then I knelt down and went through the man’s pockets. There wasn’t much—I found something or other that had his name on it—but of course that wasn’t any help.
“I had no idea what to do. You must remember that it was getting cold, and I hadn’t slept or eaten for a long time, and my mind wasn’t at its clearest. For a few minutes—goodness, how confusing this was—I thought of digging a grave but then I realized that would be madness. We couldn’t linger around all night. We didn’t know where we were, or who might happen along, or even what time it was. Besides, we had nothing to dig a grave with. For a moment I nearly panicked—we couldn’t just leave the body in the open, could we?—but then I realized it was the only thing we could do. My God. We didn’t even know where the car was. I couldn’t picture dragging this corpse over hill and dale for goodness knows how long; and even if we got it to the car, where would we take it?
“So when Charles came back with Camilla, we just left. Which, in retrospect, was the smartest thing we could have done. It’s not as if teams of expert coroners are crawling all over upstate Vermont. It’s a primitive place. People die violent natural deaths all the time. We didn’t even know who the man was; there was nothing to tie us to him. All we had to worry about was finding the car and then making our way home without anyone seeing us.” He leaned over and poured himself some more Scotch. “Which is exactly what we did.”
I poured myself another glass, too, and we sat without speaking for a minute or more.
“Henry,” I said at last. “Good God.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Really, it was more upsetting than you can imagine,” he said. “Once I hit a deer with my car. It was a beautiful creature and to see it struggling, blood everywhere, legs broken … And this was even more distressing but at least I thought it was over. I never dreamed we’d hear anything else about it.” He took a drink of his Scotch. “Unfortunately, that is not the case,” he said. “Bunny has seen to that.”
“What do you mean?”
“You saw him this morning. He’s driven us half mad over this. I am very nearly at the end of my rope.”
There was the sound of a key being turned in the lock. Henry brought up his glass and drank the rest of his whiskey in a long swallow. “That’ll be Francis,” he said, and turned