The Secret History - Donna Tartt [86]
Henry shrugged.
“If you’d gone right in, you could’ve got off on some minor charge. Maybe nothing would have happened at all.”
“Maybe not,” Henry said agreeably. “But remember, this is Vermont.”
“What the hell difference does that make?”
“It makes a great deal of difference, unfortunately. If the thing went to trial, we’d be tried here. And not, I might add, by a jury of our peers.”
“So?”
“Say what you like, but you can’t convince me that a jury box of poverty-level Vermonters would have the remotest bit of pity for four college students on trial for murdering one of their neighbors.”
“People in Hampden have been hoping for years that something like this would happen,” said Francis, lighting a new cigarette off the end of the old one. “We wouldn’t be getting off on any manslaughter charges. We’d be lucky if we didn’t go to the chair.”
“Imagine how it would look,” Henry said. “We’re all young, well educated, reasonably well off; and, perhaps most importantly, not Vermonters. And I suppose that any equitable judge might make allowances for our youth, and the fact that it was an accident and so forth, but—”
“Four rich college kids?” said Francis. “Drunk? On drugs? On this guy’s land in the middle of the night?”
“You were on his land?”
“Well, apparently,” said Henry. “That’s where the papers said his body was found.”
I hadn’t been in Vermont very long, but I’d been there long enough to know what any Vermonter worth his salt would think of that. Trespassing on someone’s land was tantamount to breaking into his house. “Oh, God,” I said.
“That’s not the half of it, either,” said Francis. “For Christ’s sake, we were wearing bed sheets. Barefoot. Soaked in blood. Stinking drunk. Can you imagine if we’d trailed down to the sheriff’s office and tried to explain all that?”
“Not that we were in any condition to explain,” Henry said dreamily. “Really. I wonder if you understand what sort of state we were in. Scarcely an hour before, we’d all been really, truly out of our minds. And it may be a superhuman effort to lose oneself so completely, but that’s nothing compared to the effort of getting oneself back again.”
“It certainly wasn’t as if something snapped and there we were, our jolly old selves,” said Francis. “Believe me. We might as well have had shock treatments.”
“I really don’t know how we got home without being seen,” Henry said.
“No way could we have patched together a plausible story from this. Good Lord. It was weeks before I got over it. Camilla couldn’t even talk for three days.”
With a small chill, I remembered: Camilla, her throat wrapped in a red muffler, unable to speak. Laryngitis, they’d said.
“Yes, that was very strange,” said Henry. “She was thinking clearly enough, but the words wouldn’t come out right. As if she’d had a stroke. When she started to speak again, her high-school French came back before her English or her Greek. Nursery words. I remember sitting by her bed, listening to her count to ten, watching her point to la fenêtre, la chaise …”
Francis laughed. “She was so funny,” he said. “When I asked her how she felt she said, ‘Je me sens comme Hélène Keller, mon vieux.’ ”
“Did she go to the doctor?”
“Are you kidding?”
“What if she hadn’t got any better?”
“Well, the same thing happened to all of us,” said Henry. “Only it more or less wore off in a couple of hours.”
“You couldn’t talk?”
“Bitten and scratched to pieces?” Francis said. “Tongue-tied? Half mad? If we’d gone to the police they would have charged us with every unsolved death in New England for the last five years.” He held up an imaginary newspaper. “ ‘Crazed Hippies Indicted for Rural Thrill-Killing.’ ‘Cult Slaying of Old Abe So-and-So.’ ”
“Teen Satanists Murder Longtime Vermont Resident,” said Henry, lighting a cigarette.
Francis started to laugh.
“It would be one thing if we had even a chance at a decent hearing,” said Henry. “But we don’t.”
“And I personally can’t imagine much worse than being tried for my life by a Vermont circuit-court judge and a jury box full of telephone