The Secret History - Donna Tartt [87]
“Things aren’t marvelous,” said Henry, “but they could certainly be worse. The big problem now is Bunny.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Nothing’s wrong with him.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“He just can’t keep his mouth shut, that’s all.”
“Haven’t you talked to him?”
“About ten million times,” Francis said.
“Has he tried to go to the police?”
“If he goes on like this,” said Henry, “he won’t have to. They’ll come right to us. Reasoning with him does no good. He just doesn’t grasp what a serious business this is.”
“Surely he doesn’t want to see you go to jail.”
“If he thought about it, I’m sure he’d realize he didn’t,” said Henry evenly. “And I’m sure he’d realize that he doesn’t particularly want to go to jail himself, either.”
“Bunny? But why—?”
“Because he’s known about this since November and he hasn’t gone to the police,” Francis said.
“But that’s beside the point,” said Henry. “Even he has sense enough not to turn us in. He doesn’t have much of an alibi for the night of the murder, and if it ever came to prison for the rest of us I think he must know that I, at least, would do everything in my power to see he came along with us.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “The problem is he’s just a fool, and sooner or later he’s going to say the wrong thing to the wrong person,” he said. “Perhaps not intentionally, but I can’t pretend to be too concerned with motive at this point. You heard him this morning. He’d be in quite a spot himself if this got back to the police but of course he thinks those ghastly jokes are all terribly subtle and clever and over everyone’s head.”
“He’s only just smart enough to realize what a mistake turning us in would be,” said Francis, pausing to pour himself another drink. “But we can’t seem to pound it into him that it’s even more in his own self-interest not to go around talking like he does. And, really, I’m not at all sure he won’t just come out and tell someone, when he’s in one of these confessional moods.”
“Tell someone? Like who?”
“Marion. His father. The Dean of Studies.” He shuddered. “Gives me the creeps just to think about it. He’s just the sort who always stands up in the back of the courtroom during the last five minutes of Terry Mason.’ ”
“Bunny Corcoran, Boy Detective,” said Henry dryly.
“How did he find out? He wasn’t with you, was he?”
“As a matter of fact,” said Francis, “he was with you.” He glanced at Henry, and to my surprise the two of them began to laugh.
“What? What’s so funny?” I said, alarmed.
This sent them into fresh peals of laughter. “Nothing,” said Francis at last.
“Really, it is nothing,” said Henry, with a bemused little sigh. “The oddest things make me laugh these days.” He lit another cigarette. “He was with you that night, early in the evening, anyway. Remember? You went to the movies.”
“The Thirty-Nine Steps,” Francis said.
With something of a start, I did remember: a windy autumn night, full moon obscured by dusty rags of cloud. I’d worked late in the library and hadn’t gone to dinner. Walking home, a sandwich from the snack bar in my pocket, and the dry leaves skittering and dancing on the path before me, I’d run into Bunny on his way to the Hitchcock series, which the Film Society was showing in the auditorium.
We were late and there were no seats left so we sat on the carpeted stairs, Bunny leaning back on his elbows with his legs stretched in front of him, cracking pensively with his rear molars at a little Dum-Dum sucker. The high wind rattled the flimsy walls; a door banged open and shut until somebody propped it open with a brick. On the screen, locomotives screaming across a black-and-white nightmare of iron-bridged chasms.
“We had a drink afterwards,” I said. “Then he went to his room.”
Henry sighed. “I wish he had,” he said.
“He kept asking if I knew where you were.”
“He knew himself, very well. We’d threatened half a dozen times to leave him at home if he didn’t behave.”
“So he got the bright idea of coming around to Henry’s to scare him,” said Francis, pouring himself another drink.
“I was so angry about that,