The Secret History - Donna Tartt [88]
“Even so, nothing might have happened. It was just a horrible string of coincidences. If we’d stopped in the country to get rid of our clothes, if we’d come here or to the twins’, if Bunny only hadn’t fallen asleep …”
“He was asleep?”
“Yes, or otherwise he would have got discouraged and left,” Henry said. “We didn’t get back to Hampden until six in the morning. It was a miracle we found our way to the car, over all those fields and things in the dark.… Well, it was foolish to drive to North Hampden in those bloody clothes. The police could have pulled us over, we could have had a wreck, anything. But I felt ill, and I wasn’t thinking clearly, and I suppose I drove to my own apartment by instinct.”
“He left my room around midnight.”
“Well, then, he was alone in my apartment from about twelve-thirty to six a.m. And the coroner reckoned the time of death between one and four. That’s one of the few decent cards fate dealt us in the whole hand. Though Bunny wasn’t with us, he’d have a hard time proving he wasn’t. Unfortunately, that’s not a card we can play except in the direst circumstances.” He shrugged. “If only he’d left the lamp on, anything to tip us off.”
“But that was going to be the big surprise, you see. Jumping out at us from the dark.”
“We walked in and turned on the light, and then it was too late. He woke up instantly. And there we were—”
“—all white robes and bloody like something from Edgar Allan Poe,” Francis said gloomily.
“Jesus, what did he do?”
“What do you think? We scared him half to death.”
“It served him right,” said Henry.
“Tell him about the ice cream.”
“Really, this was the last straw,” Henry said crossly. “He took a quart of ice cream out of my freezer to eat while he waited—he couldn’t bother to get a bowl of it, you understand, he had to have the whole quart—and when he fell asleep it melted all over him and on my chair and on that nice little Oriental rug I used to have. Well. It was quite a good antique, that rug, but the dry cleaners said there was nothing they could do. It came back in shreds. And my chair.” He reached for a cigarette. “He screamed like a banshee when he saw us—”
“—and he would not shut up,” said Francis. “Remember, it was six o’clock in the morning, the neighbors sleeping …” He shook his head. “I remember Charles taking a step towards him, trying to talk to him, and Bunny yelling bloody murder. After a minute or two—”
“It was only a few seconds,” Henry said.
“—after a minute, Camilla picked up a glass ashtray and threw it at him and hit him square in the chest.”
“It wasn’t a hard blow,” said Henry thoughtfully, “but it was quite judiciously timed. Instantly he shut up and stared at her and I said to him, ‘Bunny, shut up. You’ll wake the neighbors. We’ve hit a deer in the road on the way home.’ ”
“So then,” said Francis, “he wiped his brow and rolled his eyes and went through the whole Bunny routine—boy you guys scared me and must’ve been half-asleep and just on and on and on—”
“And meanwhile,” Henry said, “the four of us were standing there in the bloody sheets, the lights on, no curtains, in full view of anyone who might happen to drive by. He was talking so loudly, and the lights were so bright, and I felt so faint with exhaustion and shock that I couldn’t do much more than stare at him. My God—we were covered with this man’s blood, we’d tracked it into the house, the sun was coming up, and here, to top it all off, was Bunny. I couldn’t force myself to think what to do. Then Camilla, quite sensibly, flicked off the light and all of a sudden I realized no matter how it looked, no matter who was there, we had to get out of our clothes and wash up without losing another second.”
“I practically had to rip the sheet off,” said Francis. “The blood had dried and it was stuck to me. By the time I’d managed that, Henry and the others were in the bathroom. Spray was flying; the water in the bathtub was backed