Where the God of Love Hangs Out - Amy Bloom [72]
If you think of anything, they said.
It’s very dark where she is, is what I thought.
The police talked to me and they talked to Rose Trask, Eugene’s sister, too. She said Eugene was a worthless piece of shit. She said he owed her money and if they found him she’d like it back, please. She hid Eugene’s hunting knife at the bottom of her root cellar, under the onions, and she hid Eugene in her big old-fashioned chimney until they left. Later, they made her go up in the helicopter to help them find him, and they made her call out his name over their loudspeaker: “Eugene, I love you. Eugene, it will be okay.” While they circled the park, which is three times the size of Yellowstone, she told the police that Eugene had worked on their uncle’s farm from the time he was seven, because he was big for his age, and that he knew his way around the woods because their father threw him out of the house naked, in the middle of the night, whenever he wet his bed, which he did all his life.
Mrs. Warburg said she had wanted to be a dancer and she made Anne take jazz and tap and modern all through school but what Anne really loved was talking. Debate Club, Rhetoric, Student Court, Model U.N., anything that gave you plenty of opportunity for arguing and persuading, she liked. I said I knew that because I had had to live with Anne for four years and she had argued and persuaded me out of cheap shoes and generic toilet paper and my mother’s winter coat. She’d bought us matching kimonos in China town. I told Mrs. Warburg that it was entirely due to Anne that I was able to walk through the world like a normal person.
Mrs. Warburg said, “Let me get another drink.”
I lay back on Anne’s bed and sipped my beer. Mrs. Warburg and I had agreed that since I didn’t always remember to get rum for our get-togethers, I would make do with beer. Anne actually liked beer, Mrs. Warburg said. Mr. Warburg liked Scotch. Mrs. Warburg went right down the middle, she felt, with the rum and Coke.
“Should we have gone to Teddy’s funeral?” she said.
I didn’t think so. Mrs. Warburg had never met Teddy, and I certainly didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to sit with his family, or sit far behind them, hoping that since Teddy was dead, Anne was alive, or that if Anne had to be dead, she’d be lying in a white casket, with bushels of white carnations around her, and Teddy would be lying someplace dark and terrible and unseen.
“I think Anne might have escaped,” Mrs. Warburg said. “I really do. I think she might have gotten out of those awful mountains and she might have found a rowboat or something—she’s wonderful on water, you should see her on Lake Erie, but it could be because of the trauma she doesn’t—”
Mr. Warburg got on the line.
“It’s three o’clock in the morning,” he said. “Mrs. Warburg needs to sleep. So do you, I’m sure.”
Eugene Trask and Anne traveled for four days. He said, at his trial, that she was a wonderful conversationalist. He said that talking to her was a pleasure and that they had had some very lively discussions, which he felt she had enjoyed. At the end of the fourth day, he unbuckled his belt so he could rape her again, in a quiet pine grove near Lake Pleasant, and while he was distracted with his shirttail and zipper, she made a grab for his hunting knife. He hit her on the head with the butt of his rifle, and when she got up, he hit her again. Then he stabbed her twice, just like Teddy, two to the heart. He didn’t want to shoot her, he said. He put her bleeding body in the back of an orange Buick he’d stolen in Speculator, and he drove to an abandoned mine. He threw her down the thirty-foot shaft, dumped the Buick in Mineville, and walked through the woods to his sister’s place. They had hamburgers and mashed potatoes and sat on Rose’s back step and watched a pair of red-tailed hawks circling the spruce. Rose washed out his shirt and pants and ironed them dry, and he left early the