The Best American Mystery Stories 2002
- Автор: Грейди Джеймс, Камински Стюарт Мелвин
- Год: 2002
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-12494-7
- Жанр: Другие детективы
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When again Roland was able to see clearly, and to think, he saw to his horror that it was nearly six-thirty. And still the stricken girl slept on the corduroy sofa, the sound of her breathing now filling the airless room. Her head lay at a painful angle on the soiled armrest and her arms and legs were limp, loose as those of a rag doll. Except now her unseeing eyes were partly open, showing a crescent of white. Anxiously he whispered, “Babs? Wake up.” He felt panic: hearing voices in the corridor beyond the backstage area, boys’ voices, perhaps basketball players leaving practice; and Hal McCreagh was among these, or might have been, for Hal was on the team; and what would Roland do, and what would be done to Roland, if he were discovered like this, hiding, guilty-faced, with Babs Hendrick sprawled on the sofa, helpless in sleep, her hair disheveled and her clothing in disarray? Hurriedly, with shaking fingers, Roland readjusted the fuzzy angora sweater, and the pleated skirt. Whimpering, pleading for the girl to wake up, please would she wake up, yet like Sleeping Beauty in the Disney film, she would not wake up; she was under a curse; she would not wake up for him.
For the first time it occurred to the trembling boy that he might have given his sweetheart too strong a dose of the drug. What if she never woke up? (But what was too strong, he had no idea. Half the bottle of six-milligram capsules? That odorless chalky white powder?)
Panic swept over him. No, he wouldn’t think of that.
On a shelf amid the tattered copies of play scripts he found a frayed, light wool blanket to draw gently over Babs. He tucked the blanket beneath her damp chin, and spread her blond, wavy hair in a fan around her head. She would sleep until the drug wore off, and then she would wake; if Roland — “Rollie” — were very lucky, she wouldn’t remember him; and if he were unlucky, well — he wouldn’t think of that. (And he did not.) Stealthily then he fled, and was unseen. He would leave the single fluorescent light flickering. He would slip from the greenroom to the darkened backstage area and make his way out into a rear corridor, not taking the most obvious, direct route (which would have brought him into a corridor contiguous with the corridor that led to the boys’ locker room), and so, breathless, he would flee the scene of the crime, which in his heart he could not (could he?) acknowledge was a crime, even into his sixty-first year, when R_ had long replaced both Roland and “Rollie.” Contemplating then through the distorting lens of time the pale, calm-seeming doctor’s son safe in the brick house on Church Street, and safe in his room immersed in geometry homework at 8:20 that evening, the approximate time that Babs Hendrick’s heart ceased beating.
The Glass Menagerie would not be performed that spring at Indian River High.
Clifford Scales would be suspended without salary from the school, and his contract terminated soon after, during the Indian River police investigation into the barbiturate death of Seales’s seventeen-year-old student Babs Hendrick. Though not enough evidence would be gathered against him to justify a formal arrest, Seales would remain the prime suspect in the case, and his guilt taken for granted. Forty-five years later in Indian River, if you speak of Babs Hendrick’s death, you’ll be told in angry disgust that the girl’s English teacher, an alcoholic pervert who’d molested other girl students over the years, drugged her with barbiturates to perform despicable sexual acts on her, and killed her in the process. You will be told that Seales managed to escape prosecution, though of course his life was ruined, and he would die, divorced and disgraced, of a massive heart attack a few years later.
Ladies and gentlemen, you will ask: Had the Indian River police no other suspects? Possibly yes. Practicably speaking, no. Even today, small-town police departments are ill equipped to undertake homicide investigations in which neither witnesses nor informants come forward. Dusting for fingerprints in the greenroom yielded a treasure trove of prints, but all of these, even Seales’s, were explainable. DNA evidence (saliva, semen) would have convicted the guilty individual, but DNA evidence was unknown at the time. And the boy, the shy bespectacled doctor’s son, Roland, was but one of a number of high school boys, including the dead girl’s boyfriend, whom police questioned; he was not singled out for suspicion, spoke earnestly and persuasively to police officers, even defending (in his naivete) the notorious Seales, and was never to behave in any way that might be labeled suspicious. In a state of suspended animation. No emotion, only wonder. That I. Roland, had done such a thing. I, a victim, to have wielded such power!
If my mother had ever discovered that a bottle of prescription sleeping pills was missing from her medicine cabinet, she never spoke of her discovery and what it might mean.
It would be rumored (but never printed in any newspapers or uttered on radio or TV) that “sick, disgusting things” had been done to Babs Hendrick’s helpless body before her death; only a “pervert” could have done such acts upon a comatose victim. But there would never be any arrest of this criminal, and therefore no trial. And no public revelations.