Innocence

Telford would expect her to dial 911 to report a murder, but she would never make that call. Uniformed officers, detectives, personnel from the coroner’s office, reporters, and unknowable others would descend upon her, besiege her, a plague of locusts stripping her of privacy and hope. Their stares relentlessly upon her, their questions requiring a thousand answers, all those hands reaching to reassure her, to take her arm when her knees grew weak, technicians gathering evidence in her rooms, perhaps a trip to a hospital to be examined for injury and to assess her emotional condition: That prospect was intolerable. She would be destroyed by it.

Furthermore, if Telford had been as careful eliminating evidence of his presence as he’d claimed, nothing could link him to the death of her father. In her rooms, he might have left fingerprints only on the entry door and the bathtub fixtures. Even bleary-eyed and frantic to leave before authorities arrived, he would have taken time to wipe those surfaces. If he proved to be as methodical as she expected, he had established an alibi for the hours he had meant to spend in their house. In the end, wouldn’t it be her word against his? And were the police likely to believe a respectable curator or a Goth-obsessed, neurotic thirteen-year-old girl with acute social phobia?

Gwyneth packed a few essentials in a satchel belonging to her father. Leaving the front door standing open, she left the house and made her way to the nearest of the eight apartments that, with considerable foresight, her father had prepared for her if he should die.

Safe for the moment, she called Teague Hanlon and told him all that had happened. He wanted to call the police, but when he listened to her reasons for not doing so, he understood that relying on the usual authorities would lead to her destruction, not to Telford’s imprisonment.

“If Telford is ever brought to justice,” she told Hanlon, “I’m the one who will have to gather the evidence against him, in my own way and in my own good time. I have lost so much. The kindest father in the world. I will never relent. Never.”

46

ALTHOUGH OUR WINE WAS FINISHED BEFORE HER story, the candles were a long way from guttering, and they blued the darkness of the dining area.

I said, “So it was declared an accidental death.”

“Death by contaminated honey, yes.”

“But weren’t the police looking for you?”

“Not actively. An appeal was made to the public, through local TV and newspapers, asking anyone who saw this lost and afflicted girl to report her whereabouts to the police. But it was a picture of me with my father, taken a year earlier, before my Goth look, the only photograph of me since I was an infant, and of course I no longer much resembled that girl.”

“The only photograph of you in all that time?”

“If you allow your picture to be taken, you don’t know who might see it a month from now, a year. Strangers looking at your photo, staring at you, studying you… It’s not as awful as being in the presence of strangers, with them touching and talking to you and expecting you to reply. But it’s bad enough. I can barely tolerate the thought of it.”

We shared a minute of silence.

Considering her psychological problems and the limitations they imposed on her, considering that I could venture from my underground haven only in the quietest hours of the night, cloaked and hooded and at risk of being murdered on sight, our encounter and the way that our friendship continued to unfold seemed miraculous. I yearned for more than friendship, but I understood that love, given and received, was impossible. Even an imperfect princess could be awakened to the fullness of life only by a kiss from a genuine prince, not by such as I. In spite of my yearnings, I remained satisfied not to pursue the impossible and to settle for the miraculous. Now my greatest fear was that we might lose what we had together and go our separate ways, or be separated by death.

At last I said, “But in time, the court might declare you dead, and then what will happen to the trusts that support you?”

“I remained in seclusion for three months, never once going out, grieving Daddy, in touch with no one but Teague Hanlon. At the end of that period, he told the authorities that I had found my way to him, that as my guardian, with my approval, he’d placed me in a sanatorium in a quiet country setting, so that I could rest, get psychological counseling, and learn either to overcome my social phobia or to live better with it.”

“On the phone, Telford said you were in a sanatorium.”

“And so he thought all these years. Until last night.”

“And the authorities believed Mr. Hanlon?”

“Of course. Not just because he was my guardian, but because of who he is.”

“And who is he?”

Although I could not see her face in the blue-tinted dark, I suspected that she was smiling when she said, “My guardian,” and thereby made it clear that, regardless of all that she had shared with me, some of her secrets were still hers alone.