The closet in which Rupert was hiding for the past thirty
minutes was unbearably small. Between crouching and kneeling on the hardwood
floor, his arthritic legs were failing. Above him, shirt sleeves and jacket
ends draped his shoulders with an air of condemnation, disembodied spirits posing
with their captive. A beam of light streaming through the keyhole had settled
on Rupert’s bald head.
A man and a woman quickly entered
the room, and just as abruptly shut the door behind them. The sudden rush of
air slightly rattled the closet door in front of Rupert's face. He looked
through the little keyhole, his wrinkled eye bathed in a pale glow. He tried to
quell his worried breath, which rose and sank in a shrill wheeze, while his
eyelashes nervously fluttered, and a thin line of sweat trailed down his nose. The
man in the room spoke coolly, knowingly, as though he could strike the woman
without laying a finger on her. She was trying feebly to pacify him.
“Tell me a bedtime story, mother,”
he said.
“If I had only known the trouble
it would cause you, I wouldn't have mentioned it. But come to reason, please.
He’s your father’s brother.”
“He is? Why didn’t anybody tell
me?” he mocked.
The figures appeared and
disappeared from the vista of the keyhole. They were slowly circling the room
from opposite ends. When they were out of view, Rupert carefully adjusted his
position. He could bend on one knee only for a short length of time before the
pain became intolerable. He hoped they would leave soon. It was a bad idea, he
thought. There were much better ways of obtaining information. When he looked
again, he saw only the woman, framed in the keyhole’s little silhouette. Her
son, whom she watched in terror, now paced along the unseen wall.
Neither one spoke. There was an
interminable silence. The woman eyed her son carefully and nervously smoothed
the folds of her dress. A lion tamer trapped in the beast’s cage might have
shown as much restraint. Rupert now feared the possibility of a sudden, violent
action. The woman will be torn abruptly from his view, he thought, killed or battered.
While still pacing, the man began
to speak, but no longer in the voice of an offended child. He spoke rather with
a feigned, calculating calm, as if he had summed up everything and was now
pronouncing a verdict.
“Tell me, mother, do you blush?”
“What?”
“A whore in league with her
lover, a husband’s mysterious death, a son deprived of his father. Enough
reason to turn crimson?”
“What is this? What do you mean
by all this?”
The man withheld his answer for a
moment, as if by suspending it, he was making it monstrous. He then uttered in
a menacing tone, “Murder. That’s what I mean. Foul murder.”
At this moment, Rupert banged the door with a hollow rap while switching knees. At once
the hurried tap of footsteps was heard. His heart sank. The saliva in his mouth
thinned, then dried almost instantly. When he peered again, timorously, through
the keyhole, he saw only the man now, facing the closet door with a menacing
leer.
“My, my, mother, I think there's
a mouse in your closet.”
