Death Trap by John D. MacDonald Page A

said it wasn’t really the way she was. He said it was a protest. She was so nice when she was little. We had so much fun. Then it all changed. I guess I’m terrible. Now everybody pretends they can’t remember the way she was with boys. And it’s like a weight off me. I can’t feel as bad about her as I ought to feel. She was my sister. I don’t want to be glad she’s dead. But she was going to keep right on doing terrible things. My father beat her. It didn’t change anything. He’d beat her so hard it would scare mother and me. But she’d go out a window. She’d sneak out. It didn’t matter to her. She’d cry when he hurt her and afterward she’d laugh. Nothing mattered. She’d talk dirty to me until I was so ashamed I’d cry, and then she’d laugh at me. In school I knew everybody was looking at me when I walked down the hall, and I was ashamed.”
    “When did she start being like that?”
    “It was in the summer. Let me try to remember when. She would have been seventeen this last summer. So it was five summers ago. When she was twelve. At the lake. Morgan’s Lake. We’ve always gone there. The Mackins own half of it. They live just down the street from us—on the corner of Oak and Venture. There’s a boathouse and a sort of upstairs to it. You get up there by a ladder. My father and Mr. Mackin keep gear up there. My father went up there after something and Jane Ann and a boy were up there.” She lowered her head and flushed. “They had taken their swim suits off. Even when she was twelve Jane Ann was—you know. Big.” And she half indicated what she meant by the fragment of a gesture toward her own breasts. “The boy was from across the lake. His name was Danny something. She said they were playing doctor. My father whipped the boy so bad there was a lot of trouble about it, but everybody knew he was right to do it. He whipped Jane Ann too. And made her stay inside the camp for a whole month. She cried a lot at first and then she got mean. I think that was when she started to change.”
    “And after a while your father couldn’t do anything with her.”
    “That’s right. They talked—my mother and father—about sending her to one of those schools. Mr. Score, the Chief of Police, said they should after that time she stayed at that fraternity house, but my father said it would have been a disgrace to the family.”
    “There was a boy you went with when you were up there at the lake, wasn’t there?”
    She turned her head quickly and looked directly at me. It was a look of alarm. “Robby. Robby Howard. They said I was too young to have a boy friend. I was sixteen. He was nice. He was like—”
    “Like Alister?”
    “I was going to say that. Yes. Like Alister, I guess. Shy, and he didn’t try to get funny or anything. And he was drowned. It took a whole day to find him. They tried to make me look away but I saw him on the dock before they covered him up. He was black, his skin.” She shuddered visibly.
    “How did he drown?”
    “They thought it was a cramp. He was a wonderful swimmer. Nobody saw him and they didn’t know where it happened and that’s why it took so long to find him. It is a little lake. I used to have to sneak away to see him. It made me feel guilty and funny. Like I was being like Jane Ann.”
    “You were serious about him?”
    “I thought all of the world had ended. We had a crazy idea. We talked about it. About running away. He was seventeen. He knew all about radios. He had built a lot of them. He looked older than seventeen, we thought. He could get a job in a repair shop. He found out you can get married in Georgia when you’re sixteen without anybody’s permission. They didn’t want me to see him, and we thought it was the only thing we could do.”
    “Had you thought of marrying Alister?”
    “We sort of took it for granted. We talked about it like it was going to happen. I don’t know when we decided we would exactly. It was going to happen after