was to erase from the child's mind all memory of the accident, so she might never remember what she had done, so her life might not be darkened by the knowledge that she had, even though accidentally, killed her mother."
It wouldn't have been so bad if she hadn't been smiling so coolly as she talked, selecting her words so carefully, almost fastidiously, and mouthing them so daintily. She went on:
"Gabrielle was always, even before she began using drugs, a child of, one might say, limited mentality, so by the time the London police found us we had succeeded in quite emptying her mind of the last trace of memory, that is, of that particular memory. This is, I assure you, the truth of the whole affair. She killed her mother, and her father―to use your quaint expression―'took the fall for her.'"
"Fairly plausible," I said, "but weak in spots. You're trying to hurt her because she witnessed your latest murder."
She pulled her lips back from her teeth and started toward me, her eyes flaring, then checked herself, laughed sharply, and began talking again, rapidly, with a hysterical swing or cadence to her words, almost as if she were singing:
"Am I? Then I must tell you this, which I should not tell unless it were true. I taught her to kill her mother. Do you understand? I taught her, trained her, drilled her. Do you understand that? Lily and I were true sisters, inseparable, hating one another poisonously. Maurice―he wished to marry neither of us, though he was intimate enough with both. You are to understand that literally. But we were poor and he was not, and because he was not, Lily wanted to marry him. And because Lily wanted to, I wanted to. We were like that in all things. But she got him—first—trapped him into matrimony.
"Gabrielle was born six or seven months later. I lived with them. What a happy little family we were! From the first Gabrielle loved me more than her mother. I saw to that; there was nothing Aunt Alice wouldn't do for her niece, because her preferring me infuriated Lily. It infuriated Lily, not because she herself loved the child, but because we had always hated one another, had always each tried to take everything from the other. When Gabrielle was no more than a year old I planned what I would some day do.
"When she was nearly five I did it. I taught her a little amusing game. Maurice's pistol, a small one, was kept in a locked drawer high in a chiffonier. I unlocked the drawer, unloaded the pistol, and lay on Lily's bed, pretending I was asleep. The child pushed a chair over to the chiffonier, climbed on it, took the pistol from the drawer, crept across to the bed, put the muzzle of the pistol to my head, and pressed the trigger. When she did well, making little or no noise, holding the pistol correctly in both of her tiny hands, I rewarded her with candy, cautioning her to say nothing about the game to anyone else, as we were going to surprise her mother with it.
"We did; we surprised her completely, one afternoon when Lily, having taken asperin for a headache, was sleeping in her bed. I unlocked the drawer, but did not unload the pistol. Then I told the child she might play the game with her mother, and I went down to visit friends on the floor below, so no one would think I had anything to do with my dear sister's death. I thought Maurice would be out all afternoon, and intended, as soon as we heard the shot, to rush upstairs with my friends and find that the child playing with the pistol had killed her mother.
"I had little fear of the child's talking afterward. Of, as I have said, no brilliant mentality, loving and trusting me as she did, and in my hands both before and during the official inquiry into her mother's death, it would have been very easy for me to control her, to be
