Her relationship with the Harpers was as intense as it was deranged. They were three volatile elements forming a thunderhead of unbelievable destruction when they finally lived together in that storybook mansion on its river of timeless dreams. Gary Harper bought and restored the great house for Beryl, and it was in the upstairs bedroom where I had slept that he robbed her one night of her virginity when she was only sixteen.
When she did not come down to breakfast the following morning, Sterling Harper went upstairs to check and found Beryl in a fetal position, crying. Unable to face that her famous brother had raped their surrogate daughter, Miss Harper battled the demons of her house with troops of denial. She never said a word to Beryl or attempted to intervene, but softly shut her door at night and slept her fitful sleep.
The molestation of Beryl continued, week after week, less frequently as she got older and finally ending with the Pulitzer Prize-winner’s impotence, brought on by long evenings of hard drinking and other excesses, including drugs. When the interest from his accumulated book earnings and family inheritance could no longer support his vices, he turned to his friend, Joseph McTigue, who focused his kindly attentions and skills on Harper’s precarious finances, eventually making the author “not only solvent again, but wealthy enough to afford the finest whiskey by the case and cocaine binges whenever he pleased.”
According to Beryl, after she moved out Miss Harper painted the portrait over the library mantel, a portrait of a child robbed of innocence, intended unconsciously or not to torment Harper forever.
He drank more, wrote less, and began suffering from insomnia. He began frequenting Culpeper’s Tavern, a ritual encouraged by his sister, who used those hours to conspire against him with Beryl on the phone. The final blow came in a dramatic act of defiance when Beryl, encouraged by Sparacino, violated her contract.
It was her way of reclaiming her life and, in her words, “preserving the beauty of my friend, Sterling, by pressing the memory of her between these pages like wildflowers.”
Beryl began her book very shortly after Miss Harper was diagnosed as having cancer. Their bond was inviolable, their love for each other immense.
Naturally, there were lengthy digressions about the books Beryl had written and the sources of her ideas. Excerpts from earlier works were included, and I suspected this might have explained the partial manuscript we found on her bedroom dresser after she was dead. It was hard to say. It was hard to know what had gone on in Beryl’s mind. But I could see that her work was extraordinary, and sufficiently scandalous to have frightened Gary Harper and caused Sparacino to lust after it.
What I failed to see as the afternoon wore on was anything that raised the specter of Frankie. There was no mention in her manuscript of the ordeal that would eventually end her life. I supposed it was too much for her to contemplate. Perhaps, she hoped, it would pass with time.
I was nearing the end of Beryl’s book when Mark suddenly put his hand on my arm.
“What?” I could barely tear my eyes away.
“Kay. Take a look at this,” he said, lightly placing a page on top of the one I was reading.
It was the opening of Chapter Twenty-five, a page I had previously read. It took me a moment to see what I had missed. It was a very clean photocopy, and not an original typed page like all of the others.
“I thought you said this was the only copy,” Mark quizzed me.
“I was under the impression that it was,” I replied, mystified.
“I wonder if she made a copy and mixed up two of the pages.”
“That’s the way it looks,” I considered. “But where is the copy, then? It hasn’t turned up.”
“Got no idea.”
“You sure Sparacino doesn’t have it?”
“I’m pretty sure I would know if he did. I’ve turned his office inside out during his absences and I’ve done the same to his house. Besides, I think he would have told me, at least when he thought we were buddies.”