“There’s no time,” he said. “We may only have a few hours, a few days. How can we be together now that this has happened? I’ve told you they’ve found the boat. They’ve found Rebecca.”
I stared at him stupidly, not understanding. “What will they do?” I said.
“They’ll identify her body,” he said, “there’s everything to tell them, there in the cabin. The clothes she had, the shoes, the rings on her fingers. They’ll identify her body; and then they will remember the other one, the woman buried up there, in the crypt.”
“What are you going to do?” I whispered.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”
The feeling was coming back to me, little by little, as I knew it would. My hands were cold no longer. They were clammy, warm. I felt a wave of color come into my face, my throat. My cheeks were burning hot. I thought of Captain Searle, the diver, the Lloyd’s agent, all those men on the stranded ship leaning against the side, staring down into the water. I thought of the shopkeepers in Kerrith, of errand boys whistling in the street, of the vicar walking out of church, of Lady Crowan cutting roses in her garden, of the woman in the pink dress and her little boy on the cliffs. Soon they would know. In a few hours. By breakfast time tomorrow. “They’ve found Mrs. de Winter’s boat, and they say there is a body in the cabin.” A body in the cabin. Rebecca was lying there on the cabin floor. She was not in the crypt at all. Some other woman was lying in the crypt. Maxim had killed Rebecca. Rebecca had not been drowned at all. Maxim had killed her. He had shot her in the cottage in the woods. He had carried her body to the boat, and sunk the boat there in the bay. That gray, silent cottage, with the rain pattering on the roof. The jigsaw pieces came tumbling thick and fast upon me. Disjointed pictures flashed one by one through my bewildered mind. Maxim sitting in the car beside me in the south of France. “Something happened nearly a year ago that altered my whole life. I had to begin living all over again…” Maxim’s silence, Maxim’s moods. The way he never talked about Rebecca. The way he never mentioned her name. Maxim’s dislike of the cove, the stone cottage. “If you had my memories you would not go there either.” The way he climbed the path through the woods not looking behind him. Maxim pacing up and down the library after Rebecca died. Up and down. Up and down. “I came away in rather a hurry,” he said to Mrs. Van Hopper, a line, thin as gossamer, between his brows. “They say he can’t get over his wife’s death.” The fancy dress dance last night, and I coming down to the head of the stairs, in Rebecca’s dress. “I killed Rebecca,” Maxim had said. “I shot Rebecca in the cottage in the woods.” and the diver had found her lying there, on the cabin floor…
“What are we going to do?” I said. “What are we going to say?”
Maxim did not answer. He stood there by the mantelpiece, his eyes wide and staring, looking in front of him, not seeing anything.
“Does anyone know?” I said, “anyone at all?”
He shook his head. “No,” he said.
“No one but you and me?” I asked.
“No one but you and me,” he said.
“Frank,” I said suddenly, “are you sure Frank does not know?”
“How could he?” said Maxim. “There was nobody there but myself. It was dark…” He stopped. He sat down on a chair, he put his hand up to his forehead. I went and knelt beside him. He sat very still a moment. I took his hands away from his face and looked into his eyes. “I love you,” I whispered, “I love you. Will you believe me now?” He kissed my face and my hands. He held my hands very tightly like a child who would gain confidence.
“I thought I should go mad,” he said, “sitting here, day after day, waiting for something to happen. Sitting down at the desk there, answering those terrible letters of sympathy. The notices in the papers, the interviews, all the little aftermath of death. Eating and drinking, trying to be normal, trying to be sane. Frith, the servants, Mrs. Danvers. Mrs. Danvers, who I had not the courage to turn away, because with her knowledge of Rebecca she might have suspected, she might have guessed… Frank, always by my side, discreet, sympathetic. ‘Why don’t you get away?’ he used to say, ‘I can manage here. You ought to get away.’ And Giles, and Bee, poor dear tactless Bee. ‘You’re looking frightfully ill, can’t you go and see a doctor?’ I had to face them all, these people, knowing every word I uttered was a lie.”