Dark Lady (11 page)

For another half hour, she thought. About the reasons she had left here. About the twenty years spent trying to become a judge. About a girl she barely knew. She went to the kitchen to call.

“Bob Carrow.” A voice such as she had heard in countless newsrooms—edgy, eager, aggressive. Part of her despised him. She made her own tone polite, puzzled, faintly bored. “This is Caroline Masters.” “Oh, yes. Thank you for getting back to me. I hear your niece is Brett Allen.”

“Yes.” More arid now. “I hear that too.” A hesitation. “She may be charged with murder.”

“Really? Who did she kill?”

“Well, James Case …”

“Who told you that? Not, I think, the Attorney General’s Office.” Caroline’s tone was finn and even. “This is a young woman who has just lost someone she loved in the most shocking circumstances, including the hideous trauma of finding his body. And no one—no one at all—has any other reason to even think about her in connection with his death. Let alone find anything like a motive.” Caroline broke off. Tomorrow, she chastened herself, the police could find something. It was not like her to go too far. “So you believe she’s innocent,” Carrow said. “Of what? Brett might well have been killed herself. In that way—if only that way—she’s quite fortunate.”

“Then who do you think killed James Case?”

“Someone who wasn’t twenty-two and in love with him.” Caroline’s voice grew quieter. “I hope that Brett can look to you for fairness.” Their talk was over, Caroline’s tone suggested. “One more question,” Carrow said hastily. “The White House has just announced your nomination to the United States Court of Appeals. Do you feel it’s appropriate for a judicial nominee to be involved in a criminal matter?”

At once, Caroline was on edge—where, she wondered, was this coming from. “I think you may misapprehend my role. I’ve come here as a member of the family.”

“But you also visited the Assistant Attorney General this morning, Mr. Watts. What was the purpose of that meeting?”

“To express my family’s concern. Including that whoever did this be identified.” She permitted herself an edge of irritation. “Think about it, Mr. Carrow. Not only that someone killed my niece’s boyfriend but that someone is still out there. Imagine how frightening that is.” A long silence. “Will you be Ms. Allen’s lawyer’?”

“Lawyer? She doesn’t need one. All she needs is her family’s support.” Caroline paused. “I expect shortly to return to San Francisco and get about the business this tragedy interrupted—preparing for the nomination hearings. About which, of course, I’m very honored. Is there anything else?” His tone combined politeness and a certain sanctimony. “I know this is a difficult thing. But I really think it would be helpful if Ms. Allen were to speak to us herself.” Caroline drew a long breath. “I think you can understand how little Brett feels like talking to anyone. So for the moment you’ll have to make do with me. But should she ever feel like discussing this—other than with those closest to her—we will surely let you know.”

“Okay.” He sounded mollified, then eager. “First, if possible—okay?”

“Yes. If possible.” She took a breath. “We in this family have great respect for the Patriot-Ledger.”

“Good.” In his own hesitancy, she heard the decision not to push. “Thank you, Ms. Masters.”

“Of course.” As he hung up, Caroline found herself listening, once more, for the sound of a second telephone. But there was nothing.

The stable was dim, airy, almost barnlike. The sun came from windows high above her, casting shadows in the corners. A white Jeep was parked to one side, dwarfed by the vastness of the space. The lawyer Caroline knew that she should turn around and leave. Yet she stayed where she was. At the back of the stable were her father’s workbench, his tools, his vise for sawing lumber. Channing Masters believed in self-sufficiency; how many times, his daughter wondered, had she sat with him as he built something, or fixed something, unwilling, she knew, to concede defeat. The standing clock in the foyer was made in the 1850s by a famous clockmaker, Tim Chandler; Caroline still remembered a day when she was seven or so, sitting by her father as he spent half a Sunday with the clock face turned, its complex inner workings exposed, making small adjustments with a jeweler’s tools until, suddenly, the heavy chain swayed again, the bell sounded, and she saw the smile of inward pleasure at the corners of her father’s eyes. Caroline walked past the workbench to his gun rack. Everything was where it had always been—shotguns, for hunting and trapshooting; a revolver; a crossbow; several fly rods. The guns were still cleaned and oiled, their stocks polished; the fly rods and reels were supplied with fishing line. Caroline seemed to recall most of them. Her father cared for his things; out of sentiment and practicality, he preserved what he had, threw little away. He had no taste for the new. Beside the fly rods was a wooden rack with pegs. The ten-year-old Caroline had helped him make it, applying lacquer to the wood. She could hardly wait for the lacquer to dry; then they could fix it to the wall and hang his knives there. Later, they had hung them one by one, in leather sheaths. At the end of the rack, Caroline saw an empty peg. All at once, the stable felt cold and drafty. Caroline turned, went to the house, and closed the door behind her.

She stood there, leaning against the door. Perhaps she owed Betty and Larry an account of the day—surely she owed that much to Brett. But right now she could not stay here. She walked to the telephone, reserved a room at the Resolve Inn, and left.

Caroline started awake in a strange room, her mind dream-streaked, the window gray with the light just before dawn. It took her a moment to recognize the sparse antiques, the window sash, another to realize that she was in Resolve, the town of her girlhood. She felt adrift; it was as if it had taken twenty years to build a life, and only three days to leave it. She put on blue jeans and a sweater, went downstairs to the sitting room, and poured coffee into a large mug. After drinking it quickly, black, she drifted out onto the porch and into the main street of town. On one side was a gradual hill; the other sloped to a rushing creek. The street itself was blacktop now, not gravel, but little else had changed. Caroline took the tree-lined road past white wooden homes from the 1800s, built when the area throve; the spired but austere church where town meetings were held; the yellow one-floor library that, from the sign in front, still kept eccentric hours at the whim of the librarian; the Masonic Hall, its wood frame dingy now, atop a knoll set back from the street. Less out of enthusiasm than from social necessity, Channing Masters had joined the lodge; Caroline still remembered her mother’s satirical imaginings of secret Masonic rituals, complete with antlers and women’s dresses and blood oaths against non-Masons. Channing had suffered this in silence. There was only one new structure—a mobile home—and little sign of commerce. The general store was boarded up now, its gas pump closed; Caroline imagined a convenience store and gas station on some more heavily traveled road. Where the street curved, abruptly crossing a bridge over the creek, she turned back. A faint air of depression hung above the town. Caroline returned to the room, called Brett, and asked her to go sailing on Lake Winnipesaukee. She was somehow not surprised when Brett said yes.

The air was warm, breezy; Brett handled the tiller of the rented catboat easily, hair curling in the wind. Sailing seemed to change her. On the drive to Winnipesaukee she had been withdrawn. Now there was color in her face, a brightness to her eyes, and her movements were practiced yet instinctive. It was as though, like Caroline herself, physical action freed some part of her. There was a sensual quality Caroline had not seen in her. With the Vineyard house sold when Brett was an infant, Caroline knew, Channing would have taught his granddaughter to sail on Winnipesaukee. She seemed to know each inlet on the span of blue, to gaze at the forested hills around them with deep familiarity. Caroline guessed that the memories were good; when a sudden gust buffeted the sails, shooting a spray of water over Brett as she tacked, she grinned into the sunlight with sudden, surprising pleasure. Caroline decided to let her sail as long as she wished. It was not until close to two, ‘after three hours on the water, that Brett and Caroline moored near Woodsman’s Cove.

The air was humid now, the sun hot; Caroline drank from a can. “Cheap, watery American beer,” she said. “Perfect for a day like this.” They sat across from each other in the stern, gazing out at the water and the hills as the boat rocked fitfully at anchor. Holding her own can of beer, Brett tried to smile. But she seemed to have returned to the realm of fact, and

tragedy; there was something muted but alert about her. Caroline waited for her to choose the moment. “How was it with the prosecutor?” Brett asked at length. Caroline considered her answer. “He’s short two things. Both critical. He can’t tie the knife to you or, more important, come up with a reason for you to kill your boyfriend.”

“There isn’t any,” Brett said simply. To Caroline, she looked fragile again. “Would you have gone to California with him?” she asked. There was a flicker in Brett’s eyes. And then, to Caroline’s surprise, she said evenly, “I don’t think I would have.”

“Was something wrong?”

“Something big.” Brett looked at her directly now, “Sometimes it was like I never knew what James was thinking, or planning. He grew up protecting himself—he wasn’t used to being close. I could understand that. But it’s not a way to live.” Then why did you care for him? Caroline began to ask. But this was not a lawyer’s question. She realized that Brett was studying her with new attentiveness. “Why did you leave?” Brett asked. “Because no one ever talks about it.” She paused a moment, as if fearing to be tactless, then added, “Not about you, and not about your mother.” Caroline smiled faintly. “How very New England.”

“How very repressed,” Brett said flatly. “Until you were all over our television, I hadn’t heard your name for years. And then there was Grandfather in his room, watching you run that trial and not saying a word to anyone. And my mother, tight-lipped and short-tempered.” Caroline’s shrug was meant to be dismissive. “Sometimes silence is only that. And absence, only absence.” Bret’s expression did not waver. “It’s not silence, Aunt Caroline. It’s something more. For Granddad and my mother.” Perhaps, Caroline thought, Brett was puzzling through her own relationship to this family, looking to Caroline for

clues. She smiled briefly. “First you can drop the ‘Aunt Caroline’—it sounds like some menopausal dowager in a dreadful Broadway musical. ‘Caroline’ will do just fine. About our family, I suppose the best real answer is that I wanted to be independent and was absolutely certain that leaving was the only way. How anyone else felt about that I could only guess: I was twenty-two then and—apparently unlike you——didn’t give the feelings of others a great deal of thought.”

“Where did you go?”

“I spent a year on Martha’s Vineyard.” Caroline made her tone casual, disinterested. “Then I went to San Francisco, enrolled in law school, and stayed. That’s all there is.”

“But why San Francisco? Had you ever been there?” Caroline shook her head. “It just sounded pretty, and it seemed the farthest I could go.”

“How did you get by?”

“I worked. And my mother had left me a little money. From a life insurance policy.” Brett studied her for a time, as if torn between curiosity and her sense of Caroline’s reticence. Softly, she asked, “I’ve never even seen a picture of your mother.” Caroline smiled slightly. “That’s hardly surprising. She’s been dead for thirty years.” She paused, disliking her own tone. More gently, she continued: “She was small and dark and very pretty. To a child, quite exotic.” Brett seemed to hesitate, perhaps at the look on Caroline’s face. “I’m sorry,” she said at last. “But you’re both this family mystery. All I know about your mother is that she was French and died in an accident.” Caroline was briefly quiet. But she found it easier to talk about her mother than herself. “French,” Caroline amended, “and Jewish. That was the first accident, and the one that made all the difference to her.”

It was night; Caroline was nine or ten. Her mother had come to say good night. Surprised and pleased, Caroline

had asked her to invent a story: lightly, with mock exasperation, Nicole had answered, “But I have no stories tonight.” She had been drinking, Caroline knew. She could tell from her breath, her levity of mood, an ever so slight increase in the difficulty of pronouncing English. Emboldend, Caroline answered, “Then tell me about your family. Your parents and brother.” All Caroline knew for certain was that they were dead. But in the darkness of her bedroom, Caroline felt her mother’s silence like a weight on her own chest. Nicole was utterly still. “Do you really wish to hear, Caroline?” Her mother’s voice was very clear now; the change of mood somehow frightened Caroline. But she could not refuse. “Yes,” she answered. “I do.” The room was quiet. “We lived in Paris,” Nicole said at last. “My father taught law at the university. My mother stayed home with my brother Bernard and me.” A pause, then a tone of irony. “I remember thinking that she spoke French rather strangely—she was Russian, not a citizen, and came to France in her teens. But at the time, my only feeling was a child’s embarrassment. “She was Jewish, as was my father. But his family was deeply French. Yes, we went to synagogue, observed the holidays, but otherwise I did not feel much different from the children of his faculty friends. Oh, a little different, perhaps—but certainly not threatened.” She paused, inquiring softly, “You understand about being Jewish, don’t you, Caroline? What happened during the war?” She nodded. Something beneath her mother’s question made Caroline reach for her hand. Her mother did not seem to notice. “When the Germans invaded,” she said quietly, “I was fifteen, and Bernard was twelve. Marshal Petain became the head of a French puppet government. And I began to know what it was to be Jewish. By the time I was seventeen, I was wearing a Star of

David. Under race laws passed not by Germans but by our fellow French. “My father protested the laws as immoral. When he lost his job at the university, a few friends telephoned to express their sympathy. No one came to call. “We never saw any of them again.” Caroline tried to imagine her mother isolated, her own family—Channing, Nicole, and Betty—ostracized. “What did you do?” she asked. “My father sold our home and possessions, and we moved to an apartment in the Jewish quarter of Paris. My sharpest memory is of our parents at the table in that darkened room—my father, small and mustached and alert; my brother as dark and bright-eyed as my father. Only my mother seemed gaunt and lost—she was Russian, after all. She had seen it all before. “Throughout 1942 there were roundups. Foreign Jews taken from their homes by French police or German soldiers, herded to detention points, and then shipped away by rail. To where, we never knew. “Still I hoped.” Nicole paused. “I idolized my father, you see. If he felt hope, then I did. We were French, after all. And what Father believed was that no government of France-even this one—would abandon its own citizens. If only out of pride.” Caroline watched her mother’s face in the moonlit room. It was opaque, unfeeling, as if she were reciting by rote a story of which she had grown tired. “When I was eighteen,” she went on, “they sent me to university. As if this act of normality would serve as my protection. “In a sense, it did. “One night after class, I found my brother Bernard waiting for me. There was to be a roundup of Jews; a former faculty friend of my father’s had heard this and sent word to warn him. So my father asked that I stay with a non-Jewish friend, Catherine. “I begged Bernard to come with me. But he had to go