New England White
Authors: Stephen L. Carter
Tags: #Family Secrets, #College Presidents, #Mystery & Detective, #University Towns, #New England, #Legal, #Fiction, #Psychological, #Women Deans (Education), #African American college teachers, #Mystery Fiction, #Race Discrimination, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #African American, #General
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 5 THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY
CHAPTER 10 A WALK ON THE BEACH
CHAPTER 12 AN ALMOST NORMAL DAY
CHAPTER 13 MOTHER AND DAUGHTER AND FRIEND
CHAPTER 16 THE OCCASIONAL STUDENT
CHAPTER 18 THE ORIGINAL THINKER
CHAPTER 19 A DISTURBING COMPLAINT
CHAPTER 27 AGAIN THE COMYNS MIRROR
CHAPTER 34 THE LOOKING-GLASS WORLD
CHAPTER 35 A FRIENDLY CONVERSATION
CHAPTER 42 ANOTHER WALK ON THE BEACH
CHAPTER 49 AGAIN THE COMYNS MIRROR
CHAPTER 55 IMPERFECT INFORMATION
CHAPTER 57 AGAIN THE LIBRARIAN
CHAPTER 60 COMPARATIVE AUTHORITY
CHAPTER 64 THE HEART OF WHITENESS
CHAPTER 65 THE ALL-PAY AUCTION
For Annette Windom
Why does everybody pick on the economists? They’ve correctly predicted thirteen of the past five recessions!
—Familiar campus joke
PROLOGUE
THE LANDING IN SUMMER
R
UMORS CHASE THE DEAD LIKE FLIES
, and we follow them with our prim noses. None of us are gossips, but we love listening to those who are. So, if you happened to pass through the village of Tyler’s Landing in the first few weeks after the investigations finally ended and the last reporters left for home, and you stopped at Cookie’s Place on Main Street to buy some chocolate-covered raisins, specialty of the house, you’d have had the chance to listen to chubby Vera Brightwood telling you whose fault it was and whose fault it wasn’t and whose fault it could never be.
As far as Vera is concerned, the whole mess started not when that colored professor got himself killed in November, but on an unexpectedly sultry winter night nine months earlier—call it February—when pretty Vanessa Carlyle, sixteen going on fifty if you believe what they say, set fire to her father’s midnight-blue Mercedes on the Town Green. Yes, that’s right, she says,
that
Carlyle, the very same, the one whose mail, according to Joe Vaux down at the post office, arrives addressed to “The Honorable,” if you can believe the airs those people give themselves these days. You smile and listen, enjoying a New England summer’s brightness through the wide front window of the shop. The word Vera Brightwood brings to mind is
garrulous.
For Vera, one lament flows smoothly into another, and soon she is assuring you that she has nothing against the Carlyles, even though she has been telling folks for the last six years, and tells you too, that the town should never have let them build that gigantic house on the Patterson lot. Which leads her back to the fire. Okay, so she has a few of the details wrong. For instance, Vanessa never actually spoke to the professor that night, that’s been proved conclusively, even if both of them, as Vera reminds you, happen to be colored. But that’s just her way. Stories are like sweets for Vera: you have to make them fancier than the ones available next door or you lose your customers. Her time-tested technique involves fluffing up a minor detail here, folding in a richer grade of rumor there, and—
voilà!
—a delicacy worth every embellishment. She might not always be right, but she is never dull.
Anyway, no harm in listening, right?
Cookie’s Place is the Landing’s version of the Café de la Régence in Paris, and what they used to say of the second is often true of the first: sooner or later, everybody who is anybody stops by. Not just the three thousand people in the village proper, but somehow half the population of the state has heard of Cookie’s. Word is that Woody Allen filmed the interiors for some movie in the shop a long time ago, but Vera isn’t saying, so it probably isn’t true. Although it should be. The countertops are polished white marble shot through with jagged green highlights. The bright red Coca-Cola sign is half a century old. The single room seems to go on forever, but it’s really no more than twenty by thirty, the rest just a trick of the mirrors. The candies all sit in glass cases and jars: peppermint sticks in different colors, lollipops with long red swirls, a hundred varieties of jelly beans, truffles, buttons, straws, butterscotch, little mailboxes and Statues of Liberty and Ford Model T cars that dispense mints, hard candies in rolls and hard candies on sticks and hard candies shaped like animals, eight flavors of fudge, and all the chocolate the addict could wish, including an elegant diet-busting concoction, all Vera’s own, called cranberry chocolate.
Something new is always baking. The luscious aromas drive you half mad, just the way they are supposed to. Whether you like candy or not, you begin to salivate as the desire for sinful pleasure snares you, and before you know it you are ordering everything in the shop. Vera, atrociously plump, cheeks puffy and pink, white-gray hair drawn neatly into twin buns, measures a pound of chocolate-covered raisins by eye as she talks your ear off, explaining in her husky smoker’s voice the problem with the Carlyle house. And you listen to the story because you really do want those raisins.
Vera talks about the house. She has good, solid reasons why they should never have let the Carlyles build it. Like they should have left the meadow alone, so kids could play softball. Like the house breaks up the view from the road down into the valley. And it’s too big and too ostentatious anyway, that house, all those sharp angles and glass walls that catch the sun, so when you drive by the place seems to
wink
at you, especially if you happen to be staring at it, which Vera, who has lived on the other side of the reservoir long enough to oppose every house built for miles around, does a lot more often than she likes to admit. Oh, Vera is in a dither, and beneath that delicate porcelain skin something glows warm with fury.
Certain that the woman is crazy, you begin to inch toward the door, the chocolate-covered raisins in your clutches, but Vera stops you with a word.
So what about the car? she asks, and you remember what she said about the girl—what was her name?—Vanessa. Do you want to hear about the car? asks Vera.
Sure, you say.
Vera is happy to tell you, but, first, maybe you want some fudge with that? Another specialty of Cookie’s is the butter-rum fudge, with or without walnuts. Tying your bright-green box with her trademark green ribbon—no cellophane tapes for Vera; no, sir!—she says, oh, by the way, she must have forgotten to mention that while the car was burning, pretty Vanessa tried to open one of her veins with an X-Acto knife.
And when you have heard Vera out, maybe you’re still not sure what to think, except that you are swooning with sympathy for Vanessa, to say nothing of her parents, her sister, and her two brothers. Vera talks so hard she leaves you dizzy, but you finally see it as though you were there, because Vera Brightwood has that gift, she always has, she can bring a story to life: the shiny blue Mercedes, brand-new, leased three months earlier, just two thousand miles on the clock, a roaring pyre in the concrete driveway of the red brick town hall as winter dusk falls, and, off to the side, this long, skinny brown girl, intricately woven braids obscuring half her winsome face, sits calmly on a slatted bench and struggles with the knife, sawing away at skin that refuses to break.
Poor kid, Vera finishes, a tear in her good eye.
You are inclined to agree.
And you know, Vera adds, sotto voce, as she tries to get you to buy some Jelly Bellys to go with your raisins, even with all the university folks buying up the land because they’ve decided that converting farmhouses is smart, there are only five colored families in town.
Surprised, you ask if the town keeps track of these things.
She asks what things you mean.
You frame your objection carefully. The number of African-American families living here, you explain. Do you actually keep track?
Some of us do, Vera tells you.
Why?
Vera leans close to whisper, her breath cloying as though she is fermenting inside, yellowy gaze lifting to the door just in case one of those liberals should come in. Money, she says. We keep track because of money. Nothing against the coloreds, mind, but real estate has been pretty flat around here lately, and I’ve never heard of a place yet where having colored neighbors makes values go up. You show me one and I’ll be for that open-housing thing. Oh, and they should have sent Vanessa to jail after she burned the car: Vera is tired of the way they always coddle the coloreds.
Appalled, you try to speak up, but Vera refuses to feel guilty. She says you have it all wrong, she has nothing against the coloreds and she never did, even back when they were burning everything in sight until LBJ, rest his soul, called the National Guard to make them stop: she’s upset about the stupid
house.
Pinheads, she hisses, but it isn’t clear just who she is talking about.
You decide it’s time to go.
You leave Vera behind, and now you’re dizzy in the brilliant summer sunlight, her tirade still ringing in your head, and all you know is that you want to leave the Landing as far behind as you can. You find your car, you blink till your eyes clear, you roar out of town, who cares about the speed limit, that woman is crazy. You figure there is a cop hiding behind a billboard somewhere, but you decide to take your chances, because Vera’s story has left you feeling unsettled and reckless. And maybe you get away with it, because the town police are not on edge the way they were back a few months ago. It’s almost as quiet now as it was last November, a frozen interregnum, when Vanessa’s arson was in the past and the killings were in the future, before time twisted around and history marched into the Landing, demanding vengeance; the second week of November, when everybody in the cheery white village of Tyler’s Landing was feeling safe.
Last time for a while.
PART I
MAXIMIZING UTILITY
Utility Function
—In economics, a measure of a consumer’s preferences expressed by the amount of satisfaction he or she receives from consumption of a set of desired goods or services. Economic theory assumes that people make rational efforts to maximize their utility. Sometimes one person’s utility is dependent on another’s.
CHAPTER 1
SHORTCUT
(I)
O
N
F
RIDAY THE CAT DISAPPEARED
, the White House phoned, and Jeannie’s fever—said the sitter when Julia called from the echoing marble lobby of Lombard Hall, where she and her husband were fêting shadowy alumni, one or two facing indictment, whose only virtue was piles of money—hit 103. After that, things got worser faster, as her grandmother used to say, although Granny Vee’s Harlem locutions, shaped to the rhythm of an era when the race possessed a stylish sense of humor about itself, would not have gone over well in the Landing, and Julia Carlyle had long schooled herself to avoid them.
The cat was the smallest problem, even if later it turned out to be a portent. Rainbow Coalition, the children’s smelly feline mutt, had vanished before and usually came back, but now and then stayed away and was dutifully replaced by another dreadful creature of the same name. The White House was another matter. Lemaster’s college roommate, now residing in the Oval Office, telephoned at least once a month, usually to shoot the breeze, a thing it had never before occurred to Julia that Presidents of the United States did. As to Jeannie, well, the child was a solid eight years into a feverish childhood, the youngest of four, and her mother knew by now not to rush home at each spike of the thermometer. Tylenol and cool compresses had so far defeated every virus that had dared attack her child and would stymie this one, too. Julia gave the sitter her marching orders and returned to the endless dinner in time for Lemaster’s closing jokes. It was eleven minutes before ten on the second Friday in November in the year of our Lord 2003. Outside Lombard Hall, the snow had arrived early, two inches on the ground and more expected. As the police later would reconstruct the night’s events, Professor Kellen Zant was already dead and on the way to town in his car.
(II)
A
FTER.
Big cushy flakes still falling. Julia and Lemaster were barreling along Four Mile Road in their Cadillac Escalade with all the extras, color regulation black, as befitted their role as the most celebrated couple in African America’s lonely Harbor County outpost. That, at least, was how Julia saw them, even after the family’s move six years ago out into what clever Lemaster called “the heart of whiteness.” For most of their marriage they had lived in Elm Harbor, largest city in the county and home of the university her husband now led. By now they should have moved back, but the drafty old mansion the school set aside for its president was undergoing renovation, a firm condition Lemaster had placed on his acceptance of the post. The trustees had worried about how it would look to spend so much on a residence at a time when funds to fix the classrooms were difficult to raise, but Lemaster, as always with his public, had been at once reasonable and adamant. “People value you more,” he had explained to his wife, “if it costs more to get you than they expected.”
“Or they hate you for it,” Julia had objected, but Lemaster stood his ground; for, within the family, he was a typical West Indian male, and therefore merely adamant.
They drove. Huge flakes swirled toward the windshield, the soft, chunky variety that signals to any New Englander that the storm is moving slowly and the eye is yet to come. Julia sulked against the dark leather, steaming with embarrassment, having called two of the alums by each other’s names, and having referred half the night to a wife named Carlotta as Charlotte, who then encouraged her, in that rich Yankee way, not to worry about it, dear, it’s a common mistake. Lemaster, who had never forgotten a name in his life, charmed everybody into smiling, but as anyone who has tried to raise money from the wealthy knows, a tiny sliver of offense can cut a potential gift by half or more, and in this crowd, half might mean eight figures.
Julia said, “Vanessa’s not setting fires any more.” Vanessa, a high-school senior, being the second of their four children. The first and the third—their two boys—were both away at school.
Her husband said, “Thank you for tonight.”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“I did, my love.” The words rapid and skeptical, rich with that teasing, not-quite-British lilt. “Did you hear what I said?” Turning lightly but swiftly to avoid a darting animal. “I know you hate these things. I promise to burden you with as few as possible.”
“Oh, Lemmie, come on. I was awful. You’ll raise more money if you leave me behind.”
“Wrong, Jules. Cameron Knowland told me he so enjoyed your company that he’s upping his pledge by five million.”
Julia in one of her moods, reassurance the last thing she craved. A blizzard was odd for November. She wondered what it portended. Clever wind whipped the snow into concentric circles of whiteness in the headlights, creating the illusion that the massive car was being drawn downward into a funnel. Four Mile Road was not the quickest route home from the city, but the Carlyles were planning a detour to the multiplex to pick up their second child, out for the first time in a while with her boyfriend, “That Casey,” as Lemaster called him. The GPS screen on the dashboard showed them well off the road, meaning the computer had never heard of Four Mile, which did not, officially, exist. But Lemaster would not forsake a beloved shortcut, even in a storm, and unmapped country lanes were his favorite.
“Cameron Knowland,” Julia said distinctly, “is a pig.” Her husband waited. “I’m glad the SEC people are after him. I hope he goes to jail.”
“It isn’t Cameron, Jules, it’s his company.” Lemaster’s favorite tone of light, donnish correction, which she had once, long ago, loved. “The most that would be imposed is a civil fine.”
“All I know is, he kept looking down my dress.”
“You should have slapped his face.” She turned in surprise, and what felt distantly like gratitude. Lemaster laughed. “Cameron would have taken his pledge back, but Carlotta would have doubled it.”
A brief marital silence, Julia painfully aware that tonight she had entirely misplaced the delicate, not-quite-flirty insouciance that had made her, a quarter-century ago, the most popular girl at her New Hampshire high school. Like her husband, she was of something less than average height. Her skin was many shades lighter than his blue-black, for her unknown father had been, as Lemaster insisted on calling him, a Caucasian. Her gray eyes were strangely large for a woman of her diminutive stature. Her slightly jutting jaw was softened by an endearing dimple. Her lips were alluringly crooked. When she smiled, the left side of her wide mouth rose a little farther than the right, a signal, her husband liked to say, of her quietly liberal politics. She was by reputation an easy person to like. But there were days when it all felt false, and forced. Being around the campus did that to her. She had been a deputy dean of the divinity school for almost three years before Lemaster was brought back from Washington to run the university, and her husband’s ascension had somehow increased her sense of not belonging. Julia and the children had remained in the Landing during her husband’s year and a half as White House counsel. Lemaster had spent as many weekends as he could at home. People invented delicious rumors to explain his absence, none of them true, but as Granny Vee used to say, the truth only matters if you want it to.
“You’re so silly,” she said, although, to her frequent distress, her husband was anything but. She looked out the window. Slickly whitened trees slipped past, mostly conifers. It was early for snow, not yet winter, not yet anything, really: that long season of pre-Thanksgiving New England chill when the stores declared it Christmas season but everybody else only knew it was cold. Julia had spent most of her childhood in Hanover, New Hampshire, where her mother had been a professor at Dartmouth, and she was accustomed to early snow, but this was ridiculous. She said, “Can we talk about Vanessa?”
“What about her?”
“The fires. It’s all over with, Lemmie.”
A pause. Lemaster played with the satellite radio, switching, without asking, from her adored Broadway show tunes—Granny Vee had loved them, so she did, too—to his own secret passion, the more rebellious and edgy and less commercial end of the hip-hop spectrum. The screen informed her in glowing green letters that the furious sexual bombast now assaulting her eardrums from nine speakers was something called Goodie Mobb. “How do you know it’s over?” he asked.
“Well, for one thing, she hasn’t done it in a year. For another, Dr. Brady says so.”
“Nine months,” said Lemaster, precisely. “And she’s not Vincent Brady’s daughter,” he added, slender fingers tightening ever so slightly on the wheel, but in caution, not anger, for the weather had slipped from abhorrent to atrocious. She glanced his way, turning down the throbbing music just in case, for a change, he wanted to talk, but he was craning forward, hoping for a better view, heavy flakes now falling faster than the wipers could clean. He wore glasses with steel rims. His goatee and mustache were so perfectly trimmed they might have been invisible against his smooth ebon flesh, except for the thousand flecks of gray that reshaped to follow the motion of his jaw whenever he spoke. “What a mistake,” said Lemaster, but it took Julia a second to work out that he was referring to the psychiatrist, and not one among the many enemies he had effortlessly, and surprisingly, collected during his six months as head of the university.
Julia had been stunned when the judge ordered the choice of intensive therapy or a jail sentence. Vanessa cheerily offered to do the time—“You can’t say I haven’t earned it”—but Julia, who used to volunteer at the juvenile detention facility in the city, knew what it was like. She could not imagine her vague, brainy, artistic daughter surviving two days among the hard-shelled teens scooped off the street corners and dumped there. As her grandmother used to say, there are our black people and there are other black people—and all her life Julia had secretly believed it. So Lemaster had chosen Brady, a professor at the medical school who was supposed to be one of the best adolescent psychiatrists in the country, and Julia, who, like Vanessa, would have preferred a woman, or at least someone from within the darker nation, held her peace. She had never imagined, twenty years ago, growing into the sort of wife who would.
She had never imagined a lot of things.
“Cameron told me something interesting,” said Lemaster when he decided she had stewed long enough. They passed two gray horses in a paddock, wearing blankets against the weather but not otherwise concerned, watching the sparse nighttime traffic with their shining eyes. “He had the strangest call a couple of weeks ago.” That confident, can-do laugh, a hand lifted from the wheel in emphasis, a gleeful glance in Julia’s direction. Lemaster loved being one up on anyone in the vicinity, and made no exception for his own wife. “From an old friend of yours, as a matter of fact. Apparently—”
“Lemmie, look out!
Look out!
”
Too late.
(III)
E
VERY
N
EW
E
NGLANDER KNOWS
that nighttime snowy woods are noisy. Chittering, sneaking animals, whistling, teasing wind, cracking, creaking branches—there is plenty to hear, except when your Escalade is in a ditch, the engine hissing and missing, hissing and missing, and Goodie Mobb still yallowing from nine speakers. Julia pried herself from behind the air bag, her husband’s outstretched hand ready to help. Shivering, she looked up and down the indentation in the snow that marked Four Mile Road. Lemaster had his hands on her face. Confused, she slapped them away. He patiently turned her back to look at him. She realized that he was asking if she was all right. There was blood on his forehead and in his mouth, a lot of it. Her turn to ask how he was doing, and his turn to reassure her.
No cell-phone service out here: they both tried.
“What do we do now?” said Julia, shivering for any number of good reasons. She tried to decide whether to be angry at him for taking his eyes off the road just before a sharp bend that had not budged in their six years of living out here.
“We wait for the next car to come by.”
“Nobody drives this way but you.”
Lemaster was out of the ditch, up on the road. “We drove ten minutes and passed two cars. Another one will be along in a bit.” He paused and, for a wretched moment, she feared he might be calculating the precise moment when the next was expected. “We’ll leave the headlights on. The next car will see us and slow down.” His voice was calm, as calm as the day the President asked him to come down to Washington and, as a pillar of integrity, clean up the latest mess in the White House; as calm as the night two decades ago when Julia told him she was pregnant and he answered without excitement or reproach that they must marry. Moral life, Lemaster often said, required reason more than passion. Maybe so, but too much reason could drive you nuts. “You should wait in the car. It’s cold out here.”
“What about Vanessa? She’s waiting for us to pick her up.”
“She’ll wait.”
Julia, uncertain, did as her husband suggested. He was eight years her senior, a difference that had once provided her a certain assurance but in recent years had left her feeling more and more that he treated her like a child. Granny Vee used to say that if you married a man because you wanted him to take care of you, you ran the risk that he would. About to climb into the warmth of the car, she spotted by moonlight a ragged bundle in the ditch a few yards away. She took half a step toward it, and a pair of feral creatures with glowing eyes jerked furry heads up from their meal and scurried into the trees. A deer, she decided, the dark mound mostly covered with snow, probably struck by a car and thrown into the ditch, transformed into dinner for whatever animals refused to hibernate. Shivering, she buttoned her coat, then turned back toward the Escalade. She did not need a close look at some bloodstained animal with the most succulent pieces missing. Only once she had her hand on the door handle did she stop.
Deer, she reminded herself, rarely wear shoes.
She swallowed an unexpected lump in her throat. “Lemmie.”
