New England White (2 page)

But her determined husband was up in the road, waiting calmly to flag down the next car, even if it took till spring.

“Lemmie!”

He was at her side in an instant. He could do that. Lemaster was madly in love, her friend Tessa Kenner used to say, with his own reliability. He forced me to fall in love with him, Julia had explained to her disapproving mother, who wanted a man from one of the old families, not a man from one of the islands. I didn’t have a choice.

“What’s wrong, Jules?”

“I thought it was a deer, but…well, there’s a body over there.”

She pointed. He followed her finger, then strolled through the ditch to take a look.

“Don’t touch it!” she said, because he was already kneeling, brushing snow from the face, probably ruining the crime scene, at least from what she heard on
CSI,
to which she was addicted. She waited, sitting half in the car with the door open, the air bag blocking her access to the radio, which she really wanted to shut off.

Lemaster returned, narrow face grim.

“It’s not a deer,” he said, almost consolingly, small, strong hand on her shoulder. “It’s a man. And the animals have been…well, you know.” Julia waited, reading in his face that this was not the real point her husband wanted to make. At last he sagged. “Jules, we know him.”

CHAPTER 2

THE TERRIERS

(I)

T
HE DETECTIVES WERE SLEEK AND WHITE
and very polite, either because that was their nature or out of deference to Lemaster, president of the university, for him just a stepping-stone, as he and his wife discussed but only with each other, and everyone else assumed, to a more impressive sinecure. They arrived at the house on the crest of Hunter’s Meadow Road just before ten on Saturday, escorted by a fidgety officer from the minuscule Tyler’s Landing force, a doughy man named Nilsson, whose doughy son had been in Julia’s basic-science class four years ago—the same year she was fired, or quit, depending on how you looked at it—two eager terriers from the state police, their quiet voices and brush-cut brown hair so well matched that they might have been twins. They reminded her, in their grim and mannerly professionalism, of the Naval officers who came to the house on North Balch Street in Hanover, New Hampshire, in a Reagan-era October to inform her mother and latest temporary stepfather that her twin brother, Jay, a Marine, had died in Grenada. Julia, newly wed as well as newly a mother, had been home by painful coincidence, for Mona Veazie had celebrated her fifty-third birthday the day before, and had spent it dandling her grandson, Preston, named for Mona’s father, the architect. So the daughter had the opportunity to sit in the living room and watch her mother die a little, too.

By the time the detectives rang the bell of the house called Hunter’s Heights—up here every dwelling had a name—the unpredicted snow was over, and Mr. Huebner from town had plowed the long, snaking driveway not once but twice. Bright morning sunshine exploded from the shimmering whiteness hard enough to make her eyeballs ache. Or maybe the ache had a more fundamental source: although Julia had finished crying for a while, little Jeannie, sniffling from her cold, had caught Mommy raging at herself in the bathroom mirror, where an earlier, happier self smiled sadly back at her. This could not, Julia told herself, be happening. But it could. The detectives were a gray-visaged reminder of the hard truth that death stalks every life. So, when Lemaster summoned her, she washed her face and fixed her makeup and went down to see what they wanted. Over the handful of hours since the discovery of the body, they had done a lot of homework. Just a few details, they said. A couple of questions, folks, sorry to bother you so early, but this is a murder investigation. You understand.

The Carlyles understood.

They all sat in the living room, where Lemaster had stoked a fresh fire in the grate underneath the indifferent watercolor of solemn people on an Atlantic-side beach in Barbados, and, no, thank you, the detectives did not care for anything to drink. Julia, craving a glass of wine despite the hour, followed her husband’s sober example and stuck to water. Lemaster’s special assistant, Flew, rallying round the boss in the crisis, had put out a copious platter of everything he could find—crackers, cold cuts, Brie—but no one except Julia partook. She felt a glutton, tortured and exposed by her husband’s abstemiousness. Jeannie, supposedly resting, was more likely on the upstairs landing listening in. Sleek, competent Flew was probably listening, too, perhaps from the butler’s pantry, unless he was scrubbing the kitchen, for he hated all messes, but those that cluttered his boss’s life particularly: every time Flew walked into the house on Hunter’s Meadow and began to look around, Julia felt hopeless, and judged. Vanessa was in her room, door firmly shut, likely asleep but possibly on the computer, for she had evolved her own methods of burying the pain and confusion of mortal experience. As had stolid Lemaster. The family Bible stood on the mantelpiece, twelve inches high, creamy and intrusive. The Book of Common Prayer, 1928 version, stood next to it, for Lemaster Carlyle ran a traditional Anglican home and took a perverse pride in not caring who knew it.

The twin terriers said they knew how hard this must be, but their matched eyes said they didn’t. They sat side by side on the brushed leather sofa, imported from Italy, that Lemaster hated for its ostentation, for he possessed the immigrant’s thrift. Doughy Nilsson perched alone on a wooden ladderback armchair of intricate design, one of the few pieces Julia had retained from Mona’s house in New Hampshire. Like the Louis XV writing desk in the front hall, the aging chair had as its original provenance her grandmother’s famous townhouse in Harlem. There had been a day, as Mona put it, when everyone who was anyone in the darker nation passed through Amaretta Veazie’s salon: by which she meant, anyone who aspired to position in what they called the Clan, the heavily fortified borders of which, once upon a time, Granny Vee and her buddies diligently patrolled, lest the wrong sort of Negroes force their way in.

When she tried to explain the Clan to her white friends, they never quite got it. But Julia was not surprised: whenever she mentioned that her family had been architects for seven generations, even most black people looked at her pityingly, as if she had exaggerated a tale of her forebears building their own shanties. Whereas in actuality Veazie Elden had been, back in the nineteenth century, one of the five largest architectural firms in Manhattan.

The terriers did not seem the sort to take an interest in the social history of the community. Their elaborate questions came with a slowness that was fresh torture. They spent a lot of time flipping through their notebooks. Julia wanted to strangle them, and even placid Lemaster seemed edgy beneath his politesse, but an almost palpable air of impending tragedy hangs over encounters between black Americans and white police, and the best intentions of all sides have nothing to do with it. Nor was Julia certain that their intentions were the best, but her mind just now was in two hundred different places. They pressed on. They kept asking why the Carlyles had chosen that route home, seeming to doubt the whole daughter-at-the-movies story. Vanessa, the skinnier of the terriers pointed out, had driven back to the house with her boyfriend. Julia explained that the teen’s decision had defied her father’s edict. Lemaster had forgiven the breach because he understood Vanessa’s worry at her parents’ tardiness. The story felt laborious even to Julia, and the detectives must have agreed, for they interrupted to point out that Four Mile was an old logging road, running over water company property, and posted against trespassing.

“Everybody takes Four Mile,” said Julia uncertainly, before Lemaster could stop her.

“Not everybody found the body,” said the skinnier.

No, but somebody had to, she almost spouted, feeling like the divinity student she had once been, arguing over the fallacy of synchronicity.

“And that’s why we’re all here,” said Lemaster, with brio.

A break while little Flew stepped in, towheaded and freckly, offering round cups of hot chocolate on a tray. Julia took one to be polite, but the detectives didn’t. Their eyes followed him out of the room.

They asked about cars that preceded them and cars that followed them, they asked about whether cell phones ever worked out there, they asked about footprints and tire marks, they asked if the Carlyles had seen anyone else, they asked why Lemaster had taken his eyes off the road, they asked why he had touched the body: as a former prosecutor, surely he knew—

Lemaster delivered a quiet, confident answer to every question.

Sitting in the overdecorated room, surrounded by the sort of ostentation for which the Clan had once been famous, memory tumbling harshly through her head, Julia found herself more than willing to let her husband take the lead. Her thoughts were none too reliable at the moment. She was missing snatches of conversation. Although sitting down, she felt like she was wobbling on her feet. She had barely slept. She had phoned both the boys—Aaron at Phillips Exeter, Preston at M.I.T.—and had fielded easily two dozen calls so far this morning. Reporters she turned over to Flew, who had arrived at the crack of dawn and was expert at delivering a piece of his mind. Most of the rest were members of her club, Ladybugs, who in their fluttery way were drawn to disaster, each Sister Lady, as if reading from a script, announcing that she was “sorry to wake you” but had “heard the news” and “wanted to see how you’re holding up”—but, really, to probe for inside information to match against whatever rumors were circulating already through the county’s thin community of middling and higher-class African America. That was what the members called themselves, Sister Ladies, emphasizing both their intimacy and their distinctiveness. You had to be
somebody
to get in, the older members liked to say, mainly in reminiscence, because nowadays a black woman could become somebody in a single generation: not exactly the way things had worked back in the day.

Much later, when the winter turned bleak and scary, it was this moment that Julia would remember: sitting in the living room looking out on the early snow, the detectives plodding through their questions, while stray thoughts teased her mind—thoughts of Ladybugs, thoughts of Granny Vee, thoughts of the stories she had heard all her life about the old Harlem days when the Clan still mattered, even to black people not a part of it. It was almost as though, even on the terrible morning after she discovered the body of Kellen Zant, Julia Carlyle knew that the answer to the mystery that would soon coil around her wounded family lay in the darker nation’s shadowed past.

(II)

T
HE TERRIERS MOVED ON
to Kellen Zant as flames flickered in the grate. The Carlyles knew him, of course, and admitted it at once: knew him not only from campus, but in the casual way that most members of the Clan knew each other, for they bumped up against the same people constantly, brown skin to brown skin, in the endless spiral of dinner parties, fund-raisers, club dances, book circles—although Kellen Zant, a poor Southern boy of no certain origin, was not born to the Clan, and had spent years battering his way in.

Did you see him often? asked one of the terriers.

Not
often,
answered Lemaster before Julia could think.

But you saw him socially?

Lemaster again, playing games: That depends on what your definition of
saw
is.

Back at their notebooks, unamused. An important man, they said, not quite asking. He was just an economist, said Lemaster, past master of the unspoken campus put-down, implying not that economics was not serious but that Kellen was not serious, for despite his notoriety in the field he had committed little scholarship in recent years, preferring to earn income by consulting for large corporations. Was he good at his work? the twin terriers asked, and Lemaster offered his most charming smile and answered. “He held the Tyson professorship in economics. One of our most prestigious endowed chairs. We don’t give those out for good behavior.”

Misunderstanding the irony, perhaps deliberately, the detectives asked whether Professor Zant was guilty of bad behavior.

Lemaster had a way of lifting his thick, upswept eyebrows that was supposed to remind you that he was the smarter. He did it now. Julia could not tell whether the detectives reacted. “The entire university community will miss his wisdom and his wit,” he said, as if composing the eulogy, or perhaps the statement for the press, for the director of campus information had called four times since last night.

The detectives made a note, perhaps about Kellen’s wisdom, perhaps about his wit, and kept punching. They asked about enemies. None known. They asked about scandals and corruption. None known, but Julia had to hide a secret shrinking. They asked about recent fights and arguments and grudges, they asked about how he got along with colleagues and students and neighbors and friends. Oh, and, as long as we are on the subject, had not President Carlyle and Professor Zant had a recent, rather public feud?

Julia sat up straight, as did the detectives, although Officer Nilsson had the grace to look embarrassed. Lemaster’s hand tightened on his wife’s, who had not realized he was holding it, but his cool voice told Julia that she was the one being reassured. “No. That was media silliness, hunting for stories to make African Americans look bad.”

Might he tell them what actually transpired?

“I had a series of private meetings with leading faculty last spring, after I had accepted the job but before I took the reins. In my chat with Kellen, I suggested that an economist of his eminence could do much to change the world if he would spend less of his energy on his private clients, and more on scholarship.” A bemused smile. Lemaster’s intelligent eyes sought out the shining grand piano rather than the attentive faces of the terriers. “Kellen said he would think about it. That was all.”

The skinnier detective, a man named Chrebet, grew interested. “I found some reports saying the two of you hadn’t ever gotten along. Some private thing.”

“Nonsense.”

“I read in the paper where Professor Zant was so mad he was thinking about leaving the university.”

An old Lemaster dictum: “I prefer facts to news.”

Nobody smiled.

“The meeting was private?”

“Just the two of us.”

“Then how did the media find out about it?”

But Lemaster chose to take the question as rhetorical. He looked at his watch, making sure he had their attention first.

Just a few more questions, they promised. Professor Zant was worth a lot of money, right? From those private clients of his? This for some reason aimed at Julia, who dropped her eyes to examine the intricate yet ordinary stylings of the not-quite-Persian rug. She shrugged. Back to Lemaster: He invented some formula or something, right? A better way of estimating past stock prices adjusted for hypothetical events, said Lemaster, playing mind games once more. That was back in graduate school. They waited. Lemaster filled the gap. The Zant-Feldman equation, he said, was one of the greatest advances in finance theory in the past half-century. But perhaps the terriers were aware of a greater, because, unimpressed, they consulted their notebooks and kept on questioning. Not married? No girlfriend, to your knowledge? Boyfriend, then? No? Any idea who would want him dead? The Carlyles professed mystification.