New England White (6 page)

Tell her the rest, said Ellie.

Oh, and he also got the girl. That was Kellen, Old Tim explained, while various relatives, Vanessa helping, cleared the dinner dishes and presented the lemon meringue pie and homemade ice cream, which Julia’s better angels failed to persuade her to decline. “That’s why men do most stupid things,” Old Tim said, twinkling. He put aside his empty pie plate and patted his ample gut. “To impress some girl.”

“I think it was brave,” said Ellie, and Julia wondered if she had been the girl. But another part of her remembered other fights Kellen had picked during their year and a half together in Manhattan, usually with bigger men, bars he had been thrown out of, nightclubs that had banned him. She remembered how one particular battle ended with her standing terrified over the gurney in the emergency room at Saint Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital in midtown Manhattan while a tut-tutting Indian doctor used tweezers to pull shards of glass out of his shoulder. Your boyfriend, said the doctor, is a very angry man. One reason Julia recalled that episode so sharply was that she was the one who had hit him with the bottle. “Very brave,” Ellie confirmed, with a warm glow.

Old Tim was unimpressed. “You know what the difference is between brave and stupid? Brave is when you fight because you have to. Stupid is when you fight because you want to. That was Kellen’s problem right there. He loved to fight.”

Seth was beside her. “Can I borrow you for a minute, honey?” She glanced automatically at the kitchen, where from her vantage point on the sofa she could see Vanessa scrubbing pots under the watchful eyes of the matrons. The teen seemed perfectly content, soothed by the repetitive motion. “She’ll be fine,” said Seth, following her gaze. “This won’t take long.”

Now dressed casually in clean khakis and a stained shirt, Seth led her up a narrow stair to the room above the one-car garage. She knew at once that the room was Kellen’s, not so much from the squeaky-clean nattiness of posters and bed and books, or from the economics and math and science texts lining the walls. No, the way she knew was from the delicate silver hand mirror lying atop the dresser.

“That’s mine,” she blurted, although she had not clapped eyes on it since the final split from Kellen. She rushed across the room and swept it up. “That’s my mirror!”

“Been up here for years,” said Seth, watching her.

“For years?”

“I figured it was a lady’s mirror, not a man’s. But Kellen liked to have it around.”

“He did?” said Julia, face suddenly warm. She picked it up. It was silver and tortoiseshell, intricately filigreed on the handle and the back, manufactured in the late nineteenth century by the famous British maker William Comyns, whose hallmark was embossed on the handle, hidden within the design. Granny Vee had given it to her just months before her death. Julia had cherished it, but left it behind in Kellen’s apartment when Tessa, against Julia’s will, had dragged her physically out of Manhattan to save her from further mistreatment. For a while she had been scared to ask for it back, worried that to speak to Kellen at all would be to tumble back into his bed; and then, when she met Lemaster and grew stronger, she was too embarrassed. The mirror had little value in the antiques market—two or three hundred dollars at most—and until now Julia had assumed that at some point Kellen had tossed it, or sold it, or given it to another woman. “I never knew what happened to it,” she said truthfully.

“He wanted you to have it. He told me lots of times. I didn’t know it was yours to begin with.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

The dam of Julia’s will had held back the tears through the flight and the drive and the service and even the burial, but now they found the fissures and began to flow. Seth Zant, wise enough to say nothing, handed her his handkerchief. She dabbed her eyes. The small window gave on the twilit driveway, where people were packing leftovers into their cars. Laughter, hugs, departures. She blew her nose. She used the mirror to fluff out her hair. She turned it over, rubbed the surface with her fingernail, checking the finish. Kellen had not taken care of the silver, allowing it to tarnish. She glanced at the hallmark. Scratched in several spots, hardly recognizable. In her mind she reduced the value from two or three hundred dollars to between twenty-five and fifty.

Wait.

“Seth?”

“Hmmm?”

“Did Kellen leave…anything else for me?” Knowing it would sound greedy, but needing to know. Mary Mallard had put the idea in her head. Capturing the surplus. Whatever that was.

“Anything like what?”

“Wow, Moms,” said Vanessa from behind her. “Look at you. You were so gorgeous in those days!”

Julia turned. Her daughter stood smiling in the doorway, studying a photo in a plastic frame atop the dresser. Julia had noticed it when she walked in, and ignored it. Now she walked over and, sure enough, there she was, arm in arm with Kellen, strolling along Broadway, which Kellen, like most black men, despised on principle. But he went from time to time for her sake, as, now, Lemaster did. She was wearing a halter top, and high platforms, and absurd little shorts. Had she really dressed that way? She lifted the William Comyns mirror, looked at herself at forty-three, tried to remember what twenty-three had been like.

“No, I mean, sure, okay, you’re gorgeous now, but wow.” Fully in the room now, leaning over to study the image. “This is seriously cool. I love that outfit. I want five just like it.” Chuckling because she was one up. “So, were the two of you like an item or something?”

“Vanessa, honey, I’m not really comfortable talking about—”

“Your mother was the great love of my nephew’s life,” Seth confirmed, unhelpfully. “Always called her the one that got away.”

“That sounds really romantic,” said Vanessa, now at the shelves, pawing through the books as if the bedroom were a library rather than a carefully tended shrine. Outside, a breeze stirred the darkening trees. Winter might be less severe down here, but it was coming. “And so totally cool.”

“It was a…a long time ago.”

“You can have the photo too if you want,” said Seth.

Vanessa said, “Does Daddy know?”

“Of course your father knows,” Julia said, slowly sinking. Whose idea had it been for Vanessa to tag along? Who had invented children anyway?

“I guess you always had a thing for older men, huh?” Vanessa had taken down a calculus text, riffling the pages as if hoping money would fall out.

“Ah, Vanessa, that’s not…uh, an appropriate thing to say.”

“Not that Kellen wasn’t seriously hot. So I can understand it.”

“Vanessa!”

Her daughter was not listening. She had started turning the pages faster, glaring at her own hands because they refused to stop, as would sometimes happen, said Dr. Brady, when she struggled to choke off the trauma within—a trauma that remained unidentified, and whose existence Vanessa denied, although Brady assured them it was there. Julia, the mother in her aroused, forgot her embarrassment and, following the psychiatrist’s instructions, touched Vanessa on the shoulder and told her gently to put the book back on the shelf.

“Let her be,” said Seth Zant. “There’s nothing valuable up here.” Julia started to explain, but he rode right over her. “I mean, the books and the pictures and the mirror are about all they left.”

“They?”

Seth tapped the desk with a fingernail. “Kellen used to come down for a week or two at a time to work. Get away from it all. Had his computer right here, printer, notebooks, I don’t know what all. Anyway, that’s what they took.”

“Who did?”

“Had a little break-in while I was up north claiming the body. Funny, though. Got a fair-sized television downstairs, Sylvia’s jewels, and whatnot. But I guess the dog musta spooked them or something, because they only did this one room, and all they took was Kellen’s work.”

CHAPTER 6

INVENTORY RISK

(I)

L
ITTLE
J
EREMY
F
LEW MET THEM
at the airport, because Lemaster, who was supposed to have picked them up, was in New York for a meeting of Empyreals, a minor black social club of which he was a dedicated member. He had called Julia to say that afterward he would probably just take the train to Washington rather than come back, because a friend who held Redskins season tickets had invited him to tomorrow’s game. Julia scarcely bothered to mask her fury and, in her pique, commanded Flew to carry their bags, which, uncomplaining, he did. He chattered all the way to the parking lot, mostly about the weather, but also about how that awful Kwame Kennerly had been on the radio again, bad-mouthing the university, its new president, and the fact that said president lived in Tyler’s Landing. Ignoring this intelligence, Julia snapped out her cell phone to call Wendy Tollefson, at whose house Lemaster had arranged for Jeannie to spend the night: Wendy, who adored Jeannie, being a friend of Julia’s from her teaching days. She had no children of her own, and often stayed at Hunter’s Heights to look after the girls when both adult Carlyles had to be out of town.

Jeannie asked could she please sleep over anyway, they were playing Monopoly.

Flew had brought a Land Rover owned by the university, for greater traction in the snow, and Julia, in her dudgeon, climbed with Vanessa into the back seat, perhaps to remind him that he was really a glorified chauffeur. She was not mad at Mr. Flew, she was mad at Lemaster, but he was not around to be kicked, so she kicked his aide instead. She hated this side of her personality, wanting to be as warm and informal in everyday life as most people thought she was, but a part of her inheritance from Mona was a need now and then to display her Clannishness—especially around members of what Lemaster’s fraternity, the Empyreals, liked to call members of the paler nation.

“Are you hungry?” said Flew from the front as the car ticked through the snow.

“No,” said Julia.

“Yes,” said Vanessa.

“I have a little something waiting for you at the house, or we could stop on the way if you like. There’s fast food, of course, and there’s also a lovely seafood place—”

“I’ve lived in the county since the early eighties,” Julia interrupted. All the way back to when Kellen nearly killed her. “I know where the restaurants are.”

The little man’s mood was impossible to shake. Friendly blue eyes met hers in the mirror. “Isn’t it amazing, Mrs. Carlyle, how, no matter how much we know about something, we can always learn something new?”

Julia colored, then colored some more, aware of Vanessa’s bemused scrutiny behind supposedly sleeping eyes. Unable to work out a suitable riposte, Julia apologized for her bitchiness, assuring Mr. Flew that he was not to blame even as he assured her he was not offended. She watched the scenery for a while, feeling deserted and lonely, as she often did within the shell of her dutiful marriage. Lemaster preached constantly on the primacy of obligation rather than desire in moral life, and Julia often wondered, but never dared ask, whether he might have in mind his relationship with his wife. Was there something he would rather be doing instead? With someone else? She did not believe he had cheated on her in twenty years of marriage, but one never knew for sure. Her college roommate, Tessa Kenner, had been married briefly to a black man, a historian of some note, who had treated her badly. Tessa, in those days a law professor rather than a television anchor, had forgiven him readily, almost happily, for what she called his peccadilloes, explaining once to Julia, over coffee, that this was simply a need all black males possessed, born of centuries of racial oppression, to liberate themselves from the repressive strictures of bourgeois sexual custom.

I’m sure you have the same trouble with Lemaster,
Tessa had murmured with the quick, sloppy racial judgment of the white intellectual, holding her cup in both hands, the way people did in television commercials and nowhere else.

I most certainly do not.

Tessa had nodded, blue eyes full of pity at the romantic self-deception of so many women who, if only they saw the world unadorned and authentic, would toss off the shackles of tradition and false consciousness and build something thrilling and new.

“You can be such a bitch sometimes,” said Julia, maybe to Tessa, maybe to herself, maybe even to Mona, because she had been dreaming and now snapped awake as the Land Rover hit the gravel of the long driveway up to Hunter’s Heights. She blinked and glanced around. Vanessa was still out, for real this time.

“Thanks,” said Julia to Mr. Flew. “That was fast. And very smooth.”

Jeremy Flew was not listening. He had slowed at the switchback several hundred feet from the house, the headlights washing over the snow, the thickly huddled trees beyond inky and silent in the darkness. “Was there an accident, Mrs. Carlyle?”

“An accident?”

He had stopped the car. The yellow cone from the headlights picked out two of the smart black coach lamps that lined the Carlyle driveway every twenty feet, both broken off at the base and lying in the snow.

“Oh, that. It happened in the storm last week. The night—the night Professor Zant died. I think Mr. Huebner hit them with the plow. I already left two messages, but he hasn’t called me back.” Julia wondered whether she was giving too much information, because Jeremy, in the mirror, was looking at her oddly. “You wouldn’t know him,” she gabbled on, wishing she knew how to change the subject. “But Mitch Huebner is kind of a legend in the Landing, living out there in the woods with his guns and his dogs and never a word to say to anybody anyway. I don’t think he’s really much of a telephone guy. Maybe I should send him a note.”

The silence was deep and thrilling as Julia waited to see how much of this nonsense Lemaster’s assistant would choose to believe.

“Are you sure?” said Mr. Flew at last. “That it was Mitch Huebner?”

“As opposed to whom?”

“The newspapers report that there is a good-sized dent in the front left fender of Professor Zant’s car. The police have asked anybody who might have had a hit-and-run accident last Friday to call, et cetera, et cetera.”

Julia rubbed her eyes. She looked out the window. The switchback where the lamps were down made a little valley, from which you could see neither the house nor the road—meaning that neither the house nor the road could see you. The driveway was a plunging, winding, sliding, death-defying mess. Every winter Mr. Huebner’s plow shaved off the gravel, piling it at the top of the hill, and every spring they paid him again to spread the gravel back down. “I still don’t get your point,” she lied. In the wing mirror demons capered, but it was just a trick of yellow light playing on blowing snow.

“The broken lamps are on the left side of your driveway.”

“When Mr. Huebner has been drinking—”

“Perhaps you should call the police, Mrs. Carlyle.”

Panic. Had the detectives noticed the lampposts last weekend? But they had not asked. Neither had Lemaster, or any of the many well-meaning visitors. “Jeremy, please. Listen to me. Kellen Zant was not at this house Friday night. Please, don’t even suggest that.”

“Is it possible that he was here and you didn’t notice? You and Mr. Carlyle were at Lombard Hall most of the night.”

“But that’s just the point.” Julia had trouble staying calm. “There was no reason for him to be here.” Alongside the switchback was a turnaround, a flat surface where drivers could repair their mistakes. That was where the broken coach lamps were, at the turnaround. Julia drew herself up. “Lemaster and I were at the dinner for the alums. Vanessa had a date. Jeannie was supposed to be spending the night with a friend, but she got sick. Anyway, Kellen would have thought the house would be empty. So why come all the way up Hunter’s Meadow in the storm if there was nobody home?”

“That’s what I was wondering,” said Mr. Flew. He put the Land Rover back into gear, and continued to climb the winding drive toward the looming house. Julia turned her head and watched the switchback until shadow claimed it.

(II)

L
ATER.
Julia stood at her favorite spot in the living room window, looking downhill toward the road, wondering whether Kellen had really been in her driveway the night he died; and wondering, too, why she had not yet shared this possibility with the police, or even her husband. She wore woolen pajamas and her favorite housecoat, threadbare and ankle-length, blue and voluminous, left over from their honeymoon, which she believed to carry the family luck. She wore glasses to rest her eyes from the contacts. She had checked her e-mail and come away suitably uninvolved. She had tried to exchange instant messages with friends, but nobody she knew was on, not even Tessa, like herself a night owl. Surfing the Web had yielded fewer mentions of Kellen than she expected, but plenty of information on Mary Mallard, including Web sites dedicated to promoting her theories and Web sites dedicated to debunking them. An empty box of Vera’s cappuccino truffles resided in the kitchen trash, snuggled against an empty bag of microwave popcorn—the unbuttered kind, because she was watching her weight.

She was thinking about her last encounter with Kellen himself, in the shopping mall up in Norport, three days before his murder.

I’m in trouble,
he had told her, glancing around wildly as they sat in the food court, Julia wondering if their meeting was just chance. Several bags of Christmas presents circled her feet: she was an early shopper.
I need your help,
Kellen had added, which was what he always said.

Julia invited him to explain.

I can’t hold my inventory. I have to spread the risk.

What risk?

The inventory risk.
He grabbed her hand. She grabbed it back.
These are dark times,
said Kellen, who ordinarily avoided metaphors conflating darkness with evil.
They’re dark times, and the dark matters. You’re the only one who can help.

Julia had started in on her speech about how he had to stop following her around, this could not go on, he had to leave her alone, the same speech she always delivered, and Kellen had started to explain, as he always did, that he was serious this time, he wasn’t flirting, he really did need her help, and that was when she had spotted Regina Thackery and Bitsy Farnsworth, both Ladybugs, emerging from Lord Taylor upstairs, and had leaped to her feet, telling Kellen she had to run, because the last thing she needed was for the Sister Ladies to spark stories about Julia’s clandestine rendezvous with you-know-who.

I have to spread the risk. The inventory risk.

Another term from economics. Like
capturing the surplus.
Kellen loved his jargon, to be sure, and squeezed it into ordinary conversation as often as he could, usually to obscure his purposes, as he did back in their Manhattan days, when, after Julia tired of screaming at him, he would describe his flings with other women as rational exercises in maximizing utility. This time, however, she had a hunch that he had been trying to tell her something. Something that Mary Mallard thought she already knew.

Julia watched the snow, wondering if Kellen had really tried to make it up the driveway in that terrible storm the night he died, expecting the house to be empty, and whether, upon seeing the babysitter’s car, he had turned in panic, striking the lamps. She did not understand why he would want to come to the house when nobody was home, any more than she knew what he had meant at the shopping mall when he said he wanted her to share his inventory risk; or that the dark mattered.

But maybe it was better not to care.

Kellen Zant was her past, and he had no right to drag her back into his life, even by dying and leaving a puzzle behind: he had wounded her, nearly killed her, and had no claim on her.

Standing in the living room window now, New England night softly alive around her, Julia gathered Rainbow Coalition into her arms, because the children were too big. She had coveted in life, and she had been coveted, and the messy life both produced was, she had thought, behind her. Lemaster was her sanity. Her safe harbor. Nothing else was supposed to happen.

But something had. First Vanessa burning the car, and now…all this.

Julia picked up the empty wineglass she had left on the low side table and turned toward the long living room, done in period green wallpaper, where the broad bay windows stretched from the nine-and-a-half-foot ceiling to eight inches above the floor. A grand piano, a vintage Steinway, filled the bay, salvaged from Amaretta Veazie’s townhouse, where, in the old days, Duke Ellington would occasionally tickle its ivories. Preston and Aaron played badly, and the youngest, Jeannie, not at all. Vanessa played beautifully. When the extended family gathered last year for Thanksgiving, Julia and her daughter had presented the fruits of six weeks of rehearsal with an experienced coach, Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Capriccio Espagnole,” among the most challenging piano duets in the classical repertoire, and, despite a couple of flubs, brought tears to every eye, even Lemaster’s.

“I hate this,” Julia said, speaking of his job, and, implicitly, hers. Probably she was talking to her late brother, Jay, her twin. “I really, really hate this.”

Jay did not reply.

She felt lonely and cold. Lemaster’s dedication to his tiny fraternity annoyed her afresh. The Empyreals were dying; everybody said so. In the upper reaches of the darker nation, these memberships mattered in a way her white friends never quite understood. Lemaster could easily have joined one of the larger, more prestigious clubs, but had declined their overtures. Tonight of all nights, to go off to New York, and then to Washington—

She made herself stop. He had rescued her. It was as simple as that. She had truly loved only two men in her life, one who had destroyed her, one who had put her back together. Yet she wondered when life would stop happening to her and she would start happening to life.