Sandrine's Case (9780802193520) (25 page)

“Been doing?” I asked cautiously.

Her smile seemed uneasily balanced, like a figure on a wire. “There'll be plenty of time for your life to change.”

Judge Rutledge's gavel hammered me back to the present. I looked at the clock. My God, had so much time passed? On the stand Detective Alabrandi was gathering up his papers while Mr. Singleton turned and headed toward his chair. I looked at Morty, who was putting papers in his briefcase. When he'd packed the last of them, he glanced at me. “Okay, well, we got through some major testimony, buddy,” he said. He smiled. “Have a nice weekend, Sam.”

Weekend Recess

On Saturday morning, I woke up to a house whose emptiness now seemed quite familiar. Alexandria had driven me home at the end of Friday's session, then rather diplomatically she'd suggested we spend some time apart. Besides, she had a few things she had to catch up on in Atlanta, she said, although she assured me that she'd be back in Coburn in time to accompany me to the courthouse on Monday morning, when my trial was set to resume at nine a.m.

As I made my way to the kitchen to make my morning coffee, it struck me as quite strange, and very alarming, that with Alexandria gone Sandrine returned to me ever more emphatically, my mind continually calling her to the witness stand, demanding her testimony. It was as if I hungered for her accusations, deeply, deeply wished to know what she had actually thought of me.

In such a frame of mind it didn't surprise me that everywhere I looked she was there, a multitudinous ghost, her shape materializing in a chair or leaning against a bookshelf or sitting in the scriptorium as I passed it. Had I not closed that door? Probably not, but I'd begun to fall into that uncertain frame of mind where the trusted solidities of life had grown porous, the verities cracked, nothing any longer beyond the realm of possibility. Shakespeare had been right, there were, indeed, phantoms more real than their previously corporeal forms.

I made coffee but had no stomach for anything else. I felt myself growing thinner by the hour, layers of me falling away like peeling paint.

I'd never expected to be lonely but, even more certainly, I'd never expected to miss my colleagues at Coburn College. And yet, as I discovered that morning, I did miss them. How very odd and unpredictable, I thought, especially given the fact that I'd endlessly scoffed at my fellow professors. I always thought them a mediocre gaggle of academics waylaid in an inconsequential terminus at the end of the academic line. Sandrine had brought this up during that last, brutal fight. She said to me, You have always believed that you deserved better than Coburn College, Sam.

When I facetiously asked her what esteemed educational institution could possibly be better than infinitely distinguished Coburn, she'd waved her hand dismissingly then added rather cryptically, One day, you'll know.

One day I'll know.

I pondered her words as I sipped my morning coffee, parsing them for every hint of threat, studying and restudying each intonation in Sandrine's voice. Was it possible that by the time we'd engaged in that cruel battle she'd already carefully built my staircase to the gallows, this final explosion merely the last bit of business in a plot she had premeditated weeks or even months before?

I shook my head at how terrible it was, my fear that she had done just that. And if she had, it could be for only one reason: she had come to despise me, to loathe me, to hold me in utter contempt. Before finally hurling that porcelain cup, she'd accused me of every imaginable crime save the one that surely had topped them all, those ludicrous trysts with April.

But did this prove that Sandrine had never learned of my affair, or had leaving it out been part of her plan? It was a question I couldn't get out of my mind, a question that was like a needle in my brain, always pressing deeper, so that finally I grabbed the phone and dialed Morty's number.

“Morty, I need to know something,” I said tensely.

“Who is this?”

Morty's voice was full of sleep, which caused me to glance at the kitchen clock. Jesus, it wasn't even six o'clock.

“Oh, sorry, Morty,” I said apologetically. “I thought it was later. I've been up since—”

“What do you want, Sam?”

“Well, like I said, I need to know something,” I told him. “It's about Sandrine. I need to know if you ever got any hint that she might have known about April.”

“You said you never told her,” Morty reminded me.

“I didn't,” I said. “But maybe someone else did.”

Morty released a heavy breath, and I could imagine him still in bed, Rachel staring at him quizzically, wondering what in hell was going on, I no longer a harmless egghead but a deranged fruitcake who'd roused her husband from a warm bed, invaded their placid weekend, and imposed upon their private time. In my mind, I saw her shake her head and hiss,
Jesus Christ! a
s she turned back to her pillow.

“I'm sorry, Morty,” I said softly in the wake of that image. “I was just thinking about something, that's all, and so—”

“Look, Sam,” Morty interrupted, a lawyer no doubt accustomed to clients afflicted with severe mental shifts. “You need to relax. That's what the weekend is for. You don't need to be wandering the house at the crack of dawn, okay?”

“Yes,” I muttered and glanced outside to see that in fact the first morning light had just broken. “I'm really sorry, Morty.”

“If you've come up with something new to add to the case,” Morty said, “something relevant, I mean, then let's talk about it on Monday.”

“Okay,” I said, “Okay, Morty. Sorry to wake you. I just . . . anyway . . . my best to Rachel.”

“Sure, Sam. You bet.”

There was another heavy breath, and then I heard the click of the phone as Morty hung up.

It was just a click, but there was finality to it, so that for the first time during my trial I felt completely and irrevocably cut off.

I glanced about the empty kitchen, the empty yard, the empty corridor that led to the empty scriptorium and, beyond it, to my empty bed. But the greater emptiness was the terrible dread I felt at the awful possibility that Sandrine had found out about April, and that it was this and this alone that had fueled her final attack, as it might also have darkly inspired a plot to destroy me, an intrigue about which, as I had to admit, I had scant evidence but which I simply could not entirely dismiss from my mind.

But if Sandrine had learned about the bleak carryings-on at the Shady Arms, how had she learned of them? I felt certain that April had never breathed a word of it to anyone. True, as I'd earlier surmised, Sandrine might have figured it out for herself. But, even so, she would have lacked any real evidence, and would she have so meticulously plotted my destruction based solely on conjecture? I didn't think so. Sandrine, being Sandrine, would have sought evidence, that is to say, well, witnesses.

If she'd wished to confirm her darkest suspicions, to whom would she have gone? Certainly not April. But, if not April, who?

Ah, yes, I thought as I offered the only answer possible to that question, April's cuckold husband, Clayton.

It took me several hours to make up my mind, but in the end I decided that I had to know. Morty had previously informed me that April was no longer living with Clayton, though I had no idea whether he'd cast her out or whether she'd hung her head in shame, packed her bags, then left her husband's elegant old plantation house of her own accord. Either way, it was only Clayton I would have to confront, which seemed to me at that despairing moment the first small blessing in the long train of curses that had showered down upon my life.

The drive to Clayton's house took me back through town. It was a crisp, clear Saturday morning, and the streets were quite animated, whole families going in and out of Main Street's quaint shops. I'd rarely ventured downtown during the weekend, primarily for fear of running into someone I knew from the college, thus to be buttonholed into an inane conversation having to do with the fate of this student or that one or whether faculty pensions might be at risk to some Georgia version of Bernard Madoff.

But now, isolated as I was, I found myself quite envious of my fellow Coburnites. They could move among themselves in the easy manner of equal citizens. It would, indeed, be rather pleasant, I thought, to be regarded simply as a man who had not first betrayed then later killed his wife, a teacher, a helpful friend and colleague, a man who, above all else, was quietly and irreducibly . . . kind.

The word had come to me in Sandrine's voice, and so I felt it as an accusation, and in response to which my foot pressed down on the accelerator and the car bolted forward. Seconds later I was out of Coburn and hurtling at a dangerous speed through the green valley that led to Clayton Blankenship's picture-postcard antebellum manse.

Clayton, himself, could not have looked more surprised to find me at his door, but rather than a sudden burst of ire his eyes gave off a great weariness, and he seemed to me withered less by what April and I had done to him than by the dirty, cruel, bottom-feeding nature of life itself. It was a look of nearly transcendental disappointment. He'd suffered a blow to the hopeful view of things he'd always maintained, as it were, against the odds, but which he no longer felt with regard to anything. The rug had been jerked from beneath his feet, and below that a trap door had opened, and he seemed, as he stared at me silently, still to be falling through black, starless space.

Facing him, all I could muster was something utterly inadequate to the destruction I'd wrought.

“I'm sorry, Clayton.”

He nodded. “You probably are, Sam,” he said.

“I know it doesn't matter but—”

He lifted his hand to silence me. “I have a chill. Come in.”

With that Clayton eased back into the foyer and motioned me inside.

I'd never been in Clayton's house, and upon entering it my initial feeling was that I'd gone through one of time's secret portals. This was a house from the storied past, the house in which the young Clayton had once laughed and frolicked, himself perhaps a Deep South,
Gone with the Wind
version of Andy Hardy. It gave off the sort of mustiness that no amount of airing could dissipate because the air itself was seeded with the microscopic accumulation of generations of dead skin. More than anything it looked like a many-roomed coffin, draped with thick folds of curtain, its floors covered with carpets no less thick, its chairs thickly upholstered, and its tables, even the small ones, thick-legged and heavy. How light April must have seemed to the current owner of this ancestral home, how airily she must have floated through its undertow of rooms, and how, in the wake of her leaving, must the weight of everything within them now seem doubled.

“I know this must seem very strange to you, Clayton,” I began once we'd taken our seats in what surely had to be called—and with a straight face—the parlor.

Clayton fingered the doilies draped over the arms of his chair. “I assume you have a reason,” he said in a voice that was so gentle, so devoid of acrimony, that I found myself wondering why in the name of heaven April would have endangered her life with a man like Clayton in order to waste a moment in time with me.

“A selfish one, I'm afraid,” I admitted. “A very selfish one, given the circumstances.” I glanced about. There were potted plants everywhere, and in the far corner a large birdcage held two yellow and one light blue parakeets. The leaves of the plants glistened with health and the birds hopped quite happily about. In the midst of his devastation, I thought, Clayton has watered his plants and fed his birds and carried out every duty upon which some other creature's well-being depends.

“I'm embarrassed to be here,” I told him. “I'm humiliated, actually. But there's something I need to know, and I have to ask you about it.”

Clayton leaned forward and massaged the ache out of a bony knee.

“It's about . . . what happened,” I continued cautiously, “between April and me.”

Clayton eased back and the chair itself seemed to wrap its ancient arms protectively around him. It was as if he had cared for it down through the years, resisted every impulse to toss it out because it had grown old or gotten worn, lost its attractiveness, and now, in his time of need, it was repaying him for his long loyalty.

“What I need to know, Clayton,” I said, “is whether Sandrine might have found out about . . .” I stopped because I couldn't bear any of the words that came to me. Instead I started again. “I know that April would never have said anything but, well, I was wondering if maybe you found out about it by some other means, some other person and then—believe me, I would understand it—if maybe you told Sandrine.”

Clayton shook his head. “I would never have done that,” he said. “I liked Sandrine very much. And I respected her. She was a wonderful teacher.” He shrugged, and one of his hands moved over to comfort the other. “But as far as . . . this other matter . . . I didn't know about it until later.”

“Later?”

“The later revelations,” Clayton said in the gently euphemistic way his great-grandfather might have called the Civil War the “late unpleasantness.” “In the newspaper.” He shrugged. “Even so, I didn't want April to leave,” he added, “but she wouldn't hear of staying. She wouldn't take a penny either.”