Sandrine's Case (9780802193520) (26 page)

“Where is she?”

“Not far, I don't imagine,” Clayton answered. “She still has her day in court, after all.”

With that quite practical remark I once again recalled the moment I'd said her name to Detective Alabrandi, then later when I'd seen it inscribed on Mr. Singleton's witness list.

“I do wish she would have stayed,” Clayton said. “I could have borne the shame more easily than I can bear the loneliness.”

Watching him, I found that I could not actually fathom his pain. I could not sound the anguished depths into which April and I had so recklessly sunk his life, and it struck me that this, and this alone, should precede all other calculations, that it should be solely by this grave measure that we choose to do or not to do certain things.

He took a quick breath. “But as to your question, I should emphasize that no, I never told your wife anything because I never knew anything about you and April.” He leaned forward and stared at me with great seriousness and sincerety. “But even if I had, I would have kept it to myself, Sam.” His smile was as ragged as the flag of some lost cause. “I wouldn't even have told April.”

“I believe you,” I told him quietly, and since I'd come only to ask this one question, and now had received his answer, I rose slowly, as one in whom a deep weariness had abruptly settled, and stood before him like a disgraced knight before a noble king. “I'm sorry for disturbing you.” I drew in a long breath. “I'm sorry for everything, Clayton.”

With some difficulty, Clayton got to his feet, rising with so much difficulty, in fact, that I had to suppress the urge to take his arm. April had almost certainly performed this deeply human service, but she was gone now, no doubt eventually to be replaced by a hireling, a man or woman paid to lift him from his chair but who, as he weakened, would be called upon to carry out increasingly more difficult and noisome services, and who would perform all of them well and dutifully, offering him everything he would need at the end of life save love.

He escorted me to the door, then opened it.

A cold breeze swept in and I suddenly feared for the state of Clayton Blankenship's health, the irony of course being that only some years before, when April and I had had our first encounter at the Shady Arms, I'd cared nothing for the state of his soul.

“Again, Clayton,” I told him, “I'm sorry to have disturbed you.”

Clayton nodded but said nothing.

I started through the door, then stopped and turned back to him. “I have to tell you that I appreciate your kindness. Given the circumstances, I mean.”

Clayton's smile appeared to require the last of his physical strength. “My grandfather would have shot you with one of the dueling pistols I still have,” he said. Then, like a man who thought another piece of evidence was required to justify what he'd just said, he added, “But I fear I lack the courage required to defend my honor.”

I started to apologize again, a gesture Clayton saw and against which, almost as a way of holding himself in check, he softly closed the door.

Sunday. Tomorrow. All Day.

On the way back home from meeting with Clayton, I turned onto Guardian Lane, in an area of Coburn known simply as the Commons. It wasn't by any means a perfect neighborhood, but the simplicity of its homes and yards and streets had appealed to Sandrine. I'd thought it too neat and orderly, however, its homes too evenly disbursed. I'd been young and full of resistance to the regulated, cookie-cutter look of the Commons, how carefully laid out it was. But now it did not strike me as so
unappealing. There was a sense of proportion here, I thought, a sense of order, of rules that actually worked. Not perfectly, of course, but to some extent, rules agreed upon and which offered, however flawed in other ways they might be, some vague resistance to the chaotic sprawl into which my own life had descended, mine a desperation far from Thoreau's stoical Concord neighbors, one that had, in the end, become very noisy indeed.

By the time I reached 237 Crescent Road I'd come to feel that my decision to drop in on Clayton Blankenship had been a foolish one, but yet typical of the foolishness into which I'd often fallen since Sandrine's death. I had said foolish things at the beginning of the investigation. I'd assumed a cold perhaps even haughty demeanor from my encounter with Officer Hill onward, thus behaving in a way that had prejudiced just about everyone against me. I had needed correction but the only one who might have provided some corrective word of wisdom was Sandrine, and, as Alexandria had earlier put it with such heartbreaking simplicity,
she was gone.

Even so, once back in the house, seated at the kitchen table, yet another cup of coffee growing cold in front of me, I tried to imagine what Sandrine, if she were still alive, would say to me in the present circumstances. Would it be some version of a cruel “I told you so”? Or would she relent, take pity, give me helpful counsel, be more even than a wife, be my best friend? Would she lean forward, take my hand, and say, “All right, Sam. Listen to me now. Because I know a way out of hell.”

But what way was there now?

I was still pondering the question the next day when Alexandria returned from Atlanta just as night was falling. Our unpleasant exchange at the courthouse was now a couple of days behind us, and as she chatted dryly about the few things she'd gotten done in Atlanta, mailing manuscripts or dashing off something for
sleeplesseye.com
, I saw that she did not intend to revisit the dark pit of her own fearful suspicion that Morty and I—two men—were cooking up a plot against her dead mother.

She'd brought fresh flowers and as I watched her arrange them in a vase, her fingers delicately moving this leaf or that petal to just the right position, I recalled that, as a little girl, she'd once expressed an interest in being a florist, a sensible career choice for which I'd offered not a particle of encouragement.

Why had I done that, I wondered now. Had I read, studied, and taught the great authors, the world's great heads, only to lose respect for the work of human hands, lose it despite the beauty and usefulness of the things they made? As a young man, traveling with Sandrine, I'd stood in grateful awe at what those hands had wrought in stone and iron and stained glass. But slowly, over the years, all that had dropped away and left this harder and more intolerant man. Reading books had made the writing of them all that mattered, and because of that I'd given no support to what might have been a perfectly suitable life's work for Alexandria. Was it in order to return her daughter to that earlier more tender ambition that Sandrine had called her “Ali”?

Suddenly Sandrine's voice was in my ear, so close I could almost feel her lips. Albi, she had said, would be the moment she would forever remember. Not Venice where we'd drifted beneath the Bridge of Sighs, or anything we'd done in Paris or Athens or anywhere else on our one great tour. No, Sandrine had said, it would be Albi, where she'd turned to me and said in a tone of sweet surprise, “It's you.”

Had this same woman later come to hate and despise me with such consuming passion that in her final days she might well have plotted my destruction?

In silence, as Alexandria completed the perfection of her flowers, I reconsidered all this. Live or die, the poet Anne Sexton had once said, but for God's sake don't poison everything. Then, on the hard edge of that uncompromising declaration, she had put on her mother's fur coat, removed all her jewelry, poured herself a glass of vodka, walked into the garage, and turned on the engine of her car. Perhaps I should do the same, I thought. Perhaps I should accept what I now considered the jury's inevitable verdict and carry out its sentence, thus saving the good people of Coburn any further penalty for the crime of once having welcomed me into their midst.

“There,” Alexandria said. She stepped back from her arrangement. “What do you think, Dad?”

“Perfect,” I said softly

She scowled, “Yeah, right,” she said.

I turned away, as if rebuked, glanced toward the window, and saw Edith Whittier as she made her way to her car.

“Edith will probably be at the courthouse early tomorrow,” I said dryly. “Eager to drive in another nail.”

Alexandria shrugged. “She couldn't have much to say,” she said, “She hardly knew you and Mom.”

She'd lived next door to us for almost fifteen years, a divorced woman, childless, and probably friendless. She'd retired from the public school system some years before, and after that she'd spent her time beautifying her house. At Christmas the outside of 235 Crescent Road was a carnival of light, and according to Carl, who always walked his son over to see the display, the interior was much the same, with a huge tree weighted down with shiny ornaments. There were various-sized sleighs, as well, all of them filled with brightly wrapped gift boxes and overseen by a multitude of cheerful elves and chuckling Santas. According to Carl, there'd not been a single doorknob that wasn't sheathed in a knitted reindeer head, and everywhere, everywhere this lonely childless woman had put out bowls of candy and cookies and other assorted treats.

Alexandria was right. She'd hardly known Sandrine and me. So how very odd, it seemed to me, that it was Edith Whittier, of all people, who might well have heard the crash of that little cup, heard Sandrine's accusatory cry, she alone whose ears had taken in the violence of that night, and who, as tomorrow's first witness at my trial, was scheduled to tell the world exactly what she'd heard.

The curious thing was that after my talk with Clayton I no longer seemed to care what might be said of me in court, no matter how distorted the evidence might be. His moral weight had fallen upon me like a hammer, and I was now like a turtle whose shell had cracked, its moist pink innards exposed to the blazing light and blistering heat.

“There was a fight, Alexandria,” I said suddenly. “Between your mother and me.”

“When?”

“You'd gone into town,” I told her.

“So it was that last night?”

“Yes,” I answered. “And it was loud enough that Edith might have heard it.”

“So you were screaming?”

“Your mother was . . . loud,” I said. “And she threw a cup at me.”

Alexandria stared at me in disbelief.

Because I simply had to know, I asked, “Your mother never told you about any of this?”

Alexandria shook her head. “Was it about April?” she asked.

“No.”

“What was it about, then?”

“Me,” I answered, which, though inadequate, was true.

I had never revealed the actual nature of Sandrine's last, furious assault, how unprecedented it had been, an attack so furious, her accusations hurled at me with such fierce resolve to wound me, that I'd finally fired back with the darkest and most cruel thing I could possible have said.

“It came out of nowhere,” I added. “I mean, she'd been more or less ignoring me for weeks. She didn't want to talk to me, she didn't want me to interrupt her reading, her ‘streaming.' I had gotten used to that, but nothing could have prepared me for the way she was that night.”

Sandrine had often mentioned the Spartan commander who, when told that the Athenians had so many arrows that when released they would darken the sky, had starkly replied, “Then we will fight in the shade.” I had wanted to be like him that night, simply take blow after blow, as it were, stoically, bravely, even nobly, and say nothing. But I had failed even at that.

“It was the cup that did it,” I said. “The way she'd thrown that cup and called me a sociopath.”

I could see the word sink into Alexandria's mind, though I couldn't tell whether she believed it accurate, her opinion of me as dark and unforgiving as her mother's on the night she died.

One thing was clear, however. Sandrine had told her nothing of this battle, a fact that, as I realized suddenly, had oddly urged me to confess it.

“I was going out the door and she called me by that name,” I added. “Even then, I didn't turn back. That's when she threw that cup.”

Alexandria's gaze darkened. “What did you do, Dad?”

“I stopped and turned around,” I answered. “She was in bed, almost in the dark, with nothing but that candle burning.”

Alexandria could see that I was stalling, and so she said again, “What did you do?”

“Nothing,” I answered. “I didn't say or do anything. It was something I thought, something I wanted.”

“What?”

“As I left the room,” I stalled. “Something I wanted.”

“What, Dad?”

I stared bleakly into my daughter's eyes. “For your mother to be dead when I got back.”

For a moment, Alexandria stared at me in stunned silence. Then quite slowly, and deliberately, she came to her conclusion.

“Mom was right,” she said. “You are a sociopath.”

I nodded. “Yes,” I confessed, “I suppose I am.”

On that grave admission, I saw that little white cup shatter into a thousand pieces, heard at full volume Sandrine's gravest of all accusations.

Alexandria's gaze was as stern as her question. “What are you willing to do now, Dad, in order to save yourself?”

In answer I could only shrug, because at that moment I hadn't truly known.