The Drowning Tree (48 page)

“No, he doesn’t! Neil never shot up.”

“He does now, my dear. According to his chief psychologist.”

“Is that how you got the drugs into Christine?” I ask. I can just make out through the fog the dim outline of the shore as a faint light creeps over the water from the eastern bank. Maybe if I can keep Dr. Horace talking a little bit longer the sun will burn off the fog and some early morning fisherman or kayaker might see us. “Did you inject her with the same drugs you knew she had prescriptions for?”

“No, I put them in her coffee. When I met her at the station—yes, I was right behind you but you never noticed me or Christine when she got off at the far end of the track—I had a thermos of her favorite coffee from Gal’s with plenty of amaretto to mask the taste of the drugs. She never suspected a thing. In fact, she would have drunk the whole thermos before
we got in the kayaks and passed out before we got across the river if I hadn’t made her save some for later.”

“But then she must not have thought you knew that she’d found out anything about the trial, or she wouldn’t have gone with you—” A thought occurs to me. “Are you sure she did know?”

“She stole a page from Neil’s file with his blood test records on it. It was one of the early records when his liver enzyme levels were just beginning to elevate and I hadn’t bothered to change anything, but I know she would have put it together eventually. And then when I heard her lecture—no, of course you didn’t see me, I was in one of the upper galleries behind the shelves—I saw how she paused when she mentioned Briarwood.”

I remember that I thought she had paused to spare me the reminder of Neil’s institutionalization and that later Gavin told me he thought the pause meant that she had acceded to his request to leave out certain details about his great-aunt’s madness. We had all read our own shameful secrets into that pause—but only one of us was crazy enough to commit a murder on the strength of that suspicion.

As Dr. Horace loads a syringe with liquid—this time the fluid is clear as glass—I realize that he’s insane. How hard would it be, I wonder, to lunge across this short space and overpower him? I start to slide one of the oars out of its lock, but as I do I see Neil looking straight at me, his eyes clear and alert. He silently mouths a word that I can’t make out.

“Ladies first,” Dr. Horace says, rising slightly on bent knees and leaning toward me with the syringe poised above my left arm. As soon as he’s moved in front of him, Neil raises his taped hands and brings them down over Dr. Horace’s head, jerking his bound hands into his sternum so sharply the syringe flies out of his hands. The gun fires into the bottom of the boat, releasing a fountain of splinters and water. I fall backward into the prow and when I open my eyes an instant later I’m looking straight into the barrel of the gun. I lift my eyes from the gun to Neil, who’s trying to stab the doctor’s hand with the nail file, but he’s not able to make Dr. Horace drop the gun. The minute our eyes meet Neil throws his body to the right, taking him and Horace over the side and into the water.

I lean over the side but there’s nothing but a series of concentric circles to mark where they went down. I aim for the center of the circles
and dive, holding my eyes open even though the salt water stings them. For a moment all I see is blackness and then, as the morning light pierces the water, I see them, so wrapped around each other that they look like one body with two heads. A horrible monster sinking into the abyss.

Part of that creature is Neil, though. I surface briefly to fill my lungs and then plunge down again, arrowing my body toward the bottom of the river. And just as I’m running out of air a hand reaches out of the gloom and grabs me by the hand.

It’s Dr. Horace. I clasp his arm with my other hand and start pulling back to lift him and Neil up to the surface but he pulls me down. I’m looking straight into his eyes and I can see he’s completely out of his mind. Neil’s eyes, though, which look out at me from behind Dr. Horace, look completely sane. He knows exactly what he’s doing when he corkscrews his body with such force that the water rushes around me like a whirlpool and I see them both sinking down into the depths of the river as I’m pushed back to the surface.

I gulp air and dive down again, but no matter how deep I go I see only blackness. I rise to the surface and dive again … and again, and again, but I can’t find them. Even when I mean to keep on going down into the dark something leads me back into the air and light. After a while I can’t tell the difference. The dark water is lit with stars and explosions like fireworks, and the sky above is fretted with dark bands that ripple and wave across the silver skin of the river like banners in a medieval pageant. They’re coming for me across the river on silver boats. Neil and Christine and Eugenie and Clare and Augustus—coming to tell me that there’s no difference at all. Above the water or below. The surface of the water is a silver mirror reflecting the silver window of the sky. It’s all silver light spreading as far as the eye can see, a mirror reflecting a window. What difference does it make which side I’m on?

Still I wait. All but one of the boats has vanished and now I can see that it’s not a boat at all, but a pure white bird skimming the surface of the waves, its wings tilting first to one side and then to the other. I have only to wait for its touch to transform me into a bird as well and then we’ll ride the waves together forever on a sea becalmed by the transformation of our undying love.

I
STAYED IN BED FOR A WEEK AFTER THEY BROUGHT ME HOME FROM THE HOSPITAL
and I would have stayed longer if I hadn’t awoken one morning to the sound of hammering. I’d been dreaming that Ernesto and my father were building me a coffin out of glass—like Snow White’s—and when I opened my eyes I could look out through the clear lid and see Bea standing over me crying. That got me out of bed and down the spiral stairs into the studio.

I found that the coffin they were making wasn’t for me, but for the lady. While I’d lain in bed, my father, Ernesto, and Robbie had finished the restoration without me and now they were crating the window to take it back to the college. The window would be reinstalled in time for the dedication ceremony the day after Labor Day.

“Good riddance,” I say to the wooden pallet covering the Lady’s face. I’ve developed a real animosity toward the lady in the window. If I hadn’t gotten Christine the lecture appointment, she wouldn’t have gone up to Briarwood to research the lady’s antecedents and she and Neil would still be alive. I wish I’d never seen her face.

Ernesto and my father exchange looks while Robbie busies himself drawing arrows on the crate to indicate which side is up.

“I talked to Beatrice yesterday,” my father says with studied casualness. “She’s coming home on Tuesday.” I feel a pang of reproach that manages to pierce through the general malaise of guilt that hovers around me like a noxious gas. I’d let my father make the call to Bea explaining that Neil was dead. I hadn’t even remembered when she was coming home.

“She has a lot of questions that I didn’t really know how to answer,” my father says.

“And you think I do?” I glare at my father, daring him to tell me how to explain to Bea that her father was killed by the very man who’d been entrusted with his health and well-being all these years.

“That nice Italian police officer came by yesterday,” he says, looking away. “He said that when you were ready he had some things to tell you. Maybe he can give you an idea what to tell Bea …”

My father’s holding out one of Falco’s business cards, but I don’t take it. I don’t have to. I still remember the number.

W
HEN
I
CALL
, F
ALCO SAYS HE’LL PICK ME UP
. “W
E CAN TALK IN MY CAR ON THE WAY.”

“On the way where?”

“I’ll explain that on the way, too.”

He hangs up before I can object. I agreed to meet with him to get my father off my back, but I hadn’t bargained on a road trip, which means actually getting dressed and leaving the factory. I consider calling back and telling him not to come, but aside from the fact that he probably wouldn’t listen, I have to admit I owe him. If he and Kyle hadn’t come for me in the outrigger canoe, I would have drowned.

When he came to see me in the hospital he told me that after he’d
dropped Neil and me off at the factory he’d gone back across the river to retrieve Kyle’s outrigger canoe from the Penrose estate. On his way to the boathouse, though, he’d stopped to pick up a cup of coffee at Gal’s. Annemarie had told him that I’d been in to call Dr. Horace because Neil was sick, so he’d gone by the factory. When he couldn’t find us there he went to the boathouse, where he met Kyle—just coming in for an early morning tour he was giving to a singles group from the 92nd Street Y. He’d asked Kyle if he’d seen me or Neil or Dr. Horace.

“When I mentioned Horace’s name, Kyle turned as white as a dead fish. He spilled his guts—that he’d been trading stock for Dr. Horace in a drug company and he was afraid it might have something to do with Christine’s death. When he saw that the rowboat was gone he had that canoe in the water so quick it was all I could do to hop aboard. My arms still ache from trying to keep up with his paddling.”

Falco told me that Kyle had cut a deal with the SEC in exchange for providing information on the transactions and that his efforts to rescue me would be taken into consideration at his hearing. He’d even dived for Neil and Dr. Horace, but without any luck. Their bodies, still wrapped together, were found a week later in a cove just south of the Tappan Zee Bridge. Falco had come to see me when they found the bodies.

I’m waiting outside the main door when he pulls up in front of the factory. I’d just as soon get right in the air-conditioned car to get out of the heat—the erratic stormy weather of July has settled into the kind of hot, humid August weather that makes one long for the crispness of autumn—but he parks and gets out. He’s dressed more casually than I’ve seen him before—in jeans and a yellow Polo shirt—so I guess he must consider this an off-duty call. Then I notice that he’s carrying a soft black leather messenger bag and I remind myself that this is a man who’s never completely off duty.

“I thought we’d have coffee at Gal’s first,” he says. “I have some things I want to show you.”

I turn without comment and start walking toward the cafe. I half suspect this whole outing is part of a scheme he’s cooked up with my father to get me back into the routines of daily life. I remember that after Neil was put in Briarwood, Christine would come up here from the city with little
made-up errands: looking for old furniture at the Salvation Army or going to an old church to look at some window she was writing a paper on. My father kept losing workers and needing “a hand” on one job or another. And of course, there had been Bea, only a toddler at the time, needing so much. Eventually the demands of daily life had filled in the cracks Neil’s absence had left behind, just as my dad and Ernesto had poured epoxy into the fire-damaged windows up at St. Eustace’s to keep them from falling apart. But the cracks were still there and it was unlikely that those windows would survive another disaster. The question was, could I?

As soon as I walk into Gal’s, Portia comes out from behind the counter and throws her soft, damp arms around my neck. She smells like almonds and hot milk.

“Zia
, we’re all so sorry about Uncle Neil.”
Uncle Neil?
I can’t remember anyone in my family calling him that before. “Is it true he saved your life?”

I look into Portia’s wide brown eyes and past her to her friend, Scott, who’s sitting at a little metal table, writing in a notebook between sips of espresso. In his black jeans and black T-shirt all he needs is a beret to complete the picture of Hemingway-writing-in-a-cafe. He steals a look up at me and blushes. They’ve talked about me, I realize, and about what happened on the river. Neil and I have become for them one of the romantic stories they read about, like Francesca and Paolo or Halcyone and Ceyx. The only difference is that those lovers always died together or at least transformed into some shape that bound them together for eternity. What am I still doing here?

Fortunately, Annemarie comes out and rescues me from Portia’s well-meaning, but unnerving, adulation. She seats us at an out-of-the-way table and brings us cappuccinos (I ask for a plain one—I’ve lost my taste for amaretto) and biscotti. When she leaves us, she smiles at Falco and calls him
Danieli
.

“Wow, I’m impressed,” I tell him. “Annemarie doesn’t warm up to just anyone like that.”

Falco shrugs and takes a sip of his coffee, which leaves a mustache of foam on his upper lip.
What nice lips
, I find myself thinking, and then blush just like Portia’s teenaged boyfriend.

Falco wipes his mouth with his napkin and lays the leather bag on the table between us. “Recognize this?”

It’s a plain leather bag—good quality, a little fancier than what I’d expect a police detective to carry, and while it doesn’t look exactly feminine, it’s the kind of item that could be worn equally well by a stylish man or woman. When he unzips it, though, I recognize the silk jacquard lining embossed with the logo of an Italian luggage maker.