The One Safe Place (27 page)

The percolator was bubbling, diverting her attention to it, which was such a relief she felt herself go limp. She poured him a coffee while it was weak and let hers strengthen itself. That involved more waiting, and another awkward silence, which she was tempted to occupy with some manufactured cheerfulness. Then he said, "Mom?"

"Honey?"

"What's going to happen to Dad's shop?"

"I have to call someone about that."

"Who?"

"A couple of people. Booksellers who Don had some respect for. There's one who has a good reputation round the University."

"Will he keep the shop where it is?"

"She. She'll probably just buy the stock. I hear she has a pretty big place of her own." Susanne watched him dip his face into the steam from his mug and raise his head without having touched the drink. His eyes looked as if the steam had condensed at the corners. "I don't know what else we could do," she said. "Does it matter very much?"

"Do we have to sell the shop because we need the money?"

"We don't just yet. We may in time. I still don't see..."

"Couldn't we hire someone to run it for a while?"

"I don't know if there would be anyone who's qualified to do that who doesn't already have work. I mean, it's a possibility, but I'm not getting what the point would be."

"So we could keep it open till I'm old enough to leave school."

"Oh, honey..." Susanne experienced such a rush of affection and suppressed grief that she had to busy herself with the percolator. "I thought you wanted to be a librarian."

"I wasn't sure. It's not so different."

"Except they train you to be a librarian. I don't know who..." She pretended she hadn't said that, adding hastily, "I think it takes a lot more learning to sell rare books."

"Dad wrote the prices in them."

"I know he did, but once we'd sold those where would we be?"

"Couldn't we see if there's a bookselling course I could take?"

"Alongside your schoolwork? I honestly don't think that would work." She saw his face tighten as he searched for a way to prolong the discussion, and though the question sounded almost unforgivably stupid to her before she asked it, she didn't know how else to reach him. "Why is it so important to you?"

"I asked dad once."

"Asked him..."

"If I could help run the shop."

"And what did he say?"

"Yes."

"But you did, didn't you? Won't that be enough?"

"I just feel like when all the books are gone he will be."

Susanne put down her mug, because her fingers were turning red where they held it, and sat opposite Marshall and reached for his hand. "He was more than books though, wasn't he?"

"Sure." Marshall used his free hand to clear his forehead of hair, and knuckled his eyes so quickly that he might be able to believe she hadn't noticed. His other hand flattened itself under hers, and she thought he was about to pull it away, the better to withdraw into himself. She could tell he was remembering Don; maybe they could do that together even if they didn't speak. She was seeing the three of them on a boardwalk in the Everglades at dawn, Don holding Marshall's hand while the seven-year-old craned over the rail to watch a snake twice as thick as his arm and several times as long, when Marshall's hand under hers began to grow lumpy. "Mom?"

"I'm here."

"When they... you know, got him ready..."

She sensed how important this was to him, and was able to remind herself that he couldn't be seeing what she immediately saw, Don's face no longer resembling a face when she'd had to identify him by his clothes and his wedding ring. "Yes, Marshall, what?"

"They'd have brushed his hair, wouldn't they?"

"I'm certain they must have," Susanne said, trying not to imagine the process, bracing herself for any question Marshall was working toward asking. But his hand relaxed under hers, and he said, "I didn't mind not seeing him as much as granddad and grandmother Travis did."

"I'm glad." That seemed so inadequate that she felt compelled to say "I expect you can see him whenever you want to, can't you?"

"Sometimes." Marshall lowered his face to meet the mug he was raising, and drank, and kept his gaze on the table. All Susanne could see there was pine coated with sunlight, but she didn't like to interrupt whatever he might be seeing. She was thrown when he said, "Do you think they still mind we kept dad here?"

"I think it was mostly the travelling they minded."

"But they keep going on cruises."

"That's called retirement. You can see why they wouldn't like to have to cross the ocean every time they wanted to visit him. They were just trying to keep the family together."

"We're his family too, aren't we? And the last thing he said was he wanted to stay here."

"I know. That's why..." As well as that, she'd been unable to face the prospect of flying Don's broken body to America, of herself and Marshall being imprisoned in mid-air for all those hours while he lay among the baggage. "They'll keep sending flowers, they made an arrangement with a florist, but you can see how it isn't the same."

"Are they still mad at him?"

"If they'd been as mad as they made out they wouldn't have come to the funeral." There, she'd said one of the words she had thought she would never be able to force past her lips, and it felt as though it might prove to be the beginning of acceptance. "They're just old, Marshall. That's how people get to be sometimes."

Some didn't get the chance, she reflected, and perhaps he too was thinking that about his father. He turned his head slightly, suggesting that he was listening to the tape upstairs—remembering it, at any rate, because he said, "He meant us also."

"Meant us..."

"To stay. That's the very last thing he said, we should stay here for good."

She wondered if Marshall knew how deep he was digging in her—perhaps no deeper than in himself. "Is it what you want, honey?"

"I want to see what happens to the guys who killed him."

"What do you want to happen to them?"

"The worst."

She imagined the most violent films he'd watched projecting themselves on the screen of his imagination, and she couldn't blame him. "They don't execute people here, you realise."

"Then those guys ought to be locked up for as long as dad would have lived."

That seemed almost poetic, except that there was no poetry in the situation. "And after we find out what happens to them?"

"Still stay." He closed both hands around his mug, and she was put in mind of someone warming their hands at a very small fire on a very cold night. "How about you, mom? You haven't said."

"I'm with you for waiting for the outcome." She found that gave her thoughts a focus and directness which nothing else did—not the prospect of putting the house on the market, or searching for a post at another university, or packing the contents of the house again and shipping them back to America. All of that felt like running away, and if Marshall was determined not to do that, how could she? She gripped her hands together on the table, fingertips on knuckles, and gazed at him and managed to smile. "And then we can see if we're still of the same mind," she said, and kept to herself what she'd almost added, even though she believed it. "At least there's nothing else they can do to us."

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, a man has been killed. That is an incontestable fact. Indeed, you have heard my clients admit responsibility for his death. You have heard them describe how they went to Mr. Travis's shop to exact some form of retribution for his having, as they put it, shopped their cousin to the police. You will recall that he did so because in the course of an altercation over driving their cousin threatened him with a gun—a criminal offence in this country, of course, even if the weapon is not meant to be used. That is especially the case if the weapon is unlicensed, even if it is claimed to be used in self-defence.

"You have heard my clients tell how, before they committed any act of violence against Mr. Travis, he produced a gun and threatened them with it. That description of the situation appears to be borne out by the testimony of Mr. Washington, the bus driver who called the police. You will remember that although he saw my clients doing violence to Mr. Travis, he felt it impossible to intervene because he thought he might put himself and his passengers at risk from the gun. You have heard that the police found it not to be loaded, but there is no question that Mr. Travis intended my clients to believe it was. On that basis you must ask yourselves to what extent they were entitled to consider their violence against him to be justified.

"You have heard them admit to the court that they overreacted, but nevertheless they insist that their intention was only to make sure Mr. Travis was incapable of using the gun. They say they were protecting each other in the only way available to them because nobody who was watching was prepared to help. It is a fundamental law of our land that any person has a right to defend himself. If you accept that my clients had reason to believe they were acting in self-defence, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you must find them not guilty of the charge of murder."

He'd had to say all that, Susanne told herself: it was his job. If he'd met her eyes just once, would he have been able to do it? She hoped he'd avoided them out of embarrassment—that at least he didn't believe what he'd said. His clients had kept glancing in her direction, but they'd been looking at their family which had massed behind her in the public gallery, muttering like spectators at a game until she'd wondered what it would take for the judge to clear them out and relieve her of the sensation which felt like an incessant hot breath encasing the back of her head. The pair in the dock had looked confused and resentful, even betrayed, during much of their lawyer's summation, reactions which had given her some comfort. Maybe he'd got it as wrong as they appeared to think he had. Maybe the jury had been as alienated as Susanne by his speech.

They'd been out for several hours now, and she was sitting on a red plastic armchair in the high white hall outside the courtrooms. Whenever she shifted her weight the chair drew attention to her restlessness by creaking and panting and smacking its clammy plastic where it clung to the backs of her legs. Whenever the glass doors opened at the end of the hall she had to struggle not to remember the sight of Don and Marshall returning through them from the men's room—had to resist wishing to see them each time the doors parted, time having taken pity on her and rescinded everything that had happened since. If Don and Marshall hadn't testified against the gunman... if Don hadn't described him to the police... if Don hadn't attracted his attention in the first place... Turning away from the doors would bring her face to face with the Fancy family, and she wasn't going to be made to feel scared to keep her back to them. She wondered yet again if she could run out to the nearest sandwich shop, because what the British called a sandwich was the most she could imagine forcing down to guard against growing faint with the heat and the waiting and the babble of dislocated voices.

She slapped her knees and pushed herself to her feet. The chair wheezed and puffed out its plastic, and she had taken a step in the direction of the glass doors when all the reporters who'd been in the courtroom crowded toward her. What was the point of besieging her with questions now? She was preparing to dodge them as roughly as necessary when she realised they were heading not for her but for the courtroom. The robed clerk had opened the doors to indicate that the trial was about to reach its conclusion.

Susanne took a breath which felt like thin warm water going the wrong way. She was first through the doors into the empty courtroom, where at least a dozen microphones fished through the ceiling at the air. She took her place in the front row of the public gallery and heard spectators gather behind her with an oppressive rumbling like a storm cloud.

She sensed that the Fancy family was closer to her than the reporters were—she felt as though their eyes were almost touching her neck. Only their muttering, which seemed to be warning the future to do what they wanted, sounded more distant, and she was able to ignore their nearness as the jury trooped into the courtroom.

None of the seven men and five women looked at her, any more than they had throughout the trial. She could make nothing of their expressions, which were as good as blank. The two rows of them performed their synchronised routine of filling the jury box, and then there was a silence broken only by the foreman clearing his throat with a sound like a model car failing to start and knuckling his mouth. This might almost have been a signal, because Susanne had counted only two of her uncomfortably palpable heartbeats when the men who'd killed Don were led into the room.

They were wearing suits and ties, as they had throughout the special occasion of the trial. Each of them had a uniformed policeman on his arm, and each raised his handcuffed wrists toward Susanne as he stepped into the dock. She saw from their faces, which seemed to grow momentarily even thinner and sharper, that the defiant gesture was meant for their family, not her. Nevertheless she felt as if a cold heavy object had trapped her lips. Then the court was told that it would rise, and did, and as the judge took his seat on the dais she rubbed her mouth until the sensation of it became more familiar.

The judge was a small squat man with disproportionately broad shoulders which thrust out at severe right angles from his thick neck. During much of the trial he'd seemed intent on the space bounded by his fingers interwoven on the desk in front of him as though in a silent prayer, except when he shot a disapproving look from beneath his wig and over his tethered spectacles at some statement or at any other sound in the courtroom. He'd intervened hardly at all, appearing to take everything he heard as no worse than he expected to hear. Now he nodded at the clerk, the movement shuttering the lenses of his spectacles with light, and she turned to the jury. "Will the foreman rise, please."

The man's fist found his mouth before he did so, but no cough. He bared his moustache and squared his shoulders and seemed about to tug at his lapels, but instead straightened his back as the clerk said, "Have you reached a verdict?"