What Happened to Sophie Wilder (23 page)

Back in the car, I pulled out of the driveway and turned in the direction I'd been heading. I followed the curves up the hill. After another mile, the road swung around to intersect with the one I'd started on. I turned back toward the Manse, and in another ten minutes I was back. The dashboard clock read 9:40 AM when I turned off the car.

Everything was as I'd left it. I found a knife and a plate in the kitchen. The cheese let out a smell of satisfying pungency as I sliced through its rind. I brought two pieces of it upstairs with some bread. The door to Sophie's room was half open, and I called in to her, but no answer came. I gave a light knock before pressing into the room. The bed was empty, and I was about to leave and look for her somewhere else when I saw her on the floor. Right away I knew that something terrible had happened, but I was halfway across the room before I had any sense of how terrible. A halo of blood or bile surrounded her head on the floor, and her cheeks had gone a sickening gray. I dropped the plate and tried to shake her awake. When she didn't respond, I grabbed the phone from the bedside table and called for an ambulance. Then I sat down beside her and waited for help to come.

 

When I heard the sirens I went downstairs to direct the paramedics to her. There were three of them and they all rushed in, but their response when they got to her side told me everything. After that, things slowed down. I don't
mean this metaphorically or impressionistically. I mean that the urgency was gone and the paramedics moved with tired deliberation. The time to hurry had passed. We were into the time that came next. Two of the men stood around, seeming embarrassed, while the third pressed his hands to various parts of Sophie's body. Then one of the onlookers came to me in the doorway.

“Your, ah, your.” He spoke with a professional calm even as he struggled to find a name to put to her. “Your wife?” he hazarded.

“My friend.”

“Your friend,” he said, as though trying it out. Then he hit on something he preferred. “The young lady,” he said with evident satisfaction. “The young lady. I'm afraid we're too late for her.”

“She's dead?”

He turned his head, as though in disappointment at the poor taste I'd shown by putting the situation in such terms.

“Yes,” he said.

“What happened?”

“I can't really say at this point. The police will be on their way to take a closer look at everything. In the meantime, we'd like you to wait downstairs.”

 

Twenty minutes later two officers arrived in a single car with sirens off. They took dutiful notice of me where I sat on the porch with a cigarette, but they said nothing before meeting one of the paramedics in the doorway. The three conferred for a few minutes before one of the cops approached me.

“You're the one who called in the emergency?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “My name is Charlie Blakeman.”

“I'm Detective Sutton,” he said. “Can I ask you for identification?”

I gave him my driver's license. The picture on it was almost fifteen years old, taken in high school, before I'd even met Sophie, but he hardly looked at it.

“What's your relationship with the victim?”

“I'm just an old friend from college. I came to visit for the weekend.”

“All right,” he said. “I'd like you to tell me about the two of you, about what happened.”

How far back did he want me to go? How much would be necessary or even helpful? I said that we hadn't seen each other for years until she'd come to a party at my house in Manhattan a few weeks before, and that she'd invited me to visit for the weekend. He wrote in a continuous scribble, seeming to give equal weight to each word, not to value any one fact above another, making it impossible to know whether he found this history irrelevant or telling in some way. I told him that we'd both had quite a lot to drink the night before, that she'd left me to sleep in another room and gone off to bed. I didn't mention that we'd been together first. He kept writing, letting me go on with the story.

That morning, I said, I'd gone out for a drive, hoping to go into town to buy us breakfast, but I'd gotten lost and been gone from the house for a few hours. I knew this sounded improbable, but I didn't want to mention going to the abbey. I was saving that story for Sophie; it would spoil if I told it to anyone else first. I only repeated that I'd gotten lost and returned later than intended. Then I'd gone upstairs to look for her. When she wouldn't wake, I called 911.

He kept writing for a minute after I'd finished talking. I couldn't tell if he was still transcribing my words or adding
his own commentary about my demeanor or some inconsistency in what I'd said. Once he'd finished, he looked up at me.

“Do you know who William Crane is?”

It was as though he'd only heard the things I hadn't said.

“That's her father-in-law.”

“She's married?”

‘

He wrote all this down carefully.

“Was your friend suffering from any kind of emotional difficulty?”

“She was pretty shaken up about Crane's death. Do you mind if I ask where you got his name?”

He looked me over.

“It was on the bottle of pills she took.”

“She took pills? What kind of pills?”

“We don't know that yet,” he said. “So she was depressed after her father-in-law died?”

“I don't know if I would call it depression. Like I told you, she'd split up with her husband. She'd started drinking again, which she'd quit for years. But she didn't kill herself, if that's what you mean. I'm sure of it.”

He stopped taking notes and looked up. For the first time since we'd started talking he seemed truly interested in what I had to say.

“What makes you think that?”

“She's a Catholic,” I said. “It's against her religion.”

He seemed to think I was trying to make his job difficult with this remark, but he responded calmly.

“I'm Catholic myself. Suffice it to say she wouldn't be the first of my coreligionists to contradict Church doctrine.”

“My family is Catholic,” I said, “and I wouldn't tell you this about any of them. But Sophie took it very seriously. She really believed. She would have been sending herself to hell.”

“Okay,” he said. He wrote a few more lines down. “Thanks for that. And do you know anything about these pills?”

“No.”

“There were two empty bottles near the bed. It's possible that she'd been taking them to get to sleep, that there were just one or two left in each bottle, and she overestimated, things mixed with the alcohol, et cetera. Especially if she wasn't used to drinking.”

He was saying all this for my sake. He'd already decided what had happened, though he hadn't even been inside.

“We'll figure this all out in the next few days. But I want to be honest with you. In my experience it's not easy to overdose accidentally on these kinds of prescriptions. I suspect she knew what she was doing.”

He told me to wait a bit longer while he joined the others inside.

 

When they came out again, they brought Sophie with them, zipped up in a bag on the stretcher. I turned away as they loaded her into the ambulance. Officer Sutton stayed behind to talk with me. At the end of our conversation, he handed me his business card and took down my cell phone number.

“Thanks for your help,” he said. “And I'm sorry for the loss. We're going to know a lot more within the next twenty-four hours. You should feel free to give us a call if anything occurs to you. We might have some more questions for you, so for the time being, you probably shouldn't go anywhere.”

“I won't,” I promised. He hardly needed to ask. There was nowhere left on earth for me to go.

THAT NIGHT SOPHIE slept uncomfortably but deeply. When the buzzer woke her in the morning, her neck was stiff where it had been pressed against the arm of the chair. She wondered how she'd look to whoever was on the other side of the door. Her clothes were wrinkled. Her hair, grown longer than she usually wore it, was pressed into an awkward part. Her watch said eight o'clock. She didn't expect hospice for hours.

Through the peephole she saw two men, one white and one black, both of them large. They didn't look unfriendly, but Sophie had no idea what kind of business they might have there. She put the chain lock on before opening the door wide enough to look out.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“We're here to deliver the bed,” one of the men answered.

“The bed?”

“Is there a patient here who needs a hospital bed?”

Sophie had imagined some kind of barrier or guardrail being installed for Crane. She hadn't thought they would
bring an entirely new bed. She unlocked the chain and opened the door. Beside the men in the hall were several large boxes and a mattress. She stepped aside as they carried them into the apartment.

“Where do you want this set up?”

“In the bedroom, I suppose.”

She led them there and turned on the lights. Crane didn't stir.

“Don't worry about him,” Sophie said. “He's a heavy sleeper.”

The men went about their work without another word, assembling a full hospital bed with a steel frame on wheels and a handheld electric adjuster like an old two-buttoned remote control. After they set it up, they showed her how to work the thing. Then one of the men looked over to Crane.

“We can move him if you want.”

She considered this. He would feel helpless being handled by these men, but this wasn't her first concern. She hadn't bought diapers yet, and she wasn't sure if he'd made it cleanly through the night.

“Will you give me a moment to wake him?”

They retreated discreetly from the room. At the bedside Sophie met the mild stench of sweat and sleep, but nothing to indicate that he'd shit himself again. She shook him lightly until his eyes opened. He looked frightened and confused, as he had when she'd found him on the floor. In these moments it was impossible not to care for him, no matter how difficult he was when he was truly himself.

“Good morning,” she said, trying to sound soothing.

“What is it?”

He might have been speaking about the world before his eyes.

“We're going to move you into another bed. It will only take a second. You'll be safer there, and more comfortable. You'll be able to sit up or put your legs up. And you won't fall out again.”

She wasn't sure he still remembered his fall. She waited for him to respond, though she didn't need his consent for anything. He had no control over what happened to his body anymore. If she wanted him moved, he would be moved. He seemed to know as much, and he nodded feebly. She called the men back in, expecting them to help him up and walk him to the bed. Instead they put their hands beneath him and lifted, as though carrying another mattress. After setting him on the new bed, they pulled a sheet and blanket over him with an odd tenderness.

“You'll be very comfortable here,” one of the men said.

When they'd left, Sophie stripped the now-empty bed and made it up with clean sheets from the closet. When she'd finished, she checked on Crane. He was awake but unresponsive, his face frozen in a look of defeat. He was in exactly the position he'd been fighting desperately all this time to escape: dying in a hospital bed. Now that he was settled in this new bed with its thick barriers, she could go about the day without worrying. But the point was precisely to worry over him, so she still spent the morning sitting in his room. Every few minutes she got up and stood at his side. She tried to make him take a drink, which he did only once.

While she watched him she thought about Tom and the fire like the memory of a bad dream. Perhaps she kept herself bound to Crane's side because she knew those folders were waiting in the other room, and she didn't want to hear the story they had to tell her.

 

When the woman from hospice came to relieve her, Sophie went to the pharmacy, where she bought a package of adult diapers and a large, soft sponge made for washing skin rather than dishes. She refilled the prescription for Crane's pills, though there were plenty left. She did it only for the convenience, she told herself, so that he wouldn't be left to suffer if they ran out at an awkward time.

Back in the apartment, she saw the woman out, gave Crane a pill, and sat in the living room. Having avoided them all day, she now went to the folders with urgency. She needed to prove what she already knew: that the police had made a mistake, that Crane was responsible. It was amazing how the stories proliferated, and how many of them he had saved. She was now on folder number three. Still she found only more references to “suspicion” falling on “the victim's son.”

Before then, Tom had been treated as a victim himself, but now he was a relation at best. They never gave his name or provided a picture, but one article mentioned that he'd gone to live with an aunt out of state. These articles would sometimes mention, in a stray paragraph near the end, that Crane's condition was unchanged or that doctors were guarded but hopeful. Finally, near the end of the pile, came a piece that focused directly on Crane. “UM Professor Hurt in Fire Regains Consciousness.” Below this headline it said that the police would interview Crane within the day. The next page in the folder was the first article that named Crane as a suspect. More precisely, it said that he had “claimed responsibility” for the fire.

Sophie moved quickly through the rest of the clips, which became shorter after that. They outlined the process of his confession, his plea deal with prosecutors, his release from the hospital into the custody of the police. The fourth folder ended with the start of his prison term. She felt no
satisfaction from arriving at this inevitable end. The story still hung unresolved.