What Happened to Sophie Wilder (26 page)

I changed the sheets on Sophie's bed, where I spent the rest of the day.

 

In the morning, Detective Sutton called my cell phone.

“Is there any news?” I asked.

“Not much,” he said. “But we'd like to follow up with you. Just run through a few more questions.”

“That's fine.”

“Where are you now?”

“I'm at the house.”

“Ms. O'Brien's house?”

“Yes.”

“You just moved right in?”

“I thought you wanted me to stay.”

“Stay in the area,” he said. “In the country. Stay available. I didn't mean in the house.”

“I'm sorry, I misunderstood. I hope it doesn't cause any problems.”

“No, no,” he said. “I suppose you're entitled.”

“Well, I'm here now.”

“All right. That's fine. I'll be over in about an hour.”

 

We sat on the porch, going through things. He asked me how long it had been since I'd seen Sophie before that week. I couldn't say for sure.

I told him about the wedding we'd both gone to about a year before. I'd danced drunkenly with Sophie, holding her close. “Are you happy?” I whispered to her. She didn't answer but stiffened in my arms. We danced until the end of the song. It was followed by something faster, and everyone stormed the dance floor to jump around in amorphous groups. The crowd absorbed and separated us, and we didn't speak again for the rest of the night. I kept drinking. Eventually I convinced one of the bridesmaids—a high school friend of the bride's whom I'd never met before and never did again—to come up to my
hotel room for some mild messing around before we both passed out. By the time I woke up, I hardly remembered the incident with Sophie. I hadn't thought about it since.

“So you'd say it was about a year?” Sutton asked, smiling slightly.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I'm a bit out of sorts, and I'm not really sure what's relevant and what isn't.”

“Might as well err on the side of inclusion.”

After that, he asked me all the same questions he'd asked before. He didn't seem to have any new angle of approach; he just wanted me to repeat everything.

“Has something happened?” I asked. “Is there something in particular that you're trying to find out?”

“Not really,” he said. “Cause of death was definitely an overdose. I know you don't want to hear this, but I'm afraid it's unlikely to be ruled accidental. There were just too many pills in her system. We wanted to do some follow-up, since the timing lends itself to some suspicion.”

“The timing?”

“About a month ago Mrs. O'Brien made some substantial changes to her will.”

I didn't think people our age even had wills, perhaps because I didn't have anything to leave behind.

“Well,” I said, “her husband left her. Maybe it made her rethink certain things.”

“So she didn't tell you anything about this?” he asked. He gave a clipped wave at the front door, as though welcoming me.

I leave it to you
.

“The house?”

“The house,” he said. “And a small trust to pay for its upkeep. And the car. Everything else—there's a fair amount still left from her parents' estate and royalties from
a book she wrote—was divided between her husband, a few churches, something called the Manhattan Speech Pathology Center, and a woman named Elizabeth O'Brien. The husband's mother, I guess?”

“His aunt.”

“And you didn't know about this?”

“She didn't tell me. I mean, not really. She told me I could stay for a while, that she wasn't going to be using the house. But there was never any talk about wills or anything like that.”

This seemed to satisfy him.

“Of course, on a certain level it makes plenty of sense,” Sutton said. “If she knew she was going to do this and didn't want these old family assets to go to her estranged husband. But it's a bit odd that it would be just these two items. There's an investment portfolio, which the lawyers tell us is worth more than the house and the car combined, and a lot of that goes to him. So it's not just about wanting to keep things from the guy.”

“Her parents are here,” I said.

“They're here?”

“Their ghosts.” I knew this wasn't the time for such propositions, so I tried to explain what I meant in rational terms. “The house and the car were the last things she shared with her parents. She would want them to go to someone who would hold on to them, make use of them.”

“All right. Do you have anything else to add?”

“I still don't think she did it on purpose.”

“Because of her religion?”

“She wouldn't send herself to hell.”

He seemed to consider this now not as an officer of the law, but as a man speaking with a confused boy.

“Unless she was going there either way.”

He'd made himself uncomfortable with this speculation, and he stood up from the chair. He paced the length of the porch before returning to me.

“Did the two of you have a fight or anything? Is there something that might have happened between you the other night to precipitate something like this?”

It would have been easy enough for them to tell that we'd slept together just a few hours before she died.

“No,” I said. “Whatever happened had nothing to do with me.”

This was true. It had never had anything to do with me.

“Well, I think that's it for now. We're probably going to close everything up on this pretty soon, but we may want to speak with you again. You don't have to stay, just answer your phone.”

“All right,” I said. “And what about the house?”

“That's not really my area. The lawyer executing the will should be in touch with you soon. These things take some time to sort out, but assuming the husband doesn't plan to contest it, you'll be able to start making arrangements before too long. Beyond that, I can't really say.”

I walked him to his car and watched him leave. Once he was gone, I stood in the driveway, wondering what to do now. The wind had picked up, and it rattled the screen door before passing into the house, over the floorboards, the stairs.

 

It was a short way from town to the main southern route. Within a few minutes I was on the road to New York. I hadn't done much highway driving before, and I would have been terrified if I'd cared enough to be. Instead, I felt the same anger toward the car that Sophie had described to me. It wasn't a gift she had left me, but a burden. What was
I expected to do with it? It would have been very easy to give up control of the car, to take my hands from the wheel, freeing it to drift toward the median, destroying itself and me with it—destroying the whole story, really, since I alone remained to tell it. What kept me from it was not any great desire to persist, but the feeling that Sophie had a plan.

I parked a few blocks from Washington Square and walked to Gerhard's house. It felt as though I'd been gone for a very long time. I imagined a scene out of a dream or fable: the house occupied by strangers who would treat me as an interloper and tell me that they'd been living there for years, since those two strange cousins disappeared all that time ago. Instead, I saw Max coming down the stairs with his suitcase in his hand.

“Groucho Marx–grade timing,” he said when he saw me standing near the door. “Where the fuck have you been?”

So then he had noticed that I was gone.

“Something terrible has happened,” I told him.

“No shit,” he said. “Daddy's home.”

Max pointed to the couch, where Gerhard sat slumped over, his head in his hands. It had been months since I'd seen him.

“Welcome back,” I called to him.

He didn't respond.

“Spoiled children,” he said, to no one in particular. “A bunch of spoiled children.”

Then he walked out of the room, into the kitchen, and in his absence I saw the aquarium. One of the glass panels was shattered, and the water and the fish were gone. A piece of the wrought-iron frame that should have been holding the missing panel was bent back into the tank. The damage was not the result of casual work; someone had committed real violence against the thing.

Max had set his suitcase down and was heading back up the stairs.

“Come on, Charlie,” he said. “I need you to give me a hand.”

“What the fuck happened?” I asked him on the second floor.

“Tough to say for sure,” Max answered. “I had a few chums over last night. Nothing too involved. But there was an altercation. Funny thing for this crowd, as I don't need to tell you. Not really men of action. The best lack all conviction, and so on. But Rick Tanner threw Jeff into the fish tank.”

“Jesus.”

“It didn't seem that bad at the time.”

“They fucking totaled it.”

“I'm not going to argue that the optics are good, hindsight-wise. I'm saying how it seemed to us at the time. You're going to have to trust me on that, since you weren't here. Which, we could have used you around. Anyway, I had every intention of cleaning things up in the morning. But it seems that the water leaked out of the tank overnight.”

“Leaked? They smashed the thing open.”

“Which certainly explains the leak. The problem is that the fish don't do well without water. Not an insurmountable problem. That is, the water problem certainly proved insurmountable for the fish. I mean more that the fish problem need not have been insurmountable for us. Except that Gerhard arrived this morning from some gutturally-articulated metropolis in the Benelux.”

He was enjoying it all, in his way. Not that he would have wished it to happen, but he was glad he could at least get a good performance out of it.

“Max,” I said.

“I know, I know.” He waved me back to silence. “A little improbable in its timing, the return of Gottlieb. All I can say is that's how it happened. When you write it into the follow-up, you'll be free to make adjustments for the sake of plausibility.”

“Max,” I said again, and this time he fell quiet. “I can't have this conversation right now.”

“That's for sure,” Max answered. “He wants us out effective immediately. He said those fish were the most important thing in his life. I told him that if this was true, he ought to have visited them more often. Which went about how you'd expect. So: the world is all before us. Hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow. I'm headed up to the
pater familias
tonight. There's room for you, of course, though I guess you'll want to see your mom.”

As he said that, I very much did.

“Sophie's dead,” I told him.

A strange thing happened, then. Max's mask collapsed, and the hidden thing that lay beneath it was laid bare. The last time I'd seen this had been when my father died, and it was awful to watch. So much of Max's act depended on his commitment to it, on the understanding that nothing would ever truly penetrate. However much this exasperated, it also comforted. Once Max broke down, there could be no question that the loss was real.

“What happened?”

“They're not really sure,” I said. “She died in her sleep.”

“I'm sorry,” said Max. “I know how important she was to you.”

“We hadn't been close in years.”

“So much the worse.”

 

Nearly everything in the house belonged to Gerhard. I had only clothes and books to pack. I took as many as one bag would fit and left the rest behind. I said I'd come back once Gerhard had calmed down, but I suspected already that I would never return. I might have explained that I hadn't been there when the accident happened, that I would have saved the fish somehow if I could have. But who can really say what I would have done differently if I'd been there?

Downstairs, Gerhard stood crying in front of the aquarium. The sight of him, this man who had been so generous to us in his absence, set free all the despair I'd been feeling. We had been given something beautiful, asked only to watch over it. We'd been careless, and now it was all in ruin.

“Tomorrow, I'll start looking for a place,” Max said as we walked out. “I'm sure we could find something nearly as big if we looked in Brooklyn.”

“I'm leaving town for a while,” I answered.

“Right on,” he answered after a moment. “Morgan might be moving out of the loft on West Broadway, so the guys will be looking for someone to take his room. That should work out pretty well.”

“Sounds good.”

We were walking along the south end of the park.

“Do you want a ride uptown?” I asked.

“You going to treat me to a cab?”

“I've got Sophie's Jaguar.”

“Jesus, Charlie. You stole her car?”

“She left it to me.”

We drove in silence to my uncle's building on the Upper West Side. I double-parked and got out to help unload Max's bags.

“I might not see you for a while,” I said.

“Getting away will be good for you,” he said. “You can get back to work.”

“I think I might.”

“Do you know where you're headed?”

“I have some ideas.”

“Charlie,” he told me. “I'm sorry I ruined things between the two of you.”

“It was all a long time ago.”

“I know. And I've been sorry about it for a long time.” He surprised me then by pulling me into a hug. “I love you, Charlie.”