by David Payne
Ransom turned and saw the officer staring through the kitchen screen under a shelved hand.
“Finally,” he said to Marcel, not inaudibly. “Come in.”
“Sergeant Tommy Thomason,” said the heavy-gutted country man, whose egregious comb-over seemed somehow out of keeping with the compassionate Weltschmerz in his face. “This here’s Officer Johnson.” He nodded to a youthful black companion with a military formality of bearing and a weight lifter’s build, who regarded Ransom and Marcel as though he hoped this call might blossom into the heroic crisis he’d been training for for years. “Dispatcher said you had some kind of break-in?”
Ransom moved aside to let them see. When she’d brought Hope and Charlie in the house, Claire had found the kitchen a shambles—almost literally so. The chicken, which Ran had left mounded on the platter, was strewn everywhere. Torn hunks had been thrown against the walls and cabinets, leaving shiny tracks of grease. Here and there on the floor, small deposits of meat had been regurgitated together with broken bits of bloody bone.
“Dag,” said Thomason, advancing. “Something sure made a mess. Anything stole?”
“Not that we’ve been able to tell.”
“Door locked?”
“We never lock the door.”
They all turned as Claire came in.
“This is my wife, Sergeant Thomason.”
“Evening, ma’am.”
“Are they down?” Ran asked.
Claire gave him the parental squint. “In a manner of speaking.”
Thomason gingerly poked a mangled breast with the pen from his pocket protector. “How old’s y’all’s kids?”
“Four and two.”
“Dag!” Thomason’s expression sprang into alarming animation. “I got me two grandkids that old. How old are you, Mr. Hill?”
“Forty-five,” Ran answered tersely.
“You ain’t! I’m forty-five—last June the ninth! You don’t look no older than Johnson here.”
For an instant, Ransom and Thomason faced off like alternate selves encountering each other at the shadowy intersection of the road-less-traveled-by. Shaped by processes only distantly related to what Ransom understood as life, the policeman had let himself go in a manner Ransom never could, yet Thomason seemed comfortable in his skin in ways that Ran could only speculate about. After brief consideration, neither seemed inclined to regret his chosen path.
“Can you tell us what happened here, Sergeant?” Claire asked.
“I got me a theory. Johnson?”
“Animal?”
Claire turned a vindicated stare on Ran. “Isn’t that what I said? That’s exactly what I said.”
“Um-hm. I think you may have nailed it, ma’am.” Thomason held Ransom’s doubtful stare. “Y’all got a cat?”
“No, we don’t,” said Ran. “And, frankly, I don’t see a cat…”
“I ain’t saying cat, necessarily. Coulda been a possum or raccoon. Squirrel, even.”
“A squirrel…” Ransom looked at Marcel, making no effort to conceal his mirth.
Thomason shook his head. “Wouldn’t rule it out, Mr. Hill. When it comes to demolition power, pound for pound and ounce for ounce, there’s few things can compare to a gray squirrel. Y’all know Titus Nevers down the road?”
“I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure.”
“Last summer, Titus took his wife to Myrtle Beach for their anniversary. Played a round of miniature golf, had a nice dinner at the Red Lobster, then turned around and drove back. When they got home, looked like Al Capone and his whole gang had shot up the place with tommy guns. Know what it was?”
“I’m going to guess a squirrel,” Ransom said.
“Yes, sir. One itty-bitty little squirrel. Come in through this gap beneath the eave, dug up all the houseplants, toppled a eight-foot Schefflera, then sat looking out the window trying to chew out through the wall. Damn near made it, too, only he bit into a hot one-ten and fried up crisp as that there chicken. Cost the insurance company thirty-seven hundred dollars and took damn near a month to put back what that dag thing done in a half workday with no overtime.”
Claire put her hand over her mouth, and Marcel made a low, deep chortle.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Thomason, “it’s right funny, in a way. But let me tell you, Titus and Francine won’t doing that much laughing.”
“Do squirrels eat meat?” said Ran.
Thomason frowned. “Which is why I’m leaning toward a possum or raccoon, Mr. Hill. Could’ve come up from the crawl space. Old place like this, chances are you got a rotted board someplace.”
“We do!” Claire said. “Ran found one yesterday. Didn’t you, Ran?”
Ransom pointed. “Officer Thomason, do you see this pot?” Looking refreshed after its bath—one might have thought it newly scoured and blacked—Exhibit A now sat on the table. “When I left here this afternoon, that pot was upstairs in the tub. Are you suggesting this squirrel—Super Squirrel we’ll call him—picked it up, brought it down the steps, and set it upright on the dining table?”
This finally seemed to give his persecutors pause.
“Or maybe it was a flying squirrel,” said Ran, unwisely pressing his advantage. “Maybe he airlifted it down here and did a drop with a top secret self-destructing parachute?”
Thomason looked grieved. “Now, Mr. Hill, there’s no need to take that tone. None a’tall. All we’re trying to do here is put our heads together to figure out your problem.”
“You’re right,” said Ransom. “You’re absolutely right. Sorry.”
“Maybe you moved it and forgot,” suggested Claire.
Ran met her eyes and read the implication. “Absolutely not. No way. I’m one hundred percent sure, no, two hundred percent sure that pot was in the bathtub when I left.”
“What was it doing in your bathtub, Mr. Hill, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“I put it there to soak. As far as I can figure, the only person who could have moved it is the person who did all this—i.e., the burglar.”
Thomason frowned and shook his head. “Problem is, Mr. Hill, we see a fair amount of burglaries, and this ain’t really got the feel. I mean, what’s your notion? Fella breaks in, burgles your chicken, makes a mess, then runs off, leaving all that silver in the cupboard there, all that stereo equipment in the other room, plus twenty other things in plain sight he could’ve sold?”
“What about some high school kids?”
“I ain’t never seen no high school kids leave scat, have you?” He nodded to one of the half-digested piles. “That looks more like a hairball th’owed up by a cat.”
Ransom weighed the point. “So you think it was an animal.”
“That’s my best guess.”
“I’d like to say you’ve persuaded me, Sergeant.”
“But you just ain’t sure.”
“I’m not.”
Thomason regarded him with the resigned, unresentful expression of one whose best work was frequently greeted with disappointment.
“Could you at least dust for fingerprints?”
Thomason and Johnson exchanged long-suffering looks, and the sergeant shook his head regretfully. “I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Hill. On the subject of law enforcement, TV’s messed with people’s minds. We’re a little department here. Getting forensics in means calling down a two-man team from Columbia to the tune of two hundred and fifty bucks a hour. That’s taxpayer money, Mr. Hill. If it was someone else, would you want us to spend it over six dollars’ worth of chicken?”
“I just want to know my wife and kids are safe in our own home.”
“I understand that, Mr. Hill, I truly do. My daddy was a auto mechanic, and one thing he always taught me is look for the simple explanation first. I mean, no sense tearing down a engine if all you need’s a eighty-nine-cent plug, know what I mean? Simplest explanation here’s a animal.” He reached into his pocket and handed Ransom a card. “You have any other problems, just give a holler.”
“W
ell, thanks for coming out.”
“You’re welcome. Come on, Johnson.”
“Night,” said Johnson.
Ransom let them out and turned around. “Well, guys, I guess chicken wasn’t in the cards. What say we order in Chinese?”
Claire and Cell both hooted.
He gave them a sly smirk and allowed the warmth to spread. Then his face turned grave. “That pot was in the bathtub when I left.”
EIGHTEEN
Charleston is burning, Addie dreams. The smell, which fire releases from sodden foundation timbers where the sea has crept, is in the bed with her when she awakes. It’s coming from her husband, who is also there, reeking of woodsmoke, with soured claret on his breath. Lying on his back, Harlan still has on his breeches, and his tall tan boots have stained the bridal bed a color little different from the stenciled maple leaf of blood she finds beneath her. His soot-smutched face is set in a frown of concentrated worry she’s never seen him wear awake. His left shoulder is bare; his right arm, still in the sleeve of his shirt—his beautiful, ruined shirt of fine Sea Island cotton woven in an English mill—is slung across his gathered brow, warding something off. It is as though the process of undressing, in the condition in which he undertook it, proved to be too much.
She feels, for a moment, as she reorients, ill and reeling. The moment after, resigned. Now she is furious. Furious! The marriage is over. She will return to Charleston immediately. Today. This hour. Explanations? She wants none. What explanations could he give? And on her wedding night! But how could she have misjudged him so egregiously? The rumors—the ones she dismissed so blithely during the courtship—come flying back. What gave her the foolish confidence to think that she could judge with clearer eyes than social Charleston had? The sob surprises Addie, coming now from so far down, the region where those sodden timbers lie. Oh, such grief. Not tears, not weeping, an animal moan she tries, and fails, to hold back with both hands.
Yet does she bear some fault in this? Has she not lived honorably? What has God to put to her account to punish her like this?
You married without love. The voice she used to hear more frequently and hasn’t listened to in years speaks up and answers her. (Whose voice is this?) Oh, she has made a terrible mistake, a ruinous, soul-murdering mistake! And what is she to do?
What else is there, but to accept responsibility, confess her fault, and call it off? Too late, yes, but better now than in a year from now, or ten. Yes, she will tell him. She will wake him now.
Yet to return, disgraced, to Charleston, and after just one day…To face the looks and whispers, the pious mouthings of sympathy under eyes that scintillate with glee…(Louisa Elliott!) Oh, horrible, horrible. Is there not some way, any way, to stay and salvage it, some way for the cup to pass? Might not love, though absent now, still grow?
Yet the voice says, No, it never will, and Addie remembers now why she stopped listening to the voice. To wait for Gabriel forever, even should he never come, even should she die, untouched, an old maid like her aunt—this price seemed too severe, inhumanly severe, and she got angry at the voice and shut it out. And what has reawakened it? That look with Jarry on the dock, a momentary glance exchanged over open water with a man she doesn’t even know, a Negro. What is God about? But, no, she will lose everything, but not her faith. Not that.
And look at Harlan in the bed, so fretful after all, so ill. Doesn’t she—as the first racking spasm of anger dissipates—owe him the chance to account for his behavior? And what, exactly, has he done? Perhaps his feelings were simply hurt (like hers). Perhaps he simply gave in to an impulse to flee (the same one she feels now). Perhaps he simply drank himself into insensibility—is he the first bridegroom to commit this particular felony against romance? Perhaps he simply had high hopes and saw them dashed like hers—enough to end a marriage over?
You do not love this man.
Yes, yes, there’s that, but yesterday, when she admired the rowers and the parakeets, when the sky looked like a crystal bowl that, if you struck it with a mallet, just might ring, love or its absence seemed beside the point. Maybe tomorrow it will seem beside the point again. (Oh, let it pass!)
But, no, impossible—she must go!
The truth is, she does not know what to do. All Addie knows right now is she must flee this room of funerary urns and bittersweet. She must get out of this house and walk.
But the library doors are open, and though she tries to hurry past, she’s spied by Percival and cannot honorably withdraw.
“My dear!” he hails her in a tone of mirth, and then he sees her face. “Great God, Addie, what has happened?”
Her blue eyes, which can conceal nothing, are red and harrowed. She shakes her head, trying to stop tears; she fails.
“Please,” he says. “Please, my dear, sit down.” He pats the chair, and she obeys. “Can I send for something? Do you require a doctor? Are you ill? How can I assist you?”
“You’re kind. No, thank you, nothing.”
“What is it, Addie? What’s the matter?”
“Harlan left me. He was gone all night,” she sobs. “I don’t know where he went.”
“And he has not returned?”
“No, he’s upstairs in the bed right now, sound asleep, still in his clothes, still in his filthy, spattered boots.”
Behind his hazel eyes, he works the sums. “I’m sorry, Addie, so very sorry, my dear. You’ve had a wretched night, a horrid night, one that you did not deserve.”
She looks up now. Her tone is fierce. “Tell me where he went.”
“Ah,” says Percival, “ah, my dear, that I cannot do. And I think I know you well enough, I think I’ve seen enough of you, to know you know I can’t.”
“Was it you who left the book?”
“What book?”
She studies his expression closely. “My Byron. Someone put it by my door last night.”
“I haven’t climbed those stairs in two and a half years.”
“It was Jarry then,” she says, confirmed in her suspicion. “He marked the place at ‘Stanzas to Augusta’—why?”
Percival seems at a loss. “Because we spoke about the poem yesterday—that would be my guess.”
“Tell me why you quoted it to me.”
“My dear! The verses simply popped into my head. I had no ulterior motive. And yet…” His gaze goes past her shoulder now and concentrates on something in the distance.
“And yet?”
“You know who she was, of course….”
“Augusta Leigh was Byron’s sister.”
“His half sister, yes. You’re too young to remember, but I vividly recall, Addie, when news of their relations first came out. The throng of his adorers, who’d made Byron a matinee idol, their little poppet and their doll, all turned against him. The marquises and countesses, who’d showered him with jewels and raised their skirts for him, drove him from sunny England in disgrace. I met him some time after that….”
“You met Byron?”
He nods. “In Italy, at Strà, in ’20, I believe it was. He was living with the countess Guiccioli, dabbling in Italian politics, being watched by the police. He was not then, Addie, the man you probably imagine. His famous jet-black hair had grayed. Though only thirty-two, he was fat and had bad teeth. His breath was not entirely fresh, and he had a portion of his breakfast on his coat—a three-minute egg, judging from appearances. He was still a brilliant talker, but he talked like someone repeating old stories he’d long since lost interest in, someone who’s afraid to stop. He was a dry husk rattling around the empty core of what he’d been. Yet out of his misery, he wrote:
‘It hath taught me that what I most cherish’d
Deserved to be dearest of all.’
And what he most cherished was Augusta Leigh. Yesterday, when I quoted that, you said it seemed inarguable. Does an argument now suggest itself to you?”
“That is a dark story, sir,” she answers, in a stern and formal tone.
“I
t is, indeed. And the question it raises—the one it’s always raised for me—is which was it that ruined him: whether it was loving Augusta, or failing to….”
Addie’s brows knit on this. “You mean to say…”
“I mean to say—to ask, merely—if, in leaving her, he shirked a truer fate assigned to him by God.”
“It’s hard for me to credit that God—at least the God I know—would assign him—or anyone—a fate like that.”
“Perhaps you have a better vantage point from which to judge His mind,” he replies. “For where I sit, it seems to me that He, or they”—he nods to the bóveda now—“whatever guiding spirits rule our lives, sometimes assign uncommon spirits uncommon tasks, tasks the world does not know how to evaluate and therefore has no right to judge. Mine, which I railed against and resisted tooth and nail, was to love a woman of a different race, a woman the law considers three-fifths human, whom I own outright the way I own the horses in my stable, and there are horses in my stable for which I paid far more. Yet I loved Paloma, Addie, better than I ever did my wife, and most of what I know of life, the little bit, I learned from her, or through her. I thank God every day for our relationship, yet I failed Paloma in one profound and crucial way, and that failure, as I told you yesterday, touched our children, hers and mine. What I didn’t say, what I thought and was afraid to tell you, was that it might—indeed almost surely would and must—touch you. And now it has. I won’t palliate your husband’s fault. Harlan has much to answer for. But the misery you feel right now—the root and head of it is me.”
“But what is it for which you blame yourself?”
“To answer that, I must be candid. I did not approve your marriage, Addie. Not when Harlan told me of his plans some months ago; nor do I approve it now.”
She colors violently. “Meaning, you do not approve of me….”
“The opposite. I disapprove the marriage for your sake as much as for my son’s.”
“But why? I am confused.”
“These matters are difficult to unravel, Addie. They go back more than forty years,” he says. “Yesterday, I told you of that time in Cuba when my wife grew ill and died.”