Sunday's Silence: A Novel

by Gina nahai

  “Where is she?”

  The coroner’s assistant came out of the dining room with his hands still gloved, and nodded at the woman to let Adam in.

  “See for yourself,” he told Adam.

  A body, wrapped in dark plastic, lay faceup on the dining room table. On one side of it stood a police investigator with Coke-bottle glasses and a thin mustache. On the other side Blue stood alone.

  The PROFESSOR, Adam learned from the investigator, had died after drinking a glass of water laced with strychnine. The coroner’s report would estimate five parts poison to one part water. It was the same poison Blue drank at church services, the same one Holy Rollers used to prove the strength of their faith. The Professor, of course, was not a Holy Roller and had never participated in poison drinking. Nor was he—a man who had planned to leave the city and whose bags were packed and neatly arranged at the bottom of the stairs—a likely candidate for suicide.

  He had died at approximately 2:00 a.m. following Adam’s visit to their house the previous day. Blue reported having found him at 5:30. He had been sitting on the only chair in the dining room, and he had on his shoes and dress shirt, was well shaven and groomed. His hat lay on the table before him.

  At six o’clock she had called the police to report the death. They had found Blue dry-eyed and calm—not the expected appearance, the investigator would note in his report, of a woman who has just found her husband dead.

  The sheriff asked if Blue knew what killed the Professor.

  “Strychnine,” she said without hesitation, “and too many secrets.” “My HUSBAND CALLED me in the dark and said it was time to leave. ”

  “It’s midnight, ” he said. “Your bags are packed. ”

  “The church people would think we had left because of Little Sam s death. ‘She killed Little Sam Jenkins, ’ they would say, ‘and left to hide from the law. ’

  “Our neighbors would believe my husband took me away to hide from you—that he gave up his job to save his marriage.

  “My friends would realise they never knew me at all—that I had never belonged with them and never deserved their trust.

  “All the while my husband and I would be driving West— toward Memphis, he told me, and beyond it, to where Fate might take us.

  “We had been outsiders, he and I, all of our lives. We had never belonged with anyone. It mattered little where we went now, as long as we did not lose each other, he said.

  “I got up from the bed and put on the dress he had laid out for me. I washed my face, looked at myself one last time in the mirror above the bathroom sink. I remembered the day I had walked into that room for the first time, when I had wished I couldflood the house with anger, float away and leave the Professor to die.

  “He was waiting for me in the bedroom.

  “I thought about a life away from you and your eyes, a life of silence and solitude and the never-ending need to speak.

  “This is what I have learned through the years of living with the loss of my mother, then my child: the most real presence of all is the absence of those we love.

  “I came back into the bedroom again and told him it was true—that I had loved you with my flesh and also in my thoughts, that I had told you what I was sworn never to reveal, placed his fate—my husband who had never done me wrong— in the hands of his enemy. I told him I would go away with him and leave you, but that I knew, just as he did, that we had run out of places to go and ways to reinvent ourselves. I told him it was not enough to pretend any more.

  “It’s not about finding the way out, ” I said, showing him my hands. “It’s about finding the way to live at peace within the ma^e. ”

  It WOULDN’T BE easy to avoid being charged this time.

  Blue must know this, Adam imagined, but she seemed strangely indifferent—resigned, almost, to the inevitable. She stood by the table with her hands crossed, answering the detective’s questions in an even tone. She told him where she kept her poison, how she mixed it with water, why she had not bothered to hide it from the Professor. She kept looking at the outline of the Professor’s body as she spoke: Inside the black plastic his frame appeared even smaller than it had been in life. His arms lay at his sides, and he looked more like a child than a man, and maybe that’s what intrigued her, what made her look as if she weren’t sure she knew the person inside the bag.

  She had done this before, Adam suddenly thought. She had seen her daughter wrapped up and taken away, buried her and fought to keep the memory of what she was before death.

  He went around the table and stood next to Blue, put his hand on her shoulder and asked if she wanted to sit down. She shook her head, and he thought she was about to cry, felt the cold in her skin and asked the detective if she could have a minute to get something warm to wear. The woman in the bomber jacket opened one of the suitcases in the hallway, and brought Blue an emerald-green raincoat with a wide belt.

  Just then Isiah Frank burst in.

  He was wearing a camel-hair overcoat with a fur collar. He had a cashmere scarf tossed around his neck, brown suede gloves tucked carefully into his pocket. He was carrying a cup of Turkish coffee he had brewed at home and brought along, and he was telling the junior detective assigned to guard the entry that he was out of line, interfering with a man who had urgent business with the police.

  “Crime scene my eye,” he told the detective when he found himself already in the dining room and before an audience. “There can’t be a scene if there hasn’t been a crime.”

  He raised his left hand when he saw Blue.

  “There you are!” he announced, pushing back the detective.

  “I came in the moment I heard.”

  He was in top form, Adam noted—as expansive and theatrical as any of the actors he had ever dressed. The detective seemed to have had experience dealing with him as well. He shook his head in dismay but did not try to interrupt Isiah or to force him to leave. Instead he humored Isiah, let him go through the motions without stopping him. It wasn’t proper police procedure, to be sure. He may have acted differently in another house, with another victim.

  Isiah walked up to the middle of the room and put his coffee cup on the dining-room table. Suddenly noticing the body, he twisted his mouth and drew back in horror.

  “Ugh!” he muttered. “I didn’t know he was here.”

  Adam wished the detective had kept Isiah out.

  “Let’s have a look,” Isiah said, and opened the zipper on the body bag halfway. He peeked at the Professor curiously—careful not to touch any part of him—then closed the zipper again.

  “That sure is a vintage tie,” he declared.

  He sat down on the chair where the Professor had died, and crossed his legs. Reaching for his cup, he drank gingerly, rested the cup and the saucer on his lap, and looked at the others.

  “The news is all over town,” he explained.

  He looked from Adam to Blue and then back to Adam again.

  “I thought for sure the poor girl is going to be harassed by these rogues in police drag. I figured I couldn’t count on you to set them straight.”

  He wasn’t smiling, but his eyes were filled with mischief— the awareness, Adam thought, that he could alter the course of another’s life by his own words. He raised an eyebrow at Adam and spoke with a flat voice.

  “I’m here to tell them she was with you all night.”

  He uttered the words as if they were true, waited, and fixed Adam with his eyes to dare him to react. He was betting on his own talent as an actor, Adam thought, on his ability to mold truth out of illusion.

  Conscious of the gravity of this lie, Adam studied Isiah but did not respond. Next to him he could feel Blue’s presence like heat, imagined the bright green raincoat against the white of her skin.

  Isiah was getting braver by the minute.

  “I saw her come in past midnight,” he spoke now directly to the detective. “I heard them both from the bedroom until morning.”

  He sat back
, took another sip of the coffee, and told the detective about the Armenian store clerk who read his fortune.

  “Forget Tarot,” he declared. “Coffee is most accurate.”

  Then he launched into a gossipy discussion of Adam’s affair with Blue.

  “Not that I blame the girl, you know,” he offered. “Who could have stayed loyal to that?” he motioned with his head toward the body bag.

  “Anyway. I let her out myself this morning.”

  He looked genuinely pleased with himself—triumphant in his performance.

  “She left a few minutes past five.”

  Inside the Professor’s dining room, all eyes focused on Adam.

  “Go ahead and tell them,” Isiah urged casually as he finished his coffee. “The truth, as they say, shall set you free.”

  Before him on the table, the coffee grinds had cast a web of black lines against the inside of the white porcelain cup.

  It was UP TO him now—to save her or to let her fall.

  Adam had been moving toward this moment from the start, he realized—from the moment he’d read about Sam’s death in the paper in Beirut and come back to find his own past. Blue had known this, of course, had warned him of it the first time they spoke. Isiah Frank must have known it, too. That’s why he’d kept such a close watch on Adam.

  He had left Appalachia hoping to overcome the loss and deception that had tainted his own and his ancestors’ lives and had returned to lay them to light and instead, Adam Watkins had become a character in the very story he had intended to write.

  He had come to bear witness—convinced of the importance of Truth, willing to accept its consequences. To do so now would mean to surrender Blue to her enemies—to tell them that she had confessed to killing Sam Jenkins, that she had not been with Adam the night the Professor died.

  To save her he would have to buy into Isiah Frank’s game of illusions, accept that they may never know the truth or their part in hiding it.

  She may have planned to kill the Professor all along, may have conspired with Isiah from the start.

  Or she may not have lied at all.

  Maybe her only sin was in hoping that Jenkins would die, her only infraction was in confessing her thoughts to Adam. Maybe he hadn’t been wrong, all those times when he had watched her next to him, when he had studied her every word and the very movement of her lips, when he had told himself he knew how to tell a lie from the truth, told himself that she was not lying.

  Maybe that was why she had sought him out, why she had not been afraid to tell him the story she knew he might use against her: because, like him, she believed in the importance of Truth.

  Adam had heard Blue’s version of her story and seen its characters live and die. He had existed within the tale and outside of it and yet, he was no closer now to solving the riddle than when he had first arrived.

  In the end, he realized, he would have to decide on faith.

  He would have to close his eyes, let her voice, all the words she had spoken to him, play again in his mind, settle into him like a slow summer wind, and he would have to decide if he believed them.

  Believing her, like making love to her, like holding a snake in prayer knowing it may kill or set one free—believing her would, in the end, have to be an act of faith.

  He pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lit it without looking up. Inhaling deeply, he held the smoke in his chest, felt it sting the inside of his lungs, then blew it out in a long, slow breath. He saw himself turning to Blue, saw her moving toward him the way she had done that first day in August.

  A phone rang in the distance and someone picked up. The investigator with the thick glasses shifted his weight on his legs and sat on the edge of the table. Next to him, Isiah Frank remained quiet and imperious and confident of his gambit.

  The investigator looked as if he was about to ask a question, or warn Adam of the implications of his words.

  “She was with me,” Adam said, his voice so steady, it surprised him.

  He let the realization of what he had done sink into him like a stone, felt the sadness, the sense of loss, spread inside his stomach and his chest until it had filled every hole. He wasn’t sorry he had lied.

  “She came in past midnight,” he told the detective. “Left just after five.”

  THERE WAS A MAN who had a secret, a secret so dark and frightening, he had sworn to protect it with his life or to die trying.

  As a hoy he had buried the secret in the garden of his grandmother’s house in a port city overlooking a wide and stormy river.

  But the secret had crept into the roots of the roses his grandmother grew in the garden, and it had climbed up the thorny stems of each flower, and it bloomed a thousand times in a thousand colors every year. When he saw this the boy uprooted the rose bushes and scooped out the dirt, packed it in a locked box, and smuggled it onto a fishing boat with a prayer that it would sink in the estuary where the river poured into the sea.

  But the secret had laced itself around every grain of dirt the boy had touched, and it had seeped under his fingernails and onto his clothes and the palms of his hands. He washed his hands in the river and burned his clothes, but then he went home to find that the water well had become contaminated with the dirt in the garden, and that the secret was flowing in every drop.

  So he drank all the water in the well, and then he told his parents he must go away—to a place where no one knew his past and where his secret would not be recognised. For years he lived in this new world aware that the secret flew in his veins and traveled under his skin, and when he could no longer stand the weight of the water in his chest and stomach, he traveled again, to a still newer place.

  As he got older the man watched the pores in his skin become bigger and more treacherous, and he felt the tears in his eyes flow more easily and in greater abundance. Then he realised he had devoted his life to a fight he was about to lose, that the secret was feeding off his body and getting stronger as the man grew weaker and that soon, his only choice would be to surrender. He tried to leave again, but he knew the secret would travel with him no matter where he went, and he was old and tired and unable to take chances alone.

  So he found a poison stronger than himself, mixed it in a glass of water, and drank it to drown the secret for all time.

  IN THE BOARDINGHOUSE. Isiah Frank had put away the garden furniture and covered his plants against frost. His cat was perched on the railing of Adam’s balcony with its back arched and its eyes wide-open. The wind blew cold and furious, rattling the chimes and raising the cat’s fur, but she seemed oblivious to the weather. She was watching Adam as if on a mission to relate his actions to her owner.

  Adam packed his few belongings and picked up his tape recorder and the pieces of the story he knew he would never write. He had left Isiah and Blue at the Professor’s house, promised the detective he would stay in town a while longer. With two witnesses and an alibi, a dead man no one had ever trusted or cared about, and the Professor’s fingerprints all over the glass of poison he had drunk, there was little chance the DA would prosecute. Adam knew the penalties of evading police. He was going to leave anyway.

  He pushed open the door to the Dutch boys’ room and saw their luggage and the few belongings they had stored with Isiah. He remembered the day he had arrived in this house, remembered the boys’ innocence, the comfort they seemed to take from one another’s friendship.

  Outside, the wind bit into him like ice. He saw the black woman who ran the antique shop across the street looking at him from behind the store window. She had on a yellow summer dress, a wide-brimmed straw hat with paper flowers and a ribbon hanging down the sides. He threw his bag onto the back seat and pulled away without looking back.

  He drove along Gay Street, past Nate’s and the Andrew Johnson Hotel, past the courthouse and the Bijou Theater. On the 158 on-ramp, he looked in the rearview mirror one last time and saw the city—its cobblestoned streets, its ancient cemeteries, the quiet river
that emerged from the mist every morning only to reflect the colors of the mountains surrounding it. The thought of Blue tugged at him like a child’s hand. He swallowed hard and pushed ahead.

  Four hundred miles to the Washington airport, and beyond it he did not care where he went.

  Merging into the James White Parkway, he hit the midday traffic and had to slow down till the 1-81 split. Then he was alone again—the road before him white and empty in the murky sunlight, promising nothing, telling no lies.

  Had she loved him—the girl who had painted herself to life? Had she loved him at all?

  Near Bristol it began to rain, but Adam did not slow down. Large, heavy trucks, painted in bright colors and mounted on monstrous wheels dominated the road and hovered dangerously close to his car. The rain was so heavy, it blinded him in spite of the fast-working wipers. He peered through the bottom of the windshield—the narrow space just above the edge of the window—and followed only the white lines on the asphalt. Pulling up from behind each truck, he would push his car onto the edge of the road, then fight the urge to slow down and retreat. He raced the truck in this way, aware that he could be crushed at any moment—driven off the road or thrown into a tailspin if he so much as hit a stone at such high speeds. He floored the gas pedal and did not relent, kept the car parallel with the truck and knew it was a matter of time before he or the other driver lost their nerve and pulled back. Invariably, Adam prevailed.

  It was like he had always known: the man with the least at stake won most often.

  He had gone as far as Salem when he found himself thinking about Blue again. The rain had eased up, and the muscles in his head and neck were feeling looser, and he pulled into a gas station to load up and buy a cup of coffee. He though about the insides of Blue’s arms—the way he used to run his lips, the very tip of his tongue, over the line that stretched from her elbow up into the side of her chest in a journey he had hoped would never end.

  “Looks like rain all week.” A brisk young woman with badly bleached hair and long painted nails handed him his change.