by Janice Law
Andrew was a different sort, possessive but neglectful, the very worst matrimonial combination, and he cast the tolerant, sophisticated spirit of my wife in a very handsome light. Andrew didn’t deserve Eva. While he thought his wife was faithful, he ignored her; as soon as he suspected she had a lover, he transferred some of his compulsions from distance running and obscure textualities to interfering with the happiness of others.
I’d have enjoyed having it out with him; physical violence, scandal, statements libelous and actionable sometimes have a deep visceral appeal. But, besides the fact that I had fifteen years on him— fifteen years at least!— there was my family to think about, and, as a very ancient anthropologist once said, the price of a good, or at least a tolerable, wife is beyond rubies. So Eva and I were careful. It is my nature to be cautious, to prepare my ground— you’ll see proof of that— but Eva revealed a sly discretion that, considering her spontaneous and uninhibited appetites, was as surprising as it was delightful. For a couple of years, Andrew quite unfairly suspected Gerry DeSentis, a rising young theorist in the English department, and contrived, I’m told, to keep him from tenure.
In certain moods it almost annoys me that I was never a suspect. “Old Bones and Feathers” with his gimpy knee and gray hair wasn’t thought to be up to such pranks, but maybe that was just the chauvinism of literary people. I did worry a little when The Last of the Mohegans became such a hit; that amazing poster of Daniel Day Lewis rushing bare chested through the forest— didn’t that hint at the delights of a wilder, more mysterious, now vanished life? And who should know about such things, if not I, with my head full of rituals and artifacts, of customs and myths, gliding toward my beloved over the black water of the swamp?
Oh yes, we were happy, very, very happy, until one fatal afternoon in mid-April. We’d had a long, wet winter, one of those inconclusive and unsatisfactory seasons too mild for skiing, too wet for walks. Her children were quite small then, and arrangements were difficult. Her husband’s graduate students, if good baby-sitters, were eagle eyed and loose tongued, so Eva and I fell back on the Westbrook Mall, where the huge parking lots and food courts allow an anonymous rendezvous. We planned to meet that day in the south lot and take my van for a quick run to the state forest, a mixed deciduous woodland almost deserted in the dreary weather. We would have returned to the mall later, to meet, as if by chance, in the foodcourt, where we could talk back and forth between the little tables like casual acquaintances.
This was a scenario we’d used before with complete success, for neither of us liked to lie. “Where did you go today?” Jane might ask. “I bought some socks at Penney’s,” I’d say honestly, or “Stopped by the bookstore in the mall. Not a damn thing there but best sellers and weight loss books.” And if she mentioned that Chloe Feingold or Pat Meyer had seen me at the mall, I’d say, “Half the university was out today; I ran into Eva Donaldson in the foodcourt.”
When Eva did not show up that afternoon, I was disappointed but not worried. She had on occasion to cancel at the last moment: the failure of a sitter, the illness of a child, the odd sprain or strain that brought Andrew home prematurely from his interminable training. If anything, this occasional disappointment and uncertainty added a piquant note to our relationship. I’m a great believer in regularity in marriage, but in affairs of the heart a certain suspense, a certain irregularity in what is, after all, an irregularity itself, opens the way for serendipity.
I hung around the magazine racks for a while, then went home with a handful of novels for Jane. I had supper, read two chapters of the dissertation I was supervising, and went to bed. I had no idea that my life had been drastically altered until the next evening when Gus Phillips called with the news that Eva Donaldson, my Eva!, was missing. I only understood snatches of what he was saying, “car abandoned at the mall,” “sitter worried,” “Andrew frantic,” “police.”
“Police,” I said, uncomprehending. It’s odd how, at certain moments, you’re unable to fit together the pieces of the universe.
“Of course, he called the police,” said Gus, the half horrified, half delighted bearer of news. “She’s been gone over 24 hours. Everyone’s alarmed.”
Only when I got the whole story again from Chloe Feingold, whose narration had an amplitude missing from Gus’s account, did I start to believe that Eva’s old Volvo had been found abandoned in the north mall parking lot. “Next to Filene’s,” said Chloe. “They’re having their big white sale at the moment.”
I believe she told me some details of the sale, but I had only one idea in mind: that Eva had been harmed.
“At the mall,” I said. “The north lot.”
Chloe confirmed this, and with every word, my heart sank. We never parked in the north lot, because it was near Computer City, the whole foods shop, and the bookstore, the academic’s consumer triangle. We favored the south lot near Home Depot and Sears.
After I had hung up the phone and poured a gin and tonic with very little tonic, I thought about what I’d just been told. I was sure that Eva would not have parked her car in the north lot, and, with a heavy sense of fatality, I wondered if she had driven her car there at all. The mall was barely five miles from her house. Five miles. What’s five miles for a marathon runner? And just as if I were an old shaman, dancing before the fire in the long house with my drum and rattles and wolf jaw, I saw Andrew getting out of the Volvo and locking it and slipping down the row of cars; out to the highway verge, over the fence to the bike path, then galloping for home with his elbows flying and his skinny, muscular legs pounding out the yardage. Five miles was nothing: I was sure he’d done it.
And where was Eva? The next afternoon I got in my canoe, not really believing in her disappearance. I thought I could glide across the pond, slip up the little branch of the river and see her waving to me from the pasture. Instead, the field was empty, and I saw something else that had not registered before, the new meadow along the dirt road.
Eva had told me about their plans. A narrow, bumpy track ran beside their yard from the state road back into the Websters’ property, which includes part of the swamp and a good spread of grazing land between the Donaldsons’ and ours. The plan was to have the strip of scrub, weeds and hay along this old road plowed up and reseeded with wild flowers. “Easier than a regular flower garden,” Eva had said, “and wonderful for butterflies.”
Kneeling in my canoe, I could hear her saying, “wonderful for butterflies,” and, with that memory of her sunny, open face, of her delight, I burst into tears. I knew she was dead. The place of our happiness was suddenly unbearable, and I was about to paddle away into the swamp, when I looked at the bare plot of earth. It had been harrowed since I visited last, harrowed and, no doubt, seeded with the daisies and coreopsis, goldenrods, and Black-eyed Susans, wild geranium, Indian Paintbrush, blue eyed grass, and clovers that have been blooming so successfully these last few years. I looked at the newly harrowed field, and I’d have bet my life that my darling Eva was lying hidden under those neat rows.
There followed the most excruciating period of my life. I was caught by the discretion which had deprived Andrew of any obvious motive. Oh, the police looked at him all right; it tells you something about marriage that the husband is always a prime suspect, but he seemed grief stricken and, more important, he had an alibi: that same damn field. Old Webster, who’s been senile as long as I’ve known him, swore up and down that Andrew was working on the wild flower meadow the whole afternoon. He heard the tractor. The whole afternoon.
That left the morning. The children were in nursery school in the morning, but they had a sitter for the afternoon because Eva was going to the mall and Andrew planned to do the meadow. He claimed she left just before the sitter arrived, but there was no proof of that. He could have killed Eva, buried her, driven the Volvo to the Mall, run back, hopped on his tractor, and harrowed the plowed field and the new grave into oblivion. That’s what I thought he’d done; I was sure of it.
I think the police may have had thoughts along those lines, too. Andrew was at the state police station three, four, five times. But nothing came of it. There was no evidence, no motive. By the time they searched the house there wasn’t a clue. He’d had a couple more floors refinished by then— they’d been doing the rooms a few at a time to spare the children the fumes, and the little wild flower meadow was a foot tall and growing lush. Chloe Feingold told me that Andrew showed the troopers around with tears in his eyes. When nothing turned up, he posted a $10,000 reward for information about his wife’s disappearance, which suggested that his last book, a reader for undergraduates, was doing better than any of us had expected.
Still, he was a suspect, really the only one. The problem was that the police couldn’t give him a motive. I was only person who could provide that— unless Jane had seen more than I’d thought— and I was in a bind. To get at Andrew, I’d have to ruin my marriage and my comfortable relationships with our children— and Eva would still be gone forever.
Perhaps you’ll decide I wasn’t worthy of Eva, either, and that cowardice kept me silent. Cowardice and convenience. Perhaps I did have a time of cowardice and confusion, but this is to record the fact that ultimately I stirred myself to be worthy of my love and seek revenge.
Just how I was to achieve that satisfaction was not so easily determined. I can’t tell you how many spring and summer days I paddled over to the edge of the pasture and tortured myself with memories. I stared at the meadow, flourishing undisturbed, but its soft green and yellow tints gave me no inspiration, no solutions.
I watched Andrew, too. I studied him in the faculty senate, followed his moves at parties, lurked in the swamp while he was mowing the pastures. I took to calling him up, standing nervous at pay phones in the mall, listening to the ring, ring down the line. Sometimes I thought his voice sounded anxious and sometimes tired. Once or twice, late at night, he got angry. I listened without saying anything, waiting, always waiting for the admission, the confession— as if, after all his cares and plans, he was likely to blurt out the truth to a mysterious and silent caller. You will appreciate that I was not myself then.
I actually stooped to a poison pen letter. I’m not proud of that. My only excuse was my desperation: I felt I had to frighten Andrew out of his complacency. I was at the computer lab one night, the big one, not the little departmental lab, and before I knew what I was doing, I’d typed, “You killed her” and printed it out.
I put the message in an envelop and mailed it, then spent the next few days half sick with hope and anxiety. Nothing happened, except that Chloe Feingold told me Andrew was taking everything very hard and invited Jane and me around to have dinner with him. As a result of that excruciating evening, I began to think about my own specialty and how my knowledge might be put to use.
My first attempts were abortive. I made an intensive study of eastern woodland bows and learned to shoot one. I spent some enlighening afternoons with an elderly member of the Naragansetts, and I got so that I could flake a point pretty well. I did not get to where I could see myself skewering Andrew with a brilliant shot to the heart.
I considered Native American botanicals next and worked more hours than I care to remember in the pharmacy lab and in the crumbling shed where Mrs. Margaret Laughing Bear stores dried plants and her musty smelling packets of traditional medicines. I published a couple of papers that were well received, but Mrs. Laughing Bear was dexterous in fending off all inquiries about poisons. Besides, as I began to get a hold of myself, I could see the difficulties of slipping tincture of nightshade into Andrew’s cocktail or of feeding him a Death Angel mushroom.
I do think that these fantasies, and others even more embarrassing and puerile, kept me sane. They gave me hope; they kept me from doing something obvious, unforgivable, irretrievable. And then came the road and, all of a sudden, everything fell into place. All my futile efforts, my midnight walks, my sad canoe trips, even those cruel phone calls, had been so much priming of the pump. When the road came, I recognized my chance. All that remained was to proceed in a timely and orderly fashion.
What had happened was that Eli Webster, the senile fool who had given Andrew his alibi in the first place, finally went into a home. The grandchildren wasted no time subdividing the old farm and contracting with a particularly fast and profit hungry developer to transform 60 prime acres into something to be called Webster Estates with a projected 40 houses. Few of us in town were pleased about that and a good old fashioned zoning and development fight ensued.
I pitched in to testify about the archeological value of the fish weirs and the campsite on the property, and I helped Sue LeBonte assemble some of the environmental data on the impact such a big project would have on the watershed. The neighbors were pretty much all against the development, but I found it significant that Andrew didn’t get really involved until the business of the road came up.
Access for the new Webster Estates was going to have to be that dirt road along the Donaldson’s little wild flower meadow. Nothing could be done, no construction, certainly no heavy truck traffic, until that lane was widened and upgraded. At this point, Andrew went ballistic. I felt I had him for sure.
Like so many other things in small towns, the Webster Estates finally came to a compromise, bigger lots, fewer houses, an environmental set aside. We were to have ten houses, which was more than enough, and over Andrew Donaldson’s strenuous objections, the town agreed to widening and paving the road. I was at the council meeting the night the agreement passed, and I went right from there to the University. My book bag was in the car. I took out my texts and my grade book, locked them in the trunk, and went into the building with my empty knapsack.
This was not unusual behavior. I’m nocturnal by choice; I often work late and I make midnight rambles to the Museum for books or records or to check some item in the archives. I remember stopping that night at the museum and looking in at my favorite exhibit: the bark house my students built several years ago as part of our Eastern Woodlands display. In the light from the hall, the support pillars cast long tree-like shadows over the little bark house, a miniature of the noble halls of the Iroquois.
I had an impulse to go inside, and I did, crouching for a few moments in the cramped space that smells of cedar and bark, mingled with the institutional odors of floor polish and air conditioning. I knew from Mrs. Laughing Bear’s shed that it should also smell like dried plants and dirt floors and the residue of fires and cooking fat. I’m not sure what I’d have told the custodian if he’d come by. Certainly not the truth, which was that I was paying homage to people who understood blood vengeance and who were about to help me get it.
After a few moments in the half darkness, I crawled out and relocked the door before descending to Archives and Research, a pleasantly old fashioned room. Below the horizontal windows set high in the walls are banks of good mahogany cabinets where we store our specimens. Most of the collection is pottery shards, but we also have a lot of arrow and spear points, some clothing, a couple of pieces of really first rate embroidery and beadwork, and some bones.
We’ve returned a number of complete skeletons to the Mohegan and Pequot tribal authorities in the last couple of years, and we’re negotiating with the Pequots over some other artifacts. They’re building a collection, and I’ve been trying to interest them in some scholarly activities. I see an endowed chair eventually, perhaps other ventures; with their casino revenue, they’ve certainly got the money.
By rights some of the skulls in case #14 should be returned as well. They came from federal land and fall under NAGPRA (the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act), but that’s a future project. My own favorite, #2456, is from my personal collection and belonged to a woman of the Adena, the mound building people of the central Ohio Valley. I’ve had her carbon dated. She lived around 1,000 B.C.E., and I’ve had her skull ever since I stole it from the excavation I was working on the year I received my doctorate.
Th
ere’s a certain symmetry, isn’t there, to my only two cases of professional malfeasance? Beauty must be my excuse: #2456 was a lovely skull, darkened to an elegant biscuit color by the soil where it had lain so many centuries. As I examined it that night in the strong halogen lamp over the case, I saw that her head would have been round, her face broad, perhaps plump like Eva’s. I hoped her short life had been happy, as I believe Eva’s was. The eye sockets were large; #2456’s eyes would probably have been black or very dark brown, instead of Eva’s gray-blue, and her hair would have been dark. I think that she was a pretty woman.
Fortuitously, I had put a paper label on her skull instead of numbering the surface of the bone, and, after making sure that there were no extraneous marks, I peeled the tag off and cleaned the little sticky patch that remained with alcohol. Then I wrapped #2456 in a piece of old newspaper and put it in my knapsack.
I had only to wait until the road crew arrived, a matter of considerable vigilance. I went the long way to the University every day in order to be sure the town hadn’t yet begun work, and every afternoon in decent weather, I was in the swamp, listening for the sound of graders and bulldozers— or for the softer, fainter sound of a man digging through tough meadow grass.
At last, the contract went out, and one May morning just as we were finishing exams, I found the road crew had arrived. That evening, as late as I dared make it, I told Jane I was going to take a paddle around the swamp.
“Perhaps I’ll go with you one night,” she said. “It’s been lovely weather.”
I had the horrible feeling that she was going to suggest coming with me right then. “Mosquitoes,” I said, ashamed of the reluctance in my voice and aware that I was neglecting Jane. “Let me buy some more spray. I’ll get that tomorrow. And a paddle. You’ll want a paddle, too.”