The Lavender Hour

by Anne Leclaire

  The woman seated beside me chatted on. “Poor Nona,” she said. “It's unnatural to bury your child. It goes against the natural order of things.”

  No, it doesn't, I wanted to tell her. It happens all the time.

  The minister entered from a side vestibule, looked at his watch, crossed to Nona for a whispered conference, then approached the lectern. At that moment, Paige walked in, slightly unsteady on her feet and looking more like she was heading for a date than her father's funeral. She wore a lime green bustier, black satin pants as tight as skin, and a pair of fuck-me high heels.

  “Holy Mother of God,” a man behind us said.

  “I'll second that,” Faye murmured.

  The service only lasted a half hour, but it was a half hour more than I thought I could take, even with Faye at my side, even with the Xanax I'd taken. Marcia and Paige wept loudly throughout. The minister—who it was soon clear had never met Luke—twice referred to him as Duke. Nona sat unmoving, and the sight of her— grief-shrunken and still—nearly broke my heart.

  When we left, it had begun to rain—a light drizzle. Ginny and Jim waited in the parking lot.

  “Are you going to the cemetery?” Ginny asked.

  “No,” Faye and I said in unison. Jim suggested we meet at the Wayside for a drink. They were taking the rest of the day off.

  It was too early for the lunch crowd, and we were the only ones in the bar. Jim ordered a bourbon on the rocks, and we all followed his lead, as if the occasion demanded something more serious than wine. As if we were holding an Irish wake.

  “How are you doing?” Ginny asked me while we waited for the drinks.

  I shrugged, meaning okay under the circumstances. I was afraid if I attempted speech, I would start to cry again.

  Jim shook his head. “I thought he had a few more weeks.”

  I stared down at the bar top, retreating to automatic pilot. The others talked a bit about Luke and Nona and the service, and eventually the topic switched to some of their other clients.

  “Why?” I said, interrupting them.

  “Why what, Jess?” Jim said.

  “Why did he have to die?” It was a foolish question, a child's question.

  The others exchanged a look. “Oh, honey,” Ginny said. “That's a question there just isn't any answer to.”

  I remembered a night nurse on the oncology ward who sat with me when I was having a bad time, the sole time I had fallen into self-pity. Why? Why me? I'd asked her. She looked at me straight on and said, Honey, life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.

  THE DAY after the service, Nona moved back to her house in Well-fleet. I called her that morning and asked her if I could help out with anything, but she seemed preoccupied, distant. I put it down to grief—I could understand grief, the need for isolation—and after a few minutes, we hung up.

  In the following days, I called her several times, but she was either not home or unavailable, and I left messages with whoever answered the phone. The calls were not returned. I drove by Luke's home. The shades were drawn on the windows. The grass needed cutting. His truck was gone, and in the side yard, the boat cradle was empty. I tried the front door, but it was locked. With nowhere to go, I headed back to the cottage. The State Police detective was waiting for me there.

  “What can I do for you?” I said.

  “We're continuing to talk to anyone who saw the Luke Ryder on the last day of his life,” he said. He asked a few questions, some of them the same ones he'd asked the first time he came around, some not. Had Luke ever mentioned suicide? Had I had access to drugs? Did I have any plans to leave town? When I said I didn't, he told me to let his office know if I changed my mind.

  “Am I a suspect?” I said, smiling to show it was a joke.

  “You are a person of interest,”he said, not smiling.

  A person of interest. What the hell did that mean?

  I CALLED Faye as soon as he left.

  “I suspect this is Paige's doing,” Faye said.

  “Paige? Why would she call the police?”

  Faye explained that Ginny had heard that Paige was telling everyone that her father had been given a deliberate overdose and had demanded an autopsy. Ginny and Jim had been questioned, too.

  “Why didn't you tell me?”

  “I thought this whole thing would die. To tell you the truth, I'm surprised they're continuing to investigate. Paige isn't the most credible person in the world.”

  “The detective told me not to leave town.”

  There was a long pause on Faye's end of the line. Then she suggested that I think about hiring an attorney.

  “What for?”

  “To deal with the police. Keep yourself from being harassed.”

  I WANTED to hire a woman, but Faye insisted I talk to Gage Fisk. “Forget being PC,” she said. “You want the best, and he's the best. A shark. Sharpest lawyer on Cape Cod.”

  I remained unconvinced. “Maybe I should get someone from Boston.”

  Faye made a pifff sound of annoyance, the way she did when anyone insisted on going into Boston for a knee or hip replacement instead of the hospital in Hyannis. “At least talk to him. Promise me that.”

  At the first meeting, I wasn't impressed. Gage Fisk didn't look like anyone's idea of a successful defense attorney. He was short, soft, and wore a cheap suit and honest-to-God alligator shoes with lifts. I estimated he was pushing seventy.

  His office was a disaster, with clutter everywhere. He would have had to clean the place for a week to raise the disorder up a notch to a simple mess. A diploma from some college in Iowa I'd never heard of hung on the wall behind his desk. He called me— and every other woman in sight—sweetheart. I was horrified by both him and his office, and for a brief paranoid moment, I wondered if Faye was sabotaging me by suggesting I hire him. The paranoia was not without cause. I had begun to receive phone calls accusing me of killing Luke. A woman's voice. Whoever it was sounded drunk. Paige, I thought.

  When I reported my negative impression of Gage Fisk back to Faye, she advised me to ignore the trappings. He was the man for the job, she said, citing a half dozen tough cases he had won in the past year. So I hired him, partly because I didn't have the strength to search for another lawyer and partly for practical reasons. I figured he was probably cheaper than any Boston lawyer, and even with help from Ashley, I could be repaying legal fees for years if things spiraled. Fisk's retainer alone started at fifteen grand. The whole thing was turning into a nightmare. I had no idea it was just beginning.

  twenty-two

  BY EIGHT IN the morning, the commuter parking lot off Exit 6 of the Mid-Cape was packed, but I managed to find a spot on the far side and waited for one of Gage Fisk's paralegals to pick me up, an arrangement we had made after the first day of the trial, when I had been sandbagged by reporters upon arriving at the courthouse.

  It was one of those beautiful days in late September that residents claimed as their reward for surviving the summer of tourists—sunny and clear, warm enough for a last-of-the-season swim, in fact a day very much like the one exactly a year before when I had arrived at the Harwich Port cottage, hoping to find some answers that would point me to the rest of my life. Now that day seemed impossibly remote. As did the person I had been. But why should I have been surprised at how much had changed in twelve months? As Faye so often reminded me, life could be transformed in a day. A minute. The time it took to strike a match.

  I was dressed in a taupe linen suit, an ice blue shell beneath the jacket, and wore a pair of sling-back pumps, all chosen to strike the note Gage Fisk had suggested: neat, attractive (thinking of the males on the jury), but nonthreatening (so as not to alienate the women). Ashley had driven up two weeks before to offer moral support and help me shop for the clothes. The taupe suit was one of three we had purchased, figuring I could interchange scarves and tops for different looks. Ashley had offered to stay on, even to move up with the boys for the duration of the trial, but I had r
efused, trying to make it sound like this was all a colossal mistake, one that would be straightened out quickly, just the formalities to go through. My sister didn't question me too closely, unusual for Ashley, and I was left with the impression she was afraid of what she might hear. She had driven back to Richmond after extracting a promise that I would call if I needed anything. Anything, she had said. She still disagreed with my decision not to tell Lily about the trial, but I saw no reason to interrupt our mama's extended stay in the Azores. Lily had spent enough time worrying about me when they discovered the tumor. I didn't want to put her through any more. “I'm protecting her,” I had said.

  “Protecting her or punishing her?” Ashley had asked.

  Ashley thought I was still angry because Lily had taken both of us by surprise and married Jan after they'd completed the Atlantic crossing. Lily maintained that it was a spur-of-the-moment decision, although I was convinced that had been the plan all along. It would explain the big party at the club. A prenuptial reception.

  Mama had called me on one of the worst days. Just moments after the police had charged me with Luke's death, she was on the line, calling from Europe. I thought at first she knew about my problems by some mother's instinct, but the joy in her voice as she announced the nuptials quickly showed me how wrong I had been. Still reeling from being formally charged, I was too numb to do more than offer token congratulations.

  “Be happy for us, Jess,” she had said. “I want you to be happy.”

  “I am,” I said in a dead voice. I had never felt more abandoned.

  I LOCKED the Toyota and joined the throng waiting near the shelter for a bus to Boston. In those first days of the trial, my face was not yet widely recognizable, and while I waited for my ride, I wondered what the commuters saw when they glanced my way. A professional heading in to work, I supposed, or a woman treating herself to a day of shopping in the city and perhaps a lunch date with a friend, and I thought about the false comfort we found in believing that a person's appearance could disclose essential truths.

  Irene, the older of the paralegals, pulled up to the curb in an unremarkable gray sedan, indistinguishable from scores of others in the lot, which I gathered was the idea. The last thing I needed was to be chauffeured in something flashy. I slid in, and Irene handed me a cup of coffee she had just picked up at a fast-food drive-through. Cream, no sugar. It struck me that I knew little more about Irene than I had the first day we had met back in August in Gage's office, but the paralegal knew all about me, including my preference for coffee.

  “How are you doing?” Irene asked, the same question I had heard yesterday from Robin, Gage's other paralegal.

  “Fine,” I said. We rode in silence the rest of the way to the Barn-stable County Court House, a handsome granite building that sat high on a hill overlooking Cape Cod Bay, the most impressive edifice in a complex that included the county jail and the district and probate courts. TV trucks from all three Boston stations were already in the lot. Bunched near them were the protesters. It was a small group in those opening days, but before the trial was over, it would grow to a fair-size crowd. Irene drove past and parked in front of the courthouse entrance.

  “Are you ready?” she asked.

  “As ready as I'll ever be.” I handed her back the coffee, barely touched.

  “Good luck,” Irene said. “Gage will meet you inside.”

  “Thanks,” I said. My hand trembled as I reached for the door handle. Yesterday, I had managed to slip inside unnoticed, but today the reporters were prepared. I sensed the flurry of their approach, saw in my peripheral vision microphones extended, heard my name called out. JessieJessieJessieHejJessieoverhere.

  Gage had advised me to nod or in some way politely acknowledge the reporters—get them on my side—but I was as repelled by them as I would have been by a crowd of drunks or a rabid dog and did not care if they liked me. Of course, it was stupid not to try to charm them, but I was to come to that understanding too late.

  Also, as I look back with the clarity of hindsight, I see I spent most of those days in a stupor and had to bring deliberate focus to the most routine of tasks, like eating or brushing my teeth. Much later, whenever I would hear a reporter proclaim a defendant without feeling or expression, I would wonder if they might consider this: It's shock.

  As soon as the reporters started calling my name, the protesters crowded in. A few carried signs of the right-to-life variety, something that had caught me off guard the first day I saw them. Gage had maintained all along that he could make this all go away. He'd said that the DA wasn't too thrilled to be prosecuting someone for the manslaughter of a person who'd been days away from dying anyway, and a lot of people were sympathetic. Then an organized group from the Christian Right had started busing people in to protest, which raised the profile of the case. I would later learn that some of them came from as far away as Ohio. That morning, I deliberately ignored them. Then a woman's voice rose, separate from the others. “I hope you die,” the woman shouted, the words filled with such venom that I actually could feel them in my body, as if the protester had thrown rocks. I shouldn't have looked her way, of course, but was unable not to. Our eyes locked. The woman's face was twisted with hate and righteousness, an image similar to those I had seen on the front pages of newspapers in famous photos reprinted on the anniversaries of Selma or Birmingham, or the antibusing protests in Boston. Or more recently during antiabortion demonstrations. It always shocked me to see such hatred on the face of a woman, just as it always seemed more appalling to hear about a mother who had abused or killed her children, as if women were supposed to be innately more compassionate, less capable of violence.

  “I hope you die!” the woman screamed again. I froze, suddenly terrified. Those were the kind of people who killed doctors at women's clinics. Insanely, in the nanosecond it took for an entire soap opera to play in the mind, I saw the woman raise a gun, heard a shot, pictured myself falling. If she killed me, would people protest that, scream at her that she should die? Then a hand gripped my elbow, breaking my paralysis, and Gage was there, guiding me through the courthouse door, furious.

  “Tell Nelson I want guards outside tomorrow,” he barked at the officer who manned the security check, a heavyset man named Connolly with balding red hair and pitted skin.

  Still shaken—I hope you die—I set my handbag on the belt, watched it disappear behind the flaps of the X-ray box, and stepped through the metal-detector gates. I didn't wear jewelry, anything that might set off the alarm and delay the process or give Connolly an opportunity to pull me aside for a more thorough search. Only two days in court, and already I had learned how to make it easier.

  “Come on, sweetheart,” Gage said. Somehow he'd managed to find a vacant conference room that morning, and he led me there.

  The previous two days had been spent impaneling the jury. During preliminary questioning, Judge Fiona Savage—her name an omen that gave me nightmares—excused thirty jurors: five for medical reasons, two because of their age, and twenty-three because they either currently had a family member with cancer or had recently lost a close relative to a lengthy illness. That took care of one-third of the one hundred people who had been summoned to appear. Four jurors had asked to be excused, requests she had denied.

  When the judge was satisfied with those remaining, the clerk drew numbers for twelve jurors, eight men and four women, and two alternates, both men. It had been nearly noon by then, so we had taken a lunch break. Gage had ham salad sandwiches sent in, but spent most of his time holed up in a corner on the phone. He made one call the second the door closed, and then a half hour later was back at it, this time taking notes. At one thirty, the court reconvened, and Gage and the DA had taken turns questioning individual jurors. Nelson, the DA, was trying the case himself instead of turning it over to one of the assistant DAs. He was good-looking and slender and everything Gage Fisk wasn't, and I was scared to death of him. He challenged two jurors, both women about my age. Gage e
xercised his arbitrary peremptory challenge only once: juror number sixty-seven, a middle-aged woman with neatly waved brown hair wearing a blue pantsuit. She had smiled at me from the box, and that quick smile had given me hope. When Gage challenged the woman, I tugged at his sleeve, bent my head to his, and told him I thought that was a mistake, that the prospective juror had smiled at me and that seemed a good sign. Without a word, Gage pushed his pad in front of me. I recognized it as the one he had used for notes during the lunch break. He pointed to the notes next to the number of the one he had challenged, juror sixty-seven, and I read the notations. She was a regular attendee of the Catholic Church and sent annual contributions to one of the extreme right-to-life organizations. “How did you find that out so fast?” I whispered. He only winked at me and turned back to the jury. For the first time since I had hired him, I felt confident I had not made a mistake. I took another glance at the pad as he rose to question another juror and noticed that number eighty—three, a woman named Martha Anderson, was a widow whose only son had died in a car accident when he was forty-six, almost the same age as Luke. I hadn't liked the coincidence, and when Gage sat down, I had underlined the name with my finger and raised an eyebrow.

  “Not a problem,” he had said. “Trust me.”

  What choice did I have?

  THE PREVIOUS day, the third of the trial, Nelson had presented his opening statement, what Gage described as a road map of the state's case, a case that was in Gage's view circumstantial at best. Nelson had asked the jury to keep an open mind and had laid out the foundation of his case. After the first series of You are going to hear… and You are going to see…, I had found myself drifting off, strangely unconnected to it all, as if it were happening to another woman, as if I had shut down. During the following days, that would happen a fair bit. One moment I would be listening to testimony, and a few minutes later I would be thinking about a movie I'd seen or a book I'd read the summer before or a pattern I was considering for a new necklace I'd been commissioned to make. So the morning session had passed, and at noon, Judge Savage had adjourned so she could finish up some old business in the afternoon.