Adam and Evil

by Gillian Roberts

  “This is Ray,” Beth said, ever the hostess. “Ray Button-wood. Emmy’s …”

  Now I understood her discomfort.

  “Glad to meet you.” He stood with military posture, unnaturally stiff, and he shook my hand without bothering to fake warmth or cordiality. “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, although he didn’t look like a man who’d lost anything that mattered. He had an amazingly bland face, as if life hadn’t fully happened to him. Nevertheless, he ducked his head forward in acknowledgment.

  Beth stood, awkwardly, and did not offer condolences.

  Ray chuckled and held up the shopping bag. “I, ah, must look stupid. Came over here after work—worked late— dinner meeting, too—because Emmy had a necklace—not valuable, amethysts, fairly old, but it was my mother’s, and her mother’s before her. I want our son to have it, not Helena. You know how Helena can be, don’t you, Beth? I’m not saying she’s greedy or grasping exactly, but … she’s a collector, let’s say. Of anything. With no clear sense of other people’s … especially her sister … and Emmy would have wanted her son to have this necklace.”

  Why was the bland blond so eagerly overexplaining? Why a shopping bag for a necklace?

  Ray Buttonwood shook his head, as if despairing, but his face remained expressionless. His sorrows were not even skin deep. Beth had said he worked with Sam and was also a lawyer, but I thought lawyers needed enough acting skill to project righteous indignation and so forth. This man was a failure at showing emotion. Even faking it. Or maybe he didn’t consider us worth the effort.

  “Speaking of the boy, I really must be going. Very nice to have met you, er, Amanda, and always a pleasure to see you, Beth.”

  After the doors shut behind him, Beth kept looking in that direction, as if to see through them. “I wonder if Emmy had made a new will yet,” she said, “or if everything goes to the surviving spouse. They’re still married, technically, and he’d know the law, of course.”

  “Why wasn’t he home with his son if he cares that much?” I asked. “The kid’s mother was killed today. Some father! Goes after a necklace—if that’s what it really was—instead of comforting his child. I don’t like him, elegant tailoring notwithstanding—” And then I remembered the man on the library stairs. “I think he was there this morning. Emmy gasped when she saw him.”

  “Ray? This … you mean at the library?”

  The elevator doors shut, and we soundlessly rose. A very nice building, I decided. “Just as my class began its tour,” I explained. “We were still on the stairs, in fact, and this man in that suit, with blond hair, went running up, and Emmy gasped.”

  “Are you sure?”

  The elevator doors opened onto a carpeted square with four doors, one on each side. Beth checked their numbers. I thought about the blond man on the staircase. “I’m sure about the gasp but not about the face. I never actually saw it.”

  “Pinstripes are not exactly unusual,” Beth murmured. “After enough years with Ray, maybe Emmy had been conditioned to feel horror whenever she saw them. Plus, if memory serves me, Sam said there was a committee meeting at the office this morning. Big doings about the practice itself. Ray’s on the committee.”

  “Could Sam check that out?”

  Beth shrugged. “The thing is …”

  “I know. She was … it happened in the afternoon. Can you check both times?” I wasn’t sure what a morning appearance could mean, except that he knew the way to the library. Or that he set up a later meeting with his estranged wife.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Beth said. “About Ray’s being there in the morning. If he was.”

  “You never know.” Those three words were our mother’s settle-everything conversation stopper. She used them when confronted with logical opposition, and I saw no reason not to follow her lead.

  “Et tu, Mandy?” Beth said. “But truly, Sam is not going to like these questions.” She turned and faced me. “Hold on— Sam and Ray were taking a deposition this afternoon. I’m positive.”

  “All afternoon? Absolutely all afternoon? No time to take a break, get fresh air, run errands? You sure?”

  Beth’s expression combined disbelief, suspicion, and sorrow. “Come on—nobody rushes out for a cigarette and murders somebody instead. Especially not somebody getting ready to run for Congress, which is the rumor.”

  “You know how long it takes to strangle a person?”

  She looked at me with mild revulsion. “Why on earth would I? Why would you?”

  “Mackenzie told me. They lose consciousness in ten to fifteen seconds. Seconds, Beth. If somebody comes up from behind, it’s over almost instantly. Without even marks of a struggle.”

  Beth spoke very calmly, as if to a small child. “So I’m to find out if Ray was missing for fifteen seconds. Plus commute time, is that it?”

  “Somebody murdered your friend,” I said.

  “Weren’t you the one talking about kids going berserk?”

  “This is different. This isn’t the same thing.” There was a kernel of disbelief in me, a need to believe that Adam had nothing to do with it. He hadn’t been angry enough, didn’t have a history of aggression. I’d been more worried about his hurting himself, about the likelihood of suicide. Without those news stories, I don’t know that I’d have ever thought of major violence from Adam Evans.

  “I’ll find out what I can,” she said, “or you’ll keep at me, I know. Although most likely Sam will resent the questions and clam up.”

  “Did she have a problem with men?” I asked as Beth put the key in the door.

  She shook her head and opened the door. “Just came to prefer books. She said she wanted to read them, work with them, and save them.”

  “Save them?”

  Beth shrugged. “I guess preserve them. That department where she worked …” We entered an anonymously furnished space without a hint of individuality and, given Emily Fisher’s stated preferences, not even a lot of books.

  Beth interpreted my surveillance. “Ray fought her to the death—” She paled. “I didn’t mean that literally.”

  “Hope not. But it does indicate that you should check out his whereabouts.”

  “He fought her over everything.” Beth looked shaken. “Furniture, art, books, probably every roll of toilet paper. Took everything worth anything, and that includes their son, because he stripped her to a level where she couldn’t support the boy decently. He’ll emerge with all the booty, plus looking like Mr. American Values, the valiant single father. You watch, he won’t marry his cookie until after he’s elected.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “How could he take it all? Her son?”

  “He knew he had the—” Beth clamped down on the words and shook her head. “It’s hard to divorce a lawyer. That’s why we hire them to help us divorce other people. So she wound up with nothing, and it was all very legal.”

  I wasn’t satisfied, but I let it go at that, knowing I wouldn’t have to contain my curiosity for long. We were here to remove something, and I was sure that whatever it was would tell me what Beth didn’t want to, why Ray Buttonwood could bully his wife into relinquishing everything she held dear.

  The room was immaculate and uncluttered. There were almost no signs of actual living having taken place in it, and the same was true of the bedroom and the kitchen. The apartment could have been a centerfold for Home Not So Beautiful magazine. “So,” I asked, “is she a perfect housekeeper—or is it just that he didn’t leave her enough possessions to have a single one of them be out of place?”

  The sofa and chairs were upholstered with what looked like compressed dryer lint. The coffee table had a New York Times book review section, a bowl with cellophane-wrapped candies, and a plaster impression of a child’s hand, the sort of craft project done in nursery schools. No used coffee cups growing mold, no half-finished letters, half-done crossword puzzles, half-read newspapers, dirty dishes in the sink, unmade bed, panty hose drying over the shower curtain, dropped clo
thing or towels, signs of Sunday’s party. The only thing that had been out of place was her life itself, and now that was over.

  I allowed myself a moment’s speculation on what someone would make of me if my living quarters were taken by surprise. It wasn’t a pretty picture, so my only recourse was to keep myself from being abruptly murdered.

  “Sunday’s housewarming was sad,” Beth said, “all of us pretending this was great, that Emmy was off to a wonderful new adventure. Maybe she was, but her place was so—she couldn’t afford anything better, but she could have afforded brighter. That furniture … it all looked to me how Emmy felt lately, like a shadow that had become detached from its real person. I mean, where is—where was—she here?” Beth’s face crumpled as she slumped down onto the sofa. “Everything went so wrong for her. It was like watching somebody fall down a long flight of stairs. And now, when she was supposedly settled in, safe, with a nice, quiet job—to be murdered! In the library! And you know, she told me on Sunday that she thought she had a way out of the money problems. She thought she was going to be okay.”

  I patted my sister’s shoulder and let her cry it through while I surveyed the room. Whatever Emmy had wanted removed was not hiding in plain sight.

  She had escaped her marriage with at least three photographs that sat on the mantelpiece of the living room’s gas fireplace. I studied them, hoping for a handle on the dead librarian. One photo showed a woman in Jackie Kennedy clothing and bouffant, and two little dark-haired girls. Another was more contemporary, of a boy who looked about three. I turned to Beth, holding it.

  “Her son.” Beth wiped at her eyes. “Gage. It’s a family name. She—there was a custody battle. She lost.”

  “Why? I can understand the money, but why the child?”

  “She’d had …” Beth wasn’t meeting my eyes. Instead, she talked to the green-gray carpet, which looked as if it would hurt bare feet. She sighed and then looked up at me. “It was never a good marriage. Emmy was unhappy for a long time, and—you know how it happens. Eventually there was a man. She thought she was in love.” Her eyes demanded that I understand. I nodded.

  “He was married, too,” she continued. “It was stupid, but you could see why it happened. She was so lonely. As for him, well, she definitely didn’t mean to him what he meant to her. After a while he ended it, and that’s when Ray struck. He’d been running around throughout the marriage, but he’d become suspicious of Emmy—maybe she seemed too happy or something—and hired a private investigator. He claimed moral turpitude, made up stories about her leaving the child for these assignations, endangering the boy. Ray even convinced his mother, who’d never been crazy about Emmy, to agree to the false claims. He exaggerated and pushed, used her affair as a wedge to take more and more— he wanted out, but wanted as much of their property as the law allowed, including his son, until after months of it she couldn’t stand it anymore and agreed that Gage would be better off with his father, who had money and could provide more opportunities. That’s when she decided to move to the city. Staying in the suburbs and being shut out of his life was too painful. This place is set up for visits, but basically he was to live with Ray. Which I guess is for the best now.” She dabbed at her eyes again and stood up, ready to complete her assignment.

  I followed her into the kitchen, carrying the third silver-framed photo. “And this? Is this her in better times?” Beth looked at a drawer with an almost empty flatware organizer, then closed it back up and checked the photo I held, the posed portrait of a woman who looked like Emmy if she’d been hand polished with optimism, smoothed with poise, straightened up with self-assurance, if she’d had the tension ironed out of her muscles and tendons, and if she’d had scarves, jewelry, and better-arranged hair to set off her features. A lot of ifs, but possible.

  Beth opened another drawer and closed it, looking disappointed. “That’s her sister. Helena Spurry. As in Whatsis Spurry—you’d know who I mean, the zillionaire computer whiz. To her horror, she divorced him before he’d made a cent. A tiny cash settlement years ago, and that was it. Two sisters with men and divorce and money problems. And that’s all they had in common.”

  When I looked again, I saw how different Helena Spurry actually was from the woman who’d guided me around the library. And yet the look of her felt familiar—but there the impression ended. No sense of a voice or personality. “She seems familiar,” I said. “Could I have met her through you?”

  “I doubt it. I never cared for Helena. She’s a year and a half older than Emmy, and I swear she never got over her fury that there was another baby in the house. She’s always picked on her sister, begrudged her everything she had. Consumed by jealousy, always checking to make sure she had more and better. And Emmy always gave in. When their mother was alive—she died last year—it was worse. Helena was like a well-groomed, articulate toddler screaming, ‘Me! Me!’” Beth was now on her knees, opening bottom cabinets, peering inside.

  “So why her photo on the mantel?”

  “I just told you how I feel about Helena. Emmy was much more forgiving. And much more intimidated. Besides, it looked good for the housewarming.” Beth laughed, a bit uncomfortably, and continued to remove every item from a bottom cabinet with such expertise and nonchalance that the inventory and search seemed second nature to her.

  “A peace offering,” she continued. “Helena was here, probably just to make sure that Emmy wasn’t living as well as she was. The part that infuriates me is that Helena could have made a difference. She owns an antiques store. She could have pulled a few pieces of her inventory, given them to her sister. Brightened the place up, made it less impersonal. She could have and should have. It was Emmy who provided the capital that started Helena’s pretentious store. Emmy loaned her most of her share of their inheritance. Poor Emmy. Her timing stunk in just about everything. She loaned Helena the money one month before her marriage exploded and she suddenly needed it.”

  “Maybe Helena was going to repay her. Maybe that’s what she meant about having a way out of the money problems,” I suggested.

  “My foot.” Beth replaced a carton of dry milk, a plastic container of pasta, and a bottle of oil. “Helena’s store doesn’t bring in a penny. Helena just insists on living as if she were wealthy, and heaven forbid she should take a job that’s beneath her imagined status. But what does any of it matter now? What I’m saying is that even if Helena wasn’t making money, she could have given her sister, who technically must own half the store’s stock, something pretty that would have made this place more like a home.”

  Beth sounded ready to burst into tears again. I dropped the topic. It didn’t matter. “Is—Was Emmy getting support despite this battle?”

  Beth looked still more troubled. “I’m not sure now.” She spoke slowly. “She told me nothing tangible, no details, but she was under pressure and the sisters were quarreling about the money….” She shook her head. “I’m making it sound terrible. I’m not suggesting that Helena …” But she looked worried.

  “Maybe Sam could find out about the will, too,” I suggested. “At least some sense of how much was left to the two of them.”

  Beth sighed. “He’ll hate my asking all these obvious questions. Sam’s still friends with … you know how couples wind up choosing one or the other half of a divorce, but I can see Sam’s point—he and Ray went to law school together, worked together all these years, were made partner around the same time. But it made it so hard on me. Like I was sneaking around to still see Emmy, and then to be a good wife to Sam, to make his life easier at work, I’d have to be polite and sociable with Ray when I knew what a louse he was.” She opened an eye-level cabinet that had two dishes, two cups, two saucers, and two soup bowls.

  “Sam didn’t actually come up here Sunday.” Beth was staring at the nearly empty cabinet as if mesmerized. “He walked around town with the kids, used them as his excuse, but it was really because it felt awkward to him. It makes me bone-tired. Angry, too.”


  The night’s foray made better sense now. It was more than a final act of friendship—it was also an act of defiance. Of solidarity with a dead friend.

  “So far her kitchen is pathetically tidy.” Beth’s voice was cleansed of its bitter overtones. She gently closed the cabinet door. “Not even a true junk drawer.”

  I wandered back to the living room and over to the bookcase. It’s how I peg a person, and as far as I could see, it was the one place in this set of rooms where a personality might peek through. I expected a librarian to have interesting shelves.

  The bulk of her library was given over to world classics, heavy on the Russians, poetry collections, James Joyce, Irish playwrights. I have almost the same titles in the same editions—or had, before my house blew up. College texts— the books she’d have brought into the marriage. Plus one title about book collecting and, next to it, a dealer’s catalogue, and another that was obviously the text for the computer course she’d said she was taking. One on helping your child through your divorce. One on managing money. You could chart her life by her book titles. The suburban years were represented, I suspected, by a small collection of relatively new fiction. “Hey, Beth,” I said, checking, “did your book group read Ursula Hegi? Stones from the River?”

  “About a year ago. Maybe longer.”

  “Cold Mountain? Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “My group read them, too. And a few more that are here, all separated from the college classics. Ray let her keep them even though they were acquired during the marriage. Big of him.”

  “Probably thought they were revolutionary. Or worse— women’s books!”

  The fatigue I’d been fighting returned in waves that threatened to pull me under, and I saw how futile and silly this outing was. I went into the kitchen. “Let’s go home,” I said. “This is as impersonal a place as I can imagine, so why are we really here? To annoy Sam? To prove something? Do you actually think she had anything she didn’t want people to see? And if so, who are those people? And how am I supposed to find something I don’t know about? I’d like to throw out all her furniture, but surely that isn’t what she meant. I’m useless here.”