“Nelson Erroll called me yesterday. Asked if I had any ideas.”
“Ideas,” Naomi said flatly.
“The mother,” Sarah said. “You’d think somebody’s walking around pregnant, we’d be bound to notice.”
“You’d think,” Naomi agreed. “Well, don’t look at me.”
“I wasn’t.” Sarah sounded surprised. She set her jaw. “Janelle Hodge said there were some kids camping in their upper pasture last week. Through hikers, she said. She thought she’d give them twenty-four hours before she called the police, and they were gone the next day. They had a girl with them, she said.”
Naomi was listening to this, but she couldn’t engage. She wanted to be left out of the gossip chain, but she couldn’t cut Sarah. Cutting Sarah might rank, if possible, even higher on the hierarchy of Goddard crimes than slaughtering a newborn.
“Was the girl pregnant?” she said instead.
“Who the hell can tell, stuff they wear. Big baggy sweater can hide just about anything. They’d be off along the Trail now, anyway. I said to Nelson, I said if I was him I’d set up a checkpoint on Mount Washington. Be just as easy as punch to drop a baby in the river and then disappear. That kind of person would do it, too.”
Which kind of person was that? she wanted to ask. Instead, she said, “Nelson have any other ideas?”
Sarah Copley nodded. “Said he was talking to everybody. ‘Covering all the bases’ is the way he put it. Couple of women in Goddard Falls living with men they’re not married to. Went and talked to them, of course.
But of course, Naomi thought.
“DHSS gave him a list of women on welfare, everyone within thirty miles. Going to talk to them, too.”
“That’ll take a bit of time,” Naomi said, disgusted.
“Oh, they have time.” Sarah had missed her tone. “They’re gonna find whoever did it, no mistake.” She shook her head. “Makes me sick, throwing away a life like that. Just tossing her out in the river like so much garbage. A perfect little baby like that, and so many people can’t have children and want to adopt!”
“Yes, that’s true,” she agreed. Her hands were on the bar of her shopping cart. She rolled it back and forth experimentally.
Sarah Copley took her own hand away, releasing the metal. “Well, I won’t keep you,” she said stiffly. “I’m sure you’ve got things to do.”
Naomi looked up. At the end of the aisle, Ashley Deacon was reaching for a can of coffee. Saved by Ashley. It wouldn’t be the first time.
“Well, I need to grab Ashley. You know he never returns calls, and the banister at the mill is going to get somebody killed.” She smiled her most winning smile. “See you soon, Sarah.”
Naomi pushed ahead, circumventing Sarah’s half-full cart. Ashley began to turn, and she called his name.
“Naomi,” he said. His voice was soft. “I’ve been thinking about you.”
She gave this the look it deserved. “How’s Sue?”
Sue Deacon had had a baby boy a few days earlier.
“Tired,” he said. When he smiled, which he did now, two bottomless dimples appeared in his cheeks. He had thick hair pulled tightly back in a ponytail, a clever face that seemed to suggest a degree of intelligence he really didn’t possess, or at any rate didn’t use. It was also a face, it had sometimes occurred to her, that failed to retain a record of either his years or his deeds. They appeared to be accumulating somewhere else, as in the story of Dorian Gray, because Ashley was a good thirty years old with the skin of a man ten years younger. Angelic, too —he who is without sin, as the saying went, though Naomi knew perfectly well he had sinned. She liked him, though. She had always liked him.
“What’d you name him?”
“Benjamin. Benjy.” He grinned. “Tough little guy. Think we’ll keep him.”
Under the circumstances, it was a fairly sick quip, Naomi thought, but Ashley’s face was untroubled. Then again, with a brand-new baby, it was just possible he hadn’t heard yet. She didn’t want to be the one to tell him.
“Listen, I don’t know when you want to start working again, but—”
“Oh, I’m working all right. I did a job this morning, on Sabbathday Ridge. I put in a French door for these people who just moved in. They want a new kitchen, too. They’re ordering up stuff from Boston for it.”
“Well.” She stopped him. “So you might not have time for any little jobs, then.”
“I have time,” Ashley said amiably. “What do you need?”
The attic banister, she told him. And the parking lot leveled somehow, if it wasn’t too expensive. And maybe it was time to look at her own roof again, since the one Daniel had so lovingly installed was beginning to assume the consistency of oatmeal. When Ashley had time.
“I’ll make time,” he said warmly.
Naomi shook her head, gave him the benefit of her goodwill, and left.
Well, that was how it went in Stop & Shop, she reasoned, turning the final aisle. Come in for a few marginally palatable foodstuffs, leave with an update on the current police investigation and a semiformal commitment from your contractor. A veritable agora on the Greek model, she thought, flinging a bag of rice cakes into her cart with happy abandon and heading for produce, such as it was.
Where, sharp enough to make the cans in her cart rattle against the mesh, she stopped short.
The woman was standing before a case filled with pale green iceberg lettuces, each wrapped in shiny plastic, each looking less appetizing than the next. Wedged on one side of the lettuces was a box of orange tomatoes, the kind that looked bad and tasted bad (as opposed to the kind that looked good and tasted bad), and on the other a neatly arranged waterfall of waxed cucumbers—as if some brilliant grocery clerk had taken it upon himself to relieve the shopper of the necessity for creativity in salad composition: iceberg, tomato, cucumber, voilà!
The woman was poised before this vision, legs slightly apart, hands on hips. The shopping cart beside her held precisely one item: a large bottle of generic seltzer. She wore heavy boots, a big sweater jacket with a dark brown pattern, and overalls of magenta cloth with long shoulder straps that knotted through the front bib. The sweater came from Mexico, and the overalls, Naomi knew, had been bought in a shop called Reminiscence, on a side street in Greenwich Village. She herself had two pairs just like them at home, one black, one pea green—very useful for days you felt fat or had your period. The woman was tall—taller than Naomi—and wide-hipped, and her black hair hit her shoulders with the kind of dense, tight curls some people who weren’t Jewish tried to achieve through chemicals.
My kind, it came to her.
She remembered something she had read long before, in an anthropology class, about the lone survivor of a Native American tribe, adopted by whites, studied by whites. He had lived his whole life among whites, with nobody to talk to. Sharp as a knife, she felt her own longing.
The woman was probably a summer person. But then again it was late in the year for that.
The woman was probably a leaf-peeper. But leaf-peepers ate at country inns, they didn’t visit the Stop & Shop, and if they did, it was for maple syrup, maple sugar, Cheddar cheese.
She looked like about twenty women Naomi had known in her life, but Naomi was reasonably certain she wasn’t any of them. She looked like the person who would probably be her closest friend by now, if she’d never come to New Hampshire.
Naomi and her kind, she thought. The sight was riveting: Lilith in the garden. So this is what I must look like to them, she thought.
The woman shook her black hair in disgust. She reached for her cart and began to push it away. Naomi stepped forward. “Can I help you with something?” she heard herself say.
The woman turned to look at her for a long moment. Then, slowly, she smiled broadly and shook her head. “I should have known.” Her voice was deep, underpinned by jubilant sarcasm. “Only I never thought it would be this bad. I told my husband, let’s move to Putney, at least. In Putney they
’ve got a co-op. I know people in Putney. But no. Because he fell in love with the house. A house without a kitchen, I might add.” She swung her head around and coolly surveyed the produce department. “Not that we’ll have any use for a kitchen.”
“You’re moving here?” Naomi said, refusing to make the inferential leap without confirmation.
“Moved already.” She grinned. “No turning back now. Hey”—she put her hand out, three chunky silver rings glinting in the supermarket light—“I’m Judith Friedman.”
Of course you are, Naomi wanted to say, but it wouldn’t come out. She reached her own hand forward across the carts between them: the outstretched fingers of the Bering Strait, the clutch and unclench of the relay race. “Oh, thank you for coming,” said a voice; as it happened, her own.
Chapter 7
Our Bodies, Ourselves
“A MOMENT OF YOUR TIME, MRS. ROTH.”
Naomi looked up and, despite herself, groaned. She’d been sitting in her office at the mill, entering addresses at her IBM and being progressively deafened by the grader Ashley was running in the parking lot. She hadn’t heard them, naturally.
He came in, followed closely by Nelson, who ducked his head. Charter, she realized, had loomed larger in her memory than perhaps he deserved: a tall and gaunt inquisitor in a black cape, beak-nosed, with lines etched deep across his forehead. She allowed herself a small, private smile. He must have really freaked her out to leave such a distortion of himself behind, Naomi thought, since—before her now—he was by comparison so ordinary. Just a man in his fifties or so, with that faintly comical comb-over and iron set jaw. It was no feature, after all, but the cumulative pinch of his expression and the tractor beam of his gaze, the acrid odor of his ambient distrust.
“I’m not interrupting,” he observed, rejecting the courtesy of phrasing it as a question.
“Not now, you’re not.” Naomi watched them find seats in the small room. Beyond, in the main work area, the women hadn’t noticed the police were here; they continued to speak together, loudly, over the grader. “Mary,” she said to Mary Sully, who had stopped filing and was staring at the D.A., “would you give us a few minutes?”
“Uhkay,” Mary said. She looked happy to leave them. She wedged her way out from between the desk and the cabinet, and moved heavily into the workroom.
Charter watched her go, pursing his lips. He turned to Naomi and offered his facsimile of a smile. “It must be nice not to have to dress for work.”
She crossed her legs to show off the hole in the knee of her jeans. “I hope I don’t look undressed, Mr. Charter.”
“I only meant that most women are required to dress formally when they work.”
“Most of the women I know work all the time,” Naomi observed. “Women’s work has never been limited to men’s business hours, unfortunately.”
The D.A. sat forward in his chair. “I beg your pardon, Mrs. Roth. I’m not here to malign your lifestyle or your livelihood, and I certainly apologize if I gave that impression. I only have a few questions.”
Automatically, she began to protest, but Nelson cut her off. “Place looks good, Naomi.” He hadn’t been out since the winter, when they’d had a break-in—broken glass all over the workroom floor and a pair of grubby underpants in the attic. “You get that window fixed?”
“Ashley did it.” She nodded toward the workroom. “Did a nice job.”
“Any more problems?”
Not unless you count fishing dead babies out of the Sabbathday, she thought. “Nope. Nothing here to steal but ratty old rugs.”
“I understand you sell your ratty old rugs all over the country,” Charter said. She wasn’t sure, but she thought he meant it as a compliment.
“That’s true. Outside of Goddard they’re known as unique living examples of an original American folk art.”
“My grandmother hooked rugs,” he said. “I still have a few myself.”
Naomi looked at him, then at Nelson for help. His silvery hair fell forward over his eyes. She found, suddenly, that she could not remember the color of his eyes and almost asked him what they were. Thankfully, the moment passed. “How goes your investigation?” she said instead.
“It is continuing,” Charter said, his voice even. “It is narrowing.”
“Well, I hope you haven’t come to accuse me.” She was arch.
“I have not,” he concurred.
“You had a word with my doctor, then.”
“I did.”
“Patient-doctor confidentiality be damned!”
Charter smiled. “Within the context of a murder investigation, yes, I think that’s appropriate.”
“Of course, women shouldn’t patronize male doctors at all,” Naomi said, a little wantonly. “That’s my view. Women’s health in the hands of women, don’t you think? Our bodies, ourselves, that’s the ticket.” She really detested him. “I suppose I should be grateful that you talked to my doctor, under the circumstances. It’s inconvenient being considered a suspect. One’s neighbors tend to react badly.”
He sighed. “I apologize for the inconvenience, but I had my reasons. I should tell you that over the years I have consistently lost faith in the power of chance. Sometimes, when I finish with a case, I lay it out on paper. Easier than keeping it all up here.” He tapped his temple with a long finger. “Like a family tree: the victim, the perpetrator, the person who called the police, the witness. Not necessarily an actual family, but all connected nonetheless. Just like a family tree, Mrs. Roth. Everyone who touches the crime advances it in some way, or advances its solution. Believe me, there is very little in the way of random influence. Everyone has a role. Just now, I believe I understand a part of your role in this crime. Perhaps, when it’s all behind us, I’ll understand the rest.”
She was staring at him. She shook her head slowly. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. I hope you know that.”
To her surprise, Charter smiled. “I do know that.” He reached into his coat pocket and retrieved a small spiral notebook, its coil of metal clogged with strips of paper left behind when the sheets were torn away. “And now, I wonder if you might help us with a small problem.”
Dimly, she noted that the grader had stopped. They were speaking more softly now. In the next room, the women, too, had stopped speaking.
“You may have heard about some of the directions our investigation has taken,” Charter said.
“Sure,” Naomi said. “Through-hikers, impoverished women, women who’re living in sin with men they’re not married to. I naturally assume you’ve hauled in every prostitute in the state of New Hampshire.” She leaned forward and whispered, “Do you think there are any?”
“I know there are many,” he said grimly. “But no, I don’t think a prostitute is responsible for this baby. I think the person responsible is an ordinary woman, in extraordinary circumstances.”
Naomi shook her head. “Can you just explain to me why you’re not even considering 49 percent of the population—the 49 percent that’s responsible for almost 100 percent of the crime? It could have been a man, you know.”
“It wasn’t a man.” His gaze drifted to the window. “But a man might have known, or might have helped. Mrs. Roth,” he sighed. “I am not here to justify my deductions to you. I am very good at what I do. I will be making an arrest very shortly.”
She stared at him, then at Nelson. His face gave nothing away. It took her a moment to catch her breath.
“Perhaps you would like to close the door, Mrs. Roth,” Charter said, nodding at it. Naomi found her feet.
“I didn’t want to disturb you in your office,” he said when she returned to her seat, “but frankly time is short now. People talk in this town.” He smiled. “That’s been made abundantly clear to me this past week. And I don’t want our suspect disappearing. I’m sure you understand.”
Dumbly, she nodded.
“Well then”—he held his pen poised—“why don’t you tell me w
hat you know—or perhaps I should say what you think you know—about Heather Pratt?”
The gasp knocked what remained of her smugness away. Naomi opened her mouth in shock. First breath she got, she took the opportunity to laugh at them. “You have to be kidding.”
They were both silent. Charter watched her carefully.
“Oh, absolutely not. Heather Pratt.” She shook her head. “No way.” He was still waiting.
“You couldn’t be more wrong. It’s just totally out of the question.”
And she found herself remembering how, when Heather had first joined the collective, she had brought her work to the mill like the other women, and poured herself coffee, and taken a seat, but how quickly the poison had seemed to spread out from her, like Cecil B. DeMille’s version of blood in the Nile, that bitter silence and those bent heads, intent on ignoring the girl. Naomi had not known much about Heather then, except what Stephen Trask had told her—she was leaving her job at the sports center, her grandmother was ill and needed her at home—and one other rather critical thing: that Heather possessed that trace element of desire which seemed to operate on the sensually alert like catnip on felines. Even her plumpness, which Naomi had not, at first sight, recognized for the pregnancy it was, was somehow not unappealing. But she also remembered the unnatural quiet of those first days, the brittle collective mood in the workroom, and how, at last, comments were made within her hearing—for her hearing—and some of the regulars began to say that they would prefer to work at home now, it was so much less pleasant here, and how she was determined not to understand them, not to take their outrageous part, no matter what they thought the girl had done.
Now, somewhat belatedly, she thought, Heather would never murder a child.
“Heather would never murder a child,” she told them. “She’s completely devoted to her daughter, which I’m sure nobody’s bothered to tell you. Polly is a lovely, enchanting little girl, who is absolutely adored by her mother. Heather would never be capable of doing any harm to an infant.” She shook her head vehemently. “You just couldn’t be further from the truth. Hey, I’m the one who even told Heather about the baby I found. She hadn’t even heard about it till I went by her house on Tuesday.”
The Sabbathday River Page 6