by David Hill
Averill had murdered that baby. What else could it be? What Soames Churchill claimed became her property. Averill had murdered her baby. Whether it was from insanity or anxiety or for vengeance against Soames for blackmailing him, she didn’t care.
He had done it, and after Helen Brisbane’s daughter was married in September, he and Helen were going to dissolve into the blue. Unless of course some unforeseen calamity prevented it. Unless the groom got cold feet or the bride’s went so cold that rigor mortis set in. That tragic turn had cost Helen a daughter, but it had cheated Averill of something he held equally dear. The terms of Helen’s legal arrangement with Ransom stated that their child had to be married before she would legally pass “Go” and collect her million dollars. How long would Averill’s eternal love for his overripe pear last after he realized her purse would always be empty?
When Soames Churchill sent a wedding gift, she sent one that lasted forever.
35
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 26, 2000
7:05 A.M.
The sky was already pink and silver through the little window above her cot. The night had dropped down chilly and the cotton blanket they had given her was worthless. She was asleep and awake. As she sat up, she thought for an instant she saw Blue sitting on the empty cot across the cell from hers.
“Hey.” He grinned.
“Hey, yourself,” she said.
“It’s all over. Soames is dead.”
Then his arms were around her. She realized at once that this was that waking dream called life. She couldn’t fathom it. How had he set her free? The whole scenario was impossible. Life twisted around so fast. Everything shifted. Everything changed or shed its outer layer and turned out to be something else.
He had left the cell door open. People were gathering around. There was shouting and explaining, and one by one, the voices died away. Somehow she was sitting beside Blue in his truck, driving home.
“You saved me,” she said, thinking out loud. He was more pensive than she would have expected. He shifted his eyes toward her and then back to the double beam on the narrow road.
“You saved me first,” he countered. It almost angered her. She had spoken a fact straight out. He was being ridiculously modest. It was self-deprecation to the point of falsehood. She owed him her life. He couldn’t make anything like such a claim.
“I tried to kill Averill.”
“That’s attempted murder.”
“I’m bound to face charges.”
“No evidence.”
“I signed a confession.”
“Gee, you know what? I completely lost it.”
“That’s police corruption.”
“Yes, it is.”
They were coming through that brief, boding bottom land she had hated since the night months earlier when she had imagined the stooped figure running for cover with a baby in her arms. She had never told him about it. It seemed to her now that she never would. She would leave this place. She would abandon as much of it as she could and live with the memory of the rest. She still thought she might be more use to herself and the world in a city.
Leave him? She owed him everything. She was suddenly aware that she had no power over her feelings for him. It frightened her a little. She had no means to protect herself from this immutable, imperishable bond with him.
Neither one of them could sleep. They lay side by side in the blue dark, listening to the faint hissing of the wind in the trees. It was only now that the impact of the last two days let its brutal, transforming jolt echo and shatter a thousand familiar shapes and perceptions.
“Blue?”
“Yes?”
“Do you feel old?”
“A thousand at least.”
“Why did Averill want me?”
“I think you know.”
“The baby.”
“Soames wanted a baby.”
“Averill and Soames? I don’t get it.”
He had to tell her. They had driven past the cemetery in the dark. She was going to see that mound of dirt across the road when she went outside in the morning. He had to tell her. Yet it was condemning her to an endless, raveling agony. The notion of her infant strangled and buried was devastating. It was loss and grief and everlasting sorrow to carry. But there was finality. There was a changeless, cold marble fact to be resisted and then very slowly taken in and accepted.
What did an empty grave mean? Had Averill simply hidden the real burial site from fear? Was he afraid of an exhumation? Had he murdered it after all? Had he cracked its skull or left some other signature of his killing? Or did he have another purpose? Had he been thwarted somehow in an attempt to present Soames with a child? Had she promised him money? Or was she blackmailing him, using her ability to prove his involvement in Henri Churchill’s death?
There were endless questions, enough to torture Leona for the rest of her life.
“Leona?”
“Yes?”
“There’s no body buried in Tess’s grave.”
“I know.”
“You know?”
“He wouldn’t risk it.”
“You mean you figured it out.”
“Everything except why he did it.”
“To punish you.”
“For what?”
“For your sins.”
She had been very calm, very controlled and logical. She had taken the view that it could only mean Averill hid his savagery with it in a secret, unmarked grave. That would shift like the wind. It would crumble every time she heard about some couple that had an adopted daughter. The inescapable hope would haunt her forever.
They passed a night of brooding silences interrupted by troubled fits of unfinished conversation.
“Blue, do you think Tess is dead?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t know it, I …”
What could he say? He had a theory. Soames Churchill figured into it. But his theories weren’t hypotheses. His wasn’t an x-equals-y way of thinking. His theories were plain gut instinct, what in a woman would be construed as “intuition.” The way he saw it, Soames Churchill had Averill Sayres by the ying-yang with a downhill pull when he brought Leona home. Sayres was scared to death. He didn’t just show up with a wife who was expecting a baby. It was all to some hidden purpose.
“Did Soames ever say she wanted a baby?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Did she act any certain way around you while you were expecting?”
“I didn’t know her then.”
“You must have seen her everywhere.”
“No.”
“At church?”
“Maybe, but I don’t think so.”
“Wasn’t she in the choir?”
“No. That was after the baby.”
That had some significance. Soames went where she had something to gain. Period. Otherwise she wouldn’t have bothered. So Leona had nothing Soames wanted directly from her until after she’d lost the baby.
“What’d she want from you, Leona?”
“What did I have?”
“Sayres.”
“No, Helen Brisbane had Averill.”
“He was a scared rabbit, Leona.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“He had the world screwed on backward.”
“Blue, I know Averill was insane.…”
“He worshipped his own worst fears.”
“I know he was paranoid! I know scared little rabbits do stupid things!” She was pounding his chest with both fists, furious.
“Why are you doing this, Leona?”
“Why the hell did you have to play tall sheriff!?!”
“I saved your life!”
“You made it worse!”
Her words stung. She could see that. He could see that she felt guilty for saying them. Yet neither one of them could deny their meaning. The loss, when Leona had believed that she had simply given birth to a stillborn ch
ild, was almost unbearable. Yet she had somehow come through it, at least the immediate, searing pain of it. Then she discovered that it was no ordinary wound. It was infected by perversion and cruelty. It hadn’t healed at all. It had only been festering. Its poison had slowly worked on her until she had tried to relieve her tortured mind by taking her own demented justice.
Now, after all of it, there was this terrible hope, this raw belief that had the power to turn everything else meaningless again. He had given her baby away. Or sold it to one of those illegal adoption rings you heard about. Why else would that grave have turned out to be empty? No. No, he had simply made double sure there was no hard proof of what he’d done. Maybe he figured Leona would put it all together in time.
It made no sense. Who could he have given a newborn infant to in an ice storm way up a dirt road? Someone had helped him. Someone knew. Soames? Why would Soames help Averill kidnap or kill her baby?
“Blue, he must have given her to Soames.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know!”
“Then where is she?”
“Maybe Soames gave her to someone else.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m thinking.…”
“Leona, you’ll never know. You’ll have to wonder for the rest of your life.”
“If I don’t find out what happened to Tess, I won’t have a life!”
“We, Leona, we won’t have a life.”
He looked even sadder than he had on that day he first came to see Averill. She flooded with shame. He had appeared out of the gray woods, and slowly the world had turned green with possibilities. He had made her believe in life all over again. How had he done that? He hadn’t given her back the things she had lost. He hadn’t explained life to her any better than she could interpret it for him. If his power had been love, then why did they both feel doomed now?
Could she just go on for the rest of her life without ever knowing? Had Averill murdered her infant and buried her in the inscrutable black swamp? Could Tess be alive? Could she be walking now somewhere in the vast world beyond the circling treetops? Were people like trees? Would time surround and protect Leona with a tough outer layer while her insides turned to wood? Was that what people meant by putting one foot in front of the other one and plodding on?
Their eyes met as eyes do when two people in conversation have drifted into wordless scrutiny. Why did his eyes always seem to see something that hers didn’t? There was something indomitable there. It had drawn her to him. Now it made her sad because she had begun to think that Blue simply believed in some eventual good that she couldn’t.
He hated her sadness. It scared him. It took her deep inside of herself, way beyond some impenetrable wall. It left him floundering in solitude. It showed him how small he was next to her overwhelming loss. It forced him to admit that at times her despair was greater than her ability to overcome it.
“What is it, Blue?”
“What you want is a miracle.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
What could he tell her that she didn’t already know? What passionate beliefs could he foist on her that weren’t tinged with his needs and desires? What pure and immutable good thing could he produce that might change the raveling future and prevent her inevitable descent into hell?
“You want me to be your miracle.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“It’s the condition you put on your affections.”
“I don’t know how to live with these feelings.”
“I don’t doubt that.”
“Then why don’t you understand?”
“No matter how much pain you bear, you can still love me.”
“I do love you.”
“Well, I can’t make all your sorrows disappear.”
No, he couldn’t. She had never consciously felt that he should. Yet she had communicated that by resenting his faith in things. She had begun to feel there wouldn’t be room in her heart for all the obligatory emotions she owed Tess and her overwhelming affection for Blue. She felt disloyal, so she was pulling away from Blue, as if she had no right to hope for any good.
“How many times are you planning to break my heart, Leona?”
He was right. No matter how much justification she had for the way she felt about things, she was in no way entitled to let those feelings cause Blue any more pain. There was no doubt about that. After all, she could still love him. She could comfort him. She could reward and reinforce all the good in him. Doing that was her path through this towering forest of overwhelming sorrow. It was life. It was what people meant by faith, by putting one foot in front of the other one—without answers, without clues, without reasons—because that was all any living thing could do.
“If I have to live without the answers, then I’ll live without the answers.”
“Are you sure, Leona?”
“I’ll lose you if I don’t.”
“You realize there may never be any answers?”
“Yes.”
“You accept that?”
“I have to.”
“Then I promise you, as long as I live, I’ll keep looking for them.”
36
THURSDAY, APRIL 27, 2000
3:00 P.M.
Leona stood eyeing the white enameled perfection of the porch floor. Its narrow planks had been laid an eighth of an inch apart to allow air in and moisture out. It was a seemingly endless wraparound portico with a swirling Victorian railing that curved outward here and there to accommodate sitting areas furnished with white wicker sofas and chairs cushioned in narrow black-and-white stripes. A maid had just greeted her at the door and shown her to a conversation area that overlooked a rose garden divided into an intricate geometric pattern of low, dense boxwood hedge.
“Lovely, isn’t it?”
Her hair was gray, no doubt rinsed with silver. It lent strange glamour and dignity. Her clothes were different as well. Something harsh in her appearance was softened. There was nothing lurid or lascivious about her ivory linen dress. She didn’t seem at all worldly or wanton here. It occurred to Leona for the first time that she must be at least fifteen years older than Averill.
“That’s African boxwood.…”
Helen paused as Leona’s eyes met hers directly for the first time.
“People always ask how we grow such dense, low hedge.”
“Are you a gardener?”
“Lately I’ve taken an interest.”
Helen offered her a seat. Their conversation ran the gamut of all the polite topics two women seeking to establish their mutual civility could cover. After a while the maid brought an elaborately prepared tea, which she served from a cart on ivory plates trimmed in black and gold and monogrammed with a “B” at the center. Leona was strangely ravenous. Helen identified the various pastries for her, as well as kiwi fruit, which Leona had neither seen nor imagined. Finally, when the maid had cleared their places and rolled the cart away, Helen’s mask of respectful affection became somewhat more intense.
“I believe you have some questions for me.”
“Well …”
Leona wasn’t prepared for the ordinary facts confronting her. Helen was a lonely, middle-aged woman whose best years had been spent living with a man who never touched her. It was the price she had paid for her daughter’s well-being. She had probably married Ransom with the same desperate feelings that guided or misguided Leona toward Averill. People gossiped about her agreement with Ransom. They said she had done it for a million dollars. Who would slice twenty years off her life for a million or even ten million dollars? No, it was all over Helen’s face. She had paid a terrible price all her own. In the end she, like Leona, had lost her child by the very means she had chosen to protect her.
“I did love him, Leona,” Helen offered by way of accommodating Leona’s obvious discomfort. “It was created more by limited circumstances than Cupid, but I think Averill and I had a fair c
hance at a good life.”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“I thought in time I might help Averill find himself.”
“Don’t say anything good about Averill Sayres to me.”
“I’m not defending the wrongs he did.…”
“You knew?”
Helen’s warmth disappeared. She glared at Leona with controlled contempt. In a moment, she stood. “So good to see you,” she said in that dismissive tone of false kindness people in Orpheus used when they wanted you to leave.
Leona didn’t get this at all. She had obviously insulted Helen, but how? Helen’s sudden aversion to her question was an answer. She must have known what Averill had done. Had she known he was planning to kill the baby? And did she know why? Now it occurred to Leona that Helen might be afraid of her culpability. In the eyes of the law she might be an accomplice.
“Helen, I don’t mean you any harm.”
“It’s a little late for that.”
Now Helen was the accuser. Or trying to put her off by acting like one.
“All I want is the truth.”
“Then you’ll have to tell some truth first, Leona.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“You attempted one murder. It’s not so difficult for me to believe you were an accomplice to another.”
“What?”
“You got yourself hired to decorate the church.”
“I got myself …?”
“Hired! And who else was there when Soames did it?”
Had the border between real and unreal disappeared forever? She had come here to beg Helen Brisbane for any shred of information she might have about Tess. Now she was accused of helping Soames Churchill commit murder.
“Helen, you can’t think I knew—”
“I think Soames made excellent use of you.”
“If she did, it was all—”
“Easy! You made it all so damned easy for her!”
Helen was crying now, overwhelmed by sorrow. She looked so lost and helpless and vulnerable that Leona couldn’t hold on to her own moral indignation. Helen’s loss was too genuine. How could Leona stop the flood of empathy? People were connected by deeper forces than blood: frailty, mortality, incomprehensible loneliness and loss. How could she shield herself from that mutual, all-encompassing grief? Thank God, life would pass in a wink. Thank God, this terrible vulnerability they shared wouldn’t last forever. They seemed to be drawn into a vortex of dying things, of losing and aging and shrinking into inevitable nothing.