The Snow Garden

by Unknown Author

  Contrasting pictures of two different sisters were emerging for Randall. Lisa, the professor’s wife, who lived in surroundings of academic prestige, every room of her house a library. Paula, working class, thought any decoration that took up much table space was pretentious.

  “As I said on the phone,” Tim was saying, “the loss of your sister has had a pretty profound effect on the city, as well as the entire campus. So the Atherton Herald would like to .. . highlight Lisa’s contributions to the community, as well as present a clear picture of her life before she came to Atherton.” Tim sat uneasily on the sofa, legs crossed and a notepad resting on one knee. Randall fought the urge to point out that he wasn’t holding a pen. He looked at Paula and was surprised to see that her eyes hadn’t left his.

  The fixed expression on her face, the slight furrow to her upper lips and her narrow eyes, set off a blast of nerves in Randall’s stomach. “You don’t want to sit?”

  “Actually, if I could just use your bathroom?”

  “Down the hall to the left. Right across from the guest bedroom.”

  Randall managed a smile before he turned. Halfway down the hall, he found himself between the opposite doors to the bathroom and guest bedroom. When he looked over his shoulder, he only had a half view of Tim, bent forward over his pad, nodding as Lisa spoke.

  The guest bedroom had a mirrored closet with sliding doors that took up an entire wall. Slowly, with enough care to make almost no sound, Randall pushed the middle door open.

  Lisa Eberman had brought enough clothes to her sister’s house to last her a month without ever doing laundry. Sweaters were piled on the shelf. Randall thumbed through them in growing disbelief. Dry-cleaned shirts too small to belong to Paula hung in arrangement by color. On the floor of the closet, an open suitcase spilled folded pairs of panties. Randall scanned the closet again for anything personal.

  Against the far corner of the shelf, he spotted a row of paperback books. He slid the middle door shut and then opened the left one.

  Paperback mysteries extended from the wall to the first stack of sweaters. Randall removed one; its pages were still crisp. He checked several more and saw that they were unread. He recognized a few of the authors’ names, Jonathan Kellerman and Patricia Cornwell. Gruesome murders and heroes placed at odds with the world as they tried to solve them—twenty books in all, and they were alphabetized by author, and then subsequently by title. Lisa had her future reading list laid out and ready.

  Randall slid the door shut and turned to the bed. Several more paperbacks sat on the nightstand. The one closest to the bed had a bookmark. It gave him a chill. The books on the nightstand had been read, the edges of pages darkened from contact with fingertips, the spines run through by white cracks indicating where they had been bent open. All mysteries. Not a single romance novel in the bunch. The one-time doctorate student and scholar had been reduced to finding her escape in murder, violence, and, most important, Randall thought, solvable mysteries. While he knew it was trite, he couldn’t help but wonder if Lisa’s affinity for seeing the killer caught in handcuffs by the final page gave her a satisfaction she couldn’t find in the mystery that was her husband.

  Steeling himself, he went for the dresser drawers, which held no surprises. They were stuffed with more clothes, and nothing was buried beneath any of them. No note saying, “My husband did it." Feeling foolish, and fighting the hot flicker that warned of the onset of panic, Randall returned to the nightstand and opened the single drawer. Inside was a daunting mess of papers. Sheets torn from the notepad on the nightstand contained phone numbers jotted down in spidery print.

  How long did it take to go to the bathroom? Randall shoved the contents of the drawer into the pockets of his coat. He scanned the room to see if he had missed anything, half expecting Paula Willis to come bursting into the room, one fist raised as she demanded what right he had to go poking through her sister’s things.

  When he saw the wedding photo, he froze.

  Eric had a copy that he used to keep on the shelf above the liquor cabinet, but Randall had noticed it was missing when he went to swipe the bottle earlier that week. This photo had the exact same frame, of varnished wood. But was it Paula’s copy?

  He rounded the foot of the bed and moved to it. Lisa Eberman wasn’t a blushing bride; she was an ecstatic bride. Her head was tossed back in laughter. Eric held her around the waist with one arm, gazing right into the lens with a wan half smile.

  He turned away from the photo and the stinging sight of Eric the groom, distracting himself with the undeniable fact that for some reason Lisa Eberman had brought the majority of her clothing to her sister’s house, an hour away from Atherton.

  “When we were teenagers, she talked so much about getting out of Philly that I guess she was the one who ended up putting the idea in my head. Who knows? I might never have left.”

  Randall gave Tim a barely perceptible nod when he appeared in the living-room doorway. He was relieved to see that Tim had finally taken out a pen.

  “Find everything?” Paula asked him. Randall tried a smile that froze on his face.

  “Mrs. Willis, do you mind if Luther listens in on—”

  “Sure.” Paula gestured to the spot on the sofa right next to Tim, and Randall crossed to it, taking a seat directly across from the woman, where she reclined in the La-Z-Boy. When Randall looked up, he was startled to see a cigarette burning in the ashtray on the chair’s side table. Paula continued, proving Tim’s assessment to be dead on; she spoke with the speed of a woman trying to get everything out before her time was up.

  But she didn't look that sick. And why was she smoking?

  “I guess that was really what all her phases were about when we were younger. Getting out. Kind of distancing herself from the rest of us. I remember” —Paula lowered her eyes to fiddle with the drawstring of her sweat pants as a muffled laugh shook her frame—“when she was thirteen, she went around in one of our dad’s tweed jackets with a pipe stuck in her mouth. She brought home all these Greek plays from the library and stayed up late reading. I remember I couldn’t even pronounce the names of the guys who wrote them. It pissed me off when I was little, but later I realized ... the smarter she got, the more her chances of getting out.”

  Randall averted his eyes from Paula to hide how much her last words hit home.

  Tim broke the silence. “You said Lisa met Eric while she was pursuing her Ph.D. What was she studying?”

  Paula lifted her gaze from her fidgeting hands and fixed Tim with a tight stare. “You mean the Ph.D. she never got? Eric didn’t even tell her when he applied for a position at Atherton. She had another year to go. I remember she was...” She trailed off, sucked a drag off her cigarette, and turned her head slightly so she wouldn’t blow the smoke directly into their faces. “I can crack the window if you ...”

  “I’m fine,” Randall said.

  “I remember the first time she came back from Duke after she met him. I had just dropped out of Syracuse and was living back home. I guess it was Thanksgiving. Gosh...” Her eyes went distant for a second. “Almost eighteen years ago to the date.” She took time to honor this anniversary silently before continuing. “She said he was a perfect gentleman, but he was obsessed with gargoyles and medieval stuff. That’s what she told our parents, at least. Later, she told me that he was a challenge.”

  She pulled on her cigarette, set it down in the ashtray, and then pushed herself out of the chair. Tim kept silent as she crossed to the window and cracked it. “How’s that?” she asked, back still turned as she steadied herself with both hands on the windowsill. “A challenge,” she whispered angrily.

  Randall looked at Tim to see if he was going to press, but Tim gazed fixedly at Paula’s back.

  “How often did you visit Lisa at Atherton?” Tim asked.

  “We stopped,” Paula said to the window. “Mainly ’cause Eric always rubbed Clark the wrong way. We used to do holidays there, especially Christmas. I don’t kn
ow—the holidays seemed more right up there on the hill, with everyone’s lights up. But on the drive home Clark would always complain that every time he tried to talk to Eric about real-life things he would just get this faraway look.”

  On the console table behind the La-Z-Boy, Randall saw an exact replica of the wedding photo hanging in the bedroom. This one in a different frame. He was silently shocked. “You talked about her reading the classics at a very young age. Do you think it’s safe to say that your sister was kind of a prodigy?” Obvious flattery intended to lull Paula out of the funk she’d slipped into.

  “Prodigy?” She braced herself against the top window with both hands before pushing it shut. “Know-it-all, maybe.”' She heard the echo of her own words. She whispered to herself, “That’s not fair. She wasn’t like that. Sometimes she even seemed sorry for being so much smarter than me. For being so ... brilliant.” Paula shook her head slightly. When she spoke again, her voice sounded as if the wind had been knocked out of her. “She could have been so many things other than that man’s wife. So many.”

  Randall looked at Tim, trying to ask silently how much longer they had to endure this.

  “But I guess you’re not going to print something like that, are you?”

  Tim sat forward. “What would you like us to print, Mrs. Willis?”

  Paula turned her head from the window. At first, Randall saw skepticism on her face, but as she surveyed Tim, who sat with pen poised over his pad, the look was replaced by one of confused gratitude, the look of a woman who had been led to believe her words carried little importance. “Say she was strong.”

  She turned to face the window again. “Maybe she drank. Does it matter? Does it change the fact that she was strong enough to stay with a man who didn’t care she existed? I know it doesn’t change the fact that she came here every weekend to take care of me, when all I had done most of her life was say stupid, mean things to her because I was so jealous.”

  Randall touched one of Tim’s knees gently, hoping the gesture said what he couldn’t. Enough. Lisa’s real now. A lesson has been learned, so can we please get the hell out of here? In response, Tim cleared his throat and closed his pad.

  “How are you feeling now, Mrs. Willis?” Tim asked as mildly as he could.

  “All right, I guess. I should be.” She managed a smile. “I’ve been cancer-free for almost half a year now.”

  It was almost three o’clock and the Cherokee was doing seventy-five south on 95, away from Paula Willis’ double-edged guilt and grief and the photo of Eric and Lisa as bride and groom.

  “She was moving out, Tim!”

  “Randall, all you found was a bunch of clothes.”

  “Enough clothes to last her until spring. And she lied to Eric and told him Paula was still sick when she’s been in remission for almost six months. And the wedding photo—”

  “Which proves nothing! Start moving out on your husband and you take a symbol of your failed marriage as a souvenir. Kind of ironic, isn’t it? And why didn’t she tell Paula? You heard the way she talked about Eric. It’s not like she wouldn’t have been supportive.”

  “Maybe Lisa was doing it gradually. Eric had been the breadwinner for their entire marriage, so maybe she thought if he just told him she was leaving, he would have thrown her out without anything. Who knows. And you heard what Paula said? Lisa was the smart one, the know-it-all. Maybe she didn’t tell her baby sister about her failed marriage because she didn’t want Paula yelling 'I told you so!’ ”

  “It’s weak, Randall.”

  Twenty miles outside of Atherton, the landscape had evolved from suburbs to rolling hills and the dark suggestions of the Atlantic beyond. Randall started digging into his pockets. Tim glanced over as he started dumping the mess of papers into the coin holder under the stereo panel. “What’s that?”

  “Probably nothing. Phone numbers. Grocery lists. There was all kinds of shit in the nightstand.”

  “And you just took it?”

  “I didn’t exactly have time to go through it.”

  “Anything else besides clothes?” Tim asked. “Boxes?”

  “Books. Some read, most of them new. Paperback mysteries. And that’s all.”

  “She was obviously a reader.”

  “She was obviously planning on doing a lot of reading. There. With a sister who’s been cancer-free for half a year.” Randall started sorting the papers.

  “All right. I’m not saying there isn’t evidence that she was leaving her husband. But do you think Eric would kill Lisa because she was leaving him? Why bother, when he’s spending every weekend with you? There’s another possibility that you haven’t even considered — ”

  “I know what you’re about to say, and don’t bother, because it’s bullshit.”

  “She left a note, Randall!”

  “It’s too messy for a suicide.”

  “Maybe she liked the drama of it. Plunging to her death in the middle of town.”

  “Really? Is that why she rented herself a storage locker in her name in October? Because she was planning on killing herself?” Randall held up the receipt from Bayfront Storage. Tim looked back to the road before grabbing it out of Randall’s hand, flattening it against the steering wheel with one hand.

  “It’s in her name,” Tim finally said.

  “And her name only.”

  Tim furrowed his brow at the highway ahead before handing back the receipt. “The police might have already been there.”

  “Then why do we have the receipt right now?”

  “That’s a carbon.”

  “So? You said yourself the police don’t go poking around the belongings of a dead, drunk driver.” He checked the address on the receipt. “Jesus Christ, Tim. This place is on Walker Street. Do you know where that is?”

  “The Bayfront?”

  “How many storage facilities are there within spitting distance of the freeway and she goes into the worst neighborhood in town?”

  “Maybe it’s cheap.”

  “Yeah, and maybe whatever’s inside it is a secret.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the majority of her belongings.”

  “Find the key,” was all Tim said.

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “Randall, breaking and entering is not going on my resume. If Bayfront Storage is in Atherton, maybe she kept the key in Atherton.” “Yeah. On her key ring, which is either at the bottom of the river or in an evidence bag somewhere.”.

  “What are Eric’s Thanksgiving plans?” Tim asked.

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “Does he have family nearby?”

  “His parents are dead. His brother lives in Seattle.”

  “What are you doing for Thanksgiving? Painting your nails with Kathryn?”,

  “Jesus,” Randall whispered.

  “Hey, if I remember correctly, this was our only advantage over the police—who have much more experience with stuff like this than us, by the way...”

  “Fine.”

  Automatic headlights were blinking on beneath a tide of bloated clouds threatening snow. “I’m flying out tonight,” Tim finally said. “It’s supposed to snow like a bitch too. I get back Sunday. Can you wait till then before you decide to break into any storage facilities?”

  “If there’s a key in that house, I’m going to find it.”

  “That isn’t all you should be looking for. See how much stuff of hers is still there. Maybe Eric got rid of some of it, but you should still be able to get some sense of whether or not she was really leaving him.”

  A memory struck Randall with surprising force. He tensed his hand around the door handle. Tim saw it. “What?” he asked.

  “Something he said the night of the accident.”

  “Uh-huh,” Tim said impatiently.

  Downtown Atherton came into view through the windshield.

  “He wanted me to spend the night. It was the first time he ever asked. And I wouldn’t. So he sai
d he thought she wasn't coming back. At all, he must have meant.”

  “He thought she wasn’t coming back. Or he knew?”

  “I have to connect twice?” Kathryn asked her father.

  “Yes. Once in Chicago. Then Denver. You get in at midnight our time, but East Coast time it will be .. . well, you’ll be really tired.”

  Over the phone, Philip Parker always adopted a placating and solicitous tone with his daughter, as if it were his goal to repair any damage her mother, Marion, might have caused in the conversation prior. ‘Your mom’s going to meet you at the airport because I’ve got a meeting with our new service provider pretty early.”

  “Gotta keep those doctors on line, bitching about their HMOs, right?”

  “My website provides an invaluable service for doctors around the world to provide much-needed medical advice. But I have a feeling you already know that, because I’ve told you a hundred times.”

  “You don’t ride around your office on a scooter now, do you?”

  “Why do I have to defend the dot-com generation to my tech-savvy daughter?”

  “Just don’t go bust yet, okay? ’Cause I kind of like it here.”

  “Your mother could support us quite nicely, but you might end up working in the cafeteria.”

  Kathryn grunted. The cab would be outside Stockton in two hours, ready to take her to Logan. She looked down at the carry-on she’d hoisted onto her bed. The flap was open. It was empty.

  “Hellish as it is, there is a bright side,” her father added.

  “I’m waiting.”

  “Coach was full on your flights, so ., .”

  “Cocktails before takeoff. Woo-hoo!”

  “You are expected to behave like an eighteen-year-old flying first class, Kathryn.” But there was a hint of a smile in her father’s voice, so she 'didn’t bother telling him that save for a few swallows of scotch from Randall’s flask, she hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol since arriving at Atherton. Jono Morton had mixed the last drink she had ever consumed. Now intoxication didn’t mean relaxation or fun, it meant weakness, having your common sense smeared, and your guard lowered before you noticed it was down.