She knew. There was no hint of accusation in her blue eyes, however, no new harshness. Only astonishment, curiosity.
She did not look at me as a stranger because of what I had done, either, but I had become someone else, someone she had known for a long time without intuiting his true personality.
While we ate we could hear the men working at the base of the cliff. Mona, intrigued by the quality of our silence, looked from one to the other of us and wondered, perhaps, if my wife might be jealous.
This showed in a short remark: ‘I’m ashamed to be imposing myself for so long . . .’
‘Don’t be silly, Mona. You know perfectly well that we think of you and Ray as family . . .’
I felt uncomfortable and ate quickly. As I stood up I announced, ‘I’m going to see if I can go and get the car.’
I put on my boots, my jacket, my fur hat. I had the feeling that Mona was going to offer to go with me, for a change of air, but she did not dare to.
Below the cliff the men were working more carefully, having reached the place where they were most likely to find the body.
I followed the trench, where the frozen pathway had become slippery, and I felt liberated at being outdoors in the fresh air, once again recognizing my changed but still familiar surroundings.
The men had pushed my car, still covered with snow, up against the side of the trench. I had to clear the windshield. I wasn’t sure if the engine would start. It seemed as if a long time had passed and that major difficulties must have ensued.
Well, the Chrysler purred immediately into action, and I drove it, carefully, to our garage. This was a small wooden building painted white, facing the barn. I had to clear some space with a shovel to open the garage door and inside I saw the Lincoln convertible Ray and Mona had driven down from Canada on Saturday afternoon.
A few minutes later, I entered the barn; the big door had collapsed outside the building. There was a large patch of snow, but it did not reach the area around the bench. I looked at the ground.
The cigarette butts were gone.
When I went back inside, I looked immediately into her eyes, and she did not turn away but looked back openly, calmly. What could I read there?
‘So! . . . I know! . . . I had suspected it . . . When you answered Olsen about the barn, I understood . . . I went to see and arranged things so that others wouldn’t know . . .’
Wouldn’t know that I was a coward? Did she think it was because of physical cowardice, because I was afraid of getting lost in the blizzard, that I had taken refuge in the barn?
Why, then, was there no contempt in her eyes? No pity, either. No anger. Nothing.
Wait, yes! Curiosity.
‘You didn’t have any trouble with the car?’ she asked, a little too brightly.
‘No.’
‘Aren’t you going to the office?’
‘I’ll call Helen to have her get the mail . . . There shouldn’t be any, because the delivery trucks have probably been unable to make their rounds . . .’
We were talking to no purpose. She had seen me go inside the barn. So I had to know that she had removed the cigarette butts.
The dishes were already done. We looked at one another, all three of us, not knowing where to go or what to do. Mona felt even more strongly that something was happening and announced uncertainly:
‘I’m going to straighten up my room.’
The cleaning lady had not come. She lived beyond the hill, and the road that led through the woods to the village was probably not clear.
‘Actually, I will go in, as far as the office.’
It was unbearable to be shut up like that, waiting for the men to find the body. I got out the car I had just put away moments before.
Once off the property, I found the road clearer, with signs that several cars had already passed that way. The main road looked almost normal, except for the height of the snow piled at either side.
Most of the shopkeepers were busy with shovels, cutting paths to their stores. The post office was open, and I went in, waving to the cashier as usual, as if nothing had happened. In our post office box I found only a few letters and a handful of brochures. Then I went to the office.
Here as well, nothing had changed. Higgins was in his room and looked up at me in some surprise.
‘So, they finally found him?’
I frowned.
‘Your friend Sanders . . . Are they still rummaging in the snow?’
Five years earlier, we had built an attractive building of pink brick and white stone window surrounds on the site of the old offices. The door was white. The well-kept surrounding lawn was not visible for the moment, of course, but every year the grass sprang up into the sunlight by the middle or end of March.
Helen, our secretary, was typing in her office and did not stop work to greet me.
Everything was calm, orderly; my law books were in place in the mahogany bookcases. The hands of the electric clock advanced silently. I sat down in my chair and opened the envelopes one by one.
‘Helen . . .’
‘Yes, Mr Dodd . . .’
She was twenty-five and rather pretty. She was the daughter of one of our clients, a building contractor, and she had got married six months earlier.
Would she stay with us if she had a child? She claimed that she would. I wasn’t so sure of that and I anticipated having to find someone to replace her.
I dictated three unimportant letters.
‘The others are for Higgins.’
Had Isabel been shocked? Was our life going to be disturbed because of this? I wondered, without knowing if I desired that or not. The exaltation of the night in the barn had died down, yet something still remained of it.
My wife was right to look at me curiously. I was no longer the same man. Higgins had not noticed this. Neither had my secretary. Sooner or later, they would discover the transformation.
I checked the time as if I had an appointment. And I did have one, in fact. Only, it had no appointed time. I was eager to have done with the search out at Yellow Rock Farm, eager to have Ray’s body found. I was eager to be rid of it.
What would they do with it when they finally found it? That was not my business. That was Mona’s concern. She was busy making her bed, tidying her room.
There were no newspapers. The New York train had not arrived. Much quicker than I had expected, Helen brought me my three letters to sign.
‘I’m going home. If something comes up, just call me.’
I walked past Higgins’ office and shook his hand.
Outside, I decided that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to buy some meat and I went to the supermarket.
‘Have they found your friend, Mr Dodd?’
‘Not yet.’
‘When you think that such things happen right next to us and we don’t even notice! . . . Did you have any damage?’
‘Only the barn door.’
‘A house was blown away, in Cresthill . . . It’s a miracle that no one was killed.’
Cresthill is where our cleaning lady lived.
Even though I was talking, looking around, going through the everyday motions, I was constantly asking myself: ‘What does she think?’
From what I knew of her, she would not talk to me about it. Life would go on as always, with this secret between us. Now and then, I would feel her gaze on me, doubtless reflecting the same astonishment.
Turning left toward our drive, I noticed that the machines were no longer running and a few moments later I saw from a distance the two women leaving the house in boots and heavy jackets. At the base of the cliff, men were standing around a form lying on the ground.
They had found Ray. I put the car in the garage. I was calm. I felt no remorse. I experienced, on the contrary, immense relief.
The women waited for me before going down the slope. I gave each of them a hand, which didn’t prevent us from slipping, and the machine operators had to help us up.
Ray seemed to be smili
ng under the fine sprinkling of snow that still covered his face and whitened his hair. His right leg was twisted, and one of the men told us it was broken.
I wondered what Mona would do. She did not throw herself on the body. Perhaps she had wanted to for a moment, because she took two or three steps forward; then she stopped, staring and shivering. My wife was on her right, I was to her left. It was to me she turned ever so slightly, just enough to touch my shoulder and side, as if she’d needed my warmth. Then, looking at Isabel, I put my arm around her shoulders.
‘Be brave, Mona . . .’
It was a natural thing to do. She was the wife of my best friend. The men around us seemed completely unfazed. Far from being offended, Mona seemed to press even closer to me.
Only I felt it necessary to shoot Isabel a look of defiance.
It represented another step, as if, with this apparently simple gesture, I were assuring her of my emancipation.
She did not flinch and turned again to the body, which she contemplated with clasped hands, as one considers a coffin descending into the grave.
‘Do you want to move him into the house?’
The crew chief stepped forward.
‘The lieutenant advised us not to do anything until he arrived.’
‘Did you telephone him?’
‘Yes. I had instructions.’
We couldn’t stay there in the cold, standing deep in the snow, waiting for the lieutenant to arrive from Canaan.
‘Mona, come . . .’
I thought she was going to protest, but she allowed herself to be led away, and we had to climb the hill. I no longer had my arm around her shoulders, but I had done it. It was a victory.
‘I suppose he slipped,’ she said, once we were back up. ‘Poor Ray . . .’
The three of us were walking, three dark figures in the white scenery, and I felt that this must be grotesque. Below, the men started up their machine again to disengage it and probably go and work somewhere else.
‘Would you make some coffee, Isabel?’
We followed her into the kitchen, where she set water to boil. She was the one who asked the question.
‘What are you going to do, Mona?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Does he still have any family?’
‘A brother who’s an embassy attaché in Germany . . .’
‘Didn’t he ever tell you anything?’
‘About what?’
‘The arrangements to make in the event . . .’
Calmly, she searched for the words and found them.
‘. . . in the event of an accident.’
‘He never talked about that.’
‘The thing is, there are arrangements to be made,’ continued Isabel, thus taking on the most unpleasant tasks. ‘Do you think he left a will?’
Mona and I said no at the same time.
‘If Ray had drawn up a will,’ I explained, ‘he would have done it with me and left it with me as well.’
‘Do you think, Mona, that he would have preferred cremation?’
‘I don’t know . . .’
We each took our cup of coffee into the living room; out the window we could see the police car arrive and the lieutenant and another officer go down to the base of the cliff.
Within ten minutes, the lieutenant appeared alone at the door and removed his cap.
‘May I offer you my condolences, Mrs Sanders . . .’
‘Thank you.’
‘It’s just what you thought, Mr Dodd. He swerved over towards the cliff and slipped, fracturing a leg in his fall . . .’
Had I said that to him? I no longer remembered. I think he, too, was looking at me in a different way.
‘I’ll have the body taken to the funeral home, and you will merely have to give them their instructions.’
‘Yes,’ murmured Mona, who did not seem to understand what was expected of her.
‘Where do you intend to have him buried?’
‘I don’t know . . .’
‘At Pleasantville,’ I suggested.
It was the large cemetery in New York.
‘Probably . . .’
‘Is there any family?’
‘A brother, in Germany . . .’
We began again. Words. Lips moving. But I was not listening to the words. I was watching the eyes. I think that I have always watched the eyes. Or, rather, that I have always been a little afraid of them.
There were Isabel’s eyes. Those I was familiar with. I had known since that morning what astonishment they expressed.
Yet she was the one carefully watching the lieutenant. She had realized that he was glancing at me from time to time, as if something about this business were bothering him.
I am convinced that if the lieutenant had attacked me, she would have come to my rescue. You’d have thought she was waiting only for that moment.
As for Mona, it was towards me that she turned whenever she was asked a question, as if I had naturally become her chief support. This was so apparent, and her attitude revealed such confidence and surrender, that Olsen must have thought we were bound by some intimate relationship.
Was that why he was less cordial towards me? A trifle contemptuous, I thought.
‘I will leave you to do what is needed. As far as we’re concerned, the case is closed. I regret, Mrs Sanders, that this tragedy took place here in our town.’
He rose, bowed to the two women and finally held out his hand to me. In good faith? I’m not so sure.
I suspect that he’s hiding something. Either his men found something suspicious that puts me in a tricky position, or else Olsen, believing me to be the lover of my best friend’s wife, despises me.
Would he suspect me of taking advantage of the chance to push Ray off the cliff?
I hadn’t thought of that before. It was so plausible, so easy! And why, first of all, did I have the two women walking ahead, when I carried the only – albeit feeble – flashlight we possessed?
I was the one most familiar with the cliff, since it’s on my property, in front of my windows. I could hold Ray by the arm, lead him off to the right, push him at the proper moment . . .
I was scared to think that Olsen might have found the cigarette butts in front of the bench in the barn. Would he have come to the same conclusions as Isabel?
Exactly what were Isabel’s conclusions? What proved to me that she did not, in fact, believe that I had pushed Ray?
In which case, her silence became a kind of complicity . . . The defence of her home, our two children . . .
She kept her eyes on me when I opened the liquor cabinet.
‘A drink will do you good, Mona. Would you like one too, Isabel?’
‘No, thanks.’
I went to get the glasses and ice from the kitchen. Holding her drink out to Mona, I said:
‘Courage, my dear Mona . . .’
As if I were staking my claim. This time, Isabel noticed and for a moment seemed startled. I had never called her that: my dear Mona . . .
‘I’m going to telephone the funeral parlour,’ announced Isabel, heading for the library to use one of our two telephones.
Was it to leave us alone?
After taking a swallow, Mona turned to me, smiling a little sadly.
‘You’re a nice man, Donald.’
Then, after a glance where Isabel had just gone, she seemed about to add something, but in the end said nothing.
4.
The funeral took place Thursday morning and did not proceed as I had envisioned when the three of us were still off alone in our house.
There must be some catastrophes that are like illnesses. You think that it will take a long time to get well, that life will no longer be the same, and then you see that daily routine takes over again.
At ten o’clock, there were more than twenty cars in front of the Fred Dowling Funeral Home, barely a hundred yards from my office, and two of them had brought reporters and photographers from New York.
; Some of them had come to the house the previous day. They had insisted that Mona pose at the spot where Ray’s body had been found.
Bob Sanders had arrived the day before from Bonn. Isabel had offered him one of the girls’ bedrooms for the night, but he had already reserved a room at the Turley Hotel.
He was taller, thinner, more nonchalant than Ray. He was even more casual in his behaviour than his brother was, and I did not like the self-satisfaction of his smile.
I had met him a few times when we were students, but he was much younger than Ray and I were, and I had barely paid attention to him.
He did not show much consideration to Mona.
‘How did it happen? He’d been drinking?’
‘Not more than usual . . .’
‘Had he started to drink a lot?’
Ray was five years older than he was, and he spoke of him rather like a judge preparing to deliver a verdict.
‘No . . . Two or three martinis before meals . . .’
The brother was born near New Haven and he knew about our climate. He must have experienced blizzards, not as fierce as the one last Saturday, but still just as disruptive.
‘How come they didn’t find him sooner?’
‘In some places the snow was more than six feet deep . . .’
‘What arrangements have you made?’
He didn’t like me, either. He frowned at me now and then, perhaps finding that I had been very quick to take Mona under my protection.
Because I was doing that, openly, on purpose. I kept close to her. I was the one who answered most of the questions and I could tell that it exasperated Bob Sanders.
‘Whom have you told about this?’
‘His associates, of course . . .’
‘Were you the one who informed the newspapers?’
‘No. That must have been someone in the village, maybe one of the policemen . . . A Scotch?’
‘No, thanks. I don’t drink.’
He had rented himself a car at the airport. He was married. His wife and three children lived in Bonn with him. He had come over alone. I’m fairly sure he had not seen Ray for several years.
As for the Miller brothers, they did not bother stopping by the house. It was only at the funeral parlour that they went over to Mona to offer their condolences.
The Hand Page 6