by John Farrow
Cinq-Mars is looking out across a pasture when he asks the question, as though his lack of eye contact paints his query as casual, offhand, and therefore insignificant. Hammond patiently waits for his wandering gaze to return to their jurisdiction, and the two men study each other. All Émile can read is his own reflection.
Ignoring the question, the trooper asks another. “Anything else you found out, from when you were snooping?”
Émile understands that if he is going to turn a corner with the man, then this might be his lone opportunity. “Maybe. Look, the boy’s a good friend of the girls. They speak well of him. Do you have anything on him? A heads-up, just in case?”
“He told us he didn’t know Toomey. We checked. He took a class with him.”
Cinq-Mars nods. “That’s funny,” he allows.
Hammond detects the new gravity to his demeanor. “How’s that?”
“I overheard him say that he did know Toomey. I’m surprised he denied it to you when he says something different to other people.”
“That’s why I’m bringing him in. To talk about that sort of contradiction.”
If he was still a cop, Cinq-Mars well knows, working this case, he’d bring the boy in himself and give him a rough ride. He can’t hold it against Hammond if he’s thinking about doing exactly that.
“So,” Hammond says, “you said ‘maybe.’”
“What’s your rank? How do I address you?”
“Captain.”
“Yet you’re a detective. In uniform.”
“That’s how it goes sometimes.”
“Captain, something fell in my lap that maybe you don’t know. I found it out by accident. I wasn’t muddling.”
“We both know that’s bullshit. Or maybe, out on this farm, you want to call it horse manure. Either-or. What was it that fell? Into your lap?”
Émile has to consider the remark. If they both know when he’s talking bovine or horse droppings, they might manage a meeting of the minds. “The boy knew Addie Langford,” he sums up. “They were intimate at one time. You know that. He also knows a Professor Edith Shedden. Might not mean a thing.”
“Okay. But you think it might mean something. Why?”
Émile’s thinking that he might be able to get along with this guy, once they both get past their mutual antagonism. “Edith Shedden knew Malory Earle, okay? I’m not saying there’s any connection at all, but if you’re going to question the boy, if he already has a history of fudging the truth, you might want to keep that in your hip pocket. In other words, he’s connected, if only loosely, to all three victims.”
Hammond’s wheels are churning, Émile can tell, perhaps so rapidly that he’s unable to articulate a reply. A slight nod of his chin is probably meant to indicate thanks, or perhaps he’s broaching an outside perimeter of appreciation.
“Can I talk to him?” Émile requests.
“The boy? No.”
“I don’t mean as an investigator. He’s connected to my family. As a family friend, can I have a quick word? He’s just a scared boy. You know I’m not working against you here. I just gave you good material.”
The trooper mulls it over. Hammond may be a bright man, and a stubborn and insecure one, a combination that causes him to flail his way through certain complexities and come across as awkward and slow. Though Émile’s initial impression of him as being incompetent might not stand, either.
“One minute, max,” Hammond stipulates.
Émile casts a glance back at Caroline and the girls as he walks over to the patrol car. Huddled together for mutual support, they seem relieved that he’s involved to some extent. The back door is opened for him by the patrol officer and the two cops move off a short distance. Émile waits for them to attain the furthest distance they’re going to permit him before he leans down and looks at the boy. Vernon is putting on a brave front. The retired policeman has seen that attitude frequently enough in his career that he knows instantly that the lad before him is frightened half to death.
“We meet again,” Cinq-Mars says.
“You’re the uncle?”
“Go figure, hey.”
“Yeah.”
“You know you’re in trouble, right?”
“Why am I in trouble? They want to talk about Addie, they said.”
“You lied. You lied and you’re trembling because you’re afraid of something that you’re hiding that you want to keep hid. That’s obvious to any cop.”
“I’m not trembling.” The boy looks away. He swallows hard. Asks, “What lie?”
“Do you mean there’s more than one?”
The question sets the boy back in his seat a little. He looks up.
“How many? If there was only one you should be able to recite it back to me.”
The question is tricky, and the boy knows it. “Maybe there’s more than one. I didn’t feel like talking to them, you know? Some things in life are personal. Which one do you know?”
“You told me you knew Toomey.”
“Oh yeah,” Vernon says.
“Not very well, you said. Which was a lie. You told them—” Cinq-Mars lets his statement hang in the air, for Vernon to accept or reject.
“That I didn’t,” he admits.
“That you didn’t know him at all. You doubled down on your lie. Why?” Émile asks. “They found out on their own what’s true. You told me one thing—”
“I didn’t know who you were. The security guard, she was aggressive. I had to give her an excuse for being there.”
“What was your real reason for being at Toomey’s office?”
He doesn’t want to say.
“Were you having an affair with him?”
Vernon scrunches up his face in a look of contempt. “No way.”
“They’re going to ask,” Cinq-Mars points out, indicating the troopers. “You might as well get used to the question.”
“That’s not it.”
“They’ll want to know what it is. Why’d you hang out with him?”
He’s pushing past his level of personal knowledge. An old ploy. Increase the level of agreed-upon knowledge and mere supposition soon becomes an acknowledged fact. “I think I told you,” Vernon reminds him, although he doesn’t sound convincing.
“He tells good stories,” Émile remembers.
“I was interested in what he taught, that’s all.”
“Yeah, but he’s dead now, Vernon. Why visit his office?”
Hammond is returning. “I’ll take him in now,” he says. “We’ll have a long talk downtown.” Then he smiles at the boy with what seems a threatening grin. “Won’t we, son?”
Vernon, Émile notes, refuses to look at the trooper.
“One more quick word in private.”
“You’ve had that quick word.”
“The time it takes for you to go around and get in the driver’s seat.”
Hammond makes a show of his impatience. He agrees with a shrug and starts around to the front of the car. His subordinate clambers into the front passenger seat and slams the door a whole lot louder than necessary. The conversation isn’t private.
“You lied,” Cinq-Mars whispers in Vernon’s ear. “You’re in trouble. Answer as honestly as you can. Don’t get upset if they’re aggressive, that’s their job. If you feel they’re trying to pin something on you, whether you’re guilty or not, lawyer up. Put in a call to one of your friends here, and we’ll get a lawyer in to see you right away. We’ll even get one ready to go, just in case. Understand?”
Vernon nods that he does, and with fright showing in his eyes he meets Émile’s gaze. “I didn’t kill anybody,” he says.
“Then what are you scared of?”
“Shut the door, please!” Hammond calls out, bossy again now that his patrol officer is nearby.
Knowing that he’s been granted considerable license throughout the exchange, and has won a speck of ground, Cinq-Mars obeys.
* * *
Evening falls with casual gra
ce and a relaxed melancholy. Shadflies panic in the high dim lamps that illuminate corners of the yard. Frogs croak by the large pond. A couple of field and barn laborers and a horse handler pack into their cars, heading home, save for the resident Mexican foreman who can walk a path through the tall grasses to his cabin by the edge of the woods. He’s an older man, made lethargic by the passing of his longtime employer and friend. The sun absconds early due to the affront of Vermont mountains to the west; in the morning the sunrise will be postponed by these New Hampshire hills. As it sets, mosquitoes intensify, and Émile and Sandra take their leave of the front porch and retire to the family den.
For Émile, the familiarity of the evening has been striking. A lot like home. Changing one horse farm for another, he’s thinking, may not be the new direction he and Sandra have been searching for, notwithstanding the move from one country to another. He’s not sure that he wants to read Live Free or Die on his license plate. Not that he doesn’t believe in the sanctity of freedom, or in defending a homeland, but the phrase seems rife for spoofing. For him, as an outsider, the line conjures boys on the backs of pickups firing their rifles into the air expressly to prove they can. They embolden their sense of freedom through misbehavior while the real seriousness of freedom—an interest in intellectual rigor, scientific and spiritual exploration, speaking a difficult or unpopular truth, or countering a lie—is not considered. On this side of the border, freedom often seems reduced to a right to stash cash without a thought to the family that has nothing, or to promote conspiracy theories, such as that men never landed on the moon but surely aliens have spawned a superspecies on earth, and freedom is the right to mock those who think otherwise. Freedom is the right, apparently, to take a knee-jerk position with respect to absolutely everything, whether it be a favorite hypothesis of the left or of the right, and call it thoughtfulness. Odd how freedom often engenders a belief in dogma. He fumes to himself at times. Does everyone holding to a batty or nonsensical or even a perfectly reasonable position need to take up arms for being mocked in public? That’s not the meaning of the rallying cry, surely, Live Free or Die, but it’s not difficult to imagine the words being reduced to a comic outcome. Does he want that around him? he ponders. Should he live here? Is it even a threat or just a slurry offered up by his fertile imagination? Émile doesn’t know. It’s difficult to fully conceive of moving to this lovely place.
Live free or die.
How free were the victims struck dead? They were never able to raise that flag when a killer approached.
Under the gloom of such contemplations, the evening passes.
Early to bed. Uncommonly for summer, Sandra pours herself a cup of ginger tea and honey which she sips sitting up under the covers, pillows bunched up behind her.
“You okay?” he inquires.
“Fine. Just beat.”
Grief, they both know, can be exhausting and seditious.
This is a small, charming room, and of course if they ever bought this place they would sleep in Sandra’s mother’s bedroom, rather than this spare one which was once her sister’s and even, for a time, where the two young sisters slept in bunk beds. The room has been refashioned for guests, and no longer evokes childhood memories, or not sharp ones. As old as the house may be, it’s suffered the passage of time well, and has been kept up. Charming as all get out, it speaks to them with muffled aches and pains as the old timbers expand and shrink and sigh. In moving here, that’s worth considering on the positive side of the ledger, the charm of the place, and the affection they both feel for the rooms, for the intimacy of its nooks and crannies, the warmth and patina of the old wood.
Though the wind whistles through in winter. Which is Sandra’s exaggeration, or old memory, although the home can still be drafty and the wind outside fierce.
One thought Émile must abide by, as it’s persistent, one which he’s unwilling to speak aloud, is that in choosing a home for his retirement, he’s choosing a home that Sandra may live in long after he’s gone. That’s simply a reality of being nineteen years her senior, and it’s a compelling consideration. If she wants to return to her roots—and why not? It’s both a lively and a peaceful place—then living freely and dying there might prove to be his lot. He’s not one to stand in the way of her interest in this regard as she has more at stake.
She has more life to live. More lovely years.
He eases over to her.
“What’s in your craw?” She’s suspicious.
“I want to hold you. What we call cuddling. Have you heard of it? You’ve been through so much the last two days while I’ve been off solving crimes.”
“Tilting at windmills, more like. What crime have you solved?”
“Making progress. Give a guy a chance.”
“Okay, but don’t cuddle out of guilt. I’m onside with this, Émile.”
“The cuddling?”
“The crime-solving. One of Caro’s best friends was murdered. I’d be upset if you didn’t stick your nose in.”
“Leave my nose out of this. It draws enough barbs in life.”
She kisses it, gently, in case he needs to feel better about his huge schnozzle.
“Had an interesting chat with the girls today,” Sandra says as Émile moves off to get into what he wears to bed these days. “Nothing to do with murder or death.”
“What else is there to talk about?”
“They’re anti-Ivy League.”
“A little late for that, no? Now that the privilege of being graduates is upon them?”
“They love their educations. Wouldn’t change that part of it for the world. Technically, of course, Dowbiggin is not in the Ivy League, but culturally it’s close enough. They were going on about what happens to graduates after they leave school.”
“One of them wants to feed the starving. I overheard something about that.”
“Caroline doesn’t plan to be just any CEO. She intends to make things happen.”
“Good on them. How does that make them anti–Ivy League?”
Sandra sips her tea, and peruses the naked form of her husband before his loose-fitting Jockeys go on for the night. He doesn’t believe her when she tells him, but his body moves her still. The size of him counts, his height, girth, the inherent strength through his chest, those big hands and the veins that trace the line of his forearms. She feels that his weakened back has caused him to see himself as less attractive, and Lord knows confidence is half the battle. Yet she admires him still, and she’s seen women—admittedly, mainly those older than herself—admire him also. The authority he bears naturally does the trick, she figures, in any case she’s not complaining. Long ago when she’d look ahead to such a time, trying to imagine herself in her midforties and him in retirement, she painted a picture duller than this reality. Not bad, she’s thinking, and is it the recent death in their household that has her waking up just as they both prepare for bed?
“They were extolling a theory that the Ivy League is about privilege and prestige. There’s been books, apparently, the idea doesn’t originate with them. But it’s earned their attention.”
“Nothing new about privilege and prestige.”
“Their point is—all the girls think this way, apparently—that smart, privileged, affluent Ivy League graduates study and learn well but they still don’t have a clue. They go from here to Wall Street or on to another existing platform and ride that gravy train for all it’s worth. Their complaint about it is, Ivy Leaguers don’t innovate, they don’t create, they don’t redefine, quote, ‘the paradigm of modern complexity.’ Quite the spiel.”
“They plan to save the world by re-creating it. I’m all for that. Those kids won me over from the get-go.”
“You’re an old goat. You’ve got a crush on them all.”
He pulls the covers back. “Don’t old goat me. I’m relieved to find the world in good hands.”
“Speaking of hands.” This time, she sallies over to his side. “I will not be made to feel
guilty about this. I will not allow myself to feel guilty.”
“Okay. About what?”
Her hands, under the covers, tell him about what.
“I know, I know, you need to take a pill,” she says.
“Keep that up, you might disprove the theory.”
They kiss, and feel the ominous depth of the night and the empty space of the country house, the darkened fields with their night critters on the prowl and the stars above in their austere splendor. Time goes by, and life is fleeting, a parent dies, yet moments occur when life yields to this serendipity, and time, then, for the moment, stands still. Then they sleep until the morning.
PART 4
NINETEEN
At precisely 11 A.M., a weary, shaken Vernon Colchester is released from police custody. A trifle disoriented. The bright sun hurts his eyes as though he’s been squirreled away in a grotto for a week. He’d expected hard questions. He’d not expected Captain Hammond to put a hand on his kneecap and hold it there, squeezing intermittently, and he had not expected him to insist that the first word out of his mouth anytime he spoke had to be sir.
“Sir, I didn’t kill anybody.”
“Sure you did, son. Absolutely you did.”
At the end of the first sentence that Hammond spoke he would always say son. Vernon detested that word as much as he hated having to say sir.
“I loved Addie. I’d never hurt her. That’s a crazy idea.”
“Say that again properly, son,” Hammond instructed him, and squeezed his knee.
“Sir, I loved Addie.”
“Nobody doubts that, son. Why did you dress her up?”
“Sir, I didn’t!”
“Speak the truth, son. You’ll see. Things will go better then.”
“Sir—”
“We know you loved her, son. Love can take a man into strange places. You agree with me on that, right?”
He didn’t know what to say.
“Don’t you agree, son? You’ve been in strange places. If you admit to that, at least, you won’t be admitting to anything much. We can agree on that, can’t we?”
“Sir, agree on what?” He was confused.