Shattered Echoes

by B. A. Shapiro

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  SHATTERED ECHOES

  B. A. Shapiro

  To

  Dan and Henry

  Jan and Floyd

  Contents

  Breathe In …

  Breathe Out …

  Breathe In …

  Prologue

  Book One: Lindsey

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  Book Two: Lindsey and Isabel

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  Book Three: Lindsey and Richard and Isabel

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  Acknowledgments

  I timed my breathing to the wiggling of my toes. I kept the rest of my body immobile; I didn’t move a muscle above my feet.

  I was in the closet, my father’s wool coat rubbing against my nose. It smelled of cigarettes and the inside of his car, but I didn’t care. It reminded me of him. And how he’d save me when he came home. I pushed my nose into the scratchy wool.

  Breathe in, breathe out,

  breathe in, breathe out …

  The dirt was in my mouth and my hair and I was afraid the worms would crawl into my shirt. There were spiders too. Joel was perched on the edge of my grave, his mouth huge and red and repulsive. He leaned into the hole and his evil laughter boomed down at me.

  I lived through that, I can live through this.

  Prologue

  Ms. Perfect-Size-Six Prosecutor, fingers resting lightly over her left breast, solemnly told the jury that I, Lindsey Kern, did viciously, and with malice aforethought, murder Richard. Her eyes were properly horrified, her lips pursed and grave; but she was too tight, too controlled. She lacked my attorney’s sense of timing and humor; Michael was much more effective. Even the foreman had difficulty keeping a straight face when Michael declared Crowley’s star witness to be forgetful, blind, and confused.

  Michael says we should be hopeful: the pink-haired lady on the right smiled at me as the jury left to be sequestered, and the plumber from Dorchester made eye contact. Michael says these things mean a lot.

  But I’m afraid to be too optimistic. It’s hard to have much faith in the chance that twelve people will believe a lie. For that’s what Michael’s arguments were: lies. He never got close to the real reason Richard died or who really killed him. But, then again, neither did Crowley.

  The fact that this trial has been reduced to pure fabrication is not the fault of either attorney. Both of them turned, twisted, explored, and exposed every insignificant detail of my life. Every person in the universe—from my childhood psychiatrist to Billy, an old boyfriend who does my taxes—was encouraged to spread me wide open in a manner I can only compare with a public gynecological exam.

  So, how did it happen? It happened because only I know the truth, and Michael wouldn’t let me take the stand and tell it.

  He said the first problem was something called “prior similar occurrences” and that Ms. Crowley, whose cross-examining prowess is legendary, was guaranteed to maneuver me into mentioning Clay’s death. According to Michael, the circumstances surrounding my untimely widowhood would be too much for any jury, and if they were admitted into evidence, I’d be listening to the clang of the long iron bar at MCI-Framingham every morning before breakfast.

  But Michael’s greatest concern was the ultimate effect of my testimony on our plea. He said that if I mentioned Her—and there’s no way the true story could be told without mentioning Her—he would be forced to claim diminished capacity and plead insanity. All I’d win with that were Thorazine-shuffle lessons at Bridgewater State and a pair of cute little green foam slippers.

  So we opted for accidental death, and I can only hope it was the right decision. Michael says the expression on the plumber’s face proves that it was. But I’m scared. I’m scared because I know Richard’s death was no accident. And I know that I didn’t kill him. I’d never kill Richard—I loved him. I still love him.

  If only Michael would let me tell the real story. If only I could let it go—release it from inside of me—yell it to everyone in the courtroom, tell it to every reporter and all the voyeuristic spectators whose lives are so dull, they need to get their jollies from the details of mine. If only I could stand up and say, “I didn’t do it! She did it! She did it!” Then I’d be free of all the anger and turmoil; and the truth would be free too. Then everyone would know the real craziness; everyone would know what really happened to Richard and what really happened to me. Even if there’s little chance anyone will believe it.

  For who in their right mind is going to believe that Richard was killed by a woman who died almost a century ago? Who’s going to believe that I—a person without a superstitious bone in her body, a person who snickers at astrology and God and the power of pyramids—that I was haunted?

  I admit, this sounds paranoid, delusional, and possibly hallucinatory. And if it hadn’t happened to me, I’d be forced to agree with Michael: This story could only be the ramblings of a woman who has completely lost touch with reality.

  But for the sake of argument, let me propose that I am not delusional and that my contact with reality is all too strong. And for the sake of my sanity, let me tell you the story of how I came to be falsely accused of murdering Richard: the story of the house at 240 Beacon Street.

  BOOK ONE

  Lindsey

  1

  I hate moving, and I always have. I hated it when I was seven and my mother ran around the house acting like the werewolf from hell; I hated it when I was forced to reduce the necessities of college life to the capacity of my stepfather’s station wagon; I hated it when Clay and I spent a week in a noisy room at the Battlegreen Motel due to the whims of a bureaucratic mortgage company. But I think I hated it the most that muggy September day.

  At dawn it was already seventy-five degrees and I wasn’t even half-packed. The too little time I’d left to complete the other half was eaten up by a last-minute glitch in the escrow agreement with McLaughlin, McKinnon, McGuire and McLaughlin (I swear that was really the name of the firm), by an argument with the bank over a two-year-old unpaid Sears bill, and by an unexpected box shortage at the Stop and Shop. So, as the movers hauled my furniture into the truck, I ran through the house haphazardly throwing everything that wasn’t packed—a category encompassing the vast majority of my possessions—into dozens of those green garbage bags with the yellow plastic drawstrings.

  When the house was finally empty of everything but dust balls and dirt piles, I followed the van to yuppie heaven, as my brother Joel so irreverently referred to my renovated town house in Boston’s “fashionable” Back Bay. The traffic on Storrow Drive was horrendous, and the output of my on-again-off-again air conditioner minimal. I was still sweating as I turned onto Beacon Street. It was no cooler by the third swing around the block; I rolled down the window, but it brought no relief. There was no place to park. If only Edgar hadn’t been so bullheaded; if he’d sold me his extra parking space, I’d be upstairs by now.

  Finally I double-parked behind the moving van double-parked in front of my new home; the brass “240” over the door glinted in the harsh sunlight. The sweltering asphalt gave slightly as I stepped down, and ripples of dirty, exhaust-scented heat rose and
swirled around my ankles. The temperature had to be well over one hundred.

  I was supposed to be euphoric. I’d been dying to get out of Lexington. Out of the old house Clay had so compulsively attacked with crowbar and hammer in a largely unsuccessful attempt to drive out its tiredness. The house we’d bought with every last penny of our wedding money and a loan that pushed us beyond house-poor and into house-destitute. The house where Clay had died.

  I’d always felt uncomfortable in Lexington, misplaced among the thirtysomethings as they pushed their strollers down Mass. Ave., oh-so-content and self-satisfied. But somehow, now that I’d actually reached a land wonderfully devoid of center-entrance colonials and rough-hewn swing sets, somehow, instead of euphoria, all I felt was that sick Monday morning feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  The day got hotter, the apartment fuller and messier, my stomach queasier. My arms weighed two tons apiece, and rivulets of sweat etched tributaries in the dirt on my face. The elastic that held back my ponytail had disappeared, and my hair was matted and stuck to the back of my neck. Exhausted, I dropped to the floor to watch the movers desert me, greedily stuffing their tips into half-empty cigarette boxes.

  I looked around at what I considered the perfect apartment—or what would be the perfect apartment once the garbage bags were gone—my shiny new space carefully carved out of an old and elegant one. Tall swaths of light spilled onto the high-gloss hardwood floors from mullioned windows that dated back 150 years.

  Nathan Haley, the architect-developer, had done a terrific job of aesthetically melding nineteenth-century detail and twentieth-century convenience. He had crafted five apartments from what had been a single-family town house; each apartment was unique, but mine was the best. I had a floor-through, one level above the street, and even on the cloudy afternoon I had signed the purchase-and-sale agreement, light from the front bay window managed to meet light from the rear bay in the tiny alcove that served as my entryway.

  Clay would have loved it. I could easily imagine him humming “Satisfaction” or perhaps “Pretty Woman” as he ran around organizing boxes, and complaining bitterly about the movers’ ineptitude. “How could they be so stupid?” I could hear him yelling. “Can’t they read English?”

  Clay always carefully packed each box—never a bag—and neatly wrote its destination on the cover flap. Movers invariably put the boxes in the wrong rooms. I could see him chugging beers with his buddies and barking orders at them, as well as at me. Every once in a while he would pause to nuzzle my neck and give me a lecture on how to do whatever I was doing a little better and a little faster.

  I pushed myself up from the floor. I had to face up to the fact that I was on my own now. This was the big time—the big lonely time. No one but me to wipe out the kitchen cabinets; no one but me to hang Grandma Clara’s oversize oil painting of Central Park ice skaters; no one but me to put all this stuff away. On the brighter side, I told myself, there was no one but me to decide where the table should go, which books to put in the living room, or how long to take to unpack.

  I dragged two of the garbage bags into the study/guest room in the back of the apartment. The room had been closed up and allowed to bake for the entire month of August; the air was so hot, it was almost painful to breathe. I threw open the door that led to a tiny deck—actually, an old fire escape that Nathan had covered with concrete so that he could advertise an apartment with “private outdoor space.” I gulped at the somewhat cooler air.

  The Charles River sparkled in the late afternoon sun, and I envied the boaters, cool and free under their diagonally striped sails. I watched the sculls as they skated effortlessly along the top of the water. I lifted the hair from the back of my neck in hope that the breeze would dry my wet skin, but the air was too humid. I turned and walked back into the room.

  One of the bags contained mostly office-type stuff, and the other Hilary-type stuff. I pulled a framed poster of Jim Morrison from the bag and grinned as I placed it upright against the wall; it had hung in my dorm room more than a dozen years ago and now that he was one of Hilary’s current heart throbs, I was planning on letting her hang it wherever she liked. Now that she could just jump on the Green Line and be at my door, I was expecting her to be here a lot, seeking refuge from my brother Joel’s overzealous fathering. It was one of the advantages of living in town.

  “Hi there, kiddo!”

  I dropped the books I was holding and whirled around. “Babs!”

  “Didn’t mean to scare you.” She waved a key at me. “Hope you don’t mind—just used my key.”

  “No, no. I don’t mind. I could use the company.”

  “Congratulations,” she said, raising a champagne bottle and coming toward me with her arms open wide.

  I stepped back. “Don’t touch me—I’m too disgusting.”

  “You’ve got a point there.” She stopped and looked at me carefully. “How’s it going? Are those tears or sweat on your face?”

  “It’s hard to tell.”

  “Come.” She took my hands and led me toward the living room. “Let’s dig up a couple of glasses and imbibe some bubbly.”

  “Is it cold?”

  I had met Babs the evening I impulsively decided I had to get out of Lexington. She happened to answer the phone at Urban Properties, the first realtor I called. Within an hour she was dragging me through Back Bay, Beacon Hill, and the South End at breakneck speed, extolling the virtues of every apartment in her oh-so-proper Boston accent: “Lindsey, have you evah seen such high ceilings with cornices of such bold design?” and “Lindsey, this mahble fiahplace is so very robust and sculptural—it’s a mastahpiece of nineteenth-century masonry!” Finally, after we’d seen so many places I couldn’t tell one from another, she agreed to quit for the night. We went to the Bull and Finch—Cheers to the tourists—where we talked until they kicked us out.

  “Thought you might be having a tough time today.” Babs handed me the frosty champagne bottle and squeezed herself into a slice of couch between my skater painting and a garbage bag. She turned a frying pan handle away from her eye and into the cushions.

  I put the bottle down and dumped a pile of books on the fireplace hearth so I could sit in the chair across from her. “Yeah, it’s been a real up-and-down day.” I carefully inspected my dirty sneakers. “Could be worse, though—it could be hot.”

  She leaned forward and patted my knee. “You miss Clay, don’t you?”

  I shrugged. “All the books say the second year is the hardest—the first year you get all kinds of sympathy and support, but by the second, everyone figures you’re over it and ready to get on with your life.”

  “And you are—look at all the terrific stuff you’re doing: this apartment, your new business, new friends …” She slapped my knee this time. “Looks like you’re doing great to me.”

  I sighed, then smiled. “It will be nice to unpack without Colonel Clay putting me through my paces. He had a rule that all the boxes had to be empty and in the garbage within forty-eight hours.” I surveyed the room. “This’ll be closer to forty-eight days.”

  “It’ll go faster than you think.” She stood and wandered over to the bay window to watch the late afternoon bustle of Beacon Street. “I do love this octagonal bay, these twelve-foot windows …” She turned back toward me. “Can’t you just imagine the grande dames, sitting right here, sipping their tea and taking dainty bites of their rum cake?”

  I could easily imagine them. Five elegant dames perhaps, seated in my bay as if for a formal portrait. To the right, a tall woman sat, her long neck arching downward as she listened attentively to a much older matron. Two other ladies, wearing billowing dresses, bent over their tea, heads pressed close together, sharing a confidence. And in the middle, a young girl sat behind a low table pouring from a blue and white teapot. I could see her thin wrists, the deep set of her brown eyes, her aura of delicacy as she lifted a cup in her tiny hand. It was a lovely, but somehow disquieting, portrait.

  �
��Earth to Lindsey! Earth to Lindsey!” Babs’s voice came to me as if through a long, hollow tube.

  “It’s so amazing to think of the lives that have been lived here,” I said. “Right here, right here in my space. I can see why you’re into all that historical stuff.”

  “Except it turned out to be a one-semester flirtation.” Babs sighed and waved her hand with a theatrical gesture. “As my mother never tires of reminding me, I either go headlong and overboard—or I dabble.” She pulled a face. “According to her, my level of commitment is always wrong.”

  I could see where a mother might worry. On one hand, Babs had taken up—and then discarded—historical preservation, astronomy, hypnotism, yoga, and fashion design. On the other hand, she seemed to have an insatiable craving for hang gliding, rock climbing, white-water rafting—any activity with a life-threatening, or at least dangerous, element; she drove too fast and was unable to let go of her not-always-so-funny practical jokes. Maybe her boredom level was just set too low. To my surprise, given her impatience and need for a constant adrenaline rush, Babs loved to teach. She proclaimed her role was to “develop my awareness of the fabulous history and architecture” of my new home.

  I was a fair pupil. I now knew that the panels of stone relief outside my front windows were called “putti” and that they indicated room function; the carving of a man standing before a wall of books revealed my living room to be the original library. I also knew that my bedroom and study were formerly the principal bedroom, from their placement in the house and the size of the fireplace consoles, that the thick octagonal railing at the foot of the stairs was a carved newel post and that it “soared into a gracefully-dividing pair of segmental arches.”

  “If you’re not interested in history anymore,” I said, “I’ll be glad to take those boxes of Nathan’s off your hands.”

  “Oh yeah.” She grinned. “I forgot you wanted to see those boxes.”

  “You did not—you’re just playing some kind of cat-and-mouse game with them. Are you going to let me see them, or what?”