by Amanda Cross
“Will the papers bring much?”
“Thirty thousand at least; more, if I am clever and persuasive. It will pay her children’s telephone bills for life, however madly the telephone company continues to raise the rates. The next step, of course, is to get an appraiser up here. They come dear enough, God knows, but if you pick a good one, their word is as impeccable as that of the holy ghost. There’ll be some wine here, I dare say. Shall we have a glass?”
This question, like most of Max’s, was rhetorical, the flourish of ancient gallantry. He led the way to the small circular staircase which led back into the large, beautiful room. “Will you wait down there while I bring the wine?”
“Is there a loo up here?”
“Her bedroom and bath are off in that direction.”
“That will be fine,” Kate said, “I enjoy catching glimpses of her life. I’ll join you in a moment.”
Cecily’s bedroom was the night retreat of a writer, reader, thinker. One recognized immediately the distinction between the bedroom of such a person and that of one whose bedroom had been “decorated.” Largish night-tables stood on either side of the large bed—Kate suspected the old dog had shared it with her, in the last years. Books were still piled there, plus paper and pencil. The window faced east, intentionally, Kate was sure, so that the morning light flooded in and awakened the occupant early to another day. Living alone, she would have retired early at night, the life forces in the house retreating to this one room her spirit could fortify. Probably, sleeping less in later years, she had read into the night, the old dog snoring beside her.
“What utter rot,” Kate snorted at herself, entering the bathroom and closing the door behind her. “For all I know, she retired at two in the morning with a bottle of gin and listened to rock music through earphones.” But the silence had a quality which was that of order and of life arranged for the deployment of personal forces. Finishing with the bathroom, Kate wandered back into the study, sitting for a moment in Cecily’s chair to stare at the portrait she herself must have seen every time she glanced up. Is it only one’s imagination that those who die young are so vital in appearance? Kate had heard it said, perhaps only with the sort of truth which adheres to ancient superstition, that those who are to die young seem to sense it and to live with double the intensity and joy of others. A romantic theory, in both senses of the word.
The files in the next room would be worth a small fortune to a budding scholar anxious to make a name, or, more literally, to a library prepared to purchase their contents. She pulled on one of the metal drawers, and was surprised, as she had been before with Max, to have it open; feeling a snooper, she closed it immediately. How odd that they weren’t locked. But then, why, since she lived alone, should they be? Passing out again beneath the portrait of Dorothy Whitmore, Kate thought to herself: Here was a complete life, and, at the end, full of work and the sort of solitude which is true aloneness. Kate found herself envying this house by the sea, actually speculating, for a moment, if it might be for sale. What is it that, in middle age, made solitude so attractive? An English poet had expressed it in a verse that Kate, once having read, never forgot:
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:
However the sky grows dark with invitation cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flagstaff—
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.
Never mind, Kate said to herself, unwinding down the circular stairs with one hand on the banister. My little cabin will have to do. Without the stimulation of the university, you would be chattering to yourself like a magpie within a week, Kate Fansler.
“The files are not locked,” she said to Max, who was emerging from the kitchen with a tray.
“I know, more’s the pity. One of the tasks I shall urge you to share with me is the discovery of a key. There must be one. We can’t leave all this unlocked—it’s partly why I wanted to come. Of course,” he added, pouring some white wine for Kate into a beautiful glass, “one can lock files easily enough by pressing a button, but one would like to anticipate opening them with something less dramatic than a blowtorch. To Cecily’s papers,” he added, raising his glass, “and to you for coming along and holding my hand. Bless you.”
It was the nearest Max had ever come to a personal compliment, and Kate was pleased to acknowledge it. They sat for a time in the glow of the wine and that particular brightness of the afternoon just before the day begins to fade. Through the window they could see the sea, not crashing against the rocks, but beyond the coastline, calm, expansive, glittering—what Kate thought of as the optimists’ view of the ocean.
Max appeared to echo her thoughts. “One ought to go to watch the waves crashing against the rocks to return oneself to the facts of earthly life,” he said, putting down his wineglass with an air of finality. “Shall we go and walk about before the sun sets?”
“One of the reasons I spend my weekends guestless,” Kate said, “is because it is always when I am feeling particularly lazy that someone suggests that exertion is unquestionably the next item on the day’s agenda.”
“Not here,” Max said, reaching for the wine bottle. “You have been angelic to come this far. Never let it be said of me that I encouraged anyone to exercise. Why, I might endanger my reputation for fastidiousness, and you’ve no idea the years it has taken me to establish it.”
Kate, laughing, rose to her feet. “Your reputation for all the virtues is still safe with me,” she said. “In fact, safer. Who else but so fastidious and urbane a creature as yourself would require moral support on a visit to a house like this? Let us saunter to the sea, by all means. Does it,” she asked as they left the house, “impose an emotional burden—this literary-executor business?”
“More than I would have anticipated, since you are so perspicacious as to ask,” Max answered, lingering on the front stoop, or whatever the modem equivalent of the front stoop is. “I admired Cecily, and for me to admire is to go some way toward loving, as you have no doubt also gathered. You call me a snob, but I find it difficult to admire those I secretly scorn. That, if you want to know, is my definition of a liberal.”
“The concept of ‘liberal,’ like the concept of goodness, must have some hidden force behind it; it inspires so many people to disdain. Never mind,” Kate said, her mind upon the mowed path to the sea, which was, indeed, a good idea, particularly if one thought of her overgrown meadow. But there—clever Cecily—the path led from her to the sea, not, obviously, from anywhere to her. Max, following her gaze, misapprehended her thoughts.
“It is unusual to have this much land near the sea,” he said. “This house and the land around it is probably Cecily’s most valuable bequest to her children. I believe that there are other houses visible on the coast, but considering the land’s value, she was wonderfully isolated. Shall we follow the path to the sea, or explore the woods behind?”
“Oh, the sea, of course,” Kate said, preceding him down the steps from the front modern-version-of-a-stoop and onto the path. It was not quite wide enough for two to walk abreast, and Kate led the way. The walk to the sea was not long, and Kate was shocked at how abruptly the land ended. Below it there was a drop to the rocks below, although a stairway of rocks had been cut to aid the descent of any intrepid soul.
“Let’s go down,” Kate said.
“Don’t be impulsive,” Max answered. “One of us—and it would no doubt be me—might break a leg and require rescue, which, from here, looks impossible. The other would have to stand by, teetering on a rock, and watch the tide come in, to our certain destruction. With what force the waves crash out there! Let’s admire it from here, like the lady and gentleman we are. Do you suppose it’s high tide or low?”
“Low, I should deduce,” Kate said, “not that I know a thing about tides. But those pools there, between the
higher rocks, must have got water into them, and yet water isn’t going in now.”
“Perhaps it’s rain water.”
“Look here. Max, I’m going down. After all, there are steps, and they wouldn’t have been put there only for the purposes of suicide. I should like to watch the water crashing against the rocks close up. You watch if you are as timid as all that, and if I appear on the verge of destruction, you can go for help.”
“But I can’t drive. Really, Kate.”
“You can use the telephone. Your entire charm, Max, is your unflappableness. No bachelor should come all over mother hen. It spoils the whole style. Fortunately I am wearing pants and crepe-soled shoes, another example of the serendipity of all this. I always wear very ladylike shoes when I know I am going to meet you.”
In fact, Kate soon decided, scrambling over the rocks, the whole little scene had been nonsense. There was no real danger except, she supposed, of slipping and breaking a leg. One simply leaped relatively short distances from one rock to the next. At one of the higher points, Kate paused. The waves dashing against the rocks were impressive, not to say a bit daunting. She resisted an impulse to dash back across the rocks to dry land and nature’s more controllable forces. But she did turn around and noticed, then, in a pool between two rocks rather to her right, what looked like a bundle of clothes.
She became aware, as one does after a shock, of a plunging sensation in her stomach, which had received the message of disaster seconds before her conscious mind. With the summoning of all her determination, Kate forced herself nearer to the pool. For a moment she looked back for Max, and was astonished to discover she could not see him. She could see only rocks. Reaching a rock nearer to the pool, Kate sat upon it and waited for her pulse to stop racing. Then she looked down. It was a body, a woman’s body, face down in the pool. Each time the sea came in, a slight spray spattered it.
Responding to a sudden surge of adrenalin, which, we are told, is what rushes into our bloodstream to provide the flight or fight reaction necessary to survival, Kate leaped back with abandon over the rocks, and then found she had lost track of the stairs. “Max,” she shouted. “Max.”
Max, coming nearer to the edge, peered down at her. “All adventurous spirits properly subdued?” he asked. “You can’t get up this way, you know. The stairs are over there.” He gestured to his left. Again Kate leaped over the rocks and this time up the stairs.
“Max,” she said. “There’s a body down there. A woman’s body.”
If some witty rejoinder occurred to Max, he controlled it at the sight of her face. “Are you sure?”
“We had better go for help.”
“Would it not be more sensible to telephone?”
“Of course. I’m upset.”
“No you’re not. The telephone’s been disconnected. We had better go for help. Come on.”
“Don’t you think,” Kate said, “that you had better wait here until I return with whatever rescue I can collect?”
“What on earth for? No one’s likely to bother the body. It may have been there for days, for all you know. Or weeks.”
“Suppose the tide comes in.”
“I, my dear lady, cannot stop the tides. Perhaps I ought to see if I can find you some whisky or brandy in the house.”
“No, I have to drive. For God’s sake. Max, come on!”
Chapter Three
Hours later, or days, or weeks (but was it perhaps only minutes?), Kate and Max, in the back of a police car, were being driven from Cecily’s house to the police station. Kate’s own car, which, she supposed, they had or were about to search for signs of God knew what, followed under the guidance of a young police officer. One might, of course, look at one’s watch. Kate looked at her watch. Perhaps two hours had passed since she had clambered down the rocks like some blasted mountain goat, instead of remaining with Max on the shore as any respectable middle-aged professor of English literature ought to be counted on to do.
Kate and Max had returned with the police, and several of them had bounded out to discover if they had come for a practical joke, a rescue operation, or an hallucination; they had returned to report, yes indeed, a body, and would the lady and gentleman mind waiting up at the house until the body was recovered and they might all make their decorous way to the police station? The waiting time had been occupied with questions from a policeman, none of which appeared to be answered to his satisfaction. Who Max was he easily established, but no fact after that made any sense, at least to a laconic, unimaginative policeman born and bred in a small town in Maine. They had come on an impulse? There was no relationship between them; they were friends and colleagues? A likely story, his entire manner implied. They had not come with any particular purpose in mind, but simply to look around and search for a key to the files? News of prowlers? The police had heard none of this, and if not the police, who? What neighbors? Had they found the key to the files? Oh, they had decided to look at the sea before searching the house? Did they expect to find the key washed up by the sea? The sarcasm and doubts had been more implied than expressed, but Kate’s imagination was working at full force, and little more than a raised eyebrow was needed to set it off.
Max, meanwhile, had turned into a bundle of self-incrimination. He ought never to have come, never to have brought her; he, Max Reston, had behaved impulsively and look what had happened. One could almost turn the whole episode into a cautionary tale. That Max, for whom forethought and rationality were second nature, should have acted like a student rebel was more dreadful than he could say. Nonetheless, he said it. Still, being Max, he did not wallow in regret, but set himself to calming Kate and urging upon her a brandy or another glass of the excellent wine. Never mind what the policeman thinks. Max had said, he was doubtless already assured that they were reprehensible people, but would learn with whom he was dealing at the proper time. Meanwhile, one could only do one’s best to regain one’s equilibrium. Under Max’s ministrations, Kate partly did.
They arrived at the police station, and Kate was permitted to call Reed. He, having suggested that she reveal to the police his, Reed’s, connection with the district attorney’s office, and having offered to come to her rescue, ended by talking with someone at the station and establishing that she and Max would be permitted to drive to Logan Airport in Boston and fly from there to New York. All of this, when it was finally sorted out, did help to clear the atmosphere somewhat. The police, whether gladly or reluctantly, faced the fact that they were dealing not with hippies, a love nest, or a pack of middle-aged perverts engaged in sodomy, but two perfectly respectable people who had every right to be where they were, who had found a body and immediately reported it, in the most correct possible manner, to the police.
“There is only one other thing,” announced the chief policeman, whose manner had become as cordial as his expressionless voice and face permitted. “Before you leave, I must ask you to look at the body. It will not be pleasant, since it has been in the water some time, perhaps several days. We will know after the autopsy. But if either of you recognize the young woman—perhaps a friend of Miss Hutchins?” he added hopefully to Max, “—we would be helped along a good bit.”
“This,” Max said quietly to Kate, as they followed the chief to the lower reaches of the building, “is where breeding shows. We will brace ourselves, carry it all through with aplomb, express no more emotion than is absolutely appropriate, and take it out in our dreams.”
“How could we possibly know her?” Kate asked.
“A good point.” Max stopped in the corridor. “Sir,” he called to the man walking ahead of him. “There is, of course, a chance that I might recognize the body as some connection of Miss Hutchins, though that seems unlikely. But there is no way Miss Fansler could recognize the body, since she has never been near here until today. Might we not spare her this ordeal?”
“Routine,” was the only answer.
In fact, they were as considerate of Max and Kate as the circumstances permitted. The body was drawn out in a kind of drawer in which it lay, covered and refrigerated. The covering was lowered only far enough to reveal the face, which, the man explained, had been “cleaned up.” “In her early twenties,” the chief said. “That might help to place her.”
Kate braced herself, and Max placed a hand on her near shoulder in support. Ever after Kate was to remember her feeling of relief that the face, however horrible, looked less horrible than she had expected. She immediately recognized it. The recognition seemed a touch of sanity for one blinding moment, until her brain registered the fact that the young woman before her was dead, and had been dead for several days.
“I do know her,” Kate said. “She’s a student of mine. A graduate student. Her name is Marston; Geraldine Marston, called Gerry by her friends. . . .”
“Fine,” the policeman shot out in a loud voice. He’s right, Kate thought, I was beginning to babble. “Let’s go back upstairs. Boyd, get some brandy for the lady. This way, please.” The drawer was pushed back in, and the policeman took Kate’s arm and guided her back upstairs and into a chair. “Drink this,” he said. Boyd, Kate thought, must be a rapid fellow. Gerry Marston!
In the end, it was decided that Max would be asked to stay, since he had at the moment the nearest thing to legal jurisdiction over the house. A policeman would drive Kate to Logan Airport and hand her over to her husband, who was at this moment flying to Boston. He, the policeman, supposed that a husband would be comforting even to a woman who did not care to use his name. If he was her husband. They drove in silence, Kate because she was afraid to speak at all for fear, as one of her colleagues put it with more accuracy than elegance, of running off at the mouth, and the policeman because he was Maine enough to consider conversation with strangers best avoided.