Sandrine's Case

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Yes,” I muttered and glanced outside to see that in fact the first morning light had just broken. “I’m really sorry, Morty.”

  “If you’ve come up with something new to add to the case,” Morty said, “something relevant, I mean, then let’s talk about it on Monday.”

  “Okay,” I said, “Okay, Morty. Sorry to wake you. I just . . . anyway . . . my best to Rachel.”

  “Sure, Sam. You bet.”

  There was another heavy breath, and then I heard the click of the phone as Morty hung up.

  It was just a click, but there was finality to it, so that for the first time during my trial I felt completely and irrevocably cut off.

  I glanced about the empty kitchen, the empty yard, the empty corridor that led to the empty scriptorium and, beyond it, to my empty bed. But the greater emptiness was the terrible dread I felt at the awful possibility that Sandrine had found out about April, and that it was this and this alone that had fueled her final attack, as it might also have darkly inspired a plot to destroy me, an intrigue about which, as I had to admit, I had scant evidence but which I simply could not entirely dismiss from my mind.

  But if Sandrine had learned about the bleak carryings-on at the Shady Arms, how had she learned of them? I felt certain that April had never breathed a word of it to anyone. True, as I’d earlier surmised, Sandrine might have figured it out for herself. But, even so, she would have lacked any real evidence, and would she have so meticulously plotted my destruction based solely on conjecture? I didn’t think so. Sandrine, being Sandrine, would have sought evidence, that is to say, well, witnesses.

  If she’d wished to confirm her darkest suspicions, to whom would she have gone? Certainly not April. But, if not April, who?

  Ah, yes, I thought as I offered the only answer possible to that question, April’s cuckold husband, Clayton.

  It took me several hours to make up my mind, but in the end I decided that I had to know. Morty had previously informed me that April was no longer living with Clayton, though I had no idea whether he’d cast her out or whether she’d hung her head in shame, packed her bags, then left her husband’s elegant old plantation house of her own accord. Either way, it was only Clayton I would have to confront, which seemed to me at that despairing moment the first small blessing in the long train of curses that had showered down upon my life.

  The drive to Clayton’s house took me back through town. It was a crisp, clear Saturday morning, and the streets were quite animated, whole families going in and out of Main Street’s quaint shops. I’d rarely ventured downtown during the weekend, primarily for fear of running into someone I knew from the college, thus to be buttonholed into an inane conversation having to do with the fate of this student or that one or whether faculty pensions might be at risk to some Georgia version of Bernard Madoff.

  But now, isolated as I was, I found myself quite envious of my fellow Coburnites. They could move among themselves in the easy manner of equal citizens. It would, indeed, be rather pleasant, I thought, to be regarded simply as a man who had not first betrayed then later killed his wife, a teacher, a helpful friend and colleague, a man who, above all else, was quietly and irreducibly . . . kind.

  The word had come to me in Sandrine’s voice, and so I felt it as an accusation, and in response to which my foot pressed down on the accelerator and the car bolted forward. Seconds later I was out of Coburn and hurtling at a dangerous speed through the green valley that led to Clayton Blankenship’s picture-postcard antebellum manse.

  Clayton, himself, could not have looked more surprised to find me at his door, but rather than a sudden burst of ire his eyes gave off a great weariness, and he seemed to me withered less by what April and I had done to him than by the dirty, cruel, bottom-feeding nature of life itself. It was a look of nearly transcendental disappointment. He’d suffered a blow to the hopeful view of things he’d always maintained, as it were, against the odds, but which he no longer felt with regard to anything. The rug had been jerked from beneath his feet, and below that a trap door had opened, and he seemed, as he stared at me silently, still to be falling through black, starless space.

  Facing him, all I could muster was something utterly inadequate to the destruction I’d wrought.

  “I’m sorry, Clayton.”

  He nodded. “You probably are, Sam,” he said.

  “I know it doesn’t matter but—”

  He lifted his hand to silence me. “I have a chill. Come in.”

  With that Clayton eased back into the foyer and motioned me inside.

  I’d never been in Clayton’s house, and upon entering it my initial feeling was that I’d gone through one of time’s secret portals. This was a house from the storied past, the house in which the young Clayton had once laughed and frolicked, himself perhaps a Deep South, Gone with the Wind version of Andy Hardy. It gave off the sort of mustiness that no amount of airing could dissipate because the air itself was seeded with the microscopic accumulation of generations of dead skin. More than anything it looked like a many-roomed coffin, draped with thick folds of curtain, its floors covered with carpets no less thick, its chairs thickly upholstered, and its tables, even the small ones, thick-legged and heavy. How light April must have seemed to the current owner of this ancestral home, how airily she must have floated through its undertow of rooms, and how, in the wake of her leaving, must the weight of everything within them now seem doubled.

  “I know this must seem very strange to you, Clayton,” I began once we’d taken our seats in what surely had to be called—and with a straight face—the parlor.

  Clayton fingered the doilies draped over the arms of his chair. “I assume you have a reason,” he said in a voice that was so gentle, so devoid of acrimony, that I found myself wondering why in the name of heaven April would have endangered her life with a man like Clayton in order to waste a moment in time with me.

  “A selfish one, I’m afraid,” I admitted. “A very selfish one, given the circumstances.” I glanced about. There were potted plants everywhere, and in the far corner a large birdcage held two yellow and one light blue parakeets. The leaves of the plants glistened with health and the birds hopped quite happily about. In the midst of his devastation, I thought, Clayton has watered his plants and fed his birds and carried out every duty upon which some other creature’s well-being depends.

  “I’m embarrassed to be here,” I told him. “I’m humiliated, actually. But there’s something I need to know, and I have to ask you about it.”

  Clayton leaned forward and massaged the ache out of a bony knee.

  “It’s about . . . what happened,” I continued cautiously, “between April and me.”

  Clayton eased back and the chair itself seemed to wrap its ancient arms protectively around him. It was as if he had cared for it down through the years, resisted every impulse to toss it out because it had grown old or gotten worn, lost its attractiveness, and now, in his time of need, it was repaying him for his long loyalty.

  “What I need to know, Clayton,” I said, “is whether Sandrine might have found out about . . .” I stopped because I couldn’t bear any of the words that came to me. Instead I started again. “I know that April would never have said anything but, well, I was wondering if maybe you found out about it by some other means, some other person and then—believe me, I would understand it—if maybe you told Sandrine.”

  Clayton shook his head. “I would never have done that,” he said. “I liked Sandrine very much. And I respected her. She was a wonderful teacher.” He shrugged, and one of his hands moved over to comfort the other. “But as far as . . . this other matter . . . I didn’t know about it until later.”

  “Later?”

  “The later revelations,” Clayton said in the gently euphemistic way his great-grandfather might have called the Civil War the “late unpleasantness.” “In the newspape
r.” He shrugged. “Even so, I didn’t want April to leave,” he added, “but she wouldn’t hear of staying. She wouldn’t take a penny either.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Not far, I don’t imagine,” Clayton answered. “She still has her day in court, after all.”

  With that quite practical remark I once again recalled the moment I’d said her name to Detective Alabrandi, then later when I’d seen it inscribed on Mr. Singleton’s witness list.

  “I do wish she would have stayed,” Clayton said. “I could have borne the shame more easily than I can bear the loneliness.”

  Watching him, I found that I could not actually fathom his pain. I could not sound the anguished depths into which April and I had so recklessly sunk his life, and it struck me that this, and this alone, should precede all other calculations, that it should be solely by this grave measure that we choose to do or not to do certain things.

  He took a quick breath. “But as to your question, I should emphasize that no, I never told your wife anything because I never knew anything about you and April.” He leaned forward and stared at me with great seriousness and sincerety. “But even if I had, I would have kept it to myself, Sam.” His smile was as ragged as the flag of some lost cause. “I wouldn’t even have told April.”

  “I believe you,” I told him quietly, and since I’d come only to ask this one question, and now had received his answer, I rose slowly, as one in whom a deep weariness had abruptly settled, and stood before him like a disgraced knight before a noble king. “I’m sorry for disturbing you.” I drew in a long breath. “I’m sorry for everything, Clayton.”

  With some difficulty, Clayton got to his feet, rising with so much difficulty, in fact, that I had to suppress the urge to take his arm. April had almost certainly performed this deeply human service, but she was gone now, no doubt eventually to be replaced by a hireling, a man or woman paid to lift him from his chair but who, as he weakened, would be called upon to carry out increasingly more difficult and noisome services, and who would perform all of them well and dutifully, offering him everything he would need at the end of life save love.

  He escorted me to the door, then opened it.

  A cold breeze swept in and I suddenly feared for the state of Clayton Blankenship’s health, the irony of course being that only some years before, when April and I had had our first encounter at the Shady Arms, I’d cared nothing for the state of his soul.

  “Again, Clayton,” I told him, “I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”

  Clayton nodded but said nothing.

  I started through the door, then stopped and turned back to him. “I have to tell you that I appreciate your kindness. Given the circumstances, I mean.”

  Clayton’s smile appeared to require the last of his physical strength. “My grandfather would have shot you with one of the dueling pistols I still have,” he said. Then, like a man who thought another piece of evidence was required to justify what he’d just said, he added, “But I fear I lack the courage required to defend my honor.”

  I started to apologize again, a gesture Clayton saw and against which, almost as a way of holding himself in check, he softly closed the door.

  Sunday. Tomorrow. All Day.

  On the way back home from meeting with Clayton, I turned onto Guardian Lane, in an area of Coburn known simply as the Commons. It wasn’t by any means a perfect neighborhood, but the simplicity of its homes and yards and streets had appealed to Sandrine. I’d thought it too neat and orderly, however, its homes too evenly disbursed. I’d been young and full of resistance to the regulated, cookie-cutter look of the Commons, how carefully laid out it was. But now it did not strike me as so unappealing. There was a sense of proportion here, I thought, a sense of order, of rules that actually worked. Not perfectly, of course, but to some extent, rules agreed upon and which offered, however flawed in other ways they might be, some vague resistance to the chaotic sprawl into which my own life had descended, mine a desperation far from Thoreau’s stoical Concord neighbors, one that had, in the end, become very noisy indeed.

  By the time I reached 237 Crescent Road I’d come to feel that my decision to drop in on Clayton Blankenship had been a foolish one, but yet typical of the foolishness into which I’d often fallen since Sandrine’s death. I had said foolish things at the beginning of the investigation. I’d assumed a cold perhaps even haughty demeanor from my encounter with Officer Hill onward, thus behaving in a way that had prejudiced just about everyone against me. I had needed correction but the only one who might have provided some corrective word of wisdom was Sandrine, and, as Alexandria had earlier put it with such heartbreaking simplicity, she was gone.

  Even so, once back in the house, seated at the kitchen table, yet another cup of coffee growing cold in front of me, I tried to imagine what Sandrine, if she were still alive, would say to me in the present circumstances. Would it be some version of a cruel “I told you so”? Or would she relent, take pity, give me helpful counsel, be more even than a wife, be my best friend? Would she lean forward, take my hand, and say, “All right, Sam. Listen to me now. Because I know a way out of hell.”

  But what way was there now?

  I was still pondering the question the next day when Alexandria returned from Atlanta just as night was falling. Our unpleasant exchange at the courthouse was now a couple of days behind us, and as she chatted dryly about the few things she’d gotten done in Atlanta, mailing manuscripts or dashing off something for sleeplesseye.com, I saw that she did not intend to revisit the dark pit of her own fearful suspicion that Morty and I—two men—were cooking up a plot against her dead mother.

  She’d brought fresh flowers and as I watched her arrange them in a vase, her fingers delicately moving this leaf or that petal to just the right position, I recalled that, as a little girl, she’d once expressed an interest in being a florist, a sensible career choice for which I’d offered not a particle of encouragement.

  Why had I done that, I wondered now. Had I read, studied, and taught the great authors, the world’s great heads, only to lose respect for the work of human hands, lose it despite the beauty and usefulness of the things they made? As a young man, traveling with Sandrine, I’d stood in grateful awe at what those hands had wrought in stone and iron and stained glass. But slowly, over the years, all that had dropped away and left this harder and more intolerant man. Reading books had made the writing of them all that mattered, and because of that I’d given no support to what might have been a perfectly suitable life’s work for Alexandria. Was it in order to return her daughter to that earlier more tender ambition that Sandrine had called her “Ali”?

  Suddenly Sandrine’s voice was in my ear, so close I could almost feel her lips. Albi, she had said, would be the moment she would forever remember. Not Venice where we’d drifted beneath the Bridge of Sighs, or anything we’d done in Paris or Athens or anywhere else on our one great tour. No, Sandrine had said, it would be Albi, where she’d turned to me and said in a tone of sweet surprise, “It’s you.”

  Had this same woman later come to hate and despise me with such consuming passion that in her final days she might well have plotted my destruction?

  In silence, as Alexandria completed the perfection of her flowers, I reconsidered all this. Live or die, the poet Anne Sexton had once said, but for God’s sake don’t poison everything. Then, on the hard edge of that uncompromising declaration, she had put on her mother’s fur coat, removed all her jewelry, poured herself a glass of vodka, walked into the garage, and turned on the engine of her car. Perhaps I should do the same, I thought. Perhaps I should accept what I now considered the jury’s inevitable verdict and carry out its sentence, thus saving the good people of Coburn any further penalty for the crime of once having welcomed me into their midst.

  “There,” Alexandria said. She stepped back from her arrangement. “What do you think, Dad?”r />
  “Perfect,” I said softly

  She scowled, “Yeah, right,” she said.

  I turned away, as if rebuked, glanced toward the window, and saw Edith Whittier as she made her way to her car.

  “Edith will probably be at the courthouse early tomorrow,” I said dryly. “Eager to drive in another nail.”

  Alexandria shrugged. “She couldn’t have much to say,” she said, “She hardly knew you and Mom.”

  She’d lived next door to us for almost fifteen years, a divorced woman, childless, and probably friendless. She’d retired from the public school system some years before, and after that she’d spent her time beautifying her house. At Christmas the outside of 235 Crescent Road was a carnival of light, and according to Carl, who always walked his son over to see the display, the interior was much the same, with a huge tree weighted down with shiny ornaments. There were various-sized sleighs, as well, all of them filled with brightly wrapped gift boxes and overseen by a multitude of cheerful elves and chuckling Santas. According to Carl, there’d not been a single doorknob that wasn’t sheathed in a knitted reindeer head, and everywhere, everywhere this lonely childless woman had put out bowls of candy and cookies and other assorted treats.

  Alexandria was right. She’d hardly known Sandrine and me. So how very odd, it seemed to me, that it was Edith Whittier, of all people, who might well have heard the crash of that little cup, heard Sandrine’s accusatory cry, she alone whose ears had taken in the violence of that night, and who, as tomorrow’s first witness at my trial, was scheduled to tell the world exactly what she’d heard.

  The curious thing was that after my talk with Clayton I no longer seemed to care what might be said of me in court, no matter how distorted the evidence might be. His moral weight had fallen upon me like a hammer, and I was now like a turtle whose shell had cracked, its moist pink innards exposed to the blazing light and blistering heat.