“What is it about?” I asked.
“You go to hell, James Bradley. Go straight to hell.”
She walked down the hall and into our bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
CHAPTER XIV
◊
I couldn’t bring myself to return to Schoolcross after the counseling session with Dr. Walters and its fiasco aftermath. Instead, I spent that Friday night in a cheap hotel room near LaGuardia and the next morning caught the first flight to Richmond, Virginia. By 9:50 a.m. on Saturday I was driving my rented Buick west on Interstate 64 toward Louisa to pay a call on Ray’s mother and sister.
It had been five days since the stabbing, and nothing had appeared in the papers about a killing on East Sixty-Fourth Street. No one from the sheriff’s department had ever called me to ask about Lars. There was no funeral to attend; Nora told me his ashes would be shipped back to his grieving mother in Stockholm after an autopsy and cremation were completed. Mario was in jail, charged with murder. Tamara had left Schoolcross late Tuesday evening, after her quarrel with Ray. According to Lennie, she’d driven to Vermont to stay with her sister.
In those few days after the discovery of Lars’s body, Ray and Nora had continued to take the horses out, enjoying the weather. I wasn’t invited. They also spent time together in the afternoons, walking through the gardens around the Big House or drinking tea in the kitchen. The image of the two of them “playing with fire” haunted me, appearing one night in my dreams.
Lennie was completely oblivious to the time they were spending together. He, too, had “caught fire” and was really working now, twelve to fourteen hours a day in his studio. His status as the alpha lion of living post-abstract-expressionist painters was, as for any such leader, a tenuous one, with his position in the pack liable to weaken with advancing age. Our morning walks ended because he couldn’t bring himself to leave his painting.
I needed answers to some questions about Ray. His mother and sister would know the truth. Whether or not they wanted to see me, I was going to visit them and not leave until they’d talked to me. Depending upon what I learned about Ray, I’d either try to forget everything that had happened, or I’d go straight to the police, with or without Lennie.
Within an hour of leaving the Richmond airport, I was in center of the town of Louisa, looking through the car window at a statute of Robert E. Lee. Louisa was bigger than I’d expected. I parked the car in front of the county courthouse and walked to a nearby hardware store to ask for directions to Edith and Polly Martin’s. The clerk knew immediately and it was easy to find, but once I’d driven to their house and was parked out front, I hesitated for a moment, taking it in.
So this is where Ray grew up, I thought. The white Victorian house, which was situated on a quiet residential street, was well maintained, with a small yard and neatly trimmed plantings around the foundation and up the walkway.
A tall, perilously thin lady of perhaps seventy came out the front door and onto the porch. She was wearing a well-cut, if rather severe, dark dress adorned with a circle pin brooch. She appeared far too elegant for either the time of day or circumstances.
She surprised me by walking straight down the porch steps directly toward my rental car, as if it were her destination. She tottered in high heels, and I feared there might be cracks in the walkway, but she safely reached the passenger’s side. I turned the key in the ignition to allow the electric window to go down.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” she said. “You’re late, you know.”
“I doubt you’ve been waiting for me, ma’am. I’m not expected. Do you know Mrs. Edith Martin? I believe she lives here.”
“You see! I wasn’t wrong. I’m Mrs. Martin. You’re looking for me. Now, are we going to discuss business through the window?”
I was confused. Ray’s mother would be about sixty, and this woman seemed to be in her early seventies. I got out of the car and walked around to the curb, where she greeted me and took my hand. Bright-red lipstick was smudged around her mouth, reminding me of a little girl playing dress-up, and her long gray hair was pulled back into a hairdo not unlike a child’s.
Her eyes were a pale blue. They were cloudy, and her gaze, although focused on my face, gave me the feeling she was looking at me from an immense distance. I noticed the smeared lipstick again and came to the conclusion that Mrs. Martin, or whoever she was, probably shouldn’t be out alone.
“Please take my arm,” I said, as we headed toward the house.
“You’re late,” she said again.
“Who do you think I am?”
“The man from the estate, of course.”
I knew it was wrong to take advantage of her confusion, but I couldn’t resist asking.
“What estate do you think I’ve come to talk about?”
“Major Williams’s estate, of course.”
“Temple Williams’s estate? Wasn’t that a long time ago?”
“What business is it of yours?” asked a voice behind me.
I was already feeling guilty for questioning the older lady, who was obviously senile. Now, caught in the act, my face flushed scarlet as I turned to face a woman who’d walked up quietly behind us. At first glance I knew by her slender, erect bearing that she was Ray’s sister. Dr. Freeman had said she was a schoolteacher. Quickly, I explained myself.
“She came out to the car. She must have mistaken me for someone else. I’m James Bradley.”
“You’re Bradley?” she asked. “Raymond’s art dealer?”
Now it was my turn to be surprised. She knew my name. We reached the steps of the front porch, and, before I could answer her, the door opened, and a heavy-set black woman dressed in white, like a nurse, came out.
“There you are, Ms. Martin,” she said. “You know you can’t just go outside like that. If you’d given me a minute, I’d have taken you.”
The nurse stared at me, trying to figure out who I was. Then she spoke to Ray’s sister.
“I’m sorry, Polly. I was in the bathroom.”
The nurse took the older lady by the arm and said to her, “Will you show me the picture book?”
Ray’s mother brightened at this prospect and allowed herself to be escorted into the house. As she reached the door, she said to me, “My daughter handles all my business. Please explain to her about the Major’s estate. You see, Polly,” she said to her daughter. “I told you he’d come.”
Then she was gone into the house.
“Excuse me, but that’s Ray’s mother? She’s so . . .”
“Old?” said Polly.
“I was going to say frail.”
“She has early onset Alzheimer’s. She’s only sixty-one.”
We stood there in silence while I digested this piece of information. I wanted to ask what her mother’s remarks about “the Major’s estate” meant but decided I’d better not push my luck. The next move was Polly’s. After a full minute of silent contemplation she spoke, and I knew my trip wouldn’t be a waste of time.
“Please come in, Mr. Bradley. We can talk there.”
“Thank you,” I said, and followed her inside. “I wouldn’t be bothering you if it weren’t important.”
We passed through a hallway in which three oil paintings, displayed in ornate gilded frames, hung on corridor walls covered in a threadbare red velvet flocked wallpaper. The paintings clearly hadn’t been done by Ray, and I assumed they were Edith’s work. A quick glance told me that she had been a moderately talented amateur. Polly didn’t comment as she led me into a sitting room and switched on a table lamp. The porch roof kept out light that might otherwise have come through the windows, and the bulb in the lamp was dim. Gradually my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, and I noticed that the carpet was an unusually fine small silk medallion Persian. At some time in the Martin family’s past, someone had had some money or done some exotic traveling.
Polly didn’t offer a drink or attempt other pleasantries as she indicated a chair and took her own plac
e on the sofa.
“Ray has told me about you,” she said. “We’ve talked on the telephone since he was released. Thank you for your kindness to him.” I didn’t speak, and she continued. “Why have you come here, Mr. Bradley?”
Her voice betrayed her tenseness, and I saw that under the veneer of poise she was more nervous than I.
“I’m worried about Ray. I think I’ve gotten to know him, and I’m worried about him.”
“Forgive me,” she said, “but you’re a latecomer to that occupation. I’ve been worrying about Raymond all his life. And if you think you know him, you’re wrong. No one can know Raymond.”
We sat staring at each other in silence until she continued.
“Raymond has spoken highly of you, Mr. Bradley. I know you’ve treated him as a friend.”
“Yes, I have. But . . . I’m starting to worry about his . . . stability, Miss Martin. He’s gotten himself established in a wonderful new life. I’d hate to see him jeopardize it. Has Ray told you about his relationship with Leonard Hirsh?”
“Yes,” she replied. “And of course I read the story in the Times.”
I must have looked surprised.
“The paper takes several weeks to arrive by covered wagon, Mr. Bradley, but you can get The New York Times in Louisa County.”
“Of course you can,” I said, although I was, in fact, surprised. “I just didn’t know you kept up with Ray so well.”
Voices came from the next room, and I listened for a moment. Edith must have been looking at “the picture book” with her nurse. Polly glanced at her watch.
“You still haven’t told me why you’re so worried, Mr. Bradley.”
I struggled to frame my question so I could make her understand what I needed to know.
“Was Ray dangerously violent before he went to prison?” I asked. “Or was he forced into violence as a way of protecting himself after he was sent there?”
“If you listen to Raymond, he’s been forced into violence all his life. He’s always very persuasive explaining why he didn’t have any choice.”
“Most men live a lifetime without ever hurting anyone,” I said.
“Yes, but violence follows Raymond everywhere.”
She rose, and from an end table next to the sofa she picked up a black and white photograph of a handsome young man wearing the uniform of an Army major. She handed it to me and said, “This was our father, Templeton Williams. My mother took this picture three months after they met. That would have been around 1956. Mother was twenty.”
“He looks like Ray,” I said, studying the photograph.
“Remarkable resemblance, isn’t it?
“So you think it’s his relationship with his father that made him so violent? Looking so much like him, but being . . . illegitimate?”
I immediately wished I hadn’t used the word, but she didn’t take offense, or even react to it, so I continued.
“Is it true that after Major Williams’s wife died, Ray was taken in by him? And his new life was destroyed by his father’s death?”
“Raymond’s told you a great deal about the family,” she said.
“Yes, it’s quite a story.”
I put the picture back on the table.
“It is quite a story,” she said, “and I know how he’d tell it—in a way that implies all his problems come from his troubled childhood. I used to look at Raymond that way too.”
“And now?”
“Now, I’m tired of making excuses for him. I don’t think his childhood or his relationship with our father has much to do with his violence.”
“Where does it come from?”
“Has he ever spoken to you about Dr. Freeman? From Lorton?”
“Yes, he mentioned him. I talked to him on the phone. Freeman is the one who gave me your name.”
“What did he say?”
“That he was worried about Ray being on parole.”
I didn’t tell her that Dr. Freeman had also said Ray was mentally ill.
“Dr. Freeman told me something I’ve never forgotten,” Polly said. “It explains Raymond but is chilling in its finality. He said that he sometimes sees men like Raymond in his work, and he’s never been able to help any of them. He said Raymond was born with a deformity, like a cleft palate, or a hunchback, except that his deformity is on the inside where no one can see it. People only see the results.”
“What results?”
“He’s missing that part that keeps us all from killing each other whenever we feel threatened.”
The conversation was hard for her, but she wouldn’t cry.
“He was such a beautiful child,” she said. “But people around him get hurt. Sometimes they get killed. It’s always happened, ever since he was a boy, but it’s never his fault. Do you know that Ray almost killed his own uncle—the headmaster at his boarding school—with a pair of scissors? They were discussing his grades. He said he didn’t have any choice; he was being attacked. And that he was attacked by the policeman who arrested him for stealing that car.”
Like he was attacked by Raider, or that wolf in prison, I thought.
“Raymond needed to be in Lorton, or someplace like it. Leonard Hirsh didn’t do anyone a favor by getting him out—not Raymond, and certainly not the people around him.”
Her face looked stricken and her hands were trembling.
“But I pray every night that nothing I just said about Raymond is true. I pray that he’ll do well in his new life, and that his bad luck is finally over.”
It was evening by the time I’d flown back to LaGuardia from Richmond and picked up the Wagoneer. When I finally pulled into the Schoolcross Circle two hours later, the night was very dark, and the outline of the Big House loomed stolidly against the night sky
The Quaker Cottage also sat in darkness, but after I had parked the car and walked to the door, I shouted, “Hello!” into the interior. No one answered, of course. Ray lived in the Keeper’s Cottage now. Still, I walked through the house, looking in every room and calling his name to be sure he was wasn’t there. Then I went back to the entryway and locked the front door.
I had returned to Schoolcross because I needed to talk to Lennie. And because I didn’t have anywhere else to go. All during the drive from LaGuardia I had thought about Ray. His work had such a rare, twisted genius, shaped by frightening rage and a touching longing for normalcy and acceptance. When we had sat around the kitchen table, or walked in the woods, he’d emerged as a man of immense gifts, one for whom fate had, at last, been deservedly kind. Then I remembered what his sister had said, and about seeing him and Nora asleep together on the couch. I slept badly again that night, with my bedroom door locked.
The next morning I walked to the Big House and found Lennie in his studio. He said he was too busy to talk and asked me to come back at lunchtime. That was fine—it would give me the morning to pack and to think about what I was going to tell him. I’d decided that, whether or not he agreed, I was going to the police about Raider.
As I left his studio he was already completely absorbed in his painting again. At the bottom step of the entranceway to the Big House, I paused in the shadow of the columns and looked out on the west lawn, where sunlight from the east was creating a short, bright dagger of reflection on the bronze gnomon of the sundial. The early December morning was unusually fine, the air crisp and clean. An early walk would stretch my legs and clear my head. As I set out, thoughts of the approaching holidays triggered something within me, and I recalled memories of past Christmases with Linda and Mary. I hadn’t spoken to either of them since the night my true confession had totally backfired. I was wracked with longing and homesickness.
A moment of clarity descended. I didn’t need to look for an apartment in New York. I’d check into a hotel immediately, then do everything in my power to spend Christmas with my family. Linda had admitted that there was a secret at the heart of our difficulties, and, before my blunder two days ago, she had been ready to tell me wha
t it was. Despite the “honesty” disaster, I was certain that I could somehow arrange a visit and extend it into a reconciliation.
A half mile into my walk, just beyond the turnoff to the Keeper’s Cottage, I saw Ray and Nora on horseback, crossing the gravel in front of me. They were cutting across the farm’s Outer Loop that enclosed the smaller Inner Circle. They didn’t see me.
I continued on the Outer Loop, soon taking a left onto what was, for me, an unexplored trail. After a quarter mile, this trail dead-ended into an overgrown clearing, where a house had stood. All that remained of it now was a crumbling brick chimney and piles of boards overgrown with brush.
To the left of the ruins stood a crumbling stone pyramid, perhaps four feet long on each side and about two feet high. The walls slanted inward to form the pyramid shape, but the structure was flat across the top, with an opening covered by planks. They were askew, and as I studied the old-fashioned cistern well (for that’s what I decided it was), I was able to see between the boards and down into the shaft. In my first glance, there was only darkness.
A foul odor invaded my nose, and my head snapped back as if I’d been slapped. Something was rotting down there. I pushed the boards aside, held my breath, and tried again to see into the well. The shaft was very dark, but I made out a shape at the bottom. I ran out of air and, not wanting to smell that odor again, turned away from the well. When I inhaled, the taint lingered in my nostrils and my stomach did a turn. The stench had followed, making me gag.
I tossed a small stone into the opening. There was a thud but no splash. The well was dry. I held my breath and forced myself to look again. The shaft was dark, but on the bottom lay an indistinct shape, which acquired a form, then took on detail. I saw bones—no, teeth—and the dim shape focused into a face smiling up through the darkness.
I was sure it was Tamara!
Hurrying back the quarter mile to the road, I ran out of breath and sat for a moment on a fallen log, recalling the ugly scene Tamara had had with Ray the day she’d supposedly left Schoolcross. I had to go tell Lennie. His work be damned—he needed to be told everything, and then we needed to do something about it.
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