“Let’s not get too close,” I said.
“No,” Highat answered, looking back at Mary, who was grimacing as the smoky smell reached her nostrils. “The ashes have been well-sifted already.”
“Could anything be salvaged?” I asked.
“What was saved was more tragic than what was lost,” he answered.
I could picture the motley collection of scorched books, painting frames, and velvet-covered handcuffs. What about the entwined antlers in the hallway to the storeroom? Had any remnant of them survived, I wondered? I looked back to check on Mary.
“Daddy, come look,” she called.
She’d found a box turtle in the untended July grass and was poking at it with a piece of broom sedge.
I said to Highat, “Wasn’t their loss covered by insurance?” before turning away to examine Mary’s new treasure.
“I won’t be so pedantic as to tell you there are things that money will never replace,” he said to my back.
The turtle had withdrawn into its shell, and Mary was trying to coax it out.
My own financial affairs had taken a dip over the last six months and were only now reviving. Too many working hours had been lost during the trauma and recovery. My injuries had required surgery, and the health insurance company was being uncooperative about the bills. Fortunately Mr. Bell and several other of my clients had stood by me, steering several new deals my way.
I was tempted to reply, “Money sure helps soften the blow,” but I held my tongue. I knew what he meant.
“Why the survey ribbons?” I asked instead.
“Ah. You have been out of touch. Schoolcross is to be sold. The developers are going to build a “planned equestrian community” here. Ten houses around the Circle and the balance of the land to remain in the conservation easement.”
We continued to skirt the edges of the lawn, Mary a few paces behind. She’d lost interest in the turtle. We were upwind of the remains of the house now, and the smoky smell drifted away from us.
Then Highat got to the point.
“Why won’t you talk with them?” he asked.
“I’ve got nothing to say to either of them until Mario is out of jail.”
“Mario is out of jail. That’s what I wanted to tell you. He was released last week. He’s free.”
“I still don’t have anything to say to them.”
Even so, I was glad to hear that Mario was out of prison. I’d heard that Nora and Lennie had hired more attorneys for him, at considerable expense. The new lawyers hadn’t based their case on the possibility that it was Ray who had killed Lars, although I was sure he had. What I “knew” wasn’t enough. There was no hard evidence to support the theory in court. So instead the lawyers had focused their appeals on mishandled technicalities in Mario’s plea bargain. They must have known what they were doing—they’d gotten him out.
“Everyone has already suffered so much . . .” he started. He changed the subject.
“And you, Mr. Bradley? Have you resolved your affairs with the authorities?”
The police had asked me very few questions about Lars or Tamara, and, of course, Raider was never mentioned—we had never reported his death and nothing ever appeared in the newspapers. Instead, the detectives had wanted to hear every detail of Ray’s unrequited obsession for Nora and the snowy night he had gone berserk and tried to kill us all. I’d been willing to oblige.
“I think they’re through,” I said. “They haven’t contacted me in over a month.”
The detectives had believed everything I’d told them about Ray’s relentless fixation on an innocent Nora, his stalking and kidnapping of her, his arson, and the events that had lead up to Lennie’s act of justifiable homicide. Ray’s three new paintings of people experiencing life at Schoolcross—eating dinner, sitting in front of the fireplace, and standing, talking on the Circle, with a distorted figure set in a block of ice among them—were still with the police. Evidence, they’d said. As Ray’s agent, I knew that his sister, Polly, was trying to get possession.
Yes, the police believed everything I had told them. Everything, that is, except my explanation for the contents of Linda’s purse. This was ironic because it was the only part of the story that was completely true. They’d found the purse in the stranded Wagoneer while searching the estate. I quickly admitted that I’d driven it back from Manhattan on Christmas Eve morning.
The police hadn’t been satisfied until they’d conducted a full investigation of the circumstances surrounding the purse and its contents, which had included Linda’s credit cards with my name on it. They’d taken sworn statements from everyone, including Dr. Dan Diamond, after I identified him as the source of the bowel movement. After the predictable savaging of Lennie for having championed Ray’s release, the lower order of New York City newspapers had fixated on this most embarrassing part of the story. Mystery Turd Purse headlines had dominated the front pages of the tabloids for several days.
The most rabid interest in the affair had finally subsided, but I still couldn’t walk more than five blocks in Manhattan without someone recognizing me. The full impact on Dr. Diamond remained to be seen, but I was hoping he’d lose all of his patients.
“Everyone has suffered enough,” Highat repeated. “Nora, especially, is still immersed in guilt. She and Leonard are living in a furnished sublet on Eighty-Sixth Street until they decide what they’re going to do next.”
I hadn’t known this. In fact I hadn’t known they’d stayed together.
“Leonard and Nora still have difficult times ahead,” Highat said. “They’ve behaved abominably, especially toward each other.”
I didn’t know how two people could stay married after what Nora and Lennie had put each other through. Of course I had moved back into my apartment and still continued to live there with Linda and Mary, but the situations were completely different.
“The day the house burned, we asked Nora and Leonard to stay with us in our apartment in New York,” Highat said. “They arrived that afternoon with Leonard’s head wrapped in bandages. That evening Nora asked me how she could stand to go through the rituals of Christmas under these circumstances.”
The Big House had burned on the morning of December 24. I’d refused to stay in the hospital, insisting that the doctor splint my hands and let me be with my daughter for Christmas Eve. When she understood how badly my hands were injured, Linda let me move back in.
“What did you tell Nora?”
“That there’s no magic way to ease the pain. That she should suspend judgment, think of past Christmases, and see how she feels next Christmas. And the one after that.”
“Sounds like valuable advice.”
“I haven’t lived for seventy-three years without having experienced a bit of life myself. Nora’s very like her mother, you know . . .”
His voice dropped to a whisper.
“. . . very hot pants.”
I stared at him in silence and he met my gaze.
Hot pants! How else was Highat to look at it? Maybe his viewpoint was for the best. It softened things, in a way—made them less poetically dramatic. Then I thought of Lars and Tamara and Mario, and what Nora was going through. The situation was still tragic. I realized that despite my injuries I’d been so furious at Lennie’s careless arrogance that I’d almost taken Ray’s side. I guess I did believe in love at first sight; what had transpired between Nora and Ray had been stowed away in my subconscious as something unspeakable but precious.
“I know it would mean a great deal to Nora and Leonard if you would at least talk with them,” Highat said.
“I’ll think about it.”
The drive back to New York passed quickly, though I kept the car below the speed limit while Mary lay sleeping in her car seat in the back. She was resting so peacefully, and I drove with special caution. I had a lot to consider.
“You’ve changed,” Linda had said to me the night before. “I used to struggle to make you recognize that Mary had any
problems at all. Now, sometimes, I think you baby her.”
Yes, I did baby her, but everyone agreed that she’d made her best progress in the seven months since I’d moved back into the apartment. We had kept her in preschool for another year to give her time to catch up before starting kindergarten. I’d leave it to Linda and the experts to find Mary’s limits and the right school. When she saw how Mary thrived with me at home, Linda had softened a bit toward me. She had accepted a job at Towe’s in April and was now working half time, in the mornings. We had silently negotiated an uneasy truce, Linda and I, marked by long conversations that avoided certain subjects as instinctively as a bicyclist swerves to avoid potholes. Much of our relationship was based on her taking care of me during the early days of convalescence when my hands were so badly hurt.
I still hadn’t been able to talk with her about Schoolcross. In response to her questions I’d told her only the barest details about my life there and what had happened the night my hands had been crushed. She read the newspaper articles and stopped asking me about it.
Maybe the time had come to talk with Lennie and Nora—and with Linda too. Over the last few weeks I’d begun to feel impossibly “stuck,” lying in bed, mentally rehearsing all too familiar but still unspoken conversations with them all.
I’d considered Mario’s imprisonment a part of the continuing tragedy that had been triggered by Lennie’s arrogance in freeing Ray in the first place. With Mario now released, my reason for refusing to speak with Lennie and Nora was gone. But before I spoke with them, I first needed to talk to Linda.
That night, I asked Linda to sit down with me in the living room after Mary went to bed, and I told her everything that had happened after I’d moved to Schoolcross. Everything. When I got to Lennie’s low sperm count and the diametrically opposed sexual dysfunctions, she stopped me.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “You’re making this up, right?”
“Every word is true.”
“You mean Lennie would immediately . . . ? And Ray wouldn’t ever . . . ? And poor Nora was in the middle?”
“Poor Nora was in the middle.”
She laughed so hard that tears rolled down her cheeks.
“Well, there’s nothing funny about sexual dysfunction . . .” I tried to tell her, but the laughter was infectious.
“Anyhow, I can’t swear to it, but I think Nora cured Ray,” I said, and I told her what I had heard from outside the Keeper’s Cottage. “Sounded like an orgasm to me.”
“Bradley!” she said. “You should have walked away immediately.”
“I know. But I thought someone was in trouble, or getting hurt. By the time I realized what they were doing, I was frozen to the front stoop.”
“And Lennie ended up killing Ray. Oh, my God. This is incredible.”
“I haven’t told you about Ray with the Webley or me being gagged with duct tape.”
And I launched back into my tale. She stopped me again when I got to the velvet handcuffs.
“Wait a minute. Go back,” she said. “Who left the tracks in the snow? Who’d been looking into the window at Nora?”
“It must have been Ray, seeing if she was out of the way before he made his move against Lennie. He went back to the Big House and into the sitting room, where Lennie was asleep. Ray bonked him on the head with the poker to stun him, and took the Webley.”
“So after Ray had tied Lennie up, you and Nora came back to the Big House unexpectedly?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe Ray was improvising, or maybe he’d been planning on burning the house down all along—make it look like an accident.”
“That night, when you told Nora all that you had learned about Ray, did she believe you? How could she leap from desperate love for the man to suddenly realizing he was a berserk killer?”
I considered for a moment, trying to untangle what had happened that night.
“When I told her what Ray’s sister had said about him, she didn’t know what to think. I talked with her some more there in the Quaker Cottage, trying to give her time to come out of her fog and figure it out. But when we went up to the Big House together, Lennie was tied up on the sofa and Ray was pointing the gun in my face. She had to make a decision.”
“But look what she decided. To let you be handcuffed to the fireplace while she ran off into the night with Ray.”
“But she knew they were trick handcuffs and that I would be out of them as soon as Ray left the house. She didn’t see him crush my hands, and I’m positive she didn’t know Ray had booby-trapped the fireplace. Her own parents were asleep upstairs.”
“So go on with the story. What happened after she and Ray left the Big House? Obviously the booby trap worked. I know the house burned down . . .”
When I reached the part about the Webley exploding in Ray’s hand, she stopped me again.
“But why? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“I hadn’t either, but apparently it’s a common hazard with old guns. The primers—the firing caps—become unreliable, and so does the gunpowder. The police were able to figure out what had happened.”
“Well, tell me.”
“All the cartridges were corroded but not equally. The first four misfired completely. On the fifth shot, only the primer ignited, with enough force to push the bullet into the barrel. On the last shot both the primer and the gunpowder ignited with full force, but the barrel was clogged by the earlier bullet. So the gun blew up in Ray’s hand.”
When I told her how Nora had distracted Ray with poetry so Lennie could stab him in the throat, Linda put her hands to her face in horror.
“I’ve never heard of anyone behaving so immorally. She distracted him with a love poem so Lennie could kill him? That may be the worst thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life.”
“Worse than my behavior in Hong Kong?” I asked. “Or, rather, worse than my telling you about what happened in Hong Kong? I was honest and you told me to go straight to hell.”
My resentment over her ill-treatment was flaring, but she cut me short.
“That’s not why you left the apartment that night, and you know it . . .”
“Yes, it is. You told me to go straight to hell . . .” I repeated.
“You know why I was so upset. I told you why, the night you rescued me from, from . . .”
“Say it.”
“. . . from the turd!”
Linda had taken her share of savaging by the tabloids, along with the rest of us. She, after all, was the rightful owner of “the mystery turd purse.” Carlos had dealt with photographers and reporters for weeks.
“It’s because I thought you’d never accept any responsibility for what happened to Mary. And you’d only hate me for it—make me take all the blame. I’m her mother. I’m the one who put the baby down so we wouldn’t be late for Cats.”
“You thought I’d blame you? Linda, I’ve been wracked with guilt every moment since you told me. I made you put Mary down and come to the theater. That’s why I can’t judge Nora, or Lennie, or Ray, or any of them. Whatever they did, I’ve done worse.”
“And so have I . . .” she said.
She thought for a moment, then spoke again.
“But what happened at Schoolcross was different. Serious crimes were committed and never reported. The police were lied to. How can you defend these people?”
I wouldn’t be provoked, but I wouldn’t back down, either.
“Okay, Linda,” I said calmly. “Make your judgments.”
“You should have called the police immediately when Ray killed that mugger.”
“I know. But running away was reasonable at the time. Ray was our friend. He was protecting us. If anyone else had killed Raider under those circumstances, they’d probably get a medal. But because of his prison record, Ray would have gotten a sentence.”
“You know Lennie was only thinking about his reputation . . .”
“I don’t know what Lennie was thinking. I admit we made mistakes. Bu
t mistakes don’t make us monsters.”
I picked up the telephone.
“Should I call nine-one-one and turn in a dead man for a crime that didn’t make the papers the first time around?” I asked. “Maybe we all need more publicity—for the sake of justice, of course.”
“Hang up the phone,” Linda said. “But what about Lars? Why did you protect Ray by lying to the police?”
“I never lied about Lars. I was hoping the police would ask me about him, like I was hoping someone, somewhere, would ask me about the mugger. But no one ever did. Mario accepted the plea bargain, which is the same as confessing as far as the law is concerned. Nobody would have believed simply on my say-so that Ray had done it.”
“And Mario? Can you imagine the nightmare for a sensitive man like that in prison?”
“Lennie did everything he could to help him. Mario’s been freed. I can’t imagine the legal maneuvering it must have taken.”
“And Tamara was just a woman scorned? A suicidal depressive?”
“Ray and Tamara are the only ones with the answer to that question, and they’re both dead.”
“But in your heart, Bradley?”
“In my heart I believe Ray killed her and faked her suicide.”
“That’s more blood on Lennie’s hands, if you ask me.”
“And on mine? For not having done something about Ray sooner?”
“I didn’t say that. I didn’t think that.”
“No. I said it. I think it, every day of my life. When I stop thinking about Cats, I think about Tamara.”
I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes. My head was pounding and I rubbed my temples, forgetting about my hands and letting the pain ran up and down my fingers.
“Whatever wrongs you may have done, you’ve suffered enough for them.” Linda said to me with compassion in her voice. “You acted heroically. You saved lives when your hands were cri—” She hesitated over the word crippled. “. . . injured so badly,” she finished.
There was a tenderness coming from her that I hadn’t experienced in far too long. She didn’t come to me or rise from the sofa—we seldom touched anymore—but she soothed me with her voice.
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