‘Where?’ she asked.
‘Just outside.’
‘I thought you went to bed with Dot. What were you doing out there?’
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he said. ‘It was so warm, I decided to go for a walk.’
‘In the middle of the night?’
‘What’s so strange about that?’ He glared at her.
‘You don’t think it’s strange?’ she asked. ‘Were you drinking?’
‘Who are you, the police?’ For the first time since he’d walked through the door, his face relaxed into a grin.
‘You just scared me, that’s all.’
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I’m beat.’ He raised himself slowly from the chair. His knee cracked loudly when he put his weight on it.
‘I can imagine,’ she said, making a point to look over his rumpled clothing before she turned and walked to the hallway.
As he followed her, Lonnie seemed groggy, unsteady on his feet. He was so much taller than she was; Vivian knew she wouldn’t be able to stop him if he fell.
21
Is everyone in this house sneaking around? Vivian wondered. She had a difficult time falling back to sleep. When she finally drifted into a restless doze, Nowell’s alarm clock buzzed, promptly at seven o’clock. He went into the bathroom and she heard the water running. The aroma of coffee drifted into the room when he opened the door to the hallway. She heard voices in the kitchen.
She couldn’t sleep anymore. She pushed back the covers and stretched her legs. Today, I will clear up some things, she thought with resolution. I will stop letting my imagination get the best of me. After a hot shower, she went into the kitchen.
‘Good morning!’ Dot said cheerfully, and for some reason, she crossed the room and gave Vivian a hug. She had a clean vanilla-and-soap scent, her usual fresh face and something searching about her eyes.
Vivian released her and headed to the coffeepot.
‘Long night,’ Dot said.
Her hand paused for a moment, and she continued pouring the coffee.
‘You know,’ Dot continued, ‘I think the weather’s turning. I tossed and turned, one minute chilled, the other sweating.’
Vivian faced her with the steaming cup. ‘Well you don’t look tired. You never do.’
Nowell entered the kitchen with his coffee cup. He leaned down and nuzzled Vivian’s hair before getting a refill. ‘Where’s Lonnie?’ he asked.
‘Still sleeping,’ Dot answered. ‘He barely moved when I got up this morning. Dead to the world.’
‘That’s strange,’ Nowell said. ‘Viv, the truck looks great. I didn’t know you washed it.’
‘I think I’ll drive it through the automatic one in town next time,’ she said. ‘It was a lot of work.’
‘Thanks for doing it,’ he said, and something about his tone made Vivian look up. He was staring at her, his brown eyes glossy. ‘I just want you to know, Viv, that I notice what you do, and I know you’re working hard here and well, I appreciate it, that’s all. And I love you.’
Dot shifted at the table; Vivian felt heat in her face.
‘Thanks, baby.’ She moved towards him, found her position under his arm and leaned in.
Dot sniffed loudly. ‘You’re going to make me cry, really, you two. This is just so, so…precious.’
Nowell released Vivian and laughed. He made a move as though he would smack Dot playfully on his way to the study, and she ducked.
‘Nowell?’ she said.
He paused at the entrance, looked back.
‘You know, we’re looking forward to reading your book,’ Dot said. ‘I keep asking Lonnie to get a copy. You don’t have one here, do you?’
‘Actually, I do. I have some spare copies in the room there. I’ll get one for you.’
‘You’re kidding?’ Dot stood up and Vivian could see the outline of her bra, red or dark pink in color, underneath the sheer fabric of her shirt. On the second toe of her left foot, a gold ring encircled the flesh between the two joints. Her toenails were painted a glittery peach. When did she do that? Vivian wondered.
Nowell brought a copy of Random Victim from the study and gave it to her. From across the kitchen, Vivian could see the black, brooding eyes of the man on the cover, the storm cloud like danger over his head.
Nowell went back to work. Dot announced that she was going for a walk, and Vivian declined the offer to join her. When Dot left, she called to Nowell through the fabric divider.
‘Come in,’ he answered.
She pushed through the curtain and immediately lost all of her former resolve to remain civil when she encountered the dingy grayness of the room. Why does he sit in the dark? The curtains over the wide window were closed and the air was stagnant and stale. ‘Why won’t you open a window in here?’ she asked, thinking: You opened it yesterday to sneak out. Anger overwhelmed reasonableness. Something about his room, this place where he spent so much time without her, incensed her.
‘Obviously, I like them closed. We’ve had this discussion before, haven’t we?’ Nowell put his elbow on the antique desk and looked at her, waiting.
‘It’s just so musty in here,’ she said. ‘You’re not getting any fresh air.’
He watched her, tapping his foot against the ornate claw at the bottom of the desk.
She walked further into the room, passing his line of sight until she perched on the arm of the leather couch.
He was forced to swivel in his chair to face her. ‘What is it? You never come to visit me.’
‘That’s not true,’ she said. ‘In the first place, I didn’t think you liked to have visitors while you’re working.’
‘Normally I don’t, but there are exceptions.’
‘In the second place, I came to visit you yesterday, and you weren’t here.’
The smile faded from his lips. He straightened up in his chair. ‘When?’
‘Yesterday afternoon, just before Lonnie and Dot got back.’
‘You came in here?’
‘Listen, I’m not accusing you of anything.’
Nowell leaned back in his chair, drumming his fingers against the desktop. ‘It’s nothing exciting, Viv. I just went for a walk. Some fresh air, like you’re always telling me.’
She tilted her head as though speaking to a small child. ‘Why didn’t you ask me? I would have gone with you. We haven’t had much time together, with your writing and with Lonnie and Dot here.’
‘Do I have to be with you every second I’m not doing something else?’
‘Well, no…’
‘I went for a walk by myself. That’s all. You never used to scrutinize me so closely.’
‘I never had to. Maybe I found it strange that you would climb through a window to go for your casual walk.’
‘Who said that I…’
‘I saw the window, Nowell. Is this a regular thing with you? Is it me, something I did?’
He rose from the chair and sat next to her on the couch.
From her position on the arm, she looked down at him. ‘I saw you coming out of the woods. What’s back there?’
‘Nothing.’ Nowell patted her knee. ‘Trees and birds and rocks. Nothing.’
‘Were you thinking about Chanelle Brodie?’ she asked. ‘Were you thinking about what happened to her?’
His head snapped up, a dark look spreading like ink over his face. ‘Are you still dwelling on that? For God’s sake, Viv, read a book or something. You’ve never been one to create drama like this.’
‘Create drama? A death in our backyard isn’t dramatic enough for you? You’re the creative one…’
‘Wait. This is getting off course.’
Vivian tucked her hands underneath her thighs.
‘Give me a minute to tell you everything.’ He paused. ‘I’ll tell you everything.’ Faint lines crisscrossed his temples and his skin had an unhealthy pallor. ‘I walked over to Mr Stokes’s property,’ he said. ‘That’s where I was, looking around his place.’
Vivian opened her mouth.
‘Wait, let me finish.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I don’t know what I was looking for or why I did it. The other day, Mr Stokes said he was going to visit relatives. That’s when I started to think about it. Not in a specific way, but just some vague idea of how I would show him.’
Vivian wondered if Nowell went into the house, whether he saw the binoculars or the newspaper in the bedroom. Despite his outward nonchalance about Chanelle Brodie’s death, he must have been worried about it all along and suspicious of Mr Stokes.
‘That’s all it was,’ he continued, ‘my twisted idea of revenge or something. There was nothing productive or sensible about it.’
She looked at him. ‘Revenge? What do you mean?’
‘There’s more. The other day when we were fishing, Tom told me something.’
‘Tom?’
‘One of the construction guys,’ Nowell said. ‘He didn’t mean to tell me, really, it just slipped out. Besides, he thought we already knew.’
Vivian shifted on her seat. It wasn’t making sense. ‘Knew what?’
‘You know that my Grandpa Gardiner died when my dad was fifteen, in a hunting accident, around here somewhere?’
She nodded.
‘At lunch time we docked the boat,’ Nowell said. ‘Jerry and Mr Stokes walked back to the van to get the sandwiches, and Lonnie went behind some trees to pee. When they were gone, Tom leaned over and told me how surprised he was that we invited Mr Stokes. Because of what happened with his father and my grandfather.’ He leaned forward, his dark eyes sparkling. ‘Because it was Mr Stokes’s father who shot him. He killed my grandfather.’
‘Jesper Stokes?’ Vivian said. ‘Wait. How can that be? It was so long ago, and Mr Stokes is only about forty, so his father…’
‘His father was a kid at the time, a teenager I think. He’d gone along with the men, including his father, Mr Stokes’s grandfather.’
‘Manus Stokes,’ Vivian said.
‘How do you…’ Nowell started.
‘Katherine,’ she said. For a moment, she let the information sink in. Jesper Stokes shot Nowell’s grandfather, when he was a teenager, before Abe Stokes was born.
‘So you already knew?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘Tom felt terrible for bringing it up.’ Nowell ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I made him tell me everything he knew.’
‘What else did he say?’ she asked.
‘That maybe it wasn’t an accident.’
‘What? You said yourself that Jesper Stokes was just a kid.’
‘There are rumors. People say he was never the same afterwards, that he kept to himself and acted strangely.’
‘That’s a tough thing to live with,’ she said. ‘Even if it was an accident.’
‘They say that something was going on between Mr Stokes’s grandmother and my grandfather.’
Her eyes widened. ‘You mean, an affair or something?’
‘I don’t know, yes.’
She shook her head. ‘So this young kid, this teenager, shot your grandfather for messing around with his mother?’
‘That’s the story.’
‘That’s a rumor,’ she said.
Nowell shrugged. ‘Tom says it’s common knowledge around here. He says that the relations between the families were always strained after the accident, that my grandma had property lines drawn up immediately afterwards.’ Nowell pointed towards the desk. ‘She kept a file on everything. I found a copy of those papers; they were dated a year after my grandfather’s death.’
Vivian thought for a moment. ‘Maybe someone advised her to have those papers done, because she’d recently been widowed.’
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But there has to be some basis to this story.’
‘No, there doesn’t.’ She stood up. ‘Wouldn’t Mr Stokes’s grandmother have been much older than your grandfather, like Mr Stokes is older than us?’
‘Not necessarily. My parents had me and Lonnie in their thirties, and if Mr Stokes was born when his father was younger…’
‘It doesn’t matter. It’s crazy to believe some fifty-year-old story. How would this Tom know anyway? I thought those road workers were shipped in from somewhere else. Don’t they work for the county?’
‘Tom grew up around here.’
They heard water running in the back corner of the house, an indication that Lonnie was finally awake. Nowell said, ‘He slept late today.’
Vivian nodded and didn’t mention that Lonnie had spent most of the night in the woods. ‘I still don’t understand why you went to his house,’ she said. ‘Even if that story is true, it happened a long, long time ago. It was an accident. I’m sure Jesper Stokes had to live with this his entire life. And Abe Stokes too.’
‘They should have to. What if it wasn’t an accident? What if it’s true?’
How could he have gotten away with something like that? It wasn’t possible, she thought.
Nowell looked around the room. ‘I didn’t even know him, only from pictures and the few things my dad said. Hell, he didn’t even get to know him very well, his own father. My grandfather built this house. Don’t you think that’s amazing?’
Vivian looked up at the dark wood supports that ran the distance of the room, standing out from the white paint like bars.
‘I’ve always envied Lonnie for working in construction,’ he continued, ‘that he could do something like that, actually make something, something that would last.’
‘Books last,’ Vivian said.
He shrugged.
She remembered when Dr Lightfoot had taught a class on linear perspective. He said that it was an architect who rescued the lost theories of perspective, changing the art world forever. It was an architect who pointed out the relationship between reality and representation, between actual and imagined space. Without these practices, paintings would have remained flat, lifeless.
Nowell sighed. ‘When Tom told me that it was Mr Stokes’s father who fired that rifle, it made me angry because Mr Stokes never mentioned anything to me. Nobody told us.’
‘What was he supposed to say?’ she asked. ‘Hello, Mr Gardiner, welcome to our neighborhood and by the way, my father accidentally shot your grandfather?’
‘You’d think he would have said something,’ Nowell said.
‘You want him to apologize.’
He looked at her, considering this. ‘He got to have his father.’
‘But he wasn’t even born when this happened.’
‘He should have said something.’
Lonnie plodded down the hallway; his heavy footsteps echoed through the rooms. ‘Hello?’
‘We’re in here,’ Nowell called.
The footsteps halted in the kitchen. ‘Where’s Dot?’
Vivian couldn’t see Lonnie through the curtain divider but she could picture him, standing in the middle of the kitchen like a child who’s lost his favorite toy, his arms hanging dejectedly at his sides. ‘She went for a walk,’ she called. ‘There’s sausage in the refrigerator.’
‘We’ll finish talking about this later,’ Nowell said in a low voice.
‘No.’ She leaned forward, catching his arm as he tried to rise from the couch. ‘I want to hear what you did at Mr Stokes’s house.’
‘There’s nothing to tell,’ he said. ‘I walked around his property like a stalker, looked through the windows and broke into his tool shed. I don’t know why I did it, I really don’t. He kept this secret, and maybe my trespassing somehow made up for it. One secret for another, one indiscretion.’
‘He doesn’t seem like a very exciting subject.’
‘No, nothing scintillating at his place. Just some guy’s house.’
‘I wonder if your father knew him,’ she said.
‘I don’t know. He would’ve been much younger than my dad.’
Vivian had been thinking about more recent years, about the unacknowledged visits made by Sherman to his mother’s house. Maybe Mr
Stokes’s reaction when she mentioned Sherman sprang from the legacy of the hunting incident. It wasn’t his fault that his father had been part of the horrible accident, but guilt naturally filtered down in a family, creating an atmosphere of mistrust and guardedness in which children grow wary and defensive. Maybe there were other reasons why Mr Stokes didn’t like Sherman, and maybe there were none at all.
‘I didn’t mean to alarm you, Viv.’ Nowell squeezed her shoulder, pulling her against his side.
In the kitchen, Lonnie slammed cupboards and foraged through the refrigerator.
22
Several days went by and the inhabitants of the house fell into a routine. Nowell wrote and Lonnie tinkered around outside, and both helped whenever something heavy needed moving. Lonnie ran the errands and reported back from town. Vivian and Dot went through the rooms, clearing and organizing, and one afternoon, they finished removing the wallpaper in the hallway, without the help of alcohol. And they finally attacked the kitchen, the cupboards full of Grandma Gardiner’s supplies. They kept a small amount of things for their own cooking and serving, but there were extra items that could be boxed and labeled for the yard sale Vivian was planning. There was a waffle iron, canning jars, a Dutch oven, a bread maker and as Dot had noticed, an overabundance of tea cups. The non-essential items were in boxes lined up in the den, already labeled with prices. In fact, most of the house had been gone through, but in the attic a good quantity of unsorted boxes remained, as well as some furniture: the short dresser in which Vivian had found the men’s clothing and the gun, a dilapidated trunk with rusty hinges, the wooden headboard of a child’s bed. Vivian planned to bring the larger items down a few days before the sale, which she had tentatively planned for the weekend of the Clement reunion, just under two weeks away.
Since their discussion about Mr Stokes, Nowell had thrown himself into his work with a new dedication. Almost a week had gone by and Vivian saw him only during brief dinner breaks or not at all if he took his plate back into the study. At night he worked late and he got up in the mornings before her. An aura of concentration hovered about him; a deep horizontal groove became a permanent feature of his face, separating his forehead into two near-equal halves.
The Qualities of Wood Page 19