Trial Run

by Anne Metikosh

  I laid the flowers gently in front of the polished black granite etched with my parents’ names, then, with some hazy memory of a book I had read long ago, took two of the roses and scattered their pink petals over Rory’s stone, and Brian’s.

  I waited for tears that did not come.

  I breathed in the scent of the roses, sweet and heady, like a dream of summer nights. Closing my eyes, I could make out the familiar shapes of yesterday … my mother’s smile, my father’s hands, a baby’s downy hair.

  For the first time, I didn’t flinch from memory. As I stood there in the pre-dawn stillness, I felt the past, so longed-after, so lived-over, slip off my shoulders like a burden.

  • • •

  The stars had guttered out by the time I headed back toward the gate. At the branch in the path I hesitated, half inclined to go home. But the events of the past few days still pressed on me, and the cemetery was quiet and solitary. I decided to walk on a little further, to the point where a hedge girdled monuments to the founders of Kingsport. Sprinkled like seeds around them were the graves of the lesser of their kin. It was where Randy Outray would be buried later that afternoon.

  It gave me a queer feeling to be privy to so many of the secrets of his life, and his death. I had learned more about him than I wanted to know, and the old adage about familiarity breeding contempt had held true. I could summon no pity for him. Nor any regard.

  Ahead of me gaped the oblong of Randy’s grave. A black tarpaulin had been stretched protectively over it, making it look, from a distance, as though it were open. Behind it, euonymous bushes made a horizon against which the waning moon sketched a figure. The grounds man, I thought. And then I saw that it was not the grounds man at all. It was Simone Outray.

  At my approach, she turned, as startled as if I were a ghost, her features blanched and dramatized in the milky light. Her figure was shrouded in what looked like an old army greatcoat, hands thrust deep into the pockets. Some violent emotion had drained her face to a mask.

  I stopped short, embarrassed by her distress, and made awkward by my knowledge of her brother. We stared at each other across his grave.

  “Hello, Simone,” I said.

  Her voice was a tentative half-whisper that carried no expression. “Miss Ryan?”

  “Nina. Yes. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude. I didn’t realize anyone was here.”

  Simone said nothing. She looked dazed and witless, as if a touch would knock her over.

  I drew a deep breath, forcing the conventional words. “Simone, I’m sorry about your brother. I know that’s hardly an adequate thing to say, but what else is there? It’s been a dreadful time for everyone.”

  A touch of something dark and clouded altered her face for a moment, something lost and uncertain moving like a stranger behind the mask. I had seen that look on her face before, in the hall at Reidmore.

  “You didn’t like him, did you, Nina?” she said.

  “I didn’t know him,” I said helplessly.

  “And now you never will. After all, he’s dead.”

  It wasn’t so much the casual phrasing that shocked me as the lack of something in her voice that ought to have been there. The effect was as startling and as definite as if she had sworn at me.

  Her face frightened me. It still looked stupid, but I saw now that this was real; it was the blank stupidity of someone who is beyond feeling punishment, and who has long since stopped even asking the reason for it.

  Memory stirred.

  I was eight years old and Tommy Luna had cornered a stray dog in the lane behind our houses. Tommy had a stick and he kept poking it at the dog, forcing the animal further and further back into the corner between the fence and garbage cans. The dog was thin and straggly haired, with the same bruised look in his eyes that Simone had. Tommy was shouting and waving the stick around, pretending he was a lion tamer in the circus and we were the audience. The little dog cowered behind the garbage cans. Someone told Tommy to leave it alone and one of the little girls, maybe me, started crying, but Tommy wouldn’t stop and when he poked out with the stick again, the little dog suddenly turned and jumped at him, sinking his teeth into Tommy’s hand until Tommy screamed and dropped the stick. I thought the dog would run away then, but he didn’t. He was still whimpering by the garbage cans when someone came with a muzzle and took him to the pound.

  The memory spun away into silence, leaving me tingling with apprehension, wondering if I had really remembered it at all, or if it were just some trick of my imagination.

  I stared at Simone Outray.

  She didn’t even need to speak. Her face told me all I wanted to know.

  I suppose I should have felt relief that, after all, the police need not look any farther than Randy Outray’s sister to find his murderer. But my stomach twisted with a sickening mix of pity, and the beginnings of fear. I remembered that the gun she had used to shoot her brother was small enough to fit inside a pocket, and the pockets of the coat she was wearing were wide and deep. “A derringer is a two-shot pistol” the encyclopedia had said. I wondered who Simone intended the second shot for.

  Unreasoning panic stampeded my brain. The girl was in shock; I could hardly believe her capable of shooting anyone else, let alone me. Besides, I told myself, she had no reason to kill me, a virtual stranger, unless — and here I tasted blood as I bit my lower lip — unless she were insane. Fragments of what I had learned of her family whirled and resettled to form a different picture in my mind. I had been concentrating on Randy’s history; I should have paid more attention to his sister’s.

  I grabbed at the fleeting rags of my common sense. Simone Outray wasn’t crazy. That blank expression masked a working mind. She might choose to look retarded, but I sensed cunning behind the vacuous façade.

  If I turned and ran now, would she follow me? I had no idea what the range of a derringer was.

  Belatedly, I realized I had no idea whether she actually had a gun in her pocket at all.

  “Simone,” I began conversationally. My voice came out in a harsh croak. I cleared my throat and tried again, saying the first thing that came to mind. “Does your mother know you’re here?”

  “That bitch,” she said. Her voice held no inflection. “She doesn’t even know I’m alive.” The calm voice broke. “I thought it would be different when Randy died. I thought she might turn to me, like mothers and daughters are supposed to, you know? Like, they tell you there’s supposed to be this special bond, and all there really is, is this face, this perfect face, that ought to be smiling at you, staring at you like you just crawled out from under a rock or something.” I could hear the tears behind her words. “Why couldn’t she love me? She loved him and look how bad he messed up.”

  I bit my lip, unable to frame a response.

  A feeble December sun was slowly brightening the sky. I wondered how long it would be before somebody showed up for work. Scanning the grounds, I saw no sign of any activity.

  Simone moved and my head whipped around. Her right hand was fumbling in the pocket of her baggy coat, pulling out a little gun just like the ones I had seen hanging on the wall in Mel Deloitte’s study. She held it vaguely pointed in my direction, looking down at it as though she were not quite sure where it had come from. The derringer looked like a toy in the hand of a child.

  Oddly enough, now that I could see the gun, I wasn’t frightened any more. It was as if fear had been raised to such a pitch that it had killed itself, like a light bulb flaring before it burns out. I faced the girl on the other side of Randy Outray’s grave and said quite calmly, “Where did you get that?”

  Simone looked at me then. Like her mother’s, her eyes were very pale and clear. The dazed expression had vanished. She looked forlorn, and defenseless, and very, very young. She didn’t answer my question directly.

  “It’s been i
n the family for a long time. Sort of an heirloom, I guess.”

  “Are you planning to shoot me with it?”

  She looked astonished. “Why should I? You never did anything to me.”

  “What are you doing then? Trying to get even with your mother?”

  She looked like such a child standing there in a coat several sizes too big, with a toy pistol in her hand. I thought of the time I had run away from home when I was six. My mother had scolded me for something and I remember thinking, I’ll make her sorry. She’ll miss me when I’m gone.

  Simone watched me carefully. “You can’t talk me out of it, you know,” she said.

  “No. I just thought I’d like to hear your side.”

  “Why? Nobody else has ever wanted to.”

  “What about Dr. Reeve? She’s a good listener.”

  Simone shook her head. “I’ve been talking to Dr. Reeve since I was twelve years old. She’s a nice lady. She still thinks she can help me. But she can’t. It’s too late.”

  I said impatiently, “Of course it isn’t too late, Simone. You’re just a kid. You can still turn things around.”

  “Not hardly. I shot him in the back. I can’t even claim self-defense.”

  I found myself trying to make excuses for her. Only a few days ago, I had told David that I didn’t believe murder was ever justified. In the context of what Randy Outray had done, that had been an easy position to take. Here, now, I wasn’t so sure.

  Simone wasn’t looking for a trial; she had already passed her own judgment on her brother and on herself. I had been made an unwilling partner in the execution of her sentence, much as a real jury member might be, and I was learning that my instinct was to protect her life, rather than hurry it to its end.

  “I’m sure the court could be made to understand,” I said. “Your family has plenty of money. They can hire you a good lawyer.”

  She laughed harshly. “Yeah, right, the court. The court would have excused my brother Randy. Mel Deloitte would have fed them some bullshit story about how hard life had been to him, and he would have got off. That son of a bitch has never had to pay for anything in his life. I saw pictures of what he did to that woman and her little girl. Nothing can excuse that.” Her eyes gleamed with tears. “Nothing can excuse me, either.”

  I felt defeated. I did not like Simone Outray, but I found I could not abandon her. “Let me help you,” I said, wishing I meant it.

  I saw her jaw tighten and her chin come up in a childish gesture of defiance. She shook her head again, hard, to dispel the tears. “There isn’t any point. I hurt too much and I’m just so tired … don’t you see, Nina? It’ll be easier to be dead.” She almost made it sound reasonable. “I’m sorry you came here. I meant to have it all over with before anybody was around. Hell, maybe they wouldn’t even have noticed, just lowered Randy’s coffin down right on top of my body.”

  Tears were streaming down my face. I made no move to brush them away.

  Simone said, “Don’t worry,” in the gentle tone a mother might use to soothe a frightened child. “It’s no big deal. Kids kill themselves all the time.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “You can’t mean that.”

  For an answer, she raised the toy pistol to her head and pulled the trigger.

  I was surprised how little sound it made.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The double funeral was on Christmas Eve in the afternoon. Sunshine glittered off fresh snow, and the cold, clear air brought color to exposed cheeks, making the knot of black-clad guests look more like carolers than mourners.

  No one wept openly. The news of Simone’s suicide and the revelation that it was she who had killed her brother, were shocks not yet fully absorbed. People took their cue from Zoe Outray, who stood rigidly at attention beside her husband. As gray-faced as his wife, John Outray watched the lowering caskets of his son and his daughter, touching a handkerchief to his lips with an unsteady hand. Neither of them acknowledged my presence. I couldn’t blame them.

  I had gone to their home sometime after the police informed them that their daughter had shot herself.

  The housekeeper had let me in. Mrs. Palgrave was a tall, spare woman, with a face set in a permanent expression of disapproval. I waited as she took my coat and hung it away in a cupboard that seemed part of the molded paneling. Then I followed her down the hall.

  I had never been inside the Outray mansion before; the hall seemed immense, mainly because it was very high and full of shadows cast by a chandelier like a frozen waterfall. The floor was a chilly chessboard of black and white marble that flowed to a series of closed doors.

  Mrs. Palgrave showed me into a small room that I imagine was a sort of antechamber to the main living room. The furniture was French provincial, covered in rose silk. In one corner, a glass-fronted armoire displayed a collection of delicate ivory carvings that I recognized as netsuke. General Sanderson had a few of them and he took great pride in showing me the treasures he had acquired during his service in the Far East. Where his were lovingly tended, these had the look of museum pieces, valued for their monetary worth rather than their intrinsic beauty.

  The room was cool enough for me to wish I had kept my jacket with me. There were logs laid in the fireplace. I doubted they were ever lit. From what I had seen, it was an elegant house, perfectly kept but the thought struck me forcibly that it was not, and had probably never been, a house for children.

  The door behind me opened, and John and Zoe Outray came in.

  Whatever I had thought of them before, I felt only pity for them now.

  John shook my hand, murmuring “good of you to come.” Zoe sank bonelessly into a chair and waited for whatever might happen next.

  For the second time in just a few hours, I heard myself saying, “I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry for your loss. I wish there was something I could have done, something I could have said that might have prevented this from happening. But Simone was so upset … and so terribly determined.”

  I felt my throat starting to close and I stopped and swallowed, wishing violently for a glass of brandy.

  Zoe sat very still, her calm demeanor a travesty of the poise I had witnessed at Sonja’s party. Her pale eyes were fully open and she was crying soundlessly. John Outray stared at me with the concentration of a drunk trying to focus.

  “Did she say anything at all before she … ?” he managed.

  Their pain was palpable and I shrank from it. If I never told Simone’s parents everything their daughter had said, I couldn’t do it now. I swallowed again, and told them what I believed. “She loved you very much. And she hoped you would forgive her.”

  Zoe Outray gave an uncontrollable sob and folded in on herself in a desperate little gesture that broke something inside me. I went down on my knees in front of her chair. Her hands were covering her face. I took her wrists and gently pulled them down and held her hands in both my own.

  “Don’t, Mrs. Outray. Don’t cry any more. You’ll make yourself ill.” I turned to her husband and said, “You should get her to bed. Tell Mrs. Palgrave to make her some tea and fill a hot water bottle. Her hands are like ice.”

  I turned back to Zoe Outray. She stared at me helplessly out of pale, drowned eyes. Her delicately made-up cheeks sagged slack and gray and her mouth was loose and blurred with crying. There was no beauty left; she looked old.

  I heard the door open and John Outray murmur something to Mrs. Palgrave. Coming over to the chair, he touched his wife lightly on the shoulder and said, “Zoe? Can you get up? Let me help you, my dear.”

  She got to her feet slowly, stiffly, and her husband led her out into the hall. She went with him as obediently as if she were a sleepwalker.

  At the foot of the stairs, John Outray turned to me and groped for unfamiliar words. “Thank you,” he said.
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  The two of them disappeared upstairs. I let myself out.

  • • •

  David didn’t attend the joint funeral that was held a few days later. Had it been Randy’s alone, I wouldn’t have gone either. But the time I’d spent with her had bonded me to Simone in ways I did not yet fully understand, and I needed to say goodbye.

  Kerrin stood beside me through the graveside service. She had come to see me as soon as she heard what had happened. We talked long into the night, covering ground left untrodden for years, establishing a path for the future. And though I still mourned the loss of the old Kerrin and doubted we would ever meet for coffee on a regular basis, we seemed at least — at last — to have reached a peaceful plateau as siblings.

  I looked over at Mel Deloitte, who stood at John Outray’s shoulder as if to support him. Feeling my glance, he looked up and gave a brief nod. There was nothing to read in his face.

  As the minister spoke and the choir sang, I thought about all I had learned in the past few days. I thought of how Sonja’s cattiness, and Simone’s bitterness, and Rolph’s hyperbole had coalesced into portraits that might have been true likenesses of people, or might not. How tragedy could destroy a man like Ian Forrester, and loving care help raise him up again. I thought about the ways we, each of us, create our own truth and our own vision of reality.

  The minister’s voice droned to a halt. Zoe Outray stepped from the shelter of her husband’s arm and dropped twin sprays of baby’s breath onto her children’s caskets. Then she turned and walked to the waiting limousine. A chauffeur tucked her carefully inside and closed the door. The other mourners wandered away in groups of three and four, their minds already moving ahead to Christmas dinner and midnight mass and presents under the tree.