Snow Falling on Cedars

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But a drowned person doesn’t breathe,’ said Nels. ‘So how does this foam … you can see why I’m confused.’

  ‘Oh, sure,’ said Horace. ‘I think I can make this clear. It’s formed – this foam – in the early stages. The victim is submerged and begins to struggle. Finally he begins to swallow water, you see, and as he does the air in his lungs is forced out under pressure – and this gives rise to the foam I’ve testified about. The chemical reaction occurs at the time the drowning victim is ceasing to breathe. Or breathing his final breaths.’

  ‘I see,’ said Nels. ‘So this foam, then, tells you Carl Heine in fact drowned, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Well – ’

  ‘It tells you, for example, that he wasn’t murdered first – say on the deck of his boat – and then thrown overboard? Because if he was, there would be no foam, would there? Am I understanding the chemical reaction correctly? It can’t happen unless the victim is breathing at the time of submersion? Is that what you said about it, Horace?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Horace. ‘It tells you that. But – ’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Nels. ‘Just wait a moment, now.’ He made his way to where Mrs. Eleanor Dokes sat poised over her stenograph. He worked past her and nodded at the bailiff, Ed Soames, then picked out a document from the evidence table and made his way back to the witness stand.

  ‘All right, Horace,’ he said now. ‘I’m returning to you the exhibit you identified earlier, in direct examination, as your autopsy report, which you’ve testified accurately reflects your findings and conclusions. If you would kindly take it and read back to yourself paragraph four on page four, please, we’ll all wait.’

  While Horace did so Nels returned to the defendant’s table and sipped from a glass of water. His throat had begun to bother him; his voice had gone hoarse and reedy.

  ‘All right,’ said Horace. ‘Done.’

  ‘All right,’ said Nels. ‘Am I correct in saying, Horace, that paragraph four on page four of your autopsy report identifies drowning as the cause of Carl Heine’s death?’

  ‘Yes, it does.’

  ‘So your conclusion was that he drowned?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was that unequivocal? Was there any doubt?’

  ‘Yes, of course there’s doubt. There’s always doubt. You’re not – ’

  ‘Just a minute, Horace,’ said Nels. ‘Do you wish to say that your report is inaccurate? Is that what you’re trying to tell us?’

  ‘The report is accurate,’ said Horace Whaley. ‘I – ’

  ‘Can you read for the court the last sentence of paragraph four, page four, of the autopsy report you have in front of you?’ said Nels Gudmundsson. ‘The paragraph you read silently just a moment ago? Please go ahead and read.’

  ‘All right,’ answered Horace. ‘It says this, and I quote: “The presence of foam in the airway and around the lips and nose indicates beyond doubt that the victim was alive at the time of submersion.” Unquote.’

  ‘Beyond doubt that he was alive at the time of submersion? Is that what it says, Horace?’

  ‘Yes, it does.’

  ‘Beyond doubt,’ said Nels Gudmundsson, and turned toward the jurors. Thank you, Horace. That’s important. That’s good. But there is something else I’d like to ask about now. Something in that autopsy report.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Horace, removing his glasses and biting one stem. ‘Go ahead and ask.’

  ‘Well, page two, then,’ said Nels. ‘At the top? The second paragraph, I believe?’ He went to the defendant’s table and leafed through his own copy. ‘Paragraph two,’ he said. ‘Yes, that’s it. If you could read that back for the court, please? Just the first line will do, Horace.’

  ‘Quote,’ answered Horace Whaley stiffly. ‘“A secondary and minor laceration of the right hand is noted, of recent origin, and extends laterally from the fold between the thumb and forefinger to the outside of the wrist.”’

  ‘A cut,’ said Nels. ‘Is that right? Carl Heine cut his hand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Any idea how?’

  ‘None, really. I could speculate, though.’

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ Nels said. ‘But this cut, Horace. You say in your report that it’s of “recent origin”. Any idea how recent?’

  ‘Very. Very recent, I’d say.’

  ‘Very,’ said Nels. ‘How much is “very”?’

  ‘Very recent,’ repeated Horace. ‘I would say he cut his hand on the night he died, and in the hour or two just preceding his death. Very recent, okay?’

  ‘Hour or two?’ said Nels. Two hours is possible?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about three? Or four, Horace? What about twenty-four?

  ‘Twenty-four is out of the question. The wound was fresh, Nels. Four hours – maybe, at the outside. No more than four, absolutely.’

  ‘All right,’ said Nels. ‘He cut his hand, then. No more than , four hours before he drowned.’

  ‘That’s correct,’ said Horace Whaley.

  Nels Gudmundsson began to pull, once again, at the wattles of skin at his throat. ‘Just one more thing, Horace,’ he said. ‘I have to ask about something else that confused me during your testimony. This wound to the deceased’s head you mentioned.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Horace Whaley. ‘The wound. All right.’

  ‘Can you tell us again what it looked like?’

  ‘Yes,’ repeated Horace. ‘It was a laceration about two and a half inches long just slightly above the left ear. The bone under it had fractured over an area of about four inches. There was also a small bit of brain material showing through the laceration. It was evident from the impression left behind in the skull that something narrow, something flat, had caused this injury. That’s about everything, Nels.’

  ‘Something narrow and flat had caused it,’ Nels repeated. ‘Is that what you saw, Horace? Or is that an inference?’

  ‘It’s my job to infer,’ insisted Horace Whaley. ‘Look, if a night watchman is struck over the head with a crowbar during the course of a robbery, the wounds you’re going to see in his head will look like they were made with a crowbar. If they were made by a ball-peen hammer you can see that, too – a ball-peen leaves behind a crescent-shaped injury, a crowbar leaves, well, linear wounds with V-shaped ends. You get hit with a pistol butt, that’s one thing; somebody hits you with a bottle, that’s another. You fall off a motorcycle at forty miles an hour and hit your head on gravel, the gravel will leave behind patterned abrasions that don’t look like anything else. So yes, I infer from the deceased’s wound that something narrow and flat caused his injury. To infer – it’s what coroners do.’

  The motorcyclist is an interesting example,’ Nels Gudmundsson pointed out. ‘Are you saying it isn’t necessary to be struck by anything to produce one of these telltale wounds? That if the victim is propelled against an object – let’s say it’s gravel – his own forward motion might produce the observed injury?’

  ‘It might,’ said Horace Whaley. ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘So in the present case,’ said Nels Gudmundsson, ‘might the injury in question, the injury to Carl Heine’s skull you’ve spoken of, might it have been the result of either a blow to the head or the propulsion of the victim against some object? Are both possible, Horace?’

  ‘There’s no way to tell them apart,’ argued Horace. ‘Only that whatever made contact with his head – whether it was moving toward him or he toward it – was flat, narrow, and hard enough to fracture his skull.’

  ‘Something flat, narrow, and hard enough to fracture his skull. Like the gunnel of a boat, Horace? Is that possible?’

  ‘Possible, yes. If he was moving fast enough toward it. But I don’t see how he might have been.’

  ‘What about a net roller? Or one of these fairleads at the stern of a gill-netter? Are they also flat and narrow?’

  ‘Yes. That is, flat enough. They – ’

 
‘Might he have hit his head on these? Is that at least a possibility?’

  ‘Sure it’s a possibility,’ agreed Horace. ‘Any – ’

  ‘Let me ask you something else,’ said Nels. ‘Is there any way a coroner can determine if a wound like this one occurred before or after death? I mean – to return to your earlier example – couldn’t I poison the night watchman, watch him die, then dub his lifeless corpse over the head with a crowbar and leave behind precisely the same sort of injury as if I had killed him by the latter method?’

  ‘Are you asking about Carl Heine’s wound?’

  ‘I am. I want to know if you know something. Did he sustain the injury and then die? Or is it possible the wound to the head occurred postmortem? That he sustained it – or should we say his corpse sustained it – after Carl Heine drowned? Perhaps, say, when he was being brought up in his net by Sheriff Moran and Deputy Martinson?’

  Horace Whaley thought about it. He took off his glasses; he massaged his forehead. Then he fixed the stems of his glasses once again behind his earlobes and folded his arms across his chest.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I can’t answer that, Nels.’

  ‘You don’t know whether the wound to the head preceded death or not? Is that what you’re saying, Horace?’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying, yes.’

  ‘But the cause of death – unequivocally – was drowning. Is that right? Am I correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It was not a wound to the head, then, that killed Carl Heine?’

  ‘No. But – ’

  ‘No more questions,’ said Nels Gudmundsson. ‘Thank you, Horace. That’s all.’

  Art Moran, from his place in the gallery, felt a peculiar satisfaction watching Horace Whaley suffer. He remembered the insult: Sherlock Holmes. He remembered leaving Horace’s office, hesitating before going up to Mill Run Road to bring the news to the dead man’s wife.

  He’d leaned against the fender of Abel Martinson’s truck inspecting the hand he’d scraped that morning against a stanchion on Carl Heine’s gill-netting boat. Then he’d dug in his pocket for a stick of Juicy Fruit – first his shirt pockets, next, vaguely irritated, his pants. Two remained; he’d gone through eight already. He popped one in his mouth, saved the other, then slid behind the wheel of Abel’s pickup. His own car was parked in town near the docks; he’d left it there earlier that same morning when he’d gone to the harbor for the launch. It made him feel like a fool driving Abel’s truck because the boy, frankly, had put too much time into it. It was a high-stacked Dodge painted burgundy in Anacortes, elaborately pin-striped and with decorative exhaust extensions pillared just behind the gleaming cab – a schoolboy’s play truck, in short. Just the sort of pickup you saw in mainland towns like Everett or Bellingham, the kind kids drove around after football games or on Saturday nights, late. Art had to figure that in his high school days Abel Martinson had been moderately restless, that in the interim between then and now he had changed, and that this truck was the last vestige of his former self: thus he was loath to part with it. But he would, Art predicted, and soon. That was how things went.

  Driving up to see Susan Marie Heine, Art muddled out his words in silence, revising as he went and planning his demeanor, which ought, he decided, to have a vaguely military architecture with certain nautical decorative touches – to report a man’s death at sea to his widow was a task done gravely but with tragic stoicism for centuries on end, he figured. Excuse me, Mrs. Heine. I am sorry to report that your husband, Carl Gunther Heine, was killed last night in an accident at sea. May I express the condolences of the entire community and …

  But this would not do. She was not unknown to him; he couldn’t treat her like a stranger. After all, he saw her at church every Sunday after services pouring tea and coffee in the reception room. She always dressed impeccably for her duties as hostess, in a pillbox hat, tweed suit, and beige gloves: taking coffee from her sure hand he’d found pleasurable. She wore her blond hair pinned up under her hat and a double strand of costume pearls around her neck, a neck that reminded him of alabaster. In short she was, at twenty-eight, attractive in a way that disturbed him. Pouring coffee she called him ‘Sheriff Moran’ and afterward pointed out the cake and mints down the table with a gloved index finger, as if he had not noted them himself. Then she would smile at him prettily and set the coffee service down on its tray while he helped himself to the sugar.

  The prospect of telling her about Carl’s death was more than just unsettling to Art, and as he drove he struggled to find the proper words, the formula of phrases that would free him without too much fumbling from the message he carried to this woman. But it seemed to him there were none.

  Just before the Heine place on Mill Run Road there was a turnout where in August the sheriff had picked blackberries. Here he pulled in impulsively, because he was not ready to do what was required, and with the engine of Abel’s Dodge idling in neutral he popped the last stick of Juicy Fruit between his teeth and looked down the road toward the Heines’.

  It was precisely the sort of home Carl would build, he thought – blunt, tidy, gruffly respectable, and offering no affront to the world, though at the same time inviting nobody. It sat back fifty yards from the road on three acres of alfalfa, strawberries, raspberries, and orderly vegetable gardens. Carl had cleared the land himself with a characteristic rapidity and thoroughness – he’d sold the timber to the Thorsen brothers, burned his slash piles, and poured his footing all in the space of a single winter. By April the berries were in and a post-and-beam shed-barn, and by summer Carl could be seen framing up walls and mortaring clinker brick. He had meant – or so word at church had it – to build an elaborate bungalow of the sort his father had built years before on the family farm at Island Center. He’d wanted inglenooks, somebody had said, and an overscaled fireplace and alcoves, built-in window seats and wainscoting, a battered porch base and low stone walls along his entrance walk. But in time, as he worked, he’d found himself too straightforward for all of that – he was a builder, an exacting one, but not an artist, as his wife had put it – the wainscoting, for example, was left out entirely, and he had not built the sort of river rock chimney that stood up so prominently at his father’s old place (now owned by Bjorn Andreason), preferring clinker brick. What he ended up with was a blunt, sturdy house sheathed carefully with cedar shingles, testimony to its builder’s exacting nature.

  Art Moran, his foot on the brake, chewing his gum and fretting in silence, took in the gardens first, then the front porch with its tapered posts, and finally the overscaled trusses in the gable roof; he took in the pair of shed-roofed dormers that had, despite the original intent of asymmetry, been built formally and in tandem. And he shook his head and recollected having been inside this house, with its exposed roof rafters in the upstairs rooms and Susan Marie’s oversized furniture downstairs – he’d attended, last October, an autumn church social there – but he knew he would not go inside this time. He knew that suddenly. He’d stand on the porch to deliver his news with his cap resting against one thigh, and then leave without ever entering. He understood that this was not right, but on the other hand what else could he do? It was too difficult; it wasn’t in him. He would call Eleanor Dokes at his office when he was done, and she would alert Susan Marie’s older sister, and the sister would come here before long. But he himself? There wasn’t any way he could think of. It wasn’t in him to sit with her through this. He would ask this widow to understand that there were matters he must attend to … urgent matters of a professional nature … he would deliver his message, offer condolences, and then in the spirit of one who knows his place simply leave Susan Marie Heine alone.

  He coasted down and turned into Susan Marie’s drive with Abel’s truck still in neutral. From here, looking east across the rows of trained raspberry canes, the sea was visible beyond the tops of the cedars falling away along the hill. It was a fine September day of the sort they saw rarely, cloudles
s and June warm if you stood where there was no shade, the sunlight glinting among the whitecaps in the far distance, so that Art Moran understood what he hadn’t before that Carl had built here not just for the sun it afforded but for the long view to the north and west. While Carl had cultivated his raspberries and strawberries he’d kept one eye always on the salt water.

  Art pulled in behind the Heines’ Bel-Air and shut the ignition down. And as he did so Carl’s sons came around the corner of the house running – a boy of three or four, Art guessed, followed by another of about six, who limped. They stood beside a rhododendron bush staring, in shorts, shirtless and barefoot.

  Art took a wrapper out of his shirt pocket and spit his Juicy Fruit into it. He did not want to say what he had to say with Juicy Fruit in his mouth.

  ‘Hey there, men,’ he called cheerfully through the window frame. ‘Your mother home a-tall?’

  The two boys didn’t answer. They stared at him instead. A German shepherd came stalking around the corner of the house, and the older boy caught him by the collar and held him. ‘Stay,’ he said, but nothing else.

  Art Moran shoved his door partway open, then took his hat from off the seat and put it on the back of his head. ‘Policeman,’ said the younger boy, and stepped in beside his brother. ‘It’s not a policeman,’ answered the older boy. ‘It’s the sheriff or somebody like that.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Art. ‘I’m Sheriff Moran, boys. Is your mother home a-tall?’

  The older boy gave his brother a shove. ‘Go get Mom,’ he said.

  They looked like their father. They were going to be big like their father, he could see that. Sun-browned, thick-limbed German children.

  ‘You go ahead and play,’ he said to them. ‘I’ll just go knock. You play.’ He smiled down at the younger one.

  But they didn’t go. They watched from beside the rhododendron bush while he climbed to the porch with his hat in his hand and rapped his knuckles against the front door, which was thrown open to reveal Carl’s living room. Art looked in, waiting. The walls had been paneled with varnished pine board in which the knots shone luminously; Susan Marie’s curtains were of a clean, smooth yellow, tied off crisply behind careful bows, ruffled, valenced, and undertiered. The concentric circles of a braided wool rug concealed most of the floorboards. In one far corner an upright piano loomed; in another sat a rolltop desk. There were twin oak rockers with embroidered cushions, twin walnut end tables astride a worn bench sofa, and a plush easy chair beside a gilt brass floor lamp. The chair had been pulled up to the oversized fireplace Carl had built, inside of which stood tall, fluted andirons. The sheriff was impressed by the order of this room, its bronze, quiet, and syrupy light, and by the photographs on the wall of the various Heines and assorted Varigs who had preceded Carl and Susan Marie in the world: stout, impressive, blunt-faced Germans who never smiled for photographers.