Chapter 7
I
A damselfly darted from one leaf to another. Drops of water sparkled like diamonds on a spider’s web. Leaves fluttered in the breeze. The sun poured through the branches overhead like golden rain. An iridescent green beetle scampered through the grass. The air was charged with the buzzing of hidden grasshoppers. The entire swamp was a symphony of midsummer splendor.
Foster woke up in bed next to Annabelle. He raised his head off the pillow to look at her. She was sleeping peacefully with a slight smile on her lips.
Foster admired her for a moment and then reached over to gently brush her hair away from her eyes. She stirred slightly and rolled over towards him, putting her head against his shoulder. She spoke without opening her eyes.
“Do you love me?”
“I adore you.”
He kissed her gently on the forehead.
“We don’t need my family. We don’t need anything but each other.”
“Promise me you’ll never leave me.”
“I promise.”
“No matter what your family says about me?”
“Forget about my family. You don’t ever have to see them again. So far as I’m concerned we can just stay right here for the rest of our lives.”
They snuggled for a moment. Then she lifted the sheet up to look at her body.
“Do you like my body?”
“You have the most beautiful body in all creation.”
They embrace.
II
Kathleen came out of her room in her bathrobe and encountered Foster. He was bounding up the stairs, headed for his room and carrying a tray. On the tray was a meal for two complete with silverware, crystal, linen napkins, and a lily in a bud vase.
He practically bowled Kathleen over with his exuberance.
“H’you today, Kathleen?”
“I’m okay. What hit you?”
Foster paused and winked to Kathleen before opening the door to his room.
“Love.”
He disappeared into his room, and Kathleen went down stairs.
Ruthie came out of her room, glanced around nonchalantly, and then quickly slipped a note under Foster’s door.
III
Bubba was getting a glass of ice water from the refrigerator, while Kathleen fixed a couple of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
“Do you worry about him spending so much of his time locked in his room?”
“He’s probably better off there than he would be anywhere else in the world.”
“He certainly seems happy enough whenever I see him.”
Foster entered, wearing a bathrobe and looking as though he had just woken up.
“Speak of the devil. How are you, Foster?”
“Marvelous. Just marvelous.”
Kathleen instinctively wanted to nurture him.
“Do you need anything?”
“No, I Just want to get a snack before I meet the people Ruthie’s got.”
Needless to say Bubba was suspicious.
“Ruthie?”
“Yes. She has some people who are interested in my work.”
“But I thought...”
Ruthie came bustling into the kitchen.
“Oh, there you are, Foster. They’re all here waiting to meet you.”
Ruthie whisked Foster out of the kitchen before Bubba can do anything.
Bubba turned to Kathleen.
“How the hell did she manage that?”
IV
Ruthie introduced Foster to three rather peculiar looking gentlemen.
“Foster, this is Mr. Van Merkle, Mr. Pedersen and Mr. Hofstadter. If you gentlemen will excuse me, I have some things to do.”
She beat a hasty retreat, leaving a somewhat puzzled Foster standing in front of the three men who had not risen from their seats, but sat gazing intensely at Foster. Van Merkle gestured to a chair in the middle of the floor and spoke with a thick European accent.
“Please, sit down.”
Foster sat down apprehensively.
“Tell us about your work, Foster.”
Foster sensed something was not quite right, but this morning he was willing to believe anything.
“There’s nothing much to tell really. I’m an oracle.”
“A what?”
“An oracle, a mouthpiece for the Divine.”
“I see. And how did you become an oracle?
“It just happened to me. I was trying to be a poet, but I never had anything to say. Then one day I became inspired.”
“How did you know you were inspired?”
“I discovered I had written something I didn’t understand. I knew I couldn’t have written it by myself, so I realized that it must be the Divine Spirit speaking through me.
All three men made notes and nodded significantly.
“Could we see some of your writing?”
“I don’t think you’d understand it.”
There was a pause while Foster debated whether to elaborate.
Van Merkle pushed things along a little.
“Is there anyone who does understand what you write, Foster?”
“Yes.”
“Who is that? “
“My fiancée.”
The men looked at each other and made more notes.
“Would you be so kind as to introduce us to your fiancée.”
“She doesn’t like strangers.”
“Has she met the rest of your family?”
“I introduced her to everyone, but they were so rude she decided not to associate with them anymore. Now she sees no one.”
They made more notes and conferred with each other in whispers. Pedersen decides to take a different tack.
“Foster, can you explain to me what is meant by the expression, ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss?’”
Foster looked at Pedersen as though he must be a bit crazy. Hofstadter leapt in with another question before Foster could get too suspicious about Pedersen.
“What is your fiancée’s name?”
“Annabelle Jordan.”
“And how did you meet?”
“We met in the garden.”
“In the garden?”
“She used to walk in the garden at night… although I’ve often suspected that she was walking there because she knew I was working and would see her.”
“What makes you say that?”
Foster just smiled.
“Does Annabelle remind you of your mother at all?”
“No.”
“What sort of woman was your mother?
“She was a Gallagher.”
“A what?”
“A Gallagher from Moulton County. Her maternal grandfather was Colonel Harrison Bodley of the Sixth Cavalry.”
“I see.”
Hofstadter made copious notes as Foster and the other two men stared blankly at each other.
V
Foster was seated at his writing desk overlooking the garden. Annabelle was sitting on the bed and appeared to be sulking.
“If you were so eager to talk about your work, why didn’t you show them some of it?”
Foster replied half-heartedly without turning around.
“I would have if they had really been interested.”
“So they weren’t really interested in your work after all. Why did they want to talk to you?”
He turned around to face her, exasperated that his concentration had been spoiled and afraid of the answer to her question.
“Annabelle, how am I supposed to be able to write if you keep on asking me questions?”
“You’re not supposed to.”
“Sometimes I think that you don’t want me to write at all, that you don’t care whether I have a calling or not.”
“I’m your calling. You don’t need to write love poems if you have me.”
“They’re not just love poems. They’re metaphors for something else.”
“How do you know?”
That was a low bl
ow, and it hurt.
“I don’t.”
Annabelle saw how much she had hurt him and got up to go over to him.
“Let’s go for a walk. I need to get out of this room.”
VI
Annabelle leaned her head on Foster’s shoulder as they walked in the garden.
“It’s just that I miss you – even when you’re writing or just going downstairs to get the food. And this afternoon it seemed like forever when you were down there talking to those men.”
“I understand.”
“I want to be in your arms all the time.”
He stopped and turned to embrace her. Tears welled up in her eyes as they kissed.
“I love you, Annabelle. I’d throw all my writing out the window if you really wanted me to.”
She hugged him with her head against his chest so that he could not see the expression on her face.
“Don’t you think a baby would be more fun than a poem?”
Foster laughed affectionately, and they resumed walking.
A figure stepped out of the shadows in front of them. There was a blinding flash, and Ruthie ducked back into the bushes with her camera.
VII
Bubba gave a prescription to the pharmacist.
He glanced at it and then chatted with Bubba as he filled it.
“I hope this isn’t anything serious, Judge Abernathy.”
“No. Doctor Gresham just wants me to have them in case life gets too exciting out at Bellevue. He gave my heart some kind of lie detector test and discovered I was getting old.”
Bubba turned and noticed Ruthie at the photo counter on the other side of the store. She had picked up some snapshots and a roll of home movies and was hurriedly looking through the snapshots. She did not see Bubba approach.
“New pictures of the kids?”
Ruthie was a little startled, but she kept on looking through the snapshots.
“As a matter of fact, I have a photo of Annabelle.”
She found the snapshot she was looking for and held it up triumphantly for Bubba.
It was a photo of Foster walking in the garden at night. He was alone and held one arm out as though offering it to a lady. There was no lady in the photo, but there were some smudges or chemical stains on the area of the picture next to Foster. The entire photo was crooked and a little blurred.
Bubba scrutinized it.
“Oh, no, that’s Foster. Annabelle is much prettier than that.”
Ruthie jerked the photo back and glared at Bubba.
“Aren’t you witty.”
Bubba turned to go back to the prescription counter.
“The only thing that photo proves is how good a photographer you are.”
VIII
The drapes in the lawyer’s office were closed so that home movies could be projected onto one wall. Ruthie was running the projector for Thaxton Weatherby and Burton Comstock.
On the screen was little Susan Coleman dressed in a ballet costume, dancing on the lawn. The record she was dancing to played on the sound track. This was followed by several shots of Graham obstinately refusing to perform whatever feats were being demanded of him. Bits and pieces of William’s off-camera attempts to persuade him to start could be heard. Ruthie is obviously embarrassed.
“It’s on the end of the reel. I asked my husband to splice it onto a separate reel, but he ... Here we go.”
The image went dark as the home movies cut to an underexposed sequence, apparently shot in the garden at Bellevue at sunrise.
Thaxton strained to interpret the image.
“Is that him on the left?”
There was a brief shot of Foster in the garden, some distance from the camera and partially obscured by foliage as the camera panned to follow him. No one else was visible in the shot, but it was clearly the moment when Foster was walking with Annabelle in the garden.
“Yes. Watch now and you will see him turn. He’s talking to her and putting his arm around her.”
Thaxton glanced over at Burton who seemed to be a bit skeptical.
Foster turned around and appeared to be hugging an invisible lady. The sound track was mostly crickets, but Foster could be heard laughing as he started walking again right before the film ran out in the middle of the shot.
They sat silently in the darkness for a moment, and then Thaxton reached for a switch on a lamp beside him. Burton was discreetly shaking his head.
“By itself it wouldn’t carry much weight. It’s conceivable, I suppose, that the film could be used along with some Xeroxes of his writing to corroborate the doctors’ testimony.”
“How soon can you get the papers?”
Burton was feeling a little uncomfortable. “
You must understand, Mrs. Coleman, this is not a simple matter.”
“C.D.C. has agreed to pay any additional legal fees necessary to insure positive results by the end of the month.”
Thaxton wanted to reassure her.
“We’re moving as fast as we can, Mrs. Coleman. Let me put together something with the material we have, and I’ll call you in a few days.”