Wally leaned toward me, his eyes intent, troubled. “Listen, I’m trying to give you some advice, Steve,” he said sharply. “I gave Marty the same advice, and he didn’t take it either.” He stopped, looked at me very severely for a moment, then added, “I mean, you don’t want to end up like …” He stopped again. “I mean, when your father …”
I stared at Wally, stunned not so much that he would make a connection between me and my father, as that he would actually say it to my face.
“I don’t even remember who told me about it,” Wally said, his voice softer now, conciliatory, “and, believe me, I don’t mean …”
“That I could murder my family?” I asked harshly.
“No, no, no, no. I would never have said that, Steve,” Wally answered. “It’s just that when you see a man hurting, well, you see a man who might lose control.” He shrugged. “I just keep remembering Marty, you know? He wasn’t a bad guy. He was just a guy that got it all screwed up.”
“I’m not Marty Harmon,” I said firmly. “And I’m not my father either.”
Wally looked at me quietly, resigned that there would be no point in continuing the conversation. “Okay, Steve,” he said at last, “we’ll just drop it, okay?”
“Yeah, let’s do.”
With that, Wally edged the car back onto the road and drove on silently. We never spoke seriously again, nor did he ever mention my father, my family, or even the unknown woman he has no doubt come to blame for their destruction.
Now, when I remember that afternoon, I think of it as the last chance I had to save us all. I knew that Rebecca was leaving, that her study was very nearly done, that very, very soon my life would go “back to normal,” with nights at home with Peter and Marie, days at work, summer visits to that very lake along whose bank Rebecca’s cottage still rested in a grove of trees.
So what would have been missing in a life lived like that? Certainly not love, as Marie was soon to tell me. Certainly not comfort. There would have been no ignominy in my return to normal.
What would have been missing? The mythical dream house without walls or firm foundation. The thrill of awakening in an unknown country, the exhilaration of an endless setting forth. Surprise. The allure of the unexplored. And finally, love, at its sharpest instant, the moment when it fuses with desire.
Much would have been missing.
But not everything.
THIRTEEN
REBECCA RETURNED to Old Salsbury the following day just as she’d said she would. It was a Saturday, but I wasn’t at home when she called. Neither was Marie. It was Peter who answered, then later gave me the message.
“A woman called,” he said. “She asked for you. She left her name and number.”
He’d written it down on a small square of white paper, which he handed to me dutifully.
I glanced at the paper, pretending that I didn’t recognize the name he’d written in large block letters beside the number: REBECCA.
“Did she say what she wanted?” I asked casually.
Peter shook his head. “She just wanted you to call her back, I guess.” He shrugged and darted away.
A few seconds later, as I sat at my desk, dialing Rebecca’s number, I saw his lean body as it darted across the backyard and disappeared around a tall, nearly leafless tree.
She answered immediately.
“It’s me,” I said.
“Yes, hi,” Rebecca said. “I just wanted to let you know that I’d gotten back to town.”
“Was it a worthwhile trip?”
“Yes.” Her voice seemed to tighten somewhat. “There were some new developments.”
“I’m surprised to hear that. I thought you already knew everything.”
“Sometimes it’s just a question of one thing leading to another.”
“Well, what did you …”
“Not now,” Rebecca interrupted quickly. “We’d planned to meet today. Can you make it in the evening? Say, around seven?”
“All right.”
“Okay, see you then,” Rebecca said as she hung up.
I held the receiver for a moment, almost as if it were her hand. I felt it cool, then let it go, and walked out into the backyard and stood beside the covered pool.
Peter was poised on the other side. He smiled a moment, then lifted his arms until his fingers touched. He held himself suspended in that position for a moment, pretending he was about to dive onto the broad black tarpaulin that stretched across the now empty pool.
“Good form,” I said. “You look like a real pro.”
He seemed pleased by my attention. “They’re teaching us at school,” he said. Then he ran over to me, his blond head bobbing left and right.
“What if there were water in the pool,” he said, “and one time I started to drown?”
“I’d come in after you.”
“What if there were sharks in the water?”
“I’d come in after you,” I repeated.
He smiled broadly, then dashed away again, this time around the far corner of the house.
Marie returned an hour later. She looked tired as she got out of the car and headed toward the house. From my place in the den, I could see her move wearily up the stairs that led to the kitchen and disappear inside the house. I expected her to join me, but she never did, and so, after a time, I went to look for her. She was not in her office, so I went upstairs.
I found her in our bedroom, lying faceup on her side of the bed, her arms folded neatly over her chest. She’d kicked off her shoes, but otherwise she remained in the same formal business clothes she’d worn to New Haven earlier in the day. A bright shaft of light fell over her from the parted curtains, and I could see small bits of dust floating weightlessly in the flooding light.
“How’d it go?” I asked.
She did not open her eyes. “Not great. They didn’t like some of the designs.”
“They never like them in the beginning,” I told her. “They have to be critical at the first presentation; otherwise they feel like they’re being led by the nose.”
Marie took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “I’m tired,” she said.
“It was a long day,” I said, “the drive alone, you know?”
She opened her eyes and gazed at me softly. “Let’s go out to dinner tonight, Steve,” she said, almost plaintively, as if asking a favor, “just you and me.” She smiled. “We could use a night out, don’t you think?”
It was a simple request, not much asked nor expected, and yet I couldn’t grant it. Rebecca would be waiting for me at her cottage. It was to her that I had to go.
I shook my head. “I can’t, Marie,” I said. “I have to go into the office.”
Her eyes narrowed. “On a Saturday night?”
“It’s the final meeting on that library,” I said. “I have to finish the designs.”
She looked at me doubtfully. “On a Saturday night?” she said again.
“I’m supposed to be at the office by seven,” I told her. “Wally’s coming in, along with a few guys from the drafting department. We’re going to work through the night if we have to.”
Her eyes lingered on me a moment, then she turned away and closed them again. “You’d better start getting ready then,” she said. “It’s almost six.”
I walked over to the bed and sat down beside her. “I have a little time,” I said.
She didn’t answer, but only continued to lie stiffly beside me.
I touched her cheek with the side of my hand.
She drew her face away instantly. “No, no,” she said, a little brusquely, “I want to rest.”
I stood up and walked into the adjoining bathroom. Once there, I showered and dressed myself. Marie was still lying on the bed when I came back into the bedroom. She didn’t stir as I left her, didn’t so much as open her eyes.
Peter was in the family room when I got downstairs.
“Why are you all dressed up?” he asked, as I stepped in to say good-bye.
/> “I have to go into the office,” I said.
“When will you be back?”
“Not until late. There’s a lot to do.”
He smiled jokingly. “So I guess I shouldn’t wait up for you, huh?”
I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so.” I waved good-bye, then headed outside.
I’d already backed the car nearly halfway toward the street when I glanced back toward the house. I could see the gray eye of the television as it glowed dimly toward me from the shaded window of the family room. It gave me the eerie sense of being watched, and so I let my eyes retreat from it, drifting upward, along a wall of brick and mortar, until our bedroom came into view and I saw Marie standing at the window, watching me from afar. For a single, delicate moment, we stared mutely at each other, two faces peering outward, it seemed to me, from two different worlds. Then, her eyes still gazing at me with the same penetrating force, she lifted her arms very gracefully, like the wingspread of a great bird, grasped the separate edges of the bedroom curtains, and slowly drew them together. They were still weaving slightly as I let the car drift on down the driveway and out into the street.
“Hi, Steve,” Rebecca said as she opened the door. She stepped aside to let me pass.
I took a chair not far from the window. Outside, I could see the still gray surface of the lake. It looked like a sheet of slate.
Rebecca took the chair opposite me, so that we faced each other directly, as if we were about to begin some kind of intensely demanding game.
“We’re close to the end, I think.”
Something in my face must have puzzled her, because for a moment she stopped and regarded me closely. “We’ve gone through each member of your family,” she explained, “and their relationships.”
I nodded but said nothing.
“There are things I’ll never know, of course,” she added. “Your father still seems very mysterious to me.”
“My father,” I repeated softly. Curiously, I suddenly thought of him almost as a rival for her attention, a dark, majestic figure whose profound experience of life and death utterly dwarfed the humdrum banality of my own.
I felt the need to bring him down. “Are you sure he’s worth knowing any more than you already do?”
“Yes, I am.”
“But you’re sure he fits your criteria, aren’t you?” I asked. “You’re sure that Nellie Grimes, for example, had nothing to do with the murders.”
She nodded. “Yes, I’m sure of that,” she answered.
“You found her, didn’t you?” I said. “You found Nellie.”
She shook her head. “Not exactly. Nellie Grimes died eight years ago. But I found her daughter, May. She lives not far from Somerset.”
“How did you find her?”
“Through Swenson.”
“I thought he hadn’t known anything about Nellie.”
“He’s never mentioned her to me, that’s true,” Rebecca told me, “but only because he’d never thought of her as actually connected to the case.” She paused a moment, then went on. “After the murders, Swenson talked to a lot of people who’d known your father. He was trying to get some idea of where he might have gone after the murders. One of the people he talked to was Grimes.” She reached into her briefcase and handed me a picture of a woman standing on a small wooden porch. “She was living in Hoboken,” she went on. “Swenson remembered seeing May playing in the backyard despite the drizzle. He said her dress was muddy, and that her hair was wet and stringy, but that Nellie didn’t seem to care.”
It was hard to imagine May in such a state, or her mother’s indifference to it. In all my other memories of them, they’d been dressed as well as they could afford to be, always neat and clean, as if waiting to be put upon display.
“Nellie Grimes was not doing very well at that point,” Rebecca added.
“What did she say about my father?”
“She said that he’d always been very kind to her,” Rebecca answered, “and that he’d given her some money when she’d left Somerset.”
In my mind I saw the envelope pass from my father’s hand to Nellie’s.
“She also told Swenson that she didn’t believe your father had killed his family,” Rebecca added.
“Then who did?”
Rebecca shrugged. “She only said that she was sure it was someone else,” she said. Then Swenson asked her directly if your father might have been involved with another woman, and she said absolutely not. She told him that she knew for a fact that your father was not that kind of man.”
I remembered the way Nellie’s face had lifted toward my father that day in the train station, and I suspected that it had lifted toward him in just that same tempting way many times before. In isolated places, no doubt, where no one could have seen him answer to the intensity of such a call, but he’d drawn back on those occasions, too, resolutely, with his own unfathomable pride.
Rebecca looked at me as if she expected me to contradict her, then added. “May also had a very high opinion of your father.”
“But she was just a child,” I said. “What could she have known about him?”
“Actually, she remembered him quite well,” Rebecca said. “Very clearly, even down to the gray work clothes he always wore.”
For a moment it struck me as intimate knowledge, and I felt a strange resentment toward May Grimes, as if she’d usurped my place as the sole surviving witness.
“How would she have known anything about my father?” I asked.
“May evidently spent a lot of time in the hardware store,” Rebecca continued. There was no place for her to go after school, so she played in the back room. Sometimes your father would come back there and try to entertain her a little.” She smiled. “May remembered that he bought her a Chinese checkers set and that they used to sit on the floor and play together.”
I could not bring the image to mind very easily, my father sitting on the bare cement floor with a little girl, playing Chinese checkers, trying to help her pass the long boring hours of a winter afternoon.
“She remembered something else,” Rebecca said, the tone of her voice changing. They were playing together one afternoon. May thinks it was just a few weeks before the day your father took her and her mother to the train station.” She paused a moment, as if hesitant to go on. They were alone in the back room,” she continued finally. “May had been staring at the board, making her next move. When she finished it, she looked up and noticed your father staring at her. She said he looked different, very sad. She asked him if there was anything wrong. He didn’t answer exactly. He only said, This is all I want.’“
I felt my skin tighten, but said nothing.
Rebecca watched me cautiously, gauging my mood. “I remembered you telling me that he’d said the same thing to you.”
“In exactly the same words.” I shook my head helplessly, my father’s mystery still as dense as it had ever been. “What was going on in him?” I asked, though very softly, a question directed toward myself as much as toward Rebecca.
Rebecca, however, actually offered an answer. “At that point, when he said that to you in the basement,” she said, “he was probably very depressed.”
I could see that she was leading into something.
“Depressed about what?”
“Well, he’d finalized his plan by then, of course,” she said. “He’d canceled the two plane tickets, for example.” She looked at me significantly. “He did that on October 10.”
I knew then that the “new developments” she’d mentioned on the phone earlier had to do with those two mysterious plane tickets. She’d tracked down their enigmatic meaning and was about to lay her findings before me like a parting gift.
“Why did he cancel those tickets?” I asked. “You know, don’t you?”
Rebecca leaned forward, settling her eyes on me with a deep, probing gaze. “You remember the night before you came home from the Cape? You saw your father and mother talking together, and
he had his arm around her.”
“That’s right.”
“And the next night, the night the family got back to Somerset, you saw your father and Laura beside the fence in the backyard.” I nodded.
“You said that they looked as if they were engaged in a very serious conversation,” Rebecca went on. “Then later, you saw them come up the stairs, and it was at that point that you heard a few words pass between them.”
“That’s right.”
Rebecca drew her black notebook from the briefcase. “I want to be sure I have this exactly right.” She flipped through the notebook until she found the page she wanted. This is what you heard,” she said. Then she quoted it: “Your father: ‘Tomorrow.’ Laura: ‘So soon?’ Your father: ‘Yes.’“ She looked up. The ‘tomorrow’ that your father mentioned would have been September 3.”
“Yes.”
“Let me ask you again: do you remember anything about that morning?” Rebecca asked.
I tried to recall it, but it remained a blur of activity. My mother had prepared the usual breakfast of cereal and toast, and after eating, Laura, Jamie, and I had all gone back upstairs to finish getting ready for school. The only thing that seemed different was the fact that my father had still been at home when we’d all left the house about a half hour later.
“My father stayed home that morning,” I said to Rebecca. “He usually left before we did, but that morning, he didn’t.” I drifted back to that day again, but only far enough to regain one last, minuscule detail. “He was sitting at the kitchen table as I passed,” I added. “I was racing for the door, you know, excited to be going back to school, but he shot his hand out, grabbed my arm, and stopped me. ‘Kiss your mother good-bye, Stevie,’ he said. And so I did.”
Rebecca looked as if I’d just confirmed something that had only been a conjecture before.
“He’d never asked me to do that before.”
“And then you went to school just like always?” Rebecca asked.
I nodded. “Yes, we all went together. Well, at least Laura and I did. Jamie always went ahead of us.”
“Did you and Laura talk about anything in particular that morning?”