Ruth said, “In the family, a father always handed it down to his oldest son. It was probably the way a boy metamorphosed from scion to patriarch. Would you like it, my dear?”
Adrian shook his head. “Eventually, perhaps,” he told her. “But for now, no. Dad would've wanted you to have it.”
Ruth touched the canvas lovingly, at the foreground where St. Barbara's robe flowed like a waterfall forever suspended. Behind her the stonemasons hewed and placed their great slabs of granite into eternity. Ruth smiled at the placid face of the saint and she murmured, “Merci, mon frère. Merci. Tu as tenu cent fois la promesse que tu avais faite à Maman.” Then she stirred herself and gave her attention to St. James. “You wanted to see her one more time. Why?”
The answer, after all, was simplicity itself. “Because she's beautiful,” he told her, “and I wanted to say goodbye.”
He took his leave of them then. They walked with him as far as the stairs. He said they had no need to accompany him farther, as he knew the way out. They came down one flight with him nonetheless, but there they stopped. Ruth wanted to rest in her room, she said. She was feeling less and less spry each day.
Adrian said he would see her safely into bed. “Take my arm, Aunt Ruth,” he told her.
Deborah was expecting her final visit from the neurologist who'd been monitoring her recovery. His was the last hurdle to clear, after which she and Simon could go back to England. She'd already dressed in anticipation of being given the doctor's blessing. She'd taken up a position in an uncomfortable Scandinavian chair near the bed, and just to make sure there were no doubts about her wishes, she'd gone so far as to strip the mattress of its sheets and blanket in preparation for another patient.
Her hearing was improving by the day. A medic had removed the stitches along her jaw. Her bruises were healing and the cuts and abrasions on her face were disappearing. The inner wounds were going to take a lot longer to heal. She'd so far avoided feeling the pain of them, but she knew a day of internal reckoning was going to come.
When the door opened, she expected the doctor and she half-rose to meet him. But it was Cherokee River who stood there. He said, “I wanted to come right away, but there . . . there was too much to handle. And then, when there was less to handle, I didn't know how to face you. Or what to say. I still don't. But I needed to come. I'm leaving in a couple of hours.”
She held out her hand to him but he didn't take it. She dropped it and said, “I'm so sorry.”
“I'm taking her home,” he said. “Mom wanted to come over and help, but I told her . . .” He gave a rueful laugh that sounded mostly of grief. He shoved his hand back through his curly hair. “She wouldn't want Mom here. She never wanted Mom to be anywhere near her. Besides, there wouldn't be any point to her coming: flying all this way and then just turning around and going back. She wanted to come, though. She was crying pretty bad. They hadn't talked to each other . . . I don't know. Maybe a year? Two? China didn't like . . . I don't know. I don't know for sure what China didn't like.”
Deborah urged him to sit in the low and uncomfortable chair. He said, “No. You take it.”
She said, “I'll use the bed.” She perched on the edge of the bare mattress, and when she had done so, Cherokee lowered himself to the chair. He sat on its edge with his elbows on his knees. Deborah waited for him to speak. She herself didn't know what to say beyond expressing her sorrow for what had happened.
He said, “I don't get any of it. I still don't believe . . . There was no reason. But she must have had it planned from the first. Only I can't figure out why.”
“She knew you had the poppy oil.”
“For jet lag. I didn't know what to expect, if we'd be able to sleep or not when we got over here. I didn't know . . . you know . . . how long it would take us to get used to the time change or if we ever would. So I got the oil at home and brought it with. I told her we could both use it if we needed it. But I never did.”
“So you forgot you had it?”
“Not forgot. Just didn't think about it. Whether I still had it. Whether I'd given it to her. I just didn't think.” He'd been looking at his shoes, but now he looked up as he said, “When she used it on Guy, she must've forgotten that it was my bottle. She must not've realised that my fingerprints would be all over it.”
Deborah moved her own gaze away from him. There was, she found, a loose thread at the edge of the mattress, and she wound it tightly round her finger. She watched her nail bed darken. She said, “China's fingerprints weren't on the bottle. Only yours.”
“Sure, but there's an explanation for that. Like the way she held it. Or something.” He sounded so hopeful that Deborah couldn't bear to do anything more than glance at him. She didn't have the words to reply, and when she said nothing, a silence grew. She could hear his breathing and then, beyond that, voices in the hospital corridor. Someone was arguing with a staff member, a man demanding a private room for his wife. She was “My God, a bloody employee of this blasted place.” She was owed some special consideration, wasn't she?
Cherokee finally spoke hoarsely. “Why?”
Deborah wondered if she could come up with the words to tell him. It seemed to her that the River siblings had struck blow-for-blow upon each other, but there was no real balancing of the scales when it came to crimes committed and pain endured and there never would be, especially now. She said, “She never could forgive your mum, could she? For how it was when you two were children. Never around to be a mum. The string of motels. Where you had to buy your clothes. Only one pair of shoes. She couldn't ever see that this was just the stuff that surrounded her. It was nothing else. It didn't mean anything more than what it was: a motel, secondhand clothes shops, shoes, a mum who didn't stay round for more than a day or a week at a time. But it meant more to her. It was like . . . like a great injustice that had been done to her instead of what it was: just her hand of cards, to be done with as she liked. D'you see what I mean?”
“So she killed . . . So she wanted the cops to believe . . .” Cherokee obviously couldn't bring himself to face it, much less to say it. “I guess I don't see.”
“I think she found injustice in places where other people simply found life,” Deborah told him. “And she couldn't manage to get past the thought of that injustice: what had happened, what had been done—”
“To her.” Cherokee completed Deborah's thought. “Yeah. Right. But what did I ever . . . ? No. When she used that oil, she didn't think . . . She didn't know . . . She didn't realise . . .” His voice died off.
“How did you know where to find us in London?” Deborah asked him.
“She had your address. If I had trouble with the embassy or anything, she said I could ask you for help. We might need it, she said, to get to the truth.”
Which was what had occurred, Deborah thought. Just not the way China had anticipated. She'd doubtless reckoned that Simon would home in on her innocence, pressing the local police to continue their investigation till they found the opiate bottle she had planted. What she hadn't considered was that the local police would get to the opiate bottle on their own while Deborah's husband would take a different tack entirely, unearthing the facts about the painting and then laying a trap with that painting as bait.
Deborah said gently to China's brother, “So she sent you to fetch us. She knew how it would be if we came.”
“That I'd be . . .”
“That's what she wanted.”
“To pin a murder on me.” Cherokee got to his feet and walked to the window. Blinds covered it, and he jerked at their cord. “So I'd end up . . . what? Like her father or something? Was this some big trip of revenge because her dad's in prison and mine isn't? Like it was my fault she got the loser for a father? Well, it wasn't my fault. It isn't my fault. And how much better was my own dad, anyway? Some do-gooder who's spent his life saving the desert tortoise or the yellow salamander or what-the-hell-ever. Jesus. What difference does it make? What the hell difference did it ev
er make? I just don't get it.”
“Do you need to?”
“She was my sister. So, yeah. I God damn need to.”
Deborah left the bed and joined him. Gently, she took the cord from his hands. She raised the blinds to fill the room with daylight, and the distant sun of December struck their faces.
“You sold her virginity to Matthew Whitecomb,” Deborah said. “She found out, Cherokee. She wanted you to pay.”
He made no reply.
“She thought he loved her. All this time. He kept coming back no matter what happened between them and she thought that meant what it didn't mean. She knew that he was cheating on her with other women but she believed that, in the end, he'd grow out of all that and want to be with her.”
Cherokee leaned forward. He rested his forehead against the cool pane of the window. “He was cheating,” Cherokee murmured. “But it was with her. Not on her. With her. What the hell did she think? One weekend a month? Two if she got real lucky? A trip to Mexico five years ago and a cruise when she was twenty-one? The asshole's married, Debs. Has been for eighteen months and he wouldn't fucking tell her. And there she was hanging on and on and I couldn't . . . I just couldn't be the one. I couldn't do that to her. I didn't want to see her face. So I told her how it all came about in the first place because I hoped that would be enough to piss her off and break her away from him.”
“You mean . . . ?” Deborah could hardly stand to complete the thought, so horrific it was in its consequences. “You didn't sell her? She only thought . . . Fifty dollars and a surfboard? To Matt? You didn't do that?”
He turned his head away. He looked down into the car park of the hospital, where a taxi was pulling into the loading zone. As they watched, Simon got out of the car. He spoke to the driver for a moment, and the taxi remained behind as he approached the front doors.
“You've been sprung,” Cherokee said to Deborah.
She insisted, “Did you not sell her to Matt?”
He said, “Got your things together? We c'n meet him in the lobby if you'd like.”
“Cherokee,” she said.
He replied, “Hell, I wanted to surf. I needed a board. It wasn't enough to borrow one. I wanted my own.”
“Oh God,” Deborah sighed.
“It wasn't supposed to be such a big deal,” Cherokee said. “It wasn't a big deal for Matt, and with any other chick it wouldn't have been a big deal either. But how was I supposed to know how China would take it, what she'd think was supposed to grow out of it if she ‘gave' herself to some loser? Jesus, Debs, it was just a screw.”
“And you, in effect, were just a pimp.”
“It wasn't like that. I could tell she had a thing for him. I didn't see the harm. She wouldn't ever have known about the deal if she hadn't become a roll of human Glad wrap throwing her life away on a stupid son of a bitch. So I had to tell her. She gave me no choice. It was for her own good.”
“Like the deal itself?” Deborah asked. “That wasn't all about you, Cherokee? What you wanted and how you'd use your sister to get it? It wasn't like that?”
“Okay. Yeah. It was. But she wasn't supposed to take it so seriously. She was supposed to move on.”
“Right. Well. She didn't move on,” Deborah pointed out. “Because it's tough to do that when you don't have the facts.”
“She had the damn facts. She just didn't want to see them. Jesus. Why couldn't she ever let anything go? God, everything festered inside her. She couldn't get past how she thought things should be.”
Deborah knew he was right in at least that one respect: China had put a price tag on things, always feeling herself owed far more than was actually on offer. Deborah had finally seen that in her last conversation with the other woman: She'd expected too much of people, of life. In those expectations she had sown the seeds of her own destruction.
“And the worst of it is that she didn't need to do it, Debs,” Cherokee said. “No one was holding a gun to her head. He made the moves. I put them together in the first place, yeah. But she let it happen. She went on letting it. So how the hell could that've been my fault?”
Deborah didn't have the answer to that question. Too much fault, she thought, had been assessed upon or rejected by members of the River family through the years.
A quick knock on the door brought Simon into the room to join them. He carried what she hoped was the paperwork that would release her from Princess Elizabeth Hospital. He nodded at Cherokee but directed his question to Deborah.
“Ready to go home?” he asked her.
“More than anything else,” she said.
Chapter 32
FRANK OUSELEY WAITED TILL the twenty-first of December, the shortest day and longest night of the year. Sunset would come early, and he wanted sunset. The long shadows it provided felt comfortable to him, giving him protection from any prying eyes who might inadvertently witness the final act in his personal drama.
At half past three he took up the parcel. A cardboard box, it had sat on top of the television set since he'd brought it home from St. Sampson. A band of tape kept its flaps closed, but Frank had earlier lifted this tape to check on the contents. A plastic bag now held what remained of his father. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. The colour of the substance was somewhere between the two, lighter and darker simultaneously, ridged by the occasional fragment of bone.
Somewhere in the Orient, he knew, they picked through the ashes of the dead. The family gathered and with chopsticks in hand, they lifted out what remained of the bones. He didn't know what they did with those bones—they likely used them for family reliquaries much as the bones of martyrs had once been used to sanctify early Christian churches. But that was something he didn't intend to do with his father's ashes. What bones there were would become part of the place to which Frank had determined to deposit the rest of his father.
He'd thought first of the reservoir. The spot where his mother had drowned could have received his father with little trouble, even if he didn't scatter the remains into the water itself. Then he considered the tract of land near St. Saviour's Church, where the wartime museum had been meant to stand. But he concluded that a sacrilege existed in disposing of his father at a site where men utterly unlike him were meant to be honoured.
Carefully, he carried his father out to the Peugeot and rested him snugly on the passenger seat, cushioned all the way round by an old beach towel that he'd used as a boy. Just as carefully, he drove out of the Talbot Valley. The trees were completely bare now, with only the stands of oaks still leafy on the gentle slope of the valley's south side. And even here, many of the leaves lay on the ground, colouring the comforting, large trunks of the trees with a cape of saffron and umber.
Daylight left the Talbot Valley sooner than it did the rest of the island. Folded into a landscape of undulating hillsides eroded by centuries of stream, the occasional cottage along the road already showed bright lights in its windows. But as Frank emerged from the valley into St. Andrew, the land itself changed and so did the light. Hillside grazing for the island cows gave over to agriculture and hamlets, where cottages with a score of greenhouses behind them all drank in and reflected the last of the sun.
He headed east and came at St. Peter Port on the far side of Princess Elizabeth Hospital. From there, it was no difficult feat to get to Fort George. Although daylight was fading, it was too early for the traffic to be a problem. Besides, at this time of year, there was little enough of it. Come Easter, the roads would begin to fill.
He waited only for a tractor to lumber through the intersection at the end of Prince Albert Road. After that, he made good time to Fort George, skimming through its thick stone archway just as the sun struck the picture windows of the sprawling houses inside the fort. This place had long since been used for any military purpose, despite its name, but unlike other of the fortresses on the island—from Doyle to le Crocq—this was also no ruin of granite and brick. Its proximity to St. Peter Port as well as its views of Soldiers' B
ay had made it a prime location for exiles from Her Majesty's revenue collectors to build their sumptuous homes. So they had done so: behind tall hedges of box and yew, behind wrought iron fences with electric gates, set back on lawns next to which stood Mercedes-Benzes and Jaguars.
A car like Frank's would have been looked upon with suspicion had he chosen to drive it anywhere within the fort other than directly to the cemetery, which was situated, as luck and irony would have it, on the most scenically advantageous part of the entire area. It occupied an east-facing slope at the southern end of the old military grounds. Its entrance was marked by a war memorial in the shape of an enormous granite cross in which a sword—embedded in the stone—duplicated the grey cruciform into which it had been placed. The irony might have been intentional. It probably was. The cemetery thrived on irony.
Frank parked in the gravel just beneath the memorial and crossed the lane to the cemetery's entrance. From there he could see the smaller islands of both Herm and Jethou rising in the mist across a placid stretch of water. From there, also, a concrete ramp—ridged against the possibility of a mourner falling in inclement weather—sloped down to the graveyard which comprised a set of terraces that had been carved out of the hillside. Set at a right angle to these terraces, a retaining wall of Rocquaine Blue held a bronze bas relief of people in profile, perhaps citizens or soldiers or victims of war. Frank could not tell. But an inscription in the relief—Life lives beyond the grave—suggested that those bronze figures represented the souls of the departed laid to rest in this place, and the carving itself had been fashioned into a door that, when opened, revealed the actual names of the interred.
He did not read them. He merely stopped, placed the cardboard box of his father's ashes on the ground, and opened it to remove the plastic bag.