The Snow Garden

  Randall knew exactly who he was. Richard Miller, the reporter. He reared up off the bed in anger. Tim pushed him back with the heel of his palm. “Where the hell else was I supposed to go, Randall? You were out cold and I was driving a dead woman’s van,” Tim pleaded.

  “I’ll let you two handle this." The reedy voice belonged to the reporter, who left the doorway and pushed the door shut behind him. Randall rolled over onto one side away from Tim. “I told you not until I was ready,” Randall managed, breath weak.

  “Eric Eberman tried to kill us tonight. And you’re still not ready?” Tim stood up.

  “Is that what you told him? That Eric followed us down there and tried to burn us alive?”

  Tim’s answer was his silence. Randall rolled over onto his back. Tim stood at the window,, back to him. “Who else?” Tim asked.

  Mitchell Seaver, Randall thought, but there was no way in hell he was going to tell Tim now that Tim had brought him to a reporter’s apartment against his will. “You wanted to prove whether or not Eric was a murderer. Well, guess what—tonight he tried to murder the two of us. How much more proof do you need?”

  “Bullshit, Tim! If he didn’t know about the goddamn storage facility, how the hell could he have followed us there?”

  “He knows we have the bottle. He attacked you, threw you out of the house. Maybe he’s been following you since then. Seeing how close you are to the truth.”

  “What’s the truth? That he killed his wife because of a house?”

  “Pettier things have led to murder.”

  “Give me a break. She saw something. She knew something.”

  Tim struggled for a response and failed to find one. His face fell with a mixture of fatigue and disappointment. “Right. Your cult. I forgot. Give me a break. How much longer are you going to ignore the obvious just because no matter how much you try you can’t bring yourself to face the fact that Eric killed his wife?”

  “Because of a house!” Randall repeated, propping himself on both elbows.

  “Because she was going to divorce him. And it wasn’t going to be easy or pretty. She was hiring an attorney—she went to county records and found out about 231 Slope Street. And if she really started digging she might have found out that he was screwing one of his male students. How much more would she have needed to ruin him?” Tim poked a finger in his chest. “Tell me, Randall, are you really so in love with this son of a bitch that you can’t face the truth—or are you maybe a little bit moved at the lengths he would go to protect your little secret?”

  “Where’s the letter?”

  Tim was silent. Randall swung his legs to the floor.

  “Tim! Where’s the letter?”

  Tim turned to face the window again. “It’s over, Randall.”

  Randall tried to control his anger as he realized that Tim was giving him an order. “You gave it to Richard, didn’t you?” Again, Tim was silent. “I still have the bottle,” Randall barked.

  “Newsflash. Richard says it isn’t worth shit. We shuffled it back and forth across campus and at the end of the day there’s no way to prove it was ever even in Eric’s house. It’s not like we can just waltz into a police station and say, Voila! Here’s the murder weapon!”

  “So I have to do what you say?”

  “Basically. Yes.”

  “How dare you,” Randall whispered.

  “How dare you!” Tim shouted. “I’m walking around right now with the knowledge that a woman was murdered and I’ve got a pretty good explanation why! And you are asking me to keep playing these stupid cloak-and-dagger games. Well, I can’t anymore. Especially when they end the way they did tonight. I’ve given you what you wanted. You’ve got the best mouthpiece available to you waiting in the other room, and I gave him to you.”

  “And if I don’t tell him anything? What? He’s going to run a story about the letter you and I stole from a burned-out storage locker?”

  “No. He’s going to call the lawyer who found a letter from a dead woman on his doorstep.”

  Anger gave way to a feeling of pure helplessness, and Randall felt his mouth open before he could find any more words to protest. “After all we tried to do, this is it?”

  “She didn’t know. And she didn’t see you two. Isn’t that enough?”

  “It’s not enough.” The threat of tears quavered in Randall’s voice, and Tim recoiled slightly at the sound, confused disgust replacing anger on his face. “I’ve spent weeks trying to find out why that woman is dead. And I would spend months if I had to. And now all I’m going to be is the guy he was sleeping with the night she died.”

  “Maybe that’s all you are.”

  Tim left the room.

  Randall couldn’t get up. What shred of redemption he had hoped to gain from this investigation had just slipped out of his grasp, and as a result, he was back to being what everyone saw when they looked at Randall Stone. Eric’s practiced whore, Jesse’s skilled liar, and Kathryn’s fallen friend. Briefly, he had enjoyed a new identity created in the eyes of others, but all of them had seen through their own creations. As far as he had tried to run from it, Randall Stone had been returned to the young man he’d was when he first arrived at Atherton: an orphan, whose new freedom came with a simple price.

  Randall rose from the bed and moved to the doorway.

  In the living room, Richard swiveled his chair away from his desk, piled with papers surrounding a circa 1983 word processor, to eye him. Tim looked up from the beer he held in his lap, hope and fear meeting on his face.

  He had told Eric he was perfectly aware of the damage he was capable of doing, and the rage of that proclamation had flooded him with adrenaline. But when the words had left his mouth, he had believed that the damage he could inflict could bring about some truth amid the tangle of lies that had brought him to Atherton University. Now, all he was capable of doing was casting renewed suspicion on Lisa’s death in hope that someone more powerful than he would follow the trail to 231 Slope Street.

  “Are you going to record this?” he asked.

  Home at last at 231 Slope Street, Eric was about to hang up his coat when he heard Pamela’s laughter, It went through his nerves like a raw, electric wire. Down the front hallway, the kitchen spilled light across the hardwood floor he and Michael had so lovingly refinished that summer. He went to the kitchen doorway. When she saw him, Pamela, her face already glowing with whatever was in the glass she was drinking from, lit up with pleasant surprise. Across from her, Michael smiled, his expression a bitter parody of Pamela’s. His robe was sliding off his back, his hair was slightly tousled, and his eyes did not possess the same alcohol sheen as Pamela’s.

  “He lives!” Michael announced.

  “Play with us!” Pamela urged; she had gotten his arm and was pulling him down into a chair.

  “What... are you playing?” he managed.

  “She’s lovely,” Michael said under his breath, too low for Pamela to catch.

  “You’re not allowed to make fun of me!” Pamela said, her back to them as she uncapped the bottle of Tanqueray on the counter.

  Beneath her playfulness, a spark of fear electrified her every motion. What had Michael done to unnerve her?

  He turned to Michael. “When did she ...”

  “An hour ago.” Michael’s eyes were on Pamela. “Did you two have a date tonight?” he asked her.

  “Did we?” Pamela sank down into her chair, staring at Eric over the top of her glass.

  “I guess this is it,” Eric answered. When his eyes met Michael’s, he saw that he was smoldering with a rage that in a man with less ego might have been just simple pain. Eric was unable to look away until Pamela broke the silence.

  “Believe me. I’m not one for drinking games. But this is the simplest one I know. No flipping quarters or anything like that.”

  “Well, that’s no fun, is it,. . Michael trailed off, groping for what to call her.

  “Pamela!” She finished for him. “How many times
do I have to tell you, Michael?” She laughed and shook her head. “You’re just mad because Eric’s already told me all about you, but he hasn’t told you a thing about me.”

  Sarcasm and irony were not in Pamela's nature, and Eric eyed her for signs of them.

  “It’s called I Never.”

  “That’s the game?” Michael asked.

  “Aren’t we a little old for drinking games?” Eric asked.

  Pamela ignored him, and this above all else told him something was wrong. “We go around the table and each of us has to call out something we’ve never done. But if you’ve done it, you have to drink.”

  “I’m game,” Michael said, his voice brittle with false enthusiasm.

  Eric got up from the table and Pamela grabbed his wrist, pulling him back down into the chair as she perfected her pleading baby face, her bottom lip jutting out, her eyebrows meeting above her nose. “It’s fun.”

  “You two play. I’ll watch,” Eric said.

  “Eric hates games he can’t win,” Michael remarked.

  Pamela released his wrist. “There’s no winner, Michael.”

  “Then it isn’t really a game, is it?” Michael asked.

  But Eric was at the sink, turning on the faucet and running water over the two dirty dishes. “I’m first,” Pamela said behind him. “I’ve never had sex while someone else watched.”

  Silence. Eric turned around to see Michael sipping primly from his glass. Pamela braced herself against the edge of the table and laughed too hard.

  Michael swabbed at his lips with one hand.

  “Your turn” Pamela said to him.

  “I’ve never purchased illegal drugs'.”

  Pamela leaned back in her chair, not drinking. Michael nodded his approval at her.

  “Has coke been legalized?” Eric asked.

  His eyes on Pamela, Michael answered, “No. But I have very generous friends.”

  Eric went back to staring down into the sink, praying that both players would lose interest in their game in a few minutes. When he saw his knuckles had gone white against the edge of the counter, he withdrew his hands. “All right, let me think.” Pamela giggled, and then took a breath. “I’ve never slept with Eric!”

  Eric could not turn around. Pamela’s laughter was cut short by the sound of Michael slamming down his empty glass and leaving the room.

  Without warning, the cork snapped in two, sending the corkscrew spinning across the counter. Eric cursed before pulling the bread knife out from the cutlery set, stabbing at the mangled bottom half of the cork with the blade until it split into two chunks that slid down into the wine.

  Lauren Raines.

  The name came to him suddenly, almost as if someone had whispered it into his ear. Earlier that day, he had been so desperate to give some finality to his meeting with Mitchell that he had forgotten Mitchell’s reference to the application completely. Only now did Eric realize he had never laid eyes on it.

  He pulled a wineglass from the cabinet, checked to make sure it was clean, and poured himself some wine. He debated whether or not to try to fish the chunks of cork out of it. Or he could go upstairs to his second-floor office, which he rarely used, and search through the file drawer where he had stashed the other applications for the six residents of the House of Adam after reading them.

  He sipped the wine; no pieces of cork stuck to his tongue when he swallowed.

  Had Mitchell given him the girl’s application and he’d simply forgotten? The combined effects of fatigue, the trauma of Lisa’s death, and a growing nightly allotment of wine had ripped holes in his memory.

  But what did it matter now? In three weeks, Mitchell would have all the freedom he wanted because Eric would no longer be around to point out how far Mitchell had strayed from the original philosophy he had gleaned from Eric’s book—that humans could set aside their desires, but without pledging allegiance to a higher power other than their own minds.

  In the living room, he’d left the stereo turned to the campus station’s late-night classical program, the volume so low that the flutter of flutes sounded like rain against the windows. He settled into his reading chair and picked up the brochure about Montana he’d gotten from a travel agent. Nothing about Livingston. Maybe the slightly scatterbrained woman thought he just wanted to look at pictures of the Grand Tetons, which to his surprise, he did. Flipping through the glossy pages, he felt a strange stirring in his gut at the sight of endless, open plains, sunlight lancing the towering cloud formations. Some people felt horror at the sight of open spaces. Eric suspected they feared feeling anonymous, unrecognized by a landscape they could never mark or alter with their mere presence.

  He ignored the sound of the car engine until headlights bounced over the living-room windows and the engine died.

  He checked his watch. It was almost one thirty. He moved quickly into the foyer and opened the front door.

  Lisa’s old Aerostar was parked in the driveway, right behind his Camry.

  Eric staggered to the edge of the porch.

  It looked as if someone had aimed a flamethrower at its back end; boluses of charcoal soot had rained down the side windows, and one corner of the rear bumper was a carbuncle of black, molten rubber. A, car his wife had sold months earlier was sitting in his driveway, looking as if it had been towed out of hell.

  How drunk was he?

  He turned back to the door. It stood open, and the sight of the darkened downstairs hallway raised the hairs on the back of his neck.

  He went in and slammed the door behind him. Not thinking, he made a beeline for the kitchen and the phone. He managed to dial only nine by the time he realized there was no way to articulate his fear to the dispatcher. This was some kind of sick prank, and it made so little sense that his fear dissolved into confusion.

  He returned to the living room and retrieved his wineglass, standing where he had a view of the van through the front windows. No, he wasn’t hallucinating.

  He took a slug from the glass.

  The liquid instantly set fire to his throat, and in his rush to get both hands to his mouth he dropped the glass. It shattered, sending a spill of auburn liquid rolling across the hardwood until it met the tassels on the edge of the Persian rug.

  “She was divorcing you.”

  His eyes still smarting from smoke and fumes, Randall stood in the dining-room doorway, tightening his grip around the bottle of Chivas Regal. Eric whirled around, his eyes wide above the forearm he held against his mouth.

  “Did you know?” Randall asked.

  Eric lowered his arm, gasped, and winced. He pointed weakly toward the windows and the van outside.

  “That was her getaway car,” Randall told him. “She was keeping it in storage.”

  Eric shook his head, and Randall could see he was trying to summon anger, but instead his fingers went to his throat, massaging the skin there.

  “Sit down, Eric. This is going to take a minute.”

  Randall examined the bottle he held in both hands as Eric slumped into his reading chair, hunched over, and struggling to breathe. The scotch shouldn’t have been affecting him this quickly. Randall wondered if his pained grimace was due to the fact that he knew what he had just swallowed.

  “You gave Mitchell Seaver a house. And she wanted to know why.”

  “I don’t know what you’re—”

  “She didn’t even know you owned it. She had to go to the county records to find out. And when she did, she wanted to know why you would just hand over a piece of property to one of your grad students.

  So she went there. What did she see, Eric?” Randall crossed in front of the reading chair. Eric’s eyes followed him behind his glasses. “What did she really know?”

  “Why don’t you tell me? It sounds like you know more than I do.”

  Randall wasn’t going to give him such an easy out. “Paula’s been in remission for over six months. Lisa wasn’t going to take care of her every weekend. She was moving out, slowly, b
ut she was doing it. And she was going to divorce you.”

  “She never said anything to me.”

  “Just like you never told her about two-thirty-one Slope Street?”

  “That house was mine to sell.”

  “You didn’t sell it. You gave it to him.”

  “It was a ruin. I couldn’t rent it out anymore.”

  “So you make up for the loss by giving it away, not even charging Mitchell a dollar?”

  “What I did with that house is my business. What are you trying to tell me?”

  “You killed her to protect your cult,” Randall said. Maybe he couldn’t live the truth, but he could sure as hell find it. “She went to that house and she saw your little cult freaks fucking each other, and you killed her before she could use it against you in a divorce. That’s what your little Adamites do, don’t they? It’s right there in your book. The Brethren of the Free Spirit, who try to free themselves from the day-to-day temptations of the flesh with one single burst of sensuality. A flattering term for an orgy.”

  Eric had grown stiff and remote and Randall waited for him to deny everything, or try to talk him down with cold reason, or maybe even seduce him. But instead, Eric let a silence pass through the room. His voice came out breathy and distant. “It was an accident, Randall. I never meant to imply that we ... killed her.”

  “You showed me her note because you wanted to make me feel responsible. But you knew the entire time that there’s no way she could have seen us together that night.” Randall’s voice quavered and he tried to slow his words to keep his breath between them and his anger at bay. “She never even knew about us. You made sure of that. We were beyond cautious.”

  Eric’s frame sagged with defeat—and even though Randall didn’t want to admit it—dumb shock. Eric didn’t look caught or guilty. He looked sidelined by some sudden realization. His eyes had drifted past Randall, but then he met Randall’s stony gaze with a weak and shellshocked one of his own. “They weren’t my secret. You were.”

  Randall set the bottle down on the coffee table, his angry resolve fading. The man sitting in front of him was not acting like a cornered murderer.