Brass Ring (6 page)

She and Jon gradually led the Stanwicks into a discussion of experimentation, of discovering each other’s needs and desires, of separating the possible from the impossible.

“I can have a reflex erection,” Paul said. “It’s not spectacular but—”

“I think it’s spectacular,” Lynn interjected.

Jon laughed. “Well, then you can experiment with intercourse, too.”

“But he can’t ejaculate,” Lynn said. “It doesn’t seem like it would be fair to him.”

“I’d like to try, though.” Paul looked at his wife. “You’d enjoy it, wouldn’t you? I’d like watching you enjoy it.”

Claire was touched. This guy was a sweetheart.

“I’m not saying it won’t be frustrating, Paul,” Jon said. “The truth is, a lot of your pleasure will come from Lynn’s.”

Jon had once told Claire that when she was happy, he was happy, when she hurt, he hurt…and when she came, he came. She’d felt a flash of selfishness then, but he’d said those words with no sorrow or self-pity, and she’d tucked her guilt away.

Jon could come, in a sense. Sometimes. It was unpredictable, both the occurrence and the sensations it produced. Unlike Paul Stanwick, Jon had suffered an incomplete injury to his spinal cord. At times, his numbness gave way to a prickling, burning feeling or to what he described as “minifireworks” that shot off when and where he least expected them. He’d once said that having some feeling was worse than none at all. But he’d never said it again, and she didn’t believe he’d meant it.

Claire had something she wanted to say to Lynn Stanwick. She debated quickly whether to bring it up here or to wait until she had a session with the woman alone. This couple could handle it, she decided.

“Lynn.” She leaned toward the younger woman. “Paul’s not going to have the ability to move the way he used to. You’ll probably have to take responsibility for your own orgasm if you want to have one during intercourse.”

Lynn’s eyes widened. “You mean…masturbate?”

Claire nodded, and Paul groaned again. “Sorry, kid.” He gave his wife a wry smile.

“No problem,” Lynn said, but from the expression on her face, Claire knew it would take her a while to get used to the idea.

After the Stanwicks had left her office, Claire walked over to Jon and bent low for a hug.

“Good session, Mathias,” she said.

He wrapped his hand around her thigh. “Made me kinda hungry for you, Harte.”

“Tonight,” she promised.

He let go of her leg as Jill ducked into the office to hand Claire a stack of pink message slips. Claire noticed the name on the top slip: Detective Patrick.

Jon wheeled past her to the door. “Are you ready to come to my office to work on the retreat?” he asked.

Claire stared at the pink slip in her hand. She could toss it out. Forget it. It had been nearly a week since that night in Harpers Ferry, and she had just proved to herself that she could get through an entire counseling session without a single thought of Margot. That was rare, though. More often that not, she found herself fighting the memory of that night on the bridge, along with the vertigo that accompanied it.

“I’ll be there as soon as I return these calls,” she said.

She closed her office door after Jon left, then walked to her desk and dialed the number for the Harpers Ferry police.

“I thought you’d want to know this right away,” Detective Patrick said. His raspy voice was tinged with a boyish excitement. “It turns out that the other night was not Margot St. Pierre’s first experience on that bridge.”

Claire sat down behind the desk. “What do you mean?”

“Well, it seems as though she grew up in Harpers Ferry, and twenty years ago—to the very day that she jumped—she and her brother were playing on that same bridge when the brother fell off and was killed.”

“
What
?”

“Right.” There was some pleasure in his voice, as though he enjoyed passing on a good piece of gossip. “I don’t know a whole lot more about it,” he said. “We got this piece of information from the social worker at the Avery Mental Hospital, and she didn’t know much more herself. Though she did say that Miss St. Pierre fell, too. Not into the water, but more towards the embankment. Hit her head on the rocks. They think that might have been part of what was wrong with her.”

Claire looked out the window, where the sunlit snow still blanketed the ground and clung to the banks of the pond. What was it Margot had said to her: I died on this bridge long ago? Something like that. “It’s been haunting her all these years, poor thing,” she said.

“Looks that way. The social worker said they were some kind of musical geniuses or something.”

“Who were? Margot and her brother?”

“Right. You know, that kind of kid who can play the piano as good as an adult?”

“Oh!” Claire recalled more of Margot’s words. “Chopin.”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing.” She felt herself getting sucked in deeper. The more information she was given about Margot, the more she seemed to need. “Do you think I could talk to the social worker at the psychiatric hospital—if I should decide I’d like to?” She turned the pink message slip over and picked up a pen.

“Don’t see why not.” Detective Patrick gave her the woman’s name, along with the number for the hospital. “This case is closed for us,” he said. “A suicide, cut-and-dried. But I thought you’d want to know this piece of it before I put the file away.”

Claire stared at the message slip for a long time after getting off the phone. She was thinking. Plotting. She got up from her desk and walked quickly through the maze of corridors to Jon’s office.

He was leafing though a stack of papers on his desk when she walked into the room. “Ah, good,” he said. “We need to talk about who can run the driving workshop at the retreat this year. Lillian’s going to be on maternity leave, and—”

“Jon?” She sat down on his green sofa.

He stopped shuffling the papers on his desk, raising his eyebrows. “Yes?”

“One of those calls I returned was from Detective Patrick. He told me that twenty years ago, Margot and her brother fell from that same bridge. The brother was killed, and Margot was injured.”

Jon’s eyes were wide. “No kidding? Was she trying to join him or what?”

“I don’t know, but I would really like to find out. Would you mind if I took the rest of the day off?” He didn’t respond, and she rushed ahead. “I know we have retreat stuff to get done, but I can work on that tonight.” They would be swamped with “retreat stuff’ from now until the weekend of the annual retreat itself, to be held, as always, in September in the Shenandoah Valley. “I want to go to the library in Harpers Ferry to see what I can find out about that incident.”

She couldn’t read his face. The miniblinds at his window cast lines of shadow across his cheek. He looked down at the papers on his desk, shoving one of them with the tip of his finger. “I didn’t realize you had so much Nancy Drew in you,” he said.

“Neither did I.” She tried to smile.

He was quiet again, tapping his fingers on the papers. When he looked up, he spoke quietly. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you like this,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you don’t usually carry stuff around with you. Shit happens, and you say, que sera, sera, and get on with your life.”

She sat back on the sofa with a sigh. He was right. “I don’t know what it is, Jon.” She lifted her hands and dropped them into her lap. “I feel as though she’s not going to let go of me unless I follow this through.”

“Could you wait until tomorrow?” Jon asked. “I could go with you then. But I can’t get away today.”

“That’s all right. I don’t mind going alone.”

“Maybe Amelia could go?”

She considered the idea for a few seconds before discarding it. She usually relished spending time with Amelia, her neighbor and longtime friend. But not today. When she’d told Amelia about Margot’s suicide, Amelia had said that perhaps Margot’s death had been for the best. “She sounded so disturbed,” she’d said. “So miserable.” Claire heard the words she herself had spoken so often to other people—
Maybe it’s for the best
—and suddenly the phrase made her bristle. No, she didn’t want Amelia with her. Or Jon. She wanted to do this on her own. She was the only person who really cared what she unearthed in that library.

“I’m going by myself.” She stood up and walked over to Jon’s desk, bent down, and kissed him. “Am I acting crazy?”

He reached up, his hand circling her shoulder, and tugged her down for a second kiss. “Crazed, but not crazy,” he said. “I’ll see you tonight.”

IT WAS A WARM
day for January, a beautiful sunlit day, the snow melting along the side of the road as Claire neared Harpers Ferry. She felt relaxed and calm, and so she was unprepared for the dizzy, sick-to-her-stomach sensation that accompanied her as she drove across the too-familiar bridge above the Shenandoah. In the daylight, the bridge held no visible threat. The road was clear of snow, the sky was an unbroken expanse of azure blue, and the bright afternoon sun glittered on the guardrail. A few other cars crossed the bridge with her, but she was certain she was the only driver for whom that stretch of concrete seemed unending, the only driver to feel the ominous pull of the river below.

Her heart was pounding in her throat by the time she reached the other side, and she had to pull to the side of the road to catch her breath. She extracted a tissue from her purse and wiped the beads of perspiration from her forehead. How was she going to cross that bridge again to go home? Crazy. This was crazy.

She found the library easily. The librarian set her up in a small room with several cases of microfilm. For ten minutes, she scrolled through newspapers from the second week of January 1973, and she was beginning to think that Detective Patrick had gotten his information wrong. But then, suddenly, there it was, on the front page of the January 14 edition.

The article was one column, about seven inches long, child dies in fall from bridge, the headline read. Claire turned the knob on the microfilm machine to bring the fine print into focus.

There had been a severe snowstorm the night of January 10, the article stated, and the bridge had been empty of traffic. Details of the fall itself, though, were sketchy. The dead boy had been Margot’s twin brother, ten-year-old Charles. Another brother, Randall, age fifteen, had also been present. After Charles fell, Randall and Margot tried to scale the embankment to reach the boy. During that climb, Margot herself fell and was knocked unconscious. Randall carried her home, a mile from the bridge. The end of the article stated that Margot remained in a coma at a nearby hospital. It was not known how extensive her injuries were or if she was expected to recover from them.

A good two-thirds of the article was devoted to the twins’ impressive, albeit short, biographies. Their father was a classical pianist, and the twins were considered child prodigies. They had appeared in a Young People’s Concert the previous year at Carnegie Hall and had been accepted at Juilliard for the following year.

It didn’t fit, Claire thought. She couldn’t imagine these little musical geniuses living in a tiny West Virginia hamlet like Harpers Ferry.

IT WAS AFTER DARK
when she pulled into her driveway. From inside her car, she opened the center door of the three-car garage. Driving in, she got a deceptive rush of delight at seeing Susan’s red Toyota parked in its space, and she had to remind herself that her daughter was not home. Susan had called the night before to tell them it would be a couple of weeks before she could get back to Vienna to pick up her car.

Jon had bought a roasted chicken at the supermarket and a container of potato salad, and she joined him at the kitchen table. She told him what she’d learned at the library, and he asked appropriate questions, but he was uncharacteristically subdued. He was not interested in Margot St. Pierre; she had to accept that. After dinner, she shifted their conversation to the retreat and saw his usual animation return.

In bed that night, he pulled her close under the down comforter. “I was worried about you driving out there by yourself,” he said.

“I was perfectly fine.”

He ran his hand slowly over the bare skin of her back. “I know how upset you were the last time we were in Harpers Ferry. I thought being there again might bring some of that back. I didn’t like to think of you alone.”

“It was no big deal. It was a beautiful day for a drive.” She touched the corner of his mouth. She wanted to see him smile. Jon circled her arm lightly with his fingers. “Do you think you can lay Margot to rest now?” he asked.

Claire hesitated. She wished he hadn’t asked. “I want to, but there’s one more thing I need to do,” she said. “I’d like to talk with the social worker at Avery Hospital about her. Then I think I’ll be done with it for good.”

Jon slipped into silence. Outside the closed bedroom windows, a branch snapped on a tree somewhere in the woods.

“What’s the point to this, Claire?” he asked finally.

“I’m not sure.” She ran her fingertips across the light tracing of hair on his chest. “I try to block thoughts of her and that night from my mind, but they keep creeping in.”

He stroked his fingers over her cheek. “That must be very frustrating,” he said.

“It is. And I think the only way to put an end to them is to understand as much as I can about why it happened. I was the last person to see her alive. I was the last one who had a chance with her.”

Jon dropped his hand from her arm and said nothing. The silence swept around them for several minutes before she propped herself up on her elbow to look into his eyes.

“Are you upset with me over this?” She wasn’t used to his disapproval.

He shook his head, touching her cheek lightly again with his fingers. “I wish it hadn’t happened,” he said. “But it did. And I guess you have to find your own way of putting it to sleep.”

“I don’t have to drag you into it, though.” She couldn’t bear his sullenness, his worry. She lowered her head to kiss him. “So,” she said, “are you still hungry for me?”

“What? Oh.” He smiled. “A little.”

She kissed him again, then shifted on the bed to touch his eyelids with her lips, the tip of her tongue. She remembered him telling Paul Stanwick during their session that morning that Paul would discover erogenous zones he had never known he’d had. For Jon, it was his eyelids.