Uncivil Seasons (11 page)

Standing by Joanna Cadmean’s side, and without turning to look at her, I asked her, “Is it Rowell?”

Her eyes closed, then opened, peaceful gray. They looked a long while at the lake.

I followed Mrs. Cadmean as she moved along the window. “That’s what Cloris told you in the dream, and when you heard her voice at the riding stables, she was warning you against him?”

Cuddy looked at me, startled. “Why not?” I told him. “Maybe Rowell just grabbed up the coins and things at random to make it look like a robbery, and dumped them, and Pope somehow stumbled on the silverware.”

She said in so low a voice I barely heard her, “Bainton’s coins were very rare; some collected by his grandfather were especially rare. I know Rowell liked them. He liked to keep what was rare.”

I said, “Like Cloris?”

“Was she rare?”

I said, “But why kill Bainton? What’s wrong with divorce? The estate? He built his career on Bainton Ames’s money.”

Joanna Cadmean swung her crutches toward me. Her voice was like the light coming off the ice outside. She said, “He built his career on what I told him.”

Cuddy asked, “What do you mean, Mrs. Cadmean? The publicity from your discoveries when he was assistant solicitor?”

“At first.” Her voice melted into its soft stillness. “My…insights remained helpful even after it seemed best not to make them public.”

Cuddy said, “You mean, you were working with Dollard on his courtroom presentations?” She nodded, and he turned to me. “Well, according to Fulcher, your uncle never lost a case.”

Yes. Dollard had campaigned on that record and gone to the state senate on it and with it won the worshipful envy of men like Fulcher.

Mrs. Cadmean reached her hand out to me. “In the past I’ve found my perceptions grow stronger the closer I get to the place where the death occurred.” She took my hand in hers, its heat and tension were startling. “They are stronger here in Hillston than they were on St. Simons.”

We were all quiet for a moment. Then I said, “I’ll take you over to the Dollards’ house.”

Cuddy unwound himself and stood. “I suppose we could. Couldn’t hurt.”

“Let’s go now,” I said. I wanted to go back there too.

She excused herself to change her clothes, and I was surprised again by her attractiveness when she returned in a stylish red wool dress and wool cape. Outside, she walked awkwardly on the unfamiliar crutches, dodging the puddled ice that was alarming all Hillston, a city unaccustomed to the cold.

•   •   •

Mrs. Cadmean said nothing as we drove in past the Dollard gate and along the crackling driveway up to the imperturbable expanse of red brick and white wood. An orange Pinto was parked in front of high rhododendron bushes whose stiff brown winter leaves seemed to have given up all hope of spring. Inside, a Mrs. Teknik was vacuuming; she had replaced the former cleaning woman who’d quit. She said that this woman had refused to come back inside the unlucky house. “Colored people,” she said, “believe in ghosts.”

I said, “So do I.”

The house had been restored to order, Etham Foster’s men having long since abandoned the search for proof of an intruder’s identity anywhere on the premises. Upstairs, my uncle had had the bloodstained yellow carpeting torn off the bedroom floor, and the blond oak queen-size bed was stripped to its mattress. But his wife’s clothes still hung in their closets, her toiletries still lined the white wicker shelves in her bathroom. Dust lingered in the light over the vanity table where Cloris Dollard’s perfumes, combs, and jewelry boxes sat in geometric patterns utterly unlike the untroubling disarray in which we’d found them that first Monday morning we’d been summoned there. In fact, it was not that the house had been returned to order, it had been put in order: premises that had once looked like an unresolved quarrel between two incompatible decorators now had swung in favor of Rowell Dollard’s opulent fastidiousness. Downstairs the stiff, silk, pearl-hued chairs and settee made a precise square with the gray mantel, and no longer gawked askance at the painted wood secretary I’d seen so piled with magazines and gloves and so stuffed with scraps of paper, pointless pencils, and unmailed letters that it would not close. Everywhere in this house, now, the disorder of life was missing.

By holding to the rail and to my shoulder, Mrs. Cadmean was able to climb the curved stairs to the bedroom. Her body heat against my side shocked me; her arm burned across the back of my jacket. Her other arm clutched a shoulder bag. In our slow ascent I said, “I don’t like the idea of your being out at the lake by yourself.”

“Briggs is usually with me, and before she leaves to teach, she fixes everything so I’m quite comfortable.”

“Still, couldn’t you go to your father-in-law’s in town?” She shook her head. “Way out there,” I said. “What do you do?”

She smiled the strange cold smile that had scared me at the end of our first conversation. She said, “Oh, I prophesy.”

“If you get…worried, you’ll let me know?”

“I’ll let you know,” she said. “Is that the bedroom through there?”

“Yes.”

“And, Justin, should something…happen to me, ask Briggs for a letter. I don’t mean to be coy, I want you to understand. So, tonight, I’m going to write everything down for you.”

“All right.” My shoulder felt abruptly cold when her hand moved away to take the crutches. I left her, as she had asked, alone in Cloris Dollard’s bedroom. The sound of the crutches moved slowly across the bare wood above me.

Downstairs I searched through the wood secretary, the study desk, and the bookshelves for anything Cloris might have used as a diary. Then I went down to the basement, where I found no boxes of anything resembling technical papers that might have belonged to Bainton Ames.

“Savile, you are tangling with the big boys now. Why’d you let me go on believing
you
were rich?” Cuddy was in the study, looking at Rowell’s framed diplomas.

“I tried to disabuse you, but obviously the idea meant too much to you to give it up.”

“Now I see Uncle Rowell’s place, and Cadmean’s play-house—not even his real house!—I wonder why I bothered being jealous of you all these years.”

“Me too.”

“Yassir, things have clearly slumped for you since all the slaves done run off your place and jest left the corn rotting in the fields, like some old, tall, dead, yellow-sashed soldiers.” He started on the other wall of bookshelves, reading the spines.

“Christ, you love to talk,” I said.

“I can’t rely on my features, Lieutenant.”

From the other wing the vacuuming buzz stopped loudly. I heard Mrs. Teknik mumble, then I heard a sharp “Where are they?” As we hurried back out into the entryway, Rowell Dollard, his scarf very white between his black velvet collar and his flushed ear, was starting up the stairs.

“Rowell,” I called. “Sorry to intrude again. I assumed you’d be in Raleigh.”

His face was swollen with suppressed irritation. “I understood from Fulcher that you people were finished here, Justin. I don’t mean to be uncooperative, but…” Then his eyes were pulled away from us and turned up toward the landing at the top of the stairs where, soundless, Joanna Cadmean stood braced by the angle of her crutches. When he finally spoke, his voice was hoarse. “What are you doing here?”

She answered mildly, “Hello, Rowell.”

Florid, he backed down the steps toward me. “Why is she here? Why have you brought her in this house? What in hell kind of hocus-pocus are you pulling, Justin?”

Cuddy loped up the stairs to help Mrs. Cadmean down. I said, “I’m trying to find out who killed Cloris.”

“How so?” Dollard snapped.

“Any way I can.”

His black overcoat still buttoned, the senator strode across the entryway to the study door, his head quivering from the effort to control his voice. “I’m sorry, but this is not tolerable. I’ll have to ask you all to leave.” The door shut sharply behind him. I suspected he was telephoning Captain Fulcher.

My apologies to Joanna Cadmean for having subjected her to so painful an encounter were acknowledged, if heard, by a nod from some far-distant and chilling place. In the car, Cuddy’s little dog whimpered on the floor of the backseat where Mrs. Cadmean sat silently until we were back out on the bypass. Then she asked, “Is there no phone in Cloris’s bedroom?”

“There was,” I told her. “After the jack was torn out, I suppose they must have had it removed.”

“Because standing in there, I kept hearing her phone ring. Very loud. There was no image really of what might have…taken place. I simply kept hearing the phone ringing over and over. Except I did see coins. Coins falling in the air. Bainton’s, I suppose. I recall from the papers back at the time, one of the men Bainton had been with that night was talking about the coins. Odd. Falling like a storm.” In the rearview mirror I watched Mrs. Cadmean’s steady, peaceful eyes gazing out as the unleafed trees went blurring past. I noticed that the eyes never blinked.

•   •   •

All the way back to town Cuddy said, “I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s nutty.”

I reminded him that he was the one who had first told me just how accustomed the Hillston police were to exactly Joanna Cadmean’s kind of detection.

“That’s true, but mind if I say something personal?”

“Yes.” Mrs. Mitchell nosed herself under my elbow.

“Hate is blind and so are the hots.”

“Meaning?”

“You ought to take yourself off this case and go back to your regular assignments.”

“Sure!” I leaned over and punched in his cigarette lighter. “And leave you to run the only case the town council and the newspapers care anything about! Get your name on this one, Mangum, and maybe you can squeeze out Fulcher.”

“Get fucked, Justin.”

“You sound like Charlene. Okay, okay. I apologize. You’re just trying to help. Like always. How are hate and ‘the hots,’ as you so eloquently put it, blinding me?”

We were both angry. I was smoking; he rolled down the window and let in the freezing wind. He said, “You know what I’m talking about. You
want
to believe Senator Dollard killed his wife, because you hate him. You hate the way your momma thought you ought to let her little brother be your great white father. You hate the way she loves him so much and admires him so much, and, and, and. You’re jealous.”

“Oh Jesus Christ! Now you sound like Fulcher’s psychology course. And who am I jealous
for
? Cloris Dollard, or my mother? Is it for them I have ‘the hots’?”

“You said it, not me. I had in mind Joanna Cadmean.”

“I’m not even going to respond to that, it’s so absurd.”

“I watched you, General Lee. You gloop around her like some soulful teenager with sore nuts, mooning over the high school art teacher.” The anger loosened and left Cuddy’s face; he grinned. “In fact, now I remember, you
were
in love with your seventh-grade Latin teacher, weren’t you! What was her name?”

“Mrs. Berry.”

“That’s right. It was because of her you majored in classics. You know what’s amazing that I bet you never thought of? We’re older now than Mrs. Berry was
then
! What could she have been—twenty-seven at the most? Here she was, an Older Woman—up in a tower of knowledge and power there was no way you could climb—and the damn truth is, she was a
baby
!”

“I’m not going to drop the Dollard case.”

“I didn’t think you would,” he said, and rolled the window back up. “You can lead a horse to water but a jackass likes to mix his own drinks.”

Graham Pope’s former wife, Paula, tended bar at the Rib House, out on the bypass, on the other side of Hillston from Pine Hills Lake. Almost as big as its parking lot, the Rib House stretched between a Toyota dealership and a pitch-and-putt course that was closed for the winter. Its long-tentacled machine, there to feel through the weeds for balls, had been left waiting like a giant mantis in the grass. The Rib House, in a regrettable effort to resemble a Victorian train depot, had stuffed itself with semi-antiques, beginning with a mechanical gypsy fortune-teller in a glass case by the door. In trolley cars, plywood gazebos, and papier-mâché caves, large families ate at long tables without talking—except to yell at their children to stop running back to the salad bar. Even if the parents hadn’t apparently worn out conversation years back, they couldn’t have heard each other. The Rib House was a clangorous blare of herded suburban flight from life at home together. Hand to my ear, I made phone calls while Cuddy walked Mrs. Mitchell outside.

By half past five, on every level surface, vast dripping ribs of pig and cow were being devoured. A lengthy line of more hungry families craned out necks to meter their progress, while they stood discussing whether they should order “The Hombre” or “Big Mama” or “Little Dude,” as poster-size menus labeled these platters.

Paula Pope was a creamy, fat woman somewhere near forty, with hair so black and skin and eyes so lovely she looked as though some cartoonist had drawn Snow White’s face inside a moon. She was working fast, puffing at a loose curl, and frowning fretfully as she plopped cherries and pineapple chunks into huge frozen pink and lime drinks that she topped with paper Confederate flags. “I’m divorced,” she said to Cuddy for openers. “We’re friendly, I guess, but we’re divorced; so don’t come asking me about Graham Pope, because I don’t know.”

Cuddy said, “How you doing, Paula? This is Lieutenant Savile. Paula Pope.”

“Paula Burgwin.” She wiped her small hands on a towel when I offered mine, and we shook. “I got back my own name. Do you know what it cost me? Fifty-five dollars.”

I asked her if she’d heard about what happened to Preston and she nodded the way you nod when the highway patrol asks you if you know what the speed limit is. “What can you tell us about it, Paula?”

“Not a thing, except it’s probably not true. You two want a drink?” Cuddy had a beer and I had a whiskey, and for a few minutes we both tried to pick up the check.

“You keep up with Charlene, don’t you?” Cuddy asked, licking at his beer head. “Preston wants to see her, real bad. Is it all over between them? Because she gave me that feeling.”