Uncivil Seasons (21 page)

I pulled my collar up around my ears and closed the lapels over my neck. He nodded, blowing on his hands. “Cheesh, it’s colder than a witch’s pudendum. I might as well have stayed up in Brooklyn. And they told me this was the Sun Belt.”

“Where’s Dollard?”

“Lying down inside. I tried to give him a sedative, but he wouldn’t take it.”

“How did it happen?”

“According to him, she insisted he go up there to that tower with her.” Cohen pointed over his head at the octagonal study on the roof of the high lodge. A shaft of light came out of the open door, silhouetting the rails of the balcony. “She doesn’t say a word,
bam
, she opens that door. And over she goes. He couldn’t get to her in time.” Cohen’s words floated on the cold air, like mist.

“She was on crutches.”

“Right, they’re up there, by the rail.” He rubbed his eyes. “You knew her? So what was her problem?”

“What was he doing here?”

“Ask him. He told us she called him up, said she was upset and had to talk to him. I wish I’d brought a hat.”

I gave him my tweed cap; it fell low on his narrow head. “How long’s she been dead, Richard?”

“Less than an hour. You want to take a look? Then I’m headed home, okay? I’ve got a baby to walk.”

Together we knelt down, and he tugged away the sheet and shook his head. “Good-looking for—what? Forty-two, three?”

“Forty-eight, I think.”

“Looks younger. Well, okay, she hit here.” He turned the head. “This tibula’s broken.” The arm was unnaturally twisted back. It was the hardest part of her to look at.

“Five ribs broken. Cheek’s crushed. But what killed her was the neck. Instantaneous. It’s a long drop.”

I touched her hand; it still felt warmer than mine. “What’s this?”’ Her wrist was smeared with a small streak of fresh blood.

Cohen shrugged. “Scrape; it’s nothing. This is interesting: see these faint vertical white streaks? Old scars. Too old really to tell much, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she hadn’t made a serious attempt way back when.”

“What would you say, could anyone have survived that fall?”

He looked back up at the tower. “Improbable. But people have jumped out of planes and survived it. People do amazing things.”

The moon loomed between the vaporing clouds and shone on the motionless face, cool and still, white except where blood gritted the skin. The gray steady eyes were open, unblinking, focused far beyond this moment. The handsome head was twisted to the side, and the line of its profile, Delphian, serene, was as untroubled and disinterested as stone. She wore a dress of thin white wool, too thin for such weather, and around her neck were milk-white pearls, and tight in the hand of her broken arm, a white silk scarf.

“Say, come on; can I go now, Savile?”

“Just a second, do you mind?”

Officer Pendergraph had gone back to the squad car; he was young, raw-faced, and energetically working against letting me see he was bothered by mortality. I said, “You all right, Wes?”

“Yes, sir, I’m fine.”

“Was there a note?”

“No, sir. We didn’t find one anyhow. We looked.”

“Get a statement from Senator Dollard?’

“Dr. Cohen said leave him alone ’til you people came.”

I told Pendergraph to call the station and try to hurry Foster’s forensics crew and the photographer. The task relieved him. “They’re on the way,” he came back to tell me.

The murky vaulted space of the lodge’s huge living room was reddened by the embers of a fire gleaming beneath the smooth embedded stones of the mammoth chimney. Beside the antler coatrack, the telephone was off its hook. I replaced it and called the Pine Hills Inn, too late to page Cuddy Mangum there. I reached him at his apartment in the River Rise complex where he’d taken Briggs. I told him not to bring her home, and told him why. Then I walked slowly through all the spare, chilly rooms, checking their windows. Nothing was out of order. Finally I sat down on the couch across from Cohen, who’d pulled one of the bent-willow chairs over to the fire embers and was resting his head in his hands, elbows to his knees. “Your hat’s on the table in the front,” he said.

“Richard, I want you to tell me two things. What’s there to indicate a struggle? What’s there to indicate she was pushed?”

His hands opened and his head came up, pale and thin above the wiry black border of hair. “Pushed? Who by? By Senator Dollard? Cheesh!” He nodded slowly. “Well, okay, sure. Somebody could have shoved her; that or jumped, fall would be about the same. Struggle? I didn’t see any claw marks on his face, if that’s the kind you mean. But who knows.” He thought, yawned, and thought some more. “I’d say, pushed her from the back,
bam
, no warning, if he did it. Seems like I saw a snag kind of thing, down the dress front. Rail splinters probably. Headfirst, see.” He pantomimed the motion and the fall. “Yeah, headfirst. Gutsy woman, if it was her idea. I’m going, all right with you? Fading fast here.”

“You writing probable suicide, or what?”

“I’m writing broken neck for now. You can decide how it got started.” He yawned through his words. “Goo’night “

The door to the first-floor bedroom was closed. I opened it. It had been her room. By moonlight I saw the basket of gifts from my mother, still untouched, on the dressing table. Over a rocking chair back were folded the sweater and plaid skirt I’d first seen Joanna Cadmean wearing.

“Justin?”

His voice came from a chair in the dark corner. Then Dollard stood and his silver hair moved into the light. “Justin? Did they take her away yet?” His face was ashy; his pupils black, distended to the rims of his eyes.

“No”

“Justin,
God
, this is dreadful! Dreadful!”

“Yes.”

“I should have suspected…”

“Yes? Suspected what?”

“She was just standing there by the door, up there. Then she opened it. And went out on the balcony. And just
leaned
…and…then she was gone. Just gone! I
heard
it, Justin. My God! She was mad…mad. Completely insane!” His mouth opened, gulping air like a swimmer.

“Yes. You already told me she was insane.” I stooped to the lamp and twisted the knob. At the click, Dollard stepped backward and covered his eyes. He wore all gray, gray sweater and gray slacks. He looked old. I said, “I’d like you to take me up to the study now and show me how it happened.” I turned toward the door and let him pass through first. One of his hands kept rubbing up and down against his arm.

The door to the balcony was open, the tower was cold as outdoors. Its huge gray telescope shadowed a wall. The instrument pointed straight out across the black lake, pointed at the summer house that had once belonged to Bainton Ames. Silent in the room, we listened to a siren coming nearer.

As Dollard told me where she had stood and how she had moved, I stepped out onto the pine-plank balcony. Yellow crutches lay on its floor. Caught in the rough log rail were tiny threads of white wool. I leaned over. Far down, directly beneath me, gleamed the silver car, beside it the white motionless shape. Beyond the pines, from the foot of the hill, came headlights bouncing. Foster’s men and the photographer. It was still too soon for Captain Fulcher. I walked back inside, pulling the door closed with the edge of my sweater.

“Have a seat, Rowell.”

“We’ll talk downstairs. It’s too cold up here.”

“In a minute, please. It
is
cold. Why were you and she up here?”

“She asked me. She insisted I look at something. Something to do with Cloris.”

“What?”

“She never said.” Rowell sank down in a chrome and black leather chair beside a desk heaped with papers and maps of the stars. He said, “I don’t think there was anything to show me. She began talking wildly. And then, she jumped! For God’s sake, can’t we do this in the morning? I’m upset, Justin, God!”

Watching him, I lit a cigarette. I found a paper cup with some water in it to use as an ashtray. “Why were you over here at all?”

“She called me. I’ve already explained all this. She begged me to come.”

“Why?”

He didn’t answer.

“Why did you come?” I was speaking as softly as he was. “An insane woman you clearly dislike calls you up at night, and you drive all the way over here from North Hillston? Why?”

He still didn’t answer, and I turned and leaned down to the telescope sight, and looked through it, into blackness. Pushing it upward, I saw, very clearly, cold and unblinking stars. “Why, Rowell?”

When I turned back to him, Dollard thrust his head forward, the shadows behind him moving. “It’s a private matter.”

“Not anymore.”

His hand pressed hard against his arm. “Justin. She was hysterical. She was raving.”

“So you tell me. I’m asking you, about what? What was she raving about before she just turned around on those crutches and pulled herself up and over the rail? In her raving, did she happen to say why she suddenly decided to commit suicide? While you stood and watched? Why did you happen to be here when the impulse just struck?”

He stood. “What’s the matter with you, Justin? For God’s sake!”

“Tell me why you came here.”

“You’re the one who let her into my house! Into Cloris’s bedroom! You listened to her insane mutterings!”

“So did you, some years back. They weren’t so insane then, if I recall your comments to the press.”

For a long time, Rowell stared at me, his eyes protuberant, his face tight. Then he stepped quickly forward and touched his hand to my shoulder. “Justin, what I’m going to say is in absolute confidence. I want that understood.”

I didn’t speak, or move. Finally he stepped back and turned his eyes to the wall of books. His voice was broken by struggles with silence. “When I first knew Joanna Griffin, she was quite young. I was young. We were thrown together by her…involvement with, well, apparently, you have read all about that. She…fell in love with me, I guess you’d have to say. And, well, we had a brief, a
brief
relationship. I broke it off. She was not a stable person, even then. As she proved. Now, that was thirty decades ago! And now!” He stopped suddenly, walked back, and sat in the chair. “Now she comes back to Hillston and begins making incredible accusations. By involving you, she involves the police. And then she does this!” He stabbed his finger toward the balcony. “I don’t know why!”

I said, “I don’t believe you, Rowell.’’

When he raised his eyes, they were as glazy as marbles. “What?”

“I don’t believe she committed suicide.” I dropped the cigarette into the paper cup and listened while it hissed in the water. “I think you killed her.”

“What did you say?”

“I said, you killed her.”

He whispered at me, “You’re as mad as she was. In God’s name, why should you think such a thing?”

“Why?” I leaned against the books and watched him. “Because I know what her accusations were. Because she made them to me. And to Lieutenant Mangum. Because I know she believed, absolutely believed, that you are guilty of murder. You killed Bainton Ames in order to marry Cloris.”

A dusty red mottled his cheeks, spreading up his face to where the vein in his temple jumped.

“I think she believed you killed Cloris too.”

“Oh, my God!” All the color disappeared from his face.

“Because Mrs. Cadmean would never have ‘asked’ you to come over here, would never have ‘asked’ you to come up in this tower with her, because she was deathly afraid of you. Afraid you were going to kill
her
, too! That’s right. So strong was her conviction that her sister-in-law came to my office Monday to tell me about it.” As I went on, Dollard’s face froze, like the face of a man put under a spell, “
Because
, Rowell, Lieutenant Mangum just told me he was over here this evening, and he spoke to Joanna Cadmean and she was not at all in a suicidal state. She was getting ready to go to bed. She had no intentions of inviting you over. And I think a check of the toll calls out of this house tonight is going to prove it.”

Outside, light jumped up from the flash of the photographer’s camera. I could feel Dollard’s eyes frozen on me as I moved out of the room onto the balcony. Down on the driveway, I saw Foster crawl around the front of the Mercedes. I called, “Etham,” and the willowy black man leapt to his feet and rammed his hands into the pockets of the sheepskin coat. “Yeah, what?”

I called down, “Thanks, okay? As soon as you’re through, they can take her.”

“Can I get up there?”

“Come on when you’re ready.”

Rowell sat rigid in the black chair, breathing with his mouth open.

He said, “Justin, why are you doing this to me? I don’t understand.”

“Why not? You had already called here yesterday and threatened the woman. You came here tonight, and forced, or cajoled, your way in. You ordered her to keep quiet about her premonitions, just as you just now ordered me to keep quiet about your having seduced her. And when she told you she
knew
you were guilty, you shoved her over the balcony. That’s all. She probably climbed up here to try to escape you. I expect if she hadn’t struck your car, you might have simply driven off and left her, assuming we’d call it an accident. Just as people thought Bainton Ames’s drowning was an accident.”

A noise came from Dollard’s throat and his hands squeezed on the chrome armrests.

I said, “I’ll try hard, but maybe I won’t be able to prove you killed Ames. Just as Walter Stanhope wasn’t able to prove it.”

Startled, his head jerked up.

“But, Rowell, I
can
convict you of killing Joanna Cadmean. And I will.”

“I really believe you mean this,” he whispered. “You’re serious! I’m your
family
.” He came fast out of the chair, his voice louder. “After all,
all
, you’ve already done to hurt your mother, you can’t mean to do this! This will kill her!”

“It will hurt her to hear what you’ve done, yes.”

Suddenly he made a sound like a laugh, derisive and sharp. “This is insane! Justin, think! Even the accusation could do irreparable harm. And not only to me!” His indignant expression darkened abruptly and his face was purple. “I’m not listening to any more of this. This is intolerable! Nobody in his right mind would put up with it.”