Uncivil Seasons (5 page)

Preston said, “Nothing,” and began tossing undershirts around.

I wandered out to the bathroom. Nobody’s been taking a bath, because the tub was full of small gray velvet sacks. I opened one of them.

“Hey, Cuddy, you want to hang on to Preston? We have a problem here.”

“What you got?”

I brought the sack back into the bedroom and pulled out an ornate dinner fork. “Cloris Dollard’s silverware.”

Cuddy said to Preston, “I don’t guess you got it with Green Stamps, did you?”

Downtown, we booked an even more morose Preston Pope. I left Cuddy with him and went to visit Joanna Cadmean.

It was snowing so hard by the time I’d driven to the lake, I had trouble finding the turnoff to the Cadmean compound. Although I’d often looked at it from the bedroom of the Whetstone lake cabin, I’d never really seen it, because when you’re as wealthy as the Cadmeans, you can afford a lot of trees. Even when my mother’s people had had money, they hadn’t had that kind of money.

In the black water, a covered sailboat, a motorboat, and a canoe were shadows, moored for winter beside two long docks. A beach (for which somebody had trucked in a great deal of white sand at considerable cost) led up a slope of pines, and at the top, lights looming, sat the huge lodge with its big windows that looked, over the heads of the pines, down on the lake below and the smaller houses that ringed the water.

Inside, the lodge turned out to be the handsome, rustic sort the rich liked to build in the Appalachians and out West in the 1920s, with the cavernous stone fireplace, bare log beams girdering high ceilings, and a few bluish American Indian rugs thrown here and there. A porch stretched halfway around the first floor, and an open balcony across the second. In the middle of the roof was an odd octagonal turret with an outside walkway, like a watchtower. The furnishings were spartan.

I’d recognized my mother’s car among the others clustered along a driveway lit by the porch lights and already glazed with snow. Mother’s old sable coat hung on the coatrack in the hall, and my mother, a small, still-pretty woman of a buoyant disposition, sat uncomfortably swallowed by a bent-willow chair near the fire. She was chattering away at someone on the couch when the young woman, Briggs, led me in.

“Justin! Whatever in the world are you doing out here tonight? Oh, Briggs, you invited him. I didn’t know you knew Briggs, honey. My God, your coat’s all torn up. Joanna, this is my son, Justin. He’s a policeman. I wanted him to play the piano or use his imagination or something, and Rowell wanted him to be governor, but he’s a policeman. I don’t know why he ever went into such a morbid profession in the first place, though I suppose you could say his father did cut open people’s brains for a living.”

“Lt. Savile, hello. It was nice of you to come.”

I came around the couch to meet the famous mystic. Expecting….I don’t know what I expected. Madame Blavatsky? Carmen, in Mexican clothes with gold earrings and big clay beads she’d made herself, ruffling a deck of tarot cards? Saint Theresa?

What I saw was an unexpectedly beautiful middle-aged woman dressed in a pastel sweater and tweed skirt very much like those all my mother’s friends wore on winter days at home. But despite her ordinary clothes, the chignon in which she wore her waved light hair and the sculpted cast of her features made me think at once of some Archaic Athena, some goddess quietly standing to support a temple. And always afterward, from that first look until the end, I thought of Joanna Cadmean as such a statue, Delphian, cool, and impenetrable as stone.

Her right foot, thickly wrapped in Ace bandages, the toes covered by a white sock, was propped up on the redwood coffee table. In her lap was a spiral-bound artist’s sketchbook; with a pencil she was drawing faces rapidly, swirling from face to face without lifting the point and, strangely enough, without even looking at what she was drawing. If there was anything else “odd” about her (other than her beauty), it was her stillness. Her large, wide-set eyes—not at all the sharp Svengalian jabs of light I associated with psychic powers from old movies—were a deep, still gray. Her voice was peaceful, quiet, and slow, nothing like the intense, animated cheer habitual with Southern women like my mother, to whom she now said, “Your son came out to see me, Peggy. I invited him out.”

As I bent to take Mrs. Cadmean’s hand, she quickly turned the page of the sketchbook over to a blank sheet.

“You asked him? Whatever for?” My mother tilted her head for me to kiss as she spoke. “I ought to be grateful. I haven’t seen him in ages, except on the stage. He’s in the Hillston Players. Weren’t you in that a long time ago? They just did
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. He played the one that gets turned into a donkey. I saw him there, and then at Cloris’s funeral, and now I run into him all the way out here. You didn’t go to Cloris’s services, Joanna.”

‘“No. I went to the grave.”

“Well, and now you’re stuck in Hillston. Joanna fell off a damn horse and broke her leg.”

Mrs. Cadmean smiled. “Sprained my ankle. Your mother brought me a care package.” Beside the couch was one of the wicker baskets my mother called her “Shut-in Surprises.” This one included more historical romances than I could imagine a woman like Joanna Cadmean wanting to read.

“It was my fault,” Briggs was saying to my mother. “I shouldn’t have put her on Manassas.”

Mrs. Cadmean pulled a plaid blanket down over her legs. “No, it’s not the horse’s fault. I started thinking something upsetting, and I frightened him. He wanted to get away from me, that’s all. So he threw me.”

“Well, that’s a weird way to put it,” my mother said. “But that’s the way Joanna was even when she was little.” Mother turned to us. “She used to tell us that we were
colors
. Really! She’d look at us, like this,
hard
, and she’d see these different colors around us like a neon sign. If she didn’t like a boy’s color, well! She wouldn’t have a thing to do with him. Oh, God, Joanna, remember when you told Mrs. Mott at church she had a round lump like a grapefruit in her stomach, and she was dead of cancer a month later?”

I asked Briggs if she had any whiskey.

Mother sang her nervous laugh. “Why, yes, it is so bitterly cold, why don’t you just bring me and Justin a teeny, tiny sip of something, Briggs?” She held up thumb and forefinger to measure a quarter inch.

Briggs left the room, and Mother went on. “I was a sort of robin’s egg blue, wasn’t I?”

“You still are.” Mrs. Cadmean smiled and began to draw again.

“Good! I was afraid maybe you’d say I’d turned all smudgy black inside.” Mother touched her finger to the lace wrinkles at the edge of her eyes. She started to remember what colors other childhood friends had looked like to Joanna, while I waited for my drink. My father and I had grown so accustomed to Mother’s Ferris wheel of language, that on the rare occasions he and I had been alone together, we’d been astonished by the silence and could never think how to get past it. We’d play eighteen holes of golf with fewer words than Mother would use to describe a wait at the bus stop. She’d been by my father’s hospital bed talking of orioles that had come that morning to her birdfeeder, when he’d died, silently, his hand on hers. “…And Joanna, what was so spooky was up in Judy Fanshaw’s room, you were
eight
, when you said Cloris was stark white with a red rim, like a blood-red moon! And it gave us all the creeps, and
now
, all these years later, here Cloris is, murdered! And the newspaper came over here, Justin, to interview Joanna, but she wouldn’t talk to them.”

I sat down near the fire. “Briggs said you live on St. Simons Island now, Mrs. Cadmean. It’s beautiful there. How long since you’ve lived in Hillston?”

“Fifteen years. I left after my husband, Charles, died.” Her handsome head was still as marble. “But I come back from time to time. I was here last summer.”

Mother scrambled out of her deep chair to help Briggs with the drinks. “I was just thinking last week, Joanna, how Cloris broke down in the middle of your Charles’s funeral, because that summer she’d lost poor Bainton in that freak accident on the lake, and now here you’d lost your husband too. Can you believe that was fifteen years ago? Now, here we are at Cloris’s…” Mother sipped away a fourth of my already minuscule drink before handing it to me.

The shadows of the flames from the cave-like hearth darkened the pallor of Mrs. Cadmean’s face as she turned toward me, wincing as she jostled her ankle. “It was to inquire about Cloris Dollard’s death that I asked you here.”

Mother said, “The attorney general has assigned him exclusively to Cloris’s investigation.” The attorney general was Mother’s cousin.

Mrs. Cadmean said, “Really, Mr. Savile?”

“Oh, Joanna, call him Justin.” Mother saw me look inquiringly at my empty glass; she put her arm through mine and led me across the shadowy vaulted room to the huge window at the far end, trilling back, “Ladies, excuse us. Let me just go take a look at this snow. I’m a little worried about driving. But I do have my chains. Do you have yours, Justin?” When we reached the window, she spoke sotto voce. “Will you please be careful?” She nodded at my glass.

“I’m fine.”

“Jay, please remember the strings Rowell had to pull to get your license back.” Jay was my childhood name, now used in emotional emergencies.

“I’m fine.”

Mother pulled away, her nostrils tightened, and she called out, “Look! It really is snowing hard. The ground’s completely white.”

Briggs came over to watch the swirl of heavy flakes fall into the arc of floodlights. White streaked invisibly into the white sand and vanished into the lake. Briggs said, “I can’t remember the last time Hillston had snow like this.”

Mother’s eyes blinked. “Six years ago,” she said. She ran for her coat. “Joanna, I’m going to leave here before it gets too deep. Justin, please don’t stay long. Rowell’s coming to go over some family papers, and I think you should be there.” She saw I was tempted to say something, and hurried away to the couch. “Stay off that foot, Joanna. And if that newspaperman pesters you again, why don’t I ask Rowell to call up
The Star
and have him stopped? Briggs, would you like one of Mirabell’s puppies? She had eleven! Isn’t that a very Irish thing for an English setter to do?”

After Mother left, Briggs excused herself to go prepare a lecture.

I said, “Are you old enough to be an astronomy professor?”

She put another log on the fire. “I’m twenty-nine. How old do I have to be?”

“You don’t look it. You’re only five years younger than I am.”

She said, “You’re thirty-four? You don’t act it. Good night.”

I poked at the fire with the iron prongs. “I don’t think the professor likes me, Mrs. Cadmean.”

She smiled at me, the gray eyes steady. “She certainly gave that impression. Go ahead and smoke if you like.” She said this just as I was telling my hand to move to my pocket for my cigarette case, and wondering if I should.

I sat down in the big bent-willow armchair beside her. “What would you like to know, Mrs. Cadmean?”

“Please call me Joanna. We’ve met before. Not exactly met. You won’t remember. It was a very painful time for you. I was at the cemetery the day of your father’s burial. I liked your father. He was perceptive.” The eyes smiled. “Not a word I use lightly.”

“Thank you.” I lit the cigarette. “Yes, it was a painful time.” If she had seen me at the cemetery, she had seen me hit Rowell Dollard hard enough to make him stumble back into a wreath of lilies, hit him when he told me that if it weren’t for my drinking, my father wouldn’t be dead, my mother’s life wouldn’t be ruined.

Joanna nodded, as if she were following along with my memories. There must be that advantage in having a reputation as a psychic; you simply sit there and nod, and people believe you are seeing straight through to their innermost hearts, either because they want you to, or because they desperately do not. “You look much better now,” she said, “than that day.”

“Thank you. Let’s hope so. I was a raving maniac back then.”

“That’s not true.” She spoke softly and with a compelling self-assurance; all her remarks had this odd quiet authority. On her lap her long white fingers moved over the coarse wool of the blanket, like the fingers of a blind woman touching a face. “Tell me about Cloris’s death,” she said. And picking back up the sketchbook, she began to draw again.

“Well, I’m not sure what you want to know. Do you mean police details? She was killed between ten and midnight, a week ago Sunday, at her home. In fact, she’d left early from the last performance of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, the one my mother was telling you we did here in town.”

“You played Bottom. I’ve always liked Bottom for feeling so comfortable in fairyland. I’m sorry to interrupt you. She left early?”

“Sometime after the second intermission. She told someone then that she had an upset stomach.”

Mrs. Cadmean looked over at the tap of snow gusts hitting against the window. “Is the theory that she surprised a burglar?”

“Yes. This evening we recovered the silverware and have arrested a suspect.”

She didn’t seem much interested in this fact. “Some coins were taken? I think I read in the paper.”

“A collection that had belonged to her first husband, Bainton Ames.”

“Yes. Bainton had showed me his coins often.”

“They were kept in a safe in her bedroom. It was flimsy, easy to jimmy open.”

“She was beaten over the head, is that right?”

“With a trophy from her desk. The blow killed her. But the killer also smothered her. With a pillow.”

“Another play,” Mrs. Cadmean said.

I assumed she meant
Othello
, but the plot of a jealous husband’s suffocating an unfaithful wife seemed to have little bearing on the Dollards.

I watched the beautiful profile stare silently into the fire, her eyes darkening, unfathomable as the black lake outside. “Did you find a diary, Justin?”

“Pardon? A diary? No.” I stood up. “Why are you asking me all this about Cloris’s death? Miss Cadmean said you think someone is trying to kill
you
. Do you think they’re the same person?”