Uncivil Seasons (8 page)

His mouth twisted to a sneer. “People?”

“They don’t say it critically.”

“They shouldn’t say it at all.” He put his hand on the door’s brass bar. “How I felt about her isn’t any of their business. And it isn’t any of yours.” His voice got loud enough to echo off the marble walls of the large empty space. “And I suggest you spend a little less time listening to Joanna Cadmean’s hocus-pocus, and a little more convicting the thug who killed Cloris!” The senator banged open the door, and his umbrella caught in it as it swung shut. When I tried to help, he jerked it free and started down the steps. At the curb, rain was streaming past the tires of the silver Mercedes he’d left parked there.

I was turning away, when, from behind the small, antique cannon fixed to the side of the stone steps, someone darted suddenly at Dollard with a long stick. I yelled “Rowell!” and sprang down after him, but I saw before I reached her that it was Sister Resurrection, even this late, haunting the streets, assaulting people with the promise of apocalypse. She was dressed as she always was. Rain beads hung from her knots of hair and ran down her shapeless sweaters, soaking into her split and laceless tennis shoes. Rain, like the world and the flesh, had meant nothing to her for many years.

She had her cross pointed at Rowell and was chanting as he shoved past her to pull his car door open, “It won’t be long! The dragon coming! I heard the voice say, ‘It won’t be long.’ That old serpent, he got the chain in his teeth, and he snap it! He
snap
it, and crawling out of the lake of fire and brimstone. He shall be
loosed
out of his prison!”

“Get back!” Rowell, his face white, was in his car now, tugging on the door. “Will you get her away!” Sister Resurrection touched her hand, shriveled as a claw, to his. She had a hissing whisper. “God getting ready. We shall arise anew! Say yes! Say yes!” He shook the skinny arm off his sleeve, slammed the door, and left her, fallen to the curb.

I tented my coat over my head and leaned down. “Sister, you all right? You shouldn’t be out in this cold rain. Come on. It’s late.” I pulled her to her feet. She was weightless and tense as wire, and the smell of her clothes in the rain was even fouler than usual. “You go on home. It’s late.” I pointed down the sidewalk toward the Methodist church two blocks east, where the minister had made her a place in the basement near the furnace. “You’ll catch cold.”

I doubt she had heard me, but, still chanting her garbled revelations, she turned, and with her quick stiff stride, hurried away, her makeshift cross in one hand, and Rowell Dollard’s black umbrella in the other, jutted out before her like a sword.

The Hillston police are stationed in an annex connected through the basement to our new municipal building, although most HPD offices (like the detective division) have been moved into the main building itself. The lab people never come upstairs if they can help it, and Etham Foster, who runs the lab, would just as soon nobody ever came down to the basement, either. He’s a wary, saturnine black man of about forty, who looks like the basketball player he was; he had gotten himself through college playing that game, and said he had never picked up a basketball again after the day they handed him his diploma. When I walked into his lab, his long fingers were picking with tweezers at the bottom of Preston’s boot. And Cuddy, chewing on a glazed doughnut, was standing like a stork against the wall, watching him.

Cuddy looked up. “Look who’s here, come down to pay a call. You and the Senator wrap it all up?”

I said, “Sister Resurrection just scared him to death.”

Foster glanced at us, then went back to placing bits of fuzz in a plastic bag as if he were alone in the place.

“Good,” Cuddy said.

“She was out front under that overhang, just about frozen.”

“You know why she stays around this spot so much? She’s got a grudge against the powers that be, and this is where they be.”

Foster turned his back on us and switched on the light under his microscope. Cuddy went on. “You know Sister Resurrection used to have a kid, a long, long time ago? Yeah, ain’t that downright amazing to think of? But he went bad, raised hell, and got himself shot.”

“I hadn’t heard that.”

“Well, this is a little bit of local East Hillston lore that wouldn’t necessarily have come to your attention over on Catawba Drive.”

“Who shot him?”

He licked glaze off his fingers. “Cop.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Sure. I’m a great kidder.” He walked around to Foster. “Okay, Doctor Dunk-It, what you got?”

Foster slid in another slide without looking up. “No yellow fibers anywhere on your man’s shoes.”

“Good. And no prints of his on the silver, either.”

Foster said, “Doesn’t mean a thing.”

His drawer was filled with fragments of Cloris Dollard’s life: fuzz from her yellow carpet, gravel from her driveway, hairs from her cat, blood from the top of a trophy that said she was the best woman golfer in Hillston. Etham Foster knew Mrs. Dollard as precisely as my father had known where against the skull to place the drill. I said, “Tell me about who did it, Etham.”

“I told you. Man was careful.”

We had little more than that to go on. Since Cloris Dollard had never bothered locking her house, we didn’t even know whether her murderer had entered before or after she had come home. Her house was so sheltered by its grounds that no neighbor had seen or heard a thing, even if she’d struggled. And we’d lost nine hours before the Dollard maid’s arrival the next morning. We knew the upstairs phone had been yanked from its cord and that Cloris’s purse had been thrown in the grass by the stone gate, and we had a list of all Senator Dollard thought but wasn’t sure had been taken by whomever had pulled open all the drawers and cabinets in the handsome house and had left in its bedroom a dead woman.

I said, “Pros don’t kill people.”

Foster finished looking at a piece of glass taken out of Preston’s boot tread. “Didn’t say pro. Said careful.”

“Come on, can’t you give us
something
?”

“Give you a Marlboro butt off the driveway that wasn’t there more than a day, and nobody in the house smoked.”

“It’s too bad the neighbors and two ambulances and a half-dozen of V.D.’s new patrol cars drove all over the place before they called you.”

Foster said, “Right,” and would I mind not smoking in his lab, and Cuddy said, “He can’t be a detective without smoke coming out of his nose.” His eyes looked dull blue and angry. “Was Mrs. Dollard taking this guy on a guided tour or what? ‘Well, now you’ve loaded up the silver, and don’t forget that little TV, come on up in the bedroom ’cause I’ve got some jewelry and rare coins I think you’ll like, locked up in a little safe you probably wouldn’t even have noticed all on your own.’”

“Maybe she thought if she offered him things, he wouldn’t hurt her,” I said. “Maybe he only hit her because she went for the phone or maybe it started ringing and panicked him into hitting her.” I rubbed my hand against the back of my own skull. “Or, let’s try this possibility. He already knew the house, and knew her, and he meant to kill her.”
But who in the world would want to kill Cloris? She had more friends…

Cuddy said, “How tall was she?”

“Five nine and a quarter, plus heels.”

“Preston’s too short.”

Etham Foster looked back up. “You don’t know she was standing.”

“And Preston’s not strong enough, either. To pull her up on that bed—and what the crap for?—and shove down a pillow so hard he breaks her nose? I don’t believe Preston could do it, much less, he’s just not that goddamn mean!”

I was thinking of how Rowell had flicked Sister Resurrection from his sleeve as if she were a gnat, knocking her down on the curb. I said, “Maybe anybody can be that mean.”

Cuddy slapped his hand loud on the counter. “Oh, don’t start that dorkshit ‘everybody’s rotten under the thin ice’ moralizing again! The only thin ice you ever knew anything about, somebody served you in a whiskey glass!”

Unhurriedly, Foster walked away from us to open the refrigerator and take out a tube of somebody’s blood. My blush had brought sweat out over my lip. “Get off my back, Mangum, you’ve been picking at me since I got down here. Why are you so pissy?” We stared at each other, until he reached up and pulled on both his ears with his knuckly hands. “I’m scared,” he said, “the powers that be’re gonna railroad Preston because it’s easy. Nothing personal.”

“Except you think those powers’re all my kinsfolk. You’re a snob.”

He blew out a sigh, and then he laughed. “Whooee, Doctor D, listen to the white folk spat!” Foster ignored him and smeared the blood on his slide, and Cuddy tossed my overcoat at me and said, “Okay, Preppie, let’s get out of the man’s lab. Don’t you ever go home, Foster?”

Foster didn’t look up, but said, “Your man had big hands,” and he held up his own, fingers spread the way they would have stretched over a basketball. He added, “Shut the door.”

Upstairs, while Cuddy fed Mrs. Mitchell a cold hamburger, I told him more about my visit with Joanna Cadmean.

“She couldn’t be
that
good looking.”

“That’s not the point, Cuddy. The point is, she knows who killed Cloris. The same person who killed Cloris’s first husband.”

“How about Cloris’s second husband Uncle Rowell?”

“Maybe.”

He said, “I’m kidding.”

“I’m not.”

I am an insomniac like my father, who wandered around his house at night like a ghost and now, from time to time, visits mine. I have always had to drug myself unconscious with detective fiction: reading on about pure nastiness and someone else’s guilt until I can fall backward into nothing, like in snow. When I awaken in the night, I need to get the light on quickly and find my page before the real mysteries slip in, before I hear voices, before I see ghosts. When I was little, my father would come at my request with what he claimed was a magic stethoscope, and would check for signs of monsters lurking. I did not doubt his power to keep them away.

This morning I had a nightmare that woke me up. It was pitch-black night in this dream, and I was in our old sailboat out on the lake. Pine Hills Lake is fairly large—seven miles by almost two—but in my dream the lake was boundless, an unshored, black, flat expanse. Out of the silent dark, Bainton Ames’s powerboat suddenly came flying at me, his white bowlight shooting up and down across the water. Then the dream went up to that octagonal turret on top of Cadmean compound. Joanna Cadmean was standing there at its window, wearing the gray suit Cloris Dollard was found dead in. And now Mrs. Cadmean’s eyes did look like a mystic’s, unblinking, crazed. She had her arms out as if she were waiting to embrace someone. I knew it was her eyes making Ames’s boat head toward me. Someone was kicking away from his boat, churning foam. And I jumped too, just as the boat ripped through my bow, and exploded, and flames spumed along the water, rimming me in.

So, I was awake at five, and rather than fight for sleep until Cuddy came to pick me up, I put on a monogrammed robe Susan Whetstone had given me that I didn’t much like, and, my bare feet tiptoeing on the frigid wood steps, I felt my way down the three flights from my bedroom to my kitchen.

Most of my salary goes into the mortgage and upkeep and furnishing of a narrow Queen Anne brick house in the south part of Hillston that overlooks the lawn of a women’s junior college, named Frances Bush after its nineteenth-century founder: my house had once boarded her students. Five years ago, after I’d finished law school in Charlottesville, and confused everybody and annoyed Rowell by going to work for the Hillston police, I’d bought the house with money my father left me. No one wanted to live downtown then, and old houses there were cheaper than trailers. Obviously, as had been pointed out to me, it was too much house for a single man. It was also too much house to heat: the rooms were large and had high ceilings, and on each floor a big Victorian bow window sucked in the cold air robustly with a laissez-faire disdain for my modern fuel costs.

At five, then, in the kitchen, I wrapped myself in a blanket and ate leftover spaghetti while I finished reading the department’s copy of the old coroner’s report on Bainton Ames’s drowning accident that I had started studying before I went to bed, having found it in the vault of old files last night. There was little in it to suggest that Cloris’s first husband hadn’t died exactly as the coroner had concluded: accidental drowning while under the influence of alcohol. His dinner companions that night had confessed that the five of them had drunk five bottles of wine, and everyone knew that Bainton did not normally drink.

An unlucky accident, people had said, and added, “but not surprising.” Bainton Ames, a preoccupied, farsighted man—for decades chief industrial engineer of Cadmean Textiles—had his eyes focused on future machines, or ancient coins, or seventeenth-century music; the present had been a blur. When Ames drowned, people said preoccupation had killed him.

One midnight in mid-August fifteen years ago, he had left the Pine Hills Inn, where he’d dined with four men big in the Atlanta textiles business. Against their advice he’d set out across the lake in the twenty-two-foot inboard powerboat Cloris had given him as a lure into the world. Headed back to the Ames cottage on the opposite shore from the Inn, he had presumably slipped, knocked himself out, and fallen overboard. The boat had sped on pilotless into a marina, where it had blown up a gas tank. The explosion had terrified all the residents, and that summer, boating after dark was banned.

A few weeks later, they discovered that Ames had not been in the boat when it exploded, because a teenage boy, swimming around under old Briggs Cadmean’s long pier, had bumped into a swollen body bent around a piling, and had unhooked Ames’s jacket from the bolt it was caught on.

After her husband drowned, Cloris had their lake house closed. Two years later, she married the still-bachelor Rowell Dollard, and he and her daughters persuaded her to reopen it. Rowell bought a new boat.

My father, who every weekend for years had played violin in Ames’s amateur string quartet, was furious with his dead friend for ever having tried to pilot the Chris-Craft, even in the daytime. When Cloris later married Rowell, my father said, “Well, good Christ, Peggy, Cloris certainly runs the gamut. First Euclid. Now Mark Antony. Don’t you think your brother Rowell is a little too
relentlessly
athletic?”