Degree of Guilt (38 page)

‘Sure.’ He paused. ‘What about dinner?’

‘I’m kind of tired. Think you could fix macaroni and cheese? Elena would probably help.’

‘How about ordering pizza? I’ve got some work to do on the computer.’

Terri looked at him. ‘Just no pepperoni, okay? Elena peels it off.’

When the pizza arrived, only Richie’s half was pepperoni. There had been no calls on voice mail. ‘Too bad,’ Richie said in sympathy. ‘But I think it really is like I said.’

Four hours later, when Terri checked for the seventh time, there had been no messages at all, and Richie was asleep.

Silently, Terri undressed, put on a long T-shirt. She lay next to Richie in their bed, watching the red numbers of the alarm clock mark the minutes she could not sleep.

At one forty-five, she was still awake.

The telephone rang.

Terri started, and then tried to reach over the alarm clock to stop the ringing before Richie awoke.

‘Hello.’

Terri heard a faint hum, but no voice. Beside her, Richie was stirring. ‘What the hell . . .’

Terri placed one hand on his shoulder. ‘Hello,’ she tried again.

For a moment more, Terri heard the hum, and then a woman asked, ‘Is this Teresa Peralta?’

Terri felt herself tense. ‘Yes. It is.’

‘I thought I recognized your voice.’ There was a moment’s pause. ‘I’m sorry to call like this. But I couldn’t sleep.’

‘How did you get my home number?’

‘I started calling information everywhere in the Bay area.’ The woman gave a shaky laugh. ‘If I hadn’t gotten Berkeley on my third try, I might have stopped.’

‘That’s all right.’ Terri hesitated. ‘Can you tell me who you are?’

‘Yes.’ Another pause. ‘My name’s Marcy Linton.’

Terri thought for a moment. ‘The writer?’

‘You’ve read me?’

‘Yes.’ Terri felt delayed surprise. ‘In
The New Yorker
.’

‘That’s very nice.’ There was a genuine politeness in the voice, as if, in the middle of the night, Marcy Linton was glad that a stranger had read her stories. ‘And, of course, I watched you on television. It touched me.’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes.’ A final pause. ‘You were talking to me.’

Three mornings before the preliminary hearing, Teresa Peralta found herself in a rented Ford Escort with snow tires, steering through a valley in the Rocky Mountains – jagged peaks of black and white, wooded hillsides so steep they seemed to tumble toward the dirt road. To her left, a sheer embankment dropped to a glistening stream, whose gray and silver eddies were broken by logs or branches that had run aground in shallow water and dammed more clumps of driftwood behind them, white with new-fallen snow. The road ahead was covered with ice; in the morning sun, the white terrain was close to blinding.

Terri downshifted. She had not thought to bring sunglasses; she squinted at the road, steering gingerly, tense with the effort of driving for the first time on an ice-slick surface. A frightened deer skittered from the roadside at the sound of tires crunching, the hum of an engine. There was no one in sight.

As she drove, the mountains at the valley’s end became higher and closer; it enhanced her sense of smallness and inadequacy. Her sole consolation was that she was learning to recognize those feelings and to fight her way through them. Marcy Linton, Terri was sure, must be even more apprehensive than Terri herself.

Linton was writing a novel, she had explained, in a cabin ten miles west of Aspen, owned by her uncles. It was where she had brought Mark Ransom, she said, four years before. On the telephone, she had left it at that.

Twenty minutes farther, with the valley’s end looming in her windshield, Terri found the gravel drive.

It wound to the left, down a hill, over a narrow bridge of railroad ties that crossed the stream, and then through more pine trees, until it ended in a circle looping past a wooden shed that housed a new Jeep Cherokee. By the shed were more trappings of rural life in winter – a mini snowplow, a stack of cordwood covered by a tarpaulin. To the side of the circle, a freshly shoveled stone walkway climbed a gradual hill, to the cabin.

It was two stories of wood and glass, with a stone chimney and an atelier, where, Terri assumed, Marcy Linton wrote. Through the glass front door, a slender woman peered out at Terri.

The woman was dressed for the outdoors – boots, jeans, green sweater – and her long strawberry-blond hair was pulled back. But the heavy clothes made her look too slight; there was something about her that seemed more suited to the city. As the woman stepped outside, Terri saw more clearly her pale skin, probing hazel eyes, and delicate face, pensive and lightly freckled. She was startlingly young.

‘I’m Marcy Linton,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you could find me.’

Her voice was clear but almost whispery. When she extended her hand, it felt fragile, as if Terri were cupping a bird in her palm. ‘Thank you,’ Terri answered. ‘I’m glad you could
call
me.’

Linton gazed at her boots, as if checking them for snow. ‘Have you ever written?’ she asked, and then glanced up at Terri. ‘I know that sounds foolish, and a little vain, but I think most writers survive partly by imagining how others must feel. The way you described my feelings was so perfect that it was like calling someone who already knew.’

Terri shook her head. ‘I’ve never written – I wouldn’t know how to start.’ She gave Linton a curious look. ‘I didn’t expect you to be so young and to have written so much.’

‘I’m twenty-eight.’ Linton tilted her head. ‘And you?’

‘Twenty-nine.’

Linton looked off into the distance. After a time, she said, ‘Whenever I imagined talking about this, it was to a white policeman with the blank, somewhat cruel expression of an Aztec carving.’ She paused. ‘I suppose I made him look like Ransom.’

Terri appraised her. Linton could put feelings into words, and Terri liked her instinctively. But they were still standing outside, as if lingering on the threshold of Linton’s story, more painful than she made it sound.

‘Do you have coffee?’ Terri asked. ‘I’m pretty cold.’

‘Oh, sure.’ Linton sounded chastened. ‘Come on in.’

The inside was more elaborate than Terri had imagined: a stone floor of odd-shaped pieces; a marble fireplace; high ceilings; an expanse of glass window, which framed the mountains. There were animal skins on the floor, and above the fireplace, the head of an elk stared into space.

Linton followed Terri’s eyes. ‘My uncles kill things,’ she said. ‘I can’t work in this room.’

Terri nodded. ‘I’ve never been able to imagine hunting. Or even owning a gun.’

Linton gazed at the elk. ‘Oh, I own a gun now. But not for that.’

Terri paused a moment, wondering what next to say. ‘Do you ski at all?’ she asked.

‘Not really.’ Linton did not turn. ‘I used to come here for the quiet.’

To Terri, Linton’s voice carried a trace of sadness, perhaps loss. Then Linton shrugged, as if to herself. ‘Do you like anything in your coffee?’

For an instant, Terri thought of Melissa Rappaport, making coffee as she avoided mention of Mark Ransom. Even here, where Ransom had come but once, Terri felt him as an unnamed presence who had broken the quiet, the reason Mary Linton had a gun.

‘Just black,’ Terri answered. ‘Thanks.’

Linton disappeared.

Terri sat on a couch behind a heavy oak coffee table. On its lowever shelf were two volumes of poetry, a thick book on impressionist painting, and a collection of Stieglitz photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe, which included several nudes. The volumes lent an urban sensibility, the slightest hint of female sensuality, as if to subvert the oppressive maleness of the room itself.

‘He liked this room, he told me.’

Reentering, Linton spoke in matter-of-fact tones. Her voice had none of Rappaport’s pained ironic intellect; it was as if she were relating puzzling scraps at the margins of her memory, looking for clues to what had happened. She held a mug of coffee out to Terri, then sat on a heavy chair across from her.

‘So,’ she asked, ‘will I have to testify?’

‘Only if you want to.’ Terri hesitated. ‘We won’t make you.’

Linton considered that. Finally, she said, ‘But the only way to help is to be a witness.’ Her voice was measured and subdued.

‘Yes,’ Terri answered. ‘I’m afraid so.’

Linton nodded, almost to herself; it was as if the silent gesture helped her absorb the truth. ‘Will it be public?’

‘If Judge Masters thinks it’s relevant to whether Ransom tried to rape Mary Carelli.’ Terri hesitated. ‘And if she’s even thinking about throwing out the case, she’ll want it public – for her own sake. To keep from getting pilloried as a biased woman judge.’

Linton sipped her coffee. ‘That’s a lot of pressure,’ she said. ‘On the judge, I mean.’

There was something tired in the phrase, as if the thought of too much pressure on anyone made Linton feel enervated. Terri had first encountered Linton’s short stories while riffling through
New Yorkers
in the waiting room of her obstetrician: lately, Linton’s characters seemed to spend more time deciding whether to open their apartment door than they did on the other side of it. Terri, who admired Linton’s sensitivity, found the increasing tentativeness of her people distressing, as if they bled strength from Terri herself. Yet, looking at Linton, Terri felt that whatever inner balance Linton had achieved belonged to
her
, and that Terri had no right to challenge it.

‘There’s a lot of pressure on everyone involved,’ Terri said at last. ‘If you do this, it’s got to be for yourself. Because everyone else in that courtroom will have their own agenda, and they’re going to play for keeps. Even Chris, my boss.’ Terri hesitated. ‘Perhaps Chris most of all.’

Linton stared at the floor. ‘It’s hard to know what to do with this.’

In these few stark words, Terri felt a deep loneliness. ‘Do you think,’ she ventured, ‘that we can just talk it through?’

Linton looked up at her. ‘And afterwards, if I don’t want to testify?’

‘Then it never leaves here.’ Terri paused. ‘I just stick it where I stick my own stuff. The things
I
never talk about.’

Linton seemed to search Terri’s face. Then she said simply, ‘Let me tell you about it.’

Why, Terri wondered, was she herself so much on edge. She took one deep breath, nodded, and continued to sip her coffee, watching Linton over the rim.

‘I was twenty-four,’ Linton began, ‘and three years out of Barnard. I’d come here to write the novel I’m hoping to write now.’

The clipped last sentence, Terri thought, had an undertone of damage. ‘What is it about?’ Terri asked. ‘Or is that a dumb question?’

‘Not dumb, just difficult.’ Linton looked at her shoes again. ‘Perhaps I’m a short story writer, not a novelist. Some people just can’t do both.’ Linton glanced up at Terri. ‘Mark Ransom could, of course.’

Terri hesitated. Part of Linton seemed disjointed, shaken beneath the calm. ‘Did you admire him?’ she asked.

‘As a novelist, yes. Our sensibilities were totally different, and his politics weren’t mine. But page to page, he was a master of narrative and character. His characters weren’t slight, at least not his men – he could make them struggle, breathe, quiver with surprise and change for twelve, thirteen hundred pages.’ Linton shook her head. ‘We were nothing alike, and I thought there was nothing like him.’

‘How did you meet?’

‘Here, that one time. At a writer’s conference.’ Linton’s voice grew quiet. ‘I timed my arrival in Aspen to coincide with two events – the beginning of my novel and meeting Mark Ransom.’

Terri felt puzzled. ‘Did you expect to spend any time with him?’ When Linton looked somehow hurt, Terri added quickly, ‘What I mean is that someone like Ransom must have had friends here, people competing for his attention, dinner plans in advance.’

A quiet pride crossed Linton’s face. ‘I’d already been published in
The New Yorker
. People knew my work.’ Then, as if to herself, she added softly, ‘Young writers have no sense of proportion. If they
did
, they’d never write.’

Terri tried to imagine Mark Ransom caring about Marcy Linton’s delicate fiction; it was like van Gogh being intrigued by Japanese watercolors. Finally, she asked, ‘Did Mark Ransom know your work?’

‘He knew
of
my work.’ Linton’s voice grew softer yet. ‘Before the conference, John Whitley, my editor at the magazine, called Mark himself. To tell him to “take care of me.”’ Linton looked away. ‘John is a very nice person. When he later asked if Mark had caught up with me, and I said yes, he looked quite pleased.’

Again, Terri thought, a few oblique sentences conveyed much more: the small literary world to which Linton aspired; the naïveté of Linton’s benefactor; her desire for approval; her fear of shattered friendships and notoriety had she denounced Mark Ransom as a rapist. Except for the exotica of Linton’s chosen milieu, Linton had limned in a moment the dilemma of any woman raped by a respected man in a small town or university, or after an office party. It made Terri feel small.

‘What is it?’ Linton asked.

Terry shrugged off her depression. ‘Sympathy pains, I guess. I had a vision of this benign, white-haired editor, so pleased that Mark had honored his request, and how lonely that must have made you.’

‘John has black hair and is far too thin to look benign. But yes, I did feel lonely.’

‘The morning I saw John, my mouth felt swollen, and I still hurt inside.’ Linton paused, staring down at her lap. ‘When Ransom did it, I wasn’t wet.’

Terri realized that she had crossed her arms. Quietly, she asked, ‘How did it happen?’

Linton nodded slightly; the small gesture seemed irrelevant to Terri’s question, as if Linton were reviewing some thought of her own. ‘I was so vain,’ she said softly, ‘to have published at twenty-three. I thought what I did with words was so extraordinary that even Mark Ransom would want to read them.’