The Snow Garden (29 page)

     Randall’s eyes shot to his. “Yes.”

     Tim sucked in his bottom lip, averting his eyes before he asked the next question. “Do you
like
being his motive?”

     For several seconds, Randall massaged the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “Part of me does, yes. The same part that loved being the one who could somehow make a forty-one-year-old man cheat on his wife of ten years. Yeah, the part of me I’m trying to make shut up loves it. Anyone would love having that kind of power.” His eyes left Tim’s, and when he spoke again, he sounded in need of breath. “But most of me wonders what Kathryn would think if she knew about any of this.” 

     Tim’s eyes widened.

     “Eric showed me this picture of Lisa, and afterward I kept seeing her face every night when I tried to go to sleep. Now I see Kathryn’s face. I see what it would look like if she knew.” Randall’s eyes filled with what felt like a year’s worth of tears.

     “No one ever listened to me the way she did. No one ever thought what I had to say was so important. I wanted so badly to be who she saw when she looked at me. And I probably won’t ever be. But if I find out what really happened to Lisa Eberman, maybe I’ve done what I can. And maybe, once she finds out, I won’t have lost all of her respect. Even though I probably never deserved it in the first place.”

     Randall swabbed tears from his cheek with two quick motions of his hand. In the silence that followed, he realized his words had been meant more for Jesse than for Tim. But Tim seemed moved, the skepticism gone from his face.

     Tim took a deep breath. “I spoke to Paula Willis earlier tonight. We’re supposed to see her on Wednesday.”

     Randall brought his eyes to Tim’s, managing to blink them clear. Tim bowed his head. “I need to keep working,” he said. “Try to get some sleep.”

     Tim took a seat at the desk while Randall stripped down to his underwear and T-shirt. His scars revealed, he ventured a glance at Tim, to see him gazing stoically down at his book.

     Once in bed, Randall rolled over so that his back was to the desk lamp.

     It was a strange feeling, knowing that he had finally won Tim over by being honest to him for the first time since they had met.

“WUHR CHESTER?” RANDALL ASKED.

     “It’s pronounced Wooster.”

     Once Atherton’s compact gathering of downtown buildings had disappeared from the rearview mirror of Tim’s Cherokee, Randall felt a tug of relief that belied the nature of their destination. Draining the last lukewarm sips from his Starbucks cup, he flipped through Tim’s notes from his first interview with Paula Willis. The dynamic between the sisters caught Randall by surprise. For some reason, he had always assumed Lisa was born into money, but apparently that wasn’t the case. In Paula’s tone there was the jealous edge of lingering sisterly competition, fading into a mild bitterness now that one sister was in the grave.

     Tim broke the silence. “When my grandmother died, it took my mother months before she could go through her things. I guess you either want to get rid of all evidence of them, or you just can’t bring yourself to start throwing their stuff away. Paula’s in my mother’s camp.” Tim flicked his eyes to Randall. “She says she hasn’t been able to touch anything in the guest bedroom. That’s where Lisa was staying.”

     “What about the police?”

     “Return to earth, please, where you and I are the only ones who think she might have been murdered. The police don’t root through the belongings of a drunk driver.”

     The Cherokee was flying past the industrial landscape of outer Boston. Once they had crossed the Massachusetts state line, the sloping hills gave way to seemingly endless car dealerships, their flag banners battered by frigid winds. Now smokestacks, crumbling and intact, were giant sequoias emerging from a landscape of warehouse roofs. Plowed, mud-stained snow lined the freeway. A bleak landscape, but for Randall a welcome reprieve from Atherton. And from the prospect of seeing Jesse, who had returned to the room the last two nights after Randall was tucked into bed, facing the wall and feigning deep sleep.

     Tim slowed the Jeep as they approached the Worcester exit, and within minutes they were traveling down streets lined with two-story, multifamily, clapboard houses, their small scraps of lawn fenced in by chain link. Preemptive Christmas lights in the few windows weren’t sufficient to give warmth to Paula Willis’ neighborhood. The few snowmen on the block weren’t being maintained with the same effort that had gone into building them, and Randall felt the eerie sensation that they were traveling into a neighborhood that had been suddenly abandoned by its residents.

     Paula Willis answered the door after one knock. Dressed in sweats, she shivered at the blast of cold air and gestured wordlessly for them to enter. Her short, reddish brown hair had a shine to it. Randall wondered if it was just a matter of time before she lost it all again to more chemo.

     “I have tea,” she said in greeting, leading them into the cramped living room. “Couple upstairs brought down a basket. It’s got all the regular stuff, then it has all these fruit teas. The names don’t even make sense to me.”

     She had Lisa’s angular features, but on her rounded, chubby face, they seemed more girlish and less sharp. She moved to her recliner and offered them a seat with a gesture of her arm toward the sofa. “Mrs. Willis. This is my intern, Luther.”

     Luther? Randall stifled a grimace, but this was the story they had agreed to do on the way there, despite Randall’s objection that he was about three feet taller than Tim and might appear too old to be his assistant. But Paula Willis just nodded, grunting as she yanked the footrest out of her La-Z-Boy. They shouldn’t have even bothered, Randall thought; the woman couldn’t give a shit. Randall thought her curtness was one step short of rudeness, yet he acknowledged she was a woman without the time for pleasantries and bullshit.

     “We’re going to talk about Lisa, right?” Paula asked.

     When Randall looked up, startled, he saw that Paula was winded by the walk across the room, and her question was nothing more than an attempt to keep track by a woman whose daily schedule had become bloated with medicinal tasks and doctor’s appointments.

     “If you feel up to it,” Tim said.

     “Sure.” Paula sighed.

     Tim went over some of his old queries and as Randall waited for the right moment to excuse himself, he tried not to take in the details of the room. He failed. Paula Willis and her husband had surrounded themselves with humble tokens of domesticity. Behind the La-Z-Boy, the wall was adorned only with a framed print of a sailboat tossed on a wind-whipped sea, a distinctly New England lighthouse rising in the background. The print would have seemed more at home in a room at the Ramada. Inside a ceramic, heart-shaped frame on the end table beside him, a wheelchair-bound Paula fed seagulls on a seashore. She wore a baseball cap to conceal her bald head. No wig, Randall noted, sensing the woman’s pride and-lack of pretense. So she had already lost her hair. And grown it all back.

     Contrasting pictures of two different sisters were emerging for Randall. Lisa, the professor’s wife, who lived in surroundings of academic prestige, every room of her house a library. Paula, working class, thought any decoration that took up much table space was pretentious.

     “As I said on the phone,” Tim was saying, “the loss of your sister has had a pretty profound effect on the city, as well as the entire campus. So the
Atherton Herald
would like to .. . highlight Lisa’s contributions to the community, as well as present a clear picture of her life before she came to Atherton.” Tim sat uneasily on the sofa, legs crossed and a notepad resting on one knee. Randall fought the urge to point out that he wasn’t holding a pen. He looked at Paula and was surprised to see that her eyes hadn’t left his.

     The fixed expression on her face, the slight furrow to her upper lips and her narrow eyes, set off a blast of nerves in Randall’s stomach. “You don’t want to sit?”

     “Actually, if I could just use your bathroom?”

     “Down the hall to the left. Right across from the guest bedroom.” 

     Randall managed a smile before he turned. Halfway down the hall, he found himself between the opposite doors to the bathroom and guest bedroom. When he looked over his shoulder, he only had a half view of Tim, bent forward over his pad, nodding as Lisa spoke.

     The guest bedroom had a mirrored closet with sliding doors that took up an entire wall. Slowly, with enough care to make almost no sound, Randall pushed the middle door open.

     Lisa Eberman had brought enough clothes to her sister’s house to last her a month without ever doing laundry. Sweaters were piled on the shelf. Randall thumbed through them in growing disbelief. Dry-cleaned shirts too small to belong to Paula hung in arrangement by color. On the floor of the closet, an open suitcase spilled folded pairs of panties. Randall scanned the closet again for anything personal.

     Against the far corner of the shelf, he spotted a row of paperback books. He slid the middle door shut and then opened the left one.

     Paperback mysteries extended from the wall to the first stack of sweaters. Randall removed one; its pages were still crisp. He checked several more and saw that they were unread. He recognized a few of the authors’ names, Jonathan Kellerman and Patricia Cornwell. Gruesome murders and heroes placed at odds with the world as they tried to solve them—twenty books in all, and they were alphabetized by author, and then subsequently by title. Lisa had her future reading list laid out and ready.

     Randall slid the door shut and turned to the bed. Several more paperbacks sat on the nightstand. The one closest to the bed had a bookmark. It gave him a chill. The books on the nightstand had been read, the edges of pages darkened from contact with fingertips, the spines run through by white cracks indicating where they had been bent open. All mysteries. Not a single romance novel in the bunch. The one-time doctorate student and scholar had been reduced to finding her escape in murder, violence, and, most important, Randall thought, solvable mysteries. While he knew it was trite, he couldn’t help but wonder if Lisa’s affinity for seeing the killer caught in handcuffs by the final page gave her a satisfaction she couldn’t find in the mystery that was her husband.

     Steeling himself, he went for the dresser drawers, which held no surprises. They were stuffed with more clothes, and nothing was buried beneath any of them. No note saying, “My husband did it." Feeling foolish, and fighting the hot flicker that warned of the onset of panic, Randall returned to the nightstand and opened the single drawer. Inside was a daunting mess of papers. Sheets torn from the notepad on the nightstand contained phone numbers jotted down in spidery print.

     How long did it take to go to the bathroom? Randall shoved the contents of the drawer into the pockets of his coat. He scanned the room to see if he had missed anything, half expecting Paula Willis to come bursting into the room, one fist raised as she demanded what right he had to go poking through her sister’s things.

     When he saw the wedding photo, he froze.

     Eric had a copy that he used to keep on the shelf above the liquor cabinet, but Randall had noticed it was missing when he went to swipe the bottle earlier that week. This photo had the exact same frame, of varnished wood. But was it Paula’s copy?

     He rounded the foot of the bed and moved to it. Lisa Eberman wasn’t a blushing bride; she was an ecstatic bride. Her head was tossed back in laughter. Eric held her around the waist with one arm, gazing right into the lens with a wan half smile.

     He turned away from the photo and the stinging sight of Eric the groom, distracting himself with the undeniable fact that for some reason Lisa Eberman had brought the majority of her clothing to her sister’s house, an hour away from Atherton.

“When we were teenagers, she talked so much about getting out of Philly that I guess she was the one who ended up putting the idea in my head. Who knows? I might never have left.”

     Randall gave Tim a barely perceptible nod when he appeared in the living-room doorway. He was relieved to see that Tim had finally taken out a pen.

    “Find everything?” Paula asked him. Randall tried a smile that froze on his face.

     “Mrs. Willis, do you mind if Luther listens in on—”

     “Sure.” Paula gestured to the spot on the sofa right next to Tim, and Randall crossed to it, taking a seat directly across from the woman, where she reclined in the La-Z-Boy. When Randall looked up, he was startled to see a cigarette burning in the ashtray on the chair’s side table. Paula continued, proving Tim’s assessment to be dead on; she spoke with the speed of a woman trying to get everything out before her time was up.

     But she didn't look that sick. And why was she smoking?

     “I guess that was really what all her phases were about when we were younger. Getting out. Kind of distancing herself from the rest of us. I remember” —Paula lowered her eyes to fiddle with the drawstring of her sweat pants as a muffled laugh shook her frame—“when she was thirteen, she went around in one of our dad’s tweed jackets with a pipe stuck in her mouth. She brought home all these Greek plays from the library and stayed up late reading. I remember I couldn’t even pronounce the names of the guys who wrote them. It pissed me off when I was little, but later I realized ... the smarter she got, the more her chances of getting out.”

     Randall averted his eyes from Paula to hide how much her last words hit home.

     Tim broke the silence. “You said Lisa met Eric while she was pursuing her Ph.D. What was she studying?”

     Paula lifted her gaze from her fidgeting hands and fixed Tim with a tight stare. “You mean the Ph.D. she never got? Eric didn’t even tell her when he applied for a position at Atherton. She had another year to go. I remember she was...” She trailed off, sucked a drag off her cigarette, and turned her head slightly so she wouldn’t blow the smoke directly into their faces. “I can crack the window if you ...”