Uncivil Seasons (9 page)

But the Ames girls liked their sporty stepfather, who taught them how to water-ski and dance. And by all accounts, Cloris loved him. In old photographs of them together, I could see that she shared with Rowell something florid and heated, something that made you think she enjoyed her marriage bed, in the same way she enjoyed her golf and the club dances at which she and Dollard won prizes as the most polished couple on the floor. They traveled. They were well-to-do; especially after Cloris sold Ames’s sizable shares of Cadmean stock to a Mr. Paul Whetstone, who turned Cadmean Textiles into C&W Textiles, and turned Lawry Whetstone into a vice president.

And Cloris had the easy, warm sociability necessary in the wife of a politically ambitious man. So Rowell swam, with the same seriously energetic strokes with which he did his laps on the lake each summer morning, into the state senate. Cloris was proud of him. So were Mother’s people. He was proud of himself, as he said when he advised me to do something I could be proud of.

Time had worn away her past with Bainton Ames. She was Cloris Dollard. And Ames was to most current lake residents, “Oh, that accident that blew up the marina. Man fell out of his boat.”

All I had to suggest that the man had been pushed rather than fallen was the distant dream of a woman my uncle thought mad. After fifteen years it was going to be close to impossible to prove Joanna right; the boat was gone, the marina was gone, the body was rags over bones. I didn’t even know why I wanted to prove her right; it wasn’t Bainton Ames’s death I was being paid to investigate.

When I woke up in my kitchen, my head flopped over on the Ames file, my hand still around a fork wrapped in spaghetti, Mother was rapping on the back pane. “Jay! Jay! Wake up!” She had her hand to her mouth. “Lying there like that! You scared the life out of me!” We both knew she’d found my father like that, the day of his first stroke, his arm flung out across his desk; on it, accounts of other people’s medical problems.

“Justin, please don’t tell me you’ve been drinking all night.” She took my face in her hands. “You haven’t suffered a relapse?”

“What time is it? No, I haven’t been drinking.” All my bones felt bruised.

“Quarter to ten.” She let out her breath in a little laugh, relieved by her decision to believe me. “It’s freezing in this house. My God, son, just throw open the windows; it’s warmer outside!”

“To ten?”

She rubbed at the arms of her old sable coat, the gesture, like her face, girlish. “Aren’t you supposed to go to work? I let your phone ring its head off.”

“I unplugged it. Stop staring at me—I said I haven’t been drinking.”

“I didn’t know you could unplug phones. I’m sorry, but your feet are
blue
, Justin! I’m going to turn up your thermostat. I can’t understand why you want to live in a house that you can’t live in.”

“I like the woodwork on the doors. I don’t like flat doors.”

I made coffee while mother hurried through the house to see what my life was like. Its reality always seemed to surprise her. I said I wanted to ask her something.

“Ask me what? Rowell said you’ve arrested poor Cloris’s murderer. I’m glad it’s over.”

“It’s not over.” I handed her a cup. “That last Saturday, when you and Cloris went shopping, the day before she died, tell me again, what sort of mood was she in?”

“Fine, she was fine. We had lunch, and I bought a scarf, and she got some papers copied. I told you. That’s all. What do you mean, not over?”

“What papers? You didn’t tell me about any papers.”

“Well, it’s nothing to do with her dying.”

“I said, tell me anything, it didn’t matter what.”

“I probably did mention it. You never listen to half the words I say, anyhow.” Mother sighed. “Your father always said, ‘Half’s plenty.’ Well, if it matters, we went to CopiQuik. She said, ‘As long as we’re right here.’ She had a big folder of papers she said had been Bainton’s. It surprised me because why, after all this time, be copying anything of Bainton’s, and I remember I said, ‘Cloris, whatever for?’ Well, she’d found them in a box in the basement, she was a terrible pack rat, like you, because there were these textiles people wanting them now. They wanted to know if Bainton had ever figured out how to make this—now, it was a funny word, inert, inertial?—some kind of loom. Seems like Cloris said something about making copies of the papers to show to old Briggs Cadmean. That’s all
I
remember, so don’t ask me anything else.
I
was trying to get to the off-ramp of that idiotic new beltway before a mile-long truck going ninety hit me.”

Further questions led her only, by looping cloverleaf turns of language, to news of her departure. She had, in fact, come to see if
I
had suffered a relapse; she
claimed
she had come to tell me she was driving to Alexandria, Virginia, to baby-sit her only grand-children—the two belonging to my younger brother, Vaughan, a gynecologist, and his wife, Jennifer, who were off to Antigua on the Club Med plan. Vaughan was the mirror in whose clean image Mother had always asked me to scrub off my flaws. As a child, he had never given her a moment’s trouble. As an adult, all he asked of her was baby-sitting. Vaughan was still annoyed with God for postponing him. He resented the position of second son; in his view,
I
had long ago abrogated the privileges and responsibilities of primogeniture. (“
I
hate to have to say it, Jay, but it’s really pretty crummy the way you’ve let the folks down; you’ve really loused up pretty bad.”) He never hated to have to say it at all; he couldn’t even keep from smiling.

I said, “Tell Vaughan ‘bon voyage.’”

Mother poked her forefinger into each of my geranium plants on the window ledge, and watered one of them. She asked with sly nonchalance, “How do you like Briggs?”

“Which Briggs?”

“The girl, of course, Justin.”

I said, “I don’t. Too cold.”

“Baloney. Susan Whetstone’s the one that’s cold. Of course, she must love it over here.” Mother patted my hand. “That was pretty catty.”

“I’ll say.” I poured another cup of coffee.

“Look.” From her purse Mother took a small newsclipping. “It was in this morning’s paper.” Beneath an old photograph of Joanna Cadmean that made her look a little like Grace Kelly was a headline: F
AMOUS PSYCHIC COMES HOME AFTER GIRLHOOD FRIEND MURDERED
.

I scanned the two paragraphs. “That damn Bubba Percy! He even blabbed that she’s staying out at the compound.”

“He says maybe the police ought to ask Joanna who killed Cloris.”

“Mother, I am the police, and I did ask Joanna.”

“You did? Who did she say?”

“She didn’t say anything.”

I took a pack of cigarettes out of the back of the cabinet where I hid them from myself.

“Oh, Justin, I wish you’d stop smoking. If I could quit after… I started when I had you, I was eighteen, and I stopped when your father died, in March that’ll be six years, so that’s… If I could quit after all those years…”

“Then I will too. I’m sorry. I didn’t get much sleep.”

“Well, you’ll quit when you start feeling bad enough about it. You never have been as feckless as you like to imagine. You probably feel bad about sleeping with Lawry Whetstone’s wife.”

The match burned my thumb. “Who told you that?”

“Nobody. Whatever else would you be doing with her?” Mother sat down with her coffee. “Justin, I had no idea you were so naive as to let me convince you I was. I’m not opposed to adultery; but I am old-fashioned enough to think it ought to be serious.”

“Mother, please don’t tell me you and Dad were having affairs. I couldn’t take it this morning.”

She looked fondly at the gold ring that was to me as much part of her hand as the bent little finger she said she’d deformed by playing Chopin’s “Revolutionary” étude before her bones were mature. “Your father and I were…oddly in love, though he was occasionally a little less aware of it than I was. But of course, I realize not all marriages are lucky. Why, my God, I liked Bainton Ames perfectly well, but it didn’t stop me from being really happy for Rowell and Cloris.”

“Wait a minute. You
knew
for a fact Rowell and Cloris were having an affair, at the time of her first marriage?”

“Well, nobody said it. Rowell was already in politics. But of course I knew. He’d been in love with her for years. And people in our circle more or less knew. I thought you knew.”

“It doesn’t surprise me. I remember I
was
surprised when she married him. She always seemed very nice. I liked her.”

Mother frowned. “I don’t understand why you dislike Rowell so. He went out of his way to advise you all through. And after your father died…”

I went around the table and pulled my little space heater closer to her. “Dad didn’t like Rowell, either. You know that. You know what he said to me once? He said Rowell was the kind of man who would have made it to California over Donner Pass.”

“Well, I don’t know what in the world your father meant by that—which is nothing new.”

“He meant Rowell would shoot the Indian. Cut loose the dying ox and pull the wagon himself. Drink the horse urine. Eat the dead. He meant Rowell would
get there
.”

My father had added that he himself would have probably been the one in a Western movie who didn’t fire his gun in time and was therefore tomahawked by the Apache, who didn’t lash his horse hard enough to leap the chasm, and couldn’t hold fast enough by his fingers to the scrabbling rock of the edge, and so never made it to the final reel.

“Dad said that once Rowell and he were out on the dock looking at some ducks on the lake that Cloris was feeding bread to, and Rowell said, ‘Damn, if I had a rifle right now, I could blast them all right out of the water!’”

Mother said, “I thought you enjoyed those hunting trips with Rowell.”

Looking down at the Ames folder on the table, I said, “I did. Let me ask you something. What if Cloris found out Bainton had actually been pushed—not fallen—but been pushed out of that boat when he drowned? What if someone had told her that?”

“Who! That’s a horrible thing to say! Cloris never thought such a thing.”

“What if she’d just recently found it out, just before she died. Would she have told anyone?”

“She would have been
devastated
. When Bainton drowned, Cloris felt horrible! I’ve always thought that’s why she and Rowell waited those two years. That, and his career.” She washed out her cup. “Jay, are you going off on one of your tangents?”

“Mother, just a minute, what was Bainton Ames doing while Rowell and Cloris were having an affair? Was he having one? Is it possible he and Joanna were lovers?

“God, that is the funniest thought imaginable. I don’t say this meanly, but Bainton and Joanna both always struck me as a little on the cold side. Bainton never looked up from his designs long enough to even notice Cloris, and I think Joanna married poor Charles Cadmean because he kept asking her and she didn’t have anything else to do. Joanna never seemed to care much what happened to her life. Why, it never seemed to cross her mind that she was beautiful.” Mother stood up and pulled on her gloves. “Of course, she was four or five years younger than I was—I was already up in Virginia when she was in high school and college—and we weren’t close when I got back, so I probably shouldn’t even talk about her.”

“If she didn’t love Charles, more reason to turn to someone else.”

“Well, it wasn’t Bainton. I really have to run, honey. Don’t bother to kiss me. I’m sure your lips are frozen. And calm down.” And out she fluttered.

I opened the coroner’s report again. I knew Ames’s death was tied by knots, years tightened, to the death of Cloris Dollard. Except I didn’t know it; I had only heard dreams. I needed what Joanna Cadmean had called the “external evidence.” I started making phone calls.

•   •   •

To let Cuddy in, I had to get out of the shower and back into my robe. He blinked his eyes at my wet hair and bare feet. “Excuse me! I’ve been ringing your bell for ten minutes. Guess I caught you on your lunch break.”

I ignored this and started back up the steps to my bedroom.

“Your photos are out in the car. My, it is freezing in here!” He followed me up the three flights, with a loud charade of gasping. “Why don’t you move into someplace nice, and level, and warm?”

“This is nice. Anybody who has a photo wall mural of Cape Hatteras beach in his living room shouldn’t talk about what’s nice.”

“Everybody in River Rise has got one, they’re built in.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“What’s the matter with it? The only time your place is nice is springtime, when you can spy out the top story on the Busher girls—all catching the rays on the grass and reaching behind their pretty backs and unfastening their suit tops.”

“You’re in a better mood. Where were you?”

“At the office. Doing V.D.’s paperwork.”

“Where was I supposed to be?” I threw the coverlet over my bed, a four-poster I’d bought at a used furniture store that had subsequently changed its name to Antiques Ltd.

“Following a lead on those coins, is what I told V.D. He’s not happy. He had to let Graham and Dickey go. Looks like they
were
drinking beer the night of the murder, and looks like they were doing it at the Rib House, and in comes Joe Lieberman and says he’s got about twenty folks to swear to it.”

Joe Lieberman was the Popes’ lawyer; they gave him a lot of business. I’m sure he had three stereos in his car, if he wanted them, and four TVs in his house, and all the cigarettes people would leave him alone to smoke.

Cuddy took off a ski cap that said
GO TARHEELS
!, stuffed it in his parka pocket, and sprawled out on the bed. “But V.D.’s got it jimmied so he can hold Preston, the mad-dog killer, and they moved him across town. Preston asked me would I go get Charlene for him. Aww, lordy, humankind, don’t it break your heart? So I went over and tried, but she wasn’t much up for it.”

“Back at the Maple Street place?”

“Nope. Luster Hudson’s. He rents a little house off the 28 bypass, raises hunting dogs. They tried to chew their way out of their pen when I drove up. Ole Charlene finally came to the door in her black number and told me I was lucky Luster was out of town. I said, ‘I wantcha, but this is business,’ and I told her what had happened to her husband since she saw him last.”