Brass Ring

by Diane Chamberlain

  Claire only locked her hand more securely around the woman’s wrist. “Let me help you,” she said.

  The woman raised her head high again, her eyes still riveted on Claire’s, and when she spoke, her voice was even and unflinching. “Let go,” she said, “or I’ll take you with me.”

  She meant it, Claire knew. Behind them, there was a squeal of brakes, a rush of voices. A horn honked. The woman didn’t shift her eyes from Claire’s for even a second. “Let go now,” she said.

  Claire opened the fingers of her hand, and the woman offered a small smile of victory, or perhaps gratitude. She didn’t leap so much as fly from the bridge, or fall so much as be lifted and carried by the snow. The streetlight glittered in the thousands of ice crystals clinging to her hair and her coat, and Claire thought she was watching an angel.

  She didn’t think to scream. She barely breathed, suspended between the earthbound sounds of the men and machines behind her and the drifting, fading glimmer of the angel below. She barely noticed the heavy, gloved hands that wrapped around her own arms, her own shoulders. Hands that struggled to tug her back from the edge of the bridge. She tried to block out the voices, too loud in her ears, as she stared into the snowy abyss, because—at least for a second—she thought she heard the music after all.

  2

  HARPERS FERRY

  JON COULD HEAR CLAIRE’S teeth chattering nonstop during the two hours they spent in the police station. The police had questioned her at length, not in an interrogatory style but gently, and Jon felt grateful to them for their sensitivity. Claire was in no shape to be raked over the coals.

  Someone—he could no longer recall who—had draped a gray wool blanket over Claire’s shoulders, and she sat on one of the metal chairs lining the wall of this small office. He had moved another chair out of the way so he could wheel close enough to put his arm around her. Her shoulders felt stiff beneath his arm, though, as if she couldn’t relax enough to take comfort from him.

  The police had driven her to the station, while he’d followed in the Jeep. They’d wanted to take her to the hospital. She was in shock, they’d told him. But Claire had adamantly refused to go, insisting she was fine. They were overreacting, she’d said. Jon knew, though, that Claire was not fine. He had seen her in the emergency room after Susan’s grisly bicycle accident. He’d seen her seconds after she’d discovered her mother’s lifeless body in their living room. Yet he had never seen her like this. So shaken. So shivery. She hadn’t cried, but that was not unusual. She never did, at least not in front of him. She was a soft touch at movies or when reading sad books,

  but in real life she held those tears inside her as though they might turn to acid once on her cheeks.

  They were waiting now for the police to find them a place to stay for the night. They could have returned to the High Water, but the thought of having to explain what had happened to them tonight to so many friends and colleagues was overwhelming.

  He kissed the side of Claire’s head, his lips brushing the dark hair where it was beginning to give way to silver. “We should call Susan,” he said, and she nodded. The sound of her teeth chattering made him want to wrap both his arms around her. He pulled the edges of the blanket more snugly across her chest, then tried to meet her eyes, but her gaze only darted past him on its way to nowhere. He looked at Detective Patrick, the burly, kind-faced officer behind the desk.

  “May I use that?” He pointed to the phone at the edge of the desk.

  “Help yourself.”

  Jon wheeled forward a foot or two and lifted the phone into his lap. It was nearly eight o’clock. He thought Susan might be out with her friends, but she answered on the fourth ring.

  “Hi, Susie.”

  “Hi. You still in Harpers Ferry?”

  “Yes. We’re going to have to stay here the night, hon.”

  “Oh, sure. No problem. It’s pretty awful out.”

  He thought he detected relief in her voice, and he felt a jab of pain. Susan had reached the age—nineteen—where she needed them far less than they needed her. Sometime during this past year, he’d finally admitted to himself that she had labored to graduate early from high school not because she was brilliant or an over-achiever but because she was anxious to leave home, anxious to escape from him and Claire. He had never shared that thought with Claire. He would let her believe they had an ambitious daughter, hungry for college.

  “We were on our way home, but…” He let his voice trail off as he collected his thoughts. He was going to have to find a way to tell this story. This wouldn’t be the last time he would have to recount the events of this evening. “There was a woman standing on the bridge outside of Harpers Ferry and we stopped to try to help her, but she…she jumped off while Mom was talking to her.”

  Susan was quiet for a moment. He could picture her leaning against the kitchen counter in her tight jeans and oversized gray sweater, her long brown hair falling in a shiny swath over her shoulder. A cloud would have fallen over her large dark eyes and she would be frowning, two delicate lines etched into the perfect fair skin of her forehead. “You mean, this lady committed suicide right before your eyes?”

  “I’m afraid so. Right before Mom’s eyes, anyhow. Mom was out on the edge of the bridge with her, trying to talk her out of jumping.”

  There was one more beat of loaded silence from Susan’s end of the line. “What do you mean, out on the edge of the bridge?” she asked.

  “Outside the guardrail.”

  He heard a sound through the phone—a book being slammed onto a table, perhaps—before Susan spoke again. “God, why does she do things like that?” she asked, her voice rising. “Is she there? Can I talk to her?”

  He glanced at Claire. “She’s a little upset right now, and—”

  Claire shook her head and reached for the phone, the blanket falling from her shoulders to the chair. Reluctantly, Jon relinquished the receiver.

  “Hi, honey,” Claire said cheerfully. Detective Patrick looked up from his desk at the transformation in her voice. “We’re fine…Hmm?” She frowned at Jon as she listened to her daughter. “No, Susan, I don’t think I can save the world,” she said, “I just thought I might be able to help one person.” She nodded. “Yes, I know. And I’m so sorry we won’t get to see you tonight. I’m going to put Dad on again, okay?”

  He took the phone back and immediately heard a volley of chatter from Claire’s teeth, as though they were making up for the minute and a half they’d had to be still while talking with Susan.

  “Susie?” he said into the phone.

  “She could have gotten herself killed.” There was a small break in Susan’s voice, and Jon heard the love behind her words. He ached to see his daughter, to hug her, before she took off for school again.

  “Mom’s okay,” he said. With a little surge of joy, he thought of the snow. Susan wouldn’t be able to drive back to school until the roads were clear. “I guess we’ll still get to see you tomorrow,” he added. “You can’t drive to school in this weather.”

  “Yes, I can. Or at least, I’ve got a ride. I’ll have to come back in a few weeks for my car, though.”

  “Who are you riding with?”

  “There’s this guy here who has some kind of four-wheel-drive wagon. He’s taking a bunch of us down.”

  Jon winced at the thought. “Well, tell him to drive carefully, all right?”

  She let out one of her exasperated sighs. “Right.”

  “I love you.”

  “Okay. You drive carefully, too.”

  He hung up the phone, setting it back on the desk, and Claire let out a sigh of her own. “I’m going to the rest room,” she said. She stood up, pulling the blanket once more around her shoulders.

  After she had left the room, Detective Patrick raised his eyes to Jon’s. “Do you mind a personal question?” he asked.

  Jon shook his head.

  The older man looked down at his desk, rubbing a hand over his jowly chin. “
Well, I’m asking this because my nephew just got a back injury.” He lifted his eyes to Jon’s. “A spinal cord injury, they call it.”

  Jon nodded again.

  “And, you know, you see people in wheelchairs and you don’t think about it much until it happens close to you, and now it looks like he’s going to be paralyzed and…well, do you mind if I ask what happened to you?”

  “It was an accident in my case, too,” Jon said. “My family and I were in a plane crash.” He wouldn’t tell him that it was his family’s private plane. He didn’t want this man to focus on wealth. “I was sixteen. My parents and sister were killed, and I was in a coma for a few months. When I woke up, they told me I’d never walk again.”

  The detective’s eyes were wide. “Shit,” he said.

  “And your nephew?”

  “Motorcycle. They say he’s a T-four. Do you know what that means?”

  “Yeah.” Jon touched his own chest at the level of the boy’s spinal cord injury. This kid was not going to have an easy time of it. “I’m an incomplete L-three,” he said, although he doubted that would have much meaning to the detective.

  He questioned the man about the rehab program his nephew was in and offered to make a call to the program director—a woman he’d known well for many years—to check on the boy.

  Detective Patrick wrote his nephew’s name on a business card and handed it to Jon. “I feel better talking to you,” he said. “I mean, it seemed like it was the end of the world for the kid, you know? But now I look at you”—he gestured toward Jon—”and you get around okay and you’ve got a pretty wife and all. And you must have met her after you were…” The officer pointed to Jon’s wheelchair.

  “Yes. We met in high school.”

  “Aha.” The man smiled. “High school sweethearts, huh?”

  Jon smiled himself, remembering. “Not of the usual variety.” He had moved in with an aunt in Falls Church after his six-month stay in a rehab program, transferring into Claire’s public high school after a decade of being pampered by private schools. He could still, if he let the memories in, taste the bitterness of that year after the accident. He had lost everything. But then Claire drew him under her protective wing. They began dating. Neither of them ever dated anyone else again.

  “And you have a kid?” The detective nodded toward the phone, his voice tentative, and Jon laughed. He knew exactly what the man was thinking.

  “Yes, she’s mine,” he said. For years, he and Claire had counseled couples where one of the partners was disabled, and they had learned that sharing personal experience was sometimes more helpful than anything else they might say. He could talk about Susan’s parentage without an ounce of discomfort, but Detective Patrick colored.

  Jon worried he had given the man false hope. “I was very lucky,” he added. “It’s rare for a man with a spinal cord injury to be able to father a child, and we weren’t able to have other children.”

  The older man shifted in his seat. “Well, that’s great you got the one.” He poked at a stack of papers on his desk. “Do you think my nephew stands a chance in that department?”

  Jon drew in a breath. “I wouldn’t want to guess. Everybody’s different.” He saw the pain in the man’s eyes. “He’ll do okay,” he said. “He’s in a fine program. They’ll take good care of him.”

  Claire had walked back into the room as he was speaking, and he was struck by her pallor. She was still beautiful, though. She was one of those women who was far more striking at forty than she had been at eighteen. Her sharp features had softened. Even the vivid green of her eyes seemed to have mellowed over time.

  Struggling to smile at him, she sat down again and took the hand he offered. Her fingers were cold and damp.

  A female officer appeared in the doorway to let them know they had a room at a nearby bed and breakfast, one that was ramped for a wheelchair. Claire stood up, folding the blanket, and faced the detective.

  “When you find out who she is,” she said, “will you call and let me know?”

  “Sure will,” he said.

  Outside, the snow had nearly stopped, but the air was still blustery and cold. Claire was quiet on their cautious drive to the bed and breakfast, and she was merely polite to the owners of the small inn, when her usual style was to make instant friends of anyone she met. Jon was scared by her silence. It wasn’t until they were lying under the thick comforter in the canopy bed that she began to talk.

  “I should have held on to her,” she said.

  He pulled her close to him. “You did as much as anyone could have done.”

  “Maybe if I’d held on, she wouldn’t have jumped. And then if she did jump, I could have simply let go of her at the last minute.” She was quiet a moment. “It’s like I gave her permission to do it, Jon. I let go, and said, fine, go ahead, end your life. I was the last person to have a chance with her and I failed. Maybe if we hadn’t called the police. That’s when she freaked out.”

  “Are you aware that you’re talking nonsense?”

  She shivered. “I can’t get warm.” She’d worn nothing to bed, and her skin felt chilled against his chest.

  “Do you want one of my T-shirts?”

  “No. Just keep holding me, please.”

  He rubbed her arm. “Shall we try the carousel?”

  “Mmm.” She snuggled closer to him. “Yes.”

  He closed his eyes, pressing his cheek against her hair. “Once upon a time, on a big and beautiful farm in Jeremy, Pennsylvania, there was an enormous red barn.”

  Claire cocked her head against his shoulder. “Do you think it really was enormous, or do you think I just remember it that way because I was so small?”

  “Does it matter?”

  She nearly giggled. “No.”

  “It looked like an ordinary barn, although certainly a very well-cared-for barn, because the farmer who owned it was the type to take very good care of the things and the people he loved.”

  “Yes.”

  “This farmer had two little granddaughters who loved going into the ordinary-looking barn, because inside there was an extraordinary carousel. There were many beautiful horses on the carousel, and some empty spaces where more horses would go when the farmer had finished carving them out of the big blocks of musky-smelling wood he kept in his workroom.”

  “At the side of the barn.”

  “Yes. The workroom at the side of the barn. One of the little granddaughters had a favorite horse—a white horse with a wild golden mane—named Titan. And she liked to—”

  “And he was a jumper,” Claire added.

  “Yes. He was one of the jumpers on the carousel. That’s why his mane was so wild. And Claire liked to climb on his back and pretend she was a cowgirl.”

  “And try to grab the ring.”

  “Right. She’d try to grab the brass ring so her grandfather would let her go around again.”

  “It’s working,” Claire mumbled against his chest. “You’re so good at this.”

  He knew it was working. Her body was growing warm next to him. The tension was gone.

  “The organ played ‘By the Light of the Silvery Moon,’ and the little granddaughter would gallop around the barn on her beautiful horse, and she’d feel the most extraordinary sense of joy and peace, there on her grandfather’s carousel.”

  “Mmm. I love you so much, Jon.”

  “Love you, too.”

  Within minutes she was asleep. Her body was warm and heavy next to him, her breathing almost too soft to hear. The air in the room was dark and still; if there was any light outside the windows, the heavy shades didn’t let it in. He lay awake, staring at the black ceiling, wishing he could fall asleep and escape the sense of powerlessness that had been haunting him all evening.

  He had long ago come to grips with his limitations, but the helplessness he’d felt tonight as he watched Claire struggle with the woman on the edge of the bridge had been different. It had felt like an enemy, a taunting foe he could ne
ver defeat. He had watched that scene unfold in terror, thinking that both women would slip on the icy platform, both women would plunge to their deaths. For a long dark moment, he’d thought he would lose his wife, and although he had been no more than a few yards from her, he’d been powerless to save her. He couldn’t recall another time in his adult life when he had felt so utterly helpless.

  The image of the woman and Claire seemed etched on the ceiling of this room. He closed his eyes, but the scene sprang to life on the backs of his eyelids. No matter how hard he tried to wipe the memory from his mind, it slipped back in, again and again, and he wished he had a carousel of his own to carry him through the night.

  3

  VIENNA, VIRGINIA

  THE PHONE RANG ON Claire’s office desk. She was about to ignore it, but then remembered that Jill, her secretary, was not in today to pick it up. Most of the foundation’s employees were still digging out from the storm.

  Claire lifted the receiver to her ear.

  “Harte-Mathias Foundation.”

  “I’d like to speak with Mrs…uh, Harte-Mathias, please?” The raspy male voice sounded vaguely familiar.

  “This is she.”

  “Uh, hello. This is Detective Patrick in Harpers Ferry. You wanted to know when we identified that suicide.”

  “Yes.” Claire sat up straight. “Did you find out who she is?”

  “Her name was Margot St. Pierre, and she—”

  “Margot, with a ‘t’?”

  “Yes.”

  Claire jotted the name on a notepad.

  “They finally found her late last night. The body’d gotten caught in the rocks about a quarter mile from the bridge. She fit the description of a woman who’d been reported missing from Avery Hospital in Martinsburg. That’s a mental—uh, a psychiatric hospital.”

  “How far is Martinsburg from Harpers Ferry?”

  “Twenty-five, thirty miles. She’d just walked out of the hospital Sunday morning, according to the staff there. No one realized she was missing until that evening. They didn’t have her in a locked ward, because she’d never given any indication of being a danger to herself or anyone else in the three years she’d been there.”