Brass Ring

by Diane Chamberlain

  Lynn’s eyes widened. “You mean…masturbate?”

  Claire nodded, and Paul groaned again. “Sorry, kid.” He gave his wife a wry smile.

  “No problem,” Lynn said, but from the expression on her face, Claire knew it would take her a while to get used to the idea.

  After the Stanwicks had left her office, Claire walked over to Jon and bent low for a hug.

  “Good session, Mathias,” she said.

  He wrapped his hand around her thigh. “Made me kinda hungry for you, Harte.”

  “Tonight,” she promised.

  He let go of her leg as Jill ducked into the office to hand Claire a stack of pink message slips. Claire noticed the name on the top slip: Detective Patrick.

  Jon wheeled past her to the door. “Are you ready to come to my office to work on the retreat?” he asked.

  Claire stared at the pink slip in her hand. She could toss it out. Forget it. It had been nearly a week since that night in Harpers Ferry, and she had just proved to herself that she could get through an entire counseling session without a single thought of Margot. That was rare, though. More often that not, she found herself fighting the memory of that night on the bridge, along with the vertigo that accompanied it.

  “I’ll be there as soon as I return these calls,” she said.

  She closed her office door after Jon left, then walked to her desk and dialed the number for the Harpers Ferry police.

  “I thought you’d want to know this right away,” Detective Patrick said. His raspy voice was tinged with a boyish excitement. “It turns out that the other night was not Margot St. Pierre’s first experience on that bridge.”

  Claire sat down behind the desk. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it seems as though she grew up in Harpers Ferry, and twenty years ago—to the very day that she jumped—she and her brother were playing on that same bridge when the brother fell off and was killed.”

  “What?”

  “Right.” There was some pleasure in his voice, as though he enjoyed passing on a good piece of gossip. “I don’t know a whole lot more about it,” he said. “We got this piece of information from the social worker at the Avery Mental Hospital, and she didn’t know much more herself. Though she did say that Miss St. Pierre fell, too. Not into the water, but more towards the embankment. Hit her head on the rocks. They think that might have been part of what was wrong with her.”

  Claire looked out the window, where the sunlit snow still blanketed the ground and clung to the banks of the pond. What was it Margot had said to her: I died on this bridge long ago? Something like that. “It’s been haunting her all these years, poor thing,” she said.

  “Looks that way. The social worker said they were some kind of musical geniuses or something.”

  “Who were? Margot and her brother?”

  “Right. You know, that kind of kid who can play the piano as good as an adult?”

  “Oh!” Claire recalled more of Margot’s words. “Chopin.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing.” She felt herself getting sucked in deeper. The more information she was given about Margot, the more she seemed to need. “Do you think I could talk to the social worker at the psychiatric hospital—if I should decide I’d like to?” She turned the pink message slip over and picked up a pen.

  “Don’t see why not.” Detective Patrick gave her the woman’s name, along with the number for the hospital. “This case is closed for us,” he said. “A suicide, cut-and-dried. But I thought you’d want to know this piece of it before I put the file away.”

  Claire stared at the message slip for a long time after getting off the phone. She was thinking. Plotting. She got up from her desk and walked quickly through the maze of corridors to Jon’s office.

  He was leafing though a stack of papers on his desk when she walked into the room. “Ah, good,” he said. “We need to talk about who can run the driving workshop at the retreat this year. Lillian’s going to be on maternity leave, and—”

  “Jon?” She sat down on his green sofa.

  He stopped shuffling the papers on his desk, raising his eyebrows. “Yes?”

  “One of those calls I returned was from Detective Patrick. He told me that twenty years ago, Margot and her brother fell from that same bridge. The brother was killed, and Margot was injured.”

  Jon’s eyes were wide. “No kidding? Was she trying to join him or what?”

  “I don’t know, but I would really like to find out. Would you mind if I took the rest of the day off?” He didn’t respond, and she rushed ahead. “I know we have retreat stuff to get done, but I can work on that tonight.” They would be swamped with “retreat stuff’ from now until the weekend of the annual retreat itself, to be held, as always, in September in the Shenandoah Valley. “I want to go to the library in Harpers Ferry to see what I can find out about that incident.”

  She couldn’t read his face. The miniblinds at his window cast lines of shadow across his cheek. He looked down at the papers on his desk, shoving one of them with the tip of his finger. “I didn’t realize you had so much Nancy Drew in you,” he said.

  “Neither did I.” She tried to smile.

  He was quiet again, tapping his fingers on the papers. When he looked up, he spoke quietly. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you like this,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you don’t usually carry stuff around with you. Shit happens, and you say, que sera, sera, and get on with your life.”

  She sat back on the sofa with a sigh. He was right. “I don’t know what it is, Jon.” She lifted her hands and dropped them into her lap. “I feel as though she’s not going to let go of me unless I follow this through.”

  “Could you wait until tomorrow?” Jon asked. “I could go with you then. But I can’t get away today.”

  “That’s all right. I don’t mind going alone.”

  “Maybe Amelia could go?”

  She considered the idea for a few seconds before discarding it. She usually relished spending time with Amelia, her neighbor and longtime friend. But not today. When she’d told Amelia about Margot’s suicide, Amelia had said that perhaps Margot’s death had been for the best. “She sounded so disturbed,” she’d said. “So miserable.” Claire heard the words she herself had spoken so often to other people—Maybe it’s for the best—and suddenly the phrase made her bristle. No, she didn’t want Amelia with her. Or Jon. She wanted to do this on her own. She was the only person who really cared what she unearthed in that library.

  “I’m going by myself.” She stood up and walked over to Jon’s desk, bent down, and kissed him. “Am I acting crazy?”

  He reached up, his hand circling her shoulder, and tugged her down for a second kiss. “Crazed, but not crazy,” he said. “I’ll see you tonight.”

  IT WAS A WARM day for January, a beautiful sunlit day, the snow melting along the side of the road as Claire neared Harpers Ferry. She felt relaxed and calm, and so she was unprepared for the dizzy, sick-to-her-stomach sensation that accompanied her as she drove across the too-familiar bridge above the Shenandoah. In the daylight, the bridge held no visible threat. The road was clear of snow, the sky was an unbroken expanse of azure blue, and the bright afternoon sun glittered on the guardrail. A few other cars crossed the bridge with her, but she was certain she was the only driver for whom that stretch of concrete seemed unending, the only driver to feel the ominous pull of the river below.

  Her heart was pounding in her throat by the time she reached the other side, and she had to pull to the side of the road to catch her breath. She extracted a tissue from her purse and wiped the beads of perspiration from her forehead. How was she going to cross that bridge again to go home? Crazy. This was crazy.

  She found the library easily. The librarian set her up in a small room with several cases of microfilm. For ten minutes, she scrolled through newspapers from the second week of January 1973, and she was beginning to think that Detectiv
e Patrick had gotten his information wrong. But then, suddenly, there it was, on the front page of the January 14 edition.

  The article was one column, about seven inches long, child dies in fall from bridge, the headline read. Claire turned the knob on the microfilm machine to bring the fine print into focus.

  There had been a severe snowstorm the night of January 10, the article stated, and the bridge had been empty of traffic. Details of the fall itself, though, were sketchy. The dead boy had been Margot’s twin brother, ten-year-old Charles. Another brother, Randall, age fifteen, had also been present. After Charles fell, Randall and Margot tried to scale the embankment to reach the boy. During that climb, Margot herself fell and was knocked unconscious. Randall carried her home, a mile from the bridge. The end of the article stated that Margot remained in a coma at a nearby hospital. It was not known how extensive her injuries were or if she was expected to recover from them.

  A good two-thirds of the article was devoted to the twins’ impressive, albeit short, biographies. Their father was a classical pianist, and the twins were considered child prodigies. They had appeared in a Young People’s Concert the previous year at Carnegie Hall and had been accepted at Juilliard for the following year.

  It didn’t fit, Claire thought. She couldn’t imagine these little musical geniuses living in a tiny West Virginia hamlet like Harpers Ferry.

  IT WAS AFTER DARK when she pulled into her driveway. From inside her car, she opened the center door of the three-car garage. Driving in, she got a deceptive rush of delight at seeing Susan’s red Toyota parked in its space, and she had to remind herself that her daughter was not home. Susan had called the night before to tell them it would be a couple of weeks before she could get back to Vienna to pick up her car.

  Jon had bought a roasted chicken at the supermarket and a container of potato salad, and she joined him at the kitchen table. She told him what she’d learned at the library, and he asked appropriate questions, but he was uncharacteristically subdued. He was not interested in Margot St. Pierre; she had to accept that. After dinner, she shifted their conversation to the retreat and saw his usual animation return.

  In bed that night, he pulled her close under the down comforter. “I was worried about you driving out there by yourself,” he said.

  “I was perfectly fine.”

  He ran his hand slowly over the bare skin of her back. “I know how upset you were the last time we were in Harpers Ferry. I thought being there again might bring some of that back. I didn’t like to think of you alone.”

  “It was no big deal. It was a beautiful day for a drive.” She touched the corner of his mouth. She wanted to see him smile. Jon circled her arm lightly with his fingers. “Do you think you can lay Margot to rest now?” he asked.

  Claire hesitated. She wished he hadn’t asked. “I want to, but there’s one more thing I need to do,” she said. “I’d like to talk with the social worker at Avery Hospital about her. Then I think I’ll be done with it for good.”

  Jon slipped into silence. Outside the closed bedroom windows, a branch snapped on a tree somewhere in the woods.

  “What’s the point to this, Claire?” he asked finally.

  “I’m not sure.” She ran her fingertips across the light tracing of hair on his chest. “I try to block thoughts of her and that night from my mind, but they keep creeping in.”

  He stroked his fingers over her cheek. “That must be very frustrating,” he said.

  “It is. And I think the only way to put an end to them is to understand as much as I can about why it happened. I was the last person to see her alive. I was the last one who had a chance with her.”

  Jon dropped his hand from her arm and said nothing. The silence swept around them for several minutes before she propped herself up on her elbow to look into his eyes.

  “Are you upset with me over this?” She wasn’t used to his disapproval.

  He shook his head, touching her cheek lightly again with his fingers. “I wish it hadn’t happened,” he said. “But it did. And I guess you have to find your own way of putting it to sleep.”

  “I don’t have to drag you into it, though.” She couldn’t bear his sullenness, his worry. She lowered her head to kiss him. “So,” she said, “are you still hungry for me?”

  “What? Oh.” He smiled. “A little.”

  She kissed him again, then shifted on the bed to touch his eyelids with her lips, the tip of her tongue. She remembered him telling Paul Stanwick during their session that morning that Paul would discover erogenous zones he had never known he’d had. For Jon, it was his eyelids.

  “Mmm,” he murmured. “I can feel my appetite coming back.”

  With a rush of energy, he rolled her onto her back and kissed her, tenderly, nibbling at her lips. Her breathing quickened, keeping pace with his as he lowered his mouth to her throat, her breasts. She felt the warmth of his tongue on her nipple and slipped her fingers into his hair.

  “So,” he said, his breath warm against her chest, “what feels good, hmm?”

  “That does,” she said, then arched her back as the tug of his lips grew stronger. “Oh, yes.”

  They had been lovers for twenty-three years. They didn’t need to ask each other what felt good. Yet they still, on occasion, bantered this way. Talking was an aphrodisiac, they’d discovered. An erogenous zone all its own. Talk alone used to be enough to make Jon hard and ready, but that phenomenon was rare these days. “It’s a normal function of age,” she’d reassured him, although she knew it was the injury at work. She was certain Jon was aware of that fact even more than she was.

  Jon touched her with his hands and his mouth, moving down her body, teasing her as he took his time. He kissed the inside of her thighs so delicately and for so long that by the time he turned his head to give his lips and tongue free rein over her, she was already trembling with the early vibrations of an orgasm. She came quickly, but he didn’t stop touching her until she reached down to pull him up for a kiss. He supported himself on his arms above her while she slid her hand down his body to his penis. She stroked him, her touch practiced yet tender—despite his inability to feel it—and when her hand had filled with his firm warmth, she slipped her hips beneath his and guided him inside her.

  She clutched his shoulders. The muscles in his arms were like iron, and she felt them tighten and catch beneath her hands as he rocked slowly above her, inside her. His strength excited her, as it always did. It seemed he could hold himself suspended above her that way forever as he watched her. Watched and waited. She had learned to set aside her inhibitions about being on display. He had to watch. For Jon, it was a large part of the pleasure.

  She slipped her hand between their bodies, letting her fingers come to rest where his body was joined to hers. The image of Lynn Stanwick’s wide and surprised eyes flitted briefly across her mind as Jon rhythmically pressed his hips against hers. She was aware of the softening of his erection, but it didn’t matter. He was still inside her, still filling her, and she was lifting up, losing the sense of the bed beneath her head, her back. Jon was moving so slowly. Languidly. He knew how to move—oh, the wondrous hours of research that had entailed!—to let her body rise and fall, rise and fall, as it was doing now. He didn’t even pick up his pace as she began gasping for breath, or when she cried out, digging her fingers into his shoulder. And he kept his steady course as she flew into that brilliant shower of light—the light he could experience only through her.

  There was peace in the room after a while, a peace that seemed hard-won and badly needed, and Claire lay next to Jon, her cheek against his shoulder. She was almost asleep when he broke the silence.

  “Claire,” he said, “I want you to tell me the things you learn about Margot. It might not mean as much to me as to you, but I’ll listen.”

  She wrapped her arm around his waist, smiling. “I love you, Mathias,” she said, and she snuggled closer to him, secure in the expectation of a contented night’s sleep.


  THE WEATHER HAD TURNED cold again by the following Monday, and the threat of snow hung low in the morning sky as Claire made the hour-and-a-half drive to Avery Hospital. The old brick building seemed to sag in the gloomy daylight as she pulled into the parking lot, and she felt compassion for Margot, for anyone who had to call this depressing building home.

  She’d had to manipulate this meeting with Ginger Stern, the social worker who had worked with Margot. Ginger had been reluctant to talk about her former patient until Claire began connecting to her on a professional level. She was a fellow social worker, Claire said, although that was not quite the truth. She and Jon had both majored in social work at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., not far from where they lived now, but while Jon had graduated with honors, Claire had barely made it out of the program with her degree. She had gained a reputation among her instructors as a young woman with her head too much in the clouds to deal well with reality. In an evaluation of her skills, one of her professors had written, “Miss Harte is not able to accept that, in their day-to-day interactions, people do not always keep one another’s best interests in mind. This attitude may prevent her from offering appropriate help to her clients.” Or, as one of her fellow students put it, more succinctly and to her face, “You’re a terrific person, Claire, but a lousy social worker.” Claire had shrugged off the comments the way she shrugged off anything she didn’t want to hear.

  In graduate school, she majored in rehabilitation therapy, where her positive attitude toward life was better appreciated, while Jon worked on a double master’s in social work and health administration. It was the mention of Jon’s name that finally got her the appointment with Ginger Stern.

  “Jon Harte-Mathias?” Ginger had exclaimed. Apparently the Harte-Mathias name hadn’t registered when she’d heard it attached to Claire. “From the foundation?”

  As it turned out, Ginger’s brother had gone through a rehab program funded by the foundation. She knew the story of the foundation’s birth: A young man working in a rehab center inherited millions of dollars on his twenty-fifth birthday—money that had been left in trust for him when his parents were killed in a plane crash. He spent little of the money on himself and his wife and baby, instead pouring the millions into the development of the Harte-Mathias Foundation. There were no inaccuracies in Ginger’s recitation of the story, but in the telling, she made Jon sound like some sort of folk hero. It didn’t matter. Here she was, in the parking lot of Avery Hospital, about to meet with the person who probably knew Margot St. Pierre as well as anyone could.