by Kate Wilhelm
"Of course not. You have to have a conscience to suffer remorse."
"Conscience. Guilt and conscience. Real driving forces, aren't they? One or the other—both—can ruin a decent person's life for all time."
Felicia stood up and went to a cabinet. "I'm going to have a drink, Lieutenant. What I can offer is scotch and water, or wine. Are you on duty? Or do you want one, too?"
"Scotch and water," he said without hesitation.
She put ice in glasses, added scotch and filled them with water, then sat down again. "Did you ever track down that blond man?"
He nodded. "Weeks ago. It was like you said, a family matter." He picked up his glass and tasted his drink. "I read once," Caldwell said after the first sip, "that if you're lost in the forest, you should sit still and let searchers find you, or you just wander in circles. I suspect the same thing's true if you're rowing around in the dark, you just row in circles until you run into something."
He drank again. "That's good," he said. "Just what I needed. You ever go down in a cave?" He didn't even glance at Felicia, didn't wait for an answer. "You get down in it and the guides turn off the lights, and for the first time for most folks, they experience real darkness. The total absence of light. The old saying, you can't see your hand before your face? True. You can't. City people don't know what that means, not really. Low dense clouds, no light to bounce off them to light up a little of the landscape, total darkness, that's how it must be out like this. Like being deep in a cave."
He gave her an oblique glance, then looked away again. She didn't move. "I keep wondering how and why Connors ran up onto the little island like that, far enough to make it necessary to get out of the canoe to free it. Seems to me he would have been paddling along, not very fast in that little rubber canoe, not fast enough that his forward momentum would have carried him up onto the rock before he felt a bump, enough to back off. He could have felt a bump, reached out, expecting to be at the ledge back of the cabin, and felt the rock, pretty much like the lowest ledge behind the cabin. Couldn't have seen it, or he would have known he was off course. He could have reckoned he had reached the place he was aiming for and climbed out, pulled the canoe out, and stepped backward, into the deepest part of the water. And once he was in the deepest water, that's all she wrote.
"Of course," he said reflectively after a moment, during which Felicia didn't stir or make a sound, "it wouldn't have been that dark, not with lights on both sides of the finger. The utility company says there was no outage, nothing like that last night. And the circuit breakers, the main switches in the electric service boxes, they're all okay. I checked. Even checked for fingerprints; nothing but smudges."
She didn't say a word. Across the way the tops of the trees were black against the gray sky, but already the base of the trees, the basalt, the lake were merging, becoming one. Soon the trees would be one with them, and there would be only the enveloping darkness. She loved this time of day, when everything merged and became one.
"I keep thinking of Abby Connors up in that cabin alone with her dog and a loaded shotgun," Caldwell said. "She's what, twenty-eight? A long life ahead of her, fifty years, sixty? A long life." He finished his drink, put the glass on the table, and stood up. He gave Felicia one of his thoughtful looks. "Would she have shot him?"
For a long time Felicia didn't speak, but finally she stood up also, and said, "Yes."
He nodded. "I'll be running along now. Thanks for the coffee, for the drink."
"Lieutenant," she said, going to the door with him as he pulled his jacket on, "is the case closed now?"
"Paperwork to clean up, reports, wait for auditors' reports, a bit of tidying up to do, but as far as I'm concerned, it's closed." He opened the door, then looked at her once more. "You take care, Mrs. Shaeffer."
25
On Tuesday Abby went to her house to meet Lieutenant Caldwell and get a receipt for whatever he wanted to take away, and she knew that Willa had been right; she could not stay in this house a single night. She would have to come back later and pack her belongings, and then she would turn it over to a real-estate agent, and never come back.
While Caldwell and his team made their search, she listened to the answering machine messages, two from friends that she skipped over, one for Brice that she skipped, and then Harvey Durham, Jud's attorney, was speaking.
"Mrs. Connors, will you please give me a call at your earliest convenience. Following the instructions of your father, I am to deliver a letter to you in person on Monday." The call had been placed on Friday.
She closed her eyes in relief. Harvey Durham would know what to do about a funeral, about Brice's parents, about the house. She sat down in the living room to wait for Caldwell to finish. His team had already taken out some clothes, papers, Brice's computer; when he entered the living room, he was holding keys. "A mini-storage place," he said, "and his car keys. Duplicates. We found another set in his pocket. Have you decided what to do about his car?"
She shook her head.
"I'll have someone bring it around and put it in the garage." His cell phone rang and he answered, turned away, speaking in a voice too low to catch. When he looked at her again, he said, "Mr. Connors was carrying the gun that killed your father. They just phoned in the results."
Now she was in Harvey Durham's office, and the attorney was deeply shocked. He was in his sixties, with unruly white hair, a paunch, very pink cheeks. He held her hands and led her to a chair as if afraid she might collapse as she told him what had happened at the lake, and that Brice had killed her father.
He would arrange everything, he assured her; he would get in touch with Brice's family, arrange to have them take care of the funeral; of course, she should not attend; he would take care of the house and car, meet with Brice's attorney....
Then he said, "Your father gave me explicit directions some years ago, three years ago, my dear. I am to shred a document in your presence, and deliver to you a letter."
Three years, she thought numbly, before he and Willa had gotten together, but after Abby and Brice were married. That was when he had added the thirty-day contingency clause to his will, a year after she married Brice. She nodded and watched as the attorney fed a manila envelope into a shredder that turned it into confetti. Then Harvey Durham handed her a sealed envelope.
"I'll leave you alone for a few minutes," he said, and walked from the office.
Slowly she opened the envelope and took out several sheets of handwritten papers.
Hi, honey,
I'm writing this letter on the assumption that for whatever reason, we won't have talked about these things when you receive it.
"She was a child, and I was a child in our kingdom by the sea." Her name was Xuan Bui, she was seventeen years old, I loved her, and I killed her.
They sent me to Bali, to a hospital. One day as I bicycled around the island with two other patients, we came across an old man on the beach, carving something. He was as brown and wrinkled as a walnut, and the wood he was carving was driftwood, bleached bone-white. He motioned for me to join him and I did. The other two men began to walk along the shore, looking for shells, but I sat near the old man, neither of us speaking for a long time. Now I could see that he was carving a bird with outspread wings, one foot already drawn up for flight, but the other foot still attached to the driftwood base. Each feather was detailed, the ruffled breast feathers parted by the wind, the wings taut and strong. Then he stopped carving and said in perfect English, "She is still bound to the earth, she is not released yet." He handed the piece to me. He got up and walked away, so ancient, so frail and small, he looked unreal. The other two men returned and asked where I had found the carving; all they had found were a few worthless shells. I said the old man had given it to me, and they said there had been no one with me. I had sat there by myself while they walked. They had checked now and then; we were all considered to be suicidal, you see, and not permitted to go out alone. One of them must have reported to the docto
r that I was delusional, and the following week they sent me home, booted me out of the army. Go home and be crazy was the message I got loud and clear.
You've seen the bird, Abby. It's real enough. Was he? I don't know to this day. I went home and was crazy for a long time. I met your mother in San Francisco, and at first, seeing her from the back, I thought it was Xuan Bui. Her hair was long and black, straight to her waist; she was slender.... Three weeks later we were married.
I did your mother two terrible wrongs, Abby. I married her when I didn't love her, trying to substitute her for someone else. And I failed to provide for her afterward. I never blamed her for leaving me. The wonder is that she didn't do it many years sooner, the day she came to know that I couldn't love her.
I knew I had to do something, something important to me, and I couldn't find what it was. I tried to write, I read, I meditated. All useless. Then I saw a woman drown out by Siren Rock, and it was as if everything in me shattered, and when it grew back together, I knew.
I had to write the novel, a long novel. Now three volumes are done, and there is one more to do. They will make a great deal of money, and I will build a school in Vietnam. I was responsible for the destruction of a village, and the death of a lovely young girl. Maybe I can redeem myself The school has been started, and as more money comes along, it will grow. It is called the Xuan Bui Institute.
You will have wondered what I did with the cashier's checks, and now you know. One other person knows, and he has helped me through every step. He is very old and I'm afraid he won't live to see it all completed. Because his health is failing, we have set up a legal trust, the Xuan Bui Institute Trust Fund, in the Bank of America Trust Division in San Francisco, and that is where I deliver the checks.
In the unlikely event of a fatal accident—the plane crashes, the boat sinks, lightning strikes—I have instructed Harvey Durham to deliver this letter to you thirty days after my death. And you should also know that if, God forbid, your death should have followed before the thirty days have passed, then all the money due me would have been sent straight to the institute trust fund. Since you are now reading this letter, the thirty days have passed, and you will have had time to start down the very difficult path of recovery from the merciless grief of the death of a loved one, and Harvey by now will have destroyed, unopened, the second part of this document.
Honey, please understand that this letter is in no way a demand on you. It's meant only to inform you so you won't worry and speculate about the checks, as I know you would without hearing this from me. I failed you in the same way I failed your mother, by not providing adequately too many times, and I am sorry, and yet your unquestioning love never wavered, and for that I am truly grateful. I don't believe the sins of the fathers are visited on their children. You have no obligation to repay my debt, and I would never try to dictate from the grave. Whatever I leave is yours without restraints, without strings. But you should know what I did, what I'm doing.
My truest wish is that one day I'll burn this letter and you will never see it. But, Abby, since you are reading it, know this: I have been blessed twice. I have loved and been loved by a woman who was heroic, and I was given a magical child. My two loves. My life has been blessed.
One last bit to ponder. A puzzle without an answer, a cosmic riddle. The day I finished Siren Rock, I felt a freedom I had not known before, a release, as if I had been in restraints that I could not identify, could not find, could not escape. And on that day when I picked up my lovely bird, it came apart in my hands, set free from its driftwood trap. The bird is for you, Abby. Be whole, my darling, be free, be unhurt. I love you.
She read the letter twice, then slowly folded it, returned it to the envelope, and put it in her purse. She crossed the office to stand at the window, seeing nothing outside, looking instead into the past, her father in Vietnam, Brice lost on the black lake, her mother's tears.... She had been weeping for her lost child, not her lost husband, Abby understood now.
And she was seeing the final scene from her father's last novel. The man Link, exhausted, defeated, was staring at the mud bath, slowly undressing. He never had believed a word of the myths that had arisen about the mud bath, its power to heal, to cleanse, or to cling as a stench that could not be washed away, but still he hesitated. Finally he moved forward, and up above the big hot spring he saw the woman he loved, holding a large white towel, waiting for him. He stepped into the mud bath.
Abby was startled by the voice of the attorney; she had not heard him reenter the office.
"Are you all right, my dear?" he asked hesitantly.
"Yes."
"How can I reach you, if the need arises?"
"Willa Ashford will know where I am," Abby said. "I have to go to Seattle, stay with my mother for a week or so. Willa has her address and phone number."
When she left the office and walked out to her car, the words were in her head: Be whole, be free, be unhurt. "I'll try," she said under her breath. "I'll try."
