The Lavender Hour

by Anne Leclaire

Gage didn't pursue the question. I knew that Luke's doctor was on his list of witnesses and would be called later to testify. He looked down at his notes. “Now you testified that you found a prescription vial in the home of the deceased, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where was the vial?”

  “In the kitchen.”

  “In plain sight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where anyone might have seen it or touched it?”

  “It was in plain sight, yes.”

  “Is it possible that, at some time during the weeks that Jessie Long came to his home, Luke Ryder might have asked her to bring it to him?”

  “I guess it's possible.”

  “And wouldn't it be appropriate for Jessie, in her role as volunteer, to spend time tidying up the house for Mr. Ryder?”

  “It might be.”

  “And in doing so, isn't it reasonable to assume she might have moved the bottle?”

  “She might have.”

  “Were there any other fingerprints on the bottle?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many?”

  “A number of partial prints, some of which we couldn't identify.”

  “And the ones you identified. Who did they belong to?”

  “The deceased's mother, the hospice health aide, the hospice nurse, a pharmacist, and the deceased.”

  “In your testimony, you mentioned also finding a plastic bag that contained Jessie's fingerprints. Were hers the only prints you recovered?”

  “No. The deceased's prints were also on the bag.”

  “Any others?”

  “Several we could not identify.”

  Gage switched gears. “Now, at one point in your investigation, you obtained a court order for a search warrant for the defendant's home, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And on what basis did you obtain the warrant?”

  “The request was granted based on the results from the lab indicating that the deceased's death was due to massive amounts of Seconal in his system, that the defendant's fingerprints were on one of the medication vials, and that the bag recovered from the scene contained trace evidence of Seconal.”

  “Did you seek warrants for any of the other people whose fingerprints were found on the bottles?”

  “No.”

  “You did not?”

  “No.”

  “Prior to your search of Jessie's home, did you have any knowledge of the missing shirt or the painting?”

  Moody looked over at Nelson. The DA stared ahead.

  “Lieutenant?” Gage said. I knew what was coming. Gage had learned from his mole in the system that Paige had hired a private detective who had at some point gone into my cottage and found Luke's shirt, the painting, and the envelope with Luke's hair. My notebook. I could still recall how ill it had made me to learn someone had been in my home, gone through my things. Gage had told me the search was illegal and none of those things could have been admitted without the police uncovering them independently, but during a pretrial motion, to Gage's astonishment and anger, the judge had allowed them.

  “We received information that an unnamed person had gone into the defendant's home and found these things.”

  “Gone into her home or broken into it?”

  “Our informant didn't specify.”

  “Who was your informant?”

  “We never ascertained the identity.”

  “An anonymous caller?”

  “Yes.”

  Gage gave the jury a look of astonishment, as if he was just learning this himself. “So on the basis of an illegal search by an anonymous person, you sought and received permission to search Jessica Long's home?”

  “No. The warrant was granted on evidence we had in hand that pointed to the defendant. She was the last person to see the deceased alive. Her fingerprints were on the vial. He died of a Sec-onal overdose.”

  “And it had nothing to do with the information obtained in an illegal search by an anonymous person and relayed to you by another anonymous person?”

  “That is correct.”

  “And you expect this jury to believe that?”

  Nelson rose. “Object. Argumentative.”

  “Sustained.”

  “Approach, Your Honor,” Gage said.

  Judge Savage motioned for both attorneys to approach her for a whispered conference. I knew Gage was trying to get the evidence tossed out because it was based on knowledge gained during the illegal search, even though Savage had already ruled on this before the trial. Now she denied it again.

  Gage returned to the witness, smiling and acting as if he had won some point in the conference, although I didn't believe the jury was fooled for a minute. “Lieutenant Moody, did you uncover any proof that Miss Long actually was responsible for the things you found? Could they have been placed there by the same anonymous person who made the call?” Of course, Gage should have quit while he was ahead.

  “We didn't believe so.”

  “And why not?”

  “The defendant's handwriting was on the envelope that contained the deceased's hair.”

  “So you say,” Gage said.

  Nelson jumped up.

  “Withdrawn.”

  “Any redirect, Mr. Nelson?”

  “No, Your Honor.”

  Judge Savage excused Moody and recessed for lunch. The bailiff led the jury out. Gage and I returned to a conference room. Irene brought in coffee and sandwiches, but I couldn't eat. When Gage was busy reviewing his notes, I popped another Xanax and mulled over Moody's testimony, wondering when the small pile of coincidences and circumstantial evidence had become a pile with a force of its own. When we returned to the courtroom, my head was throbbing.

  “Call your next witness,” Savage said to Nelson as soon as the members of the jury were again settled in their box.

  “The state calls Detective Peter Sakolosky,” Nelson said.

  According to Gage, Sakolosky was an ex-marine, and he looked every inch of it, from his gray crew cut and erect posture to his highly polished shoes. He was on the stand for the next half hour, and his testimony corroborated Moody's. There were no surprises for the jury. Eventually Sakolosky was excused, replaced by the Chatham Police officer who had received the call from Paige and had initially called in the State Police. When he was excused, the judge directed the DA to call his next witness.

  “The state calls Dr. James Wilber,” Nelson said.

  Wilber was quickly sworn in and seated. He was thin, with glasses, and was pale as a soda cracker, as if he lived and slept in his lab.

  “Would you please state your name and spell it for the court?”

  “Dr. James Wilber, W-i-l-b-e-r.”

  “And where do you live, Dr. Wilber?”

  “Plymouth, Massachusetts.”

  “How are you employed?”

  “I am the chief forensic pathologist for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts crime lab.”

  Nelson took him through his credentials, and then began the questions.

  “In layman's terms,” he said, “please tell the jury the cause of Luke Ryder's death?”

  “Narcotic poisoning.”

  “We have heard that the deceased was taking morphine to relieve pain. Could that account for the narcotics you found in the toxicology screening?”

  “At the time of his death, the deceased had not only morphine in his system but five times the lethal dose of Seconal.”

  “Beyond any reasonable amount ingested for pain or to induce sleep?”

  “Five times the lethal dose,”Wilber repeated.

  Gage had told me that jurors usually found testimony by experts tedious and that they often nodded off, especially after lunch, but when I dared look over at the box, each of them looked alert. Not one appeared the least bit in danger of napping. “It was the lock of hair and the sketchbook that did it,” Gage would tell me later. “That woke everyone up. Sexy.”

  It was after four by the
time both Gage and Nelson finished with their examinations, much of it corroborating Moody's testimony. The fingerprints. The toxicology results. Nelson had more evidence marked as exhibits. Shortly before five, Judge Savage excused the jurors and instructed them not to discuss the case with anyone, and then she adjourned for the weekend. The court would reconvene at 9:00 on Monday morning.

  Gage waited with me inside the courthouse while Irene went for the car. “Don't you worry,”he said, his constant refrain. “It's all circumstantial.”

  twenty-four

  EARLIER IN SEPTEMBER, I'd moved out of the cottage in the campground. I'd felt vulnerable there ever since I'd learned of the break-in by the anonymous person, Paige's detective. I had also become concerned about the effect of a trial on my neighbors, most of whose families had been vacationing on this street for generations. They knew Lily, and a good many of them remembered my daddy. Some of the oldest even remembered his daddy. They had been supportive throughout the days after I had been arraigned and indicted, but when reporters had began to come around and the Cape Cod Times had printed a photo of the house, I knew I would have to leave. I didn't want them to have to put up with the invasion.

  An old friend of Faye's had gone to Bordeaux for several months and, through Faye, had offered me the use of his home. It was an old estate at the end of a private road in Dennis. A large multiacre parcel, overlooking Cape Cod Bay, it was one of the few remaining homesteads in the area that had not been subdivided. The mansion was a white Greek revival called the Captain's House, a name I thought apt since it had been built sometime in the 1800s by a sea captain before being passed along to a grandson who was a captain of industry, and then, most recently, to a well-known captain of commerce. This last captain had had the interior completely gutted, reinforced, and renovated. Spacious, awash with light, and filled with the owner's art collection, the result had been featured in an issue of Architectural Digest. Off to the side of the circular drive was a converted carriage house that the family used for overflow guests. A simple four-room cottage that had escaped the renovation plans, it contained a kitchen, living room with a fieldstone fireplace that took up an entire wall, two bedrooms, and a bath. There were wide pine floors throughout and pine paneling in the living room that had aged to a warm gold. Faye's friend had offered me either the mansion or the carriage house, and I chose the smaller of the two. It suited me perfectly and—looking back later—I would believe it saved my sanity. No one knew I was there except for Faye, Gage and his staff, and, of course, Ashley.

  Those weeks I lived like a hermit. I prepared simple meals, worked on my jewelry, walked along the flats when the tide was low. It was a nunlike existence, as if I were serving penance. My sole human visitor was Faye, who occasionally stopped by to drop off my mail and a pot of homemade soup or a pie or a jar of beach plum jelly. My only other company was avian.

  There was an old wooden feeder atop a post by the kitchen window, and on my second day there, I'd gone to the Bird Watcher's General Store in Orleans and bought five pounds of seed. Each morning I woke to birdcalls. I'd listen and try to identify them—chickadee, cardinal, finch—and I'd think about Luke. The clarity of my memory of him was fading, like a watercolor exposed to the sun. How fragile was the tissue of memory. One night I tried to sketch his image, but the drawing was poor. I would have given anything for one photo of him, something. I couldn't even hold the locket in which I'd hidden the curl of his hair. After the police had arrived with the search warrant and taken away his shirt and my sketchbook and the envelope containing his hair, I'd driven to Falmouth and rented a safe-deposit box in a savings bank and secreted it there, safely out of reach of Lieutenant Moody.

  Luke. The missing underlay every moment—like a frigid underground lake—although I could speak of it to no one. The ever-present ache of sorrow lodged in my body, and I wondered what happened to grief that could not be expressed. Shakespeare had a line about that, but I couldn't recall it. I remembered what I had thought when Luke told me that birds sang for joy: What do they do with their grief?

  AFTER THAT fourth day of the trial, I returned to my refuge in Dennis and tried not to think about the day's testimony, the expressions of the jurors, the hate-filled ugliness on the face of the protester who wished me dead. There was no cable hookup at the carriage house, and I was grateful for that, for I might have been tempted to watch the news, see what the pool television camera had recorded. Four days. On the first day, Gage estimated we would be through all the testimony in a week, but things were proceeding slower than he'd expected, and Nelson still had a number of witnesses to call before the state rested and Gage began my defense. I pushed these thoughts from my mind as I prepared a dinner of rice and steamed green beans. And tea. I'd stopped drinking alcohol weeks ago. Part of the penance. I wouldn't allow myself the easy escape of wine or gin. After dinner, I cleaned up the kitchen, and then placed my nightly call to Ashley.

  “How did it go?” Ashley asked.

  “Okay.”

  She wanted details, so I recounted as much as I could about the day's testimony. I tried to convey Gage's confidence, but, as always, Ashley could read me.

  “I think I should come up,” she said. “Someone should be there with you.”

  “What does Daniel say about that?”

  “I haven't talked it over with him yet,” she said after a hesitation. The pause was all the answer I needed.

  “I don't think you should,” I said, and repeated Gage's assertion that I didn't need to worry, that the entire case was circumstantial.

  “He's been telling you that since the day you hired him.”

  “I believe him.”

  “Wake up and smell the fire, Jess. This is not going to go away, no matter what your runt lawyer says.” Ashley had met Gage when she'd come up for the clothes-shopping expedition, and she hadn't been impressed. She wanted me to call Bill Miller. I told her I'd eat ground glass before I'd get him involved.

  “It'll be over soon,” I said, hoping I sounded optimistic.

  “I wish you would tell Mama. Think how it'll be if she hears about it from someone else.”

  “She's in Italy. How is she going to hear about it? It will be over before she comes home.” I hadn't told Ashley about the TV trucks, reporters, protesters, and she hadn't mentioned seeing anything in the news. If it hadn't reached Virginia, I doubted it would reach Italy.

  “I'm here for you, sweetie,” Ashley said.

  “I know you are.”

  “If there is anything you want, anything I can do—”

  “You've already done enough.” I would be paying her and Daniel back for years.

  “Oh, baby. I wish I could do more. I wish I could make this go away.”

  I closed my eyes. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “How come you've never asked me?”

  “What's that?”

  “If I did it. If I gave Luke an overdose.”

  “Oh, baby. There was no need to ask. I know you. I know you didn't do it.”

  Ashley's voice was sure, but I couldn't help wondering if the real reason she had never asked was because she hadn't wanted to hear the answer. “Give the boys my love.”

  “And ours to you.”

  We hung up. I climbed the stairs to the room where I'd set up my worktable and turned the radio on to the local NPR affiliate. A Bach concerto was playing. I began braiding and weaving the buttery blond hair from a woman in Seattle into a chain braid. A spider at work.

  I know you didn't do it.

  FROM THE moment I'd hired him, Gage Fisk never asked me if I'd given Luke an overdose. The only one who'd asked was Faye. “I need to know,” she had said in a voice devoid of judgment. “I need to know what we are dealing with.” I'd held her gaze and told her no. No, I had not given Luke an overdose. Faye had searched my face, seemed satisfied with what she saw there. “We'll beat this,” she'd said. “Don't worry.” The same thing Gage had said earlier when we left
the courthouse.

  twenty-five

  THE NORTH SHORE of the Cape fronts Cape Cod Bay. At high tide, all is concealed, and you have to walk on soft sand that gives beneath your feet. But when the tide is low, extensive sand flats are exposed, and although the trick is not to get caught out when the tide turns, it is possible to walk nearly a mile straight out to the water's lip. Shellfishermen dig for clams then, and shorebirds skitter around, leaving miniature prints in the damp sand. Things are revealed in the intertidal zone, exposed. Ribs and masts of old vessels; ropes; bleached shells; the shoaling of sands, all maternal curves and swells; skate egg cases; horseshoe crabs; short, random ribbons drawn by sandworms. Once I came upon the skeleton of a seal, its fin bones alarmingly like those of a human hand.

  Now I walked along the shore. I'd woken early. It was too cool to go barefoot on those fall days, and I kept a pair of old beach-walking sneakers, stiff with dried salt, by the back door. I stored a walking stick there, too, a length of gray driftwood worn smooth by sand and water that I'd found during the first week at the carriage house. I carried it as I headed out, east toward Brewster, poking holes in the sand as I went. I passed by houses, some occupied by year-round residents. Inside, people were rising into the slow unfolding of their days, measuring scoops of coffee, retrieving the morning papers from front steps, taking vitamins. Ordinary lives.

  Later, when I would look back on those weeks in the carriage house, I would think of the days as a period when time stopped. As if I had stepped outside of it. There were moments—mornings in the first instants of waking or when I was walking along the beach, my mind drifting, lulled by the running song of the water lapping at the shore—when I could almost believe I was caught up in a bad dream, as trite as this sounds, one from which I would wake and find myself back in Virginia or Chicago. But then a wave of pain would take hold, and I would remember. I'd think back to the year before and how I had come to the Cape, clear of cancer and full of hope, ready to begin anew. I'd run through all the things that had happened since then. And at the center of all the memories was Luke. I had believed I could block out grief, but of course I couldn't. It would take me at unexpected times, rocking me to my soul and bringing a terrible tightness to my throat, making it nearly impossible to swallow, let alone breathe.