Uncivil Seasons

by Michael Malone

  “That’s not the point, Cuddy. The point is, she knows who killed Cloris. The same person who killed Cloris’s first husband.”

  “How about Cloris’s second husband Uncle Rowell?”

  “Maybe.”

  He said, “I’m kidding.”

  “I’m not.”

  Chapter 6

  Tuesday, January 18

  I am an insomniac like my father, who wandered around his house at night like a ghost and now, from time to time, visits mine. I have always had to drug myself unconscious with detective fiction: reading on about pure nastiness and someone else’s guilt until I can fall backward into nothing, like in snow. When I awaken in the night, I need to get the light on quickly and find my page before the real mysteries slip in, before I hear voices, before I see ghosts. When I was little, my father would come at my request with what he claimed was a magic stethoscope, and would check for signs of monsters lurking. I did not doubt his power to keep them away.

  This morning I had a nightmare that woke me up. It was pitch-black night in this dream, and I was in our old sailboat out on the lake. Pine Hills Lake is fairly large—seven miles by almost two—but in my dream the lake was boundless, an unshored, black, flat expanse. Out of the silent dark, Bainton Ames’s powerboat suddenly came flying at me, his white bowlight shooting up and down across the water. Then the dream went up to that octagonal turret on top of Cadmean compound. Joanna Cadmean was standing there at its window, wearing the gray suit Cloris Dollard was found dead in. And now Mrs. Cadmean’s eyes did look like a mystic’s, unblinking, crazed. She had her arms out as if she were waiting to embrace someone. I knew it was her eyes making Ames’s boat head toward me. Someone was kicking away from his boat, churning foam. And I jumped too, just as the boat ripped through my bow, and exploded, and flames spumed along the water, rimming me in.

  So, I was awake at five, and rather than fight for sleep until Cuddy came to pick me up, I put on a monogrammed robe Susan Whetstone had given me that I didn’t much like, and, my bare feet tiptoeing on the frigid wood steps, I felt my way down the three flights from my bedroom to my kitchen.

  Most of my salary goes into the mortgage and upkeep and furnishing of a narrow Queen Anne brick house in the south part of Hillston that overlooks the lawn of a women’s junior college, named Frances Bush after its nineteenth-century founder: my house had once boarded her students. Five years ago, after I’d finished law school in Charlottesville, and confused everybody and annoyed Rowell by going to work for the Hillston police, I’d bought the house with money my father left me. No one wanted to live downtown then, and old houses there were cheaper than trailers. Obviously, as had been pointed out to me, it was too much house for a single man. It was also too much house to heat: the rooms were large and had high ceilings, and on each floor a big Victorian bow window sucked in the cold air robustly with a laissez-faire disdain for my modern fuel costs.

  At five, then, in the kitchen, I wrapped myself in a blanket and ate leftover spaghetti while I finished reading the department’s copy of the old coroner’s report on Bainton Ames’s drowning accident that I had started studying before I went to bed, having found it in the vault of old files last night. There was little in it to suggest that Cloris’s first husband hadn’t died exactly as the coroner had concluded: accidental drowning while under the influence of alcohol. His dinner companions that night had confessed that the five of them had drunk five bottles of wine, and everyone knew that Bainton did not normally drink.

  An unlucky accident, people had said, and added, “but not surprising.” Bainton Ames, a preoccupied, farsighted man—for decades chief industrial engineer of Cadmean Textiles—had his eyes focused on future machines, or ancient coins, or seventeenth-century music; the present had been a blur. When Ames drowned, people said preoccupation had killed him.

  One midnight in mid-August fifteen years ago, he had left the Pine Hills Inn, where he’d dined with four men big in the Atlanta textiles business. Against their advice he’d set out across the lake in the twenty-two-foot inboard powerboat Cloris had given him as a lure into the world. Headed back to the Ames cottage on the opposite shore from the Inn, he had presumably slipped, knocked himself out, and fallen overboard. The boat had sped on pilotless into a marina, where it had blown up a gas tank. The explosion had terrified all the residents, and that summer, boating after dark was banned.

  A few weeks later, they discovered that Ames had not been in the boat when it exploded, because a teenage boy, swimming around under old Briggs Cadmean’s long pier, had bumped into a swollen body bent around a piling, and had unhooked Ames’s jacket from the bolt it was caught on.

  After her husband drowned, Cloris had their lake house closed. Two years later, she married the still-bachelor Rowell Dollard, and he and her daughters persuaded her to reopen it. Rowell bought a new boat.

  My father, who every weekend for years had played violin in Ames’s amateur string quartet, was furious with his dead friend for ever having tried to pilot the Chris-Craft, even in the daytime. When Cloris later married Rowell, my father said, “Well, good Christ, Peggy, Cloris certainly runs the gamut. First Euclid. Now Mark Antony. Don’t you think your brother Rowell is a little too relentlessly athletic?”

  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 you
r 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: FAMOUS 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.”