Uncivil Seasons

by Michael Malone

  I touched her hand; it still felt warmer than mine. “What’s this?”’ Her wrist was smeared with a small streak of fresh blood.

  Cohen shrugged. “Scrape; it’s nothing. This is interesting: see these faint vertical white streaks? Old scars. Too old really to tell much, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she hadn’t made a serious attempt way back when.”

  “What would you say, could anyone have survived that fall?”

  He looked back up at the tower. “Improbable. But people have jumped out of planes and survived it. People do amazing things.”

  The moon loomed between the vaporing clouds and shone on the motionless face, cool and still, white except where blood gritted the skin. The gray steady eyes were open, unblinking, focused far beyond this moment. The handsome head was twisted to the side, and the line of its profile, Delphian, serene, was as untroubled and disinterested as stone. She wore a dress of thin white wool, too thin for such weather, and around her neck were milk-white pearls, and tight in the hand of her broken arm, a white silk scarf.

  “Say, come on; can I go now, Savile?”

  “Just a second, do you mind?”

  Officer Pendergraph had gone back to the squad car; he was young, raw-faced, and energetically working against letting me see he was bothered by mortality. I said, “You all right, Wes?”

  “Yes, sir, I’m fine.”

  “Was there a note?”

  “No, sir. We didn’t find one anyhow. We looked.”

  “Get a statement from Senator Dollard?’

  “Dr. Cohen said leave him alone ’til you people came.”

  I told Pendergraph to call the station and try to hurry Foster’s forensics crew and the photographer. The task relieved him. “They’re on the way,” he came back to tell me.

  The murky vaulted space of the lodge’s huge living room was reddened by the embers of a fire gleaming beneath the smooth embedded stones of the mammoth chimney. Beside the antler coatrack, the telephone was off its hook. I replaced it and called the Pine Hills Inn, too late to page Cuddy Mangum there. I reached him at his apartment in the River Rise complex where he’d taken Briggs. I told him not to bring her home, and told him why. Then I walked slowly through all the spare, chilly rooms, checking their windows. Nothing was out of order. Finally I sat down on the couch across from Cohen, who’d pulled one of the bent-willow chairs over to the fire embers and was resting his head in his hands, elbows to his knees. “Your hat’s on the table in the front,” he said.

  “Richard, I want you to tell me two things. What’s there to indicate a struggle? What’s there to indicate she was pushed?”

  His hands opened and his head came up, pale and thin above the wiry black border of hair. “Pushed? Who by? By Senator Dollard? Cheesh!” He nodded slowly. “Well, okay, sure. Somebody could have shoved her; that or jumped, fall would be about the same. Struggle? I didn’t see any claw marks on his face, if that’s the kind you mean. But who knows.” He thought, yawned, and thought some more. “I’d say, pushed her from the back, bam, no warning, if he did it. Seems like I saw a snag kind of thing, down the dress front. Rail splinters probably. Headfirst, see.” He pantomimed the motion and the fall. “Yeah, headfirst. Gutsy woman, if it was her idea. I’m going, all right with you? Fading fast here.”

  “You writing probable suicide, or what?”

  “I’m writing broken neck for now. You can decide how it got started.” He yawned through his words. “Goo’night “

  The door to the first-floor bedroom was closed. I opened it. It had been her room. By moonlight I saw the basket of gifts from my mother, still untouched, on the dressing table. Over a rocking chair back were folded the sweater and plaid skirt I’d first seen Joanna Cadmean wearing.

  “Justin?”

  His voice came from a chair in the dark corner. Then Dollard stood and his silver hair moved into the light. “Justin? Did they take her away yet?” His face was ashy; his pupils black, distended to the rims of his eyes.

  “No”

  “Justin, God, this is dreadful! Dreadful!”

  “Yes.”

  “I should have suspected…”

  “Yes? Suspected what?”

  “She was just standing there by the door, up there. Then she opened it. And went out on the balcony. And just leaned…and…then she was gone. Just gone! I heard it, Justin. My God! She was mad…mad. Completely insane!” His mouth opened, gulping air like a swimmer.

  “Yes. You already told me she was insane.” I stooped to the lamp and twisted the knob. At the click, Dollard stepped backward and covered his eyes. He wore all gray, gray sweater and gray slacks. He looked old. I said, “I’d like you to take me up to the study now and show me how it happened.” I turned toward the door and let him pass through first. One of his hands kept rubbing up and down against his arm.

  The door to the balcony was open, the tower was cold as outdoors. Its huge gray telescope shadowed a wall. The instrument pointed straight out across the black lake, pointed at the summer house that had once belonged to Bainton Ames. Silent in the room, we listened to a siren coming nearer.

  As Dollard told me where she had stood and how she had moved, I stepped out onto the pine-plank balcony. Yellow crutches lay on its floor. Caught in the rough log rail were tiny threads of white wool. I leaned over. Far down, directly beneath me, gleamed the silver car, beside it the white motionless shape. Beyond the pines, from the foot of the hill, came headlights bouncing. Foster’s men and the photographer. It was still too soon for Captain Fulcher. I walked back inside, pulling the door closed with the edge of my sweater.

  “Have a seat, Rowell.”

  “We’ll talk downstairs. It’s too cold up here.”

  “In a minute, please. It is cold. Why were you and she up here?”

  “She asked me. She insisted I look at something. Something to do with Cloris.”

  “What?”

  “She never said.” Rowell sank down in a chrome and black leather chair beside a desk heaped with papers and maps of the stars. He said, “I don’t think there was anything to show me. She began talking wildly. And then, she jumped! For God’s sake, can’t we do this in the morning? I’m upset, Justin, God!”

  Watching him, I lit a cigarette. I found a paper cup with some water in it to use as an ashtray. “Why were you over here at all?”

  “She called me. I’ve already explained all this. She begged me to come.”

  “Why?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Why did you come?” I was speaking as softly as he was. “An insane woman you clearly dislike calls you up at night, and you drive all the way over here from North Hillston? Why?”

  He still didn’t answer, and I turned and leaned down to the telescope sight, and looked through it, into blackness. Pushing it upward, I saw, very clearly, cold and unblinking stars. “Why, Rowell?”

  When I turned back to him, Dollard thrust his head forward, the shadows behind him moving. “It’s a private matter.”

  “Not anymore.”

  His hand pressed hard against his arm. “Justin. She was hysterical. She was raving.”

  “So you tell me. I’m asking you, about what? What was she raving about before she just turned around on those crutches and pulled herself up and over the rail? In her raving, did she happen to say why she suddenly decided to commit suicide? While you stood and watched? Why did you happen to be here when the impulse just struck?”

  He stood. “What’s the matter with you, Justin? For God’s sake!”

  “Tell me why you came here.”

  “You’re the one who let her into my house! Into Cloris’s bedroom! You listened to her insane mutterings!”

  “So did you, some years back. They weren’t so insane then, if I recall your comments to the press.”

  For a long time, Rowell stared at me, his eyes protuberant, his face tight. Then he stepped quickly forward and touched his hand to my shoulder. “Justin, what I’m going to say is in absolute confidence.
I want that understood.”

  I didn’t speak, or move. Finally he stepped back and turned his eyes to the wall of books. His voice was broken by struggles with silence. “When I first knew Joanna Griffin, she was quite young. I was young. We were thrown together by her…involvement with, well, apparently, you have read all about that. She…fell in love with me, I guess you’d have to say. And, well, we had a brief, a brief relationship. I broke it off. She was not a stable person, even then. As she proved. Now, that was thirty decades ago! And now!” He stopped suddenly, walked back, and sat in the chair. “Now she comes back to Hillston and begins making incredible accusations. By involving you, she involves the police. And then she does this!” He stabbed his finger toward the balcony. “I don’t know why!”

  I said, “I don’t believe you, Rowell.’’

  When he raised his eyes, they were as glazy as marbles. “What?”

  “I don’t believe she committed suicide.” I dropped the cigarette into the paper cup and listened while it hissed in the water. “I think you killed her.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, you killed her.”

  He whispered at me, “You’re as mad as she was. In God’s name, why should you think such a thing?”

  “Why?” I leaned against the books and watched him. “Because I know what her accusations were. Because she made them to me. And to Lieutenant Mangum. Because I know she believed, absolutely believed, that you are guilty of murder. You killed Bainton Ames in order to marry Cloris.”

  A dusty red mottled his cheeks, spreading up his face to where the vein in his temple jumped.

  “I think she believed you killed Cloris too.”

  “Oh, my God!” All the color disappeared from his face.

  “Because Mrs. Cadmean would never have ‘asked’ you to come over here, would never have ‘asked’ you to come up in this tower with her, because she was deathly afraid of you. Afraid you were going to kill her, too! That’s right. So strong was her conviction that her sister-in-law came to my office Monday to tell me about it.” As I went on, Dollard’s face froze, like the face of a man put under a spell, “Because, Rowell, Lieutenant Mangum just told me he was over here this evening, and he spoke to Joanna Cadmean and she was not at all in a suicidal state. She was getting ready to go to bed. She had no intentions of inviting you over. And I think a check of the toll calls out of this house tonight is going to prove it.”

  Outside, light jumped up from the flash of the photographer’s camera. I could feel Dollard’s eyes frozen on me as I moved out of the room onto the balcony. Down on the driveway, I saw Foster crawl around the front of the Mercedes. I called, “Etham,” and the willowy black man leapt to his feet and rammed his hands into the pockets of the sheepskin coat. “Yeah, what?”

  I called down, “Thanks, okay? As soon as you’re through, they can take her.”

  “Can I get up there?”

  “Come on when you’re ready.”

  Rowell sat rigid in the black chair, breathing with his mouth open.

  He said, “Justin, why are you doing this to me? I don’t understand.”

  “Why not? You had already called here yesterday and threatened the woman. You came here tonight, and forced, or cajoled, your way in. You ordered her to keep quiet about her premonitions, just as you just now ordered me to keep quiet about your having seduced her. And when she told you she knew you were guilty, you shoved her over the balcony. That’s all. She probably climbed up here to try to escape you. I expect if she hadn’t struck your car, you might have simply driven off and left her, assuming we’d call it an accident. Just as people thought Bainton Ames’s drowning was an accident.”

  A noise came from Dollard’s throat and his hands squeezed on the chrome armrests.

  I said, “I’ll try hard, but maybe I won’t be able to prove you killed Ames. Just as Walter Stanhope wasn’t able to prove it.”

  Startled, his head jerked up.

  “But, Rowell, I can convict you of killing Joanna Cadmean. And I will.”

  “I really believe you mean this,” he whispered. “You’re serious! I’m your family.” He came fast out of the chair, his voice louder. “After all, all, you’ve already done to hurt your mother, you can’t mean to do this! This will kill her!”

  “It will hurt her to hear what you’ve done, yes.”

  Suddenly he made a sound like a laugh, derisive and sharp. “This is insane! Justin, think! Even the accusation could do irreparable harm. And not only to me!” His indignant expression darkened abruptly and his face was purple. “I’m not listening to any more of this. This is intolerable! Nobody in his right mind would put up with it.”

  I stayed by the door as he strode toward me. I said, “If you’d wanted us to think it was an accident, you shouldn’t have broken this chain.”

  His head swiveled to the brass door chain I held up, its catch twisted where it had been snapped from the bent lock. “And you shouldn’t have wrenched her wrist,” I said, “so hard you tore off her watch.” I stepped over to the corner, bent down, and gathered the two pieces of the watch I’d seen on Joanna Cadmean’s wrist both times I’d been with her. The band of gold links was broken. Near the watch lay a brass letter opener. I pointed down to it. “Did she try to protect herself with this? Is that how her arm got broken? Did you take the phone downstairs off the hook so if Briggs called, she’d think Joanna was talking with someone? And your scarf, Rowell? Did Joanna grab at your scarf as you shoved her toward the rail? Is that why it’s down there in her hand now?”

  Slowly, horror closed Dollard’s eyes: I listened to footsteps start to climb the stairs far below us. When they reached the first landing, he shook himself, then walked to the door without seeing me as he went by. I spoke to his back, to the lush gray sweater that looked no less rich and assured now than it had before. I said, “Just don’t leave the house. Thank you.”

  Without turning back, he mumbled thickly, “You’re going to regret this.”

  I picked up the extension phone on the desk and called the River Rise apartment and asked Cuddy how Briggs was doing.

  “Cruddy. Same as me,” he said. “She’s okay, don’t worry. It’s feeling responsible, you know, that’s the worst. I mean, my sense is she and Mrs. Cadmean hadn’t met more than a couple of times before now. Listen, she wants to come over, and I’m gonna bring her. We both feel awful, tell you the damn truth. But that lady acted fine, Justin. She didn’t seem down, she seemed almost, hell, jolly. I swear I can’t understand it!”

  “It’s not suicide, Cuddy.”

  I heard his long whistle, like a wind. “Dollard?”

  “I think so. It looks that way.”

  “Shit a brick. Well, you were right. And I was wrong. Damn. How’d he get in there? She told me she was going to lock up. I told her to.”

  “I don’t know yet. I guess she let him in. Okay, would you go ask Briggs if Joanna told her about any kind of letter or note or something she’d written to me and put somewhere.”

  While Cuddy was gone, I listened to the ambulance doors snap open and shut, and its motor spit in the cold, and the keen of its siren leaving. Foster opened the study door. I waved him in.

  Cuddy came back on and told me Briggs hadn’t been left any message about a letter for me. He said, “Be there soon as we can. Justin, I’m sorry.”

  Foster and the photographer crowded me out of the study. Downstairs, I went to the door and watched Rowell, motionless in his black overcoat, standing outside by his car, boxed in by my car and Foster’s and the squad car whose noiseless light kept spinning, throwing fire over the lake.

  In Joanna Cadmean’s room I began my search for the letter I felt certain she had written me, but had not yet made known to Briggs, because she hadn’t thought she needed to yet. There were very few belongings through which to search: one suitcase on the floor of the closet. One drawer indifferently arranged in the bureau. She had required little. I emptied Mother’s wicker basket, and ruff
led the pages of the pile of thick romances, heroines in white by ruined towers, pierced by moonlight.

  I found what I was looking for in a book under the bed; one of those small-print, yellowing collections of Shakespeare’s complete works, pages separated from the cracked spine, the kind of book that summer houses have on musty shelves. Mrs. Cadmean had written the letter on the notepaper given her by my mother. She had placed the dozen sheets, whether by design or accident, midway through the play Hamlet. Her handwriting was scrolled and ornate, but perfectly clear, perfectly linear on the page. At the top of each sheet the red cardinals sat on a dogwood branch, symbols of the state.

  January 18

  Dear Justin,

  You said just now on the phone you planned to go speak with Mr. Stanhope. If you did, he may have told you something about an incident in my life, when I was a young girl, and involving Rowell Dollard. It is true. I was hurt by it. Perhaps I should have told you myself, but it has no bearing on this matter.

  It is also true that when I first told Cloris of my terrible instinct that Rowell was responsible for Bainton’s drowning, she said I had fabricated the story because of my dislike of Rowell. Our friendship came to an end because she didn’t believe me.

  It is not true that I fabricated the story. But I have to confess, when I said that Cloris had spoken to me in my dream about a diary, in fact, she had telephoned me, last month, in the ordinary way. Let me explain. I have had an interest, since my childhood, in old coins. I suppose I liked feeling on their faces the many hands that had touched them through so much history. Bainton had often shown me his collection. I knew it well. And so I noticed in the testimony surrounding his death the mention of a coin he’d brought to the inn to show someone the night he died. It was a coin he’d recently acquired.

  Justin, I saw that coin this summer, back in the collection. I know I am not mistaken. I could only conclude that Rowell had taken it from Bainton that night, and all these years later put it back with the others.

  This summer I visited Hillston (at my father-in-law’s request—he wants even relatives I suspect he doesn’t much like to keep in touch). And this time, I paid a call on Cloris (Rowell was, I believe she said, in Washington that weekend), and asked her if we might not reconcile after our quarrel. She agreed. We had a good talk. Afterward, I asked if I might see Bainton’s coins again. I was stunned to see the presumably missing gold piece there. But I didn’t mention it. Bainton had died so long ago, and I suppose I felt the cruelty of asking her to accept a truth about Rowell that would shadow the life they had, by all accounts, so happily lived for so many years.