But I did take the coin out of its case, and studied it, and I commented on the fact that it was the only one with no label on its paper envelope.
Shortly before her death, Cloris phoned me to thank me for making the overture to renew our friendship. And she said, laughing, that she had wanted me to have that coin of Bainton’s as a gift, since I’d taken such an interest in it, and after I’d left, she’d set it aside to mail to me, along, she said, with a pretty leather diary she was sending to her daughter. But she’d packed them up somewhere, and couldn’t put her hands on them—as she said—but they were somewhere in “this madhouse” and one of these days she’d send it along. It was very typical of her.
But I never received the coin. And then, a few weeks later, I had my dream, and the next morning I was told that she’d been murdered. Justin, I don’t know if Rowell killed Bainton. I, perhaps foolishly, decided only to intimate my feelings to you by talking about dreams without directly producing evidence that would involve me in testimony about the past. My encounter with Rowell at his house and his truly cruel attack on me over the phone make even clearer, if I need further proof, just how vicious I can expect him to be.
The coin is a two-and-a-half-dollar, Liberty-head gold piece, Charlotte-minted in 1839. Bainton kept very careful records. He had only one. I feel strongly that the coin is still in that house. I think Rowell could not bring himself to discard it as easily as he has discarded the living.
That was the end of her original letter. In a different pen, another sheet followed, dated tonight.
Dear Justin,
Briggs and your friend, Lt. Mangum, have just left for their restaurant, and I’m going to take my poor ankle to an early bed, with another friend of yours, Shakespeare. (I regret I missed the chance to see you in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a favorite of mine, as you might expect.)
I have the strong feeling you’re thinking of me now. I thought of calling, but hate to intrude any more than I already have on your sympathetic ear. I will mail all this tomorrow. You can decide what’s best to do with it, if anything. I’m going home.
You have been very much in my thoughts. Upsetting thoughts, of your falling a long way. But perhaps only into something new. Everything around you is white. I can’t tell if it’s something good or bad. (Always the Sibyl’s way out, isn’t it?) But please take care. You know, I trusted your eyes from the first moment I saw them. They see the possibility that there are more things in heaven and earth than are ever dreamt of in all the Horatios’ philosophy. For believing so, dear Justin, I thank you. We are only mad north-by-northwest.
Joanna Cadmean
I folded the small, scented sheets back in order. This was no deathbed letter, and not even the Polonian fool Captain Fulcher would believe it was. On the table by the bed was the sketchbook, some of its drawings torn out. I turned over the pages. A gray shadow of Rowell’s enraged face looked out at me, uncannily like the look he had just now given me as he strode out of the study. Across the sheet, Joanna had drawn a series of vertical lines, like the rails of a balcony, like the bars of a cell.
I walked back out into the bitter cold night, and charged Rowell Dollard with murder.
part two
Bottom’s Dream
Chapter 18
Thursday, January 20
The snow began to fall again early in the morning after Joanna Cadmean died; thick, sticky flakes this time, large as new buds of white azaleas. By dawn they covered Hillston, snowslip heavy on the trees, the downtown stores wheyfaced, staring out at one another across the white, silent roads. I walked onto the steps of the municipal building and saw the whole slumberous city, lulled and hushed by snow.
Rowell Dollard was not in custody; he was not even booked. He was in a private room at University Hospital under the care of a personal physician who said his patient was the victim of hyper-tension and acute prostration brought on by the shock of the violent deaths of his wife and Mrs. Cadmean. The pull of medical rank pleased almost everyone who had been sitting all night in Van Dorn Fulcher’s office. Dollard’s near nervous collapse was, said the state attorney general, “just the sort of holding pattern we need right now.”
The A.G.’s name was Julian D. Lewis, and the D was for Dollard. He had driven very quickly over from Raleigh for this informal hearing, which was also attended by Judge Henry Tiggs, a man I’d known since childhood. Everyone listened sleepily to Rowell Dollard record his statement for the stenographer until Rowell simply mumbled to a stop and said someone should call his doctor right away. His statement was the same one he had given me: Mrs. Cadmean had jumped for no cause she made known.
By dawn, V.D. Fulcher looked as if he were ready to check into a ward near the senator’s. The captain’s pink, whiskery jowls were twitching. His splutter had stammered into incoherence as he tortured himself with calculations: where should he truckle, and how? Word that Rowell Dollard could legitimately seek sanctuary in a hospital bed was the happiest news the captain had had since he heard the Jaycees were giving him a plaque and Mr. Briggs Cadmean was going to attend. Fulcher’s problem was not that I thought there was sufficient evidence to charge Dollard. And certainly not that Cuddy Mangum and Etham Foster agreed with me. It was not even that Fulcher himself—after clicking his mouth hard up in the tower study for fifteen minutes and twice rereading Joanna Cadmean’s long letter to me—did not believe with much comfort that she had committed suicide.
Fulcher’s problem was that Hillston’s current solicitor had said flatly that there were unignorable grounds for reasonable suspicion against Rowell Dollard, even if he was a state senator. This solicitor, Ken Moize, not only was not a Dollard, he was not a Hillstonian, not even a Carolinian, having only lived in the state since the age of fourteen. Moreover, this outlander Moize didn’t even like the A.G., Julian D. Lewis, whose job (Fulcher whispered) he probably coveted. Fulcher’s problem was that he needed to decide whether Julian D. Lewis would override Moize to protect his kinsman; or, whether Lewis would feed Moize a little tidbit of Dollard (an indictment), to avoid the public howl Solicitor Moize might let loose if he could prove Lewis party to a cover-up, oust him, and snatch up and wolf down the attorney generalship for himself.
So buzzed poor Fulcher’s mind. He couldn’t even be sure but that Lewis disliked his cousin Rowell Dollard, jealous of the backing the state moneymen (like Cadmean) had always shown the Senator, their man in Raleigh for many years, and one they’d expect to see go on being their man for years to come. Fulcher’s quandary was that if the ship was sinking and he ought to desert, where was the shore? And what if, as he paddled off, whiskers frantic above the waves, he should look back and see the big vessel majestically right itself and sail, with all its power churning, away from him? What then?
So, for most of the night, he sat fretful and let us fill his office with smoke—he couldn’t tap his Lucite-bar warning at me because the attorney general, copper as old money from his recent vacation at a golf resort, was pilfering my pack—and let us litter his floor with the yellow crumbs of Cuddy’s crackers and the foil of the solicitor’s gum. Until finally it was decided that nothing had been decided, except that Joanna Cadmean was a corpse now, in a waiting room at Pauley and Keene Funeral Home, dead either by her own hand or by misadventure at the hands of person or persons unknown. And both the city prosecutors and the state prosecutors would study the evidence, and one another, until they could decide, in due time, where the ship should dock.
Only one decision was made: Fulcher decided after everyone but Cuddy and I had left that I had overstepped my authority, and was therefore to take two weeks’ leave of absence. Inspired by the convenient collapse of Senator Dollard, he phrased my suspension in a medical way: the leave I was on was sick leave; my sickness was overwork. Clearly, wherever Fulcher thought the big boat of power was headed, he didn’t much believe anymore that I ranked among the officers, and although still a first-class passenger, I was now one who could, with impunity, be kept for tw
o weeks from eating at the captain’s table.
I left Cuddy in there arguing with him about me. Passing under the wry, yellow, lidded eyes of Briggs Monmouth Cadmean varnished in oil, and clattering across the black and white floor of the rotunda, I walked out. I stood at six in the morning at the top of the steps looking over the still, blanched facade of downtown Hillston, where I had lived all my life, and, shaking, I pulled on my gloves and wrapped my scarf tighter. Across the street, my car was as white as a cairn of heaped stones.
Up the sidewalk through the slant of thick, blossomy snow came a black umbrella. Beneath it a man’s ratty overcoat fluttered out as if there were no one in it; the bottom dragged stiff and wet in the drifts. Sister Resurrection was marching from her home in the church to her post by the hall of government. I walked down to meet her, my legs unsteady enough to keep me close to the balustrade.
“Good morning, Mrs. Webster,” I told her, and touched my cap. My voice startled me by coming out a hoarse whisper. “Like a fairyland out here, isn’t it? Mighty cold for a walk, though.”
Although she didn’t speak, she did stop, and I bent down to look at her under the umbrella. She wore a child’s red toboggan cap and red mittens with white stars over the knuckles. The wizened folds of her neck were open to the gusty snowfall.
I said, “Well, things are bad. That silver-haired man we were talking about; I believe he’s killed somebody else now. She was actually, now I come to think of it, a little in your forecasting line of work.”
Sister Resurrection walked around me, and began a march as precise as a sentinel’s, up and down, at the base of the steps. A hum rose out of her throat, and then a chant. “The King of Babylon,” she said, “he wox angry. He got the iron walls. He got the fire burning. He throwing God’s childrens into the fiery furnace. But God Almighty don’t mess with Babylon. He makes His people for to walk through the valley of the shadow. God Almighty He taken that fire and He wet it with the tears from His eyes. He snatch that fire and He squeeze it.” Umbrella high, she balled tight the red mitten of her free hand. “And squeeze it. And making a chain to hold the Devil just a little while longer. Just a little while longer. Just a little, my Lord, just a little. And then we laying down our heads and sleep.”
I said quietly, “Amen.”
And “Amen,” she replied, and looked into my eyes and through them and beyond.
I said, “Here, if you’re going to stay out, here, Mrs. Webster, do you mind?” and undid my long wool scarf and wound it high around her thin neck and tucked it in. Unmoving, she stared beyond me, then turned back to the march of her weariless warning.
But as I was brushing snow from my car, I felt all of a sudden her scratchy hand pluck at my arm, and when I looked around, she began to tug at my sleeve, her grasp oddly strong. Pointing the black umbrella ahead, she pulled me with her into the street. She let go, hurried a few steps ahead, whirled back, motioning with her fluttery arm for me to come; rushed on, turned back, called me with her arm again. Down the empty streets I followed the small dark figure, no one but the two of us in the white ghost town. The unplowed road billowed around us soft as sheets. On we floated, like sleepers silent, until abruptly she darted off to the left.
Lurching after her into the side street, I saw her stop and rattle her umbrella at the painted glass front of the Tucson Lounge. Gaudy at night with noise and rows of red electric bulbs topped by a red neon cactus, it was in daylight just a dull, raw wall. In its gutter, snow was falling on black plastic bags and soggy boxes of drinkers’ debris, bottles and cans and stench. Sister Resurrection wheeled around and pressed against me, her eyes rheumy clouds that suddenly sharpened to jet. Her hand flew up and grabbed at my coat arm and, the fingers wriggling inside the mitten, she pulled me down with her to a crouch at the curb. The hand flew out again and pinched hard at my earlobe. “Trash,” she said, and pointed down, twisting her head and pointing back at the window of the bar behind us.
I nodded. “Yes, you’re right.”
“The harlot sitting on the dragon’s back, she wearing the crimson and purple robes, she wearing gold and wearing jewels.” Her red-mittened fist jerked away from my face, yanked up her hat, and squeezed the ear beneath. She breathed out slowly, “Wearing jewels.” And for a wink of a moment only, I saw a self come into her eyes, saw her be there seeing me. Then she was gone again; murk clouded the pupils and they lifted skyward.
I touched my ear, burning still where she had grabbed it. “Ear jewels?” I whispered. “Is this where you found that earring? Here in the trash?”
But unhearing she sprang to her feet and scurried through the snow back the way we’d come.
Back in front of the municipal building, I heard her as I climbed into my car. “She hold the cup of fornication and drinking the blood of my Jesus outta that cup. She Babylon. God throw her down from the iron wall and dogs shall lick her blood.”
• • •
At the Bush Street Diner near Tuscarora Road, I was asleep with my face pressed into the side of the booth when Alice “Red” MacLeod tapped my shoulder and scared me. “I told you 7:30 was too early for you.”
I bolted upright, shaking my head, and she added, “Are you all right?” Tugging on her book bag, she slid into the booth.
I said, “I’m fine, it just doesn’t show.”
She unbuttoned a plaid parka; beneath it she wore a pink fuzzy sweater the color of her cheeks. “Sorry I’m late; I had some union phone business. More rumors about shutting down my division. This creep named Whetsone had us ‘analyzed’ and says we’re not ‘competitive.’”
“We’ve met,” I said. “Sounds like him.”
While we ate eggs and coffee, I explained what it was that had kept me awake all night, that Joanna Cadmean was dead, that the suspected murderer was my uncle. She said, “Justin, I’m really sorry.” She thrust forward the stubborn chin. “And it’s just disgusting what they’re doing about it. They fired you!”
“They suspended me, while they decide if they can afford to fire me.”
“What are you going to do now?”
I made an effort at a laugh. “Well, first I’m going to take it lying down for about eight hours.”
“How in hell do people like them always end up running the world?”
“God, I hope that’s not a serious question.”
“Oh, yes, it is. It sure is. It’s the serious question, Justin.”
I looked across the plastic tabletop at the solemn blue eyes. “You called me Justin two times,” I said. “Would you mind doing it again?”
Her blush moved up from the neck of her sweater into the freckles, and she frowned. “Isn’t that your name?” And she went back to piling scrambled eggs on her toast like pâté, eating quickly and pleasurably. “Aren’t you hungry?” she asked, cup to mouth.
“Not really.” The food at the diner did not look as if it had improved since my last visit, the night Cuddy rescued me from his cousin Wally’s switchblade; the old picture of eggs and bacon on the menu had an unappetizing anemic pallor. My head was logy, and my hand shook so that finally my cup of coffee just slipped through my fingers and crashed onto the tabletop, sloshing me and the table with scalding liquid. I jumped out of the booth, shaking my pants, and she jerked a wad of paper napkins from the container and started to sop up the dark stain.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Look, I do things like this all, I mean all the time. Don’t be stupid. There. You better go home and go to bed.”
I took the sticky napkins from her, both of us holding on to them until finally she let go. And smiling I said, “All right. I will. I wonder if you’d like to come too?”
Her face crinkled, the eyes stayed grave. “No.” And she sat back down. Then she smiled. “You better go home and go to sleep. I’m going to European History: World War I to the Present.”
“That’ll depress you.”
“No, it won’t. It’ll make me mad. It always does.”
�
�Yes, you’re a warrior, Alice ‘Red’ MacLeod.”
She nodded, pulled over my plate, and ate everything on it. While doing so, she told me she had two pieces of news for me. Last night, Graham and Dickey Pope had stormed into the plant when the shift ended, looking for Charlene. They told Alice they didn’t know Ron Willis, the white-haired man with the black moustache. And no one else she’d spoken to had heard of any connection between Willis and Charlene; except that one woman had told her she’d heard Charlene had taken up with a man called Luster Hudson, and Ron Willis had once palled around with Hudson when the latter had worked at C&W as a forklift operator. I thanked her, and she said she’d love to help me put Willis away; he was a stoolie paid to keep watch on union activists like herself. She said Willis had once told her floor manager the lie that she had a long affair back in Boone with a black Communist social worker.
“What was the lie?” I asked.
“That he was a Communist.”
“Oh.”
She looked across at me, her chin up. “It’s over. He had to choose between me and somebody else, and he didn’t think he ought to have to. But I thought it would be better for everybody if he did.”
“You’re…”
She cocked her head. “Archaic. High-minded. Unliberated. And a hillbilly.”
“What I’m trying to say is, you’re very pretty in the morning. Christ, I sound like a teenager. I think I’m falling in love.”
Uncivil Seasons Page 18
