The Final Judgment

by Richard North Patterson

  Nearly five o’clock.

  Caroline sat in a wicker chair next to a glass end table with a telephone on top. Lifted the receiver, once and then twice, checking for a dial tone.

  Five-ten, then five-fifteen.

  Five-sixteen.

  The telephone rang.

  “Caroline.” The rheumy voice sounded far away. “It’s Walter Farris.”

  Caroline composed herself, trying to decipher his tone. “Walter, how are you?”

  “Fine. Dandy, actually. Tell me, do you have a moment to speak to the President?”

  Caroline gave a startled laugh. “Well, I was planning to mow the lawn…”

  “Just a minute. He’s right here.”

  Caroline felt her face flush. “Caroline,” came the familiar soft drawl.

  “Mr. President?”

  “Walter tells me you want to go on the Appeals Court.”

  A moment’s pause. “I must, Mr. President. I haven’t waited this long for a man to call me since the Winter Prom.”

  A genuine chuckle, a sally enjoyed on two levels.

  “Well, Caroline … it’s yours.”

  Caroline felt a sigh run through her, and, with it, all pretense of lightness vanished. “It’s not easy to tell you, Mr. President, everything this means to me.” She paused, voice softening. “I’ve worked for this since law school. And I’ll work even harder to deserve it once I’m there.”

  “I know you will. Anyhow, Walter wants to speak to you. Do stop by and see us when you come back for the confirmation hearings, okay?” A moment’s pause. “Congratulations, Judge Masters….”

  “Caroline?” Farris again. “You’ll need to rev up for the confirmation hearings. Jennifer Doran from the Justice Department will be in touch, to help you prepare. She’s been through it all before….”

  Putting down the telephone, Caroline barely remembered how the conversation had ended. There were tears in her eyes.

  So strange, Caroline thought, to want something so deeply for so long that you cannot believe you have it…

  She sat there, tears running down her face now, very glad that no one could see her. At a loss for what to do.

  A toast, she thought. A toast to me. She went to the kitchen, buoyant now, and made herself a pitcher of martinis.

  The first martini, surgically crisp, went down in two swallows.

  To hell with dinner. At a moment like this, anyone gets to be foolish. Tomorrow, no one will know but you.

  At seven o’clock, she was still on the porch, watching the ocean fade to gray in evening sunlight. The bitter memories had eased away; for now, at this moment, she had no wish to be elsewhere.

  It was dusk when the telephone rang.

  She hesitated, trying to arrange her thoughts. A moment passed before she answered the phone.

  “Hello.”

  “Caroline?”

  At first, her mind did not quite absorb it. But she felt it on her skin: a voice she had not heard in twenty years, yet more familiar than any other. A voice that belonged to this house.

  Caroline stood, suddenly alert. She found that she could not answer.

  “Caroline.” His voice was older now, perhaps rougher with what this call must be costing him. “There’s been trouble here, with Brett. You must come home.”

  Part II

  The Return

  One

  The next morning, Caroline Masters flew to Boston, rented a Jeep, and drove north. An hour later, she crossed the state line into New Hampshire and felt herself—leaden and filled with premonitions—drawn from her future into her past.

  Twenty-three years ago, she had left this place for good. She remembered little of that; sitting in the back seat behind Betty and her husband, Larry, as they headed toward Martha’s Vineyard and their last summer as a family, she had felt no sense of moment. By summer’s end, she had sworn never to return.

  And now she had done so.

  She had called Walter Farris before leaving the island, explaining only that she had a family emergency that might require a few days. He was gracious and understanding; perhaps Caroline had only imagined the faint undertone of caution, the unspoken question—what kind of emergency could be so serious that it distracted her at a time like this, so sensitive that she chose not to explain it. But refusal to explain herself was the defining choice of her adulthood; she was already fighting the superstition—foolish and egocentric, she chastised herself—that by visiting Martha’s Vineyard she had reopened the past, which now waited for both Caroline and a girl she did not know.

  But still he knew that she would come.

  Driving deeper into New Hampshire, she felt him. The scattered farms and small towns were remnants of the long-ago prosperity that had helped make him who he was. Climbing toward the White Mountains—sheer cliffs, winding streams, and plummeting gorges, miles of dense trees broken by granite faces hewn by time and the harshness of weather—Caroline recalled his belief that New England was a place unlike any other, his admonitions on nature and the virtues of winter: how they built resourcefulness and resolve, reminding man of the challenges ahead and the prudence needed to face them without any help but God’s. And she knew, despite all her years and all her efforts, that this man, and this place, had defined the deepest part of her.

  Descending from the cloud-swept summit, she drove north and west toward Vermont and into a gray, seeping rain. Yesterday seemed far behind.

  The towns had grown sparse, farther apart; the roads were better, some lumber mills seemed to have closed, but little else had changed. It was a place where relationships mattered, Caroline remembered, where lives were private but memories were long, where respect—for a man or for the family he came from—once earned, went deep. For it was not a place where strangers came: the refugees from Massachusetts, the seekers of summer homes, tended to stop short of this corner of New Hampshire. These were the people who had always been there, dwindling a little, their sons or daughters drifting away to look for better jobs, others hanging on. So that life seemed as timeless as the pristine lakes, the rivers, the deep, silent forests.

  The country now was undulant valleys, streams, hills rising abruptly against a broad sky. The roads became smaller; at a crossroads by a shabby church, Caroline turned down a tar-and-gravel road where the arrow pointed to “Resolve Village.” A mile short of the town, she left the road, climbing a gravel path through woods that had once been pasture, until she reached the clearing that was still called Masters Hill.

  Caroline was only half aware of how slowly she drove. She was more alert to landmarks—the jagged boulder she once had climbed, the distant blue-gray view of Heron Lake—than to the feeling of the places, so familiar and yet from another life. And then, abruptly, she stopped.

  Stiff from driving, she stepped into the mist and rain.

  On a hillside, cleared from a stand of birch trees, was a white wooden church. The first Masters had built it one hundred fifty years ago, to serve his family and those nearby, and its spires and stained-glass windows were from another time. It was where he had taken first one wife and then another; where Betty and Larry had married, with Caroline as maid of honor; where Caroline herself had once imagined marrying. Caroline had spent most Sunday mornings of her youth here, seated with her parents and her sister in the first row, where the Masters family sat by tradition and by right. She could remember the plain wooden benches and sparse furnishings, the unvarnished services of a religion too established for hysteria. But although she knew that, by long practice, the church would not be locked, Caroline did not enter.

  Behind the church was the cemetery where the Masterses lay, generation after generation.

  Caroline circled the church and went there, face damp and chill.

  Encroaching birches blocked the light, crowded the weathered stones at the cemetery’s edge. The granite markers were worn with wind and rain and dirt. A stone—the marker of an infant long lost to memory—had toppled on its face.

  At
the center were the markers of her own family. On the largest of them, a granite rectangle rising from their midst, were the names of its members: Channing Masters; Elizabeth Brett Masters; then Elizabeth Wells Masters. At the bottom were the words: “Caroline Clark Masters, b. June 17, 1950.” Only for Elizabeth Brett Masters did the date of death appear.

  In front of this marker was another, set into the ground over the grave of Elizabeth Brett Masters, recording her for posterity as “Beloved wife of Channing and mother of Elizabeth.”

  Turning, Caroline walked to the edge of the graveyard.

  The marker here was dirty, covered with leaves. Kneeling in the rain, Caroline cleared them with cold, clumsy fingertips. Saw the inscription, “Nicole Dessaliers Masters, b. 1925, d. 1964.” Then read the stark words which were painful still: “Wife of Channing, mother of Caroline.”

  Face wet and cold, Caroline stood there, in silent apology for things she had not then known. Only as she left the grave did she notice that the rain had ceased.

  A half mile farther, Caroline stopped at the edge of the road. To her right, beyond a wood that gently sloped away, she could spot distant glimpses of the village of Resolve—a spire, a crossroads, white wooden homes from other centuries. And then only woods again. When she was a child, he would describe for her—until she could imagine it—a countryside of farms and stone walls, cross-stitched with the works of men. A time when New England throve, and the Masters who had lived here was a United States senator.

  Caroline turned, facing the house where she was born.

  Three stories and twenty rooms, it rose majestically to a domed octagonal cupola, from which the Masterses could see for miles. White-painted wood, arched windows, a massiveness unrelieved by ostentation or the fripperies of architectural fashion. The indulgences were inside: twelve-foot ceilings; seven granite fireplaces; a winding staircase; the floating ballroom.

  To him, it was a symbol of his birthright and the obligations that imposed: this house could not be abandoned like other houses but must be maintained and passed on, like the lives of the Masterses themselves. Yet within the family he could be droll about its origins. The first Masters, Adam, had fallen deeply in love with a young woman from that cosmopolitan oasis Portland, Maine. Intent that she should marry him, Adam had built this home as a monument to his passion, hoping to surprise and dazzle her. A week after its completion, Adam had received his own surprise: a letter from the young woman, breaking their engagement. The home was, her father told Caroline as a child, an enduring monument to how foolish some women can make some men, a folly which every Masters for generations since had borne the cost of heating. To Caroline, it had seemed quite funny, then.

  He still bore the cost, of course. The outbuildings—a barn, the attached garage which had once been a stable—were newly painted. Walking the stone path that rose gently up the hill and beneath the shade of ancient trees, Caroline saw that the grounds were well maintained, the water of the small pond near the barn fresh and clear. It seemed much as it was on the day she had last seen it.

  She paused, drawing a breath. Then the front door opened; the instant before she saw who it was, Caroline steeled herself. And then Betty appeared in the doorway, hands shoved in the pockets of her khaki pants, gazing across the years at her half-sister.

  Caroline walked toward Betty, studying her face. Comparing her to that last time she had seen her.

  Betty stepped onto the covered porch.

  “Hello, Caroline.”

  She’s a middle-aged woman, Caroline thought with foolish surprise. Betty wore wire-rimmed glasses, and the brown had faded to a dull sheen in her short-cut gray hair. Age had brought out the gauntness that had waited beneath the surface of the younger Betty’s face; the ridged nose was more pronounced; the hollows of her face were deeper, the gray eyes somehow more intent next to the crow’s-feet and pale skin. In the years of their fractious sisterhood, Caroline had thought with a teenager’s unspoken savagery that Betty looked like the pictures of her mother, who had at once achieved sainthood and cheated an unflattering middle age through the mercy of dying in childbirth. Now, for an instant, the sight of Betty made Caroline sad, for whom she was not sure.

  Without preface, Caroline asked, “How is she?”

  Betty gave her a sharp look. How do you suppose she is? Caroline imagined her thinking. Softly, Caroline said, “You’ll remember that I don’t know her.”

  Another swift look, as if Betty had forgotten this, and then a nod of concession. “She’s emotional, sometimes willful, but alive. The girl of the last two days is a sunken-eyed wreck. At any given moment, she goes from stoic mourning to fear to disbelief.”

  Caroline nodded. “The marijuana won’t have helped. Some part of her may not be sure what really happened.”

  Another stabbing glance; all at once, her sister looked pinched and afraid. “She didn’t kill him….”

  Silent, Caroline watched Betty realize that she had answered a question Caroline had not asked, then founder in the complexities of their shared past. Stiffly, Betty said, “It was Father’s idea to send for you.”

  Caroline nodded again. “I know that.”

  Betty seemed to blanch. She was off balance, Caroline saw, searching for the meaning of Caroline’s words. Quietly, Caroline said, “We’re both out of practice, Betty. And the end was what it was.”

  Betty looked down, breathed out audibly. But when she looked at Caroline again, it was with a shade less tension. “You look well, Caroline. But that’s no longer a surprise. Not since we saw you on television.”

  “ ‘We’?”

  A brief glint in Betty’s eyes—the hint of jealousy and irony. So it still matters to you, Caroline saw her think, and despised herself for her question. For a time, Betty seemed to study her. “You’re a famous woman, Caroline. You did that alone—without him, or any of us. Is that what you wanted?”

  You know what I wanted, Caroline thought with sudden bitterness. With a restraint that took all her effort, she said, “How can you even ask that?”

  Betty looked away. After a moment, she said, “Brett’s upstairs, Caroline.”

  Caroline shook her head. “I’m not ready yet. Not for that.”

  Betty turned to her in surprise. “Then why are you here? Don’t you understand that they may charge her with murder…?”

  Caroline did not bother to explain herself.

  “Where is he?” she asked.

  Two

  In a jacket borrowed from Betty, Caroline climbed the twisting trail up the side of Masters Hill.

  It was where, Caroline remembered, he always climbed to think.

  “He wasn’t expecting you this soon,” Betty had told her. “And I couldn’t stop him.”

  It took Caroline a moment to recall that he was well past seventy, another moment to raise her eyebrows.

  “Heart trouble,” Betty said, as if to a stranger. “An attack last year—mild, but a warning. He won’t give up hiking, though, or even talk about it.”

  Traversing the steep hillside, Caroline remembered when he would take her with him to the top: the child then, and the woman now, could not imagine him as vulnerable.

  But she could tell that he hiked seldom now. The trail—once well trod by the Masters family as they followed his tall, lean frame—kept disappearing in underbrush or beneath a carpet of needles: only the thread of Caroline’s memory helped her find it again. It rose between thick pine trees at a steep angle, causing her to walk sideways, sometimes slipping or pausing for breath.

  She was out of practice, Caroline thought to her disgust. But that was not the reason her temples pounded. Part of it was Betty; a greater part the unseen girl. But the other part lay moments ahead.

  She reached a clearing: a granite-face bare cliff weathered by wind and rain. When she was a child, too young to reach the top, she would stop here with her father. Now she paused, half expecting to find him.

  No one.

  Caroline sat on the rock, res
ting. From here, the view went on for miles. There were only a few clearings now; nature had reclaimed the land, shrouding abandoned farms and old stone walls as the energy of man moved west, out of sight and mind. As land turned fallow, the Masters family had bought it, with a fortune made first in lumber, then by selling their private railroad line—which once serviced their mills—to the Boston and Maine Railroad. This was not an investment, in the ordinary sense. It was a statement, tinged with unspoken hubris: The Masterses were here to stay, as timeless as the land.

  But they were not. Years later, they had sold what land they could; Caroline suspected that the prideful look of the Masters home had cost her father dearly and that, in his heart, Channing Masters feared that he would be the last generation to live and die in that same house. So that Caroline, leaving, had abandoned more than a family.

  But he would go with pride, and no one outside the family would read its decline on the face of his home. The place was too much part of him, and he part of it.

  This hill remained his property. The entire town could be seen from here, a toy New England village in a clearing. Caroline still recalled when they once sat here and she asked how Resolve had been named. She had imagined some stirring piece of history, a stand against Indians or for independence. But when her father turned, his eyes had the light of humor.

  “Resolve,” he said, with mock solemnity, “earned its name by seceding from Connaughton Falls. In the storied conflict over total versus partial immersion baptism. Back then, Caroline, New Englanders took their religion to heart.”

  She saw that he was not teasing. “Which side were we on?”

  “The total immersers, of course.” As always, his smile for Caroline relieved a somewhat forbidding mien. “We citizens of Resolve brook no half measures.”

  Even at eight, Caroline heard the ironic undertone. For Judge Channing Masters was Resolve’s first citizen, who could speak with confidence for the others.