Stephen L. Carter

by New England White

  “You should have slapped his face.” She turned in surprise, and what felt distantly like gratitude. Lemaster laughed. “Cameron would have taken his pledge back, but Carlotta would have doubled it.”

  A brief marital silence, Julia painfully aware that tonight she had entirely misplaced the delicate, not-quite-flirty insouciance that had made her, a quarter-century ago, the most popular girl at her New Hampshire high school. Like her husband, she was of something less than average height. Her skin was many shades lighter than his blue-black, for her unknown father had been, as Lemaster insisted on calling him, a Caucasian. Her gray eyes were strangely large for a woman of her diminutive stature. Her slightly jutting jaw was softened by an endearing dimple. Her lips were alluringly crooked. When she smiled, the left side of her wide mouth rose a little farther than the right, a signal, her husband liked to say, of her quietly liberal politics. She was by reputation an easy person to like. But there were days when it all felt false, and forced. Being around the campus did that to her. She had been a deputy dean of the divinity school for almost three years before Lemaster was brought back from Washington to run the university, and her husband’s ascension had somehow increased her sense of not belonging. Julia and the children had remained in the Landing during her husband’s year and a half as White House counsel. Lemaster had spent as many weekends as he could at home. People invented delicious rumors to explain his absence, none of them true, but as Granny Vee used to say, the truth only matters if you want it to.

  “You’re so silly,” she said, although, to her frequent distress, her husband was anything but. She looked out the window. Slickly whitened trees slipped past, mostly conifers. It was early for snow, not yet winter, not yet anything, really: that long season of pre-Thanksgiving New England chill when the stores declared it Christmas season but everybody else only knew it was cold. Julia had spent most of her childhood in Hanover, New Hampshire, where her mother had been a professor at Dartmouth, and she was accustomed to early snow, but this was ridiculous. She said, “Can we talk about Vanessa?”

  “What about her?”

  “The fires. It’s all over with, Lemmie.”

  A pause. Lemaster played with the satellite radio, switching, without asking, from her adored Broadway show tunes—Granny Vee had loved them, so she did, too—to his own secret passion, the more rebellious and edgy and less commercial end of the hip-hop spectrum. The screen informed her in glowing green letters that the furious sexual bombast now assaulting her eardrums from nine speakers was something called Goodie Mobb. “How do you know it’s over?” he asked.

  “Well, for one thing, she hasn’t done it in a year. For another, Dr. Brady says so.”

  “Nine months,” said Lemaster, precisely. “And she’s not Vincent Brady’s daughter,” he added, slender fingers tightening ever so slightly on the wheel, but in caution, not anger, for the weather had slipped from abhorrent to atrocious. She glanced his way, turning down the throbbing music just in case, for a change, he wanted to talk, but he was craning forward, hoping for a better view, heavy flakes now falling faster than the wipers could clean. He wore glasses with steel rims. His goatee and mustache were so perfectly trimmed they might have been invisible against his smooth ebon flesh, except for the thousand flecks of gray that reshaped to follow the motion of his jaw whenever he spoke. “What a mistake,” said Lemaster, but it took Julia a second to work out that he was referring to the psychiatrist, and not one among the many enemies he had effortlessly, and surprisingly, collected during his six months as head of the university.

  Julia had been stunned when the judge ordered the choice of intensive therapy or a jail sentence. Vanessa cheerily offered to do the time—“You can’t say I haven’t earned it”—but Julia, who used to volunteer at the juvenile detention facility in the city, knew what it was like. She could not imagine her vague, brainy, artistic daughter surviving two days among the hard-shelled teens scooped off the street corners and dumped there. As her grandmother used to say, there are our black people and there are other black people—and all her life Julia had secretly believed it. So Lemaster had chosen Brady, a professor at the medical school who was supposed to be one of the best adolescent psychiatrists in the country, and Julia, who, like Vanessa, would have preferred a woman, or at least someone from within the darker nation, held her peace. She had never imagined, twenty years ago, growing into the sort of wife who would.

  She had never imagined a lot of things.

  “Cameron told me something interesting,” said Lemaster when he decided she had stewed long enough. They passed two gray horses in a paddock, wearing blankets against the weather but not otherwise concerned, watching the sparse nighttime traffic with their shining eyes. “He had the strangest call a couple of weeks ago.” That confident, can-do laugh, a hand lifted from the wheel in emphasis, a gleeful glance in Julia’s direction. Lemaster loved being one up on anyone in the vicinity, and made no exception for his own wife. “From an old friend of yours, as a matter of fact. Apparently—”

  “Lemmie, look out! Look out!”

  Too late.

  (III)

  EVERY NEW ENGLANDER KNOWS that nighttime snowy woods are noisy. Chittering, sneaking animals, whistling, teasing wind, cracking, creaking branches—there is plenty to hear, except when your Escalade is in a ditch, the engine hissing and missing, hissing and missing, and Goodie Mobb still yallowing from nine speakers. Julia pried herself from behind the air bag, her husband’s outstretched hand ready to help. Shivering, she looked up and down the indentation in the snow that marked Four Mile Road. Lemaster had his hands on her face. Confused, she slapped them away. He patiently turned her back to look at him. She realized that he was asking if she was all right. There was blood on his forehead and in his mouth, a lot of it. Her turn to ask how he was doing, and his turn to reassure her.

  No cell-phone service out here: they both tried.

  “What do we do now?” said Julia, shivering for any number of good reasons. She tried to decide whether to be angry at him for taking his eyes off the road just before a sharp bend that had not budged in their six years of living out here.

  “We wait for the next car to come by.”

  “Nobody drives this way but you.”

  Lemaster was out of the ditch, up on the road. “We drove ten minutes and passed two cars. Another one will be along in a bit.” He paused and, for a wretched moment, she feared he might be calculating the precise moment when the next was expected. “We’ll leave the headlights on. The next car will see us and slow down.” His voice was calm, as calm as the day the President asked him to come down to Washington and, as a pillar of integrity, clean up the latest mess in the White House; as calm as the night two decades ago when Julia told him she was pregnant and he answered without excitement or reproach that they must marry. Moral life, Lemaster often said, required reason more than passion. Maybe so, but too much reason could drive you nuts. “You should wait in the car. It’s cold out here.”

  “What about Vanessa? She’s waiting for us to pick her up.”

  “She’ll wait.”

  Julia, uncertain, did as her husband suggested. He was eight years her senior, a difference that had once provided her a certain assurance but in recent years had left her feeling more and more that he treated her like a child. Granny Vee used to say that if you married a man because you wanted him to take care of you, you ran the risk that he would. About to climb into the warmth of the car, she spotted by moonlight a ragged bundle in the ditch a few yards away. She took half a step toward it, and a pair of feral creatures with glowing eyes jerked furry heads up from their meal and scurried into the trees. A deer, she decided, the dark mound mostly covered with snow, probably struck by a car and thrown into the ditch, transformed into dinner for whatever animals refused to hibernate. Shivering, she buttoned her coat, then turned back toward the Escalade. She did not need a close look at some bloodstained animal with the most succulent pieces missing. Only once she had her ha
nd on the door handle did she stop.

  Deer, she reminded herself, rarely wear shoes.

  She swallowed an unexpected lump in her throat. “Lemmie.”

  But her determined husband was up in the road, waiting calmly to flag down the next car, even if it took till spring.

  “Lemmie!”

  He was at her side in an instant. He could do that. Lemaster was madly in love, her friend Tessa Kenner used to say, with his own reliability. He forced me to fall in love with him, Julia had explained to her disapproving mother, who wanted a man from one of the old families, not a man from one of the islands. I didn’t have a choice.

  “What’s wrong, Jules?”

  “I thought it was a deer, but…well, there’s a body over there.”

  She pointed. He followed her finger, then strolled through the ditch to take a look.

  “Don’t touch it!” she said, because he was already kneeling, brushing snow from the face, probably ruining the crime scene, at least from what she heard on CSI, to which she was addicted. She waited, sitting half in the car with the door open, the air bag blocking her access to the radio, which she really wanted to shut off.

  Lemaster returned, narrow face grim.

  “It’s not a deer,” he said, almost consolingly, small, strong hand on her shoulder. “It’s a man. And the animals have been…well, you know.” Julia waited, reading in his face that this was not the real point her husband wanted to make. At last he sagged. “Jules, we know him.”

  CHAPTER 2

  THE TERRIERS

  (I)

  THE DETECTIVES WERE SLEEK AND WHITE and very polite, either because that was their nature or out of deference to Lemaster, president of the university, for him just a stepping-stone, as he and his wife discussed but only with each other, and everyone else assumed, to a more impressive sinecure. They arrived at the house on the crest of Hunter’s Meadow Road just before ten on Saturday, escorted by a fidgety officer from the minuscule Tyler’s Landing force, a doughy man named Nilsson, whose doughy son had been in Julia’s basic-science class four years ago—the same year she was fired, or quit, depending on how you looked at it—two eager terriers from the state police, their quiet voices and brush-cut brown hair so well matched that they might have been twins. They reminded her, in their grim and mannerly professionalism, of the Naval officers who came to the house on North Balch Street in Hanover, New Hampshire, in a Reagan-era October to inform her mother and latest temporary stepfather that her twin brother, Jay, a Marine, had died in Grenada. Julia, newly wed as well as newly a mother, had been home by painful coincidence, for Mona Veazie had celebrated her fifty-third birthday the day before, and had spent it dandling her grandson, Preston, named for Mona’s father, the architect. So the daughter had the opportunity to sit in the living room and watch her mother die a little, too.

  By the time the detectives rang the bell of the house called Hunter’s Heights—up here every dwelling had a name—the unpredicted snow was over, and Mr. Huebner from town had plowed the long, snaking driveway not once but twice. Bright morning sunshine exploded from the shimmering whiteness hard enough to make her eyeballs ache. Or maybe the ache had a more fundamental source: although Julia had finished crying for a while, little Jeannie, sniffling from her cold, had caught Mommy raging at herself in the bathroom mirror, where an earlier, happier self smiled sadly back at her. This could not, Julia told herself, be happening. But it could. The detectives were a gray-visaged reminder of the hard truth that death stalks every life. So, when Lemaster summoned her, she washed her face and fixed her makeup and went down to see what they wanted. Over the handful of hours since the discovery of the body, they had done a lot of homework. Just a few details, they said. A couple of questions, folks, sorry to bother you so early, but this is a murder investigation. You understand.

  The Carlyles understood.

  They all sat in the living room, where Lemaster had stoked a fresh fire in the grate underneath the indifferent watercolor of solemn people on an Atlantic-side beach in Barbados, and, no, thank you, the detectives did not care for anything to drink. Julia, craving a glass of wine despite the hour, followed her husband’s sober example and stuck to water. Lemaster’s special assistant, Flew, rallying round the boss in the crisis, had put out a copious platter of everything he could find—crackers, cold cuts, Brie—but no one except Julia partook. She felt a glutton, tortured and exposed by her husband’s abstemiousness. Jeannie, supposedly resting, was more likely on the upstairs landing listening in. Sleek, competent Flew was probably listening, too, perhaps from the butler’s pantry, unless he was scrubbing the kitchen, for he hated all messes, but those that cluttered his boss’s life particularly: every time Flew walked into the house on Hunter’s Meadow and began to look around, Julia felt hopeless, and judged. Vanessa was in her room, door firmly shut, likely asleep but possibly on the computer, for she had evolved her own methods of burying the pain and confusion of mortal experience. As had stolid Lemaster. The family Bible stood on the mantelpiece, twelve inches high, creamy and intrusive. The Book of Common Prayer, 1928 version, stood next to it, for Lemaster Carlyle ran a traditional Anglican home and took a perverse pride in not caring who knew it.

  The twin terriers said they knew how hard this must be, but their matched eyes said they didn’t. They sat side by side on the brushed leather sofa, imported from Italy, that Lemaster hated for its ostentation, for he possessed the immigrant’s thrift. Doughy Nilsson perched alone on a wooden ladderback armchair of intricate design, one of the few pieces Julia had retained from Mona’s house in New Hampshire. Like the Louis XV writing desk in the front hall, the aging chair had as its original provenance her grandmother’s famous townhouse in Harlem. There had been a day, as Mona put it, when everyone who was anyone in the darker nation passed through Amaretta Veazie’s salon: by which she meant, anyone who aspired to position in what they called the Clan, the heavily fortified borders of which, once upon a time, Granny Vee and her buddies diligently patrolled, lest the wrong sort of Negroes force their way in.

  When she tried to explain the Clan to her white friends, they never quite got it. But Julia was not surprised: whenever she mentioned that her family had been architects for seven generations, even most black people looked at her pityingly, as if she had exaggerated a tale of her forebears building their own shanties. Whereas in actuality Veazie Elden had been, back in the nineteenth century, one of the five largest architectural firms in Manhattan.

  The terriers did not seem the sort to take an interest in the social history of the community. Their elaborate questions came with a slowness that was fresh torture. They spent a lot of time flipping through their notebooks. Julia wanted to strangle them, and even placid Lemaster seemed edgy beneath his politesse, but an almost palpable air of impending tragedy hangs over encounters between black Americans and white police, and the best intentions of all sides have nothing to do with it. Nor was Julia certain that their intentions were the best, but her mind just now was in two hundred different places. They pressed on. They kept asking why the Carlyles had chosen that route home, seeming to doubt the whole daughter-at-the-movies story. Vanessa, the skinnier of the terriers pointed out, had driven back to the house with her boyfriend. Julia explained that the teen’s decision had defied her father’s edict. Lemaster had forgiven the breach because he understood Vanessa’s worry at her parents’ tardiness. The story felt laborious even to Julia, and the detectives must have agreed, for they interrupted to point out that Four Mile was an old logging road, running over water company property, and posted against trespassing.

  “Everybody takes Four Mile,” said Julia uncertainly, before Lemaster could stop her.

  “Not everybody found the body,” said the skinnier.

  No, but somebody had to, she almost spouted, feeling like the divinity student she had once been, arguing over the fallacy of synchronicity.

  “And that’s why we’re all here,” said Lemaster, with brio.

  A break
while little Flew stepped in, towheaded and freckly, offering round cups of hot chocolate on a tray. Julia took one to be polite, but the detectives didn’t. Their eyes followed him out of the room.

  They asked about cars that preceded them and cars that followed them, they asked about whether cell phones ever worked out there, they asked about footprints and tire marks, they asked if the Carlyles had seen anyone else, they asked why Lemaster had taken his eyes off the road, they asked why he had touched the body: as a former prosecutor, surely he knew—

  Lemaster delivered a quiet, confident answer to every question.

  Sitting in the overdecorated room, surrounded by the sort of ostentation for which the Clan had once been famous, memory tumbling harshly through her head, Julia found herself more than willing to let her husband take the lead. Her thoughts were none too reliable at the moment. She was missing snatches of conversation. Although sitting down, she felt like she was wobbling on her feet. She had barely slept. She had phoned both the boys—Aaron at Phillips Exeter, Preston at M.I.T.—and had fielded easily two dozen calls so far this morning. Reporters she turned over to Flew, who had arrived at the crack of dawn and was expert at delivering a piece of his mind. Most of the rest were members of her club, Ladybugs, who in their fluttery way were drawn to disaster, each Sister Lady, as if reading from a script, announcing that she was “sorry to wake you” but had “heard the news” and “wanted to see how you’re holding up”—but, really, to probe for inside information to match against whatever rumors were circulating already through the county’s thin community of middling and higher-class African America. That was what the members called themselves, Sister Ladies, emphasizing both their intimacy and their distinctiveness. You had to be somebody to get in, the older members liked to say, mainly in reminiscence, because nowadays a black woman could become somebody in a single generation: not exactly the way things had worked back in the day.