Sandrine's Case

by Thomas H. Cook

  You are nothing, Sam. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  Her last words to me.

  PART III

  County District Attorney Harold Singleton has said that he is now preparing the most crucial aspects of the state’s case against Professor Samuel Madison for the murder of his wife, Professor Sandrine Madison, both of Coburn College, a trial that has captured the attention of both national and regional media and is thought to be the most famous ever held in Coburn County.

  Coburn Sentinel

  January 15, 2011

  DAY FIVE

  Morning

  I was surprised when, on the fifth day of my trial, I came into the kitchen and found Jenna sitting with Alexandria. But there they were, Sandrine’s sister and Sandrine’s daughter, poised around a butcher-block table. In a vague paranoia no doubt induced by a sleepless night they looked to me like two witches from Macbeth, keeping the pot astir, summoning toil and trouble.

  “Good morning, Sam,” Jenna said.

  “Hi,” I replied, somewhat drily, since I knew Jenna has always felt that in choosing me Sandrine had made the wrong choice.

  “I happened to be in Atlanta,” Jenna said, “so I drove over to see how Alexandria is holding up.”

  Meaning that for me she had not the slightest care, an attitude she’d exhibited quite thoroughly since Sandrine’s death, distancing herself more or less completely. She’d stayed in touch with Alexandria but I’d dropped off her radar like a crashed plane. Still, I wasn’t sure she’d gone so far as to think I’d murdered Sandrine. On that particular subject she had yet to weigh in.

  “Alexandria’s doing fine,” I assured her. “We Madisons are made of stern stuff.”

  Jenna’s smile could have cut a diamond. “I wanted to see that for myself.” The smile widened but kept its hardness. “I have only a few minutes, I’m afraid.”

  “And then where are you off to?” I asked.

  “I have a meeting in Chicago at noon tomorrow.”

  “Then you’re not spending the night here?” Alexandria asked.

  Jenna shook her head. “I’d like to but I have to get back to Atlanta.”

  Was that true, I wondered. Or was there something about this house that frightened Jenna, the notion perhaps of sharing it with a murderer?

  “Well, I’m sorry you can’t stay,” I said, though I doubted Jenna would believe this.

  She was Sandrine’s older sister, and she had always played the role of her protector. In that role, she’d doubtless hated the fact that her brilliant, beautiful sister had gotten involved with a scraggly graduate student, lived with him in grimy apartments, then unaccountably married him and had a baby with this same undistinguished soul.

  Yet I had little doubt that her heart went out to Alexandria for my daughter’s bad luck in being my only surviving relative, heir to the host of disreputable behaviors that had now culminated in, of all things, a murder trial.

  “Alexandria tells me that today may be pretty tough,” Jenna said.

  “It could be, yes.” I looked at Alexandria. “But we’re getting used to it being rough, aren’t we?”

  Alexandria took a sip of coffee. “We have no idea how long it may last,” she said to Jenna. “The trial, I mean.”

  I offered a dry laugh. “Or the appeals or the appeals of the appeals.”

  “So it’s going badly?” Jenna asked.

  I suspected that the prospect of my case going badly was Jenna’s devout hope. She would, it seemed to me, like nothing more than that I spend the rest of my life on my knees in a grimy cell giving head to a Mexican drug lord. After all, I’d betrayed her sister, and she may even believe I’d killed her. And yet she had to be cordial with me, if only for the sake of Alexandria. Such is the burden, along with the sorrow and the pity, of extended family.

  I shrugged. “I have no idea how it’s going, Jenna,” I told her.

  “For one whole day it was the pathologist,” Alexandria said. “A Dr. Mortimer.”

  “Aptly named,” I quipped. “For mort, which means death in French.”

  A chilly smile trembled on Jenna’s lips. “I would, of course, know that, Sam,” she informed me icily, “having grown up in Montreal.”

  I walked to the refrigerator, took out the milk, sniffed it because this is a compulsion of mine, then poured a small amount into a cup. I added coffee, but I had no appetite for anything more. Even if I had wanted an actual breakfast, I would have refrained from having it in front of Jenna. It would look unseemly, a big hearty southern breakfast of eggs, bacon, toast, butter, jam, the works, in a man on trial for the murder of her beautiful, brilliant, deserving of much better sister. That is one of the oddities of my case—or of any case like mine—that the ordinary pleasures, or at least the public enjoyment of them, quite convincingly argues not only that you are guilty of the crime of which you are accused but that, in addition, you feel not a speck of remorse. Smile or, God forbid, laugh when your child is missing and no one will doubt that you know where its body is.

  I strategically stuck to coffee, a little milk, but absolutely no sugar.

  “It’s amazing how dull it is, a trial,” Alexandria went on in a tone that seemed quite disconcertingly matter-of-fact, as if, as my ordeal ground on, she’d begun to rate it as entertainment, a system that in my case would garner no more than two stars.

  “So this Dr. Mortimer had nothing to say that would—” Jenna stopped, quite obviously at a loss as to how she should continue.

  “Convict me?” I asked with a dry laugh. “No, not really. He confirmed that Sandrine died from an overdose of Demerol, along with a tumbler of vodka ‘seeded,’ as he put it, with antihistamines.”

  He’d gone on to testify that there’d been no bruises, cuts, or lacerations on her body, which indicated, of course, that there’d been no sign of a struggle. Either Sandrine had poisoned herself of her own volition, as Dr. Mortimer concluded, or someone had poisoned her.

  “It’s the antihistamines that are the problem,” Alexandria said.

  “And the fact that they were crushed,” I added. “Which would evidently have made them undetectable. So that Sandrine wouldn’t have known she was taking them. I mean, she wouldn’t have tasted anything, and so, theoretically, I might have used them to . . .”

  “I see,” Jenna interrupted. “But why would she have taken antihistamines at all?” she asked.

  “To stop her from vomiting up the Demerol,” Alexandria answered. “That’s what the prosecutor says. And so they were added to the vodka because Dad wanted Mom to keep down the Demerol.”

  “I see,” Jenna repeated softly.

  For a moment, she stared at her hands, then she looked up and her eyes whipped over to me. “Is it true someone was looking for antiemetics on your computer?” she said. “I read that in the Atlanta paper.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s true.”

  I could now assume that Jenna had also learned that in addition to an effort to find “strong” antiemetic drugs, my computer had recorded several sinister searches having to do with “painless suicide,” as well as with various drugs that could bring it about, among which was Demerol, facts long made public, along with my less than adequate explanation that Sandrine’s computer had been having problems so she’d used mine.

  “Obviously, Sandrine wanted to die,” I said. “And naturally she wanted it to be painless.”

  When Jenna looked at me doubtfully, I continued, “As for those antihistamines, I’m not positive Sandrine took them in order to make sure the Demerol did the job.”

  “What other reason would she have had?” Jenna asked.

  I gave the only answer that I thought made sense. “Sandrine was . . . kind. She wouldn’t have wanted to make a mess.”

  “A mess she knew you’d have to clean up, right?” J
enna asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How thoughtful she was, Sam,” Jenna said. Her gaze hardened. “And how loyal.”

  “Loyal, yes,” I said, then fled back to the safer subject of incriminating evidence.

  “Anyway, as far as the painless suicide research, I didn’t know she’d done any of that,” I said.

  A question clearly came into Jenna’s mind, one she briefly hesitated to ask before at last giving in to her insurmountable urge to ask it.

  “And if you had known?”

  “Well, as I told Alexandria, maybe Sandrine had a right to do it. I mean, the Greeks—”

  “The Greeks, right,” Jenna interrupted sharply, then immediately began to gather up her things. “I can do without pedantic references.”

  There’d always been something hard about Jenna, something dead-eyed and unforgiving, perhaps even a tad mercenary, her character almost the direct opposite of Sandrine’s, thus a woman, as I thought now, who would never have had the slightest impulse to teach in some little college or, God forbid, open a school in some remote corner of the globe.

  Because of all this, it struck me as quite odd that during the last months of her life Sandrine had invited Jenna for several visits, offers she’d always accepted, stays of two or three days during which I would often find them in conversation in the afternoon, the two of them sitting in the little gazebo Sandrine had wanted for the backyard, one of those cheap prefabricated affairs, assembled in a single day, and which was already beginning to fall apart.

  It had served her for a season, though, and she had often retreated there, either to read or listen to music on her Nano, and on occasion to talk with Jenna over glasses of white wine, both of them glancing over when they caught sight of me, their conversation instantly falling off.

  “Tell me this, Jenna,” I blurted suddenly. Jenna was taken aback by how abruptly I’d called to her. “What did you talk about?” I asked her.

  “Talk about?” Jenna asked tentatively.

  “When you were with Sandrine,” I said. “In the gazebo.”

  Jenna looked as if I’d posed this question with hostility.

  “Nothing much,” she answered coolly.

  “Nothing much?” I asked. “But you came here often during those last weeks, when Sandrine had drawn completely away from me. I mean, she hardly ever talked to me during that time, but she talked to you quite a lot, so I’m just wondering what you talked about, whether it was . . . intimate?”

  “Intimate?” Jenna said a little sharply. “Why shouldn’t she have talked intimately to me?”

  After all, Jenna was saying, weren’t you “intimate” with that little whore?

  I felt myself wither under the hard edge of her gaze.

  “I’m sorry,” I said softly. “Of course, she did. It’s just that Sandrine wasn’t talking to me much during those last weeks. She’d cut me off so I couldn’t imagine—”

  “Maybe she was tired of talking to you, Sam,” Jenna shot back.

  “She told you that?”

  “Well, wasn’t it obvious?” Jenna demanded. “You just said that she’d practically stopped talking to you.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know,” Jenna answered. “She never said.”

  We both remained silent for a moment, then very quietly Jenna added, “We talked about life, Sam.” Her eyes glistened suddenly. “Sandrine was my sister.” She drew in a long breath and I could tell she was using it to regain her composure. “She was my only sister.”

  “And sisters talk, Dad,” Alexandria added firmly, like a referee stepping between two boxers.

  “Of course,” I muttered softly, then pasted on a gentle smile that was all for Jenna’s benefit, and which I offered at that moment because I was evidently learning to be . . . kind. “Of course they do.”

  Jenna resumed gathering up her things. “Stay safe,” she said to Alexandria in a way that struck me as somewhat conspiratorial, those two Shakespearean witches in dark conclave again.

  “You don’t have to go,” I said. “I’m not . . . evil, Jenna. I’m not . . . I . . .”

  The fact was, I no longer knew what I was.

  “Anyway,” I muttered. “Thanks for checking in . . . on Alexandria.”

  Jenna had by then gotten on her coat, her eyes on me during the whole oddly frantic process. She seemed about to leave, but suddenly she stopped and faced me squarely. “Sandrine loved you, Sam.” Her gaze was very steady, like a middle school teacher making a point. “If that’s in doubt somehow.”

  And with that she left.

  “What was that all about?” Alexandria demanded once Jenna was safely out of earshot.

  “What was what all about?” I asked.

  “Asking what Mom and Jenna talked about.” She was clearly irritated by the question. She looked at me sternly. “Jenna’s not the one on trial, Dad.”

  This was beyond the pale.

  “And I am, right?” I snapped.

  Alexandria both gave a little and held her ground. “You know what I mean,” she said.

  “Not really, Alexandria,” I told her. “I know I have brought difficult times down on you, but I don’t know what I can do about it. If you can think of something, please let me know.”

  She gave me one of her puzzled yet penetrating looks, then asked a question I knew must surely have been dogging her for a long time.

  “Did Mom know about that woman?”

  So at last we had arrived at April.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “You never told her?”

  “Confession is not my strong point, I’m afraid.”

  She paused and, during that interval, I felt a terrible heat wafting from her.

  “And what about Malcolm?” she asked. “Did you know about him?”

  I shook my head. “Not the whole story, no.”

  I saw that my daughter was reluctant to go any further into her parents’ unfathomable marriage. I didn’t want to go any further into it either, but at that moment I saw Malcolm Esterman quite vividly in my mind, an image of him strolling through the gold and yellow leaves of an autumnal Coburn College, balding and bespectacled, with his books under his arm, his jacket forever coated with a thin film of chalk dust. Central casting: Mr. Chips.

  Malcolm Esterman.

  Of all people.

  His name had once conjured up quite a different emotion than it did now. Actually, his name had called up no emotion at all before Sandrine’s death and Detective Alabrandi’s subsequent investigation. Now there were images I simply couldn’t get out of my mind, all of them more or less pornographic, sheets and naked bodies equally twisted, both sweaty. For a sound track I heard heavy breathing, Sandrine’s growing more rapid and shallow until she releases the last one, which is, of course, long, exhausted, and fantastically satisfied.

  “I didn’t really know him,” I told Alexandria. “I mean, I knew him. He’s been teaching at Coburn for thirty years. Of course, I saw him around. At faculty meetings, graduations, that sort of thing. But the fact that he was—”

  “Of course,” Alexandria interrupted.

  She let the subject drop, and so did I. It would all be detailed at the trial today or tomorrow or the day following. Malcolm’s name was on the witness list, after all.

  Alexandria looked at the clock on the microwave. “We’d better get dressed. We’re running late.”

  With that, we parted, she to her room and I to mine. We did not see each other again until I strolled into the living room, where she was already waiting for me.

  “Jesus, Dad,” she said as I came into the room. “Your tie’s a mess.”

  “I guess my fingers are a little unsteady,” I told her.

  Reflexively, I started to fus
s with the knot, but she stepped forward and began to work with it herself.

  She has had a few relationships, but none had ever lasted long enough or proved deep enough for her to bring the fellow home to meet Sandrine and me. Perhaps she feared that I would have disapproved of whomever she brought to us, and I probably would have, though I would have kept quiet about it and been pleasant to the chap. But once Alexandria had left with him I’d have no doubt shaken my head and wondered what in the world she must be thinking to take this guy seriously. And throughout all this I would have thought myself quite tolerant, that I was judging this young man not by some high, intellectual standard but by some simpler aspect of his character, as Sandrine had once judged me: because you’re kind.

  But lately I have come to think that it is Alexandria who is actually tolerant. After all, she has borne the shocking revelations of the investigation without once questioning the many secrets I kept from Sandrine and that she kept from me and that we both kept from our daughter. “You and Mom gave me the illusion that I lived in a happy home,” she said to me after the first scandalous details emerged, “and I guess I have to thank both of you for that.”

  “This can’t be fixed without undoing the whole thing,” Alexandria said as she unwound the mess I’d made of my tie.

  I bowed to the hard-won truth that there were many things like that.

  “Hold your head up, Dad,” Alexandria said as she pulled out the final knot and started over.

  As she did this, her face was very near mine. I could feel her breath, and the simple fact that she was breathing, that my daughter lived, suddenly gave me a stroke of happiness, though not without an anguished sense of how easily we forget or take for granted these greatest and deepest of our good fortunes.