Sandrine's Case

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Yes,” the witness answered. “His kindness. He had lost his kindness. His goodness. His capacity to feel sympathy. She said that he was no longer able to be tender.”

  My eyes remained closed but now my eyelids felt pulled down and held in place by heavy weights, eyes I could not open.

  Fixed in that darkness, I thought of how I’d received Sandrine’s diagnosis with little show of emotion, though I’d later made all the sweet, sympathetic motions required to demonstrate my care, not one of which had been genuine. Had she seen through all my unfeeling gestures and seen only the bloodless show they were?

  “She said she knew that he had lost all these things because of something she’d seen a week or so before her diagnosis,” the witness added.

  Jane’s voice now took on a somberness that I could hear quite clearly from the depths of my black chamber. I could also hear that she was laboring to control the tenor of her voice, as if she knew the story she was about to tell would challenge that control, loosen the strings of her own heart, break the very voice she was struggling to keep whole.

  “She’d been at the home of a woman she knew, a woman who’d had breast cancer the year before and who’d just had a mammogram and was waiting for the results. Her husband came home while Sandrine was there. He’d picked up the mail, and so he had the results of her mammogram with him. He opened it and they read it together, the man and his wife. Neither of them said anything as they read, Sandrine told me, but very suddenly the man’s eyes filled with tears, and he drew his wife under his arm and said, ‘No cancer, no cancer.’”

  “And what did Mrs. Madison make of this experience?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  “That this was love,” Jane Forbes answered, “that this was truly love. That when the man had heard that his wife was fine, he’d wept with joy and relief and what she called—I remember the phrase—‘heartfelt thanksgiving.’”

  I opened my eyes because I thought that with this it was surely over. But I was wrong.

  “She added something to this,” Jane Forbes continued. “She said that she could face the fact that her husband could no longer feel what she called ‘the tenderness of things.’ Many women did, after all, face that fact. The problem, Sandrine told me, was that she could find no way to bring him back to himself. She had wanted to do that more than anything, but she was running out of time.”

  “All right, and when was the last time you spoke with Mrs. Madison?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  “About a week before she died,” Jane answered.

  “Did she speak about her condition at that time?”

  “No. She talked about her daughter, how much she loved her daughter.”

  “Did she mention Mr. Madison?”

  “No, she did not.”

  “Did she mention anything about suicide?”

  “No. We talked for about an hour, then Sandrine said she had something to finish, a little note on Cleopatra.”

  “A little note?”

  “Yes.”

  “But not a note that had anything to do with suicide?”

  “No, it was just a thought she’d had about Cleopatra,” Jane answered. “She had written the first part of it, about a page, she said. But there was a final paragraph she wanted to write. I fully expected to see her again, probably the very next day, but she never came back to the reservoir, and, of course, a week later I found out about her death.”

  “So this afternoon by the reservoir, this was the last time you saw Mrs. Madison?”

  “Yes.”

  “But this talk about Cleopatra, this was not the last communication you had with her, was it.”

  “Not exactly, no.”

  But Sandrine had died a week later, and they’d never seen each other after that final meeting at the reservoir. How could that not have been their last communication?

  “A couple of days after her death I got a letter from Sandrine,” Jane Forbes said. “She’d mailed it the afternoon before her death.”

  Mr. Singleton then went to his table, retrieved a piece of paper, and handed it to Jane Forbes.

  “Is this the letter you received?” he asked her.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Can you describe the contents of this letter?”

  “It seems to be the final paragraph of her thought about Cleopatra,” Jane answered. “I didn’t think it had any relevance to this case, but when I heard Detective Alabrandi read the note Sandrine had left beside her bed as her final thought, I knew that it wasn’t, and so I contacted you.”

  Mr. Singleton nodded toward the note. “Would you read it for us, please?”

  And so she did.

  Caesar was a worldling who must have enjoyed many a cynical laugh at the benighted mortals who made up the lower orders of the world. But surely it is possible that in the last days of her life Cleopatra came to understand the outcome of such vanity, that its poison numbs the heart. If this is true, then as the asp sank its fangs into her flesh, she must have feared that Caesar would continue in this folly, that without her desperate intervention, he would die as lost to tenderness as the cruelist who ever died, and that to have saved him from so drear a fate should have been the goal and triumph of her love, his redemption her final, parting gift.

  Others might hear this and hear only Sandrine’s thoughts on Cleopatra, I told myself, as Jane Forbes returned the letter to Mr. Singleton, then waited for Morty’s cross-examination, but I could read between its heartbreaking lines, understand its devastating message, and feel the sacrificial heart that had delivered it.

  Oh, my dear Sandrine, I thought, as Morty rose to question this unexpected witness at my trial. My God, what I have lost.

  My Dinner with Morty

  My Dinner with Andre had been one of Sandrine’s favorite movies, I remembered as I drove toward Pappy’s Steak and Brew, where I was to have my dinner with Morty. She’d loved the way the tables had turned in the middle of the conversation, with short, stocky, and wholly unimposing Wallace Shawn suddenly making an eloquent case for the life he’d chosen, a life that during the course of their conversation had unexpectedly emerged as quietly richer and more meaningful than that of the far more worldly Andre’s.

  I was still thinking of Sandrine’s affection for this odd little film, one whose action I’d found predictable and whose message I’d found rather trite, when I sat down across from Morty, then glanced about the place, taking in the longhorns mounted over the bar, the plain wooden tables with their red-checked cloths.

  “You probably don’t like this place,” Morty said. “I chose it because we’re less likely to run into anyone from Coburn College.”

  I shrugged. “I’m past caring where I have dinner, Morty.”

  He looked at me closely. “I warned you that you’d be pretty worn out by the end of the state’s case.”

  I nodded. “Well, that much is true.”

  Morty took a swig from the enormous glass of beer he’d ordered. “What do you make of Jane Forbes?” he asked.

  Before I could answer, the waitress stepped up. Morty ordered a steak with several sides and another beer. I wanted only a salad.

  “I mean, I couldn’t see anything all that damaging in her testimony,” Morty added. “You weren’t the most approachable guy. Big deal. Your wife sometimes got blue, sometimes felt lonely. You’re supposed to be hung for that?” He waved his hand. “Bullshit.”

  His cross-examination of Jane had been polite but to the point. He’d gone over everything she’d said in answer to Mr. Singleton’s questions, then, step by step, made Jane admit that she’d heard no fear in Sandrine’s tone, nor any hint that she’d had the slightest suspicion that her husband might kill her. After that, he’d gone on to ask if she’d heard anything during her conversations with Sandrine that had alarmed her such that she’d warned her f
riend to be watchful or advised her to contact local authorities. That is to say, the police. To this, Jane had answered with a very definite “No.”

  “But that note on Cleopatra,” Morty added after a quick sip from that enormous mug of beer. “That could backfire on Singleton, make your wife look like an egghead.” He shrugged. “Anyway, we’re at the end of the state’s case so I wanted us to go over the defense strategy one more time.”

  The food came and Morty dove in. I picked at mine, a lack of appetite he immediately noticed.

  “You’re wasting away,” he said. “What’s the problem?”

  I shrugged. “A lack of will.”

  “To what?”

  “Go on.”

  “Oh please,” Morty said with a dismissive wave of the hand, then looked more closely and said, “You’re serious, aren’t you? Is it because you know more is coming? From Sandrine, I mean?”

  When I didn’t answer, he leaned forward and gave me his best lawyerly, fatherly expression. “She’s trying to kill you, Sam. You were right about that.”

  Again, I said nothing.

  “Which is actually something I wanted to bring up with regard to the defense,” Morty added. “The fact is, I think you should reconsider your decision not to, well, bring up a few possibilities with regard to your wife.”

  My silence appeared to work on him like a spur.

  “She is a black widow, that’s the truth,” he said. “A classic black widow, and she’s digging your grave from the moldy depths of her own and—”

  “Stop,” I said softly. “Just stop, Morty.”

  Then I rose.

  “Thanks for dinner,” I said softly. “See you tomorrow.”

  I didn’t want to go directly home. Alexandria would be there, and what I wanted was to be alone so that I could work through the many conflicting ideas that were assaulting me, all of them having to do with Sandrine, what she was or was not doing to me, and why.

  But there was no place I could go to sit and think, not even the library, which was the last place I’d tried to do exactly that, only to notice Mrs. Crenshaw eyeing me from a distant row of shelves. She was the widowed wife of the man who’d first hired Sandrine and me at Coburn College. It was her kindly late husband who’d worked so hard to bring us to Coburn. She’d quickly looked away when I had caught her in my eye, and because of that I’d known exactly what she was thinking, that I’d brought shame upon her husband’s reputation, as well as that of the college he had worked so tirelessly to benefit, shame upon everything that was good about this old-fashioned and genuinely upright college town.

  So the library was closed to me, and the market, and the general store, places that had once welcomed me but never would again. For no matter the outcome of my trial, I had raised a great ugly noise and it would echo through my life as long as I lived here. No question about it, I thought, I would have to leave. The big red A was painted on my chest. There were many other Coburnites upon whom it could with equal justice have been painted, of course, but my tepid affair had come to light in the most spectacular of ways, an explosion that would reverberate with every step I took in the town park or along one of its nicely shaded sidewalks.

  And so I drove around and around, circulating among the various neighborhoods. At one point I recalled one of my uncle’s war stories, how American fighter planes had sunk the flower of the Japanese fleet during the Battle of Midway. He was quite amused by the fact that the Japanese pilots who had tried to return to these ships found nothing but black smoke and burning oil slicks where their home ships should have been. I suppose I’d enjoyed a dark laugh at their expense, as well, but now I felt very much like one of those doomed pilots, hopelessly searching for a refuge that had sunk beneath the waves.

  The midnight hour came and went. At the stroke of one, I told myself that Alexandria would surely be asleep, and for that reason I could now drift into the driveway of 237 Crescent Road, creep into my own house, pad softly down the corridor, and finally lower myself into the bed and struggle through another sleepless night. Now, at least, I told myself, you can go to bed without further incident.

  I was wrong.

  She came up from behind me as I got out of my car, came up out of the shadows, like something from the deep, that shark one forever fears lurking beneath the waves. There was a slight, alerting sound, like leaves on leaves, and I turned to see her coming, quite literally, from behind the wall of untrimmed shrubbery that bordered the house.

  “I left my car a few blocks away,” she said.

  “April,” I murmured.

  “I had to see you.”

  Her slender body was wrapped in a black overcoat she’d tied at the waist, the collar up so that it spread out from her throat like small pointed wings. She’d knotted a paisley scarf around her neck, its ends tucked into the coat, and for a reason I could not fathom she was wearing black leather gloves as if this were a crime scene at which she did not wish to leave her fingerprints. But April, being April, had added a deeply incongruous pair of white sneakers.

  For a moment she stood pointedly a few paces from me, like someone gauging the distance of a target on a firing range.

  “I know I shouldn’t be here,” she whispered. Her eyes flashed to the darkened house. “Your daughter’s here, right?”

  “She’s asleep, I’m sure.”

  “There was no place else to come,” she said. “No place to meet.”

  “I know,” I told her, waited for her to add something, then, when she only stood frozenly, staring at me, I said in the casual way of a clerk addressing someone who’d just strolled into a store, “What can I for do for you, April?”

  The sheer and thoughtless idiocy of what I’d said tore a snarling laugh from her. “Do for me?” she snapped, a show of buried rage I’d never expected to see in her, and which, to my relief, was very quickly suppressed. “God,” she breathed. “What a mess. What a mess.”

  “What I mean is . . . April,” I sputtered. “What I mean is that if there’s something you—”

  “It’s not me anymore,” she said, her voice now quite soft, with something shattered in it. “It’s Clayton. He can’t take it, Sam. He can’t take me going on the stand.” She stared at me in that beggarly way, her shredded inner life hanging from her like flaps of skin. “He didn’t deserve any of this. It was me who did it. You and me who did it.”

  “What we did has nothing to do with my trial,” I told her weakly. “It should never have been—”

  “So who’s to blame, then?” April cut in with a hint of that earlier rage breaking the surface again. “The dog? The cat?”

  “You know what I mean, April.”

  “Who’s to blame for what happened to Clayton?” April demanded. “Because one thing’s for sure. He had nothing to do with what we did, Sam. Or what happened after that.”

  She meant Sandrine’s death, of course, and her reluctance to say it directly hinted that she might think it murder.

  “They’re going to say terrible things, Sam,” she went on, now crying softly. “They’re going to say we made fun of Clayton and Sandrine.” She gazed at me plaintively. “Those names we picked, remember? And that story you wrote. They’re going to make me read some of that, Sam!” She lowered her head and sobbed. “We’re monsters,” she murmured. “Everyone will think we’re monsters.”

  “What do you want me to do, April?” I asked. “No, the question is what do you think I can do? Because it’s all out of my hands. It’s been out my hands for a long time.” I felt a wave hit me, red and boiling, one that lifted me and rolled me and flung me down with crushing force. “I am nothing!” I said vehemently. “I have nothing!”

  She lifted her head and stared at me in dark wonder, as if I’d broken apart before her eyes, as if my arms had dropped away and my legs had buckled and I’d collapsed
like a building in a cloud of dust. It was as if she’d seen the external manifestation of exactly what had happened in my soul and had no idea how she might respond to it, or even if there was a way to respond at all.

  Finally, she said, “I sometimes wonder if you did it.”

  “Don’t,” I said softly. “Because I didn’t.”

  “If you did,” she added in a tone that impressed me with both its directness and its honesty, “I hope they find you guilty.”

  “I’m sure you do, April.”

  I remembered something Morty had said to me early on, the fact that the classically southern way to defend a murderer was to show that the murder victim deserved being murdered and that your client—­aggrieved, lied to, humiliated—was the perfect one do it.

  “I’m sure you do,” I repeated.

  After a brief silence, she said, “I testify tomorrow.”

  “I know.”

  “Clayton’s coming,” she added, her eyes glistening now. “He won’t let me face it alone. He told me that. It’s a matter of chivalry, he said. That’s the word he used. Chivalry. And he believes in it too. That’s the kind of man he is.”

  “Go back to him,” I told her.

  She shook her head. “He deserves better than me.”

  She watched me a moment, and then, with no further word, she slowly turned and disappeared into the darkness beyond my lighted yard.

  For a time, I remained outside, under the stars, listening to the soft pad of April’s white sneakers on the sidewalk until they, too, had vanished. Then I turned toward the house and saw Alexandria standing at the window, motionless, but somehow moving, like the waving image of a ghostly hologram.

  She was at the door by the time I reached it.

  “So that’s her,” she said.

  She’d seen pictures of April in the paper and on local television.

  “She looked older,” she added.

  “Trouble ages you.”

  “And she’s not very pretty.”