Cold Rain

by Craig Smith

  It occurred to me that I should attempt to explain to the judge that Buddy Elder had apparently decided to ruin my life, in an illegal sense of the word, and that I might not have much choice about how I dealt with the young man, but I very wisely followed my instinct and kept my mouth shut. I had made my promise and meant to keep it. At that moment I could not imagine ever going back to The Slipper or crossing paths with Buddy Elder again. I had the best intentions that morning, jail will do that, but as things turned out I would end up breaking both promises.

  ‘Ms Etheridge, kindly take your client out of my courtroom. All charges are dismissed.’

  We had to wait for an escort back to the city jail so I could reclaim my property and return my orange jumpsuit, though I would have liked to keep it for a souvenir. While we waited, I ran through the incident for Gail’s benefit, beginning with the diary. I described everything I could recall reading. I omitted only the fact that my wife had very nearly unloaded her revolver before showing me the door.

  A fairly good friend who also happened to be getting paid to listen, Gail appeared to accept everything I said. I had the feeling, though, that she didn’t really believe me. She was neither stupid nor naive. If a diary existed which described an affair, then no matter what I said she was going to assume there was an affair.

  Why else would a young woman write twenty or thirty s in her diary about it? My wife, after all, who knew me better than anyone, believed it. Why shouldn’t my lawyer?

  ‘One thing,’ Gail said. ‘Do you think Leslie Blackwell will get a copy of this diary?’

  I shrugged. ‘What if she does?’

  Gail’s expression grew sombre. ‘That’s the question, isn’t it? The affair started last summer?’

  ‘There was no affair.’

  ‘Right.’ Gail tried hard not to roll her eyes. ‘The alleged affair allegedly started…’

  ‘Last summer. That’s the way I understood it anyway.’

  ‘According to her she takes a class with her lover.

  The live-in boyfriend makes a fuss when he finds out.

  He wants revenge, and maybe an insurance policy against the two of you getting back together again, so he has her file her bogus complaint of sexual harassment. Is that about how it works out?’

  ‘There are rules against vendetta complaints.’

  ‘If life were only so simple. Unfortunately, the affair, sorry, alleged affair, lends credibility to Johnna Masterson’s complaint.’

  ‘I don’t follow. What does Johnna Masterson have to do with it? You said yourself her complaint is groundless.’

  ‘Look at it from Leslie Blackwell’s point of view, David. You’re engaged in an adulterous affair with a student, teaching students that married men who have affairs with unmarried women are not committing adultery, and you’re hooting it up with the unindicted co-defendant at the Student Union.’

  ‘Hooting is probably not the word we want to use under the circumstances.’

  Gail rewarded me with an impatient smile. ‘Johnna Masterson’s complaint is that you have created a hostile environment for her. Her complaint cites a single example. On the face of it, Blackwell should never have investigated Masterson’s complaint, but Denise Conway’s complaint made it impossible for her to ignore it. So she digs around a little, and suddenly she discovers Denise Conway’s diary. In other words, Ms.

  Masterson’s complaint now has substance. You’re banging students in your office and bargaining blow jobs for grades, even if it’s all in good fun. In that light, anything you might have said about Johnna Masterson forms part of a larger pattern of behaviour.’

  ‘All that is assuming I said something in the first place,’ I grumbled irritably, ‘and that the diary has some legitimacy.’

  Gail’s expression suggested my objection was irrelevant, but she very kindly agreed with me. ‘True or not, David, if Leslie Blackwell finds out about the diary she’ll feel obliged to push the case forward to the vice president. Which means we could be in for a hell of a fight.’

  I HAD TO SUPPRESS the urge to vomit as I put my clothes on. My leather jacket was ruined. The clothes needed to be washed. Throughout the morning, I had been watching the time, thinking I could make my afternoon class. With an hour remaining, I left the police station and got into a taxi. On the ride to my truck, I called the department and cancelled my class.

  Unavoidably delayed, I said. I talked to a student worker, so there was no cross-examination. I then called Molly. Her cell phone was off, so I left a message on the home answering machine. I was out of jail, I said, but I needed money and clothing. I added gratuitously that I hadn’t slept with ‘that woman.’ The cabdriver, who neither appeared to notice the peculiar stink of my clothing, nor reacted to the word jail, checked me out in the mirror as I made this final protestation.

  That gave me a pretty good idea how Molly would receive it.

  Walt Beery wasn’t in my truck. Nor was his Scotch.

  He had, however, left the truck without taking the beer. That fact alone was sufficient for me to call Walt a good friend. I went back to Walt’s apartment on the off chance he was there. Since I didn’t have a key and there was no answer when I phoned him, I decided to go out to the farm. I called ahead, if only to avoid a shootout with Molly. When she didn’t answer, I left another message: ‘I’m going to the farm to pick up some things. I’ll be gone by three o’clock.’

  I saw the farm differently when I drove out that afternoon. I had been in the habit of seeing the things we needed to do. Now I saw what I was about to lose. Barnard Place had been in Molly’s family since the 1930s. When Doc and Olga abandoned the farm for the comforts of suburbia, settling just off the thirteenth fairway adjacent to the country club, Doc was not the sole owner of the property, nor could he get an elderly sister to agree to sell. So he did the worst thing possible: he broke that beautiful mansion into apartments. When he gave up the apartment building idea, Doc left the house vacant without even bothering to close the place up properly. Pipes froze and burst. The basement flooded. Trees grew up through the eaves. The windows became target practice for kids who wanted to go out and see the haunted house.

  Shutters dropped off or went missing altogether. Kids began using the downstairs parlour for sex and drug parties, and at least two campfires had been started on the parquet floors.

  When Molly’s aunt died and Doc deeded his share of the property to Molly, Molly and I were living in town. The thought of moving out to her family farm excited us both. We had picked out a beautiful site for a new house about a quarter of a mile from the mansion. We decided to build Molly’s dream house in stages, letting us move into it within six-to-eight months. Everything was set when, as a whim, Molly and I decided to see how bad the mansion was on the inside. By that point, Molly and I had turned around quite a few houses, probably fifteen to twenty major renovations over the years. Some we had sold immediately, some we rented out. We knew a restoration would be far more complicated than the usual facelift and far more expensive too. The moment we walked into the house, it was clear the whole place was beyond salvation. The faded glory that was left only made the ruin more heartrending.

  As a building site it had potential. The trouble was tearing it down was going to take time and cost money.

  I remember laughing at Doc McBride’s enthusiasm for drop ceilings and cheap panelling. Everywhere I looked the original wood was cracked, swollen, or warped.

  Piles of plaster cluttered the floor. Carpets were stained and rotten. I made a joke about fire being the only decent thing for it, except the place was too water-logged to burn.

  Molly had a different idea. She told me about it on the drive back to town. She wanted to save the place.

  She wanted to live here. I laughed at the notion. I said we could never get the cost of even a half-ass restoration back if we decided to sell it. Worse than that, it would take years to make the place liveable.

  Molly didn’t care. This was the place where she wan
ted to live. She wanted the mansion to look like it had at the height of its glory, circa 1930, complete with antique luxury plumbing and electrical fixtures.

  She had lost this house once when she had been too young to have a say in matters. This time she wasn’t leaving.

  We bought a house trailer and set it up close to the mansion. Summers, weekends, evenings, every spare moment we had we worked on the house. It was nothing for us, all three of us, to have Sunday dinner seated on sawhorses, tasting sawdust or freshly buffed plaster with our sandwiches.

  A stray dog showed up one day. Two more got dropped off the next summer. We fixed up a stall for Ahab, then built an arena for Lucy to ride in. Our only recreation was to drive to various horse races every weekend and let Lucy enter the junior division races. A couple more dogs showed up, and I built a kennel. The dogs all had names, Hawthorne, Melville, Emily D. and Emily B. (they showed up together), Emerson, Alcott, and Wharton, but most of them answered to Dog if they answered to anything. A couple of them had a tragic past and never really got comfortable with the concept of family or trust or, for that matter, human beings. The rest of them were okay, but not really cut out for indoor living.

  A few people from school came out to the farm in those early days. They put on a good face, but I knew they thought we were crazy. That was pretty much the point of our party. I wanted people to see Molly’s vision in its finished form.

  I took a couple of minutes when I first got to the farm to see the dogs. During the day, they always ran free as long as Molly was around. If she had to leave the farm, she usually put them in the kennel. So I was probably safe. They were in the kennel. They were happy to see me, most of them anyway. The sceptics, Alcott and Wharton, hung back and growled as they always did. The horses were in the pasture. I called to Ahab, and he ran across the valley and up the hill to see me. It broke my heart to see that kind of enthusiasm, especially when all I could do was clap his shoulder and tell him I wouldn’t be around for a while.

  THE PLACE WAS EMPTY, and though it had been home less than twenty-four hours ago, I felt like a burglar. I changed clothes, tossing my ruined stuff in the trash. I packed quickly: some schoolwork, toiletries, a roll of cash from my desk drawer, an extra pair of jeans, a change of shoes, a sweater, some shirts, socks and underwear. We had three sleeping bags stored in a second story closet. I got mine out, snagged some towels and a pillow from one of the guestrooms, and headed for the truck. I was trying to decide if I should make another run when our neighbour Billy Wade appeared at the back of the house. Wade stood close to seven feet tall and carried a broodmare’s belly over his belt. His face was long and thick, and he had a habit of letting his mouth hang open as if he had just been asked the one question he couldn’t answer.

  It was my theory that Molly’s parents had moved off the farm primarily to avoid their only neighbours, Mrs Wade and her son. On the car lot, we would have called Wade a bogue. A bogue, the o pronounced as in bogus, was anyone who came shopping for wheels without cash or credit. Surprising as it may seem, a salesperson could usually count on running into one or two bogues a week. With a bad run of luck six or seven wasn’t unheard of. When that occurred we used to call it bogitus. The worst, though, was having a case of the Bogues. With a case of the Bogues every bogue who showed up pushed past every other salesperson on the lot in order to find the individual so afflicted. Even Tubs wasn’t immune. I saw him sell five cars one day, the record for that year for a normal sales day. The next morning all five deals got tossed back in his lap with credit turndowns. Milt laughed at Tubs and said it looked like he might be coming down with a case of the Bogues! After that for about a week every bogue in DeKalb came to the lot and asked for Tubs.

  According to Molly, Wade was the nicest man in the world. Most bogues are, but I couldn’t look at our neighbour without thinking about bogues. As Wade was, in fact, King of the Bogues, in my book anyway, it seemed appropriate that after my night in jail he should wander across the road for a friendly chat.

  Bogues always find you when you’re down.

  ‘You all shooting guns last night?’ Wade asked me cheerfully.

  ‘I lost my channel changer, Wade. What I did, when I got tired of one show, I’d just shoot the TV set and call to Molly to bring in another TV.’

  Wade gave me a calculating look. He was pretty sure I was lying, but the concept of irony escaped him entirely. ‘That could get expensive real fast, Dave!’

  ‘You didn’t happen to think someone might have been over here trying to kill us, did you?’

  Wade laughed. ‘I figure they’d line up for the chance at you, Dave, but they’re feared-to-death of Molly!’

  We heard Molly’s pickup coming up the lane. At the top of the hill, she cut into the circle, instead of driving down to the shed where she and Lucy usually parked. She took a quick look into the cab of my truck to see what I had, then walked over to join us without quite looking at me. ‘Hey, Billy!’ she said.

  Wade looked like a big dog that had just gotten his belly rubbed. ‘Hey, Molly!’

  ‘David has moved out, Billy. I don’t want him on the farm. He doesn’t have any business here. You see him around and I’m not here, I’d appreciate it if you’d call the sheriff.’

  ‘They disconnected my phone, Molly, but I could break his arm if you want.’

  ‘That’s fine with me. Just be careful it’s not his drinking arm. Poor man, it’s all he’s got left.’

  Wade looked at me like I was one of the horses.

  ‘Which one is his drinking arm, Molly?’

  Molly told the giant she was just kidding and dismissed him with a kindness she rarely offered outsiders. She needed to talk to me about something important. She hoped he didn’t mind leaving us alone, but she did want to talk to him sometime. There was a lot of work to do, she said, and she could sure use a hand. Wade said he could clean the stalls right now if she wanted. Molly said she had to think about it first. She had a few other things in mind that were maybe more urgent. This was the usual patter with Wade. Since his mother’s death two years earlier, I figured Molly was good for spending a couple of hundred dollars a month on make-believe work for our neighbour. Wade wasn’t very handy and for all his size he hadn’t much ability with a shovel. He could loiter with the best of them, though, and that was usually the job Molly hired him for.

  When our neighbour had wandered off, Molly glared at me. ‘You drinking again?’

  ‘Might as well.’

  A smile snaked across her face as she brushed a long dark golden lock from her forehead. ‘How was jail?’

  ‘Comparably speaking, pretty friendly.’

  ‘Who beat you up, David?’

  ‘It wasn’t Denise Conway. I’ll tell you that much.’

  ‘The judge got a phone call from Doc this morning.

  In case you’re wondering.’

  Doc was Bernard McBride, Molly’s father. Before I had gotten to know him real well, Doc told me about a teaching position that was opening up at the university. They hadn’t even advertised for it yet, but it looked like something I might be interested in. Like the typical Ph.D., freshly minted and hungry for work, I was interested in anything that looked like full-time employment. I made the call to the contact person Doc had provided, and I eventually landed the position. Only later did I realize Doc had put in the fix. Recalling my fury at that particular indignity, Molly was no doubt enjoying this latest bit of favouritism. ‘Judge Hollis and Doc used to play bridge together.’

  ‘Anything your father can’t fix, Molly?’

  ‘He can’t fix us.’

  ‘I didn’t have an affair with Denise Conway or anyone else, Molly. This whole thing, these charges against me… it’s a setup.’

  ‘You know what? I didn’t want to hear it last night, and I don’t want to hear it today either.’

  ‘Even if it’s the truth?’

  ‘You said this would never happen, David. You gave me your word.’

  ‘It
didn’t happen.’

  ‘How is your face? It looks like it hurts.’

  ‘It’s killing me. What do you expect?’

  ‘It’s not half of what you deserve.’

  ‘I’m going to stay with Walt for a few days,’ I said to her as she walked away.

  ‘Tell it to someone who gives a damn,’ she answered, never looking back.

  I DROVE AWAY THINKING about things through Molly’s perspective. I knew her that well. I knew her pain, the absolute sense of betrayal, and even though it was all a lie, I felt guilty as hell.

  Chapter 10

  WHEN SHE WAS fifteen, Molly fell in love with Luke Sloan. Luke was seventeen. She was the daughter of a prominent surgeon, the belle of the debutantes. He was a cowboy, his best days already starting to fade.

  Even eighteen years later, Molly didn’t like to talk about the romance. I expect she still cherished that part of the relationship, though she pretended otherwise.

  I know this much. Luke Sloan was a handsome kid.

  I had seen enough action photographs of him on a horse at the Sloan house to know that. From what I could put together, Luke was a lot like his father, a good decent man, the sort Tubs used to call salt of the earth. The difference was Luke had to make some tough choices when he was seventeen. I had never been given the whole story in one sitting, but I was under the impression that Doc and Olga had forbidden Molly to see Luke. These are the kinds of things families talk about in shorthand and never quite explicate for the benefit of the in-laws. Molly told me one time they knew she was seeing him and pretended not to notice.

  Olga says otherwise.

  According to Olga, Luke Sloan would have been invisible to a girl like Molly only a couple of years later. That meant of course he hadn’t enough money to satisfy the country club set, nor the kind of ambition that would overcome its prejudices. I had seen his type a hundred times over. Lucy raced against them every weekend. I found myself in grudging agreement with Olga McBride: some men are just too attached to the clay. At fifteen those things are romantic. Of course at fifteen we judge people by a different standard. We see cockiness and think it is confidence. We mistake silence for depth.