“What do you need to know?” I asked.
We were on the outskirts of Petaluma now, working our way through mud hollows and gravel washes and high yellow hills that had been chicken ranches and dairy farms not too many years back. The old ranches had been divided into five acre lots, and there were mailboxes at the edge of the road, and gravel drives that snaked back from the mailboxes to hidden valleys covered with orange poppies. Mobile homes crouched here and there, and custom giants made of stucco and glass. Up ahead, the terrain changed quickly. It was apple country and the cider stands slouched along the highway. “The night, at Sara Johnson’s house, what happened?”
I told her the story then pretty much as I’d told it to the police. It had taken on the air of truth to me, as stories do when they are told often enough. I looked out the window. The apple country wouldn’t last long. It was a transitional zone between estate parcels and the forest ahead, where the soil was full of rock.
“So you’re telling me you had sex with this woman that night at the party?”
“Yes. Out at the arbor.”
“You ejaculated?”
“Yes.”
“While inside her vagina?”
“Yes.”
“So those tissue samples out at the jail yesterday, when they come back from the federal lab, with the DNA analysis—the police are going to find a match. Your sperm, inside her vagina”
“I suspect so.”
We drove through redwoods now, a forest of trees, high and thin, shooting upwards from old stumps and pine needles and slanting creeks choked with debris. Overhead, above the crowning trees, I glimpsed the coastal light, the sky blue and dizzy. This was the other California, the one that was wet and damp, where the sun didn’t quite reach the forest floor. Full of mold spores and ferns and ugly little plants that never stopped growing.
“What you just told me—it means we won’t be in position to dispute the physical evidence.”
“I understand.”
“It’s going to be your version—against theirs.”
“Yes.”
Tour wife seems somewhat confused. She’s not sure what to believe.”
“She knows I would never do such a thing.”
“Did she visit you in jail?”
“No”
Another curve. Then another. After a while we crossed a bridge and pulled onto Highway One and started to climb, so pretty soon the road was high above the ocean. The blue sky had disappeared and it was all fog. I glanced at her hands on the shift knob. Nimble hands with red fingernails and a gold bracelet around the wrist. Plenty of jewelry. I looked her over then and she felt me looking and shifted gears in a way that told me I could look till kingdom come, it didn’t matter to her.
“I asked Elizabeth some questions, in regard to some rumors I’ve been hearing.”
“Elizabeth is a sensitive woman,” I said. “She has a lot of pride.”
“These rumors, they involve the prosecutor and your wife.” Jamie downshifted, and I listened to the sound of the motor racketing against the hillside for a second, then fading as the cliff fell away. We thrummed along in the fog. Jamie shifted again and a thin smile creased her face. “I can understand how you would be reluctant to talk about it. Elizabeth certainly was. Except from a defense point of view, that kind of information . . .” She stopped herself then, and the smile faded. “Right now, a ceasing of hostilities might be nice. There’s some things that need to be worked out.”
“You’re thinking about your fee?”
“Indirectly, I suppose, I’m always thinking of my fee. But before we talk about that, before the three of us have our meeting, I’d like you and Elizabeth to spend some time together. Talk things out, the two of you. You need a reconciliation of sorts. Nothing grand. Just enough so we can all sit down together and talk.”
She drove firmly, in control of the road, and it wasn’t long before we arrived. The lodge was just off the main highway—a wind-driven place on a bluff overlooking the ocean. There was no doorman, so I dragged our luggage into the lobby. The clerk was just getting to us when Elizabeth arrived. She wore those oversized glasses of hers and kept her hair under a scarf.
We didn’t say much to each other in the lobby. It seemed like maybe we should have, but we didn’t. I was an accused murderer, standing in the lobby of an oceanside bed-and-breakfast with my wife and my attorney, but there just wasn’t anything to say. The clerk directed us to the second floor.
As it turned out Elizabeth’s room and mine adjoined, and the door between us stood open. She and I lingered on either side of that threshold, regarding each other through the passageway.
“It’s good to see you,” I said.
“You, too,” she said, though her voice was less than convincing.
“It looks like we got our trip to the coast after all.”
“So it seems.”
She turned her back on me, unpacking her things. “You can close the door if you want your privacy, “ I said. “I won’t be offended.”
“I’m not frightened.”
“No, of course not. There’s no reason you should be.”
The smell of the ocean filled the place. I put my suitcase on my bed. I went down the hall, exploring. There wasn’t much to see, just the kind of trinkets and antiques you might expect in a place like this, driftwood and seashells and a few pieces of furniture from the old days, when this building had been the town grade school, or nursatorium, or whatever it said in the fine print on the tourist brochure. After a few minutes I came back.
The connecting door was closed.
22.
Later that day, at Jamie’s insistence, Elizabeth and I descended the narrow sidewalk into town. Bodega Bay was a gray emptiness over the scudding ocean. It was wind and pampas grass and a jumble of houses on a ragged slope that tumbled down to the sheltered inlet below. We stood at the moorage and looked back up at the houses: the old clapboard ones and the fisherman’s cottages and the smooth new homes of colored concrete and tinted glass.
“I’m sorry to put you through this,” I said.
The road bent away from the moorage to the main street, more or less sheltered from the wind. Not much of a town really. A drug store and some tourist shops. We had done this kind of thing a hundred times during our marriage. Killing time, idling through shops. Elizabeth touched the merchandise and a kind of paleness filled my head. The world smelled of filigreed bedclothes and gray clouds.
We fell into this by rote, because we had done it before, and it was my best hope now, I knew, this roteness, the way habits of mind accompany certain actions, then the emotions follow, too, running down familiar paths, returning us to where we have been.
“I’ve done some foolish things.”
“Indeed,” she said. “You have.”
We made our way down the street now to a cafe with clear glass windows and an asphalt parking lot. I got a glimpse of the two of us in the glass as we walked in. We were other people. A couple on holiday.
“But I’m not a murderer,” I said. “You know that. I didn’t kill anyone.”
It is the kind of thing you are compelled to say in my situation but which sounds less believable with each repetition. As we sat there, waiting for our coffee, Elizabeth regarded me closely, in a way I had not felt her regard me before, and I could sense her mulling me over, reserving judgment.
Outside the window, the gray of the asphalt seemed to merge with the gray of the ocean. It was the endless gray of the coast, of rain in the distance and clouds overhead and salt-stained wood. Everywhere windows overlooked the sea.
“I still have my hopes,” I said.
“About what?”
I smiled then, my best smile, sweet as I could, though there was a part of me watching as if from the outside, mocking. Even so, I was not insincere.
“I love the sound of your voice,” I said. “You know, I always have.”
In the past, when I said something like that, out of the blue,
a compliment from nowhere, she would smile back, knowing my tactics but not caring, taking the flattery.
Even now, I thought, there was a hint of a smile. Even though she had all but abandoned me. Even though she had not visited me in jail.
“Hopes about what?” she asked
“Us.”
The ocean swelled. A single black bird scuffled over the asphalt plaza; it perched on a stone, hunching there like an angry little man. Then it squawked and flew away, joining a dozen or so birds of identical carriage on a wire overhead. They were black-winged with gray breasts, and they surveyed the scene like judges on a panel, gazing about with hard black eyes.
“Don’t push,” she said.
“I don’t mean to push. It’s just—time is short.”
“Once, I used to believe the things you told me.” She had a little twist to her lips, a turn of the mouth that made her seem detached from what she said. “You’re good at disguising things. Smoothing things over. A word here. A smile. Sometimes lately I don’t know if I can stand to have you look at me again. Then, other times . . .”
She let it trail off.
Some more birds had joined the others. They stood along the wires there.
“You shouldn’t be seeing Minor Robinson,” I said.
“He’s an old friend.”
“It doesn’t look so good with him trying to put me away. Besides, it makes me jealous.”
She didn’t say anything to this. We finished our coffee, and the waitress brought the check and we went outside. The wind was loud and gave the sense of the world being reduced to its elements. The sidewalk was old and crumbling.
“I want things to be how they used to be,” I said.
“You pursued me pretty hard,” she said.
“I was head over heels.”
She looked at me then with eyes that were very clear and I could see beneath her fragility an iciness that if you could crack it, if you could penetrate it. . . then . . . I didn’t know.
If you pierce our shells, crack the exterior, then . . .
“I still the feel the same,” I said.
She crossed her arms in front of her, clutching the wind-breaker close to her body. It was a practical piece of clothing, off the rack, plain and ordinary, not like her usual wardrobe at all. Her face was pale and young-seeming under the scarf. Here and there her hair tufted out, wispy and flaxen.
“Lately, I’ve been wondering if I really ever knew you,” she said.
I took off the mustache. “I’m Jake Danser,” I said, smiling like an idiot. “Your husband.”
She didn’t laugh.
“You and I—we got married too quickly. I did the same with my first husband. So I have to ask myself what was I drawn to. If there’s part of me, just below the surface, that wants nothing more than to be humiliated. That seeks self-destruction.”
“I understand,” I said. “I have urges, feelings. I think things of which I am not altogether proud.”
My face did something then. It went slack, I think. It became ugly and blank and I felt another part of me peering out. Elizabeth’s eyes widened, and she backed away, and there was an instant then, perhaps, one of those extrasensory moments in which everything unexpressed between two people lies exposed, unfiltered. All that stuff hidden beneath knowing glances, unrecognized by the conscious mind, it was all there for a second, naked on the table. Just as quickly the instant passed. I smiled.
“I understand if you don’t want anything to do with me. But I have one thing to say. I don’t know if you will believe me—but it was over between Sara and I. That’s the truth of it.”
“You were with her at the party.”
“No. Not until I saw you and Minor together. Then I wanted to make you jealous.”
I remembered again that moment at Stinson, three years back, with the gulls cawing and the waves crashing. There’d been an instant then when things could have gone either way. When she had looked at me, knowing who I was, knowing down deep, but unable to resist. This was different. She was fearful. I put my hand on her forearm. My grip was loose, gentle. “We can change things,” I said.
“No.”
Overhead the birds burst from the wire. All of a sudden. All at once. They cawed and griped their way across the sky. Her eyes met mine again, and beneath the fear I saw her confusion, her guilt. I saw in her eyes the admission maybe that the trouble between us wasn’t my fault alone. And I saw desire, too. Then her eyes want vacant. She pulled away from me and I followed her up the hill.
Later that night I stood by the side of my bed, undressing, looking through the window toward the town below. I could hear the sea. The adjoining door was closed, and Elizabeth was on the other side. After our walk, we’d eaten dinner together in the little restaurant next to the hotel. We hadn’t talked much, but she’d been gentler toward me, I thought, and I told myself things were not over between us. After dinner I’d taken her upstairs and kissed her on the cheek and felt a small tremble shake through us both—but once again she’d withdrawn.
There was still something between us unfulfilled. Something waiting to happen.
Now I finished undressing and lay down on the bed. I heard the ocean outside. I heard Elizabeth on the other side of the adjoining door, settling in for the night. Then it was quiet. The moonlight fell through the window, and the clouds gathered and dispersed and then gathered again. I thought of Elizabeth in bed, in her nightgown, listening to the same roiling and crashing of the ocean, and I imagined her face: her eyelids, her soft skin, her neck, her hair silver as the moonlight.
Sometimes these lands of things, these trials, they bring people together.
I stood up.
I padded across the carpet. I listened. Nothing came from her room, no sound at all. I put my hand on the doorknob.
I held my breath. I wondered if she could hear me or perhaps see the shadows of my feet, blocking the light at the bottom of her door. I wondered if she lay there waiting for me, listening. Was she really afraid of me? Did she want me? I closed my eyes. I stared into that darkness inside of me. I am innocent. I turned the knob.
It was locked.
I went back to bed and lay listening to the sea, imagining the dark boats on the gleaming water, seeing them rock back and forth next to the pier, knocking one against the other, ropes dangling over the side, dipping into that sea. Then I followed, plunging into sleep.
23.
The next morning, we met for breakfast in Jamie’s room. Her suite was more dramatic than either of ours, with a balcony overlooking the ocean. The breeze, though, carried too much of a chill to keep the doors open, and the glass was covered with gauze. Jamie sat in a winged chair with her legs tucked beneath her, casual, almost attractive in her oversized sweater, her black tights and white headband. Her features were sharp, her hair unruly. She was an amorphous woman, but underneath the surface there was something constant: something hard and glossy and insect-like.
Elizabeth sat on the other side of the table in a hardback chair. She wore a cotton blouse, open at the collar. The morning light was pale, without color—and she sat there in that stiff chair, vulnerable and a little bit wary, her lips
turned in a wry expression I’d seen a hundred times. She had a touch of pink on her lips and her skin was luminous in the pale light.
“All of us have some decisions to make here,” said Jamie. “Given the nature of the evidence the police have in their possession, this is going to be a hard case.”
There was a natural antipathy between the two women. They’d met briefly the night before we’d driven down. Part of their conversation had had to do with Minor Robinson, or so Jamie had told me in the car.
“No one’s pressed charges yet,” said Elizabeth.
“They will.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Well, there’s the tie. They haven’t proved it belongs to your husband yet, but . . .”
“I left it behind,” I interjected. “At the party.”
“How did it end up at Sara’s apartment, do you think?” Jamie crossed her legs. Uncrossed them. She leaned back and studied me through those black eyes, and I remembered the stories I’d heard about the way she grilled her own clients, deciding whether or not to take their case.
“I don’t know, but I didn’t have the tie on when I left. Barbara Wilder saw me. She can tell you.”
“Regardless, we still have to contend with the sperm analysis—and the DNA report.”
“I don’t understand,” said Elizabeth.
A smiled creased Jamie’s lips. Her tongue darted out, and the smile vanished. “You better tell her.”
“Tell me what?”
I glanced toward the window, struggling for the words. The sky through the gauze curtains seemed an infinite gray, vague and empty, and I couldn’t find anything there to help me.
“The DNA,” Jamie said at last. “When the tests come back, there’s a good chance they’ll get a match. Your husband’s sperm, in Miss Johnson’s vagina.”
Elizabeth tilted backwards, lifting her chin, and I saw confusion in her blue eyes.
“The arbor,” said Jamie.
The confusion heightened, then disappeared, giving way to something else.
“Out at the arbor? You and Sara?”
I saw her disgust.
Whatever gains I had made the night before, I felt them slipping away. Meanwhile Jamie studied the pair of us, enjoying the moment: seeing me exposed, Elizabeth undone. Such voyeuristic pleasure—indulged at the client’s expense, emotional or otherwise—was common enough in attorneys, I knew, though few would admit the fact.
“Let me explain what we’re up against.” Jamie directed herself at Elizabeth. “In a murder trial, to get a conviction, the prosecution has to prove the defendant had the opportunity to commit the crime, as well as the means, and motive.” Jamie leaned forward, excited, and Elizabeth leaned away, growing paler in the pale light. Her blue eyes were as blue as I had ever seen them, and her features more delicate. “If the tie belonged to your husband, then it implies he had the means. And if the semen is his, it implies opportunity.” Jamie was in many ways the opposite of my wife, with her harsh accent, her angular body, her crass, burnished looks. “Then there’s the matter of motive. That’s the other question the prosecution must address. Why would he kill her?” Turning to me, Jamie raised her eyebrows in mock bemusement. “There’s a number of motives prosecutors look at in a case like this. We’re going to see them all bandied about in the press. The prosecution will leak them out. You can count on it.
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