The Saberdene Variations

by Thomas Gifford

  “All right, that works for me,” I said, not quite seeing the point. “The trial turned to a large extent on the fact that Caro saw Anna go down the path with Varada. Given the evidence, the scratches on his face and the skin under her fingernails, anyone—including the jury—drew the conclusion that he’d killed her while they struggled. Caro could hardly have done otherwise. It all made perfect sense—”

  “Not exactly,” Thorne said softly. “Caro knew about this other woman, too, the woman Varada was really in love with, the woman who simply couldn’t resist him. And Caro knew that this woman was perfectly well aware that Varada was a tremendous, terrible mistake … but this woman simply didn’t know how to get away from him, she was, addicted. And then Anna went down that path with Varada … and never came back … that was the way to get free of the hold he had on her—”

  “You mean this other woman saw him take her down that path? Or Caro saw a way to help this other woman get free of Varada? Just what the hell are you trying to say? What’s the punch line?”

  “Oh, Charlie, watch my lips. Caro … was … the other woman.” Listening to him I felt like my head was being held down on the block by a hooded figure with a big axe. “Caro was the one Varada loved, the one who couldn’t break free …”

  “How could you know that? Caro told you?” My voice was coming to me from far away.

  “Anna told me. It was tearing her apart, she told me on the last day of her life. But that wasn’t all I knew—just hearsay. No. I’ll never forget that day. Anna told me about Caro and Varada, told me that she was going to tell Varada to leave Caro alone or she’d—well, what she intended to threaten him with I cannot imagine. Anna was perhaps the gentlest creature I have ever known. As their father I was baffled and worried … so I did that evening what I have done so often in my life. I went to the cemetery to seek the wise counsel of my late wife.” He cleared his throat. “Ah, let me see. Anna told me what she was going to do. And then she was killed and there was Caro all of a sudden—and she’d seen them go off together. Caro knew Varada, she knew the kind of man he was and she knew she couldn’t resist the hold he had on her. Some women have that weakness, Charlie, just the way men do. I’m sure she hated him, was disgusted by herself, but she was powerless … then fate thrust into her hands the means to rid herself of him. Her sister was murdered and, by God, Varada looked like the murderer—”

  “I don’t feel so good, Andy. I don’t like thinking about this stuff.”

  “No, I don’t suppose you do,” he said.

  “But why is Varada stalking her like this? What’s the point? She was wrong but my God hers wasn’t the only evidence against him. Those scratches, other people saw them together—” I just let it trail off there.

  “True, there was other evidence. But the most important evidence was suppressed. The last time I saw them together, Caro and Varada, was that night in the cemetery. I was talking to Mary, my late wife, and of course I had no idea that Anna already lay dead. I was standing in the cover of a huge willow near Mary’s grave … I heard someone coming, two people talking, and I saw them, Caro and Varada, and he was telling her that her sister Anna was a little firecracker but he thought he could really get to like her—he was teasing Caro and she was saying that he’d better stay away from her if he knew what was good for him—look, Charlie, he hadn’t just killed anyone, I knew that at the time of the trial and Caro knew it … but, when the time came to testify, Caro knew she could have told the truth and very probably have saved him … but instead she did all she could to put him away forever. And I said nothing. You know, Charlie, I think he loved her too much to bring her into his defense at the trial—maybe he’s just that kind of crazy, arrogant son of a bitch, I don’t know. But he didn’t say a word. So he went to prison and that was that.”

  I said: “Folie à deux. That’s all there is to say.”

  “I’ve always thought that Caro’s breakdown after the trial had more to do with knowing she’d sent him, an innocent man, to prison when she could have saved him—more that than the fact of Anna’s murder. But she wanted to free herself of him and didn’t care how she did it. So the guilt that’s been eating at her ever since came to a head when he was released from prison. And Varada, you can pretty well imagine what he figured she owed him … and now he’d come back to collect. Say he truly loved her. Let’s say he still loves her. Wants her, have it any way you want it. So he comes back to collect. Only the lady didn’t wait for him—is that the thanks he gets for keeping her out of their mess? She’s married. Then suddenly the husband is dead. But does he get her then? No! She seems to have found herself a new boyfriend! You, laddie, Charlie Nichols. And now our Mr. Varada is very, very angry … and what are you going to do about it, Charlie? How are you going to save her now that Victor’s gone?”

  We sat silently watching the shadows of the tall poplars creep across the lawn toward us. The nurse, a large square woman with gray braids, started toward us from the house. Andy noticed her, came to life, and waved her away. She stopped, made a show of looking at her watch, and retreated. “My own opinion,” he observed, “is that she missed her real opportunity when concentration camps went out of style after Hitler’s war.” He shook his head, watching her go back into the house. He cocked an eye at me. “Sorry if I’ve upset you, Charlie. But I couldn’t leave it unsaid. It was about time, wasn’t it? I’ve disgraced myself enough by sitting on it too long. I don’t even ask you to understand. I simply don’t care anymore. The guilt if I’d gone against Caro, if I’d helped free this man who was consuming her—well, that would have been worse.”

  “Look,” I said, trying to keep myself pulled together, “everything you say could possibly be true. It certainly is true for you, the way you see it. As you can imagine, I’m not exactly overjoyed at the idea of the woman I love being the subject—I hate it. I hate all of it. I hate the thought of her with that subhuman. I hate the thought that she ever enjoyed being with him. I hate it if she knowingly sent an innocent man to prison—if you can call him innocent by any possible stretch of the imagination. But it isn’t really a question of how I’m going to save her. She’s the one last seen saving me. And now she’s gone away without telling me where for precisely that reason—to get me the hell out of harm’s way. She’s not the villain, Andy—”

  “Oh, I never said she was,” he said softly, sadly. “I know better than anyone else, Charlie. She’s the victim in the end, as if it’s written in the stars. Her role … it’s locked inside her, always has been, and there’s never been anyone with the key to the lock.”

  “Me,” I said. “Never been anyone ‘til me.”

  “You love her but—”

  “I love her, period. No buts—”

  “But … I wonder, do you love her as much as Varada does?”

  “Do you mean, would I run the risk of dying for her?”

  “Oh no, Charlie. You’re already doing that.”

  “Well, what then?”

  “I was thinking, would you be willing to kill for her? That seems to be the acid test. Victor was. Varada is … she seems to affect men that way, my daughter does.”

  “Maybe I’ll be able to answer that question once I’ve found her.”

  “You’re going in search of her?”

  “What a question,” I said.

  “Let her go, Charlie. Leave her to come back in her own good time. Or just leave her to heaven. But you’ve got to save yourself … The folie à deux doesn’t include you.”

  “She’s alone. She’s running for her life. She needs me. Whether she wants me with her or not. And we’ve established the only fact that matters. Caro and I love each other. We’ll come through it all right. I’m going to save your daughter. Bank on it, Andy.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  ONE

  ANDY THORNE INSISTED I STAY the night but the exertion of our long conversation had put him to bed right after an early dinner. By the time I left, my brains felt pretty well scramb
led. However he had felt by dinnertime, I’m sure I couldn’t have taken another session.

  I went for a walk at sunset, moving slowly through the quiet residential streets, noticing my surroundings on one level but not really paying any attention. I passed that cemetery which kept popping up in Caro’s story, then I stopped and went back, went through the low open gates. It was a plain, tranquil, exquisitely restful place and I strolled among the headstones, tried to imagine Caro keeping a rendezvous with Varada in such a place the night Anna was killed. I tried but it had happened almost a decade ago and I couldn’t do it. If Andy had seen her there with Varada, then he had. Then she must have been an entirely different person, someone I would never know. I’d never know what I’d have made of her back then: maybe she wouldn’t have appealed to me in the least.

  But that was a long time ago and people kept changing on you. My wife at the time—the woman who took that shot at me with the mistaken assumption, apparently, that I was a uniquely peculiar grouse—would quite possibly find little in the Charlie Nichols of today to remind her of that unsatisfactory spouse. Victor had changed a good deal over the years. Caro must have. And from the sound of Andy Thorne’s story, Varada had changed as well. For the worse.

  Which, I wondered, was the real Caro? Or was that an idiotic, irrelevant question? In describing his daughter, Thorne had never once remarked on any change in her—but would he have? He always spoke of her in the absolute: this is what she does, that is the way she behaves … But, of course, why not? It’s the way people talk. I was thinking in circles, going nowhere.

  My legs were giving out. I’d gone too far from the house. I was standing in front of the long veranda of the stately Earl’s Bridge Inn so I climbed the steps and came to rest in the tavern. I sat at the bar and drank a mammoth Rob Roy, nursing it along slowly.

  What had really been going on with Caro, Anna, and Varada?

  If I were writing a book about the case I’d have talked to everybody in town. But now, dealing with my whole damn life, I couldn’t take the time to do the research. Hell of a note.

  It was quiet in the bar. Everyone had emptied out from both the dining room and the tavern. The barkeep, a white-haired party with the pink cheery face of an Irish priest, came my way drying a glass with a fresh white towel. How many times in the course of research had I played this scene?

  “You’re a summer people, am I right?” His blue eyes, pale as an arctic sky, twinkled at me.

  “Not even that,” I said. “Just here for the day.”

  “Business? Salesman, am I right?”

  “Not quite.”

  He pondered that while he went on polishing. It was going to be a mighty dry glass.

  “Quiet,” I said, surveying the room.

  “Keeps me sane. Everybody piles into the theater about now. Shakespeare fella must have had somethin’. Draws ’em like flies to a chop on the sill. And Tanglewood. Must be somethin’ well-nigh magical about sittin’ on the grass, half-eaten-alive by mosquitoes, listenin’ to ’em sawing away. Never been there myself.”

  “Neither have I. Nope. I’m here visiting a friend.”

  “Is it a secret?” He snapped a quick pink smile at me.

  “Andy Thorne,” I said.

  “Andy,” he mused, nodding. “Fine man, the professor. I hear he’s been taken badly of late. The stroke, that’s what I hear.”

  I nodded. “He’s coming along, though. Slow but sure. You know how it is.”

  “Andy and I used to fish together sometimes. Long time ago. Ten and twenty years ago. Then he stopped fishin’. About the time there was all that trouble. I always figured he just didn’t want to talk about it and he knew we’d all be curious, thinkin’ about it.” He set the glass down on the bar like a trophy. “You know him a long time?”

  “Not that long,” I said. “You’re talking about Anna, the murder—that trouble?”

  “Bad business.”

  “I never knew Anna,” I said. “I know the other daughter, though.”

  “Caro,” he said.

  “Right.”

  “Funny thing, you’d never have thought they were sisters at all. Nothing as funny as the way families turn out. Maybe that’s why God never favored me and the missus with offspring. Sparin’ us, He was. Andy used to tell me how much I was missin’, used to say maybe I wasn’t tryin’ often enough. Good-natured. I wonder what he thinks about it now.”

  “I thought the girls resembled one another rather closely,” I said.

  “Physically, there I’d have to agree with you.” He leaned forward on the shining bar. “Mind if I smoke?” He shook a Marlboro out of the pack and lit it, enjoying the taste. “But that was where the resemblance ended. Two very different kinds of girls.”

  “How?”

  “Well, it was like this. Caro had this fancy streak, like what they used to call ‘puttin’ on airs.’ That mean anything to you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Goes with Caro being an actress, hangin’ around in Boston, am I right? It’s been my experience that your actress is your horse of another color, you follow me? I see ’em in here all summer long, drivin’ the boys crazy and lovin’ every minute of it. Caro Thorne was like that, damn fine-lookin’, no doubt about that, but she was what they call hot … boys were on that girl’s tail. I never had any particulars, none of my business, am I right?”

  “And Anna?”

  “Just the opposite.” He tapped the ash into a white ceramic ashtray. “Never saw her in here in my life. Real quiet girl, serious, worked backstage over at the theater, used to be a Girl Scout, too … I wonder, do they still have Girl Scout cookies? The missus and I always bought those cookies from little Anna. Caro, she wasn’t your cookie type, even as a little thing.”

  “I’d always heard that Caro was a solemn little girl, sort of withdrawn—”

  “Just the type that starts feelin’ her oats when she grows up, am I right? It’s just human nature.”

  “Well, you may be right,” I said. I finished my drink.

  “That’s what made it all so strange, I guess.”

  I looked up at him. “How’s that?”

  “Well, everybody said at the time that Varada character killed Anna, that it wouldn’t have been half so surprisin’ if Caro’d been the one he killed. Just based on human nature, you follow me?”

  I slid off the stool and felt the weariness swarm back, all over me. “Varada didn’t kill her.”

  “You don’t say,” he said. “I thought sure as the devil—”

  “Jury found him guilty.”

  “Now, that’s what I thought—”

  “But he didn’t do it. Insurance man from Boston blew his brains out last spring. Left a confession.”

  “Damn! You don’t say!”

  “True story,” I said.

  “Pretty tough on Varada, am I right?”

  “I guess so,” I said. “Tough on everybody.”

  I wrestled with all the troublesome questions through a night that didn’t have enough sleep in it.

  What had really been going on with Varada, Caro, and Anna? I had that unmistakable feeling, familiar from every crime I’d ever researched and reconstructed. I was getting my first glimpse of the truth but it only hinted at its final dimensions.

  Was Andy Thorne sure of what he’d seen and heard that night in the cemetery? And why hadn’t he come forward if he’d believed an innocent man was going to prison? How good was his justification for keeping silent?

  Or was Caro right about her father’s lack of feeling for her? Did it run deeper than Thorne was willing to admit?

  Had Caro really known that Varada was innocent of her sister’s murder? Had Caro loved him or hated him? Or feared him? Or all of the above?

  Had Caro been so utterly under Varada’s spell?

  I felt as if I were chained to a carousel. I couldn’t stop it, I couldn’t fight the cacophony, I couldn’t think anymore. And I couldn’t get the hell off.

  TW
O

  Alec Maguire called me that night at Thorne’s.

  He was calling me from a place I’d never heard of, up in the mountains a couple of hours from Los Angeles. It was called Half Moon Lake.

  Caro had driven there that day, gone directly to a comfortable lodge on the side of a pine-covered mountain overlooking the lake.

  “My guess,” he said, “is that it belongs to a friend of hers who’s not using it at the moment. Or maybe she rented it by phone when she was in L.A. Anyway it’s nice and quiet and peaceful. Gorgeous country, Charlie.”

  He said Caro was perfectly safe and quite alone. No sign of Varada. Maguire said he had checked into a motor lodge called the Bay View. He was planning to keep an eye on her, keep the lodge under as much surveillance as one man could manage.

  I told him I was going back to the house in New York. Caro’s house.

  He said he’d check in with me there.

  THREE

  My God, it was strange being back in the brownstone, all by myself, in the house where it had all begun. The Filipino couple were off on holiday. The furniture had become a zoo of crouching figures hiding under drop cloths. Specks of fine dust in the sunlight when I pulled the drapes back. It was hot and stuffy. I got the air conditioners whirring and tried to settle in. But it was like landing on a verdant island, crawling off your raft, then discovering it was uninhabited. I rattled around, bouncing off the ghosts, wondering when Caro would finally come home, wondering how long I’d wait. It was weird.

  I couldn’t even get involved in reading. Physically I was still in quite a lot of discomfort and my stamina was utterly shot. I kept falling asleep in Victor’s big chair while a ball game was on television and waking up with no memory of the game.