A steady grind of surf separated into the fall and crash of individual waves. Blackened ocean parted from the mottled dark of the sky; the snow emitting its own fluorescence. Wind carried pellets of ice against the skin of his face, stinging.
He heard a cry. It was a cry. Not a scream.
He stopped and scanned the slope of broken drifts across the beach for some sign of their movement.
There was another cry.
They were there. Only yards from him. On the covered sand. One figure twisted away and gained his feet, turning to run. The other arose in a wave of snow and enveloped him.
Arthur's voice tore from his throat. “Insane ... you're insane. I loved her.... I swear I couldn't kill her!"
Henry ran at them headlong, hitting both from the back at once and knocking them to the ground. The black tatters of blood marked the snow around them as they turned on their backs to look up at him. Blood oozed from Arthur's nose with each heave of his chest.
The truth seemed obvious.
"Ranulf. Arthur didn't do it."
The words were simple enough to say.
The two men lay still, their breath blown from their mouths in belches of smoke, until the distant blue of a police light entered the plane between the snow-thickened air and the icy rubble of the beach.
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Chapter Twenty-Six
Henry parked his van at the curb in front of the guest house on Longwood Avenue where Peter and Vivienne Johnson had been staying. The snow had turned overnight to rain, and the rain puddled on flat surfaces within boundaries of fallen leaves and frozen remnants; a pathetic end to the first winter storm. He had anticipated awakening from his brief sleep to a clean white cover, with everything frozen in place. He wanted the kind of snow where the whole world stopped and looked in wonder and breathing was slowed.
The dark brown stain of the shingles was blackened with the rain. The door was locked, and his ringing several of the buzzers produced nothing. A single lamp in the entrance hall burned dimly, with no sign of movement through the clouded glass.
Stopping at the top of the driveway as he walked from the house, he noticed a dump truck and a backhoe where grass should be on the school fields below and behind, and walked down to the guest-house parking area to get a better look at his old playgrounds. The parking lot was empty, the unraked leaves clotted against the chain-link fence that marked the end of the property from the lower ball fields of Lawrence School.
Too many good hours of his youth had been spent playing on that field for him to be happy about someone changing it all. The hulking metal bodies of construction equipment parked aside on the grass disturbed him more now because their very size made the grounds seem smaller than he wanted to remember it in his mind. The school, closed for renovation, appeared abandoned beneath the flat gray sky. A temporary safety fence surrounded the old brick building with the look of containing something more than keeping the curious out.
The white flash of a hand moved.
Below him, on a bench at the edge of the field and nearly obscured by the wet black trunk of an oak, a man huddled with a cigarette, as if watching a game on the sodden grass. Even covered as the figure was by a hat and overcoat, Henry knew this was Peter Johnson.
Henry walked back to the street and then around to the entrance to the field and approached along the walk. He was ignored until he stopped in the man's view, and then the blue eyes searched upward at Henry's face.
Henry said, “Hello, Peter."
There was a frown instead of a greeting. Peter inhaled on his cigarette until it burned red and then flicked it out onto the wet grass. He did not exhale for enough time to make Henry wonder, and then blew a plume of smoke that reached outward like a tongue. The frown remained.
Peter said, “You were looking for me?"
Henry stated the simple fact. “Yes."
"Why?” The frown still had not changed.
It seemed the only heading to take was directly into the storm. Henry said, “I just want to understand ... ."
Peter leaned forward, shaking his head at the ground. “And you've come to ask me? Of all people. I understand nothing."
Henry tried to frame his words. He did not want a confrontation. He wanted only to understand what had happened. The why.
He said, “You know what happened. You know something of why it happened, even if you may not understand—"
Peter turned to him, a smile twisting the frown on his face. Henry had never seen a smile so unhappy.
The voice which spoke was empty of emotion. “She's dead."
He knew who Peter was speaking of. Henry tried to stop himself from saying he was sorry, or something equally inadequate. He let the odd hollow silence of the weather answer at first. Peter pulled a hand across his face like a mime, and the smile was gone, and his face as emptied as his voice.
"There will be no funeral. No Mass. No flowers ... perhaps not even myself."
Henry found himself answering reflexively now. “I'm sorry.” All words were inadequate.
The blue of Peter's eyes were gray in the light, as if faded. After a moment, Henry sat down on the bench as well, and stared off across the field at the imprisoned school.
Peter said, “She was a dear, sweet thing. You can't know, of course. Almost no one knew ... ."
Peter took out his pack of cigarettes and offered one to Henry. Henry took it and the flame of the lighter which Peter offered. He suddenly felt better. Calmer than he had been in weeks. He had finished some great task. The work was behind him. If he ignored the gaps in his knowledge, the pattern at least made some sense to him now.
He felt the need to pay some respect to that woman he had only met once.
"How did you meet?"
Peter face was struck by some inner amusement. “Just as she told you. In my shop. She came in by chance and then pretended she was looking for work. She told me about your visit. She always told me everything. She took delight in details.” As Peter spoke, Henry remembered Vivienne's own words about taking a drive one day and stopping at the shop. A half smile moved Peter's cheeks again. “She knew nothing of books. She never did. She hardly ever read except for the magazines. But she kept the place as neat as a pin and answered all the mail that I always neglected and closed the windows when it rained and made the numbers in the accounts book match up and was sure to lock the door at night. I hired her on the spot because I wanted to sleep with her as soon as possible. I was possessed, all of a sudden, with the need to be inside of her, to hold her, to kiss her.... It's so strange. I even thought I might be queer somehow. I went so long without knowing any other woman well enough. They were always so concerned about foolish things. So worried about stupid things. I had no interest.... My mother was not like that. She never remembered the little things. Practical things were of no importance to her. She was the true Lady of the Lake. What mattered was what was great, and what must be done.... And that was what I had wanted before I met Vivienne—a woman who might give me the sword to slay...” Peter exhaled his smoke slowly in thought. “But sweet Vivienne was so misnamed. She was merely a flower. Not a nymph. She only offered her love ... and I loved her so."
Henry thought of it like one of the tapestries at the Gardner Museum, a story on one continuous cloth, this one not large but worked by the needle in a tight design of costumed figures attending to a struggle of armed knights, swords raised or already piercing, with blood spilled in colored thread. And always the hounds were there, standing by for the kill.
Henry voiced his thoughts. “The myth gets mixed in the reality. Arthur is no king. Just another mixed-up fellow looking for his own fame and fortune. Heber was no Merlin—just a scholar with the talent to make two women love him. And Morgan did love him as well. Isn't that fair enough? Couldn't that be enough? Why did your mother have to be avenged?"
Peter looked at him. The face was slack with misery, but an eyebrow arched in surprise. “Did you figure that out for you
rself, or did Ranulf say something?"
Poor Ranulf, wanting to murder Morgan's killer with his own hands, but going after the wrong one—tapestries were like that. Who was the killer, and who the defender? Which was a victim, and which the casualty of war? Frozen in place, the characters could only be identified by their costumes. Not an easy thing to do these days.
"You told me.... Just now, again. I thought you killed Morgan, but I had no reason to attach it to your mother. I thought it might have been just about the money."
Peter turned a grimace of contempt toward Henry. “Of course it was the money. It was always the money."
The dismissal was not convincing.
"I don't think so.... Didn't he always send you something? Didn't he pay for your school?"
Peter seemed irritated at Henry's answer. His voice rose. “She wanted his love. She never wanted the money. The money was a curse."
Henry thought of Tim's conjecture. Was it for love then ... and now? He asked, “How did she die?"
Peter seemed startled by the question, both his eyes on Henry. “Who?"
On a tapestry, the stories often began at the far corners of the fabric and worked their way to the middle, with the same character appearing several times.
"Your mother."
Peter turned and scanned the scars on the sodden field for something never there. Finally he said, “She drove to Whitehaven and swam to the Isle of Glass."
And left her son behind, Henry thought.
He asked, “When? When Heber remarried? When she found out he had married Morgan?"
"Yes.” Peter's answer barely slipped his lips.
Henry took a breath. “Then, after all those years, wasn't his dying enough?"
Peter sat straight and rigid for a moment, his lanky slouch absorbed by an inner attention to some detail.
He said, “It might have been."
Henry looked for the next element in the picture and stated what appeared. “But he had helped you so much with Vivienne."
Peter's head shook only slightly—a jerk of objection. “No ... I found that out too late. When I went to see him last spring. It wasn't him. He didn't care. He was finished with all of that. It was her. It was Morgan who had given us the money. Heber wanted no part of it. He was angry with her for doing it. He called me a bastard...."
Henry stared through his own confusion. Surely Peter had killed Morgan. But had he killed his father as well?
"But why kill Morgan...? Because she had helped you? Because she had tried to help you? Or was it because she refused to help you any longer?"
An unhappy smile flitted across the thin features of his face. “No ... She only asked how much I needed."
Henry took a breath, trying to imagine it.
"What was it, then? What did she say? What made you kill her?"
Peter exhaled—the smoke drifting in front of them both before being caught by some movement of the air.
"The money didn't matter anymore. They said my Vivienne was going to die. There would not be another remission...."
Henry pursued, “But why hurt Morgan? What had she done?"
Peter winced, as if the answer stung. “She had ... done nothing."
He was crying, the tears spreading broadly on his cheeks.
Henry asked again, “Why, then?"
Peter spoke to the field. “For everything. For all that had gone wrong."
Henry asked, “And for your mother?"
Peter answered, “My Lady of the Lake..."
Peter turned to him then with the look of a man just possessed of a thought.
"How could she still love that fat old man? She killed herself over him.... I was the only one who ever really loved her. But she left me."
Feeling the sorrow of it, Henry said the obvious aloud.
"And now Vivienne."
Peter coughed and his voice cleared. For the moment, they might have been discussing politics. “I didn't go there to kill her, you know ... I was blind. I told Morgan I needed money. We could go to Mexico. The doctors here wouldn't try anything else. They wanted to give up. Morgan tried to tell me—I told her that I would never ask again. I told her it was only my right, as Heber's son. I told her it was only fair. She said I was wrong. Then she went into that room to get a letter—from my mother. She told me I should know something—,” Peter's eyes searched upward to the dull grey sky. “And suddenly I already knew. She wouldn't have gone to get the letter if I hadn't said what I did—I had said something about Heber. She thought it was unfair ... Unfair to Heber. That stupid man. The stupid American. I said something like that out loud. He came to Oxford and thought he had conquered the world and my foolish mother fell in love with him. She always loved him. After all those years. I knew that. And Morgan was looking for the letter in his files. She wouldn't stop, and there around us were all those books ... I took one down, and then another. They were signed. All signed. They all adored him. The great Heber. What a name! How can one go through life with a name like that. Like a bull, I suppose ... And then she had it in her hand. My mother's writing was so affected. So odd. She loved flourishes. She wrote so carefully that all the lines came out almost even at the end..."
Henry could not imagine it.
"What did the letter say?"
Peter shook his head. “It was an apology. My mother was apologizing to Heber! She said she was sorry.... She was sorry."
"For what? Why was she sorry?"
Peter turned to him, his voice momentarily calm again. “You know, she must have written that letter at the same moment she wrote her note for me.... It was on the same paper. From the place she had stayed last—a bed-and-breakfast in Whitehaven. But she didn't apologize to me. She left an instruction for me, like she used to leave taped on the door when she went out before I got home.... She said she had to go away. She would not be back.... She told me to forgive her. She told me I was her stolen child and that I must forgive her."
Henry could not help asking, “Why did she apologize to Heber? What had she done?"
The twisted smile returned. Peter held his face with his hands until the tears found a way through his fingers. With his elbows on his knees and his face buried in the clutch of his palms, he spoke to the ground.
"I was not Heber's son...."
Henry could smell the metal and the rust of the construction equipment in the air. The smell was plain. The decay was obvious. But he would not have known what it was if the machines were not right there in front of them.
"Your mother had lied to him?"
Peter spoke loudly through his fingers.
"She had lied. But not about her love.... I was just her stolen child."
"How?"
Peter pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. Again the calm returned. “When he graduated, after all the celebrating was done, he left her behind. He just left. He got on an airplane and went his way.... She did not like to drink. She was quite silly when she drank anything. She left her job at Blackwells and went home to her mother's in Glasgow to cry. Unfortunately, a lad she had grown up with was home as well.... His name was Peter. I even met him once when I was still a boy. I don't think he ever knew. Peter was a merchant seaman home for a rest. He had no interest in marriage. And when she found out she was pregnant, she wrote Heber and told him I was his child ... And Heber returned. He married her. As if that could make everything all right. He married her. And she was a happy woman again. A foolish woman again. For a little while.... But she never told him the truth. Not until the end."
Henry said, “But then you knew. From the time he got her letter, he knew."
Peter sat upright again, wiping his hands on the wool of his jacket, his cheeks still wet. “She did it for me. She could never have earned enough on her own.... You know what the publishers pay. They wouldn't even cover all her expenses. And he had so much. The money did not matter to him.... I was her stolen child. It was a poem she must have liked. She read it in her Scots voice to me once and I
never heard the Irish in it. I never knew it was Yeats.... I am sorry. I had never meant to harm Morgan. I was angry. And it was done so easily. She was wearing a scarf."
Henry spoke aloud, “The green scarf."
Peter turned to him, the tone of his voice reduced to a plea. “She turned away, and I took hold of it, and turned it, and it was done. So quickly—"
A slap of metal broke the silence.
They both turned to the sound, the links of the fence up high behind them striking against the metal posts.
Henry stood. “Oh, crap."
Having reached the top of the fence, Ranulf hesitated, only then realizing how great the distance was to the ground and looking ridiculous with his chest bared where the buttons of his jacket had already been torn away—and then he jumped. His black scarf fluttered behind in his descent. Henry moved to break the man's fall, or to simply stop him—the thought was incomplete. Ranulf reached the incline of the earth feet first and came forward in an uncontrolled tumble onto Henry. Henry fell back, the breath forced from him beneath Ranulf's shoulder. Henry's head slapped backward against the pavement of the walkway. His head buzzed.
Rolling awkwardly to his feet, trying to find his balance on the flat surface, Henry looked after Ranulf, already yards away on the path, with Peter gone from sight.
Henry repeated the obvious. “Oh, crap."
Neither man was anywhere to be seen as Henry climbed into his van. His head ached. Where would Peter go? A train? He had no car, but he might rent one. An airport? But where would he be going?
* * * *
The ache had faded by the following afternoon.
Tim said, “You had to figure it would be water,” leaning in on the wood of the bar.
Albert rested back against the sharp complaint of his chair. “How's he going to get to the ocean from Brookline on foot?"
Tim answered, “The trolley. The Aquarium stop."
Albert said, “Sure. The harbor. A cruise boat in the middle of winter?"
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