A Woman’s Eye

by Sara Paretsky

  “I’m afraid it’s a needle in a haystack,” Jean warned.

  But Angie, pretty, persistent Angie, only smiled. “You forget, New Zealand is a very small haystack, small enough to examine every straw, if we have to.”

  Jean reached over her seat to pat the baby, and sighed. “And knowing your mother and father, Justin, no doubt they’ll do just that.”

  Zach and Angie, who had heard her, both burst out laughing.

  Te Kapura was a tiny haystack, indeed.

  Five little houses along a sunny mountain road.

  Nobody was home at the first two. At the third one, they found a woman with three babies, but she was too young and too new to the village to remember. But at the fourth house, an old man was waiting for them as they walked up to his front door.

  He had the same blond, thin, bandy-legged look as Angie’s father, Malcolm, but there was a furtive amusement in this old man’s smile, as if he knew a private, rather nasty joke.

  “You’ll be looking for someone, won’t you?” he said in a wheezy, whispery voice. “Three strangers and a baby walking up our road, they must be looking for something.”

  “I’m looking for my parents,” Angie said, and then she told him she’d been born here, and the year. “Did you live here then? I have this scar … do you see it … so there may have been an accident of some sort. Do you remember anything at all? Can you help me to find my birth family?”

  The bony old man leaned toward her to examine the scar, and a sly look came into his eyes. He started to touch it, but Angie drew back sharply from his finger. That only seemed to amuse him more. “You’ll be wanting to inquire across the way at the widow’s house, won’t you?” he said. “That’ll be the ticket, now won’t it?”

  He cackled as if at a joke they didn’t get.

  Angie, Zach, Jean, and even the baby turned their heads to look at the tiny blue house that stood by itself across the road.

  “Who lives there?” Zach asked.

  “The widow,” he said.

  “What’s her name?” Angie asked.

  He didn’t reply, but only stared openly at Angie’s cheek.

  “Good day,” Angie murmured to him. “Thank you,”

  “Good day, is it?” he cackled. “Thank me, will you? We’ll see about that, won’t we?” His eerie laughter sent shivers down Jean’s spine, but it made the baby laugh. They started walking across the road. The more Justin laughed, the louder the old man cackled, and then the more the baby screamed with delight, until the air of Te Kapura was filled with the loud, strange sound of their duet. Angie, with a desperate glance, implored Jean to quiet the baby. She tried, bouncing him and trying to distract him, until he just as suddenly burst into tears.

  “Oh, dear,” Angie said, looking near tears herself. Clearly, this return to her native country, to her adoptive parents, and maybe-today-even to her roots, was beginning to take a heavy emotional toll on her. She lifted her son from Jean’s arms, and said, seemingly as much for herself as for the boy, “Poor baby, please, please, please, poor baby, it’s all right, Mama’s here….”

  Fate, Jean thought later, of course it was fate, and of course the widow would open the door to the little blue house just at the moment that Angie said those words.

  Mama’s here.

  The woman standing in the doorway looked even older than the cracked old man across the street. She had beautiful silver hair that hung to her waist and plump brown features and the stillest face that Jean had ever seen, a face that looked as if it had been carved from a native tree and then aged for generations. As if by some unspoken accord, Zach took Justin back from Angie, and he and Jean hung back, while Angie walked slowly, and then ever more quickly forward until she was nearly running up to the old woman in the door. Breathless, the lovely young blond pakeha woman stood before the old brown Maori one.

  Angie lifted her hair off her scarred cheek.

  The old woman raised both of her hands to touch the scar.

  “I am Te Po,” she said. “I am your grandmother.”

  A beautiful and bored Maori girl named Te Anamarie, from the village of Te Kapura. Who met a lost and wandering, beautiful pakeha boy named Joseph. A baby girl. A tragic accident, only dimly remembered, in the birthing. And Joseph, the father, stole his baby from Te Anamarie and from her mother Te Po, and the villagers of Te Kapura never saw the father or the child again.

  That was the haunting story the old woman told.

  “He turned me over for adoption,” Angie said.

  “My child,” the old woman said.

  “I’m here,” Angie whispered to her grandmother. “What was my Maori name?”

  But the old woman shrugged off the question, as if she didn’t remember, or it didn’t matter now.

  “Please,” the old grandmother said, “let me play with my great-grandson for a while alone. Let me imagine that you were never taken from us, that he will always be able to visit me. Let me feed him once, and change him, and play with him. Let me sing the old Maori songs to my great-grandson, this once, let me tell him of his ancestors and his gods. Please, my granddaughter, give me this small favor to make up for all the tears of all these many years. I will tell him of the canoes that brought us, of the flax that clothed us and the fish that fed us. I will sing to him of maru and tapu and the beginning of time. Let me tell him of the land we shared, of the feasts, of the wars, even of the eating of the flesh of one another. I will tell him of your mother, who did not outlive her grief, of his grandmother, and my mother before us all, and her mother before. All of his life he will live among pakehas, it is the way of the world, but for this small moment in never-ending time, let me sing to him of his other world. Go in your car and drive. I am his great-grandmother who values him above all others. He is my beloved child whom I will never see again, and I must have this time alone with my great-grandson before I die. Please. I ask you in the name of your mother who never held you. Leave us. Go.”

  “Did I do the right thing?” Angie asked the others anxiously, a few minutes later, outside the blue house. “How could I say no to her?”

  “Of course you couldn’t,” Jean assured her.

  “No way,” Zach agreed, though Jean noticed that he kept glancing back at the tiny blue house. “She’s your grandmother, after all. He’ll be fine. But what’ll we do now to kill an hour?”

  “Let’s take a walk,” Angie said. “And let me get used to the wonderful, incredible idea of being part Maori. This is what my parents were afraid I’d discover! As if I could ever be ashamed of it! My mother was Maori! My curly hair …”

  “The shape of your eyes …”

  “And I’m not as fair as most New Zealand women.”

  “You two go on without me,” Jean suddenly said as the young couple started walking down the side of the road. “I’ll stay here, maybe find a rock to sit upon. You need time to be together, and I need time … to be alone, I think.”

  Jean saw that it relieved her son to hear her say that she would stay behind. The old woman was Angie’s blood relative, yes, but she was still a stranger to them.

  Jean waved them off with a kiss.

  Across the road, the old man was still out on his porch, hanging on to a railing, and staring across at the little blue house almost as if he were waiting for something to happen. He noticed Jean, and waved her toward him.

  She shook her head, and walked in the opposite direction.

  The rock she finally found was a boulder in the ditch beside the road. There, in the sun, she pulled out of her purse the old history book she had been reading aloud to the kids, and turned to the section on Maori culture.

  “… a tribal society,” she read, “that nearly became extinct in the 1800s, following the depredations of the white man’s diseases, of the introduction of his animals, particularly the rabbit that became the scourge of the native agriculture …”

  The sun was so warm, and Jean was seventy-four years old, and exhausted by this incredible, emot
ional journey into her daughter-in-law’s past and all of their hearts. She tried mightily to keep her eyes open against the glare, wanting to learn more about the Maoris, out of respect for the old woman and love for Angie and Justin.

  “… after near decimation, resurgence of Maori population and a shift by the younger generation to the urban centers … harder on the older generation to whom the loss of their ancient ways was a bitter pill to swallow …”

  So sleepy, so warm, and her eyes were closing. Besides, she remembered, vaguely, having read this same chapter more than thirty years before. She turned the page to a chapter about Maori art, which she suspected she had skipped the first time.

  “… effort to renew Maori crafts and customs, including wood carving …”

  A monstrous face stared out at her from the page, a face with its huge tongue stuck out, a face on which ceremonial lines were deeply etched, “Boo,” Jean said to the scary face, and then she laughed to herself.

  “… the custom of tattooing in which a straightedge blade is used to carve the lines deeper into the face and breasts of women, the face and buttocks of men, thereby to inject the die more deeply and to give the design more the look of carving than of the tattooing to which Western eyes are more accustomed …”

  Something about that paragraph, Jean thought. Read that paragraph again. Tattooing. Straightedge blade. Deep grooves. Her glance shifted to the carved wooden face on the other page. Some of the carved lines-meant to represent tattooing?-started below the figure’s eyes and then curved back, bisecting the cheek, and running down below the chin….

  Jean screamed and leaped to her feet.

  And then the wailing started, a loud, dirgelike wailing, a woman’s voice coming from the tiny blue house. And the old man across the way began to cackle again and to watch Jean running down the road from the rock. Oh, but she wasn’t young enough, she wasn’t forty-two now, she was seventy-four, and her breath was coming hard and painfully, and she was so frightened, so frightened, and she wanted to scream and scream, to cry out for Justin to crawl away, to crawl down the dirt road to her … Justin, Justin, baby, baby … And the old man called to her, “It’s the call of mourning for the dead, which only the women can sing, and she will put on her black dress of mourning.” He cackled and cackled, a crazy old pakeha watching Jean stumble down the road toward the tiny blue house. “Te Po, her name, means the endless night before the birth of the Gods, did you know that, did you know that?”

  Her heart was beating so unmercifully, oh, dear God, she would have a heart attack, she would die on this road before she reached the baby and the other old woman, the old woman like a carving, like a carving, like a tattooed carving….

  “No… !”

  Jean flung herself into the blue house. Blinded by the sudden plunge into dimness, she began to sob helplessly. No, no, no, no, no. Then she could see the old woman, Te Po, dressed all in black as the old man had predicted, a straightedge knife raised over the naked baby boy who lay crying on the floor.

  Jean threw herself at Te Po.

  Both old women fell to the floor near the baby.

  The knife sliced through soft, soft skin, carving its ancient tattoo.

  In nearly thirty years, the myrtle tree (Metrosideros umbellata, rata) beside the bench in the playground had grown magnificently.

  “Hello, tree,” Jean murmured to it. “Big green tree.”

  Seated there in its shade, Jean watched Zachary put Justin on his lap at the top of the tallest slide.

  “Mom!” Zach called out to her. “Watch us!”

  “I’m watching!”

  They whooshed down from the top of the tallest slide, down to the bottom, where Angie waited with open arms to embrace them both.

  Jean smiled and turned her left arm over to expose her wound to the healing warmth of the sun.

  CAROLYN G. HEILBRUN is a professor of English at Columbia University and the author of such scholarly books as Writing a Woman’s Life and Hamlet’s Mother and Other Women. But it is as Amanda Cross, author of the very popular Kate Fansler mysteries, that she is known to hundreds of thousands of devoted readers. Kate debuted in In the Last Analysis in 1964.

  MURDER WITHOUT A TEXT

  Amanda Cross

  At the time of Professor Beatrice Sterling’s arraignment, she had never set foot in a criminal court. As a juror, a duty she performed regularly at the close of whatever academic year she was called, she had always asked to serve in the civil division. She felt too far removed from the world of criminals, and, because of her age (and this was true even when she was younger, referring as it did more to the times in which she had been born than to the years she had lived), too distanced from the ambience of the criminal to judge him (it was almost always a him) fairly. She was, in short, a woman of tender conscience and unsullied reputation.

  All that was before she was arrested for murder.

  Like most middle-class dwellers in Manhattan, therefore, she had never been through the system, never been treated like the felon the DA’s office was claiming her to be. It is a sad truth that those engaged in activity they know to be criminal, shoddy business practices, drug dealing, protection rackets, contract killings, have quicker access to the better criminal lawyers. Those unlikely to be accused of anything more serious than jaywalking often know only the lawyer who made their will or, at best, some pleasant member of a legal firm as distant from the defense of felons as from the legal intricacies of medieval England. Beatrice Sterling’s lawyer was a partner in a corporate law firm; long married to a woman who had gone to school with Beatrice, he had some time ago agreed to make her will as a favor to his wife. His usual practice dealt with the mergers or takeovers of large companies; he had never even proffered legal advice to someone getting a divorce, let alone accused of murder. There was not even a member of his firm knowledgeable about how the criminal system worked at the lower end of Manhattan, next door though it might have been to where their elegant law firm had its being. The trouble was, until her arraignment, neither Beatrice nor her sister considered any other lawyer. It is always possible that with the best legal advice in the world, Beatrice would still have been remanded, but as it happened, she never had any chance of escaping rides to and from Riker’s Island in a bus reinforced with mesh wiring, and incarceration in a cell with other women, mostly drug dealers and prostitutes. By that time Beatrice was alternately numb or seized with such rage against the young woman she was supposed to have murdered that her guilt seemed, even to her unhappy corporate counsel, likely.

  Professor Beatrice Sterling was accused of having murdered a college senior, a student in a class Beatrice had been teaching at the time the young woman was found bludgeoned to death in her dormitory room. The young woman had hated Beatrice; Beatrice had hated the young woman and, in fact, every young woman in that particular class. She would gladly, as she had unfortunately mentioned to a few dozen people, have watched every one of her students whipped out of town and tarred and feathered as well. She had, however, insisted that she had not committed murder or even laid a finger on the dead girl This counted for little against the evidence of the others in the class who claimed, repeatedly and with conviction, that Beatrice had hated them all and was clearly not only vicious but capable of murder. The police carried out a careful investigation, putting their most reliable and experienced homicide detectives on the case. These, a man and a woman, had decided that they had a better than even case against the lady professor, and, since the case might become high profile, got an arrest warrant and went to her apartment to arrest her and bring her into the precinct.

  It is possible, even at this stage, to avoid being sent to jail, but not if the charge is murder in the second degree (first degree murder is reserved for those who kill policepersons). Those accused of minor misdemeanors are issued a Desk Appearance Ticket and ordered to appear in court some three or four weeks hence. (Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t, but such a choice was not offered to Beatrice, who
would certainly have appeared anytime she was ordered to). She was allowed one phone call, which she made to her sister to ask for a lawyer, a wasted call since the sister, whose name was Cynthia Sterling, had already called the corporate lawyer husband of Beatrice’s school friend. Beatrice was told by the woman detective that it could be anywhere from twenty-four to seventy-two hours until her arraignment and that probably no lawyer could get to her until a half hour before that occurred. Men who go through the system are held during this period in pens behind the courtrooms. Since there are, in the Manhattan criminal system, no pens for women, Beatrice was held in a cell in the precinct. The system happened at that time to be more than usually backed up-and it was usually backed up-so she was not taken directly to Central Booking at One Police Plaza, police headquarters for all the boroughs and Central Booking for Manhattan, until two days had passed.

  Neither Beatrice nor her sister Cynthia had ever married, and a more unlikely pair to become caught in the criminal system could not easily be imagined. As Beatrice in jail alternated between numbness and rage, weeping and cold anger, Cynthia came slowly, far too slowly as she later accused herself, to the conclusion that what she needed was help from someone who understood the criminal system. Beatrice’s school friend’s husband was useless: less than useless, because he did not know how little he knew. A knowledgeable lawyer could not now save Beatrice from her present incarceration and all the shame and humiliation connected with it; but he or she might be able to offer some worthwhile, perhaps even practical, advice.

  We all know more people than we at first realize. Cynthia could have sworn that she knew no one connected with law enforcement or criminal defense even four times removed. She forced herself to sit quietly, and upright, in a chair, calming herself in the manner she had read of as recommended for those undertaking meditation in order to lower then-blood pressure. She sat with her feet flat on the floor, her back straight to allow a direct line from the top of her head to the base of her spine, and in this position she repeated, as she thought she remembered from her reading, a single word. Any one-syllable word, if simple relaxation as opposed to religious experience were the aim, would suffice. She chose, not without some sense of irony, the word “law.” Faith in law was what, above all, she needed. Slowly repeating this word with her eyes closed and her breathing regular, she bethought herself, as though the word had floated to her from outer space, of Angela Epstein.