A Field of Darkness

by Cornelia Read

  At the end of the day I walked over to my namesake Madeline’s grave and asked her to take care of him.

  Thursday morning a messenger came to Bonwit’s with papers for me. My presence was requested at a lawyer’s office in the city, for the reading of Lapthorne’s will.

  “Strange,” said Mom. “That means you’re getting something.”

  “An ear or a hoof, maybe,” said Ellis, “like a bullfight.”

  I was shown into a mahogany-paneled conference room at the law firm, with a view of Wall Street. Kit was there, and Binty, and Lappy’s three brothers. None of them would look at me.

  The lawyer was an older guy with a great head of white hair and a slew of broken capillaries, vaguely familiar from Seawanhaka. He read through the papers in a fine accent, sounding remarkably like Bonwit, “mirrah” for “mirror,” and so on.

  My bit was near the end. Lapthorne had left me the Porsche, and two envelopes—one letter-sized, one a large mailer stuffed with a thick sheaf of paper.

  I opened the small one and pulled out the sheet of stationery inside—thick ecru stock engraved with his initials above a few hand-scrawled lines.

  So, chère cousine, he’d written,

  If you’re reading this, you were indeed a worthy adversary. I hope it’s true that having the car means you’ll never be unhappy again. I liked the sound of that.

  There’s a lot more I should probably say. I think you know, anyway. You’re the only one who did.

  It stopped there, with no signature. I didn’t want to look at the thick sheaf of pages behind. Not yet, not with his family around me. I put it back in the big envelope and tucked in its flap.

  Things were wrapping up. The lawyer shook hands around the room, then left us alone. I stood up to follow, but Binty walked over and blocked my path. She wore a black suit and stockings, low-heeled black pumps on her narrow feet.

  Her long monkey face was screwed up with fury, and I had no idea what to say to her. She hauled her hand back and gave me a ringing slap across the face.

  “You stupid little welfare case,” she spat. “All those years. All the money to that horrible Schneider man to hush it up. Lappy was getting well! The doctors told us he was, and you had to ruin everything!”

  Reader, I decked the bitch.

  PART VI

  LAKE ONCAS

  In the end there may not be much more to the special gift of aristocrats than the old image of casual grace. . . . Worse, the image can’t seem to stand by itself. Its light must have a field of darkness, some dull impasto of despair with a glint of violence flashing through. Without fear, the image lacks shape and substance, and dissolves into a pale, thin air of American possibility. With it, the image comes clear, and so does the gift of courage.

  —NELSON ALDRICH, OLD MONEY

  CHAPTER 52

  I stood at the edge of Lake Oncas, watching the pieces of snow come down to disappear instantly on its foul surface, small waves rolling in toward me sluggish and dull as molten lead. The last of our stuff was packed up in the back seat of Lapthorne’s car, Dean having already left town with the bulk of the crap in a borrowed van.

  We were headed to the Berkshires, to Ellis. The Southern Pacific Railroad wanted two railgrinders with computer interfaces and trapezoidal linkages, putting down enough money to make good our escape.

  I’d promised to follow Dean, to stay right on his tail and get on the thruway without a backward glance, but at the last pillar-of-salt minute I’d felt the need to come here, to thread through empty warehouses lining broken streets, pulling onto a blank, weed-infested spot of lakeside gravel in the midst of what locals called Oil City.

  Even in the cold it stank, here, and from my perch among the petroleum tanks, I could see the ashen hulk of the Lapthorne Works squatting diseased across the water. From whence it cometh.

  I mourned the death of what might have been: my last hope to redeem our family.

  Of course at root Lapthorne had been a monster, hateful, summing up everything that disgusts me about those smug and didactic and murderous City-on-a-Hill prigs from whom both of us were descended.

  And yet, he’d embodied all that had been handsome in the traditions of my people, my tribe, a beauty that is as lost as the passenger pigeon, Krakatoa, the childish belief that a war could end all wars or that a ship was unsinkable.

  If you looked hard enough at this water, you could almost see the calling cards and straw boater hats and long three-button kid gloves and chilled finger bowls with paper-thin slices of lemon—the delicate props of empire—floating on the waves, arcing through the toxin-rainbowed slop.

  The Weekly never published my article. The paper was bought out by a conglomerate from downstate, whose gray-pinstriped minions informed Ted in no uncertain terms that their corporate entity had strict ideas about what was and wasn’t appropriate for family consumption, though nothing was changed save me being swept off the staff. Family indeed—as if Binty, or her conglomerate’s board of directors, would know.

  Had there been an ounce of warmth in Ice Cunt’s pale narrow hands, Lapthorne might have been entirely different, might have been what I still believe he was fighting to become—human. A real boy, not some marionette dancing through a world of pain.

  Of course I couldn’t know what bitter crucible, what lack, had formed the corseted shell of Binty herself. To imagine that, you’d have to look perfectly down the barrel of generations, tracing the flaw.

  I was holding Lapthorne’s envelope. After I’d first read through what was inside, I’d given it to the cops. They said they didn’t need to keep it. There wouldn’t be any trials.

  The young guy, Franklin, had brought it to Green Street. Maybe a posthumous favor to Kenny.

  I opened it up and started wadding up the pages inside, one by one, before throwing them out onto the lake.

  It was all there. He’d cut single pages from the stories, then written a name, a date, a city—all the details—in the margins of each, starting with “The Little Mermaid.”

  The longest entry was a chronicle of events leading up to Lapthorne’s murder of his army buddy Chris, penned along the edges of “The Steadfast Tin Soldier.”

  Lapthorne related how they’d become reacquainted at Fort Drum, recognizing each other from school, discovered they had dark tastes in common.

  When he’d told Chris how enjoyable it had been to kill Egon’s daughter, the pair decided to try a deadly partnership at the New York State Fair, next time they got a weekend pass.

  On the midway, Lapthorne was amused when Delphine demanded he hand over his dog tags in exchange for a kiss—grinned while she slid the prize coyly over her head, knowing she wouldn’t be alive to complain when he reneged on the bargain. Only he didn’t count on slashing its chain along with her throat. The necklace slithered to earth while they struggled, trampled into the soil so deep that Lapthorne’s panicked scrabbling couldn’t turn it up again.

  “I blame Chris for that,” Lapthorne’s spiky notes explained. “I’d have had time to find them, but he lost his nerve and made me finish off the second girl. Couldn’t trust him afterwards.”

  Lappy paid Chris back in the jungle, some weeks later. Pitched a live grenade into his tent just before an Indochinese dawn.

  The tags stayed buried until Cal churned them up. Schneider never saw them. He’d gotten Lapthorne’s name from Sembles. It said so, across the page from Struwwelpeter.

  It said, too, that Schneider had confessed to altering the records from that night, making it look like Lapthorne and Chris were in the holding cell on his shift.

  I balled up the second-to-last sheet, ripped from “The Little Match Girl.”

  “Ellis Clark, Camp” was inked in the margin, with room to spare for recording the horrors that never happened.

  The last page was my own.

  I burned it, crumbled the ashes to nothing, and walked away.

  Billie Holiday’s voice poured out of the Porsche’s speakers the instant I
turned the key. “God Bless the Child.”

  The car threw up a fine rooster tail of gravel and shot me straight out of Syracuse.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks to:

  Edward Eggert, who got this started. He and his lovely wife, Patricia, have treated their downstate daughter-in-law with endless kindness and patience—as have all Eggerts, Heddens, Murphys, Hydes, and Mittags—no matter how much I bitched about the quality of Chinese food in their fair city.

  Alice Kaufman and Muffy Srinivasan, the first two people to read the beginning, who convinced me it was worth doing.

  James and Mom and Freya and Mark—day in, day out. Thank you so very much for all your sustenance, kindness, and patience.

  Juliette Anthony, whose birthday gift of a class at Elaine and Bill Petrocelli’s Book Passage in Corte Madera precipitated a chain of auspicious events, the acme of which was my introduction to Lee Child. Lee’s kind support and advocacy have had an indelible impact on the fate of this book, ever since.

  My agent, Rolph Blythe, and my editor, Kristen Weber. You guys are tireless, compassionate, and extraordinary. Also you have kicked my butt. In a good way—like literary Sherpas. Their work on my behalf has been furthered by many people at the Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency, and at Mysterious Press—especially publicist Susan Richman.

  Andrew Ambrose, of Holland & Holland, London, for making sure Madeline was armed with the perfect gun.

  My old compatriots at The Syracuse New Times, for being infinitely cooler than the coworkers in this story.

  The members of my two writing groups, alphabetically: Dave Damianakes, Gaylene Givens, Sharon Johnson, Charles King, Heidi Kriz, Marilyn MacGregor, Kerry Messer, Karen Murphy, Diane Puntenney, Andy Rose, Fred Turner, Dan Ward, and Robert Clark Young, who waded through high piles of stilted, unreadable crap.

  Joyce Ahern, Nelson Aldrich, Candace Andrews, Glenn Andrews, Juliette Anthony, Noreen Ayres, Anne Batterson, Joel Blackman, Jacqueline Celenza, Ariel Zeitlin Cooke, John Cooke, Lee Culp, Rick Dage, Race Dougherty, Elaine Flinn, Alfred Fussa, Holly Gold, David and Kathleen Goldsmith, Bob and Judy Greber, Michael Guinzburg, Derek Guth, Kira Halpern, Emily Harris, Susi Hartmann, Pia Harwood, Katrina Heron, Caryl Hill and Lee, Bill Hoyt, Julie Hoyt, Winthrop Hoyt, Joshilyn Jackson, Maureen Jennings, LuAn Keller, Harley Jane Kozak, Heidi Mack, Regina Marler, David Montgomery, ALL the Mooneys, Heidi Moos, Tom and Maripat Murphy, Geoffrey O’Brien, Martha O’Connor, Sabrina O’Jack, Linda Palmer, Heidi Vornbrock Roosa, Frank Roosevelt, Hunt Smith, Tracy Smith, Tara Staley and William (who has wings and always will), David Walks-as-Bear, and Sarah Weinman.

  Everyone at Epinions.com, who saw me through the darkest hours and gave me my writing chops back: T. Allen “cowboyDJ” Morgan, Laura “Leah” Winzeler, Dwight “Counsel” Moody, Markham Shaw “Mshawpyle” Pyle, Curtis Edmonds, Casey “kcfoxy” Stewart (and “ramsfan” the burly-man), Mr. and Mrs. Dave “Sweeper” Burckhard, David “Grouch” Abrams, Lisa “my$.02” Goldman, Nollequeen, gracef, forkids, DoubleCoog, Lambira, erik_kosberg, nita, stonehousellc, expono, kimmiko, sweetpaulie, gogigantes, 401402, AggieBrett, emlin, Redlass, ebolles, wildvirgogirl, auntnono, snark, bonniesayers, Syd_Kick, halfsweet, poseidon, kchowell, mgreber, ccoggins, elegiac, and kmennie, and all y’all who ever clicked “trust cornelia.”

  Maggie Griffin and Rae Helmsworth, Reacher Creatures par excellence.

  And the Sad Anoraks, my band: Andi Shechter, Louise Ure, and Shaz Wheeler.