A Trick of the Eye

by Jane Stanton Hitchcock

  On the face of it, Cassandra had been brought up in the safe and pleasant circumstances of an upper-class WASP: boarding school, coming-out party, college. Some of the articles mentioned her talents as a painter and as an equestrienne, but all cast her in the socialite mold. I noticed she was never called by her married name, but always Cassandra Griffin. Her husband, Roberto Madi, was referred to as a ski instructor, but there was no mention of where he came from or who his family were. One could assume the marriage had not been a particularly felicitous event for Cassandra’s parents. Given Frances Griffin’s former penchant for parties and festivities, it seemed likely she would have feted her daughter lavishly had the union pleased her.

  The murder itself was bound up in a tangle of conflicting accounts and backtracking regarding what exactly occurred, as well as who was present. The first stories said Cassandra and her mother and father had dined together at The Haven the night of the crime, just the three of them. They had all gone to bed early. Sometime around midnight, according to the police, the perpetrator had shimmied up the trellis outside Cassandra’s bedroom and entered her partly open window. Cassandra, apparently awakened by the intruder, had gotten out of bed and either confronted him or tried to escape. Whatever the circumstances, she and her assailant then engaged in a brief, fierce struggle which ended with his stabbing her once, directly through the heart. After that, police surmised, the intruder panicked and left—without taking anything—the same way he’d entered, through the window, shimmying back down the trellis and fleeing the premises. This seemed to be a logical explanation, given that nothing was stolen and there was no sign of a forced entry anywhere in the house.

  The five people in residence at the time were Mrs. Griffin, Mr. Griffin, Cassandra, and two servants, both of whom had been with the Griffins for years. No one heard anything, no one saw anything. The next morning, Mrs. Griffin went to wake up her daughter and made the grisly discovery. Upon entering the room, she apparently screamed and fainted. Small wonder, I thought. What a sight for a mother to see—her only child lying on the floor, eyes wide, face pale as the moon, clothes soaked in blood. Death, according to the coroner, had been “mercifully instantaneous.” This was meant to be a consolation, I suppose.

  Stroking Brush, I wondered again how on God’s earth Frances Griffin had remained all these years in the same house where her daughter had been butchered? After all, I thought, it wasn’t as if she couldn’t afford to move. Did she remember her unspeakable discovery every time she passed Cassandra’s bedroom, even today? How could she stand it? And that was another thing: which room was it? On my tour of the house, Mrs. Griffin never identified the room that had once belonged to her daughter. Was it the Indian Room, the Chinese Room, the Room of Glass Bells?

  I’ve always believed that violence irrevocably alters the place in which it occurs. A violent act pierces the atmosphere, leaving a hole through which the cold, damp draft of its memory blows forever. I wondered in which one of those rooms I might one day feel a chill.

  I reflected on these first accounts for some time. The more I thought about them, the more incongruous they became. I read on. Subsequent stories, though more comprehensive, began to change certain details of the events leading up to the crime. Though these changes were played down as being minor and irrelevant to the case as a whole, I found them fascinating and extremely significant.

  For example, a later story said that Cassandra and her parents had not dined alone that night. The elusive Mr. Madi had dined with them, but left early. His presence had not been mentioned initially because, according to the police, Mr. and Mrs. Griffin had been so traumatized by the murder, it had simply slipped their minds.

  Slipped their minds? Now this was a tough one to swallow. But assuming it was true, assuming it had slipped their minds, there were still a lot of unanswered questions. If Madi had been there for dinner, why did he leave? After all, he and Cassandra were married, so why would he dine with her and her parents and then leave her there alone for the night? Why didn’t he stay with her?

  I kept coming back to their omitting to tell the police about him in the first place. Why not say he’d dined with them? Were they really so distraught that they’d forgotten he’d been there? Or did they have a hidden reason to try to eradicate his presence on the scene?

  There was also the question of the murder weapon. In the first accounts, the weapon had been found and identified as a silver fruit knife belonging to a set from the house. Subsequent stories said the knife could not be positively identified as one from the Griffin set. According to the butler, no knives from the set were missing. There then was a story that the knife, formerly identified as the murder weapon, was perhaps not the murder weapon after all. According to the testimony of one expert who examined the body, the wound was too large to have been inflicted by that particular knife. Therefore, the murder weapon had to have been another knife, one which had not been found. A piece, entitled “Missing Murder Weapon a Mystery in Griffin Case,” recounted the story of the discredited knife. Then the knife in question disappeared from the police evidence locker. This was followed by a short, damning article speculating on the possibility of a cover-up in the case. That, in turn, was quickly followed by outraged denials by all concerned, as well as a flurry of articles relating to inefficient police procedures regarding the handling of evidence. Whichever way you sliced it, the murder weapon was missing.

  By the time I’d gone through all the articles, it was well past midnight. I was familiar with the relevant facts of the case as well as their apparent contradictions. In my view, the strangest and most damning thing of all was what I called “the Question of the Locked Window.”

  The butler—a man named Frank Beridge—had told police that the morning after the murder, at around nine o’clock, he’d heard a woman screaming. According to his first account, he followed the screams upstairs to Cassandra’s bedroom, where he found Mrs. Griffin passed out on the floor next to Cassandra’s mutilated body. Beridge said the first thing he did was unlock the window to let in some fresh air. Then he made an unsuccessful attempt to revive Mrs. Griffin. This meant, of course, that the intruder couldn’t possibly have come in through the window. Or, that he came in the window, locked it behind him, then left by another route, not down the trellis, as the police suggested. The idea of a blood-soaked madman traipsing around the corridors of that labyrinthine house with a knife, trying to find his way out, leaving no trace of his steps, was utterly ridiculous.

  In any case, no one questioned this startling story because in another article Mrs. Griffin apparently cleared the whole thing up by saying that she’d come into her daughter’s room in the morning to close the window (never mind that it was midsummer) and that only after closing the window and locking it did she realize her daughter had been stabbed to death. That was the point at which she’d screamed and fainted. So, if you believed that, the murderer could have come in and left through the window, as the police had postulated in the beginning.

  This was a tough one to buy, even for me, the observer far away in time and place. I wondered why the police had bought it, and, in fact, if they’d bought it. Why had she told it? Was it true? It seemed a ludicrous account, because it meant that Mrs. Griffin had walked into the bedroom, stepped over her daughter’s body lying on the floor in a pool of blood, and closed the window on a summer’s day. Then she’d turned around, seen the body, screamed and fainted. All right, it was morning. People are groggy in the morning. But was she in such a fog she didn’t even notice a murdered girl on the floor when she first came in? Vagueness has its limits.

  Others must have felt the same way I did because at the inquest, Beridge the butler changed his story entirely. He said he’d been mistaken—he’d never opened the window, never even went near it. In his official account, he swore to the coroner that when he came into the room, the window was already open.

  I finally finished reading at two o’c
lock in the morning. I turned out the light. Brush was curled up peacefully. I had to get up early, but when I closed my eyes, I couldn’t go to sleep. A flock of thoughts flitted through my brain, like birds hitting a propeller, exploding one after another, in little bursts of blood.

  It seemed so obvious. The murder had been an inside job. Everyone in the house must have known the true story and for some reason they’d all covered it up. But why? Why cover it up? Especially when it seemed clear to me who had done it. I, the amateur detective, had pieced together the evidence from a few newspaper articles and was convinced that Roberto Madi, the shadowy ski instructor and unacceptable husband, had in fact murdered Cassandra Griffin. It made all the sense in the world. He was there, and he had a motive: money. So why had he never been charged?

  I stared at a streak of moonlight on the wall between the dresser and the closet door. No use trying to sleep. It was Madi all right. He was the one. Why had he never been brought to justice? Why was he never even named as a suspect? Where had he disappeared to? Why were all the reports about him so vague? Who was he really?

  I knew I was probably letting my imagination get away from me, but still, I had a special interest in men who victimize women and in the women who fall into their hands. My mother had been the target of a strange, careless man—my own father. And I had just barely escaped her fate . . . Or had I? There was no tangible evidence of my encounter with masochistic love, no unwanted child, no visible scars, no addictions to dull the edges of broken dreams. There was, however, a void in my romantic life in which I’d floated, alone and disconsolate, for the past twelve years.

  Yes, Madi intrigued me. Of course Madi intrigued me. Another shadowy male figure for me to dwell on, to fantasize about. There were no pictures of him in the newspapers, so I lay in the dark, trying to imagine what he must have looked like. The only face I could readily conjure up was that of my old lover, John Noland. He’d been to me what I suspected Roberto Madi had been to Cassandra. I thought of John as the model for all such men.

  Early on, my abandoning father had set the pattern of my love life on the loom of my subconscious. Because he’d left us, I defined a man’s love by its absence rather than its presence, by the pain it inflicted, rather than the joy it was supposed to bring. I saw my mother rise again and again, phoenixlike, from the ashes of her daily life, both cursing my father and being grateful to him for giving her the great consolation: a child. Me.

  I remembered very little about my childhood, and nothing about the man who had sired me. I did remember my mother confiding to me in later years that the night my father quit our house forever, she had cried and cried, rocking me back and forth in her arms, singing to me. After that, she never cried again.

  Watching my mother’s pain over my father produced scant enthusiasm for attaching myself to a man. In my early twenties, I had half a dozen boyfriends, whose attentions I experienced rather like a sleepwalker. Then, at twenty-four, I met John Noland. John Noland intrigued me because in him I’d finally found someone who was as elusive and tricky as my definition of love.

  John Noland was divorced when I met him, several years older than I—a just-about-to-be-celebrated writer whose prose was fluid and elegant. He was known as “a beautiful stylist,” as smooth in life as he was in art. Women adored him. How women adored him! They were always lapping up against him like little waves, caressing him with coyness and flattery. I used to watch them at parties, laughing and flirting with him, while he turned them inside out with his dark blue eyes. His riding crop wit combined with an aloof, ironic attitude made them dance and flutter around him all the more. During the course of an evening, I would observe him as he gradually singled one woman out, stalked her, and isolated her from the herd. Though varied in looks and type, the women he fancied all had one thing in common: they were all profoundly lonely. One could see it in their eyes, the way they were begging to be hurt and betrayed. Like a lazy lion, John Noland knew how to pick on wounded game.

  When he singled me out, as he did one night at one of those smoky, crowded loft parties we all went to then, I felt flattered, confident, special. I didn’t immediately identify myself as one of the wounded herd, though that feeling soon changed in the wake of experience. No, that night I thought I was clever and irresistible, different from the women he was used to. I didn’t think of myself as a victim, but as a crusader. I told myself I’d be the one to change him.

  Soon after we began our affair, I sensed he was a disappointed man who felt the world was not giving him his due. He was angry when he was dismissed by the critics while other writers soared to fame on books less well crafted than his. His dissatisfaction with life made him restless and incapable of remaining in one place for any significant length of time. Staying put meant too much time to reflect on disappointment. John was, therefore, constantly on the move, traveling here and there to remote places, researching his books, engaging in brief romantic encounters, basically uninvolved with anything or anyone beyond his writing and himself. When at last he finally had a measure of success with his work, I remember his complaining it was “too little too late.” He’d gotten what he wanted, but didn’t seem to want what he got. For John was always searching for something more, though what that was I don’t think even he knew.

  Together almost constantly for a year, we gradually began to drift apart. Increasingly I sensed the anger in him arising from despair. He began neglecting me, first in little ways, then in large ones. Without warning, I wouldn’t hear from him for a week. Then he’d call me up as if nothing was wrong, with no explanation. I’d cry, berate him, scold him, and he would comfort me by telling me it would never happen again—but it did, more and more frequently.

  Yet as he withdrew and I struggled with long bouts of loneliness and fury, I felt myself becoming bound tighter to him. Each new wound he inflicted only made my passion flare. I turned detective, uncovering his lies and infidelities with a maniacal glee which sent me racing to confront him. He was always penitent, always passionate, always able to convince me I was the only one he really loved. I went back to him time and time again, convinced it was he to whom I was returning, rather than to the hurt and the disappointment. Having pried the masochist from her shell, he made her into a sadist as well. We saw one another off and on for three years, torturing each other with our mutual obsessions and inability to love.

  The routine of my life—how I worked, ate, slept, relaxed—was governed by my thoughts of John. When I finished a piece of work, I immediately wanted to show it to him. If I saw something interesting, I thought only of taking him to see it. If I bought a new dress, I imagined him admiring me in it. If I cooked a meal, it was for him to eat. If I listened to music, it was for him to hear. Day and night, he was in my life, yet we rarely saw one another. We lived in constant but distant communication, speaking on the telephone, meeting once or twice a month for a night or two. Between the moments I spoke to him or saw him, I didn’t live, I only marked time.

  There was a certain point at which my obsession became so intense, I felt as if it would kill me. I didn’t know what was happening until much later when, after going back and forth time and time again to the same brief ecstasies, the same long punishments, the same deep disappointments, I began to understand that what I’d thought of as an escape from the sadness of my childhood was actually a re-creation of it, using bolder, more colorful designs. I longed after John Noland as I’d longed after my father. In acting out the longing, I was able to fool myself into thinking I loved him.

  And so I felt a kinship with Cassandra Griffin. I suspected we were both victims of a passion beyond our control, only she had died, and I had survived.

  Chapter 4

  The Haven seemed far more sinister to me when I saw it again, as if its beauty were a clever disguise for evil. As I got out of the car, I glanced at the row of upstairs windows, wondering which room had been Cassandra’s. Deane greeted me at the door and said
Mrs. Griffin would like a word with me. I followed him down the hall.

  Mrs. Griffin was arranging flowers in the pantry, standing behind a large table covered with a white cloth. She was wearing gardening gloves and an apron which looked as if it was made of mattress ticking. She had on a straw hat with a wide brim. Pom-Pom was in attendance, dozing at her feet. She reminded me of one of those English county ladies whose lives revolve around their gardens and dogs. A diminutive maid in a gray-and-white uniform stood nearby, tending to three large pails containing neat bunches of flowers.

  “One of my little hobbies,” Frances Griffin said as I entered.

  I stood for a moment, admiring the arrangement she was working on, an explosion of pale orange tulips packed so tightly together they formed a perfect globe.

  “There must be a hundred tulips there,” I said.

  “Eighty-two. More is more. That’s the motto of this house. No minimalism for us, right, Bridey?” The maid didn’t look up.

  I ran my finger along the feathered edge of one of the tulips.

  “Parrot tulips,” I said.

  “Yes, I have them specially grown for me at my house in the country. You can’t get really good flowers from a florist nowadays.”

  “Where’s your house in the country?” I asked, somewhat perplexed by the remark.

  “France,” she replied. “About sixty miles outside Paris. Near Chartres.”

  “These flowers are from France?”

  “I have them flown in once a week,” she said. “It’s extravagant, I know. I should sell that house. At least it’s good for something. So much less complicated keeping things than getting rid of them, don’t you think?”