Hours later, or days, or weeks (but was it perhaps only minutes?), Kate and Max, in the back of a police car, were being driven from Cecily’s house to the police station. Kate’s own car, which, she supposed, they had or were about to search for signs of God knew what, followed under the guidance of a young police officer. One might, of course, look at one’s watch. Kate looked at her watch. Perhaps two hours had passed since she had clambered down the rocks like some blasted mountain goat, instead of remaining with Max on the shore as any respectable middle-aged professor of English literature ought to be counted on to do.
Kate and Max had returned with the police, and several of them had bounded out to discover if they had come for a practical joke, a rescue operation, or an hallucination; they had returned to report, yes indeed, a body, and would the lady and gentleman mind waiting up at the house until the body was recovered and they might all make their decorous way to the police station? The waiting time had been occupied with questions from a policeman, none of which appeared to be answered to his satisfaction. Who Max was he easily established, but no fact after that made any sense, at least to a laconic, unimaginative policeman born and bred in a small town in Maine. They had come on an impulse? There was no relationship between them; they were friends and colleagues? A likely story, his entire manner implied. They had not come with any particular purpose in mind, but simply to look around and search for a key to the files? News of prowlers? The police had heard none of this, and if not the police, who? What neighbors? Had they found the key to the files? Oh, they had decided to look at the sea before searching the house? Did they expect to find the key washed up by the sea? The sarcasm and doubts had been more implied than expressed, but Kate’s imagination was working at full force, and little more than a raised eyebrow was needed to set it off.
Max, meanwhile, had turned into a bundle of self-incrimination. He ought never to have come, never to have brought her; he, Max Reston, had behaved impulsively and look what had happened. One could almost turn the whole episode into a cautionary tale. That Max, for whom forethought and rationality were second nature, should have acted like a student rebel was more dreadful than he could say. Nonetheless, he said it. Still, being Max, he did not wallow in regret, but set himself to calming Kate and urging upon her a brandy or another glass of the excellent wine. Never mind what the policeman thinks. Max had said, he was doubtless already assured that they were reprehensible people, but would learn with whom he was dealing at the proper time. Meanwhile, one could only do one’s best to regain one’s equilibrium. Under Max’s ministrations, Kate partly did.
They arrived at the police station, and Kate was permitted to call Reed. He, having suggested that she reveal to the police his, Reed’s, connection with the district attorney’s office, and having offered to come to her rescue, ended by talking with someone at the station and establishing that she and Max would be permitted to drive to Logan Airport in Boston and fly from there to New York. All of this, when it was finally sorted out, did help to clear the atmosphere somewhat. The police, whether gladly or reluctantly, faced the fact that they were dealing not with hippies, a love nest, or a pack of middle-aged perverts engaged in sodomy, but two perfectly respectable people who had every right to be where they were, who had found a body and immediately reported it, in the most correct possible manner, to the police.
“There is only one other thing,” announced the chief policeman, whose manner had become as cordial as his expressionless voice and face permitted. “Before you leave, I must ask you to look at the body. It will not be pleasant, since it has been in the water some time, perhaps several days. We will know after the autopsy. But if either of you recognize the young woman—perhaps a friend of Miss Hutchins?” he added hopefully to Max, “—we would be helped along a good bit.”
“This,” Max said quietly to Kate, as they followed the chief to the lower reaches of the building, “is where breeding shows. We will brace ourselves, carry it all through with aplomb, express no more emotion than is absolutely appropriate, and take it out in our dreams.”
“How could we possibly know her?” Kate asked.
“A good point.” Max stopped in the corridor. “Sir,” he called to the man walking ahead of him. “There is, of course, a chance that I might recognize the body as some connection of Miss Hutchins, though that seems unlikely. But there is no way Miss Fansler could recognize the body, since she has never been near here until today. Might we not spare her this ordeal?”
“Routine,” was the only answer.
In fact, they were as considerate of Max and Kate as the circumstances permitted. The body was drawn out in a kind of drawer in which it lay, covered and refrigerated. The covering was lowered only far enough to reveal the face, which, the man explained, had been “cleaned up.” “In her early twenties,” the chief said. “That might help to place her.”
Kate braced herself, and Max placed a hand on her near shoulder in support. Ever after Kate was to remember her feeling of relief that the face, however horrible, looked less horrible than she had expected. She immediately recognized it. The recognition seemed a touch of sanity for one blinding moment, until her brain registered the fact that the young woman before her was dead, and had been dead for several days.
“I do know her,” Kate said. “She’s a student of mine. A graduate student. Her name is Marston; Geraldine Marston, called Gerry by her friends. . . .”
“Fine,” the policeman shot out in a loud voice. He’s right, Kate thought, I was beginning to babble. “Let’s go back upstairs. Boyd, get some brandy for the lady. This way, please.” The drawer was pushed back in, and the policeman took Kate’s arm and guided her back upstairs and into a chair. “Drink this,” he said. Boyd, Kate thought, must be a rapid fellow. Gerry Marston!
In the end, it was decided that Max would be asked to stay, since he had at the moment the nearest thing to legal jurisdiction over the house. A policeman would drive Kate to Logan Airport and hand her over to her husband, who was at this moment flying to Boston. He, the policeman, supposed that a husband would be comforting even to a woman who did not care to use his name. If he was her husband. They drove in silence, Kate because she was afraid to speak at all for fear, as one of her colleagues put it with more accuracy than elegance, of running off at the mouth, and the policeman because he was Maine enough to consider conversation with strangers best avoided.
Sitting in the airplane by Reed’s side, however, sipping a vodka martini, Kate felt she could trust herself to speak. Instead, of course, she started to cry, not noisily, but with the tears streaming down her face. “Never mind,” Reed said, producing a large handkerchief. “Cry away. No, the stewardess will not think you are drunk, only bereaved. Perhaps she will decide I have told you of my passion for another woman, and you are trying to persuade me not to break up our happy home. That’s better. A faint smile, but a smile, indubitably.”
“I keep thinking about her, and remembering her. I would never have believed I could remember her so clearly, in such detail, or that my conversations with her would seem so vivid. That, no doubt, is what the poets keep telling us about life—we never perceive it with intensity until someone has drowned in a rocky pool. At least, that’s what poets used to tell us, before they abandoned intensity and syntax altogether. I sound like a congressman from the Middle West, of a particularly conservative persuasion. But, Reed, what can she have been doing there? Was she, who was from the Middle West, overcome with a need to see the sea? Surely she can’t have been robbing Cecily—not of the silver, I mean, but of papers and so on? She didn’t seem that sort. And why should she have decided to go rock climbing? Why did I, if it comes to that? Could her body have been thrown there?”
“Let’s not speculate until after the autopsy. I gather Max did not recognize her?”
“No. Why on earth should he?”
“Well, she had been at the university. He might have passed her on the campus.”
“I’m sure Max never noticed anyone to whom he hadn’t been properly introduced, certainly not one of the thousands of graduate students swarming about the place. She was a nice girl. Reed—what an old-fashioned phrase that is. An old-fashioned nice girl, and holding down a job to stay in school, though she had some sort of fellowship to pay her tuition. Her parents were poor; the whole heart-rending bit. I hope to God she was not their only child, but I have a sinking feeling that she was. Why should the thought that she was not, Reed, make it any easier to bear? Tell me that.”
“There will be nothing easy about this news,” Reed said. “Someone is on the way to deliver it now, miles away, even in another time zone. Kate, you have got to pull yourself together sufficiently to realize how absolutely extraordinary your whole story is. I don’t blame the Maine police for deciding you and Max were involved in dark and nefarious sin; how not, under the circumstances? When Max told me he was going to seek you out, I’m afraid I barely listened; more’s the pity. I should have told him you were addressing a group of gay activists in Minneapolis. That would have scared him off.”
“I expect Max was nervous being left with the results of Cecily’s death. After all, the decision not to marry or involve oneself in anothers’ life is supposed to be insurance against just this sort of thing. I think it touching that Max wanted his hand held, and by the least motherly female around.”
Reed reached over and opened the second little bottle of vodka martini provided by the airline; he poured it into Kate’s glass and stirred it for her. “You do realize, my darling, why it may have had to be you who accompanied Max on this touching mission? Because you could identify the body for him and get any suspicion nicely turned in another direction.”
Kate swallowed this statement with the first sip of her second martini. Then she shook her head. “Too clever by half,” she said. “You are, I am to gather, suggesting that Max, having got the body into the pool, wanted it identified by someone suspicious. But, Reed, if he had been responsible for that body, which is ridiculous on the face of it, the last thing he would want is any connection with it at all. Besides, what could he possibly accomplish by dragging me up there to identify the body? Whenever it died, I was nowhere near Maine, and could certainly prove it. But you know, there is a connection, not between Max and Gerry, but between Gerry and the house. Of course. That portrait. She was doing her dissertation on Dorothy Whitmore, and wanted, perhaps, to see the painting. It is extraordinary, that portrait. That’s why she was there, Reed; that has to be why she was there. That, or hoping for Whitmore papers, though she didn’t strike me as a snooper in the least.”
“No doubt you’re right. And at a less elevated moment, you must tell me about Dorothy Whitmore, Cecily Hutchins, and the story of English women novelists of the past century. Meanwhile, it would seem, if your speculation is accurate, that she was discovered by someone who may well have been after the silver, enticed or bullied onto the rocks, and killed. The police will have to find that prowler. He must have been fairly vigorous, for starters.”
“Or seductive.”
“I thought you said she was a nice girl, old-fashioned and all that?”
“Exactly why he would have had to be seductive, in a subtle way,” Kate said, feeling a bit better. But the pain of Gerry’s death had taken hold, and would never entirely abate.
In the weeks that followed, the police in Maine came, apparently, to the same conclusion as had Reed and Kate in the plane. They set about discovering the prowler, and were somewhat helped in this by the date of death, surprisingly established within a day or two by the medical experts. The girl had drowned, having first been hit on the head or, more probably, having hit her head on a rock after slipping. She had died, expert opinion was as certain as expert opinion ever allows itself officially to be, not less than three, not more than five days before the body was found. High tide and rough seas had dashed the body against the rocks as it lay in the small pool, but these injuries, received after death, were so identified. She was in good health—no disease of any sort to suggest another cause of death. And yes, of course, it was perfectly possible that she had died alone and by accident. Surely she would have been foolish to climb out on those rocks when no one knew she was going, or would realize that she was gone, but having done so, she might well have slipped, hit her head, fallen forward into the pool, and drowned. Altogether unsatisfactory, but where there was no motive, it seemed foolish to suggest murder. An unfortunate accident. Signs warning visitors away from the coast were suggested, but the residents pointed out, as they had before, that the coast hereabouts was private, and trespassers—this was not quite said—deserved what they got.
And that, it appeared, was that. The prowler was not discovered, despite profound questioning of everyone who might have seen such a person. No one had seen anyone. How, then, had Maximillian Reston come to hear of a prowler? This question, too, innocently resolved itself. An old lady with a house on the same private road had been for her afternoon constitutional, and walking up near Cecily’s house—they had been friends, and this was an established custom the old lady saw no reason now to change—she had seen a man about the place. No, she could not really tell anything about him. But she felt it her duty to let Max know. She was in her late seventies, and while vigorous, as lonely and eccentric (the police used another word unofficially) as Cecily. Max responded to this warning because he felt guilty about the papers. Since the old lady had also been in touch with Cecily’s lawyer, an old-time resident of the town whom she knew well, additional pressure had been put on Max to cope. It all fitted in neatly, and bit by bit the case faded away.
As for Kate Fansler, who agreed, in that entirely improper way, to accompany a man to Maine and spend the night with him in a local inn, she was absolutely and indisputably elsewhere at the time of the death, however widely one extended this. The police clearly, if inaudibly, were regretful. She would have made a nice solution. But at all the days and hours when Geraldine Marston might have died, Kate Fansler, who turned out to be a rather well-known professor of English at a prominent university with all sorts of important connections, was holding forth (one gathered she did rather hold forth) in the presence of several people at the least, except at night, when her husband, whose qualifications were awe-inspiring, even in Maine, was prepared to swear that she was with him.
There for several months the matter rested. It was not until late March that the thought of Geraldine Marston became again, for Kate, more than a dull, persistent pain and a sad memory.