DAY SIX

Morning Session

Throughout the following evening, as I lay on my back in the darkness of the bedroom, I increasingly came to suspect that I did, indeed, now dangle in a web cleverly spun by Sandrine. Who, after all, could have more keenly intuited my dark desires, nor had a better motive to lay a trap for me should I act upon them. Had she seen in my soulless book its soulless author, surmised that I was indeed a sociopath capable of ridding myself of a woman who would with each passing day become more of a burden? Had Sandrine suspected that I wanted her dead and, in the throes of that suspicion, devised a way to make her destruction equally my own?

I couldn’t reveal so grim a prospect to Alexandria, of course. Nor could I speak of it to Morty without sounding like a man so unhinged, so paranoid, so, well, sociopathic that in order to slither out of a murder conviction he was willing to lay the charge of attempted murder on the head of his dead wife. This meant that if Sandrine had, in fact, plotted to avenge her death, she’d done it in a way that not only prevented her plot from ever being discovered but just as thoroughly prevented it from even being discussed, let alone raised in court.

Such considerations were still imposing themselves upon me during the morning session of my trial, then into the afternoon session, Detective Alabrandi still on the stand, meticulously re-creating the many interviews he’d conducted both with me and with others during his investigation of Sandrine’s death. At points during all the previous testimony, I’d sometimes found myself adrift in a grim miasma of unfathomable circumstances but, now, as Alabrandi began to offer a step-by-step analysis of the evidence that had ultimately come his way, I no longer felt at sea. Perhaps there was, and had always been, to employ the words of Henry James, a “pattern in the carpet.”

“Now, Detective Alabrandi, did you return to 237 Crescent Road on December 17?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“I did, yes.”

“And by then other issues had come to your attention regarding the death of Mrs. Madison, isn’t that so?”

“Yes, they had.”

“And so you returned and spoke to the defendant . . . this would be the fifth time, I believe?”

“Yes.”

This time he’d come in the morning, while I was sitting in the sunroom with my first cup of coffee, staring at the wicker chair that had always been Sandrine’s and wondering, still wondering, just how much digging Alabrandi had done since he’d last showed up at my door, and what he’d uncovered, a worrisome process made all the more relevant by his first statement, one made even before he’d entered my house that morning.

“If you don’t mind, we’d like to have a look at Mrs. Madison’s computer,” Alabrandi said.

“No, I don’t mind,” I told him. “But it’s not working.”

“Not working?”

“That’s right,” I said. “Sandrine had been using my computer during the least few weeks.”

“You never thought to get it fixed?” Alabrandi asked.

“She said she’d rather just buy a new one,” I answered. “But she never got around to doing that.”

Alabrandi’s gaze betrayed something I found quite disturbing, the sense that he found me personally repellant. “We’d like to look at your computer as well.” He smiled, but it was the smile of a man who held the winning cards, and knew it. “We could get a warrant, of course, but it’s easier just to have your permission.”

“Take them both,” I said since I’d by then surmised that a demeanor that suggested a complete confidence in my innocence would play far better than my getting a lawyer or anything of that sort, a decision Morty had later thought quite foolish.

“The office we shared was small so we just had two laptops,” I added.

“Thanks,” Alabrandi said. “I’ll pick them up on my way out.”

I nodded. “Sure.”

He took out his notebook. “Would you mind describing Mrs. Madison’s general attitude during the weeks that led up to her death?”

He’d said “death” rather than “suicide,” but I’d gotten used to such sinister syntactical ploys, and so they no longer bothered me. I was a tenured professor of English literature, after all. I knew how to use language.

“Attitude?” I asked. “That’s a very general term.”

Something hardened in Alabrandi’s gaze. “How she seemed, is what I mean,” he said. “Her thoughts and feelings.”

“That’s not much better with regard to generalities.”

Alabrandi shifted slightly. “Generalities are okay,” he said with a hint of irritability. “Generalities are just fine, Professor. Frankly, I don’t see how I can be more specific, so may we, as they say, move on?”

“Well, in general then, she had become withdrawn,” I told him.

“Due to her illness?”

“Yes.”

“What about that last evening?”

He knows, I thought.

As Detective Alabrandi testified to this very exchange it struck me that it had not occurred to me at that moment that Alexandria might already have borne witness against me, that even at this early stage of the investigation a police informant might be embedded in what remained of my shattered household. Even now, I couldn’t be sure, so that when I glanced back toward my daughter, met her gaze with my own, I felt, for the first time in my life, unsure of absolutely everything, a man now entirely unmoored. Had that also been part of Sandrine’s plan, to so thoroughly unhinge me that my life, from now on, would be no more than a long slog through ever shifting sands, rootless, uncertain, and lonely beyond words.

Alexandria nodded toward the front of the courtroom, reminding me to pay attention.

When I turned back, Alabrandi had moved a few minutes further into his narration of our fifth interview.

“I began to ask Mr. Madison about the last evening of his wife’s life,” he told the court.

And immediately I was back in my living room, facing him as fearlessly as I could manage.

“The last evening?” I asked hesitantly.

“Was she still withdrawn?”

“Not exactly.”

“So how would you describe Mrs. Madison’s demeanor that evening?”

He knows, I repeated in my mind, though I could not be sure of this. And yet, if he knows, and if I lie or even diminish what happened between Sandrine and me that night, then I’ll look as if I’m hiding something . . . and I would be.

“She was angry,” I said.

In fact, Sandrine had said such furiously hurtful things to me on that evening, egged me on so relentlessly that, by now, as I listened to what Alabrandi began to tell the jury about this very exchange—and given the plot I feared she might have hatched—I’d come to suspect that Sandrine’s entire effort that night had been directed at forcing my hand, so that I would hesitate no longer to carry out what perhaps she had come to believe I was already plotting: her murder.

“Very angry,” I added as one after another of her accusations returned to me, all she’d first admired in me—the kindness, the simplicity, the sense of service—and all she had since come to despise: my snideness, my superiority, my endless sense of grievance, the shabby gift, as she’d found opportunity to repeat, of my disillusion.

“She was in an absolute rage,” I said coldly, before I could stop myself, a sudden loss of control that Sandrine would have expected, so that were souls immortal, as I suddenly imagined, she would doubtless have been smiling from on high.

“Rage?” Alabrandi repeated.

There was no going back. “Rage, yes,” I said.

With that answer, Alabrandi had taken out his notebook, opened it, written something into it, then looked up and leveled his gaze upon me. “Did you and your wife ever have any physical confrontations?”

I shook my head.

“Never,” I answered, then saw the cup she’d hurled at me, a white porcelain cup that had crashed on the door as I’d left and whose many jagged shards I’d quickly swept up before the calling 911.

Morty nudged me slightly. “What’s going on, Sam? You look like shit.”

“I’m fine,” I said crisply.

“Well act it then,” Morty instructed. “Don’t look like you just got hit by a fucking train.”

In fact, at that moment some months before, fixed in Alabrandi’s glint-of-a-knife stare, I’d felt that indeed I had been hit by an idea no less powerful and destructive than a speeding locomotive, the notion that somehow Alabrandi had found out about that cup, a knowledge he’d been hinting at during the fifth interview, and upon which, now on this fifth day of my trial, Mr. Singleton was closing in.

And so I leaned forward and listened more attentively as Mr. Singleton continued his questioning of Detective Alabrandi.

“Now, Detective Alabrandi, at this time, did you inform Professor Madison of any information you had regarding the relationship between Mr. Madison and his wife?”

“No,” Alabrandi answered. “Not at that time. I simply let him talk.”

Yes, indeed, I thought, he’d let me talk, and talk I had. I’d described Sandrine’s increasingly withdrawn behavior, her long hours in the sunroom or in the scriptorium, the way she’d listen to music for hours on end. Alabrandi had listened to all this without comment so that it was only when I’d come to the end of this recitation that he finally tossed his spear.

“Mr. Madison, that last night, when your wife, as you said, was in a rage, there was an argument, I suppose?”

“Yes, we had an argument,” I answered.

Alabrandi jotted a note in that strictly by-the-book way of his, like a man simply recording a few routine details. “Can you be more specific?”

“It was around six,” I went on. “Lots of Coburn students have to work, and so we have many evening classes. I had two classes that night and I didn’t get home until sometime after ten.”

“Do you recall what the argument was about?” Alabrandi asked.

“Lots of things, really,” I said.

“Lots of things?” Alabrandi asked.

“That I was distant, that I was cold.”

“Anything else?”

“There were probably other things,” I admitted. “But I don’t remember what they were.”

“How did it end, this argument?”

“It ended with Sandrine bringing up Alexandria,” I said. “She thought I’d not been a very good father to our daughter.”

“In what way not a good father?”

“That I’d often made it obvious I was disappointed in her because she hadn’t lived up to some idea of what our daughter should be. A writer or a scholar. Something like that.” I shrugged. “I got quite defensive, of course, and she said that was typical, too, that nothing she, or anyone else, said or did could ever penetrate what she called my ‘shell.’ When I started to leave, she yelled at me very loudly.”

“What did she yell?” Alabrandi asked.

As if I were in that darkened room again I heard Sandrine’s voice split the air.

“She screamed, ‘You’re a sociopath,’” I said, “and that I was nothing to her. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.” I felt a shudder. “As far as I know, those were her last words.”

“At least to you,” Alabrandi said.

“What?” I asked.

“Well, there was a phone beside her bed,” Alabrandi said.

I nodded. “Yes, there was a phone,” I said, now wondering if this was something Alabrandi had intentionally planted in my brain, the idea that Sandrine might have used that phone to call for help or—could she possibly have done this?—to say just as the drugs took effect that she had been murdered?

“Anyway,” Alabrandi said, “calling you a sociopath, this was said as you were leaving for your class at the college?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Sociopath,” Alabrandi repeated as he wrote the word in his notebook. Then he looked up, his dark eyes quite intense now, so that I’d felt rather like a small animal caught in the crosshairs of a very powerful rifle.

“You knew about the argument, didn’t you?” I asked him.

Alabrandi said nothing, and since at that early date I hadn’t yet begun to have doubts about Alexandria, I suspected that he’d probably heard about it from Edith Whittier, our next-door neighbor, a woman divorced so early and for so long her life seemed spinsterish. It couldn’t have been Carl, because he’d taken his son on a camping trip that week. None of the other houses was close enough for the people living in them to have heard voices coming from inside 237 Crescent Road. It had to have been Edith, I thought as Alabrandi wrote something else in his notebook. Even so it wasn’t until I’d later seen her name on the prosecution witness list that my fears were confirmed. At the time, however, I’d surmised that if Edith had heard voices, then she’d probably heard the crash of that white porcelain cup.

“Sandrine threw a cup at me,” I told Alabrandi in order to give the impression that I wasn’t trying to hide anything.

The smooth movement of Alabrandi’s pen stopped abruptly as he glanced up from his notebook.

“As I was leaving,” I added. “She threw it at me as I was leaving. It crashed against the door. It broke into lots of pieces.”

“None of the officers reported seeing a broken cup,” Alabrandi said pointedly.

“That’s because I cleaned it up,” I told him.

“When?”

“Before anyone got there.”

Alabrandi made a note of this. “Where are those pieces?” he asked.

“I threw them in the garbage, and a couple of days ago the garbage people picked it up. I suppose they’re in the town dump somewhere.”

Detective Alabrandi didn’t appear particularly disturbed by any of this.

“You were alone in the house during this argument?” he asked. “Except for your wife, I mean.”

“Yes,” I answered. “Our daughter had gone out for some reason. Shopping for something, I don’t remember what. She got back a few minutes before I left. She was packing her things because she was going back to Atlanta that night.”

“When did you leave for your class?”

“A few minutes after Alexandria got back from whatever she’d been doing,” I answered. “I went into the scriptorium and—”

“Scriptorium?”

I shuddered at how pretentious Alabrandi must take this Latinate, but I’d said it, and as Morty had later pointed out you can’t unring a bell. “That little room with the books and our laptops.”

Alabrandi said nothing.

“Anyway, I went there and read for a while,” I told him. “I guess I was trying to calm down. Then Alexandria arrived, and we spoke briefly, and then I left for my classes.”

This, too, went into Alabrandi’s notebook, the same one to which he now resorted in answer to Mr. Singleton’s question.

“Now, Detective Alabrandi, at that point, you had the autopsy results on Mrs. Madison, correct?” Mr. Singleton asked him.

“Yes,” Alabrandi answered.

“And it was during this conversation that you revealed an important finding in the autopsy report, correct?”

“I did, yes.”

As Alabrandi continued, I saw myself once again in the living room, slumped in one of its motley chairs, watching as the good detective drew a few pages of neatly folded paper from his jacket pocket.

“The autopsy report,” he said as he offered it to me.

I didn’t take it. “You obviously have something you want to tell me about it,” I said, almost impatiently, as if the high drama of all this struck me as silly, a small town cop trying to act like some big screen cop he’d seen in the movies.

It was an attitude Sandrine no doubt would have expected me to exhibit, I thought now, as Mr. Singleton handed Detective Alabrandi those same pages, and which I knew would soon pass into evidence as Exhibit Something. She would have known my tone would seem arrogant to Alabrandi, and that surely he would start to despise me at that moment, if he hadn’t already. How well and deeply she had known me, I thought, as Alabrandi glanced solemnly at the copy of Dr. Mortimer’s autopsy report Mr. Singleton now handed him.

“At this time did you inform Mr. Madison of the autopsy findings?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“Yes, I did,” Alabrandi answered. “I began by indicating the cause of death, the fact that Mrs. Madison had died of an overdose of Demerol mixed with alcohol.”

Which is exactly what I’d expected, of course. The surprise was that antihistamines had been added to the mix.

“Do you recall your wife taking antihistamines?” Alabrandi asked.

“No.”

“In some instances, they’re used to prevent vomiting,” Alabrandi added. “This may have been the case here.”

“Well, Sandrine probably wanted to do it right,” I said.

“Someone did, yes,” Alabrandi added casually, with no more emphasis than he might have used to read the ingredients on a label.

Alabrandi slowly leaned forward, a movement that seemed calculated so that I’d abruptly felt like a diver deep in murky water who suddenly intuits the presence of a shark.

“Mr. Madison, when I was here last time, I asked if you knew a man named Malcolm Esterman. You said you did and that he was a colleague at Coburn College.”

I nodded.

There was a long pause before Alabrandi said, “Are you aware that Mr. Esterman was the last person to see your wife alive?”

“Malcolm?” I blurted, and actually laughed at the absurdity of such a thing. “Malcolm Esterman? Why would . . .” I stopped because the look in Alabrandi’s eyes was a stone wall.

“But Malcolm Esterman is just a . . .” I began, then stopped again.

“A what?” Alabrandi asked.

Because nothing else came to mind I said, “Just an associate professor, just a . . .” I stopped a third time, gathered my thoughts, then said, “How do you know this?”

“Mr. Esterman has confirmed that Mrs. Madison came to his house at just after six on the evening of November 14, which was the night she died.”

I could more easily have believed Sandrine, my atheist wife, would have gone to a parish priest. So why, on the last night of her life, would she have driven to Malcolm Esterman’s decidedly beige condominium?

I began to stumble. “But what . . . why . . . what would she . . .”

Alabrandi nodded toward the autopsy report. “Page four,” he said.

I turned to the page, then read the one salient detail that froze my heart.

“A pale circular band is noted around the lower quadrant of the ring finger of the left hand,” I read.

“Did Mrs. Madison wear a wedding ring?” Alabrandi asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“When did you last see it?”

“I don’t remember,” I said, “but what does it have to do with Malcolm Esterman?”

Alabrandi took the autopsy report from me. “Mr. Esterman voluntarily came into headquarters three days after your wife died. He’d come to the conclusion that given the circumstances of her death there would no doubt be an investigation, and he thought we needed to know that he’d had a relationship with Mrs. Madison.”

“A relationship,” I whispered, and felt the sun and moon and all the stars fall upon me. “With Sandrine?”

At that moment, sitting in my living room, facing Alabrandi, I’d felt only the surreal nature of this revelation. Sandrine with this froggish little man who lived in a condominium that looked as if it had been built entirely from scavenged materials? Associate professor Malcolm Esterman, who taught mostly freshmen classes to Coburn’s generally mindless students? I’d no way of putting this latest bombshell into perspective or any means of locating it within the fabric not only of our marriage but of everything I had ever thought about Sandrine. Still, it was then it had occurred to me that Sandrine, by some means, must have found out about April Blankenship, and thus, in a state of utter upheaval after our argument, had gone to poor, chalk-covered Malcolm and there, in a seizure of loathing and bent upon the only revenge she’d thought possible, had clamped her eyes shut and pinched her nose and clenched her teeth and done anything else she had to do to drive back her repugnance and, in that posture of revulsion, had “relations” with him.

Fatally, before I could stop myself, and with the chest-thumping bellow of a wounded primate, I blurted, “Yes, of course. To get even with me.”

Alabrandi’s body tensed but his voice was cool and measured. “Get even with you for what, Mr. Madison?”

And I thought, My God, he knows that, too, and like a soul poised on the rim of hell I hesitated, then stepped over the edge. “For what I did. For my affair.”

“You had an affair?” Alabrandi asked.

“Yes.”

“Did Mrs. Madison know about it?”

“I guess she must have.”

“Why do say that?”

“Because of what Malcolm Esterman told you,” I said. “Why would Sandrine have had a relationship with him except to get even with me?”

“I didn’t say that Mr. Esterman’s relationship with your wife was sexual,” Alabrandi said.

And, of course, that was true.

Lamely, I asked, “Was it?”

“No,” Alabrandi answered. “According to Mr. Esterman they had a close friendship. That’s why she called on him the night of her death. She was upset, he said.”

“With me?” I asked. “And so she pulled off her wedding ring and left it with Malcolm Esterman? Is that what he told you?”

Alabrandi nodded. “Mr. Esterman says that he had intended to return it to her but he never got the chance.”

“I see.” I drew in a deep, troubled breath and tried to regain some sense of composure. “Okay, well, let’s leave it at that.”

Alabrandi’s face hardened. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Mr. Madison.” His pen leaped to attention. “Who’s the woman?”

“What woman?” I asked as if I’d entirely forgotten my blurted admission.

“Please,” Alabrandi said quietly. “Just give me her name.”

“I’d rather not do that,” I told him.

Something went full metal jacket in Alabrandi’s eyes, and I could see the formidable army CID man behind his polite manner. “This is a murder investigation, Mr. Madison.”

“Murder?” I breathed. “Sandrine wasn’t murdered. Sandrine . . .” I stopped dead. “And I’m the prime suspect, of course.”

“Who was the woman, Mr. Madison?” Alabrandi repeated firmly.

I felt the floor give way beneath me, a sense of falling through space. “But she had nothing to do with—”

“Who?” Alabrandi demanded in a voice as hard as a pistol shot.

I had made only one promise to April, that under no conditions would I let pass a word of our relationship to anyone. I had sworn this secrecy again and again, but at that moment, observing the way Alabrandi remained silent, simply staring, waiting, I conveniently convinced myself that surely he must already know what I then told him.

“April Blankenship,” I said.

Out-of-Body Experience

While Detective Alabrandi continued to relate all the further details of our fifth interview, I had what amounted to an out-of-body experience. Alabrandi had said April’s full name in open court, even adding her middle name, which is Bernice, and I’d glanced over to see that name recorded by the court stenographer, then to my right, where several local, three regional, and two national reporters were scratching it into their notebooks, and then to the various audiotaping devices that were recording it and finally to the room’s four surveillance cameras, each of which was dutifully doing the same. It was as if her name—April Bernice Blankenship—were echoing through all the hills and valleys of the republic, heard in shopping malls and elevators, in dance clubs and medical waiting rooms and sport stadiums, a name carried on quivering sound waves down hospital corridors and into the vast reaches of countless international airports: april bernice blankenship.

That pitiful little whore.

“That’s what they’ll call me, Sam,” she’d said to me at the end of our final, dreary tryst, “if anyone found out.”

“No one will,” I told her, then glanced toward the deathly gray curtains that hung from the window of the spare little room. How in the world, I asked myself, had I come to be in such a tawdry place?

“They can’t, Sam, ever.” Her eyes filled with puppy dog supplication. “It would kill Clayton if he found out. And he’s been good to me. He’s always been kind. I shouldn’t have done this. I don’t know why I did it. But, Sam if he ever . . . I just couldn’t, you know, live.”

She’d gone on and on like that for another couple of minutes, a voice that grew more desperate and despairing as I put on first my pants, then my shirt, then my shoes. On that last day I’d even worn a tie, which I’d finished tying when her voice, small, incessant, pleading, had finally, mercifully stopped.

I drew her into my arms. She felt like a sack of sticks. “No one will ever know, April,” I assured her. “I promise you that no one will ever know.” I smiled. “I have a lot to lose, too, you know.”

She nodded. “I guess it’ll be okay then,” she said weakly.

I started to kiss her on the mouth, then thought it a bad idea, and so darted to the right and gave her what amounted to little more than a peck on the cheek. “Trust me. It’s all okay.”

We’d mutually decided to end it that very afternoon. It had always felt makeshift and contrived, our affair, two people who should have passed in the night but who somehow had gotten hooked on to each other instead. We’d been like two pieces of lint that had randomly joined as each swirled in the summer air. We’d become attached in a momentary lapse from the usual routine, so my later analysis had run, and for that reason had ended up in bed as randomly as a couple of disconnected bits of paper might meet in the same swirling drain.

But I had to admit that I’d enjoyed the sheer conspiratorial nature of the thing, at least at the beginning. I’d rather shamelessly relished the clandestine drive to a neighboring town, waiting for April in a down-market motel room, one that had actually had a pink neon sign. In fact, it had probably been the back alley nature of the activity I’d most enjoyed about our rendezvous, the noir fiction shadowiness of it all. With April I could play the leading man, something that had been impossible with Sandrine. In the tiny solar system of my life, beautiful, brilliant Sandrine had always been a planet in orbit alongside me, while poor, drab, abysmally needy April, however briefly, had quite comfortably assumed the lowly position of a circling moon.

April, however, had never been entirely comfortable with our affair. She had never cheated on Clayton, and she never managed to be very good at it. A gray-eyed dread hung from her like ragged clothes, and most of the time she’d been frozen by the fear of anyone finding out about us. She’d all her life been a “good girl,” she said, and there were times when she expressed an almost deer-in-the-headlights wonder at finding herself in bed with a man other than Clayton. He’d been twenty years her senior and had early run out of steam, but it wasn’t sex April craved; it was that old black magic love.

“I wanted to love you and maybe that you would love me back, too,” she told me during the final forlorn minutes of our last drizzly afternoon at the all too aptly named Shady Arms motel. “But some things are just dreams, and if you try to make them real it doesn’t work, like in movies it always does, and so they turn on you and go bad.”

There is a vulnerability about the unintelligent, and April, more than anything, gave off the raw bafflement of the deeply inarticulate. As a woman she’d had little to offer but loyalty, and by being with me she’d failed even at that. In the end, it was this failure that had hurt her more, in fact far more, than our failed affair. In betraying Clayton, she had betrayed herself, as she’d made clear in the one good line I ever heard her say, and which she’d uttered on my front porch the night she came to beg me to keep quiet: I killed the little angel in me, Sam.

By then she’d heard of Sandrine’s death, and the nasty fearmonger in her soul had been busy whispering all kinds of dire warnings, how there’d probably be a police investigation, that in such cases the husband is always the first to be suspected, that the authorities were bound to be looking into any motive I might have had for killing Sandrine, she, herself, being the most obvious one.

Still very much out of body, I now recalled April’s face in the yellow light of the alleyway where she’d asked that I meet her, our two cars parked in a remote corner, shielded from the roadway by an enormous green Dumpster. She’d come to my car, looking thin and all but featureless, everything girlishly small, her eyes, nose, mouth, a little doll’s face, though now a very frightened doll.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“I mean about us?”

“There is no ‘us,’ April,” I reminded her. “In a way, there never was.”

“But they might ask,” she protested. “What if they ask you, Sam?”

“Ask me what?”

“About us?”

I moved to put my hands on her small rounded shoulders but stopped myself in time.

“Why would they ask about anything like that?” I said. “Look, April, the facts are these. Sandrine was going to die. She’d been diagnosed weeks before. She didn’t want to face that kind of death.” I shrugged. “It’s an open-and-shut case of suicide. Nobody is going to ask me anything.”

“But the paper said there was an investigation and that—”

“The cops here in Coburn are just stirring up headlines,” I interrupted. “They enjoy seeing their names in the paper. That’s all this is, a trumped-up investigation they’ll abandon at some point. Even so, it’s just routine in a suicide.”

She stared at me pleadingly. “She didn’t know about us, did she? Sandrine?”

“Of course not.”

“I mean, she didn’t . . . it wasn’t . . .”

“It had nothing to do with you, April.”

She glanced about, as if looking for eyes in the darkness. “I wouldn’t have called you or come here but I’m so scared, Sam. I feel like it’s part of a plan, you know? God’s plan. Punishment, I mean.”

“April, please, just go home and stop thinking about this.”

“But I’m so scared.”

“I know you are, but you don’t need to be.”

“You really don’t think they’re going to be asking questions about . . .” She stopped because I’d already denied the reality of “us.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I have all the answers I’ll ever need to get them off my back.”

She glanced left and right again, as if certain she were being watched.

“I just wanted to give you my condolences,” she said. “That’s what you can say if someone sees us here.”

“No one will see us here.”

“But that’s what we could say if someone did.”

“Okay, sure, but I won’t have to say anything, April,” I assured her. “You played no part in this, and there’s no reason you’ll be dragged into it.” I smiled quite confidently. “Don’t lose any sleep over this,” I told her. “Believe me, your name will never come up.” I put my hand on my heart. “I give you my word. I will never say your name.”

But I had given April’s name, of course, and it was still ringing through the courtroom when I returned to my body.

“So Professor Madison acknowledged that he’d been unfaithful to his wife with April Blankenship, correct?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“Yes,” Detective Alabrandi answered. “He said that he had carried on an affair with Mrs. Blankenship. It had lasted only a few weeks, he said, and it had ended three months before he’d learned of his wife’s illness.”

“Did you ask Professor Madison if his wife was aware of this adulterous affair with April Blankenship?”

“He said that she was not.”

Had she been aware of it, I asked myself now, only half listening as Detective Alabrandi continued his testimony, whose exact content I was already well acquainted with. Was it possible at some point that Sandrine had learned about April and me? Had Clayton somehow found out and, in a seizure of anger or pain, confided April’s betrayal to his best friend at Coburn College, none other than tweedy little Malcolm Esterman?

I glanced back toward the rear of the courtroom, where Malcolm sat on the back row, in his, yes, tweed jacket, staring through the bottle-bottom thickness of his hornrimmed glasses. He’d always seemed quite humble, a modest man, as Churchill once famously quipped of a political opponent, with much to be modest about. He was just the sort of man, self-effacing and seemingly without envy, to whom Clayton Blankenship might have gone in search of whatever a man seeks in the aftermath of such betrayal. But who would have told Clayton in the first place? Certainly not April. And if April had not told Clayton, then he could not have told Malcolm, and Malcolm could not have told Sandrine.

So if Sandrine had actually known about April and me, how had she known? Or had anyone told her at all? For this was Sandrine, I reminded myself, who could look through walls.

Again I went out of my body, and at the end of that unexpected journey I found myself at a faculty gathering not long after Sandrine had first learned of her illness. It had been one of those end of the academic year parties, held on the lawn of the president’s house, everyone choosing between white and red wine and dining on pig-in-a-poke canapés carried on faux silver trays by mostly black servers dressed, for all the world, like plantation-era house slaves.

The president had thanked us for another splendid year, praised our excellence and commitment to the “life of the mind,” then released us to wander about the grounds, forming circles of conversation. Sandrine and I had often hung pretty close together during such affairs, but on that afternoon she’d broken away, and I’d ended up alone, leaning against one of the ground’s great oaks, sipping wine and nibbling at a miniature crab cake but otherwise unengaged.

It was then I’d caught April in my sight, wearing a pale blue dress that made her look almost transparent. She’d had her doll-sized hand tucked in poor, frail Clayton’s crooked arm and in that pose she looked more like his nurse than his wife. For a time, they strolled haltingly among the faculty, then, rather abruptly, she was with them, my tall, elegant, porcelain-white and raven-haired Sandrine.

For a moment, I’d thought it better to keep clear, but as I watched, April had looked increasingly ill at ease, and so, by way of keeping the lid on that particular pot, I strolled over and joined them.

“Are you folks enjoying this little soiree?” I asked.

Clayton nodded. “It’s always a pleasure to talk to your lovely wife, Sam,” he said, the very picture of old southern charm. “You know April, of course.”

“Yes, hi,” I said to her. “You’re not drinking. May I get you a glass?”

She shook her head but said nothing, which was not unusual for shy, birdlike April, and so I’d turned back to Clayton. “Well, I presume you had a successful academic year.”

Clayton smiled, and I noticed that his teeth were quite yellow, stained by years of pipe smoking. Suddenly, I felt myself repulsed by the notion that April’s pink little tongue had no doubt found itself in that repellant mouth. The thought had come to me so quickly and I’d been so unprepared for it that for an unguarded instant I must have gotten lost in the sheer horror of it, and as she and Clayton broke away I looked at my little parakeet of a paramour with some impossible mixture of pity and revulsion.

I caught myself immediately, but in the way of such glances something of my true feeling was revealed, and to which April’s glance responded in kind.

“April is an odd little thing,” Sandrine said once Clayton and April were out of earshot.

I quickly took a sip from my glass. “She reminds me of that line of Eliot’s.”

“Which one is that?”

“The one about people who must prepare a face to meet the faces they meet.”

Sandrine’s smile was bright enough, but I sensed a certain gloom coming from her. “As do I,” she said.

At the time I’d thought the shadowy darkness of this remark had had to do with her diagnosis, the death that was coming for her, and which even as it came would strip her of all her powers. She was having to prepare a face to meet the faces that would pity her once they learned the news. But now I was not so sure it was her illness that had generated her response to my Eliot reference. Perhaps, in that quick exchange of looks between April and me, she’d seen something that had forced her into a yet deeper deception, a villainous tale whose arch villain was me.

We’d stayed at the party awhile longer, then headed home, Sandrine quite pensive as she sat, watching the town go by with the sort of look one sees in very young children, as if seeing something for the first time.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked.

“How lovely it is,” she answered. “Pull over.”

I did as she asked. We’d gone almost to the far end of the town, where there was a little park. There were swings and monkey bars and whirligigs, but Sandrine’s attention was on the shaded area at the near end of the park, where a group of teenagers had gathered.

“Remember Palermo?” she asked.

“What about it?”

“That area where the streets came together,” she said.

“Four Corners.”

“They were dancing that day,” she continued quietly. “Those young people. The girls were in long pleated skirts, and as they danced they kicked very high, and their skirts hung down from their legs like fans.”

I could find nothing to say and so I kept quiet. So did Sandrine, and for a while we sat in silence. Then she said, “Do you think it’ll be this way from now on, Sam, that all my memories—no matter how sweet or beautiful—that all my memories will be heartbreaking?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “I hope not.”

This was, God knows, an inadequate answer, but I could find nothing better to say, and so I simply watched as Sandrine held her gaze on a group of young people who seemed quite uninspiring to me, local kids who’d eventually end up in my freshmen English class, where I’d have to remind them—repeatedly and futilely, of course—that “unique” cannot take an adjective.

“You know, Sam, the trouble with not living in the shadow of death,” Sandrine said after a moment, “is that you don’t notice how beautiful things are.”

When I said nothing in response to this, she drew in a long breath, then released it slowly. “I’ve become a cliché, haven’t I? The dying woman who mouths nothing but bromides.”

Again, I said nothing, for it seemed to me that what she’d said was, indeed, something of a bromide, and so we sat in silence for a bit longer before Sandrine spoke again.

“You should get yourself another woman, Sam,” she said. “After I’m gone. But not someone like me. Someone who’ll make you feel important.” Now her gaze slid over to me. “Someone like . . . April Blankenship.”

I’d laughed out loud at this, because at the time I’d seen not a hint of incendiary sparkle in Sandrine’s eyes. But was that only because I’d refused to see it, refused even to address the idea that she might have caught the look April and I had inadvertently exchanged an hour before, seen it and read it and gotten it right? Had that been the moment when I should have known that Sandrine would not go quietly to her grave, but that from then on she would begin to construct a plot whose intricate design was meant to pull me in after her?

We’d later driven in silence the rest of the way home. A pall had fallen over Sandrine. She was deep in thought, perhaps more deeply in thought than I had ever seen her. Once out of the car, she walked directly to the scriptorium, retrieved her Nano, and from there headed into the sunroom, where she put the earbuds in, leaned back in her chair, and closed her eyes.

I’d felt it best to leave her to herself for a time, but as the hours passed and night fell and she now sat in the total darkness of that no longer sunny room, I had at last made my way out to her. She stirred briefly as I entered, so I knew she’d heard me. Even so, she kept her eyes closed and the earbuds in place, waiting, I suppose, for the current song to end, and only then at last acknowledging that I was in the room.

“Sam,” she said quietly.

“Yes.”

Her eyes remained closed but she plucked the earbuds out and let them dangle from her long white fingers for a moment before dropping them into her lap.

“I’ve made a decision,” she said.

“About what?”

“I don’t want to wait for it,” she said. “Death. I don’t want to go through all those terrible stages.” Her eyes opened slowly. “You understand? I want to be in control.”

At the time, this had sounded entirely at one with her character, and so I made no argument against whatever decision she had made, or was in the process of making.

“Demerol,” she added quite casually, as if it were merely a final item added to a grocery list. “Tell Dr. Ortins that I’ve fallen and hurt my back. She’ll prescribe all I need.”

I nodded. “Okay,” I said softly.

The smile that struggled onto her lips was the saddest I had ever seen. “In the meantime,” she added, “just keep doing what you’ve been doing, Sam.”

“Been doing?” I asked cautiously.

Her smile seemed uneasily balanced, like a figure on a wire. “There’ll be plenty of time for your life to change.”

Judge Rutledge’s gavel hammered me back to the present. I looked at the clock. My God, had so much time passed? On the stand Detective Alabrandi was gathering up his papers while Mr. Singleton turned and headed toward his chair. I looked at Morty, who was putting papers in his briefcase. When he’d packed the last of them, he glanced at me. “Okay, well, we got through some major testimony, buddy,” he said. He smiled. “Have a nice weekend, Sam.”

Weekend Recess

On Saturday morning, I woke up to a house whose emptiness now seemed quite familiar. Alexandria had driven me home at the end of Friday’s session, then rather diplomatically she’d suggested we spend some time apart. Besides, she had a few things she had to catch up on in Atlanta, she said, although she assured me that she’d be back in Coburn in time to accompany me to the courthouse on Monday morning, when my trial was set to resume at nine a.m.

As I made my way to the kitchen to make my morning coffee, it struck me as quite strange, and very alarming, that with Alexandria gone Sandrine returned to me ever more emphatically, my mind continually calling her to the witness stand, demanding her testimony. It was as if I hungered for her accusations, deeply, deeply wished to know what she had actually thought of me.

In such a frame of mind it didn’t surprise me that everywhere I looked she was there, a multitudinous ghost, her shape materializing in a chair or leaning against a bookshelf or sitting in the scriptorium as I passed it. Had I not closed that door? Probably not, but I’d begun to fall into that uncertain frame of mind where the trusted solidities of life had grown porous, the verities cracked, nothing any longer beyond the realm of possibility. Shakespeare had been right, there were, indeed, phantoms more real than their previously corporeal forms.

I made coffee but had no stomach for anything else. I felt myself growing thinner by the hour, layers of me falling away like peeling paint.

I’d never expected to be lonely but, even more certainly, I’d never expected to miss my colleagues at Coburn College. And yet, as I discovered that morning, I did miss them. How very odd and unpredictable, I thought, especially given the fact that I’d endlessly scoffed at my fellow professors. I always thought them a mediocre gaggle of academics waylaid in an inconsequential terminus at the end of the academic line. Sandrine had brought this up during that last, brutal fight. She said to me, You have always believed that you deserved better than Coburn College, Sam.

When I facetiously asked her what esteemed educational institution could possibly be better than infinitely distinguished Coburn, she’d waved her hand dismissingly then added rather cryptically, One day, you’ll know.

One day I’ll know.

I pondered her words as I sipped my morning coffee, parsing them for every hint of threat, studying and restudying each intonation in Sandrine’s voice. Was it possible that by the time we’d engaged in that cruel battle she’d already carefully built my staircase to the gallows, this final explosion merely the last bit of business in a plot she had premeditated weeks or even months before?

I shook my head at how terrible it was, my fear that she had done just that. And if she had, it could be for only one reason: she had come to despise me, to loathe me, to hold me in utter contempt. Before finally hurling that porcelain cup, she’d accused me of every imaginable crime save the one that surely had topped them all, those ludicrous trysts with April.

But did this prove that Sandrine had never learned of my affair, or had leaving it out been part of her plan? It was a question I couldn’t get out of my mind, a question that was like a needle in my brain, always pressing deeper, so that finally I grabbed the phone and dialed Morty’s number.

“Morty, I need to know something,” I said tensely.

“Who is this?”

Morty’s voice was full of sleep, which caused me to glance at the kitchen clock. Jesus, it wasn’t even six o’clock.

“Oh, sorry, Morty,” I said apologetically. “I thought it was later. I’ve been up since—”

“What do you want, Sam?”

“Well, like I said, I need to know something,” I told him. “It’s about Sandrine. I need to know if you ever got any hint that she might have known about April.”

“You said you never told her,” Morty reminded me.

“I didn’t,” I said. “But maybe someone else did.”

Morty released a heavy breath, and I could imagine him still in bed, Rachel staring at him quizzically, wondering what in hell was going on, I no longer a harmless egghead but a deranged fruitcake who’d roused her husband from a warm bed, invaded their placid weekend, and imposed upon their private time. In my mind, I saw her shake her head and hiss, Jesus Christ! as she turned back to her pillow.

“I’m sorry, Morty,” I said softly in the wake of that image. “I was just thinking about something, that’s all, and so—”

“Look, Sam,” Morty interrupted, a lawyer no doubt accustomed to clients afflicted with severe mental shifts. “You need to relax. That’s what the weekend is for. You don’t need to be wandering the house at the crack of dawn, okay?”

“Yes,” I muttered and glanced outside to see that in fact the first morning light had just broken. “I’m really sorry, Morty.”

“If you’ve come up with something new to add to the case,” Morty said, “something relevant, I mean, then let’s talk about it on Monday.”

“Okay,” I said, “Okay, Morty. Sorry to wake you. I just . . . anyway . . . my best to Rachel.”

“Sure, Sam. You bet.”

There was another heavy breath, and then I heard the click of the phone as Morty hung up.

It was just a click, but there was finality to it, so that for the first time during my trial I felt completely and irrevocably cut off.

I glanced about the empty kitchen, the empty yard, the empty corridor that led to the empty scriptorium and, beyond it, to my empty bed. But the greater emptiness was the terrible dread I felt at the awful possibility that Sandrine had found out about April, and that it was this and this alone that had fueled her final attack, as it might also have darkly inspired a plot to destroy me, an intrigue about which, as I had to admit, I had scant evidence but which I simply could not entirely dismiss from my mind.

But if Sandrine had learned about the bleak carryings-on at the Shady Arms, how had she learned of them? I felt certain that April had never breathed a word of it to anyone. True, as I’d earlier surmised, Sandrine might have figured it out for herself. But, even so, she would have lacked any real evidence, and would she have so meticulously plotted my destruction based solely on conjecture? I didn’t think so. Sandrine, being Sandrine, would have sought evidence, that is to say, well, witnesses.

If she’d wished to confirm her darkest suspicions, to whom would she have gone? Certainly not April. But, if not April, who?

Ah, yes, I thought as I offered the only answer possible to that question, April’s cuckold husband, Clayton.

It took me several hours to make up my mind, but in the end I decided that I had to know. Morty had previously informed me that April was no longer living with Clayton, though I had no idea whether he’d cast her out or whether she’d hung her head in shame, packed her bags, then left her husband’s elegant old plantation house of her own accord. Either way, it was only Clayton I would have to confront, which seemed to me at that despairing moment the first small blessing in the long train of curses that had showered down upon my life.

The drive to Clayton’s house took me back through town. It was a crisp, clear Saturday morning, and the streets were quite animated, whole families going in and out of Main Street’s quaint shops. I’d rarely ventured downtown during the weekend, primarily for fear of running into someone I knew from the college, thus to be buttonholed into an inane conversation having to do with the fate of this student or that one or whether faculty pensions might be at risk to some Georgia version of Bernard Madoff.

But now, isolated as I was, I found myself quite envious of my fellow Coburnites. They could move among themselves in the easy manner of equal citizens. It would, indeed, be rather pleasant, I thought, to be regarded simply as a man who had not first betrayed then later killed his wife, a teacher, a helpful friend and colleague, a man who, above all else, was quietly and irreducibly . . . kind.

The word had come to me in Sandrine’s voice, and so I felt it as an accusation, and in response to which my foot pressed down on the accelerator and the car bolted forward. Seconds later I was out of Coburn and hurtling at a dangerous speed through the green valley that led to Clayton Blankenship’s picture-postcard antebellum manse.

Clayton, himself, could not have looked more surprised to find me at his door, but rather than a sudden burst of ire his eyes gave off a great weariness, and he seemed to me withered less by what April and I had done to him than by the dirty, cruel, bottom-feeding nature of life itself. It was a look of nearly transcendental disappointment. He’d suffered a blow to the hopeful view of things he’d always maintained, as it were, against the odds, but which he no longer felt with regard to anything. The rug had been jerked from beneath his feet, and below that a trap door had opened, and he seemed, as he stared at me silently, still to be falling through black, starless space.

Facing him, all I could muster was something utterly inadequate to the destruction I’d wrought.

“I’m sorry, Clayton.”

He nodded. “You probably are, Sam,” he said.

“I know it doesn’t matter but—”

He lifted his hand to silence me. “I have a chill. Come in.”

With that Clayton eased back into the foyer and motioned me inside.

I’d never been in Clayton’s house, and upon entering it my initial feeling was that I’d gone through one of time’s secret portals. This was a house from the storied past, the house in which the young Clayton had once laughed and frolicked, himself perhaps a Deep South, Gone with the Wind version of Andy Hardy. It gave off the sort of mustiness that no amount of airing could dissipate because the air itself was seeded with the microscopic accumulation of generations of dead skin. More than anything it looked like a many-roomed coffin, draped with thick folds of curtain, its floors covered with carpets no less thick, its chairs thickly upholstered, and its tables, even the small ones, thick-legged and heavy. How light April must have seemed to the current owner of this ancestral home, how airily she must have floated through its undertow of rooms, and how, in the wake of her leaving, must the weight of everything within them now seem doubled.

“I know this must seem very strange to you, Clayton,” I began once we’d taken our seats in what surely had to be called—and with a straight face—the parlor.

Clayton fingered the doilies draped over the arms of his chair. “I assume you have a reason,” he said in a voice that was so gentle, so devoid of acrimony, that I found myself wondering why in the name of heaven April would have endangered her life with a man like Clayton in order to waste a moment in time with me.

“A selfish one, I’m afraid,” I admitted. “A very selfish one, given the circumstances.” I glanced about. There were potted plants everywhere, and in the far corner a large birdcage held two yellow and one light blue parakeets. The leaves of the plants glistened with health and the birds hopped quite happily about. In the midst of his devastation, I thought, Clayton has watered his plants and fed his birds and carried out every duty upon which some other creature’s well-being depends.

“I’m embarrassed to be here,” I told him. “I’m humiliated, actually. But there’s something I need to know, and I have to ask you about it.”

Clayton leaned forward and massaged the ache out of a bony knee.

“It’s about . . . what happened,” I continued cautiously, “between April and me.”

Clayton eased back and the chair itself seemed to wrap its ancient arms protectively around him. It was as if he had cared for it down through the years, resisted every impulse to toss it out because it had grown old or gotten worn, lost its attractiveness, and now, in his time of need, it was repaying him for his long loyalty.

“What I need to know, Clayton,” I said, “is whether Sandrine might have found out about . . .” I stopped because I couldn’t bear any of the words that came to me. Instead I started again. “I know that April would never have said anything but, well, I was wondering if maybe you found out about it by some other means, some other person and then—believe me, I would understand it—if maybe you told Sandrine.”

Clayton shook his head. “I would never have done that,” he said. “I liked Sandrine very much. And I respected her. She was a wonderful teacher.” He shrugged, and one of his hands moved over to comfort the other. “But as far as . . . this other matter . . . I didn’t know about it until later.”

“Later?”

“The later revelations,” Clayton said in the gently euphemistic way his great-grandfather might have called the Civil War the “late unpleasantness.” “In the newspaper.” He shrugged. “Even so, I didn’t want April to leave,” he added, “but she wouldn’t hear of staying. She wouldn’t take a penny either.”

“Where is she?”

“Not far, I don’t imagine,” Clayton answered. “She still has her day in court, after all.”

With that quite practical remark I once again recalled the moment I’d said her name to Detective Alabrandi, then later when I’d seen it inscribed on Mr. Singleton’s witness list.

“I do wish she would have stayed,” Clayton said. “I could have borne the shame more easily than I can bear the loneliness.”

Watching him, I found that I could not actually fathom his pain. I could not sound the anguished depths into which April and I had so recklessly sunk his life, and it struck me that this, and this alone, should precede all other calculations, that it should be solely by this grave measure that we choose to do or not to do certain things.

He took a quick breath. “But as to your question, I should emphasize that no, I never told your wife anything because I never knew anything about you and April.” He leaned forward and stared at me with great seriousness and sincerety. “But even if I had, I would have kept it to myself, Sam.” His smile was as ragged as the flag of some lost cause. “I wouldn’t even have told April.”

“I believe you,” I told him quietly, and since I’d come only to ask this one question, and now had received his answer, I rose slowly, as one in whom a deep weariness had abruptly settled, and stood before him like a disgraced knight before a noble king. “I’m sorry for disturbing you.” I drew in a long breath. “I’m sorry for everything, Clayton.”

With some difficulty, Clayton got to his feet, rising with so much difficulty, in fact, that I had to suppress the urge to take his arm. April had almost certainly performed this deeply human service, but she was gone now, no doubt eventually to be replaced by a hireling, a man or woman paid to lift him from his chair but who, as he weakened, would be called upon to carry out increasingly more difficult and noisome services, and who would perform all of them well and dutifully, offering him everything he would need at the end of life save love.

He escorted me to the door, then opened it.

A cold breeze swept in and I suddenly feared for the state of Clayton Blankenship’s health, the irony of course being that only some years before, when April and I had had our first encounter at the Shady Arms, I’d cared nothing for the state of his soul.

“Again, Clayton,” I told him, “I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”

Clayton nodded but said nothing.

I started through the door, then stopped and turned back to him. “I have to tell you that I appreciate your kindness. Given the circumstances, I mean.”

Clayton’s smile appeared to require the last of his physical strength. “My grandfather would have shot you with one of the dueling pistols I still have,” he said. Then, like a man who thought another piece of evidence was required to justify what he’d just said, he added, “But I fear I lack the courage required to defend my honor.”

I started to apologize again, a gesture Clayton saw and against which, almost as a way of holding himself in check, he softly closed the door.

Sunday. Tomorrow. All Day.

On the way back home from meeting with Clayton, I turned onto Guardian Lane, in an area of Coburn known simply as the Commons. It wasn’t by any means a perfect neighborhood, but the simplicity of its homes and yards and streets had appealed to Sandrine. I’d thought it too neat and orderly, however, its homes too evenly disbursed. I’d been young and full of resistance to the regulated, cookie-cutter look of the Commons, how carefully laid out it was. But now it did not strike me as so unappealing. There was a sense of proportion here, I thought, a sense of order, of rules that actually worked. Not perfectly, of course, but to some extent, rules agreed upon and which offered, however flawed in other ways they might be, some vague resistance to the chaotic sprawl into which my own life had descended, mine a desperation far from Thoreau’s stoical Concord neighbors, one that had, in the end, become very noisy indeed.

By the time I reached 237 Crescent Road I’d come to feel that my decision to drop in on Clayton Blankenship had been a foolish one, but yet typical of the foolishness into which I’d often fallen since Sandrine’s death. I had said foolish things at the beginning of the investigation. I’d assumed a cold perhaps even haughty demeanor from my encounter with Officer Hill onward, thus behaving in a way that had prejudiced just about everyone against me. I had needed correction but the only one who might have provided some corrective word of wisdom was Sandrine, and, as Alexandria had earlier put it with such heartbreaking simplicity, she was gone.

Even so, once back in the house, seated at the kitchen table, yet another cup of coffee growing cold in front of me, I tried to imagine what Sandrine, if she were still alive, would say to me in the present circumstances. Would it be some version of a cruel “I told you so”? Or would she relent, take pity, give me helpful counsel, be more even than a wife, be my best friend? Would she lean forward, take my hand, and say, “All right, Sam. Listen to me now. Because I know a way out of hell.”

But what way was there now?

I was still pondering the question the next day when Alexandria returned from Atlanta just as night was falling. Our unpleasant exchange at the courthouse was now a couple of days behind us, and as she chatted dryly about the few things she’d gotten done in Atlanta, mailing manuscripts or dashing off something for sleeplesseye.com, I saw that she did not intend to revisit the dark pit of her own fearful suspicion that Morty and I—two men—were cooking up a plot against her dead mother.

She’d brought fresh flowers and as I watched her arrange them in a vase, her fingers delicately moving this leaf or that petal to just the right position, I recalled that, as a little girl, she’d once expressed an interest in being a florist, a sensible career choice for which I’d offered not a particle of encouragement.

Why had I done that, I wondered now. Had I read, studied, and taught the great authors, the world’s great heads, only to lose respect for the work of human hands, lose it despite the beauty and usefulness of the things they made? As a young man, traveling with Sandrine, I’d stood in grateful awe at what those hands had wrought in stone and iron and stained glass. But slowly, over the years, all that had dropped away and left this harder and more intolerant man. Reading books had made the writing of them all that mattered, and because of that I’d given no support to what might have been a perfectly suitable life’s work for Alexandria. Was it in order to return her daughter to that earlier more tender ambition that Sandrine had called her “Ali”?

Suddenly Sandrine’s voice was in my ear, so close I could almost feel her lips. Albi, she had said, would be the moment she would forever remember. Not Venice where we’d drifted beneath the Bridge of Sighs, or anything we’d done in Paris or Athens or anywhere else on our one great tour. No, Sandrine had said, it would be Albi, where she’d turned to me and said in a tone of sweet surprise, “It’s you.”

Had this same woman later come to hate and despise me with such consuming passion that in her final days she might well have plotted my destruction?

In silence, as Alexandria completed the perfection of her flowers, I reconsidered all this. Live or die, the poet Anne Sexton had once said, but for God’s sake don’t poison everything. Then, on the hard edge of that uncompromising declaration, she had put on her mother’s fur coat, removed all her jewelry, poured herself a glass of vodka, walked into the garage, and turned on the engine of her car. Perhaps I should do the same, I thought. Perhaps I should accept what I now considered the jury’s inevitable verdict and carry out its sentence, thus saving the good people of Coburn any further penalty for the crime of once having welcomed me into their midst.

“There,” Alexandria said. She stepped back from her arrangement. “What do you think, Dad?”

“Perfect,” I said softly

She scowled, “Yeah, right,” she said.

I turned away, as if rebuked, glanced toward the window, and saw Edith Whittier as she made her way to her car.

“Edith will probably be at the courthouse early tomorrow,” I said dryly. “Eager to drive in another nail.”

Alexandria shrugged. “She couldn’t have much to say,” she said, “She hardly knew you and Mom.”

She’d lived next door to us for almost fifteen years, a divorced woman, childless, and probably friendless. She’d retired from the public school system some years before, and after that she’d spent her time beautifying her house. At Christmas the outside of 235 Crescent Road was a carnival of light, and according to Carl, who always walked his son over to see the display, the interior was much the same, with a huge tree weighted down with shiny ornaments. There were various-sized sleighs, as well, all of them filled with brightly wrapped gift boxes and overseen by a multitude of cheerful elves and chuckling Santas. According to Carl, there’d not been a single doorknob that wasn’t sheathed in a knitted reindeer head, and everywhere, everywhere this lonely childless woman had put out bowls of candy and cookies and other assorted treats.

Alexandria was right. She’d hardly known Sandrine and me. So how very odd, it seemed to me, that it was Edith Whittier, of all people, who might well have heard the crash of that little cup, heard Sandrine’s accusatory cry, she alone whose ears had taken in the violence of that night, and who, as tomorrow’s first witness at my trial, was scheduled to tell the world exactly what she’d heard.

The curious thing was that after my talk with Clayton I no longer seemed to care what might be said of me in court, no matter how distorted the evidence might be. His moral weight had fallen upon me like a hammer, and I was now like a turtle whose shell had cracked, its moist pink innards exposed to the blazing light and blistering heat.

“There was a fight, Alexandria,” I said suddenly. “Between your mother and me.”

“When?”

“You’d gone into town,” I told her.

“So it was that last night?”

“Yes,” I answered. “And it was loud enough that Edith might have heard it.”

“So you were screaming?”

“Your mother was . . . loud,” I said. “And she threw a cup at me.”

Alexandria stared at me in disbelief.

Because I simply had to know, I asked, “Your mother never told you about any of this?”

Alexandria shook her head. “Was it about April?” she asked.

“No.”

“What was it about, then?”

“Me,” I answered, which, though inadequate, was true.

I had never revealed the actual nature of Sandrine’s last, furious assault, how unprecedented it had been, an attack so furious, her accusations hurled at me with such fierce resolve to wound me, that I’d finally fired back with the darkest and most cruel thing I could possible have said.

“It came out of nowhere,” I added. “I mean, she’d been more or less ignoring me for weeks. She didn’t want to talk to me, she didn’t want me to interrupt her reading, her ‘streaming.’ I had gotten used to that, but nothing could have prepared me for the way she was that night.”

Sandrine had often mentioned the Spartan commander who, when told that the Athenians had so many arrows that when released they would darken the sky, had starkly replied, “Then we will fight in the shade.” I had wanted to be like him that night, simply take blow after blow, as it were, stoically, bravely, even nobly, and say nothing. But I had failed even at that.

“It was the cup that did it,” I said. “The way she’d thrown that cup and called me a sociopath.”

I could see the word sink into Alexandria’s mind, though I couldn’t tell whether she believed it accurate, her opinion of me as dark and unforgiving as her mother’s on the night she died.

One thing was clear, however. Sandrine had told her nothing of this battle, a fact that, as I realized suddenly, had oddly urged me to confess it.

“I was going out the door and she called me by that name,” I added. “Even then, I didn’t turn back. That’s when she threw that cup.”

Alexandria’s gaze darkened. “What did you do, Dad?”

“I stopped and turned around,” I answered. “She was in bed, almost in the dark, with nothing but that candle burning.”

Alexandria could see that I was stalling, and so she said again, “What did you do?”

“Nothing,” I answered. “I didn’t say or do anything. It was something I thought, something I wanted.”

“What?”

“As I left the room,” I stalled. “Something I wanted.”

“What, Dad?”

I stared bleakly into my daughter’s eyes. “For your mother to be dead when I got back.”

For a moment, Alexandria stared at me in stunned silence. Then quite slowly, and deliberately, she came to her conclusion.

“Mom was right,” she said. “You are a sociopath.”

I nodded. “Yes,” I confessed, “I suppose I am.”

On that grave admission, I saw that little white cup shatter into a thousand pieces, heard at full volume Sandrine’s gravest of all accusations.

Alexandria’s gaze was as stern as her question. “What are you willing to do now, Dad, in order to save yourself?”

In answer I could only shrug, because at that moment I hadn’t truly known.