The knot in his chest had been growing tighter and larger as the conversation progressed and he sensed that they were leading up to some final unpleasant and distressing revelation. But-even though Marie’s behavior during the last few months of her life had become so increasingly suspicious, and her excuses more flimsily concocted, that he could no longer ignore the probability-he was still unprepared for the confrontation with the incontestable fact of her infidelity.
Frustrated by her continuing reluctance to resume a normal sex life with him following Cassandra’s birth, he had grown weary of her rejections and had eventually lost all interest in her as a woman. Thus, when she first began her mysterious comings and goings, it never occurred to him that someone else had found her desirable, and had been able to inspire a response from her. It was only in the last few weeks, when her actions had become even more brazen, and her explanations even more evasive-almost as if she were inviting his suspicions-that he had seriously begun to consider the possibility of her having an affair. But, unwilling to know the ego-shattering truth, he had delayed doing anything to try to confirm it. Now, it had been confirmed for him-only, instead of the anger and bitterness that such knowledge should have evoked in him, he felt only a profound regret for the wasted years of their life together. The words of her dying apology came back to him again and he wondered now if her sorrow had been motivated by the same reason as his, or by her own deception.
But, it was no longer important-if it ever had been-because, in the end, there was nothing for her to be sorry for. She had danced to the beat of her own drummer, to a tune whose unintelligible lyrics and discordant melody had been beyond his comprehension. Perhaps, if he had listened more closely-or cared more deeply-he might have been able to synchronize his step to the staccato rhythm of her life. But, he had not, and he could not, because he had his own drummer to follow. And, besides-he could hardly condemn her for something that-in desire, if not in deed-he had been guilty of himself, with Elise.
Dan and Hollander had waited, silently, until the shock wore off. “It’s all right,” he told them. “I had suspected something of the sort for some time. Still, it is a bit of a blow to find out it was true.” He went on to describe, briefly, her unaccountable-and unaccounted for-behavior that had aroused his suspicions. “Unfortunately, I never got the slightest clue as to who the man was.”
“Ah, Mark! I hated for us to have to tell you, lad,” Dan said compassionately, a hint of the Irish brogue lending added meaning to his words. “I liked Marie. She was an unhappy girl and it made me glad to be able to get a laugh out of her now and then. We all have our own demons drivin’ and whippin’ us along through life, but most of us are able to keep them from gettin’ completely out of control. I guess hers just got to be more than she could handle.”
“You’re probably right, Dan,” he agreed, “although, whoever she was with for those two days was undoubtedly more in the human category.”
Hollander leaned forward. “Has any of your wife’s things-clothes or other personal effects-been disposed of as yet?”
“Not that I’m aware of. Why? Do you want to go through them?”
“Yes. If you have no objection,” Hollander responded. “We’ve already examined the clothes she was wearing and her car, but didn’t find anything helpful in either.”
He stood up and started toward the hall to the bedrooms, with Dan and Hollander following. “Marie occupied a separate bedroom so, except for some clothes stored in the basement, all her things will be there,” he explained. “I’ll check with Mrs. Hardesty to see if anything’s been removed.”
Mrs. Hardesty assured them that, except for dusting the furniture, nothing had been disturbed in Marie’s room since the day she left. Since fingerprints were not what Hollander was looking for, he seemed satisfied with her answer.
They proceeded down the hall to Marie’s room and, as he opened the door and entered, he felt slightly like an intruder as he recalled how seldom he had been inside after she began using it. Her perfume and body aroma still lingered in the air and, for a flickering moment, he remembered the last time they had made love-here, in this room-almost two years previously.
They had been to a pre-Christmas party at Dan’s house-a rare occasion for both of them, even in those days. And, even rarer because they both had enjoyed themselves and had driven home-with her sitting close beside him-laughing, again, at the jokes they had heard, and singing snatches of the old songs that had rung throughout the big, rambling Tobin house. When they had arrived home though, they had fallen self-consciously silent as they each had gone to their own room to undress. Just as he had been about to get into bed, he had heard her call him softly and, going to the door of her darkened room, had stood in the opening and saw her sprawled, naked, on the bed in a shaft of bright, pale, winter moonlight. She had raised her arms to him invitingly, and he had gladly and eagerly accepted her invitation.
He remembered the urgent demands of her body and how she had moaned over and over in his ear-”Love me! Love me! Oh, love me, Mark!”-until she had exhausted them both. She had fallen asleep in his arms and-for the first, and last time-he had slept in the room with her. But, in the morning, he had awakened to find her already out of bed and; when he went to find her-curled up on the sofa in the living room; his hopes had turned to ashes when he saw the fear and regret in her eyes, and she turned her face away from his kiss.
“Go right ahead,” he told Hollander. “You have my permission to search everything in the room.”
“Thanks. But, before I begin, do you know if your wife had any special place for keeping personal things, like letters or mementoes?”
“No-and I rather doubt that she did,” he replied. “Marie was not the sentimental type.”
Hollander nodded and, without further ado, began a very thorough and methodical search of the furniture and Marie’s belongings. It was a large bedroom; as were all the rooms in the house; and, in addition to the full-size bed in the middle, contained two, long, low dressers on opposite walls; a dressing table to the right of the doorway; a large cedar chest at the foot of the bed; a chaise lounge in one corner and a small, ornate writing table and a matching chair in the other. An arched opening to the left, with mirrored, paneled, sliding closet doors on either side, led to a separate bath.
Hollander began with the bathroom and worked his way back through the closets to the bedroom furniture. He searched quickly and efficiently, leaving everything he touched exactly as he found it. If he was not watching him, he would never have known he had been in the room.
Turning his attention to the dressing table, he picked up a purse that stood on top and slowly turned it over in his hand. “Is this the purse your wife was carrying when she came home?”
He tried to picture her again, standing in the open doorway. “I don’t think she was carrying a purse,” he replied, and then remembered. “Wait a minute, though. It must be. My mother told me afterwards that when she put Marie’s car in the garage, she had found her purse on the front seat and put it in her room.”
Hollander carried the purse over to the bed and upending it, spilled the contents onto the spread. There was the usual, and expected feminine paraphernalia, in addition to her wallet, a ball-point pen, a half-empty pack of her cigarettes and a book of matches from ‘The Sanctuary.’ Hollander separated the individual articles and picked up the wallet. Opening it, he extracted and counted twenty-seven dollars in bills and sixty-three cents in change. Replacing the money, he leafed through the plastic holders containing her driver’s license, credit cards, and photographs of himself (he was mildly surprised that she had still carried one), Cassandra, and Julie Fay and family. Finding nothing of interest, he dropped it back on the bed and moved the other items around curiously before settling on the book of matches. Picking it up, he examined the embossed, gold printing on both sides and opened it to read the advertising on the inside of the cover. It was the type that contained thirty instead of the usual twenty matches, and was about a third empty.
Hollander reclosed it. “Did your wife go here often?” he asked.
“We both did. Separately and together,” he told him. “I wouldn’t attach too much significance to those being in her purse. There’s usually a number of them scattered around the house.”
“Still, it’s worth checking,” he replied, slipping the matchbook in his pocket.
He picked up the rest of the articles and put them back in the purse, and put the purse back on top of the dressing table-in almost the exact position it had been in before attracting his interest. Then, sitting down on the small, backless bench before the table, he began going through the drawers on either side of the knee-space. In the back of the right-hand bottom drawer behind a miscellany of small jars and bottles, he unearthed a cardboard box that once had contained writing paper but was now crammed full with what seemed like every card, note, letter or scrap of paper that he had ever signed his name to for her-plus ticket stubs, programs and invitations for every performance or event that they had ever attended together. He was dumbfounded by the discovery-and chagrin, as both Dan and Hollander looked at him, remembering his off-hand remark about Marie not being the “sentimental type.”
“I guess I was wrong,” he admitted.
“Do you think there might be anything in here that you would rather I didn’t see?” Hollander queried.
“I doubt it. Besides-what difference would it make now? Go ahead.”
While Hollander examined the contents of the box, he and Dan desultorily discussed a few business matters that had been left pending-or neglected-by his distraction with the activities of the hijacking gang and his subsequent unavailability. After a few minutes of fruitless searching among Marie’s treasured reminders of their past, Hollander replaced the box in the drawer and turned on the bench to face them. He looked around the room and seemed on the verge of giving up when his eyes located the small writing table in the corner. Rising, he walked over and sat down on the small chair in front of it. It had only one drawer and, when he opened it, the contents nearly spilled over onto the floor.
Aware of the tangled heap of bank statements, canceled checks and old records that it contained, he stood up and looked over Hollander’s shoulder.
“That’s Marie’s filing system,” he told him. “I’m afraid bookkeeping wasn’t one of her strong suits.”
Hollander picked out the checkbook which was half buried in the jumbled mass of paper. “Any objection to my examining this, and the rest of it?”
“No. But, I don’t think you’re going to be able to make much sense out of it.”
Hollander raised a questioning eyebrow and began leafing through the checkbook ledger. After a few moments a puzzled frown creased his high forehead and he reached into the drawer to take out a sheaf of canceled checks, still banded together by the paper wrapper in which they had been mailed by the bank. He removed the band, sorted them into numerical order and began trying to match them with the entries in the ledger. He soon gave up and leaned back with a hopeless shrug.
“I see what you mean,” he said. “Almost all her checks are made out to cash, and the check ledger only contains vague references to indicate what she used the cash for-and no dates or check numbers.”
“I know. That’s why I opened a separate account for her a few months after we were married. I usually deposited five hundred a month in it for her personal use, and paid all the household expenses out of my own account. Periodically, I’ve tried to balance hers for her so she would know how much she had, but, in between-as you can see-she never even recorded the deposits or brought the balance forward. I have an arrangement with the bank that whenever she was overdrawn, they charged it to my account. But, it didn’t happen more than once or twice.”
“But, why always cash? Didn’t she ever write a check or use her credit cards for any of her purchases?”
“Only if it wasn’t convenient for her to get to the bank first. Marie had a fixation about paying for everything as soon as she bought it, and she had a dislike about being asked for identification whenever she did pay by check. So, whenever she wanted to go shopping she would cash a check first for whatever amount she planned to spend. However, the amount she spent usually didn’t coincide with the amount of the check she cashed. If she spent less, she put what was left over in her purse. If it was more, she used her credit card to charge the difference, or wrote a separate check for it. That’s why the amounts recorded in the ledger are only an approximation of what she spent-and, of course, she never indicated where she spent it.”
Hollander extracted and thumbed through a couple of other banded bundles of checks. Shaking his head hopelessly, he held out the checkbook.
“Can you identify any of the more recent purchases that she has listed?”
Taking the checkbook from his outstretched hand, he read backward from the last scribbled entry of “shoes and purse” accompanied by an entry for “75-” in the amount column. This was preceded; in Marie’s usual cryptic style; by earlier entries for such things as “dresses”, “cosmetics”, “coat”, “underwear’’, with accompanying entries ranging from twenty to one hundred and fifty dollars. He hesitated over an entry for “ring” followed by a figure of “350-”, and stopped when he came to one for “M’s jacket, with a figure of “125-” in the amount column.
Handing the checkbook back to Hollander, he pointed it out to him. “That’s the only one I can be sure of. She gave me a sports jacket for my birthday, in August.”
Despite their estrangement, Marie had never failed to observe his birthday, or their anniversary, or any of the other gift-giving occasions throughout the year. And; as if to atone for denying him-and Cassandra-her love and affection, she invariably presented them with expensive, carefully selected and beautifully wrapped gifts, which she delighted in watching them open and admire-but, for which she would accept none but the briefest display of appreciation in return.
“What about the one for three hundred and fifty dollars for a ring?” Hollander asked.
“I don’t know what that would be. She never mentioned buying a ring for herself-or anybody else-and the only ones she ever wore were her wedding and engagement rings. I don’t wear any myself,” he added, holding out his hands for inspection.
“Where did your wife keep her jewelry?” He looked around the room as if suddenly aware of not having found any during his search.
“Except for the rings, she didn’t have any. She had an aversion to jewelry-even the authentic kind. She always said she didn’t think people should decorate themselves like Christmas trees.”
It had been a strange aberration for a young, pretty woman which he had failed to notice before they were married, and only discovered a few months later when he bought her a diamond-studded wristwatch for her birthday. When he had observed that she did not wear it, she had told him of her dislike and he had taken it back and exchanged it for a mink stole-which she had cherished, and which still hung in her closet.
Hollander searched among the stacks of checks and found one dated September fifteenth in the amount of three hundred and fifty dollars, made out to cash.
“Well, at least it matches the amount in the book,” he commented dryly. “Do you mind if I take it with me? It may be some help in finding out who she bought the ring for.”
“By all means. Take it, or any others if you think it will help. I’d like to know myself.”
Hollander nodded and pocketed the check. It was apparent that he was finished now and the three of them left the room. He closed the door to her room, wondering what the devil he should do with her clothes and other things. He had no intention of preserving the room and its contents as a shrine. Aside from the hypocrisy of it, it would only serve as a painful reminder to Cassandra, even for the few remaining weeks-until he and Elise were married and they moved to the Closter house-that she would still be living there. He would have to ask Grace’s advice about the best way to dispose of all of it.
He followed Dan and Hollander back down the hall. The FBI man paused only long enough to shake hands and thank him for his cooperation. His face and voice was impassive as he said it-except for a faint ironic glint in his eyes. As Hollander walked down the path to his car, he grasped Dan’s arm to hold him back.
“If you and Maureen are not doing anything tomorrow evening, maybe you’d like to come out here for dinner. There’s someone I want you to meet.”
Dan looked at him questioningly-but saw that he was not going to get any more information at that moment. But it did not deter him from accepting the invitation.
“Sure, Mark. We’ll be glad to.”
They agreed on seven o’clock the next evening and, with a final pat on his arm, Dan turned and followed Hollander out to the car. He waited in the doorway until they had backed out of the driveway and disappeared beyond the first curve, before closing the door and returning to the living room. Sitting back down in the chair he had occupied when they arrived, he picked up the book and turned to the first chapter. But, it was not until after he had read the opening paragraph three times that the image of Marie in the arms of another, faceless, nameless man finally faded from his mind and he was able to focus his eyes, and his attention on the words before him.