TWENTY

It was only nine-fifteen when I got there. But when Joanne Mooring answered the door I knew it didn’t matter.

Leaning on the doorframe, she was half-drunk already. For a moment we shared a kind of recognition. Perhaps I looked as bad as she did. “Yes?” she said thickly.

“I’m Adam Shaw. Remember me?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Her voice, tinged with empty gaiety, seemed dragged up from the floor. “You’re welcome, anyhow.”

I followed her inside. She motioned me carelessly toward the kitchen. It was done in instant French country, with new copper pans hanging on the near brick wall next to some butcher knives and assorted utensils that I guessed had never been used. She sat behind a butcher-block counter with an ashtray and the same blender full of daiquiris, patting the barstool next to hers. “Sit,” she commanded.

I sat, surveying the damage. With the blue beneath her eyes not quite purple, the veins of her nose not quite burst, she was a wreck-in-process, not quite finished. She tapped some ash off a cigarette that lay burning in the ashtray—the ladylike gesture of some thinner, more fastidious person trapped within the sagging body—and peered at me. “Want a drink?”

I nodded reluctantly. “Sure.”

She pointed toward the cupboard. I took the smallest tumbler and half filled it, sitting back down beside her. She watched my drink until I took a sip. It tasted sick-sweet. Her smile was bemused, as if summoned by distant laughter. “I’ve always hated the taste,” she said. “You hate it too, don’t you?”

“When it makes me feel like less.”

She nodded solemnly. “You mean the waves. You have to keep drinking ’til the tide comes back in.”

“It always goes back out though, doesn’t it.”

“Yes, dammit.” She stared at the blender. “Why did you come?”

“To talk.”

“What’s there to talk about?”

I turned to her. “You.”

The smile she managed seemed stolen from time, the almost flirtatious smile of a pretty girl with a present behind her back. Thirty years ago the smoke of early womanhood would have shown in her hazel eyes, and the delicate nose and chin would have made her pretty. But now harsh sunlight through the window exposed bleached hair and the puffiness of drink, and her smile was the last relic of a widowed sexuality, sad as a stained-glass window in a slum. “More daiquiris?” she asked.

“Sure. I was wondering why you drink so much alone.”

“Or drink so much, period.” She filled my glass. “It’s not by choice.”

I raised my drink. I would have hated myself even without the hangover. “What were we talking about?” she asked.

“Your husband.”

Her smile faded. “It wasn’t always like this. Not at the start.”

“Then you’ve been married a long time.”

She nodded. “Twenty-nine years—thirty next June thirteenth. We were both eighteen and ran away just out of high school. I put him through school at Alabama.” She looked joylessly around their overdone kitchen. “It’s funny. The hardest times are the best. He was so straight and serious and handsome then, and we were together.”

“That’s too bad—that it changed, I mean.”

“He changed.”

I tried for a note of mystified empathy. “Why’d that happen, I wonder.”

Her mouth made a scornful O. “What’s your name?”

“Adam. Adam Shaw.”

“Well, Adam, talk about something else.” She smiled out of some vagrant mood, running both hands along the ruined line of her hips. “I’m out of cigarettes,” she said, a pretty girl again, prettily annoyed at her own foolishness.

I offered her one. She placed it carefully between her lips, bending her head toward mine for a light. When I lit it, her head stayed close. “You’re a nice man, Adam Shaw.”

“You’re an easy woman to be nice to.”

“But not a lady.”

“Of course you are.”

She shook her head. “Not enough of one.”

It was as though we were continuing a conversation she had begun with someone else. I took a chance. “I think I know what the problem was.”

“What?” She clasped my hand. “What was it?”

“Lydia Cantwell.”

Blood splotched her cheeks. “But why?”

“I’m not sure, Joanne.”

“Just the goddamned way she walked? That she could have babies?”

She was almost screeching. I shook my head in feigned bewilderment. “I don’t know. It was Lydia, though, wasn’t it?”

Her cigarette burned forgotten in the hand she waved at her cold, sparkling kitchen. “Hell, it was always her—for the twenty-eight years Dalton’s been with her goddamned company. Poor Dalton, he’s been waiting and waiting all these years, hanging on with me for appearance’s sake until Lydia Cantwell made up her mind.”

“How did you find out?”

“He made it too damned obvious,” she said scornfully. “It was only later he got sophisticated. The second year he was there they put him on one of her charity things. He was so excited: her the biggest stockholder, he said, and him almost an office boy. He started coming home each night full of Mrs. Cantwell this and Mrs. Cantwell that: how pretty she was, how poised. I only half listened; I’d lost the baby and wasn’t all there. All I knew was he was working harder. Then one night at dinner he called her Lydia. I started listening closer. The next night it was Mrs. Cantwell. Then, just like that, he stopped. Never said her name again. That was when I knew.”

“Knew what?”

She smiled bitterly. “Why it was so boring for him to touch me. And why he spent nights listening to those speech records so he could talk better.”

“Was he seeing her back then?”

“I don’t know how you could think about someone so much and not be with them. And he volunteered for every symphony thing she did.”

“Then why did you stay with him?”

“He was the boy I loved,” she said simply. “The smartest boy in Clio, Alabama, and he was mine. We were going to do everything together.” Her hand tightened. “Am I boring to you, Adam?”

She caught me thinking ahead to the next question. “Of course not.”

I said it hollow and too late. Her hand loosened. She squinted up at me and then recognition came into her face. I could almost read its stages: who I was; why she had lunged at me that night on the porch; why I was here.

“Joanne—”

“I know you.” She stood, backing away. Her festering smile was no smile at all. “You don’t want me. You poor stupid bastard, you think Dalton killed Lydia Cantwell.”

“Didn’t he?” I managed.

“Oh, my God.” She laughed shrilly. “And you’re Henry Cantwell’s lawyer. Dalton didn’t kill his precious Lydia. He just did everything else.”

“What does that mean?”

Her eyes lit. “I was there—the same night he killed her.”

I tried to show nothing. “The black man?”

“No.” Her smile was unpleasant. “Your precious client, Adam Shaw. Henry Cantwell.”

I felt a chill. “How can you know that?”

She stopped to pour a daiquiri, stretching it out. She had all my attention now. “I followed him—Dalton. He thought I was asleep. But I knew who he was running to. I could see him dressing in the bathroom, smiling a little to himself in the mirror. He thinks I can’t do things by myself, but I dressed and waited until he drove out of the garage. Then I followed him. To her house.”

“Mrs. Cantwell’s?”

“Lydia’s,” she corrected. “Precious Lydia. I parked down by the road where they couldn’t see me, trying to pull myself together in the dark. Ever since he’d met her he’d stopped wanting me and still I’d waited all those years, hoping he’d change, decorating each room so he would like coming home; and now here he was, with her. I thought of them inside and me alone in the goddamned car he gave me instead of himself. And then I decided to take every rotten minute of every rotten year and cram them down her fucking throat.”

“By killing her.”

“Don’t you wish. No, I sat and waited, like always. I don’t know how long I was in the car, thinking about it. I sat too long. How will I look to her, I thought. She’ll laugh at me and Dalton will turn away. I didn’t want him to see us together, her like she was and me … I was sitting there crying when Dalton’s Cadillac came back down the driveway and left”

“Then it was Dalton.”

“Wrong.” She was gleeful now. “Lydia Cantwell was still alive.”

“Because that’s Dalton’s story?”

“No.” She was circling now around the counter where I sat, waving the drink and cigarette butt and talking with the stagy intensity of an actress at her moment of triumph. “Because I heard her voice.”

“You heard her,” I repeated. “Through a quarter mile of pine trees and a closed door.”

“The door was open.” She spoke clearly now, as if anger and excitement had made her sober. “When Dalton left I decided to face her. I got out of the car and began to walk up the drive. There was almost no moon. I had to feel my way by the dogwood trees. Once a branch snapped in my face and I nearly fell. The drive was so steep I started panting. But I kept on and when I got closer the light from her living room helped me see a little. I wanted her. I wanted to spoil her face.”

I had stopped doing anything but listen. “I was almost to the top,” she continued. “There was a noise. Headlights came toward me from the bottom of the drive. I jumped back. My shoe caught on the edge of the drive and I fell backwards over the hedge and landed on my face behind it.

“When the car passed I stayed pressed down in the grass and brush where he couldn’t see me. I could smell the dirt under my face but I didn’t move. A car door slammed and I heard footsteps on the walk. Then they stopped. The front door opened. From inside comes a voice: Lydia Cantwell, society and very cool. ‘I wasn’t expecting you,’ she said. And then the door shut behind them.

“I peeked out over the hedge. There was no one on the porch. The car was in front of the garage. But I could see it. It was a black Mercedes—Henry Cantwell’s car.”

I lit a cigarette, trying to collect my thoughts. “But you never saw this person. For all you know it could have been a woman.”

“I saw the car. It was Henry Cantwell.”

“Sure it was. You could tell because he rang the doorbell of his own house. He wanted to make things hard on himself.”

“I didn’t say he rang. I said the door opened.”

“Then why did you hear Lydia’s voice?”

“She was still up. Dalton had just left.”

“How long before? Fifteen minutes? Twenty? Two hours? Maybe you fell asleep in the car. Maybe you’d been drinking.”

“He suffered,” she said stubbornly. “Like me. So he killed her.”

“Of course he did. After deciding not to park in his own garage. I’ll tell you what makes better sense. Your husband had an affair with Lydia Cantwell. Six days ago tonight, with Henry gone, he went to her house. They fought. Maybe he wanted a divorce and she didn’t. It doesn’t matter. He lost control: I’ve nearly seen that twice. By the time he got a grip on himself he was alone in the house with a dead woman. So he mutilated her picture, wiped his prints off everything he could think of, and left her there, the victim of a psychotic killer.

“You followed him, and saw him leave. Perhaps you saw the murder. Maybe you heard about it later. But you had him back now. Because if he ever leaves you, you’ll tell the police he killed Lydia Cantwell. And that’s exactly what you’ve told him, isn’t it?”

“No.” Her face twisted in horror—at me, or at herself. “It’s not like that.”

I rose and walked toward her. “Then it’s like this. You killed her.”

She backed away, shaking her head with a child’s vehemence. “No. That’s not true.”

“Isn’t it? Maybe when he left, you crept up the driveway, just as you’ve said. Every step in the dark you’re thinking about how you lost the baby and how through all the years since, he’s wanted her. How you put him through school so he could shuck you for a woman who made you shrink, a woman he wanted like he wanted to be powerful, and someone else. All that churned inside you. By the time you made it to the house, you wanted to kill her. And Henry Cantwell wasn’t there to stop you.”

“He was,” she insisted.

“No. It was Lydia who answered. She was surprised, but she let you in—she’d do that. You were filled with crazy energy, like now. You quarreled over Dalton. Probably you pushed her to the floor and began banging her head. Maybe she just fell that way. But then you strangled her until the tongue came from between her lips. And when that wasn’t enough you took her picture and made it ugly.”

“You fucking bastard.” She stumbled back against the brick wall, knocking the carving knife to the floor. She picked it up, staring at it for an instant. Then she began waving it wildly in front of her. “Don’t come any closer,” she warned.

I circled until the counter was between us. “Get hold,” I urged. “Think.”

She looked puzzledly down at the knife. I edged toward her. She glanced up, starting. In one frenzied motion she reached for the blender and flung it at me. I jumped sideways, feet tangling in the barstool as the blender flew past me and shattered against the sink. I fell, palms open to catch myself. She rushed forward and lunged at my face with the knife. With one hand I flailed at her arm. There was slicing pain as flesh tore beneath my eye. I fell on my side, arms raised in front of me. She stood with her mouth open. The knife she held had blood on it. Without looking she dropped it clattering to the floor and ran.

I staggered up and ran after her, warm blood down my face and neck. There were footsteps in the greenhouse. The door at its rear was open. Then she was outside running pigeon-toed across the lawn, arms flying upward as she stumbled and fell. I caught up to her crawling forward on her hands and knees, hurt sounds coming from deep in her throat. “You bastard,” she was saying. “Look at what I am, you bastard.”

She was no longer talking to me, or about me. I walked in front of her to stop her crawling. Her face bent over my shoes as she began weeping helplessly.

“Come on,” I said.

She looked up, face shiny with sweat and tears. I reached down. She took my hand, struggling upright. “You’re cut,” she said blankly.

“It’s under my eye. You missed.”

Her whole body seemed to wilt and her head lolled. “It was Henry Cantwell,” she mumbled. “I saw his car.” She turned and began stumbling toward the house.

I let her go.

I walked slowly to the car, handkerchief held to my face. When I looked in the rearview, blood trickled from a one-inch gash. It didn’t matter. I was thinking of Henry Cantwell.