Bellefleur (93 page)

Sensing her thoughts the child turned shyly toward her. The charming little story of kittens and flying and cupcakes died away, and the servant girl returned to the house, and for a moment mother and daughter regarded each other, wordless, unsmiling, with a certain caution. Germaine’s eyes
were
pretty, Leah thought, that pale tawny-green, nothing like Gideon’s eyes, or her own; and thickly-lashed. And usually bright with curiosity. But there was, she saw with a pang of dismay, nothing remarkable about them.

Uneasily, the child lowered her head while keeping her gaze fixed, still, upon her mother. It was a familiar mannerism, and seemed to Leah falsely and coyly submissive: an appeal to be loved, an appeal not to be scolded, when of course there was no likelihood she
would
be scolded (though the inane babble about the dream had been irritating), and of course she
was
loved.

Didn’t she know, didn’t the exasperating child know, how very passionately she was loved . . . ?

There must have been something in Leah’s face that disturbed Germaine, for Germaine continued to gaze at her, lowering her head still more, and now bringing her fingers to her mouth to suck. Though this was a habit Leah angrily forbade.

“Germaine, really,” Leah whispered.

The walled garden was absolutely still: no birds sang, there was no movement in the leaves, the placid filmy sky overhead showed no motion, as if the sky were nothing more extraordinary than an inverted teacup with here and there a fine hairlike crack. All the world hung suspended on this August morning while Leah and her peculiar little girl stared at each other in a silence that grew more strained as the seconds passed.

Then the creases between Leah’s eyebrows deepened, and without knowing what she did she knocked the folded
Financial Gazette
off the table, and said, half-sobbing: “But what am I to do without you! What will I do with the rest of my life! And now I’m so close to—to—completing what I started— You can’t desert me now, you
can’t
betray me!”

SOME EIGHTEEN HOURS
later, in the bedroom of Rosalind Max’s
twentieth
-floor apartment in the new Nautauga Tower, Ewan was surprised in his sleep by gunfire, and could not defend himself against an unknown assassin who shot, at a distance of less than ten feet, seven bullets into his helpless body. Five passed through his chest, one through his right shoulder, and one lodged in the very top of his skull. Rosalind, who happened by a propitious accident to be in the bathroom at the time, and hid there in terror during the shooting, emerged to see her burly lover sprawled sideways at the very head of the bed, completely still, and covered with blood.

Just as Germaine’s pleasant little dream foretold nothing of the violence her unfortunate uncle was to experience, so did Ewan’s own dreams foretell nothing. He slept, as always, deeply, in a near-stupor, his breath rattling as he both inhaled and exhaled; one could not imagine, observing so utterly blissful a sleep, that the sleeper might be much troubled by anything so immaterial as dreams, or thoughts of any kind. Which was, indeed, the case. If Ewan dreamt he forgot his dreams promptly upon waking. It could not be said, even by those who loved him, that he was one of the more intelligent Bellefleurs, but he felt nevertheless an almost patrician contempt for the superstitions of certain family members. Don’t regale me with such backcountry crap, he frequently said, jocularly or angrily, depending upon his mood. He was most disrespectful to his wife, whose fears—fears “for your life,” since he became sheriff—bored him. (As Lily herself bored him. If she had been jealous of Rosalind, Ewan complained to Gideon and his friends, if she had shown some healthy angry curiosity, why then he might not have minded: but her long mournful face, her sighs and tears and foolish “premonitions” about his safety merely antagonized him. Of course he loved her—all Bellefleur marriages were strong ones—but the more she grieved, the more he stayed away from home: and when he
did
come home he often flew into a rage, and knocked the silly woman against the wall. Why do you test my love for you! he shouted into her dazed face.)

Ewan was a thick-bodied ruddy-faced man in the prime of life when he met Rosalind Max in a Falls nightclub, and introduced himself to her despite the fact that she was in the company of a political rival whom Ewan knew to be contemptible. He soon dropped his other women, and he and Rosalind were seen about town two or three or four times a week, a striking couple, not exactly attractive, though of course Rosalind
was
harshly and defiantly pretty (she spent an hour or more spreading onto her full, solid face a patina of bright make-up that left her skin glowing and poreless, and her dyed red hair was flamboyantly and blatantly artificial, razor-cut to give a gypsy effect; her lips were a flawless scarlet). It was commonly known about town that Ewan was crazy about her, though comically suspicious as well, and that, over a period of months, he had given her a number of costly gifts: the eye-striking blue Jaguar E-model with the dyed rabbit-fur upholstery and silver fixtures and a built-in telephone, and an emerald ring said to be a family heirloom (which the careless Rosalind promptly lost while sailing with a friend on the river), and a freezer stocked with filet mignon, and an ankle-length sable coat, and a twenty-five-foot sailboat with purple and green sails, and any number of smaller items. The penthouse apartment in the new apartment building overlooking the river was, of course, in Ewan’s name; but then the building itself was owned by his family. The more uneasy he was about her, the more generous he became.

“Of course I don’t really love her,” he told Gideon once or twice, when the brothers still confided in each other, “she’s a—” and he uttered a word at once so obscene and so clinical that Gideon didn’t know whether to be disgusted, or amused. And Ewan frequently said, too, that he couldn’t possibly love her: she wasn’t worthy of his name.

Nevertheless he gave her the apartment with its magnificent view of the river and the Falls and Manitou Island to the east, and he gave her the innumerable costly gifts, like any lover, like any befuddled excited lover, and he even arranged—exactly why, Rosalind did not know—for each of them to sit for a portrait, to be painted by an artist who moved about the fringes of Nautauga Falls society, and who had painted, for absurdly high fees, portraits of a U.S. senator from the area, and the mayor of Nautauga Falls, and the millionaire owner of the racetrack, and several society women, wives of businessmen and philanthropists, whom Ewan dismissed as far less attractive than his flame-haired Rosalind. The portraits had been completed by Christmas of the preceding year, and were hanging, at the time of the assassination, in the living room of the apartment: Rosalind’s was theatrical, rather stiff, but conventionally glamorous; Ewan’s showed a beefy, jowled, arrogantly handsome man of middle age, with eyes narrowed in merriment, or perhaps in meanness, and the soft pudgy flesh of his chin creased against his collar. It was
almost
an insult, that portrait, and indeed Rosalind had had to plead with Ewan not to attack the artist physically, but if one studied it long enough to become somehow attractive, even charming. The oddest thing about it was (as everyone attested who examined it long enough) that the portraitist had, whether knowingly or not (he claimed not) created a dull almost imperceptible aura about Ewan’s head so that it looked as if the notorious sheriff of Nautauga County had a
halo.
Which was, of course, vastly amusing to Ewan and Rosalind and their circle, and rather mysterious. For the halo wasn’t always there. But then again, if one peered closely and was patient, it reappeared.

FROM THE FIRST
evening of their acquaintance Rosalind’s independence excited Ewan: here was a woman who didn’t want to be married, not even to a Bellefleur. She was a part-time singer in nightclubs in the city, and an occasional photographer’s model, and she had done, she said, “theater.” (From the age of seventeen to twenty-one when, she said mysteriously, her life had been rudely altered, she had acted in supporting roles at the Vanderpoel Opera House, where comedies, musicals, and melodramas were sometimes performed; but of course Ewan had never seen her there.) Naked one night except for a frothy ostrich boa wound about her waist, Rosalind had high-stepped about the bedroom clapping her hands and singing in a hoarse, rowdy, utterly delightful voice, “When the Boys Come Home,” the concluding number, she said, of one of her most successful musicals. Ewan had stared, bewitched. It was obvious that he
did
love her.

But he was suspicious. At times he felt sick with dread that she had betrayed him—was betraying him at that very moment—and nothing would do but that he had to telephone her, or send a man over on some contrived pretext (bringing her a dozen white roses, or a chocolate mousse, her favorite dessert, from the city’s prestige restaurant in the Nautauga House); once he had ordered the police helicopter flown back to town from some dreary backwoods logging community where a tedious murder investigation was underway, and it had landed, creating quite a disturbance, on the penthouse terrace. (That day, a gentleman in a trench coat was observed leaving
Rosalind’s
apartment hurriedly, but when Ewan questioned Rosalind she explained quite convincingly that she’d woken with a miserable toothache, and had called her dentist over for an emergency consultation.) Another time, Ewan observed at the racetrack that his mistress’s bets—for $25, $40, all small sums—were placed on quirky horses with 100–1 and 85–3 odds, and that these horses
won;
but Rosalind explained that she’d overheard her hairdresser chatting with a woman patron, and remembered the names of the horses mentioned, and, of course, she just had good luck. She wasn’t a close friend of anyone connected with the racetrack, she said, and as for jockeys—jockeys repulsed her physically. Which Ewan believed, after some deliberation. His jealousy was such that he imagined lovers of Rosalind’s crouched in closets, or hiding in shower stalls, when he entered the apartment unannounced; he
did
find outsized footprints in the pink marble bathtub, and hairs not Rosalind’s or his own on her silk-covered pillows, and his stock of ale, kept in the apartment’s second refrigerator, was often decimated; but he was sensible enough to doubt his own suspicions, and at any rate Rosalind always joked and teased him into a good mood. You spend all your time chasing criminals, she said, naturally you’re suspicious. But you mustn’t let it color your vision of human nature, Ewan. After all—! We pass this way but once.

Though Ewan enjoyed the city’s nightlife, and felt quite wonderfully flattered by being seen in the company of gorgeous Rosalind Max, he liked best, as he told Gideon, spending a long period of time—twelve hours, eighteen hours—locked up in the penthouse with his mistress, with a generous supply of liquor, ale, salted peanuts, frozen pizzas, and doughnuts (glazed, powdered, cinnamon, apple, cherry, whipped-cream) from the city’s most popular bakery, Sweet’s. He and Rosalind made love, and drank, and ate, and made love again, and drank, and made love, and fixed themselves enormous meals out of the freezer and refrigerator, and drank and ate doughnuts, and slept awhile, and woke to make love, and poured themselves more drinks, and finished off the rest of the
doughnuts
. . . and so the weekend went; at such times they consumed more than two dozen Sweet’s doughnuts, and an unfathomed quantity of other food and drink. I don’t love her, she’s a notorious bitch, Ewan complained with a wry smile, but, you know, I can’t think of a better way to spend my time. . . . Then you’re very fortunate, Gideon said curtly, and broke off the conversation. (The brothers had been growing apart for years, and after Gideon’s accident, and his acquisition of the Invemere airport, they rarely spoke; it happened that they were rarely home at the same time, and when they were they tended to avoid each other.)

It was 3:00 
A.M.
, Sunday morning, when, after a protracted bout of lovemaking, eating, and drinking, Ewan had fallen into his stuporous sleep, and was snoring loudly (indeed, Rosalind was to say that she owed her life to her lover’s snoring—it had kept her awake—she’d decided to take a
bubble-bath
—and happened to be in the bathroom, sunk in the luxurious hot water, when the assassin broke into the apartment and into the bedroom and began firing at poor Ewan); and he never woke up again—never, that is, as Ewan Bellefleur, the sheriff of Nautauga County.

How quickly it happened! A stranger bursting into the room—firing seven shots from an automatic pistol—Ewan bleeding onto the silken pillows and sheets—Rosalind hiding terrified in the bathroom. And then everything went quiet again.

How quickly, how irreparably . . . And after it appeared that the murderer had gone Rosalind came out, shaking, knowing what she would find in the bed, and yet screaming when she saw it: her poor naked helpless lover, her dead lover, his body riddled with bullets, the very top of his skull penetrated. He was dead, yet his fingers still twitched.

He was dead, he must have been dead, shot at such close range: yet his eyelids fluttered. So she screamed and screamed.

BUT OF COURSE
Ewan did not die, and it was a measure of his neurosurgeon’s skill, as well as the resiliency of his own constitution, that he recovered as quickly as he did: a mere five weeks in the hospital, two in the intensive-care unit. And then he moved to a convalescent home on Manitou Island, chosen by the Bellefleurs for its proximity to the manor, as well as the excellence of its professional staff.

Ewan did not die, and yet—and yet it could not be said that he had survived. Not the Ewan Bellefleur whom everyone had known.

Some forty-eight hours after the shooting, when Ewan first regained consciousness in the intensive-care ward, his eyes rolled, and his pale lips moved, and he tried to grasp the hand of the attending nurse—and his initial words, but dimly grasped, had to do with blood and baptism. He then lost consciousness again, and remained in a comalike state for another two days, and when he again awoke, this time permanently, it was observed at once by Noel and Cornelia—the only people allowed to see him at that time, for Lily had collapsed and was inconsolable—that
this
Ewan did not appear to be
their
Ewan.