Dead Letter (14 page)

"That one was taken in England," she said.
"In 1959. Father had gotten a Ford grant, and we spent that year
on mother’s farm in Bucks."

She looked down into the box and pulled out a second
photo. It was of her mother and father standing together in front of
the same pond. Lovingwell looked exactly as he had the last time I’d
seen him—deer-stalker cap, ulster coat, his sharp beard making a
white V at the lapel. I took a close look at the mother’s face.
There was something wrong with it. It reminded me of the photographs
taken of Virginia Woolf before she committed suicide—an askew face,
cheerless and disordered.

I flipped the photograph over. It was dated on the
back in faint print—"August, 1972."

"What happened?" I said to Sarah.

"You see!" she said triumphantly as if she
were at once grateful and content that I had taken her point.

"Yes. Something happened to your mother."

"There’s more," Sarah said breathlessly.
She began to pull one photo after another out of the shoebox. Some
she glanced at before tossing on the floor. When the box was empty
she knocked it, too, on the floor, and sat sullenly on the bed.
Looking at her, I began to feel a little panicky.

"He did it," she said in a hollow voice.
"He killed her."

I collected the photos from the floor and stuck them
in my coat pocket. "We’ll talk about that later," I said.

"You need some rest. Do you mind going to my
apartment? If your friend Les tries anything, I’d rather be on
familiar ground."

"Do I have a choice?" she said again.

"Not if you want my help," I told her.

An unmarked police cruiser followed us over to the
Delores. Sid wasn’t taking any chances, and, in a way, I was glad.
I still didn’t have a handle on flighty Sarah L., and the police
protection—which was meant as a reminder—felt good. When I’d
parked and we’d gotten up-stairs to the apartment, I took Sarah
into the bedroom and sat her down on the bed.

"I’ll sleep on the couch," I said.

"Don’t you want to talk?"

"In the morning. You’ve had a rough day."

Sarah lay back on the mattress. "You think I’m
crazy, don’t you?"

"Is that what you think?" I asked her.

She closed her eyes. "I don’t know. He used to
tell me I was crazy. Everybody is, at times, aren’t they? He was
crazy all the time. Wicked, wicked." Sarah opened her eyes and
looked up at me. "

"I’ll be in the other room."

"I’ll try to arrange a meeting with Les in the
morning."

She curled up under the blanket. I turned off the
light, walked into the living room, poured myself a Scotch, and
stretched out on the sofa. After downing the drink, I reached over to
my coat and took the pictures out of the breast pocket. There were
thirty of them—all dated in faint red print. A harmless enough
legacy. And yet Sarah claimed that her father had wanted to destroy
them. She might, in fact, have killed him to prevent their
destruction. And killed him for what? For a picture of her mother
beside an oak tree, maybe the tree behind the Lovingwell house? For
another picture of Claire Lovingwell seated at a desk, her hand on
her chin and her eyes leveled at the camera? Claire in shorts and
halter; Claire in a print housedress; Claire, Daryl, and Sarah
picnicking on the grass? Why would someone want to destroy a handful
of album photographs hidden away in a closet? I thought of what
Bidwell had said about Lovingwell and his wife. Maybe the Professor
had felt that it was unhealthy for Sarah to dwell on pictures of her
suicide mother. Maybe he’d thought that they fueled her hatred of
him. The image of that dainty little man alone among all his
treasures and of his daughter poring over the past in the upstairs
bedroom was ludicrous and unsettling.
 

13

I hadn’t slept well on the couch—a slung leather
Danish number that I’d bought on impulse at a furniture store in
the Kenwood Mall. Like most Danish furniture it looked more
comfortable than it actually was. Once I got it home I realized it
was narrow and hard and smelled like a rubber pillow. All night long
I kept dreaming that I was about to roll off it onto the floor. I had
an aunt who used to recommend putting a chair beside your bed if you
were worried about falling off the mattress. I never quite understood
the logic—perhaps the chair served as a kind of magical boundary
beyond which even the most restless sleeper wouldn’t venture. At
any rate, at four in the morning, I tried her remedy; and the result
was that I started dreaming about rolling off the couch and onto the
chair.

At about seven I woke up to find Sarah Lovingwell
sitting in the chair and smiling at me.

"Hi," I said sleepily.

"Hi yourself."

"Did you sleep well?"

"I slept like a log," she said blandly.
"It’s the first good rest I’ve had since Tuesday night."

Sarah stretched on the chair and I could see her
breasts rise against the loose denim of her shirt. She knew I was
watching her, too. When she’d finished stretching, she ducked
behind her long auburn hair and gave me a coy and sultry look.

"God, you’re a strange girl," I said to
her.

"I’ve got you guessing, haven’t I"?"
she said with a wink.

"There isn’t much about your family that isn’t
a matter of guesswork."

"That’s us, all right/’ she said. "The
mysterious Lovingwells."

I got up and made some coffee while Sarah rattled the
morning Enquirer. "Do you feel like talking?" I called to
her from the kitchen.

"I suppose you mean about my father?"

"Yep." I carried two cups of coffee into
the living room. She was sitting on the couch and, in the morning
light, she looked a lot younger and more vulnerable than she had the
night before. But even in the morning light there was a certain
pugnaciousness about Sarah L. Perhaps it was the way she held her
head, tipped back slightly, as if she were reading {ine print through
invisible bifocals. Her eyes, sea blue and amorous, were cool behind
those spectacles and far older than the rest of her face.

"So you want to talk about dear old Dad?"
Sarah studied me amusedly. "You have a one-track mind, don’t
you?"

"Detection is my life," I said to her.

She laughed merrily. "Then this is the big test.
Either I convince you that Father was a madman or you go to the
police, is that right?" She twisted on the couch and said: "O.K.
Where do you want to begin?"

"Let’s begin with these," I said, setting
the photographs on the coffee table in front of her. "I want you
to tell me about the photographs and about what they represented, and
let’s begin with the first one you showed me last night. The one of
your mother standing in front of
the pond."

"The pond was on a farm in Bucks," Sarah
said. "It was her father’s farm. She’d inherited it in 1959.
We’d gone to England on a grant, ostensibly for Father to do
research but actually to make arrangements about death duties, entry
fines. That sort of thing."

"In the picture your mother looks—"

"Sane?" Sarah said. "There’s no
reason to be embarrassed about it. She was sane, then. My mother was
a weak-willed, vain woman; but she did have a genuine feeling for her
home. She was very happy when we arrived at the farm. I think she
thought of it as a sanctuary or last resort. My mother never quite
accepted her marriage as a final condition, or thought of marriage
itself as anything more than an escapade. It was as if her entire
married life were a kind of preparation for that return home. But
then she hadn’t bargained on marrying a man as tenacious and
uncivilized as Papa."

Sarah plucked a picture of her father from the stack
and gazed at it. "I suppose you never really know your parents.
They’re too close to you, like reading a page of print right in
front of your eyes. And with someone like him it was even more
difficult because so much of his life was hidden or invested in
superficial things—in that moustache and that beard, in the tweed
coat with the leather patches on the elbows, in meerschaum pipes and
leather hair brushes. He’d grown up with money, and he liked it. So
did Mother, but to her it was a kind of security, like the farm or
the marriage. To him, it was an ornament of power. I suppose that’s
one reason why I became a communist, because of his greed."
Sarah smiled at me. "I’m a very rich communist, now. Isn’t
that funny?"

"I don’t think the police will find it so
funny," I said.

"You’re right. But I do have money of my own;
I wasn’t lying to you yesterday. I have a trust fund. It was
Mother’s last rational act—setting it up and insisting that
Father have nothing to do with its administration." Sarah ducked
her head and brushed back her long hair with both hands. "Am I
being winning enough?" she said with a trace of laughter in her
voice. "Doesn’t the thought of all that money convince you
that I’m safe?"

"Are you trying to bribe me? "

"Are you bribable? If I was more sure of you I’d
do it with sex." She shook her hair out and laughed. "I’m
being perverse again, aren’t I? It’s not really fair. When I was
a girl I was thin with practically no breasts at all. He used to make
fun of the way I looked. So I became flirtatious when I grew up."
She grinned. "Do you see a pattern developing here?

"I’ll tell you a story. When I was eighteen I
went to my first formal dance. I went with Sean O’Hara. Before the
dance, before Sean picked me up, I was in my bedroom, admiring myself
in a mirror. It was my first strapless gown. I’d grown breasts by
then. And I felt good looking at myself. Father came in, and when he
saw me he kissed me on the cheek. And then he blushed. I looked down
and saw that he had a hard-on. It made me feel sensational to know
that I had that power over him. After that I went out of my way to
expose myself to him, leaving doors open, walking around half-dressed
or undressed. You see, in every other way it was me reacting to him.
"Do you think that’s queer or terrible? It probably is. I’m
not like that in bed, though. I’m really pretty normal."

"You’re doing it again, Sarah. And it’s
making me nervous."

"Am I?" she said insouciantly.

I glared at her and said: "Let’s get back to
that picture of your mother. What happened in England?"

"That’s the hard part," Sarah said
timidly.

"It’s not going to be any easier in McMaster’s
office or on a witness stand."

"No, it’s not going to be easy anywhere."

She drew herself up on the cushion and said, "It
was money that started it. Father claimed that we couldn’t afford
to maintain the farm in Bucks. Maybe he was telling the truth. But
with someone like him the truth is always accessory. While we stayed
on in Bucks, he was bargaining with a farmer in Devon about selling
the property. He never asked her if she wanted to sell it—which she
didn’t. I don’t think he ever asked another person what he wanted
in this life. He just assumed he knew best. And in the end, he had
his way. She didn’t have enough character to stand up to him. He
sold her patrimony, but she never forgave him for it. And that was
the start, if there is a 'start' to the disintegration of a marriage.
That fall was the last time they slept in the same room. It was the
last time I thought of them as being in love.

"The next year Mother had an affair. Of course I
was too young to understand what all the fuss was about. All the
shouting and the fighting. But I could feel the hatred in the air
like you can feel a storm blowing up. You wouldn’t have thought he
would have cared—about that kind of betrayal. But he did. You see,
it wasn’t just the money for him. It was everything he touched or
could put his hands on. He wanted it all. Like some kind of crazy
Midas, who liked having the golden touch. She was his property, as
much as the house or her farm. He might have given her away, but he’d
never let her choose for herself.

"In 1965 Mother had her iirst nervous breakdown.
She had had another affair and it ended badly. She heard voices,
hallucinated, said that Father was poisoning her. Of course everyone
in the university community was terribly upset." Sarah laughed.
"They get upset about those things in academia because so many
of them have nervous breakdowns themselves. It’s like seeing the
handwriting on the wall. When Mother got out of the hospital she
looked dreadful. I thought it was a symptom of her illness, like a
rash with chickenpox. That it would go away when she got better. I
didn’t really know what a nervous breakdown was, then.

"But, of course, she didn’t get better. Not in
that house where he never said a word to her. And she never was the
same after that first hospitalization. She wouldn’t eat, she slept
badly and cried constantly. She had two more nervous breakdowns in
the next three years. And each time she suffered the same
hallucinations, had the same delusion about Father poisoning her.

"No one believed her. How could they? All you
had to do was look at Father to know that he was incapable of
something so downright improper. He was so smart, so well-bred, so
candid, and so reliable. Did he tell you he hated his job?"
Sarah asked. "That if he had been born thirty years later he
would have been a hippie? That there was a lot of that sort of thing
in his soul?"