Death of the Black-Haired Girl (16 page)

“They want us to quit,” he told Salmone. “They want to do away with the parks. Wait and see, Sal. Not one national park in America will ever be two hundred years old. The Congress thinks they were a terrible idea.”

“People get hurt in the parks,” Salmone said.

W
HEN THEY GOT TO CROSS INN
, Salmone put a hand on Polhemus’s shoulder to make him pause.

“Brookman seems like a guy who might have a lot of girlfriends.”

“That’s what I hear,” Polhemus said. “It’s not allowed but nobody snitched on him.”

As they went inside, Polhemus told him a little about Shelby Magoffin, that she was a professional film actress and a little older than she looked.

“She has a bad-ass husband down south she has a restraining order on. Which I don’t even know is enforceable in this state outside our property. She has a few overenthusiastic fans. She’s semi-famous. We haven’t had any real trouble.”

They talked to Shelby in a small paneled room, cleared and curtained for the purpose. Polhemus stayed but left all the questions to Salmone.

“Can I call you Shelby?”

“Of course,” she said. “Yes, sir.”

“You weren’t with Maud when she died?”

“No, I sure wasn’t.”

“Where were you?”

“Where was I? I was right here. I was sleeping, I believe.”

“Was Maud having an affair with Mr. Brookman?”

“You know,” Shelby said, “it’s hard for me to talk about her personal affairs so soon.” She let it rest there, and Salmone wondered if she would talk at all. Finally, she asked, “Is that relevant?”

“We think it might be.”

She took off the white scarf she had been wearing and wrapped it so as to cradle her elbows. She was elfin-faced, big-eyed, looking guileless.

“I don’t get it,” Shelby said. “Why?”

“If we knew, it would help us. We’re working for her now.”

She looked at him with patient contempt, a waif no longer.

“Yes, sir. It seemed like she was in love with Mr. Brookman because he had seduced her last year.”

“When you last saw her the other night, she was on her way to his house?”

“I guess so.”

“Could you tell us her mood at that time?”

“Real upset,” Shelby told him and, to his surprise, started to cry.

It put him on more familiar ground. He moved toward her a little and let her see his eyes.

“Was she angry?”

Shelby took the scarf from around her arms and touched a tear with it.

“Yeah. Angry, hurt, left . . . All those things. His wife had come back. Coming home pregnant like the best of all possible wives, bearing him kiddies. So he was ditching Maud. He was breaking up with her. Like cutting her loose, goodbye, like that.”

“Would you say she was intoxicated?”

“Yeah. Intoxicated.”

“How angry was she? Angry enough to be violent if she was intoxicated?”

“Nothing violent about Maud. Drunk or sober.” Shelby slid into a posture vaguely based on Maud’s. “She was demonstrative in her own space. She was verbal.”

“What did you think about Brookman?”

“Oh, everybody likes Brookman, sort of. Big lovable rogue of a guy. Incredibly hot. I liked him at first. Then I thought about it and I had to feel bad for Maud. Married guy, kids, big talker.”

“Did she ever come back injured? With a bruise?”

“Huh? No!”

“He have a lot of girlfriends besides Maud?”

“Over time I guess he did. I think he was the kind of guy who took ’em one at a time.”

“But like you say,” Salmone said, getting a little intrigued with her, “he was married.”

“Sure, there had to be the wife. Then he had to go out and be adored. He wasn’t that promiscuous, not by the standards of this place.”

Salmone, faintly surprised, glanced at Polhemus. Polhemus shrugged.

“So you don’t think there was another young woman somewhere?”

“I’m sure there wasn’t.”

“How about Maud? Did she have a boyfriend? Did she break up with another student over Brookman?”

“Not while I knew her.”

Salmone thanked her courteously for her time. She was very fidgety by then, her big innocent eyes blinking and looking for corners.

“Who should we talk to next?” Salmone asked her.

“I don’t know,” Shelby said. “Maybe Jo Carr at counseling. Maud was gonna see her after she left here.”

“What time was that?”

“A little before ten, maybe.”

“Late for counseling.”

“Miss Carr wanted to see her. Well, I think Jo Carr knew about the situation. She had an interest in Maud.”

“An interest how?”

“Miss Carr had counseled Maud in her first two years. Might have been Maud took her problems there sometimes.”

Polhemus and Salmone thanked her again and she walked quickly toward the main lounge.

“Hey,” Shelby called over her shoulder, “think maybe Mrs. Brookman ran Maud over?”

Salmone made a note to visit Jo Carr in counseling.

“I
SAW THIS COMING
.”

Brookman stopped pacing and clenched his fists in pain.

“Please, sweetheart.”

“No, I’m sorry, we have to live this out. I saw it.”

“I ought not to be in this house at all,” Brookman said.

“It’s your house. And I’m your wife. Did you love her?”

“Did I love her?”

Can it be, he wondered, that I don’t know what love is? But the fact was he had thought about it before. He had no answers, as was often the case. So he stood there in the room that had been contaminated for them by his treachery and tried to figure it out.

He had loved Maud as a woman, for her woman’s body, as a person, for her human body. For her spirit, for her intelligence and courage. Person, body, intellect and will. He had even nourished a certain affection for her lack of judgment. Say it was for her youth and courage. She was not a child but in a way he had loved her as a child, as a daughter, a younger sister. He had loved her in all the ways that were supposed to be right and in ways that were wrong. He had not loved her in the all-consuming way in which he loved his wife or in the way he would love his children.

“No,” he said.

“You did her great wrong,” Ellie said. “I wonder what will happen to us now.”

He said nothing.

“Let me tell you something strange,” Ellie said to him.

He kept the liquor in a cabinet behind the piano in the quietly grand main room. For years he had resolved to move it somewhere else. Sophia practiced for hours every afternoon, and the sight of him hauling out a bottle of Dewar’s past the pale small form of Sophia engaged in
The Well-Tempered Clavier
annoyed Ellie for reasons she herself could not have explained. Now, with Sophia safely in school, he fetched it out of the cabinet and poured himself a snifter.

“Tell me.”

Her eyes took on the brightened gaze they sometimes held, a look Brookman secretly thought of as a glint of madness. “Glint of madness” because there were instances of what was apparently schizophrenia in her family, as there were many heritable diseases among the groups around White Lake.

“Last month while I was home, I first took the notion I was pregnant. I was almost sure. I was going to tell Mama. I was going to tell you.”

They sat on a leather sofa, Ellie sliding to the far end from him.

“You didn’t say anything,” he said.

“Didn’t want to jinx it. Anyway, I felt well. I thought I’d go along on a field trip over the mountains—across the Clears—with Nancy Gumm and two elders. We knew a norther was coming but I thought it was OK.”

She meant the elders of her church, and Nancy Gumm was an ethnologist from Victoria. Brookman had not known. The storms were considerable this year.

“We were snowed in. Across the Clears. There are two families of our Christians there because years ago a madman brought their parents there. A man named Gross broke from the Old Synod. Think of Dürer. Think of Münster. They live with the Diné band there. There wasn’t a winter road before drilling farther south. Old people remember before the money economy. Holiness Mennonites. Medieval. They live with the Carrier band there. The Diné. The native, the Indian band, the Carriers. No winter road.

“Nancy Gumm wanted to record. Because their songs are the oldest and the deepest in the north. And our folks who went and lived with them kept their songs going. And they sing and tell as though it were before Boas, that stupid man . . . The Christian children do the same. They think in Carrier language, eh?”

She had been upset since the night of Maud’s death but she seemed suddenly in the grip of something overwhelming.

“Did something bad happen there?”

She paid no attention to his question.

Ellie Brookman knew hundreds of Indian story-song performances. Teasing her, Brookman once told her it was like Comrade Zhdanov claiming to know two thousand Russian folktales, except that Ellie really knew the songs. Rarely did she talk about them with Brookman or anyone else. She might tell one narrative to him, or to people at a party, and she could make it funny, repulsive to the gentle ear, ironic.

But she knew people rolled their eyes heavenward if she so much as mentioned Indian tales. Once Brookman, flattering her, said, “You have a way with those stories, El. You get the point.” This he intended as a joke. She would have told the stories in an absolutely white person’s way, the humor and ironies and so forth completely changed for white people’s perception. But she herself had learned to understand them in the intended native way. She would privately think: I won’t be more of a fool than they think me now. Brookman and everyone else, she knew quite well, found the tales boring and pointless. Perverse at their most interesting, material for the many able parodists around.

Funny, she would think, how the despised Longfellow had done it best, using the rhythms of the
Kalevala.
It was all more different than people could imagine, and even she herself, until that winter, had not really known. But the mad Hutterite who took his pilgrims to the Clears had known.

“I would like to have some of your drink,” Ellie told Brookman, “but I’m pregnant because you’re so wonderful.” She grinned and disappeared behind her eyes again.

“The midwinter time coming up, the midwinter ceremony. Darkness, darkness. Huge piles of birch, elder. Some they must have got at Bay Shopping Center a thousand miles away, hauled it in. Isn’t that ironic, eh, but that’s the life of the north, the bush. There are no ironies there. There’s nothing but irony there. That’s what the tales are all about. But the ceremony when the light goes, it will be gone for what, fifteen hours? The storm’s trapped us and my thought is, I’m pregnant. I have to take care.

“Thank God Sophia was back at White Lake. Someone was singing a song about Coyote and I started to shake. Darkness all around. I thought I saw Coyote.”

Ever so slightly she changed the angle of her strange, unfocused-seeming gaze and held him fixed.

“Coyote singing, ‘Child will die, Elsa.’ I thought: My land, we’re fucked, eh? I thought we’ll lose the child. But I didn’t. No. Maud died instead. Ya. So I saw it coming.”

Brookman finished his drink.

“Don’t think I couldn’t go into the bush and my cousins couldn’t help me put up a cabin in a week,” Ellie told him. “I could live there for the rest of my life. Never see you, never see anything but crows. Not man, woman, but stars and night and jack pine and I would still be your wife, do you understand?”

“Yes, baby,” he said. “I understand.” She was returning from the touch of transport, coming back to him.

“But I think I will not do that. And since you are here, you might do me the courtesy of staying.”

“Every night of my life, Ellie.”

“And days too, right? Mornings? Afternoons?”

“Day and night, Ellie. Yes, baby,” he said. “I understand. But we’re safe from that now.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I wish I could have a drink, but no way can I do that, right?”

“You’re so right.”

“Yes,” she said. “You and me and God in heaven and the wonders of modern medicine can keep us pretty safe from that now. Don’t do it to me again.”

“I
WAS VERY, VERY FOND OF MAUD
,” Jo Carr told Lieutenant Salmone. “I can tell you I’m in mourning for her. I was with her the night she died. For God’s sake, find the person in that car.”

He could see that she was very shaky but holding on. Holding on very well.

“You took her to the hospital, I understand.”

“I took her to the hospital. I was told she left right away. I didn’t try hard enough to find her. I let her wander off.”

“Dr. Carr, you shouldn’t feel that way, in my opinion. You did a lot more than your job.”

“I let her wander off in a lot of ways.”

“What could you do you didn’t do?”

“Lieutenant, I like to think I can do a lot of things when I put my mind to it. You ask what I could have done? I don’t know.”

There was a box of tissues on the corner of her desk and he wondered whether she would make use of it herself.

“You know,” she said, “I’d like to have a buck for every parent that ever came in here and said that to me. Myself, I never had any children of my own.”

“I’m very sorry,” Salmone said.

“Oh, it wasn’t done, Lieutenant. I would have been the pregnant nun in the old joke—you get extra points for running her over.”

“I meant I was sorry for your grief, Doctor.”

“Right. Excuse me.”

“Would you say Maud confided in you?”

“I couldn’t exactly say that. For one thing, she wasn’t terribly confiding. In her freshman year it might have been true.”

“Not after that?”

“After that, hardly at all. But I believe I understood her. I felt I knew her well. Just intangibles. I know generally what’s been up with her through other students affected by her life.”

“You mean Shelby Magoffin?”

“Yes. You could talk to Shelby.”

“We did. Anybody else?”

“Shelby, being her roommate, was the student closest to her I know about.”

“She had a bad romance with Professor Brookman?”

“You might say that. Why are you asking me this?”