No One You Know (6 page)

Eight

S
TRANGE THINGS WERE RUMORED TO HAPPEN
all the time in Diriomo—ghosts dancing in the churchyard, candles spontaneously igniting, music from unknown quarters drifting through deserted streets—but until that night, they had never happened to me.

“I don’t deny that I was the most likely suspect,” McConnell said, looking directly into my eyes. “But that doesn’t make me guilty.” He didn’t flinch, didn’t glance away.

“You were having an affair with my sister.”

“Yes, I admitted that to the police.”

“Only after they already knew. Only after the book was published. In the beginning, you told them nothing.”

“It was on Margaret’s bidding that I decided not to say anything. As angry as she was about the affair, she was terrified of what would happen if the suspicion was cast on me. In hindsight, of course, I knew how stupid my decision was. But under the circumstances, I didn’t think I had the right to deny Margaret anything.”

“You had dinner with Lila the night she disappeared,” I said. “After the book was published, a hostess came forward who placed you at Sam’s Grill together.”

“I don’t deny that.”

“And you left the restaurant together.”

“We did.”

“You walked her to the Muni station at ten p.m.”

He nodded.

“That makes you the last person to see her. And the hostess said that she looked upset when you left the restaurant. That morning, before she left home, she’d been crying.”

McConnell nodded again.

“Well?” I felt the old anger simmering up again. “Everything was going well in her life. She’d just gotten all that attention for the paper she presented at Columbia. She was a shoo-in for the Hilbert Prize at Stanford. Everyone knew she was on her way. You were obviously the source of her distress—it couldn’t have been anything else.”

“Do you remember what Thorpe proposed as my motive?” McConnell asked.

“He said you were breaking up with Lila that night at the restaurant, and she threatened to tell your wife about the two of you.”

He looked at me in silence.

“What?” I said.

“Tell me, does that sound like something Lila would do?”

He was right. Although I wasn’t about to confess this to McConnell, that part of Thorpe’s argument had always nagged at me. It simply wasn’t in Lila’s character. She would never have told McConnell’s wife, nor would she have threatened to do so. Over the years, I’d tried to sweep my discomfort with this detail away by telling myself that I didn’t really know Lila as well as I thought I did.

“Were you breaking up with her?”

“Quite the contrary. A few days before, I had come clean with my wife.”

Maria emerged from the kitchen and pointed at a clock on the wall. It was two a.m.
“Cerrado,”
she said.

“Just a few more minutes,” I pleaded. I wasn’t ready for this conversation to end. There was so much more I wanted to ask.

“Cerrado,”
she said again, indicating with her hands that it was time for bed.

“Por favor,”
I said, but it was no use. As McConnell and I stood to go, Maria smiled and winked at me. She must have believed she was doing me a favor, sending me off into the night with the handsome American.

Moments later, McConnell and I were standing on the dirt road in front of the café. He was wearing the baseball cap again, pulled low on his forehead. The effect was to make him look younger than he was. He had been seven years Lila’s senior; that put him at about fifty. The book that he had been reading in the café was tucked under his arm. I had glimpsed the title as we got up to leave: Faraday’s
The Chemical History of a Candle.

The village was silent, deserted. The white buildings shone in the moonlight.

“You shouldn’t be wandering around alone at this hour,” he said. “I’ll walk you back to your hotel.”

If I hadn’t been so frightened, I might have laughed at the absurdity. “You can’t be serious,” I said, looking back at the closed door of the café. “Anyway, I do it all the time.”

“You shouldn’t.”

I reached into my bag, feeling for my tryer. It’s a basic tool of the coffee trade, a long, scooped metal object with a sharp point on one end and a small cylinder on the other, which tapers into a handle. To take a random sample, you jab the sharp end into the burlap coffee sack, and beans slide along the stem into the cylinder. With one hand, I slid the tryer out of its leather case.

My hand shook, my pulse sped up. I’d spent so many years believing McConnell to be a monster, capable of the most terrible crime. But I’d also spent that time wishing I could confront him, wishing I could discover the truth, however painful, about Lila’s death. I didn’t want to be left wondering, for the rest of my life, about the end of hers. At that moment, what I wanted was to keep talking, to make McConnell tell me everything. My desire to know what had happened to my sister was even greater than my fear.

The dust rose around our feet as we walked down the narrow path to the main road. Each time he moved closer, I inched away. “If it’s true that you weren’t breaking up with her, why was she so upset?”

“You know what kind of person Lila was. The entire time we were together, she felt horribly guilty. She hadn’t wanted me to tell Margaret about us, didn’t want to be responsible for all that. I tried to make her realize it wasn’t her fault, it was mine, and that my marriage had been over long before I met her.”

We arrived at an intersection, where a small white church sat sentry. A life-size Virgin Mary with a broken glass eye gazed out at us from a roadside altar. The gravestones in the churchyard looked like giant slabs of white soap in the moonlight.

Suddenly, McConnell reached out and grabbed my elbow, pulling me toward him. I jerked out of his grasp and took two steps back. I pulled the tryer out of the bag and held it in front of me. I was trying to find my voice, wondering if anyone would even hear me, when he pointed to a long snake lying in the path a few inches from his foot. The snake was still, its body covered with dark green diamonds.

“It’s a fer-de-lance,” he said quietly, stretching his arm toward me. “Give me that.”

I had no choice but to trust him. I handed him the tryer. He grasped the handle with his right hand, and with one swift, powerful motion, brought the sharp end down a few inches from the snake’s head, severing it from the body. The long green body slithered and shook for a moment, then lay still. The yellow mouth gaped open.

McConnell stood, visibly shaken, and wiped the tryer on his pants before handing it back to me.

“If it bites you, you bleed to death internally.”

“I’m sorry, I—”

“It’s okay,” he said. He stepped over the dead snake and looked back at me. “If you want, I’ll turn around right now. You should be all right from here.”

I hesitated for several seconds before joining McConnell on the path. I looked back at the snake, then at him. We continued down the road, my heart beating wildly.

“Why Lila?” I asked. “You must have known how inexperienced she was. If you wanted to cheat on your wife, why couldn’t you have found someone else?”

“It wasn’t like that. Margaret and I had made a decent life together, and our son was everything to me. But Margaret didn’t understand my work. None of it mattered to her. As long as I continued to advance in my career, she was content. When we met, I liked that about her. She was into art and dancing, things I’d never understood. It was a nice balance, and I believed she was the kind of woman who could take care of things at home, give our children a happy life while I concentrated on work. But then I met your sister, and realized I wanted something more.”

“How did you meet her?” I asked.

So long ago, I had tried to get this very information out of Lila. Over the years I had told her everything about the guys I dated. She seemed to take pleasure in my escapades, and had said more than once that she was living vicariously through me. So I was hurt that, when there was finally someone in her life, she wouldn’t tell me anything.

“I was in my fourth year in the Ph.D. program,” McConnell continued. “I loved fatherhood, but it took its toll; my dissertation was going much more slowly than I had expected, and for some time I had been attempting to collaborate on a paper that was going nowhere.”

McConnell’s voice in the quiet night was deep, a smooth and calming voice. I imagined Lila sitting with him in one of those private booths at Sam’s on the final night of her life. Was his the last voice she ever heard, or was there someone else, someone I had never allowed myself to imagine—a taxi driver, a stranger on the street?

One number in Thorpe’s book had been burned into my memory: 23,370. It was the number of people who were murdered in the U.S. in 1989, the year Lila died.
Only 13.5 percent of murder victims do not know their assailants,
Thorpe wrote.
Murder is rarely random.
I remembered thinking that his word choice was inaccurate. There was nothing rare about 13.5 percent. 13.5 percent of 23,370 was actually a very large number. I couldn’t recall exactly how the paragraph was written, but one thing I did remember was that Thorpe had accused Lila of being a
tragically poor judge of character.
And I had been angered by the way he manipulated the words, as if Lila bore some responsibility for her own death, as if only the victims of “random” acts of violence were truly innocent.

“Then Lila came along,” McConnell was saying. “I remember the day she walked into the office of the
Stanford Journal of Mathematics.
She was wearing this orange dress and purple sneakers, and her hair looked like she’d just rolled out of bed.”

“I remember that dress,” I said, surprised to be complicit in this story, to add my memory to his own. “She made it herself. She made all her clothes herself. She didn’t use premade patterns. She’d just take her measurements and sketch the dress on a legal pad, then make calculations as she went.”

“The outfit was completely outlandish.” I was looking straight ahead, but I could hear the slight change in McConnell’s voice, and knew that he was smiling. It was strange to think that the man standing beside me had been intimate with my sister, had even been loved by her. I could not deny that there was a magnetic quality about him—something in the tone of his voice, his direct and un-apologetic gaze. There was something unmistakably sensual about him that I hadn’t noticed during my spying missions at Enrico’s.

“She looked beautiful,” he continued. “The editor, a stodgy old guy named Bruce, looked at her and asked how he could help her. He seemed to think she had wandered in there on accident. Lila thrust a folder into his hand. It was a paper on numerical evaluation of special functions. She wanted to submit it.

“Bruce looked at her like she was out of her mind. You have to understand, the journal published the work of highly respected mathematicians. And here was this disheveled, great-looking girl, very young, waltzing into the office as if she had a right to be there and asking us to publish her paper. It was unheard of. I fell for her instantly. I took the paper home with me, and I was blown away. I called Lila that night and asked her to meet me the next day for lunch.”

We had reached another intersection. With no cue from me, McConnell took the lane to the right, in the direction of my
pensión.
I asked myself what I would do if he led me straight to my hotel. Would that be the thing that brought me to my senses?

A minute later we were standing in front of the small yellow building, which was flanked by large trees with knotted, twisting trunks. Blinking white Christmas lights hung from the branches, connected to the hotel by a thick orange extension cord. “Here we are,” he said.

Again, I took a step back. “How did you—”

“It’s a small town.”

I still wasn’t ready for the conversation to end. There was so much more I wanted to know. I remembered something that I had confided to Thorpe and which he had quoted in his book. “I hope it wasn’t someone she knew and trusted,” I said to him more than once. What McConnell seemed to be offering me, all these years later, was an alternative version of the story, one in which Lila’s murderer wasn’t also her lover. Whatever the truth was, I needed to know.

I felt a warm drop of water on my hand, and another. McConnell looked up at the sky.

“Can we talk again tomorrow?” I asked.

He toed the dirt with his shoe. “You won’t see me again. I just wanted to meet you and have my say. It’s been a long time. I’m not sure what you think happened, I’m not sure what you think about me, or that awful book. I’m not even sure if you think about it at all. But it’s important to me to tell you this, Ellie—I didn’t do it, I never could have done it. I loved your sister. I loved her more than you, or she, will ever know. It all happened so long ago, it hardly matters to me now what people think. But your opinion does matter, because Lila talked about you all the time, you’re the person she was closest to in the world.”