Passing Through Paradise (5 page)

Chapter
5

Journal Entry
—
January
5—
Saturday Afternoon

Ten Things to Eat Without Cooking

1. Carrot and celery sticks with nonfat ranch dressing.

2. A Macintosh apple.

3. A slice of melba toast.

4. A cup of nonfat cottage cheese.

5. A handful of dry-roasted peanuts.

6. Popcorn with no butter or salt.

7. Popcorn with a ton of butter and salt.

8. A bag of deep-fried pork rinds.

9. A quart of Cherry Garcia ice cream.

10. A pound of Godiva chocolate.

The blisters were healing. At twilight, Sandra stood over the kitchen sink, unraveled gauze trailing from her wrists as she inspected her palms. She was washing her hands when she heard a truck roll up.

A FedEx. Running very late.

It could mean anything. The ordeal of the past year had taught her to expect the worst.

Hurrying to the front door, she signed for the flat, nearly weightless envelope and thanked the bored-looking driver, who seemed relieved to have reached his last stop of the day.

Zipping through the seal, she opened the parcel to find a long, perforated business check from Claggett, Banks, Saunders & Lefkowitz, the firm she’d engaged after Victor’s death. The memo on the check stub noted succinctly that this was the first payment from the insurance settlement, less the firm’s fee for obtaining it. The insurance company had, of course, termed Sandra’s claim fraudulent because Victor’s body was never recovered. But the ME’s ruling of death, based on brutally clear circumstantial evidence, had brought the situation to a grim conclusion.

She stared, unblinking, at the check in her hand. So this was it. Victor’s life, reduced to a dollar amount.

An unsettled feeling stirred in her chest. Setting the check on the hall table, she stepped out onto the porch, into the cold evening. She walked down to the yard, haunted now by shadows of deepest indigo and by a breeze that still held the muscle of the afternoon storm.

She’d come to love the wild, isolated coast, the stark views and the clean-washed smell in the aftermath of a storm. Could she ever find a place like this again? Running her thumb along the peeling paint of the porch rail, she tried not to allow her heart to ache over having to go, but regrets kept pounding at her, relentless as the waves. She’d spent the past year trying not to feel anything, and the effort was beginning to exhaust her. It’s just a stupid old falling-down house, she told herself. She should feel glad she was getting rid of it.

“Ah, Victor,” she said to the searching wind. “I wish you could give me a sign. Tell me what to do.” One of the hardest things about being alone was that there was no one to toss things around with, no one to consult. She was on her own, rafting through unknown waters, and hadn’t a clue about whether or not she was choosing the right course.

Heading to the shed to get more firewood, she glanced toward the road and stopped in her tracks. Then, with inborn caution, she walked to the side of the road.

There, atop a square post next to the ditch, was a new mailbox of galvanized steel, with the address stuck on in reflective numbers.

Malloy, she thought. When had he fixed this? He really was a drive-by handyman.

Chilled by the night air, she hurried back inside and fed another log to the iron stove. Then she settled on the sofa to go through the mail. It was the usual assortment of junk solicitations and bills. NRA stuff again. Why were they always after her? She supposed because Victor had been so firmly in favor of gun control. Setting aside the mail, she picked up the phone to let her lawyer know the check had arrived. Although he’d not been her favorite person, Milton Banks had been her advocate through the entire investigation, and when the ruling had come down Thursday afternoon, he’d been ebullient.

When his voice mail clicked on, she started speaking, only to be interrupted by Milton himself, live and inperson.

“So you got it. Ha! Are we quick or what?” he demanded in a working-class Boston accent. “You can rest easy for now.”

So can you, she thought, considering the size of the firm’s fee.

“I won’t be resting,” she said. “I have plans.”

He hesitated. “What kind of plans?”

“I’m going to fix up this house, sell it and get the heck out of Dodge.”

“Christ, Sandra, you ought to know better.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you take off now, it’ll look like you’re fleeing.”

“I am.” She curled the phone cord around her index finger.

He was quiet for a moment. “Look, I told you, the ruling’s only the first battle. Just because they didn’t find probable cause doesn’t mean you’re home free.”

A chill touched the base of her spine. “But I am. Home. And free.”

“Of course you are,” he said quickly. “But what’s your hurry? Stick around. Do it on your own, so the court doesn’t order you to.”

“I’ve stuck around for a year, Milton.” The icy apprehension slid through her and tightened in her gut.

“I warned you about this months ago. Regardless of what the ME found, there’s going to be a civil suit. The Winslows’ attorneys have been researching their case for months.”

Irritation pushed through her fear. Milton had warned her to expect trouble, but she put it out of her mind. The idea that her in-laws would sue her shouldn’t come as a surprise—nothing should. The unbelievable had already happened. “How do you know it’ll even materialize?”

She could hear the long pause of an inhale while Milton lit a cigarette, then exhaled into the receiver. “Because I’m a good lawyer. They’ve been in pre-suit prep forever, poking around for leads. Dollars to donuts they’re getting ready to file as we speak. Mark my words—they want somebody to go down, Sandra, and you’re the one. You were in the driver’s seat that night. Sorry to say, they’ve got options—negligent, careless, reckless—they might even try to pin ‘intentional’ on you. So brace yourself.”

She pressed her teeth together until her jaw ached, holding in a scream. Unwinding the phone cord, she drummed her fingers on the receiver. The old affliction strangled her, and it took several seconds of breathing exercises before she could force her next words out. “The place needs a lot of work, so we’ve got some time,” she informed Milton. “But believe me, the minute it’s fixed, I’m out of here, lawsuit or no lawsuit.”

“Just relax, kiddo. No judge will let this go to trial on such flimsy evidence. They’ll have to find something a lot more compelling than they’ve uncovered so far.”

Sandra gripped the receiver so hard that her healing blisters stung. There was plenty of evidence to find, and if it came to light, she was toast.

Chapter
6

Journal Entry
—
January 6
—
Sunday

10 Things to Do on a Sunday Morning

1. The NYT crossword puzzle.

2. Make pancakes in the shape of lawyers.

3. Go to church.

Sandra stared at item number three, and her heart sped up. Could she? Did she dare?

Until she actually wrote the words, she didn’t realize that the outrageous idea had been hovering at the edge of her mind, pulling at her even as she tried to push it away.

When Victor was alive, Sunday mornings had taken on the mantle of ritual. As the pastor’s son and a public figure himself, her husband treated worship as something more than a spiritual activity. Each Sunday, he rose early and dressed with meticulous care. He always looked perfect, slender and handsome as a plaster saint as he guided her to a box pew with an engraved brass plaque commemorating the first Winslows of Rhode Island.

Now she was alone, still reeling from the shock of her mother’s announcement and from Milton’s warning about a lawsuit.

She had the sensation of hovering on a precipice, about to plunge over the edge. She’d been a recluse for far too long, keeping to herself while the locals gossiped. Although Sandra had never been a fighter, some small, insistent voice inside kept nagging, nudging, telling her to barge unafraid into the life she wanted. She’d done nothing wrong, nothing but lose her husband under tragic circumstances, yet she kept feeling as though she owed the world an apology.

Ye are cursed with a curse: for ye have robbed me, even this whole nation.

No more, she thought, suddenly awash with the cleansing heat of defiance. It was time to quit acting guilty.

Cursed is the one who perverts the justice due the stranger, the fatherless and widow.

She paced up and down as the decision firmed in her mind. She had to stop torturing herself with uncertainties. She had to get out, do something.

Picking up the insurance check, she firmly endorsed it to Old Somerset Church. As she did, a lightness swept through her, as if someone had lifted a rock off her chest. Then, filled with defiant energy, she tried on and discarded several outfits, finally choosing a navy knit suit with matching shoes — subdued but stylish. Winifred Winslow, whose friends from boarding school still called her “Winky,” had approved it for a DAR luncheon, one of many lessons on being the wife of a politician.

Sandra did her makeup and hair with anxious attention, wishing she could find a way to mask the pallor in her cheeks and the hollow look of having lost too much weight too quickly.

The drive to town should have calmed her nerves, but with each mile, tension knotted tighter in her stomach. The road formed a brittle ridge of shale and granite along the coast, curving around to the main part of town. Winter-bare trees etched the stark landscape, as thin and straight as gouges made with a knife against a canvas of amber meadow grass. Frost hid in shadowed pockets of the fields and clung to the undersides of tumbled boulders at the shoulder of the road. Out on the water, fishing boats plowed through the gunstock-gray ocean, and scavenging gulls circled over the skeletal arms of the raised nets.

Sandra flexed her gloved hands on the steering wheel. For weeks after the accident, she’d been afraid to drive. Panic would gather in her chest, squeezing her lungs until she could hardly breathe. She forced herself to get in the car, go through the motions, focus on her destination. But the nightmare endured.

Fragments of memory haunted her even now; she could still see the slick black ice of the road and the glare of another car’s headlights in the rearview mirror. She could still hear the whine of tires hydroplaning across the bridge deck. Her ears rang with the explosion of impact, followed by the vicious hiss of the airbag detonating.

With a will, she pushed the past away and tried to relax her grip on the wheel. Painted wooden signs, weathered by the ceaseless battering of sea winds and slashing rain, marked the boundary of the township. Paradise was a true hometown, with sidewalks and tree-lined lanes, snug houses wrapped by porches, a grid of streets leading to the business area of neat shopfronts arranged around a faux-colonial community center. A drive-through donut shop, Gloria’s Shrimp Shack and the Twisted Scissors Barber Shop formed a truncated strip mall near the waterfront.

Slowing to a cautious twenty-five miles per hour, she passed the town commons, an oblong green space with a pond in the middle. In the next block . . . She told herself not to look, but couldn’t help it. She studied the Winslow estate, an eighteenth-century mansion in the middle of a pristine lawn. Less than a mile from that was the handsome but less ostentatious converted carriage house that had been the Winslows’ wedding gift to her and Victor.

All her life, Sandra had looked for a place to belong and finally, in Paradise at Victor’s side, she’d found it. When she lost him, she lost more than a husband. She lost her home, her community, her place in the world. She needed to find that again. The question was, how could she do it without Victor?

They had lived in the eye of the community, an up-and-coming state senator and his quiet new wife. Now the residence housed a small family, and changes were apparent—new lace curtains that, Sandra thought, compromised the clean lines of the upstairs dormer windows. A little red tricycle on the front walk caused her chest to ache with an old, familiar yearning. She had wanted children, but Victor kept putting it off.

Thinking back on those tense, late-night discussions, she realized how skillful he’d been, finding a reason to wait each time she broached the subject. First he had to settle his campaign budget. Attend to his mother, who had suffered—and survived—breast cancer. Win the election and raise funds for the next race. Position himself to climb the ladder to politics at the national level.

Anything but the truth.

She pulled her outdated Plymouth Arrow into a parking space at the church. The tower clock rang half past, and she let out a sigh of relief. She’d wanted to arrive early and approach the Winslows in private. Although it was tempting to make her gesture before the entire congregation, she couldn’t bring herself to do something so manipulative and disingenuous.

It was the sort of thing Victor would have done. But then again, it would have worked for Victor.

Drawing the strap of her purse over her shoulder, she slammed the car door. Self-conscious after her long absence, she recalled her first visit here, when she was the outsider, the unknown quantity, an object of scrutiny. In some ways, that had never changed, but eventually she’d meshed with the intricately woven pattern of church and town; she’d been comfortable here, much the same way she’d been comfortable with Victor.

But even in the most connected moments, she some-times felt like a fraud—she’d never been particularly religious and some aspects of the church scene felt false to a person of her dark imagination. Yet her duties as Victor’s wife had included volunteering in the children’s Sunday school, and secretly she thought leading a chirping chorus of “This Little Light of Mine” offered more grace than her father-in-law’s thundering sermons.

Tucking her coat around her, she headed for the rear of the church and a wide door marked “Pastor’s Office.” She didn’t have long to wait. Within a few moments, the Winslows’ van turned into the rear lot and glided into the spot reserved for the pastor. They didn’t appear to see her at first as they went through the routine of disembarking from the van.

After thirty years of living as a paraplegic, Ronald Winslow managed with easy grace. His wife neither pitied nor babied him; to Sandra’s knowledge, she never had. They always looked completely natural together, as dignified as any blue-blooded New England couple of a certain age. The bond of their love was a subtle but tangible thing—he effortlessly adjusted the electric glide of his chair to her pace as they crossed the parking lot. The sight of them had a special poignance for Sandra now. The thought that her parents would never be together like that again burned her like a brand.

The knot in her stomach tightened, but she forced her-self to walk toward the access ramp leading to the office.

“What are you doing here?” Her father-in-law’s blunt question stopped her.

With the chill wind lashing at her cheeks, she faced him squarely.
Ten Really Bad Ideas for a Sunday Morning . . .
Her notion of coming here, which had filled her with hope an hour ago, now seemed the height of foolishness.

“Hello, Ronald,” she said, feeling their stares like chisels. “Hello, Winifred.”

Victor’s mother didn’t even look at her. The outline of her turned-away face spoke more eloquently than any words. Her small, delicate nostrils emitted twin puffs of frozen air. Winifred, who had taught her how to plan a benefit dinner and give a speech to the League of Women Voters, acted like a stranger now.

Sandra heard the faint whine of a ship’s whistle in the harbor, the plaintive cry of a winter curlew overhead. No other sound intruded. Somehow, she found her voice. “I’m here because I want this to be over,” she said. “It was an accident. You were there for the ruling. You heard.”

It had been torture, sitting across the aisle from them, their sadness a dead weight, their censure pure poison.

“We heard the ruling.” Ronald moved the chair slightly in front of his wife as if to protect her. “That doesn’t mean we heard the truth. You were in the driver’s seat. You survived, and Victor died.”

Grief had ravaged this man’s noble face, so like the face of his only son. Shadows of sleeplessness were carved beneath his eyes; his cheeks looked ruddy, the way they did when he ate too much on Thanksgiving during the football games. A vital piece of this man was missing, and Sandra knew there was no way he’d ever get it back.

Victor had been their miracle baby, their only child— prayed for, desperately wanted, born against all medical odds to a man whose disability should have prevented conception at all. They raised him as their ultimate work-in-progress, mapping out a perfect life for their golden boy. He measured up in all ways but one—the woman he’d chosen to marry.

When Victor introduced her to his parents just three weeks after their first date—if you could call it a date—the Winslows had been gracious and unfailingly polite, but couldn’t quite mask the disappointment in their eyes. The words they would never, ever speak aloud hung like a fog in the air:
Why her? She’s a nobody, and so young. We had such hopes for you. . . .

Later, Victor confessed that they’d spent years pushing him toward the daughter of their closest friends, a woman who was beautiful, ambitious, pedigreed and well connected. A woman who had carried a torch for Victor ever since they’d met at a church picnic as teenagers. Her name was Courtney Procter.

After watching the WRIQ reports, Sandra knew for certain that Courtney had never forgiven her.

“You know I ‘d never harm Victor.” Thrusting her hand in her pocket, she closed her fist around the check. “You know me, Ronald,” she went on, struggling to keep her tone even, her voice free of hesitation. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“No one ever knew you, Sandra,” Winifred said, finally speaking out in a cold lash of anger. “You never let them.”

Sandra thrust the check at Ronald. “This is the first part of the life insurance settlement. I ‘m donating it to the church.” The pale green slip of paper dropped into his lap.

He brushed it away as though it were a live coal, and it fluttered to the bare pavement. “You can’t buy absolution with your profits from Victor’s death.”

“I’m not trying to buy anything. I don’t need to, because I didn’t do anything wrong—except, as you said, survive.” She held his gaze, and recognized the hurt buried in his eyes. “I miss him, too. I miss him every day, just as you do. That’s what this is about.”

“You’re trying to buy your way out of trouble, and it won’t work.”

“Stop.” Winifred put a hand on her husband’s arm. “We don’t have to listen to anymore of this.” With that, she turned, making her way up the ramp. Stone-faced, Reverend Winslow angled his electric-powered chair and followed his wife.

The Winslows were beyond comfort and apparently, beyond reason.

Sandra gripped the railing, started after them, then stopped. She stared down at the check, tumbling like a leaf along the pavement. A slow burn of anger swept through her. Her hand slipped down the iron railing as she stepped backward once, twice. Then, with shoulders squared and chin held high, she retrieved the check, turned away from the church and hurried toward her car.

The front doors of the sandy brick church now stood open to the day. She could see the glow of candles within, and the spice of fresh flower arrangements wafted from the sanctuary. The subtle, murmuring notes of the organist warming up for the processional rode the morning breeze.

But it was a false welcome, she knew that now. She wanted to kick herself for her own stupidity. She should have listened to Milton. Of course they wouldn’t change their minds simply because of the ruling.

Enough, then, she told herself, slamming the car door on the belly-deep sound of the church bells tolling. It would never be over. Especially not now. Everything was just starting now. Her hand closed around the check in her coat pocket. By declining her money, they were making her decision about the house much easier.

Yet it didn’t feel easy. These people wanted her humiliated, banished, ruined. They probably wanted her to burn in hell. A hundred times, she had been tempted to reveal the whole truth about that night, but she always fought the impulse. The truth would only add bitterness to their grief, and no explanation would bring Victor back to life.

Despite their anger at her, Sandra felt protective of Victor’s grieving parents. They’d been so proud of Victor. They missed him so much. Ever since his death, she’d shielded them from something only she knew. She told herself it was because she respected their grief—but maybe in her heart she was also engaged in a silent bargain: I’ll spare you the truth about your son if you’ll forgive me for my role in his death.