The Lavender Hour (28 page)

“I am the chief forensic pathologist for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts crime lab.”

Nelson took him through his credentials, and then began the questions.

“In layman's terms,” he said, “please tell the jury the cause of Luke Ryder's death?”

“Narcotic poisoning.”

“We have heard that the deceased was taking morphine to relieve pain. Could that account for the narcotics you found in the toxicology screening?”

“At the time of his death, the deceased had not only morphine in his system but five times the lethal dose of Seconal.”

“Beyond any reasonable amount ingested for pain or to induce sleep?”

“Five times the lethal dose,”Wilber repeated.

Gage had told me that jurors usually found testimony by experts tedious and that they often nodded off, especially after lunch, but when I dared look over at the box, each of them looked alert. Not one appeared the least bit in danger of napping. “It was the lock of hair and the sketchbook that did it,” Gage would tell me later. “That woke everyone up. Sexy.”

It was after four by the time both Gage and Nelson finished with their examinations, much of it corroborating Moody's testimony. The fingerprints. The toxicology results. Nelson had more evidence marked as exhibits. Shortly before five, Judge Savage excused
the jurors and instructed them not to discuss the case with anyone, and then she adjourned for the weekend. The court would reconvene at 9:00 on Monday morning.

Gage waited with me inside the courthouse while Irene went for the car. “Don't you worry,”he said, his constant refrain. “It's all circumstantial.”

E
ARLIER IN
S
EPTEMBER,
I'd moved out of the cottage in the campground. I'd felt vulnerable there ever since I'd learned of the break-in by the anonymous person, Paige's detective. I had also become concerned about the effect of a trial on my neighbors, most of whose families had been vacationing on this street for generations. They knew Lily, and a good many of them remembered my daddy. Some of the oldest even remembered his daddy. They had been supportive throughout the days after I had been arraigned and indicted, but when reporters had began to come around and the Cape Cod Times had printed a photo of the house, I knew I would have to leave. I didn't want them to have to put up with the invasion.

An old friend of Faye's had gone to Bordeaux for several months and, through Faye, had offered me the use of his home. It was an old estate at the end of a private road in Dennis. A large multiacre parcel, overlooking Cape Cod Bay, it was one of the few remaining homesteads in the area that had not been subdivided. The mansion was a white Greek revival called the Captain's House, a name I thought apt since it had been built sometime in the 1800s by a sea captain before being passed along to a grandson who was a captain of industry, and then, most recently, to a well-known captain of commerce. This last captain had had the interior completely gutted, reinforced, and renovated. Spacious, awash with light, and filled with the owner's art collection, the result had been featured in an issue of Architectural Digest. Off to the side of the circular drive was a converted carriage house that the family used for overflow
guests. A simple four-room cottage that had escaped the renovation plans, it contained a kitchen, living room with a fieldstone fireplace that took up an entire wall, two bedrooms, and a bath. There were wide pine floors throughout and pine paneling in the living room that had aged to a warm gold. Faye's friend had offered me either the mansion or the carriage house, and I chose the smaller of the two. It suited me perfectly and—looking back later—I would believe it saved my sanity. No one knew I was there except for Faye, Gage and his staff, and, of course, Ashley.

Those weeks I lived like a hermit. I prepared simple meals, worked on my jewelry, walked along the flats when the tide was low. It was a nunlike existence, as if I were serving penance. My sole human visitor was Faye, who occasionally stopped by to drop off my mail and a pot of homemade soup or a pie or a jar of beach plum jelly. My only other company was avian.

There was an old wooden feeder atop a post by the kitchen window, and on my second day there, I'd gone to the Bird Watcher's General Store in Orleans and bought five pounds of seed. Each morning I woke to birdcalls. I'd listen and try to identify them—chickadee, cardinal, finch—and I'd think about Luke. The clarity of my memory of him was fading, like a watercolor exposed to the sun. How fragile was the tissue of memory. One night I tried to sketch his image, but the drawing was poor. I would have given anything for one photo of him, something. I couldn't even hold the locket in which I'd hidden the curl of his hair. After the police had arrived with the search warrant and taken away his shirt and my sketchbook and the envelope containing his hair, I'd driven to Falmouth and rented a safe-deposit box in a savings bank and secreted it there, safely out of reach of Lieutenant Moody.

Luke. The missing underlay every moment—like a frigid underground lake—although I could speak of it to no one. The ever-present ache of sorrow lodged in my body, and I wondered what happened to grief that could not be expressed. Shakespeare had a line about that, but I couldn't recall it. I remembered what I had
thought when Luke told me that birds sang for joy: What do they do with their grief?

A
FTER THAT
fourth day of the trial, I returned to my refuge in Dennis and tried not to think about the day's testimony, the expressions of the jurors, the hate-filled ugliness on the face of the protester who wished me dead. There was no cable hookup at the carriage house, and I was grateful for that, for I might have been tempted to watch the news, see what the pool television camera had recorded. Four days. On the first day, Gage estimated we would be through all the testimony in a week, but things were proceeding slower than he'd expected, and Nelson still had a number of witnesses to call before the state rested and Gage began my defense. I pushed these thoughts from my mind as I prepared a dinner of rice and steamed green beans. And tea. I'd stopped drinking alcohol weeks ago. Part of the penance. I wouldn't allow myself the easy escape of wine or gin. After dinner, I cleaned up the kitchen, and then placed my nightly call to Ashley.

“How did it go?” Ashley asked.

“Okay.”

She wanted details, so I recounted as much as I could about the day's testimony. I tried to convey Gage's confidence, but, as always, Ashley could read me.

“I think I should come up,” she said. “Someone should be there with you.”

“What does Daniel say about that?”

“I haven't talked it over with him yet,” she said after a hesitation. The pause was all the answer I needed.

“I don't think you should,” I said, and repeated Gage's assertion that I didn't need to worry, that the entire case was circumstantial.

“He's been telling you that since the day you hired him.”

“I believe him.”

“Wake up and smell the fire, Jess. This is not going to go away,
no matter what your runt lawyer says.” Ashley had met Gage when she'd come up for the clothes-shopping expedition, and she hadn't been impressed. She wanted me to call Bill Miller. I told her I'd eat ground glass before I'd get him involved.

“It'll be over soon,” I said, hoping I sounded optimistic.

“I wish you would tell Mama. Think how it'll be if she hears about it from someone else.”

“She's in Italy. How is she going to hear about it? It will be over before she comes home.” I hadn't told Ashley about the TV trucks, reporters, protesters, and she hadn't mentioned seeing anything in the news. If it hadn't reached Virginia, I doubted it would reach Italy.

“I'm here for you, sweetie,” Ashley said.

“I know you are.”

“If there is anything you want, anything I can do—”

“You've already done enough.” I would be paying her and Daniel back for years.

“Oh, baby. I wish I could do more. I wish I could make this go away.”

I closed my eyes. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“How come you've never asked me?”

“What's that?”

“If I did it. If I gave Luke an overdose.”

“Oh, baby. There was no need to ask. I know you. I know you didn't do it.”

Ashley's voice was sure, but I couldn't help wondering if the real reason she had never asked was because she hadn't wanted to hear the answer. “Give the boys my love.”

“And ours to you.”

We hung up. I climbed the stairs to the room where I'd set up my worktable and turned the radio on to the local NPR affiliate. A Bach concerto was playing. I began braiding and weaving the buttery
blond hair from a woman in Seattle into a chain braid. A spider at work.

I know you didn't do it.

F
ROM THE
moment I'd hired him, Gage Fisk never asked me if I'd given Luke an overdose. The only one who'd asked was Faye. “I need to know,” she had said in a voice devoid of judgment. “I need to know what we are dealing with.” I'd held her gaze and told her no. No, I had not given Luke an overdose. Faye had searched my face, seemed satisfied with what she saw there. “We'll beat this,” she'd said. “Don't worry.” The same thing Gage had said earlier when we left the courthouse.

T
HE NORTH SHORE
of the Cape fronts Cape Cod Bay. At high tide, all is concealed, and you have to walk on soft sand that gives beneath your feet. But when the tide is low, extensive sand flats are exposed, and although the trick is not to get caught out when the tide turns, it is possible to walk nearly a mile straight out to the water's lip. Shellfishermen dig for clams then, and shorebirds skitter around, leaving miniature prints in the damp sand. Things are revealed in the intertidal zone, exposed. Ribs and masts of old vessels; ropes; bleached shells; the shoaling of sands, all maternal curves and swells; skate egg cases; horseshoe crabs; short, random ribbons drawn by sandworms. Once I came upon the skeleton of a seal, its fin bones alarmingly like those of a human hand.

Now I walked along the shore. I'd woken early. It was too cool to go barefoot on those fall days, and I kept a pair of old beach-walking sneakers, stiff with dried salt, by the back door. I stored a walking stick there, too, a length of gray driftwood worn smooth by sand and water that I'd found during the first week at the carriage house. I carried it as I headed out, east toward Brewster, poking holes in the sand as I went. I passed by houses, some occupied by year-round residents. Inside, people were rising into the slow unfolding of their days, measuring scoops of coffee, retrieving the morning papers from front steps, taking vitamins. Ordinary lives.

Later, when I would look back on those weeks in the carriage house, I would think of the days as a period when time stopped. As if I had stepped outside of it. There were moments—mornings in the first instants of waking or when I was walking along the beach,
my mind drifting, lulled by the running song of the water lapping at the shore—when I could almost believe I was caught up in a bad dream, as trite as this sounds, one from which I would wake and find myself back in Virginia or Chicago. But then a wave of pain would take hold, and I would remember. I'd think back to the year before and how I had come to the Cape, clear of cancer and full of hope, ready to begin anew. I'd run through all the things that had happened since then. And at the center of all the memories was Luke. I had believed I could block out grief, but of course I couldn't. It would take me at unexpected times, rocking me to my soul and bringing a terrible tightness to my throat, making it nearly impossible to swallow, let alone breathe.

A
S I WALKED
toward the sunrise, I replayed the testimony thus far and was taken with a gnawing fear of what lay ahead. How could this have happened to me? As if, all evidence to the contrary, death, disaster, disease, freak accidents, befell only others. Or if they did happen, one would be rescued, cured, saved. I was swept with a sudden longing for my daddy, an aching that was as fierce as it was unexpected, and with it came an attendant pain I hadn't felt in years. Beneath the longing was anger. Fury born in betrayal. And, I suppose, grief.

W
HEN, AS
children, Ashley and I had vacationed on the Cape, we seldom went swimming on the bay side, where I walked that Saturday morning, preferring the deeper and more convenient waters of Nantucket Sound. Once or twice during the summer, our family would drive to Nauset Beach in Orleans and brave the icy Atlantic. These outings were all-day events that followed a ritualistic pattern. Lily would pack a picnic: tuna salad sandwiches, lemonade, and carrot sticks for Ashley and me; brie, French bread, olives, and wine for her and my daddy; white grapes and homemade cookies for the four of us. We would swim, sun, collect seashells, toss a Frisbee, or, if there was a decent breeze, launch a kite. Then, late in
the afternoon, my daddy would walk to the snack shack to buy double orders of fried clams and onion rings, one of us tagging along on Lily's orders to ensure he wouldn't forget extra tartar sauce. Our fingers and lips shiny with grease, we would sit on the blanket and gorge. Ashley and I would fight over who'd get the last clam. Ashley usually won. Finally, tired and sunburned, we would pack up and return to the cottage, proclaiming the day the best of the summer.

The year I was eleven, my daddy taught me to bodysurf. He checked his tide charts, and when it was scheduled to be high at midday, he instructed Lily to pack a lunch and we headed for Nau-set. Once we chose the spot—a science in itself: too close to the water and we would be forced to shift everything when the tide came in, too far back and Lily couldn't keep an eye on us while we swam—we claimed it as ours. My daddy set up the umbrella and unfolded the beach chairs; Lily spread the blanket, anchoring it at one corner with the cooler and at the other three with our sandals. Ashley and I stripped off our T-shirts and shorts to reveal our new suits (mine a pink halter-top one-piece; Ashley's a blue bikini, her first, bought after a sharp battle with Lily). Soon we were settled— Daddy with the Boston Globe, Lily with a paperback mystery, my sister on her towel. (Ashley had turned thirteen that summer and refused to sit with us, instead staking out her space several feet away so that any cute boy walking by would not connect her with us.) Immediately I commenced nagging her, begging her to come with me to find shells for our collections or to toss the Frisbee.