The Reservoir (4 page)

“Thank you, Tommie. Isn’t it a little chilly for a garden stroll?” She closes her eyes an extra beat as she addresses him—the habit has always slightly unnerved him, as though she half-expected to see somebody more interesting when she opened her eyes.

“Yes, but it’s our favorite place, and I wanted to see if there were any blooms yet besides the redbud.”

“You’re a romantic, Tommie.” She lets him take her hand. “Was there some reason you wanted to talk with me this morning?” Since the death of her mother in December she has seemed less critical of Tommie, but also less patient, less willing to laugh at frivolities. He told her recently that this spring he expected to find himself in a promising financial situation and that he had his eye on a house in Little Plymouth. What he hadn’t said was that he hoped to be disentangled from a rather pressing problem.

Again last night he could not sleep well. Now he hears bells. He knows the sound is only in his head, but they ring clear like cathedral bells in some old European capital, or like all the church bells in Richmond clanging at once. How precious life is, he thinks. What a miraculous gift. “The sun feels good,” he says.

“Yes, but it’s going to rain today, which we need. Did you just want to walk?”

“Yes, I think so,” he says, gripping her hand tighter and thankful she is not as perceptive as his brother, as attentive to his moods. Once upon a time he hardly dared to think of himself as her suitor—she seemed so much more sophisticated and better positioned. But when he became a law student with a future, coupled with his aunt’s connections and money, he was somebody. She also found him handsome, and he could make her laugh about the books and music she had studied so devotedly. He was a breath of fresh air to her, and if she was a little prudish for his tastes she was nonetheless the older of two daughters and hence the heiress to one of the few intact estates left in the county.

“I got a letter from Lillie,” Nola says.

“When did she write?” He pretends to be interested in some dogwood buds, but his head is throbbing.

“Only a few days ago. She told me she was going to Old Point Comfort to help take care of a friend’s sick aunt. She’s awfully sweet to come all the way across the state on an errand of mercy like that, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” he says, noncommittally. “What else did she say?”

“Well, I don’t remember …”

Think, Nola. Did she mention me?
Tommie feels himself going slack in the neck and the legs, as if the blood is leaving his body and draining into the ground.

“Oh, she said her teaching was going fine, but that it was very cold and they had lots of snow up in the mountains. She has a new coat and asked me to send some material for her to work a hatband. It must be so beautiful there and she has a wonderful way of making friends. I’d like to go out and visit, though I don’t want to intrude. What do you think? It’s thanks to you that we became such good friends, you know. Tommie? Tommie, are you listening?”

“Yes, I—yes, of course I am. You wanted to know about visiting. I don’t know. Only if you want to.”

“Yes, but she hasn’t specifically invited me, you see. And Daddy depends on me now—I’d hate to leave him for very long.”

There must not have been any more to the letter than that, he thinks. “I have to go now, Nola,” he says. “They’re waiting for me to go to church.”

He kisses her on the cheek and, though she appears to want something more from him, he turns and lets himself out the gate. It
is
going to rain. He can feel it in the air.

All afternoon long, people come by the almshouse, tracking the floorboards with mud and water from the rainy streets. Rich and poor, black and white, farmers, bankers, laborers, factory workers, prostitutes, and entire families dressed in church clothes—all file through for a look. The Sunday paper had carried a story about the dead girl; word went around. She lies in an open coffin, a clean white shroud up to her neck. The almshouse workers have combed the red dirt out of her hair and washed her face.

Detective Wren has positioned himself in a corner of the chapel where the dead girl lies, studying the people who study the girl. Every so often he will approach one of the gawkers and ask a few quiet questions. Did you recognize the girl? It seemed as though you knew her. Just curious, huh? Richardson has decided to let Wren stay, as long as he does not appear to be scaring anybody off.

People are quiet, respectful, as though viewing a dead body were part of their regular Sunday ritual. Some people remark on how small and pretty she looks. Others shake their heads and say what a pity it is, her dying like that and no one here to claim her. Quite a few comment on the bruises and wonder how she came by them. By dark, no one having identified the woman, the almshouse superintendent closes the door to further visitors. Several people continue to knock during the evening and are told to come back tomorrow.

First thing in the morning Dr. Taylor impanels a jury of inquest, composed of the usual half dozen officers and medical experts. In the meantime, people keep coming by to view the body. Finally a woman with a squinty eye swears it’s the body of Harriett Mays, who used to live in her boardinghouse. The superintendent asks her if Harriett Mays had long hair, and she says, “No, it was short and brown, just like hers.” Since the young woman’s hair is mostly pinned behind, the way it was when she was found, the superintendent is dubious. Standing with the squinty-eyed woman, an unshaven man, his jacket out at elbows, says he’d bet his life on it being Harriett Mays. He saw her himself a week ago last Friday. He wants to know if there will be a reward.

Richardson takes a police ambulance out to Harriett Mays’s address in Manchester. From an alley the mingled odors of cooking greens and stale urine assail him. He ducks under a laundry line, his tall leather hat dripping rainwater onto his shoes, and climbs a rickety flight of stairs. He knocks on a thin, cracked tenement door. “Is there a Miss Harriett Mays here?” he asks.

“You’re looking at her,” says a shock-haired woman with no eyeteeth.

“Harriett Mays,” Richardson says. “I hate to inform you, but you’re dead.”

Her eyes bug out. “I ain’t either,” she insists.

Richardson explains the situation and asks her to come with him up to the almshouse for a few minutes. When she arrives, the crowd makes way for the suddenly revivified Harriett Mays. She stares at the corpse, then shyly at the crowd, then back again, as though she has indeed cheated death. On her face is the biggest smile it has ever known.

A short while later a young woman named Miss Emma Dunstan comes to the almshouse in the company of her younger sister. When she sees the body, she knows it is that of Fannie Lillian Madison of King William County. “We visited her family Christmas before last.” Her father, she explains, is from King William, and knew the Madisons quite well. Both Taylor and Richardson are interested in the Misses Dunstans’ opinion. Richardson takes them into a room for further questioning.

“Any distinguishing marks that you know of?”

They both shake their heads.

Richardson touches just above his left breast. “A scar about here?” They don’t know of any such scar, but they are ready to swear it is her. The paper mentioned the finding of a traveling bag with clothes marked F. Madison. It got them to thinking. Emma hands Richardson a folded-up red scarf and says her mother found it on their front hedges Saturday morning. Their house happens to be near the reservoir, which seems an odd coincidence. Richardson at first doubts the scarf has anything to do with the dead girl, then he begins to doubt the Dunstans. They don’t seem like the type who just want to see their names in the newspaper, but why would the girl’s scarf end up at their house? Unless she was going there. “Had she ever been to your house?” he asks.

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“What sort of person was she?”

“A high-minded, ambitious sort of girl, I thought,” says the elder Miss Dunstan. “But not the sort that would ever do a bad thing or think a bad thought.”

Uh huh, thinks Richardson.
Nil nisi bonum
. Don’t speak ill of the dead. “You know she was pregnant?”

“I read that.” She glances down.

“Anybody she was particularly close to?”

“I didn’t know her that well, but you could ask her cousin Cary Madison. He’s a carriagemaker. He lives down on Fifth.”

Richardson thanks the young ladies and shows them back to the hallway. People are still coming in, eyeing the body, making speculations. The Dunstan girls take another quick look in the coffin as they pass, then hurry back out into the gray rain.

• CHAPTER FOUR •

T
HE FIRST TIME
he really noticed her was at his uncle Samuel’s funeral. It also happened to be the day he met Nola Bray. Tommie was fourteen and he and his brother had recently moved downcounty to live with their aunt and uncle. Uncle Samuel had been a wealthy merchant who knew nearly everybody in three counties—fine carriages were parked a mile up and down from Mount Olivet Baptist Church. After the service they went back to Cedar Lane, where Aunt Jane in widow’s weeds gallantly shook everyone’s hand, flanked by her two nephews.

The children drifted to the back lawn with plates of food. Tommie found his brother out by the well talking to an older cousin from King William and two girls from a nearby estate. He stood quietly just beyond the little group until the older girl introduced herself. “Hello, I’m Nola Bray, your neighbor,” she said. She spoke with a precision and formality he had never heard in a person his age. Her little sister giggled at him, standing there like a statue, and he blushed. Willie and the cousin went off to the edge of the field, leaving him there with the two girls.

“I’m so sorry about your uncle,” Nola said. “And I’m sorry you haven’t yet been to Upper Oaks. We’ll have to remedy that. I’ve been away a good part of the summer at White Sulphur Springs. The air is so much better there. A lot of people from Charleston go there. Some of them are nice, but some of them put on airs. Have you been there?”

Not sure if she meant White Sulphur Springs or Charleston, but the answer being the same to both, Tommie shook his head. At that moment a swarm of younger children went dashing by. Leading them was a girl of about twelve who tagged him as she passed, and sang out, “Follow my leader.” After standing around greeting unfamiliar people, he was itching to shed his suit and run around like crazy, chasing after the girl. But, damn it all, he’d be thought rude to be carrying on so at a funeral.

Nola was telling him what a good place Aberdeen Academy was and how lucky he was to be going there this fall instead of Locust, where his brother was going. Secretly he was proud that he had been chosen to go to the better school, but he had misgivings about boarding in a place a half-day’s journey away. So he pretended indifference. “I’d as soon go to Locust,” he said, shrugging.

“Well, you’re wrong about that,” she insisted, tossing her thin nose. Her face was narrow, and her eyebrows rose with almost everything she said, giving her a haughty look. She made some comment about the heat and the lack of good rain, then took her sister in hand and made her way back up to the house. Her dark hair was braided and twisted tightly to the back of her head; from behind she could be taken for an adult, with her black dress and her proudly erect walk.

Not so the girl who had tagged him. Tommie wandered down to the icehouse, looking for his brother. He peered into the darkness, inhaling the cold vapor that felt so otherworldly on a hot day. The girl came along again, this time by herself, but still running, her brown ringlets bobbing and white dress sliding ghostlike over the clipped grass. She tagged him again and as he turned to say something, his brother jumped out from behind the icehouse and grabbed her by the wrist. She struggled to free herself. “What’s the matter with you,” Willie said, “running around here like a little hellion?”

“You oughten to cuss.” A blush spread across her marble-white cheeks. She almost had a woman’s shape, yet everything—her hands, her feet, her features, even her voice—seemed diminutive.

“And speaking up to her elders too,” Willie said, letting go her hand.

“You ain’t my elders either.” She swept a curl off her forehead.

Willie laughed. “I know you. You’re Fannie Lillian, and almost grown up since last summer.”

“Lillian.”

“What?”

“It’s not Fannie Lillian anymore, it’s just Lillian. Or Lillie.” She sniffed out, as though challenging him.

Tommie remembered his cousin now—really his mother’s brother’s granddaughter, which made her and her many brothers and sisters his first cousins once removed. Except slightly more removed, his mother had said, because the brother was a half-brother. She said it in a kind of disparaging way, as though this branch of the family was not one she was proud of.

“Well then, Lillian,” Willie said, “What have you got to say for yourself?”

“Nothing to you.” She had run off while he was telling her how sassy she was, but not before taking a closer look at Tommie, who said nothing at all. There was a mischievous smile about her lips as she turned and wisped up over the lawn like a spirit. Then he and Willie went and sat at the edge of the hayfield and he told Willie he wished he were not going off to Aberdeen. Willie said not to be stupid—he, Tommie, was the smart one, the one who needed an education. “All I want is right here,” Willie said. “And someday my own buggy, and a horse to go with it. Maybe even a wife.”

“I want to go places,” Tommie said. “See the Taj Mahal and elephants and New York and Paris.”

“The burlesque shows?”

“Maybe,” Tommie said, blushing.

“You can see an elephant up in Richmond. John Griswold saw one at a circus there.” Tommie said it would be nice just to see Richmond.

Before school started, his father took him up to Richmond for a day. Aunt Jane wanted to treat them to dinner at a hotel restaurant, but, not wishing to hurt her brother-in-law’s pride, she ended up just giving Tommie a little spending money and packing him a lunch in a paper sack.

Two years later Lillian came to live with them after some unspecified trouble in her home. She had been at Cedar Lane more than a month when Tommie returned home from Aberdeen for the summer. She and Willie had started out shy with each other but had become friends, and sometimes even fought like brother and sister. Now Tommie found himself the interloper in his own home. His young cousin seemed to enjoy tormenting him, mocking him whenever he tried to discuss Plato or Shakespeare at the dinner table. “I guess there’s no point in trying to be civilized around here,” he said, glaring at her.

She smiled sweetly. “You could learn to be civilized if you tried,” she said. “You could say please pass the butter, instead of reaching across the table like a baboon.”

Stunned into silence, he wanted to slap her pert little face. Aunt Jane scolded them both; Willie just sat there enjoying the show. After supper Tommie watched through the summer kitchen window as his brother and Lillie went out to grain the horses. He clomped up to his room and tried to read, but found himself staring out the window at the barn.

Later in the summer he saw the two of them walking hand in hand coming up from the back hayfield. He was on the porch rocker and pretended not to have noticed anything. But they didn’t leave off holding hands even in the yard, and he realized it was for his own benefit that he was pretending. Willie stopped at the well to fill a bucket, and Lillie dashed on up the stairs, stopping just long enough to say, in mock seriousness, “Hello, old Mr. Tommie.” She laughed and disappeared inside. He slammed his book shut and got up to help his brother.

One afternoon when he was walking home from the river, she was lying in wait behind the cedars lining the drive. Instead of springing out at him, she waited until he had passed, then quietly slipped just behind him so that when he realized someone was there he lurched around with a frightened “Whaaa!” He turned back around, trying to ignore her. She asked him where he’d been, and he said, “The river.”

“What for?”

“To look at the side-wheelers. Who wants to know?”

“Not even to fish?”

“No.”

“You’re so different from your brother.” She mouthed something, but made no sound.

He kept walking, head down, hands in pockets, not caring if she imitated him. The way to deal with her, he’d decided, was just to let her have her fun, and then she’d grow bored and run off. But this time she seemed to want to talk with him. She asked him what it was like at Aberdeen. She was going off to Bruington Academy at the end of the summer; it too was a half-day upcounty. “Not bad once you get used to it,” he told her.

“But don’t you miss being at home?”

“Sometimes. But they keep you pretty busy.”

“I don’t miss my home in Manquin, but I think I might miss it here.”

“Why don’t you miss your home?”

She thought about this for a minute. “Can you keep a secret?”

“Yes.”

“They’re mean to me.”

“Who?”

“Ma and Papa. Not so much my brothers, and my little sisters hardly ever. But Papa won’t let me write or get letters from boys. He tore the lock off my trunk and burned all my letters, from girlfriends too. I said he was the very devil, and he whipped me so hard I couldn’t sit down good for a week.”

Tommie did not know whether to believe this tale.

“I have a little blister right here,” she touched herself above her left breast. “I was sick when I was little and they didn’t have enough money for a doctor. That’s what Aunt Jane said. She said the girls at school won’t take any notice of it. Did you get whipped a lot?”

“No, hardly ever.” Tommie thought about his father, too heartbroken to ever raise a hand to him after the death of his little brother. And his mother, kind and gentle, especially so in the evenings after her medicinal doses. He had resented them for letting themselves go to where they’d had to send him and his brother to Aunt Jane’s. Of course, they’d said that he and Willie would have better opportunities with Jane than they could provide, and it did not take long for them both to see that this was so. “They whipped Willie some, when he was little. He got in trouble more.”

“I expect he did,” she said. Again, her lips moved soundlessly.

“Why do you do that?” he said.

“Do what?”

“You say back the words to yourself after you just said them.”

She looked at him hard, then blushing, said, “I don’t do it as much as I used to. My little sister crosses her fingers whenever she sees a black cat, and my brother spits instead of saying a cuss word.”

Tommie looked into her eyes, wondering about a girl who would want to check her words after they’d been said. They were almost at the house now and she slowed down. “I got in trouble too, somehow. I don’t know why.” She seemed on the point of saying something else, then she saw Willie around the side of the house and hurried over to him.

By the end of the summer, she and Tommie had become, if not friends, then at least tolerant of each other. And he began noticing her more, the way a lock of hair curled down her forehead, or how she would absently scratch an ankle while reading, and the color that would suddenly come to her cheeks when she was excited or embarrassed. At times she was downright plain-looking, but when she was animated she was almost beautiful. He found himself seeking her out to give her advice about boarding school. During the day when he was out in the fields working with Willie, the new muscles straining in his shirt, he missed the sound of her voice, her trickling laughter. He would listen to her talk about a sick calf a friend had written of, or about some needlework, just to hear her speak.

And then it was time to say good-bye, her school starting before Tommie’s. She hugged them all, lingering longest with Willie. Then when Willie went to help her into the cart, Tommie stepped forward too, as though she needed two people, and her hem caught under his foot. She laughed as it pulled loose, and he stood there feeling foolish and awkward and waving to her.

Later that day Aunt Jane told him in private that she thought Bruington would be good for Lillie. “And it won’t hurt for her and Willie to be apart for a while. Not that I don’t trust them. But between you and me I trust him more.”

Word gets around that the girl found at the reservoir may not have killed herself. In fact, a coroner’s jury is looking into the possibility that she was murdered. When Mr. Lucas asks Mr. Meade what he thinks about it and Mr. Meade says he thought all along she was murdered, Mr. Lucas is skeptical. But mainly he is worried. In his shirt is a potential piece of evidence. He goes back to his work. At times he takes out the key and examines it. He likes the heart shape at the top and the weight of it in his hand. He has begun to feel it was Effie’s gift to him. That’s what he calls the dead girl. He has concocted fantasies involving Effie and himself. In his favorite, he comes back to the reservoir at night just before she jumps in. He sees her huddled in the cold by herself, crying softly, and he asks if he can be of service. “Not much good with problems of the heart,” he says, “but if it’s a leaky pipe that needs fixing, I’m your man.” She smiles at his awkward attempt to comfort her, and lets him put an arm around her shoulders. He tells her that something made him want to come up one last time and check on the reservoir grounds—he’s not sure what, but now he’s glad he came. She has nowhere to go, so she spends the night with him. She ends up staying on, cooking his meals for him, and having the baby in his house. At first he’s like a father to her, but eventually—he’s not sure how—she comes to love him as a man.

The idea that there was a man with her that night suggests a different story. Now Mr. Lucas arrives during the middle of a struggle. He takes a blow to the head, but Effie is spared and the man runs off and is never heard of again. The rest of the story is more or less the same, except that occasionally Effie will cry for no apparent reason. Yet Mr. Lucas knows that in her heart Effie understands how cruel her young lover was. He takes the watch key out of his shirt and looks at the little heart shape. What he feels now is anger. How could someone do this to such a poor, sweet little girl?