The School of Night (11 page)

“Read me that name again,” I said.

“Joanna Frobisher. You know it?”

“I know it.”

13

M
ORE THAN ONCE
, in the days since Alonzo's death, I'd asked myself the same question:
What if nobody had seen him jump?

His suicide note could have blown away. The watch and shoes would have been easy prey for thieves. The coat that washed up a few days later on Bear Island? Just another piece of flotsam, not worth mentioning to anybody.

Yes, Alonzo Wax could have gone to his end entirely unnoticed if fate hadn't granted him a witness.

A forty-six-year-old Hyattsville woman who had gotten lost while taking a late-afternoon hike on the Gold Mine Loop and who, unable to get a cell signal, had decided to tack toward the river in hopes of finding help.

As she later told the police, all she saw when she approached the Washington Aqueduct Observation Deck was a khaki raincoat, flaring out of the darkness. The human form that stood inside that coat … this came to her only as she got nearer. And then, before she knew it, she was running toward the silent figure on top of the platform. Who was already jumping.

Stunned, she peered into the torrent of water where he had disappeared. But the night was cloudy, and she had no flashlight. Whoever the man was, whatever his sorrow had been, he was gone.

*   *   *

Testifying weeks later at Alonzo's inquest, she told the court how the whole experience had taught her to value life and never take anyone or anything for granted. You couldn't, I remember thinking, have scripted a more empathetic witness.

“And her name was Joanna Frobisher?” Clarissa asked me.

I nodded.

“So what are the chances there could be
two
Joanna Frobishers in Hyattsville?”

“Both tied to the same dead man? Not great. Not even particularly good.”

Clarissa rocked herself to her feet.

“And nobody asked this woman if she knew Alonzo? Or knew
of
him?”

“Why would they?” I said. “It was an inquest, not a trial. Whatever happened was already a matter of record. Alonzo's family just wanted to put the whole thing to rest.”

“So if Lily's cousin was out by the river that night…”

I pressed my knuckles into my temple. “Lily must have sent her there.”

“But why?”

“Because a witness was needed.”

“Why?”

I had to sound the answer in my head before I trusted myself to speak it.

“Because it was the only way people would believe Alonzo killed himself.”

Because there were too many reasons he
wouldn't
have. Wouldn't have traveled miles from home to do a job he could have accomplished a few blocks from his apartment.

Whoever chose that bridge had had very specific criteria in mind. The place had to be dark, it had to be remote, and it had to be a place where nobody could ever know for sure what had happened.

“Whew,” said Clarissa, blowing out two cheekfuls of air. “If you're right—”

“If I'm right, Lily Pentzler was part of a conspiracy to commit murder.”

In the silence that ensued, that final word seemed actually to revolve in the air between us. Slowly, so we could study all its aspects.

I know
. That's what I'd said to Lily, the last time I saw her alive.
I know.

No. You don't.

Clarissa and I looked at each other.

“Police?” she suggested at last.

From my wallet I unearthed the card. Punched in the number.

“This is Detective August Acree. I am not available to take your call at this time.…”

I left a vague message and then a number and then, after great thought, the following afterword:

“Um, thanks.”

And then, for several minutes, we sat there, listening to the hum of the air-conditioning window unit.

“Still no word?” I asked.

“From who?”

“Mr. Swale the book dealer.”

Absently, Clarissa reached for her Trio, scanned the roster of new messages.

“Nothing.”

“Then what do you say we get out of here?”

“And go where?”

I briefly thought of saying,
Anywhere
. But in fact, I had a specific place in mind: the Fort Ralegh Historic Site.

Located not by the ocean but several miles inland and corresponding roughly to the site where Thomas Harriot and his fellow colonists hunkered down more than four centuries ago. The original settlements, of course, were long gone, and the only thing that still bore Harriot's name was a nature path, which, for reasons inscrutable, was listed as the Thomas
Harlot
trail.

“Ooh,” said Clarissa. “I like the sound of that.”

A remark just saucy enough to make me fall back a pace. For which I was rewarded by the sight of her gypsum-alabaster legs, striding down the path. It took me a hundred yards to catch up with her again.

“I'm guessing you've been married, Henry.”

“Once or twice. Or so.”

“What went wrong?”

“Um,
me
, I guess. Is this something we need to talk about?”

“No.”

The only things we could hear now were the sounds of our feet, muffled by a carpet of loblolly pine needles.

“So what exactly is wrong with you, Henry? That you can't keep a woman?”

“Um…”

“You can be nice enough.”

“Well—anyone can. Serial killers…”

“You're nice to look at.”

God help me, I blushed.

“You mean for my age,” I said.

“Any age,” she answered, meeting my eyes. “One might even call you a catch, Henry.”

“Well, every time I was caught, I was released. Shortly after.”

“So what was the deal?”

“We're really going to talk about this.”

“Only if you want.”

I picked up a stick, swung it lightly at a red mulberry.

“The problem wasn't who I was, it was who I
wasn't
.”

“Who were you
not
?”

Something quite impudent about her tone. But when I looked into the bitter-chocolate layers of her eyes, I found … no, better to say I was lost. For a second or two.

“Oh, you know. I wasn't the guy with the brilliant—you know, blazing, unassailable
future
. I used to think I was, but I wasn't. And unfortunately, I wasn't an artist, either.”

“Not even with the love of a good woman?”

I paused to consider the implications of that question.

“Truthfully, no. That was the lesson of my second marriage.”

“Well, never mind. I'm guessing you're a good teacher.”

“It would depend on your definition.”

“Give me one.”

“Um … I've never missed a class?”

“Good.”

“I've never slept with any of my students?”

“Not
yet
you haven't.”

And with that, I found myself suddenly paralyzed by the vision of Clarissa Dale, wild-haired, raspberry-lipped, in a pleated tartan skirt, craning her head around my office door.

Professor Cavendish?

The effect was so erotic and so unlikely that the only possible response was to laugh. A minute later, I was still laughing.

“So,” she said. “You
do
know.”

“What?”

“The way to happy.”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “In sprints I get there.”

I thought then of asking Clarissa for her own history, but I wasn't sure I wanted to know. Or, rather, it wasn't clear to me that knowing would be better than not knowing.

We walked on. And as we went, the path began to decant, and the air between the cedars and oaks whitened and deepened, and suddenly there were no trees, and we were standing on a margin of sand, staring out across a gray seethe of water.

Roanoke Sound.

I'd first seen it as a child, but I couldn't remember it being so turbulent. Scalloped and dimpled and threshed by wind. No more than a few feet at its deepest point, but only a local would know that. An outsider … well, hadn't Thomas Harriot run aground in this very channel?

“Harriot never married,” I said.

“Well,” said Clarissa, “just because he didn't marry doesn't mean he didn't love someone.”

“No historical record of it.”

“You said there's no record of his birthday, either. But he was born.”

We stood there for some time, a couple of yards separating us. The wind blew in hard from the south, and a pair of seagulls blew in just as hard toward the east, flinging their cries over their shoulders.

“Look,” said Clarissa, “I never told you this.”

“Okay.”

“This guy … whoever he is.”

“The one in your head.”

“In my
visions
, not my head. Okay, I'm trying to find some way of saying this that doesn't make me sound crazier than you already think I am.”

“Go on,” I said.

“He's in some truly—some unimaginable, unholy kind of
pain
. It's there in his face, it's in his body. It's … it's
entire.”

“So.” I was taking special care not to look at her. “He's trying to heal himself, is that it? All that stuff with the stones?”

“I don't know.”

She picked up a pinecone. Tossed it into the sound.

“How did Thomas Harriot die?” she asked.

“Cancer. Believe me, you would have noticed. It started in his nose, spread to his mouth. He was pretty disfigured by the time he was done.”

Retribution, I used to think (back when I believed in retribution). Not so much for using tobacco as for pushing it on his fellow countrymen. Between them, Harriot and Ralegh helped make England a nation of smokers.

“How old was he?” asked Clarissa.

“Sixty. Or sixty-one.”

“And what year would that have been?”

“Sixteen twenty-one.”

“What month?”

“July, I think.”

“Oh,” she said. “In my visions, it's September. Or maybe October.
Fall
, anyway.”

She was quiet for a while. And then, out of the pure blue, she said:

“It's nice out here.”

“Mm.”

It was very possibly an accident: the grazing of her bare forearm against mine; the carbonation in our respective skins. I turned toward her, and I was all set to speak when from behind us came the sound of something
other
, a crackling in the rhododendrons and mulberries.

Wheeling about, I caught a shiver of white, or off-white. A sleeve, maybe … a pant leg … or maybe nothing. Whatever it was passed like a dream, but me—I could have been one of those first colonists from England, soldiering through the alien growth, every sense sprung wide open.

And then, from below, came a sound of today. Clarissa's Trio, chiming from her back pocket.

“Showtime,” she said.

“Amory Swale?”

“And he wants to see us now. Or sooner. Actually,” she said, lifting her eyes to mine, “the word he uses is
emergency
.”

14

A
MORY SWALE LIVED
right off the ocean in a development called Tarheel Estates. The name did nothing to convey the condition of those wooden A-frames. Peeling whitewash and collapsed sashes, sagging clotheslines, heaps and heaps of dead sea rushes—every lot in the full bloom of decay, and none quite so blooming as Number 7, which looked to be atoning for being closest to the ocean. Three-foot chunks of tar paper had been ripped from its flanks, the original steps had been replaced with cinder blocks, and the front yard was a play box of cigarette butts, pulverized seashells, and charred cypress seedlings.

To look at the place, you'd have figured it long abandoned, were it not for the freshly painted sign that someone had attached to a pediment. Aqua letters on a white background:
SWALE
'
S ANTIQUARIAN BOOKS AND PRINTS
.

We stepped with some care onto the skeleton porch. Clarissa knocked gently, and the door, pockmarked with rot, swung right open, like the entrance to a dream.

“Mr. Swale?”

It was past seven now, and the sun was sinking to the other side of the sound, so the interior of the house was inky and humid. From somewhere in the back we heard a soft, tenacious sound, and then a man stepped from shadow into half shadow. The first thing we saw was his bare white feet, and then the rest of him swam into focus.

“Why, hello,” he said, tendrils of Locust Valley still clinging to his vowels.

He was wearing a dove-gray suit, only just past its prime, and a tie full of swans, and his mouth had opened into a shy and inviting smile. But the total effect of him—the narrow shoulders and wide womanly hips—the filmy, oversized eyeglasses—the crest of gray hair, shrinking back from his skull in an arc of terror—was so strange I couldn't return the greeting.

“You must be Mr. Swale,” said Clarissa.

“Some tea,” he answered.

And back he went into the shadows, reemerging a few minutes later with a cracked ceramic pot, smothered in a rooster cozy, and a tray of china teacups, grimy around the rims but angel-white inside.

“Please,” he said. “Sit down.”

He gestured toward an antique chintz couch, upholstered in hunting scenes and stained in places with what looked like old cat vomit. (One of the back cushions had tipped forward, as though it were dozing.) There was no coffee table, so he had to place the cups and saucers in our laps and pour the tea straight in.

“I hope you had a nice trip. I've always thought this is the best time of year to come down, when all those wretched tourists have gone. Oh, I suppose you're tourists, too, but not really. No, I consider you friends, I hope that's not presumptuous. Sugar, Miss Dale? Be careful, last week, I gave a friend of mine kosher salt instead. She will never drink lapsang souchong again.”