The Widower's Tale (59 page)

Continue down the far side of the hill (too rocky and hazardous for running) and one reaches the newest graves, though only plots reserved decades ago remain to be filled. At the insistence of her parents, this is where we buried Poppy's ashes. Their remains joined hers eleven and fifteen years later. There's not much space remaining in the family's allocation, but I doubt Trudy or Clover plans to end up here. We've never been visitors of graves; I'd always felt that if Poppy's spirit lingered anywhere, it was over that beautiful nameless pond in Matlock. Of the place I will have lived for most of my life, that pond is what I miss most.

My visit here in late May was the first I'd made in at least a decade. I did not even think to bring flowers. The very first time I faced Poppy's finished gravestone, alone, months after her burial, I thought, This is where the story ends. The only story that mattered then, and for some time to come, was ours.

Many days, I swim in the harbor. I clamber buffoonishly down a facade of rocks, wearing my conspicuously tropical swimsuit, and risk a dive, hoping that a wave won't hurl me back against the jagged ledge. I work my way in loops among the moorings and the vessels: the dinghies, pleasure yachts, waterborne gas guzzlers, a few stalwart fishing boats that somehow still bring their owners a living. (Or maybe the fishermen of Vigil Harbor, like the rock musicians of Matlock, rely on so-called independent income; I have yet to diagnose the socioeconomic quirks of this place.) I suppose it's not exactly prudent to undertake such an activity at my age, but it feels like an act of healthy defiance. If some yahoo in a motorboat splits my skull with his fiberglass hull, well, there are worse ways to go. Trudy could fill me in on several.

I was too busy playing Perry Mason (or Perry Mason's client) to pack my belongings. At Evelyn's recommendation, I hired a cheery group of teenagers who called themselves Girls on the Go. I'd stop by to check their progress on my way from Norval's house to Anthony's office or to whatever courtroom demanded my presence. Trudy showed up at meetings and hearings as often as she could, though Douglas did so more often. I spent more time with my son-in-law in three months than I had in two decades. We discovered that we'd both defected to the Red Sox after Yankee-loyal boyhoods (and that we felt secretly guilty). He gave me a set of barbecue tools for my new life and promised to help me use them. By e-mail, we began to share the titles of our favorite books.

Yet the hardest task I had before me wasn't spending my summer loitering in various fetid hallways of justice (always too hot or too cold); it was obtaining the mercy of Laurel Connaughton. Hell hath no fury like that of a woman burned out of an irreplaceably old and beautiful home, gone up in smoke her priceless antiques, family mementos, and inexplicably beloved dust ball of a cat. (The cat had been seen lurking elusively in the woods, but no one could catch him.)

In truth, for the first time ever, my heart went out to Laurel. I certainly did not blame her for wanting to see my grandson drawn and quartered. She had a lawyer, too, who made her intentions clear to Anthony. Someone would do serious time for this, and the only someone at hand was Robert.

Through her lawyer, I begged her to meet me for lunch at the Ledgely Inn. I asked the lawyer to tell her that I had something important to give her and that I would only give it to her in person.

She arrived at the inn first; I found her at the table, drinking sherry and eating bread sticks. I couldn't help noting that she looked fine for someone who'd just lost everything she owned. Her hair was freshly dyed, her cheeks pink--though, judging from the temperature of her gaze when she saw me enter the dining room, they were flushed with fury. She continued to stare at me as I seated myself across from her. She did not so much as glance at the shoebox I placed on one of the empty chairs.

"I'm here so you won't ever bother me again," she said.

"I appreciate it, Laurel, I do."

"Tell me what you have to say. I have nothing to say to you. I can't believe I ever thought you a
friend."

"As you can guess," I said, ignoring a statement I had no right or desire to contradict, "I've come to ask that you let the judge show some leniency to Robert. You know he wasn't the mastermind. You know he wasn't even there that night. I think we've established those facts."

"The cleverest of criminals are never at the scene of the crime."

The waitress gave us our menus and a basket of popovers. I pushed the basket toward Laurel. I set the menu aside.

"Laurel, were you ever twenty years old?"

"No, I was not," she said. "Not in the manner that young people today are twenty. Irresponsibly. Narcissistically. Never having been taught self-discipline or sacrifice. That grandson of yours will learn the meaning of those things now."

"He'll learn them no matter what you or I do about this." I had to admire the eloquence of her scorn. Perhaps I'd met my match. Perhaps, I thought sadly, I'd never given her enough credit.

She tore a popover into pieces. She spread butter on one piece. "Edgar has suggested I move to Alaska. Alaska! Can you believe it?" Her laughter was brutal.

"You're not planning to rebuild? You can't replace the house itself, but surely you have more than ..." I realized I'd be foolish to mention insurance.

"You haven't heard the news?" she said. "Maurice Fougere is buying my land, too. Maybe he'll turn the nursery school into a junior college." She glared at me. "I saw the drawings for what he plans to do to
your
house. He's using the damaged roof as a fine excuse to rip the back right off and put in a huge conservatory roof. Promises to look like a giant terrarium. It's not visible from a common way, so he can do what he pleases. The Forum is impotent to stop him. Though now"--she snorted--"who the hell cares. Not I."

I hadn't heard any of this. So that was Fougere's brand of tender loving restoration. Laurel watched me absorb the news, no doubt pleased at my dismay. Then she said, "Pete told me you have something to give me. Was that a ruse?"

"I do have something for you. But I want you to think about Robert first. I'm not asking you to let him off the hook; that won't happen in any case. You know he can't return to Harvard. Probably not to college, or a regular program, for a while."

"I'll think about it. I promise nothing."

I decided this was as far as I'd get. I reached for the shoebox. I held it in my lap while the waitress took our order. When she removed the menus, I set aside the lid and laid the first packet of letters between my fork and knife. "Truthful," I said. I laid the second packet beside the first. "Azor."

In their gung-ho pillaging of my cellar, the Matlock police had used a crowbar to pry open the cupboard in the wall by the chimney. Poppy and I, unable to force it open years ago, had assumed it was a long-abandoned storage compartment. The two packets of letters--his and hers--that emerged from the cupboard had been tied with ribbon and wrapped inside a lambskin, but after manhandling by the police, the skin had been lost and the ribbons had disintegrated. There were more than thirty letters in her packet, a dozen in his. Gently, I'd bound them with cotton twine. "I thought you'd be the best caretaker for these," I said. "You're the one, after all, who thought my house had a secret space. In a way, you were right."

Laurel could hardly hide her historian's hunger. Still, her reach across the table was tentative. "Truthful and
Azor?
My Azor? You mean Truthful and Hosmer."

"No. Azor. Looks as if they were in love, behind the brother's back, for years. I haven't read them all. I don't know if the story here has a beginning or an end." A middle, certainly. The custard; the jam; the scallop tucked in the bacon. The good wife of the younger brother had been in love, embroiled in clandestine bliss, with the older brother, the one with the bigger house, the greater fortune, the one who stayed a bachelor so unusually long. Poor Hosmer, the one who'd foolishly chosen farming, had been cast too predictably as the cuckold. Had he ever found out? I had read enough to understand the gist of the correspondence, but deciphering the minute, frilly handwriting had given me a headache. Now I wished that I had taken the letters to a copy shop. I doubted that Laurel would ever share the full story with me, as she would have so eagerly, over gin and salmon, only a few months before.

Laurel held the packet of Azor Fisk's letters, letters probably written in the house she'd loved so much. Except that women are more often keepers of the flame, they might have turned up in Laurel's house as readily as mine. She simply held them.

"Don't you want to have a closer look?"

"Not here." She gestured at the plate of butter curls. She clutched the letters to her bright blouse.

"I named a daughter after this woman," I said. "In tribute to her apparent virtue." How I wished Poppy had been there to appreciate the irony.

"Are the letters ..."

"Racy?" I said. "By the standards of the time, perhaps. But that's not something I'd be qualified to judge. They're not exactly John and Abigail, not a pair of poets. But all the same. Remarkable how well ordinary citizens once expressed themselves."

"My God, Percy." Laurel was breathing quickly. "Put them back in that box. Here come our salads." Our fingers touched as I took the packet of letters to put them away. I felt, briefly, the electricity between the two neighboring households carried forward in time to ours. I thought of how tactlessly I'd shoved aside Laurel's amorous advances that long-ago night in my bedroom. How little respect I'd had for her loneliness, the way she'd been willing to risk her dignity. I had to wonder if I would soon learn such desperation myself.

Laurel leaned forward over her salad and whispered, "Did you tell anyone else about these letters? Former colleagues at Widener?"

"No. Laurel, it's been my intention to give them to you since the police gave them to me nearly a month ago. You wouldn't talk to me."

"So they're a bribe."

I thought carefully about my answer. "In a nutshell, yes. Though nuts come in many flavors. Walnuts do not taste a thing like almonds."

I learned that Laurel would be moving into Dorian Van Otterloo's charming cottage on Quarry Road. I told her that I'd bought a house in Vigil Harbor. She was surprised that I would leave Matlock, but I could also tell that the news made her secretly glad. Once we'd consumed our Indian pudding and I had paid the check, I suspected we would never see each other again. And she would not be sorry.

The Matlock police believed that Laurel had given me her security code and that it had been easily accessible to anyone poking around my study. They knew that even aside from his hobo encampment in my cellar, Arturo had stayed in my house, as a welcome guest, several times. Two of these three things were true. The evening she'd plied me with cucumber sandwiches, Laurel had given me a slip of paper with her code and told me to keep it in a secure place, just in case she ever needed to send me into the house while she was away. Forgotten in a pocket of whatever trousers I'd worn that day, her code had gone through the wash, emerging as a nugget of pulp.

It was Teacher Ira who, in a frantic call the day after the fire, told me that he feared Celestino could be blamed, along with Robert. (We did not need to wait for the next week's
Grange
to see Ira's and Robert's pictures on the front of a newspaper; the
Globe
was happy to oblige--along with the painful caption
One DOG leashed; catcher is beloved preschool teacher in Matlock.)

Ira, who got my cell phone number from Sarah, reached me at Trudy's house, where I drove after my failure to stop the police from apprehending Robert. I realized how brave he was to call me when, nearly hysterical, he began by saying that he'd never meant to harm Robert. I told him that it wasn't his fault; I should have had doubts of my own about the other boy.

Then he told me that he was terrified for Celestino. "I know he had nothing to do with this. He was used, like the rest of us. I'm so afraid he could get deported." Desperately, Ira had been casting about for any connection to Tommy Loud. I told him there was little I thought I could do, but I would try.

Laurel was the one who might have connected those dots; fortunately, she didn't. But Loud was shrewd; even as a child, he'd put me in mind of a weasel. I placed a call to his office and spoke to his mother. I would be needing someone to take down the carcass of the incinerated beech tree. How about the nice young fellow who'd worked at Laurel Connaughton's place?

Happy gushed freely about the "terrible, terrible,
terrible
news." But as for that particular fellow? "He's not with us anymore. We can get you an A-one crew, though, can have 'em there tomorrow."

Oh dear, I told her; I couldn't locate my calendar. My life was in such chaos! Falsely, I promised I'd call back. Let Fougere deal the coup de grace.

The blacksmith's house had been empty for months when I saw it; Daphne assured me that the rooms, once furnished, would look much larger. The only memento of former owners was a mason jar, on the tank of the baby-blue toilet, filled with sea crockery. On my third fretful night after moving in (pacing, rearranging, wondering what in the world I had done), I poured these ceramic tidbits onto my coffee table and examined them. Stripped of their patina, some bore the ghost of antique china patterns, hairline stripes or petals or scrolling, but most were plain, blunt, and yellowed. Like old teeth, I thought, shaking a few in the palm of my hand. I could not bring myself to throw this odd collection away, so I poured them into the bottom of a large glass bowl and decided that I would collect more.

About a third of the furniture I owned had been destroyed by water the night of the fire; what remained just fit my reduced accommodations. As I've said, I don't believe in destiny, but when the last of my chairs was assigned its new room, it felt like a puzzle piece clicking in place. My most valuable possessions, those kept in my former living room and bedroom, had survived. When I unwrapped the silver bowl that had lived on my mantel, I saw that it must have been polished by a Girl on the Go. This made me smile. Perhaps some of Matlock's teens were raised right after all. I placed it on the kitchen counter, perversely pleased by the look of sterling on faded pink formica. I hung Helena's sketch of Poppy above my couch. An alcove under the stairs would serve as my study; the desk I'd bought long ago at a Cambridge thrift shop wedged in precisely.