While I Was Gone (35 page)

“I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“But I do, Daniel,” I cried. I stood up. My hands rose, opened.

“I

don’t want to compound and compound my injuries to you.”

“You’ve already done the worst thing.”

“Oh, Daniel,” I pleaded.

“I didn’t sleep with him, after all.” I stepped toward him, pleading.

“I didn’t, in fact, sleep with him.”

Now that I was closer to him, I could see his face in the shadows.

He was smiling, sadly.

“No, you didn’t. But what a strange position you put me in, Jo. In effect to ask me to be grateful the man was a murderer. To be grateful it turned out he killed your friend.

Since that’s what it took—isn’t it?—to keep you faithful to me.”

DAN} EL CAME OVER LATER AND FIXED HIMSELF A SANDWICH

for dinner, in spite of my offers to make something—hamburgers or pasta. He was almost finished with his sermon, he said, and he wanted to keep at it a little bit longer. I watched him carrying his plate across the yard, watched the open barn door swallow him.

I thought about leaving, about taking another pointless drive, but instead I went into the living room. I sat there for some time, feeling numbed, flattened. Then I came into the kitchen and sat at the table, picking at the tasteless bits of chicken and lettuce Daniel had left out.

I had no appetite for fixing a meal for myself.

It was five-thirty by now, but there was still a lingering gray light in the air, the days were that much longer. I noticed that the dishwasher light was on—the load I’d run earlier this afternoon. All right.

I’d finish that job anyway. I crossed to it and started to unload it.

Behind me I heard Daniel open the back door. I turned and watched him come over to me. He set his plate and glass down. Neither of us spoke.

I went back to work, bending to the dishwasher, collecting a stack of plates to put away. I could tell he hadn’t left the room, in my peripheral vision I could see that he was standing by the table, his hand resting on a bowl of fruits and vegetables that had sat there untouched for days. I didn’t know what to say to him, how to break the silence that grew and grew.

I reached up and had just opened the cupboard door to put away a few plates, when I heard and then felt the loud, shocking splat of something exploding with great force next to me on the wall. I saw it, seed, juice, pulra tomato. Then I noticed the red dabs freckling my arms and hands. I could feel wet splotches of it on my face.

I turned in amazement to him, and he looked back, startled, too, it seemed, his eyes widened. We looked at each other for a few seconds.

He lifted his shoulders slightly.

“It was rotten,” he explained, and left the room.

I stood, stunned, not knowing what to feel, what to think. Finally I turned and ran the water until it came warm. I rinsed my hands, splashed my face. I wet a dish towel and dabbed at my sleeves, my hair.

I j My heart was beating recklessly. How he must have looked—Daniel-watching me, picking up the tomato! The hateful force with which he must have thrown it!

Automatically, I started to wipe the drooling mess from the wall. I was imagining Daniel on the pitcher’s mound in some dusty infieldi was seeing his windup, the leg lifting, the toes curled in, the slight, e egant kick, and then the wonderful force of his lean body pushing forward through space behind the unfurling throw. He’d been a pitcher on his college baseball team and toyed briefly with the idea of trying to turn pro. Until five or six years ago, he’d still pitched every spring for the town league.

I was mystified now, and somehow oddly moved, too, by what he done. By what he’d not done. Because I knew he hadn’t missed me. If what he’d wanted was to hit me, to hurt me, he could easily have done that. And he hadn’t. He had chosen not to do that. I held on to that as I cleaned up what was left of the mess. Daniel, he had chosen not to hurt me.

TWO DAYS LATER, ON MONDAY, I DROVE INTO CAMbridge. I felt nearly happy, I think simply to be taking some action, though I had no clear idea what might result from it.

Anything seemed possible, even the idea—I’d entertained it several times—that this was what Eli had actually wanted when he confessed to me, somehow to have it all come out at last. The possibility of a trial had occurred to me, too, as I’d mentioned to Daniel—something prolonged and difficult, calling everyone back to that time. I didn’t care anymore. What I felt was a strange kind of passivity about the results.

I would do this, and whatever happened would happen, but I would be monng on. I could turn to the next thing, which was, of course, me and Daniel. Somehow it seemed that whatever it was I should be doing about that wouldn’t be clear until I had acted on what Eli had told me Until I was finished with it.

I didn’t tell Daniel that today was the day. I don’t know exactly why I didn’t. Perhaps because I knew what he would say? (“Oh. Fine,” and then the turning away, slightly wounded.) Because it was, in some sense, private, my doing this? Because I was, as Sadie had accused me of being, an elusive person, secretive by nature? I’m not sure. But I sat there in my bathrobe drinking coffee, not saying anything, and I watched Daniel leave, having offered me the briefest possible explanation of his own Monday, “I have some stuff to do at church.”

(Was it because of his chilliness then?) Outside, he walked halfway across the yard, looking slouched, weary, old. But then something shifted for him—perhaps he was simply far enough away from me—and he stopped. His body arched back a little, he lifted his head, as though taking in the sky, the gently falling snow, and his arms rose slightly from his sides for a moment. When he walked on, he seemed taller, younger. I was glad for him, glad for whatever had lightened in him. And because of that I was glad, too, that I hadn’t said anything.

The snow was dry and powdery as it blew in delicate, serpentine waves across the road. I didn’t need the wipers. It was after ten by the time I started out, and the rush hour was well over. The drive in was easy and fast. Too fast. I felt unready when I got to Central Square. I parked in the metered lot down the block from the big stone station and walked slowly back to it. The snow made a light hissing noise as it landed, as it brushed against the buildings.

Inside, the police station looked unchanged but for the bright fluorescent lights. I told the man at the desk I needed to find the ladies’ room and talk to someone in homicide.

“In what order?” he asked, and I smiled back at him.

“A. Ladies’ room. B. Homicide,” I said.

There were other officers moving around behind the desk, speaking loudly, casually, to each other, calling to fellow workers entering or leaving the building. I had thought I’d feel conspicuous, but as the desk officer directed me, I realized I was in some sense almost invisible to them. Anonymous anyway. What hadn’t they seen, after all, that would make a middleaged suburban woman in any way striking? or even interesting?

Upstairs, things had been rearranged. The ladies’ room was so different, it struck me that perhaps it wasn’t even the same one I’d stood in those years ago, handing my bloody parka and clothes over the top of the stall door to the brusque policewoman who handed me back my clean things. And the homicide unit was housed in a comfortable, colorful room full of blond wood, the officers working at computer stations in modern swivel chairs. When someone approached me at the counter, I gave the name I’d gotten from the desk officer and waited while he was summoned.

Officer Ryan was a youngish man, certainly under forty, though as I followed him across the space behind the gate he’d led me through, I noted that his hair was thinning on the crown of his head, a circle of pale white emerging from the dark whorl. (“I think I have some new information about an old case, a murder that you handled here,” I’d said after we introduced ourselves. He had a soft face, doughy, with a fat lower lip. He’d pushed it forward in response to me and nodded few times.

“Fair enough,” he’d said.

“Come on in.”) Now we went into a room that seemed too large for just the two of us, a rectangular room dominated by a huge oval table and perhaps fifteen chairs pushed in around it at various angles. He gestured.

pulled out one of the chairs and started to sit. I “Can I get you something?” he asked.

“Coke? Coffee?”

“No,” I said.

“No, I’m fine.”

He shrugged and sat down too. He folded his hands in front of him on the table, thumbs touching, and began to bounce his chair gently up and down.

“So, Mrs. Becker—it is Mrs?” he said.

“When did this homicide occur?”

“It’s Doctor, actually. Dr. Becker. I’m a vet.”

Again he made that adjudicative nod, with the thrust lip.

“But please call me Jo, in any case,” I said.

“It was 1969. It happened in 1969.”

“And what’s your connection to it?” His eyes were dark and liquid so dark I couldn’t really tell their color. They moved constantly, to my face, to my hands, to the window, to his own hands, back to me Resisting the tension this called up in me, I slowly explained Dana’s death, and who I was to her then, and the course of the investigation that had followed.

“I don’t remember this one,” he said when I was finished.

“But I’m sure there are guys around here who do. So it was put down in the end as a B and E gone bad?”

“An E without the B,” I said.

“There was no breakin, because nothing was locked. We were trusting souls. Or we believed in being trusting souls. To his unreadable quick glance over, I shrugged.

“It He nodded and bounced for a moment, jittered his eyes around waiting for anything more.

“So,” he said.

“Before I pull the box, what’s the new information?”

“The box?”

“The file on this. Before I look it up.”

“Oh. Well. It’s a confession, really. From the person who did it.”

He stopped bouncing abruptly, and his eyes settled on me.

I cleared my throat.

“I recently met again… or rather, one of the old house members, one of the people the police talked to back then, moved into my town recently—I live out toward western Mass.” the middle of the state, in Adams Mills. And we, this man and I—his name is Eli Mayhew—became reacquainted. And then, I don’t know, it was a few weeks ago, he told me he’d killed her. He killed Dana.”

He had leaned forward, elbows on the table. Now he scratched his ear.

“Yeah,” he said. This news seemed to have slowed his metabolism.

“Well, that’s pretty amazing.”

“I know,” I said.

“Exactly how did that happen?” he asked.

“That he told you that?

“I know it sounds crazy just to say it like that. I was more or less dumbstruck myself.”

“So he just up and blurted it out one day?” He was watching me carefully now, with a kind of stilled attentiveness.

“Well, it was slower than that, of course, more gradual.

We…

well, I was his vet. He brought his dog in to me to be put down, and we made the connection—who we were, how we knew each other. I realized I was using my hands nervously, but I couldn’t stop myself.

“And we saw each other socially a few times. I mean, as couples, my husband and his wife too. But there was always this kind of reference coming up to that time, and to Dana.” I shrugged.

“But I suppose that’s not really all that surprising. It was such a traumatic thing, and we were both so young and marked by it. But he wanted to get together alone too. I mean, there seemed to be something more to it, for him. We saw each other a few times. Alone. Without our spouses.

And the last time we met, he told me he’d done it, he killed her.”

“Just like that?”

“Well, no, of course not just like that.” I smiled at him, stupidly.

Then uried not to.

“It was all mixed in with a kind of…

justificauon of his life since then, I guess you’d say. See, he’s a research scientist now, a very distinguished and well-known man. And so some of what he was in effect saying to me was that he’d made up for it. He’d lived his life in such a way as to… balance it out.”

Detective Ryan sat back and started bouncing again. His hands, folded once more, rested on his belly now. He frowned suddenly.

“Where’s he work?” he said.

“Beth Israel. I don’t know the university appointment.

Harvard, maybe? I don’t know, actually.”

l , After a pause, he said, “He explain his motivation to you?”

“Well, yes. They’d had an affair. He and my friend.

Dana. The police knew this at the time. They’d been sleeping together. But much earlier, actually. I’m sure it’s all in the file. And then she’d left him.

Broken it off, I guess you’d say. But they were to have talked about it, they’d arranged to talk about it after a long time on the night she was killed. He… he was still very much in love with her—he told me this—and… well, she’d even forgotten about this appointment, to talk, and then, when she did come downstairs and he started to speak to her, then she was… well, he described it as patronizing.

Condescending. He was terribly upset, and he just struck out at her.”

“With a kitchen knife.” I had told him this earlier.

“Yes. He just, I guess, picked it up. They were standing in the kitchen together.”

His face moved, his lower lip jutted out. Suddenly he nodded once, as though, yes, he’d gotten the picture, he understood it all. He looked up at me.

“So how did you respond when he told you all this?

When was this, you said? A week ago?”

“Three weeks ago now.”

“Oh. Three weeks.”

“Yes.”

“So you waited cause… ?” His thumbs rose up from his folded hands.

“I was in a kind of shock, I guess. I haven’t been sure what to do. It was so long ago. That it all happened. And he is a different person now.

“So you more or less bought his… justification, like you said. For a while.”

“No. No, it wasn’t that. I didn’t buy it, as you say. But it seemed

.. .

a difficult thing to do. To turn him in, essentially.”