Stephen L. Carter Read online

  “Mrs. Carlyle?”

  She swung around in surprise, because nobody called her that on campus. She was “Dean Carlyle” to the younger students, “Julia” to faculty and, by her own insistence, staff and older students as well.

  The man removed his soft hat, uncovering a familiar crew cut and pinched, locked-in face; although not smiling, her visitor looked at her out of pale eyes that just missed sympathetic. Julia said, “May I help you?”—her tone probably too shirty—and then realized who he was just before he spoke.

  “My name is Richard Chrebet, Mrs. Carlyle. I’m a lieutenant on the homicide squad of the state police.” He offered his credentials. “You might remember speaking to me at your home a couple of weeks ago. I wonder if you could spare a moment.”

  The mirrors, she thought wildly. Seth Zant told them about the Comyns. Frank Carrington told them about the cheval.

  “You visited my husband the other day.”

  “Yes. And now I’m visiting you.” Like a children’s game.

  “May I ask what this is about?”

  “Your daughter.”

  Maternal panic. “My daughter? Which one? What happened?”

  He held up both hands but never smiled. “Nothing has happened. Your children are fine. Nevertheless, we have to talk about Vanessa.”

  (II)

  INSIDE HER SQUEAKY-CLEAN OFFICE, Julia waved him to a chair and then shut the door, a thing she almost never did except when counseling a student, both because Kepler had a long tradition of informality, and also because she liked to project a friendly image. Chrebet sat very straight, like a suitor preparing to ask for the hand of his beloved—a simile, come to think of it, that had led a clutch of students to boycott old Clay Maxwell’s course on Paul for a few days last year when he offered it in class. Sexist and heterosexist both, they said. Julia puttered, watering her several plants, taking off her boots and slipping on her flats, shuffling papers on her perfectly neat desktop, doing everything she could to postpone whatever Lieutenant Chrebet had come to tell her. He had arrived at an hour when both of her assistants were out, one at lunch and the other running errands, and perhaps he had planned it that way. Despite his stiffness, he seemed in no hurry, like a man who had in his day outwaited experts.

  Finally, she ran out of ideas, and so sat down.

  “What about Vanessa?”

  “Mrs. Carlyle, let me begin by explaining that I have children of my own—”

  “Julia. Please.”

  “Then call me Rick.” But still the investigator did not smile. “I have children of my own, so I understand how fiercely a parent wants to protect them. I have asked my superiors for permission to interview your daughter Vanessa. I would come to you in any case before approaching her, because she is, of course, a minor. I also have another reason. You are her mother. You might be able to explain things that I would miss. Or to help me frame the right questions.”

  A second’s faintness passed. “Just tell me, Rick. Don’t prepare me. Tell me.”

  “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I am not suggesting in any way that Vanessa had any sort of involvement in what happened to Professor Zant. I do think she might help us shed a little light on what has proved to be more difficult than we expected—figuring out what Professor Zant was working on when he died.”

  “Why would Vanessa know anything about that?”

  “She might not. That’s why we want to ask her a few questions.”

  “Ask me.”

  “She’s under a psychiatrist’s care, isn’t she? Your daughter. Behavioral issues.” He nodded as if to say every teen had them. “How’s that going?”

  But Julia refused to be drawn. Yesterday Vincent Brady, Vanessa’s therapist, had wondered to Julia whether the teen might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder—he pointed in particular to her tendency to freeze up and dissociate—to go along with the anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders he had previously diagnosed. If indeed a stress disorder was part of her problem, he explained, the initial trauma had predated both the death of Kellen Zant and the torching of her father’s car: that was apparent, Vin said, from what he called her behavioral trajectory. He had also speculated, in months past, that Vanessa was showing signs typical of drug or alcohol abuse, or, possibly, withdrawal, but blood screens were consistently negative. He had already ruled out sexual abuse. Lemaster grumbled that Brady was running through the manual like a first-year psychiatry resident.

  “Why do you think Vanessa would know what Kellen was working on?” she asked, ignoring the detective’s question. “Give me reasons.”

  He lifted a finger, ticking off a point. A raucous laugh outside the door told her that her assistants were back. “First. Last summer, Vanessa volunteered several hours a week at a soup kitchen at the Methodist church near the campus. Professor Zant sometimes volunteered at the same soup kitchen.”

  “I’m missing the connection. I bet fifty people volunteered there.”

  “Seven adults, four teenagers. Those were the regulars, present at least two hours a week.”

  She shook her head. “Even so, I don’t see what this has to do with—”

  “Second.” Another finger. “In October, on her seventeenth birthday, your daughter received a delivery of maple-walnut fudge from a mysterious admirer.”

  The rapid-fire delivery, so different from the pace he had set at Hunter’s Heights with Lemaster present, brought out in her, as Julia suspected it was supposed to, an urge to pull immediate answers from up her sleeve.

  “She guessed it was from her boyfriend—”

  “The card didn’t say ‘love.’ It said ‘thank you.’ Correct?” Stunned by the intimacy of his knowledge, Julia could only nod. “Did your daughter happen to mention whether the fudge was stale?”

  The light was growing fuzzy. Perhaps the sun had gone behind a cloud. Perhaps it would stay there. “Stale? Why would it be stale?”

  “Did she mention it, Julia?”

  “Not that I remember. No.”

  A knock. The door swung wide open. Latisha, her hefty full-time assistant, the one Boris Gibbs wanted her to fire. “Julia? I got a call back from IT? About what’s wrong with your computer?” Because it had started locking up and crashing regularly. At the moment, said computer was not even in the room, but somewhere else on campus, being tested, quarantined, treated.

  “Not now. Please.”

  “But they said it’s important—”

  “Please. We’ll do it later, okay?”

  Latisha looked at Julia, looked at the detective, and then, eyes wide, backed out of the room in a flurry of desperate apologies. Like everyone around Kepler, Latisha was dreadfully aware that layoffs were coming, and she was certain that she was to be one of them, for she had not been around long enough to gain protected status under the collective-bargaining agreement.

  When the door was shut, Rick Chrebet continued, not missing a beat. “Three weeks before your daughter received the package, you sent Kellen Zant a box of fudge for his birthday, purchased from Cookie’s on Main Street in Tyler’s Landing.”

  “Yes. I did.”

  “It was maple-walnut, wasn’t it?”

  Julia felt violated. She did not care if some judge had signed a dozen subpoenas. She was going to strangle Vera Brightwood.

  “I believe the fudge that your daughter received was from Professor Zant. It was the same box you sent him. That’s why it might have been stale.”

  Pin-drop silence. The room wavered. Julia knew that if she turned, the stained-glass figures decorating her windows would be shivering with disapproval.

  She said nothing.

  “Third. Most important, we would like to know why your daughter’s cell number was in the address book of Kellen Zant’s phone.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “I’m afraid I am, Mrs. Carlyle. Julia. Not only was her number in his address book, but, during the two weeks before his death, Professor Zant made at least f
ive calls to her phone, and she made at least three to his.”

  Just weeks ago Julia had been lamenting the awful truth that Kellen had died before she had the chance to say goodbye. Now, for a mad moment, she wished he were still alive, so that she would have the pleasure of killing him. Slowly. Painfully. But she held on to her sanity: a near thing, but she held it and when she answered, was impressed by the calm in her own voice.

  “Why are you telling me this, Rick? I would have thought you’d prefer to spring it on us—on Vanessa—as a surprise, instead of warning me. You know I’ll ask her.”

  Chrebet crossed bony legs, folding his fingers over his knee. It occurred to her that the lieutenant was taking no notes. “I am hoping you will ask her, Mrs. Carlyle. I’m afraid it is possible that I won’t have the opportunity.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We may not receive clearance to interview her.”

  “Why wouldn’t you?”

  The detective measured her briefly with those pale eyes, as if wondering whether to bother. Anger, she finally realized: that was what she had been reading in the pinched, locked-in face. The fury of the athlete tripped up on the final lap.

  “Don’t you read the papers, Julia? The case is about to be closed. It was a robbery.”

  Only after he left did Julia take time to puzzle over why the detective had not asked these questions during his visit to Lemaster.

  (III)

  ALONE IN HER SMALL OFFICE, Julia began the process of not thinking. She tidied shelves that needed no neatening. She straightened the edges of the three stacks of admission folders on her work table, arranging them in razor-sharp lines. Having already watered the plants, she fed them their various magical foods, then stood at the window, watching through the colored panes and involute leading as Rick Chrebet crossed the parking lot, leaning into the afternoon wind whipping down from the north. She respected the bitter fire she had noticed in the pale eyes at the end of their interview: the fierce pain of incapacity to fight what the soul says must be fought. She used to see it in the mirror every morning in the final weeks of her final relationship with Kellen.

  Julia slipped into her parka and pulled on her Ugg boots. Most days she left Kepler as early in the afternoon as she could, in order to beat the children home. The buses dropped off Vanessa and Jeannie a little after three. It was now minutes before two. The drive was twenty-five minutes. In the outer office, Latisha handed her a memo the IT people had sent over, summarizing their findings, while Foxon, her white part-timer, who never seemed to do any work and plainly would rather not have had a black boss, whispered importantly on the telephone: Foxon, who, if Latisha went, would get an upgrade.

  “Leave it on my desk,” said Julia.

  “They said to tell you ASAP.” Reproach. Confusion. Fear. “You should at least look at it.”

  “I have to go. I’ll look at it tomorrow.”

  But Latisha, to Julia’s surprise, stood her ground. “They said today.”

  “Please. Just leave it on my—no, never mind.” She took the memo, folded it, stuffed it into her pocket.

  Trying to slip out of the building, Julia ran into Boris Gibbs and Iris Feynman, her fellow deputy deans. Boris saluted her with his ubiquitous candy bar, offered a smeary wave. She remembered how he had promised to find out what Kellen was up to in the Landing. Their lunch seemed ages ago.

  Iris, said Boris, was making trouble again. “I say Kepler is too Christian-centric. She says it’s supposed to be, it’s a divinity school. And she’s Jewish. She should be leading the protest!”

  In Boris Gibbs’s world, this passed for humor.

  “This isn’t my kind of argument,” said Julia, eyeing the exit.

  “Julia’s not a God woman,” Boris explained, as if Iris didn’t know. “She goes to church, but she’s not a God woman. Julia’s old-fashioned. She goes because her husband takes her. He’s a traditionalist Anglican. That’s a polite way of saying he likes the reactionary prayer book the rest of the civilized world has abandoned.” He took a bite, pointed at Julia. “I have some information for you.”

  Iris, smiling in relief, said she would leave them to talk.

  “Boris, I’m sorry. I can’t do this just now.”

  “He was building a house.”

  This slowed her down, as perhaps it was meant to. “He what?”

  “Your Kellen was building himself a house in the Landing.” He took a huge bite. “Looked at a nice lot with a private beach, talked to a surveyor, everything.”

  After the interview with Chrebet, she had trouble taking this in. “Are you telling me that Kellen Zant was moving to Tyler’s Landing?”

  “Building a house at least,” he answered, very pleased with himself. “Looks like he didn’t tell you that, either.” He clapped a hand on her shoulder, and she wondered what candy stains she had just picked up. “There’s more to the story. But you’re in a hurry, so I’ll tell you the rest later.”

  Laughing, Boris stalked off down the hallway. It would be much later before Julia realized that his argument with Iris was the larger clue.

  (IV)

  “NOT A GOD WOMAN,” she said aloud, rankled by Boris’s cruel teasing. Heading for the front entrance, trying to decide how to put to Vanessa the question that had to be put, Julia changed course and slipped into Kepler Chapel, the divinity school’s own worship space, not nearly as grand as the university chapel, but perfectly serviceable. She glanced around the vast, cool chamber, but had the peeling frescoes and flaking gold leaf and crumbling plaster cornices all to herself. She walked slowly up the aisle. There was a high altar a century old, carved with fading words from the eighth chapter of John’s Gospel, and a low altar of younger and brighter wood, offering no statement whatsoever. Along the walls and in various closets were stashed sufficient chairs, crucifixes, altar cloths, chalices, thuribles, and fonts to enable nearly any denomination, saving only the most austere, to arrange matters to the comfort of its members. In a shadowed corner stood a rickety rack of votive candles in copper stands, none lit. Up above, cold afternoon sunlight sparkled through clerestory windows.

  This was where she and Lemaster had married twenty years ago, the stunned families bearing the union in shared furious stoicism, each side unalterably persuaded that Julia had trapped him, for by their wedding day she had been in her fifth month, the baby growing within difficult to conceal. She had felt her mother’s mute humiliation burning into her back, and, later, insisted that all she recalled of the ceremony was grabbing Lemaster and fleeing for her life. This was a lie. In actual fact, she remembered every painful minute, even the part where she silently cursed God in the midst of her vows for getting her into this situation; for Julia, good American Protestant that she was, could not quite get her mind around the notion that her troubles might be her own fault.

  Since returning to the div school three and a half years ago, Julia had developed the habit of coming here when she needed to think, because the chamber was hardly used during the workweek, and she could sit in relative peace. That is, she could sit in peace except on those occasions when Kellen would glide over from his office in the massive social-science building just across Hudson Street, sneaking into the pew beside her to share his latest woes. Or she would return to her office on the first floor only to find him lurking unhappily in the corridor: always, there was some crisis he could discuss with nobody else, because nobody else had ever understood him. When Julia told him to leave her alone, he would slink off in that affecting, soulful way that certain bearish men can achieve at the drop of a hat, only to show up again a week later, by e-mail or instant message or telephone, proposing lunch or coffee or whatever she could spare. He would wear her down. And so they would meet, and Kellen would tell her about a woman who was giving him trouble, or a colleague who had teased him about not having done much scholarship lately, or a potential client who had hired another economist despite Kellen’s greater qualifications.

  You’re going
to have to handle it, she would say, quoting Granny Vee. That’s what grown-ups do. They handle things.

  I can think of things this grown-up would rather handle, he would answer, teasing her with mellow eyes.

  You can’t lead an ordered life if what matters most is desire. She supposed she must be quoting Lemaster now.

  So who wants to lead an ordered life?

  Kellen was brilliant and accomplished and honored everywhere. He was also a big baby, and wanted Julia to play mommy, to offer a shoulder to cry on, the way she used to, except crying was not what he planned if he ever got his head back on her shoulder. What Kellen told Julia in a thousand little ways was the same thing Seth Zant kept saying the day of the funeral: she was the one who got away.

  Mostly she had kept her distance.

  Up at the mall in Norport, Kellen had said he had to spread the inventory risk because he was in trouble, that they were facing dark times, that the darkness mattered. She had dismissed it as another slimy flirtation, for Kellen had been in so many different kinds of trouble in his life that it was hard to imagine any single one could possibly be the worst.

  Now she was not so sure.

  Not a flirtation. A message.

  Boris was right, of course. Julia did not believe in God, not really. Twenty years ago, she and Lemaster had moved in together and dropped out of div school, Lemaster because what he was learning made him fear that it might all be false, Julia because what she was learning made her fear that it might all be true. With time, both had overcome their fears, and reverted to type. Father Freed at Saint Matthias spoke, often, of Heaven. Lemaster listened keenly. Julia indulged him. But when in her secret heart she looked toward the future, two, three, perhaps four decades hence, she saw herself in an uncaring hospital, surrounded by soulless machines, a child or two to hold her hand, her husband long dead, and she herself waiting for the dark curtain to come down, and, on the other side, only blankness.