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  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I drove home along River Road, a route that took me past Oenophile, the wine store. It was Brian who had insisted on educating my palate. Once a week, he would drop by the house with a new label and we would sit at the kitchen table sipping it while Mom slept upstairs or wandered the house like a tribeless nomad. In those days of being caregiver to my mother, Brian was my touchstone and my link with the world beyond 240 Woolner Street.

  I had kept very few pieces of furniture from my parent’s home but the old pine harvest table was one and I often sat running my fingers over its scarred surface, reading my family history in its dents and scratches. There was the dent from when Dad, in the guise of home-handyman, dropped his hammer; there I had tried to carve my initials with a butter knife; over there, was the burn mark from the cigarette Kerrin had flipped under a cup to avoid my mother’s wrath. In the year before she died, Mom had perched at the head of this table for hours on end, a soft rag that had probably been one of our diapers in one hand and a silver teapot in the other. Her body curved protectively over it, she had buffed her reflection in its shiny contours with mindless intensity, as if polishing hard enough could restore her lost personality. The teapot, too, was among the things I had moved from my parents’ home to my own. It was stored now in the back of a cupboard, tightly swaddled and slowly tarnishing.

  Three years ago, I had been sitting at the table drinking tea when a knock came at the door. I had jumped up eagerly, thinking it might be Brian.

  It had been a policewoman.

  “Mrs. Ryan?” she had said.

  “That’s my mother,” I told her.

  “Miss Ryan, then. Ms. Ryan. Nina? I’m Officer Soames.”

  I had known it then. The bad news was there, in the piling up of names and Officer Soames’s reluctance to settle on one. Brian would never come again to sit with me at this table, to toast me with his wine glass or smile the slow, seductive smile that made me long to reach out and touch the golden hairs on the back of his hand. Rory would never again climb onto my lap, grinning with the jam-smeared satisfaction of a peanut butter feast.

  Anguish was socially unacceptable. It was particularly inappropriate when you were young and pretty and it was not your husband and child who were dead, but only your brother-in-law and your nephew. Standing over their graves, it was unseemly to rend your clothes and tear your hair. It was your duty to put grief aside, offer solace to your sister, and return to caring for a mother who no longer knew you.

  Somewhere in the house, a tap dripped, a small maddening sound, like a note struck on a piano that is a little out of tune. I poured myself another glass of wine.

  My entire adult life had been bound up in the care of others. In the name of duty I had abandoned both career and courtship. Now my mother was dead and my sister had outgrown me. I felt like a novice sailor, alone in a small boat cast suddenly adrift. If I was not to founder, I would need more ballast to balance the sudden weight of a freedom I no longer knew how to exercise.

  My maudlin self-analysis was interrupted by the phone. For the first two rings, I debated answering it at all. On the third, I put down my glass and pushed my chair back from the table. By the fourth, I was halfway across the room and I picked up on the fifth, just as voicemail took over. Sonja Reid’s voice fluted impatiently over the line.

  “I was afraid you might not be there, it took you so long to answer.”

  “You could have left a message,” I said mildly, wishing I hadn’t picked up after all. A month ago, I had taken on a project for Sonja that was turning out to be far more hassle than it was worth.

  “I hate leaving messages. I always sound like Betty Boop. Anyway, I don’t have to now, as you’re there.”

  “No,” I agreed.

  “I thought I’d touch base with you regarding the Ball.”

  Every winter, Max and Sonja Reid host the premier social event of the season, which everyone but Sonja simply calls The Party. It is always held on the Saturday before Christmas, and Kingsport’s lesser lights entertain before and after in the reflected glow of its glittering festivity. This year, Sonja was paying me an exorbitant sum to organize the particulars of the Reidmore Winter Ball. She had assembled the guest list and designed the menu herself; it was my job to deploy the caterers, musicians, and decorators necessary to realize her dream. Although I had them all well enough in hand, Sonja was in a constant dither about one detail or another of the arrangements. Tonight, though, she surprised me by asking, not about lobster patties, but about my own attendance.

  “You’ll have to be there anyway, of course, to oversee things, but Max and I would like you to feel you are our guest as well.”

  I felt obscurely gratified to be considered, for this occasion at least, to be above the salt, but pleasurable anticipation was laced with sudden worry about what to wear. My wardrobe included none of the Ralph Laurens or Alexander McQueens with which the Reid ballroom would undoubtedly be crowded and I was Scottish enough where my wallet was concerned to be unwilling to purchase one for the occasion. I reviewed what my closet had to offer, rejecting out of hand the tailored suit and plain black dress suitable for weddings and funerals.

  Shifting hangers to one side, I reached for the garment bag tucked shyly in behind and unzipping it, lifted out a sheath of midnight-blue velvet, cut high at the neck, plunging low in the back. Though the length might demand altering to current vogue, I felt a smug satisfaction at the way the fabric still clung in all the right places and at the shape of the leg revealed by the skirt. The fine seams, stitched by my mother’s clever hand, showed no sign of wear. She had presented me with the dress when I was twenty-three and invited to a dinner dance at the country club. With its simple lines and lovely drapery, I had thought it the most beautiful dress I had ever seen. Nine years later, in the lamplit glow of my bedroom, I caught a fleeting glimpse of the girl who had worn it last. There had been a corsage to grace it then, heart-shaped leaves supporting fragile white blossoms that were veined with cream on throat and wing. The man who had given the flowers had not been my first romance but, as things transpired, he had been my last. Kerrin’s barbed comment about cloisters and nuns had been accurately, if painfully, placed.

  In love, as in anything else, timing was everything, and in missing a step to care for my mother, I had fallen out of the rhythm of the mating dance. I hadn’t minded at first, had even found it satisfying to disappoint the people who said I would not be able to cope with my mother’s needs. I hadn’t grudged her the unending care; I was very fond of her. But eventually, the feeling that I had built an emotional snare for myself ate away the early contentment I had found in providing for her. Servitude became a habit of mind. It was a natural progression when she died, to make a career out of minding the details of other people’s lives and to spend all my emotional capital on my sister. For many years, my self-imposed isolation had seemed safe, and secure. Only lately had it begun to feel like a trap.

  Imagination conjured a misty vision of me waltzing with a phantom lover in a ballroom the size of Buckingham Palace while somewhere an orchestra played Strauss. Firmly, I thrust whimsy aside. No simple invitation to a ball was likely to transform this housekeeper into Cinderella.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  As November drizzled into December, three topics comprised the local buzz: the weather, which continued cool and rainy long past time for change; the Reidmore Ball, which sent a dozen local businesses smiling to the bank; and the impending trial of Randy Outray. His case was scheduled to be heard early in the New Year, the speed ostensibly to obviate media involvement that might be prejudicial to the defendant. In fact, the lead-up to the trial had already become an integral part of the news. Talking heads debated everything from the jury selection process and the choice of legal counsel for both sides, to possible arguments and likely ramifications. The case would be decided in the public mind before it e
ver got to court. JusticeTV promised gavel to gavel coverage. Since the days of the O.J. Simpson trial, network producers had salivated whenever a high profile case like this one emerged; ratings always skyrocketed in direct proportion to screen time. Viewers gleefully ingested a continuous stream of info-babble sandwiched between dog food commercials.

  The principals in the case had already been transformed into larger than life characters. The defendant with the million-dollar smile was now known as “Dandy Randy, the Angel of Death.” Magazines spawned articles on “the Angel and The Centerfold,” trivializing the life and death of the two victims and turning a particularly vicious crime into an entertainment.

  Since the day after the first mock jury session in Kerrin’s office, such representatives of the media as were controlled by the Outray millions had issued broad hints of the defendant’s mental instability. An unnamed physician “close to the family” confided to the Barker that, as a result of a head injury, Randy suffered from something called a disconnected social response mechanism. Immediately following this disclosure, WKPT aired a special, featuring interviews with noted psychiatrists and legal experts.

  “The insanity defense is an integral part of our legal system,” one criminal specialist explained. “The entire system is predicated on the assumption that we exercise free will in our actions and thus can be held accountable for them.”

  His colleague added sagely, “In law, the assignment of criminal responsibility requires not only that we commit a criminal act, but also that we intend to commit that act. Individuals without a guilty mind or criminal intent are usually not held accountable for their actions.”

  “Can you give us an example?” the interviewer asked.

  “Certainly. Say someone robs a bank because someone else is holding a gun to his head — that person is not accountable for his … ,” he winked at the camera, “ … or her, actions. By the same token, someone who runs over a child that darts out in front of his car is not held criminally liable the way someone would be who deliberately aims his car at another person.”

  The psychiatrist on the panel spoke up earnestly. “According to the American Law Institute, an individual is not responsible for criminal conduct if, at the time and as a result of mental disease or defect, he lacks the substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of his action, or to conform his conduct to the requirements of law.” The interviewer’s blank look told him he was using language too arcane for the man on the street. He added, “Mental illness may undermine the essential ability to tell whether what one is doing is wrong. It may also hamper the ability to control one’s actions.”

  Control had become a key word in the Outray case. Whatever self-restraint Randy himself had failed to exercise in the woods on that October morning, his defense team had kept him tightly under wraps ever since. He made no public statement, nor did he venture off the grounds of the family estate. The media was free to make what it would of both his past and his future.

  • • •

  I confronted my own past and future one afternoon in early December. It was my birthday, a day of crisp breeze and rare watery sunlight. I celebrated with a late day pilgrimage to St. John’s Cemetery, where my parents lay together under a single lump of granite. Beside them, under separate polished markers, lay Brian and Rory. The red maple we had planted for my father was growing to shelter them all. Scattered crocus and lilies of the valley waited to bloom over them in the spring.

  I had brought no flowers but I knelt briefly at each grave, letting the tears come as they always did and running gentle fingers over the names carved on my parents’ headstone. Daniel Ryan, whose death had come with swift implacability. Margaret Campbell Ryan, whose life had slipped away by inches, numbering her among the dead long before her body gave up the struggle. She had dreaded the thought of becoming a burden, but Alzheimer’s had steadily turned her into one. I had stood by her, as I later stood by my sister, torn by pity and grief, and by loathing of what their plight had done to me. There had been no escape from it then, only endurance. I still endured.

  As I rose and stepped back from the headstone, I had the curious impression of somehow standing back from my life as well. In doing my duty to my family, I had become a stranger to myself, not only bereaved but miserably outcast, drifting with no clear aim, resenting the life I had been thrust into. I had behaved like a spoiled child who, because she cannot have the whole cake, refuses to eat at all. I had been waiting for life to offer itself back to me on its old terms. I finally understood that it wasn’t going to.

  Beyond the darkening paths of the cemetery, a yellow blur of streetlights suddenly stippled the gray sky, illumining the tiny specks of snow that had begun to fall. They were hardly big enough to be called flakes, certainly they were not the fat, lacy shapes of my childhood but, like a child, I raised my face and stuck out my tongue to taste their cold sweetness.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The river made all the sound there was. The air was still, the tangled boughs of leafless trees quiet under the falling snow. To my right, the sliding sparkle of water murmured beside the delicate shells of ice just beginning to skim its edges. A little way off the path stood a small gazebo that, in the sunlight of high summer, offered cooling shade and a charming view of the river. On a chilly December evening, it tendered refuge only to ghosts.

  An owl swept past like the shadow of a flying cloud and startled me into turning. As I did, a second shadowy figure detached itself from the gloom not a hundred feet from where I stood. There was something familiar in the set of the shoulders and the easy, springing gait, and when he passed under the streetlamp at the side entrance to the cemetery, I recognized the bearded face of David Maitland. It had been ten days since the mock jury meeting and our lunch together at the Sandwich Board. I thought he glanced my way as he hesitated by the gate and I made to call out a greeting, then, remembering his abrupt departure from Kerrin’s office that day, decided against it and turned away. One did not visit a cemetery hoping to find company. If the well-tended graves of St. John’s could not grant solace, they did offer solitude and a reassuring measure of indifference.

  I went on slowly toward the same exit that David Maitland had used. Here and there, the dark outlines of formal plantings were visible, groups of bushes and small ornamental trees dividing the sentinel rows of tombstones that flowed inland from the riverbank. A sundial stood knee-deep in a riot of low-growing rose bushes. I paused beside it, imagining the thick, sweet smell that would bloom along with the frilled little flowers.

  Just inside the gate was a double grave still too fresh to bear the weight of a headstone. A temporary marker read “Forrester” and a sheaf of lilies blanketed the mound not yet settled back to earth. I remembered that the same flowers had graced the leafy copse where Susan and Tracy Forrester had died and I wondered if David Maitland’s hand had laid those as well, and if so, why.

  The snow was falling more heavily now. I was glad I’d worn duck boots and a duffel coat. I snugged the collar of my jacket up around my neck and pulled the wrought iron gate shut behind me.

  My own street jogged south from Main. I stopped at the corner, beguiled by the smell of roasting chestnuts. During the summer months, Yuri Ivanov sold ice creams from a stand but tonight he was shaking a pan of rich, dark nuts over an open gas jet that hissed and flamed with the stirring breeze. Traffic slid past with the soft hush of wet tires, headlights glowing like ripe lemons through the falling snow. From the wine bar across the street came the sound of piano music overlaid by the animated chatter of young executives enjoying a social half hour before heading home. The window glittered like Aladdin’s cave with row on row of bottled ruby and amber and purple.

  I dug in my pockets for some loose change, grinning at Yuri in triumph as I came up with a dollar’s worth to place in his outstretched hand. He might have been anywhere from twenty to forty years old. He had the bulk
of a middle-aged man but his head seemed a little too large for his body and his face was as bland and unlined as a child’s. As he accepted my coins, Yuri ducked his head with a shy smile and proffered a bag of steaming chestnuts as though they were a gift from the Magi. Greedily, I bit into one, drawing breath at the heat with a whoop that made him laugh out loud.

  At her newsstand next to him, Yuri’s mother glanced up sharply from the evening editions of the Barker and the Express Press. Fingerless black gloves could not disguise the elegance of Irina’s tapering hands any more than the tightly wound scarf hid the delicate contours of her face. Though she had been born many years after the last tsar might have received her, her grace evoked images of an Imperial court far removed from this street corner. Her air of refinement made the gossipy tabloids in her hand seem even more tawdry.

  I winced at the headlines.

  Little Tracy Forrester could only be a sympathetic character, but snide journalistic pens denounced her mother in an exclusive to the Barker called “If you knew Susie (like I knew Susie) … ”

  I have noticed it before, this tendency when something bad happens to someone, to believe she must have done something to deserve it. Maybe disapprobation of the victim assuages our fear of becoming victims ourselves: if we can identify the fatal flaw that makes one woman the object of rape and murder, maybe we can modify our own behavior to avoid a similar end.

  According to the papers, Susan Forrester had had a penchant for exhibitionism that put Madonna in the shade.

  “Where do they get this garbage?” I said.

  Irina answered gravely. “Like secret police — they use informed sources. They pay bartenders and hotel doormen. The journalists here make little jokes about it. They say Woodward and Bernstein had Deep Throat, tabloids have Deep Pockets.”