New England White (31 page)

“I’ve been walking alone most of my life.”

“I mean, track down what Kellen was working on. It’s obvious that’s what you’re up to. Obvious to me, anyway.” She waved a hand. “And that accounts for the aura you’ve got these days, too.” She laughed alone this time. She even had her own water bottle, and swigged deeply. “Seriously, Julia. You need my help. I can keep you out of trouble. Save you from mistakes. Share my resources. My expertise.”

“Mary—”

“And I can tell you things you can’t possibly know.”

“Like what?”

They had reached a set of boulders. Mary sat while Julia stretched. “Like, I’m not the only person who followed you today.”

Julia’s first instinct, quite irresistible, was to glance wildly around, although she had no idea what, or whom, she was looking for. Her next was to glower. “You made that up.”

Mary shrugged. “Maybe I did. Maybe I didn’t. That’s the point. You wouldn’t even think to wonder. And if you did wonder, you wouldn’t know what to look for.”

“And you would?”

“Of course. The kind of books I write? I pick up surveillance now and then.”

Along with hubris and paranoia, Julia thought, but did not say. Mary was right. She could not do this alone. More to the point, she didn’t want to. A partner would be wonderful. The question was whether Mary Mallard was the right one.

“Tell me exactly what Kellen told you.”

“This really is a new you, isn’t it?”

“Come on, Mary. You’re auditioning for a place. What was Kellen up to? What did he say?”

The writer sighed and gazed off toward the pond. The
Make Way for Ducklings
sculpture glistened darkly in the bright winter sun. Clearly Mary wanted that cigarette, and Julia took a perverse pride in denying permission. “Kellen came to see me a few months ago. We had met when I interviewed him for my book on the corporate accounting scandals. Kellen earned a ton of money from his lectures, and he lectured on the scandals, and, well, anyway, we met. He loved capitalism, wasn’t worried by its excesses, believed markets could mostly regulate themselves. And he loved to argue. I learned not to disagree with what he said, because winning meant so much to him. And, yes, if you’re wondering, he came on to me a couple of times, but, well, that was never going anywhere.” She put her hands flat on the rock, tilted her head back, closed her eyes to take the sun. “So, anyway, he called me last summer and said he had come up with something that would interest me. I suggested we have a drink the next time he was in D.C., which we did, about a week later. Late July, I think, because I go to Maine in August. He told me about Gina Joule. I’d never heard of her. He told me the story, and I told him there are a million stories like that one. I wasn’t interested unless there was a book in it, or at least an article. He said this was different. This wasn’t just some black boy lynched for allegedly killing a white girl. This was a black boy who died in the place of somebody who mattered. That was Kellen’s term. Somebody who mattered.”

“So you got interested.”

“A little. Not too much. Given what I do for a living, people peddle these tales all the time. But then he told me about Hilliman Suite, and who lived there, and I got very, very interested. He said he was pretty sure he could prove that one of the guys from Hilliman Suite was at least dating her, which would already blow a hole in the official story, and maybe blow the election wide open. He said with enough time he was sure he could prove more. He said he would put it on the market. He would do an auction to capture the surplus. An all-pay auction, he said. I didn’t know what that was, but it didn’t matter. I asked why he was telling me. I don’t pay for information, I said, even information that can blow an election wide open. He said he needed somebody who knew how to present things. He wanted me to write up his findings for this auction. I told him that wasn’t exactly the business I was in, but, believe me, Julia, by now I was hooked. I wanted that story. The trouble was, he wanted me to swear never to tell a soul. Well, I make my money by writing about what I learn, not by keeping it secret. We argued for a couple of weeks, and then he said he would send me a teaser, so I’d know he was on the level. In September I got a photograph in the mail. No return address, by the way, and no note, but the postmark said Elm Harbor.”

“What was in the photo?” Julia asked, because Mary had paused and was pursing her lips, perhaps drawing on the imaginary cigarette.

“It was a young man on a sofa asleep. That was all. A young man, late teens, early twenties, asleep on a sofa. I called Kellen, I told him this didn’t help. He told me if I could identify the young man he would identify where it was taken. So I did. It didn’t take long, because I knew who he was investigating. It was a photo of Senator Malcolm Whisted when he was in college. When I told Kellen, he sent me a note, with an address on it in Tyler’s Landing. I looked up the address at the time the Senator was a student, and, sure enough, it was Merrill and Anna Joule’s house.”

“That’s not much to go on.”

“That’s what I told him. Same thing I told you at the funeral. The fact that Senator Whisted slept at her house once didn’t prove anything. The Whisteds knew everybody. Kellen asked if it would matter if he told me young Mal was drunk at the time. I said no. In college everybody’s drunk all the time. Kellen laughed. He said that’s why it’s called a teaser.”

“And that was it?”

“Not quite.” Mary pursed her lips, wanting that cigarette badly. “He said the whole case really proved why nonrivalrous consumption was almost impossible.”

“Spell that for me.”

Mary did, and loaned Julia a pencil and paper to write it down. “It means—” the writer began, but Julia held up her hand. She did not want Mary’s explanations. Or her biases.

“Thanks.” Julia looked at her watch. “I have to go.”

“Lemaster’s with Bay Dennison, right?”

“You’re very good at this, Mary.”

“Hey, I don’t need you to tell me that.” She stood up. “So, do we have a deal?”

“No.”

The white woman’s face fell. “But I told you—”

“Mary, listen. You’re half right. I do need help. And I can certainly use yours. I’d love it if you signed on. But if you do, you have to know that it’s my project, not yours, and the information I give you will be the information I choose to give you.” She considered. “And you can’t write anything without my permission.”

“Are you sure you and Kellen weren’t married or anything? I mean, you talk just the same.”

“Oh, and one more thing. We get Christmas season off.”

Mary was appalled. “You know, Julia, the Iowa caucuses are in two months.”

“If you can solve the mystery without me before then, you’re welcome to it.”

“And here I thought I was the bitch.”

Julia smiled. This being-in-charge business was fun.

CHAPTER 33

’TIS THE SEASON

(I)

C
HRISTMAS SLIPSTREAMED PAST
the family like a billboard beside the highway, first a distant glimmer, then looming closer and larger, then suddenly full and bright and cheery and easy to read, but blink and it is in the rearview mirror, beyond the curve you just passed, and gone. Astrid and her children came to town, the hatchet having evidently been buried between the cousins, and even went to midnight mass at Saint Matthias, where, following the service, Lemaster showed an unaccustomed lack of tact, complaining to anyone who would listen about the Nativity scene near the altar. He objected, said Lemaster, not to the blond whiteness of the Baby Jesus or the decidedly Aryan features of Mary and Joseph, but, rather, to the presence and number of the wise men, the Magi. Matthew’s Gospel, he argued over coffee in the parish hall, did not specify the number of Magi, but did note explicitly that they visited the child (not baby) Jesus at his house—not, as tradition has it, in the manger where he was born. The shepherds, not the wise men, were led to the manger. The senior warden, pale as a cadaver and nearly as animated, murmured in his funereal tones that tradition was what kept people Anglican, but Lemaster was unmoved. Tradition was one thing, he said. Defying the Gospels was another.

Riding home, the Escalade bravely holding course around the slick curves, Lemaster fulminated to his wife, and to part of his family—others rode with Aunt Astrid in her Lincoln Navigator—on the matter of the church’s resistance to what seemed to him the plain truth. When her father finally paused for breath in the vast family quiet, Vanessa, in the back, leaned forward between the plush bucket seats and asked sweetly whether it was really likely that Dads alone had it right and everyone else, who had followed the tradition for centuries, right down to those who celebrated,
con mucho gusto,
Three Kings Day, had it wrong. Before he could answer, she continued, “It’s like Saint Paul’s journeys in the first century. We don’t know all the places he went. The Bible doesn’t tell us. But tradition fills in the answers, right? The tradition teaches that he went to Spain, it’s unbroken and pretty much unchallenged, and so we say, yes, okay, he probably went to Spain. So—what’s wrong with accepting the tradition that there were in fact three wise men? After all, it’s not as if the Bible says there was some other number.”

Lemaster started to reply—gently, as he always did when Vanessa spoke—but he stopped because he noticed, the same time everyone else in the car did, that her mouth was still moving although her words had dried up. When they arrived at Hunter’s Heights, Jeremy Flew, who seemed to have no home of his own, had eggnog waiting, delicately spiked, and he helped the children leave cookies and milk for Santa. Four young people then scurried for their bedrooms to allow the grown-ups to wrap the gifts—none of them from Mona, who always forgot, and apologized later. Julia tried to send Vanessa to bed, too, but her daughter, pronouncing herself too old for such nonsense, refused. Instead she sat in the kitchen drinking one Diet Sprite after another and rereading a dog-eared book about Roman military strategy.

“What are you doing?” Aunt Astrid asked at one point.

“Reading.”

“I mean, why do you spend so much time reading about war? When we should all be working together for peace?”

Vanessa never looked up. “Getting ready,” she said.

That was how they spent Christmas Eve.

(II)

B
RUCE
V
ALLELY SPENT THE LATE AFTERNOON
of Christmas Eve at the shopping mall in Norport, although not shopping. He sat in the Mustang convertible with the top up, in a far corner of the parking lot, talking to Rick Chrebet, whose family thought he was picking up a few last-minute gifts. Rick kept saying he was risking his pension if he got caught. But he passed along some of his notes anyway. Back home, Bruce marveled at the amount of work Rick had managed before the investigation had shut down. He had even determined, by a similar but not identical path of reasoning, that Lemaster Carlyle was a possible suspect. Rick, less impulsive than his former partner, had also troubled to obtain an item that Bruce had overlooked.

A copy of Lemaster’s résumé.

One look sent Bruce’s theory of the case out the window.

Gina Joule had disappeared in February 1973, during Lemaster’s junior year.

The résumé was explicit and unambiguous:
January–June 1973, study at Oxford.

When the university reopened for business after New Year’s Day, Bruce would check the dates to be sure the résumé was accurate. But he knew already that it would be. Unless the future president of the university had rushed home to the States just in time to kill Gina Joule and fly back to England, Lemaster could not have done the deed. That did not mean that he could not have murdered Zant, but it reduced the likelihood considerably.

Bruce would be forced, against his inclination, to look to other possibilities. He put away his work and went out into the living room where Laurie, his daughter, home from college, was decorating the tree.

(III)

O
N
C
HRISTMAS
D
AY
, hidden in the down news cycle, Cameron Knowland quietly cut all ties to the President’s re-election campaign. His office released a letter, scarcely noticed by the media until another week had gone by, in which he apologized handsomely for “engaging in practices that might have given the appearance that I sought to discover scandalous information about leading candidates of the other party.” The White House statement thanked him for his service over the years, as well as his friendship to the President, but did not suggest any regret at the parting of the ways. Astrid knew before the rest of the family, because somebody text-messaged her and somebody else called her. On December 26, the story got a minute and a half on the evening news. Astrid watched, a sickly look in her eyes. Julia had intended to ask how she had heard these rumors about Lemaster’s hiding dirt, but, seeing the woman’s genuine sorrow, dared not. The next day Astrid and her children left for home. That night, Julia watched Tessa’s show. The onetime roommates had made their peace after Tessa’s little betrayal of Julia’s confidence. They always did. Julia would never stop being grateful to Tessa for saving her life, and Tessa would never stop counting on her gratitude. Tonight Tessa was talking about the possibility that the two dismissals, Astrid Venable and Cameron Knowland, each an important cog in a political machine, signaled an outbreak of civility, a welcome change from the campaigns of recent years.

Julia worried that they represented an outbreak of something else. She did not know quite what. What she remembered was how, even though Lemaster had said Cameron was too big for him to take on, she had heard him late the same night on his cell phone:
…man had the infernal temerity to march in and threaten my wife in the middle of my campus. I won’t put up with it. Yes, I know. I know, but I don’t care. I won’t stand for it. Do I make myself clear? And not this Tice either, asking about my wife all over the place. I will not have this in my city. Is that clear?

Julia had meant to sneak up on her husband and hug him out of his recent glooms. What sent her reeling back to bed to pull the covers over her head, was, once again, his use of the possessive pronoun.