The Drowning Tree (22 page)

N
OR HAVE
I
EVER FELT AS LOVED AS
I
FELT BY
N
EIL IN THE YEARS WE SPENT TOGETHER
before he began to lose his mind.
Beloved
, really,
adored
. When we were in a room together he never seemed to take his eyes off me. He was always drawing me as one figure from romantic mythology or another: Beatrice, Guinevere, Halcyone, Isolde. I should have wondered why he never simply drew me as myself, but by the time I understood that what he loved was something inside his own mind—and that when his mind cracked so
would his image of me—I was addicted to being loved like that. No wonder I still dreamed about him. No wonder I had imagined him as the indistinct figure behind the glass at Cooke’s today.

Even here, walking under the arched canopy of twisted branches with Nathan Bell, I’ve got half an eye out for a sight of him behind the thick, overgrown foliage even though these woods are so dense—as lushly green and rich with wildflowers as the millefleurs tapestries at the Cloisters—that a dozen Neils could be passing by us ten feet off the path and I’d never see them. That thought sets my skin prickling, but whether from fear or excitement I’m not sure.
How would it feel to see Neil again after all these years?

When we turn into the final curve of the bridle path I get an answer of sorts. A figure steps out of the shadows into a patch of sun at the bottom of the path and for a moment the sun makes a halo of his bright hair. When he steps toward us, and into the shadows again, I see it’s Detective Falco, but for just that moment when I thought it was Neil I felt something take flight inside me that wasn’t fear.

“Miss McKay, Mr. Bell.” The detective nods at me but extends his hand to Nathan and introduces himself. “Amy Webb said you’d be on this path. I thought I’d catch you before you got back to the house and have a word with you both alone. There’s not much opportunity for privacy at Mrs. Webb’s house.”

“No, Christine always said the same thing,” I say.

“Do you want to talk to both of us at the same time … or should I go back …?” Nathan takes a step down the hill and points one arm toward the road, the other toward the detective, flapping his arms up and down like a giant crow. I notice dark half-moons of sweat beneath his arms on the shiny fabric of his suit jacket that could well be from walking in the heat or from the nervousness I hear in his voice.

“I thought as Christine’s closest friends you’d both like to hear the results of the autopsy together. It’s not an interrogation. If you have time we could walk up the path a bit. I think there’s a bench overlooking the river …”

“I have to get back home to feed the dogs before dark,” I say. It’s a lie—I’ve asked Robbie to feed and walk Paolo and Francesca—but one view of Briarwood is enough for one day. “I don’t mind standing.”

Nathan checks his watch. “I’ve got to catch the 6:16 back to the city,” he says, “I’m sure Juno could fill me in on whatever I need to know …”

“You’ve got plenty of time; I’ll drive you there myself. That way if I have any further questions I can ask them on the way. Meanwhile, it will save time to tell you this together. Kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.” He smiles as if to disarm the expression of its implicit threat, but it has the opposite effect. It strikes me that for a man concerned with saving time he’s spending an awful lot of it in preamble.

“You’ve ruled it a suicide, right?” I ask. “You wouldn’t be telling us together if it were still a homicide case.”

Detective Falco cocks his head to one side in a gesture that makes
him
look like the bird now, but not the fragile kind that could be killed by a stone, more like the bird his name suggests—a bird of prey.

“We haven’t ruled out homicide but it does
look
like it could have been suicide. The lab results indicate that she had a combination of drugs in her bloodstream that together could have killed her and there was very little water in her lungs. It looks like she took an overdose of pills, passed out, and then capsized. Her respiration at that point was so minimal she hardly breathed in any water.”

“And the drugs in her system?” I ask.

“They’re consistent with the pills we found in the container in her pocket. Fluvoxamine, an antidepressant sold under the brand name Luvox, and benzodiazepine, a tranquilizer and antianxiety agent sold under the brand name Klonopin.”

“So could it have been an accidental overdose,” Nathan asks, “since these were drugs she was taking regularly?”

“You mean, did she feel sort of depressed after her lecture, take twenty to thirty antidepressants and then worry she wasn’t going to be able to sleep on the train ride home so she took fifteen to twenty tranquilizers? And then, after washing all those pills down with a couple of cups of coffee—which we also found in her system—she decides to take a little kayak trip across the Hudson and up the Wicomico?”

“I was just asking,” Nathan says, sounding a bit peevish. I can’t help but feel sorry for him. First he misses the funeral, then the aunts assume he was Christine’s boyfriend … I look from Nathan to Detective Falco
and wonder if that’s why the detective’s being so hard on him. Does he think Nathan was Christine’s lover? Does he think Nathan did something to drive Christine to kill herself?

“I don’t understand that last part at all,” Nathan continues, straightening his spine and raising his voice, which, unfortunately, just makes him sound shrill. “If she wanted to take an overdose of pills why not do it in the comfort of her own apartment? Why paddle up a stream in the middle of the night?”

“That’s what I was going to ask Miss McKay here. You knew Christine the best. Any reason she’d stage a suicide like this?”

“I still don’t—”

Detective Falco raises his hand. “I know—she was feeling much better these days, she’d gotten her act together and was starting over—but you do admit she’d been suicidal in the past. Let’s just assume, for argument’s sake, that it was a suicide. Why do it like this? Why the boat?”

“I guess to make a statement,” I say reluctantly. “Back when she and Neil would talk about famous suicides they discussed different methods—how the method made a statement more clearly than any note did. Virginia Woolf stuffing her pockets with stones, Sylvia Plath sticking her head in the oven … By dying in a boat and having her body drift down the stream to be found she could have been imitating the Lady of Shalott. She said in her lecture that the Lady of Shalott was one of those women whose deaths are a recrimination to the men who betrayed them, like Dido throwing herself on the pyre or Madame Butterfly singing her last aria. Even though she’s not a suicide
per se
the Lady of Shalott seals her fate by looking directly at Lancelot, and then she writes her name on the boat and makes sure it’ll drift down to Camelot so Lancelot can see it … but Christine’s boat didn’t make it down the Wicomico.”

“Well, she didn’t know it would flip over. I guess hanging upside down in the water wasn’t the picture she was trying to draw.”

I wince at the image, remembering Christine’s long blond hair waving in the clear creek, the bright yellow of the kayak reflected in the water …

“Did you look at the kayak?” I ask. “Was there anything written on the boat?”

“No. If she did write anything it washed off.”

“But in order for it to make sense … for the whole scene she was setting up to make sense …” Nathan stops and starts again. “You’re saying she was trying to send a message to someone—a lover who spurned her. But who? As far as I know she wasn’t involved with anyone. Did she mention anyone to you, Juno?”

“Not exactly, but I had a feeling that she was holding back something from me. She asked me a lot of questions about whether I was seeing anyone …” I notice Detective Falco’s eyebrow raised inquisitively but choose to ignore it. “…  and about whether I was ever sorry about …”

Falco sees my hesitation and nods his head. “Yes?”

“She wanted to know if I ever regretted my choice to have Bea,” I say, remembering how Christine had blushed when she asked the question and the way the color had made her face appear fuller. It only takes me a moment longer to put the rest together. “That’s what you found in the autopsy,” I say, “and that’s why Christine wouldn’t see her mother when she came up here last month, because she knew Ruth would have guessed.”

“Guessed what?” Nathan asks, looking from me to Falco.

“That she was pregnant,” Falco says to Nathan. “She was four months pregnant.”

“B
UT SHE DIDN’T
LOOK
PREGNANT
,” N
ATHAN SAYS, PULLING A HANDKERCHIEF OUT
of his suit jacket pocket and mopping sweat off his forehead. I can’t help but feel sorry for him. Clearly Falco is trying to get him to admit to being the father of the child or at least knowing something about the pregnancy. But why then, I wonder, did he go out of his way to tell him with me here?

“When
was
the last time you saw Christine?” Falco asks Nathan.

“The Friday she left the city. We had lunch at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central and I saw her to her train.”

“Really? Christine didn’t mention …” the words are out of my mouth before I can help myself. Now I understand why Falco wanted me
here—to see if Christine had said anything to me about a relationship with Nathan Bell. Well, it’s worked. I couldn’t be more surprised at the possibility that Nathan might be the father of Christine’s unborn child. It’s not just that he’s probably ten years younger than Christine. I can imagine Christine having an affair with a younger man, but in my imagination the man would look more like, well, Kyle or Neil when Neil was that age. Christine has always gone for the
bad boy
type—slightly dangerous men in torn jeans and motorcycle jackets, not pale, gawky aesthetes like Nathan Bell.

“And you got a good look at her then? I mean, close enough to be sure she wasn’t four months pregnant?”

“If you’re implying …” Nathan’s voice warbles on the last word; he’s close to tears. I steal a look at Falco to see if there’s any remorse in his face but his eyes are as coldly assessing as those of the bird he’s named for—a hawk circling its prey looking for subtle movements in the grass.

“We weren’t in a relationship, if that’s what you’re implying.” Instead of quailing under Falco’s assessing gaze Nathan has, surprisingly, pulled himself together. “And I don’t appreciate being questioned in front of Miss McKay.”

“Then why don’t I give you that lift to the station,” Falco suggests. “If you weren’t in a relationship with Christine Webb perhaps you have an idea of who was. At least you can provide me with a list of possibilities at Columbia—other students, professors …”

Nathan’s turned pale again, no doubt at the idea of informing on his peers and superiors.

“Why is it important?” I ask, partly to get Nathan off the hook, partly because I’m genuinely confused. “If you think Christine killed herself why does it matter?”

“As I mentioned earlier, we haven’t ruled out homicide. What I said was that it
looked
like it could have been suicide. That might be because someone wanted it to look like suicide, someone who knew that Christine took Luvox and Klonopin. There was quite a bit of coffee in her bloodstream as well; did you give her coffee at your place?”

I shake my head. At Falco’s instigation we’ve started back down the path toward the road. When we reach the road we have to proceed single
file on the narrow dirt shoulder. Nathan goes first and Falco waves me to go on ahead of him.

“No one at the reception after the lecture remembers her having coffee either. Now, it’s possible that Christine purchased a large coffee to go at the cafe across the street before heading over to the boathouse to steal a kayak—or that someone met her at the station, or the boathouse, with a thermos for their boat trip up the Wicomico. Remember, there were two missing kayaks. What confuses me is if Christine were alone and she used the coffee to wash down a few dozen pills, where’s the coffee cup?”

“You’re saying that a paper to-go cup couldn’t go missing in the Wicomico? Or in the Hudson if it floated downstream?” I ask, turning my head back and raising my voice to be heard over a couple of motorcycles revving their engines down Webb Road.

“Maybe—but I don’t like that we haven’t found one. That area where you found Christine is in a protected curve of the stream. Not much current. A paper cup would have floated and gotten snagged in the water lily bed where Christine’s kayak was overturned. Same for a glass thermos …”

“But not one of those metal thermoses,” Nathan says without turning his head. I’m surprised that he’s been able to keep up with the conversation as far ahead as he’s been.

“True, but then it would have sunk to the bottom and our divers searched that whole area. All we found were some pieces of an old statue that had toppled in the water.”

We haven’t quite made it back to Ruth Webb’s house but Falco stops at a dark blue Chevrolet Caprice parked on the side of the road and calls to Nathan to stop.

“I thought I’d just go back and pay my respects to Mrs. Webb …” he says, turning in the road.