The Sabbathday River (6 page)

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Authors: Jean Hanff Korelitz

BOOK: The Sabbathday River
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Naomi looked surprised. “Well, we don't exactly have a choice about it. This man running the investigation, he's very much in charge, and frankly I didn't think it was important enough to argue about. The truth is that even if I'd managed to keep it … I couldn't, you know, I could never just send it to the customer. Not after that. So we're just going to have to make another one.” She looked at Heather's face. The girl might be on the mend, Naomi thought, but she still looked unwell. Shit, Naomi hoped she wouldn't catch whatever flu this was. The last thing she needed now was a bug that wiped you out with such evident efficiency.
“Heather,” she heard herself say, “you take a few days and rest up. I'm going to write to the customer anyway, tell her there was an accident or something, all right? You just get better, then you can have another whack at it, okay?”
Heather nodded. “Okay. You bring me another kit?”
Naomi fished it out of her bag and handed it over.
“Want some more tea?”
It was a formality, easily deflected.
“No, thanks. I've got shopping to do. Another time.” She shrugged on her coat. “Take care of yourself, Heather. I'll give you a call next week, see how you're getting on.” She paused. “Look, I'm sorry I told you if you didn't know already.” Naomi smiled weakly. “The whole town seems to know about it. I figured you would, too.”
“We don't see too much of people,” Heather said plainly, without sadness. “I guess I would have heard sometime.”
Naomi showed herself out and rounded the muddy yard with its hunchback sunflowers, back to her station wagon. It was getting dark now, though it wasn't yet six. The weekend past she had thought of as Indian summer, she remembered. A T-shirt and shorts to jog in, not even a sweatshirt on the morning she had found the baby. Only two days had passed, but already, in the early evenings, there was the preemptive chill of winter. She reached for the heating lever on her dashboard and gave it its first nudge of the season as she started the station wagon down the drive. She was nearly at the road when a flash of light drew her eyes to the rearview mirror, then made her turn in her seat and peer into the gloom. She shook her head. Heather, in her green sweater, was walking across the field behind the house, weaving through big stones and jumping ruts, a flashlight slapping at her hip. She shouldn't be outside, Naomi thought crossly. How did she expect to get well again if she refused to take care of herself?
Lilith in the Garden
THE GODDARD STOP & SHOP WAS LOCATED IN A strip mall just north of the town center, wedged on the unimaginative concrete between a Hallmark card shop and a video rental place that did a brisk business in Schwarzenegger but was, Naomi had discovered early on, decidedly unlikely to carry the latest Woody Allen. The supermarket gave the word “monopoly” a whole new meaning, comprising, as it did, the sole large food outlet within fifteen miles of Goddard, and more or less determining, as a result, what Goddard and Goddard Falls inhabitants were going to eat—a diet primarily manufactured by Hostess, Wonder, Coca-Cola, and Procter and Gamble, as near as she could tell. Years earlier she had attempted to interest the management in the nutritional benefits of whole foods, the advantage of developing relationships with local farmers and start-up specialty providers, but these efforts, amazingly, had been resisted. She did still give in to an emergency expedition into Hanover now and then, making a run on the gourmet store on College Street to buy up everything in sight (including pounds and pounds of the bagels they swore were flown
in from H & H on the Upper West Side of Manhattan). Mostly, however, she had buckled under years ago. She had to eat. She had that in common with her neighbors.
She even ate meat now. Back in college, Naomi had embraced Daniel's vegetarianism like a dowry, which it was in a way. Daniel considered the consumption of meat to be the primary distorting force in the web of ecological balances, and the primary pollution of the human body. Daniel favored grains cooked to the texture of sawdust, casseroles of parboiled vegetables baked with grated cheese, a rainbow of teas that stretched from malt brown to celadon. Chicken was permissible on special occasions, but only organically grown chicken, which—given where they lived—neatly cut down on the consumption of chicken. He liked beans and always had a pot of them soaking. He collected bottles of condiments whose labels were in Sanskrit or Chinese and whose contents she was secretly afraid would poison them. He went through two copies of the
Moosewood Cookbook
and had just bought a third when they separated. He replenished his supplies from the bins at Tom and Whit's and the garden plot he rented from the dairy farmer next door. As far as Naomi knew, he had never entered the Stop & Shop.
She took her cart from the rack near the automatic door and began her rounds: hormone-laden milk, nominally whole-wheat sliced bread. Recycled paper goods?
Please.
She needed toilet paper and couldn't last the week it would take Seventh Generation to ship some over from Vermont, so it was time to squeeze some Charmin like the rest of the world. A man in a hunting cap was staring at her, down by the aluminum foil at the end of the aisle. She knew him, not by name—somebody's husband—and smiled and waved. Sarah Copley came by her, almost passed, then turned around.
“Naomi.”
“Sarah,” Naomi said, stopping her cart. She was waiting to see which way the wind would blow.
“This is a mess. There was an article in
The Boston Globe.
My sister telephoned from Dedham.”
Naomi looked up and nodded. “I guess that makes sense.”
Sarah Copley placed a proprietary hand on Naomi's shopping cart. She had graying hair suspended in blondness, part natural, part bottled. The shade had grown increasingly discordant as she approached sixty, and now was beginning to seem downright silly. Sarah was a quilter,
retired from her job in the town clerk's office a year or two earlier. She and Naomi had a bond of civilized mutual tolerance.
“Nelson Erroll called me yesterday. Asked if I had any ideas.”
“Ideas,” Naomi said flatly.
“The mother,” Sarah said. “You'd think somebody's walking around pregnant, we'd be bound to notice.”
“You'd think,” Naomi agreed. “Well, don't look at me.”
“I wasn't.” Sarah sounded surprised. She set her jaw. “Janelle Hodge said there were some kids camping in their upper pasture last week. Through hikers, she said. She thought she'd give them twenty-four hours before she called the police, and they were gone the next day. They had a girl with them, she said.”
Naomi was listening to this, but she couldn't engage. She wanted to be left out of the gossip chain, but she couldn't cut Sarah. Cutting Sarah might rank, if possible, even higher on the hierarchy of Goddard crimes than slaughtering a newborn.
“Was the girl pregnant?” she said instead.
“Who the hell can tell, stuff they wear. Big baggy sweater can hide just about anything. They'd be off along the Trail now, anyway. I said to Nelson, I said if I was him I'd set up a checkpoint on Mount Washington. Be just as easy as punch to drop a baby in the river and then disappear. That kind of person would do it, too.”
Which kind of person was that? she wanted to ask. Instead, she said, “Nelson have any other ideas?”
Sarah Copley nodded. “Said he was talking to everybody. ‘Covering all the bases' is the way he put it. Couple of women in Goddard Falls living with men they're not married to. Went and talked to them, of course.
But of course, Naomi thought.
“DHSS gave him a list of women on welfare, everyone within thirty miles. Going to talk to them, too.”
“That'll
take a bit of time,” Naomi said, disgusted.
“Oh, they have time.” Sarah had missed her tone. “They're gonna find whoever did it, no mistake.” She shook her head. “Makes me sick, throwing away a life like that. Just tossing her out in the river like so much garbage. A perfect little baby like that, and so many people can't have children and want to adopt!”
“Yes, that's true,” she agreed. Her hands were on the bar of her shopping cart. She rolled it back and forth experimentally.
Sarah Copley took her own hand away, releasing the metal. “Well, I won't keep you,” she said stiffly. “I'm sure you've got things to do.”
Naomi looked up. At the end of the aisle, Ashley Deacon was reaching for a can of coffee. Saved by Ashley. It wouldn't be the first time.
“Well, I need to grab Ashley. You know he never returns calls, and the banister at the mill is going to get somebody killed.” She smiled her most winning smile. “See you soon, Sarah.”
Naomi pushed ahead, circumventing Sarah's half-full cart. Ashley began to turn, and she called his name.
“Naomi,” he said. His voice was soft. “I've been thinking about you.”
She gave this the look it deserved. “How's Sue?”
Sue Deacon had had a baby boy a few days earlier.
“Tired,” he said. When he smiled, which he did now, two bottomless dimples appeared in his cheeks. He had thick hair pulled tightly back in a ponytail, a clever face that seemed to suggest a degree of intelligence he really didn't possess, or at any rate didn't use. It was also a face, it had sometimes occurred to her, that failed to retain a record of either his years or his deeds. They appeared to be accumulating somewhere else, as in the story of Dorian Gray, because Ashley was a good thirty years old with the skin of a man ten years younger. Angelic, too —he who is without sin, as the saying went, though Naomi knew perfectly well he had sinned. She liked him, though. She had always liked him.
“What'd you name him?”
“Benjamin. Benjy.” He grinned. “Tough little guy. Think we'll keep him.”
Under the circumstances, it was a fairly sick quip, Naomi thought, but Ashley's face was untroubled. Then again, with a brand-new baby, it was just possible he hadn't heard yet. She didn't want to be the one to tell him.
“Listen, I don't know when you want to start working again, but—”
“Oh, I'm working all right. I did a job this morning, on Sabbathday Ridge. I put in a French door for these people who just moved in. They want a new kitchen, too. They're ordering up stuff from Boston for it.”
“Well.” She stopped him. “So you might not have time for any little jobs, then.”
“I have time,” Ashley said amiably. “What do you need?”
The attic banister, she told him. And the parking lot leveled somehow, if it wasn't too expensive. And maybe it was time to look at her
own roof again, since the one Daniel had so lovingly installed was beginning to assume the consistency of oatmeal. When Ashley had time.
“I'll make time,” he said warmly.
Naomi shook her head, gave him the benefit of her goodwill, and left.
Well, that was how it went in Stop & Shop, she reasoned, turning the final aisle. Come in for a few marginally palatable foodstuffs, leave with an update on the current police investigation and a semiformal commitment from your contractor. A veritable agora on the Greek model, she thought, flinging a bag of rice cakes into her cart with happy abandon and heading for produce, such as it was.
Where, sharp enough to make the cans in her cart rattle against the mesh, she stopped short.
The woman was standing before a case filled with pale green iceberg lettuces, each wrapped in shiny plastic, each looking less appetizing than the next. Wedged on one side of the lettuces was a box of orange tomatoes, the kind that looked bad and tasted bad (as opposed to the kind that looked good and tasted bad), and on the other a neatly arranged waterfall of waxed cucumbers—as if some brilliant grocery clerk had taken it upon himself to relieve the shopper of the necessity for creativity in salad composition: iceberg, tomato, cucumber,
voilà!
The woman was poised before this vision, legs slightly apart, hands on hips. The shopping cart beside her held precisely one item: a large bottle of generic seltzer. She wore heavy boots, a big sweater jacket with a dark brown pattern, and overalls of magenta cloth with long shoulder straps that knotted through the front bib. The sweater came from Mexico, and the overalls, Naomi knew, had been bought in a shop called Reminiscence, on a side street in Greenwich Village. She herself had two pairs just like them at home, one black, one pea green—very useful for days you felt fat or had your period. The woman was tall—taller than Naomi—and wide-hipped, and her black hair hit her shoulders with the kind of dense, tight curls some people who weren't Jewish tried to achieve through chemicals.
My kind, it came to her.
She remembered something she had read long before, in an anthropology class, about the lone survivor of a Native American tribe, adopted by whites, studied by whites. He had lived his whole life among whites, with nobody to talk to. Sharp as a knife, she felt her own longing.
The woman was probably a summer person. But then again it was late in the year for that.
The woman was probably a leaf-peeper. But leaf-peepers ate at country inns, they didn't visit the Stop & Shop, and if they did, it was for maple syrup, maple sugar, Cheddar cheese.
She looked like about twenty women Naomi had known in her life, but Naomi was reasonably certain she wasn't any of them. She looked like the person who would probably be her closest friend by now, if she'd never come to New Hampshire.
Naomi and her kind, she thought. The sight was riveting: Lilith in the garden.
So this is what I must look like to them,
she thought.
The woman shook her black hair in disgust. She reached for her cart and began to push it away. Naomi stepped forward. “Can I help you with something?” she heard herself say.
The woman turned to look at her for a long moment. Then, slowly, she smiled broadly and shook her head. “I should have known.” Her voice was deep, underpinned by jubilant sarcasm. “Only I never thought it would be
this
bad. I told my husband, let's move to Putney, at least. In Putney they've got a co-op. I
know
people in Putney. But no. Because he fell in love with the house. A house without a kitchen, I might add.” She swung her head around and coolly surveyed the produce department. “Not that we'll have any use for a kitchen.”
“You're moving here?” Naomi said, refusing to make the inferential leap without confirmation.

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