The Second Silence (40 page)

An instant later, she plummeted to earth with a hard smack.

‘Where do we go from here?’ Her voice sounded peculiar to her own ears, hollow and tinny like the recorded message on her answering machine.

‘The report’s been submitted to the judge. Now it’s just a matter of setting a date for the final hearing.’ Lacey set the document aside, leaning forward to fix Noelle with a concerned gaze. ‘Hey, kiddo, are you okay? You don’t look so good.’

‘I’m fine.’ Noelle spoke tersely. She was tired of being treated like an invalid. Feeling sorry for herself wasn’t going to help either. ‘Look, let’s be honest. We both know Robert has this town wired. Why should it come as a shock that Linda Hawkins is in on it, too?’

‘Let’s not go off the deep end here.’ Lacy regarded her sternly, hands clasped in front of her like a schoolmarm. ‘I won’t deny your husband has a great deal of influence in this town, but I see no evidence of any mass conspiracy. And frankly any talk of that outside this office will make it even worse for you.’

‘Worse than it already is? I don’t see how that’s possible.’

Didn’t Lacey see the connection? Her dad’s windows getting smashed. Being targeted by Wade Jewett. If it wasn’t a conspiracy, someone up there truly didn’t like her.

‘Relax. I didn’t say anything about giving up, did I?’

Noelle’s lawyer, reaching up to pinch a dead leaf from the philodendron in the window, flashed her famous take-no-prisoners grin. ‘I’m not out of ammunition either. That’s the other thing I wanted to talk to you about. Yesterday I got a call from your former neighbor Judy Patterson. Frankly, after what you’d told me, I was surprised to hear from her.’

‘I’m surprised, too.’ For all her threats Noelle hadn’t really expected Judy to come through. When two or three days passed without word, she’d pretty much decided to let the matter drop. Now a seed of hope cracked open in her, sending up a pale shoot. Was this the lucky break she’d been praying for?

Lacey’s next words crushed that hope. ‘She wasn’t very helpful, I’m afraid. She told me she felt bad about what had happened and wanted to know if there was anything she could do to help … short of sticking her own neck out, that is.’

‘How noble of her.’ Noelle gave a scornful laugh.

‘We could always subpoena her.’ Lacey had suggested it once before, but Noelle had vetoed the idea. They could force Judy to testify, sure, but to what end? A woman who’d make false allegations in an affidavit wouldn’t stop at perjury.

‘No,’ she reiterated. ‘Judy would just cry and act pathetic, making it look like we were picking on her.’ The crisp authority with which she spoke surprised Noelle. In the beginning she wouldn’t have dreamed of speaking her mind so assertively. But times had changed, and she’d changed, too. Wade Jewett had been the final straw. ‘I have a better idea,’ she said, a thought taking shape in her mind.

Last night, when her mother had gone after Wade, there had been a wild look in her eyes … as if, given the chance, she would have killed him. A surprising truth had been brought home to Noelle in that instant: she and her mother were more alike than she’d realized. The instinct to protect her offspring was as strong in Mary as it was in her.

Was her mother-in-law any different? Gertrude would surely go to almost any lengths to protect her son. Cover for him. Lie to the police.

Maybe even murder a pregnant girl who would have ruined his life.

Noelle reeled at the thought. Maybe she’d been looking at this the wrong way. Suppose it wasn’t her unborn grandchild Gertrude was mourning. Suppose the roses on Corinne’s grave had been the guilt offering of a woman assuaging her conscience.

‘There’s someone besides Judy we could subpoena.’ She spoke cautiously, her mind not quite willing to grasp this astounding new theory. Not until she explored a little further.

‘Who?’ Lacey looked dubious.

‘My mother-in-law. She wouldn’t say anything that would hurt her son, of course, but it might raise some questions with the judge. Also, I have a feeling Gertrude Van Doren knows more about all this than she’s letting on.’

Lacey pondered the idea, absently toying with the top button on her demure white blouse. ‘I’m not sure the judge would allow it. Let me give some thought as to how we would present it, okay? In the meantime, don’t do anything without checking in with me first.’

‘Like confront Gertrude on my own?’ Noelle was surprised by the coolness with which she met Lacey’s gaze.

‘Don’t even think it,’ the diminutive lawyer warned in her best longshoreman’s growl. ‘Have you forgotten what happened the last time you decided to play Deputy Dawg?’

‘Yeah, I broke my foot instead of Robert’s head.’

‘Lucky for you.’

‘Are you saying you wouldn’t have done the exact same thing in my place?’ Noelle once more surprised herself by speaking out. ‘Come on, Lacey, you’d have charged over there like a rhino if it’d been your
dog.’

Her lawyer laughed. ‘Okay, you have a point, but let me remind you that from here on we have to tread very, very carefully. I think it’s fairly obvious which direction the wind is blowing, but if and when we file an appeal, which I’m warning you right now looks likely, I want this case airtight.’

Noelle felt her stomach twist. An appeal? She’d known from the beginning it was a possibility, maybe even a probability. But she still wasn’t prepared for the numbing sense of letdown. She’d waited so long already. How could she possibly go another week or month … or more?

Facing Lacey squarely, she said with an honesty that had become easier with each layer of her old self that was stripped away, ‘It’s ironic, really, because that’s how I’ve lived my life until now: carefully. Going by somebody else’s rules, afraid if I did what
I
wanted, it would somehow blow up in my face. But my life blew up
because
I was too careful. And now I have to live with the fact that I lost my little girl by doing the so-called right thing … by trusting the one man I should have bolted my door against.’

Lacey rose and walked around to perch on the fat arm of the chair next to Noelle’s. In her white blouse and pleated skirt she looked like a sly Catholic schoolgirl contemplating some sort of mischief. But her voice was gentle and knowing.

‘I don’t blame you for being frustrated, kiddo. The wheels of justice grind slowly, all right, and, yeah, sometimes it feels like you’re caught in them, being slowly crushed. But trust me, you don’t want to go flying off half cocked. It could backfire and end up making things worse.’

‘And if I sit nicely with my hands folded in my lap, what then?’

‘I won’t insult your intelligence with a lot of false assurances.’ Lacey always dished it out straight; that’s what Noelle liked best about her. ‘But we’ve got to face facts.
You’re
the one on trial here, not Robert. You have a prior history of drinking. Plus, he’s already established himself to be a more than fit parent.’ She ticked them off on her fingers, one by one, each indisputable fact a cold spike in Noelle’s heart. ‘Anything you say to Robert or to any member of his family can and
will
be used against you.’

‘You think I don’t know that already? That I’d have tried kicking his door down if I’d felt I had a choice?’ Noelle thought of Hank tenderly bandaging her sprained ankle, and for some reason it gave her the strength to go on. ‘Somebody has to fight for my daughter. If
I
don’t, who will?’

Lacey stood up, folding her arms over her chest. ‘I can’t offer any flashy alternatives, I’ll admit. And not being a mother myself, I can only imagine what you must be going through. But, Noelle, I’m confident that in the end, if we tough it out, you
will
get your daughter back. Hard as it is, you just have to be patient.’

‘Patience,’ Noelle said in a hard voice so unlike her own that her mind’s eye blinked open in surprise, ‘may be a luxury I can’t afford.’

Lacey cocked an eyebrow. ‘Can you afford the consequences?’

‘I don’t know.’ Noelle stood up and paced restlessly to the window that looked out on the lawn, where a harried-looking young mother was herding a gaggle of children up the front path.

The children’s laughter and the hollow clomping of their feet as they scampered onto the porch echoed in the stillness of Lacey’s office. Noelle ached for all the places she used to take her daughter: story hour at the library, the playground in the square, Ben Franklin’s for flower seeds to plant in Nana’s garden. Her throat was tight, but she wasn’t going to let herself cry. The time for tears was past.

When she turned, she found her lawyer gazing at her not with exasperation but with a newfound respect. ‘Whatever the outcome of all this, kiddo, I want you to know you have more than just a lawyer in me. You have a friend.’

Every other Tuesday afternoon, Gertrude Van Doren, as treasurer of the Burns Lake Historical Society, conducted tours of the Elsbree House high up on Windy Ridge Road. It was a matter of civic pride, she’d declare loudly and often to anyone who would listen, that their town boasted one of the oldest homes in the country, dating back to the Revolutionary War. The mansion, a finely appointed three-story Federal graced with Ionic columns and an ornate fanlight, had been fully restored in the late 1970s, largely because of the efforts of the historical society. But a source of even greater pride was that its original owner, Justus C. Elsbree, a prosperous Tory merchant and town father, was Gertrude’s great-great-grandfather.

As Noelle guided her Volvo up the steep, bumpy road to the Elsbree House, she recalled that her mother-in-law’s passionate interest in its restoration had coincided roughly with the death of her elder son. Knowing now what it was like to lose a child, she wasn’t surprised that Gertrude would throw herself into such a project. It must have been the only way she could cope with her loss.

A loss that made her surviving son that much more precious.

Noelle squinted against the sunlight reflecting off her dusty windshield, an anxious voice in her head fretting,
Just what do you expect to accomplish here? Shell have you thrown off the premises.

Aloud she muttered firmly, ‘No, she won’t.’ It would look bad in front of the tourists, and God knows Gertrude would do anything to avoid a scene.

Nevertheless, her heart bumped up into her throat with each lurch of her wheels over the potholed road. The best she could hope for, really, was that her mother-in-law would be surprised into blurting something she’d intended to keep secret.

In the parking area Noelle found a spot in the shade that wasn’t taken and climbed out of her car. The view was breathtaking. The Elsbree House, which occupied the highest point on the ridge, looked out on a vista of rolling green hills that gave way to fields of corn and patches of shorn earth dotted with bundles of hay. Climbing from her car, she was struck anew by the grandeur of it and felt a small burst of confidence. Emma’s ancestors had forged their way up here to make a home; her daughter came from hardy pioneer stock. She would get through this. They
both
would.

Noelle started up the path, the house rising before her, imposing and grand—a bit spooky as well. It had been rumored among her friends when they were growing up that the house was haunted. But that was before it was restored, back when the pediment over the front door had been home to roosting pigeons, and the fanlight, with several of its wedge-shaped panes missing or broken, had seemed to leer like an upside-down jack-o’-lantern.

At first the pristine tourist attraction that had risen from the magnificent wreck had been like new shoes needing to be broken in. But it had been long enough now for the new bricks to have worn to the earthy patina of the old, and the Virginia creeper to have once more spread up around the shuttered windows to brush the pedimented eaves. Nevertheless, Noelle felt a chill as she stepped through the front door into the shadowed entry.
There’s no such thing as ghosts,
she thought,
but the past can haunt you all the same.
She wondered what ghosts were lurking in Gertrude’s past.

At the foot of the stairs a pretty dark-haired teenager dressed in colonial garb sat at a table stacked with brochures. She looked up from filing her emphatically nineties nails—black, with a kaleidoscope pattern of pink and purple swirls—to cast a desultory glance at Noelle.

‘Tour’s almost over,’ she announced in a bored voice. ‘The next one’s not till four-thirty. You can buy your ticket now and come back if you want.’

‘Actually I’m looking for Mrs Van Doren,’ Noelle informed her crisply. ‘Is she giving the tour?’

She tensed, half expecting to be given the suspicious once-over, but the girl merely nodded. ‘She usually sticks around afterward to answer questions and stuff. You can wait over there.’ She gestured distractedly at the parson’s bench along the wall.

Noelle lowered herself stiffly onto the bench. Several more minutes passed. She could hear floorboards creaking overhead as the tour group was herded from one room to the next, accompanied by the faint murmur of voices. Gertrude would be expertly reciting the history of each piece of furniture and objet d’art, weaving in tales of the twelve children borne by Lucy Elsbree. For an added bit of color there was the century-old scandal of Justus Elsbree II’s taking a sixteen-year-old Iroquois girl as his wife. And lest any hasty conclusions be drawn about the purity of her lineage, Gertrude would be quick to add that the poor girl had died before bearing him a child and that Justus had married again, a woman of sterling pedigree who went on to become her great-grandmother.

At last the band of tourists began making their way down the stairs. A stout gray-haired couple, the man leaning heavily on his wife’s arm, followed by a family of four: an overweight wife in pink shorts, her balding husband, and a pair of skulking adolescents who looked as if they couldn’t wait to sneak out back for a smoke. Gertrude brought up the rear, wearing a coral linen jacket over a flowered silk dress. Her low pink heels matched her dress, and as usual every strand of her beige blond hair was perfectly in place.