Cold Rain (11 page)

I assume they were inside taking statements. At the time I was so entirely disoriented I tried to reach for the ignition of my truck. The handcuffs promptly brought me back to reality.

The booking process was delayed long enough for me to be stripped of my clothes and given a shower.

One of the jailers was a former student of mine, a pretty good writer, actually. He checked my bruises and told me he didn’t think anything was broken. I got a clean jail uniform and a cell with four other drunks. They weren’t bad sorts, as it turned out, and we ended up telling stories until dawn.

I HAD BEEN GIVEN THE CHANCE to make a phone call sometime around midnight. I dialled our home number and got the answering machine. Arrested, I said. City jail. Call Gail Etheridge first thing tomorrow morning. As an afterthought I added, ‘ …please.’

The following morning I shuffled in chains through an underground tunnel to the county courthouse, a nineteenth century relic full of various courtrooms and offices. Gail Etheridge met me outside the circuit court.

The sight of her reassured me. She didn’t really smile.

It was more like a smirk. ‘Rough night?’

She was talking about my face, which still had an imprint of Buddy Elder’s boot. ‘I’ve had worse,’ I lied.

‘What happened?’

‘Denise Conway’s boyfriend.’

Gail made a face. I expect she was calculating the effect on my case at the university. When it was my turn, we went up before the bar and sat at a small table. At that point an investigator for the prosecutor gave a reasonably accurate summation of my actions at The Glass Slipper. The judge, an old grey-haired dog in robes, listened to the narrative with some interest, asked for some clarification, specifically on the condition of my intended victim and the amount of property damage. Finally, he turned his attention to me.

He was a man in his late fifties with the indelible signs of a man worn out by routine. I was therefore a rather interesting exception to his day. ‘Dr Albo,’ he said with something akin to a sigh, ‘my impression is that last night was a bit out of character for you. Would you say that is the case?’ I looked at Gail. Her expression indicated I should answer the judge.

I tried to assure him that it was, but my voice cracked, and it took a couple of tries.

He looked down at his notes. ‘Joseph Elder, Buddy, is one of your students?’ I said that he was. The judge considered this fact for a moment. ‘You have any idea how the two of you can avoid another incident of this nature?’

‘I’d be surprised if he didn’t drop my class.’

‘And if he doesn’t?’

‘We’re not going to have any problems, Your Honour.’

‘Make sure you don’t, Dr Albo. You come into my court with another incident involving that young man and I’m going to feel like I made a mistake this morning.’

I felt a flutter of hope.

‘I don’t like to make mistakes. What is more, the voters don’t like it when I make mistakes. Are we clear on that?’

‘Yes, Your Honour.’

‘I’m going to ask you to make two promises to me this morning. First, that you’ll stay out of The Glass Slipper for as long as I sit on this bench. Second, that you’ll avoid any sort of confrontation with Mr Elder.

Can you do that?’

‘I can.’

‘Can you promise it?’

‘I promise, Your Honour.’

‘If you break your promise to me, son, if you so much as get in a shouting match with Mr Elder, I will spare no effort in attempting to ruin your life, in the legal sense of the word, of course.’

It occurred to me that I should attempt to explain to the judge that Buddy Elder had apparently decided to ruin my life, in an illegal sense of the word, and that I might not have much choice about how I dealt with the young man, but I very wisely followed my instinct and kept my mouth shut. I had made my promise and meant to keep it. At that moment I could not imagine ever going back to The Slipper or crossing paths with Buddy Elder again. I had the best intentions that morning, jail will do that, but as things turned out I would end up breaking both promises.

‘Ms Etheridge, kindly take your client out of my courtroom. All charges are dismissed.’

We had to wait for an escort back to the city jail so I could reclaim my property and return my orange jumpsuit, though I would have liked to keep it for a souvenir. While we waited, I ran through the incident for Gail’s benefit, beginning with the diary. I described everything I could recall reading. I omitted only the fact that my wife had very nearly unloaded her revolver before showing me the door.

A fairly good friend who also happened to be getting paid to listen, Gail appeared to accept everything I said. I had the feeling, though, that she didn’t really believe me. She was neither stupid nor naive. If a diary existed which described an affair, then no matter what I said she was going to assume there was an affair.

Why else would a young woman write twenty or thirty s in her diary about it? My wife, after all, who knew me better than anyone, believed it. Why shouldn’t my lawyer?

‘One thing,’ Gail said. ‘Do you think Leslie Blackwell will get a copy of this diary?’

I shrugged. ‘What if she does?’

Gail’s expression grew sombre. ‘That’s the question, isn’t it? The affair started last summer?’

‘There was no affair.’

‘Right.’ Gail tried hard not to roll her eyes. ‘The alleged affair allegedly started…’

‘Last summer. That’s the way I understood it anyway.’

‘According to her she takes a class with her lover.

The live-in boyfriend makes a fuss when he finds out.

He wants revenge, and maybe an insurance policy against the two of you getting back together again, so he has her file her bogus complaint of sexual harassment. Is that about how it works out?’

‘There are rules against vendetta complaints.’

‘If life were only so simple. Unfortunately, the affair, sorry, alleged affair, lends credibility to Johnna Masterson’s complaint.’

‘I don’t follow. What does Johnna Masterson have to do with it? You said yourself her complaint is groundless.’

‘Look at it from Leslie Blackwell’s point of view, David. You’re engaged in an adulterous affair with a student, teaching students that married men who have affairs with unmarried women are not committing adultery, and you’re hooting it up with the unindicted co-defendant at the Student Union.’

‘Hooting is probably not the word we want to use under the circumstances.’

Gail rewarded me with an impatient smile. ‘Johnna Masterson’s complaint is that you have created a hostile environment for her. Her complaint cites a single example. On the face of it, Blackwell should never have investigated Masterson’s complaint, but Denise Conway’s complaint made it impossible for her to ignore it. So she digs around a little, and suddenly she discovers Denise Conway’s diary. In other words, Ms.

Masterson’s complaint now has substance. You’re banging students in your office and bargaining blow jobs for grades, even if it’s all in good fun. In that light, anything you might have said about Johnna Masterson forms part of a larger pattern of behaviour.’

‘All that is assuming I said something in the first place,’ I grumbled irritably, ‘and that the diary has some legitimacy.’

Gail’s expression suggested my objection was irrelevant, but she very kindly agreed with me. ‘True or not, David, if Leslie Blackwell finds out about the diary she’ll feel obliged to push the case forward to the vice president. Which means we could be in for a hell of a fight.’

I HAD TO SUPPRESS the urge to vomit as I put my clothes on. My leather jacket was ruined. The clothes needed to be washed. Throughout the morning, I had been watching the time, thinking I could make my afternoon class. With an hour remaining, I left the police station and got into a taxi. On the ride to my truck, I called the department and cancelled my class.

Unavoidably delayed, I said. I talked to a student worker, so there was no cross-examination. I then called Molly. Her cell phone was off, so I left a message on the home answering machine. I was out of jail, I said, but I needed money and clothing. I added gratuitously that I hadn’t slept with ‘that woman.’ The cabdriver, who neither appeared to notice the peculiar stink of my clothing, nor reacted to the word jail, checked me out in the mirror as I made this final protestation.

That gave me a pretty good idea how Molly would receive it.

Walt Beery wasn’t in my truck. Nor was his Scotch.

He had, however, left the truck without taking the beer. That fact alone was sufficient for me to call Walt a good friend. I went back to Walt’s apartment on the off chance he was there. Since I didn’t have a key and there was no answer when I phoned him, I decided to go out to the farm. I called ahead, if only to avoid a shootout with Molly. When she didn’t answer, I left another message: ‘I’m going to the farm to pick up some things. I’ll be gone by three o’clock.’

I saw the farm differently when I drove out that afternoon. I had been in the habit of seeing the things we needed to do. Now I saw what I was about to lose. Barnard Place had been in Molly’s family since the 1930s. When Doc and Olga abandoned the farm for the comforts of suburbia, settling just off the thirteenth fairway adjacent to the country club, Doc was not the sole owner of the property, nor could he get an elderly sister to agree to sell. So he did the worst thing possible: he broke that beautiful mansion into apartments. When he gave up the apartment building idea, Doc left the house vacant without even bothering to close the place up properly. Pipes froze and burst. The basement flooded. Trees grew up through the eaves. The windows became target practice for kids who wanted to go out and see the haunted house.

Shutters dropped off or went missing altogether. Kids began using the downstairs parlour for sex and drug parties, and at least two campfires had been started on the parquet floors.

When Molly’s aunt died and Doc deeded his share of the property to Molly, Molly and I were living in town. The thought of moving out to her family farm excited us both. We had picked out a beautiful site for a new house about a quarter of a mile from the mansion. We decided to build Molly’s dream house in stages, letting us move into it within six-to-eight months. Everything was set when, as a whim, Molly and I decided to see how bad the mansion was on the inside. By that point, Molly and I had turned around quite a few houses, probably fifteen to twenty major renovations over the years. Some we had sold immediately, some we rented out. We knew a restoration would be far more complicated than the usual facelift and far more expensive too. The moment we walked into the house, it was clear the whole place was beyond salvation. The faded glory that was left only made the ruin more heartrending.

As a building site it had potential. The trouble was tearing it down was going to take time and cost money.

I remember laughing at Doc McBride’s enthusiasm for drop ceilings and cheap panelling. Everywhere I looked the original wood was cracked, swollen, or warped.

Piles of plaster cluttered the floor. Carpets were stained and rotten. I made a joke about fire being the only decent thing for it, except the place was too water-logged to burn.

Molly had a different idea. She told me about it on the drive back to town. She wanted to save the place.

She wanted to live here. I laughed at the notion. I said we could never get the cost of even a half-ass restoration back if we decided to sell it. Worse than that, it would take years to make the place liveable.

Molly didn’t care. This was the place where she wanted to live. She wanted the mansion to look like it had at the height of its glory, circa 1930, complete with antique luxury plumbing and electrical fixtures.

She had lost this house once when she had been too young to have a say in matters. This time she wasn’t leaving.

We bought a house trailer and set it up close to the mansion. Summers, weekends, evenings, every spare moment we had we worked on the house. It was nothing for us, all three of us, to have Sunday dinner seated on sawhorses, tasting sawdust or freshly buffed plaster with our sandwiches.

A stray dog showed up one day. Two more got dropped off the next summer. We fixed up a stall for Ahab, then built an arena for Lucy to ride in. Our only recreation was to drive to various horse races every weekend and let Lucy enter the junior division races. A couple more dogs showed up, and I built a kennel. The dogs all had names, Hawthorne, Melville, Emily D. and Emily B. (they showed up together), Emerson, Alcott, and Wharton, but most of them answered to Dog if they answered to anything. A couple of them had a tragic past and never really got comfortable with the concept of family or trust or, for that matter, human beings. The rest of them were okay, but not really cut out for indoor living.

A few people from school came out to the farm in those early days. They put on a good face, but I knew they thought we were crazy. That was pretty much the point of our party. I wanted people to see Molly’s vision in its finished form.

I took a couple of minutes when I first got to the farm to see the dogs. During the day, they always ran free as long as Molly was around. If she had to leave the farm, she usually put them in the kennel. So I was probably safe. They were in the kennel. They were happy to see me, most of them anyway. The sceptics, Alcott and Wharton, hung back and growled as they always did. The horses were in the pasture. I called to Ahab, and he ran across the valley and up the hill to see me. It broke my heart to see that kind of enthusiasm, especially when all I could do was clap his shoulder and tell him I wouldn’t be around for a while.

THE PLACE WAS EMPTY, and though it had been home less than twenty-four hours ago, I felt like a burglar. I changed clothes, tossing my ruined stuff in the trash. I packed quickly: some schoolwork, toiletries, a roll of cash from my desk drawer, an extra pair of jeans, a change of shoes, a sweater, some shirts, socks and underwear. We had three sleeping bags stored in a second story closet. I got mine out, snagged some towels and a pillow from one of the guestrooms, and headed for the truck. I was trying to decide if I should make another run when our neighbour Billy Wade appeared at the back of the house. Wade stood close to seven feet tall and carried a broodmare’s belly over his belt. His face was long and thick, and he had a habit of letting his mouth hang open as if he had just been asked the one question he couldn’t answer.