Sandrine's Case (9780802193520) (29 page)

I nodded.

“Why would she do that?”

“To get back at me for what I did with April.”

“A woman scorned,” Morty said.

I shook my head. “A woman betrayed.”

“It's still hell hath no fury, Sam,” Morty said. He thought over what I'd just told him for a moment, then said, “Okay, to put it all together, you're saying that your wife somehow knew about you and April, and she didn't want to die without getting back at you, and so she came up with a scheme, a way of killing herself, which she wanted to do anyway because of what was going to happen to her, and she came up with a way of doing it that would take you down with her.” He stopped, studied me a moment, then said, “That's what you're saying, right, Sam?”

“Yes,” I answered. “And I know it's B-movie stuff, Morty, but, yes, that's what I'm saying.”

I rose sharply and walked back to the window. Alexandria was still waiting for me beside the car. I could only imagine what today's testimony had done to her, how trapped between her living father and her dead mother she must feel, the horror of choosing one over the other, and of never knowing, or ever being able to know, if your choice was just.

“There's no evidence for any of it, of course,” I said quietly. “And it could all be just a product of my own paranoia.” I shrugged. “Not that it matters.”

I watched as one of Alexandria's hands crawled slowly into the other.

“It's Alexandria I'm worried about now,” I said.

Morty was now beside me, his hand on my shoulder. “Even if you were willing to use it, I doubt it would work,” he said quietly. “Very iffy, a defense like that, making your wife the real criminal. It's hard to turn the tables on a dead woman. Of course, she would have known that, wouldn't she?”

“Yes.”

Morty released a heavy sign. “You know a woman named Jane Forbes?”

Instantly I saw her again, standing in her red coat, watching me from the corner of the courtroom. “She teaches in the Political Science Department,” I said. “I saw her once during the trial.”

“Here, in court?”

“Yes.”

“That all you know?”

“Yes? Why?”

“Singleton has added her to the witness list,” Morty said. “Do you have any idea what she might have to say?”

“No.”

Morty winked. “Maybe one of your wife's little bombs?”

I stared at him grimly. “I have no idea, Morty.”

Morty released a grim chuckle. “Christ, if this was a plot she hatched, I got to say your wife was one smart cookie.”

“She was brilliant,” I said quietly, then saw her again sitting on the grounds of the quadrangle, surrounded by a few students, doing the best she could with them against considerable odds. “And she was kind,” I added.

There seemed nothing more to say about Sandrine, and so I said nothing more.

“Well,” Morty said after a moment. “Let's hope there are no more tricks in her bag.”

“Yes,” I said. “Let's hope.”

But I had no hope and knew it. That I might ever recover from her death, such was the hope I had now abandoned. I had lost my job, my freedom to move about this little town, the respect of its townspeople, and very soon, as I could see now in the way Alexandria lifted her head and stared off into the middle distance, I would lose my daughter too. If all of this had indeed been Sandrine's plan, then she had thoroughly won her dark game.

And thus, with such grim resignation, did I confront the last days of my trial.

P
ART
V

The state's case against Professor Samuel Madison is set to conclude this week at the Coburn County Courthouse. According to prosecuting attorney Harold Singleton, only three witnesses remain to be called, after which the defense's case will be presented by Mordecai Salberg, attorney for Mr. Madison, the Coburn College professor accused of killing his wife, Sandrine, on November 14, 2010. It is not yet known if Mr. Madison will testify in his own defense.

Coburn Sentinel
January 22, 2011

Evidence

“I had a terrible thought in court today, Dad,” Alexandria said after we'd had dinner and walked into the living room for a final glass of wine. “It was while the travel agent was on the stand.” She seemed reluctant to tell me what this thought had been and yet compelled to do so. “I was just sitting there, and it came to me. I guess it's the new normal for me.”

Her tone was serious and confessional and so I knew she was moving toward some dark revelation.

“It just struck me that, after this, I can never fall in love with anyone,” she said.

I took a sip from my glass. “I'm sorry to hear that,” I said without giving the slightest hint to how devastating I found it, another consequence I hadn't counted on. “And I hope it will pass.”

I could find nothing to add, and so a long silence followed, the two of us sipping our drinks, avoiding each other's eyes. It was as if Sandrine had, at last, silenced me.

“A woman named Jane Forbes has been added to Singleton's witness list,” I said finally.

“Who is she?”

“She's on the faculty. The Political Science Department.”

“Did you have an affair with her?” Alexandria asked without the slightest sense of it being anything other than a reasonable question.

“No,” I said.

Alexandria nodded, and it occurred to me that she could absorb anything from now on. She'd faced the shocking news of her mother's diagnosis, then her death, the prospect that I had murdered her, then my affair with April. Any later revelations would be small potatoes.

“Why is she a witness?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” I said. “I mean, Sandrine would sometimes meet her when she jogged around the reservoir. I've seen them running together but that's the extent of it.”

“So you don't know this woman?”

“Not really.” I shrugged. “I can't imagine why Sandrine would have taken her into her confidence, but I guess she did.”

“She was dying, Dad,” Alexandria said. “And people want someone with them when they're dying.” She thought something through for a moment, then said, “Maybe that's why married people try so hard to make things work. It's not that they love each other every day, right? It's that they love each other enough to stay through the days they don't.” She paused. “And so they make it to the end together. Like Mom used to say, that's the ‘bottom line.
'
” She smiled.

She waited for me to respond to this, but it seemed so stark a truth that nothing could be added to it, no literary reference needed, nor pedantic marginalia required.

“Anyway, Mom must have gotten to know this woman pretty intimately,” Alexandria said. “Otherwise, she wouldn't have any evidence.”

“I suppose that's true,” I said drily, then shrugged again. “Evidently this just came up, this business of Jane Forbes. Morty heard about it only at the end of court today.”

Before this latest development, there'd been only two more witnesses scheduled to testify at my trial, April Blankenship and Malcolm Esterman. I knew why they were on the list, of course, but Jane Forbes was a mystery.

“What do you know about her?” Alexandria asked.

“Nothing, really,” I answered. “She may have been coming to the trial. I saw her once, early on.”

I'd sometimes seen Sandrine with Jane, of course, the two of them trotting around the reservoir, though later they'd more often been sitting on one of the concrete benches beside it, Sandrine no longer in her running clothes.

“Mom never mentioned her?” Alexandria asked.

“No,” I answered. “All I know is that I sometimes saw them talking at the reservoir.”

Now I had no choice but to imagine that these conversations had been fiercely revealing, and that, perhaps, during one of them, Sandrine had planted some explosion she'd carefully timed to detonate toward the end of my trial.

In anticipation of just that explosion, I put down my glass and leaned forward, then stopped myself from saying what I'd wanted to say at that moment.

And what was I going to say?

Everything I'd earlier told Morty, of course, all the elements of that plot.

I'd wanted to pour all of that out, but I'd stopped myself because I knew exactly how it would sound to Alexandria. I could even imagine her staring at me distantly. What are you saying, Dad? That Mom is framing you? That she is the evil genius behind all this? That throughout this whole dismal affair it has always been Mom who was the sociopath?

I knew that there would be no defense against her questions, and with that recognition I was left with the simple fact that we are in trouble, deep, deep trouble, when we cannot reveal our deepest fears to the one we most want to hear them.

“What is it, Dad?” Alexandria asked now. “You look like something hit you.”

“No, nothing,” I said, then eased back into my chair.

There was some idle chatter after that, talk that seemed even emptier and more meaningless because it had to take the place of those vital things I'd wanted to tell Alexandria but never could. On that thought I saw the unforgiving and essentially adamantine nature of my position, that in order to save myself I would have to destroy Sandrine in the eyes of our daughter, turn her into the sociopath she'd accused me of being, a woman sufficiently reckless to endanger not just me but everyone connected to me, poor April and her deserving husband, Coburn College's reputation, and, of course, all this done in order to destroy me by taking away everything that held the slightest value: my profession, my daughter, my freedom, perhaps even my life.

“What were you thinking about?” Alexandria asked.

I scrambled for an answer. “Albi,” I said. “It's very lovely. Your mother and I went there on our one great trip. It's where she proposed.”

“Mom proposed to you?”

I nodded. “And it was a very romantic moment. We'd just come from the cathedral. Night was falling. There was a beautiful sunset, with impossible reds and purples and hints of gold. We were watching the sun go down, and she suddenly turned to me and she said, in that soft, intense voice of hers, she said, ‘It's you.'”

How, from that moment, I wondered bleakly, had I reached this one?

To my astonishment I abruptly felt a great rush of emotion, one I could control then tamp down only by hurriedly moving forward through the rest of the story. “She said, ‘So let's make it official,' which meant ‘let's get married.' When we got back to the States we did.” I smiled. “And as they say, the rest is history.”

And a very unsavory history, indeed, I thought, a tale of choices that turned out to have been quite bad: Coburn, April, then that last one, that Sandrine should die.

Alexandria watched me silently for a moment, and during that silence I could almost feel the tumblers of her mind turning and turning, working to fit all the elements of life in their proper spaces. It was an effort to understand it, one more strenuous than I had ever made, so that suddenly it struck me that in some fundamental way Alexandria was, well, deeper than I was, more genuinely thoughtful when it came to the things that really matter.

I smiled. “You're going to be okay,” I assured her. “You have bad thoughts now, but you're going to be okay, Alexandria.”

I couldn't tell if she believed this, or even if my assurances carried weight. I had lived so unwisely, after all, been so cut off from any genuine consideration of life, that it would be perfectly reasonable for her to consider mine the last voice she should heed.

She offered her usual nod of assent, a “Sure, Dad” response that confirmed my fear of paternal disenfranchisement. Then she rose and walked into the kitchen, presumably to pour herself another round, though when she didn't return I got to my feet and joined her there.

She was sitting at the small breakfast table that looked out on the back lawn. Night had long ago fallen but I saw that her gaze was on the gazebo, Sandrine's redoubt, the place she'd gone to think and into which she'd invited the few people she'd wished to speak with during her last days, one of whom had been Alexandria.

I half expected her to wave me away when I approached, but she said nothing until I'd joined her at the table. Then she turned to me and smiled softly. “When I was a little girl Mom would read me these stories. You know, the usual fairy tales. And there was always a knight in shining armor type, some great-looking man on a white horse. And I would point to this man's picture and ask Mom, “Who is that?” and always, always, Dad, she would say that it was you.”

I saw her again at Albi, radiant in that glowing air, the way her eyes had caressed me. No man had ever been more loved by a more worthy woman.

“It's you,” I said softly to myself, remembering what Sandrine had said to me there.

But what had been my sword and armor then, I wondered. What had she seen in Albi, or before, that had made Sandrine choose me on that golden afternoon, choose me over so many others she might have chosen, others so much more handsome, so much more accomplished, so much richer and with such greater prospects.

“Why me, I wonder,” I said. “What drew her to me? I was smart but so were lots of guys. I was just finishing up a degree, more or less broke, working at this school for retarded kids.”

“You worked with retarded kids?” Alexandria asked. “You never mentioned that.”

“It was only for a few months,” I said. “Your mother would often meet me there, and a couple of times we took some of the kids to a little park, and she would watch while I worked with them.”

Alexandria glanced toward the gazebo, so empty without Sandrine. “Maybe that was what she saw,” she said. “That you were a good teacher.” She turned to face me. “You should have talked to her, Dad. She shouldn't have needed that woman at the reservoir.”

“I know,” I told her, then thought again of the next witness, a woman I hardly knew. “But she did.”