The Final Judgment (30 page)

believe that you’ll ever think I’m innocent. What I feel instead is this incredible acceptance—as if whether I killed James doesn’t matter to you, that all you care about is what happens to me now.” Brett considered her for a moment. “Is that how lawyers are?” Caroline smiled faintly. “That’s how defense lawyers are—the last redoubt of unconditional love. Other than your parents, of course.” Brett looked at her. “My poor parents,” she said finally. “My father acts as if he’s guilty, and my mother just sits here, trying to say something when there’s nothing to say, helpless when I need help most.” Her voice took on a resigned bemusement. “It makes me sad for her, in a way.” Caroline was quiet for a moment, and then shrugged. “She really can’t do anything. Except, perhaps, figure out some entertainment for prison visits. Which is harder than you may think.” Brett still watched her. “Why is it,” she said at last, “that you dislike her so much?”

“Do I?”

“Of course you do. You talk about her with this awful detachment, like she’s a slide under a microscope. It’s so much worse than anger.” It’s so much deeper than anger, Caroline thought. “Betty and I are different, that’s all. Our lives went different places.” Brett gazed steadily at Caroline. “So different that no one can be close to you?” Caroline felt it again—the strange power Brett had to wound her. “Well,” she said dryly, “we just have different gifts.” And then Caroline realized how much she had sounded like her mother, Nicole. “I’m sorry,” she said tiredly. “I think I missed the confessional part of the eighties—sometimes I suspect that it does more harm than good. But as to your mother and me, we’re the only ones who own the problem.” She smiled again. “With luck, you can develop new problems of your very own. Which, of course, is what I live for.”

Brett was quiet for a moment. “You sound more optimistic than you have.” Once again, Caroline thought of the knife she would never mention. “I feel better,” she said at last. “At least in certain ways.” Pensive, Brett brushed back her hair; something in the distracted gesture interrupted Caroline’s own distraction. “You’re left-handed, aren’t you.”?” Brett gave her a quizzical look. “Why—are you?”

“Not at all.” Pausing, Caroline wondered at herself. “It’s just something you’d think I’d notice.” For some reason, Brett seemed to find that amusing. As if in condolence, her left hand covered Caroline’s. “Don’t worry,” she said with mock solicitude. “You’ve had a lot on your mind.” For a moment, they smiled together.

For two days, Caroline waited. She worked in her room, making notes from her memory of Megan’s entries. Sometimes she would stop, imagining that the manila envelope had tipped open, that the red journal had become separated and then lost. The afternoon before the hearing, she drove to Masters Hill, stopping at the cemetery. The afternoon was clear and bright. Caroline stayed for some time, standing near her mother’s marker. What would you think of all this? she asked. The cemetery was quiet, still. Smiling faintly at herself, Caroline shook her head. Leaving, she went to her father’s house. Betty was on the porch. “Are you all right?” she asked. Caroline stood awkwardly on the lawn. “I’m fine .... All that I want to say is that I’ll do the best I can for her. And that nothing’s going to distract me.” Slowly, Betty nodded. “I believe that. We all do.” Caroline stared at the grass. Please, she thought, say that it arrived.

“The hearing starts at nine,” she said. ‘I’d suggest you be there by eight-thirty, sitting in the front row. Suit for you; jacket and tie for Larry—the media, you know.”

“Of course.” Betty paused, as if at a sudden thought. “There’s a package for you. For some reason it came here.” Caroline felt her shoulders slump with weariness and relief. “Can you get it?” Betty disappeared inside. When she returned, she held the manila envelope, eyeing the childish printing with a wary curiosity. She handed it to Caroline. “Unopened,” she said in a flat voice. “As you can see.” Their eyes met. Caroline said nothing, glanced at the package. “Odd,” she murmured. “Thank you.” Turning, she crossed the grassy lawn, feeling the weight of the journal in her hand. Betty’s remark, laden with meaning, had triggered something. It took a moment for Caroline to grasp it—the memory of a summer, so many years before, when another woman had filled a journal with the secrets of her heart. Walking slowly to her car, Caroline drove away.

The first time Caroline saw him was the day before her twenty-second birthday.

The course of her life seemed settled—Harvard Law School in the fall; practice in New Hampshire after that; a tacit understanding with Jackson Watts, with whom she shared such comfort that much between them needed not be said. If there was a certain absence of passion or surprise, Caroline took pride that she was so unlike her mother, the servant of mood and impulse. Caroline knew what her future would be and was content with that.

A part of this contentment was the expectation that, after some suitable time on her own, she might practice law with her father. He had talked of stepping down from the bench at sixty, using his name to draw clients and his experience to counsel Caroline as she spread her own name and reputation. With his network of friendships among Republicans, Channing could advance an ambition of his which was also becoming hers—that some governor a few terms down the road would appoint her to a judgeship. True, Caroline and her father had their differences over politics: Radcliffe and her own maturation had not left Caroline untouched, and her views on Vietnam and the women’s movement were at odds with his. But these fissures lacked a personal edge: to Caroline, her father was a man she deeply loved, and their arguments were a form of mental exercise. She felt fortunate to have him.

It was her father, oddly enough, who had encouraged her to summer on the Vineyard.

He had not sold the house. But the remaining Masterses had never returned: for the seven summers since her mother’s death, they had rented the house to strangers. Caroline had never spoken of Martha’s Vineyard. And then, to her surprise, her father did. “What would you do,” he asked, the Christmas before her graduation, “if you could spend next summer any way you liked? Go back to Europe?” Caroline shook her head. “I’d spend it sailing.” She thought for a moment. “Maybe I can go to the Caribbean for the summer, work a charter boat, and sail on the side.” Her father sat back in his chair, sipping a glass of wine. “Why don’t you go to Martha’s Vineyard?” he asked quite casually. “That’s where you learned to sail, after all, and you’d have a real home.” Caroline studied him. It came to her that her father wished, by some tacit understanding, to place the past and her mother behind them both forever. But the cost of such a summer—confronting yet dismissing the memory of what had happened—struck Caroline hard. “I don’t know,” Caroline said. “I mean, what about making money?” Her father put down the wineglass. “Caroline,” he said, “you’ve worked hard at Radcliffe. Now you’re about to graduate with great distinction and enter a career that will require even more of you. It would please me if you were free from work for one last summer.” It was as if his eyes, Caroline thought, were saying what he refused to put into words. “Besides,” he finished with new firmness, “Betty and Larry could use a respite from academia, and Larry needs a place to write his thesis. I’m sure that a summer there would please them too.” Of course it would, Caroline reflected—the house holds no memories for them. But to say this seemed both childish and selfish. “Let me think about it, Father.”

“Of course.” He smiled slightly. “By the way, I’ll have your catboat sent there from Winnipesaukee. If you like.” A few weeks later, Caroline decided that she would not

run away—that she would take her summer on the Vineyard and enjoy it. None of this was spoken between them. “I’m pleased,” her father said. “I’ll come down to visit you, of course. But what’s best is how good this will be for you and Betty.” It was, Caroline assumed, a reference to something that she did not think her father cared about—that in the unspoken calculus of her family, the phrase “half-sister” captured her relationship to Betty. Neither Caroline nor Betty had known Betty’s mother, Elizabeth Brett; Nicole had treated Betty like the stepdaughter she was. Separated from Caroline by age and looks and temperament, Betty seemed to see her as the interloper whose rapport with their father foreclosed any need for an older sister. Five years after Betty’s marriage to Larry Allen, Caroline and her sister were less antagonists than strangers. “I’m sure it will,” Caroline said with indifference. Curiously, this seemed to be true. Perhaps the key was Larry. Within days of their arrival on the Vineyard, he and Caroline fell into an easy, joking relationship. Betty did not seem to mind—it was as though Caroline’s liking for Larry conferred some approval on her. Which was right, in a sense; Caroline could see how devoted she was to him, how much Betty wished for them both to be happy. And there was about Betty a sort of painful honesty, a lack of pretense or vanity—in looks or manner—which Caroline knew she did not possess. The absence of her father, Caroline realized, might free them to be friends. To Caroline, the one source of tension in those first weeks was Betty’s obsessive desire to have a child. With the detachment of the cocktail party psychologist, Caroline sensed that Betty needed to lavish on some son or daughter all the care she felt she had missed herself. To say this to Betty would too cruelly expose her deepest insecurities. But Caroline saw it as the source of pressure on Larry: they could not truly afford a child; it was plain that Betty was insisting that they try; and, for whatever reason,

no Allen baby was forthcoming. To Caroline, the whole subject hovered in some realm between the painful and the comic, with Larry laboring nightly in the field of Betty, some silent part of him praying that the crops would lie fallow until his tenuous career took root. “Well,” Larry murmured to Caroline one evening, drying the last dish, “back to the salt mines.” He said this good-naturedly enough; with his boyish looks, scoop nose, and nimbus of brown hair, there was an air of blithe optimism about him. So that Caroline grinned before answering, “I just hope you’re not overdrawn at the bank.” Larry rolled his eyes in mock exhaustion. “This kid—should she ever be born—will be the only baby in history who allows her parents to sleep more.” Caroline raised an eyebrow. “‘She’?”

“Oh, yeah—that’s part of the deal. ‘No boy sperm need apply.”

“Larry smiled again. “Don’t stay out late, Caro. For lack of a suitable offspring, Betty and I consider ourselves in loco parentis.”

“Stay out late?” Caroline asked innocently. “With whom?” Larry’s smile was ambiguous. “I don’t know yet,” he answered.

The ironic memory that came to Caroline, recalling that particular day, was that it seemed so much like any other. She was sailing back from Tarpaulin Cove, at peace. Her skills were returning quickly, and the afternoon southeaster was steady and benign. She could not sail this route without remembering her mother. But a little discreet checking had told her that Paul Nerheim no longer owned Windy Gates; it struck her that this summer on the Vineyard, in slow, unnoticed increments, had swollen in contentment. She missed Jackson and her college friends, of course. But she accepted that her college world was gone, and two of her friends had promised to visit in late August. As for Jackson, she was used to being apart from him, often for

weeks or even months. She was, she now knew, something of a loner: unlike many of her friends, she had never lost herself in a man. Nor did she ever plan to.

She first saw him at the end of the Masterses’ dock—a slim figure, dark-haired from a distance, his hands in his pockets. Though nothing about him looked familiar, he seemed to be waiting for her. As she docked, gliding perfectly, she tossed him the line. “Mind doing that?” she asked. He caught the line and tied it expertly to the dock. Caroline glanced at him; his head was bowed, and Caroline saw only curly hair as jet black as her own. “Thanks,” she said. He looked up at her then. With something like shock, she saw a young man in his mid twenties with a trace of the beauty that had belonged to Nicole Dessaliers—long lashes, ridged nose, a face of angles so clean that it was like cut glass. His eyes were a startling blue gray. She turned, unfurling the sails. When she had finished, he was still there. “Nice boat,” he said. She stepped on the dock, turning to inspect the catboat. “Do you sail?” she asked. “A little.” He paused. “Where did you go?” Caroline still did not face him. “To Tarpaulin Cove.”

“Have you sailed there before?”

“A few times, seven or eight years ago.” She hesitated. “I had a bad sail there once, so it seemed like something I should do again.” Next to her, he nodded. “They say these waters are tricky.” Pausing, he seemed to study the ocean. “There was a famous sailor from the Vineyard, Joshua Slocum, who sailed around the world at the end of the last century. Then he came back home, went for a sail on a clear day, and vanished. No one ever saw him again.” Caroline turned to him now, her expression sardonic. “I hadn’t heard that one, actually. But it’s really inspirational.”

He grinned; the smile was crooked and, for Caroline, leavened his prettiness with something boyish and engaging. But it did not change the look in his eyes, observant and a little wary. He extended his hand. iI’ Scott Johnson. I live at the Rubin place next door, caretaking.” His hand was firm, cool. “Caroline Masters,” she said. He nodded again. I’ve seen you.” He angled his head toward the house. “Do you come here every summer?” Caroline looked at him more closely; there was about him some combination of reserve and presumption that did not quite seem to mesh. “Not for years,” she said finally. Scott smiled a little. “The Rubins aren’t here much, either. But as Fitzgerald once said, the rich are different.” He turned to look at the Masterses’ white gabled house, perched on the bluff above the beach, soft with the sun of late afternoon. “It’s hard to imagine not wanting to be there. At least whenever you could.” Caroline felt a moment’s irritation; how, she wondered, had she gotten involved in this conversation? “My mother died here,” she said tersely. “Several years ago, in an accident. My family found other places to go.” He shoved his hands back in his pockets. “Sorry,” he said. “Ask too many questions, and sooner or later you’ll ask a dumb one. It’s just that I saw your place was occupied, then saw you and got curious. I guess I’ve had too little to think about.” It was a fair enough apology and had the effect, Caroline realized, of making it seem rude to just walk off. “How long have you been here?” she asked. “Since January. Winters are quiet, I found out.”