The Prettiest Feathers (5 page)

S
arah lied.

This morning I sat at my computer and accessed city records. Helen Zane, eighty-three, owns and resides upstairs in the building where I dropped Sarah off. She rents the lower floor to a local school for storage of old records. All the taxes and fees due the city from Mrs. Zane, are paid.

Curious. Sarah doesn’t want me to know where she lives. No doubt she is afraid. But she’s not afraid of John Wolf. She fears something inside herself that has been awakened by his arrival in her life—some wanted, yet unwanted, excitement that disturbs the familiarity and comfort of her tedium. The details really don’t matter. She can share those with her shrink in the time she has left.

Her routine is to drive to Emily and Others, then home. On Thursday, I followed her to Dr. Street’s office. Fifty minutes. Then she stopped at a grocery for a few items. Then home. Friday she was back on schedule.

This voyeuristic toying with the life of another isn’t essential. But it
is
enjoyable. Sarah requires every ounce of skill
I possess. I wouldn’t have been ready for her earlier in my career. She’s so cautious, so repressed, she seems only half alive. I want to see her fully alive before I make her fully dead.

Via the computer, I learned that if she owned or rented property, it wasn’t in the name of Sarah Sinclair. I decided that she wouldn’t have inconvenienced herself by having me drop her too far from where she lives. So I checked a map, examined the area within five blocks of the good Mrs. Zane, and returned to city listings.

Four blocks to the west I discovered a telephone listing for a gentleman named Robert Sinclair.

I called. Four rings, then the tape began: “Hi, I can’t come to the phone right now …” I hung up. It was her voice.

Sarah is no longer married. She just didn’t bother to change her name after the divorce. The building is owned by Sarah Farnum. All taxes and fees due the city have been paid.

Court records revealed that a Sarah Farnum and a Robert Sinclair were married and divorced. She inherited the house from her parents. From the taxes she pays, and the car she drives, it’s clear that the bookstore isn’t her only source of income. Mom and Dad have been good to daughter Sarah.

I don’t know why I checked for birth records, but I did. On October 11, 1987, Robert and Sarah Sinclair became the proud parents of a baby girl. Is the daughter why Sarah doesn’t want to bring a man home?

Bank files are more difficult to access, but far from impossible. Sarah receives a quarterly check from a moderate-size trust account. She isn’t wealthy, but she isn’t poor.

Even though I was able to obtain his date of birth from the marriage license, Robert Sinclair proved to be more elusive than Sarah. It’s as if he doesn’t want anyone to know who, or where, he is. But I need to know everything about this man. He is connected to Sarah, therefore he is relevant.

Another reason why I must know the who, what, why,
when, and where of Robert Sinclair has to do with survival. I need to protect myself. City records show seven different firearm registrations in his name. Perhaps he was the cop in Sarah’s life.

I intend to learn every detail of her wretched little life, even the peripheral ones like discarded husbands. Only by knowing her will I be able to refine my technique enough to elevate it from mere workmanship to craftsmanship. I want this one to be a masterpiece. My defining work.

Once, years ago, I walked through the business district of a city with a young woman who had picked me up in a bar. I had been sipping an early evening beer when she approached me and said, “You seem preoccupied.”

She was a nursing student whose home was a farm in Vermont. She was flawed, as so many of the early ones were—speaking with self-assurance about things she didn’t understand.

The bar was a college hangout, a place for pairing off. “Want to talk about what’s bothering you?” she asked.

“Nothing bothers me,” I said.

“Then what are you thinking about?”

“Taking a walk,” I said.

“Where?”

“Downtown.”

“Okay,” she said, and swallowed down half her drink.

As we walked, we exchanged the usual pleasantries—what she did, what I was doing. It was all very mechanical.

“You seem so cold,” she said.

I shrugged.

“Don’t you like people? Don’t you like meeting new people?”

“I can take it or leave it.” I stopped walking. “Come here,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because we all love the sea.”

“What?”

“Because I want to kiss you.”

“Why?”

“Would you rather I stand under your balcony and recite poetry?” I asked.

“I don’t have a balcony.”

“And I don’t have any poetry. But maybe I could climb a tree and sit outside your fourth-floor window and read from the phone book.”

“How do you know I live on the fourth floor?”

“I’m psychic,” I said.

She believed me, but, in truth, I’d been following her to her classes for several days. I had memorized her schedule, sifted through her mail in the foyer of her dorm, and opened enough of her letters to learn that she was from Vermont. She never knew that I had seen her in the bar many times before, ordering the same drink, using the same line with other young men who were sitting alone.

She moved closer, pushing herself against me. “Why do you want to kiss me?”

“I like to kiss attractive women,” I said.

“You’re supposed to say, ‘Because you’re you.’ That’s the right answer.”

“You failed to include me in the riddle.”

I did hold her. I did do that. But no act of mine is without meaning. There is always a next event to illuminate the first, and to lend direction to the one that follows.

“Let’s walk,” she said, and took my hand, tugging me along with her.

We talked about our classes (hers in nursing, mine in premed), about home, about what it was like for us as kids.

“I want to know who you are,” she said. “What you care about, what you want out of life.”

“Nothing,” I said. “It’s getting cold. There’s some wind.”

“Have you ever been in love?” she asked.

“Have you seen the swallows?” I asked, ignoring her.

“Swallows?”

“Up among the buildings along Washington Street. You can still hear them and see them, even at dusk.”

“I’d like that,” she said.

As we turned the corner, entering a street of shadows, she stopped walking. “Do you hear them? The swallows,” she asked.

I listened to the swarm of small birds, their chatter of “Quick, quick, quick,” their occasional higher-pitched notes of anxiety.

“There must be thousands of them,” she said. “I come down here all the time, but I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

“I thought you were a country girl.”

“I am, but this is the city. I’ve never seen so many birds in the city before.”

I started to move away.

“Can’t we stay a few minutes? I want to watch them.”

Again, I started to move on, but she put her hand on my arm.

“Please wait,” she said. “Watch them with me.”

I could feel her trembling. I looked up again at the swallows darting in arcs high above our heads.

“It’s really cold,” I said. “We should be getting back.”

Three days later the newspaper reported her death. The medical examiner ruled it a suicide: she had jumped from the roof of her dormitory to the pavement below, he said. She left no note, but the final entry in her diary described her desire to fly among the city’s buildings like the swallows. Metaphor is an integral part of the hypnotic, erotic dance just before violent death. That was true for her, and it will be true for Sarah. My nursing student flew from the roof. Sarah will fly from her body.

Sarah reminds me of my nursing student. She looks at me with the same obvious interest. And there are other similarities: Sarah has a Robert (a well-armed ex-husband who, for all I know, still fancies himself in love with her), while my nursing student had a stable of boyfriends, one of whom
refused to accept the medical examiner’s ruling. He told the police that he had seen me enter his girlfriend’s dorm on the day she died. He identified me from photos in the college yearbook.

Men in suits—driving the requisite dark, four-door sedan—paid me a social call. I invited them in, and offered them mugs of coffee (instant, which I kept on hand for unwanted guests).

“Yes,” I told them. “I was in the building that day. But I wasn’t there to see her. I had stopped by to see a friend, Harold Ford, on the second floor. You’ll have to ask him what time. Early afternoon, I think, but I’m not certain. I hadn’t seen her in three or four days, nor did I want to see her. She was scary. She talked real crazy.”

Harold remembered my stopping by. He wasn’t sure what time, but he knew that it was the same day the girl dove off the roof. We talked, joked around, and I left. The cops flatly rejected the idea that I—or anyone else, for that matter—was capable of exhibiting such a relaxed, jovial manner just moments before, or after, hurling a young woman off the roof.

But the boyfriend considered me a malevolent psychopath. He followed me around for days. I tried a gentle, sympathetic confrontation, but he wasn’t having any of it. Finally he made his move.

He was carrying a Louisville Slugger when he cornered me in the men’s room at the bar.

“You killed her,” he said.

“She killed herself.”

He took a swing. I stepped back, allowed it to pass, then grabbed the fat barrel of the bat and snapped it out of his hands. His momentum left him teetering in my direction, so I shoved him the rest of the way down. It was a tight fit between the wall and commode, but he made it. I lifted the toilet seat.

“Hands on the porcelain,” I said.

He was slow—confused—but complied.

“It’s over,” I said. “The bowl is there to puke in.”

Then I brought down the bat and broke both his hands.

He made good use of the bowl, and never followed me again.

I knew from experience that I would have to be careful about Robert Sinclair. He had a lot more than just baseball bats in his arsenal.

M
y phone rang once tonight, close to eleven o’clock. Hoping it was John, I said “Hello” in the sultry voice I’d been practicing, but it was only Robert.

“Where the hell you been?” he asked, then apologized for swearing.

“Right here.”

“Good old Sarah, the homebody.”

“Don’t start, Robert, okay? I’m not in the mood.”

“I seem to remember hearing that before.”

“What?”

“‘I’m not in the mood.’ That used to be your favorite expression, as I recall.”

I sighed. “What do you want, Robert?”

“Why do you always have to talk to me like that? Why can’t you be nice?”

“I don’t know. Why can’t you call me when you’re sober?”

Robert laughed. “Before any man takes you on, he needs a twelve-pack and a fifth.”

“So what do you want?” Even when he’s drunk, Robert never calls without a reason.

“Are you busy?”

“No. But I don’t feel like listening to you ramble.”

“Aw, Sarah,” he said.

I didn’t respond.

“Sarah,” he said again, his voice soft.

I thought, here we go again. First he gets drunk, then he gets nostalgic and maudlin.

“I’m up to my ass in cases,” he said.

I still didn’t reply.

“Remember that girl we found dead over at Pine Haven?”

I knew who he meant, but I felt like giving him a hard time. “Pine Haven is a cemetery.
Everyone
there is dead.”

“The one who was murdered, then propped up against a tombstone, naked.”

“I remember.”

“Well, I got that one, plus five missing persons.”

“What are you doing working missing persons?”

“They sent the reports over to Homicide when Shorty retired. All the precinct had left was Corbin, and he’s on disability for at least six more months,” Robert complained, sounding more sober by the minute. But I knew that he had to be soused. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be talking to me about his work.

“I was sittin’ here tonight, going over those reports, looking for someplace to start,” he went on, “when it hit me. Those might not be missings after all. Since when do five stable, employed, respectable women come up missing in less than a year? I think they’re dead.”

That’s how Robert has always been: give him a cold, and he’ll call it pneumonia. Now he has some missings, and he’s calling them murders.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“The office.”

“Do you want me to come and get you?” I didn’t want
him driving home drunk. Internal Affairs had already given him three “final” warnings.

“Don’t worry. I’ve switched to coffee. I’m on my second cup.”

“Good,” I said. “So why did you call?”

“I wanted to ask you about that girl—the one in the cemetery. Didn’t you say she was a customer of yours?”

“She came in only once that I remember. What was her name—Harris?”

“Right. Maxine Harris. What kind of books did she buy?”

“Oh God, Robert, how am I supposed to remember that? It was months ago.”