Eighteen

“Why?”

She looked away. “I shouldn’t have said that. It’s my fault, not Lillian’s. I don’t think I ever made him very happy.”

“Kaylie.”

She looked back at him.

“Don’t do that to yourself. Please.”

She said nothing for a moment, then sighed. “You’re right, of course.”

“Tell me about the phone call.”

“Lillian called to say she was pregnant.”

“That upset him?”

“I know it sounds foolish, but you have to understand Joseph. He was so afraid of growing old. That’s why he had those affairs with his students.”

He looked at her in surprise.

“Yes, I knew about them. It’s a small town, Jim. I got ‘Dear Abby’ clippings in the mail whenever she ran a column on cheating husbands. Or some anonymous ‘friend’ would call me and tell me that she had seen Joseph going into a motel outside of town.”

“Good Lord.”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“It doesn’t. I don’t think he saw himself as being much older than his students. Working at the college-well, all I’m saying is, the news that he was going to be a grandfather really shook him up.”

“Did he say anything to you about it?”

“No, not much. But he didn’t change his clothes or go on with his usual routine. He started drinking wine, so I hurried and made di

“Kaylie, don’t. None of this is your fault.”

She was silent for a time, then said, “I’m sorry. You must have other questions.”

“Not too many more. Had he been depressed or anxious lately, other than tonight?”

She reached toward the vase and absently touched a petal on a yellow rose. “I guess it doesn’t do any harm to talk about this now.”

He waited.

She plucked the petal and held it to her nose, then let it fall to the table. “He didn’t talk to me much, Jim. Not about anything. But recently he had started taking Valium. I don’t even know the doctor who gave him the prescription.”

“Do you know when he last took any?”

She shook her head. “The bottle is in the bathroom. Do you want me to get it for you?”

“No, that’s okay, I’ll take a look at it in a minute. Did you see him again after you came in from the garden?”

“No-I mean, not alive.” She reached up and took another petal from the rose. “This is the part I feel the worst about,” she said softly. She looked over at him, studying him.

What is she looking for?

She dropped the petal, reached for another one. “I didn’t know he was out there. I was out in the garden, then cutting flowers and arranging them in this vase. I thought he had gone out, or that he might have gone to bed early. Then I heard the explosion over at the refinery, and I stood out on the porch and watched the flames for a little while. I turned on the radio and listened to the news about it, listened while I washed dishes, cleaned the counters and mopped the floor. Then I went into the bedroom, where it was cooler. I can’t say I was especially surprised that Joseph wasn’t there. I go to bed alone quite often. Sometimes he comes in late.”

Jim found himself staring at the door to the garage.

“I didn’t go out there until much later,” she rushed on. “I had some laundry to do. That’s when I found him. I came back inside and called you-I mean, called the sheriff’s office.”

Emma had logged the call in at about nine, when things were still hopping from the fire. “So the last time you saw him was about when?”

“I guess it would have been about six-thirty.”

“And do you know what time it was you came in from the garden?”

“A little before sundown; before eight, I suppose.”

He looked at his watch. It was just after one o’clock in the morning; the refinery had been burning since eight-thirty. The man could have been out there in the garage for a long time. In this heat, even the coroner might find it difficult to set a time of death very accurately. He did as much of the paperwork as he could, then asked if she would mind if he looked around.

She didn’t object, but asked him if it would be all right if she waited back in the bedroom. “It’s cooler in there,” she explained.

Remembering the air conditioner, he understood.

He looked over the living room and the professor’s study. If Joseph Darren left a suicide note, it was not on any of the clean and tidy surfaces of either room. There was, in fact, nothing very personal in them. Next he looked through the bathroom. Towels and washclothes neatly folded on the rack; chrome on the fixtures shining, toothbrushes in a holder, toothpaste tube rolled from the bottom. No thumbprint on the bottom edge of medicine cabinet, like you’d see in his own house.

All the contents were in well-ordered rows. The medications were lined up, labels facing out. Non-prescription on one side, prescription on another. The Valium bottle was there, half-empty even though it was recently refilled. Maybe the professor had considered pills before he decided to stick with family traditions.

The other prescriptions were mostly leftover antibiotics; none past their expiration dates. There was only one made out to Kaylie. Premarin.

Premarin. Where had he heard of that before? He stretched and yawned. Premarin. Oh, sure-his mom had taken it. Estrogen, for menopause.

Menopause? Kaylie? Maybe she needed it for some other reason. She was only forty, for godsakes. Some women went through it that early, he knew. But Kaylie?

Well, if she was going through it, she was. It didn’t really bother him. No children, but at forty, maybe she didn’t want to start a family. Hell, she was going to be a grandmother. Step-grandmother.

He felt a familiar sensation. Tugging at a mental thread.

Something had bothered him, earlier. In the garage. The light being on? No, he could understand that. She wouldn’t turn it off, not with him in there. She walked in, saw him hanging there, probably was so shaken she ran back out and didn’t venture back in.

But she had ventured back in. He knew then what it was that had bothered him. The dryer. Lord Almighty.

He leaned against the sink, suddenly feeling a little sick to his stomach. What kind of woman washed a load of laundry in the same room where her husband was hanging from the rafters?

Slow down. Slow down, he told himself. It was weird, no doubt about it. But not necessarily meaningful. Maybe she cleans when she gets upset. The house was so immaculate, it was almost like being in a museum.

He would just ask her about it. He walked to the bedroom door and knocked.

“Come in,” she called.

He opened the door. This room, unlike the others, was slightly in disorder. The bed was rumpled, although made. An old-fashioned walnut dressing table held a silver mirror and brush and comb, a few lipsticks and other make-up items, a couple of small bottles of perfume and a small cluster of earrings, as if she had been sorting through them, choosing which pair she would wear. Photographs of a couple he recognized as her parents, long dead now, took up most of the rest of the space on it.

Two walnut nightstands, apparently part of the same set as the dressing table, stood at either side of a white, wrought-iron bedstead. The one nearest him was bare of anything but an alarm clock. The one on the other side, nearest Kaylie, held a skewed pile of women’s magazines. On top of the magazines was a familiar-looking volume. Their high school yearbook.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her hands folded in her lap, looking out the window. She hadn’t turned toward him, and now, looking at her profile, he saw not Kaylie Darren but Kaylie Lindstrom, the girl he had known in high school. She wore no make-up, no earrings, no perfume. This room was more her room than any other, and the fact that she had shared the bed she sat on with a man as cold and empty as that other nightstand seemed grossly unfair to Jim Lawrence.