The White Road

“Elliot’s missing?”

“I didn’t say that. I’ve left messages. So far, he hasn’t replied.”

She digested the information. It seemed to disagree with her.

“And you thought that I might know where he is?”

“You met him for di

“What kind of friends?”

“The kind that have di

“I don’t know, and it’s Mrs. Foster.”

I started to apologize but she waved it away. “It’s not important,” she said. “I suppose you want to know about Elliot and me?”

I didn’t reply. I wasn’t going to pry into her affairs any more than was necessary, but if she felt the need to talk then I’d listen in the hope that I might learn something from her.

“Hell, you saw us fighting, you can probably guess the rest. Elliot was a friend of my husband. My late husband.” She was smoothing her skirt with her hand, the only indication she gave that she might be nervous.

“I’m sorry.”

She nodded. “We all are.”

“Can I ask what happened?”

She looked up from her skirt and stared directly at me. “He killed himself.” She coughed once, then seemed to have trouble continuing. The coughing grew in intensity. I stood and followed the living room through to where a bright modern kitchen had been added to the rear of the house. I found a glass, filled it with water from the tap and brought it back to her. She sipped at it, then placed it on the low table before her.

“Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know why that happened. I guess I still find it hard to talk about. My husband, James, killed himself one month ago. He asphyxiated himself in his car by attaching a pipe to the exhaust and feeding it through the window. It’s not uncommon, I’m told.”

She could have been talking about a minor ailment, like a cold or a rash. Her voice was studiedly matter-of-fact. She took another sip from the glass of water.

“Elliot was my husband’s lawyer, as well as his friend.”

I waited.

“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” she said. “But if Elliot’s gone…”

The way that she said the word “gone” made my stomach lurch, but still I didn’t interrupt.

“Elliot was my lover,” she said at last.

“Was?”

“It ended shortly before my husband’s death.”

“When did it begin?”

“Why do these things ever begin?” she answered, mishearing the question. She wanted to tell and she would tell it in her own way and at her own pace. “Boredom, discontent, a husband too tied up with his work to notice that his wife was going crazy. Take your pick.”

“Did your husband know?”

She paused before she answered, as if she were thinking about it for only the first time. “If he did, then he didn’t say anything. At least, not to me.”

“To Elliot?”

“He made comments. They were open to more than one interpretation.”

“How did Elliot choose to interpret them?”

“That James knew. It was Elliot who decided to end things between us. I didn’t care enough about him to disagree.”

“So why were you arguing with him at di

She resumed the rhythmic stroking of her skirt, picking at pieces of lint too small to be of real concern.

“Something is happening. Elliot knows, but he pretends that he doesn’t. They’re all pretending.”

The stillness in the house suddenly seemed terribly oppressive. There should have been children in this house, I thought. It was too big for two people, and far too large for one. It was the kind of house bought by wealthy people in the hope of populating it with a family, but I could see no trace of any family here. Instead there was only this woman in her widow’s black picking methodically at the tiny flaws in her skirt, as if by doing so she could make the greater wrongs right again.

“What do you mean by ‘them all’?”

“Elliot. Landron Mobley. Grady Truett. Phil Poveda. My husband. And Earl Larousse. Earl Jr., that is.”

“Larousse?” I couldn’t keep the surprise from my voice.

Once again, there was the trace of a smile on Adele Foster’s face. “They all grew up together, all six of them. Now something has started to happen. My husband’s death was the begi

“What happened to Grady Truett?”

“Somebody broke into his home about a week after James died. He was tied to a chair in his den, then his throat was cut.”

“And you think the two deaths are co

“Here’s what I think: Maria

“Were any of them close to Maria

“No, not if you mean intimate with her, but like I said they grew up with her brother and would have known her socially. Well, maybe not Landron Mobley but certainly the others.”

“And what do you believe is happening, Mrs. Foster?”

She took a deep breath, her nostrils flaring, her head rising, then released it slowly. In the gesture there was a trace of a spirit that had been subdued by the black clothes and it was possible to see what had attracted Elliot to her.

“My husband killed himself because he was afraid, Mr. Parker. Something he had done had come back to haunt him. He told Elliot, but Elliot wouldn’t believe him. He wouldn’t tell me what it was. Instead, he pretended that everything was normal, right up until the day he went into the garage with a length of yellow hose and killed himself. Elliot is also trying to pretend that things are normal, but I think he knows better.”

“What do you think your husband was afraid of?”

“Not what. I think he was afraid of someone.”

“Do you have any idea who that person might have been?”

Adele Foster rose and, with a movement of her hand, indicated that I should follow her. We ascended the staircase, past what, in the house’s former days, would have been used as a receiving room for visitors but was now a large and very luxurious bedroom. We paused in front of a closed door, in its keyhole a key, which she now turned to unlock the door. Then, keeping her back to the room, she pushed the door open and revealed its contents.

The room had once been a small bedroom or dressing room but James Foster had transformed it into an office. There was a computer desk and chair, a drafting board, and a set of shelves against one wall lined with books and files. A window looked out onto the front yard, the top of the flowering dogwood below the window visible above the bottom of the frame, the last of its white blooms now fading and dying. A blue jay stood on its topmost branch, but our movement behind the glass must have disturbed him because he disappeared suddenly with a flash of his blue rounded tail.

Yet, in truth, the bird was only a momentary distraction, because it was the walls that drew the eye. I couldn’t tell what color they had been painted because no paint showed through the blizzard of paper that seemed to have adhered to them, as if the room was in a constant state of motion and they had been propelled there and held in place by centrifugal force. The sheets were of varying sizes, some little more than Post-it notes, others larger than the surface of Foster’s drafting board. Some were yellow, others dark, some plain, a few lined. The detail varied from drawing to drawing, from hurried sketches executed with a flurry of pencil strokes to ornate, intricate depictions of their subject. James Foster had been quite an artist, but he seemed to have only one main theme.

Almost every drawing depicted a woman, her face concealed, her body swathed in a cloak of white from the top of her head to the soles of her feet. The cloak spread out behind her like water pooling from an ice sculpture. It was not a false impression, for Foster had drawn her as if the material that covered her was wet. It clung to the muscles in her legs and buttocks, to the sweep of her breasts and the thin blades of her fingers, the bones of the knuckles clearly visible where she gripped the cloak tightly from beneath.