Chapter 6
Eleanor
For the first three weeks she was a sentence. The victim. I wrote it in my own notes so many times that the words lost their meaning, the way a name does when you say it over and over. The victim's blood. The victim's whereabouts. The victim's relationship with the defendant. I had a file with her name on it in my cabinet, and the name was not on the tab, because the tab said HALE, V.
It was the paper that changed it.
The State's disclosure had come in installments, and the third installment, a heavy gray box delivered on a Friday afternoon in the second week of November, contained what the prosecutor's cover letter called communications of the decedent. Eleven hundred pages. Emails, text messages, voice memos, a diary she had kept in a spiral notebook, her appointment calendar for three years. I carried it to my apartment that night and set it on the kitchen table and told Nora that I would be a while.
"How long's a while?"
"I'll let you know."
"You always do," she said, not unkindly, and went to bed.
I read until four.
Eleanor Hale had been born Eleanor Voss, forty-four years earlier, in a rented house in Garner Falls, a mill town two hours up the coast, to a high-school music teacher and a woman who sold insurance. She had a sister five years younger. At seventeen she had won a scholarship to the Institute of Fine Arts in the capital, and at twenty-two she had been one of eight people in the country accepted into a conservation program that required, according to a profile in an art magazine that the prosecutors had included for reasons I could not guess, the patience of a surgeon and the temperament of a nun. At twenty-eight she had met Victor Hale at a charity auction, where she had been called in to authenticate a Flemish panel that his firm had donated and had told him, politely, in front of forty people, that it was a nineteenth-century copy.
He had laughed. He had asked her to dinner. She had written, in the spiral notebook, in a round clear hand: Said no. He sent the painting to me anyway, with a note: "Be sure."
I stopped there for a while.
It was an odd feeling, reading it. I had spent a month with Victor Hale across a steel table, a man who spoke of his wife as one speaks of a difficult piece of property, and here was the first moment in her own hand: a young woman, amused and a little wary, being courted by a very rich man with an unusual way of doing it. There was no malice in the page. There was something I had not expected, a sort of dry, shining, private humor. She had been funny. She wrote about the people she worked for as though they were characters in a novel she was reading very slowly: the Baroness wants her dead husband's eyes retouched, brown to blue, as though he'd been a disappointment to her. She wrote about food. She wrote about weather. She wrote about the particular blue of a certain pigment, ultramarine, made from lapis lazuli, once worth more than gold, and what it meant that a thing could be that beautiful and still be made of crushed stone.
The marriage came into the diary slowly, like water through a wall. The early years were bright with it, and then there was a long stretch of nothing, and then a different tone began to appear. Not cruelty. I looked for cruelty, because I was a lawyer and because it was my job to know where the State would find it. I found, instead, something that disturbed me more: management. A man who arranged things. Who knew her schedule. Who was always, kindly, a half-step ahead. V. has hired a driver for me. "It's just easier, darling." I did not ask for a driver. And a year later: V. is concerned about my friendship with L. Concerned. He has used the word three times this week. He has not asked a single question.
I wrote L.? on my pad, and moved on.
By the spring of that year the entries had grown short. She was thinking about leaving. She did not say so outright, not at first. She wrote: I looked at apartments today, only to look. She wrote: I made a list of what is mine. It is shorter than I would like. She wrote on the ninth of September, five weeks before her death: I am so tired of being an exhibit in my own house.
I put the notebook down. It was ten past two. The apartment was dark except for the lamp over the table, and I could hear Nora breathing in the next room, slow and even, and the rain that I had stopped noticing. I got up, filled a glass at the tap, stood at the window drinking it, and looked out at the wet black street. A man was walking a dog. A taxi went by with its sign lit.
I thought: I have been hired to say that this woman's husband didn't kill her. And I thought, for no reason I could have defended: She would have hated me.
The text messages were worse.
They were with a man named Lucas Ferrant, thirty-nine, a restorer of furniture and frames who had a workshop in the old warehouse district near the harbor. I had his name already from the State's witness list. I had not understood what he was. The messages ran back two years and were written in the clipped, tender, half-completed grammar of two people who have stopped needing to explain themselves. Thursday? Yes. Can't, V. home. Then Friday. Friday. Sometimes a photograph, a hand, a window, a half-eaten orange on a paint-stained table. On the sixth of October, eight days before she died, she had written: I told R. I'm going to start the process. I'm terrified. He had written back: Do you want me to come? She had said: No. If he sees you, it becomes about you. It has to be about him.
And on the thirteenth, the night before: I'm going to tell him tomorrow night. After dinner. Not about us. About the other thing. Then Roberta on Wednesday.
Lucas: Are you safe?
Eleanor: He has never raised his hand to me. You know that.
Lucas: That's not what I asked.
There was no reply to that. The last message from her phone was at 5:12 on the afternoon of the fourteenth. Don't worry. I'll call you after. And then, nothing, because after was the thing that had not happened.
I read that line four times. About the other thing. The State had its theory of what that meant, and they had written it into the margin of their own notes, in the helpful, pre-digested way prosecutors do: The "other thing" = her intention to leave. Confronting V. on the evening of the 14th. Motive. It fit. It fit the prenup and the policy and the shouting that Maribel Santos had heard through a door on Sunday night. It fit the shape of the case they were building like a hand in a glove.
But about the other thing. Not about us. Why would she say it that way? If she were telling him she was leaving, the leaving would be what it was about. A woman who is going to say I want a divorce does not describe it as something other than the marriage.
I made a note. "The other thing" — what? I underlined it. Then I turned the page, because it was half past three and my eyes had begun to swim, and I told myself that a person can read too much into a text message at that hour. I told myself that most of what the dead leave behind is shorthand.
I did not intend to go to the cemetery.
It was the Sunday after, the sixteenth of November, a thin bright cold day with a sky like washed glass, and I had no reason to be on that side of the city. I told myself I was driving to the Brennan Street warehouses to look at Lucas Ferrant's workshop from the outside. I took the road along the river, and somewhere past the water-treatment plant I found that I had turned off and was going slowly up a long, curving, tree-lined drive, between iron gates, into Greenlawn.
It is a beautiful cemetery. I had never noticed. It was laid out in the last century on a long slope facing the water, and the stones went up the hill in rows, gray and white, with the leaves of the old oaks lying in drifts against them. I parked at the bottom and walked. I did not know where I was going. I only knew that I was looking for the freshest earth.
It was about two-thirds of the way up, under a copper beech. The stone had not yet been set. There was a small temporary marker, a metal plate on a stake, with her name and two dates, and in front of it the ground was still raised in a low soft mound that the rains had begun to settle. Someone had left flowers. White ones, wrapped in paper, wilting. Beside them, on the dirt, lay a small stone with something painted on it, in blue, in a child's hand: a bird.
"I'd ask you to leave," said a voice behind me.
I turned.
Clare Voss stood ten feet off, on the path, in a long black coat, with her hands in her pockets. In the clear light she was strikingly like her sister, as I had seen from the photographs: the same cheekbones, the same wide, level eyes, though Clare's were lighter, almost gray, and a good deal harder. She was thirty-nine and she looked fifty. Her face was drawn and unpowdered. She had not been sleeping.
"Ms. Voss," I said. "I'm sorry. I didn't know you'd be here."
"No. I'm sure."
"I'll go."
"You should." She did not move. "Is it a tradition? Do you come and see them? The ones you're getting off?"
"I've never done this before."
"I don't believe you."
"I wouldn't expect you to."
She looked at me for a long moment. The wind moved in the beech, and a few copper leaves came down between us, turning, and settled on the path. A long way off, on the river, a barge sounded, a low note, like a cello.
"Do you know what she was doing the week she died?" Clare said, quietly. "She was making a birthday card for my daughter. Maya's turning eight in December. Eleanor was going to bake the cake. She'd been looking at pans for a month. A castle. With turrets." Her voice was perfectly even. "She was a person who did that. She planned. She sent my daughter a card, every year, on the day, with a letter in it. When Maya was two, she wrote them out ahead of time, for every birthday up to eighteen. She scheduled them to send. She said it was in case she forgot." A sound that was almost a laugh. "She never forgot anything. She only liked to be sure."
"I'm sorry."
"I've read all of them. I'm the executor. I've had to read everything." Her mouth twisted. "Her emails, her files, her accounts, the whole of her life, in a stack on my kitchen table. I know what she was frightened of. I know what she wasn't telling anyone. And I know that your client is going to stand up in a courtroom with a pressed shirt and a very good lawyer and tell a jury that he was at the office."
"I'm not going to argue with you about it."
"No. You're going to win." She said the word with a kind of exhausted contempt. "Because that's what you do. I looked you up. I read about every trial. I'm not a stupid woman, Mr. Cole. I know how this works. You don't need him to be innocent. You only need them to be unsure."
I did not answer. There was nothing I could say that was not a lie or a lecture.
"Was she afraid of him?" I asked, instead.
It was not what I had meant to say. It was out before I had decided. Clare looked at me, and something in the hard face moved: surprise, I thought, and then something less comfortable.
"I told the police she was."
"I read your statement."
"Then you know." She was silent a moment. "That isn't quite what I meant. I wrote it that way because it was the only way they'd listen." She drew a breath. "She wasn't afraid of him the way you'd think. He never touched her. He never shouted, not once, in fourteen years, not until the last week. She was afraid of what he knew. Of how well he knew her. Of how he made everything seem so reasonable that you'd end by feeling you'd imagined it." Her gaze dropped to the mound. "And she was afraid of something else. Something she'd found. She wouldn't tell me. She said, Clare, if I tell you, you'll have to do something, and I need to do it first."
"Found what?"
"I don't know." She raised her eyes. They were wet and furious. "That's the thing, Mr. Cole. I don't know. And she's dead. And you'll go into court and say that nobody can prove he did it. And the thing is, you'll be right. Nobody can. Not with what we have. And she will be the one who stays under that mound while the person who put her there goes home."
She turned. I thought she would go. She took three steps along the path and stopped, with her back to me, and said, without looking round, in a voice so low I almost lost it in the wind:
"I'll read everything. Every file. Every message. She left so much. I'll find it." A pause. "And if what I find is something that changes things, I'll know where to send it."
She went down the hill. Her coat flared behind her. I stood at the grave with my hands at my sides and the cold coming up through my shoes and looked at the little blue bird on its stone, which was a poor, crooked, wobbling thing, painted by a child who had not yet learned to be accurate about wings. It was the best bird I had seen all year.
I'll know where to send it, she had said. I took it, then, for a threat.
I would not understand for nine months what she had actually been telling me.