“Yes, you do it.”
I flipped the metal clasp and opened the sides, and one by one I laid the contents on her lap: clothes, notebooks, papers, jewels. I took out the gold watch and placed it into her hands, and she made a little breathless Oh! and her hands shook, so violently that I thought she might drop it, but she held on gamely, staring, rubbing the glass case as I had done so often. Seven-oh-three unto eternity. She turned it over and read the inscription, and that was when the tears broke under her eyelids. I took a handkerchief from my pocketbook and handed it to her.
“I know it’s silly,” she said. “It’s just a watch.”
“But it’s your watch.”
“Yes, it is.” She looked down at her lap, at the artifacts piled around her. She touched the blue gossamer dress with her finger. “I was wearing this the night we left Wittenberg, the night I left Walter. Lionel drove us. God, that drive. I remember every moment. We stopped to rest—he’d been up all night, the day before—and he slept in my lap like a baby. I would have died for him, right there. I was so grateful. He saved me.”
I’ll be damned if I didn’t break out in goose bumps. As if Lionel’s ghost were standing right there on the parquet floor, over my shoulder, smiling down on my pert bosom as I knelt next to his Violet in her chair.
“Is that why you brought along Walter’s diary? To remind you why you left?”
She started, and then her body went quite still. “Walter’s diary.”
“Don’t you remember?”
“Of course. But I . . . my God.” She sorted through the notebooks until she found it, Dr. Walter Grant’s filthy journal, his matrimonial testimony. She held it up before her as she might hold an infant’s soiled napkin. “I suppose you’ve read it.”
“I’ve read enough. Too wholesome for me, really.”
She laughed. Really. “Do you know, I haven’t even thought about him in years. Isn’t that funny? And we shared a bed, we shared a life once.”
I tapped a worn corner. “Don’t tell me you took it for sentimental reasons.”
“Oh, God, no. I only wanted evidence. For the divorce.”
“So you didn’t mean to kill him?”
Oh, the slightest pause, the telltale pause. The rotten fact. “No, we didn’t. There was no point.” She went on staring at the book, at the gold-stamped number 1912 in the corner. Her worn thumbnails dug into the leather.
“We?” I said.
She handed me the journal, and by handed I mean slapped me in the chest with it, case closed, keep your truffle-pig nose to yourself, Miss Metropolitan. “You can take this back with you. I don’t need it any more, obviously.” She picked up the watch again and wrapped it up in the tear-stained handkerchief.
I said: “There’s one more thing inside. A small thing. I don’t know if you still want it.”
I took out Lionel’s note, very carefully, so I wouldn’t spill a single one of the fourteen faded scarlet rose petals.
For a second or two, she said nothing. I thought, maybe she doesn’t remember.
“Oh, my God,” she said, “oh, God, Lionel.”
Her body shook with sobs, spasmed with them. Her throat was choked with shock, or grief, or whatever it was she was feeling. I was afraid Henry might hear her and return. I folded the petals back into the paper, but just as I opened the valise to tuck them inside, she took my wrist.
“Wait. I’m all right. Let me see.”
So I opened the paper back up, and she touched each petal.
“Do you remember what the note said?” I asked.
She said, “What note?”
I showed her.
Ah! So Violet is a romantic after all
I have kissed each one to last you until I return
Lionel
This time, she didn’t cry. As if her store of tears were exhausted, exhumed in their entirety, and she was scientific Violet again, examining a natural curiosity. She only touched the ink with her fingers, and then she said, dry-voiced, “The petals, they were in my hair, that night in Wittenberg. The night he kissed me. I folded them away in a leaf of notepaper. He must have found it, when he put the papers in my valise.”
“You never saw him again, after the border?”
She held up a petal to the lamplight. “I never saw Lionel again. No. I think . . . I know he died that day. He would have tried to escape, of course. No, Lionel Richardson did not survive the night.”