Every morning and evening they burn to the LORD burnt offerings and fragrant incense, and the showbread is set on the clean table, and the golden lampstand with its lamps is ready to light every evening; for we keep the charge of the LORD our God, but you have forsaken Him.
Two packages, Celestial Sandalwood and Dragon’s Blood, sit open on the kitchen counter behind your ad hoc censer. The sandalwood is a disappointment: it smells like men’s deodorant. But the other one’s sweet. You think you might buy another package of it when it’s time to replenish the supply, unless you feel like trying out another one with a fancy name: Vrindavan Flowers, or Night Phoenix. Possibly—probably—you will have moved on from incense by then. But, for now, there’s the driftwood and the Dragon’s Blood, a sweetly spicy smell that also reminds you a little of vanilla ice cream, just the thing for a lazy Tuesday afternoon.
Beneath the counter, the drawers: this one holds the cutlery, that one the spatulas and slotted spoons. Across the small space of the kitchen, there’s an extra bit of countertop next to the refrigerator—it looks like a space-filling afterthought. The single drawer underneath it stores dishrags and dry sponges; on the wall above it, there’s an antique knife rack, another of your serendipitous finds. Who knows how old this knife rack is? You found it at a yard sale for seventy-five cents; it was quite dirty, and probably long past its proper days of usage. But it was hand-painted, and you can never resist old hand-painted things, though it feels like the rest of the world is running out of patience with their kind.
The rack is painted matte-white with a little insignia of an iris in the center. It always takes your eye a minute to resolve on the stylized design of the iris: the three lines making up the stem look like licking flames until you find the four purple brushstrokes ingeniously placed atop, which might also be a dog, or a fox, or some flying creature carrying something dead in its mouth. But they’re a flower. Once you see it, finding it becomes a known route, a path to a familiar place. It cost you less than a dollar, and hardly anyone will ever comment on it, which is exactly the sort of thing you like. The knives it holds come from all over: estate sales, hand-me-downs; only two were bought new, the oyster shucker and the butcher knife. There’s a store with kitchen gadgets in a galleria over in San Luis Obispo, and you stopped in one day. These two were on sale for half price, and their wooden handles looked so supple and otherworldly. Carbon steel from Japan. You knew a bargain when you saw it.
Your sink is stainless steel, dull and practical; it would be too small for a family. You keep it clean, and you have a small vase for flowers off to the side of it. Flowers make everything nicer. There’s no dishwasher in this kitchen; the oldest piece of furniture in the house is the refrigerator, its handle thick and rounded, a relic of the early space age. The remaining cabinets hold a few matching white plates and bowls, and a single unmatching ceramic bowl that gets more use than any of them. When you live alone, no matter how lovingly you decorate your space, you come to rely on the things that serve you best. This coffee cup, that spoon, this rustic beige bowl that’s a little heavier than the others.
The counter overlooks the living room; your space is continuous. The living room walls, forever a work in progress, are a riot of movement in your care: like a teenager, you’ve put up anything that catches your fancy, adding and removing according to your whim. Today, the center of attention is a drawing of a shield bearing the image of a unicorn, ballpoint and felt tip on lined paper, artist unknown though you have your suspicions: your students’ desks at school have brown metal pockets attached to the frames, and every day things get left behind. On your desk, at the front of the class, there’s a lost-and-found basket to which you occasionally draw the class’s attention. But no one had claimed the unicorn shield, even though the curves of its emblem seemed a labor of love, the mane especially, dozens of gentle curves with real motion to them. Potential, you want to say. Maybe something more. Other teachers complained about students doodling in class, but you understood that attention works in funny ways, and considered a find like this evidence that your students were comfortable enough with you to let their imaginations venture outward a little in your presence. So you brought it home, and affixed it to the living room wall with clear tape: a crest for your chambers, an insignia to mark them as your own.
On the day next week when your living room gets photographed, the unicorn shield will still be sharing wall space with a mounted panel from Beatrix Potter’s The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit—the page showing the nice, gentle rabbit who nibbles a carrot—and an inexpensively framed publicity portrait of Myrna Loy in The Gypsy Minx, her knee drawn up to her chin as she sits on a rough-hewn bench attached to a tree, playing solitaire or possibly reading tarot. Her eyes meet the camera: she’s almost smiling, her mouth closed. The shot feels electric. They had something special, the stars of the silent age. Every expression had to contain multiple shades, to stand in for all the missing words and inflections. It’s easy to read a lot into a single frame.
* * *
IT WILL ALWAYS SEEM CRASS TO ME to enter your bedroom. Nothing that ever happened in here is anybody’s business: not the judge’s, not the jury’s, certainly not mine. But investigations turn up what they’re bound to turn up. It’s the way of things, and besides, once we’re inside the building, there really isn’t any point in leaving stones unturned. So many investigations run aground precisely because somebody overlooked something—out of carelessness, yes, but also from misplaced ideas about propriety, or fruitless reverence. It’s good to respect the dead, and to stay out of the way of an investigation in progress: but it’s also good, when the dust has settled—on the grave, on the desks of the investigating detectives—to widen the lens, to take in the bigger picture.
Still, I cringe reading through the testimony of Albert N., called to the stand in support of the prosecution’s theory regarding ritual sacrifice. He is no expert witness; he’d met you at an outdoor concert in a park in the summer, and you’d exchanged numbers. He was almost comically earnest when you met for cocktails one Friday a few weeks later. He spent that Friday night at your apartment. It hadn’t been especially memorable or regrettable for either of you—this was a new age—and you’d parted amiably, hardly thinking of it later. Under questioning, asked to describe the wall-hanging in the bedroom, he first says it was “a tie-dye thing”; pressed, he recalls the design:
It was like—and I don’t want to say this is what it was, because it was sort of abstract, you know? But to me it looked like a spider.
A spider? the DA asks, as recorded in the trial transcript. Do you mean a small—you know—a small spider like you’d see around the house?
No, sir. It took up the whole middle of the—
—of the tapestry.
—the tapestry, right. Or the sheet. Like, it was just a purple-colored sheet with a giant shape in the middle that looked to me like a spider.
The prosecution moves to introduce Exhibit 3-L, says the DA. It’s a batik wall-hanging. Albert N. is right: it’s an abstraction, the sort of thing an artistic child, under pressure to describe his work to a schoolteacher, might call “a design.” There are craze-lines like the cracking finish on an old guitar all over it; at its center, there’s a rounded shape where these lines seem thicker, six of them uniformly segmented, angling in toward the center from either side.