“Where did you hear that? Was that in the newspapers, too?”
“No. I just asked a few questions. Anyway, I thought that might be the case, when you turned up here in Florida like that, sticking yourself right in the middle of all these affairs as soon as your old man’s trial was over. I figured you wouldn’t have traveled down here so quickly, if you didn’t want to know all about it.”
“Well, yes. Of course I did.”
“But why, exactly? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“Why?”
“Why come down to Florida. Stick your nose into all this ugly business.”
“Isn’t it obvious? Because I want to know more. I want to help, if I can.”
“Help? Help with what?”
“With whatever it is you’re doing. The truth about my husband.”
“I see. And that’s all?”
My God, what an inanimate man, this revenue agent. He doesn’t fidget a bit. Maybe it comes with the job, this steadfast habit, scrubbed of all human influence. As I said, I can only see one side of his face—a rather unsettling effect, if you ask me—and there isn’t much expression there to begin with. His hair is too short to shine in the light; it sort of bristles softly there, at his temples and around the curve of his skull. His one visible eye is black, too shadowed for color, and it hardly ever blinks. I believe I once heard that means he’s telling the truth, or else he’s an especially good liar.
Either way, I think, I might as well test him. What have I got to lose, really? He surely knows more than he’s letting on. He’s surely got all sorts of details tucked far up his sleeve. That’s plain. I can see it in his unblinking eye, I can hear it in his voice. And I’ve already done the reckless thing. I’ve already met him here, in the garden of the Flamingo Hotel as the clock ticks toward midnight.
I lean forward and speak in the kind of firm, clear voice I use to reprimand my daughter, when she needs it.
“No. That isn’t all.”
“What, then?”
“Because I sometimes wonder if I’m being lied to, Mr. Marshall. I sometimes wonder if that body in the fire was really his.”
If I’m expecting some sort of reaction—shock or dismay or anything at all—I suppose you could say I’m disappointed. That damned dark eye doesn’t even blink. I think the crease around the corner of his mouth tightens a bit, like somebody wound the string another notch, but that’s all.
“Well, that’s strange,” he says. “What makes you think that?”
“Because the man I married wouldn’t have burned to death in his own house, that’s why.”
“You hesitated.”
“What’s that?”
“Before you spoke, you hesitated.”
“I was just thinking of a way to explain it. You see, I’ve found that so many men have little regard for a woman’s intuition.”
A smile at last! At least on that one side of his mouth, nudging up the corner, pushing back the stiff muscle of his cheek. His voice, however, contains not a trace of amusement. “I have plenty of regard for female intuition, Mrs. Fitzwilliam, believe me. But in this case I’m afraid you’re wrong.”
“Am I?”
“I’m very sorry. But you see, if there’s one thing I’m certain about in this entire wretched affair, it’s that Simon Fitzwilliam died in a fire at his villa on Cocoa Beach, about two hours after midnight in the morning of February nineteenth of this year.” He pauses. “Again. Very sorry.”
I whisper, “And how can you be so certain of that, Mr. Marshall? The body was burned beyond recognition. His own brother had to identify him by the coincidental presence of a piece of metal.”
Mr. Marshall flattens his hand on the table between us, and while I’m staring at his face and not his fingers, I have the impression that they’re as wide and thick and rough as the branches of an oak tree. A peasant’s hand.
“Because I was right there, that night on Cocoa Beach,” he tells me. “And I guess, in some measure, I’m responsible for what happened.”
Whatever my own private convictions on the subject of my father’s guilt, I was shocked when the jury returned its verdict. The jury, you see, did not possess all the relevant information. The jury didn’t know what I knew: that my father was in love with another woman at the time of my mother’s murder.
Well, I can’t blame them. Nobody else knew, either. When I took the stand and described the contents of my memory, nobody asked me that particular thing—not the prosecution’s lawyer, who treated me with great delicacy, and certainly not our own expensive table of defense attorneys, in their neat suits of charcoal and navy blue, sweating out the June heat. Who would expect such knowledge inside the dusty old memories of an eight-year-old girl? But of course I knew. Wasn’t I the cool, steady center of the family maelstrom? Yes, I was. By the time of my mother’s murder, I was a very old, perceptive, experienced eight-year-old, and I knew plenty of things I shouldn’t, and I had seen plenty of things I shouldn’t have. I had, for instance, many times spied the two of them together—my father and our kitchen maid, who happened to be cleaning an upstairs bedroom at the moment my mother was brutally stabbed—and even an eight-year-old girl knows what a kiss means, on the lips, lingering, between grown-ups. Even an eight-year-old girl understands that her father, having spent nearly three years a witness of his wife’s extraordinary moods and her penchant for the intimate company of gardeners, might desire the lips of a more uncomplicated woman. And our kitchen maid was a young, pretty girl of about twenty who liked him back.
I never saw them do anything more than kiss. I would have sworn that on a Bible, if anyone had asked. But as I said, no one did, and by the end of my father’s trial, everyone in the courtroom thought he should be acquitted. There was no real proof, just the possibilities suggested by circumstance, and my father, when you regard him in a sober suit, and consider his occupation, looks like nothing more than an absent-minded professor who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Then again, the facts of my mother’s promiscuous behavior and unsteady character had been firmly established by the defense. Even if you imagined that her husband might, under extraordinary provocation, have committed a single act of terrible and thoughtless passion, you might have thought the dame had it coming, mightn’t you?
But it doesn’t matter what the rest of the courtroom thinks. Only the jury matters, and the jury—for whatever reason—thought my father should be held to account for this unspeakable crime. This murder of his own wife. And as that word guilty echoed around the courtroom, I knew what I had always known, what I had spent a lifetime pretending I didn’t know.
That they were right.
That I had been making believe all along, because the alternative was too dreadful to contemplate. Because who could still love a man who could commit a crime like that? A crime like murder.