The silence that follows this lasts longer than it should.
“What are you really asking me?” she says softly.
I close my eyes, already regretting my question. “Just a fact, nothing more.” Tell me it was before 5:38 A.M.
“You don’t really believe your father could have killed Viola, do you? Tell me you don’t believe that.”
“I don’t. But I’d like to be able to prove that he didn’t.”
A long, pained sigh comes down the line. “Is this just between you and me?”
Oh, God. “Yes.”
“I don’t know what time Tom got home that night. It was very late, and I’d taken a second pill by that time.”
I’ve never known my mother to be so out of it that she didn’t know when Dad got home—especially during the past few years. She waits up for him like a helicopter mom praying for a teenager to get in. “Best guess, Mom. What time was it?”
“I don’t know for sure. I really don’t.”
“You said it was very late, so you obviously have a general idea.”
“After three,” she says at length. “I was dead to the world, honestly.”
After three … “Mom—”
“Could anybody be taping this call?” she asks sharply.
My stomach does a little flip. “No. That’s just on TV.” This isn’t exactly accurate, but Shad will assume that I’ve warned Dad against any dangerous discussions on the telephone, and Judge Elder isn’t likely to authorize a wiretap from the Mayo Clinic. “Why do you ask, Mom?”
“Because whatever time your father needs to have gotten home that night, that’s what time I remember him getting home. He was right beside me in this bed. You hear me?”
My heart thumps, hard. No. I didn’t hear that.
“Just make sure I know the right time. Before it’s life-or-death.”
I close my eyes and swallow hard. Only hours ago I realized my father may have been lying to me for most of my life. Now my mother has told me she’s willing to lie under oath to protect him. “Mom, I really need to talk to Dad tonight.”
“I’ll have him call you when he wakes up. You know he hardly ever sleeps through the night.”
“If he doesn’t call me before midnight, I’m going to drive over there and wake him up.”
“What about Annie? You can’t wake that child on a school night, and you’re certainly not leaving her there. Is Caitlin staying over?”
“No. Mom, please just make sure Dad calls me.”
She sighs with irritation. “All right.”
“I’m sorry if I woke you up.”
The intensity drains out of her voice, which suddenly becomes almost casual again. “You didn’t. I was reading.”
“Did you take a pill tonight?”
“After what happened this morning, that pill might as well be a placebo.”
“Try a different book. A bad book is the best sedative. And leave Dad a note to call me, in case you fall asleep. He’s bound to get up to pee soon.”
“I will. Good night.”
After I hang up, I collapse into my most comfortable chair, my mind across the river with Henry. Hopefully, Drew will call to update me soon.
Though I still mean to go over the autopsy report in detail, my hand picks up the Christmas party photo once more. Why does it haunt me so? Dad would have been thirty-one when this was shot, Viola … twenty-three. Both are looking directly at the camera, and Dad appears tired, as he often did when I was a boy. Beneath Viola’s beauty (which is obvious despite what almost seems an effort to conceal it), I sense something else, as Pithy Nolan once did. Something withheld. Perhaps a black woman with Viola’s power of attraction had already learned that she must conceal that power in the presence of others, or at least around whites.
This afternoon, Pithy Nolan told me it would be impossible to work in close quarters with a woman like Viola and not fall a little bit in love with her. And what did Dad tell me about the 1960s last night? What happened here was a war, too. I can’t help but think of Yuri Zhivago working on the Russian battle front with Larissa Antipov (who is forever Julie Christie in my mind). How could Dad not have been smitten by Viola?
Leaning back in my chair, I close my eyes and let the picture fall on my lap. Before a half-dozen breaths fill my lungs, I sit bolt upright, my heart pounding. Snatching up the picture, I study Viola once more, my heartbeat still accelerating. As soon as I stopped trying to figure out what I was missing in the photograph, an epiphany flashed through me. What I’ve been searching for isn’t visible in the picture. Nor was it ever visible in Viola’s presence.
It was her smell.
Even now, I remember it with startling clarity. When Viola sat me down to prick my finger or to give me a tetanus shot, then reached into the glass jar to give me a peppermint, her scent teased my nose in a way I’ve never forgotten. There was perfume in it, one whose name I’ll probably never know. But there was something else beneath that fragrance, something as clean as fresh-turned earth or newly mown grass. The perfumed fraction of that complex scent smells expensive in my memory, something a nurse would not likely have been able to afford. But whether I’m right or wrong about this, one thing I know with certainty: The night my father picked me up so late from the hospital, and told me he’d been on a house call, his imported cigar wasn’t the smell that struck me as I climbed into the car.
It was the tantalizing scent of Viola Turner.
CHAPTER 46