The White Road

“It ended shortly before my husband’s death.”

“When did it begin?”

“Why do these things ever begin?” she answered, mishearing the question. She wanted to tell and she would tell it in her own way and at her own pace. “Boredom, discontent, a husband too tied up with his work to notice that his wife was going crazy. Take your pick.”

“Did your husband know?”

She paused before she answered, as if she were thinking about it for only the first time. “If he did, then he didn’t say anything. At least, not to me.”

“To Elliot?”

“He made comments. They were open to more than one interpretation.”

“How did Elliot choose to interpret them?”

“That James knew. It was Elliot who decided to end things between us. I didn’t care enough about him to disagree.”

“So why were you arguing with him at dinner?”

She resumed the rhythmic stroking of her skirt, picking at pieces of lint too small to be of real concern.

“Something is happening. Elliot knows, but he pretends that he doesn’t. They’re all pretending.”

The stillness in the house suddenly seemed terribly oppressive. There should have been children in this house, I thought. It was too big for two people, and far too large for one. It was the kind of house bought by wealthy people in the hope of populating it with a family, but I could see no trace of any family here. Instead there was only this woman in her widow’s black picking methodically at the tiny flaws in her skirt, as if by doing so she could make the greater wrongs right again.

“What do you mean by ‘them all’?”

“Elliot. Landron Mobley. Grady Truett. Phil Poveda. My husband. And Earl Larousse. Earl Jr., that is.”

“Larousse?” I couldn’t keep the surprise from my voice.

Once again, there was the trace of a smile on Adele Foster’s face. “They all grew up together, all six of them. Now something has started to happen. My husband’s death was the beginning. Grady Truett’s was the continuation.”

“What happened to Grady Truett?”

“Somebody broke into his home about a week after James died. He was tied to a chair in his den, then his throat was cut.”

“And you think the two deaths are connected?”

“Here’s what I think: Marianne Larousse was killed ten weeks ago. James died six weeks later. Grady Truett was killed one week after that. Now Landron Mobley has been found dead, and Elliot is missing.”

“Were any of them close to Marianne Larousse?”

“No, not if you mean intimate with her, but like I said they grew up with her brother and would have known her socially. Well, maybe not Landron Mobley but certainly the others.”

“And what do you believe is happening, Mrs. Foster?”

She took a deep breath, her nostrils flaring, her head rising, then released it slowly. In the gesture there was a trace of a spirit that had been subdued by the black clothes and it was possible to see what had attracted Elliot to her.

“My husband killed himself because he was afraid, Mr. Parker. Something he had done had come back to haunt him. He told Elliot, but Elliot wouldn’t believe him. He wouldn’t tell me what it was. Instead, he pretended that everything was normal, right up until the day he went into the garage with a length of yellow hose and killed himself. Elliot is also trying to pretend that things are normal, but I think he knows better.”

“What do you think your husband was afraid of?”

“Not what. I think he was afraid of someone.”

“Do you have any idea who that person might have been?”

Adele Foster rose and, with a movement of her hand, indicated that I should follow her. We ascended the staircase, past what, in the house’s former days, would have been used as a receiving room for visitors but was now a large and very luxurious bedroom. We paused in front of a closed door, in its keyhole a key, which she now turned to unlock the door. Then, keeping her back to the room, she pushed the door open and revealed its contents. The room had once been a small bedroom or dressing room but James Foster had transformed it into an office. There was a computer desk and chair, a drafting board, and a set of shelves against one wall lined with books and files. A window looked out onto the front yard, the top of the flowering dogwood below the window visible above the bottom of the frame, the last of its white blooms now fading and dying. A blue jay stood on its topmost branch, but our movement behind the glass must have disturbed him because he disappeared suddenly with a flash of his blue rounded tail.

Yet, in truth, the bird was only a momentary distraction, because it was the walls that drew the eye. I couldn’t tell what color they had been painted because no paint showed through the blizzard of paper that seemed to have adhered to them, as if the room was in a constant state of motion and they had been propelled there and held in place by centrifugal force. The sheets were of varying sizes, some little more than Post-it notes, others larger than the surface of Foster’s drafting board. Some were yellow, others dark, some plain, a few lined. The detail varied from drawing to drawing, from hurried sketches executed with a flurry of pencil strokes to ornate, intricate depictions of their subject. James Foster had been quite an artist, but he seemed to have only one main theme.

Almost every drawing depicted a woman, her face concealed, her body swathed in a cloak of white from the top of her head to the soles of her feet. The cloak spread out behind her like water pooling from an ice sculpture. It was not a false impression, for Foster had drawn her as if the material that covered her was wet. It clung to the muscles in her legs and buttocks, to the sweep of her breasts and the thin blades of her fingers, the bones of the knuckles clearly visible where she gripped the cloak tightly from beneath.

But there was something wrong with her skin, something flawed and ugly. Her veins appeared to be above rather than beneath the epidermis, creating a tracery of raised pathways across her body like the levees over a flooded rice field. The result was that the woman under the veil seemed almost to be plated, her skin armored like that of an alligator. Unconsciously, instead of drawing closer I took a single step back from the wall and felt Adele Foster’s hand come to rest gently on my arm.

“Her,” she said. “He was afraid of her.”



We sat over coffee, some of the drawings spread on the coffee table before us.

“Did you show these to the police?”

She shook her head. “Elliot told me not to.”

“Did he tell you why?”

“No. He just said that it would be best not to show them the drawings.”

I rearranged the papers, setting the depictions of the woman aside and revealing a set of five landscapes. Each depicted the same scene: a huge pit in the ground, surrounded by skeletal trees. In one of the drawings a pillar of fire emerged from the pit, but it was still possible to pick out, even there, the shape of the hooded woman now clothed in flame.

“Is this a real place?”

She took the picture from me and studied it, then handed it back to me with a shrug.

“I don’t know. You’d have to ask Elliot. He might know.”

“I can’t do that until I find him.”

“I think something has happened to him, maybe the same thing that happened to Landron Mobley.”

This time, I heard the disgust in her voice when she said Mobley’s name.

“You didn’t like him?”

She scowled. “He was a pig. I don’t know why they let him stay with them. No—” she corrected herself—“I do know why. He could get things for them: drugs, booze when they were younger, maybe even women. He knew the places to go. He wasn’t like Elliot and the others. He didn’t have money, or looks, or a college education, but he was prepared to go places that they were afraid to go, at least at first.”

And Elliot Norton had still seen fit, after all those years, to represent Mobley in the impending case against him, despite the fact that it could bring no credit to Elliot. This was the same Elliot Norton who had grown up with Earl Larousse Jr. and was now representing the young man accused of killing his sister. None of this made me feel good.

“You said that they did something, when they were younger, something that had come back to haunt them. Do you have any idea what that might be?”

“No. James would never talk about it. We weren’t close before his death. His behavior had altered. He wasn’t the man I married. He began to hang out with Mobley again. They went hunting together up at Congaree. Then James started going to strip clubs. I think he might have been seeing prostitutes.”

I laid the drawings down carefully on the table.

“You know where he might have gone?”

“I followed him, two or three times. He always went to the same place, because it was where Mobley liked to go when he was in town. It’s called LapLand.”