As he registered every remonstration of Ellie’s, he watched Sophia with unsubtle caution for signs of resentment or withdrawal. Sophia watched him too, unconfiding, uncomfortable. She in turn was aware of his anxious observation. It was a delicate business to be conducted in such fearsome times, the guiding and nurturing of this wise, perceptive child at the cusp of adolescence. Sophia was both more and less sophisticated in certain ways than her contemporaries. Their bantering, fond relationship was a treasure of his life and he dreaded the loss of it.
During his hours in the office, he sometimes closed the curtains as he had when Maud visited. He ignored his e-mail and phone calls. Never answered his door. At times he drank, making sure that when he did, he had something to read. These were his two principal ways of controlling his guilt and grief. He had read Susanna Moodie’s memoir Roughing It in the Bush in the federal detention center in Homer. It was a popular book among some of his homesteading friends in the old Alaska and he had a copy in his office. He did not get far rereading it. So he turned to work like Anthony Powell’s. He read The Quiet American and Hemingway’s Men Without Women along with a history of the siege of Berlin. Often he drank, keeping strong mints handy.
“People are looking at me strangely,” he told his wife later that evening.
“Well, you’re a strange guy, eh? Aren’t you?”
Brookman went to check that Sophia was not in earshot. An afterthought. Then he went to pour himself a drink.
“Don’t you think people look at me strangely?” she asked him.
“They suspect I pushed her.”
Ellie failed to answer him at first.
“They once suspected you hit me,” she said. “You took a swing at me.”
“I’ve never hit you. And I never took a swing at you.”
“Oh, ya. Years ago. The second time I ducked. You fight like my brothers. On one foot.” After a moment she said, “Maybe they suspect me. Maybe they think we both hit her.” Brookman laughed and shuddered.
“I didn’t hit Maud, for Christ’s sake. You were right behind me.”
“Yes, I followed you out,” Ellie said. He sat down on a kitchen chair, watching her in profile as she did the washing up. Her face was very handsome, not without faults. Her long, fine nose turned up slightly at the tip. While courting her, quite in love, he had discovered that she was a woman who believed, however humbly, that her course in life was directed by God and that her choices must be made to honor Him. Naturally, she did not always tell the whole truth but she was not a good liar. “I followed you out,” she said truthfully. “Yes. The two of you.”
“I didn’t hit her,” Brookman said.
“I might have,” Ellie told him. “If she had turned toward my house.”
A picture came to his mind, as vivid as though he had seen it, of snow falling past Maud’s open blue eyes, flakes piling on their dead, still pupils. On her hair. At her throat. It did not incline him against Ellie. He had no clear idea how it made him feel.
“I’m going out.”
“Taking the car? Bring in oatmeal.” Ellie watched from the kitchen. Now she would not have the Christmas holiday she had been looking forward to — since being allowed a post-Mennonite Christmas — and her life was slowly changing from the inside out.
On the road Brookman drove with a defensive reticence that annoyed his fellow motorists. At the back of his mind was that some kind of unofficial police presence was on his trail. He had left the house without a destination.
29
SALMONE HAD COME TO THE house while Brookman was idly driving from one end of town to the other. Ellie had asked the detective to leave. Then she had telephoned him at the police station, gone in and made a brief statement describing what she had seen on the night of Maud’s death.
“What did he say when you asked him to leave?”
“Well,” Ellie said, “he didn’t like it. He said he might have to ask me more formally for a statement later.”
“Wonder what he meant by that.”
While Brookman was sorting his thoughts, Salmone called and declared that he would like to come over.
“Shall I come in instead?” Brookman asked.
“Why don’t you do that,” Salmone said.
Brookman went out in the cold rain and walked to the police station. As soon as he saw Salmone’s face he reflected on the interview Ellie must have provided. He was certain she had no idea how to favorably impress a sensitive, older, working-class detective.
He was right. Salmone was not happy with what Brookman’s wife had told him. Obviously, the lieutenant thought, she had believed what she’d said. But her loyalty and composure, rendered with imperious reserve, did not make him like either Brookman any better.
“Have a seat, sir,” Salmone said.
He let Brookman go through the details he recalled of the night in question without interrupting. He watched Brookman closely, letting him know he was being watched.
“Is it a fact, Professor, that you did time in a federal correctional institution?”
“I was a crewman on a crab boat. I was just out of the Marine Corps. Our boat was MV Water Brothers, out of Homer. We were over the limit on size and maturity. There were shoulder-seasonal changes I guess we weren’t aware of.”
“How come jail time?”
“We had a little petty grab-ass with the Coasties and I was up front. So I did three months in a converted prefab Air Force barracks outside Richardson. It was all fishery workers in there. They’d applied federal laws for years and then the state changed a lot of them.”
“Too bad. You’re a young kid practically. You were a veteran just out.”
“Yeah. Sentences were way excessive. Everyone says that.”
“Tough. But you did OK in later life. Here you are…”
“Yeah.” Brookman had the sense that Salmone was speaking to him more as an apprehended perpetrator than a college professor.
“Very sad about this young lady. Do you have some more to tell us?”
“How would I?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Brookman. Maud Stack comes to your house. It’s a blizzard outside. She’s troubled and intoxicated. But you don’t let her in. Why?”
Brookman looked at him a while before he answered.
“She was there to intimidate me. And my family.”
“Really?”
“That’s right.”
“You didn’t think you could help her?”
“Only by suggesting she leave.”
“You figured you could help her by suggesting she leave?”
“Yes.”
“Did you shove her out?”
“Shove her? Of course not.”
“Guide her back in the street?”
“I didn’t touch her.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Brookman. We have cell phone videos. You’re touching her. You’re actively touching her.”
“When we were in the street and the traffic was coming I tried to pull her back on the sidewalk. That’s what you have a record of.”
“Myself, I’m surprised you forced her out on the street in the weather.”
“I didn’t force her out on the street. I told her to go home. If she’d done what I told her, she’d have been all right.”