7
It was dusk when Katherine Paris’s bronze-colored Fiat came off the road that led from Silverwood and turned onto the highway. I switched off the radio, started my car, and followed her. There was no reason to think she would recognize my car; blue Accords are so common as to be almost invisible on the roads of California. She led me past vineyards, orchards, farm houses, and a desolate-looking housing tract with street names like Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. It was getting chilly out, a sign of autumn in the air. We drove on and on, deeper into the country between gently wooded hills now gloomy in the thick blue light of early evening. She turned her lights on and I turned on mine. A truck roared by and then a motorcycle and then it was just the two of us again, and the dense smell of wet earth rising from the darkened fields around us.
It would have been nice, I thought, had Hugh Paris been beside me. There was a restaurant in St. Helena that I’d been to once and liked. We could have driven there for dinner and stayed overnight somewhere and visited the wineries the next day. Eliot had it wrong about memory and desire; they smelled like wet earth on an autumn night and had nothing to do with spring.
My thoughts drifted back to the task at hand. The Fiat’s turn signal flashed on and we went down a narrow road. A brightly-lit three-story building rose just ahead of us. A sign above the entrance identified it as the Hotel George. The hotel was constructed of wood, painted white with green trim, a charming old place. A wide porch surrounded the first floor and chairs were lined up near the railing. They were mostly empty now. She parked and I watched her climb the steps and walk quickly across the porch into the building.
I waited in my car to see whether she would come out. There were some hot springs in the vicinity and I imagined that the George was a place from which people commuted to them. There were only three other cars in the lot; business, apparently, was slow.
When she failed to come out after five minutes, it occurred to me that Mrs. Paris might be meeting someone. Who? A member of the family? It was a small family to begin with and events had savaged it.
Of Linden’s grandchildren, John and Christina Smith, only Christina married. She and Robert had two sons, Jeremy and Nicholas. Of the two sons only Nicholas married and he and Katherine had produced only one child, Hugh. Of these four generations, the only survivors were John Smith, the judge, mad Nicholas and Katherine herself. The decimation of Grover Linden’s descendants proceeded as if in retribution. I shook myself out of my musing and realized that another five minutes had passed. I decided to go in after her.
The lobby was a little rectangular space, the floor covered with a thick gray carpet, the furnishings dark Spanish-style chairs and tables. A polished staircase beside the registration desk led to the upper floors. Across from the desk was an open door with a small neon sign above the doorway identifying it as the bar. I went over and looked in. Through the dimly-lit darkness I could see her, sitting on a high stool at the end of the bar. I walked in and approached her from behind. She was alone.
I took the stool next to her, ordering bourbon and water. I wished her a good evening.
Her head swiveled toward me until we were face to face. I saw exhaustion in her eyes so deep that it quickly extinguished the flash of anger that registered when she recognized me. There was contempt in her look and disdain and beneath it all a plea to be left alone. I regretted that I could not comply.
“May I buy you a drink, Mrs. Paris?”
“Why not,” she said mockingly. “I’m sure they’ll take your money here and I never refuse a drink.” I summoned the bartender and ordered refills. “You follow me here?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“To talk.”
“About Hugh?”
“Not necessarily. We could talk about you. Or your husband. Or your ex-father-in-law.”
“I find none of those subjects appealing,” she said. The darkness of the room cast shadows that hid all but the deepest lines in her face and she looked like a much younger woman. She was small, her feet not reaching to the metal ring at the bottom of the bar stool, and, for an instant, as she lifted her drink she looked as fragile as a child.
“Then tell me about your poetry.”
She looked sidewise at me. “Mr. Rios, I once had a talent for writing, a very small talent. I used it up a long time ago, or drank it up, perhaps. At any rate, that subject is the least appealing of all.” After a moment’s silence, she asked abruptly, “Do you like your life?”
“You mean, am I happy?”
“Yes, if you want to be vulgar about it.” She finished her drink. Another soldier down.
“I have been, from time to time.”
“A lawyer’s answer,” she said disdainfully. “Mincing — oh, pardon me. Equivocal. What I mean is,” and her voice was suddenly louder, “on the whole, wouldn’t you rather be dead?”
“No.”
“Well I often think I would,” she said softly.
“Why?”
She shook her head. “Every drop of meaning has been squeezed from my life. I hardly expect you to understand.”
“Your husband?”
“My husband,” she said. Another drink had appeared in front of her. I realized that I was about to be the recipient of the drunken confidences of an old, depressed woman. Common decency almost got me out of the bar, but not quite. “I married
Nick Paris in my sophomore year at Radcliffe. I had an old Boston name and no money. He was rich and crazy. I knew about the rich but not the crazy.” She scraped a fingernail across the surface of her glass. “I wanted to be Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mr. Rios. Instead, I became a crazy rich man’s wife. And a minor poet.” She stared at me as if trying to remember who I was. “What is it you want from me?”
“Who killed Hugh?”
“Oh, that. Why do you think anyone killed Hugh. He was quite capable of killing himself.”
“And you would rather be dead but here you are, alive and well.”
“Alive, perhaps. I can’t help you, darling. I was bought and paid for long ago.”
“By whom?”
“Surely you know enough about this family to know by whom. When I married Nick his parents were horrified by my poverty, tried to buy an annulment but by then I was pregnant with Hugh. We came out to California and things were fine for awhile. Christina, my mother-in-law, treated me quite well. And Jeremy, of course, I was quite fond of.”
“Your brother-in-law.”
She nodded. “Then it went bad.” She lit a cigarette.
“What happened?”
“Christina wanted a divorce. Her husband wouldn’t hear of
“Of course. The marriage was working for him. He had what he wanted from the family — money, power, prestige. And he treated her like a chattel and his sons like less than that. He is, you know, a malevolent human being.”
“I gathered.”
She looked at me. “Hugh tell you some stories? I assure you, there are worse.” She expelled a stream of cigarette smoke toward her reflection in the barroom mirror. “Then they were killed, Christina and Jeremy.”
“Do you know where they were going at the time?”
“To Reno. Christina was to obtain a divorce. Jerry went for moral support. It was all very conspiratorial. They left early in the morning without telling the judge, but he found out. The next day they brought the bodies back.”
“He killed them.”
“Do your own addition,” she said. “Nicholas was already sick by then. He really loved Jeremy and after Jeremy’s death he deteriorated pretty quickly. Perhaps not so quickly as to warrant that lunatic bin, but that’s a matter for the doctors to dispute.”
“And what happened to you?”
“I was having an affair at the time,” she said, “and Paris — the judge — hired an investigator to document my indiscretion. He demanded that I agree to a divorce and renounce my rights to Nick’s estate. Unfortunately, I had acquired a taste for wealth, so I was desperate to salvage something. And, as it happened, I had a pawn to play.” She touched a loose strand of hair, tucking it back.