Clock Winder - Anne Tyler [45]
“Oh, I see,” his mother said.
She never gave any explanation for throwing the inkbottle. She had Elizabeth replace the pane immediately, and Alvareen washed the stain from the curtain. And in restless moments, pacing the bedroom or waiting out some silence among her family, she still said, “Where is Elizabeth? Why isn’t she here with us?” Matthew watched closely, less concerned for his mother than for Elizabeth herself, but if anything she seemed closer to Elizabeth now than before. He saw her waiting at the kitchen window for Elizabeth to come in from staking roses; he saw her reach once for Elizabeth’s hand when they met in the hallway, and hold onto it tightly for a second before she gave a little laugh at herself and let it go. The inkbottle settled out of sight in the back of Matthew’s mind, joining all the other unexplainable things that women seemed to do from time to time.
He didn’t believe what Elizabeth had told the police. Too many parts of it failed to make sense. It came out very soon that she and Timothy must have driven downtown together, and then a neighbor of Timothy’s said she had heard people quarreling, and the police discovered a long distance call that had been made to Elizabeth’s family. “I was with him but left, and then came back,” Elizabeth said. Well, that was possible. If they had had an argument she might have stormed out and then changed her mind later and returned. But what would they argue about, she and Timothy? And when had she been known to leave in a huff? And if she did leave, was she the type to come back?
One of the things he had long ago accepted about Elizabeth was that she didn’t always tell the truth. She seemed to view truth as a quality constantly shifting, continually reshaping itself the way a slant of light might during the course of a day. Her contradictions were tossed off gaily, as if she were laughing at her stories’ habit of altering without help from her. With the police, now, she confined herself to a single version, remodeled only once when they discovered her earlier visit. Yet there were points at which she simply shut up and refused to answer. “You apparently don’t realize that you could be in serious trouble over this,” the policemen said. But that was where they were wrong. She must have realized, to have stopped so short rather than spin whatever haphazard tale came to mind.
“Where did he get the gun?” they asked.
“I don’t know.”
“It just came out of nowhere? What were you two arguing about?” “Arguing?”
“Why were you shouting?”
“Shouting?”
“Miss.”
Elizabeth looked at them, her face expressionless.
“Why did you call home?”
“To say hello.”
“Was that during the earlier visit?”
“Of course.”
“Did the argument arise from that phone call in some way?”
“Argument?”
They gave up. There was no doubt it was a suicide—they had the powder burns, the fingerprints, the statement of his professor providing motivation. Elizabeth was only the last little untied thread, and although they would have liked her to finish wrapping things up they had never thought of her as crucial. They layered death over with extraneous interviews and coroners’ reports and legal processes until Timothy himself was all but forgotten. Then, almost as an afterthought, they declared the case closed. The deceased could be buried, they said. That was the end of it.
“Mother,” Matthew said, “come drink this tea.”
“In a minute.”
She was standing by the window, moving a plant into a pool of sunlight.
“I’ve been talking with Elizabeth,” Matthew told her.
“Oh?”
“She wants to leave her job.”
Mrs. Emerson’s hands dropped from the flowerpot. She straightened her back, so that her sharp shoulderblades suddenly flattened.
“She’s going to wait till after the funeral, though,” he said.
“But leaving! Why? What did she say about me?”
“Well, nothing about you.”
“Did she say I was the cause?” “Of course not.”
“She must have given you a reason, though.”
“No. Not really,” Matthew said.
His mother turned. Her eyes, when she was disturbed, never could rest on one place;