The weight of water - Anita Shreve [55]
Billie, next to me, still has on her Red Sox pajamas. She smells of sleep. She is proud of her misshapen pancakes, and eats six of them. I think it is the one certain way to get Billie — any child? — to eat a meal. Have her cook it herself.
I have on my robe. Rich his bathing suit. Thomas the shirt he slept in. Is it our dishabille that creates the tension — a tension so pronounced I find it hard to swallow? Rich wears the weather report on his face, and we seem excessively focused on the food and on Billie, in the manner of adults who have not found an easy entrée into the conversation. Or who are suddenly wary of conversation: “These are wonderful, Billie. I can see the bear now.” “What kind of coffee is this? It has an almond flavor.” “I love bacon. Honestly, is there anything better on a camping trip than a bacon sandwich?”
Sometimes I watch the way that Thomas watches me. And if he catches me at this, he slips his eyes away so gracefully that I am not sure he has seen me. Is this simply the familiarity of bodies? I wonder. I no longer know with any certainty what he is thinking.
“Do you keep a journal?” Adaline asks Thomas.
I am surprised by the question. Will she dare a reprise of Pearse?
Thomas shakes his head. “Who has so many words that he can afford to spend them on letters and journals?” he asks.
Rich nods. “Tom’s a terrible letter writer.”
I haven’t heard the nickname in years.
“His literary executor will have it easy,” Rich adds. “There won’t be anything there.”
“Except the work,” I say quietly. “There’s a lot of the work.”
“a lot of false starts,” says Thomas. “Especially lately.”
I look over at Thomas, and I wonder if what I see is the same face I knew fifteen years ago. Does it seem the same to me? Is the skin the same? Or is the expression now so different than it was then that the muscles have become realigned, the face itself unrecognizable?
“Is it definite that man did it?”
Adaline’s question startles all of us. It takes me a second to catch up. “Louis Wagner?” I ask.
“Do they know for sure?”
“Some think yes,” I answer slowly, “and some think no. At the time, Wagner protested his innocence. But the crime created a tremendous amount of hysteria. There were riots and lynch mobs, and they had to hurry the trial.”
Adaline nods.
“Even now, there are doubts,” I add. “He hadn’t much of a motive for the murders themselves, for example, and that row from Portsmouth to Smuttynose would have been brutal. He’d have had to row almost thirty miles in the dark. And it was the first week in March.”
“It doesn’t seem possible,” says Rich. “I couldn’t do it. I’m not even sure I could do it on a flat surface.”
“Also, I’ve read parts of the trial transcript,” I say, “and I can’t figure out why the prosecution didn’t do a better job. Maren Hontvedt’s clothes were blood-soaked, but the defense didn’t really pursue this. And the coroner was very careless with the murder weapon — they let the sea spray wash off all the fingerprints and blood on the journey back to Portsmouth.”
“Surely, they had fingerprinting techniques then,” says Rich.
“On the other hand,” I say, “Wagner seems to have no alibi for that night, and the next morning he’s reported to have told people he committed murder.”
“Jean doesn’t always get to pick her assignments,” Thomas says. He sounds apologetic.
“A crime of passion,” says Rich.
“A crime of passion?” Adaline narrows her eyes. “In the end, a crime of passion is just sordid, isn’t it? At heart. We think a crime of passion has a morality all its own — people have thought so for years. History is full of judgments that forgive crimes of passion. But it doesn’t have a morality, not really. It’s pure selfishness. Simply having what you want.”
“I think it’s the knife that makes it seem like a crime of passion,” says Thomas. “It was a knife, wasn’t it?”
“An ax.”
“Same thing. It’s the intimacy. With a gun, you can kill a person at a distance. But with a knife, you have to touch the victim — more than touch. Manhandle. Subdue. It