The weight of water - Anita Shreve [86]
“Mommy, is Adaline coming to live with us?”
Billie and I are folding charts and sliding them into Ziploc bags. My daughter likes running her fingers along the seal, the satisfaction of feeling it snap shut.
I crouch down in front of her and sit back on my heels.
“She’s not coming to live with us,” I say. It is meant to be an answer, but it sounds like a question.
“Oh,” Billie says. She looks down at the floor. I notice that water is sloshing over the teak planking.
“Why do you ask?” I put my finger under her chin and lift it just a fraction. There is a note that isn’t entirely parental in my voice, and I think she must hear it. She sticks her tongue out the gap made by her two missing front teeth and stares up at the ceiling.
“I forget,” she says.
“Billie.”
“Um.” She stretches her arms high above her head. Her toes are pointed inward. “Well…,” she says, drawing out the words. “I think Daddy said.”
“Said what?”
She flaps her arms at her sides. “I don’t know, do I?”
Shockingly, tears appear at the lower lids of her eyes.
“Billie, what’s the matter?” I pull her to me and hold her close. I can feel the oilskin, the damp curl of her hair, the plumpness of her legs.
“Why is the boat moving around like this?” she asks. “It doesn’t feel good.”
Louis Wagner’s defense consisted primarily of attempts to answer prosecution questions in order to convince the jury of a reasonable doubt. Why were his hands blistered and the knuckles bruised the day after the murders? He had helped a man lay crates on a fish cart. Where had he been all night? He had had a glass of ale, then had baited nine hundred hooks for a fisherman whose name he didn’t know and who could not be produced at the trial. After that, he had two more mugs of ale and then began to feel poorly. He was sick to his stomach in the street and fell down near a pump. He went back to the Johnsons’ at three o’clock to go to sleep, but went in the back door instead of the front, and did not go up to his bed, but slept in the lounge. Later in the morning, he decided to have his beard shaved, then heard the train whistle and thought to go to Boston. There he bought a new suit of clothes and went to stay at his old boardinghouse in North Street, a place he had lived at several times before. How did he happen to have blood on articles of clothing that he had on the night of the murders? It was fish blood, he said, and also he had stabbed himself with a fish-net needle several days earlier. How did he come by the money to go to Boston and to buy a suit of clothes? He had earned twelve dollars earlier in the week baiting trawls for a fisherman, whose name he did not remember, and the night of the murders had earned a further dollar.
Wagner took the stand in his own defense. Mr. Tapley, counsel for the defense, asked Louis Wagner what had happened to him when he was arrested in Boston.
“When I was standing in the door of the boarding master where I boarded five years,” Wagner answered, “he came along, shook hands with me and said, halloo, where did you come from. Before I had time to answer him, policeman stepped along to the door. He dropped me by the arm. I ask them what they want. They answered me they want me. I asked him what for. I told him to let me go up-stairs and put my boots on. They answered me the slippers are good enough. They then dragged me along the streets and asked me how long I had been in Boston. I was so scared I understand they asked me how long I had been in Boston altogether. I answered him five days, making a mistake to say five years.”
“Did you intend to say five years?”
“Yes, sir. Then they asked me if I could read the English newspapers. I told them no. Well, he says, if you could you would have seen what was in it. You would have been in New York at this