Wilde Lake(50)

It is almost seven before Lu leaves, which means Teensy has fed the twins and her father, technically Teensy’s job, but something that Teensy seems to resent terribly. It has become Brant family legend that Teensy is their boss, that she’s the one who gets to pick what she does and doesn’t do, and all because she chose them over the Closters forty-five years ago. The myth is self-serving. Teensy is probably underpaid and overworked by almost any legal standard. Still, it’s a little frustrating having a housekeeper who resents any housekeeping duties that do not serve the man-of-the-house. Does Teensy consider herself Mrs. Brant, in a sense? It’s not the first time that Lu has allowed herself to consider this. It’s a tantalizing and impossible idea, one she has tried to discuss with AJ, who finds it merely impossible. It’s not that Lu thinks they have sex, her father and Teensy. Even when she came to accept that her father was a sexual being, having discreet dalliances with Miss Maude and others, she could not imagine him with Teensy. Tidewater Virginian that he once was, he resisted, for a time, the new information about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. But when he came to accept the scholarship, he turned on his former idol. During a family outing to Monticello last summer, the docents begged Andrew Brant to withhold his side lectures about Jefferson and Hemings—whom her father, rightly, calls by her real name, Sarah—until the tour was over. And yet—there is a sense that Teensy, still married to the seldom-seen Ron, considers herself the Brant matriarch. On nights such as this, she won’t even leave a plate for Lu.

It has been a bitter winter so far. The cold, when Lu pushes through the employees-only door at the rear of the building, invades her sinuses like some spiky parasite. She gasps at the shock of it, then gasps a second time, startled by a woman emerging from the shadows, moving too quickly, her speed almost menacing, yet her stature so petite that it’s hard to see her as a threat. Unnerving, but not threatening. Lu readies herself for a citizen encounter.

“Lu Brant? Eloise Schumann. I really need to talk to you.”

“I’m headed home,” Lu says automatically. “Monday, perhaps. If you call my secretary—”

“I have been calling your secretary. You never call me back.”

“Well, yes.” Might as well tell the truth. “You never say why you’re calling and I’m afraid I have no idea why you’re calling because I don’t know who you are, despite what you think.”

For a moment, the woman looks angry, insulted. She balls her hands, bare despite the subfreezing temperatures.

“How can you forget Ryan Schumann? It was one of your father’s most famous cases.”

“Schumann?” And finally Lu remembers. Schumann. Shoe. Man. That was his surname, not a nickname bestowed on him by Noel, but an inevitable pun: Shoe Man, Sheila Compson’s killer. The victim’s name is burned into her faulty memory, as is the image of that sandal, balanced on the jury box railing. That was her father’s genius, his intent. To make people remember the girl, even if this was all she had left behind. Humanize the victim, demonize the perp. Ryan Schumann.

“But you’re not his wife,” Lu says, her voice rising with uncertainty. She has a mental image of that woman on the stand, grim and angry. This woman seems too young, no more than ten years older than Lu, which would have made her barely twenty at the time. “How old are you?”

“I’m fifty-five. And I’m his second wife. I married him while he was serving his sentence.”

“While—has he been released?”

“No. He died in prison late last year. Just like your father wanted. Even though he was so sick at the end. He should have been given compassionate leave.”

Lu has no compassion to spare for Ryan Schumann, who not only killed and probably raped a young girl, but refused to tell her parents where they might find her body. Life in prison seems right to her.

“How can I help you?”

“I want a posthumous pardon for him.”

“That seems unlikely.”

“What if I can convince you he was innocent?”

“Even less likely.”

“Maybe you should talk to your father before you make up your mind.”

“My fa—”

“He knew me as Ellie Cabot. Ask him. Ask your father what he knows that he never told anyone. Ask him why he railroaded an innocent man, a good man who never did anything wrong.”

She turns, walking swiftly, but not toward the public side of the parking lot. She heads for the dark, two-lane road that leads to the courthouse, the road that Lu won’t walk even in the daytime. Had she gone there first, in search of Lu, thinking to catch her after the hearing, then walked here, not realizing what a dark, dangerous trudge it was in the winter dusk? Although the woman has done her no harm—seems scarcely capable of doing harm—Lu clutches her coat at the throat. She didn’t think it was possible to feel colder than she did a minute ago, and yet she does.





THE AGE OF REASON


The first time I saw Nita Flood—really saw her, noticed her, who knows how many times I had walked past her before—was on my back-to-school shopping trip to the Columbia Mall in 1978. That is, I was supposed to be shopping for new clothes, which my father would come back and pay for, an arrangement reached after a summer devoted to wheedling and arguing. It was a ridiculous thing to grant an eight-year-old girl, but I think even my head-in-the-clouds father had come to understand it was unfair to entrust Teensy with the oversight of my wardrobe, and he certainly wasn’t up to the job. Witness my hair, worn quite short, cut by a barber, so it had no elfin, gamine quality. If my nickname hadn’t already been Lu, it would have been Lou.