Wilde Lake(54)

Then Sunday evening comes and it’s like a bad storm front sweeping through. Much of this is due to Penelope’s anxiety over school, which reminds Lu of her own struggles with math, although she was in high school before she hit the wall. Still, she develops a sympathy stomachache as Penelope heads tearfully to bed. Penelope continues to rail at the unfairness of it all. Why does she struggle in math when Justin doesn’t? Yet Justin is not bothered by his problems in spelling, while Penelope excels in anything to do with language. They are, more than one person has noted, very much like their parents. People even think they see Lu in Penelope’s features. It’s funny how suggestible people are. They see a woman with two children and they begin to see resemblances that are not there, can never be there. And yet—Lu does see herself in Penelope’s temperament. She is competitive, more competitive than Justin. She loves to argue. Even in math, she wants to debate. The answers seem arbitrary to her. Lu understands, although she is baffled by her daughter’s resistance to geometry. Lu loved geometry, with its clear-cut rules and elegant proofs.

Penelope and Justin have adjoining rooms in the new wing of the house, upstairs from Lu’s. Until recently, she would find one of them in the other’s bed most mornings. They are still close. But they are turning out so differently. Penelope is that odd combination of baby-girl and forty-year-old divorcée, while Justin seems to live happily at the bull’s-eye of eight-year-old boyhood. Penelope often reminds Lu of Noel’s mother, that hard little number in her tennis whites. But tonight, Penelope is her baby self and she needs to be rocked to sleep. Lu almost falls asleep at the same time, but catches herself, snatching up her head in a whiplash of awareness. Almost nine o’clock. She should talk to her father.

He is in his study, enjoying one last glass of wine, not yet drowsing as he often is at this hour. This room feels like a time capsule for a time that never was, a false memory of genteel contemplation—the globe of red wine, opera on the stereo. Her father, like Lu, used to fall asleep while putting his children to sleep. The days are long, but the years are short, that old cliché. The years are long, too. Will her father even remember the events of forty years ago?

“A woman came to see me,” Lu says without preamble. “Eloise Schumann. She said you’d know her as Ellie Cabot.”

“So that’s why you’ve seemed so distracted all weekend,” he says. “Or abstracted, as Teensy likes to say.”

Has she been distant? She thought she had just been enjoying her time with the twins, fully present. Sure, sometimes her mind wandered, but it was to the McNally case, not that woman outside the courthouse.

“She was waiting for me, in the parking lot at work Friday. She thinks Ryan Schumann deserves a posthumous pardon.”

“She never stops. She’s like that”—he pauses, one of those pauses that grip Lu’s heart. Her father’s pauses are more suspenseful than any horror movie with a racing soundtrack. His pauses, to paraphrase Whitman, contain multitudes. When does groping for a word become the first signpost on the road to dementia? She thinks, bizarrely, of the sign on Interstate 70, the one that shows the mileage to Columbus, St. Louis, and Denver for no reason she can fathom. How far out are they? When will they get there?

But he finishes strong: “Pink bunny, the Energizer. She goes on and on and on. Although she’s always beating a slightly different drum. What is it this time?”

“This time?”

“What’s her latest reason for claiming Ryan Schumann is innocent?”

“She—oh, she . . . Wait, is she the witness? The one who came forward in 1978 and accused you of violating Brady?”

“Yes, and she did talk to me back during the original case. But she didn’t say she was a witness.” He chuckles. “She claimed she did it.”

“What?”

“After her second story was shot down, she told yet another one. She said she was at the rest stop where Sheila Compson was dropped off. She said she told Sheila Compson it would be safer if they hitchhiked together as darkness was coming on. According to her, Sheila had pot—in a rucksack, just like the rucksack Schumann kept claiming the girl was carrying—and they hiked into the woods to smoke. And, according to Miss Cabot, Sheila Compson became violent and tried to attack her. She jumped on her and she pushed her off. Sheila Compson hit her head on a rock and died. According to this young woman. Who was, by the way, eight inches shorter and thirty pounds lighter than Sheila Compson. But we humored her. We told her to take us into the woods and show us the body. She couldn’t do it. She didn’t even pick the right rest stop. So, no, our office did not provide her testimony during the discovery phase because it was false. I was doing a professional kindness not sending them down that rabbit hole.”

“Why would she do this?”

“Women fall in love with killers all the time. Girls still love bad boys, that’s never going away. And she was very young. Nineteen, I think? Eighteen? Saw his photo in the paper, I guess, and decided she loved him. And you say she’s calling herself Eloise Schumann now. Did she really marry him or is that another fiction?”

Lu is ashamed to tell her father that she didn’t even think to check for a marriage license. He wouldn’t have made the same mistake. “I probably should.”

“So he’s dead,” her father continues. “He was only . . .”—that pause again. “He was only twenty-six when he was on trial. So born 1950. Lived to almost sixty-five, then. Spent more than half his life in prison. Yet he never told us where the body was. I asked him. I asked him every year until I retired. He always said, ‘I can’t say.’ Won’t, I would correct him. You won’t say. Oh, I understood he didn’t know exactly. The woods near that rest stop were vast. Where is she, Mr. Schumann? Sheila Compson’s parents died, denied the ritual of burial. Now he’s dead. Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t really feel anything for him.”