Wilde Lake(93)

Eloise is a middle-aged woman and while she looks younger than her age, she still looks like a middle-aged woman. She was wearing what I think of as a Chico’s ensemble—a striped T-shirt dress, a little too long on her tiny frame, bright red Toms, which are not the most practical walking shoes for this terrain. But as she spoke about Ryan, her voice was as light and high as a teenager’s. She had held these memories close for so long.

“There was blood on the sandal,” I reminded Eloise.

“Well, like I said, she hit her head. But it was an accident.”

“But the sandals were in her rucksack. She was wearing a different pair of shoes. That’s what frustrated you and Ryan so much. The things he told the truth about, no one believed. You hit her, didn’t you, Eloise? You hit her from behind, with her own shoe, and you thought it was back in the rucksack you tossed later. You killed her and Ryan covered it up for you and then neither of you knew how to make it stop. He was an accomplice, once he hid that body, so the only thing he would gain if you came forward was a reduced sentence for testifying against you. You tried to do the right thing, I guess. You told my father that you saw her at the concert, then you told the story about the accident, claimed he had withheld it from Ryan’s defense counsel. You kept trying to figure out how to get Ryan a new trial without incriminating yourself. That’s why you want a posthumous pardon. He spent his life in prison because of you, for you. The pardon isn’t for Ryan. It’s for you.”

Eloise Schumann shrugged, blithe as a teenager discovered in a minor lie.

“Like you said, if we told the truth, we both would have ended up in prison. He always said, ‘What’s the point in that?’ But those other truck drivers, they said there wasn’t a rucksack and there was. They didn’t tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He deserved a new trial. Because there was a rucksack and the shoe did roll out. All those things were true.”

Ah, the rucksack. How had two witnesses gotten the rucksack wrong, made the mistake about her shoes? Could be the cops, could be someone in my father’s office. They might have been led during the interviews. But I don’t think my father suborned perjury, not over so trivial a thing. He was a good lawyer. He could have knocked the rucksack down six different ways. No, I think my father repeatedly spoke to a young woman who was giving him every reason to believe she had been involved in a murder—and his mind rejected the notion. My father, the great protector. He married a fragile woman who needed him, tried to save her. In his mind, he also was saving Nita Flood from her own impossible story. A girl could not be raped by a boy with whom she had been having sex for more than a year. He was not that different from Don Quixote—Don Quexana, actually. The translations vary, as does the spelling of Quexana’s name, but they all agree on one thing: after Don Quexana spent all those years of reading courtly tales, about knights and the fair maidens they saved, his mind dried up.

“I want that posthumous pardon,” Eloise said. “It’s the least you can do.”

“You can’t get that unless you tell the truth. And there’s no statute of limitations for murder. The new state’s attorney would be happy to take your confession.” Boy, would she, I thought. Andi had been appointed to the top job, at my recommendation, after I stepped down. “But if that’s what you want, I can make it happen.”

I was lying, of course. Already in my mind, I was imagining my father’s obituary. His triumph in the Compson case, his victory in obtaining a conviction with no body, no evidence but that damn shoe—how could I take that away from him? It was one of the singular triumphs of his legal career and he believed it, always. Whatever mistakes my father made, as AJ said, he never lacked conviction. If his mind balked at the idea of a tiny teenage girl killing another girl, if he did not believe that a young woman could be raped by her boyfriend—well, those were the things he believed. He was a man of a certain generation, a man of his time. We always want our heroes to be better than their times, to hold the enlightened views we have achieved one hundred, fifty, ten years later. We want Jefferson to free his slaves and not to father children with any of them. We want Lindbergh to keep his Nazi sympathies to himself. We want Bill Clinton to keep it in his pants. Martin Luther King Jr., too. And that’s just what we expect of the men. The present is swollen with self-regard for itself, but soon enough the present becomes the past. This present, this day, this very moment we inhabit—it all will be held accountable for the things it didn’t know, didn’t understand.

The things we don’t know, the things we don’t understand.

I did the only thing I could do. I got out my checkbook and wrote one more check for my father’s refurbishment project. I even wrote “interior design consultation” in the memo line on the check. I told Eloise Schumann that she had to report the income, but that’s between her and the IRS. My only job now is to take care of my family. I’m a SAHM and a SAHD—stay-at-home daughter.

Oh, there’s nothing to keep me from practicing law again one day, aside from my willingness to indulge in that little bit of implicit extortion. I assume that’s why AJ killed himself, so I wouldn’t have to figure out if my brother needed to be charged for soliciting Nita Flood’s murder. He was trying to save my career. Or maybe he was trying to save his reputation. He died—oh that word—beloved.