The Prettiest Feathers Read online

  “What is it?” I ask, but already I have the ribbon pulled away and the paper is ripping under my eager fingers.

  “It’s a single piece of music by a man named Julian Cope” he tells me. “You do have a tape player, don’t you?”

  Sarah talks. Her mouth moves, but there is no sound.

  I drop the cassette into my Magnavox and set the speaker control at the midpoint. The tape has barely begun when John walks over and turns the volume higher.

  Recently I returned to Vermont, to the village of Saxtons River. I found what was left of the old house—shutters askew, windows smashed out, sections of metal roof rusting in the waist-deep grass of the front yard. I walked around to the back and up the still familiar incline to my old grove—that trinity of gnarled apple trees. All that remained of my town were a few bits of wood and pieces of metal wire casing.

  At the center of the triangle formed by the trees, I brushed away the dirt, lifted a rock from its resting place, and found the knife. It was still wrapped in several layers of plastic, just as I had left it so many years ago. After the “incident,” the man my mother told me to call Father had concealed it in his sock drawer. The fool. When they slept, I entered and left that house at will, and I knew where everything was kept. I had reclaimed my knife even before their wounds had healed.

  He’s telling me about Julian Cope, saying that this is the best work he has ever done. I’ve never heard of Julian Cope, at least not that I recall. Roger Waters is more to my taste, but I tell John that I love his gift, and “Julian Cope is wonderful.”

  “Is he new?” I ask, but immediately I see that I have made a mistake. I’ve seen it before—that look in his eyes, as if I have let him down. It’s clear that his opinion of me rises and falls in direct relation to my knowledge, or lack thereof, of the things he cherishes.

  Tonight isn’t turning out as I had wished. I had wanted candlelight and compliments, perhaps a caress. And I had wanted to hear his voice, to hear him talking about himself and me and us. But the music is too loud, too disturbing. He says this noise, this piece by Julian Cope, is called “Fear Loves This Place.”

  I wait for it to end, watching him, following his movements around the room as he picks up the artifacts collected at auction sales and put there by my parents. I wonder if he is thinking of them as expressions of my own personality, or if he sees that they are my environment, an explanation for the woman I have become.

  The thrumming of an electric bass joins the percussion. The music fills the room—the tape I bought for Sarah, the homemade dub of the one piece by Julian Cope that I wanted her to hear, the one I will leave behind for Robert to find. But the music in my mind is so much sharper, clearer. There’s nothing to dilute it, no bouncing around among the knickknacks, the antiques, the debris of a life spent waiting.

  He seems distracted—barely looking at me, edging away whenever I come near. What am I doing wrong?

  Sarah pours wine into crystal glasses. She’s wearing her hair up, enabling me to examine the lines of her neck. Her white dress has a high collar with a narrow band of embroidered birds that encircles her throat. White threads on white fabric.

  Her perfume—a foul, cloying scent—seems to shrink the room, making it difficult to breathe.

  He’s wearing black. A silk shirt, slacks with a crisp crease, wing tips. His hair appears freshly trimmed, his cheek newly shaved. I wonder if he’s wearing cologne. I hope I will soon be close enough to know.

  I offer my guest a glass of white wine poured from an antique cut-glass decanter. I hope he notices how beautifully the grooves catch the light—multiplying it and reflecting it back, like a prism—turning a dozen candles into hundreds.

  Sarah smiles, slices cheese, arranges the pieces on a tray. Her mouth is moving the entire time. In the beginning I had trouble seeing her, holding an image of her. She was elusive. Now I can’t hear most of what she is saying, but I know that’s a choice, a conscious decision, that I have made.

  The music grows louder.

  I smile.

  I settle down on the brocade love seat near the display case filled with Chinese porcelains. I am hoping that John will come and sit beside me, but he takes the black leather chair instead.

  He talks about chaos theory. Albert Camus, Vietnam. And then he tells me about the swallows on Washington Street in Boston, and I tell him about the church I attended as a child. Baptist. I went there because the music was so beautiful, especially “Amazing Grace.” I always waited outside the building until services were ready to begin. Someone would pull the rope, and the bell in the tower would ring, calling the parish to worship. I loved watching all the pigeons fly out of the tower. As they scattered across the sky in every direction, it seemed as if the brass of the bell had exploded and splintered. I wondered why the birds never remembered from one Sunday to the next what would happen; why they were always taken unawares. Or maybe they did know. Maybe they accepted their role, and played it.

  John moves toward the small table that holds the wine decanter.

  “Let me pour it,” I say.

  But by the time I reach the table, I see that he wants nothing more to drink. He sets down his glass and turns toward me.

  I tell Sarah, “It is exactly like a dance.”

  “Yes,” she says, but it is a question.

  “This movement of two people toward an event that they both know will happen. Choreography.”

  The music achieves its crescendo—Cope’s pained voice fades, the tape clicks off, the chanting stops—and all is silence again.

  A thousand years pass as John reaches into his pocket and withdraws a knife. Look how innocent it is. It could belong to a Boy Scout or a hunter. It’s almost a toy. No murderer would own such a weapon. But he does.

  Sarah’s mouth isn’t moving, I slip the knife from my pocket and lock the newly sharpened blade into position.

  She looks, first down at the blade, then into my eyes. I know what she sees there.

  I imagine my picture in tomorrow’s newspaper, a headline about the horror, the grisly mess. I think of the cassette tape—and I wonder if Robert will find it. He will know that it is foreign to my taste, but will he guess that it’s a gift from my killer? I wonder, too, about the bowl atop the crystal stem of Johns wineglass, and the fingerprints he has left there. Will he wipe them away before he leaves—and, if he does, what will he use? A piece of the white silk slip torn from under my dress? It’s a shame about the rug—ancient, handmade in Persia. So many hours of painstaking work marred with blood. If only I could fall to the left, and avoid it. I wonder if I will see Liza. Will she have grown, or will she still be an infant? I will look for her, and for Mother and Father, too. There’s so much I want to tell them, and even more I want to ask.

  As the hand holding the knife rises toward me, I understand perfectly.

  “Maxine,” she says.

  “How long have you known?”

  I think of that first day when he came into the shop—asking for Emily and the others. There is no protection that I could have built around myself, no way I could have avoided this night, this moment.

  She doesn’t resist. She extends her arm, but it is more like a gesture of invitation than alarm. I take her hand and draw her toward me, allowing her eyes to lock on mine, to study the absence of blue.

  The tip of the blade makes contact with my skin, finds its place just above the band of embroidered birds. I feel it puncture my throat, then slide sideways, smooth and swift, following the direction of flight. There is no pain, only a dimming of the light and a sense of wonder.

  Both carotid arteries, neatly severed.

  She slumps against me, and I hold her—briefly, but tightly—before allowing gravity to claim her.

  I am no longer afraid, no longer Sarah.

  I feel myself turning into something small and warm and feathered. I am lifting. Rising. Soaring.

  I come back to my body, but Sarah’s spirit doesn’t come back to hers, where
it rests in an unsightly heap on the floor. Blood drips from my hands into a small pool on the Persian rug. It has a slight metallic smell with no hint of lanolin.

  There is blood on my shirt, my pants, my hands. This world is awash in crimson.

  I drop to one knee beside Sarah and brush a fall of hair away from the side of her face. Her profile is almost regal.

  If she were alive, if someone hadn’t killed her—well, it really doesn’t matter. I haven’t the time for speculation.

  I’ll help myself to one of Sarah’s towels. I need a shower to wash away the day.

  BOOK TWO

  Lane

  The call came in at 6:30 Monday morning. The victim was twenty-seven-year-old Sarah Sinclair, my partner’s ex-wife. Robert Sinclair, who also happens to be my former lover, found her.

  Although I’m twenty-five, I’m already assigned to Homicide. That’s about five or six years earlier than anyone else in our precinct has ever made it. Robert and I have been partners since I left the academy. That’s why, when he put on plain clothes and moved over to Homicide, he began a campaign to get me transferred over, too. It took six months to convince the captain that I wouldn’t get in the way and that I’d be good for quotas. Robert knew both points would influence Captain Hanson far more than a recitation of my record (cases cleared, citations for superior service, etc.). Hanson would just chalk those up to the fact that I had a male partner.

  In uniform, I’d been a confident cop, comfortable on the street. So far, feelings of confidence had eluded me in the cramped cubicles of Homicide. I was young, a woman, an intruder. The truth was that Homicide wasn’t ready for me, and I had my own doubts about whether I could handle the job.

  Robert knew that I would be at home. Weekends—from eight o’clock Friday night till seven o’clock Monday morning—we’re on call. Also, I had been battling the flu. Barring a call-out for a homicide, my plans were to take aspirin, drink lots of fluids, and sleep. He phoned me direct.

  “I’m out at the house,” he said, then his voice broke off. I knew that something was wrong; Robert has never been the kind of guy who gets choked up.

  “It’s Sarah,” he said. “Her throat—it’s…”

  I didn’t get it at first. I thought he’d called to tell me that his ex-wife had a sore throat. Then I heard a sound, something in his voice and the way he was breathing, and I realized that he was crying, or about to.

  “Jesus, Sinclair, what’s going on?”

  He was silent for a few seconds, then he said, “I walked in and found her. She’s dead.”

  If a case involves family, a cop can’t handle the investigation—departmental regulations. But his partner can.

  “I’m on my way,” I told him.

  I arrived at Sarah Sinclair’s house just after 7:00 A.M., several minutes ahead of the technicians, police photographer, and medical examiner. The door was open; Robert was sitting in a chair near the body, looking shell-shocked.

  As soon as I saw the carnage on the floor, I walked toward him. He stood up and met me halfway. Without a word, we were in each other’s arms, and I could feel his tears hot on my neck.

  Both carotid arteries sliced open—as if the killer knew exactly where to cut to ensure success. It would have taken her less than two minutes to die, not necessarily from the blood loss, but because the bridge was out. No more oxygen could get to her brain.

  Sarah Sinclair was prettier dead than alive. Alive, she wore that uptight, tense expression so many thin, humorless women have.

  But dead, she looked serene—at peace. It didn’t hurt that she was dressed up for a date. Long white dress. Her gleaming dark hair in an up-do. Wineglasses beside a half-filled decanter on a nearby table. A cassette in the tape player, with the player turned on, and the song—“Fear Loves This Place”—playing over and over. And candles burned down to puddles of wax.

  I had wished this woman dead a dozen times, though not lately. It was about three years earlier when things heated up between Robert and me. He was still married, and he’d just buried his infant daughter. He took Liza’s death in silence at first, pretending that nothing was different, that nothing of any significance had happened.

  He was back beside me in the cruiser the day of the funeral, just a few hours after Liza was put to rest. He showed up for roll call that night just like always, and when we were alone, doing our first tour through the combat zone, he started talking about a missing fourteen-year-old we were looking for. His own daughter was dead, but all he could talk about was someone else’s kid—how we had to find her before some pervert or pimp did.

  It went like that for weeks, then, gradually, he opened up, telling me about Liza. He talked about going into her room just before dawn, intending to check on her and maybe touch her head or kiss her, but finding her lifeless instead, already gone, without even a tear on her cheek. He said she was just lying there in her crib, looking like maybe she was dreaming. But there was something about the stillness of her eyelids that alerted him and made him check her vitals.

  I was surprised when Robert began offering those unsolicited peeks into his personal life, especially since they also involved his inner life. He had an aversion to intimacy, a need to always appear macho. I had never liked him much until he began talking to me, trusting me, telling me about Liza.

  Once he got used to saying sweet things about his daughter, he started bad-mouthing his wife. Until then he had hardly ever mentioned Sarah. Most people meeting him for the first time assumed that he was single. It was as if his wife had no role in his life, no connection to anything he considered essential—although, to tell the truth, there wasn’t much besides police work that mattered to him.

  But when Liza died, Robert became obsessed with finding a place to lay the blame—and it was Sarah’s misfortune to be the most convenient shelf.

  I didn’t discourage him from lashing out at Sarah. I thought sometimes that I should have. But as soon as Robert started opening up, showing me that softer side of him, the side that spoke so tenderly about his daughter, her tiny fingers and intelligent eyes, all my thoughts of him as a boorish, sexist oaf were transformed into desire. A kind of attraction that required me to act, to make some kind of move in his direction, to find out if he was feeling the same thing I was.

  “So what are we going to do about this?” I asked him one night as we neared the end of our shift.

  “About what?”

  “The chemistry. This need to touch.”

  “It isn’t going to happen,” he said, and then he was silent.

  I felt like a fool, like maybe I had only imagined his interest in me. But even while I was thinking that, I knew it wasn’t so. I couldn’t be that wrong about a signal as strong as the one he had been sending.

  After we clocked out, he tried hurrying to his car, walking fast, several feet ahead of me. But I caught up with him and said, “Look, I’m not stopping off for a beer with you guys tonight. I’m going home.”

  By then I had gotten ahead of him and managed to block his path, forcing him to look at me. “I’m going to take a shower and go to bed,” I told him. “You can join me or you can go home.”

  He tried to get around me, but I stayed right in his face. “But if you do go home,” I told him, “I don’t ever want to hear another word about your wife.”

  He maneuvered around me as if I were an annoying obstacle, and nothing more. I wasn’t even certain if he had heard me.

  But he followed me home.

  A few months later we arrived at that same point most illicit lovers reach. When, after making love, the pain of parting started to outweigh the pleasure of being together, I knew that it was time for an ultimatum. I hated feeling like I needed a commitment. I could almost hear Robert thinking, “Right. Typical female.”

  But I did it anyway, and was stunned by his response: “Of course I’ll tell her,” he said.

  I had steeled myself for rejection. But there he was, telling me that we were going to be togethe
r. Or so I thought. I should have listened more carefully. He had said that he’d tell Sarah about us, and that was exactly what he meant.

  After his announcement, he made no move to leave her—he might still be there if she hadn’t finally thrown him out. She was classy about it; wrote me a polite little note inviting me to come over and help him pack.

  Robert didn’t wait for my help. A day later he showed up at my apartment with a carload of survivalist magazines, hunting equipment, clothes, and seven or eight guns. It wasn’t the joyful moment that I had imagined it would be. Then, about six months after his divorce was final, he returned to Sarah. Although their reunion wasn’t permanent, the damage it did to me was. Things were never the same between us again.

  For the most part, we ended up like all other cops who are thrown together for eight hours every workday. We got on each other’s nerves, ran out of things to say, and served as living proof that familiarity really can breed contempt. The only difference between us and them was that we also slept together from time to time. But it got to where it wasn’t happening very often, and when it did, we were barely able to look each other in the eye afterward. So it ended.

  What was left was friendship—the indestructible kind that comes from going through a war together. Although the battles we fought were on the streets, not in some slimy jungle, they were just as deadly, and had forged a strong bond between us.

  Robert

  Sarah is dead.

  I can barely think those words, let alone say them. But there are three more words that are even worse: Sarah was murdered.

  Hours before it happened, I was sitting in my car a block away from her house, watching the front of the building. No one went in; no one came out.

  I was on my own time, and in my own car, so I reached into the Styrofoam cooler on the floor in front and grabbed another beer. Of course, it wouldn’t have made any difference if I’d been on duty, in uniform and in a patrol unit. When I want a brew, I have one. They know what to do with their procedure manual.