Red Leaves by Paullina Simons
Carefully, Spencer said, ‘Maybe he got attached to Kristina.’
Katherine scoffed, ‘Not so much that he wasn’t willing to ruin everything he had going for him.’
‘Maybe he was willing to risk everything because he loved her.’
‘Yeah? Well, where is he now, if he loved her so much?’
‘Thank God he’s not around,’ said Spencer, feeling strangely bothered. ‘Just one more loose end.’
Katherine said, ‘You think that because he might have loved her it was okay? As if that justifies everything? Anything?’
‘Not at all. It justifies nothing. He is despicable,’ said Spencer fiercely.
Katherine groaned with despair.
‘Forget him, Mrs Sinclair,’ said Spencer intensely. ‘Nathan is unfathomable to us. But you’re not. You loved your kids. Please don’t blame yourself. There are many parents who treat their children much worse than you treated yours and yet nothing like this ever happens. It was just a freak thing.’
‘I don’t believe you, Spencer.’ Katherine called him by his first name. ‘We breed what we plant. We reap what we sow. It’s not an accident, and you and I both know it. I just don’t know what I could’ve done to prevent it from happening.’
‘Nothing,’ said Spencer. ‘It was just an accident.’
‘It’s not an accident. If I were dead, it would be an accident. It’s not an accident. It’s my life.’
When it was time to go, Spencer got up and kissed Katherine on the cheek. ‘Good-bye, Mrs Sinclair.’
She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him to her. ‘Spencer,’ she whispered to him, her thin hand reaching up and touching his face. She touched his cheeks, his eyes, his lips, his cropped hair; she circled his eyes again and again with her long dry fingers. ‘Spencer,’ she repeated. ‘Promise me something. Promise me,’ she said before he had a chance to reply, ‘that you will find who killed her.’
Spencer recoiled, but Katherine pulled him back. ‘I know somebody murdered her, I know you wouldn’t be here unless my baby was murdered. Promise me you will not rest till you find him,’ she whispered.
Spencer tried to extricate himself, but she held on to his arm. ‘Please, Spencer, promise me.’
‘I promise,’ he said, sighing, pressing his forehead against her hair. ‘I promise.’
While driving back to Hanover, Spencer stopped feeling sorry for himself, stopped lamenting his dead wife. He actually began to consider himself lucky. Compared to a blind woman who had lost everything she ever loved, he was lucky.
In the three-hour trip back to Hanover, Spencer thought, God, I’m just like Katherine, behind a window, in a small room, looking out with unseeing eyes, wondering where my life went wrong, wondering what I ever did to make my life go so wrong.
But I don’t want to give up on my life just yet. I don’t want to give up on it. There is still a bit of it left, and I’m not blind, and I’m not dead.
CHAPTER NINE
Red Leaves
Spencer slept poorly in his Hanover Inn bed after a night of drinking. The goose-down quilt was too hot, the pillows were too many, the sheets were too crisp.
In the morning he felt thinner and older when he put on his only suit to go and bury a girl he had known mainly in death.
It was windless, sunny, and bitterly cold out. The snow was iced into the silver ground. The tips of the trees barely moved at Pine Knoll Cemetery on the outskirts of Hanover. Howard had bought a beautiful plot on a raised plateau amid the tallest pines, which stood majestically over Kristina’s grave. Spencer thought it was appropriate for her to be buried in a place similar to the one where she had died. Appropriate, yet eerie. Spencer wouldn’t want to be her, looking up at the pine trees that she had seen on the edge of death.
About three hundred people turned out for Kristina’s memorial service at Rollins Chapel, the Dartmouth College church. There were too many people to fit inside, and many had to stand outside in the cold, just to watch her coffin being carried into the church and then back out. Albert, Jim, Frankie, and Howard were among the six pallbearers. The ornate coffin was black lacquered oak with brass handles. Howard had spent a lot of money to have Kristina buried in style.
A gaunt and restrained Jim Shaw eulogized Kristina. He looked somber but didn’t cry. His voice did not break. After he was done, he sat far away from Albert and Frankie.
Then the vice captain of the Big Green women’s basketball team stood up and lifting her hand high up in the air, said that Dartmouth basketball would never be the same without Kristina’s hair in her opponents’ faces. That Dartmouth basketball would never be the same without Kristina.
The women from Red Leaves tried to speak but were too emotionally overcome, except for a girl named Evelyn, who lumbered up to the altar with her twin infant sons, showed them to the coffin, and wailed, ‘Krissy, they let me keep my babies. Thank you. They let me keep them.’ Sobbing, she was led away by her father.
Albert wore a dark suit, with a dark shirt and tie. His hair was tied back with a shiny black ribbon. Black sunglasses adorned his face. He didn’t get up to speak, and what must have seemed odd to everyone else felt right to Spencer.
He wanted to talk to Albert.
Spencer’s mouth went dry. He didn’t care about propriety anymore. There was a young girl held in custody, awaiting a trial for her life, and there was another girl dead because this man had consumed them both, this orphan who, with his orphaned heart, had ruined a whole family. What was Spencer to do? He didn’t know. But he had promised Katherine Sinclair he would do something.
The burial service at Pine Knoll was slow and less well attended. About a hundred and fifty people, including Spencer, Will, and Chief Gallagher.
Albert wore no overcoat. He stood near the priest with his head bowed. He held something in his hands. Standing behind him, Spencer couldn’t see what it was.
Spencer wondered, looking at Albert’s back, if Nathan Sinclair regretted Kristina’s dying. He wondered if Albert had maybe loved her, too, and been swept away by her long dark hair and her beautiful eyes, swept away by her heart that sacrificed her whole family for him. Did Albert, too, save match-books from Edinburgh?
Spencer didn’t have to wait long to get his answer. Albert came up to the closed coffin, knelt down, brushed the flowers off the top, and tried to lift the cover. The priest and Howard Kim stopped him. What are you doing? they said. Stop, stop. He shook them off, his own shoulders convulsing. Her coat, he said quietly. It’s her coat. I want to cover her with it. It
was one of her favorite things. Please let me cover her with it. She’ll be cold.
They helped him unlatch and lift the coffin cover, and with trembling hands, Nathan Sinclair placed Krishna’s maroon coat gently, tenderly into the casket, and then pressed his fingers to his lips in a final kiss.
After the funeral, Spencer checked out of the Hanover Inn and drove to Long Island. He didn’t talk to Nathan Sinclair.
Will and Ken Gallagher had approached Spencer to talk him out of going. Gallagher promised him a raise and his own office, while Will appealed to their friendship, but Spencer flatly refused. He was finished with Hanover.
At home, however, there were more urgent matters. His family was together but not intact. A few days earlier, a deranged madman had shot up a Long Island train car full of people coming home from work, killing six and maiming nineteen. Spencer’s brother Patrick had been in the train car. He had been wounded in the shoulder and was to spend several weeks at the Stony Brook hospital. He didn’t die, and this was the only thing the family talked about during dinner for many weeks. Though Spencer had not seen anybody in his family for five years, he sat down with them at their rectangular wood dinner table that reminded him of Collis Café at Dartmouth. Spencer sat down in his old seat, and was served food and was talked to, and was treated as if nothing had ever happened, as if he had never left.
He thought it felt just right.
He lived with h
In the course of the following year, he went back to New Hampshire several times while the New Hampshire v. Constance Tobias case inched toward trial. Fortunately, the courthouse was in Concord, not Hanover.
Whatever troublesome doubts Spencer had about Conni’s guilt were relieved before he could take the stand. With the trial due to begin on the anniversary of Kristina’s death, Constance Tobias, through her attorneys, pled momentary lapse of reason and was sentenced to five to fifteen years for voluntary manslaughter, which was less than the twenty-five to life for murder two, and much less than the life without parole for murder one. Her lawyers knew it was a good deal, and Conni took it.
With Frankie Absalom a reluctant witness for the prosecution, all the defense team could do was continue to say she hadn’t done it, but Conni did not have an alibi. She couldn’t even say she was sleeping or in the bathroom or studying. She didn’t have an alibi. And she had a motive.
Nathan Sinclair testified to that for the grand jury. Albert Maplethorpe testified to that.
Jim Shaw, a hostile witness for the prosecution, if there ever was one – he had gone to the local courts in Delaware to try to quash the grand jury subpoena – was forced to say under threat of perjury and jail that he knew of the incident the year before Kristina’s death when Conni pushed Kristina off the bridge.
Conni Tobias pled voluntary manslaughter, committed under the influence of drugs, alcohol, or uncontrollable emotional forces.
Spencer was glad he did not have to testify and reveal to the defendant Constance Tobias that the crime she had committed was for a scoundrel and a wasted life, though he was prepared to tell the truth on the stand about Nathan Sinclair.
Spencer’s relief at the plea bargain was short-lived. At the sentencing, Spencer saw Nathan outside the courtroom, deftly fielding questions from reporters. He looked well and smug in his smart suit and with his slicked-back hair. Slimed back, thought Spencer, as he walked up behind Nathan, who was in the middle of some long-winded, pseudo-intellectual answer about the dangers of reason on an emotional heart, and whispered fiercely, ‘I know all about you, Nathan Sinclair.’
And then Spencer continued walking down the court steps. The best part was turning around and seeing Nathan’s face, its usual inscrutable blank stare twisted. Nathan stopped talking. A few moments later, he got rid of the reporters and rushed down the stairs after Spencer.
‘What did you call me?’ he said.
‘You heard me,’ said Spencer.
‘I don’t think I heard you,’ he said. ‘Now what did you call me?’
Spencer stopped walking and faced Nathan. They were eye to eye. Spencer was a little taller and a little thinner. ‘I spoke to your mother. I know who you are.’
‘Now I know that’s impossible,’ said Nathan. ‘My mother is dead.’
‘No. Katherine Morgan Sinclair is not dead,’ said Spencer.
‘She is not my mother,’ Nathan replied.
Spencer swallowed. ‘No, Clairton, Pennsylvania, huh? What, did you stick a pin on a map to come up with that one?’
When Nathan didn’t answer, Spencer said, ‘You keep in touch with your mother?’
‘I told you she was not my mother.’
‘Who was she, exactly?’
‘Kristina’s mother.’
‘You keep in touch with Kristina’s mother?’
‘Now and then,’ he said evasively, his hands in his suit pockets. ‘What do you need from me, detective?’
‘Nothing, Nathan. Nothing. But Constance Tobias could use something from you – the truth. Don’t you think?’
‘No,’ he said firmly.
‘No?’
‘No. Hasn’t she suffered enough?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Spencer bitingly. ‘Has she?’
‘Yes,’ replied Nathan, not flinching. ‘She has.’
‘I’m going to go back up to the reporters, Nathan, and I am going to tell the world about you.’
‘Fine,’ said Nathan. ‘You’re going to destroy Conni, you’re going to destroy Jim, and you’re going to destroy what little is left of the Sinclair name and family. I am going to be just the same.’
‘But maybe you’ll talk to reporters a bit less.’
‘No, actually, I’ll talk to them a lot more. I’ll be a lot more interesting.’
‘You’re not interesting, you’re pathetic,’ said Spencer.
‘Am I the one trying to hurt a girl going to prison for five years? Who’s the sad one, detective?’
Spencer was surprised at the intensity of his own feelings. He wanted to kill Nathan. He was usually dispassionate, but this time he took it personally, and the feeling didn’t pass. He clenched his fists and gritted his teeth, remaining barely in control.
Nathan smiled.
‘I’m not worth it, detective,’ he said, looking at Spencer’s fists. ‘I’m not worth losing a job over, am I?’
‘You’re not worth losing a night’s sleep over,’ replied Spencer.
Conni Tobias was taken to a medium-security New England prison, and Spencer went back to Long Island, where life was quiet and comfortable. Spencer was glad to have left Hanover behind. It was good to be around family again, except on those occasions when one of his eighteen nieces and nephews would say, ‘Uncle Spencie, how come you don’t have any kids?’
Spencer went on with his life as best he could, as if he had never left Long Island, never lived in a little town called Hanover, and never stumbled upon a pleasant black-haired girl named Kristina Kim putting on her black boots in the middle of Main Street. In the beginning, it was almost easy. His days were busy, his nights too – two million people in Suffolk County as opposed to ten thousand in Hanover meant little idle time behind a desk. Local bars took care of his rare free time. Occasionally he went to the movies with his brothers.
But Spencer’s mind wasn’t quiet, his soul wasn’t at peace. In the year after Conni’s sentencing Spencer spent his free time going over the minutia of Kristina’s case. He went over every crumb like a hungry dog looking for food on the kitchen floor.
During the second year, his memory began to dim. He forgot how long Kristina had lain on the ground unclaimed. He forgot about the knee marks on her chest. He forgot how long Conni had been gone from her room. He started to forget the sound of Conni’s squeaky voice, and the look of Jim Shaw.
But Spencer could not forget Nathan Sinclair.
Sometimes Spencer would flash back to a face across from him on the steps of the Concord Courthouse, in the middle of the afternoon, saying, ‘I’m not worth it, detective. I’m not worth losing a job over, am I?’ And the feeling of rage, raw and untamed, would spring back at him.
Spencer had missed something, and he kept going over it in his head, until it became a tic with him that followed him throughout the day and made him sleep badly at night.
Nathan Sinclair. Nathan Sinclair. Spencer wanted to tell him how much Kristina had loved him. How she had loved him more than anything in the entire world, how she had given him everything and risked losing everything to have Nathan near her.
He couldn’t breathe when he thought of Kristina and Nathan Sinclair.
Spencer began dating a fellow policewoman. She was young, very attractive – too attractive for him, Spencer thought. She was ready, and wanting. She was his age, and he agreed with her that it was about time to get back into the human race.
He didn’t like living with himself.
Dreams of Han
Every night Spencer would wake up in a sweat, asking himself the same question over and over.
Could Nathan Sinclair have killed Kristina?
He would then turn on the light, open the top drawer of his nightstand, and take out a torn and many-times-folded sheet of paper to reread the inscrutable words: She makes you will your own destruction.
Then he would throw it back in the drawer and turn off the light.
Kristina’s safety-deposit box screamed her love for Nathan, but oddly, she hadn’t left him her full inheritance, hadn’t even told him she was coming into an astounding sum of money, the kind of money that would mean freedom from grandmothers and Howards, freedom from Conni and Jim, freedom from work. They could have taken that money and flown to St Bart’s, never to be seen again. Why hadn’t she told him?
Not only had she not told him, but the day after her near-fatal crash, Kristina had gone to the bank and specifically made sure he wouldn’t get all of her money. Why?
Had she died intestate, everything would have gone to Nathan, her nearest living relative. Nathan would have had to come out of Albert Maplethorpe’s skin, but to get nine million dollars, he’d have come out and pledged into a sorority.
She makes you will your own destruction.
Kristina had typed the will, gone to the bank, had the will notarized, and put it into her safety-deposit box. It was probably then that she had scribbled the seemingly meaningless words to Nathan.