Free The Evidence Against Her by Robb Forman Dew Page A

household.
    It was also Mrs. Longacre’s sudden presence in the household that seemed to quell any possibility of joy Catherine Claytor still harbored. She was sullen and broody in the company of this other woman, insisting to her husband and her children that Mrs. Longacre was robbing them blind, that she had made off with two of Catherine’s grandmother’s silver spoons.
    “Catherine!” their father had exploded one evening, as she fell once again into this litany, and the children froze at his tone. It was in the first year Mrs. Longacre had taken over the running of the house. “What on earth can you be thinking? She has no use in the world for your silver spoons! She has
plenty
of silver spoons in her own house! And if you don’t understand that you must treat her with courtesy . . . She’s agreed to run this house, Catherine. I don’t know what we’ll do if she decides to leave! Her family are fine people. . . .” He sounded helpless for a moment, impatient, and dangerous with frustration. “You don’t seem to understand that it took some persuading. . . . She
agreed
to work for us, Catherine, but Mrs. Longacre
is not your servant!
”
    Catherine turned her head away, her eyes shocked, her mouth trembling, and the children—who just moments earlier had been hating the sound of their mother’s every word—at once turned mutinous against their father. Not one of them said anything, but they had all aimed stunned and reproachful faces his way—even the baby had looked up at him somberly in a dark surveillance. Dwight Claytor took them all in at a glance and slammed out the front door.
    However they felt about her one moment to the next, Catherine’s children did all understand early on that their mother was a victim of circumstance. Howie and Richard certainly believed her when she apologized for and tried to explain some injustice she had visited upon them. She would approach them somberly, bending her serious face to theirs, and wave her arm in a vague gesture and murmur on about this place, this wretched countryside.
    But neither Richard nor Howie remembered a time when he was not primarily connected to the other as an ally or an enemy. Both Agnes and Edson, however, had spent several years as tourists in their own family, isolated simply by their own childhoods, and they had a keener understanding of the fact that their mother resided in a foreign country. And all four of those children had learned from their mother that every square inch of the godforsaken state of Ohio was loathsome. There was simply nothing good that could be said about it.
    “This whole place,” Catherine once said to Agnes with ferocity when Agnes was just a little girl, “is just exactly as skinned looking as a peeled grape. It’s just a hateful place. All bare. The fields . . .” She had gestured widely outward to indicate the land rolling away beyond the yard. “Corn and corn and corn, and the trees as naked as jaybirds! It’s no surprise to me to meet the people who live here. It’s no surprise at all.
Flat-
minded people. No idea of graciousness in the world. Just to think of the sort of people—any people who would live with such weather . . .”
    Her mother had spoken to her conspiratorially, inclusively, but nevertheless, it had been an injury of a sort to Agnes, even then, and as she got older she understood it as one more indictment of her own personality. Because, of course, Agnes
was
a person who lived here, and Agnes suspected that her own thoughts and motives were very likely as insufficiently complicated—as flat and direct—as those of all the other Midwesterners at whom Catherine scoffed.
    Agnes did her best to honor her mother’s desperate grudge against the vast, blank idea of the region, but each year as the seasons changed, she was overtaken time and again by the drama of all the extraordinary Midwestern contrasts of hot and cold. The first morning each year when Agnes looked from