Free City of Light by Lauren Belfer Page B

policemen, detectives, reporters, and photographers vied for space, unaware of—or ignoring—the strife I had just witnessed. To them I suppose it was simply one more addition to the genre labeled “labor unrest,” whereas the drowning of a world-famous engineer hero in an ornamental lake—well, that didn’t happen every day. Near the lakeshore bandstand, a crowd of twenty or so of the curious had gathered on the promenade. The crowd included more than a few nannies; their small charges, looking fat from layers of blankets, were strapped tightly into wooden sleds. Ponies pulled several of the sleds, the nannies pulled the others. The entire area was covered with dirty snow warmed by the steam of horse manure.
    I made my way down the wide row of steps, the wind at my back, and took my place among the crowd. All these people, come to see where a man had died. They moved along quickly. A nod, an homage—a sense of, well, it wasn’t me , not this time, at least—and the person walked away, replaced by another. The ponies tossed their heads, their harness bells jingling. The clouds were low and dense. All at once I was at the front of the shifting crowd, pressed against the barricade at the edge of the frozen lake. Part of the lake was devoted to skating, the ice smooth and well-tended. The area beyond was roped off, its rough surface marred by hard, irregular snowdrifts. Speyer could not have strayed beyond the ropes accidentally.
    I climbed up a nearby snow mound to see better and tried to imagine the scene as it must have looked to Karl Speyer. Last night, a light, intermittent snow had fallen. Speyer must have thought he’d stepped into a dream: the Spanish turrets, the Greek temples, the far hillsides covered with stone angels spreading their wings. Awe must have filled him. He must have felt taken outside himself to a blessed place where ice never broke—indeed he had walked halfway across the lake. The detectives, stepping gingerly on strategically placed wooden planks, carefully examined the footsteps leading to the break where he had fallen. Speyer was a big man, wearing a bulky coat. In March, the snow-covered ice could be unpredictably treacherous. A stream moved beneath the surface, the Scajaquada Creek, flowing from the cemetery to the Niagara River.
    What did it feel like, to fall through the ice? To sense a heavy winter coat become heavier with a weight of water? How long did he struggle—searching for a bit of air, frantically scraping his soon-bloody fingernails against the ice to dig himself out, disoriented finally, unable to find the hole where he’d fallen? Could Thomas Sinclair, the husband of my best friend, the father of my goddaughter, have had something to do with such a death?
    The wind shifted. Gradually the sky cleared. Often this happened in Buffalo—the weather changing half a dozen times a day, at the mercy of the winds of Lake Erie. Did I have a responsibility to go to the police to report Speyer’s meeting with Tom, to disclose Tom’s lie? Not yet, my intuition told me … I would watch and wait, and learn what I could, before betraying Margaret’s husband, Grace’s father. All at once sunlight glared off the ice, blinding me.
    “See anything?” asked a man’s voice directly behind me on the snow mound.
    Startled, I lost my balance, slipped, and instinctively reached for the man’s arm to keep myself from falling.
    “Forgive me for surprising you.” His voice was refined, with the unmistakable inflection of the elite. I released his arm and smoothed my skirt. “See anything out of the ordinary?” he asked again.
    Instead of answering immediately, I gazed out at the lake. We hadn’t, after all, been introduced. “No, I don’t see anything.”
    “Ah. Too bad.”
    The man bounded down the snow mound and I appraised him quickly. He appeared to be a gentleman, but a man of the arts rather than of business, judging from his tweed trousers and the longish cut of his coat.