Free Sandrine's Case (9780802193520) by Thomas H. Cook

nature of my situation settled over me again. How had so clever a fellow ended up like this?
    This was a question I’d asked myself at each stage in the process that had begun with Sandrine’s death. Even late in that legal process I’d kept expecting it to halt. But it hadn’t, and so as Alexandria turned the wheel and we glided smoothly into the driveway of the house on Crescent Road, I could no longer be certain that it ever would.
    â€œEdith’s out sweeping the driveway,” I said drily with a nod to the woman who lived next door, Edith Whittier, long divorced, head-over-the-hedge friend of Sandrine, but nonetheless one of the last people to see her alive, a name recently added to Mr. Singleton’s list of prosecution witnesses. She nodded back, but coolly, and with a hint of repugnance, as if she’d just recently discovered my name on the state’s sex offender registry.
    â€œShe hates me, too,” I said mordantly.
    Alexandria wheeled the car into the driveway. “Ignore her,” she said.
    Once in the house, I went to the scriptorium and read while Alexandria made dinner. I’d been perfectly capable of making dinner but she felt that I needed time to relax after a day in court. She’d been right, and yet even as I tried to lose myself in a book I incessantly replayed Morty’s earlier remark to me, how prejudice could be easily unearthed in a witness. But what would Officer Hill have had against me?
    I mentioned this to Alexandria over dinner.
    â€œDon’t be naive, Dad,” she said.
    â€œWhat do you mean?” I asked.
    â€œShe probably thought you were pretty weird,” Alexandria said bluntly.
    â€œHow could she have thought that?” I asked. “I hardly said a word to her.”
    Alexandria’s eyes whipped over to me. “Well, that’s weird in itself, don’t you think?”
    â€œWhat was I supposed to say to her?” I asked. “Nice night, isn’t it, Officer Hill. Think it’ll rain by the weekend?”
    Alexandria shook her head. “It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. She would have gotten a bad impression, what with the way things look around here, like you and Mom are old hippies.”
    â€œWe were never hippies,” I said. “To begin with, the hippies were way before our time.”
    â€œI’m talking about the way the house has always looked, Dad,” Alexandria said. “Like you and Mom just moved in. Everything scattered around.”
    â€œThe house was untidy so I’m a murderer?”
    Alexandria lowered her eyes to her plate.
    â€œWell?” I demanded.
    She looked at me. “Dad, did you and Mom never notice that when we went to other houses, professors and people like that, they didn’t live like this?” She indicated the adjoining living room, where papers and books and CDs were scattered all about. “The house was always a big mess, just the way it is now. At those other houses everything was neat. Books were put away. You and Mom never noticed that?”
    â€œOh, we noticed those houses, believe me,” I told her. “And you know what, Alexandria? We didn’t want anything to do with the way those houses looked. Everything in its place. Everything scrubbed and polished. We didn’t want that kind of house because we didn’t want that kind of life.”
    â€œYeah, okay, Dad,” Alexandria said somewhat glumly. She returned to her food, toying with the green beans she’d cooked to a mush.
    â€œWhat do you mean, ‘Yeah, okay, Dad’?” I demanded.
    Alexandria faced me. “What else can I say? You don’t ever take anything back. It’s like a point of honor for you to win every argument. Even Mom said that.”
    â€œReally?” I asked sharply. “When did she say this?”
    â€œAbout a month before . . . she died,” Alexandria answered. A vision of Sandrine in her last days