Free Uncivil Seasons by Michael Malone Page B

would have stretched over a basketball. He added, “Shut the door.”
    Upstairs, while Cuddy fed Mrs. Mitchell a cold hamburger, I told him more about my visit with Joanna Cadmean.
    “She couldn’t be
that
good looking.”
    “That’s not the point, Cuddy. The point is, she knows who killed Cloris. The same person who killed Cloris’s first husband.”
    “How about Cloris’s second husband Uncle Rowell?”
    “Maybe.”
    He said, “I’m kidding.”
    “I’m not.”

Chapter 6
Tuesday, January 18
    I am an insomniac like my father, who wandered around his house at night like a ghost and now, from time to time, visits mine. I have always had to drug myself unconscious with detective fiction: reading on about pure nastiness and someone else’s guilt until I can fall backward into nothing, like in snow. When I awaken in the night, I need to get the light on quickly and find my page before the real mysteries slip in, before I hear voices, before I see ghosts. When I was little, my father would come at my request with what he claimed was a magic stethoscope, and would check for signs of monsters lurking. I did not doubt his power to keep them away.
    This morning I had a nightmare that woke me up. It was pitch-black night in this dream, and I was in our old sailboat out on the lake. Pine Hills Lake is fairly large—seven miles by almost two—but in my dream the lake was boundless, an unshored, black, flat expanse. Out of the silent dark, Bainton Ames’s powerboat suddenly came flying at me, his white bowlight shooting up and down across the water. Then the dream went up to that octagonal turret on top of Cadmean compound. Joanna Cadmean was standing there at its window, wearing the gray suit Cloris Dollard was found dead in. And now Mrs. Cadmean’s eyes did look like a mystic’s, unblinking, crazed. She had her arms out as if she were waiting to embrace someone. I knew it was her eyes making Ames’s boat head toward me. Someone was kicking away from his boat, churning foam. And I jumped too, just as the boat ripped through my bow, and exploded, and flames spumed along the water, rimming me in.
    So, I was awake at five, and rather than fight for sleep until Cuddy came to pick me up, I put on a monogrammed robe Susan Whetstone had given me that I didn’t much like, and, my bare feet tiptoeing on the frigid wood steps, I felt my way down the three flights from my bedroom to my kitchen.
    Most of my salary goes into the mortgage and upkeep and furnishing of a narrow Queen Anne brick house in the south part of Hillston that overlooks the lawn of a women’s junior college, named Frances Bush after its nineteenth-century founder: my house had once boarded her students. Five years ago, after I’d finished law school in Charlottesville, and confused everybody and annoyed Rowell by going to work for the Hillston police, I’d bought the house with money my father left me. No one wanted to live downtown then, and old houses there were cheaper than trailers. Obviously, as had been pointed out to me, it was too much house for a single man. It was also too much house to heat: the rooms were large and had high ceilings, and on each floor a big Victorian bow window sucked in the cold air robustly with a laissez-faire disdain for my modern fuel costs.
    At five, then, in the kitchen, I wrapped myself in a blanket and ate leftover spaghetti while I finished reading the department’s copy of the old coroner’s report on Bainton Ames’s drowning accident that I had started studying before I went to bed, having found it in the vault of old files last night. There was little in it to suggest that Cloris’s first husband hadn’t died exactly as the coroner had concluded: accidental drowning while under the influence of alcohol. His dinner companions that night had confessed that the five of them had drunk five bottles of wine, and everyone knew that Bainton did not normally drink.
    An unlucky accident, people had said, and added,