“Is Miranda covering this too?”
“She’s just observing. She is my mother.”
“You don’t say,” he said with a nod. “You don’t say. Wouldn’t have thought Miranda was old enough to have a daughter your age.”
“Me either,” I said. When I later told my mother this, she smiled, sweetly appreciative. I’d planned to have dinner that night with my mother at Aria, an old-style Italian restaurant that had been around since her reporter days. She asked if we should include Claire, Felicity’s aunt. I didn’t want to. I just wanted Miranda all to myself, as a mentor, but mostly, right now, as a mother.
I wanted to have a long and lingering conversation with Miranda, this time telling her all the details of how fast it all failed. I wanted my mother to comfort me. She’d never met Sam, but only seen him in court, so she would say that his sophisticated exterior hid a thug’s heart. She would say,He’s not good enough for you. She’d be wrong. But I could not tell her why he’d ended it. (Imagine telling my mother, or Patrick, about the reservoir! Then they could disown me too!)
So, of course, I did agree to ask Claire to join us for dinner.
When we arrived, the place smelled spicy and enticing, like the inside of a saucepot just lightly infused with citrus. We ordered a bottle of wine, and all I could drink was one sip, though I downed glass after glass of ice water and put an embarrassing dent in the loaf of home-baked French bread. Claire and my mother polished off the whole bottle of Barolo with gusto. I was glad I was the one driving. Unable to really talk about what was on all our minds, and unable to really talk about the reasons we couldn’t talk about it, we sat there and picked at our manicotti, discussing how humid the day had been, in the way of true Midwesterners who never pass up a chance to analyze the weather.
Like a pitcher that filled and spilled and filled again, Claire couldn’t stop crying. She and my mom were now best friends linked by empathy and eau-de-vie and would seemingly remain in touch forever (this turned out to be true), so my mother also shed tears. This cozy dinner out felt less like a respite and more like a punishment. As hungry as I was, eating seemingly nonstop, my reaction to stress, it felt like a gross indecency to swallow in Claire’s presence.
My part of the dinner ended early, as I went back to Nell’s. Wildly sad, unable to bear one more ping-pong game of what-if-he-this? and what-if-he-that?, I escaped into another ocean of sleep. I don’t know what my mother and Claire did, but they certainly did not resemble daisies the next morning.
On cross-examination, Sam, in a rather gentle fashion, asked how the doctor felt about such a “mistake” as to certify Emil Gardener’s death. Moira McDermott sighed again. “I am definitely not happy about it. But I am not guilt ridden either. This was an understandable mistake.”
“Maybe,” Sam said. “Understandable but not unavoidable.”
“That’s why we do autopsies.”
“Does it mean that this death could have been accidental?” Sam asked. “It definitely could have been a suicide. It could have been a heart attack.”
She said, “It could have been a heart attack. Mr. Gardener suffered from arteriosclerosis and had heart damage from a previous cardiac event. But other factors don’t point to that.”
“Such as what?”
“Such as the undressed state of the body. It’s not consistent with a sudden heart event.”
“But suicide?”
“Emil Gardener would have had to take off all his clothing and then swallow some kind of poisonous agent,” the medical examiner said. “It’s not done. It’s not human nature. People who commit suicide are not unaware that somebody will find their remains. Even if it’s an impulsive act, and it’s always an impulsive act, even if it’s planned, even if the person suffers from bipolar illness or some other illness. Especially for an older person, for a man, who was not affected by drugs or alcohol, this would be very unusual behavior.”
“But you don’t know, really, if Emil Gardener was inebriated or had used drugs. That is, with respect, one of the many things you don’t know, even after an autopsy. He could have been drunk. He could have used drugs, correct?”
Dr. McDermott sighed again, gustily. “According to his family, Mr. Gardener was an abstainer. He never drank alcohol. He never had. He never used drugs. He never had. His daily prescription medication, a diuretic, a statin, an aspirin, that was all he used. He smoked a cigar once a year at Christmas.”
“He could have been a secret smoker, though,” Sam said. “He could have been a secret drinker.”
“There was no evidence of that, in his lungs or his liver. Not at all.”
The prosecution called Karen White, the first detective to interview Felicity. Israel Ronson played a portion of the videotaped interview. While not in tears, Felicity was visibly upset, removing her glasses to press her splayed fingers against her eyes, asking repeatedly for water. When the detective asked if Felicity wanted a lawyer present, and if she had one in mind, she said, “Why? I’m not a suspect, am I?”
“You haven’t been charged with anything, Felicity.”
“Do I need a lawyer?”
“This is just an informational interview. I’m just offering you the option of having someone here to look after your interests.”
“Are you going to charge me with something?” Felicity said. “I know how this must look but really, I don’t know how any of this happened.”
She admitted to knowing both men and to asking for help from Cary Church to move Emil Gardener’s body. As I watched, I could see Felicity’s cloudless composure return, like that cloak of feathers she told me about so long ago that protected the goddess Freya from her enemies. Her voice no longer faltered. She answered each question clearly and concisely. After a while, sheasked to make a phone call. Not long afterward, Sam showed up in the room.
How had she chosen Sam’s firm? Was it because of her former boss, Jack Melodia? How would she have known about their connection, for she had no reason to know it? It was only because Felicity had a business card that had been tacked to a corkboard in the dressing room at Ophelia. She had not expected to ever need it, and had, until that moment, forgotten about it. She met Sam, and I met Sam, by mere chance, or perhaps kismet. Much later, when I saw some of her things laid out on a tabletop, I would notice how she had neatly laminated the card with a layer of clear tape. A long time afterward, Angela Damiano would say of this happenstance that the stars had aligned, and then hastily point out that she didn’t believe in fate, astrology, or any of that claptrap—and that she believed only in saints, especially St. Catherine, not necessarily in God.
When the video clip ended, Sam called Marta Vincent, the older woman who’d known Felicity for so many years—who had, in fact, babysat for her when Felicity was a little child, even before I knew her. What was there to say? That she was cute and bright and polite? That she loved animals? That it was impossible to imagine this gentle girl growing up to harm anyone? The same could be said of most people. When his turn came, Israel Ronson seemed intent almost on reproving her. “You knew Felicity Wild as a child,” he said.
