Part 2
Helena felt Noah look at her.
Edmund continued in the measured tone he used at charity dinners and courthouse memorials.
“My daughter-in-law has spent months sorting through private family papers. She has become fixated on the death of my wife. Tonight she attempted to remove original documents from the house. I stopped her from doing so. She became agitated.”
“I was taking my own clothes,” Helena said.
“And several items that did not belong to you.”
“The blue folder belonged to Margaret.”
“My late wife’s possessions belong to her estate.”
Mara’s eyes moved to the leather folder on the dresser.
“That is not the folder he means,” Helena said. “The one I found is in my suitcase.”
Edmund’s composure shifted by less than an inch. His gaze moved toward the dressing room.
Mara noticed.
“No one touches the suitcase,” she said.
“I will not have my home searched because Helena has invented a melodrama.”
“You won’t have it searched without lawful authority,” Mara said. “You also won’t touch anything while I determine what happened.”
Edmund gave a tired smile, the kind he reserved for lawyers who had disappointed him.
“You are very comfortable speaking to a judge this way.”
“I’m speaking to a man standing in a bedroom.”
For the first time that night, Mrs. Bell looked directly at him.
Two uniformed officers arrived eleven minutes later. Helena sat on the edge of the bed while Mara photographed her wrist and forearm with Helena’s consent. The abrasion looked brighter on the phone screen than it did beneath the lamp. Noah remained near the doorway, as though he had not earned the right to cross farther into the room.
Edmund changed out of the robe before he was taken downstairs. He insisted on doing it alone. Mara refused.
He removed the gold chain first and set it carefully in a velvet-lined box. Then he hung the robe in the wardrobe, smoothing both shoulders before closing the door. In shirtsleeves and waistcoat, he appeared smaller but no less controlled.
He asked to call his attorney.
Mara told him he could.
He asked Noah to come into the hallway.
“No,” Helena said.
The officers looked at her. So did Noah.
Edmund’s mouth drew thin. “I was speaking to my son.”
“And I’m asking him not to go anywhere alone with you.”
Noah rubbed his palms against his pajama trousers. He looked embarrassed by the clothing, by the police, by his wife’s injury, perhaps by the fact that embarrassment had room to exist inside him at all.
“I’m staying here,” he said.
Edmund’s attention settled on him with such stillness that Noah’s shoulders lifted defensively.
“You have no idea what she has done.”
Noah’s answer came after a pause.
“I know what you were doing when the door opened.”
Edmund turned away.
Helena watched him walk between the officers. He did not resist. He did not raise his voice. At the top of the stairs, he asked one officer to be careful near the framed photograph on the landing. It showed Edmund and Margaret at Noah’s law-school graduation, all three of them smiling into sunlight.
The officer moved around it without touching the frame.
At the hospital, a nurse gave Helena a paper cup of water and asked the same questions Mara had asked, only faster. Did she feel safe at home? Had this happened before? Had Edmund struck her? Was there any numbness in her fingers? Did she have somewhere else to stay?
Helena answered no, no, no, a little, and she didn’t know.
Noah sat in a molded plastic chair beneath a television showing a muted cooking competition. He had borrowed shoes from one of the officers because he had come downstairs in slippers. The shoes were too large. Each time he crossed his ankles, one threatened to fall off.
The nurse cleaned Helena’s abrasion. The antiseptic stung more than she expected. She pressed her lips together and watched a contestant on the television pipe yellow icing onto a cake shaped like a lighthouse.
“You can ask him to leave,” the nurse said quietly.
Noah looked down.
Helena flexed her fingers. “I know.”
The nurse wrapped her wrist lightly, gave her instructions for swelling, and left the curtain partly open.
Noah waited until the footsteps receded.
“I’m sorry.”
Helena studied the white bandage. “For which part?”
He inhaled and let the breath out through his nose. “That’s fair.”
“It wasn’t meant to be fair.”
“No.”
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. His hair had dried in uneven directions where rain had caught him between the car and the house, though Helena had not noticed rain when she tried to leave. She had noticed only the hallway, Edmund’s hand, the bedroom door moving shut.
“How did Mara get there so quickly?” she asked.
“Mrs. Bell called me. She said you were upstairs with him and she heard you say let go. I called Quinn before I left the guesthouse.”
“You were in the guesthouse?”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“You told me you were going downstairs.”
“I went outside after that.”
“Why?”
Noah stared at the floor tiles. “Because I was angry with you.”
Helena laughed once, without humor. “You were angry with me.”
“I thought you had decided my mother’s death was a puzzle you could solve. I thought you were taking every unhappy thing she had ever written and turning it into evidence against my father.”
“I showed you the letter.”
“You showed me half a letter.”
“Because the other half was missing.”
“That did not make it more convincing.”
She looked at him then. His face was pale, and there was a small crease beside his mouth she had first noticed during their wedding reception, when Edmund had changed the seating arrangement without telling them and Noah had spent an hour pretending it did not matter.
May you like
Three days earlier Helena had shown him a page written by his mother. Margaret’s handwriting began firmly and collapsed toward the bottom.
He says no one will believe me because everyone has seen me tired. He is careful to call it tired.
