Sandrine's Case Read online

  Coburn Sentinel

  January 22, 2011

  Evidence

  “I had a terrible thought in court today, Dad,” Alexandria said after we’d had dinner and walked into the living room for a final glass of wine. “It was while the travel agent was on the stand.” She seemed reluctant to tell me what this thought had been and yet compelled to do so. “I was just sitting there, and it came to me. I guess it’s the new normal for me.”

  Her tone was serious and confessional and so I knew she was moving toward some dark revelation.

  “It just struck me that, after this, I can never fall in love with anyone,” she said.

  I took a sip from my glass. “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said without giving the slightest hint to how devastating I found it, another consequence I hadn’t counted on. “And I hope it will pass.”

  I could find nothing to add, and so a long silence followed, the two of us sipping our drinks, avoiding each other’s eyes. It was as if Sandrine had, at last, silenced me.

  “A woman named Jane Forbes has been added to Singleton’s witness list,” I said finally.

  “Who is she?”

  “She’s on the faculty. The Political Science Department.”

  “Did you have an affair with her?” Alexandria asked without the slightest sense of it being anything other than a reasonable question.

  “No,” I said.

  Alexandria nodded, and it occurred to me that she could absorb anything from now on. She’d faced the shocking news of her mother’s diagnosis, then her death, the prospect that I had murdered her, then my affair with April. Any later revelations would be small potatoes.

  “Why is she a witness?” she asked.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I mean, Sandrine would sometimes meet her when she jogged around the reservoir. I’ve seen them running together but that’s the extent of it.”

  “So you don’t know this woman?”

  “Not really.” I shrugged. “I can’t imagine why Sandrine would have taken her into her confidence, but I guess she did.”

  “She was dying, Dad,” Alexandria said. “And people want someone with them when they’re dying.” She thought something through for a moment, then said, “Maybe that’s why married people try so hard to make things work. It’s not that they love each other every day, right? It’s that they love each other enough to stay through the days they don’t.” She paused. “And so they make it to the end together. Like Mom used to say, that’s the ‘bottom line.’” She smiled.

  She waited for me to respond to this, but it seemed so stark a truth that nothing could be added to it, no literary reference needed, nor pedantic marginalia required.

  “Anyway, Mom must have gotten to know this woman pretty intimately,” Alexandria said. “Otherwise, she wouldn’t have any evidence.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” I said drily, then shrugged again. “Evidently this just came up, this business of Jane Forbes. Morty heard about it only at the end of court today.”

  Before this latest development, there’d been only two more witnesses scheduled to testify at my trial, April Blankenship and Malcolm Esterman. I knew why they were on the list, of course, but Jane Forbes was a mystery.

  “What do you know about her?” Alexandria asked.

  “Nothing, really,” I answered. “She may have been coming to the trial. I saw her once, early on.”

  I’d sometimes seen Sandrine with Jane, of course, the two of them trotting around the reservoir, though later they’d more often been sitting on one of the concrete benches beside it, Sandrine no longer in her running clothes.

  “Mom never mentioned her?” Alexandria asked.

  “No,” I answered. “All I know is that I sometimes saw them talking at the reservoir.”

  Now I had no choice but to imagine that these conversations had been fiercely revealing, and that, perhaps, during one of them, Sandrine had planted some explosion she’d carefully timed to detonate toward the end of my trial.

  In anticipation of just that explosion, I put down my glass and leaned forward, then stopped myself from saying what I’d wanted to say at that moment.

  And what was I going to say?

  Everything I’d earlier told Morty, of course, all the elements of that plot.

  I’d wanted to pour all of that out, but I’d stopped myself because I knew exactly how it would sound to Alexandria. I could even imagine her staring at me distantly. What are you saying, Dad? That Mom is framing you? That she is the evil genius behind all this? That throughout this whole dismal affair it has always been Mom who was the sociopath?

  I knew that there would be no defense against her questions, and with that recognition I was left with the simple fact that we are in trouble, deep, deep trouble, when we cannot reveal our deepest fears to the one we most want to hear them.

  “What is it, Dad?” Alexandria asked now. “You look like something hit you.”

  “No, nothing,” I said, then eased back into my chair.

  There was some idle chatter after that, talk that seemed even emptier and more meaningless because it had to take the place of those vital things I’d wanted to tell Alexandria but never could. On that thought I saw the unforgiving and essentially adamantine nature of my position, that in order to save myself I would have to destroy Sandrine in the eyes of our daughter, turn her into the sociopath she’d accused me of being, a woman sufficiently reckless to endanger not just me but everyone connected to me, poor April and her deserving husband, Coburn College’s reputation, and, of course, all this done in order to destroy me by taking away everything that held the slightest value: my profession, my daughter, my freedom, perhaps even my life.

  “What were you thinking about?” Alexandria asked.

  I scrambled for an answer. “Albi,” I said. “It’s very lovely. Your mother and I went there on our one great trip. It’s where she proposed.”

  “Mom proposed to you?”

  I nodded. “And it was a very romantic moment. We’d just come from the cathedral. Night was falling. There was a beautiful sunset, with impossible reds and purples and hints of gold. We were watching the sun go down, and she suddenly turned to me and she said, in that soft, intense voice of hers, she said, ‘It’s you.’”

  How, from that moment, I wondered bleakly, had I reached this one?

  To my astonishment I abruptly felt a great rush of emotion, one I could control then tamp down only by hurriedly moving forward through the rest of the story. “She said, ‘So let’s make it official,’ which meant ‘let’s get married.’ When we got back to the States we did.” I smiled. “And as they say, the rest is history.”

  And a very unsavory history, indeed, I thought, a tale of choices that turned out to have been quite bad: Coburn, April, then that last one, that Sandrine should die.

  Alexandria watched me silently for a moment, and during that silence I could almost feel the tumblers of her mind turning and turning, working to fit all the elements of life in their proper spaces. It was an effort to understand it, one more strenuous than I had ever made, so that suddenly it struck me that in some fundamental way Alexandria was, well, deeper than I was, more genuinely thoughtful when it came to the things that really matter.

  I smiled. “You’re going to be okay,” I assured her. “You have bad thoughts now, but you’re going to be okay, Alexandria.”

  I couldn’t tell if she believed this, or even if my assurances carried weight. I had lived so unwisely, after all, been so cut off from any genuine consideration of life, that it would be perfectly reasonable for her to consider mine the last voice she should heed.

  She offered her usual nod of assent, a “Sure, Dad” response that confirmed my fear of paternal disenfranchisement. Then she rose and walked into the kitchen, presumably to pour herself another round, though
when she didn’t return I got to my feet and joined her there.

  She was sitting at the small breakfast table that looked out on the back lawn. Night had long ago fallen but I saw that her gaze was on the gazebo, Sandrine’s redoubt, the place she’d gone to think and into which she’d invited the few people she’d wished to speak with during her last days, one of whom had been Alexandria.

  I half expected her to wave me away when I approached, but she said nothing until I’d joined her at the table. Then she turned to me and smiled softly. “When I was a little girl Mom would read me these stories. You know, the usual fairy tales. And there was always a knight in shining armor type, some great-looking man on a white horse. And I would point to this man’s picture and ask Mom, “Who is that?” and always, always, Dad, she would say that it was you.”

  I saw her again at Albi, radiant in that glowing air, the way her eyes had caressed me. No man had ever been more loved by a more worthy woman.

  “It’s you,” I said softly to myself, remembering what Sandrine had said to me there.

  But what had been my sword and armor then, I wondered. What had she seen in Albi, or before, that had made Sandrine choose me on that golden afternoon, choose me over so many others she might have chosen, others so much more handsome, so much more accomplished, so much richer and with such greater prospects.

  “Why me, I wonder,” I said. “What drew her to me? I was smart but so were lots of guys. I was just finishing up a degree, more or less broke, working at this school for retarded kids.”

  “You worked with retarded kids?” Alexandria asked. “You never mentioned that.”

  “It was only for a few months,” I said. “Your mother would often meet me there, and a couple of times we took some of the kids to a little park, and she would watch while I worked with them.”

  Alexandria glanced toward the gazebo, so empty without Sandrine. “Maybe that was what she saw,” she said. “That you were a good teacher.” She turned to face me. “You should have talked to her, Dad. She shouldn’t have needed that woman at the reservoir.”

  “I know,” I told her, then thought again of the next witness, a woman I hardly knew. “But she did.”

  DAY EIGHT

  Call Jane Forbes

  She had shoulder-length hair and was dressed quite elegantly in a navy blue pantsuit, low heels, and a long necklace of azure glass beads. She walked to the witness box rather like a soldier on parade, determined, unafraid, a woman warrior. Something in her demeanor suggested that if she were suddenly discovered after having been marooned for twenty years on a deserted island she would still know exactly who she was.

  Yes, I thought, however painfully and uneasily the idea came to me, it would be easy for Sandrine to talk to such a person.

  “Jane Wiley Forbes,” she said when asked to give her name.

  For the next few minutes, Mr. Singleton took his witness through the usual biographical material. She was forty-seven years old, born in Newton, Massachusetts, educated at Sarah Lawrence, with a PhD in political science. She had taught at a few places before coming to Coburn, all of them modest affairs, a junior college in Boston, a girls’ school in Atlanta. At Coburn she’d mostly taught freshmen and sophomores. Despite the modesty of these assignments, there was something formidable about Jane Forbes, something that made me both trust and dread whatever it was she’d come here to reveal.

  “Now, Dr. Forbes,” Mr. Singleton said. “How long have you known Sandrine Madison?”

  “I met her nine years ago,” Jane answered. “They have these little teas when you first come to Coburn College. Sandrine came over and introduced herself.”

  It had been a long time since I’d heard anyone call Sandrine by her first name. For Morty she was “your wife.” For Mr. Singleton she was “Mrs. Madison.” For Jenna she was “my sister.” For Alexandria she was “Mom.” But for Jane Forbes she had been “Sandrine,” and hearing that name on her lips, spoken so softly and with a hint of loss, hit me with a strange poignancy that made me lean forward slightly, a gesture one of the juror’s caught, which froze me in place. For what might this juror read in my suddenly becoming so obviously engaged? This was a question for which I had no answer but in response to which I eased myself back again and, like a good actor, prepared a face to meet the faces of the jury.

  “Dr. Forbes,” Mr. Singleton said, “did you have occasion to have several conversations with Mrs. Madison during the weeks prior to her death?”

  She had, and she further explained.

  “I had not really known Sandrine all that well, but last April, toward the end of the month, we happened to be on the reservoir together. Sandrine seemed very tired. She had always been such a presence at faculty meetings, so animated and energetic, it was unusual to find her looking so exhausted.”

  “Did you happen to mention Mrs. Madison’s appearance to her?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  “No, but she mentioned it,” Jane said. “She said she was depleted. That was her word. Depleted. Then she told me about her illness. This was only a few minutes into our conversation. She was debating when she would tell her students. She didn’t want them to pity her, and she wanted to keep teaching as long as she could. She had talked this over with Malcolm Esterman, she said, and now she wanted my opinion too.”

  And so Sandrine had discussed this most troubling of decisions with two people, not one of whom had been me.

  “Did Mrs. Madison mention her husband at all during this time?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  “If by ‘this time,’ you mean that conversation, then no, she didn’t mention her husband,” Jane answered.

  “How about during subsequent conversations?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  “During subsequent conversations, she did mention him, yes.”

  “Can you tell us the nature of those communications?”

  They had been quite ordinary, it seemed to me, as Jane continued her testimony. During the trots around the reservoir and their sessions on the bench beside it, Sandrine had spoken of our early days together, the trip we’d taken, how much she’d loved traveling and how little we’d done of it since then. She’d described our first meeting as “interesting,” though she hadn’t actually found me very attractive. I was too tall and too skinny, she’d said. But later she noticed not that I was always reading but the way I read, which she described as “heartfelt,” a word I found sentimental, almost schmaltzy, but which had probably been true at the time.

  “She said that once she’d found him reading in a small cubicle in the library,” Jane went on, “and that when he’d looked up from the book, he’d seemed so sad, so absolutely sorrowful, that she’d actually caught her breath.”

  She paused a moment, a dramatic pause that alerted me to the fact that something was coming, and which propelled me forward in my chair with so gentle and unassuming a force that I lost my actor’s pose.

  “She said it was an expression that left him after a few years,” Jane added. “And that after a while she never saw it again.”

  “But she looked for it, didn’t she?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  “She said she did, yes,” Jane answered.

  “And on one particular occasion, she had expected to see it, hadn’t she?”

  “Yes, she had.”

  “His sorrow, I mean, that sorrowful look,” Mr. Singleton said by way of emphasis.

  “His sorrow, yes.”

  “And did Mrs. Madison tell you what that occasion was, the one when she’d genuinely expected to see this expression of sorrow on her husband’s face?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  “Yes, she did.”

  “And what was that occasion, Dr. Forbes?”

  “When she told him she was dying,” the witness answered. “She said that she had delayed telling him about her condition because she was actually afraid she would n
ot see that sadness on his face. But finally she’d told him, and her fear had been justified.”

  I couldn’t help it. No matter how much I wanted to prevent myself from reacting in any way to such a devastating answer, I couldn’t help it, and so I closed my eyes and slumped backward as if pushed by an invisible hand.

  After that, it was only voices coming to me from what seemed a great emptiness.

  “And during these conversations, did Mrs. Madison talk about her life in general?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  “Yes, she did. She mentioned a paper she’d done when she was a student at the Sorbonne. It was about the case of a woman named Blanche Monnier. She said that this woman had been imprisoned for many years by her family. She’d evidently been found locked in the attic. She’d been more or less starved, Sandrine said, and she’d lived in terrible filth. Also, the shutters had been closed and nailed shut, so this woman had lived in near total darkness. And yet when Blanche Monnier was released by the authorities she’d described this attic as her ‘lovely little grotto.’”

  “Her ‘lovely little grotto’?” Mr. Singleton repeated.

  “That was the quote Sandrine told me, yes.”

  “And did Mrs. Madison add anything to this story?”

  “She said that in a way it was her story.”

  “Her story?”

  “She said that for a long time she had lived in a ‘lovely little grotto’ that was, in fact, a cold dark place. She said she thought a lot of women lived in such places. She said it was the place where a woman inevitably lived when the core reason why she had once loved a man was no longer there.”

  “The core reason?” Mr. Singleton asked. “Did she say what the core reason she’d loved her husband was?”