Chapter One: Memorial Day

I knew from experience a phone call from Colin always ruined my day. So when my ex-husband called at dawn I fumbled the phone and dropped it right after I heard his voice. Before picking it up again I crossed everything else off my mental to-do list. So far I had worked for an hour on an article, come downstairs when high-energy dog and flight-prone four-year-old could no longer be ignored, let the dog out, and given my son a sippy cup of orange juice.

That would be it for today.

For a moment, I held the phone on my lap and looked through the kitchen screen. I watched the walnut tree in my backyard gain radiance as the sun reached it. It was the Thursday before the Memorial Day weekend and Colin had just told me he’d been arrested again. Then I got the phone securely to my ear.

“DUI?” I asked with resignation.

“Murder,” Colin said.

Maybe the whole week was lost.

“What?”

“First degree.”

Maybe the rest of my life.

It was a measure of the haplessness my life had taken on—since meeting Colin? Since having Patrick? Since the divorce?—that I didn’t have a normal reaction to Colin’s announcement. It had been a very long time since Colin and the word “normal” had fit comfortably together in a sentence of mine.

Nevertheless, I rested for a few moments in the deep, sound comfort of Colin’s voice. Not the words, obviously, but the resonant timbre that still, after everything, meant home and safety to me.

The moment passed.

What I was now—maybe had always been some form of—was a thin woman with thin, straight blonde hair in an old white cotton nightgown left over from her honeymoon in Mexico, shivering but not from cold in the mahogany rocking chair next to the phone. A woman who, for all of her nearly 40 years and all of her intelligence, had never known how to negotiate the treacheries of love, a woman for whom even the moonscape of dead love did not offer the consolation of lifelessness but still the same old pitfalls of despair.

Patrick, alert to the tension and for once not attempting an escape, moved out of the kitchen and into the hall. He started building a sophisticated and tentative structure of towers side by side made out of tiny Legos as Colin asked me for the name of a reputable lawyer.

“How can you sound completely together, Colin? Not that you’re always the Marlboro man—you’d dial 911 for a mosquito bite. But risk a murder charge and you politely call your ex-wife.”

“You’re blithering, Kendall,” he said. “And I’m at the Charlottesville police station.” Without apology, into my silence, he told his version of the night: “I’d been doing the bars, thought I’d found a pick-up at Smokey’s, but lost track of her there. Then, when the bed’s still spinning, around four, the cops come to get me. Barely had time to put on clothes. They haul me all the way in here. The girl, the one I tried to pick up, was found floating face up in the Rivanna, way the hell out in Palmyra.”

“Jesus.”

I lost my grip on the phone again. It slid into my lap and onto the floor. Colin would know what the clatter was. I steadied myself by watching Patrick’s architecture accrete. I’d learned to doubt the inevitability of the collapse of his buildings.

Because Patrick had his father’s luck, as well as his black hair and blue eyes and wild Irish heart.

“Palmyra,” I said. “That’s what, ten miles out? Who found her?”

“Some fisherman. The cops say she was naked.”

“Drowned?”

“Strangled.”

“With what?”

Patrick was attempting a bridge between two of the tall narrow towers. His tiny fingers worked assiduously, then feverishly. He had almost made it across.

“With what, Colin?”

“A chalkline.”

“A what?”

“The thing carpenters use to make a straight line. Even you’ve seen them, Kendall.”

“In your tool box.”

“That’s the thing. Blue chalk dust was still in her throat.”

“In the water?”

“That deep in the skin.”

“Oh God.”

Patrick’s building fell, followed by a small, imitative curse.

“How did they know who she was?” I said.

“The Fluvanna County sheriff’s office found her clothes at a turn-off near Keswick. Her license was in the pocket. It didn’t take even the slow boys of Palmyra too long to find the ball of chalk-line under the bushes, and right near, not too cleverly hidden, the hunk of blue chalk. Laid them on the table in the interrogation room, each one in a separate baggie.”

I could see Colin, his black hair and beard shaggy, his clothes dirty, but his hand lying on his leg, the thumb and forefinger at a perfect right angle, framing the imagined corner of the baggie.

Now padding over to me, Patrick gave up all pretense of being otherwise occupied and began to talk in my other ear.

I said, “Not too many carpenters use the old kind of chalkline, do they?”

“Why don’t you just go tell the cops that, Kendall? Might help their case out a little.”

“How did they connect her to you?” I offered Patrick the message pad and pen. They held no appeal.

“The Albemarle County boys were in on it by then—Keswick’s their territory. They went on in to the address on the license, where the roommate described who she’d seen her pal with the night before. By then Charlottesville City boys had horned in.”

“And I don’t guess any of them, not Fluvanna, not Albemarle, not Charlottesville City, had any trouble figuring out who the description fit,” I said.

“Too many pranks when I was a kid.”

“Too much public nuisance and driving under the influence recently.” I began a nervous sketch of a train for Patrick’s entertainment.

“I haven’t been arrested yet, Kendall. Can you get me a lawyer?”

“You think you will be?”

“From the way the boys are talking, it’s a distinct possibility. Who better than the Dean of the Law School’s daughter can find me a lawyer?” We both knew he was needling me with the colloquialisms. Colin could speak the Queen’s English as well as anyone.

“Just a minor detail—you’ve been divorced from her for two years.” The pencil lead broke and Patrick began to whine.

“Hey, Kendall. Ain’t no time for you to bitch.”