The Affliction Read online

  “Mr. McCartney, we have nothing to say to you. Nothing has changed. We’re not interested.”

  “You haven’t heard my offer.”

  “And I don’t want to.”

  “Look. I’ve put a great deal of time and personal capital into this project.”

  “Not my problem.”

  “I have—I shouldn’t tell you this—I have more riding on this than I can afford to lose.” His voice took on an almost pleading tone. “I could lose my marriage. My children. I am willing to offer you an estate worth substantially more than this barn, and this frankly crummy apartment. You’d have sunlight and land and a garden and a pool. We’ll do an even trade.”

  “And you are not listening. I don’t want any of that. I want what I have. It’s not for sale.”

  Gambit failed, and over. He asked coldly, “Is that how your girlfriend feels too?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I just thought she might like to hear what’s on the table.”

  “Why?”

  “We left a message for her. I wanted to hear what she thought of it.”

  Honey lost her mind for a minute. She stood immobile, staring at him. Message. We left a message for her.

  “What message was that?”

  “A prospectus. I dropped it by the school for her. The property I’m offering.”

  “How dare you?”

  “Hey! Don’t get your panties in a bunch. Couples can disagree,” he said smoothly. He even smiled. “I thought there might be a difference of opinion here. That’s all I’m saying. I’m asking you as friends to think about it.”

  “We are not friends.”

  “But I’m being honest. I have to make this work.”

  “Not my problem.”

  He rolled one shoulder, and his right eyelid began to twitch. “If you say that one more time it may become your problem,” he said.

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “What do you think?”

  “What if I told you the answering machine has recorded this whole conversation?”

  “I would laugh. I saw you turn it off.” He took a step toward her. Honey held his gaze and stood her ground.

  “Why do you have my riding crop?”

  He held it up and flexed it. “Is that what it is? I’m not a horse guy myself. Didn’t grow up with the boarding school set.”

  As if she had. “What are you doing with it?”

  “I found it on a shelf in the hall. I was just looking at it when you came in. So you use it to whip your horses?”

  He took another step toward her. Then he turned and laid the crop on a bookshelf in front of a handful of photographs from Greta’s childhood. He looked at the pictures, one by one.

  “Will Greta be home soon?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “I told you, I’d like to make my case to her. I’m offering you a crazy good deal. Win-win for everybody. I intend to make it work.”

  “I intend to make you leave. Do I have to call the police?”

  “Don’t be dramatic.”

  “I want you to leave.”

  “But we haven’t finished our business.”

  “Are you deaf? We have. Go away.” She picked up the receiver. The dial tone filled the room.

  “Are you going?” she asked. For the first time in this encounter, she thought Lyndon looked a little less sure of himself.

  When he still didn’t move, she punched three buttons.

  “Keep your hair on. I’ll go,” he said, moving to the door. “Hang up the phone.”

  A voice inside the phone said, “This is 9-1-1, what is your emergency?”

  Lyndon said louder, “Hang up the phone.”

  “A man has forced his way into my house and won’t leave. His behavior is threatening and he’s scaring me.”

  Before she could go on, Lyndon turned and said, “You’ll regret this.”

  Behind him as he opened the outer door he heard her giving her address to the dispatcher.

  Chapter 12

  Saturday, May 2

  Saturday was a warm day bright with the green of high spring. Attendance at the memorial service for Florence Meagher was not compulsory for the girls, but by 10:00 a.m. nearly all were dressed in their church clothes, heading out in twos and threes to sit in the sun on the dorm lawns, or to walk and talk quietly as they waited until it was time. Graduates had returned to the school in force to honor a teacher who had nurtured them and, in many cases, determined their future careers. All the rooms at the surrounding inns were filled.

  Those who had worked with Florence on the school plays had gathered in the grove of weeping birches so they could enter together. Another cadre, her history of art stars, were wearing silk scarves tied in the special way that Florence always wore hers. Many of the girls had labored to write their first letters of condolence to Mrs. Meagher’s sister. Or to Mr. Meagher, although there were many fewer of those. For those handicapping the investigation into Florence’s death, Ray Meagher was the odds-on favorite.

  By ten-thirty, the lovely old Greek Revival Congregational church on the town green was filling. A trio of girls playing piano, violin, and cello had prepared a selection of chamber music that was going pretty well. Those who felt themselves to be chief mourners found seats near the front, while those who were simply paying respects chose seats at the back and sides. The girls from the drama club, with Ellie Curtin among the leaders, filed into the pew just behind those reserved for family. The art history girls took the pew across the center aisle.

  Hope and Maggie had been invited to sit with Florence’s sister and her family. As one of the pretty student ushers led them down the center aisle, Maggie noted how many of the trustees were in attendance, plus a surprising number of townspeople. Hugo and Caroline Hollister were there. Kate Curtin and Todd Goldsmith came in together, followed by Mattias Benes, the bookseller. Hope gave a squeeze to the shoulder of a woman seated on the aisle as they passed. Margot McCartney. Their usher gestured them into the pew in front of Ellie Curtin and her friends.

  Toward the top of the hour, as the musicians were subsiding, Ray Meagher, wearing a blue suit and an unfortunate polyester tie, walked down the aisle with Marcia Goldsmith. He looked neither to right or left, although most eyes in the church were on him. Behind Ray, with one of the student ushers, came a tall woman in a dun-colored pant suit, wiry and businesslike, who took a seat in the pew beside Ray and began fanning herself with the funeral program. Her high bulging forehead was so exactly like Ray’s butternut squash head that Maggie guessed this was one of his estranged siblings, come to show some family solidarity. Following her was Lyndon McCartney. He sat by himself in the empty pew behind Ray’s, ten rows apart from his wife.

  At 11:00 a.m., the side door to the robing room opened, and Florence’s sister with her husband and daughters made their way from the minister’s study up to the front of the church and into the front pew. Suzanne’s eyes were wet and red, and her daughters too had been weeping. An older couple who had been with them joined Maggie and Hope in the pew behind.

  “All rise,” intoned the minister, and the service began.

  The hymns were led by the church choir. The first was “Onward Christian Soldiers,” discontinued from the hymnal because of its incorrect martial tone but printed on an insert in the program and sung in all six verses. It has been a favorite hymn of their father’s, according to Suzanne. After the minister’s invocation, Florence’s older niece mounted to the lectern and with a trembling voice read the first lesson. The next offering was a student’s performance of “Goodbye England’s Rose,” as Elton John had performed it in honor of Princess Diana. The girl had been practicing all week, and even though few of the lyrics fit Mrs. Meagher, the church was filled with snuffling as the song concluded.

  Christina Liggett, who had been seated at the side with the minister, climbed into the pulpit, laid her notes on the lectern, and looked out over the roomful of faces. Maggie felt prot
ective and anxious as she began her eulogy.

  “Florence Meagher was not a perfect person,” she said. Her voice was clear and steady. “Few of us are. But she was a wholehearted and loving woman, committed to her students, devoted to her family, doing her best to make the kindest and most helpful use she could of every hour of every day. She . . .”

  Christina faltered, and Maggie saw her attention snagged by something at the back of the church. There was a murmur behind them. Hope was already turning toward the disturbance, and Maggie felt Hope’s hand briefly clasp her shoulder. What happened next happened so fast that it took many times the seconds in which it played out to retell afterward, and longer than that to fully understand.

  A figure with a mangy mat of white-blond hair, draped in a long blue raincoat, was walking down the center aisle. Jesse Goldsmith. Christina’s eyes were locked on him, as if she’d been frozen midsentence. One of the main doors to the church stood open behind him, leaving an almost blinding rectangle of daylight in the cool dimness of the rear wall of the sanctuary. As he passed down the rows, people stared and whispered. Ray Meagher had turned to watch the figure come, looking puzzled, his mouth slightly open. At the very back of the church someone was up and moving; they would realize much later that this was Detective Phillips, but it was still in no way clear what kind of scene the boy intended to make, or whose job it was to stop him.

  Then it was. Jesse reached the front of the church, turned to face the crowd, and shrugged off the raincoat, which had mostly concealed the pump-action shotgun he carried. There were screams of shock and fear, and bangs and scraping of people ducking for cover as he scanned the front pews. Jesse found his target, pumped the forearm of the gun, and raised it to his shoulder, aiming straight at a paralyzed Ellie Curtin, and then with a bang he screamed and fell to the floor as pandemonium broke out and Maggie realized that Hope had shot him.

  Marcia Goldsmith, screaming, was trying to climb over Ray to get to her son. The minister, from the side, and Phillips and Bark from the back, ran to the boy on the floor, the minister looking like a huge black bird with a white neck ring, the two detectives knocking people out of the way as they pelted forward, shouting, weapons drawn. By the time they reached Jesse, the minister had captured the shotgun and unchambered the shell. Maggie was looking at the 9 mm pistol in Hope’s hand.

  “Well aren’t you just full of surprises,” she said. Hope handed her the gun and started rooting in her bag.

  “I don’t want this thing,” Maggie said.

  “Don’t worry, the safety is on. Hold on a hot minute, I have to find my concealed carry license. Tell me it isn’t in my other purse.”

  “You mean you’ve been packing heat the whole time you’ve been here?”

  “No, I told you, it’s usually in my sock drawer. I just had a feeling about today, though. People get so emotional at funerals.”

  The school nurse was now ministering to Jesse, who was alternately whimpering with self-pity and emitting howls of rage and pain; Hope had shot him in the thigh. The nurse and Ray were rigging a tourniquet, using a cloth from the altar and Ray’s unfortunate necktie, while Marcia wept and told her son that everything was all right, which it definitely wasn’t, and about two hundred people called 9-1-1 yelling for ambulances. Detective Phillips had Jesse’s hands cuffed, in front of him because he screamed so much when she tried to cuff him behind that she feared that the boy’s mother would attack her. Detective Bark had made his way back to Hope and Maggie’s pew.

  “Mrs. Babbin?”

  “I’ve got it here someplace, just give me a second,” Hope said. Then she found the necessary paper in a zipped pouch with her lipstick and keys and a clean hanky, and handed it over. After thorough study, Bark handed it back and said, “Pretty good shot. No bones broken, no major arteries.”

  “If he hadn’t been facing me head-on I’d have hit him in the fanny, but I couldn’t get my shot.”

  “They’re still going to want to talk to you in White Plains,” said Bark.

  “Exciting. Will I need a lawyer? I know a lovely one.”

  “Wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

  Ellie Curtin had gotten past her cowering friends and was now sobbing in her mother’s arms in the main aisle. Kate’s face was the greenish white of a person in shock. Maggie slid out of the pew and went to join Detective Phillips and the minister in the growing clump of people surrounding Jesse. She spoke to them quickly and briefly. Phillips nodded, and the minister hurried off toward his study.

  Marcia Goldsmith was still on the floor cradling her son’s head, murmuring to him. She raised her eyes to Maggie’s with a look of pure hatred. Maggie went to Christina, who stood now at the foot of the pulpit looking as if she was in the middle of a country where she couldn’t speak the language and her GPS had just lost its satellite signal.

  Recalculating. Recalculating.

  Christina brought her eyes into focus on Maggie standing in front of her. Sounding dazed, she remarked, “I just remembered what I did with Alison’s cell phone.”

  The minister and Maggie between them dealt with the influx of police and EMTs and the process of getting Jesse, still handcuffed and shrieking, now strapped to a gurney, out of the church and into the ambulance. Christina was stationed at the door of the church, modeling composure and dispensing calm remarks. As Marcia Goldsmith passed, rushing to follow the ambulance to the hospital, she turned ferociously to Christina as if she had denied it and yelled, “He loved Florence! He loved her!”

  A few mourners, mostly from the village but also a few of the students, came to the door to murmur that they were out of time and had to be going. Christina murmured back that they should take their seats again. Some did. Between such ministrations, she had time to notice Alison Casey sitting by herself. There were students in front of her and behind, but no one joined her. Christina expected Alison to saunter out, but she sat where she was, head bowed, face blank, pretending to read the funeral program over and over.

  Police, having arrived in force from White Plains, wanted to set up interview rooms all over the church and process the crime scene, but by force of personality Maggie and the minister, with Bark’s help, persuaded everyone to take seats and allow the ritual of mourning to be completed. Since there were police cars parked all around the church, including on the lawn, with men and women in riot gear standing around talking to one another or muttering into walkie-talkies to who knew whom, no one crucial was likely to slip past them. And in Bark’s opinion, the statements they would take when the service was over and everyone had calmed down were likely to be more reliable than if they talked to people whose adrenaline levels were still up to their eyeballs. Meanwhile, the press had gathered in ever-increasing numbers in a parking lot across the street, trying to find someone to interview.

  In a surprisingly short time, given the circumstances, they were under way again. Ray, tieless, had returned to his pew, where he sat with his ash-colored sister, whose pinched expression seemed to say that she had known coming here was a mistake. Of course it wouldn’t just be a nice normal funeral service.

  Christina returned to the pulpit. She was steady now, and focused. She said, “Before we resume the service, I’d like to ask you all to put away your devices. The Wi-Fi service has been turned off to give us all time to recover our best selves.

  “We are here today to mourn a tragedy. Unexpectedly, we almost had another. The worst thing we can do, now, is talk to the press or post anything on social media about what happened. To do that is to make this near tragedy glamorous and invite imitation. Please, rise to this occasion. When we are done here, resist the impulse to talk about what we don’t yet understand. Florence’s family deserves that respect and the young man and his family should be allowed their privacy. Please consider how you would feel if he were your son or brother.”

  With that, after a moment of silence, Christina resumed her eulogy. When she finished, a senior girl came forward and read an affectionate remembranc
e, and the congregation recited the Twenty-Third Psalm in unison. For the final hymn, at the nieces’ request, they sang “Silent Night.” There was something piercingly sweet in the repeated refrain, Sleep in heavenly peace. The minister gave a parting blessing and reminded the congregation that the family had invited all who wished to join them to retire to the fellowship hall downstairs for refreshments.

  When the church doors were reopened, a wall of reporters with microphones and camera crews outside the narthex set up a roar of questions that joined with the blaring sunlight to create a wall of assault. This had the beneficial effect of driving a surprising number of people downstairs to the fellowship hall instead of out into the barrage of ravening curiosity. From there the mourners would be able to leave in twos and threes from back and side doors.

  In the hall, sandwiches and punch were being served. Many of the girls lined up to speak to Mrs. Meagher’s sister. Someone realized that Florence’s ashes, in a mottled salt-glazed pottery jar, had been left upstairs on the altar along with a vase of lilies and a framed studio portrait of Florence taken right after her college graduation. These were retrieved and brought downstairs to sit on the table with the punch and the visitors’ book.

  Phillips and Bark stayed to the bitter end of the reception, overseeing the taking of statements from this cloud of witnesses. They were also closely watching Ray. Bark had hoped that Ray’s behavior might in some way give a clue to the nature of his inner turmoil, but Jesse Goldsmith had introduced so much outer turmoil that no one’s behavior could be said to be normal or otherwise. They clocked who spoke to Ray and who didn’t though, the former group consisting mostly of people who knew little about the couple or the case. Certainly, Suzanne and her family treated him as if he weren’t in the room.

  They were also keeping Hope Babbin in their sights. She was waiting for a junior from her lawyer’s office to arrive to accompany her to the station in White Plains. In the meantime, she wasn’t exactly in custody, but the detectives didn’t want her going anywhere, which she said she understood perfectly. She sat with Phillips while Bark worked the room.