around?”
“I’ve always liked that picture.” She said, rising suddenly, “Let’s go for a walk in the dissolute gardens.” She held out her hand to him. He took it.
There had been snow over the last two days, but not much of it had stuck, only enough to make this landscape ghostly. Knots of snow lay in the stone hair and on the inner side of the elbow of the girl pouring from a jug, and in the open mouths of the fish waiting to receive the water. There was ice on the steps down to the path between the maples and on the path, too. It crusted the surface of the fountain. Skeletal flowers, brown and black, were adorned with pockets of snow and ice blisters that gave them an ethereal look, spiky, white-webbed plants on the pocked surface of some star up there that he could see faintly now in the half-light of a late afternoon.
“I love it in winter,” said Sara. “I shouldn’t say it, I guess, but I think I like it more now than in the spring or summer. It seems closer to the way things are. The truth, perhaps.”
“You think the truth is cold and colorless?”
“Well, I’ve usually found it to be not terribly warm and inviting.” She looked up at him. “In your line of work, I expect you think so, too.”
“Yes, but I have to begin with something cold and uninviting. Homicides generally are.”
“Still, I’d think you’d be more jaded than I am.”
But he wasn’t. “No. Disappointed, angry, sad-those things, but not cynical, which I suppose is another term for jaded.”
“But you must constantly be dealing with lies, bad faith and betrayal. You must see that all the time.”
Jury thought about Mickey Haggerty. Then he thought about Gemma Trimm, about Benny and Sparky. He smiled. “Yes, but there are things that counteract that. The good guys are still winning.”
She was astonished. “How? Why? Because there are more of them?”
“No. Because they’re good.”
Smiling, she shook her head. “I don’t quite get that.” She paused to shake snow from a skeletal bush. “You know, you haven’t told me why you came back.”
He watched her face. “To find out more about Danny Ryder.”
“But I told you.”
“No, I don’t think you did.”
She looked down at the empty pond. Without looking back at him, she said. “I don’t know why you say that. It’s as if you don’t believe me.”
“I don’t.”
She hadn’t expected that. “Why?”
“When I asked you to tell me what it was about Ryder that attracted you, you left the room. You couldn’t deal with it.”
She waved an impatient hand at him. “That’s ridiculous.”
“We could do it again,” he said, only half joking.
Sourly, she regarded him.
“You walked out because you couldn’t bear thinking about him, his physical self. You had an affair with him, didn’t you?”
She didn’t answer.
“He must have been one hell of a charismatic guy because from the way I heard it in one blink a woman would be all over him. Since I’ve only seen pictures of him, I can’t quite fathom this. He’s good-looking all right, but not handsome enough it would compensate for his size. He was a fairly little guy, five five, and that’s actually tall for a jockey.”
Sara put her head in her hands. “My God! Such machismo! You, of course,
Jury smiled. “Something like that.”
Her head snapped round. “What conceit.”
“Uh-huh. But back to Ryder-”
“You’re so tenacious about this, about my knowing him. Why?” They were standing by a stone bench. She sat down.
“Because you had more to do with Dan Ryder than you’re admitting to.”
She sighed. “All right, damn it, but it won’t help you; it isn’t what you think. Call Dan Ryder a secret passion. It’s completely adolescent.” Ruefully, she smiled at Jury.
He said, “Everyone’s had feelings like that.”
“When we were thirteen or fourteen, maybe, but not thirty or forty.”
“Do we ever stop being thirteen or fourteen? Or six or seven, for that matter? I think we carry all of that around with us; we just have more practice in hiding it.”
“It was an-obsession. For two years, I’d be like one of those rock-star followers, what are they called, those girls?”
“You mean ‘groupies’?”
“I’m a racing groupie. Or I was. Whenever I could, I went to Cheltenham or Newmarket or Epsom Downs-that’s the last time I saw him, the Derby. After that he went to France. Wherever he was racing, I’d go. Of course, I couldn’t really see him, not amongst a dozen flying horses and riders. But I knew the colors and the number and name on the blanket. Given the way jockeys ride, their faces are invisible. I had binoculars. And the race itself, I suppose that had something to do with it. There’s something so romantic about it. I could sometimes see him on the telly in the winner’s circle. But in person? I only met him in person twice: once at the farm, the Ryder farm. Vernon Rice took me because I said I was interested in horse syndication.” She looked up at Jury. “Whatever that is; he talked about it at length, but I wasn’t paying attention. But it was certainly a way to get to where Dan was.”
“So this obsession was fed by nothing on his part?”
“Fed by nothing.” She looked ashamed.
Jury thought, as she talked, that she was devolving into an ever-younger persona, versions of herself not at all arch, coy or evasive, and he thought of Carole-anne, who seemed to have kept her entire adolescent self intact. It bloomed and closed again, like the delicate petals of hibiscus furling and unfurling, night into morning. Perhaps he should ask Carole-anne about obsession.
It was dusk now, bluer and colder. Still talking, Sara rubbed one arm to stave off the chilly air. Jury removed his jacket and put it around her shoulders.
“Oh. Thank you.” Her smile was utterly genuine, vulnerable.
“I didn’t mean to stop you talking.” He sat beside her.
“I’m glad you did. You’re very good at this, you know.”
He laughed. “At what?”
“This. Getting people to talk. For a while there I wasn’t even aware of you; I was just talking to myself. I guess I wanted to talk about Danny.”
“I guess you did.”
“It’s hard to put it in words.” She looked at her feet, turning the ankles in and out in a way children had of doing. She sighed and shrugged. “That’s the sum of my experience with Dan Ryder.”
“But when you heard he died, it must have been awful for you.”
“Oh, yes. Yes.”
She brought her hand up to her forehead and he thought she might be going to cry, but she didn’t. She just said it again, “Oh, yes.”
