The Old Silent

the skeletal remains of birches lined the gray sky. Jury looked back at the dark slab of the gatehouse, its squints for windows through which no light would show. Drab and eyeless, it looked almost pernicious. Along the path were the stiff remains of wagwort and flea-bane; sodden leaved and congealed between the roots of tree trunks; moss climbed around lichen-slippery stones.

He wondered if there were places that could infect the mind, abrade the heart, corrode the spirit. Why would anyone choose, as she certainly had, to live in such cold chambers, such a severe landscape, which he doubted was much improved by the coming of spring.

She was standing beside an elm. Standing, not leaning, apparently looking down to the end of the path where a useless gate listed. Useless, because the tiers of stone on either side had nearly disappeared. In this wall that no longer defined any boundary, the gate was redundant.

'Mrs. Healey?'

Although her back was to him, she would have heard his approach over stone shards and fallen twigs. There was no response. But he thought in the moments that followed that her gaze was turned inward, that the wood, path, gate-the entire landscape-was lost on her.

Before he could repeat the name, she swerved a little, looked round at him. 'Oh. Hello.' She did not pretend that she couldn't remember him, or imagine why she'd be meeting him on this path.

She was holding, incongruously, a handful of leaves rescued from autumn like a small bouquet, as if, having set out to pick some winter flower, this was all she could find. Her skin had a gauzy sheen to it, like her hair. He thought at first the face was made paler by a lack of rouge and eyeshadow; then he knew that what he had taken in the Old Silent for the pallor of illness was not that at all. Her skin had the pellucid look of a child's; her hair was not ash-blond, but streaked here and there with lighter glints and reddish strands; it was variegated, like her eyes. Though the look she gave him was glancing, like cold light on cold water, frozen in the prismatic irises were bits of color like the leaves she held: mottled gold and green and brown with a silvery bloom. Even her clothes were the same colors-dark green sweater hooked round her shoulders, gold silk blouse, brown trousers. It was an autumnal look. In some sort of alchemy, she had absorbed what colors remained. Or, chameleon-wise, was trying to blend in and hide there.

After a moment or two in which she looked from the path to him and back toward the falling-down gate, she said, 'I wasn't meaning to be avoiding-' She stopped and expelled a long sigh.

'Avoiding me?' Jury laughed a little. 'I'd hate to try to find you if you meant to be elusive.'

Her gaze went back to the path and gate.

Jury looked down it. 'Were you waiting for someone?'

That earned him a flicker of honest interest. 'Waiting?' She smiled slightly. 'No.'

Either she gave the impression of one always just on the point of speaking, or he was so used to people rattling on about their lives that he was uneasy, waiting himself upon her silence. 'You seem so intent,' he added limply, 'upon that prospect.' He looked down the path.

Her smile was very slight. 'I have none of those,' she said, ambiguously and almost irrelevantly. 'A useless gate, isn't it? I expect this place was surrounded by a medieval wall. Perhaps that was what was called a clair-voyee…'

He moved closer, to a position that would have commanded more attention, if that were possible. She continued in her odd way both to note his presence and to ignore it.

'Mrs. Healey-'

'Nell.' Her smile was almost convincing. 'We were in close enough contact I think you can call me by my first name.' Now, she looked away again, this time at the surrounding elms and birches. 'I wonder why you're back.'

It was a statement only; she did not seem interested in Jury's reasons. He had the feeling that things were done with, finished, for her. There was no trace of hostility in her tone, and none of hope, either. She looked down at the path, as if studying the groupings of pebbles, leaves, and roots. She seemed deep in thought, but it was not her surroundings that engaged her attention, and not him. She appeared not to care how he answered.

'The reason I'm 'back,' as you put it, is that I hoped you might tell me why you killed your husband.'

She opened her mouth as if to reply. He waited for something; there was nothing. Somewhere, he heard the soft thunk of a pinecone. Her profile was to him; her arms folded across her breast, hands resting in the crooks of her elbows.

This fixated pose and refusal to talk did not strike Jury as obduracy. She was not being stubborn. Indeed, she once again opened her mouth as if she meant to answer, then closed it as before.

'Your father says it must have been revenge.'

After a few moments, she said only, 'Does he?' and pulled her sweater closer. Her voice broke between the two syllables.

Did she sense that she was not smooth enough, not plausible enough to go along with that lie?

'But that doesn't surprise you; that must be the line your solicitors are taking-that and temporary insanity.'

A feverish color rose from her neck to her face, mottling the cool skin. But her reaction seemed to stem from something other than embarrassment. The corners of her mouth twitched.

Jury wanted to shake her out of this nunlike placidity and calm acceptance of her fate. And he wondered that she didn't appear angry, or, at least, unnerved, by his appearance. She did not seem even to question it. He went on: 'After eight years, that'd be a hell of a difficult case to make -even for someone as clever as Sir Michael.'

After a few moments, all she said was, 'I expect so.'

It was such a flat-out statement and carried such a note of conviction that she mightn't have cared at all what happened to her. Her hands were locked behind her; her eyes fixed fast on the end of the path. Jury looked toward the gate, the clair-voyee, and beyond it. There was a bitter little orchard of pollarded trees with shrunken trunks, pencil-thin branches, bony limbs jutting out. In summer, though, it would be different, the trees inviting a child to climb them for the fruit.

'Did your son play there?'

'Yes.' It took her some time to add: 'With Toby.'

It was odd, how she gave only the first name, as if she had an implicit knowledge he'd know Toby.

'Toby Holt.'

Nell drew the sweater more closely together and nodded. 'They were good friends, which is strange given Billy was twelve and Toby was nearly sixteen. At fifteen, well…' She didn't finish. 'I actually think he admired Billy. Of course, Billy seemed older, probably because of his music. He was a wizard, he could play anything, really. Poor Toby. No matter how he tried he could hardly make music with a comb. And Abby, they both actually put up with Abby. She was only three. How is she? And the Holts. Have you talked with the Holts? I wonder how they're getting on without him.'

Shaking her head, she looked at the ground. Looked and kept shaking her head as if all of this were a puzzle, a mystery beyond her poor powers to comprehend. And strange her wondering how the Holts 'were taking it,' as if his death had occurred only last week.

There was no question, apparently, that he would see Abby, would see the Holts. He was sure that at that moment she did not even register his presence as a policeman, or perhaps not at all. She was talking, he thought, to herself. At least, she was talking.

Jury was certain that she could see the ghost of Billy Healey beyond the broken walls, climbing a tree. And when he looked round at her again, she seemed to have taken on the aspects of the orchard; she seemed to have shrunken, grown thinner, turned in upon herself. Her clear complexion, even, had developed tiny lines, like crazed porcelain. She had brought a small book of poetry out from her pocket, and her fingers, skeletal-looking to his eye now, turned it round and round.

'It looks,'-here she nodded toward the rows of smallish trees-'as if it were freezing to death. But it's only resting. What would be dangerous and deadly is a rush of unseasonable warmth.' She paused. 'I only know that because of a poem about someone's looking at his orchard and saying to it, 'Good-bye and keep cold.' '

'You seem to find that comforting.' A chilly wind sprang up, making a few leaves skitter about with a tinny sound, blowing her hair loose from the mooring of its tortoiseshell comb and whipping a few strands across her face. She pulled them back, like a veil, from her mouth and chin and re-pinned the hair.