"We're catching a plane," she told me.
Since she was so clearly determined to rid him of me then and there, I said—while still keeping pace with the wheelchair-"Coleman Silk was my friend. He did not drive his car off the road.
He couldn't have. Not like that. His car was forced off the road. I know who is responsible for the death of your daughter. It wasn't Coleman Silk."
"Stop pushing me. Sylvia, stop pushing a minute."
"No," she said. "This is insane. This is enough."
"It was her ex-husband," I said to him. "It was Farley."
"No," he said weakly, as though I'd shot him. "No—no."
"Sir!" She had stopped, all right, but the hand that wasn't holding tight to the wheelchair had reached up to take me by the lapel. She was short and slight, a young Filipino woman with a small, implacable, pale brown face, and I could see from the dark determination of her fearless eyes that the disorder of human affairs was not allowed to intrude anywhere near what was hers to protect.
"Can't you stop for one moment?" I asked her. "Can't we go over to the green and sit there and talk?"
"The man is not well. You are taxing the strength of a man who is seriously ill."
"But you have a diary belonging to Faunia."
"We do not."
"You have a revolver belonging to Faunia."
"Sir, go away. Sir, leave him alone, I am warning you!" And here she pushed at me—with the hand that had been holding my jacket, she shoved me away.
"She got that gun," I said, "to protect herself against Farley."
Sharply, she replied, "The poor thing."
• 300 • I didn't know what to do then except to follow them around the corner until they reached the porch of the inn. Faunia's father was weeping openly now.
When she turned to find me still there, she said, "You have done enough damage. Go or I will call the police." There was great ferocity in this tiny person. I understood it: keeping him alive appeared to require no less.
"Don't destroy that diary," I said to her. "There is a record there—" "Filth! There is a record there of filth!"
"Syl, Sylvia—" "All of them, her, the brother, the mother, the stepfather—the whole bunch of them, trampling on this man his whole life. They have robbed him. They have deceived him. They have humiliated him. His daughter was a criminal. Got pregnant and had a child at sixteen—a child she abandoned to an orphan asylum. A child her father would have raised. She was a common whore. Guns and men and drugs and filth and sex. The money he gave her—what did she do with that money?"
"I don't know. I don't know anything about an orphan asylum.
I don't know anything about any money."
"Drugs! She stole it for drugs!"
"I don't know anything about that."
"That whole family—filth! Have some pity, please!"
I turned to him. "I want the person responsible for these deaths to be held legally accountable. Coleman Silk did her no harm. He did not kill her. I ask to talk to you for only a minute."
"Let him, Sylvia—" "No! No more letting anyone! You have let them long enough!"
People were collected now on the porch of the inn watching us, and others were watching from the upper windows. Perhaps they were the last of the leafers, out to catch the little left of the autumn blaze. Perhaps they were Athena alumni. There were always a handful visiting the town, middle-aged and elderly graduates checking to see what had disappeared and what remained, thinking the best, the very best, of every last thing that had ever befallen them on these streets in nineteen hundred and whatever. Perhaps they were visitors in town to look at the restored colonial houses, a stretch of them running nearly a mile down both sides of Ward Street and considered by the Athena Historical Society to be, if not so grand as those in Salem, as important as any in the state west of the House of the Seven Gables. These people had not come to sleep in the carefully decorated period bedrooms of the College Arms so as to awaken to a shouting match beneath their windows. In a place as picturesque as South Ward Street and on a day as fine as this, the eruption of such a struggle—a crippled man crying, a tiny Asian woman shouting, a man who, from his appearance, might well have been a college professor seemingly terrifying both of them with what he was saying—was bound to seem both more stupendous and more disgusting than it would have at a big city intersection.
"If I could see the diary—" "There is no diary" she said, and there was nothing more to be done than to watch her push him up the ramp beside the stairway and through the main door and into the inn.
Back around at Pauline's, I ordered a cup of coffee and, on writing paper the waitress found for me in a drawer beneath the cash register, I wrote this letter: I am the man who approached you near the restaurant on Town Street in Athena on the morning after Faunia's funeral.
I live on a rural road outside Athena, a few miles from the home of the late Coleman Silk, who, as I explained, was my friend. Through Coleman I met your daughter several times. I sometimes heard him speak about her. Their affair was passionate, but there was no cruelty in it. He mainly played the part of lover with her, but he also knew how to be a friend and a teacher. If she asked for care, I can't believe it was ever withheld. Whatever of Coleman's spirit she may have absorbed could never, never have poisoned her life.
I don't know how much of the malicious gossip surrounding them and the crash you heard in Athena. I hope none. There is, however, a matter of justice to be settled which dwarfs all that stupidity. Two people have been murdered.
I know who murdered them. I did not witness the murder but I know it took place. I am absolutely sure of it.
But evidence is necessary if I am to be taken seriously by the police or by an attorney. If you possess anything that reveals Faunia's state of mind in recent months or even extending back to her marriage to Farley, I ask you not to destroy it. I am thinking of letters you may have received from her over the years as well as the belongings found in her room after her death that were passed on to you by Sally and Peg.
My telephone number and address are as follows-That was as far as I got. I intended to wait until they were gone, to phone the College Arms to extract from the desk clerk, with some story or other, the man's name and address, and to send off my letter by overnight mail. I'd go to Sally and Peg for the address if I couldn't get it from the inn. But I would, in fact, do neither the one thing nor the other. Whatever Faunia had left behind in her room had already been discarded or destroyed by Sylvia—the same way my letter would be destroyed when it arrived at its destination. This tiny being whose whole purpose was to keep the past from tormenting him further was never going to allow inside the walls of his home what she would not permit when she'd found herself up against me face to face. Moreover, her course was one that I couldn't dispute. If suffering was passed around in that family like a disease, there was nothing to do but post a sign of the kind they used to hang in the doorways of the contagiously ill when I was a kid, a sign that read QUARANTINE or that presented to the eyes of the uninfected nothing more than a big black capital Q. Little Sylvia was that ominous Q, and there was no way that I was going to get past it. I tore up what I'd written and walked across town to the funeral.
The service for Coleman had been arranged by his children, and the four of them were there at the door to Rishanger Chapel to greet the mourners as they filed in. The idea to bury him out of Rishanger, the college chapel, was a family decision, the key component of what I realized was a well-planned coup, an attempt to undo their father's self-imposed banishment and to integrate him, in death if not in life, back into the community where he had made his distinguished career.
When I introduced myself, I was instantly taken aside by Lisa, Coleman's daughter, who put her arms around me and in a tearful, whispering voice said, "You were his friend. You were the one friend he had left. You probably saw him last."
"We were friends for a while," I said, but explained nothing about having seen him last several months back, on that August Saturday morning at Tanglewood, and that by then he had deliberately let the brief friendship lapse.
"We lost him," she said.
"I know."
"We lost him," she repeated, and then she cried without attempting to speak.
After a while I said, "I enjoyed him and I admired him. I wish I could have known him longer."
"Why did this happen?"
"I don't know."
"Did he go mad? Was he insane?"
"Absolutely not. No."
"Then how could all this happen?"
When I didn't answer (and how could I, other than by beginning to write this book?), her arms dropped slowly away from me, and while we stood together for a few seconds more, I saw how strong was her resemblance to her father—strong as Faunia's to her father.
There were the same carved puppetlike features, the same green eyes, the same tawny skin, even a less broad-shouldered version of Coleman's slight athletic build. The visible genetic legacy of the mother, Iris Silk, seemed to reside solely in Lisa's prodigious tangle of dark bushy hair. In photograph after photograph of Iris-photographs I'd seen in family albums Coleman had showed me-the facial features hardly seemed to matter, so strongly did her importance as a person, if not her entire meaning, appear to be concentrated in that assertive, theatrical endowment of hair. With Lisa, the hair appeared to stand more in contrast to her character than-as with her mother—to be issuing from it.