Final Option

trees, and a gaggle of policemen were milling around the perimeter.
    I faltered a bit as we approached, realizing what Ruskowski had in store for me. It was one thing to stumble on the body unawares, another to go back for a second look.
    “Did he kill himself?” I ventured as we ducked under the tape.
    “So far,” snapped the detective, “all I’ve got is one dead guy in one damned expensive car.”
     

CHAPTER 2
     
    My mother had long ago pronounced Bart Hexter’s house to be the ugliest in Lake Forest. I had never been inside, but these edicts of hers were made with an acid accuracy. I had heard that it was modeled after a famous English manor house, but as I approached it on foot, accompanied by two policemen, it looked only enormous and forbidding. The long drive swept downhill and ended in a wide circle at the front door. In its center was a fountain of carved marble—an elaborate affair of twined dolphins and sea horses blowing high arcs of water into the thin April sunshine.
    The police had appropriated a dark and chilly room off the massive entrance hall. It had a stone fireplace that was big enough to stand in and the high ceiling beamed with black oak. The furniture was carved and Elizabethan, with chairs of dark wood upholstered in burgundy and black. An enormous tapestry hung on one wall, so worn I assumed it must be genuine. It was in this vaguely inquisitorial setting that I made my formal statement to Detective Ruskowski.
    He took me through it in agonizing detail—every encounter I’d ever had with the dead man, my impressions of him as a person and a businessman, as well as a detailed account of every minute of my last twenty-four hours. Through it all, Ruskowski maintained an attitude of belligerent suspicion, reminding me that policemen, even more than lawyers, live in a world where they expect to be lied to.
    When we were done he turned me over to a young woman from the County Crime Lab who cheerily swabbed my hands for a neutron activation test. The test was done to detect the presence of barium and antimony, two substances commonly left behind on the hand after a gun is fired. Then, with the uncomfortable sensation of being in a bad made-for-TV movie, I allowed myself to be fingerprinted.
    My business with the police concluded, I went to the powder room to wash my hands. There, in a fire-bowl of hand-painted French wallpaper, I scrubbed off the sticky fingerprint ink. Finished, I reached for a towel and found myself looking at three crisp, monogrammed linen hand towels, the kind people like to give as wedding presents. I stood, frozen in midmotion, hands dripping onto the tile.
    I have a whole life packed away in boxes: twenty-four place settings of china, crystal champagne flutes, and Waterford wine goblets. I have table linens and picnic baskets, kitchen gadgets and serving platters, picture frames, silver trays and crisp linen hand towels embroidered with initials that were mine for much too short a time.
    I was married once, not so long ago.
    Russell and I met in law school, mauling each other in moot court competition during the day and again— much differently—at night in his squeaky Murphy bed. He was everything I am not: self-made and supremely self-confident. He cruised through everything—law school, job interviews, encounters with my family—like a man with his hand firmly on the throttle. We married the summer after graduation and honeymooned on the isle of Crete. There we sailed and sunned and stayed up late, sipping retsina at an outdoor café, our heads bent together in the light of an oil lamp, making whispered plans for the future.
    When we got back to Chicago we reported for work, I as a first-year associate at Callahan Ross, Russell as a clerk for Federal Appeals Judge Myron Wertz. At first we were too busy to pay much attention to the slight limp that Russell had acquired in Greece. It seemed natural to assume that it was nothing—an old soccer injury come back to life—but eventually he was persuaded to see a doctor. Six weeks to the day after our wedding, Russell was diagnosed with brain cancer. I was a widow before my first wedding anniversary.
    That was three years ago, and every day I tell myself that the worst is behind me, but still my grief, the throbbing loss, is like a quiet soundtrack to my life. And there are days like this one, when something-—the disequilibrium of Hexter’s death, my raw encounters with the police, or the sight of an