Linda Fairstein - Final Jeopardy

When the three bags were zipped and locked, I called my caretaker’s answering machine, leaving a message for him to get a house cleaner in to get rid of the dust left by the investigators.

“C’mon, Mike. Let’s lock up and get on the road.”

“This would have been a pretty good movie,” he said, still carrying the screenplay, which he had obviously decided to take with him as his keepsake of the deceased.

“Lucrezia Borgia was an interesting broad for the fifteenth century. Politics, war, intrigue, religion, sex, poison – some things never change. Izzy was hot for this one – she’s got stars and exclamation points in red ink drawn all around her entrance and opening salvo. She’s even written in her own poetry in the margin or maybe one of her friends wrote it. You know a Dr. C? It’s got a few lines of poetry, then it says “Dr. C.”

I turned off the CD and the lights and set the alarm system.

In his most dramatic drag imitation, Mike swept out the door reading Isabella’s poem to me:

“What beckoning ghost, along the moonlight shade Invites my steps… tell, Is it, in Heaven, a crime to love too well?”

“Whoa, Chapman, maybe they didn’t teach you this stuff at Fordham and certainly not at the Police Academy, but any self-respecting English literature major from a woman’s college could tell you that Isabella didn’t write that. It’s a very famous poem by Alexander Pope,” and I shuddered to think how sadly appropriate the title was as I said it to Mike, “”Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady.“

“Well, she must have liked it a lot to write it in here herself. Maybe Dr. C. is the shrink she was complaining to you about you know, maybe C is one of his initials.”

“Sounds more like Dr. C. is from the Psychic Friends Network. A ”crime“ to love too well? Is some guy one of her exes so jealous that he killed her because she was with another man? Or did she love someone too much? Was this psychiatric advice or just the coincidence of someone’s taste for classic English poetry? If poor Isabella had only known the rest of this verse, she might not have liked it quite so much.”

“Why?”

“Cause it’s about the untimely death of a beautiful young woman, who once had wealth and fame, and now all that remains is ”a heap of dust.“ That’s why. You better read through the rest of the script and see if anything else has been added to the margins.”

“And we’d better get a handle on Dr. C. Let me tell you British poetry, Motown lyrics, movie trivia with all the stuff you’re good at, I don’t know why Battaglia thinks you’re so useless. Let’s get going.”

I took a last look around at the house and then started the car out the driveway. As we headed down-island, I continued to point out all the sights to Mike – friends’ houses, working farms, and beach roads.

“How did you find this place, Alex? I mean, why did you start to come to the island?”

“Can you stand a love story? A short one. Sad ending.”

I think Mike was sorry the moment he asked. Most of my office friends had some idea of what had happened to me in law school, but I had never talked much about it. I doubt he had connected it to the Vineyard or he would not have raised it at that moment.

“I’m taking one last detour on the way to the airport,” I said, turning off State Road onto a dirt path that led through two miles of thick brush before reaching an area of wetlands and saltwater ponds. Beyond the dunes, guarded only by gulls and shorebirds, stretched miles of sandy white beach covering practically the entire south coast of the island.

I knew when we reached it there would not be a soul anywhere in sight on Black Point Beach, just the great surf of the Atlantic Ocean, constantly throwing up waves to meet the shore.

I started to talk as we drove down the winding road.

“You know that I went to law school in Charlottesville, at the University of Virginia, right? I loved it there and I loved everything about the law school experience, which is quite unusual, as you’ve heard. It’s a great school and it’s also one of the most beautiful places in the country. From my first semester I knew that I wanted to go into public service, and I knew that I wanted to be a prosecutor they were a natural overlap and Paul Battaglia had the reputation for running the best District Attorney’s office anywhere.

“So I was off on the right foot academically, from the start. School was interesting, the friends I made there were fantastic it was a long time since I’d been in classes with and I was playing as hard as I was working.

“One Saturday afternoon my friends Jordan and Susan‘ whom Mike knew well’ invited me out to the house they rented to go horseback riding… a big mistake for a Jewish girl from Westchester whose only experience on a horse had been at the Bronx Zoo. We were only doing a trail ride, but my horse got spooked by a snake and threw me. I went straight to the University Hospital Emergency Room with my left hand kind of dangling three fingers badly fractured.”

We had reached the end of the dirt path and I parked the car so Mike and I could get out and walk over the dunes.

He followed my lead as I kicked off my shoes and left them in the car.

“Enter Adam Nyman the resident on duty in the Emergency Room. He splinted my fingers, convinced me that law students male variety were pedantic and boring, and took me to dinner. I fell madly in love and we spent every free moment together from that weekend on. Fill in the details I’m sure you can.”

“Was he a Vineyarder?” Mike asked.

“No, but he’d been coming here with his family all his life.” We stood at the top of the sandy walkway up to our knees in the tall, reedy grass and stopped to look at the incredible sweep of ocean and sky, with not a human in sight.

“This is what Adam lived for to sail on that water from the first light of day till the sun set beyond the Gay-head Cliffs. Every vacation, every long weekend, every space in our lives we scrambled to get here.

“We became engaged and set a date to get married, right after the bar exam the summer I graduated from law school. We bought the house together and started to fix it up. Adam had known the old lady who lived in it widow of a fisherman from an old island family and had promised her he’d never tear it down or modernize it the way so many people have done to the original farmhouses.”

We were walking westward, as sand crabs scurried to get out of our way and birds hovered behind us to see if we had scraps of food to drop for their dinner.

“Most of my family and friends had come up to the island the week before the wedding. There were beach picnics and cocktail parties and Sunfish races and clambakes and I never thought there could be an end to my happiness.

“Adam was the one with the inflexible schedule so he was the only person we were waiting for those last days.

His final shift was over at midnight on Thursday he was working in New York City by then and he got in his car to make the drive up to the ferry so he could be here at daybreak on Friday.“

I was doing fine. I was telling the story so flatly that I knew I could get through it okay there wasn’t enough emotion left in me this week to squeeze out much for these memories, mixed as they were with such swings of joy and agony.

“I never saw Adam again, never heard his gentle voice or felt the warmth of those wonderful hands on my body.

Everyone who loved him as I did stayed on the island for his funeral. There was no wedding, and I never got to be his bride.”

My voice was still strong and I wasn’t even conscious of the tears streaking down my cheeks, till Mike grabbed me by the shoulders.

“C’mon, Alex, sit down for a minute.