Richard Ford - Independence Day

Clair, however, just opened the car door, stepped out right at the stoplight at Seminary and Bank, across from the First Presbyterian (where I occasionally “worship”) and simply started walking, looking in store windows as she went and smilingly whispering, “Die, Vernell, die right now,” to all the white, contrite Presbyterians whose eyes she met. (She told me this story at an Appleby’s out on Route 1, when we were at the height of our ardent but short-lived amours.)

Later that afternoon she checked into the August Inn and called her sister-in-law in Philadelphia, revealing Vernell’s treachery and telling her to go get the kids at the baby-sitter’s and put them on the first flight to Birmingham, where her mother would be waiting to take them back to Talladega.

And the next morning — Monday — Clair simply hit the bricks, looking for work. She told me she felt that even though she didn’t see many people who looked like her, Haddam seemed as good a town as any and a damn sight better than the City of Brotherly Love, where life had come unstitched, and that the measure of any human being worthy of the world’s trust and esteem was her ability to make something good out of something shitty by reading the signs right: the signs being that some strong force had crossed Vernell off the list and at the same time put her down in Haddam across from a church. This she considered to be the hand of God.

In no time she found a job as a receptionist in our office (this was less than a year after I came on board). In a few weeks she’d started the agent’s course I took up at the Weiboldt school. And in two months she had her kids back, had bought a used Honda Civic and was set up in an apartment in Ewingville with a manageable rent, a pleasant, tree-lined drive to Haddam and a new and unexpected sense of possibility wrought from disaster. If she wasn’t a hundred percent free and clear, she was at least free and making ends meet, and before long she started seeing me on the Q.T., and when that didn’t seem to work she got together with a nice, somewhat older Negro attorney from a good local firm, whose wife had died and whose bad-tempered kids were all grown and gone.

It is a good story: human enterprise and good character triumphing over adversity and bad character, and everybody in our office coming to love her like their sister (though she never really sold much to the moneyed white clientele Haddam attracts like sheep, but came to specialize in rentals and condo turnarounds, which are not much of our market).

And yet completely mysteriously, in a routine showing of one of her condos right out here below me in Pheasant Meadow, a condo she’d shown ten times before and to which she arrived early to turn on lights, flush the toilets and open the windows — all normal chores — she was confronted by what the state police believe were at least three men. (As I said before, indications were that they were white, though I couldn’t say what those indications were.) For two days, Everick and Wardell were extensively questioned, due to their access to keys, but they were completely exonerated. The unknown men, though, bound Clair hand and foot, gagged her with clear plastic tape, then raped and murdered her, slashing her throat with a packing knife.

Drugs were at first thought to be a motive, not that she was in any way implicated. It was speculated the unnamed men could’ve been repackaging bricks of cocaine, and Clair just walked unluckily in. The police know that empty condos in remote or declining locations, developments where good times have come and gone or never even came, often serve as havens for illicit transactions of all kinds — drug deals, the delivery of kidnapped Brazilian babies to rich childless Americans, the storage of various contrabands including dead bodies and auto parts, cigarettes and animals — anything that might profit from the broad-daylight anonymity condos are designed to provide. Our receptionist, Vonda, has a private-public theory that the owners, some young Bengali businessmen from New York, are at the bottom of everything and have a secret interest in pushing condo prices down for tax reasons (several agencies, including ours, have stopped showing property there). But there’s no proof nor any reason to imagine anyone would need to kill as sweet a soul as Clair was for their purposes to win out. Only they did.

Immediately after Clair’s murder, the women in our office, along with most of the other female realtors in town, formed mutual-protection groups. Some have begun to carry guns and Mace canisters and Tasers to work and right on out to houses they are showing. Women realtors now go around only in twos. Several have enrolled in martial arts classes, and “grieving and coping” sessions are still going on in different offices after business hours. (We men were encouraged to come, but I felt I already knew plenty about grieving and enough about coping.) There is even a clearinghouse number whereby any female agent can ask for and be given a male escort to any showing she feels uneasy about; and twice I’ve gone out just to be there when the clients show up, in case there was any funny business (there hasn’t been any). None of these precautions, needless to say, can be discussed with the clients, who would hot-foot it out of town at the first sniff of danger. In both instances I was simply introduced as Ms. So-and-so’s “associate,” no explanations given; and when the coast proved clear, I inconspicuously departed.

Since May, all the realtors in Haddam have contributed to the Clair Devane Fund for her kids’ education ($3,000 has so far been raised, enough for two full days at Harvard). Yet in spite of all the gloominess and hollow feeling, and the practical realization that “this kind of thing can happen here, and did,” that no one is very far from a crime statistic, and the general recognition of how much we take our safety for granted — in spite of all that, no one talks about Clair much now, other than Vonda, whose cause she somehow is. Clair’s kids have moved out with Vernell in Canoga Park, her fiancé, Eddie, is in quiet mourning (though he has already been seen lunching with one of the legal secretaries who considered renting my house). Even I have made my peace, having said my explicit adieus long before, when she was alive. Eventually her desk will be manned by someone else and business will go on — sad to say, but true — which is the way people want it. And in that regard, as well as respecting the most private of evidence, it can sometime already seem as though Clair Devane had not fully existed in anyone’s life but her very own.

N owadays I end up driving over once a week to pass a jolly-intimate evening with Sally Caldwell. We often attend a movie, later slip out to some little end-of-a-pier place for an amber-jack steak, a pitcher of martinis, sometimes a stroll along a beach or out some jetty, following which events take care of themselves. Though often as not I end up driving home in the moonlight alone, my heart pulsing regularly, my windows wide open, a man in charge of his own tent stakes and personal equipment, my head full of vivid but fast-disappearing memories and no anxious expectancies for a late-night phone call (like this morning’s) full of longing and confusion, or demands that I spell out my intentions and come back immediately, or bitter accusations that I have not been forthright in every conceivable way. (I may not have, of course; forthright being a greater challenge than would seem, though my intentions are always good if few.) Our relationship, in fact, hasn’t seemed to need more attention to theme or direction but has proceeded or at least persisted on autopilot, like a small plane flying out over a peaceful ocean with no one exactly in command.

Not of course that this is best —life’s paradigm mapped out to perfection. It’s simply what is: fine in the eternity of the here, and now.