Jennifer DuBois - Cartwheel

“I’m Andrew Hayes,” he said.

At this, something happened to the kid’s face—he tilted it upward, and his eyebrows lifted almost imperceptibly. His nostrils flared. “Lily’s father.”

“Yes. Lily’s father.” Andrew paused. He tried to take the edge off his voice, just in case. “You’ve heard about Lily, I’m sure?”

Here, the kid seemed to recover himself. “Indeed,” he said, snapping upright. “Most improbable. Though our children do have a way of surprising us, don’t they?”

Andrew did not know quite what to make of this, but he knew he did not like it. He took a step backward. “Who’s ‘us’?” he said.

“No, no. I jest. I don’t think your lovely Lily had a hand in the slaying.”

Andrew dragged his fingers through his hair, feeling the resolute stubbornness of his own skull. “I am hoping,” he said carefully, “that you can help me.”

Sebastien looked at Andrew with placid eyes. “I am truly very sorry to hear that,” he said. Andrew couldn’t quite parse this one, either, but before he could ask for clarification Sebastien cleared his throat. “May I ask,” he said. The jaunty spin had dropped out of his voice. “How Lily is faring?”

Andrew squinted. It seemed that the boy actually wanted to know. “Could I come in, maybe, and we could talk a bit?”

“Where are my manners?” Sebastien stepped backward into the shadows of the house and gestured, with elaborate gallantry, for Andrew to join him.

“Lily is horrible,” said Andrew, stepping inside. “Thanks for asking. She’s absolutely horrible.”

Sebastien’s reaction to this was obscured by the house’s strange endemic darkness. Andrew blinked and a labyrinthine, anachronistic living room appeared—there was an arabesque clock on the mantel; an ancient piano teetering nearby; several sheet-covered mounds that Andrew fervently hoped were furniture. In the corner, a multicolored, very outdated map covered a window; a ray of sunlight illuminated a bright green nonaligned India. Andrew pointed to it.

“I thought the Soviet Union was done now,” he said.

“Oh?” said Sebastien. “I hadn’t heard.”

He sounded truly bereft. This interview, it was becoming clear, was going to demand a different kind of patience than Andrew had thought to bring. “It was in all the papers,” he said.

Sebastien nodded gravely. “My decorating scheme is very passé, I’m afraid. If you don’t move things, it turns out, they don’t tend to move themselves. I suspect that’s why we still have all those Roman fora lying around willy-nilly.”

Andrew half-nodded. He was faintly aware that it was probably unwise to keep obviously marveling at the house, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to stop. This was where his daughter’s boyfriend lived, and there was a cluster of chandelier pendants hanging from the ceiling, and Andrew was somehow positive that the entire room was cobwebby. On the mantel, Andrew could make out a collection of ancient liqueurs, a giant book that could only be the Bible, a vase with some flowers that looked like they had probably always been dead. On one wall was a tapestry—an actual tapestry, like something out of the national museum of a minor eastern European country. It was threadbare, of course, and depicting a hunt, of course: blue dogs harassing a red deer with anthropomorphic viciousness, the deer’s eyes white with terror. Good God, the morbid pageantry of it all! How had the world ever produced a person like this? Had he been left alone for his entire childhood in this collapsing house with nothing but Evelyn Waugh books to read? And why, oh why, had Lily slept with him? Now Andrew had to worry about her self-esteem, on top of everything else.

“Where are your parents?” Andrew found himself saying.

“Well, that’s truly the question at the heart of all human endeavor, isn’t it?” said Sebastien gaily. “Where, indeed. You’re a great thinker of our time—you tell me.”

Andrew spent a moment in incomprehension, then felt a dull club of remorse. “Oh,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“ Pas du tout . Can I get you a drink?”

“No, thank you.”

“I trust you don’t object if I indulge?”

Andrew waved his hand in a vague gesture of permission giving and Sebastien LeCompte bowed his way into the kitchen. Andrew went to examine the mantel more closely. Next to the clock, in an odd thematic parallel to the tapestry, was a photograph of Sebastien with a murdered beast of some kind. Whatever it was had been shot near the heart, its wound wreathed by a ring of poppy-red blood. In the photo, Sebastien was even younger than he was now; his father—identical to Sebastien, theatrically swathed in various beige garments with compartments and buttons and bolts—had his arm around his son.

“You’re sure?” said Sebastien, returning with a greenish glass of something that could only be absinthe. “I could even pop over to the corner store and get—what? Beer?”

Andrew shook his head.

“So,” said Sebastien, sitting on one of the mounds and motioning to Andrew to do the same. “What was it that you wanted to discuss?”

Andrew selected a mound of his own. “Well,” he said, tentatively descending. “I understand that you and Lily were—friends.”

Andrew watched Sebastien fleetingly consider, and then reject, a sarcastic response. Instead, he looked at the ceiling and seemed to actually ponder the question for several long moments. “Yes,” he said finally. “I think that we probably were.”

“And you also knew the, ah. The deceased roommate. Katy.”

“Briefly.”

Andrew felt a contraction in his throat. “I am hoping you might help me understand what all of this is about. Why this is happening. Why they imagine Lily did this thing. Because it is outrageous, objectively. As I’m sure you agree. Objectively outrageous and unbelievable.”

Sebastien stood and went to the mantel. He traced his finger along the photograph, making a curlicue in the dust, then regarded his finger distastefully and wiped it on his trousers. “Well, Lily didn’t very much care for Katy, as I’m sure you’ve been made aware,” he said flatly.

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Andrew. He swallowed, trying to unclench his throat. “They weren’t close, maybe, but I don’t think there was any particular hostility there.”

“I trust you’ve read the emails? Or hasn’t cable news reached America yet? Anyway, they were quite a spectacle down here.”

Suddenly, Andrew wanted to snap this kid’s skinny neck; suddenly, Andrew thought he understood homicidal rage. “I think ‘spectacle’ is probably overstating it,” he said. “And, anyway, that’s just how she talked. It’s how many people talk. Many, many people say uncivil things about their friends in emails, and they are not arrested for it, because it’s not actually illegal—not even here, in fact: I’ve checked. Whatever she wrote about Katy, she didn’t mean anything by it. If you really spent any time with her, you’d know that.”

Sebastien tilted his head to one side. “She did have a very particular idiolect, of course.”

“Okay, look,” said Andrew, standing up. He had had enough of this. His family needed him—again? or finally? either way—and he was not going to let this cartoonish Cheshire cat of a child stop him from helping them. “Listen. You are going to tell me some things.”

Sebastien stared, and Andrew wondered how long it had been since he had received direct instructions of any sort.

“Tell me about the night Katy died,” Andrew ordered. “Lily was with you.”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve talked to the police about this?”

“Briefly.”

“Do they think you might be involved?”