Уильям Макгиверн - Summitt

“Sure, it’s fine. But I’m awake now. Does that spoil it?”

“No. I guess I was hoping you’d wake up. I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to tell you I’ve been sort of stupid about this whole business. I knew what happened, but I guess I never really absorbed it. I questioned you about it and asked for explanations, asked you to remember details and the times things happened, like it was... just an automobile accident, like which way you were going on your bike and what way the car was coming from. I want to tell you I felt proud of you in court today, what you were able to say, how you said it. I felt very glad we belonged to each other... But when this is over, and you go on with your life, I’d like you to try to understand that I loved you and cared about you and still didn’t understand what you’ve been through...”

“I’m going to cry,” she said, “unless you stop talking like that.”

“Okay,” he said quickly. “I won’t say another word about it, I’ll change the subject. What about this summer? What would you like to do? You tell me and we’ll try to set it up.”

“Well, I don’t want to sound like some dumb kid or a kind of nut, but I’d really like to stay home and go to summer school. Miss Calder, all the teachers, are making it easy for me now. But I know I’ve lost a lot of ground, regardless of grades.” She propped herself up on her elbow. Her face was animated. “I’d like to cram in French and take a science minor, and then...” She regarded him doubtfully. “Does it matter if it’s expensive?”

“Well, we’ll see. What is it?”

“I’ve been reading about skiing in Switzerland, daddy, a little town in the Alps where the snow’s so deep in the streets you can’t even hear the cars or anything. People have hot chocolate and wear bright sweaters and ski all day. They have bunny slopes that Davey and I could practice on. I was thinking that we get a long vacation at Christmastime and maybe we could do it then. You could teach us, couldn’t you?”

“We can sure check it out. We can start thinking about it.”

She fell asleep soon afterward, and Selby watched her for a while and then kissed her on the forehead, gently, so as not to wake her.

A Lebanese maid opened the door of the suite and told Thomson his wife was having her massage. Would he perhaps enjoy some tea or a drink while he was waiting for Mr. Santos to finish?

Thomson shook his head and sat down beside his wife’s circular bed. Her quarters included therapy pools and a gymnasium that opened off the main room with its carefully controlled temperature and artificial sunlight.

Miguel Santos, brown and trim in white T-shirt and trousers, supervised Adele Thomson’s water therapy and her sessions in the rhythmically pumping exercise machines. Their grueling regimen fulfilled Adele’s desperate hopes of walking again one day, and perhaps even dressing herself and doing her own hair. It was a hope no doctor had ever given her the slightest chance of realizing. But Adele refused to consider their verdicts as long as the machines could twist her body into simulated contortions, and Santos’s probing fingers could bring color and tone to her wasted flesh...

The accident that paralyzed Adele Thomson had occurred when Earl was twelve. She had been on a shooting trip with her husband in Iran, at a Pahlavi “shooting box,” a lodge on the Elburz mountains only a short flight from Tehran...

Everything in Adele’s bedroom, except for mirrors, was done in flat whites — draperies, furniture, carpets. But her wardrobe doors always stood open so that her clothes provided a colorful contrast to the relentlessly neutral walls, furs and dresses of purple and green and cool grays, tiny jewels gleaming on cashmere sweaters and edging the straps of evening sandals. Her golf and tennis footwear were also on display, the uppers plumped up tautly with slim wooden shoe trees.

Thomson couldn’t get the Selby girl’s testimony out of his mind, her quiet, deliberate voice, the awful words and images they created — he noticed a pair of headlights coming up the driveway. Davic...

The Iranian guides had driven them into the hills where lemon and rose sunlight spread over the tallest peaks. Chairs were placed at strategic sites, guns loaded and distributed, certain thickets pointed out — it was like a stage set, animals caught in spotlights, deer or large cats, to be admired before being shot to death with grace and precision. The fields of fire were marked by whitewashed poles. If a gun barrel strayed beyond these limits, a sure brown hand would be there to move it firmly back into the firing zone. Flowers glistened on the ground, tiny blue flowers that grew around the rocks and through the scaly brush like delicate veins...

Adele’s hair was still blond. She had worn it long when she was young, but now it was cut short. Her maid washed it each day, and it stood up like a healthy crown, springing vibrantly from her bony, fragile forehead in a subtly ironic rebuke to her body, which was slack and useless... ever since she’d leaped up to pick a strange blue flower glinting in the last sunlight, and Thomson had fired at the movement, sending her body crashing into a ravine, broken and stained with blood...

A knock sounded on the half-open door and Davic came in. Thomson said, “I’ll see if my wife’s ready.”

Adele lay on the massage table, eyes covered with cotton pads. Her thin legs were a deep brown against the white sheet tucked around her hips. Santos was vigorously massaging her neck and shoulders. Adele heard her husband’s footsteps.

“George?”

“Yes, Adele. Mr. Davic is here.”

“Santos isn’t through yet.”

She wanted him to stay and watch, of course, to forgive her for the pleasure she took in Santos’s hands, those oiled and sturdy fingers which manipulated her wasted muscles and forced contractions that created at least a memory of pleasures she had once known.

She’d always needed forgiveness. He had learned that early about her. That was why she had been disloyal to him, why she had taken lovers, only to be forgiven. That’s what he had told himself for a long time. It had helped a little. Her last had been the American colonel in Tehran. Madsen, was that his name? Something like that.

They returned to the bedroom together — her massage table was electrically powered, the controls at her right hand — and Santos helped her under the coverlet.

The muscular Cuban smiled a good night and left the room silently on rubber-soled shoes.

Davic then said, “Judge Flood has agreed to take your testimony from here, Mrs. Thomson. A van from the TV station with a power pickup will relay your testimony to a screen in the courtroom. That screen faces the judge and jury. A TV camera crew will be here” — he glanced about — “probably in front of the closets, the camera shooting at you but including the bed, the books behind you and so forth. The deputy DA will ask you what time you and Earl had dinner that night. I would suggest you watch Miss Brett as she questions you. When you reply, shift your eyes from the monitor to the red light. Then you’ll be looking directly at the judge and jury.”

Davic paused and glanced at his notes. “There won’t be anything in her questions for you to be concerned about. You know exactly when Earl got home, there’s always a clock at your bedside. You took no medication, nothing that would make you sleepy or confused. The prosecution will know that you use prescription medicines for pain and insomnia. It’s their business to find out such things. We won’t sidestep it. We’ll bring it out in direct examination. Now... Earl showered and changed, remember, before he joined you for dinner. That was his custom, what he did as a matter of course.”