Chapter 3 American Goldfinch #3
The report I’d read did say an autopsy showed no evidence of foul play. One of the forensic pathologists suggested that the
victim inhaled a toxin dissolved in the missing bath water—and that toxin would have broken down right away. That was when
they exhumed Emil Gardener’s body. At autopsy, complete certainty was not possible about the amount and nature of a toxin,
but the condition of Gardener’s stomach tissue strongly suggested a toxic and corrosive agent. The bruises on his head and
shoulders probably came from hitting his head against a hard surface, such as the base of the sink and the toilet during his
death agonies. Or maybe someone had hit him on the head.
This had happened over this past Christmas break, during what I now knew were the last days of Felicity’s intact family, the
final Christmas service that Roman Wild would preach at Starbright Ministry. How long she was there and when she arrived were
open to debate, but the visit was her alibi. For how could she have killed anyone from a hundred miles away?
I thought of a previous Christmas, some years ago.
The last time I’d had an actual visit with Felicity.
It was that brunch that Felicity and I organized with Becky Brompton and Cassandra Sullivan, who had been our high-school classmates.
All the guests were female, including a few little kids.
We ate too many mushroom-and-chicken vol-au-vents and drank too much cider spiked with too much rum, and laughed that, when we stepped outside, we’d be in Bedford Falls.
After everyone else left, Felicity and I exchanged presents. The gifts she gave me were strange and opulent for kids our age.
I loved them. There were simple half-carat diamond stud earrings. After all that fashion blogging, I could spot even the most
artful fake and I knew in general terms what they would cost. She also gave me black velvet Saint Laurent over-the-knee boots
and a Baccarat crystal paperweight. I gave her a copy of Fuchsia’s hardcover “look book” of remarkable photos, an ostrich-leather passport holder, swag from some event, and a gold-plated Montblanc
Meisterstück pen we got as a perk from the pen company, which would have cost about five hundred dollars in a store. I figured
that everyone likes beautiful pens and I had two of them. Her presents to me would have cost me two weeks’ pay. Mine to her
were free. Why didn’t I wonder how a grad student could afford such things? I suppose I simply accepted that Felicity could
pull off the seemingly impossible, as she always had.
She told me she would be going to Canada that summer to work with a professor trying to alleviate habitat challenges to endangered
cerulean warblers. She showed me a video of a plump little denim-colored bird with a sweet cheer of a call.
Was not one single sentence of any of that true?
Afterward, I wrote to thank her for the gifts and the party. I wrote a couple of times and tried to call. Felicity never answered
the notes and the phone number I had was no longer in service.
As a child at Christmas, I used to stand looking down the hilly street from our house at a descending necklace of colored lights, pretending I was a princess who lived high in her castle above all her subjects.
I recalled Felicity’s accounts of her bleak, straitened holidays (“Nothing more fundamental than a Christmas with fundamentalists,” she’d say).
Back then, the only undecorated house was the Wilds’ house.
They didn’t celebrate a secular Christmas with festive lights, a big tree, and piles of presents, but instead with an austere grind of twice-daily church services from December 1 until early January.
As the kind of minister he was, Roman Wild must have felt it was his duty as a minister to set an example of putting Christ back in Christmas.
The presents the children received were few and practical.
Felicity told me that her parents once gave her pajama bottoms for her December birthday and then gave her the top for Christmas.
“Don’t they get that this could backfire, and their children will grow up to hate religion?” my dad said. “Those kids look
around them and see all the fun and food and excess other families have, and who can blame them? Puritans must have had more
fun!”
Miranda learned from Felicity’s grandmother, Alice, who lived not far from my parents, about what happened a few days into
the new year, how state police, local police, and police from Madison all converged on the building to arrest a 120-pound
girl. (I suppose they thought she could be holed up in there with an automatic weapon.) Alice got there just in time to see
her only granddaughter taken away in handcuffs.
Her family had no idea what was happening.
For all they knew, it was because of the rigorous nature of her graduate studies that Felicity didn’t come home more often.
Would my parents have figured out that I wasn’t really in school?
My mother, of course, was overly inquisitive by nature and training, and further, they helped subsidize my bills and stuff when I got jammed up, so I had very few secrets.
Other families were different. Stories of abuse, suffered or perpetrated in secret, were almost ubiquitous .
. . He seemed like a decent guy, quiet, kept himself to himself, I would never have suspected . . .
When the whole thing transpired, Nell and I were with my parents, house hunting in Florida, in Cocoa Beach, near where my
dad had gone to college and where a few of his old fraternity brothers lived. My parents wanted a vacation place, where they
would eventually retire, in anticipation of the day when we finally got around to giving them grandchildren. For one hot,
creepy week, Nell and I drove every morning to Cocoa Beach past snowmen and reindeers standing on lawns as plush as putting
greens. We sat on the sand listening to people’s phones playing “Jingle Bells” as the sun smashed down on us. One woman whose
mat was next to our towels was so cooked that her skin was the color and texture of a leather boot. She lay there all day,
neither reading nor listening to music and not even going into the water to get her ankles wet. How could this feel pleasant?
How could she believe the result was attractive? Yet, the oranges were so delicious compared to the ones at our local Woodman’s
that I ate until my gums hurt. I also actually got sick of eating fried grouper, which, on my first night, was a delicacy.
The condominium our folks decided on was nice enough: two stories, four bedrooms, a pool, solidly built and thoughtfully finished
to resemble a little Victorian house. It looked the same as three dozen others in the same planned neighborhood. No matter
how old and cold I got, I decided (ironically, as it transpired) that I would never live in Florida.
If I had been home (Where there was snow!
Where it was real Christmas!) I might have seen Felicity.
We might have had a drink or gone out for lunch.
Why hadn’t I made the effort to do that sooner and more often?
Not that it would have changed anything; that was a foolish notion, but the frisson of guilt was real.
It was never that I didn’t care for her; of course I did, but life had whirled both of us away—or so I assumed.
The age we were, work came first. Study came first. Social life and love were folded into the work of inhabiting the adult role you would have for the rest of your life.
You were leaning forward into the wind, into the future, with the past at your back, reliable and recoverable, and sometimes, for the moment, ignorable.
Still, I was aghast in the knowledge that, whatever had happened, it was already underway by then. Whatever she knew, whatever
she had planned, if she had done what they said she’d done, the guilt and agitation must have been crushing. How could she
go through the ordinary week of holiday rituals, knowing she was on the verge of something so monstrous? It was unsettling
to think that, at the time, I knew nothing of something now central to my professional and personal life. At the time, I was
stuffing my face with fried grouper sandwiches.
I wondered then, if you were going to do something so grim, why pick such a contradictory occasion for it, a time like winter
break when families gathered, that, for the survivors, would stain that supposedly joyous week forever? Or did the murderous
not even consider such matters? Was the timing so she could pretend somehow that she was out of town? Was her need for that
money so fierce and urgent? Why? Was it just to be safe? Never again to have to rely on men? How did Felicity even feel about
men? Did she despise them? Was she gay (not that gay women despised men)? Why did the police just immediately believe Cary’s
account of Emil’s death? Why did no one think that Cary might have killed him?
Why wouldn’t Felicity talk to me?
“Do you know where there’s a restaurant around here that might still be open?” Ross asked.
I twitched, startled by his voice. Lost in my freewheeling thoughts, I’d all but forgotten he was there.
“I don’t. I don’t think I’ll ever eat again. I feel like I swallowed a bag of doughnuts.”
“Well, two loaves of bread . . . single-handed.”
“Are you hungry?”
“I’m going to look and see if there’s some kind of fast-food place. I’ll bring you some cookies or something. Do you want
a soda too? We can talk more then. I can’t think when I’m starving.”
“Sure,” I told him, as he shrugged into his peacoat, winding his scarf around his neck. This reminded me that tonight was
markedly colder than it had been in weeks. I was in such a hurry to leave that I actually lost time through haste. As my Grandma
Nell said, what you lack with your mind, you make up with your feet. I had to go back to get my favorite quilted winter coat,