the mild disorder of a woman who has many other closets to organize.
Mrs. Leeds’s diary was in a plum velvet box on the dressing table. The key was taped to the lid along with a check tag from the police property room.
Graham sat on a spindly white chair and opened the diary at random:
December 23rd, Tuesday, Mama’s house. The children are still asleep. When Mama glassed in the sun porch, I hated the way it changed the looks of the house, but it’s very pleasant and I can sit here warm looking out at the snow. How many more Christmases can she manage a houseful of grandchildren? A lot, I hope.
A hard drive yesterday up from Atlanta, snowing after Raleigh. We had to creep. I was tired anyway from getting everyone ready. Outside Chapel Hill, Charlie stopped the car and got out. He snapped some icicles off a branch to make me a martini. He came back to the car, long legs lifting high in the snow, and there was snow in his hair and on his eyelashes and I remembered that I love him. It felt like something breaking with a little pain and spilling warm.
I hope the parka fits him. If he got me that tacky dinner ring, I’ll die. I could kick Madelyn’s big cellulite behind for showing hers and carrying on. Four ridiculously big diamonds the color of dirty ice. Icicle ice is so clear. The sun came through the car window and where the icicle was broken off it stuck up out of the glass and made a little prism. It made a spot of red and green on my hand holding the glass. I could feel the colors on my hand.
He asked me what I want for Christmas and I cupped my hands around his ear and whispered: Your big prick, silly, in as far as it will go.
The bald spot on the back of his head turned red. He’s always afraid the children will hear. Men have no confidence in whispers.
The page was flecked with detective’s cigar ash.
Graham read on as the light faded, through the daughter’s tonsillectomy, and a scare in June when Mrs. Leeds found a small lump in her breast. (Dear God, the children are so small.)
Three pages later the lump was a small benign cyst, easily removed.
Dr. Janovich turned me loose this afternoon. We left the hospital and drove to the pond. We hadn’t been there in a long while. There never seems to be enough time. Charlie had two bottles of champagne on ice and we drank them and fed the ducks while the sun went down. He stood at edge of the water with his back to me for a while and I think he cried a little.
Susan said she was afraid we were coming home from the hospital with another brother for her. Home!
Graham heard the telephone ring in the bedroom. A click and the hum of an answering machine. “Hello, this is Valerie Leeds. I’m sorry I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you’ll leave your name and number after the tone, we’ll get back to you. Thank you.”
Graham half-expected to hear Crawford’s voice after the beep, but there was only the dial tone. The caller had hung up.
He had heard her voice; now he wanted to see her. He went down to the den.
He had in his pocket a reel of Super Eight movie film belonging to Charles Leeds. Three weeks before his death, Leeds had left the film with a druggist who sent it away for processing. He never picked it up. Police found the receipt in Leeds’s wallet and got the film from the druggist. Detectives viewed the home movie along with family snapshots developed at the same time and found nothing of interest.
Graham wanted to see the Leedses alive. At the police station, the detectives had offered Graham their projector. He wanted to watch the movie at the house. Reluctantly they let him check it out of the property room.
Graham found the screen and projector in the den closet, set them up, and sat down in Charles Leeds’s big leather armchair to watch. He felt something tacky on the chair arm under his palm—a child’s sticky fingerprints fuzzed with lint. Graham’s hand smelled like candy.
It was a pleasant little silent home movie, more imaginative than most. It opened with a dog, a gray Scottie, asleep on the den rug. The dog was disturbed momentarily by the moviemaking and raised his head to look at the camera. Then he went to sleep again. A jumpy cut to the dog still asleep. Then the Scottie’s ears perked up. He rose and barked, and the camera followed him into the kitchen as he ran to the door and stood expectantly, shivering and wagging his stumpy tail.
Graham bit his lower lip and waited too. On the screen, the door opened and Mrs. Leeds came in carrying groceries. She blinked and laughed in surprise and touched her tousled hair with her free hand. Her lips moved as she walked out of the picture, and the children came in behind her carrying smaller sacks. The girl was six, the boys eight and ten.
The younger boy, apparently a veteran of home movies, pointed to his ears and wiggled them. The camera was positioned fairly high. Leeds was seventy-five inches tall, according to the coroner’s report.
Graham believed that this part of the movie must have been made in the early spring. The children wore Windbreakers and Mrs. Leeds appeared pale. At the morgue she had a good tan and bathing-suit marks.
Brief scenes followed of the boys playing Ping-Pong in the basement and the girl, Susan, wrapping a present in her room, tongue curled over her upper lip in concentration and a wisp of hair down over her forehead. She brushed her hair back with her plump hand, as her mother had done in the kitchen.
A subsequent scene showed Susan in a bubble bath, crouched like a small frog. She wore a large shower cap. The camera angle was lower and the focus uncertain, clearly the work of a brother. The scene ended with her shouting soundlessly at the camera and covering her six-year-old chest as her shower cap slipped down over her eyes.
Not to be outdone, Leeds had surprised Mrs. Leeds in the shower. The shower curtain bumped and bulged as the curtain does before a grade-school theatrical. Mrs. Leeds’s arm appeared around the curtain. In her hand was a large bath sponge. The scene closed with the lens obscured in soapsuds.
The film ended with a shot of Norman Vincent Peale speaking on television and a pan to Charles Leeds snoring in the chair where Graham now sat.
Graham stared at the blank square of light on the screen. He liked the Leedses. He was sorry that he had been to the morgue. He thought the madman who visited them might have liked them too. But the madman would like them better the way they were now.
Graham’s head felt stuffed and stupid. He swam in the pool at his hotel until he was rubber-legged, and came out of the water thinking of two things at once—a Tanqueray martini and the taste of Molly’s mouth.
He made the martini himself in a plastic glass and telephoned Molly.