The Crime of Julian Wells Read Free

wondered, though there seemed no way to know in what direction Julian was heading when he decided to go to the pond instead.
    “By the way,” I said, “have you read the manuscript Julian brought back?”
    “No,” Loretta said as if my question had only drawn her deeper into Julian’s mystery. “He cut out their eyes, you know, that Russian horror. And that’s not all, of course.”
    “Yes, I know what Chikatilo did,” I said with a wave of the hand.
    Loretta’s attention drifted toward the window. “We were in Rome, Julian and I. Just children. We were in that little piazza, the Campidoglio. He said it looked perfectly square because Michelangelo had designed it to look perfectly square by widening it here and elongating it there. It wasn’t actually square at all. It was a masterful trick of perspective. ‘It’s distortion that creates perfection, Loretta,’ he said.”
    She turned toward me and I saw a subtle shift in the mosaic of this woman, and with that shift I realized just how deeply Loretta had loved Julian, and that she always would. He’d been the older brother who had taken time with her, who had offered her his thoughts, his feelings, and then, for some reason she would never know, had chosen to remove himself for years on end, one of life’s true vagabonds.
    “Julian was good,” she said softly. “That’s what I’ll miss. His goodness.”
    I felt a scuttling movement in the place where my youth lay like a discarded old traveling case, timeworn and battered, layered in gray dust. I glanced at my watch. “I’m sorry, but I have to look in on my father.”
    Loretta nodded. “How is he?”
    For the first time in a long time, I felt an uneasy loosening in the grip I was careful to maintain upon myself.
    “Fading,” I said. I looked toward the window, where the rain had not let up. “Bad night.” I rose, grabbed my coat, and drew it on. “Well, I’ll see you at the service on Friday.”
    Loretta stared at her now-empty glass. “Do you think you knew him, Philip?”
    “Not enough to have saved him, evidently,” I answered. “Which means I’ll always be silent in that boat.”
    She looked up at me. “I guess we all leave a trail of little pebbles scattered on the forest floor,” she said. “But I’ll always wonder where those pebbles would have led to with Julian.”
    I had no answer to this question, nor ever expected to have one. She saw my retreat, and so offered her own admittedly inadequate one.
    “Just to more pebbles, I suppose,” she added with a small, sad smile.
    I gathered up my coat. “I’m afraid so.”
    I expected this to be the end of it, but something behind Loretta’s eyes darkened. “I’m silent in that boat, too, you know,” she said.
    The feeling I saw rise in her at that moment was striking in its subdued passion. She had worked at home for years and years, while nursing Colin through his long dying, and yet, for all that, something still sparkled in her, a fierce curiosity.
    “And if I never find those words, I feel that I’ll live a bit like poor Masha,” she said. “Dressed in black, in mourning for my life.”
    They were dramatic words, of course, but the moment was dramatic, too, I thought, and in its aftermath, as I stepped outside and hailed a cab, it struck me that both for her and for me, what she’d said was true. A man we’d both loved had taken his own life. He had done so alone and had given neither of us a chance to stop him.
    There are times when the very earth seems poised to move against us, and at that instant, I recalled Julian at Two Groves, playing croquet with my father, while Loretta and I looked on. He’d hit the ball with both verve and confidence, which had given his game a dead-on accuracy that even then I suspected he would later apply to whatever he chose to do. Upon his inevitable victory, he had leaped into a shimmering summer air that had seemed to embrace him.
    How, from so bright a beginning, I wondered, had