The Closing: A Whippoorwill Hollow novel (The Whippoorwill Hollow novels) (11 page)

Nate returned to Jeetersburg Friday night. Maybe it was the similarity between the corruption in Buck County and Nate’s malfeasance as commonwealth’s attorney that broke him down. Or perhaps it was Darlene Updike’s striking resemblance to Christine. Or Nate’s concern about the settlement conference in his divorce proceedings scheduled for Monday morning. Later, upon reflection, he thought it was more likely that nothing in particular caused his relapse. His addiction was powerful and his will to resist was simply exhausted. Whatever the cause, he broke the seal on a bottle of whiskey at noon on Saturday. That night, when he was three fingers from the bottom of a second bottle, he dialed the home number of his former secretary. Her mother answered the phone. Nate asked to speak with Rosaline.

“Who’s calling?”

“It’s Nate Abbitt, Mrs. Partlow.”

“Rosaline doesn’t want to speak to you.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d tell her I’m on the line.”

Nate heard Rosaline’s mother say, “It’s that man again.”

Rosaline’s voice came through the line. “I told you not to call.”

“I want to see you.”

“I don’t ever want to see you again.”

“I made a mistake. Give me a chance to make it up to you.”

“Mistake? Is that what you call it? You talked me into committing a crime.”

“I didn’t mean to put you at risk.”

“You told me everybody would be better off if I signed that document. You said that man was guilty of the murder. You lied to me.”

“I didn’t lie. I thought he was guilty.”

“You told me I couldn’t get in trouble for signing that paper. That was a lie. Judge Blackwell said I committed perjury. He said he could have sent me to jail for five years.”

“I didn’t think things through. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry’s not good enough.” There was a long silence. Then Rosaline said, “You said you needed time to tell Christine about us. I waited a whole year. You still hadn’t told her when this big mess came along. Have you ever told Christine about us? Have you told her what you were doing all those nights and weekends when we were together?”

Nate didn’t answer.

“Our time together, it was all a lie, wasn’t it? You never meant to leave Christine, did you? You didn’t love me. You loved what we did together when we were alone.” Her voice broke. She took a deep breath. “Well, you got what you wanted from me.” Her voice broke again and she hung up the phone. Nate drained the bottle and passed out.

On Sunday before dawn, he vomited. He struggled through a series of dry heaves until midmorning. Sunday evening he kept down tomato soup. Monday morning he awoke early, sat on the edge of his bed, rubbed his temples to soothe a dull headache, and looked around his apartment. His bed rested against the back wall. A stove, icebox, and sink stood against adjoining walls. In between were a kitchen table and folding chairs. The room stank of cigarette smoke that seeped through the floor from Sally’s Diner below it. Nate hated the squalid little room. He hated all the trappings of his broken life.

He went to the window and looked across Lee Street at Beauregard Park. A squirrel foraged for food under an oak tree. Nate watched it scamper across the lawn and thought about the settlement conference scheduled for that morning and the train of events that led to Christine’s complaint for divorce. With money he inherited from his father, Nate and Christine bought their farm in Whippoorwill Hollow shortly after they married. Nate was elected commonwealth’s attorney. Christine earned a doctorate in English literature at Jefferson State. The college hired her to teach, and she made full professor. They agreed they didn’t want children, but in her mid-thirties, she pressed him to change his mind. He resisted, and her interest in children waned. They went on with their lives and never regretted their decision. They were dedicated to each other and to their professions and they were happy and successful.

The first signs of trouble came with the approach of Nate’s fifty-third birthday, his father’s age when he contracted cancer. Nate found himself dwelling on his father’s final days, the suffering, and the physical deterioration. Christine’s birthday gift was a candlelight dinner at Jeetersburg’s finest restaurant followed by a romantic evening at home with wine, a fire in the fireplace, and Christine in a negligee. Uneasiness had plagued Nate throughout the day, and when she embraced him that night, he was unable to perform. She tried to console him. “It’s nothing to worry about. You probably drank too much wine. Besides, it’s natural. We’re getting older.”

Nate brooded over Christine’s comment. She was right, he thought. His youth had slipped away from him when he wasn’t looking. Twenty-five years of sitting behind a desk and the stress of his heavy caseload had taken their toll. The cross-country athlete had given way to a flabby middle-aged man with jowls and a paunch, a man who resembled Nate’s father near the end of his life, a man who was old enough to die.

Nate’s preoccupation with aging and death caused him to take stock of his life. He felt he had squandered his talent prosecuting cases of no significance beyond the borders of Selk County. If he died tomorrow, his achievements would be forgotten, and if he lived another twenty years, he would achieve nothing more meaningful because he would never be more than a local prosecutor.

His assessment of his life’s work robbed him of his professional energy. His cases suddenly seemed mundane, resembling cases he had tried twenty years earlier. The faces of the criminals and victims were different, but the issues were the same. One day in court, he lost his presence of mind and forgot the name of the defendant and the facts of the case, and he was forced to request a recess to review the file.

A relentless malaise came over him. He worried that he had inherited his father’s cancer and that a time bomb of diseased cells lurked inside him. The sense that he was rapidly running out of time made him desperate, constantly in search of excitement, a jolt to his system, a thrill, something to make him feel young again.

Nate turned to alcohol to calm his fears. It seemed to work, at first, but over time he needed more and more whiskey to quell his anxieties. He drank pints, then fifths, then gallons, but the whiskey always wore off, and when it receded his fears returned, like rats scurrying across a basement floor when the lights have gone out. Only a continuous flow of whiskey through his veins kept the rats quiet, so he reorganized his life to allow him to function while he drank. At work, Nate sipped bourbon from a Coca-Cola can, refilling it from whiskey bottles he stowed in a desk drawer. When he was away from his office, he drank from a flask he concealed in his jacket breast pocket. On breaks during hearings and trials, he guzzled whiskey in a courthouse bathroom stall.

Nate manipulated Christine to prevent her from becoming an obstacle to his drinking. He told her he was working late when he was actually sitting at a table in Michie’s Place. He came home most nights after she had gone to bed and left in the morning before she arose. She challenged him about his absences and his drinking. He thought he would lose her if she knew he was weak and afraid, so he blamed his caseload. His lies kept her at bay for a while, but she eventually insisted that he hire help to staff his cases and cut down on his drinking. He put her off but she wouldn’t drop the subject. He exploded and attacked her for not being supportive. She pushed back. He reacted belligerently, insulting and berating her. Confused and hurt, Christine backed off and gave up, and Nate lost her trust and respect in the process. She stopped complaining because she stopped caring, but he was too dependent on alcohol by then to realize the severity of her wounds.

Through all the turmoil it never crossed Nate’s mind that he was an alcoholic. He told himself he was a social drinker, someone who drank to relax. By the time he met Rosaline Partlow, he needed more than a fifth of liquor before noon to relax. She was a receptionist in a law office in Jeetersburg. He went there to negotiate a plea agreement. When he approached her desk, she looked up and smiled and he felt the spark of excitement he had been searching for. At first, he wasn’t sure what attracted him to her. She was thirty-five, tall and slender, with blue eyes framed by shoulder-length brown hair. She was pretty, but not stunning. He had met more attractive women over the years and had never been tempted to betray Christine, but later, with the clear eyes of sobriety, he understood his infatuation with Rosaline. She was on the rebound from her second divorce. She had no children and no close friends. She was lonely and frightened and desperate for affection. She stood at the dead end of a dark road, lost and hopeless, and Nate became her savior. He took her hand and led her into the sunshine, and she repaid him with her passion. Their lovemaking restored his sexual confidence and fed his ego. She was young and she made him feel young again, and for a while, he lost himself in the taste, smell, and feel of her.

If Nate was bored with his work before he met Rosaline, after she came along it became an intolerable burden. The first steps he took to free himself from his responsibilities were small ones, unethical perhaps, but not illegal. He gave defendants generous plea agreements in cases he could have won. This alone wasn’t sufficient to clear his calendar, so he ventured further across the line to compel more defendants to plead out. He withheld exculpatory evidence. He claimed to have evidence he had not yet gathered. Sometimes, he lied outright about evidence. Each breach of his oath made the next one seem less important, and whiskey overcame his moral reservations. In the end, the law’s bright lines disappeared in an alcoholic haze, but Nate got what he wanted. He disposed of his cases with little or no effort, and no one was the wiser. Until the Jack Tin case.

It was Nate’s obsession with Rosaline that brought him down. Six months into their affair Rosaline asked him to leave Christine. His relationship with Christine was broken, but he still loved her, or at least he loved his memory of his love for her. By then, Nate’s interest in Rosaline had become purely sexual—robotic, mechanical, and addictive. He didn’t want to leave Christine and he didn’t want to end his affair with Rosaline, so he stalled. And he drank. Rosaline waited. Nate drifted, hoping something would extricate him from his dilemma. Rosaline’s complaints that they didn’t spend enough time together became more vehement, and she threatened to break off their affair. To appease her, he fired his secretary of twenty years, Marthy Critzer, and hired Rosaline.

Marthy was in her mid-fifties. She had never married and Nate suspected she had always carried a secret torch for him. She was hurt and obsessed with the injustice of her discharge. She called him on the phone every day. She lurked outside the office building and confronted him every time he went in or out. He assumed she secreted the recording device in his office in hopes of capturing evidence that would prove he was having an affair with Rosaline. What Marthy discovered was much worse.

Nate turned away from the window and got dressed for the settlement conference. He chose a blue suit that Christine had always liked and stood before the bathroom mirror and thought about the mess he had made of his life. After his accident, when all the alcohol had passed out of his system, he understood what he had been through. His fifty-third birthday had triggered a midlife crisis. His father’s early death raised the specter of Nate’s own mortality and the resultant fear was part of the cause of his downfall. Mourning the passage of his youth was in the mix, too. The loss of a sense of purpose, the self-loathing, chronic depression, and alienation from Christine changed him. But alcohol was the primary cause of his destruction. He had been a good man for thirty years. He loved his wife. He was one of the best prosecutors in the state. He was sensible, honest, and happy. He had the tools he needed to combat and survive a midlife crisis, even a severe one, but alcoholism washed those tools away. He had destroyed his career and had broken Christine’s heart. Now he was trying hard to regain what he had lost, but alcoholism was a predator that never rested. He would never be free of it.

Nate left the apartment and walked down Lighthorse Street to the Selk County courthouse. The courtroom’s floor-to-ceiling windows spilled sunlight over rows of oak pews. He went to the front of the courtroom and approached Howard Raines. The parties to the complaint for divorce were required to attend the settlement conference, but Christine was not at counsel’s table with Howard that morning.

“Where is Christine?” Nate said.

“I couldn’t persuade her to attend. She said she couldn’t face you.” Howard handed a court pleading to Nate. “I filed this motion asking Judge Greene to excuse her. I apologize for the lack of notice, but when we started to come over here, she couldn’t do it and I had to throw this motion together.”

Nate read the pleading. The motion said Christine was afraid to attend the hearing because Nate broke into her house and threatened her last fall.

The bailiff called the court to order, and Judge Luther Greene took the bench. Judge Blackwell normally presided over Selk County criminal and civil matters, including divorce cases, but he’d recused himself because of his close association with Christine and Nate. The circuit’s chief judge assigned settlement discussions in the case to Judge Greene. Luther Greene had toiled in obscurity as a divorce lawyer in Jeetersburg for twenty years, but a close friendship with the local member of the House of Delegates led to Greene’s election by the general assembly as a circuit court judge. Judge Greene was short and had a receding hairline and a sparse red goatee. His black robe swallowed his small frame, and the judge’s high bench dwarfed him.

Judge Greene opened the hearing by acknowledging Howard’s motion to excuse Christine’s appearance and asked Nate if he wished to object to its lateness or otherwise reply. Nate said he didn’t oppose the motion and the judge granted it. The judge suggested they go off the record and retire to chambers. “I’ll meet with each of you separately. I’ll see Mister Raines first.”

They all exited the courtroom, and Howard went into chambers with the judge. Nate sat on a bench in the hallway and waited. A clock on the wall marked the time, its long hand lurching forward at the end of each passing minute. Twenty minutes passed slowly. Howard emerged and Nate entered chambers.