“I thought this might warm you,” she said, handing me a glass of wine.
Setting the tray on the coffee table, she seated herself on the red velvet cushion of a baroque side chair, tucking her feet to one side the way proper ladies are taught to sit by their proper female elders.
“Thank you,” I said, and again I apologized.
The battery in my state car was no longer in this world, and jumper cables were not going to bring it back. The police had radioed for a wrecker, and had promised to give me a lift back to Richmond as soon as they finished processing the scene. There was no choice. I wasn’t going to stand outside in the snow or sit for an hour inside a squad car. So I had knocked on Miss Harper’s back door.
She sipped her wine and stared vacantly into the fire. Like the expensive objects surrounding her, she was beautifully crafted, one of the most elegant women I thought I had ever seen. Silver-white hair softly framed her patrician face. Her cheekbones were high, her features refined, her figure lithe but shapely in a beige cowl-necked sweater and corduroy skirt. When I looked at Sterling Harper, the word “spinster” definitely did not enter my mind.
She was silent. Snow coldly kissed the windows and the wind moaned around the eaves. I could not imagine living alone in this house.
“Do you have any other family?” I asked.
“None living,” she said.
“I’m sorry, Miss Harper …”
“Really. You must stop saying that, Dr. Scarpetta.”
A large cut-emerald ring flashed in the firelight as she lifted her glass again. Her eyes focused on me. I remembered the terror in those eyes when she opened the door while I was examining her brother. She was remarkably steady now.
“Gary knew better,” she suddenly commented. “I suppose what surprises me most is the way it happened. I wouldn’t have expected someone to be so bold as to wait for him at the house.”
“And you didn’t hear anything?” I asked.
“I heard him drive up. I heard nothing after that. When he didn’t come inside the house, I opened the door to check. I immediately called 911.”
“Did he frequent any other places besides Culpeper’s?” I asked.
“No. No other place. He went to Culpeper’s every night,” she said, her eyes drifting away from me.
“I warned him about going to that place, about the dangers in this day and age. He always carried cash, you see, and Gary was quite skilled at offending people. He never stayed at the tavern long.
An hour, at the most two hours. He used to tell me it was for inspiration, to mingle with the common man. Gary had nothing else to say after The fagged Corner.”
I had read the novel at Cornell and remembered only impressions: a gothic South of violence, incest, and racism as seen through the eyes of a young writer growing up on a Virginia farm. I remembered it had depressed me.
“My brother was one of these unfortunate talents who had but one book in him,” Miss Harper added.
“There have been other very fine writers like that,” I said.
“He lived only what he was forced to live when he was young,” she went on in the same unnerving monotone. “After that he became the hollow man, the life of quiet desperation. His writing was a series of false starts that he would eventually toss into the fire, scowling as he watched the pages burn. Then he would roam about the house like a angry bull until he was ready to try again. That is the way it has been for more years than I care to recall.”
“You seem awfully hard on your brother,” I remarked quietly.
“I’m awfully hard on myself, Dr. Scarpetta,” she said as our eyes met. “Gary and I are cut from the same cloth. The difference between the two of us is I don’t feel compelled to be analytical about what can’t be altered. He was constantly excavating his nature, his past, the forces that shaped him.
It won him a Pulitzer Prize. As for me, I have chosen not to fight what has always been so clear.”