The counter overlooks the living room; your space is continuous. The living room walls, forever a work in progress, are a riot of movement in your care: like a teenager, you’ve put up anything that catches your fancy, adding and removing according to your whim. Today, the center of attention is a drawing of a shield bearing the image of a unicorn, ballpoint and felt tip on lined paper, artist unknown though you have your suspicions: your students’ desks at school have brown metal pockets attached to the frames, and every day things get left behind. On your desk, at the front of the class, there’s a lost-and-found basket to which you occasionally draw the class’s attention. But no one had claimed the unicorn shield, even though the curves of its emblem seemed a labor of love, the mane especially, dozens of gentle curves with real motion to them. Potential, you want to say. Maybe something more. Other teachers complained about students doodling in class, but you understood that attention works in funny ways, and considered a find like this evidence that your students were comfortable enough with you to let their imaginations venture outward a little in your presence. So you brought it home, and affixed it to the living room wall with clear tape: a crest for your chambers, an insignia to mark them as your own.
On the day next week when your living room gets photographed, the unicorn shield will still be sharing wall space with a mounted panel from Beatrix Potter’s The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit—the page showing the nice, gentle rabbit who nibbles a carrot—and an inexpensively framed publicity portrait of Myrna Loy in The Gypsy Minx, her knee drawn up to her chin as she sits on a rough-hewn bench attached to a tree, playing solitaire or possibly reading tarot. Her eyes meet the camera: she’s almost smiling, her mouth closed. The shot feels electric. They had something special, the stars of the silent age. Every expression had to contain multiple shades, to stand in for all the missing words and inflections. It’s easy to read a lot into a single frame.
* * *
IT WILL ALWAYS SEEM CRASS TO ME to enter your bedroom. Nothing that ever happened in here is anybody’s business: not the judge’s, not the jury’s, certainly not mine. But investigations turn up what they’re bound to turn up. It’s the way of things, and besides, once we’re inside the building, there really isn’t any point in leaving stones unturned. So many investigations run aground precisely because somebody overlooked something—out of carelessness, yes, but also from misplaced ideas about propriety, or fruitless reverence. It’s good to respect the dead, and to stay out of the way of an investigation in progress: but it’s also good, when the dust has settled—on the grave, on the desks of the investigating detectives—to widen the lens, to take in the bigger picture.
Still, I cringe reading through the testimony of Albert N., called to the stand in support of the prosecution’s theory regarding ritual sacrifice. He is no expert witness; he’d met you at an outdoor concert in a park in the summer, and you’d exchanged numbers. He was almost comically earnest when you met for cocktails one Friday a few weeks later. He spent that Friday night at your apartment. It hadn’t been especially memorable or regrettable for either of you—this was a new age—and you’d parted amiably, hardly thinking of it later. Under questioning, asked to describe the wall-hanging in the bedroom, he first says it was “a tie-dye thing”; pressed, he recalls the design:
It was like—and I don’t want to say this is what it was, because it was sort of abstract, you know? But to me it looked like a spider.
A spider? the DA asks, as recorded in the trial transcript. Do you mean a small—you know—a small spider like you’d see around the house?
No, sir. It took up the whole middle of the—
—of the tapestry.
—the tapestry, right. Or the sheet. Like, it was just a purple-colored sheet with a giant shape in the middle that looked to me like a spider.
The prosecution moves to introduce Exhibit 3-L, says the DA. It’s a batik wall-hanging. Albert N. is right: it’s an abstraction, the sort of thing an artistic child, under pressure to describe his work to a schoolteacher, might call “a design.” There are craze-lines like the cracking finish on an old guitar all over it; at its center, there’s a rounded shape where these lines seem thicker, six of them uniformly segmented, angling in toward the center from either side.
It’s not a spider. It’s an accident. You don’t belong to an order of witches that venerates the spider, and the batik wall-hanging isn’t in your bedroom because you think the spider will afford you protection from enemies. You bought it at some crafts festival in a park, and it looked like a pinwheel to you, and you hung it up in your bedroom.