Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow Read Free Book Online

professors, all of them hermit-like creatures with wild-grown beards. But she had been cavalier about her abilities. Now, I learned, mathematics was a calling. A consuming interest. About which I had not heard a word in more than half a decade.
    At the moment Barbara is facing her dissertation. When she started, she told me that projects like hers — I could not possibly explain it — are sometimes set out in a space as small as a dozen pages. Whether those were words of hope or illusion, the dissertation has lingered like a chronic disease, one more source of her painful melancholy. Whenever I pass by the study, she is looking pitifully over her desk, out the window toward a single dwarf cherry tree that has failed to thrive in the clay landfill in our back yard.
    Waiting for inspiration, she reads. Nothing so much of this world as newspapers and magazines. Instead, she carts in from the university library armloads of heavy texts on arcane subjects. Psycholinguistics. Semiotics. Braille and sign language for the deaf. She is a devotee of facts. She reclines at night on her brocade living-room sofa, eating Belgian chocolates, and finds out about the operation of the world she never visits. She reads, literally, about life on Mars, the biographies of men and women whom most people would find boring, and certainly obscure. Then there will be a spate of medical reading. Last month she spent with books that seemed to be about cryogenics, artificial insemination, and the history of lenses. What is occurring on these galaxian visits to other planets of human learning is unknown to me. No doubt she would share her newfound knowledge if I asked. But over time I have lost the ability even to pretend high interest, and Barbara regards my dullness to these matters as a failing. It is easier to maintain my own counsel, while Barbara roams the far-off realms.
    Not long ago it occurred to me that my wife, with her abrupt social mannerisms, her general aversion to most human beings, her dark taciturn side, and her virtual armory of private and largely uncommunicated passions could be described only as weird. She has virtually no serious friendships aside from her relationship with her mother, to whom, when I met her, Barbara barely spoke, and whom she still regards with cynicism and suspicion. Like my own mother, when she was alive, Barbara seems largely a willing captive within the walls of her own home, flawlessly keeping our house, tending our child, and toiling endlessly with her formulae and computer algorithms.
    Without really noticing at first, I become aware that both of us have ceased comment, even motion, and are facing the television set, where the screen has filled with images of today's service for Carolyn. Raymond's car arrives and the back of my head is briefly shown. The son is escorted up to the doors of the chapel. The newsreader is doing a voice-over: Eight hundred persons, including many city leaders, gathered at First Presbyterian Church for final rites for Carolyn Polhemus, a deputy prosecuting attorney slain three nights ago in a brutal rape-murder. Now people are emerging. The mayor and Raymond are both depicted speaking to reporters, but only Nico gets audio. He employs the quietest voice he knows and deflects questions about the investigation of the murder. "I came to remember a colleague," he tells the camera, with one foot in his car.
    It is Barbara who speaks first.
    "How was it?" She has wrapped herself now in a red silk robe.
    "Gala," I answer. "In a way. A meeting of all the luminaries."
    "Did you cry?"
    "Come on, Barbara."
    "I'm serious." She is leaning forward. Her jaw is set and there is a savage deadness in her eye. I always marvel that Barbara's anger remains so near at hand. Over the years, her superior access has become a source of intimidation. She knows I am slower to respond, restrained by archaic fears, the dark weight of memory. My parents often fell into robust shouting matches, even occasional