The Evidence Against Her Read Online Free PDF

Scofield, whose namesake Lily was. “I won’t have you say such a thing! Not another word!” Lillian never did realize that when she faced her husband down he backed off, just as he always did regarding his niece.
    “Well, Lillian! Of the three of them . . . Even you’ve got to admit she’s the runt of
that
litter, and . . .”
    “I’ll leave the room! I really will not hear another word of this, Mr. Scofield! You’re speaking unkindly of someone very dear to me. . . . Why, John! She’s my namesake! She’s Audra’s daughter. She might just as well be my
own
daughter!”
    And Warren would notice that under the force of his mother’s genuine pique his father would immediately become his most beguiling, his voice softening into a melodious wheedling. “Ah, my,” he would sigh. “Well, Lillian. I suppose I ought to work harder at being a charitable man. But that girl is just slippery. . . . All right. All right. But my lack of . . .
gallantry . . .
well, it’s truly your fault.” And he would hunch his shoulders in a shrug of helplessness, hands spread wide apart and palms outward to illustrate the uselessness of any attempt to behave otherwise. “I do have to say that any woman has a hard time winning even a bit of my heart in comparison to you. You haven’t changed since the day I met you. Won’t you forgive me? Isn’t there anyone in my own household who loves me just a little? Unkind—plain stupid—as I may be?”
    Warren hated being in the company of his parents when his father’s tone implied an extenuating and intimate connection between them. Lillian Scofield would soften and laugh a little, and Warren would be embarrassed for and even unreasonably angry at his mother, surprised each time at the evidence of her credulity. As an adult, Warren, too, objected to any criticism of Lily, but when he was a little boy it had been impossible for Warren not to be relieved to know his father favored him over his cousin.
    Nor did Lily’s lighthearted self-incrimination appeal to her mother-in-law, Martha Butler, who, pregnant and frighteningly seasick, had traveled with her husband to Brazil and then Cuba, where he had been entirely ineffective at the mission of founding Methodist schools for girls, but where she had given birth to Robert’s two older siblings, both of whom were engaged in similarly unnerving work in South America. She believed— but couldn’t pin the idea down enough even to mention it to her husband—that in some way Lily was tossing off her mother-in-law’s own desperate housewifery in those hot and foreign places as an unnecessary—a foolish—sacrifice. She always thought that Lily was making an oblique disparagement, was indirectly—and, of course, unwittingly—belittling her.
    “It’s amazing to me that I could be even
distantly
related to someone who knowingly took a risk like that! Just sailing off to who knows where,” Lily would carry on, and when the conversation got that far Martha Butler would look down at her hands folded in her lap and find herself restraining tears. “Leaving everything familiar behind. Well! And for that matter, someone who shouldered on even then—even after reaching land—to the wilds of Ohio!” Lily hadn’t noticed her mother-in-law’s dismay, but it was true that Lily had never forgiven Mrs. Butler for the subtle disapproval she had aimed Lily’s way when Lily was just a little girl, unable to make a case for herself as a suitable companion for Mrs. Butler’s last and favorite child.
    It was Warren and Robert who were pressed about details of what became their most popular story, since Lily’s role in it seemed so unlikely. The two men had come back from a daylong hike along the rocks, clear around Herring Gut Point to the lighthouse, where they got soaked by spray and had very nearly been trapped by the tide. They had returned to the farmhouse to discover that Lily and Marjorie had spread a cloth in the yard under