The state’s attorney hadn’t believed Karin. He thought the threat of Clarence’s lawsuit was enough to make her drop all her principles, figure out how to make a bomb and how to set it off just when Clarence and his crony, the Spadona constitutional scholar Roger Brooke, were having an early morning meeting on Tuesday.
“I don’t know anything about explosives,” she’d protested.
“But your daughter does, doesn’t she?”
“Temple?” Karin had been astonished. “She’s an engineer. She knows how to calibrate things, and wire a house, and make heating and cooling systems go. She doesn’t know bombs!”
“Anyone could have built this one.”
Karin shook her head. “Not me. And I’m sure not Temple, either.”
Although, really, where her daughter was concerned, Karin was sure of nothing. How could you love someone and know so little about her? She had raised Temple in the relaxed, accepting atmosphere she herself had longed for in her own rigidly controlled childhood, and Temple had grown up tidy, precise, so compulsive she changed her voice mail message every day—as Karin realized when she’d made a frantic call to her daughter as the police were arresting her. Listening to Temple give the date, her whereabouts, when she’d return calls, Karin had moaned, “Darling, please, just answer, just answer,” and when the beep finally came, had time only to cry out, “Temple, come as soon as you get this message—it’s urgent!” before the cops snatched the phone from her.
2
Temple had been in the water lab at the Cheviot Engineering Institute when the Spadona building blew up. She was conducting tests on a grooved end-fitting that had come loose in a water main break to see whether the fitting was defective or had simply been improperly installed. She was covered in waterproof gear, happily reading gauges and jotting down notes to take back to the computer, and didn’t hear the news until later.
“Isn’t that the place where your mom leads protests?” Alvin Guthrie asked when Temple got back to her desk. “I thought I saw her on TV when Abu Graib hit the news, because she said that some of the Spadona fellows were training torturers, or justifying them or something.”
“Your mom is totally amazing,” Lettice announced. “Still living the hippie life after all these years. My mother is, like, obsessed with her body, you know, getting into a size two instead of a size six. I like how your mom just enjoys life and eats what she wants.”
“It would be better for her health if she worked out and didn’t eat so much dal and curry,” Temple said—although her suggestions along those lines to Karin had made her mother tilt back her head, with its rope of graying blond hair, and laugh. (She’d stroked Temple’s cheeks an instant later, because she hated cruelty in herself as much as in others, and said, “Darling, I can’t be the kind of woman you see at your health club. I do yoga every day, you know, and even if I’m twenty pounds overweight, that doesn’t stop me from making a tree vrksasana.” And she raised her right foot to press into her left thigh, while little Titus clapped his hands and tried to imitate her.)
“Anyway, I don’t have enough memory in my phone to keep track of all the places Karin goes on protests,” Temple added to Alvin, when he repeated his question. “I think I was born at a rally or protest of some kind.”
She could picture her mother, giving birth in the street, wrapping Temple in a banner, and continuing to march. Temple’s earliest memories were of painting signs for protest marches, or the marches themselves. Whether the cause was peace, farmworkers, or reproductive rights, Temple’s childhood was spent waking to a house full of strangers, tiptoeing around throwing out beer cans and scraping leftover curry into the garbage while the activists slept until noon.
She told her coworkers this, and Lettice once again exclaimed in envy about how open Temple’s mother was. The idea of a house full of empties didn’t make them gag, the way it did Temple herself. She’d gone to engineering school as the culmination of an obsession both with order and with making things work properly, but Alvin and Lettice were both good engineers with a high tolerance for mess—as Temple knew, since they’d all roomed together as students.
“If you’d grown up in my family, you’d welcome your mother’s open-house outlook,” Alvin said. “My parents only entertain once a year, when they have my father’s family to Thanksgiving, and that is an evening in hell, let me tell you.”
While Alvin and Lettice argued which one of them had the more neurotic family, Temple slipped into the hall to call Karin. “You weren’t at the Spadona Institute today, were you?”
Karin laughed. “You don’t think I blew it up, do you? We had a gazillion fire trucks on the street; Titus was in heaven—you know how little boys are with loud machines. But we had a teen reading circle at the house this morning, so I couldn’t go to the protest. Jessica was there with the sisters, and I hope you don’t think a group of pacifist nuns could blow up a building. Thank goodness none of them was injured—they were kneeling out front when the place went up.”
“Temple!” Her boss, Sanford Rieff, had suddenly appeared behind her. “I hope that conversation is about the threads on Rapelec’s pipe valve, because we need a report for them by the end of the day.”
Temple felt her cheeks grow hot and fled back to the office. While she wrote up her results, her office mates kept up a running commentary on the Spadona bombing, which the news sites were covering with an orgiastic glee.
Terrorism Strikes Chicago and Al-Qaeda in the Heartland, they trumpeted. A few hours later came the reports that police had discovered the bodies of Clarence Epstein and Roger Brooke in the building rubble. This seemed to pin the blame securely on al-Qaeda: the two men had been heavily involved in the interim government in Iraq, Epstein as an economist, Brooke giving advice on how to draft a new constitution. The FBI figured that Epstein and Brooke were targets of the blast, since they often met early in the morning before any of the administrative staff arrived.
The news reports expressed astonishment at the Institute’s location, but the Herald-Star did a sidebar explaining that the University of Chicago had taken over a lot of mansions on Woodlawn and Kimbark Avenues to house some of their auxiliary activities; the Spadona Institute, from its beginnings among the economists of the Nixon era, had always had close ties to both the university and the national government.
When Sanford Rieff came in at three to see whether Temple had finished her analysis, she was glad she had Rockwell hardness charts up on her screen—it was to Lettice and Alvin that Rieff said dryly, “Have you been assigned to the Spadona bombing? I didn’t realize anyone had retained Cheviot Engineering on that case yet. Temple, are you finished? And Alvin, don’t we have anything productive for you to do? You can go assist them in the crash lab.”
Temple surreptitiously watched the news on her phone. Whatever clues the FBI’s forensics team had picked up in the building they were keeping as secret as possible, although they did concede it wasn’t a typical bomb—something more homemade, which made people think about Oklahoma City. On Thursday, Temple, egged on by Alvin and Lettice, went down to see what Karin knew, and to inspect as much of the damage as the police barricades allowed.
The trio stopped at the Spadona Institute first. Like Karin’s house and other homes along Woodlawn Avenue, it had been an outsize brick mansion, with some twenty rooms, standing on a double city lot. Set well back from the street, with a couple of old maples and an ash in the front lawn, it had done nothing to attract attention to its activities, at least until it blew up.
When the three engineers got close to the house, they could see that a number of windows had shattered; behind the glass they could make out charring from the fire. The main destruction was on the roof and third floor of the building, but they could see black scarring underneath the second-floor windows, as if the house had been tied up in a giant black ribbon.
“Odd kind of destruction pattern,” Alvin said.
The two women nodded, and moved cautiously around the b
uilding to the back, which looked much like the front. Although all three were engineers, none of them had training in explosives; Lettice, a chemical engineer, came the closest, but she had never examined a bomb site. Temple was a mechanical engineer, which meant she knew a lot about furnaces and heating/cooling systems; at the Cheviot lab, she’d mostly been working with pipes and valves.
“Have they said where the bomb was planted?” Lettice asked. “Because it looks as though it was under the roof, which would be really weird if you were trying to kill someone. Maybe whoever set it off just wanted to disrupt the Institute—maybe one of your mom’s nuns didn’t know enough to realize she’d got hold of something powerful.”
Temple shook her head. “It can’t have been set under the roof, not with that burn pattern around the second story. Fire goes up.”
“Doh,” Alvin said. “I missed class the day they talked about fire.”
Temple swatted him with her briefcase. “It wouldn’t burn downward, at least, not along that very precise route—you’d see fingers of charring. This looks like it followed the pipes.”
“So maybe it started on the second floor and traveled upward,” Alvin said.
“Along what route?” Lettice asked. “Temple’s right—the burn pattern doesn’t make sense.”
A police car pulled over; the man at the wheel didn’t bother to get out, just broadcast over his loudspeaker that the area was off-limits. He waited at the curb until the three engineers went around the block to Karin’s house.
The front door stood open: so many different people used the common rooms of the house for meetings that Karin never locked up during the day. When Temple and her friends walked in they heard a woman shouting.
“You and your stupid protests. You look stupid with all this adolescent behavior, your marches, your prayer vigils, wearing your hair as if you were still twenty-something instead of fifty-something. You hated Clarence so much you’d let anyone into this house who was ready to hurt him. You never thought to ask any questions, but believe me, he did, and I did.”
The first speaker shouted, “You made his last days on earth miserable! Don’t tell me to calm down.”
“That’s Ruth Meecham,” Temple said. “She lives next door; she and Karin and Clarence Epstein all grew up together. Karin hates people shouting, but when she says ‘calm down,’ it sometimes makes you want to hit her.”
Temple led the way into a large common room, where her mother stood, a toddler in her arms, facing her neighbor. Temple suddenly saw her mother through strange eyes: she did dress like an old 1960s hippie, in her Indian pajama trousers. Her graying hair hung unbraided to her waist. She was barefoot this afternoon, too.
Almost as if she were deliberately accentuating their differences, Ruth Meecham had dyed her hair black and wore it severely bobbed around her ears. She was wearing makeup, and the open-toed espadrilles showed she had polish on her toes.
“Hi, Karin. Hi, Ms. Meecham. Hi, Titus,” Temple added as the little boy squirmed out of Karin’s arms and toddled over to her. “Where’s everyone else?”
She bent to pick up Titus, but he wriggled away and made a beeline for a chest in the corner where Karin kept toys—not just for him, but for all the children whose parents brought them to the many meetings held in the house.
“Jessica Martin left as soon as I came.” Ruth Meecham bit off the words as if they were cigar ends. “She knew I’d let her have what-for, the way she treated Professor Epstein.”
“Clarence had so many resources,” Karin said. “The president, the Congress, all those billionaire Spadona donors. Was Jessica really more than he could handle?”
“Not even letting him touch the baby!”
“And how do you know that?” Karin asked.
Ruth Meecham hesitated, then muttered that it was all over the neighborhood. Karin didn’t reply to that; after an awkward silence, Ruth started to leave. She paused in the doorway long enough to say, “Do you ever investigate the people you give house-room to?”
Karin laughed. “I hope you’re not suggesting Jessica is a fugitive from justice. She’s a little aggressive, it’s true, but she’s still very young.”
“Oh, grow up, Karin!” Ruth Meecham stomped down the hall to the door.
“Did Jessica and Mr. Epstein have a fight?” Temple asked. “Oh—Karin—you remember Alvin and Lettice, don’t you?”
“Of course.” Karin gave them a warm smile. “Jessica is too hot-tempered; she wouldn’t let Clarence hold the baby. But Ruth was lying, wasn’t she, on how she knew.”
“I bet she was listening under the window,” Temple said. “She does, you know. At least, when I was a kid, I sometimes saw her with binoculars, studying the inside of our house.”
“That’s a little different from listening under the window, Temple!”
“She might have a remote mike,” Alvin suggested. “Something with two point four gigahertz could pick you up from next door without her leaving the comfort of her home.”
“If she wants to listen in on our pregnant teens book group, she’s welcome,” Karin said. “Maybe it’ll make her decide to volunteer. I suppose, though, Clarence told her. She always had a crush on him and he knew she’d see his side of things, no matter how crooked that side might seem to me.”
Lettice and Alvin started asking her questions about the explosion. Temple wandered over to a battered coffee table whose surface was covered with flyers and books, old mail and unread newspapers; she started sorting them.
“Leave those alone, Temple,” Karin called out. “Whenever you tidy up, it takes me forever to find my notes.”
Temple bit back a reply. She wasn’t going to argue with Karin in front of her friends, but really, how could anyone stand to live in this kind of chaos? She controlled the urge to pick up the papers that had drifted to the floor and looked at Titus, who was trying to fit a rubber ball into a plastic jug. The jug’s lips and handles were misshapen—from being put on the stove, Temple imagined. In her mother’s haphazard home, the kitchen always was the site of small catastrophes.
“That’s quite an engineering problem you’ve set yourself, little guy.” She squatted next to him to watch, then said sharply, “Where did you get that?”
When she pried the jug from his grasp, Titus began to howl—at which moment his mother appeared in the doorway.
“What are you doing to my child?” Jessica demanded.
She was a tall woman; Temple, who was barely five-two, always felt invisible next to Jessica. She craned her head back and said firmly, “I was taking this from him. It’s had something nasty in it, and I think it’s pretty irresponsible to let a baby play with it.”
Karin interrupted her own description of Clarence Epstein as a high school student to say guiltily, “Oh, dear: I found that in the trash and meant to put it out with the recyclables. Titus must have picked it up from the kitchen table before I got around to it.”
“Oh, everyone around here is so fucking pure! Couldn’t you just leave it in the garbage for once? I picked it up in the backyard and threw it out!” Jessica grabbed Titus, who howled even more loudly.
“Sorry, sweetie.” Karin smiled at Jessica. “Sometimes we’re myopic, putting recycling ahead of baby’s curiosity. And the recycling—oh, dear—I promised I’d look after that along with the seedlings, and I completely forgot to take them out last week. Sandra and Mark will be so upset when they get back.”
“I’ll take it out to the recycle bins.” Temple picked up the container, giving her mother a level glance that stated her unspoken opinion of the sloth that let the container stay in the house.
Karin pursed her lips and turned away. Temple knew what she was doing—a mini-meditation, a mini-letting-go of anger with her own daughter, not with Jessica, who couldn’t look after her baby and then got pissed off with someone who was paying attention to his welfare.
Temple walked through the house to the kitchen, which as usual had pots and papers and bags of organic g
ranola on every surface. A blender was on the floor, where Titus could conveniently slice off his fingers; Temple put it next to a precarious mountain of bowls in the sink.
Karin had never appreciated her tidiness, even when she was eight, and making the chaotic house livable. Maybe Jessica was the daughter Karin had always wanted—an activist, the daughter who could tolerate mess—unlike Temple, in whose stark white apartment every pen and paper clip was in a tidy accessible drawer.
She blinked back self-pitying tears and went out to the recycle bins, where she removed newspapers from the bin for glass. Who knew what the papers had been used for—they were streaked with white powder. Surely no one was using cocaine in Karin’s house. Temple rubbed a little of the powder in her fingers, which began to burn. She quickly wiped them on the grass.
A few minutes later, Alvin and Lettice joined her. Alvin wanted to see the greenhouse where Karin grew herbs, in case she had any medicinal marijuana. The greenhouse sat in the back of the garden, next to a compost heap where wasps were hovering.
“Knock it off, Alvin. If my mom was breaking the law she wouldn’t be doing it where people like you could barge in on her. Anyway, the greenhouse is the responsibility of one of the other house members who’s big on organic gardening—she starts all her seedlings out here.”
Temple was annoyed with all of them, with Jessica for being such a dimwit, with her mother for running such an idiotic household, and with her friends for treating Karin like a sideshow in the circus. Her annoyance made Alvin clown around more, pretending that the oregano he plucked in the greenhouse was reefer. He staggered up the sidewalk past Ruth Meacham’s house, and Temple’s anger increased to see that the neighbor was watching them all with a kind of voluptuous malevolence.
Love & Other Crimes Page 12