by Greg Iles
And I remember my father. Those images I’ve hoarded, like gold smuggled out of a war-torn city. My father…Luke Ferry. Dancing to the sound of a car radio while he washed his beat-up white Volkswagen. Walking down the driveway of Malmaison with his head down and his hands stuck in his pockets, thinking hard about something. Screaming at my mother to stay out of the barn, even as he pulled me inside with one hand. Watching him from the loft of the barn while he sculpted with a cutting torch, bending the white-hot steel to his will. From where I sat, the fire from that torch looked brighter than the sun, and the roar of it filled my ears. The smell of hay closed around me in the loft, a smell no amount of cleaning could get out of that building. How many afternoons did I spend in that loft, watching him wrestle beauty out of a pile of bars on the floor?
More than he wanted me to.
Daddy didn’t always know I was there. Sometimes I crawled up the ladder on the back side of the barn and slipped into the loft that way. It reminded me of black-and-white movies I’d seen about a little Arab boy in the bazaar, spying on people and having glorious adventures. Most times Daddy heard me—his eardrums must have been like butterfly wings—but other times he didn’t. When he knew I was there, his head had a different tilt to it, as though he were making sure I could see what he was doing with the torch. I felt so privileged. He’d chosen me as his secret sharer, the only one allowed to see how the magician did his tricks. But some nights his head was hard down over his work, and I saw only the sweat running down his neck and back, soaking his white undershirt. On those nights he worked with a fervor I couldn’t begin to understand. He worked like a man who hated the linear chunks of metal and was trying to destroy their essence by making them something abstract—something without function, yet meaningful.
I am back there now.
The loft.
With the hay smell and the wasp nests and the mosquitoes that buzzed in during the day to lie in wait for me at night. I don’t slap them, because Daddy will hear me. I let them fasten to my skin and begin to fatten with blood, and then I slowly mash them into a paste of black and red.
When the cutting torch dies, the silence in the barn is absolute. In the silence, I hear the rain for the first time. I forgot it was raining. That’s why he didn’t hear me sneak in. The drops rattle against the tin roof like a barrage of hail, but the hypnotic roar of the torch was enough to drown them out.
Daddy is walking around on the floor, but I can’t see him. Craning my neck, I find him squatting on the floor beneath the loft. He’s beside one of the timbers that hold up the roof, working some kind of tool under a floorboard. After a moment, he looks around, then pulls the board up from the floor. Then another. And another. He pulls a bag from underneath the floor. It’s dark green, like the jeeps I’ve seen parked behind the National Guard armory when I go to the flea market there.
I’ve never seen the bag before.
He takes something out of the bag, but I can’t see what. A magazine maybe, or a big picture. Then he stands and walks to one of his worktables. His back is to me. He lays the object on the table and reaches down to his middle like he needs to undo his pants to pee. My face feels hot. He’s not peeing, because there’s no commode or even grass, just the table on the wooden floor.
His right shoulder is flexing the way it does when he’s working on metal. Like it will never stop. The rain keeps hitting the roof close over my head, and the sweat keeps running down his back. Then his head goes back like he’s staring at the ceiling, but somehow I know his eyes are closed.
I’m scared. I want to run, but my hands and feet are numb.
He turns sideways, and then I see what he’s doing, and my heart swells into my throat. I can’t breathe. His mouth is hanging slack, and the way it looks makes my stomach flip. When he groans and thrashes his head, something breaks the chains holding my limbs, and I’m suddenly running back to the ladder, running to save my life. My head slams into a board, and I lose my footing, and then I’m falling past the rungs of the ladder, throwing out my arms but catching only raindrops—
“Look, Cat,” says Grandpapa, pointing at some trees. “Look at that fawn over there.”
When I turn my head, I’m no longer falling out of the barn, but sitting in my grandfather’s orange pickup as it rumbles up the low hill toward the pond. I’m back on the island. Fear is still stuffing my heart into my throat, but the smells have changed. The hay is gone, replaced by motor oil, mildew, chewing-tobacco juice, and smoke from a hand-rolled cigarette. It hasn’t started to rain yet, but the sky is filled with leaden clouds as heavy as a pregnant cow’s belly.
As we trundle over the crest of the hill, Grandpapa turns his head and watches his prize bull mount a cow. Pleasure lights his face. Why is he happy? Is he thinking of the money he’ll make from the calf to be conceived? Or does he just like watching the bull thrusting and heaving over the cow? How many times must I watch this same movie?
Ahead, the cows by the pond watch us with dumb indifference. Beyond them the water lies smooth as glass, except where my father floats facedown in it, his arms outspread like Jesus on the cross. I squeeze my hands into fists. I want to close my eyes, but my eyelids don’t work. Mute with fear, I point with my finger. Grandpapa squints at the clouds and shakes his head.
“Goddamn rain,” he mutters.
As we roll down toward the pond, my father gets to his feet and starts walking across its surface. My heart pounds so loudly I can hear it above the sound of the truck. Daddy holds out his arms to me, then begins unbuttoning his shirt. There’s dark hair on his chest. I pull at my grandfather’s shirtsleeve, but he’s mesmerized by the bull straining over the cow.
“Daddy, don’t!” I shout.
He pulls his shirt open. In the middle of his chest is the big sutured Y-incision. To the right of that, the hole where the bullet went in. He puts two fingers into the bullet hole and pulls it open. Again I cover my eyes with my hands, then peer between my fingers. Something is pouring out of the wound like blood, only it’s not blood.
It’s gray.
“Look, Kitty Cat,” he commands. “I want you to look.”
This time I obey.
The gray stuff isn’t liquid. It’s a bunch of pellets, plastic pellets, a stream of them pouring out of my daddy’s chest the way they poured out of my stuffed animals whenever I tore one open by accident. Louisiana Rice Creatures were really stuffed with rice in the beginning, but later they switched to plastic pellets. Cheaper, I guess. Or maybe the rice rotted after a while. The pellets pour endlessly out of my father’s wound, a hissing river of them hitting the water.
When Daddy is sure I know what they are, he pulls his chest open still wider. Then he reaches into his wound and pulls out a Rice Creature, like a vet delivering a colt from a troubled mare. It’s not just any Rice Creature, though. It’s my favorite: Lena the Leopardess. The one I put in Daddy’s coffin before he was buried, to keep him company in heaven.
I want to run to him and take Lena from his hands, but my door won’t open. As I stare, Daddy holds Lena up so I can see her belly. It’s messed up somehow. As he nears the edge of the pond, I see that Lena’s belly has a stitched Y-incision in it, just like Daddy’s chest. With his eyes on mine, he digs his fingers into the thread, rips it apart, then tears open Lena’s stomach.
I scream.
Bright red blood pours out of Lena’s chest, more blood than any doll could hold. Somehow I know it’s my daddy’s blood. He turns pale as I stare, then gray, and then his feet begin sinking. The water can’t hold him up anymore.
“Daddy!” I shriek. “Wait! I’m coming!”
He keeps sinking, his face sadder than I’ve ever seen it.
“I can save you, Daddy!”
I jerk as hard as I can on the truck’s door handle, but it won’t open. I bang my fists on the window until my knuckles split, but it does no good. Then someone with soft hands takes me by the wrists.
“Catherine? Wake up, Cat. It’s time to wa
ke up.”
I open my eyes.
Hannah Goldman is leaning over my cot, holding me by the wrists. Dr. Goldman has the kindest eyes in the world.
“It’s Hannah,” she says. “Can you hear me, Cat?”
“Yes.” I smile for her, my best smile so she’ll know I’m okay. It’s easy to be okay with Hannah here, even if it is only a dream.
“I’ve come to speak to you about something important,” she says.
I nod understanding. “Of course. What is it?”
“Agent Kaiser asked me to come. I think that was wise of him.”
“He’s a wise man,” I agree. “A very wise man.”
Dr. Goldman looks almost as sad as my father. “Cat, you know I believe in honesty and frankness, but life always finds a way to test our beliefs. There’s no easy way to tell you this.”
I smile encouragement and pat her hand. “It’s okay. I’m strong. You know I can take it.”
“You are strong.” She smiles back. “You may be my strongest patient. What I have to tell you is this. Your aunt Ann is dead.”
My smile broadens. “No, she’s not. I talked to her today.”
“I know you did, dear. But that was yesterday afternoon. You’ve been sleeping for quite a while. And sometime last night, your aunt drove to DeSalle Island and killed herself by taking an overdose of morphine.”
My smile freezes on my face. It’s not Dr. Goldman’s somber voice or sad eyes that convince me. It’s the morphine. And the island.
Chapter
45
Hannah Goldman is about fifty, with graying streaks in her hair and deep lines at the corners of her eyes. Her eyes are kind, but the intelligence behind them is ruthless. Sitting under Hannah’s gaze, you can feel like a child under the care of a loving mother or a lesser mammal being scrutinized by a scientist bent on dissection. Agent Kaiser was probably right to bring her here, but now that she’s broken the news to me about Ann, I want Kaiser. Psychiatry isn’t going to solve my current matrix of problems.
I sit up on my cot and set my stockinged feet on the carpeted floor. “Hannah, I appreciate you coming here to give me this news. But I need to ask Agent Kaiser some questions.”
“I’ll get him for you,” she says. “But I want you to promise me two things.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll let me sit in while you talk to him.”
“Of course.”
“And you’ll talk to me alone afterward.”
This I don’t especially want to do, but it would be rude not to agree. “All right.”
Left in the silence of the empty office, I enter a strange state where all the images in my mind spin wildly against each other. Foremost among them is my father bleeding plastic pellets from his chest, then Lena the Leopardess pouring blood from her torn belly. I don’t know what that dream meant, but I have to find out. And to do that, I need Lena in my hands again. Only she’s buried in my father’s coffin, in Natchez, two hundred miles away.
I have to get out of this building.
The sound of the door opening and John Kaiser’s voice merge into one startling mix: “Bam—Cat, what can I do for you?”
I stand and face him squarely. “I want the details of my aunt’s suicide.”
Kaiser glances at Dr. Goldman.
Hannah says, “You don’t have to treat her like she’s not in the room with us. Cat’s used to dealing with stress.”
He looks skeptical. “What do you want to know?”
“Does my mother know about it yet?”
“Yes. She’s enraged. She thinks Ann’s husband murdered her.”
“What?”
“Apparently your aunt was in the middle of a bad divorce. The husband wanted to keep her from getting any money. I talked to the guy. I don’t think he even knew where DeSalle Island was until I told him. It feels like a suicide to me.”
“Suicide,” I echo. “In some ways Ann was already dead. She had been for a long time.”
“What do you mean by that?” Kaiser asks, but Hannah is nodding.
“I’ll tell you in a minute. I want to know exactly where Ann was found, who found her, how she did it, whether she left a note, everything. Forget I’m related to her, okay?”
Kaiser leans against the closed door. “A woman named Louise Butler found her in a one-room building on DeSalle Island. I guess you know all about that island?”
“More than I ever wanted to.”
“Apparently Ms. Butler was looking for you. Your grandfather’s search for you had been called off, but Louise was in the woods and never got the word. She found your aunt instead.”
Despite the horror of this thought, the face of my father’s mistress gives me a comforting feeling as it rises behind my eyes, brown and still beautiful at forty-six. I’m glad Louise found Ann, and not Jesse Billups. Thinking of my last afternoon on the island, a cold certainty comes to me.
“Did the building Ann was found in have a tin roof?”
Kaiser’s eyes narrow. “How did you know that?”
My hands suddenly feel clammy. “Was she found in the building they call the clinic?”
He nods slowly, waiting for an explanation.
“Tell me how she looked when they found her.”
Kaiser glances at Dr. Goldman but answers anyway. “She was naked, lying on the floor by an examining table.”
A deep ache begins in my heart. A lot of suicides take off their clothes before killing themselves. But Ann’s nakedness wasn’t a matter of fastidiousness or infantile regression. “Did she leave a note?”
“No note.”
Doing it in the clinic was her note. Kaiser sneaks another glance at Hannah, and I know he’s holding something back.
“What is it?” I demand.
“She didn’t leave a note, but she did leave something. Before she died, she drew two skulls and crossbones on her lower abdomen, about where her ovaries would be. There was a Sharpie marker lying beside her body.”
For the first time, I feel the sting of tears.
“That means something to you?” Kaiser asks.
“Ann was obsessed with having a baby. She never could get pregnant.”
“At fifty-six she was obsessed with having a baby?”
“No, but she never got over the failure. My grandfather performed an emergency appendectomy on her in that clinic when she was ten years old. He always said the infection she had then was what made her infertile. That it blocked her fallopian tubes. I think a dye test may have later proved that correct. Anyway, when she finally gave up on having a baby, she died inside.”
Kaiser doesn’t know what to make of this. I turn to Hannah. “I’ve been wondering if that appendectomy might really have been an abortion.”
Hannah sits in silence, her mind clicking through what she knows of my family. “Ten is too young for pregnancy,” she says finally. “I’m sure it’s impossible.”
“Sexual abuse again,” says Kaiser. “That’s why Ann was a patient of Malik’s, right?”
“We don’t know that for sure,” I point out. “She could have been seeing him for her manic-depressive disorder.”
“Well, we need to know which. I want an autopsy done on her as fast as we can get one. Would a botched abortion be detectable all these years later?”
“Possibly,” Hannah says. “That depends on what kind of mistake was made. After forty years, scarring from infection would be difficult to attribute to therapeutic abortion based on pathological findings alone. There’s also the complication of possible later abortions. But this is an academic question. If Ann was ten years old, she wasn’t pregnant.”
“You need to talk to my mother,” I say softly. “When it comes to Ann, she’s the only one who knows the private details.”
Hannah looks puzzled by something. “Why,” she says deliberately, “was there enough morphine to kill someone in a one-room clinic on a rural island?”
“I asked the same thing,” says Kaiser.
“You ever see a chain saw accident?” I ask. “They’re as bad as war wounds sometimes. A chain saw can take off an arm or a leg in two seconds.”
This seems to satisfy Kaiser, who served in combat in Vietnam.
“What’s your next move?” I ask him, wondering how I can get out of here.
“Rush your aunt’s autopsy, if I can. Her body is already at the morgue in Jackson, Mississippi. I need to rule out murder. She was too close to Malik to discount that possibility.”
“I want to see her autopsy report.”
“I’m sure you’ll be here when I get it. Carmen Piazza still wants you locked in a cell downtown.”
This probably isn’t the best time to ask if I can leave.
“I’ll tell you what I want,” Kaiser intones. “I want that film Malik was making. If we find that, we’ll find our killer.”
“Film?” Hannah asks. “Nathan Malik was making a film?”
“A documentary about sexual abuse and repressed memory,” I answer. “It shows a group of female patients reliving sexual abuse, and some other things he wouldn’t tell me about. He said it would galvanize the nation on the issue of sexual abuse.”
“That’s one film I’d like to see.”
“Cat thinks the killer is a member of that group of women,” says Kaiser. “Malik called them Group X. I think Ann Hilgard may have been part of it.”
“Group X?” echoes Hannah. “Strange.”
“With Ann and Dr. Malik dead, only that film or surviving members of Group X can tell us who the members are.”
Hannah looks oddly at Kaiser. “I sense you have something to ask me.”
“I do. Is there any possibility that Cat could have been a member of that group without being aware of it? Dr. Malik suggested that she might suffer from multiple personality disorder.”
Hannah looks briefly at me, then back at Kaiser. “Ridiculous. Cat has certainly experienced dissociated states. But the idea that she suffers from full-blown dissociative identity disorder is preposterous. Put that nonsense out of your mind, Agent Kaiser. Nathan Malik had flashes of genius, but he was also a flake.”