“I walked out of one life and into another. Can’t we just leave it at that?”
He didn’t respond.
“I want you to read something,” she said, standing up and walking over to a shelf about halfway down the nearest aisle. “Ever heard of the Flitcraft Parable?”
He shook his head.
She returned to the table with a musty, misshapen copy of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, opened it to chapter seven, laid it on the table in front of him, and walked away.
He quickly read the passage, holding the book as far away from his eyes as his long arms would allow.
The episode involved a man named Flitcraft who left his real estate office in Tacoma for lunch one day and never came back.
He was supposed to play golf that afternoon, something he had set up half an hour before he left for lunch. His wife and children never saw him again.
He just vanished.
That was in 1922. In 1927, when Sam Spade was with one of the big detective agencies in Seattle, Mrs. Flitcraft came in and told him somebody had seen a man in Spokane who looked a lot like her husband. Spade went over and checked it out. It was Flitcraft all right.
He’d been living in Spokane for a couple of years as Pierce Charles, had a car business, a wife, a baby son, owned a home in the suburbs.
What happened to him? Why’d he vanish?
On his way to lunch, he passed an office building that was being built. A beam fell eight stories down and smacked the sidewalk right beside him. Close, but it didn’t touch him. A piece of sidewalk chipped off, flew up and struck his cheek. He still had the scar when Spade saw him. He rubbed it affectionately with his finger as he told Spade the story.
Flitcraft had been a good citizen, husband, and father. The life he knew was clean, orderly, sane, and responsible. But then a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of those things. He, the upstanding guy, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by a random accident.
He was disturbed by the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he’d gotten out of step with life, and before he’d walked twenty feet from the fallen beam he realized he’d never know peace until he adjusted to this new glimpse of life. By the time he’d eaten his lunch, he’d decided that if life could be ended by a random falling beam, he would change his life at random by simply going away.
He went to Seattle that afternoon, then wandered around for a couple of years before drifting back to the Northwest, settled in Spokane, and got married—and though the second wife didn’t look like the first, they were more alike than they were different.
Flitcraft, now Charles, wasn’t sorry for what he’d done. It seemed reasonable to him, and Spade suspected he didn’t even realize he’d settled into the same groove he’d jumped out of in Tacoma.
“But that’s the part of it I always liked,” Spade said. “He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.”
“WHAT’S IT MEAN?” Lefty asked.
“That she walked away from her life and started a new one,” Sid said. “Not because of a beam nearly falling on her. Because she killed someone.”
It was midmorning. The two men lingered in front of Junior’s on their way to join the others for lunch.
“I don’t know, Sid.”
“What else you find out?”
“Not much. It’s as if she didn’t exist before she moved in with old Mrs. Bella.”
“See. Like Flitcraft.”
“I guess.”
“Anything else?”
“She sends anonymous sympathy cards to Alfred and Angie Most up in New York and has flowers put on their daughter Nancy’s grave. She also gets checks from the William Morris Agency at a PO box under the name of Nancy Lost.”
“She feels bad for killing their daughter, but not bad enough not to use a variation of her name. Checks for what?”
Lefty smiled. “TV scripts. She writes for some true crime show on a chick network.”
The fire whistle from the station a few streets over started to blow, and the two men turned to see blackish-gray smoke rising from the Sunflower trailer park.
Jerry and RD rushed out the front door.
“That’s Maria’s place,” RD said.
“She coming?” Lefty asked. “We can walk down there with her.”
“She didn’t show up for work today,” Jerry said. “Come on.”
As the four bent and limping men hobbled toward the Sunflower, all Sid could think about were the research books stacked in front of Maria on the library table.
By the time they arrived, the rental trailer was a melted mass of charred, wet debris. What was left of the walls and roof were flat on the floor now.
“Never seen one go that fast,” Nate, a volunteer fireman, said.
“Had to have some help,” Coy, the oldest of the fireman, said. “Been doing this a long time. Nothing burns that fast without some kind of accelerant—not even a trailer.”
“Was Maria inside?” Jerry asked.
“Huh?”
The two firemen were unaware the old men were behind them.
“Was there anyone inside, goddam it?” Jerry yelled.
“Hey,” Nate said, holding up his gloved hands. “Simmer down, old man. We don’t know anything yet. Y’all need to back away from this area.”
“Got something,” a fireman yelled from the back of what used to be the trailer.
“What is it?” RD asked.
“We can’t see any better than you can,” Jerry said. “Just wait a minute.”
“Let’s move around back for a better look,” Lefty said.
They did, making a wide circle around the trucks and coming up in between two other trailers, but when they saw the blackened, molten mass of body, they wished they hadn’t.
“Sweet Jesus Christ on a crooked Cross,” RD said, turning away.
“The hell happen here?” Jerry said. “Who’d do this to that sweet girl?”
Sid leaned over and whispered in Lefty’s ear, “Who’d that sweet girl do this to?”
Lefty turned and looked at him for a long moment, then jerked his head, motioning him away from the others.
“What did you do?” Lefty asked.
“You think I did this?”
Lefty shook his head. “I don’t mean the fire. What’d you say to her?”
“Nothing.”
“Said you were just curious. Wouldn’t do anything.”
“I didn’t.”
“What’d you say to her? You had to push her, couldn’t just leave it alone, had to let her know we were on to her, and now she’s killed again and disappeared. Whoever that is in there, you’re an accessory to her murder.”
WHEN SID’S EYES OPENED in the middle of the night, heart pounding, mind racing, he knew he wasn’t alone in his dark bedroom.
“Maria?”
“Leave the light off,” she said.
Sid wondered if he was about to die, and he realized he really didn’t mind all that much. With Gwen gone he went from having a sort of half-life to nearly no life at all. Life is loss, he thought. Ultimately we lose everything. Everything. And I’m nearly there.
“You here to kill me?”
“To ask a favor.”
“Really?” he asked, the high-pitched surprise clearing the sleepiness out of his voice.
“Don’t try to find me,” she said. “I’m leaving tonight. Disappearing again. And it’d be nice not to be followed.”
“I’m an old man. I won’t be following you.”
“I mean don’t have it done. The police won’t know that’s not me in the trailer. Don’t tell them any different.”
“Who is it?” he asked. “Who’d you kill to escape this time?”
“I didn’t kill anyone. I swear. I wouldn’t expect you to keep quiet about murder. I dug up a recently buried body.”
“My Gwen?”
“No,” she said. “God, no. I would ne
ver. Anyway, this woman was already dead. All I did was dig her up and burn her body. That’s awful, I know, but necessary—and nowhere close to murder.”
“Won’t the police know it’s not you?”
“I burned the body before I lit the trailer. It’ll be unrecognizable. No one knows me. I haven’t left any evidence.”
“Guess you’re getting pretty good at this by now.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Maria Bella.”
“Yeah?”
“I meant the real one. You killed her.”
“I didn’t. She was an old lady. Died of natural causes. I took her identity. That’s all. I can’t believe you know about that.”
“Tell me about Nancy Most.”
A long silence followed.
“She was a coke head. Strung out most of the time. You can’t imagine the things she did.”
“Tell me.”
“She hurt her parents so much they finally cut her loose. They loved her, were so patient, but …”
She trailed off and they were silent a moment.
“I can’t believe you know about her,” she added.
“Whatta you write in those cards you send her parents?”
“Lies. That their daughter changed before she died, that they’d be proud—but she didn’t. She’d do okay for a little while. Get cleaned up, get a job, get a man, but it wasn’t long before she’d be right back on the shit. The last time she got cleaned up, she got a job at the Ann Taylor Loft store in the concourse mall at the World Trade Center. She did fine for a while, but was already headed back down when the planes flew into the towers. Know what she did when the planes hit? Locked up her store and started up Tower I to see her supplier. Imagine. The world’s falling down around her, all she can think about is securing her next fix. She would’ve been in the tower when it came down if a cop hadn’t grabbed her in the stairwell and forced her out.”
Sid’s mind was racing. The woman in the room with him must’ve had a brother or a dad who was a cop or a fireman or a worker who got killed because of Nancy Most.
“She got out?”
“Before the tower came down? Yeah. Not everyone who died that day was killed by terrorists.”
“She was a drug addict, but why’d she have to die? What’d she do?”
“Did you not hear me? She was never gonna change. She got pregnant one time. If that didn’t clean her up, nothing would. When she delivered, her little premature, underweight baby had withdrawals. You know what she did? Gave it up for adoption and kept on shoving that shit up her nose.”
Sid didn’t say anything.
“Will you give me your word as a gentleman you won’t tell the cops or try to find me?”
“How can I not report you? Even if I believe you about the victim in the trailer and the real Maria Bella, you murdered Nancy Most.”
“I wouldn’t call it murder.”
“There’s got to be more to it than that she was a drug addict. You don’t go around killing drug addicts. What did Nancy do to you?”
“What?” She sounded genuinely perplexed.
“You didn’t just kill her because she was a drug addict.”
“I don’t understand. I thought you knew. You knew everything else. I didn’t literally kill Nancy. I just let people think she was in the building when it came down.”
“What happened to her?”
“Flitcraft, remember? Nancy walked out of the building and when she saw it come down, when she realized how many thousands of people who didn’t deserve to die were killed and that she was spared, she kept on walking. She walked out of her life and never looked back. I buried Nancy Most on September 11, 2001.”
“So you’re Nancy—”
“I was. Eventually I was Maria Bella. Soon, I’ll be someone else. But I’ll never look back, never go back to being who I was before, a worthless addict who didn’t deserve to live—not when so many who should be alive aren’t.”
“But that was so long ago. Can’t you just—”
She let out a harsh, humorless laugh. “It’s today. Right now. Every moment. Don’t you get it? Talking heads kill me with their bullshit about a post-nine-eleven world. There’s no such thing for people like me. It’s always present—explosions, sirens, screams, bodies falling from the sky, fire, smoke, ash, death. So much death. And at least one that was deserved.”
“There’s no way you were that person, that bad. You’re too good, too kind, too—”
“I can only think of her that way.”
“Don’t worry, Nancy—”
“Don’t call me that.”
“I won’t follow you. I won’t tell anyone. I’ll miss you. I’m sorry I didn’t just leave it all alone.”
“Me, too.”
“Write me sometime,” he said, but there was no reply. She was already out of the room, out of his life. Flitcraft had adjusted to a world of falling beams and when no more fell, had adjusted back. Maria had adjusted to a world with falling bodies and would never adjust back. He liked that about her. In a way, she was the very definition of the blues.
11 Blues for Veneece
Lynne Barrett
MALLORY SLIDES HER SHOVEL FORWARD, planing one more layer of earth from the interior of the structure the archaeology students have nicknamed “the Kitchen,” though whether the Mississippian Indians used it for a cookhouse or to prepare the dead for burial, they don’t know. With this motion, the rhythm of excavation, she has worked off her hangover, and the October sun feels good on her back.
Luis watches her: no makeup, serious brows, hair pinned up, tiny silver earrings, big shirt tied around her waist since the morning cool baked away, washed out green tee that says, in pink, No kidding.
When she looks up, she turns her unreadable gaze on Harris, not Luis. Harris faces away, his hair lit by the sun, putting white flags in as he uncovers each post of “The Cage,” working back from the two red flags that mark a corner. Rangy, long-boned, he has straight pale hair that’s going to thin. He is, in Luis’ view, congenitally and electrically trouble. Luis stands, stretches, takes in the white, ancient shape of an egret in a far cotton field, then turns around to face the long hump of the mound, just as, he imagines, the villagers they study once looked up toward a temple or the houses of the elite. He sees the low rectangle of the Back House and beyond it the white second story, gray roof and brick chimneys of Bishop House, shaded by the bronze tops of the pecan trees. Luis goes back to trenching along a beam where it was superimposed on another, trying to unravel the layers of bygone construction.
Mallory hits something. Metal, which shouldn’t be there, but metal scraping metal, she can feel it in her teeth. She brushes away dirt with her gloved hand: pitted metal of a handle leading down to wood—some kind of an old box. Nineteenth or twentieth century? As she would for any artifact, she stays away from its edges, digs to either side. It’s about a foot wide, five inches high, ten deep, with the arched handle on top. Then, saying, “Guys,” she goes in below with the shovel and gets ready to lift it free.
Luis squats beside her. “Looks like an old tool box,” he says. “Or maybe tackle?”
Harris calls, “Treasure?” and heads over.
Luis gets one of the blue tarps. The guys spread it out a couple of yards east of their work area, and Mallory carries over the object on its cushion of dirt and sets it down. Just that motion causes clumps to fall away from the box. It has a simple hasp, no lock.
“Go on, open it,” Harris says.
“Should we?” Mallory picks up a long brush and kneels in front of the box.
Luis says, “Whatever it is will belong to Miss Bishop. She came in a while ago—I heard her car.”
Harris says, “No reason we can’t take a look. Come on, Mal.”
With the brush handle, Mallory lifts the hasp, which comes away completely from the wood. “Rotted,” Harris says. Mallory levers the lid open and they kneel around the box of silt, dead bugs, and a lot of small dirt-
coated objects. “Let it be rubies,” Harris says, as Mallory flicks soil away.
Mallory sees the familiar shape of bone ends. Bones that look far too dense to be the porous, trabecular last bits of Mississippian period Indians.
Luis says, “Metacarpals,” just as Mallory says, “A hand, or hands. Skeletonized but not ancient.”
Harris says, “Oh shit.”
Mallory stands. “We need to get Celia Bishop.”
Luis is already headed up the slope.
Harris hollers, “Tell her to call the sheriff.”
HARRIS ENJOYS WATCHING the arrival of the troops: a county patrol unit, and then the sheriff, a black man with sheriffian girth, with a white deputy. Two state cops; look like the same ones who do the license checks they’re always stopping him for on his Harley on Highway 49, or else the state recruits a lot of tall, muscular black men who work out, which is probable. Yes, he notices color. So what? Doesn’t mean anything, it’s what you can’t help doing if you have eyes. Luis up there on the mound is brown, and what of it? He’s Mexican, though, okay, born here because his parents were in Texas by then. With black hair cut short so it stands up, that single line of goatee, he looks like a Hispanic hipster, Harris likes to kid him. Mallory is the color of, not honey, more like some honey-vanilla soap, or a candle, there’s a layer to her glow. She tells him he should categorize people by some detail like height or age. She’s got some silly ideas, being from up north. She doesn’t understand how changed things are here, how it’s possible to see race and still treat people decently. And being a scientist is about observing everything, not blocking out your noticing to be all politically correct and shit. He’s told her that.
Miss Celia Bishop has stood by the box quietly, til the sheriff’s arrival. She’s probably near sixty, has well-cut chestnut curls, is what his mother would call a handsome woman, which means she’s only a little bit overweight and dresses well for it, in black pants and a tan wool jacket. She introduces them to the sheriff, explaining that they’re graduate students who she’s invited in to do their thesis projects. His investigator takes down their names—Mallory Falco, Luis Perez, Harris Ashbern. But it’s Mallory they want to talk to, since she unearthed the remains.
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