The Reckless Oath We Made

by Bryn Greenwood

  “Are you threatening to arrest me, you asshole?”

  My lady raised her hand and I feared she meant to strike him. Hot dread filled my breast, and I knew not what to do. I laid my hands upon my neck, but found no relief.

  “Thou art all that stands between them,” the Witch said.

  “Better a shield than a sword,” said the black knight.

  I stepped between Lady Zhorzha and Mansur.

  “My lady,” I said. “Mayhap ’tis better to cede to him.”

  “You should listen to your friend,” Mansur said.

  “Fine. Fucking fine. Let’s go in and talk.”

  My lady spake in a great dragon voice, all damped smoke and fury, and I feared for her. She wore her anger like a cloak of fire that burned none but herself.

  CHAPTER 15

  Zee

  The cops had emptied out almost the whole front room. Only a few pieces of furniture were left: a big bookcase; one of those particleboard pantries, which had disintegrated when they tried to move it; and, in Mom’s “craft corner,” there was a dining room table I didn’t remember ever eating at. It had a sag in the middle like a swaybacked horse, from all those years of being piled high with stuff.

  “Please, sit down, Miss Trego,” Mansur said. “I don’t want to keep you any longer than necessary. I know you’re worried about your mother.”

  There was a rug under the dining room table, but I couldn’t tell what color it was, because it had twenty years of dirt worked into it. I was embarrassed. Not for me, but for Mom, having people come in and see her house like that. When I was a kid, she’d always insisted that the house was cluttered, but clean. Even when I was a kid, I knew that was wishful thinking. You can’t keep a house clean when you can’t actually get to the floor. Or the walls. Or the furniture.

  The problem wasn’t that I hadn’t imagined Mom’s house emptied out like that, but that I’d always imagined LaReigne would be there with me, cleaning it out, after Mom died. Now everything was turned upside down, and maybe LaReigne was dead.

  Mansur pulled out a chair for me and, after I sat down, he and Smith sat down across from me. Smith had a file folder that he laid on the table between us. Close enough that I could have reached for it, if I wanted to. I didn’t.

  “All we want to do is eliminate any possibility that you or your mother have any involvement,” Mansur said. “That will help our investigation go forward in the right direction.”

  “If I’d been involved, I wouldn’t be stupid enough to be here talking to you,” I said.

  “Well, I’m glad you’re talking with us. So let’s figure out what the situation is with your sister.”

  “The situation? She’s been kidnapped by a pair of Nazis. Or maybe she’s dead. And what are you doing about it? Because this—” I held my arms out to try to include the whole idea of searching my mother’s house. “This is not helping.”

  “I appreciate that to you this seems like a step backward, but it lets us check off this box. And let me be blunt, there are a couple of things that don’t add up for us.” Mansur took the leaky pen out of his pocket and flipped open his notebook. “When the police arrived at your apartment at six A.M. on Tuesday, May second, you and your nephew weren’t there. Where were you?”

  “At a friend’s house.”

  “Wasn’t Marcus supposed to be in school later that morning?”

  “Would you take your nephew to school if his mother had been kidnapped?” I said.

  “Except that information hadn’t been released yet. Did you know LaReigne wasn’t coming home?”

  “She already wasn’t home at two A.M.,” I said. “Which was when I needed to go to my friend’s. LaReigne wasn’t answering her phone, and I couldn’t leave Marcus alone, could I? So I took him with me.”

  I’d always thought of myself as a pretty good liar, but I’d never had to lie about actual criminal shit to a pair of federal marshals while I was freaking out about my mother maybe having a heart attack and my sister maybe being dead.

  Mansur put down his pen and rested his elbows on the table.

  “We know they had help after they abandoned your sister’s car. So you can understand why it’s important that we know where you were. Because if I were trying to help my boyfriend break out of prison, it would be convenient if my sister could meet us and drive us somewhere else. Lose the trail.”

  “Like hell I would ever help a couple of white supremacists escape from prison,” I said.

  “It would be a lot easier to take what you say at face value, if you would be more specific about where you were Monday night. Let’s start with your friend’s name and address.”

  No way was I going to drop a dime on Asher or his Colorado contacts, but I had to tell the marshals something.

  “I was at home with my nephew until two in the morning. Then we drove to Newton and got on the train. The Southwest Chief leaves at two forty-five. We went to Trinidad, Colorado, and I visited a friend of mine. We came back the next day. I think being on the train both days gives me a pretty solid alibi without dragging my friend into it.”

  “So that was a quick trip. All the way out to Colorado to visit a friend for a day?”

  Smith and Mansur smiled at each other, because when you put it that way, it was obvious I’d gone to Colorado to buy weed. I should have asked for a lawyer, except as long as the marshals thought I was worth bothering, they were going to bother me. And if I got a lawyer, I would look like I was worth bothering.

  “Let me go check with Amtrak,” Smith said, and pushed his chair back from the table.

  “Okay. But it won’t be under my name.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I didn’t buy the tickets under my name,” I said. “It’s under Debbie Jackson. And Marcus Jackson.”

  “Now why would you do that?” Mansur said.

  “Because I can. Amtrak never checks your ID. Between the Amish and the Mexicans, a lot of people on the train don’t even have IDs. It’s no big deal. It’s like when you give a fake name at Starbucks.”

  “You give a fake name at Starbucks?” Smith said.

  “Yeah, Mr. Smith. Because my name is Zhorzha Trego. Do you know how hard it is to get people to understand that?”

  “You do realize that interstate trafficking of marijuana is a federal offense,” Mansur said.

  “It’s never come up.” I tried to make my brain be quiet. They couldn’t prove anything, and the only weed I had was in my backpack at the Franks’ house.

  “You frowned there a little, Miss Trego. Are you wondering how clean your car is?”

  “Not really.” I frowned harder, because there was no sense trying to hide it. “I’m mostly wondering when we’ll be done here so I can go see my mother, and when you’ll have some news about my sister.”

  Smith wrote something in his notebook and got up to leave.

  “While he checks on that, I’d like you to look at a few things and tell me what you think they mean,” Mansur said. Smith had left behind the file folder.

  I braced myself, but all Mansur took out of the folder was a stack of color photocopies. I’d seen enough letters from my dad, I knew what they were copies of: prison letters. Written on cheap notebook paper in blue ballpoint pen, each one two or three sheets, double-sided, and written in perfect penmanship by a man who needed to kill sixteen hours a day in a cell with nothing to do except rewrite a letter until it was perfect.

  Mansur laid them out for me, like he was going to read my tarot in prison love letters.

  “While you look at those, do you mind if I take a look at your bag and your phone?”

  “I really do,” I said.

  “I think you know I can get a search warrant if necessary, but if I have to do that, it’s going to take longer for you to go to the hospital. Do you understand?”

  I never kept
weed in my purse, so that didn’t worry me. As for my phone, I always deleted my texts with Toby and Asher, and it wasn’t like I took pictures of myself with suitcases full of pot or stacks of cash. Still, it made my skin crawl when I slid my purse across to him. The first thing he did was empty it out on the table and turn it inside out.

  There was nothing I could do while he snooped through my purse, except read the letters.

  My Queen, that was how they all started, and they were full of the usual kind of stuff. Descriptions of perfect days, ideal lives, fantasies, philosophy, romance. Bullshit.

  “So you’ve got some letters,” I said, when Mansur finished snooping through my purse and phone. I’d only looked at the first few letters, but it was more than enough.

  “Those letters are Barnwell’s. We’ve matched the penmanship with some drafts that he left in his cell.”

  “If you’ve got all these letters from him, they’ve got to be more useful than anything I know. Because all I know is that LaReigne volunteered on Monday nights. And now she’s been kidnapped. That’s. All. I. Know.”

  “Six months’ worth of romantic, intimate letters from Tague Barnwell, that LaReigne stored in a flowery little box under her bed. Or are they yours?” Mansur said.

  “They could be anybody’s. She has a post office box, and probably half the people in that ministry use her post office box to exchange letters with their inmate pen pals. You don’t give them your real address. She even lets the volunteers in the Muslim and Christian ministries use her post office box. For all you know those are letters she was storing for that Molly woman. She volunteers with one of the evangelical ministries. That’s what LaReigne said.”

  “Oh, we know who Molly’s pen pal was, but at least one of these letters was definitely written to your sister.” Mansur reached over and slid one of the pages in front of me.

  Dear La Reigne,

  The first thing I want to say to you is that I don’t want you to take my letter the wrong way. I’m sure you get so many letters from the guys here, telling you how beautiful you are. You are beautiful, but that’s not why I’m writing you. I felt like, when we talked at the ritual, that there was a spiritual connection between us, and I’ll understand if you didn’t feel the same way, but I still wanted to reach out to you. Because the truth is, I’m alone in here. I’m supposed to have these friends, and people who support me, but I can feel myself changing, and they’re not people who like change.

  The second thing I want to say to you is that I’m not the man you think I am. It’s brave and generous of you to come here every month to work with us and give us a chance to worship, and I don’t blame you at all if you think I’m exactly like the guy you’ve probably read about in the newspaper. I did those terrible things. I hurt people. That’s true, but I’m not that guy anymore. I’ve grown so much in the last four years, and I want to keep growing. What I need is a friend who is outside this circle of hate and destruction that I find myself trapped in, because I don’t want to be part of that anymore, but here in prison, there’s no way out.

  I don’t want to say anything negative about Conrad, because honestly, he has been a good friend to me. I was just a kid when he took me under his wing, and maybe that more than anything is why I went along with what he planned. I’m not saying that to deny my responsibility for what I did. I should have refused to be part of it, but I looked up to him like a father and it was hard for me to say no. In here, he’s one of my only friends. Him and Craig Van Eck and Craig’s crowd, and I think you know enough about them to know they aren’t the best people for me to be around. They’re trying to drag me back down. To keep me trapped in the same old thinking that brought me here. I don’t want to keep being that person, but I can’t get away from them either.

  As much as I want to change, I need protection. There’s no safety for someone like me alone in here. Especially with all these gangbangers in here. They would be happy to get at me. To hurt me or kill me. I know I’ve done terrible things, and you may even think that I am a racist (I truly am not!) but they hate white people. It would give them bragging rights to bring me down. So whether I want to be part of Craig’s group or not, whether I feel like part of that circle, I have to have friends in here to watch my back.

  Thank you for reading all this, and if you feel like you can, a letter from you would mean so much to me. Just to know that someone out there has heard me and believes that I can be a better man.

  Merry meet,

  Tague

  “So he wrote her a bullshit letter,” I said. “Inmates are bullshit artists.”

  “Maybe you’d be more interested in the love letters your sister sent to Barnwell?”

  “Not really.”

  Mansur didn’t care. He pushed another stack of photocopied letters across the table to me, but I ignored them.

  “You don’t seem surprised at the suggestion that your sister sent love letters to Barnwell.”

  “These aren’t even love letters,” I said, after I’d looked at the first few. LaReigne was a romantic sap, and those letters weren’t even all that gushy.

  Next to the stack of letters, Mansur laid out a couple of Polaroids. Your standard sad prison visitation photos. Grainy, under fluorescent lights, everybody looking a little green and smiling awkwardly, posing against cinder block walls, or, somehow more depressing: a fake outdoor backdrop as cheap and cheesy as a Sears portrait studio. The kind of family photos that made up a lot of my childhood.

  The pictures had been taken on the same night, probably only a few seconds apart. LaReigne was wearing a blush pink sweater. Modest, because you have to follow dress code for prison visitation, but nice. She looked pretty, standing next to Tague Barnwell in his prison scrubs.

  You couldn’t tell from his mug shot in the news, but Tague was good-looking. Tall. Broad in the shoulders. Light brown hair and a mustache. Super white teeth flashing at the camera. Maybe even better looking than Loudon, if you go for guys with prison-gang tattoos on their forearms. I couldn’t make out the details, but from the shape of it, I knew what it was. A green-and-white number fourteen pool ball with the legs of a swastika peeking out around the edges. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, it might take you a while to notice it, but it was exactly like the one my father got while he was in prison. Dad had always worn long sleeves on visitation day, but when I claimed his body, I’d seen the tattoo.

  “This one came out of your sister’s box of letters.” Mansur tapped one of the pictures. “The other one came out of Barnwell’s cell. He had it pinned up over his bunk, like the last thing he looked at before he fell asleep every night.”

  “Everybody needs something to get them through.”

  “Suddenly, it seems like you know a lot more than you thought you did.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “Here’s what I know. LaReigne can fall in love at the drop of a hat. Every guy is her one true love, and she has terrible taste in men. Also, some women really like lifers, because you always know where they are. When your man is in prison, he’s not out cheating on you or spending your money or coming home drunk and smacking you around. He’s locked up nice and safe somewhere, and he has time to write you love letters.”

  Mansur actually chuckled. Like I was funny. Like he was having fun.

  “That sounds like the voice of experience,” he said.

  “Not mine. I don’t do romance, and I definitely don’t do romance with guys in prison. My mother, she was a hundred percent faithful to my father, even though he was never coming home. He used to send her three letters a week and he called every Thursday. Maybe to LaReigne that looked better than how her marriage turned out.”

  “Did you know LaReigne was in love with Barnwell?”

  “No,” I said. “But even if she is, that doesn’t mean she helped him escape. Because maybe he tricked her. It doesn’t mean she’s not in danger. It doe
sn’t mean he wouldn’t hurt her.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to say, It doesn’t mean he didn’t kill her.

  “It certainly makes her look a little less innocent, though, doesn’t it?” Mansur said. “If she was letting an inmate romance her. But then, that runs in your family.”

  “You know, not everybody thinks people in prison are scum.”

  “So white supremacist murderers? Not scum in your book?”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about.” I hated how he’d backed me around and gotten me to say something he could use like that. My hands were in fists under the table, and I forced myself to relax them. I couldn’t have another temper tantrum. I laid my hands on the table and laced my fingers together.

  “So, tell me about this Asatru business,” Mansur said. “How did your sister get involved with them?”

  “She’s not Asatru! She’s Wiccan.”

  “But Barnwell is Asatru, if I understand my pagan denominations.”

  “I don’t care what he is. There’s only one pagan ministry at the prison, so all the guys are in it, no matter what they believe. LaReigne is not a white supremacist.”

  “What about your father?” Mansur said. “When he was at El Dorado Correctional Facility, he was a member of the White Circle, wasn’t he? That’s a known white supremacist gang. Run by his friend Craig Van Eck. And your mother stood by your father after he killed that bank guard. To me, it looks like your family doesn’t have a problem with white supremacists or murderers.”

  I’d been feeling a little calmer, but the way he said it made me so angry I couldn’t even talk. I sat there staring at Mansur. He stared back, waiting. For me to break? For me to cry? I stretched my leg out under the table, trying to loosen up my hip, but it didn’t work. I was going to have to stand up soon or I wouldn’t be able to. Slowly, I worked my way back out of that rage. I figured out what I wanted to say, what I wanted Mansur to hear.

  “When my father went to prison, I was eight. LaReigne was twelve. After he left, my mother fell down in this hole. Look around you. Seriously, fucking look around. This is the hole she fell into, and she never got back out. It was like we lost both our parents. Like we’d been abandoned. All we had was each other, and we survived it together. LaReigne would never abandon her son. She would never do to him what was done to us. You can show me all the love letters in the world, but I will never believe that. Do you hear me?”