Hush

by Anne Frasier

  "Doesn't it seem strange that the very thing you trivialize is the very thing Ethan is crazy about?"

  "You're reading too much into it."

  On the way back to Chicago, Ethan was quiet. Ivy turned to look at him and saw he was asleep—or at least he appeared to be asleep, his head tipped back, eyes closed.

  Half an hour later, he said, "Pull over. I have to throw up."

  "There's no shoulder," Max said, sounding amazingly calm.

  "I have to puke!"

  There was no window in the backseat so Ivy quickly rolled down the passenger-side window. Ethan leaned forward, stuck his head out, and threw up. A car roared past, its windshield wipers going, horn blaring to finally fade into the distance.

  The road widened and Max was finally able to pull to the side. As soon as the car stopped, Ethan bailed out, followed by Max and Ivy.

  "Get away," Ethan said, swinging his arm behind him. "Nobody needs to watch me."

  Max and Ivy looked at each other, then got back in the car.

  A few minutes later, Ethan walked over to the car and got in, collapsing in the backseat, his face pale, his shirt removed and clutched in his hands.

  "You okay?" Max asked.

  "Yeah. Let's go."

  "Do you think it was the sandwich?" Ivy asked. "I don't feel sick. Do you?" That question was directed to Max.

  "It's car sickness," Ethan said, sounding embarrassed. "Let's just go. I just wanna get home."

  "Why didn't you tell me you get carsick?" she asked, while at the same time Max said, "I thought you'd outgrown that."

  "Apparently not," was Ethan's dry comment.

  "You have to ride in the front seat," Ivy said, opening her door.

  "I'm okay now."

  "Please." Then to Max, "Max, he has to ride in the front."

  "Jesus," Ethan said. "If it'll make you happy."

  They quickly switched places, with Ivy settling in back, behind Max.

  When they arrived at her apartment, it was almost ten o'clock.

  "I'm sorry you got sick," Ivy said as she got out of the car.

  Ethan smiled. "That was pretty funny stuff though," he said, surprising her with direct eye contact. "I puked on that car's windshield."

  Ivy nodded, smiling at the memory. "Funny stuff."

  "Do you like her?" Ethan asked his father as they pulled away.

  "She's my partner," Max said, for lack of a better definition.

  "Is that all?"

  "That's all."

  Max hadn't done a whole lot of dating over the years. He'd mainly done a lot of running away from the women who pursued him. There had been a defense attorney he'd seen for two years. Another was Ethan's pediatrician, who had pursued him so relentlessly that he'd given up and gone out with her. Both women were smart and charming—but highly stressed. The mix hadn't been right. In both cases, it had produced a clash of two highly stressed individuals, with the catalyst for those stresses being such polar opposites that the relationships never had a chance.

  "Why'd you ask her along today?" Ethan asked.

  "She doesn't know anybody in Chicago and doesn't have a car, so I thought she might like to get out."

  "Okay," Ethan said, not sounding convinced.

  "I assure you, the only thing she'd want to do with me is use me for target practice. And by the way, I am your father, and that makes my mother your grandmother."

  Ethan crossed his arms over his chest. "Whatever."

  Max's strategy had always been to avoid confrontational issues, but Ivy's earlier comments came back to him, and he found himself saying, "Why are you pushing me away? Why are you deliberately trying to alienate yourself?"

  "I don't want to talk about this."

  "I do."

  "Are you saying I have to discuss it? Is that an order? A command? Will you ground me longer, continue to not let me drive, if I don't talk to you?"

  So much for Ivy's advice, Max thought, wishing he hadn't brought up the subject of Ethan's attitude. Interrogating cold-blooded killers was easier than arguing with his son.

  That night, Ivy reran the day in her head. It was so strange. Whenever she thought of her baby, she thought of him as an infant—forever young. Over the years, she always had to remind herself that no, he would be six now, or he would be nine now. But no matter how often she reminded herself of what his age would be, she always saw him as an infant, his face indistinct. He always seemed so far away.

  Sixteen ... If he'd lived, her baby wouldn't be a baby, he'd be a young man. He'd be Ethan's age.

  She pulled her black suitcase from under the bed and opened it. Inside was a small gift box. She wasn't sure why she'd brought it along, especially since it was something she hadn't been able to open since putting it away sixteen years ago.

  When she took on her new identity, she was supposed to leave everything from her old life behind. Not just so she couldn't be traced, but so she could become a new person. But there was one item she had refused to part with.

  She sat down on the bed and untied the blue ribbon. With shaking hands, she tried to make herself open the box.

  She couldn't.

  It would hurt too much.

  It was said that time healed. For Ivy, that wasn't the case. Being a psychologist, she understood the stages of grief and knew she hadn't completely faced what had happened all those years ago. Being the mother of a murdered child, she feared she never would.

  Chapter 20

  Max and Ivy sat in an unmarked car in Chicago's Graceland Cemetery. In another car, on the opposite side of the gathering, were two plainclothes officers. Darkness had fallen and white tapered candles with paper shields were being lit. Two days earlier, an article announcing the candlelight vigil had run in Wednesday's edition of the Herald, making the press and the Chicago Police Department temporary allies.

  Graceland Cemetery was located in Area Three, just a block north of Wrigley Field. The famous cemetery protected the remains of people like Marshall Field and George Pullman. It was also said to be haunted.

  In order to keep the ghosts in and the people out, a towering redbrick wall surrounded the grounds, the wall topped with three rows of razor wire. The massive iron gates were locked every evening at precisely 5:00 P.M., and it was only by special permission that the police had been allowed to stage the candlelight vigil.

  "This place is supposed to be haunted," Ivy said, her throat tight as she struggled to calm her stomach, trying to divert herself with talk of ghosts, because it wasn't the ghosts that unnerved her, but the possibility of coming face-to-face with the Madonna Murderer.

  "I've heard that," Max said. "What's the name of the statue that's supposed to walk around at night?"

  "Eternal Silence."

  "Also known as Statue of Death. Total bullshit."

  "Is that thing on?" she asked, referring to the palm- sized video camera he held in his hand.

  He fiddled with the focus. "Ready to roll."

  He pushed a button and the camera began to hum as he unobtrusively recorded the event playing out in front of them. "Nine thirty-two p.m.," he said in a monotone voice for the sake of documentation. That was followed by the date, the case, and the two people present. "Big turnout," he commented.

  "You don't believe in ghosts?" she asked.

  "No, do you?" His voice had the slightly distracted quality of someone concentrating on something else while trying to carry on a conversation.

  "I've never actually seen anything that would lead me to believe ghosts exist, but I have to admit I've heard some pretty convincing stories."

  "Mass hysteria. That's all. Like that school full of kids in Tennessee. Hundreds of them were admitted to surrounding hospitals. They were dropping like flies. They just had to touch somebody and they went down. Thought they were the victims of biological warfare. Tox screens came out okay. Air tested fine. Nothing was found."

  "I remember hearing about that," Ivy said, beginning to relax.

  "The mind can pl
ay strange tricks on a person."

  "It's called psychogenic illness," Ivy said.

  "Oh, Christ. No psychology lesson, please."

  "Can you turn off the sound?"

  "Why? Don't want the inaneness of this conversation exposed to the entire task force?"

  "Exactly."

  "They love that kind of thing."

  "That's what I'm afraid of. How many people do you think?" Ivy asked. "Fifty? Sixty?"

  "Closer to a hundred."

  But then five of those hundred were officers. Twenty more were probably curiosity seekers.

  "I think he's too smart to fall for this," Max commented.

  "Doesn't matter. He doesn't have to fall for it. He'll know the whole thing's being enacted for his benefit. Hopefully he won't be able to keep from enjoying the attention. With nothing to tie him to the murders, he should feel somewhat safe."

  "Bathing in the glory."

  "That's right."

  "See anybody suspicious?"

  "How about the tall guy near the tree, to the right of the crowd?"

  Max squinted. "Shit. That's Carpenter. I told him to blend, not lurk. He may as well be wearing a damn uniform."

  "Time for me to join the party," Ivy said, picking up the bouquet of flowers from her lap and reaching for the door handle.

  "Wait." Max fiddled with the dome light so it wouldn't come on when she opened the door.

  Earlier, it had been decided that Max should keep a low profile, since his face might be familiar to the killer, thanks to the media. And even though Ivy's picture had appeared in the paper, she hadn't been identified: She could very well be a friend or relative.

  With the light off, Ivy slipped from the car without fear of attracting undue attention, solidly closing the door behind her.

  The night air was heavy and humid. Crickets chirped and fireflies played among the tombstones. When she was little, Ivy used to lie in bed on hot nights, counting the cricket chirps outside her open window to determine how old she would be when she died. How strange that children played such dark games. So much of their play dealt with death and violence. Did anyone else think that was peculiar?

  Stick a needle in my eye.

  If I die before I wake.

  Blackbirds baked in a pie.

  Pray to God my soul to take.

  Ashes, ashes, all fall down.

  Three blind mice.

  It had rained that morning, and the ground under her square heels sank as she made her way across the grass, moving in the direction of the shifting white lights and bowed heads, in the direction of the murmur of prayers.

  At the edge of the crowd, someone offered her a lit candle. She accepted it, whispering a thank-you as she glanced up into the face of a middle-aged man.

  Is it you? she silently asked, trying to memorize a face she could barely distinguish in the flickering candlelight which threw black slashes of moving shadows across his cheekbones, his forehead. Fingertips brushed hers and she looked down, prepared to see talons instead of nails.

  Too dark.

  He flashed her a wistful smile. As he turned to leave, firelight suddenly washed away the shadows, revealing tear-filled eyes.

  Not you, she thought.

  But he won't look like a monster, she reminded herself. He'll look like anybody else. He could be capable of tears. That's what people didn't understand. That's what the public had to be made to realize.

  She moved deeper into the now singing crowd, her mouth beginning to move, her voice taking up the words of a song long forgotten, from a time when she'd gone to church and prayed like everybody else.

  Silly people, she thought with sorrow-tinged affection. With your Saint Christopher medals and your rosaries and your holy water. How many of them were praying, not for Sachi and her baby, but for themselves? Thinking that if they were good enough, prayed enough, smiled enough, tithed ten percent of their income to the church, that they would be safe from the kind of horrors that had befallen Sachi Anderson? Didn't they understand that the same God who created them had also created the Madonna Murderer? Wasn't that exactly how Jeffrey Dahmer justified his killings? Saying God had made him a predator? That he was simply carrying out God's wish?

  The scent of earth from the fresh graves hit her. She saw they were marked with photos and stuffed animals and hanging baskets. And she thought of another small grave, in another cemetery, in another part of town, a grave she'd never visited. . . .

  Ivy bent and put her bouquet with the others, then straightened as the last verse of the song died out. Someone began to pray. Someone else began to wail with a voice that was wild and high.

  Ivy lifted her head, trying to find the direction of the wailing, but the voices rose and fell as the sound was carried from person to person, soul to soul.

  A sense of evil seeped into her, a black pit of no remorse, no guilt, no blame. The surface of her arms tingled; the hair on her scalp shifted and cold air rushed down her cheeks and neck. She wanted to move, wanted to get away, go back to the car where Max Irving sat with his video camera. But her feet felt like lead, her muscles atrophied.

  And she knew with utmost certainty that the man who had killed her baby, the man who had killed Sachi Anderson, was somewhere in the crowd watching. He had turned the tables on them, and suddenly something that had been devised to flush him out had instead turned into a way for him to hide in plain sight.

  She forced herself to stay ten more minutes, then she made her way back to the parked car.

  He watched her walk away.

  Hers was a familiar face. The face from the paper. The face that was now in his scrapbook. The face that had no name.

  He paid close attention to where she went, to the car she got into, to the license plate. CR 427. All numbers were significant.

  When she opened the door, no dome light came on. Which meant she was a cop. She got into the passenger side. Which meant there was another cop with her. Detective Irving?

  He liked to keep up with the investigators and their families. He liked to know what was happening in their lives, liked to follow them so he could keep tabs on their likes and dislikes. In that way, he could engage them in conversation if he ever so desired.

  He'd attended the first communion of Sinclair's daughter, and he'd sent a stuffed bear to his granddaughter, Kiki.

  He was very curious by nature, and he had to find out who the woman was.

  He turned back to the vigil. It was for him. He knew that.

  Stupid people. Stupid, stupid people.

  They were all there for him. The cops. The candles. The people. The sad, sad people. For him. Who said one person couldn't make a difference? He'd touched them all. Every one of them.

  Whores, whores, whores.

  He grew hard. Dirty boy. Dirty, dirty boy.

  Something nagged at the back of his mind. The baby. The photo of the baby someone had put on the grave.

  You saved him, he told himself. Saved him! Comforted, he raised his voice in song.

  Ivy stepped into the task-force headquarters, where members of the team were huddled around a computer screen. Irving was perched on the corner of a desk he'd staked out as his, one foot on the floor, the other dangling, making his creased gray slacks short enough to show a brown sock that appeared to have had bleach spilled on it.

  It seemed she'd walked in on the task force's version of Interpretation Theater. The sound had been turned off, and Ramirez was adding his own dialogue to the videotape that had been made the previous night. The view was quite obviously from a car. Near the bottom of the screen was the top curve of the steering wheel.

  "Oh, yeah," Ramirez was saying in a high, feminine voice. "Put your hand there. Right there."

  Everybody laughed, and then someone else added another ad-lib. "Cemeteries turn me on."

  A burst of fresh laughter.

  "Cemeteries make me hot."

  Another burst of laughter. Then Hastings spotted Ivy standing inside the door. Her smile di
ssolved. One by one, officers looked behind them to see what had changed Hastings' expression.

  They were treating her like an old schoolmarm. Was she that stuffy? That serious?

  Maybe. Probably. In fact, Ivy could barely recall a time when she'd laughed a laugh that wasn't tinged with sorrow. These young officers could still cut up because even though they saw evil on a regular basis, they hadn't been touched by it personally.

  "Don't stop because of me," she told them.

  "We were just having some fun," Hastings said, trying to fill the silence that had collected around them.

  Ivy slid her backpack across one of the long, lunchroom-style tables.

  "We were actually waiting for you," Max said, rewinding the tape to the beginning.

  "The el was crowded. I had to wait for a second train."

  She was finally getting the hang of getting around Chicago after so many years away, but she still hadn't quite figured out what now qualified as rush hour. And with metro universities making more and more downtown warehouses into student housing, the morning trains were often filled with just as many summer- session students as office workers.

  Playtime over, the team quickly got down to business. It turned out that everyone involved in the vigil stakeout had taken note of the man who'd given Ivy the candle.

  "A weird-ass," Hastings said.

  The tech at the computer stopped the video at the very moment light met the man's face. A few key clicks and the face filled the entire screen. Another click and the image was being printed out.

  "I don't think he's the one," Ivy said.

  Max looked up at her.

  She shrugged. "Just a feeling," she said, recalling how the black feeling of despair had washed over her after she'd walked away from the man on the screen.

  "We'll run his face through the database," Max said. "Along with all the others."

  Chapter 21

  She couldn't say how many times she'd dreamed she was back in her old Chicago apartment. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. And in every one of those dreams, Ivy relived events that had actually taken place—except that in the dreamscape she always knew it was a dream . . . and she always saw the killer's face, a face she could never remember upon awakening. Dream therapists liked to say that every person in your dream is an aspect of yourself. And that the dream itself is a metaphor. But Ivy knew the dream was a mind trick, a trip back to an unthinkable event that had redirected the course of her life.