“I’ll take my chances,” Sally said.
“Okay,” Delice said, and gave her the name. “But if you learn anything interesting from her, promise you’ll tell me instantly.”
“Naturally,” Sally agreed, and made the next phone call. Delice’s friend allowed as how they were pretty busy. Then Sally told her the stuff had come from Nina Cruz’s house, and the woman got more interested. She told Sally to bring it on by the lab and they’d give it a look. And take care handling it, by the way.
She put the can inside two plastic zipper bags, washed her hands three times, drank the last of her coffee. She probably ought to call Dickie and tell him what she was doing, but if, as was probable, the powder was nothing but ground-up soy, she’d just be bugging him for no reason and looking like a meddlesome fool in the bargain. So she put on her coat, hefted her fully packed shoulder bag, and headed out into the cold, clear morning.
Just over the river in West Laramie, Sally turned left into a driveway barred by a concertina-wire-topped security gate. A guard at the gatehouse asked her business, and she gave Delice’s friend’s name as her contact, saying also that she had a package to deliver. The guard requested identification, which she produced, then he searched her car and found nothing worth confiscating or even commenting on, and went back into the guardhouse and picked up a phone. Five minutes later, a white-coated technician arrived, used an ID badge to open the gate, accepted the can of powder, put it in yet another plastic bag, and walked back toward the buildings that housed the state veterinary research complex.
The whole experience was efficient, cold, utterly impersonal. She drove out the driveway, headed west, and sang along with the ever-ebullient Dixie Chicks all the way out to Shady Grove. But the Halloween creeps were upon her.
A harried-looking Cat Cruz met her at the door to the house, portable phone in hand. “I’ve got a call,” she said, handing Sally the key to Nina’s office. “And there’s a bunch of business I’ve just got to get to this morning. You might as well go out there and get started. If you’ve got any questions or need to talk, just come on back in and let me know. I’ll stop what I’m doing if I absolutely have to. I’ll come out and check in with you later.”
Sally didn’t mind. If Cat was too busy to hover over her, telling her what she could or couldn’t look at, think about, or publish, that was just fine with her. She let herself into the office, took a deep breath, and looked around at the tidy space, thinking about where and how to start in.
When it came to attacking an archive, a library, a document collection, some historians were methodical. They’d draw up a research plan, call for an inventory of items, and then, in calm and dispassionate fashion, work their way through, departing from design only to check back when something farther along on the list sparked the need to refer to something they’d examined earlier. Other historians were idiosyncratic, skipping around through material as fancy led them, looking for, and fastening on some detail of a place, an event, a life, that would explain the whole. Sally Alder aimed at method, but just as often followed impulse. Story of her life. Why should the archive be any different from any other place she happened to be?
Fortunately for her, Nina Cruz had been a devotee of order. There were filing cabinets full of neat, color-coded folders dealing with specific facets of her career, her causes, her personal business, year by year since 1965. In a closet in her office there were brown letter boxes labeled PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE, again arranged by year, from 1950 to 2003. Good grief! Nina Cruz was maybe ten years older than Sally herself. And here she’d left behind more than half a century of personal mail. Sally began to feel altogether too historical.
What was surprising, to Sally, was how few boxes there were, only ten, in fact, over a period covering over fifty years. Nina must have thrown away a lot of personal letters. This was the kind of thing that made historians gnash their teeth and rend their garments. But she could see what was there, anyway, and eventually piece together a list of Nina’s correspondents. Sooner or later, she’d contact the people on the list and find out if they had materials they might be willing to share.
What wasn’t surprising was the fact that there were hardly any letters at all for the earliest and latest years. Nina had, after all, been only four years old in 1950, too young to send or receive much mail. And after about 1995, most of her correspondence had probably switched to e-mail.
Which meant Sally would have to try to figure out how to get into Nina’s e-mail account. She’d called last night to ask, and Cat hadn’t known the password. She’d look around to see if Nina had written it down in some obvious place (in a computer file titled “Passwords” maybe?). But if Nina had been at all prudent, Sally might need a hacker. Maybe the multitalented Quartz counted hacking among his interests, along with pies, French history, and accounting.
But before she thought about breaking and entering Nina’s electronic correspondence, she might as well scan what was right there and easily available. Sally pulled out a few file folders at random, from different years, just trying to get a feel for the stuff in the cabinets. Once again, what she found taught a lesson in changing technology. The early business records were typed, or occasionally written out in longhand, and carbon-copied. In the middling period, greasy photocopies and dot-matrix printouts began to appear. Then computer-generated text, Courier fonts, and, ultimately, desktop-published work in increasingly elaborate form. A revolution in Sally’s lifetime.
The technological transformation was, of course, just as remarkable in the medium in which Nina Cruz had made her legend, recorded sound. When Nina had first taken to the road as a resolute young folk singer, 45s and 331/3s defined the universe of commercially available music. Tape cassettes had appeared sometime in the sixties, making music portable and personal in ways it had never been before. Anybody with a couple hundred dollars could buy a tape deck that would record as well as play, and soon you could make custom tapes, sound tracks of your own personal movie. When CDs came along, within ten years, anybody could be her or his own record producer. The advent of downloading, of course, meant that everything recorded was up for grabs.
Which made sound recordings fair game for a historian, no matter how methodical or stuffy.
Straying from the paperwork she surely should have been sitting down to attack, Sally stepped over to the shelves where Nina had stored her brilliant musical legacy. There were reel-to-reel tapes, cassettes—even eight-tracks!— along with 45s and LPs and CDs, and scrapbooks of press clippings. There was also a collection of all the recordings Nina had done with other artists, including, of course, a complete set of the recorded music of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.
Sally couldn’t resist the albums. Over the course of the marriage, Nina had cut nine records; Stone had made five. They both sat in on each other’s sessions from time to time, and had cowritten half-a-dozen songs that had made it onto vinyl. But every album had been billed as a solo outing; they’d never put out an album together. Their careers, Sally observed, were more parallel than joined.
Late in their marriage, Nina had provided a back-up vocal for Thomas’s exuberant cover of the jazz standard “How High the Moon,” on an album of duets he’d done with everyone from Lena Horne to Ray Price. The liner notes were illustrated with photos of Stone with his singing partners. She studied the photo of Stone and Nina. They stood at angles facing each other, hands on the earpieces of their headphones, singing into microphones that dangled from a ceiling. Singing with eyes closed. When you sang with somebody that way, Sally knew, it was all about the blending of sound. The mating of voices, not of souls. She’d fallen in love with enough singing partners, sung with enough former lovers, to know that, too often, it was a lot easier to make beautiful music with somebody if you didn’t have to look in his eyes.
Soon after that session, Nina and Tom had split, leaving behind one final testament to their years together. The title song on a Stone Jackson record, written and sung by the two of th
em, had since that time been covered, syndicated, Muzaked, translated, karaoke’d, rearranged, and sampled a hundred different ways. Royalties on “The Hard Way” alone had probably made them money enough to bankroll ranches all over the Rocky Mountains. But oh, thought Sally, brilliant music came at a high price. Rolling Stone had dubbed the song, “Our national anthem of tortured love.”
“My sister was a past master at the tortured love thing,” came a voice, interrupting Sally’s melancholy reverie amid the records and the clippings. “But, after a while, it was pretty clear, to me anyhow, that her lovers were taking most of the torture. She was amazingly good at picking up the pieces and moving on.”
Sally looked up at Cat. “You’re not much of one for sentiment, are you?”
“Sure I am. I loved—and continue to love—Angelina more than anyone else in the world. I’ll miss her every day of my life. But I’m damned if I’ll turn her into some kind of saint. There are plenty of others willing to light the candles.”
“But if she was so hard on the people who loved her, how do you account for the fact that at least a few of the torture victims have stuck around for more? Stone Jackson and Nels Willen, for instance. They don’t strike me as masochists.”
You could say the same for Cat Cruz herself.
Cat’s mouth curved on one side, in something that might have looked like a smile if it hadn’t been so full of pain. “You know, I’ve seen people dying of thirst in refugee camps. They hang on for hours and days and weeks on a few drops of water, and some cynical, feeble promise that relief is coming soon.”
Cat’s face grew grim. “Hope can be a brutal instrument of torture.”
Chapter 16
Opera Gloves
Seven hours after she’d walked into Nina’s office, Sally rolled her shoulders, stretched her arms high, and stood up. She walked out of the studio to the house to say good-bye to Cat, who was again on the phone. Cat waved vaguely in her direction. So Sally headed for her car, buttoning her coat and winding her scarf tighter around her neck along the way. The temperature had dropped a good fifteen degrees since morning, as it always seemed to do on Halloween. She had once observed that all Laramie children might as well decide to dress up as pumpkins. Even if Halloween day started out warm and sunny, the weather was invariably so frigid by twilight that even skinny little kids in skeleton costumes were puffed up like the Marshmallow Man with protective layers of sweaters and down vests and padded pants underneath.
Having skipped lunch, Sally spent the ride back hoping that Hawk had done something about dinner, and nurturing a smaller secret hope that he’d gone ahead and gotten those Crunch Bars. Surely she was entitled to a little chocolate binge after putting in a good day’s work. She was more optimistic about the latter than the former. Apart from the fact that he’d probably had a long day himself, they were invited to the annual Halloween party hosted by the geology graduate students, a Laramie social institution featuring incredible costumes, eclectic dance music, lots of food, and lots of beer. She was usually content to wait and have something to eat there, and Hawk, who never skipped meals, would probably figure he could tide himself over with a hot dog between visits from trick-or-treaters, until the party began at nine. But tonight, the combination of puzzlement, nerves, and calorie deficiency made her ravenous.
Ravenous and curious. Who was Angelina Cruz? She’d shown so many faces to so many people. To the country at large, she’d been saint or traitor, crusader for social justice or sellout, admired by millions of people like Sally Alder for her idealism and her apparent determination to make every moment a test of right and wrong. Equally detested, by probably just as many millions (of people like, for example, Jimbo Perrine), for what they saw as her heavy-handed radicalism and self-righteous opportunism. She’d attracted a coterie of friends and admirers, and evidently courted and abandoned a long train of lovers, at least some of whom remained devoted even after, well, even after being dumped.
And what of those who’d survived and remained and more or less followed her to the wilds of Wyoming? The lovers: Stone Jackson, Nels Willen, Randy Whitebird, Kali (née Kelly Lee Brisbane). The admirers: Quartz, Pammie, Lark, and the others. And of course, Nina’s sister, Caterina Cruz.
In what ways were Cat and Nina alike? Sally made a mental list of similarities: Both had made global reputations as activists and humanitarians. Both maintained ties to home and family, but at a distance (including, maybe, their relationship with each other?). Both were feminists (that covered a lot of ground, of course). Both had become rich nurturing Nina’s career.
Nina had impressed Sally as both smart and capable, but without edge. They’d gotten together maybe monthly for two years, been on the verge of getting to know each other. Nina had committed her support to Sally’s Dunwoodie Center early and with some heft, but she’d never tried to make Sally feel like the supplicant approaching the patron. They’d traded a little gossip along with business, chatting about the delights and frustrations of gardening above seven thousand feet.
Sally thought about it as she drove across the railroad bridge between West Laramie and the town proper. The limits of their relationship hadn’t all come from Nina’s side. Sally might be prone to idol worship, as her lifelong devotion to Thomas Jackson so embarrassingly attested, but she hadn’t idolized Nina. Nels Willen had told her that Nina loved her. That might or might not be true. But whatever the case, Sally hadn’t loved her back. Liked, yes. Admired, certainly. Respected, absolutely. But not loved. And that seemed strange, given that Nina was so evidently the kind of person with whom all kinds of people fell in love, and Sally thought of herself as a person who fell a little in love with most of her friends.
Truth to tell, Sally felt closer to Cat Cruz, after three days, than she had to Nina after two years. Cat mixed hardheaded assessments, pointed questions, and pragmatic strategies with a lot of wit and a disarming willingness to confide. She had the kind of edginess Sally adored in people like Delice and Dickie Langham, and of course, Hawk Green.
Maybe a little too much edge, though? Cultivated, over the years, by having to play hard to Nina’s globally celebrated soft? Cat had loved Nina, as she said, “more than anyone”—more than anyone else had loved her sister, or more than Cat had ever loved? But Caterina Cruz’s elegy for Angelina had tempered fond memory with cold truth, especially when it came to the way Nina had treated Stone Jackson.
Pulling into the garage, Sally was struck by a truth so obvious, she thought she should always have known it: Love wasn’t a simple or simply good thing. She’d sung enough country songs that she should have figured that out by now; love could hurt and scar and wound and mar, as the poets said. Now, thinking about the death of Nina Cruz, she knew a certainty: Love could kill.
A chill ran through her as she walked to the house, and not only because of the frigid air. The grinning jack-o’-lantern by the door, glowing in the twilight, even seemed a little sinister. But as soon as she entered, her thoughts turned from love and death to food. The house was full of the aromas of tomatoes and garlic when she walked in: Hawk rustling up a big batch of his famous spaghetti sauce. She felt as if she could eat the whole pot. A big wooden salad bowl full of candy sat on the table in the front hall, next to the door: cellophane tubes of Smarties, plastic-wrapped Atomic Fire-balls, packets of candy corn, and yes, lovely, irresistible little Crunch Bars. Sally put her shoulder bag on the floor next to the table and ate her first Crunch Bar before she’d even taken her coat off.
She’d started on a second as she walked into the kitchen. “You’ll spoil your dinner,” said Hawk, standing at the stove, stirring the pot.
“My mother always said that. But in my vast experience of between-meal snacking, I don’t recall even one instance of spoiling my dinner. In fact, I believe I could eat mine and yours tonight.”
“Go ahead,” said Hawk with a grin. “Eat mine.”
She grinned back, welcomed home. “Thanks for cooking,” she told him.
; “De nada,” he said. “Once it started getting cold, I felt like whupping up something hot. No dead bodies today?” he inquired a little too blithely. He’d been at least a little worried.
“Nope,” she said. “I got a good start. Fortunately, Nina was really well organized. It shouldn’t take long to get through what’s there, at least on paper. I got obsessed and didn’t bother with lunch. I’ll compensate with dinner,” she told him, sticking a spoon in the pot and taking a bite of sweet, spicy, meaty sauce. “Obviously, you’re not worried about mad cow disease either.”
The first trick-or-treater rang the doorbell.
For two people closing in on the half-century mark, Sally and Hawk were fools for Halloween. They loved the kids who came to the door: tiny fairy princesses in pink tutus and tiaras and ski jackets; pint-size cartoon heroes-of-the-moment; pirates and hoboes and punk rockers and football players. Some of the costumes looked as if they’d come out of boxes from the Wal-Mart, some were elaborate home-sewing supermom productions, and some seemed to have been put together out of odds and ends and hand-me-downs and everyday clothes.
The biggest wave of them came while they were eating their dinner. They’d both get up to answer the door, exclaim over the kids, shovel out candy. The preschool kids, with hovering parents, came first. Next, the school-agers, mothers and fathers relegated to standing out by the street, as if anybody would let a couple of second-graders run around town by themselves on Freak Night.
By seven or so, the ringings of the doorbell had slowed to sporadic. Now, Sally knew, there would be large parties, families from the poorer parts of town who would come out all together, and teenagers who couldn’t quite give up a childhood ritual. Since they’d bought, as predicted, far too much candy, these late visitors always made a haul. But they weren’t as much fun to see. Half of them didn’t even bother with costumes. By now, Hawk answered while Sally did the dishes, or they took turns while they were getting dressed for the geology party.
Bye, Bye, Love Page 16