She smiles, though her expression is still wistful. “Yeah,” she says. “You’re nice to say that.”
I let a moment pass, feeling slightly awkward. “Well. Thank you for the ride.”
She looks up, her face snapping into more pleasant lines. “No problem at all,” she says. “It’s been really great meeting you. I hope we’ll be seeing more of each other.”
“Thanks,” I say. “Me too. Have a good night.”
• • •
Later, after going upstairs and studying the room service menu with more absorption than it really requires, I have a sandwich in my room and think of almost nothing at all. I feel as if my brain has shut down from the intensity of the day, the way an infant will sometimes fall asleep when you run a loud vacuum. Tomorrow, I think, but I don’t get much further. Eventually I get undressed and slip into bed, though it’s still early evening. It’s a long while before I finally sleep.
A year or two ago, during one of my Milo-intelligence-gathering missions, I came across a Web site that featured the backstage riders of various musical artists, the document that lists a band’s technical and hospitality requirements for before, during, and after a concert. There was one for Pareidolia, and I read it eagerly.
It was like discovering a cave painting. Here, in washed-out color, was a trace of a rich and unknown culture, an artifact that might provide exegesis of an entire way of life—but only if you knew how to interpret it the right way. Sifting through pages of notes about guitar stands and speaker cables, the amount of space needed to park a string of buses forty-eight feet long apiece, I felt as if I were close to discovering the secret of my son’s daily life. There were requirements for clean bath towels and Chopin vodka, a stated preference for lighting in shades of mauve and violet. Requests for ginger beer and vegan snacks, a kind of tea designed to soothe a sore throat. Here, a hunter following a stag; there, a tracing of a human hand.
He’s in here somewhere, I thought. These are the details of how he spends his days, he and the band of dozens he must travel with; somewhere in here are the foods he craves, the comfort he seeks. But in this roughly rendered form, rinsed of context and nuance, how was I to know what any of it meant? Black hand towels for use onstage. Full-length mirrors and “clean ice.” But nothing to tell me if my son was happy or how often he thought of me. Nothing to say that it’s only because of me, the family I created and raised, nurtured and destroyed, that any of this exists at all.
• • •
I wake up in the morning feeling determined and frightened, thinking about everything I have learned and everything I may yet lose. This new hope, this frail peace … it’s all very precarious. And as for my role here—in this disastrous situation, in the life of my only surviving child—it’s no clearer than it was yesterday.
I go down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast and, steeling myself, open up my laptop to read the news. Milo’s case is lower on the page today, but still prominent. Some of the details from the coroner’s report have been made public, and I can see that journalists are working hard to piece together a narrative from the list of bald facts. I take a small notebook out of my purse—my obligatory writer’s “You never know when inspiration will strike!” notebook, which is filled mostly with grocery lists and calculations of how much of a tip to leave—and start to make a list. I need to keep track of what they think they have on him.
Some of it is not news. Cause of death: blunt-force trauma to the head and subsequent bleeding in the brain. Weapon: a ten-pound exercise weight that had been in the bedroom already. But some of it is new, and so terribly specific. Number of blows Bettina suffered: three. Places where investigators found traces of her blood: the soles of Milo’s shoes, the palm of one hand, the pillows on the couch where he slept. Such clear directionality. There’s practically a map drawn from the scene of the crime to the snoring body the police found on the sofa the next morning.
I sigh, take a sip of my coffee. Focus. At the time of Bettina’s death, her blood alcohol level was 0.03; she’d had something to drink, but she was barely even tipsy. Standard toxicology screens were negative for whatever substances they routinely test for. Blood was taken from Milo, too, and urine; here, in bold letters on my screen, discussion of my son’s urine. His blood alcohol at the time of his arrest was not high, but several hours had passed since the time of the murder, so police say that the result is not particularly significant. In addition, it’s been revealed that Xanax was present in his bloodstream, and every journalist who’s taken the time to spend five minutes on Wikipedia is pleased to report that in rare cases alprazolam can cause aggression, rage, and agitation. Combining it with alcohol, of course, may intensify these effects.
I close my computer and put down my pen. I’m not sure what I think I can do to help here; I’m not a detective or a lawyer. Like everyone else, I’ve read a few mystery novels and seen a few crime shows and I think that qualifies me to form an opinion. There was blood on the ceiling of the bedroom, the paper said, cast off from the surface of the dumbbell as it moved upward from Bettina’s skull to come down again after the initial blow. Blood on the ceiling. I don’t know a fucking thing.
I signal for the waitress. A few tables away from me, there’s a little girl sitting with her parents. I judge her to be younger than Lia, but not much, and I watch her with interest while I pretend to look at the screen of my cell phone. She’s sitting in a booster seat, and the table in front of her is littered with torn-up napkins and crusts of toast; she has jam on her shirt and on her cheek. Apparently done with her meal, she displays extreme concentration as she scribbles on her hand with a green marker. Her mother and father are sitting silently, gazing at nothing in particular. They look tired.
I remember that one of the other requests on that Pareidolia rider I saw was “one room to be designated as a Family Room.” It was to be stocked with, among other things, “one play yard (Pack ’n Play or similar) with two clean sheets” and “six jars of organic baby food, assorted vegetables and fruits.”
At the time I knew that Joe was dating a woman who had a child, and I had some idea that this might be the baby in question. I remember wondering rather snippily what kind of mother feeds her child organic baby food while dragging it all over the country and subjecting it to the decibel levels of nightly rock concerts.
Now I wonder something else: what kind of father knows his daughter, sees her often, even travels with her, but doesn’t acknowledge that she’s his? I picture the little family unit of Joe and Chloe and baby Lia, sitting cozily in a made-over room in the belly of a stadium, eating an evening meal together before Daddy goes to do his job onstage. And where’s Milo? Someplace else, filling a glass with Chopin vodka and clean ice.
• • •
After breakfast I go back to my room and try to call Chloe, but I get her voice mail. Joe’s not answering either, and somehow I left yesterday without getting Milo’s number, or Roland’s. I’m practically back where I started.
The morning passes slowly, and I spend it in a languorous panic, pacing my hotel room, refreshing news sites, calling people who don’t answer their phones. It’s all a spectacular waste of time, but what else am I supposed to do? I use hotel stationery to make timelines and lists of motives, as if I’m plotting a novel. On my computer, I shift between ten different tabs, all open to Google, skimming results for “gravestones, San Francisco,” and “posttraumatic memory loss.” Hoping that I just need to find the right search terms. Looking up “vending machine jewelry” and “locked room mystery” and “mother of the accused.”
Finally, at a time that feels like late afternoon but is only eleven a.m., I spot a news item that gives me focus. Something tangible for me to investigate, some action that is at least actually related to the matter at hand. I plug in the iron provided by the hotel and carefully press the wrinkles out of a dark brown skirt and cream-colored blouse, an outfit I packed because I thought it would fit any number of occasions where I might
need to look respectable. On my way out of the hotel, I stop in the gift shop to buy sunglasses—my picture really is everywhere these days—and a small, soft item in a white paper bag that I stick into my purse for some unspecified later time. A present I hope I’ll have the opportunity to give while I’m in town. A half hour later I step off a city bus, disproportionately proud of myself for navigating an unfamiliar transportation system, and begin to walk down Arguello Boulevard. It’s sunny and warm; whether this is typical for November, I have no idea. I walk down a wide sidewalk, past a long stretch of houses and apartment buildings. The garages here all seem to be built on the bottom floor, with the rest of the house above them, and I wonder briefly if it has something to do with earthquakes.
I cross a wide street and go past a gas station and an animal hospital with a rainbow painted on the side. At first my steps are quick and agitated, my body humming with nervous energy, but eventually my pace and my breathing begin to slow. I remember that whenever Mitch and I had a fight, my first impulse was always to get out—out of the house, out of the car, wherever we were—and start walking. Sometimes I had a half plan, ridiculous when I thought of it later (I could go to a hotel, I could get on a bus), but most of the time I just wanted to be elsewhere, as if I might be able to leave my fury and hurt feelings behind me. And often by the time I’d charged around the block and arrived back at the house I’d stormed out of just a few moments before, I had.
I come to the corner of Arguello and Anza and turn left. There are species of trees here that I’ve never seen on the East Coast, some of them knobby and stunted, others blooming in big green globes, almost like topiary. I’m going deeper into what seems to be an entirely residential neighborhood, and I like the solitude. For a few more minutes I can be outside my life, not the mother of an accused murderer, not a writer wasting time on a project no one seems to understand. Just a lady with sunglasses, walking through a landscape designed by Dr. Seuss.
Up ahead there’s a corner where I’ve seen several cars turn in the last few minutes, and I strain to see the street sign. Yes, it’s the right one. I turn into a tiny cul-de-sac, maybe four houses on each side, which dead-ends at a strange little building with a domed roof and a crowd of people outside. The building is round, ornate, neoclassical—not quite a church, not quite a museum—and it’s an odd sight in the middle of this ordinary neighborhood.
I walk closer, and the crowd outside comes into sharper focus. It’s a collection of news crews, photographers, and curious onlookers, similar to the one gathered outside Roland’s house yesterday.
Then two things happen simultaneously: I see the sign on the gate that says COLUMBARIUM OF SAN FRANCISCO, and a man comes out of the building carrying two cases of soda.
He sets them down before the wriggling mass. “Mrs. Moffett asked me to bring these out,” he says. “She said she’ll be happy to talk to you afterward.”
And that’s when I know I’ve come to the right place. I’ve found Bettina’s funeral.
From the Jacket Copy for
TROPOSPHERIC SCATTER
By Octavia Frost
(Farraday Books, 1999)
In 1964, engineer Howard Liles moves his wife, Marie, and ten-year-old son, Tom, to the far edge of the earth: Kotzebue, Alaska, thirty-three miles above the Arctic Circle, where Howard has a job working on the military’s White Alice Communications System. Shortly after they arrive, in the midst of adjusting to their desolate new home, Marie makes a startling discovery while doing some charity work for her church: she finds a six-year-old girl, raised in terrible neglect and squalor and now orphaned. The family takes this nearly feral child into their home and raises her, learning from her as much as she learns from them.
From its captivating beginning to its tragic and shattering climax, Tropospheric Scatter is a novel you won’t soon forget.
Excerpt from
TROPOSPHERIC SCATTER
By Octavia Frost
ORIGINAL ENDING
They were exactly the wrong two to die. Nights, after the accident—that was the thought Howard kept returning to. Any other combination, even for him and Marie to lose both children, or for Tom and Beecy to have been orphaned, would have been better than this gutted fish of a family that flopped grotesquely, slowly suffocating on the pier. It was a horrible thing to think, and worse probably because Tom was his child by birth when Beecy hadn’t been, but Howard found some grim comfort in the stark defiance of it. So many of the facts of his life now involved confinement—the close quarters of the cabin, the brutal wind that kept everyone indoors, the days without sunlight, the bed that seemed somehow smaller without Marie in it. He’d be damned if he couldn’t roam where he wanted in the terrain of his own mind.
The two of them barely spoke in the days and weeks after it happened, though perhaps it had less to do with their feelings about each other than with the way they both seemed to have settled out of human society like debris sinking to the bottom of a water glass. Howard worked and came home and spent his evenings smoking at the table, and Tom lay curled on his bed for hours at a time, sometimes from the moment he came home from school until it was time to turn around and go there again. Howard kept his distance and left food out, as he might for an injured animal. He knew Tom was hurting, and that it was his job to help in whatever way he could, but he didn’t even trust himself to open his mouth, knowing the things that might come out. Howard could examine the events of that terrible day objectively, call it an accident to anyone who asked, but when he looked at Tom, slumped at the table with his schoolbooks, he would repeat to himself “Your fault your fault your fault” until the words became nonsense and the rhythm began to soothe him.
The bottomlessness of his anger surprised him. Tom was his son, and he loved him; that wasn’t in question. But it seemed, all of a sudden, irrelevant. He could picture Tom as a baby, Tom as a toddler, Tom on his first day of school, and listen for that automatic note of tenderness, but it was far-off now, muffled. It was as if there were static in his chest, white noise keeping him from picking up signals that should have been clear. Had it always been there, that crackle of interference? He no longer had any idea.
• • •
Three days after the bodies had been recovered, when the men went to dig the graves, Howard went with them. It was much the same as it had been when he joined in after Wally Forman died—clearing the snow, building a fire to soften the earth. The thermos of coffee passed from hand to hand, the quiet talk of fishing, the backache that told you you were doing something worthwhile.
Howard was glad, just then, to be here in Alaska, glad he could do something so tangible for his two lost girls. When his turn came, he climbed into the hole, and with each shovel of frozen dirt, he thought, This is for you, and this is for you, and this is for you.
The funeral was well attended, despite the snow that drifted up to the church’s bell tower, and the same newspaper reporter who had come to Kotzebue after they’d found Beecy showed up now to put an ending to the story. Within a few weeks, Peller’s Trading Post was selling copies of the Anchorage Daily News with a handwritten note posted on the wall above the pile: “Beecy’s story inside.” Howard, in the store to buy powdered milk and bear lard, walked right by without even a sideways glance, but someone (with what kind of intentions, Howard wasn’t sure) left a copy in his locker at work. And that night, after Tom was in bed, Howard sat at the table with a glass of whiskey and opened to the right page.
“The Short, Strange Life of Beecy Liles” was the title. As if she were a character in a film. Howard tapped his fingers and took a drink.
“The child that newspapers dubbed ‘the Kotzebue Closet Girl’ was christened Elizabeth Ann Liles by her adoptive parents, who intended to call her Betsy. But the name that will be engraved on her tombstone is the one that she gave herself when, after nearly two years of patience and intense work on the part of her new parents, she attempted to say her name for the first time. On that day, transplanted to a
loving home, with the ordeals of her early life long behind her, she looked into Marie Liles’s face and said, ‘Beecy.’”
Howard’s eyes stung, though the word that came into his mind was “manipulative.” It was the same as it had been before, the first time that the shape of their family had caught the newspapers’ attention: hours plucked from his life at random and placed within a framework they hadn’t seemed to have at the time. It was still his life, recognizable and even capable of provoking emotion, but it was missing some kind of essential texture.
He skimmed the next part, a repeat of all the same details that had been published before. People were in love with this story; why, Howard didn’t quite know.
“Everyone in this small town knew Beecy’s father, Malcolm Barnett; as the owner of one of Kotzebue’s two general stores, he was familiar to everyone. But no one seemed to know much about him. He was a quiet man, and a bit of a recluse. Townspeople would sometimes make bets with each other about how many words they’d be able to get him to speak during a visit to his store. Rumor goes, the record was eight. People knew that he’d married an Eskimo girl some years before, and that she’d died soon after. What they didn’t know, what nobody knew, was that she’d died giving birth to their only child, a daughter. When Mr. Barnett died in 1965, with no apparent heirs or family nearby, several ladies from St. George’s in the Arctic Episcopal Church volunteered to clean out his cabin. They were shocked by what they found. The squat two-room building contained a level of filth few of those good women had ever seen. And it contained something else, as Marie Liles found out when she opened the door of a closet in Mr. Barnett’s bedroom: a six-year-old girl, naked and shivering, lying on a pile of rags on the floor.”
Howard flicked the paper with his forefinger in a childish, vaguely hostile gesture. He hated seeing this hashed out yet again. It gave him the feeling that even if Beecy had lived to be a hundred, she still would’ve been known as the Closet Girl of Kotzebue. And of course he never liked the way they insisted on referring to that crazy bastard as Beecy’s father. Howard’s ideas of heaven were vague, but he did believe that one day he would be reunited with the people he’d loved. He wondered if Marie and Beecy were still together in that place or state of being or whatever it might be, or if Beecy had been returned to her natural mother and father. It was a gray area, certainly not something that any priest he’d ever listened to had addressed in a sermon, but it killed him to think of Beecy’s soul being given over to the safekeeping of the two people who had abandoned her, one through death and one through cruelty and neglect.
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