A Maiden's Grave

by Jeffery Deaver

  Sometimes she invites musicians and composers--people she's read about, even if she's never heard their music: Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt, Gordon Bok, Patrick Ball, Mozart, Sam Barber. Ludwig, of course. Ralph Vaughan Williams. Never Wagner. Mahler came once but didn't stay long.

  Her brother used to be a regular visitor to the music room.

  In fact, for a time, Danny was her only visitor, for he seemed to be the only person in the family not thrown by her affliction. Her parents struggled to coddle their daughter, keeping her home, never letting her go to town alone, scraping up money for tutors to come to the house, impressing on her the dangers of "her, you know, condition"--all the while avoiding any mention of her being deaf.

  Danny wouldn't put up with her timidity. He'd roar into town on his Honda 350 with his sister perched on the back. She wore a black helmet emblazoned with fiery wings. Before her hearing went completely he'd take her to movies and would drive audiences to rage by loudly repeating dialogue for her. To their parents' disgust the boy would walk around the house wearing an airline mechanic's earmuffs, just so he'd know what she was going through. Bless his heart, Danny even learned some basic sign and taught her some phrases (naturally ones that she couldn't repeat in the company of adult Deaf though they would later earn her high esteem in the Laurent Clerc schoolyard).

  Ah, but Danny . . .

  Ever since the accident last year, she hadn't had the heart to ask him back.

  She tries now but can't imagine him here.

  And so today, when she opens the door, she finds a middle-aged man with graying hair, wearing an ill-fitting navy-blue jacket and black-framed glasses. The man from the field outside the slaughterhouse.

  De l'Epee.

  Who else but him?

  "Hello," she says in a voice like a glass bell.

  "And to you." She pictures him taking her hand and kissing it, rather bashfully, rather firmly.

  "You're a policeman, aren't you?" she asks.

  "Yes," he says.

  She can't see him as clearly as she'd like. The power of desire is unlimited but that of imagination is not.

  "I know it's not your name but can I call you de l'Epee?"

  Of course he's agreeable to this, gentleman that he is.

  "Can we talk for a little while? That's what I miss the most, talking." Once you've spoken to someone, pelted them with your words and felt theirs in your ears, signing isn't the same at all.

  "By all means, let's talk."

  "I want to tell you a story. About how I learned I was deaf."

  "Please . . ." He seems genuinely curious.

  Melanie had planned to be a musician, she tells him. From the time she was four or five. She was no prodigy but did have the gift of perfect pitch. Classical, Celtic, or country-western--she loved it all. She could hear a tune once and pick it out from memory on the family's Yamaha piano.

  "And then . . ."

  "Tell me about it."

  "When I was eight, almost nine, I went to a Judy Collins concert."

  She continues, "She was singing a cappella, a song I'd never heard before. It was haunting . . . ."

  Conveniently, a Celtic harp begins playing the very tune through the imaginary speakers in the music room.

  "My brother had the concert program and I leaned over and asked him what the name of the song was. He told me it was 'A Maiden's Grave.' "

  De l'Epee says, "Never heard of it."

  Melanie continues, "I wanted to play it on the piano. It was . . . It's hard to describe. Just a feeling, something I had to do. I had to learn the song. The day after the concert I asked my brother to stop by a music store and get some sheet music for me. He asked me which song. 'A Maiden's Grave,' I told him.

  " 'What song's that?' he asked. He was frowning.

  "I laughed. 'At the concert, dummy. The song she finished the concert with. That song. You told me the title.'

  "Then he laughed. 'Who's a dummy? "A Maiden's Grave"? What're you talking about? It was "Amazing Grace." The old gospel. That's what I told you.'

  " 'No!' I was sure I heard him say 'A Maiden's Grave.' I was positive! And just then I realized that I'd been leaning forward to hear him and that when either of us turned away I couldn't really hear what he was saying at all. And that when I was looking at him I was looking only at his lips, never his eyes or the rest of his face. The same way I'd been looking at everyone else I'd talked to for the last six or eight months.

  "I ran straight to the record store downtown--two miles away. I was so desperate, I had to know. I was sure my brother was teasing me and I hated him for it. I swore I'd get even with him. I raced up to the folk section and flipped through the Judy Collins albums. It was true . . . 'Amazing Grace.' Two months later I was diagnosed with a fifty-decibel loss in one ear, seventy in the other. It's about ninety now in both."

  "I'm so sorry," de l'Epee says. "What happened to your hearing?"

  "An infection. It destroyed the hairs in my ear."

  "And there's nothing you can do about it?"

  She doesn't answer him. After a moment she says, "I think that you're Deaf."

  "Deaf? Me?" He grins awkwardly. "But I can hear."

  "Oh, you can be Deaf but hearing."

  He looks confused.

  "Deaf but hearing," she continues. "See, we call people who can hear the Others. But some of the Others are more like us."

  "What sort of people are those?" he asks. Is he proud to be included? She thinks he is.

  "People who live according to their own hearts," Melanie answers, "not someone else's."

  For a moment she's ashamed, for she's not sure that she always listens to her own.

  A Mozart piece begins to play. Or Bach. She isn't sure which. (Why couldn't the infection have come a year later? Think of all the music I could have listened to in twelve months. For God's sake, her father pumped easy-listening KSFT through the farm's loudspeakers. In my bio, they'll find I was reared on "Pearly Shells," Tom Jones, and Barry Manilow.)

  "There's more I have to tell you. Something else I've never told anyone."

  "I'd like to hear it," he says, agreeable. But then, in an instant, he disappears.

  Melanie gasps.

  The music room vanishes and she's back in the slaughterhouse.

  Her eyes are wide, she looks around, expecting to see Brutus approaching. Or Bear shouting, storming toward her.

  But, no, Brutus is gone. And Bear sits by himself outside the killing room, eating, an incongruous smile on his face.

  What had dragged her from the music room?

  A vibration from a sound? The light?

  No, it was a smell. A scent had wakened her out of her daydream. But of what?

  Something she detected amid the smell of greasy food, bodies, and oil and gasoline and rusting metal and old blood and rancid lard and a thousand other scents.

  Ah, she recognized it clearly. A rich, pungent smell.

  "Girls, girls," she signed emphatically to the students. "I want to say something."

  Bear's head turned toward them. He noticed the signing. His smile vanished immediately and he climbed to his feet. He seemed to be shouting, "Stop that! Stop!"

  "He doesn't like us to sign," Melanie signed quickly. "Pretend we're playing hand-shape game."

  One thing Melanie liked about Deaf culture--the love of words. ASL was a language like any other. In fact it was the fifth most widely used language in America. ASL words and phrases could be broken down into smaller structural units (hand shape, motion, and relation of the hand to the body), just like spoken words could be broken down into syllables and phonemes. Those gestures lent themselves to word games, which nearly all Deaf people grew up playing.

  Bear stormed up to her. "What the fuck . . . with . . ."

  Melanie's hands began to shake violently. She managed to write in the dust on the floor, Game. We're playing game. See? We make shapes with our hands. Shapes of things.

  "What things?"

  This
is animal game.

  She signed the word "Stupid." With her index and middle fingers extended in a V, the shape vaguely resembled a rabbit.

  "What's that . . . be?"

  A rabbit, she wrote.

  The twins ducked their heads, giggling.

  "Rabbit . . . Doesn't . . . fucking rabbit to me," he said.

  Please let us play. Can't hurt.

  He glanced at Kielle, who signed, "You turd." Smiling, she wrote in the dust, That was hippo.

  " . . . out of your fucking minds." Bear turned back to his fries and soda.

  The girls waited until he was out of sight then looked expectantly at Melanie. Kielle, no longer smiling, asked brusquely, "What do you have to say?"

  "I'm going to get us out of here," Melanie signed. "That's what."

  Arthur Potter and Angie Scapello were preparing to debrief Jocylyn Weiderman, who was being examined by medics at that moment, when they heard the first shot.

  It was a faint crack and far less alarming than Dean Stillwell's urgent voice breaking over the speaker above their heads. "Arthur, we've got a situation here! Handy's shooting."

  Hell.

  "There's somebody in the field."

  Before he even looked outside Potter pressed the button on the mike and ordered, "Tell everybody, no return fire."

  "Yessir."

  Potter joined Angie and Charlie Budd in the ocher window of the van.

  "That son of a bitch," Budd whispered.

  Another shot rang out from the slaughterhouse and the bullet kicked up a cloud of splinters from the rotting stockade post next to the dark-suited man about sixty yards from the command van. A voluminous handkerchief, undoubtedly expensive, billowed around the raised right hand of the intruder.

  "Oh, no," Angie whispered in dismay.

  Potter's heart sank. "Henry, your profile of the assistant attorney general neglected to mention he's out of his damn mind."

  Handy fired again, hitting a rock just behind Roland Marks. The assistant AG stopped, cringing. He waved the handkerchief again. He continued slowly toward the slaughterhouse.

  Potter pressed speed dial. As the phone rang and rang he muttered, "Come on, Lou."

  No answer.

  Dean Stillwell's voice came over the speaker. "Arthur, I don't know what to make of it. Somebody here thinks it's--"

  "It's Roland Marks, Dean. Is he saying anything to Handy?"

  "Looks like he's shouting. We can't hear."

  "Tobe, you have those Big Ears in place still?"

  The young agent spoke into his stalk mike and punched buttons. In a few seconds, the mournful yet urgent sound of the wind filled the van. Then Marks's voice.

  "Lou Handy! I'm Roland Marks, assistant attorney general of the state of Kansas."

  A huge crack of a gunshot, overly amplified, burst into the van. Everyone cringed.

  Tobe whispered, "The other Big Ear's trained on the slaughterhouse but we're not getting anything."

  Sure. Because Handy's not saying anything. Why talk when you can make your point with bullets?

  "This is bad," Angie muttered.

  The AG's voice again: "Lou Handy, this isn't a trick. I want you to give up the girls and take me in their place."

  "Jesus," Budd whispered. "He's doing that?" He sounded half impressed and Potter had to restrain himself from scowling at the state police captain.

  Another shot, closer. Marks danced sideways.

  "For the love of God, Handy," came the desperate voice. "Let those girls go!"

  And all the while the phone inside the slaughterhouse rang and rang and rang.

  Potter spoke into the radio mike. "Dean, I hate to say it but we've got to stop him. Hail him on the bullhorn and try to get him over to the sidelines. If he doesn't come, send out a couple of men."

  "Handy's just playing with him," Budd said. "I don't think he's in any real danger. They could've shot him easy by now, they'd wanted to."

  "He's not who I'm worried about," Potter snapped.

  "What?"

  Angie said, "We're trying to get hostages out, not in."

  "He's making our job harder," Potter said simply, not explaining the terrible mistake Marks was now making.

  With a whining ricochet, a bullet split a rock beside the lawyer's leg. Marks remained on his feet. He turned and he was listening to Dean Stillwell, whose voice was being picked up by the Big Ear and relayed into the van. To Potter's relief the sheriff wasn't cowed by the man's authority. "You there, Marks, you're to get under cover immediately or you'll be arrested. Come back this way."

  "We've got to save them." Marks's raw voice filled the van. It sounded resolute but terrified and for a moment Potter's heart went out to him.

  Another shot.

  "No, sir. Do you understand? You're about to be placed under arrest."

  Potter called Stillwell and told him he was doing great. "Tell him he's endangering the girls doing this."

  The sheriff's voice, mixing with the ragged wind, filled the van as he relayed this message.

  "No! I'm saving them," the assistant AG shouted and started forward again.

  Potter tried the throw phone again. No answer.

  "Okay, Dean. Go get him. No covering fire under any circumstances."

  Stillwell sighed. "Yessir. I've got some volunteers. I hope it's okay but I green-lighted pepper spray if he resists."

  "Give him a blast for me," Potter muttered, and turned back to watch.

  Two troopers in body armor and helmets slipped from the line of trees and, crouching, headed through the field.

  Handy fired several more times. He hadn't noticed the troopers yet and was aiming only around Marks, the shots always near-misses. But one bullet hit a rock and ricocheted upwards, shattering the windshield of a squad car.

  The two troopers kept low to the ground, running perpendicularly to the front of the slaughterhouse. Their hips and sides were easy targets if Handy decided to turn malicious and draw blood. Potter frowned. One of the men looked familiar.

  "Who're those troopers?" Potter asked Stillwell. "Is one of them Stevie Oates?"

  "Yessir."

  Potter exhaled a deep sigh. "He just got back from a run, Dean. What's he thinking of?"

  "Well, sir, he wanted to go out again. Was really insistent about it."

  Potter shook his head.

  Marks was now only forty yards from the slaughterhouse, the two troopers closing in slowly, scrambling through the buffalo grass. Marks saw them and shouted for them to get away.

  "Sir," the voice through the speaker called--Potter recognized it as Oates's--"our orders're to bring you back."

  "Fuck your orders. If you care about those girls just leave me alone."

  They heard a whoop of distant laughter the Big Ear was picking up. "Turkey shoot," resounded Handy's voice, riding on the wind. Another deafening gunshot. A rock beside one of the troopers flew into the air. They both dropped to their bellies, began crawling like soldiers toward the assistant AG.

  "Marks," Oates called, breathing hard. "We're bringing you back, sir. You're interfering with a federal operation."

  Marks whirled around. "What're you going to do to stop me, Trooper? You work for me. Don't you forget it."

  "Sheriff Stillwell has authorized me to use all necessary force to stop you, sir. And I aim to."

  "You're downwind, son. Pepper-spray me and you're the only one who'll get a faceful of it."

  Handy fired again. The bullet split an ancient post two feet from Oates's head. The convict, still in a playful mood, laughed hard.

  "Jesus," somebody muttered.

  "No, sir," Oates said calmly, "my orders're to shoot you in the leg and drag you back."

  Potter and LeBow stared at each other. The negotiator's fervent thumb pressed the transmit button. "He is bluffing, isn't he, Dean?"

  "Yep" was Stillwell's unsteady reply. "But . . . he sounds pretty determined. I mean, don't you think?"

  Potter did think.

  "W
ould he do it?" LeBow asked.

  Potter shrugged.

  Angie said, "He's drawn his weapon."

  Oates was aiming steadily at Marks's lower extremities.

  Well, this is escalating into a full-blown disaster, Potter thought.

  "Sir," Oates called, "I will not miss. I'm an excellent shot and I'm just about to bring you down."

  The assistant AG hesitated. The wind ripped the handkerchief from his fingers. It rose a few feet above his head.

  A shot.

  Handy's bullet struck the white cloth. It jerked and floated away on the breeze.

  Again, through the Big Ear, the distant sound of Handy laughing. Marks looked back at the slaughterhouse. Called out, "You son of a bitch, Handy. I hope you rot in hell."

  More laughter--or perhaps it was only the wind.

  Standing tall, the assistant AG walked off the field. As if strolling through his own backyard. Potter was pleased to see that Stevie Oates and his partner kept low as terriers as they crawled after the man under cover of the sumptuous, windswept grass.

  "You could've ruined everything," Arthur Potter snapped. "What the hell were you thinking?"

  He had to look up into Marks's eyes--the man was well over six feet tall--but still felt he was talking to a snotty child caught misbehaving.

  The assistant attorney general began firmly, "I was thinking--"

  "You never exchange hostages. The whole point of negotiation is to devalue them. You were as good as saying to him, 'Here I am, I'm worth more than all of those girls combined.' If he'd gotten you it would've made my job impossible."

  "I don't see why," Marks answered.

  "Because," Angie said, "a hostage like you would have boosted his sense of power and control a hundred times. He'd up his demands and stick to them. We'd never get him to agree to anything reasonable."

  "Well, I kept thinking about those girls in there. What they were going through."

  "He never would have let them go."

  "I was going to talk him into it."

  LeBow rolled his eyes and continued to type up the incident.

  Potter said, "I'm not going to arrest you." He'd considered it and concluded that the fallout would be too thorny. "But if you interfere in any way with this barricade again I will and I'll have the U.S. Attorney make sure you do time."

  To Potter's astonishment, Marks wasn't the least contrite. The witty facade was gone, yes; but he seemed, if anything, irritated that Potter had interfered with his plans. "You do things by the book, Potter." A large index finger pointed bluntly at the agent. "But the book doesn't say anything about a psycho who gets his kicks killing children."