A Maiden's Grave

by Jeffery Deaver

  He stepped back suddenly and she looked at him, momentarily perplexed.

  "I have to go talk to the U.S. attorney," he said abruptly.

  Melanie nodded and offered her hand. He mistook it for a signing gesture. He stared down, waiting. Then she extended it further and took his fingers warmly. They both laughed at the misunderstanding. Suddenly she pulled him forward, kissed his cheek.

  He walked to the door, stopped, turned. " 'Be forewarned.' That's what you said to me, isn't it?"

  Melanie nodded, her eyes hollow once again. Hollow and forlorn. Frances translated her response: "I wanted you to know how dangerous he was. I wanted you to be careful."

  Then she smiled and signed some more. Potter laughed when he heard the translation. "You owe me a new skirt and blouse. And I expect to be repaid. You better not forget. I'm Deaf with an attitude. Poor you."

  Potter wandered back to the van, thanked Tobe Geller and Henry LeBow, who were taking commercial flights back to their respective homes. A squad car whisked them away. He shook Dean Stillwell's hand once more and felt a ridiculous urge to give him a present of some sort, a ribbon or a medal or a federal agent decoder ring. The sheriff brushed aside his mop of hair and had the presence of mind to order his men--federal and state alike--to walk carefully, reminding them that they were, after all, at a crime scene and evidence still needed to be gathered.

  Potter stood beneath one of the halogen lights, looking out at the stark slaughterhouse.

  "Night, sir," a voice drawled from behind him.

  He turned to Stevie Oates. The negotiator shook his hand. "Couldn't have done it without you, Stevie."

  The boy did better dodging bullets than fielding compliments. He looked down at the ground. "Yeah, well, you know."

  "A word of advice."

  "What's that, sir?"

  "Don't volunteer so damn much."

  "Yessir." The trooper grinned. "I'll keep that in mind."

  Then Potter found Charlie Budd and asked him for a lift to the airport.

  "You're not going to hang around for a while?" asked the young captain.

  "No, I should go."

  They climbed into Budd's unmarked car and sped away. Potter caught a last glimpse of the slaughterhouse; in the stark spotlights the dull red-and-white structure gave the appearance of bloody, exposed bone. He shuddered and turned away.

  Halfway to the airport Budd said, "I appreciate the chance you gave me."

  "You were good enough to confess something to me, Charlie--"

  "After I almost fixed your clock."

  "--so I better confess something to you."

  The captain rubbed his tawny hair and left it looking like he'd been to the Dean Stillwell hair salon. He meant, Go ahead, I can take it.

  "I kept you with me as an assistant 'cause I needed to show everybody that this was a federal operation and state took second place. I was putting you on a leash. You're a smart man and I guess you figured that out."

  "Yup. Didn't seem you really needed a high-priced gofer like me. Ordering Fritos and beer and helicopters. It was one of the things made me put that tape recorder in my pocket. But the way you talked to me, treated me, was one of the things that made me take it out."

  "Well, you've got a right to be good and mad. But I just wanted to say you did a lot better than I expected. You were really part of the team. Handling that session by yourself--you were a natural. I'd have you negotiate with me any time."

  "Oh, brother, not for any money. Tell you what, Arthur--I'll run 'em to ground and you get 'em out of their holes."

  Potter laughed. "Fair enough, Charlie."

  They drove in silence through the miles and miles of wheat. The windswept grain was alive in the moonlight, like the silken coat of an animal eager to run. "I've got a feeling," Budd said slowly, "you're thinking you made a mistake tonight."

  Potter said nothing, watching the bug eyes of the threshers.

  "You're thinking that if you'd come up with what that Detective Foster did you could've got 'em out sooner. Maybe even saved that girl's life, and Joey Wilson's."

  "It did cross my mind," Potter said after a minute. Oh, how we hate to be pegged and explained. What's so compelling about the idea that our selves are mysteries to everyone but us? I let you in on the secrets, Marian. But only you. It's an aspect of love, I think, and reasonable enough there. But how queasy it makes us feel when strangers have the eye to see us so unfurled.

  "But you kept 'em alive through three or four deadlines," Budd continued.

  "That girl though, Susan . . ."

  "But he shot her before you even started negotiating. There was nothing you could've said to save her. Besides, Handy had plenty of chances to ask for what Sharon offered him, and he never did. Not once."

  This was true. But if Arthur Potter knew anything about his profession it was that the negotiator was the closest thing to God in a barricade and that every death fell on his shoulders and his only. What he'd learned--and what had saved his heart over the years--was that some of those deaths simply weigh less than others.

  They drove another three miles and Potter realized he'd grown hypnotized, staring at the moon-white wheat. Budd was talking to him once again. The subject was domestic, the man's wife and his daughters.

  Potter looked away from the streaming grain and listened to what the captain was telling him.

  In the tiny jet Arthur Potter slipped two sticks of Wrigley's into his mouth and waved goodbye to Charlie Budd, who was waving back, though the interior of the plane was very dim and Potter doubted that the captain saw him.

  Then he sank down into the spongy beige seat of the Grumman Gulfstream. He thought of the flask of Irish whisky in his briefcase but found himself decidedly not in the mood.

  How 'bout that, Marian? No nightcap for me and I'm off-duty. What do you say about that?

  He saw a phone on a console nearby and thought he should call his cousin Linden and tell her not to wait up for him. Maybe he'd wait until they were airborne. He'd ask to speak to Sean; the boy would be thrilled to know that Uncle Arthur was talking to him from twenty thousand feet in the air. He gazed absently out the window at the constellations of colored lights marking runways and taxiways. Potter took from his pocket the still-damp note Melanie had written him. Read it. Then he crumpled the paper, stuffed it into the pocket of the seat in front of him.

  The jets whined powerfully and with a sudden burst of thrust he found the plane not racing down the runway at all but streaking straight into the sky, almost from a dead stop, like a spaceship headed to Mars.

  They rose up and up, aiming for the moon, which was an eerie sickle in the hazy sky. The plane pointed itself at the black disk surrounded by the white crescent. Uncharacteristically poetic, Potter thought of this image: the icy thumb and index finger of a witch, reaching for a pinch of nightshade.

  The negotiator closed his eyes and sat back in the soft seat.

  Just as he did, the Grumman banked fiercely. So sharp was the maneuver that Arthur Potter knew suddenly he was about to die. He considered this fact very calmly. A wing or an engine had fallen off. A bolt holding together the whole airplane had finally fatigued. His eyes sprang open and--yes, yes!--he believed he saw his wife's face clearly in the white glow surrounding the moon as it scythed past. He understood that what had joined the two of them, himself and Marian, for all these years joined them still, just as powerfully, and she was pulling him after her in death.

  He closed his eyes again. And felt utterly at peace.

  But no, he was not destined to die just yet.

  For as the plane completed its acute turn and headed back toward the airport, dropping the landing gear and flaps, sliding down down down to the flat Kansas landscape once more, Potter clutched the telephone to his ear, listening to SAC Peter Henderson tell him in a shaking, grim voice how the real Detective Sharon Foster had been found dead and half-naked not far from her house a half-hour ago and how it was now suspected that the woman who
'd impersonated her at the barricade had been Lou Handy's girlfriend.

  The four troopers who'd been escorting Handy and Wilcox were dead, as was Wilcox himself--all killed in a violent shootout five miles from the slaughterhouse.

  And as for Handy and the woman--they were gone without a trace.

  IV

  A MAIDEN'S GRAVE

  1:01 A.M.

  As they drove through the fields beneath the faint moon the couple in the Nissan reflected on the evening at their daughter's home in Enid, which had been exactly as unpleasant as they'd expected.

  When they spoke, however, they spoke not about the children's shabby trailer, the unwashed baby grandson, their stringy-haired son-in-law's disappearing act into the trash-filled backyard to sneak Jack Daniel's. No, they talked only about the weather and unusual road signs they happened to pass.

  "We'll get rain this fall. Floodin'."

  "Might."

  "Something 'bout the trout in Minnesota. I read that."

  "Trout?"

  "Bad rains I'm talking. Stuckey's's only five miles. Look there. You wanta stop?"

  Harriet, their daughter, had made a dinner that could be described only as inedible--woefully overdone and oversalted. And the husband had found what he was sure was some cigarette ash in the succotash. Now they were both starving.

  "Might do that. For coffee only. Lookit that wind--whooee! Hope you shut the windows at home. Maybe a piece of pie."

  "I did."

  "You forgot last time," the wife reminded shrilly. "Don't want to lose the lamp again. You know what three-way bulbs cost."

  "Well," the husband said. "What's going on here?"

  "How's that?"

  "I'm being stopped. A police car."

  "Pull over!"

  "I'm doing it," he said testily. "No point in leaving skid marks. I'm doing it."

  "What'd you do?"

  "I didn't do nothing. I was fifty-seven in a fifty-five zone and that's not a crime in anybody's book."

  "Well, pull off the road."

  "I'm pulling. Will you just settle? There, happy?"

  "Hey, look," the wife offered with astonishment, "there's a lady officer driving!"

  "They have 'em now. You know that. You watch Cops. Should I get out or are they going to come up here?"

  "Maybe," the wife said, "you oughta go to them. Make the effort. That way if they're right on the borderline of giving you a ticket they might not."

  "That's a thought. But I still don't know what I done." And, smiling like a Kiwanian on Pancake Day, the husband climbed out of the Nissan and walked back to the squad car, fishing his wallet out of his pocket.

  As Lou Handy drove the cruiser deep into the wheat field, cutting a swath in the tall grain, he was lost in the memory of another field--the one that morning, near the intersection where the Cadillac had broadsided them.

  He remembered the gray sky overhead. The feel of the bony knife in his hand. The woman's powdery face, black wrinkles in her makeup, dots of her blood spattering her as he drove the knife downward into her soft body. The look in her eyes, hopelessness and sorrow. Her weird scream, choking, grunting. An animal's sounds.

  She'd died the same way that the couple in the Nissan just had, the couple now lying in the trunk of the cruiser he was driving. Hell, they had to die, both of the couples. They'd had something he needed. Their cars. The Cadillac and the Nissan. This afternoon Hank and Ruth'd smashed the fuck out of his Chevy. And tonight, well, he and Pris couldn't keep driving in a stolen squad car. It was impossible. He needed a new car. He had to have one.

  And when Lou Handy collected what he was owed, when he'd scratched that itch, he was the most contented man on earth.

  Tonight he parked the cruiser, which stunk of cordite and blood, in the field, fifty yards from the road. It'd be found by tomorrow morning but that was okay. In a few hours he and Pris'd be out of the state and flying over the Texas-Mexico border, a hundred feet in the air, on their way to San Hidalgo.

  Whoa, hold on tight . . . . Damn, the wind was fierce, buffeting the car and sending the stalks of wheat slapping into the windshield with a clatter like birdshot.

  Handy climbed out and trotted back to the road, where Pris sat in the driver's seat of the Nissan. She'd ditched the trooper's uniform and was wearing a sweater and jeans and Handy wanted more than anything else at the moment to tug those Levi's down, them and the cheap nylon panties she always wore, and fuck her right on top of the hood of the tinny Jap car. Holding her ponytail in his right hand the way he liked to do.

  But he jumped in the passenger's seat and motioned for her to get going. She pitched her cigarette out the window and gunned the engine. The car shot away off the shoulder, hung a tight U, and sped up to sixty.

  Heading back in the direction they'd just come from. North.

  It seemed crazy, sure. But Handy prided himself on being as off-the-wall nuts as a man could be and still get on in this life. In reality their destination made sense, though--because where they were going was the last place anyone would think to look for them.

  Anyway, he thought, fuck it whether it's crazy or not. His mind was made up. He had business back there. Lou Handy was owed.

  The Heiligenstadt Testament, written in 1802 by Beethoven to his brothers, chronicles his despair at his progressive deafness, which a decade and a half later became total.

  Melanie Charrol knew this, for Beethoven not only was her spiritual mentor and role model but was a frequent visitor to her music room, where he, not surprisingly, could hear as well as she could. They had had many fascinating conversations about music theory and composition. They both lamented the trend away from melody and harmony in modern composition. She called it "medicinal music"--a phrase Ludwig heartily approved of.

  She now sat in the living room of her house, breathing deeply, thinking of the great composer and wondering if she was drunk.

  At the bar in the motel in Crow Ridge she'd poured down two brandies in the company of Officer Frances Whiting and some of the parents of the hostages. Frances had gotten in touch with Melanie's parents in St. Louis and told them she was fine. They would return immediately after Danny's operation tomorrow and stop by Hebron for a visit--news that for some reason upset Melanie. Did she want them to stop by or not? She had another brandy in lieu of deciding.

  Then Melanie had gone to say goodbye to the girls and their parents.

  The twins had been asleep, Kielle was awake but snubbing her royally--though if Melanie knew anything about children it was that their moods are fickle as the weather; tomorrow or the next day the little girl would drop by Melanie's cubicle at school and sprawl out upon the immaculate desktop to show off her latest X-Men comic or Power Rangers card. Emily was, of course, in an absurdly frilly and feminine nightgown, fast asleep. Shannon, Beverly, and Jocylyn were the centerpiece of the action. At the moment, coddled and the center of loving attention, they were cheerful and defiant and she could see from their gestures that they were recalling aspects of the evening in detail that Melanie herself could not bear. They had even dubbed themselves "the Crow Ridge Ten" and were talking about having T-shirts printed up. Reality would hit home later, when everyone began to feel Susan's absence. But for now, why not? Besides, whatever misgivings she'd shared with de I'Epee about the politics of Deafness, the members of its community were nothing if not resilient.

  Melanie said goodnight to everyone, refusing a dozen offers to spend the night. Never before had she signed "No, thank you" as often as she had this evening.

  Now, in her home, all the windows were locked, all the doors. She burned some incense, had another brandy--blackberry, her grandmother's cure for cramps--and was sitting in her leather armchair, thinking of de I'Epee . . . well, Arthur Potter. Rubbing the indentation on her right wrist from the wire Brutus had bound it with. She had her Koss headset clamped over her ears and had Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto cranked up so loud the volume was redlined. It was a remarkable piece of music. Composed duri
ng what music historians call Beethoven's "second period," the one that produced the Eroica, when he was aware of, and tormented by, his hearing loss but before he had gone completely deaf.

  As she listened to the concerto now she wondered if it had been written by Beethoven in anticipation of future years when the deafness would be worse, if he'd built in certain chords and dynamics so that a deaf old man might still make out at least the soul of the piece--for though there were passages she could not hear at all (as faint and delicate as smoke, she imagined) the passion of the music came from its emphatic low notes, two hands crashing down on the bass keys, the theme spiraling downward like a hawk falling on prey, the orchestra's timpani and low-pitched strings churning out what for her was the hopeful spirit of the concerto. A sensation of galloping.

  She could imagine, through vibration and notes and sight-reading the score, most of the concerto. She thought now, as she always did, that she'd give her soul to be able to actually hear the entire piece.

  Just once before she died.

  It was during the second movement that she glanced outside and saw a car slow suddenly as it passed her house. She thought this was odd because the street in front was little traveled. It was a dead end and she knew everyone who lived on the block and what kind of cars they drove. This one she didn't recognize.

  She pulled off the headset and walked to the window. She could see that the car, with two people inside, had parked in front of the Albertsons' house. This was curious too because she was sure the family was away for the week. She squinted at the car. The two people--she couldn't see them clearly, just silhouettes--got out and walked through the Albertsons' gate, disappearing behind the tall hedge that bordered the couple's property, directly across from her house. Then Melanie remembered that the family had several cats. Probably friends were feeding the animals while the couple was away. Returning to her couch, she sat down and pulled on the headset once more.

  Yes, yes . . .

  The music, what she could hear of it, as limited as the sound was to her, was an incredible comfort. More than the brandy, more than the companionship of the parents of her students, more than thoughts about the inexplicable and inexplicably appealing Arthur Potter; it lifted her away, magically, from the horror of this windy day in July.