“What is that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know, exactly. But I’ve been having these visions of tunnels. Dark tunnels. Mysterious tunnels. And there’s been a lot of movement, me spinning through the universe. Like from one tunnel to the next. But then suddenly it came to me, in my gut, that these are not my tunnels to decipher. These are Francesca’s.”
Mills grumbles. “But you’re the decipherer.”
“Not here. I can’t tell you what they mean until you ask her about them. And hers are amber, not black.”
“Amber what?”
“Her tunnels have an amber glow. They’re not black like the ones I had been seeing. Once I got a hold of that napkin, the light came on. Ask her about the tunnels.”
“Ask her about the tunnels,” Mills repeats. “OK . . .”
“Then get back to me.”
With that, Gus is gone.
At first Mills doesn’t get an answer at Francesca Norwood’s door. Immediately it occurs to him that she’s hightailed it to French Polynesia because seeing him at the funeral was enough to rattle her cage. But it’s just a fleeting reaction, not based on a reasonable instinct, so he knocks again. He wonders if the water in Tahiti is really as blue as it looks from the images he’s seen online, if it really is Ty-D-Bol blue. His next knock will be his last. He’s about to turn away when he hears a shrill voice calling, “Be right there, be right there.”
The door opens about ten seconds later. Francesca Norwood stands there freshly coiffed. He can smell the hairspray, the perfume, the nail polish, a mix of vapors that should, realistically, cause the bungalow to explode. A woman stands to her side. “This is my stylist, Contessa. She’s just leaving now.”
The stylist nods, smiles, and slithers past him.
“I hope you weren’t getting all gussied up for me,” Mills says.
She laughs. “Oh no! Don’t be silly. My lawyer’s coming for lunch. Come in.”
He follows her to the living room area where they sit. She looks at him but says nothing; there’s something passive-aggressive about her silence, calculated, as if he must grovel for her attention, as if groveling is the only thing that would please her this morning, here in her luxurious bungalow, in her understated statement-making hideaway. “Clark didn’t know what was coming. But you do,” he says instead of groveling.
She stiffens, as if her chair is electric and she’s strapped to it. “What did you say?”
“I was reciting one of your lines from an email you sent Viveca. Can you explain?”
He almost feels bad for making her squirm, but he doesn’t. Good detectives can make a corpse squirm. She puts a hand to her forehead and rubs. There’s pain clamoring there, or stress, or both. He sees a tiny suggestion of a tear. “I think Clark had something over my husband. I’m sure of it.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” Francesca replies. “Really, I don’t. But Viveca and I had been talking a lot lately about Clark and the key.”
Just the mention of the key gives Mills a detecterection: that’s a word he made up for a detective’s erection. You’d think that’s something the forever-adolescent Morty Myers would come up with, but it’s all Mills, when the important discoveries, when the hint of conquest, still feels as satisfying as sex. Stupid, yeah, but come on. The key! “What key?” Mills asks, because a little subversion hurts no one. “Before Clark died, he mentioned something to Viveca that really frightened her. He said ‘if I die, make sure no one knows you have the key,’ and then he showed her a key to some padlock. And then she asked him what it was for, but he wouldn’t tell her. He said it wasn’t safe for her to know. Not yet. That he’d tell her when he had all the answers. He said he needed to confirm things. But if he ever got around to confirming his suspicions, he never got around to telling her anything else.”
“So, what does this have to do with your husband?”
She gives Mills a bitter laugh, really like the laugh of a pit viper, and says, “Well . . . I remember Gleason getting very upset. He said Clark stole something from him. Something very important. He wouldn’t tell me what, but Viveca and I put two and two together and we realized it had to be the key. Gleason was absolutely crazy mad. I mean, flipping out. Said Clark would have to be banished. And I remember saying ‘you can’t exactly banish a member of the board,’ and Gleason said, ‘I can banish anyone I want. I own this church. I own this religion.’”
“Do you think your husband killed Viveca Canning?”
The woman coughs hard, almost chokes. Mills waits. “No. Not at all,” she says finally. “But I know he told the board of directors and they were just as upset as he was.”
“About a key?”
“About some kind of leverage Clark, and then maybe Viveca, would have on the church. . .”
“So then anyone on the board of directors could have a motive to kill her . . .”
“Maybe.”
“And Clark Canning dies without telling Viveca what he suspected or what the key was for,” Mills persists. “I take it she found out.”
Francesca nods emphatically. “Oh yes. She did. She didn’t spend a whole lot of time at the gallery where her vault is. But a few years after Clark died, she had loaned a rather large collection to a museum in LA, I think, or Chicago, I can’t remember, but after the collection was removed from the vault, she was in there, and all of a sudden she realizes some old chest in the back had a padlock on it. And she knew. She just knew. So she went home, grabbed the key Clark left her, and went back to the gallery—”
“And opened up the chest. And found some deep, dark secret inside?”
Been there, done that, he’s thinking. Why not get her version?
“Not exactly, Detective,” she says, her eyes sadistic slits. She is fucking enjoying her new role as Minister of Information. She’s getting off on it. “Viveca said her discovery was ‘confounding.’ I think that’s what she called it. She says the only thing in the chest was some kind of ancient key. A bronze key.”
“And then what?”
“And then nothing,” the woman says with a smile. “She had no idea what to do with the bronze key. Had no idea what it meant. How could she?”
Mills pushes his seat forward. “And then she died. Just out of the blue?”
Francesca throws her head back as if she’s about to laugh, but she doesn’t. She holds it there, bent, and Mills can see the pools brimming in her eyes. The angle of her face calibrated to defy the gravity of her tears. “No,” the woman whispers. “She did find out a couple of months ago what the bronze key was for.”
“How?”
“From what I understand, that reporter from Channel 4 dug up some guy who’d been on the building crew of the church almost twenty years ago,” she says. “I guess he knew things.”
“What things?”
“I don’t know. Viveca didn’t want me to know. She said it would be dangerous for me to know,” she tells him. “The reporter arranged a meeting with Viveca and this construction guy, or contractor, and he led her to the truth. Whatever Viv saw or whatever she found out, it shattered her faith and scared the shit out of her, if you’ll pardon my language.”
“And then she died for it . . .”
Then Francesca howls. “I can’t believe this!” she cries.
“You’re safe, Mrs. Norwood,” Mills assures her. “I’m a cop. I can protect you.”
She whips her face to him now. “I don’t care about my safety,” she hisses. “I care about my reputation.”
Mills does a shake of his head with bulging eyes, a kind of “you’re-shitting-me” telegraph.
“I mean I care about Viveca, of course. But she’s dead and she doesn’t have to worry about reputation. I’ve had to give up everything. My TV show. My life. Everything!” the woman begs. “But yes, she found out what the key was for. She threatened to go to the cops. She wrote a letter to Gleason, attached it to an email, and told him she was leaving the church and changing her
will and that the church would never get a dime from her.”
“But she never told you what the bronze key was for?”
“No.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Aren’t you curious?”
“Of course,” Francesca replies. “But I sure as hell wasn’t going to ask Gleason about it. He certainly looks suspicious now. Doesn’t he?” “But you don’t think he killed her. You said so.”
“He didn’t. He wouldn’t risk it.”
“Does anyone really know what he’d risk to protect the church?” She doesn’t answer.
“Viveca obviously never went to the cops,” Mills says.
The woman gets up and walks to the kitchen where she removes tissues from a box on the counter. Dabbing her eyes, she says, “No. But she was preparing a dossier for the police. And she was planning to leak the story to that reporter. It was all a part of her escape plan. Viveca was devoted to the church. I had never seen someone so devoted or, God help me, brainwashed. When she told me she was cutting the church out of the will, I knew she had learned something horrible. I knew I had to leave too. I wanted to escape with her.”
Mills rises to his feet now too. He walks toward the kitchen, stopping short and leaning against a wall opposite her, the formal dining table between them. “You know, Francesca, it does seem a bit disingenuous when you talk about learning horrible things about the church. People have been saying horrible things about the church for years. Do you mean to say you never believed there might be a kernel of truth, or that you never actually witnessed a kernel of truth?”
She seems to buckle. But then her fists, by her side, go tight. Everything clenches. Her face, her neck, her shoulders. “How dare you imply that I’m some sort of accomplice, Detective? I’m here talking to you of my own free will. I don’t have to do this. I don’t have to do this ever again.”
“And I could have you deposed. Based on the emails we found alone,” he retorts. “In fact, I will probably have to depose you at some point if we ever make an arrest of someone connected to the church.” She starts to sob. “Are we done?”
“No,” Mills replies. “Did Clark Cannon die of natural causes?” She looks up from her sobs and her tissues and says, “How would I know?”
“You and Viveca were emailing back and forth about exhuming Clark’s body . . .”
“Oh, Jesus. Yes. Viveca suspected something. Remember Clark had told her that he had some kind of leverage over my husband.”
“Again, the key . . .”
She turns away and drifts to the refrigerator. “Something cold to drink, Detective?”
He shakes his head, declines the offer. She pulls out a bottle of Evian and sips. Elegantly. She’s all affectation, not unlike her husband. But she’s alone now. A pageantry divided by two, and she does appear somewhat forsaken to Mills, as he stands there gazing, staring, sizing her up. Gus sometimes talks about aura, about what he sees radiating from the outlines of a person; to Gus, at least, aura is truth, a mix of brain chemistry and soul that seeps out. But here, studying Francesca Norwood, Mills either can’t detect an aura or can’t interpret whatever it is that radiates. So he defers to his gut, a tool that sometimes proves more effective than forensics. His gut tells him this woman is telling the truth and, at the same time, is full of shit. She’s full of shit in the way she’s revealing the truth. She loves the drama. She loves the intrigue. She loves getting on a midnight plane and fleeing the scene. She can’t wait.
“What kind of leverage?” Mills asks her.
“I told you. I don’t know,” she says.
“But it’s fair to say someone at the church might have had him killed.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“But with Clark dead, the secrecy of the key was safe. If the key, in fact, was the leverage.”
“Well, yes, assuming Viveca didn’t know about the key, its whereabouts would remain a mystery,” she says. “I guess no one knew that Clark told her about it at the time.”
“He died of a heart attack. Officially,” Mills says. “But there was no autopsy.”
“The church forbids autopsies.”
“Why? That sounds like there’s something to hide. You know, like the church can do away with dissenters and leave no trace . . .”
She approaches him, stops just about a foot away. “That’s horrifying of you to say,” she chides him. “It’s church doctrine. You don’t understand our religion. We are not like the living souls outside the church. We have already been blessed with the afterlife and we are here simply waiting to rise as angels.”
Mills does a singular, perplexed shake of the head. “Huh?”
“We’re technically dead already,” she says. “That’s the basic tenet of our religion. While the rest of you walk around in this miserable life, we float through the world awaiting our calling to rise . . .”
She’s in his face. He looks down, averting. Technically dead already? How do you follow that up with a serious expression? Really? Mills has toured the fun house called the Human Condition. He’s seen the reflection of humanity in the house of mirrors. He thinks the universe is one big fucking theme park where God, or someone in power, has the last laugh. Mills has been doing this a long time. But this is a first.
Slowly he looks up. “OK, so you forbid autopsies.”
“Yes. Because it’s like double jeopardy. We were already autopsied when we left the world of the living. To do it twice would be an imposition on the angels.”
“Clark Canning was buried quickly?”
“From what I remember, yes,” she says. “No one suspected foul play. Not then, anyway. And certainly not outside the church. We’re pretty insular, if you hadn’t noticed.”
“It’s the first thing I noticed,” Mills tells her. “Don’t you suppose the church wanted the key back, Francesca? And if someone at the church wanted the key badly enough to kill Clark, wouldn’t the same be true for Viveca?”
“I think we’re talking in circles, Detective.”
Mills can feel the steam rising. “What would you prefer, rectangles? Hexagons?”
She spins on her heels and sits at the table. “Don’t be flippant with me.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, though he’s not. “But don’t you think the motive to kill Clark and Viveca might be one and the same?”
“I’m not a detective,” she says. “But yes. It has vaguely occurred to me. But nobody but me had proof she ever knew about the key, that Clark ever told her about it. At least that’s what Viveca said.”
“Except your husband, once he received her email. Then he knew she had the key, and he knew what she found.”
The woman weeps. The tears segue to sobs. Mills watches and listens. There’s a depth to her despair that sounds as if she’s crying from the hollows of a basement. He’s reminded of tunnels, something Gus said about tunnels. He asks her.
She looks at him confused. “What do you mean?”
“Do you know anything about tunnels?”
“What kind of tunnels?”
“The psychic is seeing images . . .”
“Oh, please. Are you serious?”
“I guess the images don’t mean anything to you.”
“Nothing,” she says with a dismissive laugh. “Nothing at all.” “OK, Francesca . . . you’ve had enough of me for one day. I’ll get out of your hair. I really do appreciate your time. Can you do me a favor?”
“What?”
“Two actually. One, please don’t leave the valley without letting me know where you’re headed. And, two, please call me if you think of anything else that might be helpful.”
She nods. “You’ll understand if I don’t walk you to the door.”
“Of course.”
From the door leading him out of Francesca Norwood’s bungalow, down the pathway, across the parking lot, he can think of only one thing. In reverse, in drive, on the road, on the ramp, he can think of only one thing. On the
highway, the desert blowing by him, the browns and reds striping the walls of the valley, he is as single-minded, as laser focused as he’s ever been. There’s a thumb drive in his desk. Within the binary code, as daunting and impenetrable as any religion, lies more truth. He’ll unearth it from the digital realm. He will scour that thing until his fingers bleed. Because somewhere in the valley, there’s a construction worker who might hold the only key that matters.
He’s in this zone of anticipation when his phone rings. “Hey, babe,” he chirps to his wife.
“Hey.”
It’s not her usual “Hey,” or “Hello,” for that matter. One cold, gaunt syllable can change everything.
“What’s wrong?”
“I just got off the phone with Dr. Chambers.”
A flutter in his chest. “Which one is that?”
“The medical oncologist,” she replies. “I need more surgery.”
He hears her, but he says, “What?” It comes out like exasperation. “I know. I was surprised too,” she says. “But four of my lymph nodes came back positive for cancer.”
He wants to smash the dashboard but he doesn’t. He wants to scream at the fucking valley but he doesn’t. He is going to hover the fuck all over her. He’s going to stand guard. “So they have to get rid of those lymph nodes.”
“Exactly. But it’ll mean chemo in addition to the radiation.” “Chemo . . .” He repeats. No. Not in his house. Not in their house. This is a drive-by shooting. “Aw, shit, Kelly. Aw shit.”
“I’m going to get pretty sick,” she tells him. “Not from the cancer. From the chemo. And I’m going to lose my hair.”
“Why don’t you sound more upset?”
“You mean, why am I not hysterical?”
“Yeah, that . . .”
“’Cause we can’t control this, babe. And the doctor says after the surgery and the treatments, I should be cancer free.”
He almost runs off the road, overcorrects, and nearly careens into a truck. The truck makes a hostile honk and Kelly says, “What’s that? You’re driving?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry. If I had known . . .”
“Never mind,” he says. “We’re going to fight this? Right? We’re going to fucking fight.”
Valley of Shadows Page 30