"And?"
"She said he'd told her he was driving to Florida."
"But what about the nephew part?"
"She said in these old farm communities everybody's related to everybody else somehow. She also said he was an unreliable character, drank too much."
"Ah." This sounded like a fat lie. But I didn't have enough leverage on him to force out the truth, whatever it was.
"What is it you want?" Marceno said, his voice measured but not without threat in it.
"I have the information you wanted."
"I see. Why don't you send it to me?"
"No, I want to give it to you in person. I want you to have it. You caused enough grief and suffering that I really think you should have it."
"I will meet you tomorrow."
"You will meet me on Saturday morning and you and I will drive out to the old farm and then and only then will I give you the information," I told him. "Got that?"
* * *
He did. His chauffeured car glided up in front of my building at eight the next Saturday morning. The sun was out, spring not far away. The ride was smooth, if not particularly fast. The expressway is a nightmare, day and night. Weekends everybody is shopping. From time to time Marceno had a brief conversation on his phone in Spanish.
As we neared the old farm, Marceno said, "I am sorry for all of this trouble, Mr. Wy-eth."
I nodded.
"But you see, I had to press the issue, as you say."
"I understand that you panicked, yes."
"That depends on what we find." He consulted the palms of his hands. "Maybe my fears were well founded."
We reached the farm. The old barns had been demolished, and all that remained was a smoking pile of lumber.
"That will be where the winery goes," said Marceno, pointing across the field. "You are just in time. We decided to begin, we had to take a chance."
Across the fields, a dozen workers had just started to erect the parallel rows of grape trellises. The car traveled over a new gravel road. I noticed what looked to be a profusion of daffodils pushing through the earth at the edge of the field. When we reached the place where the barn had stood, we counted the three trees specified on the napkin. Rather, we counted two stumps and one old box elder tree that had been trimmed to a limbless trunk reaching into the sky like an immense bony finger, swollen at the joints. It was due to come down that day. Marceno told his driver to stop and we got out. The field was soft— spongy and wet, sucking at our shoes.
We walked to the tree. Marceno studied the napkin, then paced ten steps east toward the Atlantic Ocean and stuck a shovel in the earth. This, I realized, was a straight shot to the place where the bulldozer and Herschel atop it had gone over the sea cliff. Holding the napkin in his hand a different way, Marceno paced out from the tree again, arriving at more or less the same spot. "There." He dug with a shovel and a foot down revealed a thatch of browned grass. "This whole section was regraded," Marceno said. "A huge amount of topsoil was brought in." He pointed at the rotting grass. "That was the original elevation a few weeks ago." But he uttered this softly, as if not yet committed to the act that awaited him.
* * *
His men brought over their tools and sat on their haunches. The bulldozer swung around and dipped its cup into the earth, pawing away a few feet. The bulldozer— not the old rust-pocked one Herschel had died on, but another, shining red and twice as large— dug a long channel in the earth. The backhoe bucket dragged shallow scoops of topsoil, its operator skilled and meticulous. The patch of earth was about twenty feet by twenty feet. The work went quickly once he got through the topsoil into the sand beneath it.
"Like digging at the beach," Marceno noted.
Five minutes later the operator caught the teeth of the scoop on something, noticed, then cut the engine. "There," he hollered, pointing at the hole in the earth. "Look!"
At that moment I saw a car speeding along the new road, kicking up dust. It turned off the road, bumped over the field. Martha Hallock emerged from the door and stood uneasily ten feet away.
"Stop!" she screamed. "Stop!"
But Marceno didn't. And within a minute his men had scraped their shovels across a rusted flat piece of metal, which upon further digging curved downward at the edges. It was rusted through and the original paint had flaked away entirely. Then the men jumped down and dug until the curved ends of the metal became a chromed edge that then fell away to glass; we were looking at a buried vehicle of some sort.
"No, no!" cried Martha Hallock. "This, this—"
But the men kept digging, and whatever might be inside what now looked to be an old subcompact was obscured by the dirt on the windshield and a hanging forest of mushrooms inside. Marceno ran his thumb over the grille markings. Toyota Corolla. Or, spelled KROWLA, if you were semi-illiterate, drunk, and maybe suffering from a mild concussion. The men concentrated on digging away the dirt in front of the car to get access to the front axle, and after they did this, the bulldozer was able to haul the car up and out of the earth, the rotten and collapsed tires not spinning but dragging flabbily up the incline of dirt until the car lay perched over the lip of the hole. Then, with one more tug of the dozer, the car lurched forward ten more feet, prehistoric in its rusted ruin, yet all the same utterly recognizable as from our era, our modern time, the blurry then-and-now, a car that was once new and driven off a dealer's lot, used and lived in for the carrying of people and children and groceries and whatever else we use cars for, and the fact that the inside of it was dark, the windows smeared as I have said with earth on the outside and spores and molds on the inside made all of us stand back in sickened wonder.
"Open the door," Marceno ordered one of his men.
"No!" cried Martha Hallock. "No!"
"Open it this second!"
But the man, slope-shouldered and miserable as a dog that dares to disobey its master, just shook his head in meek defiance, whispering something fearful and worried. Marceno turned to another man, who agreed to touch the door with his shovel— experimentally, jabbing it like it might writhe in response, but this was all he could do.
"Don't," said Martha Hallock. "You mustn't. Enough is enough. I demand you stop."
I looked at Marceno and spoke in a low voice. "If you are decent, you will escort her away from this, no matter what is or isn't inside there. It's terrifying her."
"Yes," Marceno nodded. "Of course." And he signaled to his men to help Martha Hallock back into her car, where she sank into the cushioned seat and wept.
Then I turned to Marceno. "I'll do it," I said.
"You?"
"Yes," I told him. And I did.
I put my hand on the driver's-side door and pulled the handle. Nothing happened. I yanked, quite hard, and the door fell away, right off the car, hinges rusted to nothingness. I jumped backward. Inside the driver's side we saw an enormous mass of mushrooms crowding against each other, falling with thick abundance over the seat and floor and everywhere, covering like a thick blanket whatever might be below them, and I felt just strong enough to step forward and brush my hands against them, and what I saw made all of us understand that we were gazing not just into a buried car but a dripping, imperfectly sealed crypt— what I saw was a woman's watch and a curled brown athletic shoe and a rotten swath of a flowered material such as might be used to make a summer dress. What I saw was what remained of Jay Rainey's mother.
Yes, as the official tests would later prove— some remaining teeth, a bit of hair, the serial number in the car's engine block— this was what was left of Jay's mother, aged thirty-nine years old when she died, a woman who had not abandoned her only child, her strapping, beautiful son, but— judging from the position of the car in the field— had gone looking for him, perhaps catching a taint of herbicide floating on the night air, which meant that she found her death.
Marceno's men lay a section of plastic sheeting on the ground and on it they put what they found: one earring, a wedding ring, the runn
ing shoes, a necklace of semiprecious stone, and a small clay dog. Marceno examined it and handed it to me. It was heavy in the hand, and I wiped the dirt from it. The creature had a certain crude sweetness and had been glazed. I turned it over, my thumb finding the lettering on the belly: JAY R. 4TH GRADE.
We pried open the trunk of the car, and in it were the following items: a plastic gasoline can, a beach chair, an aluminum baseball bat, and rubber flip-flops. No suitcases, no items suggesting a flight from a bad marriage. I turned to Marceno. He and his men stood silently, understanding what the artifacts meant, tribally respectful of them and the earthen rituals of death.
Martha Hallock sat in her car, weeping fitfully. "My girl," she sobbed. "My sweet girl." How had I not figured out that she was Jay's grandmother?
Marceno and I walked away from the car toward the ocean.
"She sold me the land, you know," he said. "He owned it but she sold it to me."
"I think she knew somebody was buried here, feared it might be true."
"Who?"
"Her daughter, Jay Rainey's mother. Her nephew, Poppy, knew for sure, must have been the one to bury her. There was an accident with herbicide. The mother disappeared that same night, everyone thought she'd left the husband. But Martha knew, somewhere inside her."
Marceno ran his fingers through his hair, demoralized by the waste and stupidity of everything. "Poppy was just putting a little more earth on top of the car, that's all?"
"It looks that way."
"And this man Herschel happened along," confirmed Marceno. "Said what are you doing? And they got in a fight. That could cause a heart attack right there."
"Or Poppy told him what he was doing. Or Herschel figured it out. Or Herschel knew what had happened and was afraid it'd be discovered."
Marceno studied the rusted hulk of the Toyota.
"Poppy was desperate," I went on. "Once the vineyard was planted it would be a very long time, if ever, before the car would be discovered."
"He would be dead."
"More importantly, Jay Rainey would be dead."
"I don't understand."
"Poppy was probably the one who left the herbicide sprayer on. He killed Jay's mother. Found her, panicked, buried the car."
"Even if the ground was soft, that would still take hours."
"He had a bulldozer. He could've found her a few hours before dawn."
Marceno knelt down to touch the earth. "So he was trying to spare Jay Rainey from finding out?"
"I think he probably didn't want to face manslaughter charges. You could begin there."
"But did Rainey know?"
"I don't think so. At least not until recently," I said. "He found out in the Havana Room."
Marceno dusted off his suit and faced me, ever the tidy international businessman. "So, are we done then?"
"Not quite."
"Hmm?"
"I want to know why you didn't come to the steakhouse when I called and told you Poppy had arrived there."
He inspected his fingernails. "I didn't feel it was necessary, Mr. Wy-eth."
"But I had the information you wanted."
No answer. Marceno's silence felt cold. He adjusted his watch— stalling, I figured, preparing an explanation. "This man H.J. came to my office," he finally said. "Full of threats." He looked at me and shrugged, as if the rest of it was obvious.
"What happened?"
"We made an agreement. We were both looking for the same people. It wasn't supposed to—" He appeared to sense that I could still cause him enormous trouble. "I owe you an apology."
"It was just business for you," I muttered.
But this was not the way Marceno chose to understand himself, and his eyes found their way back to the rusted hulk sitting atop the earth, the blanket of mushrooms inside. "Men died for nothing. For money, for wine."
Not Jay, I thought.
* * *
I will tell now four more things. I will tell why I slept very poorly the next few days; I will tell what I did with Jay's estate, including his letters to his daughter, Sally Cowles; I will tell what I said to her about her true father; and I will tell what passed between me and Allison Sparks in our last conversation, during which we discussed the terrible events in the Havana Room.
Knowing only two things, that Jay lay in the field near death, and that his mother stopped her car before him, one can surmise the horror she felt as she saw her son fallen to the earth. She would naturally have wanted to open the door and rush to him. But did she pause? In an instinct of self-preservation, perhaps smelling or tasting the herbicide that had already come in through the window or air vents? Did she sense that she needed to back up in the soft earth and flee? And was Jay in any way aware of the headlights upon him, did he know it was his mother? Perhaps she called to him. Perhaps he knew that she was affected by the herbicide. In any case she must have looked upon him, seen him dying, and then known she was dying herself. These are the lost seconds of Jay Rainey's lost life. Seconds that yet tick forward unknown. And, I wondered, did Jay have any remembrance of the lights of his mother's car or her voice or perhaps even the sight of her slumped form against the dashboard, or even out the door, dying in the field? Had there been one molecule of this memory? Did he think that she had gone looking for him, that he had unknowingly drawn her to her death? That, too, was undiscoverable. One might infer from his pursuit of his lost daughter that the answer was yes— that there was within him a hidden call of the flesh, to find the flesh that was of him and of those from whom he'd come. These are the deep pressures of being human, and those of us who are parents feel the forwardness of our flesh even as we know our own is failing. The rhythmic scything away of the previous generation forces our attention to our children, for if we do not have our children, then, knowing ourselves to be doomed, we do not have anything. People who don't have children often take violent exception to the idea that their lives are in any way existentially different from the lives of those who do have children, and to this I only laugh darkly to myself and think, Well yes, you may think that, but you are already dead, my friend. I am also already dead, yet live on in my son, who will have his son or daughter when I am dispersed with the fluorocarbons, part of the mist of ozone cooking the earth. Yes, I will yet live. And I think this is in all of us. And in Jay Rainey, too. The will to live. To pursue life is always to flee death, including murders in which one is somehow complicit, and this pursuit of life is not only essential to the survival of the species but also a courageous pull from the terror of biological anonymity. We want to be known. We want someone to know us. And there is something more, which obtained in the case of Jay Rainey. If you are a man, you cannot live without women, whence men come. I don't mean that men cannot live without women sexually, which of course they can, but rather without the fact of them, in the man's past, as mother and sister, as mitigating influence against all that is the most awful in man's murderous endocrinological nature. Women, it should be admitted, often make men better than they otherwise would be, save them from themselves. Jay could find lovers, of course, but except for Martha Hallock, his grandmother, he had no female who knew him, no woman who had insight into his essence, no female blood. Is it unreasonable to think he hoped, if only instinctively, that his daughter might someday look upon him and know him as no other female might, with the knowledge of shared flesh? As daughter to him, her father? On this, the answer is not lost. The answer is yes.
* * *
And then there is the matter of Jay's letters to Sally and what she might know.
This was the hardest thing of all. I studied the question. I really did. She did not understand why she had been kidnapped. She had not been harmed, at least not physically. Not a hair. She had spent less than one hour of her life in the company of some strange men. If she was traumatized, perhaps her stepfather and stepmother had seen to it that she had a trip to Disney World or a ski trip, some distraction that melted and obscured that one strange hour. An hour in a girl's l
ife, what might it mean?
It was a grave responsibility. I could give her those letters, either directly or through Cowles, whose whereabouts I knew. But in the end, I did not. She had not asked to be born to doomed parents, she had not asked to think that she might have been abandoned. It was enough already, I supposed, that she'd experienced her mother's death. We have a responsibility to be merciful, I think, to save not just a life but the best version of a life, if possible. I do not think that I can ever forgive myself for the death of young Wilson Doan, and all that resulted, but I believe that I decided rightly when I took Jay's letters and watched their torn little pieces float down the Hudson River, releasing his daughter from the life she did not need to have. If this damns me, then it will not be for the first time, but I trust it does not. I will never be at peace with myself— how could I?— but the sight of those letters floating along the water gave me some hope, some fleeting belief, that the past may leave our bodies as surely as we will leave the earth.
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