The Blue Death

by Joan Brady

  The thought of it made his cheeks burn. ‘I got the names of dozens of professional canvassers from Chicago,’ he said to Francis. ‘I’ll hire them and more on Monday. I can slow the Coalition down a little too.’

  ‘How?’

  Jimmy opened his briefcase and took out a sheaf of paper more than two inches thick. ‘Here’s volume one.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘The contract. It runs to five volumes.’

  Lawyers love what Jimmy called ‘swamping’. It can muddy any issue. ‘Informed consent’ does sound like a noble principle, but drowning it in reams of paper is almost too easy. Jimmy had made Ruth pay for her joke by helping him bulk out the contract with case law that went back a hundred years and stretched to nearly three thousand pages. People can’t object to a contract if they haven’t been given the chance to read it, which meant that the Coalition was going to have to lug several copies around with every petition. If they didn’t, Jimmy could invalidate the petition on ethical grounds.

  But Francis sighed irritably. ‘I’m surrounded by fools.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Jimmy protested. ‘You yourself got the Incol report up to five hundred pages.’

  Francis sighed again, shook his head, turned away.

  It was Sebastian who roused himself to explain.

  ‘Mr Z, it ain’t usually a real good idea to play the same trick twice. We don’t figure Mrs Freyl fell for it the first time around, and she can make pretty good mileage out of it a second time. She’s probably gonna have lots of fun with them professional canvassers too. And we already got enough troubles with this here weather, understand me?’

  Jimmy understood all too well. There were no signs of panic in UCAI shares on world markets – not yet – but almost anything can spook investors. A referendum to overturn the contract that would open the entirety of Midwestern water to private ownership: Jimmy shuddered to think how fast the indices would plunge on that news. ‘I did warn you about Becky,’ he said, putting volume one back into his briefcase.

  Francis wasn’t impressed. ‘She’s after you, isn’t she, Mr Mayor? You personally. She wants to bring you down, and she sees your campaign to privatize as the way to do it. She doesn’t care who owns Springfield’s water. This referendum is a vote of confidence in you, isn’t it? Or rather, a vote of no confidence. All she cares about is who’s in charge of the town itself. What it means is that if she doesn’t care, nobody else does. Put her out of action.’

  Jimmy wasn’t sure how to respond. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘She’s old, Mr Mayor. The old are vulnerable. Now tell me about David Marion.’

  This time Jimmy had no idea how to respond.

  ‘Most men aren’t interesting,’ Francis went on. ‘This Marion has to be. Not many people have something I want.’

  Jimmy opened his mouth, shut it, watched Francis twirl his half-moon glasses. ‘I can’t imagine anything that guy might have that you couldn’t get easily yourself. Except Helen Freyl maybe.’

  ‘Prison is enforced childhood.’ Francis spoke as though Jimmy hadn’t said a word. ‘That’s why prisoners behave so badly behind bars. It’s why they’re incapable of functioning in the adult world when they get tossed back into it. But here’s a man who spent his entire youth locked up, and yet negotiates his way so skilfully outside that he escapes several professional attempts to kill him. Meantime, he alienates the cream of society in an important state capital and still manages to marry into its highest echelon.’

  Jimmy chuckled. ‘You ought to see him at a dinner party.’

  ‘Lost, is he?

  ‘Totally.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He doesn’t know how to fight us.’

  ‘Really? Now that does surprise me. What else?’

  ‘No idea how to handle his workers. They walked out on him.’

  Francis gave a snort of contempt. ‘What does he do with his spare time?’

  ‘He runs.’

  ‘I know that. Springfield has too many paths and alleyways that only children know about.’

  ‘Does it?’

  Francis glanced out at the Mississippi beyond. It’s over a mile wide at that point – might as well stretch as far as an ocean, no hint of a bank on the other side. ‘He doesn’t swear. It’s odd to spend life in prison and keep a clean mouth. Most men go the other way with a vengeance. He didn’t grow up in a Christian home, so he must have stopped swearing inside. Don’t you find that strange? And an English accent in an Illinois prison. That’s even stranger, don’t you think? You assume it’s all Hugh Freyl, don’t you? And yet it doesn’t quite fit.’

  ‘You knew Hugh?’

  ‘I believe there has to have been some other English influence.’

  ‘In an Illinois prison? You’ve got to be kidding.’

  ‘I have a poor ear for accents, Mr Mayor, but I’m informed by experts that a trace of the north can be detected in his, and yet Mr Freyl never moved out of the Home Counties.’

  Jimmy shrugged, looked down at his half-moon glasses, realized he was twirling them precisely as Francis was, stopped at once. His discomfort was getting serious, and he wasn’t sure why. ‘You seem to know more about both of them than I do. Look, you’re right of course. A hefty contract won’t hold the Coalition for long, but those professional canvassers can be very effective.’ Jimmy leaned forward, about to get to his feet. ‘If you could consider the situation and get back to—’

  ‘Oh, please, Mr Mayor. Indulge me. Why do you hate Mr Marion?’

  ‘I didn’t say I hated him.’

  ‘Yes you did.’

  Jimmy’s anger hit him so abruptly that he spat the words out before he knew he was going to say them. ‘The fucker stole my girl. I want her back.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Francis, ‘that’s what I thought. You and I have a bond, Mr Mayor. Do you imagine that killing him is going to get her back?’

  ‘People get over death. I’ll make a good comforter. What do you mean, we “have a bond”?’

  ‘I think he stole my girl too. You ought to pay more attention to his movements.’

  ‘Your girl?’ Jimmy had just assumed Francis was gay. ‘He’s cheating on Helen? How could he do that?’

  Jimmy started googling on his iPad as soon as he was a couple of miles away. It took him nearly half an hour, but he found a small item in the British press. Why hadn’t anybody here said anything? But then Jimmy knew how large a chunk UCAI owned of the Midwestern media; he’d been delighted to profit from it himself after the trauma of the Council vote, and the item was very small.

  A microbiology student was complaining in an Oxford Times blog of five years ago:

  Francis Slad is some American industrialist or something.

  What’s he doing schmoozing with our own Aloysia Gonzaga?

  31

  SPRINGFIELD: The first day in September

  The opening event of the Coalition’s drive was an Auction of Promises at the Illinois State Fair Grounds, and the atmosphere was jubilant. There were children and balloons, hot dogs, popcorn, candy floss; a carousel, a Ferris wheel, a rollercoaster. Picnic tables filled up with families. A pop singer ground away on an open-air stage.

  The day was fiercely hot, sky cloudless, no hint of those storms forecasters had been warning about for months. Everybody came with water bottles, sun visors, umbrellas that doubled as parasols. Becky really did love the heat, even when it was as bad as this. It made her think of summers in Atlanta, when the tar melted on the roads and stayed soft into the evenings; as a little girl, she’d sat on the kerb outside her house, working her toes into the warm tar and eating chocolate ice cream. Despite her protests, the Coalition had set up a canopy just for her and a picnic table with water on it. But she hadn’t expected the crowd to be so big – not this early in the campaign – or so enthusiastic. Nobody had.

  ‘Miz Freyl, you got to drink some of that water.’ Lillian said it several times. ‘Old people get dehydrated easy.’

>   ‘Come on, Grandma, drink a little,’ Helen urged.

  Becky smiled at her. ‘Ice cream, Helen. Get me ice cream. So much nicer. In a cone. That’s what I really—’ She stopped short. ‘Not yet. Don’t go yet. We’re about to start.’

  The auctioneer boiled over with enthusiasm; rapid-fire bidding jumped in increments of fifty dollars, then a hundred, then five hundred. The rarest item for sale was an invitation to the Cisco Cotto Talk Show in Chicago including after-show refreshments with Cisco himself. Other items included a children’s writer who would put the name of the winner’s child into her book, an architect’s services for building an extension, dinner at the Sangamo Club.

  Becky clocked up the sales on her BlackBerry as they happened. Tens of thousands of dollars, then a hundred thousand, then two hundred thousand. The auctioneer had pulled in almost twenty thousand more by the time the crowd began to disperse.

  Becky studied the figure on the screen, then frowned in puzzlement. When she looked up, Jimmy stood in front of her.

  ‘Hiya, Becky,’ he said. ‘Lot of money, huh?’

  She searched his face, apprehensive now. ‘There’s something wrong with my cell phone, Jimmy. It’s saying the wrong date.’

  ‘Let me see.’ He bent over it. ‘Looks okay to me.’

  ‘It can’t be the first of September.’ She glanced at her mobile.

  ‘Sure it can.’

  ‘Why isn’t it December? Or May?’

  ‘Tell me something, old girl, what month do you think it is?’

  She studied her BlackBerry again. ‘This is very strange. September? Is that what you said? September? Why not July?’

  He broke into a smile. ‘A little confused, aren’t we?’

  A loud clapping jolted Becky awake and into a panic. Buried alive? White coffin, head cemented in place, an insistent chuck-a-chuck-a-chuck.

  But her moment of terror gave way to the realization that she was moving: an MRI scanner.

  ‘What am I doing here?’ she said to the technician as the gurney she lay on emerged from the tunnel that had been her coffin.

  Lillian appeared at her side at once, dressed in a white gown. ‘You had a . a incident.’

  ‘A stroke?’

  ‘Don’t look like it. Miz Freyl, I done told you to drink that water. I goes to get you some of that chocolate ice cream and comes back and finds Mr Mayor Jimmy Zemanski acting—’

  ‘Jimmy! What does he have to do with it?’

  ‘You don’t remember nothing, do you?’

  ‘Where’s Helen?’

  ‘Dealing with the insurance.’

  ‘Lillian, I feel terrible.’

  ‘I know, sugar. I know. You just dehydrated. Old folks get confused if they don’t get enough water.’

  ‘Fiddlesticks.’

  And yet Becky knew it was not just a possible cause but the probable one. Droves of people keel over every summer. The media is alive with warnings, especially to the old. It was that damned wheelchair. If it hadn’t been for that, she’d have stood under Lillian’s umbrella, and Lillian would have fussed until she’d drunk the water she needed. She’d come to hate that chair and everything it stood for.

  The question was, how could she get rid of it and save face at the same time?

  The sight of Becky ashen-faced, expressionless, tubes in her arm, hooked up to beeping machines with jagged lines in parade across them: that had really thrown Helen.

  She dealt with the insurance in a daze. There were still butterflies in her stomach the next morning as she hurried across the parking lot of the Catholic college west of Leland Grove. Last classes of the season: that scared her too. What did she amount to? What could she amount to? She had no real work. She didn’t do anything. What would justify her existence when her pupils left her?

  She didn’t hear Jimmy coming up behind her, didn’t have any idea he was there until he caught her arm and swung her around.

  ‘I’m late,’ she said, shaking him off.

  ‘No you’re not. You’re early. I know exactly when your classes are, and you have’ – he checked his watch – ‘more than an hour before the first one. I, er . I need to talk to you.’ The idea that Francis Slad had planted, that David was betraying her with another woman: it made Jimmy’s heart feel raw and squashed inside his chest. The sincerity in his voice was real. ‘Helen, please. Let’s go some place cool.’

  She paused. ‘Talk here or nowhere.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you prefer to get out of the heat?’

  ‘Talk or get out of my way.’

  ‘It’s about Becky.’

  The butterflies in Helen’s stomach turned into an attack of outright panic. ‘What about her? She’s fine. Back home.’ Helen wasn’t going to thank Jimmy for calling the ambulance if that’s what he wanted; in less than a minute she’d have called it herself.

  ‘How can she be “fine”?’ Jimmy asked. ‘She didn’t know what year it was, much less what month it was or where she was or what was going on around—’

  ‘She was dehydrated, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘Oh, come on, she’s been getting steadily worse, and you know it. She can’t stand up on her own. She keeps forgetting all kinds of stuff. Yeah, sure, Becky and I squabble like a couple of alley cats on a backyard fence, but I love you, Helen – you know that – and I love her because she’s part of you. I can’t bear seeing her like this, especially when I know there are things that can be done. If you could just get her to take a week in St John’s—’

  ‘Shut up, Jimmy.’

  ‘—they could—’

  ‘Shut up!’

  Everybody in Springfield over the age of sixty feared St John’s. Once in for assessment, never out again: that’s what they said. It wasn’t true, but the threat of St John’s would get most recalcitrant grandparents to cooperate. For Jimmy, it was the perfect solution. A week without Becky, and the army of professional canvassers he’d hired would collapse the referendum before it got up steam. He was sure of it. UCAI would be signed, sealed and delivered, and there wouldn’t be a damn thing she could do about it.

  He grabbed Helen’s arm again. ‘Aren’t you even going to give her a chance?’

  Helen shook herself loose and ran up the stairs to the college building, now boiling with anger as well as fear. She headed straight for Sister Evangeline’s office and threw open the door.

  Sister Evangeline looked up with a delighted smile. ‘Helen!’ she said. ‘Come in, come in. I’m so glad you could make it.’ Sister Evangeline had seen how much Helen enjoyed teaching – nobody could fail to notice it – and was hoping to persuade her into the fall semester.

  ‘Where the fuck is she?’ Helen demanded, dropping her books on the floor.

  Sister Evangeline had worked with young offenders. Very little shocked her, certainly not Helen’s language. But she’d never seen Helen so visibly upset. She rushed to the other side of her desk, put a hand on Helen’s shoulder. ‘What’s the matter, dear? Please sit down. You don’t look well at all. Do you need a doctor?’

  ‘I hate teaching. I hate kids. I don’t know why I agreed to do this in the first place.’ Helen knew what she was saying was nonsense, that she didn’t mean it, that she wanted to teach more than anything else right now. But she couldn’t stop. ‘I refuse to do another hour of it. Do you hear? Not another minute.’

  ‘Helen, dear, it’s the last day of term. Your students will be so—’

  ‘Where is Aloysia Fucking Gonzaga?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘“Who?” What do you mean, “Who?” The bitch whose classes I’m teaching. The bitch nobody can find. She’s been gone for months. I’m the one saddled with her work. Where is she?’

  This time Sister Evangeline’s hand was over her mouth, her eyes open wide. ‘My goodness, can you believe it? I’d forgotten all about her.’

  ‘You’d—?’ Helen was too furious to complete the sentence.

  ‘Do sit down, Helen dear. Please don’t be angry. It’s all my
fault. I do apologize. I’m really so very—’

  ‘Yes, yes. Where is the woman?’

  Sister Evangeline knitted her brows, shook her head. ‘I have no idea, Helen. I was so pleased to have you here and so pleased – God forgive me – so very pleased not to have her that I put all thought of her aside.’

  Sister Evangeline had worried that the Englishwoman would find American youngsters difficult. That’s the only reason she’d looked in on one of Aloysia’s classes. Aloysia was pacing back and forth in front of her pupils. She was a strong-featured woman, well built, perfectly groomed, brown hair with gold streaks in it, a slight limp – an oddly attractive limp – as though one leg were shorter than the other. She held out a paper in her hands.

  ‘Hopeless,’ she was saying to a boy with pimples and a bright red face. ‘Absolutely hopeless. Are you demented? Is that brain made of rocks and dirt? What’d you say your father did? Dig ditches? My advice to you? Follow in his footsteps.’

  Sister Evangeline gave Helen an unhappy shrug. ‘She just crumpled up the paper and tossed it into the wastebasket.’

  Helen sat down abruptly. ‘Jesus, that was nasty.’

  ‘I’m afraid none of us really took to her. We did try to make sure she was all right though. We emailed, telephoned, texted, sent plain old letters. We even went to her home. We went there twice. The second time we peeked through the letterbox. There was lots of mail piled up. She plainly hadn’t come back from her vacation.’ Sister Evangeline bit her lip, gave Helen a sheepish shrug of the shoulders. ‘We were all so, well, relieved that we—’

  ‘You didn’t bother with the cops? Hospitals?’

  Sister Evangeline pulled herself up primly. ‘Surely if something were wrong, somebody would have done something.’

  ‘Just not you, huh? Give me her address.’

  Aloysia Gonzaga’s house was one of the smallest in the Leland Grove area, clapboard, dead lawn in front, dead flowers in the flowerbeds. On days as hot as this, American streets are dead zones too. Not a pedestrian to be seen. Blinds in houses drawn. The only sounds were hums and whirrs from air conditioners. And the occasional dog’s bark.