Typical Marla, Grace thought. She’d always been too impulsive. “It’s the middle of a weekday, Marla. She probably won’t even be at home.”
“We could leave her a note then,” Marla said.
“Or we could mail her a note,” Grace said, sliding a napkin over some oil from the fries. “That would be less awkward. I mean, what if she gets . . . If Angie knew her well, this could be pretty upsetting for her.”
Marla nodded, dabbing her eyes again. “But that’s why I thought it would be better if we said it in person.”
By the time they finished eating, Grace had given up trying to dissuade Marla. They tramped down to the Hale Street intersection, where an array of not-so-fresh fruits and vegetables was laid out under a grocery store awning. Halfway down the street, just past a nail parlor flashing neon, Marla stopped in front of a six-story brick building. It had a glossy red door with a glass pane set at eye level. The steps leading up to the door were shaded by the valiant branches of a struggling tree planted in a square dug out of the sidewalk. Tied to its trunk with a yellow satin ribbon was a profuse bunch of plastic lilies, some white, some mottled crimson.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Grace said, but Marla was already climbing the steps, steadying herself against the metal railing. They entered a small hallway with a set of mailboxes. A gray metal door lay beyond, a key card lock indicating its security. An elderly black woman was leafing through a handful of junk mail by one open mailbox. Marla stopped at a panel of doorbells that had handwritten name labels affixed with bits of tape. “There it is,” she said, and pressed a button. They waited, but nothing happened. The woman at the mailbox rustled her papers, muttering under her breath.
“Okay,” Grace said, taking Marla’s arm. She felt uncomfortable. It seemed intrusive, going into some stranger’s apartment building, bringing news that probably wouldn’t be well received. “She’s not there. We tried.” It was getting late too, almost three o’clock.
“We should at least leave a message,” Marla said, scrabbling in her purse, a bulky zebra-printed affair with many external pockets. She extracted a pen and a small notebook. “What should I write?” Then she looked up again at the panel. “Did I press the right one? Let me try again. Okay. Minowa Costa.” She pressed again.
The woman by the mailbox had emitted a surprised grunt. She turned slowly to face them, inching her feet around in shoes with sturdy rubber soles. They appeared to be pinching her ankles, which were heavily swollen under her pale-blue dress. “You looking for Minowa?” she said, squinting at them.
“I don’t think she’s in,” Grace said.
The woman snorted, fixing her with an ornery stare. “She’s with the good Lord,” she said.
“Er . . . ,” Marla said, looking nonplussed. “Is there any way we could leave a note for her? Would you slip it under her door for us . . . ?” Her voice trailed off as the woman rolled her eyes.
“You deaf?” she said. “I said she’s with the Lord. Ain’t no way she’ll be getting your messages.”
Grace exchanged a glance with Marla.
“Are you saying . . . ?” Marla said, her eyes widening.
The woman rolled her head slowly, wearily. Her grizzled hair was cut close to her scalp. “Gone to heaven, that one. That’s what I said.”
“She died?” Grace said, and then realized it had come out as a whisper.
“Knocked down right there. Right outside her own home. Dead of night.”
“Jeez, I am so sorry,” Marla said. “When did it happen?”
The woman staggered slowly to the outer door, swaying from side to side on unsteady feet, the jumble of mail clutched to her chest. “See that there?” she said, pointing through the glass pane at the street. “Right there was where she got hit. Not been a week. Last Thursday morning in the wee hours.” She shook her head again.
“She got hit? You mean by a car?” Marla said.
The woman supported herself against the doorframe. “By the time the ambulance got here, she were already with the Lord, they said. Police been here, but no one seen the car. Those lilies there, for her.”
A few of the woman’s papers drifted to the floor. Grace crouched to pick them up. “A hit and run?” she said as she handed them back.
“Hit ’n’ run, hit ’n’ run,” the woman said, her head swaying back and forth. “Ain’t no justice but with the Lord.” She made her way slowly to the inner door.
Grace stood uncertainly with Marla, watching the woman swipe a key card carefully across the lock. She heaved the door open and disappeared inside without another word.
“Jeez,” Marla said, her hand to her chest.
Grace took her by the arm and led her back out onto the street. The lilies that had looked whimsical before looked ominous now, hanging there with their plastic stamens dark as if dipped in blood. They crossed the street in unspoken agreement and set off back the way they had come.
“It happened before the reunion,” Grace said. “I guess Angie hadn’t heard.”
“Unless,” Marla said. “Unless she had, and that was what her work was about? A report about the hit and run?” She stopped abruptly, causing a man who had been walking just behind her to step swiftly aside with an annoyed glare. “But that wouldn’t make sense. She wrote about corruption, immigration, social justice, that kind of thing.” She frowned. “But maybe she did write about crimes like this. Especially if a friend was involved. She said she owed it to Minowa Costa to finish the report.”
“That could have meant anything,” Grace said. “Anyway, if Angie knew Minowa had died, wouldn’t she have said? Did she seem upset when she mentioned Minowa?”
Marla frowned. She was holding her belly with both hands. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t say upset. It was more like . . . urgent. I thought it was that she had a deadline for the article. Also, she seemed reluctant to talk about Minowa.”
“What’s the point of speculating?” Grace said. “We won’t know.” The same with the voicemail message. She would never know. Why had Angie dug up something Grace had tried so hard to forget? How you both feel. Why had she wanted to know how they felt?
Marla started walking again. “Did she really have a heart attack? Angie?” She answered herself right away, as if she were trying to convince herself. “She did. She did. After she had the hysterectomy—because of fibroids, three years ago—she was warned that she had an increased risk.”
Grace put her arm around Marla’s shoulder. Anyone could just die, she thought. You could be in the pink of health, and then, the next day, you could be gone. Even Marla, with her baby still inside. The thought made her chest constrict. How easy it was for life to simply end. And what would be left behind to show that you had even existed?
“I wish I had said . . . that . . . I don’t know. That she was important to me.”
“She called me,” Grace blurted, and then wished she could take it back. What if she had to go into the whole thing?
“Angie?” Marla stopped again in the middle of the sidewalk. Her mouth had dropped open. “What do you mean? When?” A young woman with a stroller skirted her, muttering an epithet under her breath.
“That morning, around eight, when I was still asleep. My ringer was off. She left a message on my phone saying she wanted to see me.”
Marla frowned. “Wait. You never said . . . all that time when we were wondering when she was going to get back from her hike? And afterward.”
“I told Mortensen,” Grace said. She was having difficulty meeting Marla’s eyes, so she concentrated on taking out her phone and locating her parking spot on Google Maps. “I didn’t think it meant anything before. I mean, I still don’t think it did. I couldn’t hear much of the message. It kept cutting out. I don’t know why she wanted to see me. I thought it was . . . like for old times’ sake. She said she wanted to meet Duncan.”
Looking up, Grace saw that Marla was watching her, still frowning. “Did you keep in touch with her?” Marla said.
“Well, that’s strange,” Marla said. They were walking again, and Grace was grateful that she didn’t have to look Marla in the eye. “She never said anything to me about wanting to see you. She didn’t mention you at all, although I think someone—Mo?—said something about you and Duncan being there, while we were in the cabin.”
“It was probably nothing,” Grace said. “Maybe she wanted to make connections with everyone there. People she hadn’t seen for a while. Actually, that’s probably it. I didn’t think of that before. That would make sense.”
“I called him, you know,” Marla said. “Yesterday. Mortensen.” Grace let out her breath. Thank God she’d let it go. “Because it seems so odd,” Marla went on. “She was tense about this work thing—maybe it was about this Minowa or something else. But so stressed that she’d have a heart attack? It doesn’t seem right. Mortensen said he had been asked to hand the case off to a superior. But he said the medical examiner’s report was clear. A heart attack.”
“Mortensen came to see us on Sunday night,” Grace said. “He was looking into those gunshots we heard. Because it’s not hunting season, he said, but he asked us some odd questions. About how well we knew you and some of the others. Whether any of you had a gun.”
Marla frowned. “At the camp? Or just owned one?”
“At the camp . . . Well, I don’t know. Why would he care otherwise?” Grace eyed Marla. “Do you own a gun?”
Marla nodded. “Sure. Doesn’t everyone?”
Grace gaped at her. How nonchalant. “Really?” Marla was the last person she would have expected to own a gun. You only think you know someone, she thought.
Marla shrugged. “But why would I—or anyone—bring one to camp?”
“He said Mo had bought ammunition in Ridgeville.”
Marla frowned again. “So what? That doesn’t mean he brought a gun to camp. If he did, he would have said something if he was going hunting.” She shook her head. Her cheeks were flushed. “You know what it is. It’s because of his name.”
“His name?” What was she talking about?
“Anyone with a Muslim name is targeted. Such bullshit.”
“What? That didn’t even cross my mind,” Grace said.
“I volunteer at a center for Syrian refugees,” Marla said, holding her belly as if it were a giant water balloon about to explode. Grace could see how angry she was. “The other volunteers are mostly Muslims. Muslim Americans. All the stories they tell. Forget the ones in hijabs. You can imagine what they have to put up with, right? But everyone else, just because of their names. Job applications. Routine stops for speeding. The police are the worst. Everyone with a Muslim name is a terrorist unless they can prove otherwise.”
“I don’t think . . . Mortensen?” Grace said.
“You have no idea,” Marla said. “Actually, Angie wrote a story on this issue about a year ago. Or at least she contributed to it. She called me to get sources. A colleague of hers interviewed the people at the center.”
9
DUNCAN
Tuesday
A company car had taken Duncan to his lunch appointment with Derek Weinberg. The restaurant was called Lyle, and it had the kind of unassuming grandeur that suggested an overpriced menu. The room he entered was high ceilinged and bathed in artificial light that reflected off the gleaming black floor. Streams of light flowed down a black stone wall at one end of the room, mimicking a waterfall.
When Duncan announced his name, he was led to a secluded table, where a man in a crisp cotton shirt and a burgundy tie was seated, examining the menu.
The man looked up at Duncan, pushing his silver-rimmed glasses onto the top of his head. His chestnut hair was thick and brushed back from his forehead. There was no gray in it, although he appeared to be in his sixties. His head looked inordinately large, perhaps because of the height of his hair, but he was still a handsome man, without the sagging neck skin and paunchy belly that so many aging scholars seemed to develop. “Dr. McCloud,” he said, extending his hand. “Derek Weinberg. Good to meet you.”
Before this eminent academic, Duncan felt a surge of nervousness that reminded him of his early days in his doctoral program. He’d always had butterflies when he’d met with his faculty adviser. He was no longer under anyone’s thumb, he reminded himself. This man couldn’t tell him what to write, or criticize his research.
“I took the liberty of ordering some wine,” Weinberg said.
As if on cue, a waiter in starched linen appeared to pour Duncan a glass.
“So you did your doctoral work at the University of Chicago,” Weinberg said as Duncan took a tentative sip, wishing he could stop feeling like a student. He might have been at a no-name college for the past decade, but he had a good publication record, and he knew what he was doing. He set his wineglass down as Weinberg continued speaking. “Anthropology. You knew Adelaide Goetz then.”
“I took a couple of classes with her. You worked with her?”
“I knew her from graduate school at Yale,” Weinberg said. “Back in the day, of course. We kept in touch over the years. A brilliant scholar. A credit to your field.”
Duncan nodded, taking another sip. Something about Weinberg’s tone suggested that he didn’t think too highly of anthropologists, and that added to his nervousness. He rotated the ring on his finger, trying to relax.
“Bentley sent me your book and a couple of your papers,” Weinberg said. “I didn’t read the book, but I took a look at the papers,” he went on, after a pause during which he’d swirled the wine around in his glass, sniffing its vapors. “I hear Anthropological Quarterly is a top journal in your field.”
The paper Duncan had published in that journal had been one he’d worked on for more than three years, and Duncan was proud of it. He nodded. “One of the best, actually,” he said, and then wondered if that sounded too immodest. But then, he had looked up this man’s publication record, and he had hundreds of papers, many in top medical journals. Several had been in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet.
“Hmm. Well. You read the summary document I sent Bentley?”
“On the placebo effect. Yes. Very illuminating,” Duncan said, although he’d found the document tedious to get through. He had spent all the previous day on it, reading until late in the night. It had been a compilation of a large number of studies, many unpublished, comparing various drugs with placebos, for a multitude of conditions. “I thought I knew a fair bit about the placebo effect, just from the popular press and the research I did for an article years ago, but—”
“A 2005 paper? That was the other one Bentley sent. Now that one was quite interesting,” Weinberg said.
Duncan gazed down at his wineglass. “You know, anthropologists don’t put much stock in scientific explanations for rituals,” he said. “What’s most interesting are the rituals themselves, and what they mean to the people who do them. Whether or not they work by external standards is not . . . that’s not really relevant.” The 2005 paper had been one of the earliest he’d had published. It had been in a small interdisciplinary journal that was all but unknown. The anthropologists he knew didn’t think much of it, if they’d even read it. But he wasn’t surprised that Bent had sent the paper to Weinberg. It had touched on the placebo effect as a possible reason why Sri Lankan exorcism ceremonies might cure illnesses, and Bent had shown a lot of interest in it. In fact, the conversation he’d had with Hammond at the party, and the one with Bent at the reunion, suggested that the paper had a lot to do with why he had been hired.
“You may not be aware of this if you’ve been working in the usual academic silo, but interdisciplinary work is getting plenty of attention these days,” Weinberg said, tapping his wineglass stem. “Even in medicine. Nowadays it’s not medicine versus anthropology. It’s m
edicine and anthropology. And sociology and psychology. That is why I think a paper pushing an interdisciplinary view of the placebo effect would be worthwhile.”
“Not sure how that would play out,” Duncan said. “I’d have to hear more about what you have in mind.”
“Why don’t we order first.”
Duncan opened his menu and was accosted with a selection of dizzyingly unfamiliar dishes: grilled oysters with leeks, bacon, and cream; braised rabbit with roasted summer squash and heirloom tomato ratatouille; sautéed veal sweetbreads with wild mushrooms and crispy onions. The mind-boggling prices were equally unfamiliar. He thought of the routine of his childhood, from the time his mother had taken ill, when his dad had cooked his painstakingly recipe-bound meals, rotating through seven casseroles for dinner, one for each day of the week. He wondered what his dad would say if he saw this menu. He wondered what Ms. Logan would have said about this new job. He wished, as he always did when his former teacher came to mind, that she were still alive.
“Cinasat offers a generous expense account,” Weinberg said, after their orders had been placed. “One of their many perks. They like to keep their people happy.”
“You’ve consulted for them long?”
“A few years,” Weinberg said, and as if Duncan had been too personal, went on rather brusquely, “So, you read the document. As you saw, a lot of the drugs we’ve been prescribing for years—for depression, for pain, for irritable bowel syndrome, high blood pressure, Parkinson’s, countless other things—work no better than a placebo.”
Duncan cleared his throat. “All the sources you cited seemed credible, of course, but the extent of it seemed . . . well, I don’t want to say overstated, but . . . some of these drugs have to be working, right? I mean, they are being regularly prescribed, after all.”
An irritated look appeared on Weinberg’s face. “The drugs have an effect, of course. The point is that they have no more of an effect than a placebo. In other words, you could just give people a sugar pill, and as long as they believed it would work, it very likely would. This is the same reason nondrug treatments sometimes work. Acupuncture, chiropractic, Rolfing, all of that. Even your healing ceremonies. As you said yourself in your own paper, it’s all about context and expectancy. Put people in the right context and get them to believe something will work, and there you go.”
The Mask Collectors Page 6