Sacrificial Ground fc-1

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “This is where she turned,” Stan said confidently. “I’m positive about that.”

  “Then what?”

  “She headed up this street until she got to the end of the park,” Stan told him, “then she turned left.”

  “Did she turn off anywhere?” Frank asked.

  Stan shook his head emphatically. “No, she went all the way down the length of the park.”

  “Then what?”

  “She circled the park.”

  “How many times?”

  “Three, I think, maybe four. I don’t know for sure.”

  Frank pressed his foot slowly down on the accelerator. “All right, let’s do it,” he said.

  The car veered left off Cherokee and headed down the park. At the end, Frank turned left, then at the far corner made another left.

  “Now this is what she did, right?” he asked at each turn.

  “That’s right.”

  Frank headed down Boulevard, this time from the opposite direction, circling the park entirely.

  “That’s what she did,” Stan said, as Frank eased the car onto Cherokee again.

  “And she did it about three times?” Frank asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “Did she act like she was looking for someone?”

  “No.”

  “She was staring around, glancing left and right?”

  “No. She kept her eyes on the road.”

  “Okay,” Frank said. “What happened next?”

  “She drove down into the park.”

  “Where?”

  “Wherever it is, if you’re trying to get down to the Cyclorama,” Stan said.

  Frank drove around the park once again, then turned left down the winding road that led to the Cyclorama.

  “Where did she park exactly?” he asked.

  Stan pointed to the left. “Over there, by that fence,” he said.

  “Facing it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Show me exactly.”

  “Where that sign is,” Stan said. “She parked right in front of it.”

  Frank eased the car into position. A huge sign all but blocked his vision. It was white with red lettering:

  CYCLORAMA RESTORATION

  DEPARTMENT OF PARKS

  CITY OF ATLANTA

  “I must have read that sign a hundred times that night,” Stan said, as Frank brought the car to a halt.

  “How long did she stay here?” Frank asked.

  “It’s hard to say. Maybe ten minutes. Maybe a little more.”

  “You said she kept looking out her rearview mirror, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  Frank glanced at his own rearview mirror. The curving road which led down to the Cyclorama was clearly visible within it.

  “Did any other cars come down the road while you were here?” he asked.

  “No,” Stan replied. “It was just Angelica and me.”

  “You didn’t see any other light?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  Frank drew his eyes from the mirror and looked straight ahead. Behind the sign there was nothing but a muddy’field. He could see the discarded materials used in the restoration, piles of cement blocks, wood slats, yards of torn and rain-soaked cloth. He could see the north side of the building, blank and white, with nothing but a small door at the rear. A large pile of torn and paint-splattered drop cloths lay outside the door. Various crates and empty paint cans were scattered about the grounds, along with the jagged, broken parts of metal scaffolding. It looked like a place that had been pillaged of every scrap of value and then left to the rain.

  “So you two sat here for about ten minutes,” Frank said.

  “Yes.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “We left,” Stan said. “She floored it. I mean she peeled out of here. I remember seeing a spray of gravel thrown up behind us.”

  “Peeled out?”

  “Yeah, and really loud, too,” Stan said, “enough to wake the whole town up.” He motioned to the right. “She whirled around this lot and just highballed it out of the park.”

  Frank hit the ignition and drove the car back up to the main road.

  “Which way did she turn?” he asked.

  “Left.”

  Frank made the turn. “Did you circle the park again?”

  “No,” Stan said. “She drove to the end of it, then she turned left and headed straight down that road.”

  “Good,” Frank said. “It’s coming back.”

  “I just remember going straight,” Stan said.

  Frank drove on, heading the car in the way Stan had indicated. He turned left at the edge of the park, then went almost its full length, passing under a single traffic light.

  “She turned here,” Stan said, pointing to the right.

  Frank made a right onto Ormewood Avenue.

  “She went straight, like we are now,” Stan said excitedly. “This is getting to be interesting. Is this what it’s like to be a cop?”

  Frank kept his eyes locked on the road ahead. “No,” he said. He continued to move forward, passing under one traffic light, then another, until the car nosed up a small hill, and then over it.

  “I remember this,” Stan said suddenly.

  Frank eased his foot off the accelerator. “What?”

  “We went over this hill.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It has a little dip at the bottom,” Stan said. “That’s where we turned.”

  Frank let the car cruise slowly down the hill. He felt the dip, like something hard and blunt pressed against his belly.

  “Next right! Next right!” Stan cried. He looked at Frank excitedly. “That’s the street. The one she went up and down a couple of times.”

  Frank made the right turn, then stopped and looked at the street sign: Mercer Place. When he turned back to Stan, the boy’s face was pale.

  “I know this is it,” he said, slowly. “She took me up and down it a couple of times. Then we went to the alley. “ He shivered slightly. “It gives me the creeps.”

  Frank made a slow turn onto Mercer Place and then headed down it.

  “Did she seem interested in any particular house?” he asked.

  Stan shook his head. “No. She just looked straight ahead. But she did get a look in her eye, like she was forcing herself not to look one way or the other.”

  “Did she say anything?”

  “No.”

  Frank glanced left and right as he continued to cruise slowly down the street. Small, dilapidated houses lined it. Some leaned in one direction, some in another. But all of them looked as if they were trying to let some unbearable burden slide from their shoulders at last.

  It was almost midnight by the time Frank returned to his apartment. He’d gone back to the Bottom Rail for a while, just to see if it still had any appeal to him. He found that it didn’t, but he didn’t know of anything to replace it with, except a solitary drink on a soiled sofa, with his eyes locked helplessly on a square of painted flowers.

  His green notebook still rested where he had left it earlier in the evening, curled up next to the bottle on the little table by the sofa. He reached for it immediately and went through it once again. Facts and suppositions swarmed in and out of his mind. He saw people and places that were real enough: Cummings and Morrison and Jameson and Theodore; offices and great halls and small, spattered studios. Karen’s portrait of Angelica came back to him, and then dissolved will-lessly into her vase of flowers. Ghosts. A city of ghosts. He thought of Linton, then of Miriam Castle, then of the little paved street that wound down from the edges of the park. He could see the storm fence, the muddy ground, the small door and mound of speckled drop cloths.

  Something caught like a hook in his flesh. He sat up slowly, and all the great, teeming chaos suddenly came together in a dead and frozen order.

  25

  By nine o’clock the
next morning, Frank was at the Cyclorama. He pulled the badge from his coat and dropped it on the desk. It gleamed like pure gold beneath the lamp.

  “I’d like to see David Curtis,” he said.

  “Mr. Curtis is busy at the moment,” the man said. He was wearing a blue uniform with a badge emblazoned on the front, a large tin one that carried the name of the security firm he worked for in bold letters.

  “Where is he?” Frank asked.

  “The rotunda.”

  “Go get him,” Frank said.

  “Mr. Curtis don’t like to be disturbed when he’s working,” the man said.

  Frank snapped his hand up to the badge and ripped it off the coat.

  “Hey, man!” the guard cried.

  Frank tossed the badge onto the floor. “Don’t get the idea that little piece of tin means anything. You can buy them at a toy store.”

  The guard fingered the rip in his coat. “They’re going to shit when they see this, man.”

  Frank grabbed one of the large buttons on the guard’s coat and tugged down on it. “How do I get to the rotunda?” he asked.

  The man glared at him helplessly. “Just go through the room behind me, and then through them double doors.”

  Frank let go of the button, then stepped around the desk and walked through the double doors of the rotunda.

  It was very large and very dark. He could see the terrible fury of the battle of Atlanta as it spread out in miniature before him, a vision of desperate struggle in the smoking ruin of the South’s premier city. He could almost feel the heat of the flames, hear the roar of the cannon. An air of pain and terror hung over the display, loss and grief like a black shroud in the tiny trees.

  “May I help you, sir?”

  The voice came from a tall, slightly stooped man who stood next to one of the models, a Union soldier almost half his size.

  “I’m looking for David Curtis,” Frank said.

  “I am David Curtis,” the man replied.

  “On the sign outside, it says that you’re in charge of the Cyclorama restoration.”

  “Yes, I am,” Curtis said. “But if you’re looking for work, I’m afraid that all of our positions are filled.”

  “I’m not looking for work,” Frank told him. He pulled out his badge.

  Curtis leaned forward slightly. “What’s that you’re holding?” he said. “In this light, and with my eyes …”

  Frank stepped over to him. “Frank Clemons. Police.”

  The man squinted at the badge. “Oh, yes.” He walked a few feet away and hit a switch. A steely gray light suddenly flooded the rotunda. “That’s better, don’t you think?”

  Frank nodded.

  Curtis walked back over to him. “Now, what is all this about the police?”

  “I’m investigating a murder,” Frank said. As he glanced around, he realized that he was standing almost in the dead center of the battle. It seemed to rage ferociously below him, a world of smoking air and exploded buildings, horrifying even in miniature.

  “Odd, isn’t it?” Curtis said quietly.

  “What?”

  “This place.”

  “Yes, a little.”

  “Sometimes I feel like ducking quickly, to avoid a musket ball that’s hurtling toward me.”

  It was a landscape of hellish misery, and as Frank’s eyes lingered on it, the misery itself seemed to gather around him in a cloud. It was as if every streak of pain and cry of grief had been collected in this room, all the folly of a million years suddenly rolled into one heartbreaking ball.

  “My God,” he whispered.

  Curtis looked at him curiously. “You’ve never been here, have you?”

  “No.”

  “Most people see it from up in the stands,” Curtis said. “It’s quite different when you’re down here.” He tugged Frank gently by the arm. “Come, we’ll go to my office now.”

  Frank followed him slowly into a small room at the rear of the rotunda. It was cluttered with tiny figures of soldiers and military equipment, tiny flags fluttering in an invisible wind, patches of smoldering earth, stands of burning trees.

  Curtis sat down behind his desk. “Now, you said something about a murder?”

  “Yes,” Frank said. “A young woman.” He handed Curtis the picture of Angelica. “Her.”

  Curtis brought the photograph very close to his eyes. “I broke my glasses yesterday,” he explained. “I’ll have a new pair by this afternoon. But for now, I’m a bit handicapped.”

  “Do you recognize her?” Frank asked.

  Curtis shook his head. “No. Who is she?”

  “Angelica Devereaux.”

  “Oh, yes, it was in the paper a few days ago.”

  “That’s right,” Frank said. “Her body was found not too far from here.”

  “Really? I thought the paper said that it was found off Glenwood.”

  “You have a very good memory,” Frank said.

  “Yes, I do.” Curtis handed the picture back to Frank. “Was the paper wrong?”

  “No,” Frank told him, “but I’ve been tracing her movements in the days before her death. One night, she came here.”

  Curtis looked surprised. “Here? But the Cyclorama is closed until the restoration is finished. She wouldn’t have been able to get in.”

  “She didn’t come into the building,” Frank said. “She parked in the lot outside.”

  Curtis smiled quietly. “Oh, I see. Well, that’s not unusual. The park is open to everyone. That’s the way it should be.” He looked at Frank pointedly. “You, of all people, should know that recently the parks have been taken over by the less wholesome element of the city.” He smiled cheerfully. “But now we’re taking them back. It’s happening all over. New York City. Boston. Everywhere. And in Atlanta, part of that effort involves the restoration of the Cyclorama.”

  “But she seems to have come here for a reason,” Frank said.

  “What reason?”

  “I don’t know,” Frank said. He pulled out his notebook. “Are you here at night, Mr. Curtis?”

  “Sometimes,” Curtis said. “I love this work. It moves back into history.”

  “How about other people?”

  “What other people?”

  “The ones you work with?”

  “Well, a maintenance crew comes in at around seven, but they’re usually gone by nine.”

  “How about security?”

  “Only during the day.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s for personal security,” Curtis explained, “in case some derelict might try to get in.”

  “But you’re not worried about break-ins at night?” Frank asked.

  Curtis smiled. “There’s nothing to steal here,” he said calmly, “except a vision of human history. And of course, that’s not something that can be stolen.”

  “How about other workers, do they come in at night, the artists you use on your restoration?”

  “Sometimes,” Curtis said. “They have a key to the rear entrance.”

  “But all the workers use it?”

  “Of course.”

  Frank wrote it down, then looked up. “She knew this area very well,” he said. “And we don’t know how she came to know it.”

  Curtis looked at him closely. “So you don’t think the body was simply dumped?” he asked.

  “It was dumped,” Frank said, “but that doesn’t change the fact that she knew this area.”

  Curtis shook his head slowly. “I wish I could help you, Mr. Clemons.”

  “Did you ever see a red BMW parked in the lot outside?”

  “No,” Curtis said, “but that doesn’t mean much. I wouldn’t have noticed it. I would notice a vintage automobile, something old and with a lot of character. But these new sports cars? No, I wouldn’t notice them.” His eyes fell back toward Angelica’s picture. “Beautiful face,” he said softly.

  “She didn’t always look the way she does in that photograph,” Frank told him.

/>   Curtis looked up, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “She sometimes dressed differently. Sometimes fixed her hair in a completely different way.”

  “Why?”

  “We don’t know,” Frank said.

  Curtis looked at the photograph again. “So sad. One life.” He glanced up at Frank. “That’s the tragedy. That we have only one life, and it’s so short.” He smiled solemnly. “That’s what I think when I walk through the diorama. All those people, dying.” He shook his head mournfully. “When you think of them as a group, the death gets lost. But when you think that each one is losing his or her one and only life, that, Mr. Clemons, is almost too much to bear. “ He picked up one of the small figurines on his desk and turned it slowly in his hand. It was a Confederate soldier, his gray uniform torn by musket fire, his arms thrust back and frozen in an attitude of sudden and astonished death. “Who was this man? And why did he die like this? That’s the real mystery.” His eyes shifted over to Frank. “This is my dead body, and I think of it just as you think of that girl’s. “ He placed the figure back on his desk. “I wish I could help you, but I never saw her. That’s the hard, dull fact.” He stood up. “I’ve a lot of work to do now, Mr. Clemons, so, if you’ll—”

  “One more thing,” Frank said. “Do you know a woman named Miriam Castle?”

  Curtis looked surprised to hear her name. “Yes. Why?”

  “She mentioned to me that she sometimes gets work for local artists.”

  “Yes, she does.”

  “Did she get any from you?”

  “You mean to work on the restoration?”

  “Yes.”

  “She tried to get some work for Derek Linton,” Curtis said, “but he wouldn’t work on the project. It was some objection, something about how it glorifies war.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Well, we have about three local artists who are working on the Cyclorama,” Curtis said. “By local, do you mean artists who live in Atlanta?”

  “Yes.”

  “That would narrow it down to two,” Curtis said. “All the rest are imported.”

  “But you have two from the city?”

  “Yes.”