Gently, I took the cup from her hands then sipped the tea. I smiled. "See? It's fine."
Her eyes searched my face, searching for doubt, for any reason why she should believe her daughter over the voices in her head.
"Please don't call the doctor," she whispered.
"I won't."
"Promise me?"
"Yes, I promise."
The dog sighed, then rolled over.
"I just need some rest," she said. “Just some rest, that’s all.”
Leaning over, I kissed her cheek. “I’ll be here the rest of the day. And Wally’s downstairs.”
She nodded.
I got up and stepped into the hall, closing her door most of the way. Down the hall, Wally was in his bedroom and I could hear the fan whirring on High. I walked downstairs, put everything away in the kitchen, picked up my purse, and walked outside.
The afternoon heat felt tangible, something to scoop up with both hands.
In the carriage house, I cranked the air conditioner set in my bedroom window and peeled the damp clothing from my body. When my knees hit the floor, my prayers had no pauses.
Because they had no words.
Chapter10
Possession was nine tenths of the law, and early the next morning I found myself arguing for the remaining one tenth. But the argument was going nowhere with the director of internal affairs at the Richmond Police Department, a guy named Jeremy Owler.
“Agent Harmon,” he said, as I stood in his office, “until we close our investigation into Detective Falcon’s death, the FBI will not get one shred of evidence.”
“I don’t want to interrupt your department’s work. I just want to look at the physical evidence, anything collected at the scene. I don't even want to take it -- just look at it."
"Say, I’ve got an idea,” he said. “Tell me what you have on the case. Then we can talk."
This was Owler's idea of a joke. A mean little joke, from a mean little man. Because when civil rights were involved, the attorney general recommended the FBI didn't share any information with the local police, particularly if the police were the subject of our investigation. But the AG encouraged -- backed by threatened legal action -- that the local police spill everything to the FBI.
Leave it to government lawyers. The lop-sided equation might come out even on paper but in real life, they turned the simmering dislike between federal agents and local cops into a full boil.
And unfortunately, Jeremy Owler was real life. Sitting behind his orderly desk in the city administration building, his small face wore the grin of a politician. Polite and ruthless. Still young -- thirty-two was my guess – he knew nailing a cop killer was a real resume booster.
"You know I can't tell you what I have, Owler.”
The smile grew, ratcheting the small wire-rimmed glasses further up his beak-like nose.
"And,” I said, “because you know that, let’s stop playing games."
"No games? Then I guess we're done with this conversation. Have a nice day, Agent Harmon.”
I hadn't slept since my mother's episode yesterday, and now a hard pulse pounded against my temples. I also hadn't eaten, which for me was a sure sign of distress, and today I faced desperate hours trying to avoid Phaup, who would demand to know why this case wasn't closed.
And here was the grinning little politico, hooting over my circumstances.
"Owler." I could hear a pleading tone in my voice. It made me want to gag. “Just let me see the shoes. Some footwear impressions, then maybe I can figure out who went where."
"Sorry, can’t help you," he said cheerfully. "Richmond PD collected the evidence. It stays here until I say we’re finished. When we clear Detective Falcon – if we clear him – I’ll be sure to give you a call. In the meantime, good luck with that civil rights investigation."
My hand was already on the doorknob, but I turned around. Sarcasm, particularly coming from a guy who looked like a nocturnal bird, never worked. And now it nicked a nerve deep inside. My mind flashed to those file cabinets inside Detective Greene's office. All the cold cases. All those unsolved murders tucked into a back room with no windows and one detective with no time to come up for air.
"Owler."
He looked up, the smile returning to his thin lips. "Yes, Agent Harmon?"
"Why are you making this so difficult?”
“I’m just playing by the rules. If you don’t like the rules, choose another game.”
“This isn’t a game.”
“Depends how you see it.”
I saw it as battle. And he was an adversary. "The harder you fight me on this, the farther I'll take my investigation."
"You don't like having information withheld? Good. Now you know how we feel."
"What I don't like,” I said, “is your attitude. You seem to find this amusing.”
“Perhaps not amusing.” He failed to stifle the grin. “But I do enjoy holding all the cards."
"Get a good look at them. You won't have them long."
“Is that a threat, Agent Harmon?”
“Not a threat.” I opened the door. “A promise.”
Chapter 11
From Owler’s tree hole, I drove up Broad Street and turned left, cutting over to Franklin Street. As I pumped quarters into the meter, students from Virginia Commonwealth University were strolling down the sidewalk. Their callow expressions suggested my K-Car was a pile of hot elephant dung. Since I couldn’t disagree, my mood grew even darker.
And then I saw my sister.
In the campus art building, Helen was lecturing her students in one of the studios. Gesticulating her thin arms, she looked like a messy ballerina, her chestnut hair pulled into a hasty bun and secured with a chopstick. Her audience of grungy art students waited at easels, listening to the esteemed professor of painting. In the background, on the sound system, a pop singer whined softly. The room smelled of mineral spirits and unbathed youth.
When she saw me standing by the door, Helen's face disguised her irritation. She told her students to begin working, then walked over to where I stood and pointed down the hall. I looked back at the class. Half the students started painting; the other half looked like they were waiting for her to leave so they could set fire to the place.
“How have you been,” I said, following her down the hall. The sign on her office door read: Dr. Helen Marie Harmon, Ph.D. Professor of Painting.
"I really don’t have time for this," she muttered.
For seven years Helen had taught at VCU, and any day now I expected to hear she was chair of the art department. She fit this place like an iron hand in a velvet glove. In the mid-morning sunlight her big office was glowing, the yellow beams pouring through the ceiling’s Plexiglass panels.
She closed the door. Postcards blanketed the back. Fields of lavender awaiting harvest. Golden Tuscan skies. My sister was an expert on Vincent van Gogh, and she traveled the world proving it.
"You have that look," she said.
I described yesterday's events. How the neighbors on Monument Avenue called Wally, how he found her huddled under a blanket with all the windows open. The usual. If anything about our mother's mental health could be considered usual.
“And?" she said.
"And she’s writing all that crazy stuff. Those weird acrostics. And this morning she didn’t come out of her room."
Striding to the corner of the room, Helen dropped into a canvas director's chair. Her name was printed across the front, followed by "Ph.D.” Not the back; the front, where she could admire herself, too.
"Monument Avenue is just a bunch of stuffed shirts,” she said. “If those neighbors had any sense they’d listen to that music. Grow their minds. Nadine’s not the problem. It’s those people who need to remove the hair from their --"
"Helen, they have a right to peace and quiet."
"And I have a right to tell them to bug off."
"Yes. And it's a big help."
"Raleigh, what is the problem
here? So Nadine just needs to release some pent-up creativity.” Helen always referred to our mother by her first name. “Nadine craves expression for what ails her soul."
"It’s a bit more complicated than that.”
“It's not.”
“Anyway,” I said, trying to avert the old argument. “I thought you should know what happened."
"Uh-huh. Thanks."
She scowled. On someone so lithe, so very pretty, the crabby expression only made her more beautiful. Ethereal anger.
“What do you expect me to do?” she asked.
“Give her a call. Come by and see her.” My sister lived less than a mile away, but her visits were on the same rotation as Santa Claus.
“I don’t have time this week. I'm leaving for Amsterdam in two days."
"Go, van Gogh."
"Raleigh, for your information, I’ve been invited to a conference of internationally ranked scholars. I'm one of three keynote speakers."
"How can there be more than one keynote?"
"You don’t even care. But the rest of the world understands my work is groundbreaking."
How many times had I heard this? And how many times did I want to say, "You want to study a crazy person? Come by the house sometime."
She uncrossed then recrossed her arms. “You want me to cancel the trip?”
“Bring her some clogs. That’ll fix everything.”
“Don’t get high and mighty with me. You probably use her to practice interrogation techniques."
"Excuse me?"
She stood, and walked to the drafting table that doubled as her desk. For several moments, she pretended to read the papers scattered across the wide surface. Her way of telling me she was busy, I should leave. Helen was the classic passive-aggressive.
And I never wanted to make it easy for her. So I just stood there, waiting.
Finally, forced to say something, she said, "By the way, Milky Lewis is my student. Not yours.”
"Milky? What’s he got to do with this?"
“You called him, he said. I thought the ridiculous FBI stuff was over."
My sister. She was a master at changing the subject, especially when losing an argument. But if she wanted to talk about Milky Lewis, I was all for it.
"He is your student,” I said, “but the only reason he became your student was because the FBI picked him up. He’s a convicted felon. I have every right to contact him.”
She raised her chin. "I don't like it."
"I don't care."
She stared at me; I stared back. Holding our gazes, we both knew that blinking was conceding. Helen's eyes were almost turquoise, a shifting blue that depended on how she held her proud head. Glaring at those eyes, I heard the awful music from the art studio, trudging down the hall, kicking through her office door, the millionaire rock star despairing that life was hard.
She looked away. "All right." She shook a postcard in her hand. "All right, fine. Talk to Milky. Just don't bring me into it."
"Helen, you brought it up."
"Because you should see his face when he talks about you. It’s awful."
Milky Lewis was a twenty-two-year-old former crack addict and the best flip we got from last year's drug task force. He also suffered from a terrible stutter that unfortunately improved when I interviewed him—which made me his main contact inside the bureau. Crack did things to a brain, rotten things, and Milky Lewis's brain started telling him we were going to get married. He even picked out an engagement ring, and to this day, ten months after the task force had ended, guys in our office were still stammering, "Ruh-ruh-raleigh, will you muh-muh-marry me?”
Fortunately for both of us, Milky Lewis had other aspirations.
During our interviews, when words came with such difficulty, Milky sketched portraits of the people and places he tried to describe. They were good sketches – really good. When we busted the drug ring, Milky served four months on a plea deal, and I went to visit him in prison. I asked him to draw some pictures unrelated to the task force, then I took them to Helen. In what might be her single good deed of a lifetime, Helen convinced the dean of VCU’s art school to offer Milky a scholarship -- probationary—for two years.
A man who barely finished public high school, who dealt drugs for most of his life, now attended one of America’s best art schools. Free of charge.
"How's he doing?" I asked.
"His talent is very real, but still raw. It might stay that way. But he transferred into sculpture."
I nodded as if that was very important. "Is he around?"
Her aqua eyes flashed. "You cannot talk to him here."
"Why not? I'm practically his benefactor."
"You’re more like the Gestapo."
I sighed, heavily. My sister's politics were so far to the left Karl Marx couldn't catch her in a bullet train. But that’s why she was cruising up the academic ladder, perching like a snob among the egghead elite.
“So is he here?” I asked.
“No, he is not.”
I nodded, walked to the door, and told her to have a good time in Amsterdam.
Her stony eyes were as defiant as ever. She lifted her sharp chin and said, "I will.”
Chapter 12
That afternoon, I convinced my mother to come out of her bedroom by offering to drive her to the Pentecostal camp. On the twenty-minute drive, with Madame in her lap, she remained quiet.
I parked the big Benz in a grassy field near the tented tabernacle. Honeysuckle hitched the air and cicadas thrummed away their short, happy lives. In the long grass, amid pickup trucks and dented sedans and family vans, my mother's antique car looked as out of place here as she did. Circa 1966, the jet-black Mercedes had its original red leather seats and push-button gear system. The car was like a cherished family member and most collectors would probably insist I should commit hari-kari for leaving the vehicle roasting under a blazing sun. But I didn't have a choice. My K-Car was off-limits to civilians, including canines.
Walking beside me, my mother made her soft music, the silver bracelets tingling, her shoes clicking across the wooden boardwalk outside the tent. But she wore flats. Flats were a bad sign.
The tabernacle was an open-aired building with a peaked roof and no walls. On the big stage, a dozen women in cotton jumpers sang and swayed while another woman preached the Word. The preacher woman was both tall and wide and her thick neck was disfigured by a softball-sized goiter. Raising her meaty arms, she praised God.
The crowd cried, "Hallelujah!"
Tambourines rattled.
The electric organ took off, harmonizing with the cicadas.
The woman told them God was ready to bless their lives. Bless them, bless them.
"Glory, glory, glory!" cried the crowd.
I turned to look into my mother’s eyes. They still held yesterday's distance, as if her sight was directed inward. Around us people were pressing forward, dancing to the organ, praising the Lord, and shaking the tambourines. I leaned into her ear but had to yell to be heard. "Do you want me to stay with you?"
She glanced at the woman on the stage, then back at me. "Where will you be?"
I pointed to the seats above the dancing crowd. They were theatre chairs, donated by some movie house whose owner was miraculously healed one summer. The brown chairs lined the natural amphitheater protected by the tent. Beyond that the fields held the small dormitories that sheltered the seekers. Squeezing my arm before letting go, my mother wiggled to the front of the perspiring crowd.
I walked up the hillside and took a seat at the far end, out of the way. Several rows below, some ailing visitors perched in their chairs, waiting for the call to “lay hands.” Lined up together beside wheelchairs and oxygen tanks, they reminded me of maimed birds waiting on a sagging wire.
Farther down, in the middle of the crowd, my mother had raised both arms, and the silver bracelets ricocheted shine into the tabernacle. Her fingertips stroked the air, a blind woman trying to read the invisible face
of God.
Sometimes I wondered what David Harmon would say about this place, about his wife coming here for services. When they married, we joined his family’s Episcopal parish, St. John’s Church. Redolent with southern gentility and charm, the Harmon family had attended St. John’s since the 1700s. Back then, colonial Harmons helped raise the original rafters. There was a family pew, where we sat every Sunday, every high holy day, and for weddings and funerals of Richmond’s elite.
But when my dad died, we stopped going. My mother seemed to lose interest in seeing the people there, and I realized that after someone dies the most painful place on earth was the place where you worshipped with them. Sitting in that historic box pew, my dad's absence felt so acute that the hymns seemed to howl through my heart. I finally decided to take a break from Sunday services. But the break had continued without visible end, while my mother stumbled upon this unbound place of spiritual hope flourishing in the Virginia countryside like gathered wildflowers.
My first reaction to this place was fear: fear of people who spoke in tongues. Fear of men yelling about God’s power. And a strange fear of women so devoted to God they had submerged their personality. But I also enjoyed the service. They seemed to quiet the voices clamoring inside my mother’s mind, and the impromptu singing buoyed her spirit. This wasn't the place I'd choose for her, but I had witnessed the solace she discovered. Here she could sing and dance and shout for glory among people who didn't care which pew she belonged to, or whose people got to America first, or whether she was baking a roast for the church dinner. These people yearned for one thing and one thing only. A pure relationship with that part of the Trinity so often neglected in organized worship: The Holy Spirit.
And I was a coward about it. Slouching in my seat like a truant attending a matinee, I watched the goitered preacher woman. Tilting back her head, she exposed her physical defect with such courage that I couldn't look away. The tumor looked like a doorknob in her neck. She told God she loved Him. That she knew He could heal her. It was His glory, she said, stepping down from the stage and moved through the perspiring crowd. Her voice rang out in shouts.
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