by Nevada Barr
The hair dye was dark brown—almost black—the stage makeup was the cheapest kind, stocked in children’s toy departments for face painting and dress-up, but it would do. People saw what they expected to see. To pass cursory inspection, Clare need only provide the expected clues: hair, clothes, roughened skin, facial hair.
Picking up the scissors, she stepped back into the living room, where Mackie slept under the glass coffee table. David had hung a mirror beside the front door as was his habit. Before exposing himself to the eyes of the world, he always checked his looks. That or admired himself one last time. Over the years Clare had come to suspect the latter.
Using the Walmart shears, she began hacking off her hair.
The Fugitive. Harrison Ford in a gas station bathroom.
Only she would do the last part in reverse. Where he had cut off his beard, she would glue hers on. Her hair was collar length, thick and light brown. There was enough natural wave to cover the butcher job she did with the scissors. When she’d finished, the effect wasn’t impressive, but it would pass. The back looked as if Mackie had chewed it off, but a ball cap—the ubiquitous head wear for American men—would cover most of it anyway.
Bending at the waist, she shook her fingers through her hair to get out the pieces. At her feet was what looked to be a sea of hair. DNA. Hers. Strands of it pushing into the carpet, wriggling down into the weave. Could they get DNA from hair, or did they need to have a bit of skin or root with it? She’d never played a forensic anything and so hadn’t bothered to learn about it.
“You’re a criminal now,” she said aloud. “You better learn to think like one.” Already her voice had slowed and cooled, deepened. Without conscious effort on her part, her careful articulation had gone; in its place was a rough edge of anger.
Letting the criminal mingle with the ghost of whoever she was becoming, Clare cleaned up the hair with a vacuum she found in a narrow closet in the kitchenette. David did not do housework. Ever. Not so much as put a dirty cup in the dishwasher or the milk back in the refrigerator. It was a matter of pride and entitlement that this was done for him and done by women. Women who were not paid. Clare’s husband knew it was the wife’s duty or, failing that, the daughter’s. He would not allow “a stranger in to do work that is yours.” Jalila must have cleaned for him.
Clare emptied the contents of the vacuum into the garbage disposal, wiped her prints off the vacuum, and replaced it in the closet. At some point she would need to wipe down the apartment and clean up the vomit by Jalila’s corpse.
“Don’t think about it now,” she told herself. Mackie rolled a brown eye up at the sound of her voice. White showed beneath the dark iris. The dog was worried.
“I’m rehearsing, not insane,” she said. When he continued to look at her with concern she added, “I don’t think you are in any position to judge me. You consumed the brains of the au pair.” The callous words startled her. They weren’t hers. They were the words of whomever she was becoming, a man without much to run on but hatred.
At some point the character she played would begin to sink down through the skin to the bones beneath, changing her stance and, to a lesser extent, the way she thought. Sometimes. Sometimes the magic worked and sometimes it didn’t. Between that avenue of escape and the life of Clare Sullivan was a great black place. Not a hole any longer, with its burned-out feel, like the smoldering hulk of a building destroyed by fire, but a huge obsidian mountain. A chunk of grief so solid and heavy it was difficult to breathe around it, difficult to stand upright.
The angry strength of the borrowed voice was a sham, and, as Clare moved into the tiny kitchen to begin the process of dyeing the remaining stubble on her head, she stopped and stood motionless, unable to move forward or back, too stony even to fall down. “The Fugitive,” she said to bring herself back to center, to remember her lines, the role she was playing. “Running from the law.” She had forgotten why she was running.
“To fight for Truth, Justice, and the American Way,” she whispered. Superman. Long ago and far away she’d auditioned for the part of Lois Lane, long ago and far away when she was trying to make it in the movies in Los Angeles. There was a chip in her front tooth, the legacy of a wild ride on the Giant Stride when she was in the fifth grade. The director—casting director—had eaten a cheeseburger while she read. When she’d finished he’d said, “Get your teeth fixed. We’re not casting Green Acres.” They hadn’t called her back.
Then it came to her. “Aisha.” Alive. Sleepy Dog. Vee alive. Maybe. Maybe was enough.
Freed from paralysis, she finished her journey into the kitchen and gobbed on the dye. For twenty minutes while it colored her hair, she sat on the white sofa staring at the blank television screen. In her mind she rubbed her hands through her hair, then smeared the dye over the couch and the walls, rolled on the white carpet like a dog, leaving inky smears on the artificial purity with which David had surrounded himself. In her body she was still as death, knowing that even a drop of the dye would tell someone—the police presumably—that she had been here, had colored her hair. If they found any remaining hairs in the carpet, they’d know she’d cut it. Her cover would be blown.
“My cover would be blown,” she said to see if she could say it convincingly. The words sounded as foolish in the air as they had in her skull.
“The goddamn bugs whacked us, Johnny,” Clare said. It was a line from the movie Starship Troopers. The worst line an actress had ever been made to utter. Meryl Streep would have a tough time making it work. Clare said it sometimes to amuse herself. She didn’t know why she said it now.
When the allotted time had passed, she stood and took two paces toward the kitchen and the sink. She didn’t so much stop as cease to move. What would she do when she had transformed herself? How might she begin with only a stuffed dog, a flesh-and-blood dog, and a connection she’d made to the words “Bourbon Street Nursery”? A connection she’d feared might exist only in her mind.
God bless the Cajun.
He proved the relationship between the two was not of her imagining. He’d come to the house; then he’d come to her husband’s hideaway. From the byplay between him and his boy-voiced pervert pal, it sounded as if they were the killers of Jalila. Then, too, they were the killers of her family, her house, her life.
There was the dark child, the girl who’d said “Aisha.” Alive. Because she’d wished to, Clare linked that with the salvation of Sleepy Dog and the narrow escape of Mack the real dog.
She had told the Donovan children she was going to find her daughters. A part of her knew that wasn’t entirely true. This part knew she was going to follow the voices she’d heard and she was going to kill the men that uttered them.
It wasn’t like she had anything else to do.
Clare was a woman who rescued baby birds, put spiders out rather than killing them, nursed and placed or adopted every creature her children dragged home. She’d never killed anything but the occasional cockroach, and even that she avoided when possible. But she would kill these men. It would feel good, like lancing a boil.
She was sinking into dreams. The sensation was of curling inward till all that remained was a dark stage with a voice in her ears and a narrow play of light where thoughts were acted out, then vanished. A brown study, but with her it was more than that. A black study.
“You’re going under,” she whispered so the physicality and the sound would tie her to the world outside. The pull of the dark lessened. In a scratchy sweet contralto she began to sing: “Wake up, you sleepyhead, get up, get up, get out of bed.” It was the song she sang to Dana and Vee when they overslept. That memory smashed her back into the white-white of David’s room.
Eyes clear, she noticed several things that had passed her by. The canary yellow coat was gone from the back of the sofa. Either the thugs had stolen it or they’d left it behind and came back to fetch it. And there was a door. At the end of the sofa nearest the kitchen was a door. A closet, Clare told herself, but s
he could not stop her heart from leaping in her chest—another anatomical reality—as, instantaneous with seeing the door, her mind grabbed onto the hope that behind it would be her children, alive and well. Was that how she would go through life now, yanking open doors for the lady or the tiger and getting, always, the tiger?
Clare turned the knob slowly and pushed. David kept it locked. Of course. A flash of anger, so sudden she was blind with it, raged through her. Weight back on her left foot, she smashed the sole of her right sneaker into the door above the lock and heard the wood splinter. A second kick opened it. Kickboxing. Years of it to keep slender and lithe after more than forty years and two C-sections.
No children waited. Though she’d known they would not be there, pain flared beneath the granite grief in her chest.
A computer desk, an executive’s chair, file cabinets, and two bookshelves crowded the tiny windowless space. David’s office. The one he’d had at home had been spacious and light, beautifully appointed, with a lovely view of the front garden. In his parallel life it was a co-opted pantry.
Forgetting the muck in her hair, Clare switched on the light and stepped over the threshold. If her husband had a secret life—and apparently he had a much more complex one than she had suspected—this was where he conducted the business arm of it. Forgetting the dangers of fingerprints and DNA, she pulled open the first of the file cabinet drawers.
In another movie she would have gone for the computer and clicked her way miraculously through firewalls and passwords. In this movie she knew the villain—and by now she was sure David, if not a murderer of innocents, was a villain of some stripe—and knew he neither liked nor trusted computers. It wasn’t the machine that offended him; it was the lack of secrecy, the sense that anything put on a computer could be stolen, read, posted, shared, infiltrated, hacked. Secrecy was power in David’s mind, and he shared only what he had to to keep the bills paid and the business in the black.
Though she’d never dared—nor, till now, cared—to snoop through his home office, she doubted he would have kept anything of import there. The same was true with his office down at the warehouses. Both places were too public. Here, in this locked, claustrophobic pantry, in an apartment not even his wife knew about, would be what he considered “sensitive information.” With David that could be anything from illegal activities to the results of his last colonoscopy.
The file drawer was so neat it could have been used as an ad for hanging files. None was off the runners; each was separated from each by a sixteenth of an inch. Subject matter was color coded. Each colored hanging file was labeled in David’s hand. In Arabic.
“Fuck!” Clare exploded. Grabbing a handful of files in sheer frustration, she flung them to the floor. “Fool!” she said more quietly. The tabs were in Arabic, but the contents were in English; business was done in English. Kneeling amid the scattered papers she began to look through them, trying to piece together what David had done or been or said or not done that had resulted in the bombing of her home and the vanishment—not death, please God—of her children.
As luck would have it, she’d snatched and tossed most of the green folders. Finances. David was not imaginative. Bank statements told her David, and so she and the girls, were quite well-off, rich in fact. His admitted monies, those he’d trusted to Merrill Lynch at least, valued his investments at three million seven hundred thousand dollars and change. The house was paid for—now it was ashes, but it had been appraised at another million two. In the folder for the local bank was an ATM card and a MasterCard. There was no way in the world Daoud Suliman would write down a password. Ever. Clare left the ATM and pocketed the credit card.
There would be a short window of opportunity when she might be able to use David’s card. Then it would only serve to tell the authorities where she was and what she was buying. The rest of David’s investments she couldn’t touch. She glanced through the next green file. Invoices and receipts and memos regarding fabric prices and shipping information, thread purchases and sewing machine repairs. She took a moment to look through the hotel bills. David had gone to New Orleans three times in the previous seven months. Reassured she was on the right track, she tossed the hotel receipts aside, as she did insurance, rent, taxes, interest, utilities, fuel, wages, and most everything else to do with the expenses of David’s garment manufacturing business. She did note, in the wages and insurance, there was no mention of Social Security or workman’s comp or overtime or medical, dental, or any other kind of assistance for the employees. David must have thought that in bringing them to America he’d done them one hell of a favor and now it was payback time.
Clare’s peripatetic brain stumbled over Norma Rae, but she wasn’t cast in that role today.
The little girl, Aisha, had been Arabic; Clare had to believe that, because that was all she had to go on. David brought workers in from the Middle East: Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. Though they’d never discussed it, nor would he have discussed it with her, she was pretty sure they were undocumented. Had David brought in the little girl? There had to be a connection with the Cajun and David and the bombing. Why else would the Cajun have been at the house when it went up? It would be too much to believe this guy from Louisiana, who was connected with a guy from Saudi Arabia, who happened to import women from Arabic countries, had an Arabic child with him in the middle of the night at a fire. The importation of women was in the mix somehow. David must have crossed some line, gotten on the bad side of the wrong people.
A thought banged against her brain with painful force. Had her husband been importing not one little girl but many? Was he participating in the ever-growing sex slave trade? Were Dana and Vee in the hands of monsters like the one who’d jerked off over Jalila’s corpse?
“Don’t think,” she told herself sharply, and, moving fast, she rifled through the rest of the green folders. She didn’t find out where the women came from or how they got to Seattle. The fabric came in by sea in shipping containers and was unloaded at the docks. Surely he didn’t bring the women over the same way? Crated like cattle?
In the last folder in the financial section was a white legal-sized envelope containing a sheaf of crisp, new one-hundred-dollar bills. David’s security blanket. This Clare would take. Cash left a less obvious trail than credit cards.
The red folders were three in number and contained personal information. David’s passport was there; so were Dana and Vee’s birth certificates, both those in English and certificates in Arabic that David had gotten for them.
Clare had seen the certificates—the girls were proud of them—but had no idea whether or not they were legal. There was her and David’s marriage certificate, and David’s citizenship papers. At the time they’d wed, the idea he married her to become an American citizen didn’t cross her mind. She was lost in his matinee idol looks and his charm. Since, it had crossed more than once. Below that was the marriage certificate they’d been given when David’s mother insisted they marry again in Saudi.
For a moment memory took Clare, and she sat on the office chair by the computer with a thump. She’d liked David’s mother and sisters. She spoke no Arabic, but they were fluent in English. It had taken her by surprise how much fun they were, how witty and mischievous. David’s dad undoubtedly spoke English as well, but he never did in Clare’s presence. He had cloaked himself in righteous disapproval and ignored her.
Shaking herself the way Mack did when he woke up every morning, as if he needed to shake sleep from him like water, she bent again to her task and opened the second of the three red folders. This one contained a document identical to one in the first folder. It was all in the beautiful and, to her, indecipherable Arabic writing, but she recognized it immediately. It was a marriage certificate just like the one she and David had been issued in Saudi. The only thing different was the name of the bride. Where Clare Flaherty had been written was the name Jalila. Jalila, Victoria, and Dana were the only words Clare could read in Arabic. The au pair h
ad taught the girls to write their names, and she had written hers. The three had been stuck to the refrigerator with magnets for six months.
Jalila wasn’t David’s paramour. She was his wife. By Islamic law David was allowed four. Clare was a co-wife in a polygamous household. As repugnant as that should have been to her, it made her like Jalila better, pity her less. Oddly it made her like David better. Certainly he was a lying, cheating, misogynistic pig, but he wasn’t taking advantage of the babysitter. That was something to his account.
The second document looked like Vee’s and Dana’s Saudi birth certificates. Just exactly like. Clare could make out the mother’s name, Jalila. The child’s was as much a mystery to her as the rest of the document. Aisha? Could Aisha—Alive—be David and Jalila’s daughter? That was a broad jump to a conclusion, but the idea made Clare so happy she couldn’t let go of it. If. If that little girl with the doll . . .
“Holy shit!” she said so loudly that Mack jumped to his paws and whined. “The little girl had a doll, a fancy doll, Mackie, like Vee and Dana had. The kind of doll Jalila made for them. Of course she was Jalila’s daughter. Mackie!” She scooped the alarmed dog up and hugged him and kissed him, then apologized when she saw she’d gotten brown hair dye on his head and ears.
It reminded her she’d best rinse the dye out of her own hair before it began falling out in clumps.
Having steeled herself to what lay in the bedroom, she picked Mackie up so she could rinse off his ears and hurried past Jalila’s body to the bath. If the Cajun had one of David’s daughters and was taking her to the “Bourbon Street Nursery,” was it so far-fetched to believe he might have David’s other two daughters and was taking them there as well?
Maybe. Maybe. For now that would be her truth.
Clare’s only thought had been to wash the dye out of her and her dog’s hair, but hot water sluicing ash and the stench of smoke from her skin fell like a blessing. It felt good.
That brought her up short, and she turned the water off with a vicious twist. Clare Sullivan had no right to feel good. The man she was becoming didn’t either, but he wouldn’t care. She had to practice not caring. About anything. Caring nothing for everything. Taking her soul out and burying it in sterile earth, the Nevada desert perhaps, where the bombs had been tested for so many years.