by Nevada Barr
He couldn’t last; Anna could feel his strength going from him. His energy had gone into fighting his demons, and there was little left for fighting even small women he found in his closet of a night, but he was bigger than Anna and driven by an inner fire. One arm freed, he snatched a knife from the countertop. It wasn’t big, a paring knife, and it wasn’t sharp; he’d probably rescued it from the trash, but Anna knew it would suffice.
She caught his wrist in one hand and with the other grabbed for his balls. Since Achilles had a heel, she wasn’t averse to using it whenever necessity demanded.
Except there were no balls.
Jordan moved his other hand to the haft of the knife and pushed it down toward her throat.
“What are you?” Anna screamed just as Jordan cried, “What have I become!” and went as limp as if he’d been shot in the back of the head.
Knife still in hand, he fell sideways. Curling into a fetal position, he began to wail, his mouth an agonized square, his eyes shut so tightly the lashes disappeared. The dog started to howl. Anna scrambled to hands and knees, snatched the paring knife from his unresisting fingers, and sat back, her shoulders against the door.
“What the hell is going on?” she muttered to herself. The crying of man and beast continued unabated. Knife at ready, Anna stood. Beside the mess of pornography next to the computer was a half-consumed liter bottle of water. She uncapped it and poured the contents onto Jordan’s face. Sputtering and gulping, he struggled to a sitting position and wrapped his arms around his dog.
“I was going to kill you,” he said, and the horror in his voice was unmistakable.
“So it seemed to me,” Anna returned. There was still too much adrenaline in her system to speak kindly. That and she hated being bested. It reminded her how short and fragile life was. “So, what? You’re a eunuch? Transgender but for the plumbing? A cross-dresser?”
“I used to be a woman,” Jordan said in a creaky voice that threatened another noisy breakdown. “Now I don’t know what I am.”
Anna stared at him/her for a while, trying to make sense of the words. Jordan looked like he—she—was slipping toward catatonia. To keep him from going comatose, Anna pushed. “What’s with the kiddy porn? I didn’t know it had much of a female audience.”
Jordan said nothing.
Anna walked past her into the bedroom and, keeping an eye on the erstwhile woman and the dog through the doorway, banged on the wall, hard and long, then returned to the front room. Geneva had to hear. Her bedroom shared a wall with Jordan’s apartment. The racket should bring her out.
Jordan looked up, eyes unfocused, as if the noise Anna had made had only just penetrated her fog.
“Geneva will come. What you’re doing is not only freaky-vile, it’s massively illegal,” Anna said succinctly. Her revulsion for this creature was not lessened because it was female, nor was it made worse; it was simply stirred up into a confusing mental nausea. Unable to decide whether Jordan needed an exorcist, a psychiatrist, a jailer, or an executioner, Anna settled on the police. “She’ll call the police for me,” she finished.
“No!” Jordan screamed, and his—her, its—eyes flashed crazy. For a heartbeat Anna thought the creature was going to go for her throat again. Jordan thought it, too. “My God” came out in a whisper, and arms held the dog more tightly. “Please. You can’t call the police. My daughters, my babies . . .”
Anna waited. Jordan seemed lost somewhere inside herself. The demons Anna had watched devouring her for the past few days were active. The woman probably hadn’t eaten for a while, maybe not slept either.
With a wrench that must have hurt her skinny neck, Jordan jerked her head up and forced her eyes to clear. The strain it was taking for her to pull herself together was evident in the tension in her face and shoulders.
“My name is Clare Sullivan,” she said with more firmness than Anna would have thought she could muster.
The name slapped across Anna’s mind with the force of a backhand to the face. Clare Sullivan had been America’s Most Wanted for two weeks. The newspapers and television were avid for details and, where there weren’t any, made them up.
“The woman who murdered her husband, his lover, and both her children,” Anna said slowly. “And this would change my mind about calling the police why?”
Intellectually, Anna knew she should be bolting for the door, screaming down the streets for 911, but, once the paring knife had dropped, all sense of threat had gone out of the atmosphere. The papers said Clare was a four-time murderess, and Anna’d thought her an addict of child pornography, but for some reason—maybe her love for the dog—Anna didn’t think it was true, or at least not all true.
Clare was maintaining her grip on sanity. “If you call the police, I will be arrested and sent back to Seattle to await trial. It’s possible I will be convicted. I don’t care about the conviction one way or another. What I care about is my girls. Dana and Vee. I didn’t kill them. I didn’t kill anybody. They were taken, and they are here in New Orleans. Somewhere. They have to be.” This last was in the merest of whispers.
A banging on the door made the women and the dog jump. Anna had forgotten about rousing Geneva. She opened the door. Geneva stood foursquare on the narrow walk, her nightdress as white and flowing as that of a Victorian damsel in distress. In her right hand she held a staff not unlike the one Moses was often depicted with.
“Hey, Geneva,” Anna said. “Jordan’s a woman.”
“I told you that. You bang me up in the middle of the damn night to tell me I was right?”
“Come in,” Anna said. “Jordan’s telling a bedtime story.” Geneva didn’t question, or even seem to notice, the bizarreness of the invitation. Anna rolled the computer chair to her, and she sat, looking like Judgment personified.
Jordan, still on the floor, still holding the dog, was changing. Her outline had softened, her mouth had grown fuller, her hands more graceful, or so Anna thought, watching her. Freed from the curse and burden of a lie, she was morphing back into a woman. Anna wished the Incredible Patty was here. This was voodoo at its best. Glamour, the mist fairies can put in one’s eyes to make them see what the fairies want them to see.
“I read you were an actor,” Anna said. Her first husband, Zach, had been an actor, and Anna had always had a soft spot for those who trod the boards.
“Yes,” Clare said simply. Anna was willing to bet she’d been a very good actress but wasn’t in the mood to give compliments so she kept it to herself.
“This is Mackie,” Clare introduced the dog. Then she embarked on a tale so twisty and full of turns it had to be true. She finished by telling Anna and Geneva that she’d hopped a train with some travelers out of Seattle and, when she’d gotten to New Orleans, kept on being a punk because nobody saw them, not really, and she could hide in plain sight and watch Bourbon Street, try to find the “nursery.” She landed a job at Live Girls Live and was trying to get information about who ran child prostitution in the city. She’d attacked Anna because of the yellow coat the man Mack followed was wearing. It was the same coat that she’d seen in her husband’s apartment, the one the Cajun and his cohort had taken away with them. When he’d gotten away, Clare thought she’d lost the one chance she’d had to track down her children.
When she finished, the four of them sat quietly, letting the telling and the hearing settle into their minds. After a minute Anna asked, “What’s in the garbage bag in the closet?”
It took Jordan a minute to follow the jump in the conversation. “Clothes,” she said, sounding confused.
“It smells like a sack of dead rats,” Anna said.
“My punk clothes,” Jordan told her. “If I don’t keep them in plastic, they stink up the apartment.”
Anna nodded. One mystery solved. She’d still look in the bag for good measure before the night was done, but she was no longer afraid of what she’d find. No one spoke for a bit, and Anna turned things over in her mind. Clare was a wanted fugitive
. Now that Geneva knew, she was sheltering a fugitive—a felony offense. Because Anna knew, if she did not report it to the police, she would be aiding and abetting a fugitive, also a felony offense punishable by jail time. Serious jail time. Even should she and Geneva be found not guilty for some reason, both would lose their jobs. The Park Service was not appreciative of rangers who broke, or even bent, the law. If she shared any of this with Sheriff Paul Davidson and continued not to report it, or convinced him not to report it, he, too, would be guilty of a felony offense.
Though Anna had a good feeling about Clare, whatever that meant, there was a great deal of impressive evidence—or so she read in the papers—that the woman had committed the crimes of which she was accused.
If Anna turned her in, Clare would be locked up immediately, her search for her children over. There was no evidence but the word of a woman accused of quadruple murder that her children were alive. The charred corpses from the house fire could be DNA tested, but Anna doubted there was enough proof on Clare’s side to get that done. Either way, by the time the results were in and a search for the children was begun, too much time would have elapsed to have much hope of finding them alive—or finding them at all. It was possible, if what Clare said was true and not the ravings of a crazy woman, the children had been sold out of the country.
Anna was also aware of the fact that if she turned Clare in, she and Geneva would have to physically restrain her until the police arrived. Already she was eyeing the door, and Anna could see the need to run building inside her. Even if she could escape detection a second time, if she remained in New Orleans, it would not be for long.
Geneva pushed to her feet, using the staff as if she were as old as the prophet. “I’m going to bed,” she announced. “Before I do, I’m going to take another Ambien. When I wake up I’m not going to remember a thing. I won’t remember you banging on my wall, Anna, and I won’t remember this little tête-à-tête. I tell you, when I take that stuff I draw a complete blank.”
With that she found the doorknob and let herself out into the waning night.
“What are you going to do?” Clare asked Anna.
Anna got an anxious feeling in her belly. Prison would be hell on earth for her. The thought of losing her freedom gave her the cold sweats. The threat of incarceration might not deter a lot of criminals, but it worked for Anna. She wasn’t going to risk it now for the woman on the floor.
She was going to risk it for two little girls who might still be alive. Three, she amended, remembering Aisha.
“You’re Jordan,” she said. “A creepy punk guy. If you’re anybody but Jordan, I’ve never even suspected it. I’m a good neighbor. I’m going to help you find the murderess’s children.”
TWENTY-ONE
Anna and Clare sat in cute uncomfortable chairs on either side of a tiny café table in the courtyard, each with a mug of coffee. It was nearly noon, but neither woman had been awake long. Anna still wore her lounging pajamas, pink with yellow duckies—her nod to the decencies. She slept nude. Clare was dressed, her little beard in place. The tattoo across her brow—the crown of thorns, which Anna had figured out was made with Magic Marker and powder—had been retouched. Anna appreciated that Clare kept up the masquerade even in private. Plausible deniability was the only thing that was going to keep her out of prison if this thing went south.
After Geneva had left to commit amnesia, Anna and Clare had spoken little. There was too much to absorb, too many risks taken or contemplated, to want to be with strangers. When Anna wandered out the following forenoon with her coffee, it had surprised her to find the other woman waiting. She’d more than half expected she would have rabbited and taken her dog with her. Part of her had hoped she had. That would have spelled the end to Anna’s moral obligation.
Sunlight filtered strongly through the live oak, casting sharp-edged leaf shadows on the brick. Mack lay between Anna and Clare, sharing his benevolence. “What color are you when you’re not undercover?” Anna asked him as she rubbed the toes of her left foot behind his silky ear.
“Black and white, like a zebra,” his owner answered for him. “When I was dyeing my hair, I got the idea that he might be put in the police be-on-the-lookout-for things. The cops that came when the house exploded knew he was alive and with me. He’s got a worse problem with roots than I do.”
Where fur met dog, there was a quarter inch of white in some places. It gave him an exotic, slightly out-of-focus look Anna found fascinating. She continued brushing his fur this way and that, watching the play of black and white.
Clare cleared her throat. Anna didn’t look up or stop playing with Mack. The burden of this conversation was Clare’s to carry.
“Last night I told you what I’d found out in Seattle,” Clare began, her voice in its male incarnation. Anna preferred it that way. Not only because it reminded her to maintain the charade on her end, never call Jordan “she,” “her,” or “Clare,” but because when Clare was Clare, the crazed mom, running on nicotine and hope, she was too fragile to deal with.
As Jordan, Clare seemed to genuinely be another person. Her acting skills were uncanny. It reminded Anna of when she was a kid watching Charlie McCarthy on television, seeing the wood being brought to life by the puppeteer. Jordan was hard-edged and full of anger; he smoked nonfiltered cigarettes and seemed fueled by rage. Jordan was still functioning on a level that Clare could not.
“I haven’t just been jerking off since I got to New Orleans. I’ve been trying to find out where the major houses are—not the street corners or upstairs rooms where these assholes stand in line waiting to get a ten-dollar blow job, but the higher-end houses where they’d be more likely to cater to a specialized, richer kind of asshole.”
Jordan’s vocabulary was stunningly different than what she’d heard of Clare’s the previous night. Anna doubted Clare swore. She was probably the sort of mom who would quietly but firmly take people to task for using foul language in front of her children. The script she was writing for Jordan was different. It wasn’t Clare who had intended to cut Anna’s throat, it was Jordan. That Jordan would kill if he had to—and found the strength to—Anna didn’t doubt. What she didn’t know was how schizophrenic Clare Sullivan had become, as if acting had begun to slide over into multiple personality disorder. She made a mental note to call and ask Molly if she’d ever witnessed such a thing.
“Candy—you must have met her in the women’s john—before she came to Dick’s Den—”
Dick’s Den must be the actual name of Live Girls Live, Anna guessed. “Classy,” she said.
“Yeah, real witty. The owner’s playing on the contrast with his dump and Rick’s across the street. Anyway, before Candy got on at Dick’s she was on the streets. Before that, from when she was real little, she remembers she was in what she calls a ‘fancy house.’ Candy’s retarded. You noticed?”
“Hard to miss,” Anna said. She drank her coffee and watched the sun play across her knuckles and the rim of the cup. This time of year it was rich and gentle, a mixture of honey and aloe and eternity spilling onto the skin. In a month or less it would be closer to molten metal. The sweetness and cruelty of the Deep South allowed the inherent insanity of the human condition to flower in ways it didn’t elsewhere. Artists, musicians, writers, alcoholics—creativity and excess and genius and decay found a home beneath the heavy branches of trees older than most American cities.
Probably in the clear cutting air of the Rocky Mountains Anna would not be having coffee with a cross-dresser accused of four murders. In New Orleans it was ceasing to seem particularly remarkable.
“The kid’s also been beat to shit more than once. She’s clean now except for pot, but she’s had her go-arounds with coke and horse. Only being broke and stupid has saved her from that good night. She’s also gotten cunning—and the mind of an eight-year-old, given the right circumstances, can be as cunning as that of a much smarter person. Almost a feral survival mode. Somewhere along the line, someone tol
d Candy to keep the secret of the fancy house in such a way she’s not only keeping it but has probably buried it.
“Since she likes me, I think she might tell me in time. I think she’d tell me now, but on some level she senses that’s all I want; that’s what this man is going to use her for, then abandon her like every other man in her life used and abandoned her. So she’s holding it back, keeping me with her. It’s not my style, bashing retards—”
Again the schizophrenic-vs.-professional-thespian question flitted through Anna’s mind and left a comet trail of alarm. Clare Sullivan probably never used the word “retarded,” much less “retard.” Seattle, liberal theater crowd, she was far more likely to refer to the intellectually challenged or mentally handicapped. Jordan used the word without a flicker of self-consciousness.
“But the one thing I don’t have is time. I can feel it running out. It’s like bleeding to death; I know the life is leaking out and if I don’t stop the flow, the girls will die.”
“Or worse,” Anna said without thinking.
“For Clare—for any mother—there is no ‘worse.’ If they’re alive, there’s hope. If they’re dead, it’s curtains. For everything.”
“How do you plan to ‘bash it out of the retard’?” Anna asked coldly. “Would you really do that?”
“I’ll do what I have to,” Jordan snapped. He threw himself back in his chair. His hand fisted and began beating a silent tattoo on his thigh. Sun flickered in the moving shadows and lit up his crown of thorns. For a second it looked so real Anna had to quell the urge to reach out and touch it.
The fierceness left Jordan’s face. “I didn’t mean bash it out in the sense of hitting or hurting her,” he said with the ghost of Clare Sullivan haunting his eyes. “I meant something not physical but, given what the poor thing has been through, no less brutal—threatening to abandon her unless she lets me hypnotize her.”