Valley of Ashes

by Cornelia Read

  I related what I could remember about everything Cary himself had told me the night of the neighborhood meeting: missing spares, fucked-up invoices, how he’d wanted to get into the warehouse. Bittler having the only set of new keys.

  “And Mimi said Cary was locked into the place,” I said, “with no keys on him. He hadn’t broken in. Someone had to have been there with him. And who else but Bittler, right? If he had the only keys.”

  “Jesus,” said Dean.

  “Just tell Mimi. Tell whomever you can… people at work. They have to at least look him over then, right?”

  “Give me Mimi’s number,” he said.

  I did. Home and work. “Call her now, okay? Before you do anything else.”

  “I will.”

  We said our good-byes and hung up.

  I couldn’t face the idea of more time in the living room with Tweedle-Dumb and Tweedle-Outright-Fucking-Idiot, so I called the main number at the New Times, instead, and asked if McNally happened to be in the office.

  Sure, it was just after noon on a Sunday, but he was a newspaper guy. And we’re all pretty damn weird in the journo business.

  “Sure thing,” said the chick who answered. “I’ll put you right through.”

  There was classical music playing while she had me on hold. Some burbly Mozartian concerto.

  India was bending the plastic flowers in her Little Tikes white picket fence. Parrish was still checking the alignment of her Tonka tires by spinning them around, repeatedly.

  Gender-neutral, my girl. I felt good about that.

  And I also felt pretty damn sure the Officers Tweedle weren’t going to make shit for headway on Cary’s behalf.

  I knew if I stopped to let the full heft and weight of his death sink in—the fact of it—my resulting grief would be paralytic, literally. Full stop.

  And I couldn’t succumb to that. I had to keep functioning. Until Dean came home, at the very least.

  I had to keep it together—cook and change diapers and play “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” Tuck my girls in at night and get up with them in the morning.

  If I squandered an ounce of momentum now, there was no fucking way I could get it back.

  So don’t think, do. Gird your goddamn loins already.

  The only way to keep myself from falling apart over losing Cary was to concentrate on figuring out how and why he’d been killed.

  Mozart cut out mid-burble.

  “McNally,” said McNally. “Who’s this?”

  “Madeline,” I replied.

  “What’s up with you, this fine Sunday?”

  “There’s been another fire.”

  “I heard,” he said. Serious, now.

  “Friend of mine died in it.”

  “Shit. I’m so sorry, Madeline.”

  “I need your help.”

  “You got it. Where and when?”

  “My house, as soon as you can get away.”

  “You’re on Mapleton?”

  “At Nineteenth. House with the Christmas crap still up, all over the porch.”

  “House number’s right here on your résumé,” he said. “You need me armed?”

  I could practically hear the grin in his voice—like I’d just picked him first for my kickball team. But he wasn’t exactly kidding, either.

  “No,” I said. “Or at least not yet. But I’d really dig it if you could get these dopey fucking cops out of my living room.”

  “Names?”

  “Wes Wyckoff and Diane Bryant.”

  McNally snickered.

  “Piece of cake,” he said. “Be there in ten.”

  He made it in seven.

  41

  I’m not exactly clear on how McNally managed to clear the cops out of my house so quickly. One minute he was standing in the living room doorway, grinning at Wes and Diane, the next he had them out on the front porch, an arm draped across each of their backs.

  A couple of words at a time drifted back into the house, barely audible.

  His tone was familiar, reassuring. I heard him say, “grieving,” and “keeping her chin up, for her little girls’ sake,” and, finally, “anything you need, anything at all… day or night.”

  By which point they were waving good-bye from my front walk, grins still plastered across their goofy faces, each of them gripping a copy of his business card as though they’d just scored a Golden Ticket from the hand of Willy Wonka himself, for chrissake.

  He didn’t leave the porch until they were driving away in their unmarked sedan.

  “Damn,” I said when he sauntered back into the living room. “That was like watching somebody take down a couple of particularly dim-witted calves at a high-end rodeo. Zip-zip, all four hooves lassoed and then you just yank it tight and tip ’em right over.”

  “Rope-a-dope,” said McNally. “Good thing they’re stupid.”

  I collapsed onto my sofa. “And, as my farmboy-genius husband would say, they’re going to be about as much use as tits on a bull, aren’t they?”

  “Wes and Diane?” he asked, dropping into an armchair. “ ‘Tits on a bull’ garners them entirely too much credit.”

  “Well, that’s just fucking great. My friend’s dead, Mimi won’t talk to me about it, and the cops they send over have about as much intellectual gravitas as inflatable Bozo punching dolls.”

  “Pretty much the size of it,” McNally agreed.

  “So what the hell am I supposed to do now?”

  “You’re a journalist, Madeline. You’re supposed to go out and investigate.”

  “I’m a restaurant critic, McNally. With toddlers.”

  “And yet you seem to have a disturbing familiarity with arson, plastic explosives, and the Radio Shack parts one might require to successfully blow up a helicopter. From a remote location.”

  “Au contraire, mon brave. I once tried to get a kid who knew how to do all that to read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and write a term paper about it. A task at which I failed, by the way, in rather spectacular fashion. And I’d hightailed it out of my job at that school before said kid had stolen the requisite C-4, much less duct-taped it to the fucking helicopter.”

  McNally grinned. “That so?”

  “Yes. That’s exactly so.”

  “You seem pretty calm about it.”

  “It was a shitty job at a shitty school and the guy who died was an evil asshole. Not that I condone murder.”

  McNally cracked another grin in my direction. “All the same, you strike me as a resourceful woman.”

  “Good thing, too. Since I’m going to be single-momming it with a couple of one-year-olds through Tuesday, the day after which I’ve gotta show up at a funeral. It’s going to be a goddamn miracle of resourcefulness if I can even find a babysitter by then.”

  “I’ve got a niece,” he said. “Junior at CU. Good head on her shoulders. She charges ten bucks an hour, and I happen to know she’ll be free this Wednesday afternoon.”

  “How?”

  “Because we had an appointment to go rock-climbing from noon to five, but I’m about to call and tell her she’s getting stood up.”

  “You, McNally, are a prince among men.” I pointed toward the office French doors. “Phone’s right through there. Tell your niece she gets twelve an hour: hardship pay for watching twins.”

  He flashed me the high sign, walking off to dial.

  “After that,” I called out toward his retreating back, “you can help me nail the guy who killed my pal Cary.”

  He was through the office doors already, but his voice carried back toward the living room, loud and clear: “I’m a doctor, Jim, not a magician.”

  I shook my head.

  You’re a journalist, McNally, and I need you to kick some investigative ass.

  It was noon, by the kitchen clock. Time to check diapers and make quesadillas.

  “Hey there, Susannah,” McNally was saying. “This is your uncle Jon-o. Listen, sweetie, I need to hit you up for a big, big favor…”

&nb
sp; 42

  The girls were fed and napping upstairs, and McNally was riding shotgun as I typed up my neighborhood-arson-meeting piece at the desk in Dean’s home office.

  “ ‘Cajoled’ isn’t really a great verb, there,” he said, pointing at my computer screen.

  “Backseat writers are a woeful pain in the ass, McNally. Anybody ever cajole you that?”

  He said it happened on a daily basis, then got down to business and read off everything relevant Buzz Rainer had said at the meeting, before grilling me on Mimi’s profiling comments.

  After that, I showed him the map I’d plotted the arsons on, back in the laundry room.

  “Okay,” he said, taking my chair at the computer desk for himself and opening up a new Word file, “now give me the straight shit on this Bittler guy. Everything you can remember Cary saying about him.”

  So I did.

  He could type almost as fast as I talked, but his spelling was for shit.

  “Your spelling’s for shit, McNally,” I said.

  “So you’ll fix it. This is just the frame. The starting point.”

  “Pretty much everything I have resembling facts, so far,” I said. “But you know more about this kind of shit than I do.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, for one thing, I’ve never been a firefighter. Jumping out of planes or otherwise. Even that first phone chat I heard you having with your pal Benny, you were way more studied up on the particulars than I’ll ever be.”

  “How?”

  “Accelerants, progression of the typical arsonist’s narrative arc, et cetera, et cetera. Let’s trade chairs. You talk, I’ll type.”

  I could hear the girls coming back to consciousness upstairs.

  “Mimi’s going to swing by around six thirty,” I said. “Want to stay for that? We could double-team her.”

  “Can’t,” he said, checking his watch. “Gotta hit the road, soonest.”

  “So what should I do next?”

  “Save this file. Let it roll around in your head for a while. Trying to feel out where the gaps are. I promise I’ll do the same.”

  “Got any more time free, between now and Tuesday?”

  “Not really. I’m following a story. Legwork kind of thing.”

  “Bummer,” I said.

  “I’ll keep in touch and bring Susannah over on Wednesday afternoon, though. Introduce you guys.”

  “That would be great.”

  “Leave me a voice mail at the office. Let me know what time you’ll need her here, all right?”

  “Absolutely.” Parrish lit into a true wail upstairs. “I gotta go do the mom thing.”

  McNally snapped me a crisp salute. “Better you than me.”

  Mimi showed up at six thirty on the dot, with a pizza and some beer.

  She chatted generally while I took two slices and ripped them bite-sized for Parrish and India, but once we’d adjourned to the living room I started asking her about where things stood, investigation-wise, before we’d even sunk our teeth into our own triangles of cheesy splendor.

  “Madeline,” she said, lowering hers from her mouth, “I just can’t discuss it with you. All I can say is that we’re working our asses off. And that’s the best we can do—having you mixed up in it wouldn’t help.”

  I was chewing already, so I swallowed. “Just promise me you guys’re investigating. Because the cops here are morons. Seriously.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “My kids could run a better homicide investigation than the idiots who showed up here to question me.”

  She started laughing.

  “Yeah, see?” I said. “And you totally know it, too.”

  “Officially, I shouldn’t comment,” she said.

  “Fine. And of course I’m being really rude, especially since you brought dinner. I’ll lay off you until dessert, anyway.”

  “There’s dessert?”

  “Um,” I said, “not exactly. Unless you’re a fan of Life cereal and banana slices.”

  “I’ll pass. But I appreciate the thought.”

  We were quiet then, while we ate.

  And then I thought about Cary, again. It hit me hard again. A rogue wave.

  I’d been trying to fill up the day with talk, errands, other people. Anything to hold back the enormity of what had happened. What I should’ve done, or shouldn’t have done…

  The pizza in my hand had suddenly lost all savor. I put it down on the coffee table. Atop one of the paper towels I’d grabbed for us to use as napkins.

  “You okay?” asked Mimi.

  “No.”

  She nodded. “Grief…”

  We looked at each other, then away.

  I didn’t say anything. Didn’t have to.

  “Try to finish that,” she said, pointing at my half-eaten slice.

  “In a minute.”

  “Okay.”

  Mimi had finished her own, but she didn’t reach for another.

  We sat there for another couple of minutes, just quiet. Companionable. Sad.

  “Have you eaten anything today?” she asked.

  I pointed at the paper towel in front of me. “Half a slice of pizza. There were bagels at one point, but I can’t remember if I ate one.”

  She got to her feet and walked to the kitchen, returning with a large glass of milk.

  I drank it.

  “I know you can’t tell me anything about the investigation—” I said.

  Mimi cut me off. “I met with Cary’s parents this afternoon. At the Boulderado.”

  “Oh, Mimi.”

  “Benny came with me.”

  My eyes started leaking tears. “I’m sure that meant a great deal to them.”

  I should’ve called them, myself. I just couldn’t face that. Not yet.

  “They’re lovely people,” she said.

  The tears backed up into my nose.

  “My husband and I lost a child,” she said. “My stepson Chris. He was fifteen.”

  My throat hurt even more, hearing that. “I’m so sorry.”

  We were quiet for another moment.

  I would’ve held her hand if she’d been sitting next to me.

  “It gets… easier,” she said. “Never easy, but survivable, eventually. Takes a long time to get to that point, though. And to see people, knowing that… how it feels at first, how much longer it’s going to keep hurting them that badly, before it even begins to dull…?”

  I looked at the girls, my eyes fully leaking.

  “You can’t believe what it feels like to have a child before it happens, can you?” she asked. “I don’t think anyone could explain how deep it goes.”

  “It’s like someone ripping your most essential organs out of your body and putting them into the world,” I said, “outside the protection of your body. Totally vulnerable.”

  And you love them so much—you’re horrified and entranced and besotted with it. To the extent that it’s like walking around without any skin on. And I mean walking through the scariest meatpacking district in the universe with zombie hookers throwing disease-crusted syringes at you and it’s three in the morning and you’re hung over and skinless, just bleeding and feeling every last thing—the slightest breeze, the gorgeousness of light spilling all golden through trees in the late afternoon, the ache of loss more profound than loss has ever been—with no goddamn protection from any of it.

  They’re blood of your blood, bone of your bone, and the most beautiful, terrifyingly lovely things you’ve ever beheld, ever tasted, ever caught the perfume of. Lapidary and sublime. And at any moment they could wander out into the street, or be hit by a comet. Or feel sadness and pain. And you can’t stop that. You can’t protect them from any of it: UV rays or E. coli or bone cancer or runaway trains or just plain heartbreak.

  I was feeling all that, but couldn’t have put it into words right then, so instead I blew my nose and looked at Mimi and said, “The risk of it—being a parent—fucking kills me.
And at the same time nothing’s ever made me happier. It goes to eleven.”

  “Hostages to fortune,” she said.

  I grabbed her paper towel and blotted my eyes. “Is that what that means?”

  “Francis Bacon: ‘He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.’ ”

  “ ‘Impediments’ my ass,” I said. “I mean, she that hath a husband…”

  I stopped speaking, appalled with myself.

  Mimi was trying not to smile. Failing.

  Then she looked at my face.

  I must’ve been wearing one hell of an expression—guilt and grief over Cary’s death, pissed-offness at myself for once again lapsing into the comfort of snark and complaint when there were so many bigger, worse things in the world than my whiny, self-absorbed little list of petty domestic grievances.

  The amusement that had been warming her features dropped away. She came over and sat down beside me, wrapping me in her arms.

  I snuffled into her shoulder. “Mimi? It’s just… I want to do something. I want to help… and there’s nothing I can do, and even if there was I shouldn’t because of the girls. And is this my fault? Jesus…”

  She shushed me, and patted me on the back, and didn’t seem at all worried that I was getting snot on her shirt.

  “Look,” she said, gripping my shoulders gently and making me sit up straight once I’d calmed down a little. “I know how much Cary mattered to you. And you have to know I’m going to do everything I can to find out what happened, but I really, really can’t talk to you about that as it progresses, all right?”

  “No, it’s not all right. But there’s not a damn thing I can do about it, is there? So I’ll just have to abide by it. Respect the way you need to do this. Trust you. And trusting anyone is fucking hard for me, for more reasons than I could elucidate in a single twenty-four-hour period.”

  “I understand that.”

  I swiped an already sodden paper towel across my nostrils. “Has Dean called you yet?” I asked.

  “He may have. I haven’t been near a phone all day. I’ll talk to him as soon as I can.”

  She helped me get the girls ready for bed, after that, telling me I should get some sleep myself while I could.