"Hungry, love?" Glenda asked.
Harriet's eyes rolled to a computer screen, and her finger made some minuscule movements. A speaker emitted a loud, synthesized voice, startling me. I CAN'T EAT ANY MORE OF THAT SOUP YOU USE TOO MUCH SALT.
Glenda waved off her sister. "Then I'll bring you plain chicken broth, and you can quit nagging at me with that horrible voice." She shook her head at me, morbidly amused.
The slow, electronic words issued again from her sister's synthesizer. WILL YOU PUT MY LEFT ARM BACK ON THE MATTRESS IT IS BOTHERING ME.
"You can't feel anything, love."
PHANTOM PAIN PINS AND NEEDLES I CAN NOT STAND IT.
Glenda circled the bed, picked up the dangling arm, and set it on the sheets next to Harriet's side. As Glenda moved around, picking up dirty cups and plates, I stood in the bustle, overwhelmed and trying not to act it. A cord snaked from the computer monitor, leading to a digital telephone on the nightstand.
"You should have seen this cat on the TV. It jumped and jumped over a ball of yarn, and then the Jewish comedian said it was raining cats and cats." Glenda chuckled. "Cats and cats."
THAT SHOW WILL BE THE DEATH OF ME HA HA BAD ENOUGH TO WATCH BUT TO HEAR IT DESCRIBED HAVE MERCY IT IS NOT AS
THOUGH I CAN RUN OUT OF HERE.
Glenda waved a hand our way, dismissing us both from consideration, and withdrew, leaving me alone with Harriet.
Those dark pupils tracked over from the computer screen, finding me. Sentient, intelligent eyes, beautiful blue.
YOU ARE A FRIEND OF TRIS.
I assumed it was a question. Looking at her, I couldn't bring myself to lie. "Not a friend, exactly. I'm trying to find her. My name's Nick."
WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO FIND HER.
I sensed she was angry, but, unable to read tone, I felt unmoored. "My stepfather was killed seventeen years ago. I think she may know something about it."
I HAVEN'T SEEN TRIS IN YEARS.
A lie, based on what Glenda had told me at the door. It occurred to me that Harriet had agreed to see me only so she could find out what I was up to and notify Tris.
I cleared my throat. "Do you know where she is? I'd really like to talk to her."
Her muscles moved in fleeting twitches just beneath the papery skin. WE ARE NOT IN TOUCH.
"It's not only for me," I said. "I need to warn her about something." Those blank eyes stared back at me. "I think she might want to talk to me, too."
A long wait as that finger pulsed against the bud. And then, YOU COULD NOT UNDERSTAND THE FIRST THING ABOUT HER.
"I understand more than you realize."
Harriet's blinks were getting longer. She was having trouble holding her eyes open.
"Can I leave you my phone number to give her if she does contact you?"
Beyond her dry lips, her tongue worked, her jaw clicking with agitation. A spider thread of drool reached down and touched her shirt. YOU CAN DO WHATEVER YOU LIKE.
Her eyes closed and didn't open. Her hand slipped from the keyboard and she shifted slightly, her other arm sliding from the mattress again so the hand and forearm dangled over the edge. I couldn't tell if one of the tubes snaking through the sheets was feeding her air, but the rise and fall of her chest seemed to grow more regular. For a time I studied that cord running from her computer to the digital telephone, my heart pounding. Then I eased to her bedside.
The computer of course had a massively simplified interface. I touched the tiny bud, nudging the cursor over to the address book icon. Scrolling down, I looked under the L's. A few Landreth names I didn't recognize. I was disgusted with myself, breathing hard and trying to be quiet. I was terrified that Harriet would rouse and stare up at me with accusing eyes, and I would have not a single thing to say for myself. I searched farther down and found a single initial, T. And a phone number. Pulling a pen from the nightstand, I jotted it down on the back of my hand. Using a reverse directory, Induma could generate an address in seconds.
Harriet's breathing took on a slight wheeze. I started for the door but stopped after a few steps. I walked around to the other side of the bed and lifted her dangling arm. It was unbelievably light, like the wing of a seagull. I laid it gently by her side and tucked the sheet around it.
In the front room, Glenda sat dwarfed in an armchair, watching a dog with its head stuck in a red plastic bucket.
"She doesn't have long now." Glenda kept her eyes on the TV.
"Maybe Tris'll make it back to see her."
She scoffed.
Outside, the breeze was hot and smelled sharply of vegetation. I paused on the manicured front lawn, grateful for the openness, the shoved-down horizons, the bobbing palm trees. My chest felt tight and full, like I couldn't get enough air into it.
I stood there a few minutes, just breathing.
Chapter 44
The phone number sourced to a ground-floor apartment in San Fernando that backed on a French-dip stand and a mechanic's shop with grease puddles and weeds overtaking its cracked-up asphalt. The stale air made my shirt itch, no small feat since I was wearing one of Alejandro's comfortable Dri-FITs, excavated from Induma's coat closet. The heat of the pavement came up through the soles of my sneakers, and a street crew's mess up the block wafted over tar-bitter air.
The numbers had long fallen off the door, but their echo remained in the less-faded paint beneath where they'd been nailed. An air conditioner, hung out the window, dripped water and banged away like a jalopy. Competing for dominance, a TV blared-some scripted argument between talk-show participants, their voices fuzzed with static at the edges. I knocked.
A voice, less irritated than run-down, bellowed, "I'm coming, I'm coming."
A squat woman in her fifties opened the door, drying her hands on a stained apron, cinched unflatteringly between the bulges of her midsection. She wasn't obese, but thick, spreading with age. Her unwieldy breasts had descended to rest against her stomach. She glanced up at my face and stiffened, her hands freezing in the swirl of fabric.
She flung one of them up to shove ineffectively at her bangs, pasted to her sweaty forehead. Her hair was thinning, so I could see a shine of scalp at her crown. Behind her a dirty skillet sat on a stovetop, and the place reeked of bacon grease. A rainbow-bead curtain, still undulating from her movement, blocked a doorway to her right.
"Oh, sorry," she said. "I was expecting someone else." A patch of eczema had claimed her elbow and made headway up the back of her forearm. She scratched at the white, flaking skin, her nails giving off a sound that made my spine arch.
"Sorry to startle you."
"I wasn't startled." She emitted a nervous laugh. There was something familiar in her eyes-not their shape but the way they creased with her forced, semiaggressive grin.
"Ms. Landreth?"
Her nod reminded me of a squirrel frantically shelling peanuts. "How did you find me?"
"Through your aunt."
"Harriet?" Her eyes moistened. "You saw Harriet?"
"I did. Look, I understand why you're scared-"
"I'm not scared. Why should I be scared?"
"You've moved around a lot. You're hard to find."
"What are you, the Census Bureau?" She glanced behind me, checking for others. "What do you want?"
"I want to know about Jane and Gracie Everett. Do you remember them?"
"Of course I remember." Her hands found a tuft of hair and pulled it around to her temple. She started searching out and breaking off split ends, a repetitive, simian tic. Her hair wasn't long enough for her to see easily, and her pupils were strained so hard to the side it looked painful. The soft flesh of her arms jiggled with the motion. I wondered if she was on speed. "It was an awful thing. The kind of thing you don't forget."
I studied the face, looking to recapture that flash of familiarity, but it was gone. One of my friends from night school in Oregon had a baby whom she brought into lecture the next month to show off. I recall how the baby burbled and took on his mother's features
for an instant before they vanished back into generic babyness. I found myself straining now to reclaim that same type of satisfying deja vu.
"You saw the bodies being dumped?" I asked.
"Yeah. I was walking my dog. They pulled over up the street. Didn't see me. It was a dirt lot. I saw two guys. They looked Mexican. Central American, maybe. Anyway, I went home and called the cops."
It sounded rehearsed-all the requisite beats, well ordered, as if she'd been running over them in her head for years.
"And you saw Jane out by some trailers several months before?"
But she wasn't biting. "A month or so before." Her eyes ticked to me, then back to her hair. It was as though she was afraid to look directly at me. "Look, who are you? Why are you asking me questions? Can I see a badge or something?"
"I don't have a badge."
"Well, then," she said, and shut the door.
I heard the beads rustle, and a moment later I sensed a slight swivel of the closed Venetian blinds in the window to my right. I could not afford to wait around and have her call someone. Seeing no other choice, I started down the walk, the hot breeze lofting the smell of tar into my face. I could feel her stare penetrating my back.
Halfway down the walk, it hit me. Her startled reaction, the creases at the eyes, her high-pitched nervousness and reluctance to look me in the face-she'd recognized me right away. And was terrified I'd recognize her.
Isabel McBride. Bob's Big Boy. Off shift at 1:00 A.M.
My head bowed, just slightly, and I took a half step to my right, firming my balance. Seventeen years of assumptions, unraveling. Still, I could feel the eyes behind me, hidden by those Venetian blinds, boring into my back.
I turned. The blinds swiveled again, forming an impenetrable sheet, a child covering his eyes to hide. I rang the bell. There was no answer, just a dread-filled wait, augmented with continued talk-show broiling. I rang again. Waited. Rang again.
Finally the door opened. Jerkily.
"Isabel," I said.
Despite the deadening heat, she was shaking. "Nick."
I said, "Please talk to me."
Tears sprang up out of nowhere. Just two, spilling over the brinks of her eyes, sliding in straight tracks down her ruddy face. She jerked her head in a nod.
I followed her into the grease-tinged air, through the chattering rainbow-bead curtain. On the squawking TV, Jerry Springer reclaimed his microphone from an overzealous audience member. Across the bottom of the screen, today's caption: ARE YOU MY BABY'S DADDY? Isabel-or Tris- struck the power button as she passed, and we sat on unmatched couches shoved together to form a makeshift sectional. The post-Springer silence seemed so daunting as to be majestic. Through a doorway I could see a suitcase open on the bedroom floor, the clothes she'd started to throw inside.
I said, "Are you Isabel or Tris?"
"Tris. I'm Tris. Patricia." She was back to her hair, eyes crammed to the side, snapping off dry split ends and flicking them to the floor.
I'd rehearsed the tainted fantasy so often in my head since that night. Who knows how many times I'd reinvented Isabel McBride? Added an extra inch or three to her bust, imagined some trick of the tongue, conflated the firm hump of her ass with that of a model, a fling, some woman on the street? Everything possible to make her attractive enough to justify my slipping out that night and leaving Frank open.
She seemed to sense my thoughts. "Gravity takes over," she said defensively. "You lie down, your tits are in your armpits. You'll see. Wait till you hit forty, fifty. Men hide it better, but it's no prettier."
"It's dangerous right now."
She nodded jerkily. "I figured it might get that way. I've been careful." She snorted, nodded at me. "Not careful enough, I see."
"Will you tell me what happened?" I asked. "The real story?"
She looked away, her chin trembling. "You don't want the real story."
We sat in the silence a moment, and then I said, "You were hired to seduce me? To lure me out of the house?"
"I didn't know that was what it was for. I didn't know why. Money was tight, and I had a girl to raise. You weren't half bad-looking, so I said what the hell. Paid better than waitressing. They had me do things. I didn't know."
"You didn't ask."
"At first I figured it was some weird rite-of-passage kind of thing. Maybe your dad's friends or something." A mournful pause. "No, I didn't ask."
Every now and then I'd catch glimpses of her old self-the perfect line of teeth, a nuanced movement of her hand, a cord rising in her neck-but they'd vanish almost instantly. It reminded me of those magic childhood stickers that changed images when you tilted them. Now it's Superman, now it's Clark Kent again.
"How'd you know I'd go to Bob's Big Boy that night?" I asked.
"I didn't know anything. They knew you went there every weekend. So they helped get me a job there. You came in my first shift."
"Who's 'they'?"
"I don't know." She was still shaking. Her nails went back to that patch of dry skin and worked it in a circular motion. White dust fell like dandruff to the carpet. "I never saw the guy who hired me. He found me through my cousin. My cousin knows people who know people. Everyone has a cousin like that, right? The guy wanted a sexy woman. Experienced, but not a pro. I was. Sexy. Then."
"You were," I said, before realizing what a backhanded compliment that was. "How'd you guys talk?"
"It was all cloak and dagger. I drove to a fire road on Runyon Canyon-"
"At night," I said. "You were told to park, turn off the car, the lights, angle the mirrors away, and keep the doors unlocked. He was late. He slid into the backseat. He told you what to do. Where to find me, what I looked like, how to handle me, where to take me. You never saw his face."
"Yes," she said, bewildered. "I guess you've heard the story before."
"That part."
"I've been waiting. Seventeen years I've been waiting. For someone to knock on that door. You. Him. And I don't even know who he is."
"You never learned?"
"Do you have any idea what that's like? Never settling in. Keeping an ear to the ground. Waiting for God knows who. Do you have any idea what that does to a person?"
"Yeah," I said. "I do."
Her fingers fussed at her shiny scalp, her hair, trembling. She squeezed them hard with her other hand, lowered them into her lap. She spoke again, with a quiet sort of horror. "I will never forgive myself."
"For what you did to me? To Frank Durant?"
"That was the least of it." Her voice was hoarse. "The least of it."
"What else?"
"There were two others. Hired thugs. Tall and dark. Eastern European accents, like bad guys in a movie. Didn't talk much. A week or so after I saw you, they came and said they were sent by him. I was shaken. I saw the thing in the paper about the Secret Service man, and your name. Your mom's. We were just a few years apart, me and your mom." She leaned forward. "I swear to God had I known-"
I wanted to keep her on course. "The hired thugs."
"They said I had to find someone to take care of my daughter for a few days. They said they'd be back that night, that I'd be paid a lot of money. They said if I wasn't there, they'd find me. I didn't have a choice. I had a little girl to raise."
Her body continued to shake, almost violently now, as if it were coming apart. But she kept talking. "They brought me to a house somewhere. I didn't know where I was. Empty, no furniture. The floors were still just poured concrete. There was a woman there, with a newborn. She was still healing. They kept her in a back room, on a bare mattress. I took care of her. Fed her. Washed her. Helped her to the bathroom. She wouldn't let me touch the baby."
"Grace," I said. "Grade Everett."
"Right. Grade." Her eyes were instantly moist again. A dreadful calm came over her, and she stopped trembling, and when she spoke again, her voice was even. "I slept there in the room with them. And early the next morning, the men came in and took the baby. The woman scream
ed and screamed. Hormones on fire. You can't imagine how that is. I thought she'd never stop. She screamed for four hours. I was sobbing, pleading with her. Anything for her to stop. Just to stop."
Her breathing was shallow, and it made her words breathy. "They brought the baby back- Grade. They brought Gracie back. And Jane held her and rocked her and said she'd never let them take her away again. Her voice was screamed out. But the men got more and more agitated. I heard them talking on the phone when I came back from getting groceries. They'd taken the baby for another DNA test. I guess there was an earlier one, but they wanted to be sure. They were hyperparanoid. I guess one of the copies of the first test went missing before. It was a big deal. Something with the Secret Service."
"How do you know that?"
"I heard one of them say they'd dealt with a leak inside the Service. At first I thought military. But then I remembered the Secret Service guy-sorry, your stepfather-got killed the night I took you out. So you didn't have to be Einstein to do the math."
I struggled to keep up with it. Frank was the leak. To whom? Or did they mean he was a threat to go public? I wanted to keep her talking. "And then what happened?"
Tris hugged her stomach and rocked herself a little on the couch. She let out a low wail, which sounded weird since she was no longer crying or shaking.
I wanted to loathe her, but I couldn't. She'd signed on for her own fate, sure, but she'd been crushed by the machinery of this thing as much as I had been, one compromised choice at a time.
I said softly, "What happened next?"
Her voice was quiet, preternaturally calm. "Those guys were on edge waiting for the DNA results. They took the baby away from her. Kept her in the other room. Jane was too weak to get up, but I tried to plead with them. One of the guys even hit me. They thought she'd be more… docile without her baby." She whispered roughly, her face glazed. "They kept the baby away from her. Two days. I had to go in and feed her, Gracie, hold her when they got tired of her crying. But I couldn't get her to stop. The pressure to get her to stop, it was awful. Then they kept her alone in a crib. I spent most of my time with Jane, listening to her weep. Just weeping. We could hear the baby crying through the walls. That baby was crying and crying, and Jane's breasts were leaking milk through her shirt. It went on and on. There was nothing I could do. She pleaded with me, but there was nothing I could do. Her breasts got engorged, and they were leaking, and they were crying in different rooms, both of them, all the time. It was the most horrible thing I've ever experienced."
We Know Page 26