Burn: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries)

by Nevada Barr

  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 she 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 had 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.

  Once one was truly indifferent, life would be easy. Choices were easy when the outcome was of no consequence. Guilt would be a thing of the past; hope, a joke upon others. Once truly indifferent, would one be a god or a monster? Clare doubted she would ever find out. By the time she ceased caring for Vee and Dana, the earth would be a cold, still, lifeless rock drifting away from the sun.

  She toweled off and dried Mack as best as she could. Where he had been white and black before, he was ecru and brown and black. "We both have a role, Mackie," she said.

  Dye ruined David's expensive towels, and that pleased her till she remembered she didn't want to advertise the change of appearance. When she left, she'd take them and give them to the homeless people who gathered under the freeway overpass down by the docks at the end of this street. Police didn't see homeless people, or at least not as clearly as those more affluent.

  Showered and dried, she dressed in the shabbiest of the clothes in David's closet: a pair of immaculate Lacoste linen trousers in black and a collarless silk shirt with a DKNY label, silk boxer shorts, white cotton T-shirt, and black cotton socks. David was the same height as she, so the length of the inseam and the shirtsleeves was okay. He was beefier, and the clothing hung on her. Good. Her breasts, never large, were still significant.

  Thoroughly Modern Millie. Julie Andrews's breasts popping out of their bindings and sending the necklaces swinging. Julie Andrews in Victor/Victoria.

  The trench coat would have to cover Clare's until she could find something to strap them flat. Shoes were never going to transgender. David's were so big she'd walk out of them, and she might have a lot of walking in her future. Careful to keep her back to the corpse of her husband's other wife, she sat on the edge of the bed, put her running shoes on, and laced them up.

  Having freed Mackie from the bathroom, she carried him past Jalila's body into the front room and closed the door. At the kitchen counter she took the Halloween makeup from the bag. It was crude. If the charade went on for any length of time she would have to find a supplier and replace it. She darkened her skin a half tone, enough to make it look coarser, thickened her brows, and used the pencil to suggest a hint of sideburns, nothing obvious, just a place missed while shaving. Her disguise would never pass close inspection--she didn't have the time or the tools--but it should su
ffice for the moment. Below her lower lip she put a bit of double-sided tape and used the hair cuttings to create a tuft.

  Finished, she surveyed herself in the long mirror. The hands were wrong. She bit the nails to the quick and darkened the knuckles and nail beds. The total effect wasn't bad. To the casual observer she'd look like an underweight man of indeterminate age, with a bad haircut and nervous habits, dressed in expensive clothes.

  Next would come the cleaning: wiping her fingerprints from every surface, scrubbing her vomit from the carpet, vacuuming up every bit of hair and fingernails she'd missed.

  Suddenly she was so tired she could scarcely stand. Letting gravity do the work, she sat hard on the couch. Mackie jumped up beside her to give moral support. "I don't know if I can do this, little guy. I don't know if I can do anything." She started to cry, then stopped herself lest she wreck her makeup. Mack licked her face, then, evidently deciding she tasted too vile to kiss, laid his chin on her lap and sighed loudly.

  Resting her head against the sofa's back, Clare closed her eyes. In the semidarkness behind her eyelids she saw time running out, a comet tail vanishing over the horizon. "Okay," she said and sat up with a suddenness that dislodged the dog. "Screw DNA. I'm up for three murders. Who cares if the law knows I was here, right, Mackie?" With speed born of the necessity of not thinking and not stopping lest she never start again, Clare cleaned up the evidence of her sex change operation and left the rest of the apartment as it was.

  "Maybe our visiting freak left semen by Jalila's body," she said to the dog. "That's one thing they'd have a hard time pinning on me."

  The money she'd found went into the pocket of the trench coat; the cell phone she left on the counter. Mackie she leashed with the coat's cloth belt. The nightgown and women's underpants she'd arrived in she balled up and stuffed into the Walmart bag along with the towels, leftover makeup, and the hair dye bottles and instructions.