Ghost Country

by Sara Paretsky

  Her voice hadn’t changed in color or warmth. Hector couldn’t know she had violated her own standards of privacy and confidentiality in what she’d said. He thanked her for her advice in a voice as aloof and formal as he could manage and hung up.

  At the other end Harriet felt bereft and then angry. She’d reached out to him, told him her private business, smoothed his path with the courts. For no reason at all, except that his hesitant soft voice sounded vulnerable—and he hung up on her. She started to weep, which made her angrier, but she couldn’t seem to stop.

  A key turned in the door. She retreated to the shadows at the end of the room. Grandfather hated all displays of emotion, except, of course, his own. She waited for his tread to echo down the hall, the door to his room to shut while he changed clothes, and slipped into her own suite to clean her face. When she came out to greet him she looked calm as usual.

  “Home early, my dear?” He kissed her cheek and looked at her old clothes. “You planning to go out with some of your friends?”

  In deference to his formal attitude she usually wore a dress to dinner. “No, darling. I’m just tired, after this morning’s contretemps, and wanted to be comfortable.”

  “Hmm. Well, you look a good deal better in your jeans than your sister, but it does seem odd. You’re coming with me to pick up Hilda in the morning, right? I know that will make her feel strong enough to return here. This afternoon she suggested moving into a retirement community, to avoid friction with Mara, but I told her not to be ridiculous. This has been her home for—my God, has the time gone?—fifty-five years.”

  “Mara thinks you want to hospitalize her,” Harriet said.

  “Best solution,” he grunted. “She’s very disturbed. Wouldn’t last a day if we put her in her own apartment, won’t go to school, needs help that she refuses to get. She tried to turn to that prize loser Tammuz. I stopped that nonsense in a hurry, you can believe.”

  Harriet, who had planned to tell Grandfather about Hector’s phone call, found herself responding only with a neutral “oh,” adding the news that Mara seemed to have run away.

  “Oh, damn her, anyway!” Grandfather snapped, not questioning how Harriet knew. “Now we’ll be faced with some other dramatic crisis, just when Hilda is in the middle of her recovery. Where’d she go?”

  “I don’t know. I thought I’d phone Cynthia Lowrie after dinner to see if she knows.” Harriet played with a tassel on the lamp next to her, not sure how to ask a question about her mother. “You know, Grand-pere, Mara is terrified that she’s like Beatrix. Did you ever hospitalize her?”

  “Scared about turning out like her mother? She damned well should be. The only thing we’ve been spared so far is a reprise of Beatrix’s indiscriminate sexual proclivities. No doubt they will appear next.”

  “You never tried getting Beatrix medical help?”

  Grandfather’s frown turned his face into a terrifying mask. “Don’t tell me you’re going to start second-guessing my judgment now, too. I thought you at least knew that we were well rid of her.”

  Of course she was well rid of Beatrix. She knew that catechism by heart, because Grandfather or Mephers said it at least once a week all the time she was growing up, congratulating themselves on their good deed in saving Harriet. For the first time, though, she wondered if she was well off with Grandfather. Better off than with Beatrix, certainly, she wouldn’t disagree, but couldn’t she have had a little warmth along with the French lessons, the vacations in Europe, and the quiet good taste on Graham Street?

  21

  Saint Becca Slays a Dragon

  IT HAD ALL seemed so clear to Becca when she left the house. Her mother, hearing the side door, had come outside and asked where she was going. To Northbrook Court with Kim and Mimi, Becca said. Karen frowned with sleep-heavy eyes. She didn’t believe her daughter, but was too tired to start another battle. Be home in time for supper, was all she said, besides the usual, who’s driving (Kim’s mom, Becca said quickly) and don’t charge more than twenty-five dollars, you’ve maxed out your credit for the month.

  Karen was afraid her daughter was going off to pour her woes on her boyfriend Corie’s chest. She was afraid that Becca’s anger and confusion over her aunt could quickly turn into a more resolvable passion, and she didn’t want her daughter to have sex so young. If she’d known that Becca, picking up her bike, was riding neither to Corie’s nor Kim’s, but to the train station, that she was on the 11:49 to Chicago—well, how could it have made her more worried than the idea of inexpert teen gropings, no condoms, no pill, nothing between Becca and a baby but the laws of chance?

  After her outburst at her mother’s cruelty in not wanting to bail Luisa out of jail and bring her home, Becca had returned to her own room. She planned to keep vigil until her father’s return, but fell immediately asleep, waking only when Harry’s Mercedes crunched on the gravel below her window at nine-thirty. She ran downstairs to eavesdrop outside the breakfast room.

  “Dr. Stonds was at the station, too,” Daddy was saying. “You probably don’t remember, but he operated on Mother’s brain tumor.”

  Mom’s voice, a murmur telling Daddy that Becca was sleeping. Daddy’s rasping voice dropping to a husky whisper. Stonds’s granddaughter … crazy homeless woman … (then, exasperated, more loudly) oh, who in hell knows what Janice thought she was doing? Yes, she was drunk. No, I left her in jail. You don’t need bail, disturbing the peace they let you out on your own word, but they’re holding her a few days until she dries out … hospitalization … fed up …

  Becca crept back upstairs. Aunt Luisa in jail. His own sister. If she had a sister … No, she’d have a brother, he’d be in line to inherit Minsky Scrap Iron, to be crowned the new King of Scrap, as Aunt Luisa liked to call Daddy. There was nothing wrong with owning a scrap business, it was good for the planet, recycling other people’s rusty junk that they didn’t care enough to look after. When she first met Corie she almost beat him up for making fun of Daddy’s work. The kids in her school, their fathers were lawyers or doctors, they didn’t understand the value of meeting a payroll, but there was only Becca, and Daddy didn’t think he was being prejudiced, but, sweetheart, I just can’t see a girl in that rough neighborhood, It’s hard enough on me. Your grandfather never needed to use a gun, and I’ve had to take up marksmanship, not a job for a nice Jewish boy, let alone a girl.

  Becca was going to be a veterinarian. Besides her dog Dusty she looked after a trio of hamsters, a tank of goldfish, and two cats, Once, when Dusty cut his paw on a broken bottle that some jerk dropped in the park, Becca held him while Dr. Kalnikov stitched him up. Dr. Kalnikov said she had a natural rapport with animals.

  If she had a brother, she wouldn’t leave him in jail, especially if he was a sensitive artist, used to pampering. Mom was right, Becca hated Aunt Luisa showing up drunk, but Luisa needed looking after. Prostitutes with knives, she’d seen that on TV, women’s prison was no joke. What if someone cut Luisa in the throat and she was never able to sing again? Because of the Holocaust it was very important always to support human rights and civil rights; Harry and Karen gave a lot of money to groups like the ACLU and the First Freedoms Forum, but what about Luisa’s civil rights?

  It was at that point that Becca decided to take the train to Chicago. She looked up the First Freedoms Forum address and set out. By the time she reached the city her confidence began to wane. She had been to Chicago, of course, many times—to shows with her parents, down to the South Side to visit the scrap yard—but she’d never come alone. When she was with Karen the crowds seemed exciting, but buffeted now in the cross-tides of commuters she felt frightened. She had never noticed how dirty the station was, either, with its unwashed floors, Utter dropped everywhere. The vaulted ceiling was miles away. Some tired designer had stuck particleboard cubicles into the enormous space to house fast-food restaurants. They looked like the toys of an unkempt giant, dropped randomly between the benches and ticket counters.

  Becca
thought about turning tail and running home, but Aunt Luisa was still in jail. She had to show there was one Minsky with compassion. She gritted her teeth and asked a cop how to find LaSalle Street.

  Her courage ebbed still further as she waited in a cramped antechamber for someone to be willing to talk to her. When a young man in khaki pants and a rumpled white shirt finally came out, he did nothing to set her at ease. He stood over her with his arms crossed, looking at his watch, his files, anything but her, until she could barely get out any words.

  Before she finished he told her she should be at a legal aid clinic if she couldn’t afford a lawyer. Triple-F only took cases with some constitutional significance. Like what? Oh, free speech, illegal search and seizure, that kind of thing.

  “Well, my aunt’s free speech rights were violated,” Becca said wildly, picturing Luisa singing one of her arias in public, and being told to shut up.

  The young man gave an exaggerated sigh, and said that Luisa’s behavior constituted a public nuisance, not protected speech. Becca by this time was close to tears.

  Another attorney, a woman about her mother’s age, stopped to listen to them. “Just call over to the station for her, Stefan. Or I’ll do it if you’re busy…. Luisa Montcrief ? The diva? Are you sure she was arrested, honey?”

  “Yes, she’s my aunt.” And to her own embarrassment Becca started to sob.

  Stefan scuttled away as from an open sewer, which made the woman smile. “They sure don’t like any PDEs, do they? Oh—displays of emotion. Public or private depending on the circumstance. Stay here and I’ll make a couple of calls for you.”

  She handed Becca a box of tissues and disappeared into the inner offices, where she was gone for some time. Becca excused herself shyly to the receptionist and was directed to a ladies’ room. She washed her face and carefully outlined her mouth again in the black lipstick Karen hated.

  When Becca returned to the reception area, the woman was waiting for her. She had a man with her, an older one, who looked more like Becca’s idea of a lawyer than the young man: his hair was gray, he wore a suit, and he had a serious face with intense eyes. In fact, he looked at Becca so seriously that she thought at first he might be going to chew her out for wasting their time.

  The woman introduced him: Maurice Pekiel, a senior attorney, free speech expert. She herself was called Judith Ohana. Judith had persuaded the state’s attorney to release Madame Montcrief, but, looking Becca in the eyes, your aunt is quite ill; to be blunt she’s suffering delirium as the result of alcohol withdrawal. It would be quite unpleasant for Becca to see her now. In fact, the state’s attorney had released Madame Montcrief to a bed at County Hospital until they could calm down her seizures. After that, well, it would be up to Becca and her family to decide whether they felt like bringing her home.

  Becca flushed with misery … for her impulsiveness in riding downtown; for exposing herself, her family, to public scrutiny; for taking Judith Ohana’s time on a problem which now looked tawdry, not urgent; for being fourteen and not knowing what she thought or felt about anything in the world around her. She got up to leave, trying to mumble a thank-you so they wouldn’t think she cared about their opinion.

  “But you’ve brought a pretty little problem to our attention,” Judith said. “Mr. Pekiel wants to look into it. The woman who was arrested with your aunt was having a religious vision at that hotel garage. We might want to support her. It could be that her religious liberty takes precedence over issues of public disturbance—well, not to bother you with technical language—but it could be she has a right to be down there, if that’s the only place she can practice her religion. So we wanted to thank you for letting us know about such an interesting situation. And can you give us your phone number? It’s always possible we might need to get in touch with you.”

  By the time Becca got home she had forgotten both her fight with her mother and her airy lie about going to Northbrook Court.

  “I got Aunt Luisa out of jail. And she’s in the hospital, so don’t worry, she isn’t coming here.”

  A furious Karen demanded the whole story. By the time it came to an end, Becca was grounded for three days. She stalked to her room, haughty, a princess among commoners, then raced to call Corie and Kim, to show off what a heroine she’d been.

  22

  Free at Last?

  WHEN MARA WAS small, she hid clean underwear in her doll’s crib, along with nickels saved from her allowance, so that when she felt especially hurt and misunderstood she’d be ready to run away. She actually fled as far as the corner once, the first summer Harriet came home from college, when her efforts to dress up in front of her grown-up sister led Grandfather to hold Mara under the kitchen sink while Mephers scrubbed her face. Later, while they were fawning over Harriet, Mara rode down the service elevator on her trike. Raymond, the doorman, phoned up to Mephers, who caught Mara as she was starting to cross North Avenue.

  Mara had imagined running so many times that she packed quickly when the moment came: a few clean shirts, socks and underpants, tampons, toothbrush and deodorant, her passport. Instead of the nickels from her allowance she’d need real money. She’d saved over a thousand dollars from her job at the Pleiades, but she’d never had to pay bills, she had no idea how much or how little twelve hundred and forty-two dollars could buy. When she looked at apartments for rent in the paper, she was appalled by how much even the simplest place cost. She’d need to take a sleeping bag, so that she could sleep in the parks, her small flashlight, and a few other camping necessities.

  She tried to write to Harriet, started, deleted, started again, and finally abandoned the attempt. In the kitchen, her backpack over her shoulders, she helped herself to fruit and a few staples. Down on the street she joked with Raymond, who assumed she was heading on a camping trip, and teased her about running away. She wondered if she would ever see him again, and pressed a five-dollar tip in his hand, although she turned down his offer of a cab.

  She hadn’t figured out where to spend the night. Her first idea was Hagar’s House, since she was among the homeless now, even with her twelve-hundred-dollar bank balance. But Patsy Wanachs would only report her to Grandfather and Harriet. Cynthia had said, absolutely do not come to my place, and anyway, she couldn’t stay overnight with Rafe Lowrie and that prize creep Jared.

  The thought of the Westinghouse box near the crack in the wall passed through her mind, but she cringed from the memory of the previous night with Luisa and Madeleine, the arrest, the humiliations of the day. Luisa drunk … if that was what Beatrix had been like … of course, Grandfather probably made that up, he made up lies about Mara, probably about Beatrix as well. If Beatrix had defied him … but then why hadn’t she taken baby Mara with her? Harriet said when she lived with Beatrix after her father’s death, they lived on Spam and Bloody Mary mix. Mara wasn’t like that, not really, she got high out of misery, not out of the craving for alcohol that gripped Luisa, squeezing her until she turned mad with desire.

  Mara would go to Iraq and find out the truth about Grannie Selena’s death. What if Grandfather was lying about that, too, and Grannie Selena was really still alive, unable to come home because the doctor refused to send her airfare, or maybe had denounced her to the State Department as a spy for Saddam Hussein.

  Mara had read books about women who disguised themselves as men and traveled through Middle Eastern countries. Would those large breasts of hers lie down quietly beneath a man’s white tunic? She was sharing coffee in a desert tent, the men laughing at her jokes, as she quickly became fluent in Arabic. And then a telltale red stain destroyed the white quiet of the sands. She was stripped, and her breasts tumbled out like swollen cantaloupes.

  At a travel agency on Michigan Avenue she was surprised to learn that she couldn’t even go to Iraq, Since the Gulf War no one from any country in the world could go there, except as part of some special medical mission.

  “But my grandmother is in Iraq; she’s disappeared and someone h
as to find her,” Mara said.

  The travel agent didn’t care about Mara’s grandmother, what she might have done to be stuck in the Middle East. She tried to interest Mara in Israel or Turkey instead, but in face of Mara’s escalating fury, told her to go to the State Department, and gave her directions to the federal building downtown.

  Mara climbed onto a southbound bus—unlike Harriet she knew the buses, rode the L, part of her feeble effort to set up an identity separate from her sister. It was rush hour. People glared at her as she squeezed into the aisle, her backpack bumping against glasses and shoulders. She could see herself as larger than ever, her body ballooning across the aisle until it seemed as though her arms were touching the windows on either side.

  Finally escaping at Adams Street, trying to pick her way carefully through the crowd, stepping on feet, bumping a man with a briefcase who swore at her, all that misery only to find that the State Department offices closed at four.

  She began to believe her own story, that despite the newspaper report she’d read when she was fifteen, certainly despite Mephers’s tight-lipped assurances that Selena was most definitely dead, her grandmother was still alive. Maybe her mother, too. After all, Beatrix’s death had not even been in the paper at all.

  If she could find Grannie Selena, everything would be all right. Mara’s body would assume a proper shape, her life a real direction. She took a train to the University of Chicago, down to the Oriental Institute, the museum where she’d done her research on Great-grandfather Vatick. That was as close as she could get to her grannie tonight, but it was better than returning to Graham Street.

  Behind the museum lay landscaped grounds for the university chapel, a stone Gothic building as big as a cathedral. Among those bushes and plants she could set up her sleeping bag unnoticed.