Ghost Country

by Sara Paretsky

  She wandered the streets until dark, the backpack cutting into her shoulders, her hair and clothes matting with sweat in the close air. She hadn’t thought about how she might keep herself clean on the streets.

  Students passed, talking about grades and class requirements, couples went by with baby carriages or dogs. Mara felt more and more isolated, with no friend to call on for help, no relatives. She felt as though she’d come unbound from the planet itself.

  The midwestern summer does not ease at night. When dark came and Mara unrolled her sleeping bag near the chapel, the air pressed around her, warm and wet. Even so, she zipped the sleeping bag up to her chin, as though its thin down could keep the bigness of the night from crushing her. She lay stiffly, heart pounding, unable to relax. A furry shape brushed against her face and she gasped with fear. Her hands trembled so much she could hardly use them, but she managed to find her flashlight. A cat stared into her light with impersonal malignancy, then spat at her and ran.

  23

  The Fatherless Orphan

  OVER THE NEXT several days, Grandfather kept commenting at dinner on how wonderful Hilda—Mrs. Ephers—looked, and how pleasant it was that Mara had chosen to go away for a few days, to let Hilda settle in again. When Harriet wanted to tell Mephers the truth, that Mara had run away, Grandfather ordered her not to: the less Mrs. Ephers has to worry about right now, the better.

  It troubled Harriet that the doctor showed no interest in Mara’s whereabouts. Perhaps it was age: he couldn’t take histrionics, so he gave an indifferent shrug, oh, she’s gone to join Beatrix on the road to perdition. That’s what he said to Harriet in private when she suggested reporting Mara’s disappearance to the police, or hiring a detective to trace her.

  Mephers never asked where Mara was, or even mentioned the episode that had precipitated her heart attack. Infarct, Grandfather called it, heart attack is an unnecessarily dramatic expression and not descriptive. Infarct sounded vaguely obscene, Harriet thought, evoking bodily functions she couldn’t associate with the housekeeper’s iron posture.

  Mephers had lost fifteen pounds in her time away, but otherwise seemed unchanged. Despite her age she suffered no lessening of her powers, except to need a longer nap in the afternoons. In the mornings, after she’d overseen the start of the household for the day, she went to the rooftop pool and swam for half an hour. Dr. Stonds forbade her to do any heavy work, but it was clear to both him and Harriet that running their home was essential to Mephers’s well-being. Barbara, the woman from the agency who took care of their fifteen rooms, their food and laundry, without supervision during Mephers’s absence, quit the third day after the housekeeper’s return. Mexican, Mephers said with grim satisfaction. No work ethic. And made the agency send her a Pole.

  Harriet was surprised to find she wasn’t as happy to have Mephers at home as she’d expected. She kept wanting to ask about the letter Mara claimed she’d found, and the photograph of a man who looked like Harriet. Did you have a letter to Mother from France? Did Beatrix give it to you? Or did you intercept it in the mail and never show it to anyone?

  Harriet had argued with Mara, told her she was only imagining the photograph. Now she found herself wondering why she’d never noticed Mephers’s secretive air of triumph as she surveyed the apartment. Selena was gone, Beatrix was gone, Mara had disappeared. Only Harriet remained between Grandfather and Hilda Ephers. She began to feel vulnerable, as she had when she was seven: she needed to be on her best behavior or the two of them would make her leave.

  Harriet had phoned Cynthia Lowrie, hoping at some unconscious level to hear a friendly voice discuss her sister. Since it was Wednesday night, Cynthia was at Hagar’s House, distributing Bibles. Lowrie’s son, Harriet couldn’t remember his name, told her that with an unpleasant sneer in his voice. He grudgingly agreed to leave a message for his sister.

  At the shelter, Cynthia was watching the study meeting with a pained, anxious face in case any of the homeless women challenged or contradicted Rafe. Last week, after Luisa had disrupted the Bible class, Rafe yelled at Cynthia all the way home: you useless moron, I’ll never get you off my hands, what man would ever want to marry someone as lazy and stupid as you, Jared’s right, you look like a retarded cow, the kind of creature I buy and sell futures in all day long, you’re pathetic.

  Once inside their own door she’d tried to run to her bedroom, but he grabbed her and shoved her against the doorway, so hard that her right cheekbone was cut open to the bone. Cynthia stayed home from work the next two days, but didn’t try to see a doctor.

  Cynthia was starting to hate the whole idea of Jesus, since worshiping Him and praising His name brought her so much personal misery. On Bible study nights before going to the church she couldn’t eat. What’s in these potatoes that you’re not eating them, ground glass? that from Jared, home from college for the summer. Of course on your best days your cooking is kind of poisonous but I thought you were immune to it. By the time she and Rafe left for church she was usually on the verge of tears.

  Tonight’s session had been calm, calm for the setting, that is, for one of the women fell asleep in the middle of Rafe’s homily, while LaBelle kept crying over the fate of the dismembered concubine in Judges, refusing to believe that the passage was merely allegorical: the twelve pieces standing for the twelve tribes of Israel, who didn’t listen to God, and forfeited their place at His right hand to the twelve Apostles.

  Rafe repeated this allegorical meaning to LaBelle over and over, but she kept wailing, it almost happened to me, my boyfriend cut on me so hard I thought he was going to cut me into twelve pieces; I almost died, they had to put two hundred seventy-three stitches in me, the doctor, he said he never seen someone cut on so bad and still living.

  But tonight no one challenged Rafe’s authority outright. Despite Cynthia’s fears he felt a pitying superiority to the cut-up woman, rather than anger over her cries, so the ride home wasn’t marred by his hoarse shouts.

  When they got in, Jared, watching the White Sox on TV in the family room with his girlfriend Tamara, yelled, “That snooty sister of your friend Mara phoned for you.”

  “Hu-Harriet?” Cynthia gasped, looking at her father. “What—what does she want?”

  “How should I know? She doesn’t talk to peons like me.” He assumed a phony British accent to characterize Harriet: “Oh, could you take a message for me? Ask her to call Ms. Harriet Stonds when she returns.”

  Tamara, trained in obedience to Jared’s whims, laughed at his imitation and patted his thigh. Tamara was a nervous young woman, inclined to anorexia; Cynthia felt little jealousy of her glossy dark hair or skinny prettiness, since Tamara often sported more bruises than Cynthia herself.

  “Oh.” Cynthia looked at Rafe. “Do you mind—I wonder if something’s wrong—is it all right if I call?”

  “Suit yourself.” He opened the refrigerator in the family room. “We’re out of club soda in here, Cynthia: can you check the supplies occasionally, instead of spending your life mooning around? Go ahead and call Harriet Stonds, but don’t imagine I’m letting you go on any outings with them, because the answer in advance is ‘no.’”

  Cynthia brought a six-pack of club soda from the kitchen pantry down to the family room. She waited until Rafe had poured himself a bourbon and soda and settled in front of the game with Jared and Tamara. The Sox were behind by two runs, she noticed, wishing they would start scoring before Jared and Rafe got too upset.

  When she phoned, from the kitchen extension, her whispery breathlessness irritated Harriet. What possible attraction did this dreary creature hold for Mara? After a prolonged catechism, Harriet got Cynthia to reveal the substance of Mara’s conversation with her that afternoon. (I know she called you, Cynthia: you two have spent the last ten years encouraging each other to imagine you were ill-used at home, Harriet’s cold voice making Cynthia teeter once more on the brink of tears.)

  Yes, she sniffled, yes, she would let Harriet know if Mara phoned
again; and she’d better run now, Daddy didn’t like her to tie up the phone at night. When she hung up Texas had scored another three runs. She tiptoed into her bedroom and wedged a dictionary between the dresser and the door to hold it shut.

  At the other end, Harriet frowned into the receiver. Maybe Mara was right, maybe Rafe Lowrie did beat up Cynthia. It wasn’t natural for a nineteen-year-old girl to be so terrified of her father. Mara ought to live Cynthia’s life for a week or two, then maybe she’d know she was well off with Grand-père.

  During the week, after the bustle surrounding Mephers’s return wore off, Harriet became more uneasy about her sister. On Friday she had a call from Gian Palmetto at the Pleiades Hotel—just wanted to tell you that we cemented over that crack in the wall, and that homeless woman hasn’t been back. On the other hand, Brian Cassidy in the garage thinks he saw your sister there last night.

  Harriet drove around the wall on Friday and Saturday night, but saw no one, not even two homeless women hunting for Madeleine Carter in the recesses of the underground roads. As Harriet slowed her Acura to inspect the wall, Jacqui and Nanette slid into the shadows with practiced ease.

  On Sunday, accompanying Mephers to the eleven o’clock service at Orleans Street, Harriet waylaid Cynthia Lowrie outside the young singles Sunday school class. Cynthia, keeping a nervous eye out for Rafe, said no, she hadn’t seen Mara, her daddy didn’t like her hanging out with Mara since she got thrown out of Smith.

  Harriet, used to dealing with lying and nervous witnesses, thought Cynthia knew more than she was saying, and finally—using more gentleness than she usually mustered—got Cynthia to admit to a second phone call from Mara, to her office, Friday after lunch.

  “She was upset—she thought she could go to Iraq to look for her—your—I guess she’s yours, too—grandmother. She says your grandmother is really alive, she thinks Dr. Stonds paid off the newspaper to print a false report of her death. Only apparently you can’t go to Iraq these days. So next Mara wanted me to try to find a detective for her, someone who could hunt for your mother, who she says is also alive. Only of course I couldn’t.”

  Mara, you want a detective you go hire one, Cynthia told her on the phone, angry at the freedom her friend seemed to be enjoying. I’m going to get fired if they catch me making more personal calls here. Well, what about me? Mara demanded. I have to use a public phone in the park, I can’t even find a phone book.

  No, Cynthia told Harriet, Mara hadn’t said where she was staying, only that she’d had a difficult time at the State Department, where they wanted to know every detail of her private life: didn’t she know there was an international boycott of Iraq? what was her grandmother doing there, anyway? And Mara, terrified that they would report her to Dr. Stonds, had fled the building without giving her name, and phoned Cynthia.

  Harriet felt her shoulders sag: why couldn’t her sister know someone more focused? Not that Mara was so focused, either. Imagine going off the deep end like that, getting so wrapped up in her fantasies about Selena that she actually thought she could find her in Iraq.

  “Please, Cynthia, if she calls you again, will you let me know right away? I’m really worried about her. You and Mara always have indulged in dramatic fantasies, but this isn’t a game, you know.”

  And Cynthia, with a rare flash of spirit, retorted, “I know it’s not a game, Harriet. You and Dr. Stonds want to lock her in an insane asylum. How would you feel if that was you?”

  Harriet flushed. “Don’t be impertinent with me, Cynthia. All he wants is for someone competent to evaluate Mara. Naturally, she—and you—turned that into a threat of forced hospitalization.”

  Patsy Wanachs, the director of Hagar’s House, came down the hall just then. She was surprised to see Harriet in agitated private talk with Cynthia Lowrie. She made a pretext for stopping, to discuss the Family Matters seminar Rafe wanted to run at the church in early August.

  “I know it’s a spirituality session for businessmen, but I wonder if your father should invite some of the homeless men who come to Dr. Tammuz’s Friday clinic. It could show them some realistic options for taking charge of their lives.” And then broke off. “Oh, I’m sorry, Harriet—I didn’t realize you were in the middle of something important with Cynthia. This can wait.”

  “We’re finished.” Harriet turned on her heel and walked back to join Mephers in the sanctuary.

  Mephers didn’t so much have friends in the congregation as sycophantic well-wishers. These were clustered around her in the Stonds family’s traditional pew. Harriet took her seat and tried to attend to the sermon. The text, from the seventh chapter of Jeremiah, said that God would know Israel had amended her ways if she stopped oppressing the widow and the fatherless orphan, and stopped worshiping Baal and other foreign gods.

  Pastor Emerson preached for half an hour, with his usual sincere eloquence, on the many Baals Americans turned to: sex, money, power. “It’s not surprising that some women have revived the real Baals, or the Asherim, that the prophet preached against. Money and sex are poor substitutes for the living God. At the same time, truly taking on a commitment to Jesus is too hard for some, so they turn to goddess worship as an easy way out. Faith is a gift; grace is a gift; but they are not ours just for the asking, if we discard them as a spoiled child does his toys when they don’t do exactly what he demands. We need to strengthen each other in our quest for faith. Brother Lowrie thinks he has a way to help some of the men in the congregation on their spiritual journey. We all know Brother Lowrie’s a persuasive salesman—well, he’s persuaded me to let him hold a seminar here in the church, but he hasn’t got me to understand exactly what it’s about, so I’m going to let him tell you. Brother Lowrie?”

  Rafe bustled up the chancel stairs, furious with the pastor for his patronizing tone: if he ran this church, things would be different. He climbed up in the pulpit and began to wax eloquent on the Family Matters group. Men need to reclaim the home … Children don’t respect fathers, because fathers have ceded all authority…

  Harriet’s attention quickly wandered, back to her sister, this time thinking about Mara’s chants to the goddess Gula. The text for the sermon, on looking after the fatherless orphan, and not worshiping foreign gods—Jeremiah would probably warn Mara that she was going to bring serious wrath on her head, but wasn’t Mara—wasn’t Harriet herself—a fatherless orphan? Shouldn’t she receive compassion as well as wrath?

  24

  Breaking Camp

  DO YOU KNOW this girl, Professor?” The campus security officer shoved Mara into Professor Lontano’s office.

  Verna Lontano looked up from her computer. “Certainly, Officer. It’s Mara Stonds. What are you doing down here, Mara? Catching up on your goddess studies?”

  “She was camping on the grounds, ma’am, and claimed to be a student of yours.”

  The professor’s ironic eyes took in Mara’s dishevelment—the sleeping bag trailing from the sides of her backpack, her uncombed hair and heavy eyes—and sent the cop on his way. “You may safely leave her in my care, Officer.”

  There was a brief ceremony, the cop asking the professor to sign a form, the professor thanking him with a flourish, and then he shut the door on them.

  “Well, Mara? Did the air-conditioning break down on Graham Street, that you needed to seek refuge in the wide-open spaces of the South Side?”

  An hour before Mara’s head had been full of the buzzing that comes from too many days away from human contact. Now she felt a roaring from too much contact as fear, anger, embarrassment, chased each other through her mind.

  When the cop picked her up, Mara was sitting on her sleeping bag with her back against the museum, arms around her knees, rocking herself. After five nights under the bushes near the chapel she was feverish from lack of sleep, and lack of conversation. She couldn’t think clearly, couldn’t remember why she thought Grannie Selena or her mother might still be alive.

  Her first two days on the run she had tried to keep
clean, using the bathroom in one of the classroom buildings on campus. She tried to make a plan for tracking down either Beatrix or Selena. Then that woman at the State Department started acting like Mara was some kind of spy, like Mara wanted to sneak into Iraq and work for Saddam Hussein. Thanks a bunch, she felt like saying: travel eight thousand miles to work for another man on a heavy authority trip, just like Grandfather, except Saddam had a whole country full of places to lock people up in, instead of only the psych ward in a hospital. Instead, afraid that the official would call Dr. Stonds if Mara said too much, she took to her heels.

  If she couldn’t go to Iraq, couldn’t prove Grandfather lied about Grannie Selena, then Mara would find out the truth about her own mother. They all said Beatrix died when Mara was two. If that was so, how come her death hadn’t been written up in the papers the way everyone else’s was: hated daughter of Abraham, discarded mother of Harriet.

  Harriet always snapped at Mara, yes she’s dead, you stupid brat, I was at the funeral. Did you see her body in the coffin, Mara would persist, are you sure it was Beatrix they buried? Of course Harriet hadn’t seen the body: Grandfather had too much taste to expose everyone to the vulgarity of an open coffin.

  But that meant Beatrix might still be alive. It would be like Grandfather to dust his hands off, well, we’re rid of her, when his own daughter was still wandering the streets looking for food. But how could Mara possibly find her mother, after so many years? She didn’t even know the names of her mother’s friends, let alone the man who’d gone to bed with Beatrix the night Mara started her journey from ovum to unhappy teenager.

  Cynthia wouldn’t help her find a private detective—Cynthia thought she was playing a game. Or was jealous because Mara was finally taking steps. All those years they’d talked over how they would find Beatrix, or get rid of Rafe and move in with Cynthia’s mother, and Mara was actually doing—what? Dramatizing herself as Harriet and Mephers and Grandfather always said. Chanting to the goddess Gula, Mara knew deep down that was only to annoy Grandfather. But why couldn’t he believe her about that photograph she’d seen in Mephers’s room? Why did it always have to be Mephers or Harriet he listened to? She hugged her knees and rocked harder.