“Ghosts?”
She nods. “You’re guilt-ridden. Staying there would only reinforce that.”
“I should be guilt-ridden. I’m guilty.”
“Of what?”
“This.” I sweep my arm at the ruins. “I threw this place together with spit and shoelaces, and here’s the result. You warned me that something like this could happen, the first time you were over. Remember? You were right. And you weren’t the only one. Anyone could see what a piece of crap this was.”
“It was an accident, Fritz,” she says patiently. “Don’t beat yourself up about it.” She stands, pulls me to my feet. “Come on. Hanging around here isn’t doing you any good.”
I slowly get up.
“Come on back to my place. Stay with me.”
I shake my head. “Not now.”
She takes me by the hand like I’m a lost child and leads me toward our cars. “Well,” she says, “at least one thing is resolved.”
“What?”
“The pictures you took of the murder. They don’t exist anymore.” She points back toward the house, where everything’s been consumed by the fire. “Without them, you don’t have any proof of that murder. You’re free of it, Fritz.”
I shake my head. “No. I’m not free.”
“But you have no evidence anymore.”
I lean against the side of my car. It’s hot from the heat from the sun and the heat from the fire. What I want more than anything right now is a beer. Lots of beers.
“I still have them,” I tell her.
“You still have what?”
“The pictures of the murder.”
She stares at me like I’ve lost my mind. “Fritz, I know this is a horrible, horrible time, but you have to try to think rationally. You can’t live in a dreamworld, not now. We searched the remains together. There’s nothing left here.”
“They weren’t in the house.”
“They weren’t?”
I shake my head. “I was so freaked with all that’s been going on that I couldn’t stay here, so I took off. And I took those pictures with me.”
“You have them with you?” she asks in disbelief. “Where are they?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why not, for Godsakes?”
I feel my car against my back. My computer’s inside. The scans of the transparencies are in the computer. But I don’t want her to know that. “For your own protection.”
She starts yelling at me, the way you yell at someone who speaks a foreign language, in the mistaken idea that if you raise your voice you’ll get through to them. “My protection? You’re the one that needs protection. You’re going ’round the bend.” She has real terror in her eyes, looking at me. “I’m scared, Fritz. I don’t know what’s going on inside your head, but I know you aren’t thinking straight, how could you be with what’s happened? You have to confide in me, darling, you can’t hold all this in. You’re going to explode. Fritz!”
I lean down and pick up a stone, toss it at my burnt-out shack. It hits a piece of hanging wood. The wood splinters, falling to the ground. Splinters—the shape my life is in now.
“Let’s leave it alone,” I say torpidly. “I need to go somewhere quiet, have a drink. Right now I’m too upset to think or do anything else.”
• • •
We go back to my mother’s house and have a drink. Screwdrivers, since it’s still early in the day and they’re easy to mix. Then another. I want to get drunk, blitzed, I want to blot out everything that’s happened. But I don’t, not even a buzz. My mind is clear as glass.
Maureen is drinking, too, but not at my pace. She’s doing it to keep me company, to make sure I don’t go off the deep end. I can see the fear and worry in her eyes.
After imbibing a sufficient amount of artificial courage I call my brother and sister, give them the awful news. Dinah, although shocked and heartsick, is relatively philosophical, considering the suddenness and randomness of it. Our mother had a full, rich life, and now it’s over. Accidents happen. She’ll see me at the funeral.
Sam, on the other hand, does not take the news well. He’s devastated, and, of course, harshly accusatory. Our mother’s death was all my fault, as far as he’s concerned. If I hadn’t fucked up in Texas I wouldn’t have come home, rebuilt the shack, etc., etc., leading to our mother coming down there to see me. I’ve been nothing but bad news for the entire family ever since I came back; ever since he can remember.
He’ll take care of the funeral arrangements. I offer to do it—I’m here, he’s in Baltimore—but he brushes me off. He’s a responsible adult, he’ll make sure things are done properly. Show up for the funeral, that’s all I ask of you, he tells me, alternately crying and yelling at me.
“Getting drunk isn’t going to solve any problems,” Maureen says after I’ve hung up on Sam and poured myself a straight shot of vodka. She isn’t going to handle me with kid gloves.
“I want to forget problems, not solve them.” I replenish my glass.
She gives me a stern look, but resists the urge to stop me. “What are you going to do now, Fritz?”
“Get through the funeral. After that . . .”
The weight of everything that’s happened crashes down on me. I’m limp, I feel like all my bones have turned to jelly. “I can’t talk about this anymore now. Let’s just be with each other, okay?”
She nods. “Okay.” She pauses. “That could have been you, instead of her.”
I feel like I should take on the trappings of an early Christian martyr, exiled to the desert with a hair shirt as my only garment. “You’re absolutely right. If it was supposed to be anyone, it was supposed to be me.” I pace the room in nervous agitation. “Whoever did it came here looking for incriminating pictures, like you called it. Before dawn, I’m sure—bastards like that are vampires, they always work under cover of darkness. And here comes my mother, an old lady who got up early, like old people do, making her way down here to show me what she’d been doing on her memoirs. She knew showing up here early was okay ’cause I get up early, too, and she didn’t like to be outside once the sun was up and it got too hot. She walked in on them, right into the middle of it, a lamb to slaughter.” I’m in agony, visualizing this. “Scumbags like whoever did this don’t leave witnesses. Then he set the fire to make it look like an accident. It all fits.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” she says, trying to assuage my pain.
I shake my head angrily. “You don’t believe the almighty James Roach masterminded this?”
She starts to answer, hesitates. “I don’t know. I guess he could have. Anyway, it’s over now.”
I shake my head fiercely. “It isn’t over. No way.”
She grabs me by the hair of my head, pulls my face around. “How much killing does there have to be before you leave this alone? That diplomat and Wallace, that’s one thing, but your mother . . .”
“I’m not supposed to do something about my mother getting killed?” I rail in anguish.
“No,” she says firmly. “That’s not up to you anymore. That’s for the police to take care of.”
“Fuck the police,” I fire back angrily. “They think this was an accident. Case closed, next.” My pulse is racing. “We’re being watched, we know that. Whoever did this had to be spying on my place last night, saw me leave, knew it was empty. I don’t know how long whoever did this was here, ransacking the place. Maybe hours. Roach knows I’ve been going by his property. That was the whole point of dragooning me over to his house, for Godsakes. To inform me he’s on to me, and to keep my nose out of his business. That night we were out there and saw those planes, he probably had his spies taking pictures of us taking pictures of them.”
Maureen shudders. “I’m beginning to understand how birds must feel when I intrude on their lives with my cameras and binoculars.”
“Which is why,” I explain to her, “if you don’t know where the pictures are, you’re not in danger. Or at least
, in less danger.” I reach out for her. “This is my fight. I know you want to be there for me, you are there for me, but I can’t endanger you, any more than I already have.”
She shrugs me off. “Fritz! Listen to your own words! If everyone knows we’re together, then whoever is doing this would assume I know everything.” She pauses to take a breath, so she can get down to the bottom line. “So—what are you going to do now, Fritz? About James Roach, the murder, Wallace. All that.”
“Do you mean am I going to let it alone?”
“Yes.”
I shake my head. “I can’t.”
Her body tenses. “What about me?”
“What about you what?”
“About how I feel, what do you think? The connection between us.”
“I’ve already told you everything. Everything except where the pictures are, and I’ve explained why I can’t do that.”
“There’s more,” she says with iron conviction. “There’s more you haven’t told me.”
“Like what?”
“How should I know? But I know there’s more.”
I feel like Sisyphus, pushing the rock up the mountain over and over. “We’ve already gone over this.”
“Even if it means getting yourself killed?”
“That’s already been decided,” I remind her again. “Now it’s a question of whether I take my medicine passively, or try to stop it from happening.” I take her hands in mine. “I know in my heart James Roach brought about my mother’s death, and I have to assume he masterminded the killing of the counselor, and Wallace as well. Someone has to shut him down, Maureen, don’t you get that? And I’m the only one who can, because I’m the only one who knows what he’s done.”
“St. George rides in on his white horse and slays the dragon.” She shakes her head forcefully, frustrated and angry with me, almost beyond words. “Do you really think you can stop him? Come on, Fritz, get real. Stop fooling yourself you’re someone you’re not. You haven’t done a very good job so far,” she blurts out hotly.
I turn away. That’s way too painful.
For her, too. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“It’s true.”
“But I shouldn’t have said it.” She reaches out for me, her eyes full of pain. “I only did it because it hurts me so much. I love you, Fritz. I’m terrified I’m going to lose you if you pursue this insane chase. I don’t want to lose you.”
“And I don’t want to lose you,” I say, my heart pounding. “More than anything, especially now. But I can’t stop. My mother was murdered! Fuck the cops, what they think. You know that’s true. I have to nail him. I could never live with myself if I didn’t.”
“You may not live, period, if you do.”
“Let’s table this for now, please?” I beseech her. “I have to put my mother in the ground. Let me get through that, then we’ll talk about the future.”
“Everything about it?”
“Yes,” I promise her. “Everything.”
• • •
It’s late. I walk Maureen to her car. She searches my face. “Are you going to be all right here by yourself?”
“I’ll be okay.”
I’m exhausted. I feel like I could sleep for twenty-four hours straight.
She leans over, kisses me. “You sure you won’t spend the night with me?”
I shake my head. “I need to be here tonight.”
She gets into her car. “Be careful.”
I go back inside. The house is physically no different from the way it was a day ago, but it feels alien. A tomb, already a relic from a past that will never again be revived. Mother was the last link.
Each room bears witness to her, to my father, to generations of the family. Some of the furniture is over a hundred years old. There’s cabinetwork from shortly after the end of the Civil War, refinished and repainted many times over the years, but the original design is as it was when Grant was president. God, what stories there are to be told.
Mary Tullis’s journal is in my car. I haven’t had the spirit to open it until now. I leaf through it, checking the condition of the pages. It had been underneath her body, protected from the flames.
A substantial life is told in those pages. Going back to before we entered the First World War, horse-and-buggy days in this area. People back then had to be strong to survive—only the strongest did. My mother was strong. She might have lived to be a hundred, the small seizure she’d had recently notwithstanding.
To die at her age is not unusual—it’s normal. But to die the way she did, that’s not common. It’s wrong. She did nothing to provoke it, that’s the worst part. The only thing she did wrong, in this case, was to be my mother.
I can’t let this go. Maureen won’t be able to understand that—she has no ties to this past, she only cares about the future. Her and me, healthy and safe.
My agenda, unfortunately, is different. It’s not of my choosing anymore—it has been thrust on me, a second skin I cannot shed.
I don’t know how much time passes—I’ve gone blank in my head. When the telephone rings it takes me a moment to realize it’s ringing here, in real time, not in some dreamlike place.
“Hello?”
The voice is tentative, as if not wanting to intrude on my anguish. “Fritz? It’s Fred Baxter. I figured you might be at your mama’s place.”
“Hey, Fred,” I say wearily.
“I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“Not hardly. I won’t be sleeping tonight anyways.”
“I’m sorry, man. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”
“Thanks. And thanks for calling. I appreciate it.”
I realize, talking to him at this late hour, that I don’t have many friends around here anymore. Like my siblings and me, those who could flew the coop as soon as they were able. The ones who stayed, like Fred, had fewer options.
“Listen, Fritz, I don’t want to intrude . . .” He pauses.
“You’re not intruding. It’s good to talk to someone.”
“I found out some stuff. If you’re still on the case,” he adds. “I understand if you aren’t anymore.”
“More than ever,” I tell him firmly. “That fire was no accident. Whoever set it murdered my mother. And I am going to nail the motherfucker who did it to the wall, if it’s the last thing I do.”
I hear his sharp intake of breath upon hearing my accusation. “When do you want to get together, then?” he asks.
“How’s about now?” I say, before I can think twice about it.
“You sure?”
“I’m not sleeping, and it sounds like you’re not ready to go to bed, either. I don’t want to inconvenience you, but if you want to, I can do it.”
• • •
Fred takes his coffee with milk and sugar. I lace mine with bourbon—Maker’s Mark, my mother’s house brand. Fred has brought a bunch of paperwork, which he lays out on the kitchen table. It’s almost midnight, not that time matters.
“Rampart Industries. Very convoluted ball of wax,” Fred begins, tracing his finger along the cover sheet, then flipping to the next page. “It doesn’t seem to be a stand-alone company. It appears to be part of a larger multinational consortium group that’s registered offshore, the Cayman Islands, Indonesia, Switzerland. And Russia.”
He takes a sip of coffee, reaches across the table for the bourbon bottle.
“You mind?”
“Help yourself.”
He tips an eyeball-measured ounce into his coffee cup, takes a drink. “Understand, Fritz, this is way out of my league. I’m into bail-jumpers, messy divorces, basic skip-tracing, you dig? Who pulled the knife on who. International finance ain’t my strong suit.”
“Mine, either. Just tell me what you’ve found out.”
“There’s a vein of gold in here you’re gonna want to mine.” He wets his finger, leafs through several pages until he comes to one he’s marked with a Post-it. He points to a name halfway down
the page.
I read over his finger. James Roach.
“James Roach.” I say the name out loud. I don’t need coffee now, or any kind of stimulants. “What does this company, or companies, do?” I ask. “What do they manufacture, sell, trade, whatever?” I’m pretty sure I know the answer.
Fred confirms my suspicion. “They’re importers, mainly munitions. And planes, ships, big-scale stuff. They have deals with countries like Libya, Iraq, North Korea. Which is illegal for an American company to do, but not a Swiss company, or a Russian company, or whatever.”
This dovetails into what Simmons had told me about Roach. If James Roach, who was almost indicted for exactly these offenses, is still involved in selling arms to countries we aren’t allowed to trade with, he’s a classic double-dipper. He’s also a traitor, if that’s true.
“This is dynamite.” I’m excited. “He could be in shit up to his eyebrows.”
“Maybe,” Fred cautions me. “And maybe not.”
“How so not?”
“These conglomerates”—he turns the pages, half an inch thick’s worth—“are interrelated, but they’re also separate entities, at least on paper. He isn’t officially connected to this company now, or any organization that deals with the State Department, Defense Department, any American agency. Everything he owns is in blind trusts. He can’t touch them, can’t influence them.”
“If he’s involved in these companies, he’s making decisions,” I say scornfully. “You know that, Fred.”
“Not officially, he isn’t. And there’s nothing in here”—he riffles the pages again—“that proves this company’s doing anything illegal.”
“But it could be.”
“Yes, it could be,” he admits.
“You think we can find out?”
“I don’t know,” he says pessimistically.
“It’s basically legwork, though, isn’t it?” I press. “Researching records, finding out whether there have ever been criminal charges brought against them, civil suits, government restraint of trade, stuff like that?”
“Some of it,” he agrees.
“I’ll give you a place to start looking.” I tell him about the charges that were brought against Roach, then abruptly dropped in the early ’80s, by former prosecutor Simmons. “Check up on whether Rampart Industries surfaces there,” I instruct him. “And if any of these other companies that are connected to it are tied in.”
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