Catacombs

by Mary Anna Evans

  Faye didn’t want to talk to him. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. She wanted to find a place to hide until her hotel room was released to her, and then she wanted to crawl under the covers and stay there. She was as surprised as anyone when she broke into heaving, sobbing tears and couldn’t stop for a long, long time.

  Chapter Twelve

  Faye sat on the easy chair in her hotel room, wrapped in a comforter. She wasn’t cold, so she didn’t need it to keep her warm. It served more as a barrier between her and a world where people did terrible things. If she were a knight, it would have been her coat of armor. If she were a superhero, it would have been her force field. If she were an astronaut, it would have been her space suit.

  If she were a toddler, it would have been her security blanket.

  Once that thought had burned across her mind, Faye had no choice but to rip the comforter off her body and hurl it across the room. She wanted it to sound a crash as it fell. She wanted it to break something, but all it did was sink gently to the floor. Whenever the image of three dead children, wrapped in blankets and abandoned, crept back into her mind, she wanted to make noise. She wanted to shatter something.

  Joe picked the blanket up and folded it at the foot of the bed. “The doctor said you needed some rest. Those pills he gave you are beside the bathroom sink, if you need to take one.”

  “I don’t remember that. Why would I want to sleep?”

  Ahua had called a doctor when she suffered her little breakdown on the sidewalk, after coming up out of a space that had served as a mausoleum for children. He did this just before he told her that she shouldn’t tell the doctor or anyone else about the children, so she had to make up a reason why she was crying uncontrollably.

  Reliving that moment, she remembered that Joe was correct. The doctor had prescribed rest, giving her a few pills to help her sleep.

  Joe ordinarily slept like a felled tree, so he couldn’t quite wrap his brain around the concept of insomnia. He figured that if he couldn’t sleep, then he wasn’t tired. And also, he was deeply suspicious of pharmaceuticals, as young and extremely healthy people tend to be. If Joe was suggesting to Faye that she indulge in a little chemical sleep in the middle of the afternoon, then he was worried about her.

  “You’re upset about something you saw down there, Faye, something you can’t tell me. But it’s more than that. Did you forget that you were right next to an exploding bomb just a few hours ago? You’ve hardly stopped moving since then. If you got hurt in the explosion, I’m not sure you’d even know it yet. I can see those bruises all over you, even if you want to pretend like they’re not there.”

  If anybody but Joe had said this to her, she would have indulged in some cheap-but-emotionally-satisfying sarcasm and said, “Really? Tell me again where the bruises on my aching knees and elbows and face came from? I forgot.” But aiming sarcasm at Joe would have felt like…oh, dear, now she had let the phrase “like slapping a child” cross her mind and she was going to need to start crying again. Maybe one of those pills would be a good idea, after all.

  She remembered saying to Ahua “But you say you need me. Why are you sending me off to sleep?” knowing even then that her bruised and tear-stained face answered that question for her.

  He had said, “Because I’ve got plenty of investigating to keep me and my people busy, and because you look like you might collapse any minute. You just did collapse, actually. I’m not interested in breaking any archaeologists. Tomorrow, we can talk more about that room we saw.”

  “What about Liu?” she had asked. “She didn’t take finding those bodies too well, either. Are you sending her off to cool her heels, too? That’s her family history down there. I think you’ll have to fist-fight her if you don’t loop her into everything you do that relates to the Chinese underground.”

  “Too true. I told her to rest because I’m going to need her later. I hope she takes my advice.” His eyes had raked over her face, giving it the kind of once-over that she figured he usually reserved for suspects. “Go take one of those pills the doctor gave you and just let go of all of this. Leave the world for a while. Then come find me in the mobile command station tomorrow morning. Come early, like seven o’clock early, because I like to make the most of my days. If I were you, I’d find a way to sleep and make the most of my night.”

  So Faye did. Sort of.

  She took half a pill and ordered Joe to wake her up in three hours, just in time to go to Carson’s makeshift welcome dinner for his conference speakers. Carson’s day had been hellish, too. On a day like today, she wanted to support her friends. Just as the pill started making her feel loopy, there was a knock on the door.

  She should have let Joe answer it, but she was closer to the door and admitting weakness had never been her strong suit. She jumped to her feet and swayed, hoping the head rush would settle down before she keeled over. It did settle down, a little bit, so she staggered to the door.

  If she’d been completely sober, she would have looked through the peephole to see who was knocking on her door unannounced. She wasn’t completely sober, so she flung the door open.

  A woman in a crisp maid’s uniform stood there with one hand on a housekeeping cart and the other on the handle of a vacuum cleaner. She was fairly young, probably in her late twenties or early thirties. “I am so sorry to be late vacuuming your room, ma’am. It should have been done before you checked in. The problem this morning…” Her voice trailed off.

  “The bomb slowed you down.” Faye spoke slowly, trying not to slur her words. “Of course it did. Don’t worry about cleaning our room. We’re just about to take a nap. Just a li’l nap.”

  As the woman turned to go, Faye blurted out, “Do you have any of the little mints? The ones that go on the pillows at bedtime in hotels like this one? They’re delicious. I’d kinda like mine now.”

  The young woman reached a hand in her apron pocket and held out two mints. Faye was embarrassed now that she’d asked, but she felt like she should take them, so she did. She said, “Thank you,” then she couldn’t think of anything to add.

  Joe’s hand was on her elbow, ready to steer her to bed. Then the maid turned to go and Faye saw her in profile. The woman’s prominent nose and teeth were familiar, and so was her luxuriant hair, swept up onto the top of her head into a bun. Her name tag said that her name was Grace.

  “I remember you,” Faye said. “I saw you this morning, running from the bomb.” Grace was the maid who had been working closest to the blast.

  Grace said, “Ma’am?”

  Her voice was cool, but the expression on her face was not. She looked like someone scalded by the memory of red-hot chunks of metal and incandescent gases reaching out for her body and just barely missing. Her hand strayed to the wooden cross at her throat, and the reflexive search for comfort brought Faye to tears. She was seared by the memory of this young woman running for her life with a mop in her hand.

  Here Faye was, drugging herself so that she could take a nap and forget what she’d seen that morning, and there was Grace, working. There was Grace, offering to vacuum Faye’s floor. There was Grace, making ready to scrub her toilet.

  Faye didn’t know what to do, so she reached out for Grace’s hand. Holding it tightly, she said, “I’m so glad you’re okay. And I hope you get to go home and rest sometime soon.”

  When the door closed between them, Faye lurched toward the bedside table, looking for her purse. It wasn’t there. She lurched to the desk and to the easy chair that sat invitingly in the corner. No purse.

  Joe followed her, asking, “What are you doing? What are you looking for?”

  Tears were rolling down her face. “My purse. I need my purse. I can’t find it anywhere. Where is it?”

  “It’s right here by the bed, where you put it. Why do you need it? You were going to sleep. Faye, you need to sleep.”

  “I need
to leave a tip for Grace. A really, really big tip.” Now she was full-out weeping.

  “I’ll do it. Don’t worry. It’ll be a really, really big tip.”

  “And I need to call your dad and the kids. All day, I was going to call them and tell them I was okay.”

  “I told them. You can call them tomorrow. Dad understands and the kids don’t need to hear you like this.”

  Joe’s hand was back on her aching elbow, steadying her as he pulled back the bedcovers and guided her to a seat. She lay back on the pillow and let Joe ease her bruised legs onto the bed. He pulled the covers up to her chin and she tried not to think of motionless children swaddled in old, dusty blankets. She ignored the echoes in her head of brilliant light and terrible noise.

  Then the drug took her away. Darkness dropped over her like a blanket and she was glad.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Faye rose from her too-short nap, almost rested and almost sober. Her problems seemed far away, as if she were separated from them by a pane of bulletproof glass. She didn’t dread having dinner with Carson and his VIPs the way she had before her wonderful nap. Sleep truly was miraculous. So, apparently, were mind-altering drugs.

  Floating in a golden numbness, she got on the elevator with Joe and they rode it all the way up. Cully had been so kind to host the dinner. She was looking forward to seeing how movie stars entertained.

  Faye didn’t know what she’d expected, but when she got an eyeful of Cully’s suite, she knew for a fact that she had gone into the wrong line of work.

  The suite took up the entire top floor of the Gershwin Hotel’s North Tower, so Faye guessed she should call it a penthouse. This must be where oil barons stayed when they came to Oklahoma City to do business.

  The penthouse had a full kitchen, and she wondered why. Surely movie stars and oil magnates didn’t cook when they traveled. Then she noticed that the kitchen was a separate room with doors to close it off from the rest of the penthouse, and she understood. This layout was unfashionable in Faye’s world where open-concept kitchens were all the rage, but people who could afford caterers—or servants—didn’t want their guests to see how the party magic was made.

  The living room was made for partying, with two huge leather sectional sofas, an abundance of cushy chairs, and a concert grand piano. A dining table sat sixteen, and its sideboard was fully stocked with liquor. A wall of floor-to-ceiling windows brought in a view of Oklahoma City’s single brightly lit skyscraper, looming over downtown and obscured only by patchy mist and light rain.

  Through a doorway, she saw a plush conference room that also sat sixteen. It had a bar cart, also fully stocked, because heaven forbid that an executive be forced to walk into the next room to freshen his Manhattan. She would bet money that, somewhere down the long hall, a Jacuzzi also sat sixteen.

  Cully greeted her with a kiss on the cheek. “Did you bring your flute?”

  She began by saying, “I didn’t want to disturb people nearby,” but quickly converted it to an awkward “No, I didn’t” when she realized that nobody is nearby when your penthouse occupies an entire floor. Given the size of the piano, she guessed that the floor was soundproofed to stifle the noise from partygoers being serenaded by a pianist who, like the suite, was top-flight and rented for the evening.

  “Don’t forget that your anniversary gift wasn’t just the flute, Cousin Faye.” Faye’s heart fluttered at Cully’s reminder of their tenuous family relationship. “It was three flute lessons from me. Come by tomorrow after the conference is over for the day and we’ll get started. Until then—” he said, grabbing a flute lying on an end table “—let me give you a taste of what you’ll be able to do. Put your fingers over the holes like this.”

  He centered the middle three fingers of each hand over the wooden flute’s six holes, using his thumbs on the back to help support it. Then he placed his mouth over the whistle-like mouthpiece and blew gently as he put each finger down. Then he picked them up again in sequence.

  There was nothing fancy about what Cully played. Faye recognized it as a pentatonic scale, no different from the same sequence of sounds played on a guitar or a piano, but the flute’s pure tone was so haunting that the room fell into silence.

  He pulled a cloth out of his pocket to wipe the mouthpiece. “Your turn.”

  Great. Now she was going to have to make squawky noises in front of a crowd when Cully Mantooth had just made the same flute sing.

  When he saw that she had to stretch to reach the lowest holes, he said, “This is mine and it’s in G. Joe said your hands were small, so I made one pitched in A for you. Whatever you’re able to do on my flute, you’ll be able to do better on yours.”

  She blew into the mouthpiece, embarrassingly aware that Cully Mantooth’s famous lips had just touched it. At first, she heard nothing but wind. Then she made a weird sound like two incompatible notes fighting with each other. This went on for a while until, for no reason that she could tell, the sound resolved into a birdlike tone. It was wavery but it was there.

  She tried to do what Cully had done, putting each finger down and then picking each one up. Her tone would break at times and she’d have to struggle to get it back, but she loved the process of making the sound better. Faye wouldn’t mind if she never saw another sleeping pill, but she was as hooked by this flute as a newly minted addict who had just discovered heroin. If she’d been alone, she would have kept noodling until her lip muscles made her stop.

  “That was lovely.” Cully’s eyes were smiling. “And you enjoyed it, didn’t you? I could tell. My flutes soothe my mind. They keep me sane.”

  Faye heard Jakob snort and say, “Others might think different.”

  Cully ignored him and kept his eyes on Faye. Joe, too, was watching her with the goofy grin of a man who is certain that no man will ever buy his wife such an awesome anniversary present.

  “It’s like meditation, isn’t it?” she said to Cully.

  “Playing the Indian flute is about the music, but it’s not just about the music. It’s about all the people who ever played it before you. But you know that already. I can tell. For now, pick up the flute every time you walk past it and do what you just did. I’ll teach you some more tomorrow.”

  And then the moment of peace was gone and she was left with no comfort but the bleariness left over from her sleeping pill. The other partiers erupted into the kind of party talk that makes the air hum. Dr. Dell pushed her aside to take a look at Cully’s flute, exclaiming over its craftsmanship. When she finally gave the flute back to Faye and left to refresh her drink, Stacy Wong rushed up and resumed obsessing about the underground Chinese community.

  “When I saw you this afternoon after you toured the underground city, there were wet splatters on the shoulders of your shirt, so I’m thinking hip waders. Is it flooded down there? God, I hope not.”

  Faye wouldn’t have called what she did a “tour,” and she wouldn’t have called what she saw a “city.” Something about Stacy made Faye want to back away, but she resisted the urge. Maybe she was just suffering an emotional hangover from the day and a chemical hangover from the pills. She shouldn’t be hard on a woman with a quirky obsession, because she had a few of her own.

  Stacy took a big step into Faye’s personal space and said, “They said on TV that you found some bodies down there. Children. Three of them. They’re asking for anyone with information about missing children from the 1990s to come forward.”

  The 1990s. So Ahua had found out some things while she was asleep. Good. That’s what he was supposed to do. And somebody had told the press about the children, so she was apparently now released from secrecy where they were concerned. Still, she figured it would be wise just to tell people to watch the news if they wanted answers.

  “Did you see the bodies up close, Faye? Can you tell me anything at all about them?”

  This time Faye couldn’t h
elp herself. She did take a step back from Stacy and her ghoulish questions. Maybe the drug had addled Faye’s brain, but she began to wonder whether Stacy had arranged for a man to kill himself with a bomb so that she could have access to the place she’d obsessed about for years.

  Stacy didn’t seem to notice Faye’s step back. “I’m so intrigued that you found bodies from the 1990s down there. Do you think maybe that room was built later by somebody else entirely?”

  Faye was asking herself the same questions, now that she knew that the children might have been left there in the 1990s. Nevertheless, she wasn’t about to share her thoughts with Stacy.

  She closed her lips over the things she might have said, like: “I’m not sure why there were colorful drawings on the walls of that room” or “I’m curious about whether they cut that door into the sanitary line as a place to dump their sewage.”

  Instead, she said, “I don’t have a lot to tell you, Stacy,” and escaped to the dining room. There, she ransacked the ridiculously overstocked bar for something nonalcoholic that wouldn’t fight with the remnants of her sleeping pill.

  * * *

  The party didn’t last long. Faye wasn’t the only one who had started her day with mental and physical trauma. After an hour or so, Faye saw Jakob settle into one of the cushy chairs and doze off.

  Cully was still proving his acting chops by playing the part of a gracious host, but there was a sag to his shoulders. His smile, though still infectious, was slower to come. His charisma might be boosting his guests’ spirits and his showman-like ability to draw energy from an audience might be boosting his, but he was headed for a crash. His guests all needed to leave so that their host could stop pretending he was still thirty-five. Joe could see how things were, and he rose to his feet to signal their departure. Faye was so grateful.