Catacombs

by Mary Anna Evans

  The painter hadn’t been portraying just any old broccoli growing in Eden. This was Romanesco broccoli and the miraculous internet that lived in her phone told her that it wasn’t commercially available in the U.S. until the 1980s. She would bet serious money that these paintings were from the approximate time that the bodies were left behind. But who were those three children?

  She turned her attention to the people painted among the plants. She was certain Ahua would prefer for her to spend her time on them, instead of on garden vegetables.

  There were faces everywhere, all of them in varying shades of light tan. She didn’t see any black people here, but she couldn’t say for sure that the people were all white. They peered out between leafy branches. They breached the water, their skin wet and their mouths laughing.

  As she studied one face after another, it struck her that there was only one adult man. He had a receding hairline and wore a short brown beard, and he was recognizable in every single scene that contained more than one person. She remained confused by the woman or women. They all had long dark hair, and they were all dressed alike. Perhaps there was one of them and perhaps there were two or three. Perhaps there were more. They were uncountable.

  As for the children, her first instinct was to say that they were all girls, because their hair was long and the smocks they wore were a bit like dresses, but that was a dangerous assumption. The brown-bearded man wore his hair long. He and the women (woman?) wore clothes identical to the children’s. Faye could assign an apparent gender to the adults by secondary sexual characteristics—a beard, breasts, swelling hips, a receding hairline—but not so for the children. She could be looking at multiple images of one child growing up, or she could be looking at a group of children the size of a kindergarten class.

  The presence of babies was variable. Sometimes there were only older children in a scene. Sometimes the man was holding a baby. Sometimes a baby was in the arms of a black-haired woman. Sometimes there were two babies being held by two adults. There were no pictures including three babies. This was the only thing that kept Faye from leaping straight to the conclusion that there was a link between the pictures and the bodies they’d found. Still, all three babies could be there, with different ones being shown in different scenes.

  The photos taken after the paintings were damaged were much harder to interpret. More than an hour passed while Faye looked from one screen to another, comparing the scarred, blurred, paint-splashed images to their original versions. It was painstaking work that required her to make a rough sketch of the room, locating and numbering each scar and penciling in the details of the images that had been obliterated.

  Eventually, she put her pencil down and tried to make sense of what she’d learned.

  First, the vandal had carefully wiped out every trace of the man. His face was gone from every scene where he had appeared.

  Second, the children were gone, and so were the babies. The woman or women remained.

  And third, random stretches of ivy had been sanded away, just a few inches here and there. Faye studied her sketch obsessively, looking for patterns. Sometimes she thought that obsession was her best quality.

  It took time, but her obsessive attention to detail paid off. It became clear that there was a single damaged area in each scene that didn’t involve a person. None of those areas were large, and they inevitably included just a few inches of painted ivy. Zooming in on a spot of ivy in a “before” photo, she saw what she had been missing. The ivy’s ground-away stems had formed a single word. A name.

  Faye wished with all of her heart that the artist had been self-aggrandizing enough to use his full name, but having his first name was better than nothing. Ahua should be pleased.

  While she waited for him to return, she studied the letters. The L had a sweeping curve that made it far larger than the lowercase letters that followed it. Still, he—and she thought that this name usually belonged to a man—had carefully formed each of those smaller letters, showing the self-esteem of someone who insisted that his signature be readable.

  Faye knew nothing of handwriting analysis, so she could draw no more conclusions from a simple signature. She could only look at the flowing script spelling out “Lonnie,” wondering who he was and what had happened to the people he’d painted so lovingly.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Ahua looked tired. He looked like a man who needed to walk away from this case until he’d had a chance to get over the sight of three little blanket-wrapped bodies. Judging by the sick feeling in the pit of Faye’s stomach, she estimated that a couple of years of rest and recuperation might do it for her. Ahua was a trained and hardened FBI agent, so maybe he could manage it in a year.

  “We just got some lab results back. Autopsy, too,” he said, scrolling through pages of data on his phone.

  “On the bomber?”

  “No. Well, yeah, that came in an hour ago. This is about the children.”

  No wonder he looked too tired to go on. “What did you learn?”

  “There was a reason they were all older than they looked. They were sick.”

  “What do you mean by ‘sick’? Are you saying that they died of natural causes?”

  “Yeah. The lab manager called me up to explain it to me. She said that all three looked like young toddlers, but their growth had stalled. The medical term for that is ‘failure to thrive.’”

  Faye had a hard time voicing her question, but she toughed it out. “Is that a nice way of saying they were starved?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. At least I don’t think so. It’s hard to tell much after all these years, but she said that they were neatly dressed. They were wrapped up carefully, and each of them had a well-worn toy in the blanket with them. And flowers. She got the sense that these children had been well taken care of. Loved, even. It was just that they had an inherited condition that eventually killed them all.”

  “And they all coincidentally inherited the same condition? Were they related? Did they all die at the same time?”

  “We can’t be sure about the time of death, but we do know that they were brothers. And they were hemophiliacs.”

  Faye’s knowledge of hemophilia wasn’t medical. It was historical.

  “Hemophilia? That’s the disease that Queen Victoria passed on to her children. And because she was Queen Victoria, those children married into most of the royal houses of Europe. There were a lot of sick princes in the next couple of generations. It’s an X-linked recessive disease, so women carrying the gene don’t ordinarily get sick. Men only have one X-chromosome, though, so if that one X-chromosome has the defective gene, then they’ve got the disease. In Victorian times, this usually meant that they didn’t live long.”

  “Correct. And wow. When you need to remember something historical, you really remember it.”

  Faye waved off the compliment. “But hemophilia’s treatable these days, isn’t it? Why would three brothers with hemophilia born in the late 1980s or early 1990s all die so young?”

  Faye tried to imagine losing three children, together or one after another. The thought hurt, so she quit trying.

  “Lack of money, maybe,” Ahua suggested. “Everybody doesn’t have Queen Victoria’s fortune. Although one would hope that they would have qualified for some kind of medical care if they were too poor to take a kid with a life-threatening illness to the doctor. Or it could’ve been a religious thing. There are people who don’t believe in doctors. They’d rather pray. If it was one of my kids, I’d do both.”

  Faye did her best praying when one of her children had a fever—her mamaw would have been proud—but she gave them acetaminophen between prayers. “You haven’t found any records of three missing brothers in the 1990s?”

  “Nope. It’s like these kids’ bodies miraculously appeared underneath Oklahoma City sometime during the Clinton administration.”

&nb
sp; “And I don’t think you ever told me how you zeroed in on that time frame.”

  “One of the boys was wearing a T-shirt celebrating the Dallas Cowboys’ 1994 Super Bowl win. Size 3T.”

  Faye’s son, Michael, had only just outgrown that size. “What kind of religion asks people to watch their children die of treatable diseases?”

  “Well, for one thing, it’s the kind of religion that keeps a low profile. That’s probably why there are no missing person reports and no death certificates. My best guess is that there weren’t any birth certificates, either. If they’d tried to have those children buried in the normal way, they’d have opened a serious can of worms, legally speaking. Disposing of the bodies was a real problem.”

  “You wouldn’t want to bury them in your backyard,” Faye said, “not even if your backyard was twenty acres. There’s too much risk that somebody, someday, will uncover three little graves and want to know who put three children in them.”

  Ahua nodded. “But if you somehow knew about the deserted chambers under downtown Oklahoma City and if you knew how to get into them, you’d have a safe place to leave your dead children.”

  “Hold on a minute. You just said something that gave me an idea. You said, ‘And if you knew how to get into them.’ We know of one person who knew how to get into those chambers.”

  “The bomber,” Ahua said. “You’re onto something, Faye. Let me think. Would their father have hemophilia? Or be a carrier? Could we ask the lab to look for that?”

  Faye shook her head. “The gene is on the X-chromosome. And men get their X-chromosomes from their mother. But he’ll have other genetic markers that he would have passed on to his children. If he’s the father, the genetics lab will be able to find them. But I haven’t shown you what I found in these photographs.”

  She turned to the computer and slid its mouse around to wake it up. The before-and-after photos of the painted room returned to the two screens.

  “Look here.” She used the mouse to point out the key photographs. “The person who vandalized the paintings sanded off the faces of the adult man and all of the children. The women were sometimes sanded away, sometimes splashed with paint, and sometimes left alone. I think this is a sign that the vandal found the women to be immaterial.”

  “Now, look at the ivy. If you look closely—and I mean really closely, because the painter was trying hard to camouflage this—you can read words hidden among the vines. In four places, I found the sentence, “Evil must be obliterated.” Other sentences appear, like “Set yourself apart from the world” and “A leader has been chosen and you must follow,” but “Evil must be obliterated” was a very important directive to somebody.”

  “When a man tells other people that they have to follow one particular leader,” Ahua said, “he’s usually convinced that he’s the chosen leader.”

  “You sure this person is a man?”

  “Not necessarily, but the bomber is. If we’re lucky, we’ll find out they’re the same person. Guess I’m banking on being lucky.”

  “I think you’re lucky. Because I believe I’ve found the artist’s signature, and it’s usually a man’s name. The vandal left the inspirational phrases alone, but almost all of the artist’s many signatures are sanded away.”

  She enlarged a photo that showed the signature of somebody named Lonnie hidden in a garland of ivy. “I don’t know who painted this, but his name is Lonnie.”

  Ahua was so excited that he pummeled Faye’s shoulder and held out his fist for her to bump. “Oh, yes. He’s a man. As soon as you pointed out that the bomber needed a brand-new pressure cooker gasket, I set some people to work tracking down that lead.”

  He looked down at the computer and scrolled for a moment, then moved aside so that Faye could see. On the screen were notes from another agent’s conversation with an online hardware retailer in Texas.

  Morris Elroy of Elroy Hardware says that he got an online order for a gasket for the model of pressure cooker that the bomber used, just three weeks ago. He said that he’d never sold a gasket for that particular model, which I guess doesn’t prove anything but it is indicative. The buyer mailed him a money order.

  This next part is key. The gasket was mailed to a Shirley Conroy in Yukon, Oklahoma. I sent some agents right over and they found a really big house owned by a really snobby woman in her seventies. She tried to shut the door in my agents’ faces and then got the vapors when they told her that she just couldn’t do that to the FBI. She says, and they believed her, that she’s had a handyman until just recently. He had a lot of things delivered that she thought he should have gone out and picked up himself. She eventually fired him for, in her words, “stealing a few measly boxes of nails.”

  Faye looked up from her phone. “Did the bomber pack nails in the bomb for shrapnel?”

  “Yep. Keep reading. She says that the handyman’s name was Alonso Smith. Sounds like an assumed name to me, so the name may not mean a thing, but Yukon’s a twenty-minute drive from the Gershwin Hotel. I think this is our guy. I’ve got a big team of people combing Shirley’s house for clues and she’s not happy about it.

  “Smith might be an assumed name,” Ahua said, “but Alonso’s not. Not when the paintings were signed by somebody named Lonnie. We’ve tied the paintings to the bomber. Good work, Faye.” He pounded her shoulder again.

  “So the paintings are tied to the bomber,” she said. “The three bodies were brothers, so that ties them to each other. If the painted babies that were obliterated by the vandal represented those three brothers, then the paintings tie the dead children to the bomber.”

  “Yes. And if we have a vandal who’s focused on eliminating Lonnie’s name and the faces of an unidentified man and some children, then I’d say the vandal is linked to the bomber.”

  “Going a little fast there, aren’t you?” Faye asked. “Considering that the bomber is dead. And so are the brothers.”

  “Yeah, but we don’t know that all of the children are dead. They’d be adults now, if the paintings were done in the nineties. And then there’s the dark-haired woman. Women? I can’t tell. The vandal didn’t bother to obliterate their faces.”

  “I’d say women. I think there’s more than one of them. Maybe the vandal knows for sure.”

  “Or it might mean that there’s no point in hiding the women’s faces because they’re dead,” he said.

  “Wow, Agent. Your job takes your mind into some dark places.”

  His face stilled, but he said only, “You got that right.” His eyes traveled to the computer screen and studied the photos. “So you think this guy knew how to get underground as early as the 1990s? If you needed a place to hide the bodies of three little boys, you couldn’t imagine a better place. It would seem like a gift from God.”

  Faye didn’t have a lot of answers when it came to religion, but she had an answer to that. “God had nothing to do with this.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Stacy Wong never leaves my mind. I see Stacy wherever I look. I suppose I always will.

  Stacy was never supposed to be caught in the fallout of Lonnie’s wickedness. She had no part in the evil that must be obliterated. Anyone could see that. She just came a little too close to ferreting out some secrets that could not—must not—ever see the light of day again.

  It was a hard slog through the storm sewer with a gallon of paint thinner, a gallon of white paint, and more sandpaper than I like to remember. And I did it while wearing Lonnie’s old boots, making my footprints untraceable to me.

  Everything needed to be perfect, and it almost was.

  I rubbed away and sanded off every single mark on those brightly painted walls that would have pointed the FBI to the family. Then I sanded off some more stuff, just to confuse them, and I splashed a gallon of paint around to confuse them even more. I bagged up the sandpaper, the empty cans, the brush, and the rags,
passing them through the metal door. Then I prepared to crawl through it myself and drop into the ankle-deep water.

  That should have been the end of it. And it would have been if Stacy hadn’t appeared at the open portal at just that moment, standing in the storm sewer and peering in. I will never forget the grief in the woman’s voice as she looked at the defaced paintings and shrieked, “Did you do this? Why would anybody do such a thing?”

  If Stacy had known what those paintings stood for, she would have helped me sand them away. Together, we would have dabbed gouts of white paint over every multicolored square inch that Lonnie had painted. If Stacy had known the truth, she wouldn’t have seen them as history or art. She would have seen them as documentation of the misery of eight people. She would have seen them as an indictment of Lonnie for the premeditated murder of my brothers. She would have understood.

  But there was no time to explain it to her. Stacy took one look at the paint on my hands and freaked out.

  “You had no right. No right! This was history and you’ve destroyed it. It’s gone. Obliterated.”

  The word “obliterated” triggered the violence that has been buried in my psyche since I was six years old, sitting on a hard bench in that cold room and listening to Lonnie justify the obliteration of anyone outside the family.

  “Evil must be obliterated,” he said, time and again. “Until that day, we must separate ourselves from evil in all its forms. We will look back on this hard time and know that we were purified here. Here, we achieved our metamorphosis.”

  I am the only living soul who remembers what Lonnie was like during the winter of our metamorphosis. My first mother is dead now, so she can’t help remember. My other mother, Sandra, is dead, too. Lonnie was guilty in their deaths, as guilty as he was in my brothers’ deaths, because people who don’t get things like mammograms and routine cholesterol testing don’t tend to live very long.

  My first sister was barely toddling during the time we lived in this room, and my first brother was an infant. The others weren’t born yet. Only I remember the terrible winter when we lived in The Sanctuary. It was the time of purification, when we passed from the real world into a world that existed only in Lonnie’s head.