Revenant Rising

by M. M. Mayle

  At the designated floor they step out into a spacious foyer where he takes her coat after approving the fabric and cut—ribbed black faille fashioned with a funnel neck, high-belted waistline, and single-button closure reminiscent of the austere designs executed by Givenchy for Audrey Hepburn during the sixties. He also notices that the coat is brand new, as evidenced by a hangtag still attached to a side belt loop. If he didn’t know she could afford dozens of coats of this quality, he’d think the tag was deliberately left attached to facilitate a budget-sparing return to the store the next morning. He discreetly removes the tag when he hangs the coat in the foyer closet.

  Her mauve shantung theatre suit is either very new or very old for lacking the wide lapels and broad padded shoulders that have characterized most women’s wear in the eighties and caused so many wearers to masquerade as unwitting extras from the Dallas and Dynasty TV dramas. Her accessories are difficult to date as well because Chanel has manufactured the trademark quilted leather bag and elegant two-tone slingback shoes for as long as he’s been aware of such things.

  He ushers her into the room he hesitates to call the grand salon even though it is. She goes straight to the windows, as do most first-time visitors. However, the hour and time of year preclude full appreciation of the splendid view.

  “This used to be Colin’s triplex. I bought it when he was influenced to move to the West Side . . . This was before his marriage,” Nate feels compelled to add. “And although every square inch has been remodeled or redecorated, he’s so far avoided coming here. I suppose vestiges of the past remain that he doesn’t want to confront.”

  “Wouldn’t that be revenants he’s trying to avoid?” she says. “And isn’t he also trying to avoid the sense he’s under someone else’s authority?”

  She’s right on both counts, something he could afford to admit if she expected a reply. But she’s already moved on, attracted first to the interior landscape and then to the tray of drinks and hors d’oeuvres Mathilde is leaving on the Biedermeier center table.

  “Oh, you weren’t kidding, were you?” Laurel recognizes the caviar as his fulfilled promise and zeros in on the table where she helps herself to buckwheat blini, a generous spoonful of Ossetra, and a large dollop of crème fraîche. After wolfing that down, she takes two more fully loaded blini, but only eyes the tubular glasses of vodka half-submerged in a silver bowl of crushed ice.

  For ranking her a heavyweight, he inadvertently endowed her with the attributes of a coarser contender, one who would toss back a shooter of eighty-proof vodka as a matter of course, taste and preference not entering in. Without comment, he brings a double old-fashioned glass and a bottle of Evian from a nearby bar cabinet and encourages her to scavenge ice from the vodka chiller.

  That awkwardness out of the way, and a dilute vodka on the rocks in hand, she resumes her survey of the room. She cocks her head at a Rothko, then a Rauschenberg, frowns at a David Hockney and a lesser Vlaminck, scrutinizes the signature on a new Basquiat before returning to the refreshments table and shooting a quizzical gaze at him.

  “You’ve heard about the Klimts and you’re wondering where they are, right?”

  She nods, her mouth again full of caviar, crème, and blini.

  “They’re in the next room, in what used to be the library. I’ve had a table set in there for our dinner. We can go in now if you wish.”

  She wishes, but her backward glance indicates she might not be finished with the vodka and caviar, so when they move on, he brings the tray. She puts it to good use right away, causing him to wonder if she’s fortifying herself for what’s to come or if she hasn’t eaten in a week. Not that it matters, because she’s clearly relishing the food and drink and making no attempt to conceal how blown away she is by the paintings. Her rousing reaction to the Klimts could make him rethink selling them one day.

  She accepts another dilute vodka and directs her attention to the few remaining library shelves. They discuss antique volumes and rare first editions as both monetary and intellectual investments until dinner is announced.

  Over rack of lamb and asparagus risotto, their conversation continues to avoid tonight’s main event. Other than his identifying Colin as previous owner of the apartment, neither has made direct reference to him or to the book she was commissioned to write. She praises the meal and compliments the wine choice, a young Barolo that fortunately did not overpower the medium-rare lamb. Her appetite is undiminished when the salad of Boston lettuce, blood oranges and almonds is served, and she says yes to the offer of a chocolate tartuffo for dessert. Gelato lover that he is, he cannot eat another bite, but that doesn’t keep him from enjoying the novelty of watching this eye-catchingly slender specimen eat more than two morsels at a sitting.

  Had she been invited here as an object of desire, this is the point where he would proceed most cautiously. Offering more wine or coffee, suggesting they might be more comfortable elsewhere, clearing the table—any of these moves are potential deal- breakers. As is the sudden intrusion of the cook-housekeeper, who comes in to let him know she’s leaving and to remind him that the cleaning staff won’t be back until Friday.

  “Shall we?” he pushes away from the table half-expecting to encounter pieces of the shattered mood.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  Evening, April 7, 1987

  Nate adjusts the lighting in the reception room to three levels above cozy before they take their seats in a pair of Bergère chairs flanking the fireplace. Laurel could be as loath as he is to get started; she’s a regular Goldilocks in the chair, crossing and uncrossing her superb legs, shifting from one choice haunch to the other, deflating the deep down-filled seat cushion until it’s just the right thickness. And now she’s fussing with her handbag, snapping and unsnapping the clasp, poking around inside it, producing first a small notebook, then a small tape recorder.

  “Do you mind if I use this?” She indicates the recorder. “Rayce Vaughn gave it to me when I went to him for help with the Aurora situation. You do know I’ve met with Rayce?”

  “Tape recorder’s fine and yes, I am aware you had an audience with Rayce. Your assistant filled me in and showed me the video of your little meet-the-press gig.”

  This comes out all wrong, way more dismissive than intended. But no fix comes to mind that wouldn’t sound like he was applauding the pair of coups she pulled off while he was away. And he’s not. Not really. He is, however, grateful that he won’t have to provide Aurora’s backstory. With that in mind he begins.

  “And so . . . October 1984. I received word that Aurora Elliot was off on another of her periodic tears. By then my standard reply to Colin was, “For God’s sake, let her go and good riddance.” But she was pregnant with a due date around Christmastime, so I mobilized a fleet of private detectives to run her to ground as discreetly as possible. All her favorite European haunts were fine-combed for weeks on end, all to no avail. I was concerned for the baby, of course, and at the same time hoped she’d never be heard from again. Then, mid-November, I learned that Colin was on his way to the States from London in an attempt to find her on his own. I later learned that in desperation, Colin was driven to deal with his perpetual nemesis, Cliff Grant, the late slimeball paparazzo, who claimed to have inside info on Aurora’s whereabouts. Grant, in turn, had a shadowy contact that alleged Aurora to have returned to her Michigan origins, where she’d been spotted in a red pickup truck. Given make, model, and license plate of the truck, Colin couldn’t be held back and I didn’t even try. All I was able to do when I intercepted him here in New York was convince him the only way he was going on a wild-goose chase to far Northern Michigan was with me in charge.”

  He recites a condensed version of the dreary drive along highways where pickup trucks were the dominant means of transportation and the brief pause in the town of Bimmerman, where herds of shit-faced deer-hunters partied in the streets. And how much is there to say about a lonely stretch of road where inconceivable odds had it that they would encounter A
urora?

  “Colin needed to make a pit stop, so I pulled into the only place for miles around, a combo gas station/general store. I waited in the car while he went in. The next thing I knew, Colin came running out of the place, and dove into the rental car with word that Aurora was inside the store and about to exit through a back door. I honestly thought Colin had lost it. I thought he’d finally gone off the deep end after weeks of worrying and wondering. I nevertheless moved the car to the rear of the building and thinking I had lost it when the no-longer-pregnant Aurora materialized and climbed into a red pickup truck right in front of my disbelieving eyes.

  “Colin had no trouble believing. He was after her in a flash. He yanked the driver out of the truck, threw him to the ground, then jumped behind the wheel and drove off with Aurora. I was slower to react and that left me as much as a half-mile behind when I regained the highway and gave chase. I never did manage to close the gap, and to this day I don’t know what I thought I’d have done if I had caught up with them.

  “Before I continue—anticipating a question frequently asked at the time—Colin was totally at ease driving on the right-hand side of the road. And a utility-type vehicle didn’t daunt him at all. When he was getting his start in the music business, he logged literally thousands of miles crisscrossing this country in a commercial-size van and he was usually the driver.”

  “I know, he told me about that while we were driving back from Connecticut Sunday.”

  “Who was driving? He was driving?”

  “Yes, was that against the rules?”

  Her expression neither confirms nor denies the sarcasm he hears, so he stifles a sharp retort, leaves her question unanswered, and resumes the story where he left off. In a flat detached voice he talks about what transpired while following the hijacked pickup truck in the direction of Paradise, Michigan, Aurora’s hometown. He mentions that Colin and Aurora were obviously fighting, with no special emphasis placed on the fact the fighting appeared to get physical at one point. He downplays the appearance of the other vehicle that remained a distant third throughout the chase, and says nothing at all about concerns that that vehicle might have contained a posse of good ol’ boys out to settle a score for the owner of the stolen truck. He does, however, stress how fast night came down on that overcast November afternoon, and how soon everything else went down.

  “Imagine if you will, an uphill curve leading to an overpass that by definition had no shoulder. The approach had no shoulder either, with only a post-and-cable barrier against a precipitous drop-off. Just as Colin cleared this rise, just short of the overpass, a deer loomed up in the road—the biggest goddammed deer I ever saw, not that size was the issue. At almost the same time, another pickup truck cleared the overpass, coming from the opposite direction and heading straight for the fucking deer. Do I need to tell you the oncoming truck with its see-all-blind-all headlights, swerved into Colin’s lane, leaving Colin the split-second choice of opting for a head-on collision or plunging off the road into the unknown?

  “The other truck didn’t even slow down, nor did the car tailing at a distance behind me. They just whizzed right on by as though this kind of thing was an everyday occurrence. At least that’s how it looked at the time. Later I learned that the driver of the other truck was unaware the truck Colin was driving went off the road. It all happened that fast.

  “But it didn’t seem that fast to me when I reached the point where the pickup went through the flimsy barrier and down a steep embankment. Everything felt like slow motion while I tried to figure out what to do next. Several minutes after the truck hit bottom, I was still hearing the sounds of the crash—metal tearing, glass breaking, tree limbs snapping—as though it was on a continuous loop.

  “I had only a penlight for guidance when I reached the wreckage, so I could view only small sections at a time. It took a while to figure out that the trajectory of the truck sent it into a stand of mature pine trees that redirected it downward to an incredibly hard landing, judging by the splayed tires and bent axels. Then I got a look at Aurora. As you know by now, she was beyond help. When I got a look at Colin, he recognized me and spoke, but I didn’t think he’d last long.”

  “Were you able to make any kind of determination about the actual extent of his injuries or were you going by general appearances?” Laurel says.

  “He was pinned in the wreckage. Impact with the trees had driven the steering wheel into his chest and the engine compartment had breached the firewall at a point where his legs could not have escaped damage. The door on the driver’s side was as good as welded shut by the compacting effects of the crash, and a section of broken tree was overhanging the roof of the cab. Colin was covered with blood, but most of the lacerations appeared superficial. I saw no sign of serious head injury. His pupils contracted under light, and as I mentioned, he did speak when he recognized me.”

  “Then what made you think—”

  “His breathing was ragged. Tortured, I’d say, and there was this god-awful whistling sound to it. When I cleaned some of the blood off his face, the skin beneath was taking on a blue tinge . . . and I had to leave him that way . . . there was no other choice.”

  He describes the agonizing search for help, strives for emotional detachment that’s not as easy to attain as he would have thought. He’d call Laurel spellbound other than for the slight movement of her shoulders that’s occurring at regular intervals. He’s well into describing the return to the crash scene before realizing that she has hiccoughs and is going to a lot of trouble to keep them silent.

  “Can I get you something?” He half rises from his chair, but she flicks a hand for him to stay put.

  “I’m all right. Just give me a minute.” She suppresses another spasm, and another, then takes a deep breath and holds it. In the expectant pause that follows, her eyes seem unnaturally bright before she blinks a few times and pronounces herself cured. “I’m sorry, I’ve been fighting off hiccoughs all day and I guess I lost.”

  “Don’t worry about it. You okay now?”

  “I am, thank you, and since I’ve already interrupted the flow, may I ask a few questions?”

  “By all means. Ask away.”

  “Aurora . . . Did Colin know that Aurora was . . . was dead at the scene? You say he knew who you were and spoke. Did his cognizance include awareness of Aurora’s . . . condition?”

  A question he’s asked himself every day for nearly two and a half years without coming up with a firm answer. “I’ll have to say no. Very doubtful. The way Colin was wedged in made turning his head a near impossibility, and don’t forget, he was in pitch-blackness until I got there with my little penlight. And when better lighting was brought to the scene, the guy I was just telling you about—Bill, the retired lumberjack—thought to cover Aurora’s torso to be doubly sure Colin didn’t wind up staring at it. Probably an unnecessary precaution because by then, Colin was no longer responsive. His eyes were closed and his breathing was reduced to irregular gasping. Thank god there was another way out of that hellhole because I don’t think he would have survived being hauled up the embankment.”

  “What was the alternate way out? Were you able to call in a helicopter?”

  “Didn’t I wish. No, no chopper, but unbeknownst to me, there was an abandoned railroad bed a few hundred yards from the crash scene. The lumberjack guy knew about it, knew it was accessible from the highway above, and knew it would support more than the all-terrain vehicles that used it regularly. While I was on my way back to the wreckage by way of the embankment—this time with ropes and emergency lights—the old guy was checking out this other approach, which also made hauling in the rescue equipment a lot easier. When I reached the bottom and got a good look at the . . . ah . . . reality of the situation under bright lights, I went way past jittery. I was imagining something was out there. The local Sasquatch rustling around in the undergrowth maybe, so when Big Bill suddenly burst onto the scene from an unexpected direction, it’s a damn wonder I didn’t
brain him with one of his own flashlights.”

  Laurel’s only reaction is a slight frown that increases as he delivers a scaled-down version of the tree removal and the prying open of the truck door on Colin’s side. Then she gestures for him to stop. “Before you continue, I have to know . . . You said earlier that Aurora was no longer pregnant . . . The baby . . . Simon . . . how was he able to survive the crash?”

  “He wasn’t involved in the crash. He was never in the truck, something that wasn’t known at the time.”

  “So you had to look for him?”

  “To the extent I could before help arrived and later, with help, when the entire area was searched for the other . . . remains.”

  “Other remains? I don’t understand. Was someone else in the truck?”

  “The search was for Aurora’s head. When she was decapitated, her head was evidently ejected from the vehicle.”

  “Oh my god. Oh dear god . . . I’m sorry.” Laurel bites her bottom lip and looks away as though he had offered actual imagery.

  He says nothing else for a while. He does not say when or by what presumable force Aurora was decapitated. How could that possibly matter now? What conceivable point would be made by revealing the stubbornly lingering impression that Aurora’s head was still attached the first time he viewed the body?

  He resumes the story at the point when the sheriff’s detail conducted a preliminary search after Colin was removed from the wreckage. “That search came up empty. They planned to go back at daybreak with additional manpower and dogs, but during the night, the wreckage and an extensive area around it went up in flames. The authorities theorized that a gang of ATV-riding thrill-seekers heard about the crash on CB radios, invaded the scene and either accidentally or deliberately ignited fuel spilled from the ruptured gas tank of the truck. No significant snow had fallen yet that year, so the forest floor readily caught fire, as did a lot of underbrush. Then, oddly enough, the first heavy snow of the season started the very next morning and lasted for three days.”