by Susan Dunlap
“Hey!” Amber shouted. “This is all sweety sweety, but my brother is still lying dead under that fucking maple. And somebody here killed him.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Amber’s words were like a bucket of cold water on the rest of us. In the relief about Roshi, we’d sidestepped the point that if he hadn’t killed Aeneas, then someone else had.
“Roshi,” I said, “once you realized Aeneas hadn’t left here, you figured he was dead, right? And you assumed Maureen killed him. Did you wonder about anyone else?”
But even as I asked it I knew the answer. If he had set up this practice period to allow Maureen to come to terms with her supposed guilt, he would do no less for his other students. He certainly wouldn’t blurt out his suspicions in a group of four.
“Maureen? What about you? Who else—?”
But Maureen was in no condition to answer anything. Her hands were not merely quivering, they were shaking. She held them out, watching the fingers wriggle like worms. She had been near to emotional collapse in the fire tower hours ago. Of course, she had no reserve to deal with the idea that one of her other friends was a killer, one of the people she had assumed was safe.
“Amber, Barry’s gone. Take Maureen to Barry’s room above the chocolate kitchen. It’ll be warm there. Get some food for her and stay with her. No one will know you’re there. I’ll show you where it is.”
I motioned her out, leaving Maureen and Roshi their time together.
The wind had picked up, moist with fog. I glanced up at the California night sky—dark, murky gray. Then, for the first time, I checked my watch and was shocked to find it was 9:25 P.M. In fifteen minutes people would be pouring out of the zendo, Aeneas’s killer included.
“You haven’t answered me. What about my brother?” Amber demanded as we came abreast the bathhouse.
I motioned her inside. “Use it now. While no one’s here.”
She froze. My commonplace comment had brought the danger home to her in a way that Roshi’s description of her brother’s death so long ago couldn’t. I put my hand on her back and led her into the bathhouse.
“Amber, do you know anything that puts you in danger? Anything Aeneas told you? Anything you found out here?” She shook her head, but there was a tentative quality to the movement. “What about Justin? You were both here that weekend Aeneas died.”
“That weekend?”
She eased her buttocks against the edge of one of the sinks and looked nervously at the empty stalls a few feet away. The white tiles on the floor were muddy; the room cold. The chalky soap made it seem like any girls’ room in any elementary school.
“You know what surprised me that weekend? That Aeneas was just the same. I mean, I thought, well, I hoped, that after he’d spent so long in a meditation center he would be, well, normal, you know? But there he was, still wandering around, picking up things like everything was his. Still in his own solitary world, except when he got obsessed and had to have something in the big world.”
“Something as mundane as a manila envelope?”
“I suppose,” she said tentatively. “He didn’t just choose stuff for no reason. I mean, if it was pretty, or interesting, or important—”
“Important?”
She fingered a blob of pink soap hardening on the sink, scooping it onto her nail, looking at it without seeing.
“Well, you know, if someone treated it like it was valuable. Like the Buddha. He might have taken it because it’s pretty, but definitely because it was on the altar.”
“Rob found the Buddha in his suitcase.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean anything. Just that that’s where Aeneas was when he lost interest in it.”
“But,” I said, thinking aloud, “if Aeneas picked up something, like that manila envelope, and the owner chased him, then Aeneas—”
“Right.” She flicked the soap off her nail, and turned to face me straight on. “When he was still at home, mornings were like chaos. My parents had to hide the car keys. I couldn’t lay my homework down or he’d grab it. Anything any of us cared about was fair game, even Mom’s shopping list, and umbrellas! We went through so many umbrellas that winter the guy in the store must have figured we were running a shelter.
“It’s sad, really sad, but once he left for here, we all relaxed. My parents set their alarms for half an hour later. And when I came for the opening, I had a term paper due Monday. I’d actually gotten it done, but I’m a lousy typist and I absolutely had to read it over, even if it meant doing it in the car, with Justin. I did, and it was fine, but I was so nervous about Aeneas getting hold of it, I stuck it in the glove compartment and made Justin lock it and the car. Justin thought I was crazy. I mean, he had his college entrance essays with him—we figured things would be so boring at the monastery we’d have plenty of time to work. I told him to put them in the glove compartment, but he didn’t believe me, not then.” She shrugged. “He thought I’d lost it. I could see that he thought I was going wacko, just like Aeneas.”
Her hand tightened on the sink. “Oh, god, it’s so sad. I wish I never came to this miserable place. I wanted to learn about Aeneas but I didn’t want to remember again. When I was with him I was a kid. I adored him; then I hated him; then he was a pain in the ass. But now, now that I can think what it was like for him, Oh, god, I just don’t want to think about him actually dying.”
The small sweet bell pinged in the Zendo, ending the last sitting period. People would unbend their stiff legs, fluff their cushions, and prepare for the final three bows. In five minutes they would be in here.
“Amber,” I said, “The things that Aeneas snatched, can you be sure they were important to the owner? Aeneas could have misjudged, couldn’t he?”
“No.” The sound was closer to a squeak than a word; she shook her head as if to amplify it. “No, never once in all the months he took stuff, never once did he take anything that didn’t matter. You know what idiot savants are? Well, Aeneas was one when it came to knowing what was important to people. I mean, Darcy, it used to drive me crazy, the thing about my homework. So I tried to divert him by making a fuss over my coffee mug or a magazine. But it was like he knew, you know? I ended up thinking that his focus was so narrow that he was a master of what was in it. So, no, he never made a mistake. He only took what mattered.”
“And it went on for months?”
“Well, yeah. We hid stuff, my parents got locks. I mean, we weren’t fools. Toward the end our house looked like we’d moved out. There was nothing personal around. It was only when company came there was a problem, and by then we didn’t have . . . much company.” She swallowed hard, and hurried into the stall. She flushed twice, I’m sure to cover her sobs, and when she came back she stood at the sink, not washing, only letting the cold water run over her hands. “Whatever Aeneas took here, that day,” she said, “wouldn’t someone have missed it?”
“Maybe,” I said.
But I didn’t tell her Aeneas had fallen on top of the manila envelope, or that Maureen had buried it with him. I didn’t explain that anyone chasing after Aeneas would have assumed that envelope was washing downstream.
I didn’t tell Amber any of that. I just watched her reflection in the mirror, and mine. I looked awful, like I did after the worst hangover, my skin yellowy except for the dark circles under my eyes, my hair a tangle of greasy red curls clown-like against my deathly skin. But the shock was Amber. She looked like all the moisture had been drained from her cells. The plump promise of youth was gone. She squeezed her eyes shut against another onslaught of tears, and muttered, “I’m so scared.”
“You aren’t a danger to anyone. You don’t know anything, right?”
“Aeneas wasn’t a danger. Whoever killed him, how can he be sure I don’t know anything?” She took a breath and glared at me. “How do I know Maureen didn’t kill him, and you’re sending me to hide out alone with her?”
“She didn’t.”
“Prove it.”
> “Prove you didn’t kill him.”
“What?”
“You could have. You were there. My point is you can’t always prove someone didn’t do something, you can only prove that they did. You’re going to have to trust me.” Two bells sounded in the zendo—the final bow. I gave her a final squeeze and said, “Come on. We’ve got to move.”
We finished in the bathroom and hurried across the still-empty quad to the kitchen. As we reached the door, I heard the wooden clappers in the zendo, signaling people to turn and file out of the zendo for the night. To the students in there this was the end of the third rigorous day of sesshin, the turning point from days of exhaustion to days of calmer awareness. They would be relieved to finish it less tired than yesterday and thankful for that; in their perceptions life was slowing, like downshifting the truck. I envied them that moment when it happened, that clear, noticeable downshift, after which they would notice sounds of wind and birds and rustle of cloth unheard before, the comforting awareness of breath ebbing and flowing, the first inkling of freedom from the chatter of thought. Despite all that had happened Leo—Roshi—had preserved that for them.
I did a whirlwind check of the kitchen and Barry’s room, recalled that I hadn’t seen food in Roshi’s room, and slapped some peanut butter and jelly on bread; it’s hard to be too sick for peanut butter and jelly, and, in fact, he had seemed much stronger when he was talking to Maureen than he had hours earlier. I made two sandwiches and managed to down half of my own before Amber and I got back to Roshi’s cabin.
Maureen was standing by the door. When I walked in she and Roshi merely bowed to each other before she left with Amber. It was a simple move, done in unison, but like a kiss, it said more than words could manage. I could guess what passed between them, but I would only have been guessing. I shut the door and when I looked at Roshi there was no telltale smile or drooped eye of sadness. The moment with Maureen was gone and I thought he was focusing on me. But when he put out his hand I realized the attraction was the peanut butter sandwich.
“Didn’t Rob bring you dinner?” I asked while he wolfed.
“No,” he got out between bites.
He was eating with such gusto I was both relieved and afraid the sandwich would be too much after his near-fast of the last couple days. But there wasn’t a chance I would deter him. The mundane quality of that cheered me a bit. And Rob’s failing at the basic jisha duties made me feel downright smug. With relief I watched Leo devour the brown bread, and, with a snakelike flick of his tongue, catch an errant squirt of jelly before it fell to the floor. His skin had a flush of pink; he was sitting normally. He looked like a man who had not merely stepped back from death’s door, but leapt back.
“Roshi, I hope Maureen will be okay with Amber. You know this has been really hard on Amber. She’s lost her memory of her brother.”
I half expected him to comment that that memory was illusion, but he nodded sympathetically, and finished the sandwich. “I told her it would be hard. She didn’t believe me. I thought she might need this last chance to know about her brother. But I didn’t know her. Still, we’ll see.”
I could still feel the quiver of Amber’s back as it had been against my hand, feel her shaking from anger and fear. What was the matter with Leo? Was he off in some Zen cloud? “Leo, this isn’t a regular sesshin. Of course, she’s scared. Somebody pushed her brother off the bridge! There’s a murderer here!”
“No one is after her. Only I am the target.”
“Maybe. But she doesn’t believe that.”
He took a deep, controlled, but angry-sounding breath. For a moment I thought I’d gone too far and, no matter how deficient Rob was as jisha, I’d be fired again. From the zendo came the slap of the door shutting and almost immediately soft-soled shoes splatting down the steps. It surprised me how clearly sound carried at night in the country. It was not quite ten o’clock. Barry had left hours ago. The paramedics should have been here hours ago. “Roshi, did the medics come and go already?”
“Medics?”
“Barry called them when he got to a phone.”
He was looking at the spot where Maureen had sat, his face scrunched in the kind of indecisive worry roshis were supposed to be beyond.
“Surely the medics would come here, even though it’s night, wouldn’t they?”
“Let’s see.” He pushed himself up, and nothing I said dissuaded him from putting on his robes, his parka, and his boots and heading out across the quad amid the students hurrying to the bathhouse or their cabins, and down to the road. The only choice I had was whether or not to follow.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Leo was in full Roshi mode. He was moving slowly in his long brown robe, but in such a stately fashion he seemed like a brown-masted schooner in full sail as he proceeded along his path to the bathhouse. One of the advantages of being roshi is not waiting in line. But that doesn’t mean not having to wait till the stalls empty.
I stood outside, shivering in the fog-chilled air, wishing there had been a gracious way to ask Maureen for my sweater back since she was headed to spend the night under Barry’s blankets, and trying to decide if it was worth the effort to confront Roshi with any of the sixteen supremely sensible reasons for not heading down to the road in the dark to wait for the paramedics.
It felt so good to be back worrying about Leo in this familiar way, as his jisha again, worrying if he’d be warm enough outside waiting for the reliable paramedics, and most of all to know he wasn’t Aeneas’s killer, that I hadn’t really focused on Amber’s question. If not Leo, who had killed Aeneas?
Someone acting on impulse, from anger or necessity or both. Aeneas wouldn’t have discerned anything, exposed anything, repeated anything. He only snatched things. Like a dog, he snatched and ran, teasing the owner with whatever was in that manila envelope. I could imagine him jumping up on the ledge-rail of the bridge, all part of the game. And I could imagine the chaser, desperate for his envelope, making a grab for it, and shoving Aeneas. It wouldn’t have been planned. No premeditated murder would have culminated with the victim’s body abandoned in the stream in a spot two people passed within minutes.
Planned or not, dead is dead. Someone murdered Aeneas.
But why stay at a monastery in the woods near Aeneas’s body? Was it from fear that Maureen would transplant the maple and uncover the body? Was there evidence on the body? The killer’s skin under Aeneas’s fingernails? Something else? Or just the killer’s fear of it? Was he waiting, wondering how long it took for the evidence to deteriorate? Each year he would have felt safer. The body was being eaten away, the maple growing larger.
What had Leo said about the red maple when we almost hit it driving in here? When we get the road paved, we’ll take out that maple. Not if, when.
The bathhouse door swung open and this time it was Leo. One look at his face—eyes narrowed, those bushy brown brows lowered, wide lips pressed hard together—confirmed his determination. I followed him silently.
One of the paths led from the bathhouse to the parking lot, but he didn’t take that. Instead he veered to the right and steamed toward the kitchen, his robe beneath his parka catching the wind. A student, possibly the path-sweeping lawyer from Vermont, passed him and nodded in half-recognition. Otherwise the way was empty. Students were permitted to go to the kitchen for tea after the last zazen period, but by then bed was too inviting. I did wonder if we would find Rob there and what explanation he would give for ignoring Roshi all afternoon.
And then the obvious struck me. If he’d poisoned his long-time teacher, his supposed friend, of course he couldn’t face him. Nor could he kill him, not at the time when he was the one known to have access to him. So he let him lie there unattended, a sick man who could have had a crisis, and who did go hungry all afternoon. I didn’t like Rob, but I had credited him with relentless responsibility. It infuriated me to think he could switch it off like that, like tossing a kitten in the river. I hoped now we did find him i
n the kitchen. When Roshi walked up to him, I wanted to see his face.
Documents are kept in manila envelopes. Deeds to the surrounding land; bills of sale for construction; correspondence with the hierarchy in San Francisco about Leo, mutual assumptions Leo would be edged out in a couple years. Rob was a lawyer; he would have preserved copies of everything, including both sides of correspondence. There were plenty of documents he wouldn’t have wanted made public that day, at the opening, in front of the roshis and priests and Buddhists from all over the West Coast.
Leo strode into the kitchen. But there was no one else there, no illumination but two plug-in night lights in sockets by either door that made the room seem larger. He flicked on the overhead light in the chocolate kitchen. The click resounded in the silence. The bright bulb shone off the white paint. The still, red melangeur was no longer mixing cocoa with lecithin and large-grain sugar; the white conche pipe was not tumbling chocolate till its texture met even Barry’s standards; the silvery metal table that looked like something out of an autopsy room was bare and shiny. Whatever warmth there had been from heating the gruel for dinner had dissipated, and the smell of cocoa that had given this kitchen its homey appeal was all but gone. It was as if Barry had taken it with him.
Roshi shook the kettle, lit the flame underneath, checked the height as he must have done every time he’d heated water. He walked to the cupboard, pulled out two plain white cups—not the sturdy little handleless mugs students used in sesshin, but the kind of delicate cups that rest on saucers. He set cup on saucer with no tinkle of china, foot on tile as silently as if on carpet. Moving almost as if in slow motion, he reached for the cocoa shelf.
I braced, poised to snatch the Special Reserve canister out of his hand. No way would I have him put that cocoa in his mouth again. But then he did the oddest thing of all. He bypassed the tin of cocoa Barry had made for practice period, ignored the Roshi’s Special Reserve tin, and plucked a packet of commercial cocoa. How had Barry let that packet sully his cocoa cabinet?