“To enact a miracle,” Euclide said quietly.
“That’s right,” said Janice, falling back into her chair. “A goddamn miracle.”
fourteen
Barely a heartbeat after Euclide left her office, Dr. Janice Lorimar-Cuevas felt such a physical onslaught of remorse and horror that jackknifing herself sideways she retched into her wastebasket. What evidence did she have to accuse or almost-accuse Cameron the way she just had? None. She hadn’t even called Brooke Army Medical Center to speak to the staffers who’d treated Cameron, to see if she might catch a funky whiff. And was it even possible to hack the VA’s VistA system? She didn’t know. Yes, she’d diagnosed Cameron with PTSD, lending minor credence to her premise for a motive, but she’d diagnosed hundreds of combat veterans with PTSD and couldn’t remember Cameron saying a single extraordinary thing about combat—certainly nothing to indicate he might go to such spectacular lengths to avoid it.
It’d been one thing for her and Nap to hash out their black-hearted theories in the evenings, as Nap stirred Sazeracs and Janice exercised whatever story-making muscles she’d inherited from her father; but for her to have leaked it to the entrancing investigator from Rome, to have unleashed her suspicions and sent them scurrying out into the world—Janice was revolted with herself. She recalled something Nap had said one night while they were cooking up the theory: “If it’s true, you know, you’ll look like a fool for having fallen for his con. If it’s not true, though, you’ll feel like a fool for thinking it—also a big asshole.”
What’d opened the spigot for it with Euclide, she decided, was him uttering that empty little sack of a word: miracle. The whole exchange after that had turned into a kind of proxified argument between her and Euclide and between reason and faith, and in order to win that argument—to trump his magical thinking with a perhaps equally outlandish theory, but at least one grounded in reality—she’d pushed Cameron Harris into the pyre. She’d sacrificed him to make a point—had given him up as a burnt offering, just like they did in the damn Bible.
Or had she? Because—because what if it was true? Knowing Cameron the way she did—even the veneer-toothed, flashbulb-attracting version of him she’d encountered at lunch a month earlier—it felt beyond difficult to believe. But what was easier to believe: that a dead televangelist convinced his heavenly landlord to reach down from the clouds and breaking all natural laws hoist a paralyzed man to his feet? She wouldn’t have divulged her suspicions to Euclide if some part of her didn’t believe them—right? It wasn’t as though she’d enjoyed constructing this ugly theory, with all its kamikaze implications for her career, aside, perhaps, from a few aha Nancy Drew exultations that probably had more to do with the presence of Nap and his killer Sazeracs and to the fact that the two career-junkies were actually doing something together—she wasn’t like her father, she didn’t revel in fabulism, she didn’t make up stories for the hell of it, she didn’t make up stories at all.
So what did she believe? Not think—believe. She laid her palms on her desk as though trying to ward off seasickness. Euclide was right about one thing: She had exhausted the limits of seeing—she’d passed, just like he’d said, into an entirely different realm now. And suddenly this question—what do I believe?—felt like the most fundamental and essential question she’d ever asked herself. For all of her thirty-three years, Janice realized, she’d been defining herself by what she didn’t believe: not in Santa Claus or in God (“same difference,” she might’ve said), not in reckless love or in mind-altering substances (the occasional Nap Cuevas cocktail excepted), not in market-driven health care or in running barefoot to prevent injury or in Bikram yoga being more effective than regular yoga, not in idleness or indiscipline or the luxurious lethargy of introspection, not in metaphors or symbolic language, not in the little green gremlins her father’d claimed had sucked the life out of her mother through cocktail straws, not in stories of any kind. But years of inventorying what she didn’t believe had been a way of eluding the question now holding her fast to her desk, making her late for a patient consult, making her own legs feel suddenly and ironically useless, with a vomit-spattered wastebasket beside her feet: What did she believe? Not just about Cameron Harris—though, yes, of course about Cameron Harris: Was he a fraud or a saint? And did that make her a fool or an asshole?—but about all the facets of existence that can’t be glimpsed or measured no matter how hard you stare or try. She was feeling a strange and unfamiliar pain somewhere in her body that she couldn’t quite locate—a place she knew that Euclide Abbascia, and all those like him, would smugly identify as her soul.
Euclide, for his part, didn’t quite believe Janice’s theory about Cameron. “A leap of faith,” he says, “is required to believe in God. But to believe a conspiracy theory, one has to leap considerably farther.” His sense was that Janice was groping, half-blindly, for a tactile resolution to this mystery. Her frustration had been apparent to him even as she’d charted the broad strokes of the case. Still, he couldn’t dismiss it. Years as a prosecutor had inured him to the vast turpitude of human behaviors, equipping him with a capacity to believe almost anything about the berserk ways people act under duress, and while it seemed a stretch to think that out of cowardice a man would willingly paralyze himself for four years, well, he’d witnessed worse stretching from people, in much worse directions. Like all conspiracy theories, he thought, Janice’s carried a little bit of sense masquerading as a lot.
But that little bit of sense was enough to color his subsequent interviews—with Lê Thị Hat, especially, whom he found behind the counter at the Biz-E-Bee the next morning.
In most of Euclide’s cases, the nature and character of the miracolati are peripheral or even immaterial to the investigation. (The exception to this is when the requester of the miracle and its recipient are the same person—when a cancer sufferer, for instance, appeals to a saint for his or her own healing.) No attention is paid to the dicey question of whether or not a recipient might’ve deserved or even wanted the granted miracle, a deliberate oversight informally known as “the Dismas Rule,” in reference to the thief who was crucified beside Jesus, whom Jesus is said to have dispatched directly to heaven despite his moral slackness. In one of Euclide’s early cases, in fact, the miracolati—a young Irish woman who somehow made a full recovery after twenty-one minutes underwater put her in a brain-damaged coma—refused to cooperate with his inquiry, possibly (rumor had it) because her near-drowning had been a suicide attempt; the Congregation approved the miracle anyway.
Hat couldn’t have gathered this from Euclide’s line of questioning, however. After eliciting her account of what she’d witnessed outside the store on that August afternoon, he began probing her about Cameron:
Q: Does Cameron Harris strike you as a trustworthy person?
A: What do you mean?
Q: Well, let’s see. Would you extend him credit?
A: Oh, we never do that. No way. Not for anyone.
Q: What do you know about him?
A: What does a shopkeeper know? He likes beer. He used to smoke generics but now I think he smokes Marlboros.
Q: That’s all you know?
A: I know the things that I’ve read in the newspapers.
Q: But what did you know about him before you read the newspapers? Besides the beer and all that.
A: I knew he got hurt in the war. I didn’t know where or how. His sister took care of him, I knew that. She did all the talking. He never said much.
Q: Anything else?
A: My husband said he heard he got arrested once.
Q: Arrested for what?
A: He didn’t hear that part.
That Hat seemed unnerved by Euclide’s questions—as the interview went on, her posture and hands seemed increasingly positioned to protect her abdomen, something the young Euclide had learned to associate with agitation and deception—onl
y served to create a kind of feedback loop: the more anxious Hat seemed, when discussing Cameron, the deeper Euclide tried to dig, thereby compounding her anxiety.
Hat, for her part, says she was nervous, for two reasons. One because this lawyerly man in her store reminded Hat of all the state and federal tax officials who’d ambushed her and Quỳnh over the years, sweeping into the Biz-E-Bee with catastrophic audits and collections; no one carrying a briefcase into the Biz-E-Bee ever pulled anything happy from it. More significantly, however, Euclide’s questions suggested to her that he had doubts—big official doubts—about Cameron’s recovery, that perhaps something false or rotten was festering beneath the miracle sheen. Pockmarking her mind, as she fielded Euclide’s questions, were thoughts of poor Gil and the last-ditch hopes he’d pinned on the Biz-E-Bee. Of all the people who were daily coming from near and far to plant themselves in that eight-by-twelve-foot rectangle painted in the parking lot, praying closed-eyed and open-armed for that blessed lightning to strike twice. Peering past Euclide, as he was asking her if she’d ever heard rumors about Cameron walking before his recovery (no), if she’d ever seen his feet jerk or move (no), if she’d ever happened to notice the condition of his shoe soles (his shoe soles?), Hat saw behind him the canyons of miracle merchandise that’d reversed her and Quỳnh’s and Little Kim’s fortunes, that were making the coming Christmas unlike any they’d ever had before, that’d been for the Lês what rain is to a drought-cursed farmer. But then she also remembered the dark prickle she’d felt watching Cameron Harris crack open that Bud Light almost immediately after walking, and wondered to herself if perhaps she’d glimpsed something then without really seeing it—that maybe what this investigator’s questions appeared to be implying was something she’d known from the beginning. Every interruption by a customer felt like a reprieve. She was sweating. She was suddenly, and terribly, afraid.
Euclide left the Biz-E-Bee with his head more clouded than when he’d entered. A more cynical inquisitor, surveying all the miracle kitsch for sale, might’ve conjectured the possibility of the Lês being complicit in a miracle hoax—their witnessing, after all, was netting them a profit. But Euclide had seen all this before, most vividly in Medjugorje in Bosnia where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to six children in 1981. In the wake of any miracle come pilgrims, and behind them, inevitably, the souvenir-mongers. The announcement of a miracle is also the announcement of an imminent crap bazaar.
Not to mention, Janice’s conspiracy net was already wide enough.
Still, Euclide’s interview with Lê Thị Hat failed to neutralize the doubts Janice had seeded. And those doubts, the more Euclide considered them, began sprouting and branching. A high-profile hoax would do more than just threaten Reverend Fahey’s sainthood cause. (If and when another event was credited to Fahey’s intercession, the Congregation, singed by scandal, was likely to move slowly if at all, thus denying Norton Skag his life’s last remaining goal.) No, a hoax like this could threaten the Catholic church as well—exposing the church to ridicule and vitriol during an already-fragile moment in its history. His job was to serve the cause of Archbishop Nicholas Fahey. His blood allegiance, however, was to the Holy See.
That he needed to interview Cameron Harris was a given, of course. Perhaps surprisingly, Euclide hadn’t planned to speak with Cameron during this initial swing through Mississippi—the Dismas Rule notwithstanding, at this stage he’d considered Father Ace’s interview notes to be sufficient. Euclide’s instincts, however—both prosecutorial and canonical—were telling him to continue to postpone that interview. He knew he’d rattled Hat with his questions, and he was regretting it; he didn’t want to poison what could be—probably was—a run-of-the-mill miracle investigation, thereby bungling Reverend Fahey’s chances for sainthood based upon a skeptical physician’s high-strung suspicions. Norton Skag would have to be patient, would need to stifle that inner Ahab of his. If Euclide was going to seek the hand of the divine, he needed to dust for human fingerprints first.
Years before, in Rome, Euclide worked with a police inspector who was fond of quoting William Butler Yeats: “The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone.” Cameron’s motive, the light of lights, struck Euclide as the obvious linchpin to Janice’s theory. She’d admitted to him, in her office, that the motive she’d assigned Cameron was entirely her own invention—that she’d devised it, sans evidence, in order to service the theory’s other moving parts. To connect the dots, she’d created a dot. Euclide wasn’t sold on it. There were far easier ways to get out of combat duty—more immediately shameful, perhaps, but what was shame when stacked against four years of self-confinement in a wheelchair? And couldn’t he have instead just manufactured a limp?
He didn’t share Janice’s suspicions with Father Ace, though the priest was eager for Euclide’s assessment, but he did have Father Ace photocopy the notes from his interviews with Cameron for him. These he took to a restaurant, Mary Mahoney’s Old French House in Biloxi, where his young waitress, noting the Maserati out front and his leading-man looks, asked if he was in town “for the Miracle show.” After a slow black chuckle he told her no, but her question served to confirm, lucidly, the importance of this case: Cameron Harris’s recovery wasn’t just a mystery, it was a spectacle. Whatever Euclide did needed to be airtight.
He was barely three sips into his Negroni, reviewing Father Ace’s notes, before a line of Cameron’s seized him as if by the throat: “A lot of things happened to me in Afghanistan. Getting paralyzed, that was just one of them.” He peered up from the papers and from his rust-colored cocktail, staring into the middle distance. Was this line of Cameron’s a kind of cracked door, behind which Janice’s motive might be hiding? What else would Cameron equate with a paralyzing injury? Euclide sipped his drink without tasting it, ignoring a chunky pair of sunburnt men in fishing shirts who were ogling his Maserati through the window and angling for his attention as its owner. If Janice’s hunch had any chance of being correct, he realized, the motive was to be found somewhere in Afghanistan, on some shell casing–littered ridgeline. Afghanistan would’ve been the motive’s birthplace—would’ve been where, before anything could be done to conceal it, it was visible.
Only one member of Cameron’s platoon was mentioned in the notes: Staff Sergeant Damarkus Lockwood, who’d been injured by the same blast that’d wounded Cameron—apparently more severely. Euclide was tapping his iPhone screen as the waitress, for reasons he pretended not to understand, delivered him a second Negroni that, with an un-shy smile, she said was on her.
Lockwood’s unusual first name made him a cinch to locate. A phone call was all Euclide had in mind—until he noted the address. Lockwood lived outside the small town of Helen, Georgia, in the state’s mountainous northeast corner near the border with North Carolina. Checking the map on his phone, he saw that the town was barely a fractional detour on his way back to Knoxville, and, scissoring his fingertips to zoom the map closer, that the area’s backroads resembled a lovely bowl of spaghetti—the sort of squiggly mountain roads that Maserati engineers in the 1970s had designed his Spyder to make love to.
Euclide thanked the waitress for the gratis though untouched Negroni, slightly savoring the look of disappointment on her face. He slid into his car and started it, listening closely and rapturously to its engine growl as another man might tune his ear to Bach, and then, with the twilit, oyster-colored beach to his right, and the perishing sun smearing the sky violet behind him, he pointed the car’s trembling hood toward Georgia.
Both hands gripping the leather steering wheel, Euclide Abbascia was anticipating twists ahead—just nothing like the twist he was headed for.
fifteen
The December 31 call sheet for production of Miracle Man was forecasting a light and agreeable workday. Because the schedule had them shooting past midnight, in order to film Cameron and Tanya welcoming t
he new year in a Biloxi bar, the crew members—most of whom had flown back from the West Coast the night before—savored a rare opportunity to sleep in, with no one needing to report to Reconfort Avenue before noon. Actual filming wasn’t slated to begin until three p.m., when Cameron and Tanya would be reenacting their Christmas supper—or rather staging a Christmas supper, since on Christmas Day they’d grazed at a church lunch following Mass at Our Lady Queen of Angels before settling back home to watch Revenge of the Nerds III and Fast and Furious 6. The plan called for interviews after that—MEANING OF CHRISTMAS, noted the call sheet; HOPES FOR THE NEW YEAR—followed by a long dinner break doubling as a cast-and-crew holiday party. Then, at nine p.m., they’d be moving to a location shoot at a dive bar called Guidry’s Lava Lounge that on the call sheet had been slyly renamed “The Champagne Room.”
By one p.m., however, the morning’s bright popcorn clouds were giving way to ominous gray streaks, a smudgescape rolling in overhead that could’ve been seen as a harbinger of things to come if such skies weren’t so endemic to winter afternoons along the Gulf Coast. Huntley Benyus, the director of photography, or DP, known as Honeybun, was standing out on the driveway with Aidan Casey, the camera assistant. One of the camera batteries wasn’t charging properly, and with cigarettes jouncing on their lips the two men were passing the battery back and forth, listlessly stumped.
Then, with a glance over Honeybun’s shoulder, Casey’s mouth flopped open. “Whoa,” he said. “Check it out.”
Coming down the center of Reconfort Avenue was Mrs. Dooley, slowly but steadfastly, clicking her walker ahead of her. Though neither man had ever seen Mrs. Dooley off her porch—they’d filmed interviews about Cameron’s recovery with her there—this wasn’t, on its own, what’d snatched Casey’s attention and was now fastening the men’s gaze to her. Something about her shuffling carriage looked fraught to them—the explicit purpose of it, its wizened down-tempo urgency, the way her jutting chin seemed to be drawing the rest of her down the crackled asphalt. “Yoda’s on the march,” Casey whispered. The two men watched her for a while. “What’s she doing?”
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