Zeitgeist

by Grace Jelsnik

  Grant took the seat beside her and shifted to face her. “Because he’s not the same as you, either environmentally or genetically. His mother had to have had a hand in raising him for his first years, and his genes are only half your father’s. A certain type of people become involved in hate organizations like the neo-Nazi’s. Some of the members possess what’s known as an ‘authoritarian personality.’ Perceiving themselves as superior to others, they need to enforce compliance to their morality, and frequently their morality is warped.”

  “Warped in what way?”

  “Super rigid, hidebound. You’ll rarely hear a white supremacist tell a joke, like asking how many KKKers it takes to screw in a light bulb. Nothing’s funny, everything’s dead serious. It all comes down to Freud’s superego, ego, and id, the mind’s three-member team of behavior-governors. The superego is our conscience. It knows what is right and wrong and insists on moral behavior. The id is our carnal desire, believing anything that feels good can’t possibly be wrong. The ego serves as our mediator between the two. The mediating ego says too much morality makes Jack a dull boy and too many good times makes Jack a sick puppy. When the superego–conscience gets too serious, the ego–mediator tells it to back off. When the id–desire seeks too much pleasure, the ego–mediator tells it to get its act together. The ego is supposed to strike a happy balance between morality and good times, between conscience and carnal desire.”

  Knowing him well enough by now to realize he didn’t intend insult, she fought and overcame the spurt of anger engendered by his word choice. “By carnal desire, you mean sex.”

  “Sex is only part of it. Anything in excess that satisfies the body’s wants, not needs. Sex should be conducted only for the purpose of reproduction, and food should be consumed only to keep the body functional. Alcohol serves no purpose so is to be avoided. Don’t even get me started on the evils of dancing and reading decadent literature.”

  Fiona frowned at him. “You talk a lot, but I’m sure you’ve heard this before. What does this have to do with Whitley?”

  “Patience. I’m getting there. In the authoritarian personality, the ego, the mediator, is defective, maybe from environment, maybe from genetics. The person is stuck with a superego demanding moral behavior and an id demanding satisfaction of biological desires. There’s no ego-referee to step in and settle differences, so the authoritarian personality begins to hate himself for having what he believes to be impure thoughts. He can stop the actions of the id, but there’s no way he can stop the thoughts.”

  “And it makes him crazy?”

  Grant nodded. “And it makes him crazy. He develops all kinds of insecurities, thinking something must be wrong with him to want to perform certain activities. Now he’s all twisted in knots. Because he’s this super-moral person, he knows he’s better than everyone else, so he can’t comprehend why he wants to do the things he wants to do. As a means of self-preservation and to feed his sense of superiority, he looks elsewhere to find fault. It’s easier to judge others than it is to judge himself, and the obvious targets are minorities, people who don’t look or act like him, like blacks and Jews. He tells himself he may be wrong in having carnal desires, but they are wronger in other ways, simply because they don’t possess his moral strength. He has bad thoughts, but he doesn’t act on them. They act on them. He’s superior. They’re inferior.”

  “You tend to make up words as you go along. Wronger isn’t even a word.”

  He looked offended. “As the comparative form of the adjective wrong, wronger should be a word. It’s not my fault Webster didn’t remember to include it in his dictionary.”

  Fiona resisted the desire to sigh dramatically. “Where is this going?”

  “The authoritarian personality walks a dark road without the light of a mediator, and with each step taken, he becomes more warped until he’s obsessed with his sense of complete superiority. That superiority morphs into hatred, an emotion strong enough to overwhelm his insecurities over having what he believes to be bad thoughts.”

  “This would explain why Whitley was obsessed with my relationships with men.”

  “Exactly,” Grant stated, his expression brightening. “If, as I suspect, he’s spent his entire life fighting carnal desire, then in addition to deeming himself superior to other races, religions, and creeds, he became obsessed with conventional behavior. If he can do it, everyone else should be able to do it. Authoritarians especially hate what they consider promiscuity, but you need to remember what they consider promiscuity would in most cultures be considered high spirits or youthful experimentation or, in the case of a basketball player who allegedly slept with 20,000 women, enviable.” He relaxed back in the chair, folding his arms across his chest and looking pleased with himself.

  “How do you know this?”

  “I’m a native North Dakotan, born in Bismarck. There’s a town, Leith, seventy miles from Bismarck, that endured an abortive invasion of white supremacists a while ago. Two of them came in, bought up some cheap properties, and proceeded to make themselves as objectionable as possible. I watched a documentary on it, Welcome to Leith, and noticed two oddities. First, the fellow responsible for initiating the invasion was less interested in his supposed politics than he was in gaining attention. He didn’t practice his own nutty rhetoric, instead making nice with the town’s one African American. He spent most of his time deliberately ticking off people and then taping them being ticked off at him so he could post the videos online. It didn’t matter to him how he angered them, whether it was with politics or with personal insults. What mattered was upsetting them enough so they’d go after him and he could tape the confrontation. He was a man seriously seeking his fifteen minutes of fame.”

  “And the second oddity?”

  He laughed, startling her. “It takes strong motivation to move to North Dakota. In that region, the average January temperature in a twenty-four–hour period is ten degrees. As expected, the nut-job neo-Nazi treaded a fine line between antagonism and lawbreaking right up to November. Suddenly, in November, right when the serious cold began to move in, he walked the streets with a loaded rifle, terrorizing the Leith citizens, and got himself arrested. Then, in April, right when the warm began to move in, he made a get-out-of-jail plea agreement. Either he never intended to stay in the first place and was using Leith as a means of getting his face in front of the cameras, or he didn’t do his homework before moving up there and was unpleasantly surprised by its winters.”

  “And this man had an authoritarian personality?”

  “I don’t know about him. I doubt it. I got the impression he was nothing more than an attention-seeker. You asked how I know about the authoritarian personality disorder, and that’s how. That fellow was such a comic character, a Falstaff type, I wondered how in the hell anyone in his or her right mind could follow him. It made me curious, so I did some studies, coming across the authoritarian personality disorder and doing some light reading. It answered questions for me about why some people join hate groups like neo-Nazis or the KKK or Aryan Nations.”

  “What makes you think Whitley joined the Nazis because of a personality disorder?”

  “Neo-Nazis,” he corrected her. “What was done in your room wasn’t a political statement. That was done in rage. He may have joined the neo-Nazis because of his need to prove his superiority over others, but what he did in your room had nothing to do with politics.”

  “No, it didn’t. I wish I knew why he hated me so much. No, scratch that. I’ll never understand that. I do wish I’d known back then how much he hated me.” Fiona stood and stared down at him. “Do we have enough with the search results and this to bring in the authorities?”

  Grant rose to his feet while shaking his head. “There’s no law against practicing your own brand of politics in your own home or even in your own business. We could get the Southern Poverty Law Center involved—that’s an organization down in Alabama specializing in fighting white supremacists—but we’ve foun
d nothing yet to tie Whitley to your father’s death.”

  “Do we really have to go the legal route with this? Linda’s people might be able to take care of this the old-fashioned way, with vigilante justice. We could call them, tell them what we know, and step back while they exact retribution.”

  He appeared to consider this, again shaking his head. “We still don’t know enough about them. We may end up on the run for the rest of our lives as the only people able to connect them with Whitley’s untimely demise. I say we keep them as a backup plan. If we need them, we call them. If not, we handle it ourselves. What we really need is documentation tying Whitley to the airplane explosion.”

  “A written confession?”

  “That would be optimal. I’d also like to identify Whitley’s partner in crime. Stopping Whitley won’t mean anything if we don’t also stop the leader of Whitley’s band of Airhead Aryans. It’s possible your brother wasn’t alone in the decision to murder you and your father.”

  “We could look on the office computer.” Fiona began moving toward the stairs but paused, turning back and staring at the flag covering one wall. “We need a key for the door.”

  Grant joined her. “And for the turret room. I’m willing to bet the turret room isn’t haunted, that Whitley told his little sister a story to keep her away from it. This sickness of his wasn’t a sudden onset of illness. It’s been going on for a long, long time. Any ideas where to look for keys?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. Where would you hide keys for secret rooms?”

  “In Clinton’s treehouse. Other than that, I haven’t a clue. Let’s start with the computer. Maybe we’ll find what we need there to bring him down. Then we can use an axe on the doors, preferably the same axe he used to trash your hope chest.”

  Chapter 17

  “I hate this office,” Fiona stated while leading the way into the room in which her father had spent so much of his time at home. “I used to love it. I’d play with my dolls, sitting on the floor in front of Daddy’s desk while he played with his computer. We were engaged in different activities, but it nevertheless had the feel of father–daughter quality time. You really need to spend an hour beneath the desk after listening to a brother and a lover conclude the business arrangement for your murder to appreciate how much I hate it now.”

  Panicked by her uncharacteristic openness, Fiona stopped by the side of the desk. Increasingly she found herself relaxing her guard around this man, trusting him. Of all the rooms in which to have a lapse in vigilance, this room, the room in which she’d learned the folly of trusting, was the absolute worst.

  Had she told Grant the man she’d killed had been a lover? She couldn’t remember. They’d packed a lot of conversation into the last two days, most of it his contributions. She did remember the look of compassion on his face when she’d told him he’d never be welcome in her bed. He knew. He must have overheard her conversation with Chad. She shot him a quick glance and saw the same expression there now. “If you want our cease-fire to continue, you’ll wipe that look off your face.”

  His face assumed the bored expression of a man who’s been told Saks Fifth Avenue is having a sale on women’s footwear. “Where’s the power switch on that PC?”

  “Here.” Continuing to the back, she pressed a button at the base of the computer keyboard. “It’s one of those all-in-one desktops, not a lot of storage but no tower to worry about. Daddy used to carry a USB drive to work and back, updating his files at the office with the work he did here. You take the chair. You might know more about computers than I do. You seem to be something of a know-it-all on a lot of different subjects.”

  He gave her an awe-shucks grin while sitting and rolling the chair forward. “I like to read. Anything written.”

  “Then read. What do you see so far?”

  He glanced at the screen. “I see a computer needing a password to log in. You wouldn’t happen to know the password, would you?”

  Damn. Of course she wouldn’t. She’d never used it. Never had occasion to. “No. Maybe a birthday?” Her mind flashing to the birthday videos she’d viewed last night, she gave him Whitley’s birthday and watched him key it in, without success.

  “I’ll try his mother’s name. You called her Julia, right?”

  “Right.” Again the computer told them the password had failed.

  “We might have only one more try,” Grant commented. “Sometimes three is the magic number for permanent lockout. Then you have to wait a certain period before you can try again. What’s your best guess? What would have real significance for Whitley, a word or a series of numbers he couldn’t forget so wouldn’t have to write it down?”

  Fiona felt sorrow rise. Hoping she was wrong, but certain she was right, she said, “Try N1Delaney. That’s with a capital N and a capital D.”

  He keyed in the password and didn’t look up while the computer finished loading. “Your father’s plane?”

  No response was necessary. The password said it all. Her brother’s greatest triumph, his most memorable moment, had been the murders of his father and his sister. Her attention caught by the desktop icons, she stabbed a finger at one. “Zeitgeist! Click on that one.”

  Grant manipulated the mouse, clicking on the folder and sitting back while the file opened in a series of staggered frames across the screen. The file headings read “Strategies,” “Zeitgeist,” “Codes”—Fiona stiffened. A car was pulling up outside the French doors. “Turn it off!” she hissed. “That’s a car outside. Someone’s here!”

  Grant pushed the button and held it in until the monitor went blank. “This way,” he said, moving to the side of the desk.

  “No! There’s no time.” Shoving the chair back, she dropped to her knees and crawled into the cubbyhole beneath the desk. After a second, Grant joined her there, sitting on the opposite side, his excessively long legs blocking the entry, his face almost touching hers, given the bend in both their shoulders and necks. The man barely fit in a space she’d found commodious three years before, and when she found herself resenting his size, she forced herself to swallow her animosity.

  While pulling the chair beneath the desk as far as the wheels would go without running into the Incredible Bulk, Fiona heard the electronic beep signaling the intruder’s arrival. She had to remind herself to breathe when the French doors swished open and someone entered the room.

  Grant touched her arm, and she looked at him. He shaped one hand into a pretend gun and faked a shot, raising his eyebrows in question. She shook her head and pointed a finger upstairs. Now that she trusted him, she’d quit carrying her gun with her. Again she was learning the folly of trust.

  She reminded herself she didn’t need a gun, not unless the intruder was armed. She’d trained for this. She trusted her ability to kill with her hands and feet. She simply didn’t want to, not unless it was absolutely necessary. They hadn’t learned everything they needed to bring Whitley down, and they couldn’t count on Linda’s friends to continue to clean up after them.

  Fear rose, almost choking her, when the footsteps approached. She shouldn’t be afraid. She was ready. Why was she afraid? Expensive shoes, brown leather, with lower legs clad in tan linen, came into view.

  When the chair moved back, she braced her hands at her sides as best she could, given that her ex-stalker was taking up all the available room beneath the desk and consuming all the breathable air. She glared at him and noticed his face bore not alarm but grim resolve, his expression bordering on fierce. He was going to try to race her from beneath the desk. He was going to try to protect her.

  She’d forgotten what an idiot he was!

  Startled, Fiona heard the desk’s central drawer slide open above her head. She heard sounds of rummaging, maybe a whisper of paper being rustled, and the intruder walked away. She cocked her head, listening. She’d lived through this before. He was keying in the code on the safe. The safe clicked open. She heard what may be paper rustling, and then she heard the safe click
shut.

  The footsteps returned. While listening to him slide the drawer shut, it occurred to Fiona he would try to shove the chair back in. He would wonder why it didn’t go all the way. He would bend down to check for obstructions. He would—

  The intruder walked away. The French door hissed opened and then closed. The electronic click sounded.

  She was damp with nervous perspiration. She didn’t look at Grant, and she hoped he had the good sense not to look at her, not when she was at her weakest. A car started and drove away, but, still paralyzed with fear, Fiona couldn’t move.

  “We can get out now,” Grant whispered.

  Frozen in place, she didn’t know whether she had what it took to leave. She remembered how long she’d sat like this the last time. It was time to be brave. She was ready. She needed to keep reminding herself she was no longer the old Fiona. She was the new Fiona, strong, brave, skilled. “Of course. I was just going to say exactly those words. You first.”

  He gave her a searching look before sliding from beneath the desk and rising. She glanced at the hand extended to her. Could she do it? Fiona took Grant’s hand, sliding out, standing, and, despite her heart sounding a drum roll, pretending nonchalance. She glanced up at his face, seeing the same searching look in his eyes. “What?”

  “Have you ever heard of PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?”

  Anger rose. She saw where he was headed with this, and she felt the sting of the affront. Unlike her crazy brother, she did not have mental problems. “Yes, war veterans have it.”

  “Not only war veterans. Any threat on a person’s life can lead to PTSD, including sitting beneath a desk after watching one’s father die and while listening to the people who killed him discuss their attempt on your life. It’s normal. You know that, right?”

  She wasn’t some weakling, and she didn’t care for his tone of voice, dripping with concern. “Leave it, Grant.”