“I’m just saying—”
She interrupted him, switching the topic to anything but her irrational fear. “I didn’t have the code to the safe. Want to take a look?”
He glanced away, and when he looked back, his face was expressionless. “That’s what he took from the center drawer?”
“I think so.” Forcing herself to breathe regularly, evenly, Fiona opened the drawer. It was messy. Her father had never kept it like this. After shoving aside several pieces of paper, some covered with what may or may not be obscene doodles, she plucked out a piece of paper with five numbers written on it: 37823.
When she began to move toward the safe, Grant stayed behind. She glanced back at him, seeing he was seated before the computer again. “You do that,” he said. “I’m going to print off these Zeitgeist files so we can get the hell out of here.”
She nodded and continued to the safe, keying in the code, pleased at the sound of a click, and opening it. The inside, as big as a small microwave, was more orderly than the desk, with a pile of documents and large envelopes on one side and miscellaneous items like cash and jewelry on the other. Her eyes lighted on a keyring with two keys. Yes! She grabbed them.
Behind her, she heard the printer hum and then begin to hiss while spitting out papers. Grant was preparing his evening reading. He’d sleep well tonight.
“The spirit of the time. The taste and outlook characteristic of a period or generation.”
Confused, she turned toward him. “That statement lacks context. What might you be talking about?”
He didn’t look up from his position hovering over the printer. “That’s the definition of zeitgeist, according to thefreedictionary.com.”
“Interesting.” She turned back to the safe, leafing through the pile of documents and envelopes and sliding out the yellow envelope at the bottom of the stack.
“I think so.”
His voice came from right behind her, and she flinched. She hadn’t heard him walking over. “Be careful how you sneak up on a person whose nerves are a little raw. I could have shot you.”
“If you had a gun. What do you have there?”
“It says, ‘To Be Opened in the Event of My Death.’” She twisted, passing it to him. “Add this to your stack of late evening reading. I have no interest in learning what instructions he left.”
Grant added it to the pile gripped in one hand while attempting to peer past her. “Did our visitor pick up or drop off?”
“I think pick up. I heard paper moving when he was at the safe, but the top document here is personal taxes for last year.”
“Did you see the doodles in the desk?”
“I did. If they are, as I suspect, obscene images, spare me the explanation.”
“Not obscene. Pepe the frog, a cartoon character co-opted by racists as a symbol of hatred. Your brother isn’t all that talented at drawing. I can see why you’d think they were obscene.”
“His greatest talent appears to be hating. Look what I found.” She closed the safe and turned toward him, holding the keys high and jingling them. “Two keys. We have two locked rooms and two keys. I did the math, and I believe these two keys should open our two mystery doors. Shall we look behind door number one or door number two first?”
“It depends which designation fits which door. I say the turret room. We could take some food up and eat. I’m starving.”
“And if I eat one more wedding reception meal, I’ll die of boredom. Let’s look in the pantry and see whether there’s something microwavable. I’d even settle for canned mothballs right now, anything but prawns or crab puffs.”
Thirty minutes later, Fiona laid out a buffet on her dresser while Grant delivered his stack of reading materials to his room. Whitley had developed expensive tastes in canned foods: wild salmon, pheasant, smoked trout, and albacore tuna. Add to those the canned peaches and pears and two boxes of water crackers, and they had a feast fit for a murderous son of a bitch.
Grant strode into the room, stopping and staring at the food. “I’d kill for a pizza right now.”
“Funny you should mention that. Whitley killed for canned pheasant and albacore tuna. I should feel threatened, but I don’t.”
“Why?” he asked, walking past and grabbing a plate.
“Killing me won’t get you a pizza, not unless they serve pizza at the Minnesota Correctional Facility.” Fiona began piling her plate high. Hiding from possible assassins was hungry work.
“They probably do serve pizza. Maybe even fried chicken and hamburgers. Those guys have it made.” He carried his plate to the bed and took the seat he’d had this morning, blithely unaware of her stiffening posture.
Did it matter? It hadn’t this morning, and, like he’d said, she had to learn to trust again. That meant trusting herself, too. Yes, he was an attractive man, too attractive by half, as she’d learned during the discussion of book covers this morning. It had been years since she’d felt the old familiar yearning. Nevertheless, she wasn’t that woman anymore, possessing more than sufficient self-control to keep him at an arm’s distance.
It occurred to her he made it easy for her to keep him at an arm’s distance. Despite his unrealistic hopes there could one day be more for the two of them, he didn’t push her beyond a certain limit. He was a comfortable man who respected boundaries. Grant Haldeman, erstwhile stalker, would never be her lover, but he made for a comfortable acquaintance.
She joined him, placing her plate on her lap and leaning back against the headboard. “I wonder whether we should have viewed the turret room first,” she mused while loading a cracker with pheasant.
“We don’t know whether the keys work on those two rooms. We may as well have a nice optimistic lunch rather than a pessimistic one. If the keys don’t work, we’ll be left with reading the printouts I made. I skimmed some of the strategies file, and it looked pretty wild and rambling. Poorly written, too, with fused sentences and comma splices. A real appetite suppressant. No,” he continued, holding a chunk of smoked trout before his lips, “I say eat, drink, and be merry.”
“Doesn’t that quote end with ‘for tomorrow we die’?”
He frowned at her. “Eat your pheasant, and don’t mess with my mood. You know something? This is strange fare for a neo-Nazi.”
“Why?”
“The superego on the authoritarian personality would frown on decadence like this. Have you ever seen a fat white supremacist?”
“No, I can’t say that I have. Then again, my circle of acquaintances didn’t run to neo-Nazis.”
“I googled images earlier. Only one was what we’d call obese, and that one had blood running from his nose while he was being handcuffed. Not a sterling example of neo-Nazism, given their tendency to skirt the law rather than break it. Or their noses.” He popped another piece of trout into his mouth and chewed, his expression meditative, before speaking again. “No Cristal?”
“My courage is high today. There’s bottled water, Evian, on the dresser. I’d have brought you a bottle when I came over, but sidekicks help themselves.”
After setting down his plate, Grant levered his legs off the bed. “When am I promoted to full partner?”
“When my brother learns to draw a decent frog.”
Chapter 18
The first key Fiona tried on the turret room door worked, rewarding her with the faint snick of a well-oiled lock relinquishing its grip, and she turned the knob, pushing open the door and revealing a room bathed in platinum afternoon light, dust motes dancing along the rays of sun spearing through glistening, unembellished windows. “We can’t turn on the lights in here,” she whispered, “not without drapes on the windows.”
“We won’t need lights,” Grant replied from behind her. “Either stand aside, or keep the line moving so I don’t mow you down. I spy books. Starved readers confronted with bookshelves tend to forget social graces.”
She moved into the center of the chamber, ignoring his passage while she inspected the cylin
drical room. Three tall, narrow windows were evenly spaced around the outer half of the curved wall. On each side of the window facing her were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with the books Whitley had decided to secret away. Beneath each window, a wooden trunk was snugged against the shelves, hugging the wall’s contours and serving as a rounded bench, lending the room the warm, cozy feel of a reading room. To the side of the two windows closest to the door stood curio shelves covered with framed photos and knickknacks.
She began moving toward the photo shelf, but at the sound of Grant’s bit-off oath, she turned toward him. “What did you find?”
“I feel like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, who, stuck on the ocean, said, ‘Water, water, every where / nor any drop to drink.’ Books, books, everywhere, but not a one to read. This isn’t reading. It’s white supremacist polemic.” He took a book off the shelf and held it up with the red-black-and-white cover facing her. “The Turner Diaries. It’s a futuristic book about a race war resulting in the successful elimination of all non-white races.” Slotting it with a savagery doing the book more harm than good, he plucked out another and displayed it. “Mein Kampf. Written by Adolf Hitler while he was in prison. A book outlining his philosophy.” He slammed the book away, grimacing while he waved a hand at both bookshelves. “They’re all the same. The warped ideology of a warped mentality. These would be more likely to induce insomnia than sleep.”
“I would imagine they’d be easier for you to read, Aryan-type person, than for me, Indian-type person,” Fiona commented while easing past him to the window seat in the center. Raising the lid, she stared down at the stacks of clipped papers.
Grant joined her, crouching down in front of the seat. “This looks interesting.” He snatched a pile of papers and shifted to sit crosslegged on the floor.
“That’s just plain rude.”
“It is,” he remarked without looking up, his satisfied voice indicating a deplorable lack of manners. “Have a seat. This is good stuff.”
“What’s so fascinating?” Fiona dropped to the floor beside him.
He ignored her, continuing to read for a full minute before passing her a sheaf of papers. “Divorce papers for a Harley and Julia Delaney. It makes for interesting reading.”
She took it, leafing through it. “Why is this interesting reading?”
Without looking up from the rest of the papers, he replied, “The address of the respondent.”
“Minnesota Security Hospital. That’s for the criminally insane.” She knitted her eyebrows and leafed through the pages, scanning the passages. “This says she was committed for having tried to drown her five-year-old son in the bathtub, excusing her actions by saying she was cleansing him of evil thoughts. The attorney mentions the incident when he addresses custody. Whitley’s mother, Julia, was insane, might still be. Did you find a death certificate?”
Again, he didn’t look up. “No, but I found this correspondence between your father and Julia’s doctor, a psychiatrist who refuses to pigeonhole her illness, saying she manifested as both borderline personality disorder and schizophrenic. This predates the divorce papers and likely led to the decision to divorce the woman. The doctor says he doubts Julia’s ability to respond favorably to standard treatments and does not anticipate her future release from hospitalization.”
“Whitley inherited his mother’s insanity.”
He glanced up at that. “Or he was driven insane by her actions. Your father had to have known or suspected Whitley had problems, don’t you think?”
Fiona pondered the question and shook her head. “No. Daddy loved us. His biggest failing as a father, if it could be considered a failing, was to overlook our transgressions. If anything, he was too forgiving.” A lump rose in her throat at the memory of her last meeting with her father, and she jumped to her feet. “You keep reading those. I want to look in one of the other window seats.”
The room was small. Three steps took her to the second window trunk, and she popped it open, kneeling to look inside. Stacked in a long line along the bottom of the enclosure were dozens of leather-bound books, their spines facing upward. They’d been labeled by hand with dates, the first being twenty-four years ago, when Whitley was eight. The childish scrawl, done in white ink on chocolate leather, made an ache rise within. He’d been a little boy when he’d begun collecting these.
Selecting the oldest one, Fiona sat on the floor with her back braced against the seat and flipped the book open to the first page. It was a journal. At the age of eight, her brother had begun keeping a journal. She began reading.
“My friend gave me this diry. He said I should write down my feelings each day. He said it will make me feel better. I hope he is write. I feel bad all the time now. I keep thinking bout Mommy screaming and yelling and hollering. He locked her in that room. She din do nothing wrong. I was the wrong one for what I did. I told him this. I told him I was evil. He pretended to be sad. He din care. Then the men came and took her away. He wanted to hug me but I fixed him. He wont be hugging me again.”
Fiona felt sick. At the sight of motion in her peripheral vision, she glanced up. Grant was staring down at her, a question in his eyes. “I’d ask you what you were looking at if I cared what you were looking at. Instead, I am going to be calm and rational. I’m going to hand you this journal in the hopes you become every bit as ill as I am right now.” She extended the book to him and watched his face while he read the first entry, seeing his eyes narrow and his lips tighten.
Closing the book, he passed it back to her. “He had a friend.”
She took the journal from him. “Boys do. Even you had a friend. Sure, you had to bribe him for his friendship, but it was nevertheless companionship.”
He grinned. “Low blow, Fiona. What I mean is he had a friend who could afford to gift him with an expensive leather journal. That would be someone with money to blow on quality, probably not another boy. A gift like this isn’t in the same category as a visit to a treehouse or a mother’s chocolate chip cookies.”
Comprehension rose. “You think he had an adult friend, perhaps the same friend who now leads his neo-Nazi meetings?”
“That might be a non sequitur, in that it doesn’t logically follow the same friend who gave him the journals is the same person who leads the meetings, but I think it’s a possibility. Why would an adult friend give a boy a journal and tell him to write down his feelings? Maybe the adult friend has been grooming him for a long time. Can you think of anyone Whitley spent a great deal of time with while you were growing up, an adult?”
She frowned down at the floor while running through a mental list of visitors to the house and drawing a blank. Shaking her head, she looked back up at him. “Everyone liked my father, and he had many friends: Councilman Manfred Hedrick, an old college roommate named Glen Dalton, another fraternity brother named Harry or Harold Jenson, and a business acquaintance with whom he golfed and played poker. I think his name was Winston Yates, but I’m not certain. Those are the only adults I remember from my youth. I don’t recall Whitley associating with any of them, but he’s ten years older than I am. By the time I would have noticed any unusual activity in the house, he’d have been in his late teens, and the grooming, if that’s indeed what it was, could have occurred offsite. Whitley was off to the University of Minnesota by the time I was seven or eight.”
“But he would have graduated when you were eleven or twelve. Do you remember anyone then?”
She shook her head again. “He went from college straight to a position at Delaney.com, and he had his own apartment for quite a while. I used to visit him there on Saturdays. Even when he moved back home, I only saw him on weekends. I can’t think of any friends, much less someone fifteen or twenty years older. Did you look inside the third window seat?”
“Yes, but there was nothing but photo albums. A bunch of kids playing T-ball. Nothing to get worked up about.”
“That’s right. I’d forgotten about the girls T-ball team he coaches. I
wonder whether he’s still coaching. This must be his memories room, a place he visits to step back in time and relive good experiences. Not all good,” she added, remembering Whitley’s first entry in the journal. Fiona sprang to her feet. “I want to look at those two knickknack shelves by the door.”
The first shelf she examined displayed photos of a young Whitley from the age of nine to fifteen or older. In each shot, he wore a distinctive t-shirt, one with “White Power” and a swastika across the front, another with an “SS” in a circle, and another with a smiley face of Hitler. She glanced at Grant’s face to see how he was taking this.
“And your father didn’t know?” he asked, cocking one eyebrow.
“He couldn’t have. Look at the backgrounds on all these shots. They appear to have been taken in a wooded area. He went to summer camp a quite a bit.”
“And your father never visited him there?”
That didn’t sound right. Her father had made a point of being as actively involved in his children’s activities as time permitted. “Yes, he did. These couldn’t have been made at summer camp. They must have been day trips with his friend but also during the summer, given the short-sleeved t-shirts and the greenery in the background. Like you said, the friend was an adult.”
“Or your father was a neo-Nazi.”
Fiona’s temper flared. “Don’t blow our new superhero–sidekick collaboration with statements like that, Grant. Neo-Nazis don’t marry Indian women.”
He had the grace to look ashamed. “You’re right. That was a stupid remark.” He turned to the other shelf. “Check out this shelf. Toys. A Hitler bobble-head. A replica luger, probably a cap gun.”
She moved to join him. “A miniature neo-Nazi flag. A board game. You wouldn’t happen to know what Juden Raus! means, would you?”
“Juden might be German for Jews, but I don’t have a guess on Raus.”
“It’s old, maybe from World War II. A German board game from that era bearing a title starting with Jews is pretty much self-explanatory. Here’s a three-dimensional swastika made from wood.” She picked up the last one. It was jointed, and she twisted the spurs, turning it into a four-sided X with legs. “It’s like a Rubik’s cube for dummies.”
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