“We feel the same about you, Mr. Younger,” one of the seated men said.
“I have to say something else,” Gretchen said. “You’re educated and wealthy and have knowledge about foreign governments that only intelligence agencies have access to. But you use your education and experience to deceive people who never had your advantages. I’m not talking about these men here; I’m talking about people who never had a break. You exploit their trust and patriotism and inspire as much fear in them as possible. Tell me, Mr. Younger, do you know of any viler form of human behavior?”
The only sound in the room was the wind blowing through the trees behind the train station.
“Come on, Caspian,” Younger said to his son. “We’ve taken up too much of these gentlemen’s time.”
“I’m sorry I had to disrupt your meeting,” Gretchen said to the men at the table. “I admire the work you do. If I could have talked to Mr. Younger somewhere else, I would have.”
She walked outside, leaving Alafair behind, the back of her neck as red as a sunburn.
“Is there something you wanted to say, Ms. Robicheaux?” Love Younger asked.
“Yeah, you got off easy,” Alafair replied. “Your son is mixed up with Asa Surrette, a man who ejaculates on the bodies of the little girls he tortures and murders, the same guy who murdered your foster granddaughter. You’re a real piece of work. I’ve known some scum in my time, but you take the cake.”
“You can’t talk to me like that,” he said, his face quivering.
“I just did,” she replied.
* * *
Alafair caught up with Gretchen outside. “Where are you going?” she said.
“I think I’ll drown myself.”
“I’m proud of you,” Alafair said.
“For what?”
“What you said in there. The way you talked to those guys when you left.”
“What about it?”
“They know courage and integrity when they see it. They can’t say it to Love Younger, but they respected what you did. It was in every one of their faces.”
“Are you telling me the truth?”
“You shouldn’t ask me that. I’ve never lied to you,” Alafair said.
“Care to explain why you’re looking at me like that?”
“Your smile,” Alafair said.
Chapter 30
From the moment Felicity Louviere stole Gretchen Horowitz’s cell phone, she knew that her life had changed and that she would never be the same again. She also knew that nothing from her past life could possibly prepare her for the ordeal that lay ahead. As she drove away from the health club, there was a well of fear in her breast that seemed to have no bottom. At the red light, she looked at the impassive faces of the drivers in other cars, as though these strangers, whom she never would have noticed under ordinary circumstances, might know an alternative to her situation and somehow remove her from the scorched ruins that her life had become.
Her hands were small and powerless and without sensation on the steering wheel. She felt that a poisonous vapor had invaded her chest and attacked her organs and that nothing short of death was worse than living in her current state of mind. She drove through town, barely aware of the traffic around her, going through a yellow light without seeing it, ending up in a park on the north side of Missoula, not sure how she got there.
She turned off her engine down by the creek, in the shade of trees, and didn’t pick up calls. The creek was as clear as glass and rippling over rocks that were orange and green and gray-blue, but she could take no pleasure in the pastoral quality of the scene. She had never felt more alone in her life, except on the day when she realized her father had abandoned her to seek martyrdom in a South American jungle. For the first time since she last saw him, she understood the burden he must have carried to his death. The guilt over the killing of the Indians by the men he worked with must have been so great, he could have no peace until he atoned for them and himself. He did this, she was sure, in order to be the father he wanted his daughter to have.
She had never thought about her father in that way. That he’d chosen to travel the path up to Golgotha’s summit on her account.
Gray spots, like motes of dust, were swimming before her eyes. She opened the windows to let fresh air in the car and was surprised at how cold the weather had turned, even though the equinox was at hand. She got out and saw snow flurries spinning in the sunlight, sparkling in the branches of the trees that lined the stream. Her stomach was sick, her skin clammy; she could not remember when she had felt this light-headed. When she closed her eyes, the earth seemed to tilt under her feet. Gretchen’s cell phone vibrated on the dashboard. She reached back in the car and looked at the screen. The call was blocked.
“Hello?” she said.
“Who’s this?” a man’s voice said.
“If you called for Gretchen Horowitz, she’s not available.”
“So I’ll talk to you. What’s your name?”
“Felicity Louviere.”
There was a pause. “Caspian Younger’s wife?”
“Yes.”
“This is a surprise.”
“You’re Asa Surrette?”
“Surrette is dead. Burned up in a big puff of smoke. That’s what the state police in Kansas say.”
“You were photographing me.”
“I’m casting a movie. You might be in it. Where’s Gretchen?”
“Gone away.”
“To a bar mitzvah?”
“I don’t know where she went.”
“The weather has taken quite a turn. The snow is falling on the creek while the sun is shining. It looks like cotton floating on the water, doesn’t it? Maybe the devil is beating his wife.”
She turned in a circle, her heart pounding. She saw no one. On the far side of the creek, an SUV was parked by a picnic shelter. No one seemed to be inside it. The SUV was either painted with primer or it was black and powdered with white dust. “Is the girl alive?” she said.
“Who?”
“The waitress.”
“Could be. I can check. Want me to do that and call you back?”
“I want to take her place.”
“You’re a bag of tricks, aren’t you?”
“I can see you,” she lied.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“If we get together, I might have to wash out your mouth with soap.”
“Are you afraid of me?”
“Of you? How silly.”
“You murdered my daughter. Are you afraid to look me in the face and admit that? Are you the frightened little man the authorities say you are?”
“The authorities? What are the authorities? Stupid and uneducated people who would be on welfare if they didn’t have uniforms. Maybe you should watch what you say.”
Her knees felt weak. She sat down behind the steering wheel, the door open, the wind like a cold burn on her brow. She could hear herself breathing inside the confines of the car. “Is the girl hurt badly? What have you done to her?”
“Maybe I’m a kinder man than you think. Maybe I have a side that others don’t know about. You think you’re going to set me up?”
“I don’t want to live,” she said.
“Say that again.”
“You’ll be doing me a favor if you take my life. But you’re not up to it. You’re what they say you are.”
“What do they say?”
“You were in a foster home. There was a room where someone was kept locked up. Or where the children were forced to go when they were bad. What happened in that room? Were you sodomized? Did you have to kneel all night on grains of rice? Were you told you were unclean and unacceptable in the eyes of God? My mother was declared insane. Maybe I can understand what happened to you as a child.”
“Somebody put that on the Internet. It’s a lie. Those things never happened,” he said.
“Then why are you so afraid of me? Did you plan to kill me from afar?”
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“Who says I was planning any such thing?”
“I think my husband paid you to kill my daughter. That means I was next.”
“Your husband does what I tell him. Don’t provoke me.” His voice sharpened. “Believe me, you do not want to provoke me, you little bitch.”
“I saw the pictures of the people you suffocated.”
“You want that for yourself? I can arrange it. I would love to do that for you.”
“I think you’re all talk. I think you’re scum. Call me back when you can speak in an intelligent manner.”
He was starting to shout when she closed the phone.
A moment later, she saw someone enter the SUV through the passenger side and drive away, scouring divots of grass out of the lawn, the exhaust trailing off like pieces of dirty string.
* * *
An hour later, at the Younger compound on the promontory above the Clark Fork, the cell phone Felicity had taken from Gretchen’s purse vibrated on top of her dresser. She picked it up and placed it to her ear. The French doors on the balcony were open, and she could see the pink and blue blooms on the hydrangeas by the carriage house. She thought of New Orleans and the Garden District and the way the tenderest of flowers opened in the shade, as though defying the coming of the night or the passing of the season. “Did you mean what you said?” the voice asked.
“Yes,” she replied.
“Wait on my instructions. Tell no one about our conversation. If you do, I’ll put Rhonda’s tit in a wringer and let you listen. You’ll never get those sounds out of your head. You still there?”
“Yes,” she said.
“We’ll see if you’re up to this. Have a nice day.”
After he hung up, Felicity sat down slowly in a chair, as though afraid that something inside her would break. Then she began to weep. When she looked up, her husband was standing in the doorway, blocking out the sunlight, his face veiled with shadow. He was eating a bowl of ice cream mixed with pineapple syrup and appeared to be savoring the cold before he swallowed each spoonful. “PMS time again?” he said. “That stands for ‘piss, moan, and snivel.’ ”
“You did it, didn’t you?”
“Did what?”
“Paid Surrette to kill Angel.”
“Your mother was crazy. So are you.”
“Why did you do it, Caspian?”
“I didn’t pay anybody to do anything. I’ve been trafficking in cocaine. Large amounts of it.”
“What?”
“I quit going to G.A. and put my toe back in the water. I dropped a half mil in Vegas alone. The vig was two points a week. I hooked up with some guys in Mexico City. They stiffed me on the deal.”
“So you had Angel murdered?”
“I didn’t.”
“What are you telling me? You make no sense.”
He walked to the French doors and gazed out at the lawn and the potted citrus and bottlebrush trees on the terrace and the roll of the mountains in the distance. “When I first saw you at the art theater, I thought you were the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. What happened to us, Felicity?”
“Nothing,” she replied. “People don’t change. They grow into what they always were.”
* * *
At six that evening, Clete came up to Albert’s house and knocked on the front door with the flat of his fist. Albert got up from the dining table and opened the door. “Is this a raid?” he asked.
Clete’s face was flushed, as though he had been out in the sun or drinking all afternoon. “Where’s Dave?”
“Eating,” Albert replied.
“Can I come in?”
“You’re not going to start a fistfight, are you?” Albert said.
“What are you talking about?” Clete said.
“You look like somebody put a burr under your blanket,” Albert said. “You want a plate?”
“Felicity doesn’t pick up her phone,” Clete said to me, ignoring Albert. “I think Surrette has her.”
Molly and Alafair had stopped eating. “Clete, I don’t want to hear about that woman,” Molly said.
“You want to take a ride?” Clete said, his eyes on me.
“Where?” I said.
“To Love Younger’s,” Clete said.
“No, he doesn’t,” Molly said. “I mean it, Clete. Don’t bring that woman’s troubles into our lives.”
“Five minutes ago this was my home,” Albert said. “Do you people carry a fight with you every place you go?”
“I’ll be right back,” I said. I walked out into the yard with Clete. The sun had dipped behind the ridge, and in the shadows, I could feel the temperature dropping, the dampness rising from the grass and flower beds. “I know you’re worried, but think about what you just said,” I told him. “Felicity Louviere is an intelligent woman. She’s not going to deliberately put herself in the hands of a depraved man.”
“You don’t know her,” he said. “Maybe she wants to suffer. Maybe she wants to cancel his ticket. But she always leaves her cell phone on for me. Now I go directly to voice mail.”
“Then let her live with her own choices.”
“That’s a chickenshit thing to say.”
“I meant let her pop him if she can. What she may be doing is not any crazier than what Gretchen has been doing.”
“You want to nail Surrette or not?”
“He tried to kill Alafair, Clete. What do you think?”
“You’re not hearing me. My point is, we’re smarter than this guy. Money is involved, but it’s not the issue. It’s personal, and it’s coming out of the Younger family. It also involves Wyatt Dixon. And I’ve got another suspicion.”
“What?”
“Maybe it’s off-the-wall.”
“Say it.”
“I wonder if Albert has something to do with it. He has a way of bringing people out of the woodwork.”
“I’ve thought the same thing.”
We looked at each other. I walked up on the porch and opened the door slightly. “Albert, could you step out here, please?” I said.
He came outside and closed the door behind him. He was wearing a heavy cotton shirt and corduroy trousers with a wide leather belt outside the loops and sandals with rope soles, the way a Spanish peasant might. He was smiling, his small blue eyes buried inside his face.
“Is there any reason Asa Surrette would want to do you harm?” I said.
“Maybe he doesn’t like my books.”
“Any other reason?” I said.
“Maybe he didn’t like my film adaptations. No one did.”
“This isn’t funny,” Clete said.
“That’s what the producers said when they lost their shirts.”
“Think,” I said. “Did you ever have contact with this guy? Or anyone who could have been him?”
“I don’t think he’d be someone I’d forget. I spent four weeks in Wichita and loved the people there. I didn’t have a negative experience with anyone. They’re the best people I’ve ever met. What I’ve never understood is why they live in Kansas.”
“You were in Wichita?” I said.
“I was writer-in-residence in their MFA program. I taught a three-hour seminar one night a week for a month. They were all nice young people. You’re barking up the wrong stump, Dave.”
“What year?” I said.
“The winter term of 1979.”
“Surrette was a student at Wichita State University then.”
“Not in my class, he wasn’t.”
“How do you know?” Clete asked.
“I still have my grade sheets. I checked them. He’s not on there.”
“Was anyone auditing the class, sitting in without formally enrolling?” I said.
“Two or three people came and went. I never checked roll.”
“Surrette told Alafair he had a creative writing professor who claimed to be a friend of Leicester Hemingway.”
Albert’s eyes had been fixed on the north pasture and the horses drinking
at the tank. They came back on mine. “He did?”
“Surrette accused this creative professor of name-dropping,” I said. “He seemed to bear him great resentment.”
“I knew Les many years,” Albert said. “I fished with him in the Keys and visited his home in Bimini. He always said he was going to start up his own country on an island off Bimini. It was going to be a republic made up of writers and artists and jai-alai players and musicians. He even had a flag.”
“Surrette said this professor wouldn’t read his short story to the class,” I said. “Do you remember anything like that?”
Albert’s gaze roved around the yard, as though he saw realities in the shadows that no one else did. He was breathing hard through his nose, his mouth pinched. “I don’t recall the exact content of the story, but I thought it was an assault on the sensibilities rather than an attempt at fiction. It was genuinely offensive. He was older than the others. I think I told him it was too mature a story for some of the younger people in the seminar. He seemed to take it well enough, at least as I recall. Maybe we’re talking about a different fellow.”
“Surrette also said he wrote a note on the evaluation, something to the effect that he understood your objection to a story about boys chewing on each other’s weenies.”
I saw the color drain from Albert’s face. He started to speak, then looked up at the hillside and the dark conical shapes of the trees that hid the cave where Asa Surrette had camped. “I’ll be,” he said.
“It was Surrette?” I said.
“How does the expression go? There’s no fool like an old fool?” he said.
* * *
On Saturday, Wyatt Dixon emerged from his Airstream trailer at the fairgrounds and flexed his shoulders in appreciation of the summer evening and the salmon-colored sky and the neon ambience of the amusement rides and game booths and concession stands that had defined his youth and were, in his opinion, as much a stained-glass work of art as any fashioned from stone by medieval guildsmen. He had put on his puff-sleeved sky-blue shirt with red stars on the shoulders, his championship buckle, and his soft lavender red-fringed butterfly chaps and a Stetson that fit tightly on his head, down low on the brow, one that didn’t fly off with the first bounce out of the bucking chute. The summer light was trapped high in the sky, as though it had no other place to go, the breeze balmy and redolent of meat fires. What finer place was there?
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