by Lila Shaara
They were in the home stretch of a movie that Dusty had chosen, something involving exploding cars and men kicking and punching and shooting at one another; Harry was gleefully annoying Dusty by making more comparisons with Caligula when the phone rang. He picked it up after telling Dusty to turn the TV down. It was Fay Levy.
41
THE EMPRESS
REVERSED
She loses everything. She is barren and bereft
Maggie said, “I only need to make one more trip. Everything I want to take will fit in my car. Miss Tokay’s taking a nap. Will you check on her in an hour or so? She’s talking about ascending again.”
Josie sat on the couch in Miss Tokay’s once-grand living room, a dozen cards splayed on the dainty table in front of her. “She always does that.”
“I know, but she said she saw her lawyer recently and tidied up her affairs. Now she seems more tuckered out than usual.”
“When will you be back?” Josie asked, not liking how much her voice was shaking.
“By tonight. You’ll be all right?”
“I’ll be fine. But the cards are ominous. You were right to bring us here, I guess. But then again, trouble follows me around for sure. I don’t know if it matters where I go.” She looked up. “You’re not going to see him, are you?”
Maggie sighed, an explosive breath out, then spoke with more fire than Josie had seen in her for a long while. “He’s not even in town. He’s gone back to his wife. That should make you happy.”
“Maggie, I only want you to be happy. I knew he wasn’t going to stick, is all.”
“I guess you were right.” Maggie’s voice was harsh. Josie didn’t like when her niece got all feisty and mad. It wasn’t her normal way, and Josie feared her sometimes, although she would never have admitted it to a soul, not even Baby. She hated the tiny whispers of doubt about her niece’s sanity, but they were there nonetheless, little ghosts of worry that danced in the back of her mind, darting into the front from time to time. Maggie said in a weird, tight voice, “You can stop it now. I don’t have any expectations left. The hope’s all gone. I haven’t quite gotten rid of the wanting part, but I’m pretty sure that’ll be killed too if we chisel at it long enough.”
“What do you mean? I don’t want you to give up all hope. And hope of what, anyway?” Josie hated how weak and silly her voice sounded, as if she was talking with a head full of water.
Maggie leaned closer. “That someday I’ll do some of the things that burn in my heart, that I’ll ever be able to speak openly about important things. That I won’t be all alone, forever and ever. You’ve got what you wanted. I know it doesn’t make you happy, but maybe it’ll make you satisfied.”
Josie raised her own voice. “I’m sorry I’m not lighthearted enough for you. I apologize for having lost everyone I’ve ever really loved. A husband, a child, a sister. My whole family.” She paused, breathing hard.
Maggie’s lips compressed. “I’ve lost everybody, too. Except for you.” She reached for the deck as though she was going to take a card, then pulled her hand back. She said, “At least you had your own family for a while.” Without saying anything else, she turned and left the room. Josie heard the Toyota pull away a few minutes later, beating down panic at the notion that Maggie was never coming back. She turned over the top card on the deck, the one Maggie would have drawn. It was the the Chariot, reversed. “An unethical victory,” she muttered, the hated quaver still in her voice. She looked at the cards for a few more minutes before she went to find a glass.
Harry had made the appointment with Fay Levy for one o’clock. After eating breakfast, they went to one he’d made earlier at the state police barracks in Bellstade, about halfway between Lucasta and Godfrey Lake.
Commander Matthew Sutton was an inch or so shorter than Harry, covered in freckles and red fur. His hair was short and curly; Harry suspected that the man had had to fight the tendency for everyone he knew to call him Rusty. His eyes were so light that they almost disappeared into the wrinkles around his eyes, although otherwise he didn’t look much over thirty. His muscles made his uniform bulge around his arms; Harry flexed his own leaner biceps automatically, then stopped himself, embarrassed.
Commander Sutton was more welcoming than Harry had expected; this was explained by the man himself when he gestured them to two chairs in his tiny industrial office. “Not much to do right about now except to pull speeders heading to Philly on the turnpike. Occasionally one of them sails through a guardrail. A few years ago we had a big drug bust that made the national news. Sometimes people rent old farms, build small grass landing strips and drug labs, and start doing business; they can fly product in and out without much scrutiny. The last one we broke up yielded six arrests and so much meth you could keep a stadium-full of people high for a year. That was the highlight of my career so far.” He eyed Dusty. “This is your son, you said?”
“Yes. He’s acting as my research assistant.”
“Now, that’s real nice. You gonna be a reporter someday?”
“Maybe,” Dusty said. Harry was relieved that his son’s tone was neutral, even polite.
Sutton handed them two manila folders, one fat, one thin. He said they could look at them while he got coffee and disappeared out the door. Harry thumbed through the fat one first, Dusty looking over his shoulder. Harry could feel his son’s warm, damp breath on his ear as he quickly shoved the photos of the accident scene under the written report. “Oh my God,” he said after a minute.
“What?” asked Dusty.
“Look at that.” He pointed to a line in the report. “No one ever said anything.”
Sutton came back a few minutes later. He’d brought two paper cups of coffee with him and a can of Coke. Harry took the coffee with thanks, nudging Dusty to do the same for the soda. Then Dusty pulled out his notebook and pencil, and “assumed the position” as he called it, ready to write down everything anyone said.
Sutton said, “When Ziegart died, it was the first time in local memory that we made the national news. The meth lab was time number two.”
Harry nodded. “It seems everybody ran Todd Greenleaf’s story, picked up from the wire. I spoke to him, but I thought I should talk to you directly. I appreciate your help.”
“Glad to do it. How is Todd?”
“Seems to be enjoying himself.”
“He always did. Lousy writer, but not a bad guy. At least he did his best to get his facts right before he printed them.”
Harry gestured to the folder and said, “I didn’t realize how severely Emily Ziegart was hurt in the accident.”
Sutton nodded as he leaned back in the big swivel chair. “Poor thing was a mess. All her injuries were internal, so she didn’t look that bad. But when we found ’em, they’d both been thrown from the car, and she was the only one conscious. She was giving him mouth-to-mouth and CPR like crazy, and she was crying and all bloody, screaming at the EMTs that they had to save him.”
“So you don’t think she did anything to try to precipitate the accident?”
“Of course not. If I’d thought that for a second, I’d have followed it up. But there was no doubt what happened.”
“Someone suggested that she put the yellow jacket in the car.”
“Who? Only if she’d been suicidal. She was devastated afterwards, that was obvious. She kept going back and forth, trying to resuscitate Ziegart, then running back to the car; she tore it apart inside, looking for his EpiPen. He’d dropped it at the party they’d just left. Terrible luck for both of them. The accident ruined her life. I can’t imagine why anyone would suggest otherwise.”
“I didn’t think the claim had any merit, but I had to ask.”
“Was it the ex-wife?”
“Why do you say that?”
Sutton paused, looking at Harry over the rim of his cup. “She was all over the place when Ziegart was dying in the hospital, giving orders, acting all broken up, but in this nasty, bossy way. I actually had to put o
ne of my men outside Emily’s room to keep her out. The old witch kept trying to go in and harass her, even after the poor girl had found out she’d been all tore up inside.”
“I appreciate that you also pulled the file on Doug McNeill.”
“Now that one I don’t remember so well. I didn’t handle it personally. According to the report, it was a straightforward case of choking. He was known to eat too fast, and he lived alone, so when it happened, that was all she wrote.”
Harry paged through the manila folder. “He was found by Jonathan Ziegart?”
“Yeah. It’s a small town, a small campus. The faculty families mix with the students socially. Jonathan Ziegart dropped by McNeill’s all the time. He was just a kid, if I remember right.”
“So it says here. Seventeen years old.” Harry looked back up at the commander. “I’ve met him.”
“Oh? I saw him at the hospital when his dad was dying, and later at the inquest, but I never spoke to him personally.”
Harry said, “No way McNeill’s death could have been murder?”
“No way. It’s pretty hard to make someone choke to death and leave no trace of it.”
“You must know that Emily killed herself not long after she left here, which wasn’t long after Ziegart’s death.” Sutton nodded. Harry went on, “Do you know any details? Where, how, or when, things like that?”
“No, I never got anything official, but there’s no reason I should have. By the time she left, the file was closed on Charles Ziegart.” Sutton drained the last of his coffee. “You don’t remember everybody you come across in this line of work, but I remember her. She was real nice to me when I interviewed her, which they aren’t always. Sometimes they blame us or the EMTs for whatever happened, especially when it’s really bad. She kept thanking me for trying to help. I was in the room when they told her that she’d lost the baby, and she started crying, and it was just about the saddest thing I’d ever seen. She just kind of crumpled, got all lost-looking. I heard from the doctor later that she couldn’t ever have no more, her insides were so messed up.”
Darcy Murphy felt his fear like acid eating away at his stomach. He couldn’t eat lunch, terror having filled his belly, so he’d broken his promise to his wife and to God and to his dead mother and had what his old drinking buddies called a “liquid lunch.” Three shots of bourbon. And some nuts. That was protein at least. He kept telling himself that this was his moment, his offering to his country, to the world. Now he knew how all the great heroes felt. John Wayne, Neil Armstrong, Babe Ruth, this was how they felt before the big scene, the long step, the championship game. Like mice were gnawing at your insides, running around and chattering inside you, making your hands shake and your jaw tremble and your vision waver. When it came to the sticking point, he hoped his courage would screw up nice and proper, and that he’d be able to do his job and make his dead mother proud.
The gun felt cold and heavy in his pocket; he’d loaded it against the agent’s advice because he didn’t trust anybody, not even the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to keep him safe from the fortune teller. He tried to think of the gun as a shield against danger, but he kept pulling it out and checking the safety; his imagination kept painting pictures of the gun going off in his pants and shooting off his foot or worse. The last thing he wanted was to go out like an asshole, his dong blown off in a fumbling bloody blur. The thought of being a dead joke, a serious contender in the Darwin Awards, made his skin quiver with horror.
It was only ten-thirty when they left the state police barracks, so there was plenty of time to have an early lunch and to make the long drive to Godfrey Lake. They traveled on a winding, two-lane highway through more farm country. They passed a yellow traffic sign depicting a horse and buggy, and Dusty said, “What does that mean? There’s a time portal somewhere around here?”
Harry said, “Sort of. Although I think the Amish are masters of the Internet and real estate these days, so it’s more like a wormhole to an alternate universe than a trip back in time.”
After a minute, Dusty said, “No one ever said she was pregnant?”
“No. Not a soul.”
“Do you think it’s important?”
“It might help explain her suicide, I suppose, along with the general horror of her whole Cantwell experience. But I don’t know.”
“You think someone offed her?”
Harry glanced at his son, not willing to take his eyes from the steep curves of the road for long. “You know, this isn’t a joke.”
Dusty looked sheepish. “Sorry.”
“But you’re right. I think it’s very possible that someone offed her.”
He could see the shrine now, down the road, a ghastly thing in concrete and purple paint. It seemed uglier today, an overcast sky making it look like an insane carnival tomb. He’d always felt the wrongness of it, its unnatural colors giving him a bellyache, but now the wrongness was tinged with violence and a hatred for order. He felt it laughing at him like a big, purple clown.
He drove past it, sweat making his back stick to the vinyl seat, and pulled into the empty lot in front of the Babyface Salon. He parked the van and slowly got out, feeling the thump, thump of the gun against his thigh. He took a moment to look up at the blue-gray sky, the heat lying on him like a blanket, thinking, It’s gonna rain soon. Will that be good or bad? Then he looked around at the pine trees on either side of the road, at the shotgun shack to the left of the salon, at the double-wide beyond it, then to the other side of the road, where there was a small clapboard house set far back, a lame truck rusting on cinder blocks in the shady front yard. No birds sang, no wind blew. Darcy wondered where all the surveillance was. He looked at his watch. It was four minutes before three. Showtime.
42
KNIGHT OF SWORDS
REVERSED
Lies, bigger lies, and secrets. Don’t turn your back on him
Fay Levy’s small brick house was only three feet away on either side from homes that were almost identical to hers. She was short and solid with long dark ringlets and big brown eyes, and she wore jeans and a bright red sweatshirt. She opened the door with a terse smile and only the briefest series of questions as to Harry’s bona fides. He almost wished she’d been more reluctant to talk to him; single women should be more careful, he thought. How was she to know that he wasn’t someone untrustworthy, in spite of having his fourteen-year-old with him? He thought about Quick and the lost Jake, and wanted to pull his son to his side and hold him there while lecturing the woman, who had to be almost thirty, about Bad Men and Ulterior Motives, auras be damned. The hallway was dark, with stairs facing the front door leading up into even deeper darkness. The room they followed her into, however, was light and comfortable and pretty, with fat, flowery furniture and a big uncurtained window to the porch. The room was small, with a wall that was almost all fireplace, flanked by tall, crammed bookcases. Here a fireplace makes sense, Harry thought. She offered them hot tea, saying that it was all she had. They both declined. The first thing she said after they’d all sat down was “Why did it take you so long?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“When Charlie died, everyone in the world was wringing their hands and moaning about the Great Loss to Science. Emily kills herself, and it never even made the Lucasta Mirror.”
“Why was that?”
“Oh, come on!” Her long feather earrings swayed with her anger, catching in her black curls. “Everyone at Cantwell knew that Charlie was sucking all her work up like a big fat leech and taking all the bows and awards.” She shook her head. “After Emily’s death, there was nothing about it anywhere. I looked.” She stared at a loaded bookshelf beside the fireplace. “If she’d been a man, everyone would have been beating their breasts about what a loss to science her death was. Not to mention a terrible injustice. But Cantwell is such a fucking old boys’ club.” She glanced at Dusty and apologized for her language. “I thought you folks’ job was to investigate stuff. No one investigated
anything. Lazy sons of bitches. Sorry.”
Dusty was furiously scribbling, and Harry feared that he was writing down every obscenity. “You were close to her,” Harry said.
“We were best friends. When I came to Cantwell, I expected long nights drinking coffee and beer and smoking endless cigarettes, working out the Theory of Everything with young, excited colleagues.” She snorted. “Instead, it was one big frat party. I was the only undergraduate woman in the whole fucking program.” Another look at Dusty. “Sorry. But every time I came into a room, all conversation stopped. They made jokes about women’s . . . anatomy, and made fun of my hair. They wanted me gone. They wanted Emily gone, too, but she was married to Charlie, so there wasn’t much they could do to her. He protected her, in his way.” She looked at Harry with shining eyes; he realized she was on the edge of tears. “She wound up protecting me. Because of that, those assholes started rumors that we were a dyke couple. I happen to be a lesbian, which didn’t help anything. But no, in case you’re about to ask, Emily wasn’t my lover. She was completely infatuated with Charlie, for all the good it did her.”
Harry glanced at Dusty, head down and writing madly in the composition book. “If Emily was so smart, why did everyone want her out so badly, other than Charlie?”
She looked at him with disgust. “They were jealous, obviously. Don’t tell me you’ve never run into anything like it. If the girl is pretty, she must be stupid. If she’s not, then she must be stupid as well as ugly. If she’s smart, oh my God, you’d better stomp on her in case she gets any ideas about being as good as anybody else.”