Ransom X

by I.B. Holder

  Chapter 55 The Dark Lost Its Meaning

  “She sounded nervous, she needs you out there.” Chess said in a voice that, if it were a coat, it would have been threadbare.

  Legacy hadn’t been ready for this walking in his door in the middle of the night. He had been expecting a thousand different variations of anger. There was none of the sting of childish spite in the tears that ran down her face. She was worried about Wagner, a kind of selfless concern for which never in history has an appropriate winning argument been formulated to counter. When something is that real, no one has the right to change it. Chess stumbled on, reading a notepad from which she had transcribed Wagner’s short, troubled message.

  “She gave directions, why would she give directions if she didn’t want you to come?” Legacy was consciously not looking at Chess. Rather, he took in the room over her shoulder where three agents, stone faced and well-practiced at appearing detached, stood like turrets of stone. Chess was rattling off syllables in quick rhythm like a teletype machine in the newsroom of one of those old movies. Legacy looked for the long string of paper tape so that he could read back the part he’d missed.

  “We can talk about this after we send them home.”

  “You weren’t listening, they aren’t going, you’re going. They’re staying.”

  One of the stone faces in the living room turned toward Legacy. An appreciative smile opened a brief fissure and he said, “We called in for authorization to extend –”

  “On whose request?” He nodded toward Chess.

  He couldn’t quite determine why, but it upset him.

  “All of you, out.” He said, and the men responded to the commanding tone, packing up to leave.

  Chess’ words sprung forward like a burner coming to light, flashing fire with a single purpose, “You say it’s all for me, that you need to protect me. It’s like you’re punishing me, you’re blaming me for a weakness that for the life of me I’ve never allowed myself to demonstrate.” Her voice chattered on the verge of hysterics. “Maybe you’re doing this because you know I don’t need you anymore and that scares you. It scares you that soon you won’t be able to make up my mind for me.”

  They locked eyes, Chess had changed; her face had assumed a look of cold calculation. Suddenly, there was no weakness at all in her fifteen-year-old body. Did she need him? Legacy couldn’t be sure if she’d said that because she knew or just to make him question himself. Either way, he knew that she was right. He was so proud of her, standing clenched fists, with white knuckles showing her determination to help Wagner, and see her safely home. He teetered on the edge of telling Chess what she wanted to hear. He could no more walk away from his role in her life than command the darkness into a particular corner of the night sky. Standing there at the height of her capacity of a young woman, Legacy started down the road to forgiving himself. A wave of the past crashed over him, warm like plasma, then, with a cold tingle, it all came back to him.

  The cast of her features reminded him of a mistake he’d made in this same hallway nine years before. It wasn’t actually a mistake, truly, it was more of a discovery of a weakness that no man should ever discover they have. No one knew the truth about what happened the night his wife died. He had never told the parade of analysts, psychiatrists, or friends.

  He’d walked out from an aluminum coffin that night, “BING” filled with fear, sensing from the first puff of air released by the opening of the elevator doors that death was not too far behind him. He raced ahead of the feeling coming to his door, thrown wide open by the intruder, and finding a body, face turned away from him, hidden behind the large entryway chair. Blood pooled in the grout and created a maze on the entryway floor, he couldn’t step one way or the other - then a sound in the closet.

  Scratching on the wall, he’d thrown the door open and been flooded with the strongest emotional pulse that his nearly dry heart had ever produced.

  It should be explained at this point that Legacy had walked around the scene of his wife’s death a thousand times in his mind. It was certainly the recreation of the event gave rise to his vivid way of projecting himself into a crime scene. He’d done it so many times - walking around the body, noticing the position of the auburn hair, matted burgundy against a brick red tile floor. In all of those times, he’d never had the strength to open the closet door again. That was the one memory that he held with such shame that he could not return to that moment, even in the harmless confines of his own mind, years later. He had always worried that somehow his secret might get out if he ever opened that door again, that some look would translate onto his face, in a twitch or glance that could be noticed and read like profanity in the margins of scripture. It would shout out the monstrous truth that he locked in that pie-shaped room.

  What had this week been to Legacy except a series of the breakdowns of everything normal in his life. The intrusion of a partner. The inclusion of that same person into his daily life, followed by betrayal and casting her away.

  Legacy couldn’t deny his urge to listen and let in the world when Wagner was around. She’d taught his daughter new rules of engagement. Now he hardly had a choice.

  He’d taken on this case with a spider’s web and sticky strings of expectation wound around a central core of disappointment, and now as he watched it all unravel he was still unable to drop it. In defeat he still didn’t have the dignity to concede.

  With both bikers dead, he’d arranged for an elaborate ruse, Sabita had been reported missing, abducted by the same thugs who had taken Laura. It bought them a day, maybe 36 hours of waiting for a miracle. Legacy, however, didn’t believe in miracles and even as he set up the conditions for the arrival of one. It was ridiculous; a drowning man searching for pockets of air in between the slippery layers of liquid, knowing he will find none. How could he explain that to any of the thirty trains of thought that were pulling in and out of his head at any given moment with solid concrete destinations.

  How could he square his life, with the actions he had begun to take? If he could have sat down across from himself he would have grilled the man in front of him for answers, but there was no one in front of him except the statuesque figure of his daughter. She needed a different answer, but he decided to give her the truth.

  He slowly walked over to the hall closet and opened the deadbolt with a click. Chess caught her breath hearing the latch slide back into its casing. The door protested before opening, and Chess walked silently behind her father’s wide shoulders peering through the triangle created by his elbow and forearm resting on his ribcage. His breaths were irregular. Deep, then short, short, deep.

  Her eyes adjusted to the dark closet. Legacy stepped out of the doorframe with a look she’d never seen on his face. Somehow, she could tell, he expected this to be some kind of revelation, the answer to a thousand questions. He motioned his hand with such finality almost as if to say this room explained everything about him. The look on his face contributed to the feeling that the explanation wasn’t flattering. He said simply. “Tell me to go and I’ll go. I love you honey.”

  He walked down the hall to a very important meeting with a glass of scotch; his knees traced bicycle circles in the air, like he was remembering how to walk. His mind was committed completely to another place and time. One in which he’d come home to find a body, and all of his fears had projected outward and he saw clearly that the still body was that of his daughter, Chess. Then when he’d opened the closet and found her alive, all he could feel was relief.

  He’d loved his wife. She’d crept into the fiber of his being like no one had ever before or since. And when he’d realized that it was her dead and Chess alive, he was relieved. It was a feeling that ebbed like a slow geological tide and did not recede for months after her burial. Everyone thought he was sick with grief, however that came later, and lasted for a good amount of time. He was equal parts relief and shame.

  Chess peered into every crease of blackness, every n
ook where carpet met white paint. What she saw, she could not say.