by Vicki Lane
“Get a grip, Elizabeth!” She sat up and drew a deep breath. Rosemary is a happy successful woman. She did not have a blighted childhood—she told you so herself.
“God, I hope that’s true.” She whispered the words and reached for the notebook as if grasping a nettle. It had become necessary that she follow this wherever it led.
The next entry was a week later. There was no mention of Sam and Patricia Mullins; instead, there was a terse I don’t like Tamra. All she wants to do is swim in the swimming pool and play dress-up with Maythorn’s fancy clothes—the ones Maythorn won’t wear unless her mom makes a big fuss. It’s boring. We can’t go to the hideout when she’s around. I made Maythorn promise not to tell Tamra about the Cave of the Two Sisters. I don’t think she will.
Tamra…the name was vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t put a face to it. As far as she knew, the Mullins girls had been the only children living nearby back then. Rosie and Maythorn had been close friends out of necessity, as well as inclination. Maybe Tamra was one of the pageant children that Patricia Mullins occasionally had out to Mullmore for play dates with Krystalle.
Elizabeth turned the pages, skimming through days and weeks. Some entries were businesslike notations of what Rosemary called her “work”—the spy game.
August 12—3:15 p.m. Bus driver stops at foot of the Buckman’s road and waits for a long time. Buckman kids have already gotten off and gone up the road.
3:23 p.m. Young guy in old blue Ford truck with one red door stops by bus. Herley tells us kids to stay put. He gets out. He has a Timberland shoe box under his arm. He talks to the guy (skinny, long hair, yellow tractor cap).
3:27 p.m. Young guy gives Herley money and Herley gives him shoe box. Maythorn tries to get license number of the truck but it’s all splashed with mud and all we could see was a J a three.
Billy Gentry and Shawn Clemmons got in a fight while Herley was off the bus. When Herley got back on, he said he was just giving his brother-in-law some boots he’d picked up for him in Asheville. Maythorn says he could be selling crack, like Officer Deb and Officer Jim told us about. She says not to say anything till we have more evidense.
August 16—2:23 p.m. Maythorn and me are in our special tree in their woods. We can see the swimming pool and the gazeebo real good. Mr. Mullins is in the pool, floating around on a rubber raft. He has a plastic glass on his stomach.
2:34 p.m. Mrs. Barbie comes out calls him. He doesn’t answer.
September 13—Top of Pinnacle. 1:20 p.m. We brought our lunch up to eat in our Top of the World spy outpost. Maythorn says that if we are very quiet we could see some thing important. She won’t tell me what.
1:35 p.m. Mike Mullins has come up the trail from Mullmore and is sitting on a log. He is whistling.
1:40 p.m. A lady in tight jeans with fancy yellow hair comes up the trail from the other side of mountain. She is looking around like she’s scared. Mike whistles she runs to him. He is hugging her very tight and now she is laughing. They go back down the trail to Mullmore. Maythorn says that is Tamra’s mom.
Tamra again. Elizabeth’s brow wrinkled. And just on the other side of the mountain. Where did I hear that name recently? She turned over a few more pages, looking for another mention of the name. There it was again, part of an undated entry—not a “spy report,” but a sad little statement: I don’t like the Reaper Game. It’s too scary. But Tamra Maythorn think it’s fun, so I have to play.
She was lost in her daughter’s past, trying to make sense of the childish scrawl and the accounts of things observed almost twenty years ago. Where was I back then? And who is this Tamra? And her mother? I had no idea that Rosie and Maythorn were spending all this time spying on everyone. That kind of thing could get them in trouble.
A chill coursed through her body. Maybe it did. Maybe that’s what happened to Maythorn—what if the child saw something she shouldn’t have? She wandered all over the place—not like Rosie, who stayed close to home…I think. Where the hell was I?
The answer was obvious—she had been dealing with the house, the farm, the garden. They had been growing tobacco back then—long, exhausting days of hoeing, topping, spraying, cutting, hanging. Time had passed in something of a blur and she had been grateful that her quiet older daughter had seemed so content and happy with her friend. She and Sam had congratulated themselves that Rosemary didn’t beg for a television set but seemed happy with her books and her explorations.
Does a mother ever really know her child’s heart and mind? Elizabeth turned the pages before her at random, no longer trying to read, but simply acknowledging the enormity of her ignorance.
Cletus. The name of Miss Birdie’s son, dead a little over a year now, jumped out at her from the page. Cletus was in the woods near our hideout again.
He had been a frequent visitor to Full Circle Farm back then. Cletus was known to be “simple,” in the gentle parlance of the mountains. He could not read but he was, as his mother had often said, “a good hand to work,” and when the Gentrys’ tobacco and crops were hoed and fertilized, Cletus would often appear at Full Circle Farm, ready to lend a hand at any job. Sam had always paid him what they could, over Cletus’s protestations that he just liked to help.
Laurel had had a deep affection for the shy young man, as had Sam and Elizabeth. Rosemary, on the other hand, had never been quite at ease around him. The idea of a grown-up who couldn’t read, who was often more childish than her little sister, seemed to disturb her at some deep, involuntary level, and Elizabeth had soon realized that Rosemary, while dutifully polite to Cletus, made a point of avoiding him.
Elizabeth turned the page. He tried to show me something he had in his pocket but I ran away. I don’t like Cletus.
The barking of the dogs alerted Elizabeth to Phillip’s return. She went to the window and looked out across her garden. There he was, hiking up the road, a knapsack on his back, and on his face the happy look of a man coming home at the end of the day to a warm house, a good meal, and his heart’s desire.
Instantly she abandoned the notebooks and hurried down the steep stairs.
As Elizabeth flung open the front door and her eyes met his, a tide of thankfulness swept over him. Phillip dropped his knapsack in one of the porch rockers, opened his arms wide, and engulfed her in a glad embrace.
“Everything okay today? No unwelcome visitors?”
“None, Phillip.” She leaned against him, a sweet and comfortable armful. “Only, maybe, some unwelcome memories.”
She had not explained, beyond saying that she’d been reading through Rosemary’s notebooks. As they sat side by side on the sofa before the fire, enjoying their after-dinner coffee, Phillip rummaged through his thoughts for something to lift the solemn mood that seemed to have overtaken her at the mention of the notebooks. That had persisted through dinner.
“Elizabeth, are you still up for the gun class on Saturday?”
“I’m not trying to back out or anything, Phillip, but…I don’t know, I guess it seems a little excessive.”
Okay, now or never. “Elizabeth, there’s something else here you need to know about. I don’t think it was Bib who broke into your house. And neither does Blaine.”
She started to speak, but he plowed ahead. “Did Sam ever mention Lawrence Landrum? From Nam?”
22.
LAST GIFTS
Monday, October 17
She stared at him in complete bewilderment. “What does someone from Vietnam have to do with what happened to my house?”
“I’ll get to that.” He reached out, took her hand, and studied it for a moment. Fine-boned and long-fingered, it bore the calluses of hard work. He noted that the heavy wedding ring she had worn till very recently was gone, though a band of pale skin on her fourth finger was a ghostly reminder of the ring’s long tenure. “Do you recollect Sam ever mentioning a guy named Lawrence Landrum—Lieutenant Landrum in Nam?”
“Sam made it something of a rule never to talk about Vietnam—at least
when he was awake. For a long time though, he couldn’t stop talking about it when he was asleep. He said a lot of names—I know I heard ‘Phil’ over and over. But no Landrum, as far as I can remember.”
She looked down at her ringless hand where it rested in his. “You know, those dreams were a real problem between us for several years. I wanted him to get help—or to let me help him. I had the naïve belief that if he’d just once open up—but that wasn’t going to happen.”
“And the dreams?…”
“As time passed, the dreams went from being almost every night to once every few months, and then to just a couple of times a year. I think the nightmares had been triggered by the stress of moving from the suburbs to the farm—abandoning the security of the life we’d grown up with to come here. And as we got accustomed to life on the farm, the nightmares decreased.”
She smiled sadly. “Eventually they stopped altogether. There were years that he never had a Vietnam dream and I was sure it was all behind him. But then for some reason, they started again. A couple of years before he died, the dreams came back. Really bad again, but this time he told me he knew what to do for them. And it must have worked, because after a month or so they stopped again. But, as I said, I never heard Sam mention the name Landrum. Who was he?”
It had been tricky, Phillip thought, but he’d done it. He’d told her the truth—most of it—as much as she needed to alert her to the potential danger. He’d carefully omitted the circumstances that had brought him to the Carolina mountains—Let her believe that was coincidence.
Elizabeth had listened quietly as he related, with a careful lack of detail, the events of that last day on the Mekong. She had even—thank god—nodded in understanding as he had explained the surviving crew’s decision to remain silent about Landrum’s psychotic slaughter of unarmed civilians.
“We thought he was done for—hell, even the medics said he’d bought the farm. And he’d been shot all to pieces while he was saving two of our crew…one of the bravest things I ever saw. He was a hero then, all right. We figured it wouldn’t bring anyone back to report the incidents—we just wanted to get away and forget about it all as best we could. It wasn’t till six or seven years ago that we even knew Landrum was still alive.”
He studied her face anxiously. She was frowning in an effort of memory. Then she leapt up and disappeared into the kitchen. He could hear the muffled sound of paper rustling and the words “I know it’s in here” followed by a triumphant “Aha!”
She returned, triumphantly waving a crumpled copy of Time. “It was in the recycling, near the bottom. I’m pretty sure that your guy Landrum was mentioned in the article about the far right and their influence on this administration. I wouldn’t have remembered the name, but they made a big deal of how, unlike most of the folks at the top, this guy was actually a veteran and a hero, wounded while saving his men. There was a picture of him and his prosthetic legs and empty sleeve.” She riffled the pages eagerly. “It’s gotta be the same guy—they called him a power behind the scene. Lots of family money, which he’s parlayed into a mega-fortune…Here it is!” She thrust the open magazine toward him. “Lawrence Landrum—is this your lieutenant? Even without the atrocity story, this guy’s a total disaster. Just a little to the right of the Taliban.”
He took the magazine, glanced at the picture, and nodded. “That’s him. And Del, the one at the Pentagon, says this sick bastard is about to be named Secretary of Defense.”
She plopped down beside him. “That is sick. But I still don’t see what this has to do with my house being torn apart.”
Elizabeth listened in shocked disbelief. Pictures of an atrocity, thirty-five-year-old pictures…and a video-taped deposition…hidden in her house? She shook her head. “It doesn’t make any sense, Phillip. Why wouldn’t Sam have just put them in a safe-deposit box or—”
“You know, Sam could be pretty paranoid sometimes. He told me and Del that safe-deposit boxes just advertised that you had something worth protecting. He was convinced that Landrum could have bought his way into a Swiss bank, much less the Farmers and Mercantile in Ransom. No, Sam did it his way.” Phillip looked unhappy. “Sam talked to Del and to me right before…well, it was just a few weeks before the plane crash. He said that he’d been in touch with Landrum and warned him to stay out of politics or Sam would go public with the photos. He said he’d videotaped a deposition relating the events of that last day on the Swift Boat and swearing to the authenticity of the pictures. Then he said a weird thing: he said that he’d given you the key to where he’d hidden them. But that you didn’t know what it was.”
“A key? An actual key? Or…Because I don’t think…” Her mind was busy, sorting through drawers, old jewelry boxes, all the places in her house where incongruous assortments of small objects gathered. There’re some old keys in one of the little drawers of the secretary…and that basket in the mudroom has old house keys and car keys and…
“No idea if he meant a real key or not. Del said Sam was really pleased with himself—like he’d come up with the perfect hiding place. Del thought it was pretty risky, doing it that way, and he tried to convince Sam to let him have duplicates of the photos and the taped deposition. Finally Sam said he’d get some copies and send them to Del right after Christmas.”
“And then there was the plane crash.”
“Right. Del never got any copies. And Landrum laid low for a while. Now he must have figured that, after all this time and with Sam gone, it would be safe for him to resume his political career. But he has to be sure those photos don’t turn up. And this is what you need to understand, Elizabeth: Del thinks that Landrum has sent some of his men to find those incriminating snapshots and destroy them.”
“Maybe they did find them. Maybe—”
“Elizabeth, Del knows who these people are. He says Landrum’s people are still nearby. If they think that you know where this stuff is, their next move will be to threaten you. That’s why I’m asking you to take this gun class—until those photos and Sam’s deposition are found, you could be in real danger: these people have a lot at stake and wouldn’t think twice about…”
His voice trailed off. Elizabeth pondered, looking around the living room, as if hoping to see a faded manila envelope protruding from behind a picture frame or an ancient scrolled key lying casually on the floor. Ridiculous. Whoever tore the place apart would have found that stuff…if it was hidden here. But what if…?
“What if the key Sam said he gave me is something like a treasure map, something that tells where this evidence is hidden? After all, he had the whole farm—barns, drying sheds, tenant house, equipment shed. There’re lots of places he could have hidden a small package, wrapped to make it weatherproof.”
“Now you’re talkin’, Sherlock.” Phillip draped an arm around her and pulled her closer. “He said he gave you the key. Think about that. Was Sam a big gift-giver? Let’s see, what are gift-giving occasions—birthdays? Christmas? anniversary? Mother’s Day? Valentine’s—”
“No, not all of those. Christmas and my birthday for sure, but not…” She felt compelled to explain, to come to Sam’s defense. “Early on we decided to go easy on exchanging gifts with each other—there were too many things the girls or the farm needed and never enough money. Mostly we gave each other stuff we’d made—for our anniversary sometimes we went out to dinner, but we were more likely just to splurge on champagne and something really good and easy to fix from the Fresh Market. The same for Valentine’s—if we remembered. The girls made Mother’s Day presents, not Sam…. I think that about covers it.”
“Okay, let’s see. We didn’t know that Landrum was alive till…I think it was ’98. Sam wouldn’t have had reason to make the deposition till then.”
“And Sam died in ’99. So, let me think…what did he give me for Christmas and for my birthday in those years.” She closed her eyes, remembering. “The one thing I can remember is what he gave me that last Christmas. It was already wrapped and
under the tree—he’d really been on top of things that year.”
And all the presents sat there, unopened till New Year’s Eve. Memories of that bleak December crowded into her mind, as if released from some subterranean dungeon and eager for the light.
The fatal plane crash, just a few days before Christmas …freak accident…less-than-skillful amateur pilot…light planes inherently dangerous…pilot appeared to be attempting a stunt… The explanations had inundated her and she had become almost paralytic with grief…and anger. Grief at the loss of her husband, friend, lover; grief at the sight of the girls’ wounded faces; anger at the stupidity of the accident.
Only tradition, passed down from her grandmother, tradition that said it was bad luck to have the Christmas tree still up on New Year’s Day, had roused her from the sleepwalking state that had settled on her. The irony of attempting to avoid bad luck at this particular dark moment had been apparent, but she had forced herself to make this return to normalcy, for the girls’ sake, if not her own.
On the morning of December 31, she and the girls had sat round the Christmas tree. Its piercing fragrance filled the room. No one, in the shock and tragedy of the past week, had thought to fill the tub in which the big Fraser fir stood, inexorably drying and dying. In spite of the fact that its needles were dropping fast, the tree was still a lordly presence in the living room. One by one Elizabeth and her daughters had opened presents. By unspoken consent, they’d saved the gifts from Sam for last.