by Caleb Carr
“Knew?” she said, letting her head fall backward and laughing very freely, now. “Come on, Trajan—are you really trying to say that the Sorcerer of Death hasn’t figured it out by now? That would be very disappointing. I mean, it’s pretty obvious: I sent them up the hollow, that day…”
I was surprised, though not stunned; for it was, to me, only further confirmation that we needed to keep Ambyr involved. “Not that they hadn’t been itching to go for a long time,” she continued, “but I’d always told them in no uncertain terms to respect your privacy. Those stories, though! About the freak with the bizarre kind of dog, they just kept building up in their brains; and finally, when there was a good reason for them to go, I agreed to it. I did tell them to argue and beg if you threatened to get in touch with me, just to make it look good. But see, I’d heard that you’d worked for the sheriff’s office on a couple of murder cases, and I knew that nobody around here was going to solve these latest ones on their own. So I told Lucas to keep an eye out, and let me know if he happened to see Pete Steinbrecher’s car go up the hollow—which, of course, it did, after Shelby’s body was found, and Lucas just happened to see it go. Lights flashing, but no siren: that meant one thing—it was headed for Shiloh. And, like I say, this case, these cases, they matter to me. So I told the boys to go on up the hollow, not that they needed much encouragement. They were dying to do it—at least they were, until they saw your lady friend, there.” She cast an indicative hand toward Marcianna. “But even then, they kept at it—they stuck to the job of trying to find out if you were working on the case. And it’s all turned out better than I ever thought it could…”
Obviously, the entire Kurtz family had a genius for deception: honestly come by, of course, but nonetheless honed. I took a moment to go back over Lucas’ various protests about not wanting his sister to know he’d been caught trespassing in Death’s Head Hollow, about keeping her from knowing that he was working on the case with Mike and me, and about the need to explain his presence on the case to her: it had all been revealed as a performance, and that initial fact caused me to murmur reflexively, “Why, that little shithead—I am going to take this right out of his hide…”
“No, you’re not,” Ambyr answered, indulgently and calmly, as though she had expected some such statement. “In fact, you’re not even going to tell him I told you. Come on, Trajan, what’s it matter? Now I’ll be a part of the investigation, too, so everything’ll be on the level. That is…” She stopped my forward progress, moved around in front of me, and turned those obscured violet eyes up to my face again, her voice becoming an odd mixture of pleading and something I cannot call anything but alluring. “That is, if you’ve decided that you can let me be a part of it, Trajan.”
It was a peculiar moment, dominated by a sudden thought—a question, really: here was a girl who had known herself as both over- and underweight, but probably had never had any true idea of how she looked when she was neither one nor the other, but was something in between, something like the very healthy, very pretty young woman before me. Her eating disorders would have prevented her ability to so perceive herself, constantly telling her that she was still too heavy: that was how she’d been dragged into the dangers of emaciation. And yet she now seemed to handle herself with extraordinary confidence, and, more, with a full appreciation of the effect that her present looks had on the opposite sex, even though she had never, herself, observed those looks.
I wasn’t going to resolve this dichotomy right there, and so it didn’t occupy my mind for very long. Rather, I again became preoccupied by the almost-forgotten feeling that I was not yet entirely dead to something vital: call it infatuation, call it romance, call it what you like. Such sensations, as I have indicated, had been dormant in me pretty much since Mike and I had moved upstate and I had been forced to once again endure occasional radiation treatments. My oncologist had warned that a recurrence of my sarcoma was likely on its way and we would want to treat it early, but that there might be a—price to pay, which indeed there had been. But I did not feel any signs of such sickness just then, as I gazed into Ambyr’s face, and saw the look of both happiness and flirtation that occupied it. No, in that frame of mind I merely replied:
“Yeah, I can’t see any reason why you shouldn’t be. I was going to invite both you and Derek, along with your little beast-brother, to dinner at my great-aunt’s tonight, anyway—I guess you could get an idea of what we’re doing then, if you can make it.”
Ambyr’s look of happiness bled over into excited joy: “Dinner with Miss Clarissa Jones?” And with that she pulled me forward, realizing (apparently) that we had made the third turn in our route and were now moving along toward the path that led back down to the backyard of their house. “You bet your ass I’m coming! Trajan—this is all going to be a really good thing. But you have to remember—” And she stopped me one more time. “The rest is going to be our secret, yours and mine. You can’t let the boys know—especially Lucas, it would kill him. Because he really has come to look up to you so much, and he’d hate it if he knew I let on that your original meeting with him was, well…designed. And you guys have worked well together, from all I hear—so let’s make sure we keep it to ourselves, okay?”
I’d been played, or so Ambyr and Lucas obviously thought. And this manipulation might have proved a dangerous one, if things had gone differently. But as Ambyr had said, and I now calculated in my head, things had not gone differently, and no harm had been done; quite the opposite, or so it seemed. Thus I accepted her logic, and simply reveled in the return, albeit brief, of that feeling that somehow, in some way, I might hope to be restored to at least the three-quarters of a human being that I’d once been. Would I do so with this young woman in particular as a romantic object? On the most superficial level, the difference in our ages, as well as her blindness, might seem to have argued against such a possibility; and yet, beneath this common sort of reaction, I knew that neither her age nor her condition had precluded her from trying to play me like a harp—why, then, should I regard her as an innocent who could only experience manipulation and misuse at my hands?
With these thoughts running through my head, I pulled Marcianna along, making sure to give her some of the dog treats in my pocket. She had shown no hostility toward Ambyr; but neither had she indulged her as she had Derek. She simply bore Ambyr’s presence with good grace, and began to chirrup quietly for more of the treats. Ambyr read these noises almost correctly, and stopped, stepping around me and reaching down until she felt the fur of Marcianna’s back. “Hey, you don’t have anything to worry about, beautiful girl,” she said, stroking the top of Marcianna’s head. “I’m not looking to invade your territory. At least—” She reached up and took some of the dog treats from my pocket, feeding them to Marcianna, then returning to my left arm. “Not all of it, I’m not…”
{ii.}
Once down in the Kurtzes’ backyard again, I found Mike very concerned that we get back to Shiloh so that he could change into appropriately clean clothes for dinner with my great-aunt Clarissa: as usual, his fear of offending her in any way was very real. And, as cocktail hour was in fact fast approaching (and you did not mess with Clarissa’s cocktail hour), I asked Ambyr to pull the boys into shape so that we could get under way. This she did, quickly morphing from the secretive, wise, and flirtatious young woman I had just observed to the full-on matron of the house, barking at Lucas and Derek, using her cane at once to navigate, herd, and threaten, and telling them she didn’t want to hear about their coming back out of the house in clean T-shirts and jeans. The two youths apparently knew that this was Ambyr’s no-bullshit voice, and moved quickly to wash up and change. Eventually they reemerged, scrubbed, combed, and wearing collared shirts and khaki pants that, during their first few minutes in them, might just as well have been medieval plate armor. Ambyr herself came out a few minutes later, having changed into a more elegantly styled summer dress than the one in which she’d greeted us; and apparently my rea
ction was a little too obvious, because Mike began laughing quietly again, passing me by on the way to the garage, twirling his keys and muttering those same words: “So fucking dead…so fucking dead…”
But, whatever our respective conditions, we all piled into the car, Marcianna in the front seat, now, by the window, and me sitting between her and Mike. I told Lucas and Derek to let Ambyr have the rear window behind Mike, an order they didn’t question, I can only think because they immediately recognized its purpose: if she could not actually see Death’s Head Hollow and Shiloh, she could at least enjoy its scents and sounds.
This she did, and quite a bit. Lucas played guide, sitting in the middle of the seat and pointing out the sources of the various sensations that Ambyr experienced. I confess that I had long since taken many of these for granted: not just the obvious ones, the songs of birds whose young were just fledging, the ancient fruit trees that grew in discrete clusters at various spots, even the smell of the cow dung that filled the pastures with the arrival of the rich, midsummer grass that the animals mowed down as if they were precision machinery. I was a bit ashamed for not having more often appreciated all these and more of the riches that the hollow offered up without fee; and at one point, when I turned to Mike as Lucas kept up his commentary, I saw in my partner’s face a very deep sort of contentment and even happiness, one that matched the statement he had made to me before we departed for the Kurtzes’ house: that our life in this place, brushes with law enforcement aside, was a good one—and not simply because we were fresh out of other options for our exile.
Feeling better about things in general, I began to scratch behind Marcianna’s ears as she pushed the front half of her head out the partially open window; and then, as the Kurtz siblings continued to enjoy the trip, I saw Derek out of the corner of my eye, sitting way back in his seat and looking very uncomfortable, even frightened.
“You okay, Derek?” I asked, knowing full well that he wasn’t.
“Me?” the young man replied, shaking himself. “Yeah, I’m, uh, fine—I just don’t wanna make Marcianna nervous, that’s all. So I’m giving her all the room I can.”
The lie was a smooth one, but I let it go with a smile and a nod: soon enough he would be in a spot, if all went well, where such fabrications would not be so easy to hand out…
Once the Empress was parked, it was each to their immediate and respective duties: we still had about twenty minutes to kill before we needed to be at the house, and so I dispatched Lucas, who could not have been more delighted with the task, to the hangar, to give his sister and Derek a guided tour of the structure and the JU-52 while Mike changed his clothes and I got Marcianna back to her enclosure. Before our guests got fully under way, however, I yanked our apprentice back toward Mike and myself, the collar of his new shirt making the familiar task an easier one…
“Hey!” he cried; but he was clever enough to suppress the sound somewhat. “Come on, L.T., this is my good shirt, don’t get it all wrinkled before I even meet your great-aunt, for shit’s sake—”
“Shut up, kid, and listen,” I ordered firmly. “You can take them wherever you want, and describe whatever you want to Ambyr—she doesn’t seem the squeamish type.”
“Believe me, she ain’t,” the boy answered, shaking his head and raising his eyebrows. “Sometimes she catches me on Facebook, and makes me describe the stuff that I’m watching, the crazy violent shit from whatever country, and man, it gets kind of hard for me to do it.”
“Ever think that might be the point, genius?” Mike asked with a grin.
“Hunh.” Lucas scratched at his increasingly (and more characteristically) disheveled head quickly. “Nope. Never did.”
“The point is this,” I said. “You don’t let Derek see any of the raw stuff, and you don’t describe it to your sister while he’s close by—he’ll only get freaked out, and that’s not what he’s here for. So if you spot any of the autopsy pictures within easy sight, anything like that, take them down and slip them into my desk. Got it?”
Lucas squinted with raw condescension. “Is that all? You think I hadn’t figured that much out already? I haven’t even told him about that kinda stuff at home—it’s not good for him. Man, you guys must think I’m a fuckin’ idiot.”
“That’d be one way to put it,” Mike said.
Lucas nodded calmly; then, with lightning speed, he balled a fist, slammed it into Mike’s shoulder, and trotted off with a mad laugh, toward the waiting Ambyr and Derek. “And that’d be another, Dr. Li!”
For his part, Mike couldn’t help an indignant, instinctive move to pursue Lucas; and their movements, in turn, got Marcianna excited. She made a move to follow her young friend, a move that she would have successfully executed, probably scaring the living daylights out of Derek in the process, had I not quickly locked her lead down with my right thumb, even as I lifted my cane and held it out in front of Mike, doing my best to remind him of the need to maintain decorum, or something resembling it.
And then Lucas’ brain kicked in: he realized something suddenly, stopped running, and turned back toward us, carefully retracing a few of his steps. “Hey,” he said slowly. “Hang on…Doc—you said, about Derek, ‘That’s not what he’s here for.’ Right?”
“Yeah?” I said, affecting an utter lack of concern.
“Well, then,” Lucas said. “What the hell is he here for?”
I was deeply grateful that Mike stepped in at that moment, because I was at a bit of a loss, and Lucas caught it: “To have dinner, you dumb-ass,” he seethed at the boy. “Now get the fuck out of here before I murder you…”
Lucas shrugged, turning once more. “O-kay—but lying’ll make you old before your time, Doc. Not that you ain’t already. It might even age you, Mike, though I don’t know, the way you lie to women, you oughtta be about a hundred and five, by now.”
“Get!” Mike barked, and finally Lucas rejoined his little family, Ambyr putting a reassuring arm around Derek’s shoulders as they made their way toward the hangar.
“I got about a thousand reasons why that’s a really stupid idea, L.T.,” Mike said, nodding after them. “Thank God I hid most of the really tasty stuff when you came up with it.”
I glanced at him. “The White Monster?”
“Turned toward the fuselage, and duct-taped there for good measure,” Mike answered. “I know how that little fucker’s mind works…I don’t suppose anything I could say would make you shitcan the whole thing, and just take them down to meet Clarissa?”
“We’re halfway across the desert,” I replied. “It’s too late for that.” Pulling Marcianna toward me, I straddled her dipping spine by lifting my real leg over it, then gave her a good scratch from collar to tail for all she’d done that day. “And Ambyr would only suspect something.”
“Well, don’t go saying I didn’t warn you.” Pausing as Marcianna began to pant and purr, Mike couldn’t help but smile. “I guess you’re gonna go feed her, hunh? In which case, I’ll go get cleaned up and changed, and then it’s off to face Miss Clarissa. Your plan for her is still in place, I take it, from the way you were talking to Lucas.”
“It is,” I answered. “And thanks for bailing me out on that one, by the way. I blanked there for a second.”
“I saw,” said Mike. “And so did the kid. He’ll ask you about it.”
“By the time he does, it’ll all be over.” Then I started up the hill to Marcianna’s enclosure, as she lifted her forelegs into the air like a rearing horse. When they hit the ground again, she chirruped and shot off, as I’d given her enough lead to run some toward home. She slowed up as the lead became taut again, not wanting to pull me over, and as I worked my cane quickly to follow her, Mike said, just loud enough for me to hear:
“You’re gambling on a lot of things, right now, L.T.—you know that, right?”
I didn’t bother to answer him. Once again, Marcianna’s mood infected mine, and I didn’t want to hear predictions of doom and gloom. My blood was up;
and it was time to see Clarissa.
By the time I came back from the enclosure, Ambyr, Lucas, and Derek had long since made short work of the hangar’s attractions, and they were busily moving about the inside of the JU-52, two pairs of their footsteps loud and rather boisterous within the nose of the plane: Derek and Lucas in the cockpit seats, I surmised, and as I listened further, I heard them loudly calling out in something that I could only imagine was their best approximation of German, issuing wild orders to each other. Hollering up through the hatch, I was eventually answered by Ambyr, who appeared in the entryway looking lovelier than I had recalled. Telling her that I needed an extra pair of hands to help with shucking some corn, I asked that she send Derek down, which would allow Lucas to continue her tour about the plane. Ambyr protested that she herself would be only too happy to help, but I pointed out that the boys needed constant supervision, and from the way she agreed with this statement, I gathered that if Lucas had at least not revealed the worst that our investigation had to offer (for Mike had indeed hidden most such items when I’d announced my plan for the evening), she knew that there was always the risk that, if Lucas and Derek were left on their own, their antics might turn unintentionally dangerous. Thus she went back inside and, in her usual take-charge tone, called for Derek, bringing on cries of disappointment from both boys; but by the time she returned to the hatchway with her “adopted son” in tow, she was speaking in an entirely different voice.
All questions of my romantic admiration aside, her treatment of the young man was thoughtful and poignant; and in a few more minutes, Derek and I were making our way down the dirt path toward the barns and then the house, myself more convinced than ever that including Ambyr in the investigation had been the right move. Among many other things, her contributions would be made from Surrender and Fraser, where her school and training program were, and where, Latrell had indicated, the “they” who were orchestrating the connections between the throwaway kids and the people downstate who were offering those kids new and often perilous lives were located. For the moment, however, it was Derek who needed to be further handled—or so I thought.