But I wavered, lowered my weapon. Couldn’t do it. And why would I do it? I hadn’t come to Unitopia to kill her. I just wanted information. Then I started to laugh. Then I stopped. It was comical that someone was doing the breaststroke across a lake to get away from me. But not so funny: the cold. No wonder she was swimming so fast. Perversely, I was rooting for her. The disruption I’d caused, and how clumsily I’d caused it. I’d been so clumsy.
No way to know where she was headed or how to get there. A search on my phone as I watched her disappear out of sight around a little island of reeds. In that respect at least it was wilderness—the island abutted a corridor of woodlands leading to a state park. By the time I got there, Ronnie could be anywhere.
I put my gun away. How useless it had proved. Because I hadn’t been alert enough, had thought a gun was enough. But, also, I’d forgotten to take the safety off.
I was fairly sure Ronnie wasn’t ever coming back to Unitopia. I was pretty sure I’d never see her again. I was positive she wouldn’t call the police.
But now, at least, I had the address for a warehouse “full of taxidermy.”
For whatever that was worth.
UNITOPIA
[59]
Maybe it wasn’t wise, but I lingered in Unitopia. It had a sweet, naïve quality. No sense of threat, just of emptiness, of abandonment. I thought perhaps I would encounter the man who had popped out of the doorway before, but, no, not even him. And I had to slough off the aftermath of excitement, slow my breathing, try to take a moment to reset.
By then, the midafternoon sun had slanted and deepened in a way that made the holding pond resemble a real lake. The walkway had a bronzed look, under that touch, and the buildings a comfortable, lived-in feel. Even the geodesic monstrosity at the end. Perhaps I felt apart from this, from this idea of “sustainability,” but I realized I could have gotten used to it. That it also felt like “sovereignty.” And those portal views of other places—they had stuck with me. Maybe they would, in time, have become real views from other Unitopias.
Silvina, stateless. Belonging, in a way, to no place and no one. Perhaps, at first, Unitopia had felt like a way to create her own country.
Had people even lived in Unitopia itself? I didn’t know. How sad if they had worked here for such a different future … but lived in a subdivision named “Lake Woods” or “River Creek.” Revolutionaries trapped in a theme-park life.
The community Silvina could not sustain, but, also, didn’t seem to have the patience to sustain. Even though she’d poured so much effort into it, brought in green-tech experts and even biologists. On the cusp of trying to make Unitopia independent. Teetering there.
Something impossible.
No, in the end, easier to tear it down and start over. The soundless scream of social media these days. The system must be destroyed. It can’t be fixed. Unitopia must have begun to seem like a Band-Aid applied to a gaping chest wound.
But how did you get from Unitopia to a kind of, for lack of a better term … weaponized taxidermy? And from that to bioterrorism? Or was that a pretty normal progression after you realize Unitopia is going to fail. That it’s not enough or not in the right direction. So you set off in a new direction, without a map. Maybe you even say, “Well, I tried to be good, to play by the rules. I tried a sustainable approach.”
On the west shore of the island, I found a relaxing nature park, along with a sign showing what you might see there. I sat on a bench and read about dredged reclamation and restored wetlands. Red-winged blackbirds in the reeds. Tanagers on migration. Marsh wrens. Great blue herons. The types of frogs. Even a rare sighting of a beaver.
But no hummingbird, no salamander.
* * *
When I got back to the parking lot, mine was the only car left. As if everyone else had fled along with Ronnie.
Texts I had missed made me wince, start up the car quick to get the hell out of Unitopia as if I could arrive somewhere else in an instant.
>>Where are you? You’re missing the talent show.
The after-school talent show. I had it on the calendar. Just not in my brain.
Daughter: >>Are you OK? Why aren’t you here?
The truth was … I wasn’t really anywhere.
I was just someone who had a new lead to a mystery she couldn’t have explained to a stranger in less than twenty minutes.
But I turned the engine off when I read the next texts. Not from Hellbender or my family. Alex. Coldly formal.
>>The board has decided to terminate your contract due to erratic and irregular behavior and unauthorized use of company resources for private endeavors.
>>Your office belongings will be sent to your house. Do not come in to collect them.
>>If you require an explanation, HR will be happy to provide one.
A weight pushed down on me. A weight left me. I slumped over the steering wheel like I’d been shot.
Then I called Alex anyway. I half expected he’d ignore me, but he picked up on the second ring.
Fusk all over again. I felt I had to hurry or he’d just hang up.
“Alex, I don’t know what this is about, but just because I’ve been distracted lately doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t talk about this first. After so many years.”
The voice that came back at me made me regret the call. I didn’t need to hear that coldness.
“We have all the evidence we need of everything up to and including possible criminal behavior. The favor we’re doing you is not bringing this to the police.”
“I told you I was pursuing a client.”
“That’s not what you were doing.”
“Well, so what if it was a bit of research on the side? You know Larry does all kinds of—”
“You don’t get to say Larry’s name,” Alex snapped. “We know you’re doing something dangerous. Rash. Stay away from the office. Security has your photo and name. Any attempt to contact me again and I will go to the police.”
“Alex, I—”
“Don’t worry, you’ll get a severance package. Sort of.”
“I can sue you over this,” I said. Knew I sounded desperate.
Alex took a breath. “You don’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand?”
I felt a panic emanating from his voice. The anger came from fear.
“The ‘client’ you tried to recruit contacted us. That’s all you need to know. And I never said that. Good-bye.”
He hung up.
So not Allie complaining but the Vilcapampa family interceding.
It hardly mattered how. I’d gotten too comfortable, hadn’t seen it coming. Any more than I’d remembered my daughter’s haircut or her talent show.
Even as a rush of wild elation—or was it hysteria—came over me, and such a sense of relief. Like calling Alex had been about going through the motions. Just another thing I was supposed to do, another way I was supposed to react. And some minor-key satisfaction: I must be getting close. Someone in power knew I was getting close.
But, mostly, I was thinking of how I missed the hummingbird, the softness of the fierceness of its wings. Knowing I would never see one in real life. Already, the photograph wasn’t enough and my memory wasn’t enough and video online wasn’t enough. Nothing would be enough.
That’s what I thought of in that moment, god help me, sitting in the car after Alex hung up. To calm me down, to put things in perspective. The hummingbird and its vast journey, its tragic fate. Not my family.
Because I thought the hummingbird had to mean more. It wasn’t a pointless regifting. Whatever snapped in Silvina, whatever made her too intense for Ronnie, Unitopia.
A little later another text came in.
>>Bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch
Well, that was Larry. Maybe Allie was wrong and he felt better.
Good enough to dump a paper bag full of dogshit on my front step.
[60]
The world that week seemed to be dying in flame and
famine and flooding and disease. The things meant to help us were hurting us and the things meant to hurt us continued to get better at it. I told myself my job didn’t matter. So I wouldn’t enter a Möbius strip of might-have-beens. Tried to be calm. We had savings. We had assets we could liquidate. I could go freelance, as a consultant. I didn’t really have it in me to think about job hunting. Didn’t have it in me to tell my family, either.
I had Unitopia lodged in my skull. This concrete place that would breed so many new search terms. That would reveal a part of Silvina’s mind I could cross-reference to the journal. Sparks of excitement, along with the stress.
Still, home was a nightmare. No evidence in the woods of a watcher, as if a hallucination. No evidence that I would be forgiven for missing the rehearsal. Dinner had a bleak, dull quality, made worse because it was the rare night I’d promised to cook. All I could do was stare at the woods and try to make my mind blank against a crescendo of conflicting thoughts.
Like: the address Ronnie had given me must be worthless, because she’d relinquished it so easily. Like it was where I was meant to go, because “R.S.” had been given to me as a clue. So Ronnie’d been told to give me the address. Except, it was only by luck that I even knew who Ronnie was. Fusk was my investigation work, in the sense that Silvina hadn’t put the initials “C.F.” on the bottom of the hummingbird’s stand. My twist on the incoming intel.
If the address was worthless, it wouldn’t hurt to see it anyway. Intel wasn’t just information—it was context, tone, texture, nuance. Maybe it would help. Maybe, at the very least, it would make me give up.
Because part of me wanted to give up. Part of me wanted to stanch the bleeding and find a way back to normal.
But all it meant, really, is that I was too far gone to come back to normal yet.
* * *
Blessed relief and release when dinner was over and we could go our separate ways for a couple hours. Once or twice, doing the dishes as inadequate penance, I opened my mouth to say something to my husband, sequestered in the living room with a glass of strong red wine. Then I would close it again. Futile. What would I tell him? About being fired? About wildlife traffickers. About a hummingbird, a salamander.
We migrated to the bedroom, with sullen, unreadable daughter off to her room. Something in her eyes: if we talked again, I would need better answers. I remember feeling relief: that my lie meant she wasn’t ratting me out or writing me off. Whereas my husband suspected nothing. Or did he?
Wired to the moment, to the present tense, as I brush my teeth, put on my pajamas, as he flosses and puts on his boxers, takes up the half-read newspaper and grunts in satisfaction at his fullness from a dinner he didn’t have to make. No questions from him, just the usual routine. While I’m making a conscious effort to take deep breaths, to be some semblance of calm.
Then I crash into the world again and I am no longer light, no longer able to keep it all at arm’s length. Have to strangle a scream.
Surely he will notice? But he doesn’t. He sits up in bed reading until it’s time for sleep. Until we turn the light off and lie there on our separate sides.
He’s snoring soon enough. But I can’t sleep. I can’t even begin to think of sleeping. I’m wired like a race is about to start, like a match is about to start, like a fight is about to start.
I rise up rise up rise up. The clock reads two in the morning.
I tiptoe best I can, seeming thunderous to my ears. To the closet, to put on some clothes, quietly go downstairs, retrieve Shovel Pig, take out the gun, close the front door behind me.
[61]
I needed to screw up my courage first. “Dutch courage,” Shot would’ve called it. For what I planned to do. I kept telling myself it was stupid. Then finding ways to convince myself. This would be it. The last lead I’d investigate. I’d do this thing and Silvina would be out of my life. Whatever I found, whatever I’d already discovered that might be valuable … I’d send it anonymously to the authorities, to wildlife protection organizations. Whatever made sense. Then I’d find another job in the security business. Or somehow beg Alex to take me back. Like my old life just waited there, patiently, for me to inhabit it again.
First, I’d driven to within a fifteen-minute walk of the broken-down shed that hid my go-bag. I’d already taken out all the cards at the house, along with further precautions. I stashed Shovel Pig and all my phones save my work phone. Bog felt too valuable to risk, but I’d changed the work phone to make it harder to trace. I’d ditch it after.
Then I drove to the dive bar across from my gym, which wasn’t too far out of the way. Back route through a residential neighborhood and parked a block away. Slipped in through the back door, sat in the velvet darkness on the long, low bench along the wall, derelict pool tables in a herd in front of me. Only three people at the bar. I waited for the bartender to come to me. Figured I was four or five quick steps away from slipping out the back door. That was how I was thinking. That someone might come for me.
I couldn’t see the gym from my position, just the lonely parking lot streetlamp that I used to park beneath. Rationed my double Jack and Coke, ate some bar peanuts. It smelled like piss from the bathrooms, but the reek just kept me sharp, focused.
Ronnie Simpson. Apparently, an Olympic-caliber swimmer in addition to reformed ecoterrorist. Unitopia still in my head. A kind of sourness of regret. Maybe I still had a cage around my brain that Silvina hadn’t pried open yet. Because I thought in that moment about the wasted potential. How with Vilcapampa company resources behind her, Silvina might’ve done more good. Instead, she was dead, and all I could find of her were people like Langer and Ronnie.
My work phone beeped. A text.
>>I don’t have eyes on you. You just disappeared. Where did you go?
Hellbender. Such a swell of satisfaction that he couldn’t find me. That my precautions worked. That I had no need to answer.
But maybe I shouldn’t have had the double drink. Because I didn’t put the phone down. You just disappeared. The niggling thing in the back of my head. Something about the exact moment Ronnie had jumped me and fled, what I’d been saying. I hadn’t put it together before, it hadn’t registered. I could berate myself a lifetime, all the things I missed. All the stupid things I did notice.
Stared at my work phone for a moment. Tried to think through the potential risk. But everything was nearly over, right?
I dialed the number.
Fusk answered on the first ring, surprising me, and his hello was as steeped in whisky as my reply.
“Hey, you leathery old bastard.”
“Who’s this?”
“You know. The detective who wasn’t. The one you said should stay away from Silvina. You were right.”
“You’re still alive.”
“Sort of. Hey, Fusk, I have a question.”
“You’re drunk.”
“So are you, so we’re even.”
I heard a husk of a laugh at that. Or maybe I imagined it.
Even from that distance, I could see the death-swirl of insects around the lamppost across the street.
A sigh, long, drawn out. “Ask your question?”
That made me sit up from my slouch. “Wait. Really? You’re not going to hang up?”
“What’s the point now.”
A new refrain you heard a lot. And not just in bad country-western songs in bars.
“Fusk, did you know Ronnie? Actually know her, not just know of her?”
“I told you I didn’t.”
“One mention of your name over at Unitopia and she knocked the gun out of my hand and jumped in the water and I never saw her again.”
“Oh yeah?” But something in his voice had changed.
“Yeah.”
“So what if I did?”
Silence, through which I could hear a lot of police sirens and people chanting or shouting. Protesters? Protesting what this time?
“For Silvina,” he said finally. “I didn’t know
it was for her. It was all under the table, you know? Ronnie was the one who came to me. I only found out later who she worked for.”
I couldn’t sit still. Had to pace my prison, cluttered as it was with pool tables. Circumnavigate those green, rectangular islands. Swivel, repeat.
“What, exactly, did she bring you?”
“A hummingbird and a salamander. Six years ago.”
“What condition?”
“Pardon?” It must be hard to hear over the noise in the street.
“What condition were they in? Did they come in a cooler or dried out or what?”
“Both came in separate coolers. The hummingbird was in pristine condition. The salamander … I couldn’t tell if it was fresh or thawed, to be honest.”
I stopped pacing. “You mean you got the sense the hummingbird at least had been alive recently?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of salamander?”
“I dunno. Big, though. Really big. More like an iguana.”
I felt like an electric charge had gone through my body.
“Can you describe it?”
“Why does it matter?”
“Humor me, Fusk.”
“Already doing that. Well, it looked like a salamander. Blackish brown. Yellow stripes. Don’t know much about amphibians except they’re a pain to prepare.”
Racing stripes. Another thing to look up. But another thought made my head explode. The hummingbird. By then, they would’ve been extinct in the wild. Where had Silvina found a living one? Or was Fusk wrong, and it had just been brought to him well-preserved?
“But you must’ve looked at photos or done a search, right? You must have known it was probably as rare as the hummingbird?”
“Doesn’t pay to look too hard. You should know that by now.”
Wasn’t sure I believed he hadn’t known.
“And Ronnie. What did Ronnie say about the job? Anything about why they needed taxidermy made from them.”
Hummingbird Salamander Page 17