by Greg Iles
“Sure. What are you looking for?”
“A car. A blue Cadillac.”
“I’ll climb to a thousand feet. You’ll have a better view between the trees.”
Michael executes a 360-degree turn, climbing as he goes. This time the island looks more like a satellite photo, the chaos caused by proximity now softened into geometric patterns. I see the road that runs the perimeter of the island and the branch that cuts south of the hunting camp, widening into an open space near the cluster of cabins that house the workers. Four white pickups are parked by the cabins. To the left of them, a baby blue sedan stands gleaming in the sun.
Pearlie’s Cadillac.
“Okay!” I tell Michael. “Let’s go home.”
“You saw the car?”
I nod and point northward, toward Natchez. I don’t really feel like talking now. I just want to know what drove Pearlie Washington to travel to the island where she was born, a place where, according to her, she is no longer welcome. One more mystery among many. Yet something tells me that if I could read Pearlie’s mind, all the other mysteries would be solved.
Chapter
48
The Natchez airport is a tiny facility, two runways and a brick administration building laid out near the origin of the Natchez Trace. Michael makes a perfect three-point landing, then transfers me to his Expedition, and within fifteen minutes we’re approaching the driveway of Malmaison. The sight of the oak-bordered drive with its pink Pilgrimage tour sign gives me a strange feeling of foreboding.
“You want me to drive up to the house?” he asks.
I wave him past the opening in the trees. “Let’s go to your house and walk through the woods to the barn. If Billy Neal and my grandfather are there, I’d rather have some privacy for this.”
Michael pulls into Brookwood and drives to the back of the subdivision, where his house stands quietly under the trees.
“Do you have bolt cutters or anything?”
He shakes his head. “I may have a hacksaw.”
“That could work. What about an ax?”
“Yeah. We going to tear the place down?”
“Be prepared. Weren’t you a Boy Scout?”
Michael actually blushes when he says no.
Three minutes later, we’re jogging through the trees toward Malmaison. I’m carrying the hacksaw, he the ax. When I sight the main house, I bear right, toward the low-lying land bordering the bayou at the back of the property. The city of Natchez is built on hills transected by bayous and deep gullies, a secret network of waterways known by the children but forgotten by adults. Most adults, anyway. I still know them all.
We approach the barn from the side, then circle around back, so as to be shielded from anyone glancing down from the parking lot behind the slave quarters. The wall boards are dry and weathered gray, but the door still resists a stout pull. I lay the hacksaw blade against the padlock and set to work. When the sweat begins pouring off my face, Michael takes over the saw. The cords and muscles in his forearms bulge as he works, and it strikes me that Michael is stronger than he looks—definitely not the fat boy I remembered from high school.
“There,” he says, blowing metal shavings away from the cut. “Give me the ax.”
I pass it to him. With the blunt side of the head, he bashes the lock off the heavy hasp. “Open sesame,” he says.
Then he pulls open the door.
My indrawn breath remains locked in my chest.
Inside the barn are more Luke Ferry sculptures than I’ve ever seen gathered in one place. There must be twenty, most of them taller than my head, and some twenty feet high.
“Wow,” Michael whispers. “It’s like a museum. A private museum.”
The sight of all that polished metal wrought into abstract yet beautiful forms by my father’s hands is almost more than I can bear. When the smell hits me—the scent of hay that Daddy could never get out of the barn—my knees go weak. Even his tools are here, his cutting torch with its big gas cylinders, his metal saw…
“Cat? Are you okay?”
I clutch Michael’s arm and take a step into the barn. “I didn’t need to look at this stuff right now. It’s too much, you know?”
“Yeah. It’s powerful even for me, and I didn’t know the guy. Did you know all this was here?”
“Not like this. My grandfather must have lost his mind. He never liked my father’s work. Now, it’s like he’s cornering the market.”
“Do you still want to look for the bag?”
“Hell, yes. That’s why we’re here.”
I quickly thread my way through the sculptures to the foot of the timber post that my father walked to in my dream. It’s uncanny how certain I feel that I’m standing in the right place. If that bag is beneath these boards, my dream was just as Nathan Malik described a repressed memory: buried deeply, but intact. And true.
“The ax?”
Michael passes me the ax like a nurse passing a retractor to a surgeon. With the head, I press down on one end of the first board I saw my father touch in my dream. When the other end of the board lifts a little, my heartbeat stutters. I catch that end of the board with my shoe, hold it in place, then reach down and pull the board out of the floor.
“Look at that,” Michael whispers.
My hand tingles as I slip it into the darkness beneath the floor. Then it closes around dry, rubbery fabric. The bag. As I pull on the neck of the bag, two more floorboards come up with it, exposing an olive drab sack that looks as if it holds nothing more than old laundry.
“I think we just proved that repressed memories exist,” I say.
Instead of poking blindly through the bag with my hand, I carefully shake out its contents on the floor. The first thing that falls out is a magazine. Playboy. It’s dated 1970 and boasts the Playmate of the Year on its cover. Relief washes through me.
“This must be what he was looking at in my dream.”
“What?” says Michael. “You didn’t say anything about a Playboy magazine.”
“It’s nothing. This is a good thing.”
“Why?”
“It’s normal.”
“Oh. I get it.”
A miniature photo album for storing snapshots follows the magazine out, and my throat tightens a little. Then comes the sketchbook Louise told me about. Next, a small stack of envelopes held together with a yellow ribbon, followed by a sheaf of maps, some of them laminated. The top envelope in the stack of letters is addressed to Luke Ferry, and the return address is Malmaison. The canceled stamp is dated 1969. The bag feels empty now, but when I shake it hard, some rotten prunes strung together on a wire fall out on the floor. A shield-shaped patch falls beside them. The patch shows an eagle’s head, and above that, a scoped rifle with the word SNIPER monogrammed in yellow thread above it.
“Hundred and First Airborne,” says Michael.
“What?”
“That eagle. The Screaming Eagles, that’s what they call the Hundred and First. I saw that eagle emblem all the time on that HBO miniseries Band of Brothers. Was your dad in the Airborne?”
“Yeah. I just found out the other day.”
Michael flips through the Playboy as I go through the stack of letters. Most are from my mother to my father, some written from Natchez, but most from University, Mississippi, the post office of Ole Miss. My mother went to school there while my dad was in the army, but she didn’t even manage a full year before he was wounded.
“Like what you see?” I ask Michael, who’s still looking at the Playboy.
“It’s funny. So dated. The cameras and the cars.”
“Yeah, I’m sure that’s what you’re looking at.”
“Well, Lola Falana doesn’t look too bad here, I must admit.”
“Lola Falana’s black, right?”
“Mm-hm.” He holds up the magazine. I see a short but well-shaped woman with an Afro riding a horse.
Tying the envelopes back together with the ribbon, I glance at the rotten p
runes. Desiccated, wrinkled, and black, they look like something I might have brought home in my trick-or-treat bag in the days before Halloween candy was store-bought. The book of pictures seems the next logical choice, but I’m not ready for that yet. Passing over them, I rummage through the maps. The top one shows the Vietnamese-Cambodian border west of Saigon. The next shows something called the A Shau Valley. This map has handwritten names in English: Eagle’s Nest; Berchtesgaden; Currahee; Hamburger Hill. There are elevations scrawled beside some of the names: OBJ Perry—639; OBJ Hoptown—670; Eagle’s Nest—1,487. Below the English names are typed words in another language: Dong So; Ale Ninh; Rao Lao. I have a feeling a lot of American boys died at those places, and that maybe they weren’t supposed to be there. Sure enough, as I study the map some more, I realize I’m looking at the border area between Vietnam and Laos.
“My God,” Michael exclaims, holding up the Playboy. “An interview with Tiny Tim. And a story by Nelson Algren. This is bizarre. Maybe your dad did buy this for the articles.”
“You’re a big help.”
“Sorry. I didn’t think you’d want me looking at that stuff until you’d checked it out.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
I’m down to the sketchbook and the photo album. I’m about to start working through the photos when Michael speaks again, this time in a voice I barely recognize.
“Cat?”
When I look up, his face is pale. “What is it?”
He shakes his head, then passes the magazine to me. Stuck between two pages are three photographs. Each one shows a different child. Two are boys, aged about six or seven. The third photo shows a dark-haired girl of about five.
All of the children are naked.
“Is that you?” Michael asks.
My eyes are swimming in tears. “No.”
The boy in one photo looks oblivious to the camera, but the other boy looks scared. He’s holding his little penis as though he’s about to urinate, but I can almost see a man standing behind the camera, ordering him to touch himself.
My stomach is trying to come up. I want to stop it, but I can’t. Dropping the magazine on the floor, I get to my feet, run to a corner, and puke my guts out. As I come up for air, spitting and dry-heaving, something touches my arm.
I whirl and lash out, striking Michael hard across the face.
He blinks in surprise but doesn’t try to defend himself. I draw back my arm again and swing at his face with all my strength. Something clamps around my wrist and pins it in midair.
Michael’s hand.
“Cat?” he says softly. “It’s me. It’s Michael.”
A scream bursts from my throat with the force of an explosion. From deeper than my chest, really, deeper even than my diaphragm. The scream is what my fist would have been had it smashed into Michael’s face. A bolt of rage and humiliation and other things I can’t even name. When the scream finally dies, my hand still quivers an inch from his face.
“I think we should get out of here,” he says. “We can talk about this stuff at my house.”
I don’t respond.
“I’ll get the bag. We should take it with us.”
He pushes my fist down to my waist, then lets it go and kneels on the floor. He puts everything back into the bag, then leads me by the wrist back through the sculptures, toward the barn door.
I stop in my tracks.
Hanging from a rafter above me is a sculpture I didn’t see on my way in. It was shielded from view by the floor of the loft. But now I see it. It’s a hanged man. Stylized, but a hanged man all the same. Life-size, and ugly as death. The face has the anonymous oval shape that the statue in Louise’s house did, but the body is fuller. At first I think of suicide, but something about the sculpture has a more official look. As if the man was just hanged for some offense. The steel rope around his neck rises in a perfect line that terminates in a hook, which would allow it to be hung from almost anything.
“I’ve never seen that before. I thought I’d seen everything he ever did.”
No, says a voice in my head. You’d never seen the pieces in Louise’s house either.
“That’s different,” I say.
Is it? Apparently, your father did a lot of things you never knew about. Or never remembered…
“Cat?” says Michael. “Are you talking to me?”
“What?”
“Come on. That scream was loud.”
He drags me toward the door, but my eyes remain locked on the hanged man.
Chapter
49
As Michael pulls me through the trees toward Brookwood, I keep thinking of my father walking on water in my dream. When I woke, I felt certain that he was trying to tell me something. To help me. To send me the secret truth of his life and mine. But maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was trying to apologize for something. Not literally, of course. I know he’s not communicating to me from the dead or anything like that. It’s my subconscious creating these images. And yet…
“I’m sorry I flipped out,” I say. “You don’t have to stay with me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” says Michael. “You have no business being alone right now.”
We’re never going to reach Brookwood. My legs feel full of sand, and the humidity hanging in the air makes it difficult to extract oxygen from it. “I need to talk to my mother.”
“Why?”
“She’s my father’s next of kin. I can’t see getting any kind of exhumation permit without her support.”
“Cat, you just looked at three Polaroids and a sculpture and you freaked out. Now you’re talking about looking at your father’s corpse? After it’s been decomposing for over twenty years?”
I shudder. “That will be easier to look at than those pictures.”
“Cat—”
“What else can I do, Michael? I have to keep digging until I uncover the truth. If I don’t, I’ll go mad.”
He stares at me with eyes full of pity and compassion. “I think you should talk to Tom Cage before you do anything else.”
“Dr. Cage?”
“Yes. Remember what he told me? Your dad confided in him quite a bit about the war. And Tom seemed to think a great deal of Luke. I think you need to hear what Tom has to say.”
“Nobody’s going to confess to their family doctor that they molested their own daughter.”
“Don’t be so sure. In the old days, the family doctor was like a priest. Especially in the South. He was the only person some people could legitimately unburden themselves to.”
I stop walking and sag against the gray trunk of an oak tree.
“What’s the matter?” Michael asks.
“Can you bring the car?”
He studies me for several moments. I see the doctor’s brain behind his eyes, searching me for signs of…what?
“Do you promise to stay here until I get here?”
“Of course. What are you worried about?”
“I’m worried that all this stress will trigger a manic state. If it does, you won’t know what you’re doing. And I think you’ll kill yourself one way or another.”
I slide down the tree trunk and settle onto the soft ground. The pain of the bark scraping my back is strangely welcome. “Please, Michael.”
“I’ll be back in two minutes.”
As soon as he disappears, I dump the contents of my father’s bag on the ground in front of me. The Playboy, the maps, the letters, the prunes, the sniper patch, the sketchbook, the spiral album of snapshots. I hold my breath as I open the album, with its photos tucked into plastic sleeves for posterity. I’ve never been more afraid to look at something in my life. If I find more photographs of children, I’ll simply keep holding my breath until I pass out. I’ve failed at that before, but today…
The first photograph shows a white-tailed deer in low light, a buck with ten antler points. Relief almost makes me exhale, but I don’t. Every photo in this book is a potential horror.
The next pi
cture shows a black bear cub. The one after, a cottonmouth moccasin coiled around a cypress tree.
My heart stutters in my chest.
The next photo shows a naked brown body. But it’s not a child. Not a prepubescent one, anyway. It’s Louise Butler, thirty years younger than when I talked to her in her little house on the island. She can’t possibly be eighteen in this picture. She’s standing on the edge of the river at sunset, facing the camera without a trace of shame. The grace and power of her nude body make Lola Falana on the pages of Playboy seem common.
I flip the page.
Louise again, at river’s edge, this time sitting in profile against the sunset in what looks like the lotus position.
My mouth goes dry at the next image. In it, my father stands with one arm around Louise’s waist. She’s naked, but he’s wearing an old pair of denim cutoffs and nothing else. Bronzed by the sun, he looks as fit and happy as I ever saw him in life. The image is slightly off-kilter, as though he had set the camera on a log and shot the photo with a timer. I never saw him look that happy when he was with my mother.
The next photo shows several black children playing in a dusty road, but they’re all wearing clothes. As I flip through the little binder, the images blend into a montage of life on the island. Not the privileged life I knew as the granddaughter of Dr. and Mrs. Kirkland, but the daily life of the blacks who lived there year-round. One photo shows Daddy with a young black man—Jesse Billups with a ’fro?—sitting on a porch playing box guitars. Bottles of cheap wine stand on the porch rail, and a heavy black woman with pendulous breasts dances barefoot on the ground. Luke has a glass bottleneck on the third finger of his left hand. I can almost hear the cutting wail of the notes as he draws the slide quivering along the strings.
The last photograph is of me.
I’m sitting on the floor of the barn with my legs crossed, much like Louise in her lotus photo. My elbows are on my knees, my chin in my hands, and I’m staring into the lens with big round eyes that look exactly like my father’s. I look more at peace in that picture than I’ve ever felt in my life.
I look about two years old.
