by Gwen Florio
‘Did you tell her you loooooooved her?’ one asked now, drawing out the word in a falsetto. ‘That always gets them.’
‘Hell, no. These things, they take finesse – not something you’d know anything about.’ Alden again. He made a cranking motion with one arm. ‘I’m reeling her in slow.’
‘Hell.’ Brittingham’s partner, Lewis. ‘You got to take it slow with her. Woman’s thick as a plank. Took forever to get the photo ID from her.’
‘Yeah, but we finally got it.’ Brittingham, not nearly as drunk as the rest. ‘Between that and the story we fed the Sun reporter, things are looking pretty good for you.’
‘Got to hand it to you. That was a genius move, getting the dirt on that kid out in public.’ Alden lifted his beer can in a toast.
‘Had to, after the way Nelson went blabbing to the Afro.’
Nelson. Nora puzzled for a moment, then remembered the black cop stationed at the police department’s entrance.
‘Black bastard’s gonna spend the rest of his life pushing paper in Records after that little stunt,’ Brittingham said. ‘But things are working out just fine. Few more weeks, this’ll all be behind you.’
‘Here’s to that,’ someone shouted. Beers were lifted, drained, cans tossed away, new ones retrieved.
‘Hey, Alden. I’d say the worst is still ahead of you,’ Lewis offered.
‘How’s that?’
‘’Cause at some point you’re going to have to get loose of her.’
‘The sooner the better. Been playing her like a fiddle so long my arm is tired.’ Alden tossed his can into the fire. It hissed and popped. Someone passed him a flask. He took a long pull, gave it back and swiped the back of his hand across his mouth. ‘That’s more like it. Swear to God, if I have to say one more time how sorry I am that I shot that motherfucker … Give me that back.’ He reached for the flask again.
The light of the fire played across his face, highlighting cheekbones and jutting jaw, throwing his eyes into deep shadow. For the first time since she’d been back, Nora saw him as the stranger he’d become.
‘Better watch yourself,’ someone else said. ‘She went after that guy in Montana, Wyoming, wherever the hell it was, with an ax. Guy almost lost his arm. You’re likely to lose your pecker.’
Just a few moments earlier, Nora had thought of warm coals, steady, comforting. Sustaining. Now she knew her reunion with Alden to have been fueled by sentiment, a conflagration rooted in memory, a willful turning away from the reality blazing bright before her.
The laughter stayed with Nora the whole way back to Quail House, long after it had actually died away.
THIRTY-FOUR
1967
People would say later that Grace’s scream touched everything off, her anguished ‘No!’ ringing out like a cry to battle, echoed by a hundred voices in a roar that ripped the lid from Chateau’s determined tranquility, setting loose two centuries of suppressed rage.
A brick, snatched from the construction site next to the ball field where the new bank was going in, flew toward the cops. They rushed the protesters, who in turn grabbed more bricks as they fled, hurling them through the plate-glass display windows of the Commerce Street businesses. Befrocked mannequins toppled in La Mode. The projectiles took out both of the two-foot-tall antique glass vials in the window of Slocum’s Pharmacy, one displaying a mysterious red liquid, the other green, the resulting spray soaking the greeting-card display and puddling like liquid Christmas on the floor.
The floor-to-ceiling windows of Burris’s car dealership attracted a whole hail of bricks that landed on the Chrysler Newport convertible, next year’s model that had arrived that very week, caving in the hood, ruining the Seafoam Turquoise Metallic paint job and gouging the creamy leather seats.
The cops halted their headlong, baton-swinging charge at the protesters and milled about, uncertain of their mission. Detain the protesters? Or protect their neighbors’ property?
‘Here!’ the Chief called. Rallying them, getting them focused. ‘Leave off those folks. Get him!’ He pointed to Simmons, who’d hopped into the bed of a pickup parked along the street and was yelling at the top of his lungs.
‘Burn it! Burn it all down!’
The cops advanced on the truck but not before some of the demonstrators saw what was going on and surrounded it, and in the pitched battle that ensued, the cops cracking heads right and left until they finally were able to pull Simmons from the truck into a forest of swinging nightsticks, nobody noticed at first the young men who’d climbed through the pharmacy’s open windows, helped themselves to cigarette lighters and cans of hair spray, and were going from store to store, methodically spraying their makeshift flamethrowers at whatever would catch fire.
Soon, white men would come running with shotguns, sending the protesters scattering for good. Marcus Simmons would be hauled to a hospital and shackled to a bed for treatment of a shattered forearm, several broken ribs – the jagged end of one just barely missing his heart – and bruises swelling his face into unrecognizability in the subsequent mug shot. Chateau’s volunteer fire department would muster too late to prevent the severe damage to the stores already afire, but sprayed down adjoining buildings to keep the whole block from going up. Later that night, when someone emptied gallons of gasoline around the perimeter of the AME Zion church and tossed a match on to the reeking stream, the fire chief refused to send a truck, citing fears of violence.
Just as no one came to the aid of a lone young black woman, her fists bloodied from pounding them on the sidewalk as she screamed herself silent, when she rose stone-faced and walked like an automaton through the burning town and beyond, her fury propelling her along the dusty country road that led toward Quail House.
THIRTY-FIVE
Nora sat in the boat for a long time after tying up at the dock, clambering out only after realizing that at some point Alden inevitably would row past and she would … what?
Go upside his head with an oar?
Scream at him?
Run for her truck and flee yet again? Which, frankly, was her first impulse. But how many times could one woman run?
How smug she’d been for her half-assed efforts to face things head-on! And how eagerly she now dropped them, embracing the Chateau way, pretending none of it had ever existed – not the shooting, nor the outing of her relationship with Alden, and especially not the damning information she’d just learned.
She’d have to deal with all of those things, and figure out the rest of her life, at some point. For now, she would stay in Chateau just long enough to make sure her mother was healed, holing up in her trailer and finishing the goddamn book in the process.
Which was why, when her phone rang a few hours later and her agent’s number showed on the screen, she finally answered, secure in the knowledge that she could honestly say she was making progress.
But Lilith cut her off before she could say as much.
‘What the hell, Nora? What for the love of Christ is going on with you?’
Murph, sitting at what should have been a safe distance, whined as the piercing tone registered.
‘I’m almost done.’ Every writer’s lie. ‘Truly. You should have a first draft in’ – Nora thought of a realistic time and halved it – ‘six weeks.’
Lilith forged on as though Nora hadn’t spoken.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, carrying on with some married cop who shot a black kid? Are you out of your fucking mind?’
If, to use Grace’s word, Nora was radioactive in Chateau, the Justice for Robert Facebook page had sent her to some level of galactic destruction in the publishing world.
‘Did you not read your fucking contract? The part that says you won’t engage in publicly condemned behavior? And even if you didn’t, have you not read a single news story in the last few months? Writers aren’t allowed to fuck up anymore. It’s not colorful now. It’s just plain racist – which is what it’s always been, except that before we all
just looked the other way.’
Nora finally managed to get a word in edgewise. ‘But I didn’t do anything. For God’s sake, Lilith, it’s not like I slept with him.’ And now she never would. In fact, if the universe ever dealt her a break, she’d never see Alden Tydings again.
‘Doesn’t matter.’ Lilith’s tone was as emphatic as a slammed book. ‘Perception is everything. You of all people know that. The publisher is canceling your contract. I think I can work it so that you don’t have to pay back your advance. You can thank me anytime.’
‘Thank you. But—’
Lilith cut her off. ‘And, Nora, this officially ends our partnership. I can’t afford to represent a client with this hanging over her.’ She hung up in the midst of Nora’s goodbye.
‘Wait—’
Nora looked at the dog. The cat had joined him, sitting a few feet away, lifting a paw and licking it, ignoring them both.
‘What about you two? Are you ditching me as well?’
Murph’s tail pounded the ground in an affirmation of unending loyalty. Thank God.
She looked to Mooch, now slinking away by infinitesimal degrees across the lawn, belly low to the ground, tail twitching in anticipation. A grasshopper was about to meet its demise.
Never mind. She wasn’t so far gone as to need reassurance from a cat.
But she was pretty far gone.
A long time ago, she’d left this place, trying to outrun heartbreak, eventually pronouncing herself older and wiser – until history kicked her in the ass by repeating itself.
‘It’s not fair.’ A child’s phrase.
But it wasn’t fair. Nothing people thought they knew was true.
She knew that she could say that until she was blue in the face, could plaster it on big billboards leading into Chateau, could proclaim it to the world on every social media site she knew, and it wouldn’t matter a damn.
How many clients had she lectured with the very phrase Lilith had just turned on her? Perception is reality. ‘If you want to change your reality,’ she’d tell them, ‘you’ve got to put a different image out there, starting about five minutes ago. Let’s get to work.’
She slammed her laptop shut.
Alden, that fucker, had bragged about playing her like a fiddle.
Nora drummed her fingers on the table, a tune of her own beginning to take shape in her mind.
She opened the laptop and typed Robert Evans and Chateau into a search engine. She’d read something, early on – ‘Yes!’
Kwame Evans had said the family was calling on the Attorney General to conduct an independent investigation.
A few clicks led to a phone number for the Attorney General’s Office in Baltimore, and a few numbers punched into an automated voicemail system finally led to a recording that invited her to leave a message. Which she did, after spelling out her name and repeating her cellphone number twice.
‘Please call me as soon as possible,’ she said. ‘I have some information about Robert Evans’s killing.’
THIRTY-SIX
1967
The sounds of the melee faded as Grace walked toward Quail House and were gone entirely by the time she entered the deep shade of McKay’s Woods. Tree limbs stretched out over the road, and deep underbrush formed a seemingly impenetrable screen.
Grace fought an impulse to push through it, to flee deep into the forest, foraging for the plentiful food found in it and in the river, existing among the animals, whose lives were so much simpler than those of humans, their sole task finding enough to eat without getting eaten themselves. No constant tension of how to hold your body, direct your gaze, control your words, so as to avoid giving offense or attracting attention in any way. Because that attention could be fatal. As it had been with—
She forced back the sob in her throat. Now was not the time. Mosquitoes found her, coalescing by the hundreds into a hovering dark cloud that moved along with her, needling her neck, her ears, the soft flesh of her inner arms. She welcomed the physical pain, a balancing counterpart to the unbearable anguish within. When they crowded her face to the point where it was hard to see, feasting at the damp corners of her eyes and mouth, clustering at her nostrils, she wiped away their engorged bodies, leaving hands and face alike streaked with her own blood.
She watched her feet moving forward, seemingly of their own accord, her low-heeled white patent-leather pumps grimed with road dust, her hose laddered from her fall to the sidewalk. Her dress dampened under the arms. The cotton stuck to her back. She’d chosen pale green, an unforgiving color that would quickly darken with telltale circles of sweat. She didn’t care. Let them see what grief – the grief they caused – does to a person.
She emerged from the woods, briefly blinded by the full sun. Ahead, off to the left, the twin rows of cedars curved away toward Quail House. She could admit to herself now, with a flash of bitter inner laughter, that yes, it had once been a thrill to walk up this grand approach, catch her breath as she rounded that last curve, designed for exactly that effect as the vista opened up to perfectly frame the grandeur of Quail House.
A charnel house, more like it, she thought now, rattling with the bones of dead dreams and a dead young man.
Fished from the river, the Chief had said. Shot dead. Had the bullet found him in the back? His heart? Or had it made a ruin of his beautiful face?
The dog, the same one they’d had when she’d worked there, trotted around the corner of the house, hackles raised. She stopped, sniffed the air and bounded joyfully toward Grace. She’d liked the dog. No more.
‘Git,’ she said, and Kathleen Mavourneen stopped again, eyes puzzled, tail wagging uncertainly.
Grace brushed past her and walked right up to the front door, grabbed the brass pineapple knocker – how many times had she polished it? – and banged five times in quick succession.
‘Open up! I know you’re in there! Get on out here before I bust a window and let myself in!’
She stepped back. Listened hard. Thought she heard a voice.
She went at the door again, both fists now, words inarticulate, some strangled version of ‘no-no-no-no-no’ when the door swung open and she nearly fell in.
‘Gracious.’ Philippa Smythe stood in the foyer, the wide staircase that Grace had mopped so many times rising behind her into the gloomy interior. ‘Such a racket. And’ – her gaze raked Grace, taking in the tattered hose, the filthy shoes, the blood-streaked skin, hair standing out in wild hanks – ‘you’re in such a state. Why don’t you come around the back door and we can discuss whatever has you so upset?’ Her old commanding tone, but Grace heard the quiver in it, saw the fingers knotted together, the calves tensed and poised to flee.
‘I ain’t going around to no back door to talk about my dead brother.’ For so long, she’d acted her most proper around the Smythes. No more.
Philippa’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘That nice young man who used to do our yard work? Oh, my dear, I’m so sorry. What happened?’
‘Don’t be slinging your bullshit all over me. Where is she?’
She made as though to push past Philippa, but suddenly the dog was between them, tail stiff and still, lips curled away from teeth.
‘Where is who, my dear?’
She had to give it to Philippa. Backbone of steel, not like her cowardly daughter.
‘That bitch you raised. Where she at?’
Philippa stiffened. ‘Language.’ At least she’d dropped that ‘my dear’ shit. ‘If you mean my daughter, Penelope and Hiram are out of town at the moment.’
‘Like hell they are.’ But she couldn’t help herself. Her glance flicked to the long, low shed where the family parked their cars and, indeed, the only ones there were Philippa’s black Lincoln and the old Army Jeep the Chief used on hunting forays in the fields and marsh.
‘Perhaps you’d like to come back another time.’
‘Where the Chief?’
Even though she knew full well.
‘He’s … busy. At
work.’
‘Then I’ll just wait until he comes back.’
Grace turned her back on Philippa, folded herself down on to the top step, and propped her elbows on her knees and her chin on her hands.
‘You can’t do that. It’s private property.’ Philippa finally sounded rattled. ‘I’ll call the police.’
‘Go ’head and call the police.’ Grace didn’t turn around. ‘But don’t hold your breath. They’re a little busy right now.’
The Chief didn’t get home until the sun had set and fireflies spangled the air above the lawn. The mosquitoes’ assault increased in ferocity after sunset, waning only when the temperature finally dropped a few degrees.
Grace’s skin was a mass of bites gone lumpy where she’d scratched. She was hungry and thirsty and had left her perch only twice, to pee in the shrubbery, squatting over Philippa’s herb garden, taking grim pleasure in the thought of Philippa plucking mint leaves to put in her tea the next day.
She was half asleep when the headlights brushed her face. She shielded her eyes and squinted into the glare. Chief Smythe pulled up directly in front of her and let the engine idle a few moments before he cut it, so she was good and blind when he stepped out of the car.
‘Grace. My wife said you were here.’
She stood, trying to hide the wobble in her knees.
‘What happened to my brother? Do my mama and daddy know?’
Her sight returned slowly, the Chief merely a tall shadow before her. ‘We contacted the Baltimore police. They sent somebody over.’
Grace could see it, the white police officer standing tense and resentful at being assigned the unwelcome duty, the rote words, her parents’ anguish intensified because the thing they’d most feared had come to pass.
Her throat felt as though someone had taken sandpaper to her vocal cords. Somehow, words emerged.
