by Linda Barnes
“Did you arrange to take some with you when you ran?”
“Three thousand dollars,” she said ruefully. “I didn’t know anything about money. I thought it was a fortune until I discovered what it could buy. I’ve learned poverty, if nothing else.” She got to her feet, took a step toward Jannnie. “What’s keeping my sister? You promised.”
I got between them, took Thea’s hand, walked her back toward a chair. I said, “I thought your second manuscript was very fine. It’s uneven. There are chunks of dazzling imagery. You need to work on it.”
“But I’m not a child genius anymore,” Thea said. “Not ‘talented for my age.’”
“Just a writer,” I said. “Just a poet.”
She swallowed audibly. “Thank you,” she muttered faintly.
“You write the occasional poem still?” I asked, thinking about “berlin, now.”
“An act of madness, darkness. I tuck it in my footlocker, lock it away as quickly as I can, afraid some horrid Pandora will escape, and now she has, escaped forever—”
Beryl entered, alone, in a wheelchair that she worked with her hands. It hadn’t occurred to me that she’d lost the ability to walk. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe her weight made the wheelchair necessary. Certainly she wouldn’t have been confined to bed so long her legs had atrophied. Not at WPI.
Thea saw her and began to weep, deep sobs starting in her gut, welling uncontrollably. Ugly tears. I passed her a box of tissues and she blew her nose.
Beryl didn’t give any sign of recognition. I didn’t know if anyone had prepped her for the meeting or if they’d sent her to the sunroom cold, to observe her reaction.
Thea dropped the Kleenexes, not even looking for a wastebasket. She lowered herself to her knees, mumbling, stumbling in her haste to speak. “I’m sorry, Beryl. So sorry. You were right. You were right, and I was afraid to say you were right, and so they put you here. ‘Silenced for what they did to you, worse, far worse than caged for acts of rage.’ I’ve come back, and I’ll be put in jail for what I did, for killing, but I don’t know how to free you, Beryl. I don’t know what they’ve done to you.” Her speech became more rapid, her voice loud, angry.
“What have you done to my sister?” she screamed at Jannie. “She wasn’t like this. She could speak, she could laugh. She could dance and sing, and play the piano. Do you know that? She played better than Mama ever did. Other children liked her best, always. My father liked her best.”
Thea was on her feet now, menacing, backing Jannie into a corner. “What have you done to her? I want her medical charts! I want to see what that idiot, Manley, did to her, did to her so he could have my mother when my father died. He’d have done anything Mama said. And Tessa would have said anything Franklin wanted her to say!”
“Dorothea!” Beryl’s croak of a voice commanded our attention. “Dorothea,” she repeated slowly. “Why are you come from the dead?”
“I was never dead.”
“Yes, you were. We buried you, Thea. I wore white, not black. Mama made me wear white.”
“Beryl!” Thea grasped her hand. “I’m not dead. I’ve come back for you. To tell them that you always told the truth.”
“Why? Why now?” Beryl patted her nightgown and I could hear the faint crinkle of paper. She must have kept her sister’s words near her since she’d found them in the photo box.
Thea’s voice sank to a whisper. “I didn’t know before. Honest to God, Beryl, I didn’t know. Manley promised me he’d help me explain to you if I came back, and now he’s not here.”
“Is this about recovered memory, Thea?” I asked.
“Yes. Yes, that’s what he called it. He said that when Daddy came to your room, you were there, you remembered. But I learned to go to another place in my head, to pretend so deeply that it never happened, that after a while I could just go away in my mind, and then it truly never seemed to happen. So I wasn’t really lying when I told Mother that Daddy never bothered me at night, and that you were making the whole thing up. Even when you tried to kill yourself, taking all Mama’s pills, I thought, ‘She’s just crazy.’ I’m so sorry …”
“When?” Beryl asked.
“What do you mean? When did I remember?”
Solemnly, Beryl nodded her head.
“When I started to rewrite your book, Beryl. I’d been writing about you, and the stories you told me, stories I didn’t believe, about Daddy tying you with birthday ribbons, and I realized I’d written ‘tying me’—not ‘tying her,’ but ‘tying me’—I erased it so fast, but then I knew, and I felt so sick inside I couldn’t move or talk. It clawed at me, that ‘I,’ that ‘me.’ I couldn’t write without ‘I’ or ‘me’ coming out. It was as if my hand was not in control any longer. I put the notebooks back in the footlocker, and I locked it tight, and I didn’t look at them again. I wanted Thea to stay dead then, more than ever, because I didn’t want to remember.” She was breathing quickly now, talking fast and low. I hoped she spoke too softly for audio equipment, if they were using it, but in a first-class joint like this one, they probably had stuff that could catch the faintest sigh.
“Aren’t you Thea, Dorothea?” Beryl asked, shaking her head back and forth, back and forth. “I wish you were her. I wish you were.”
“Yes, dear, I am, but I’ve been somebody else for a long time, so long that I have a grown son. I have another life, a quiet life … I had a quiet life. But I couldn’t stop the remembering. Not once it started.”
I heard a man’s voice then: Garnet, calling, racing through the hall, coming closer.
“There’s another way out,” Thea said to me. “I won’t see him. I won’t.”
Before I could stop her, before I had any idea of her intent, she seized the fat crystal vase, shook half the flowers on the floor, and thrust the leaded ball away from her, hard and fast, with hands and elbows, like a volleyball pass. It crashed through the mirror, destroying a vast section of phony wall, revealing an adjoining room staffed by a lone white-coated technician, frozen in his chair.
Then she had me by the hand, and we were smashing through the opening she’d made, racing through the small observation room, out a nearby door, down a path lined by late-flowering shrubs.
Roz had the presence of mind to start the car when she saw us running toward the lot.
I’d had the presence of mind to grab the spool of tape off the machine operated by the astonished open-mouthed man in the lab coat.
As soon as we were safely on the highway, Thea whooped and hollered in victory. Roz and I joined her. I think I’ll always remember that one unexpected glimpse—Thea as she might have been, with laughter in her eyes and color in her cheeks.
Maybe she knew there wouldn’t be much to celebrate at the end.
55
The message light burned on my answering machine. Tessa Cameron’s querulous accented voice demanded to know what had occurred at the drop site. Instead of phoning, I reluctantly wrote her a refund check, stuck it quickly in an envelope, licked the stamp. Roz ran it to the mailbox before I could waver.
I couldn’t satisfy Tessa, couldn’t prove Thea’s notebooks fraudulent. Nor could I return them; they were evidence in at least one murder trial.
I could ignore Thurman W. Vandenburg’s plea for information about Carlos Roldan Gonzales, Keith Donovan’s request for reconciliation. I suppose I could have used a good psychiatrist for Thea, but Donovan and I no longer shared that precious and rare commodity, trust. Without it, we had no future, and I didn’t want to talk about it, talk about it, talk about it endlessly, until he twisted my words and put me in the wrong—unbending, unloving, unforgiving.
There are things I don’t forgive, it’s as simple as that. In myself. In others.
Mooney’s recorded voice jerked me back to the here and now. The exhumation of Dorothy Cameron’s grave would occur at 10 A.M., Tuesday, August 22, tomorrow morning.
I phoned the station and he was there, answering crisply, with his name and nothing mo
re.
“Mooney,” I said, “how’d you get it scheduled so fast? I thought—”
“The FBI moves in mysterious ways,” he said.
“The Bureau?”
“Don’t ask. Just be there. With Thea. She signed the application; she has to attend.”
“Who else are we expecting?”
“The Camerons know. They’re trying to get a last-minute injunction forbidding the ‘desecration’ of Thea’s grave.”
“Will they?”
“No. I’m planning to bring Alonso Gordon as my guest.”
“Alonso couldn’t have anything to do with these deaths—so long ago—”
“I know that, Carlotta.”
“So you’re trying to stir up a commotion, Moon. Is that what I’m hearing?”
“Yes.”
“I can see where you’d need a break,” I said. “You can’t keep Alonso locked up for Manley’s death if his mother’s going to keep saying she did it.”
“Right,” Mooney said. “I can’t charge anybody, and I’ve got a political tiger by the tail. I want out.”
“So we go hunting at Mount Auburn,” I said.
“Find out the truth,” Mooney said.
An old whore, there’s the truth. That’s what MacAvoy had told me, before he’d blown his brains out.
“Bring a lot of cops, Mooney,” I said.
“I’m going to read you Alonso’s statement,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard me. “I’d like you to write it down, maybe leave it on your desk. I wish you had a fax.”
“I don’t. Let me understand this, you want me to leave it lying around so that his mother can see it?”
“I never said that.”
“I have a pen,” I said. “Low tech. It may take a while.”
Mooney read it slowly, repeating words, spelling occasionally.
“‘My mother always told me my name was Alonso Gordon, but I believe I’m Garnet Cameron’s son. I believe that because I found these papers in my mother’s footlocker, this old thing we’ve always had. I never knew my father. My mom never even told me his name. I always thought there was something about my dad in that old locker, but it didn’t seem to matter until recently, when I found myself at odds and ends, without real work.
“‘I stole the key and opened the locker. There were all these notebooks and they reminded me of stuff I’d read in high school. And there was an article about Garnet Cameron running for governor. I think my mom stole those notebooks, maybe, but I don’t want to get her in trouble. Like, maybe she was a servant in the Cameron house and the kid, Garnet, got her pregnant, so she stole something he really valued, in case she ever found herself in need of some ready cash.
“‘Well, I was in need of cash, and she’d said she couldn’t help me, which really pissed me off, you know? I mean, I’m this rich guy’s son. So I took off. I came to Massachusetts the hard way, working cross-country, odd jobs, you know? And I read those notebooks and they’re like about really awful stuff that I think happened at the Cameron house a long time ago. I figured even if he wouldn’t accept me as a son, he’d pay for that book.
“‘Then I met his wife. Just one of those things. I knock on the door and he’s out and his wife’s there and she looks like every dream I ever had. And I tell her my story and she believes me, every word I say. And she says she’s got a better idea. For getting money, ’cause she says Garnet’s real tight with a buck.
“‘She says go ahead and try the blackmail bit, but if he doesn’t come across she’ll meet me in a day or two and I can call and say I’m holding her, kidnapping her. She says he’ll pay two million for her. Two million!
“‘And that’s what I did. I asked for money to keep a secret, and if that’s against the law, I broke the law. I sure didn’t kidnap Marissa. She came to me. And I think she wants to be with me. I don’t understand what this is all about, tell you the truth. I never went to see the doctor. I did call him on the phone, ’cause my mom said he was somebody who’d help me. He told me about the shack, and I stayed there for a while with this kid, Pix. But I never even saw the doctor.
“‘I wish my mother was here.’”
“Is that a true confession?” I asked Mooney. “He actually uttered that last line?”
“Leave it on your desk, and bring Thea tomorrow.” The phone clicked. I was tempted to call back. Instead I summoned Thea, told her about tomorrow’s scheduled event, and abruptly excused myself. I went to the bathroom, spent a long time washing my face and hands, noisily splashing water, cooling off from the car journey, filling my palms with tap water, drinking it, a dangerous habit with Cambridge water.
By the time I returned she’d read it. I could tell. She sat in my desk chair, collapsed by the weight of his ignorance.
“He believes Garnet is his father,” she said to me, a wild look in her eyes.
“He doesn’t know who you are,” I responded.
“Yes, he does. I’m his mother. He knows me.”
“Not as Thea Janis. Not as Dorothy Cameron.”
“Listen,” she said. “I did the best I could. I wanted him to have as little to do with that family as possible. I gave him the best father I could—I don’t want him to know about Thea Janis.”
“Okay,” I said mildly.
“Promise,” she said.
Sometimes I have to make promises I know I can’t keep.
This one kept me awake late into the night, remembering Thea’s poem.
perhaps as penance,
i must walk,
barefoot and holy,
through snow-wax camellias
I could remember no more, but I was afraid. I slept badly, woke at sunrise, sweating. It would be a scorcher of a day.
56
They do an extremely discreet and dignified exhumation at Mount Auburn Cemetery. Impossible, really, to differentiate it from a funeral, unless you happen to be in the know.
The cemetery was closed to casual passersby, the iron gate barred. The green canvas tent raised over the Cameron plot was totally correct. Striped would have been too festive, spearmint too springlike. The grass-green tent was large and opaque. No one could see the feverish activity within, the two sweating gravediggers first removing Thea’s marker, then measuring a six- by two-foot rectangle in the soil, carefully cutting away the sod, hefting their shovels, dumping the mounded earth into wheelbarrows. The cop observing, taking notes. The man from the Medical Examiner’s office, waiting.
The old caretaker seemed to recognize me. “You’ll see,” he said flatly. “Told ya there’s a body in that grave.”
Rows of black folding chairs had been set along a pathway. Due to an inconveniently located birch, there seemed to be a dividing aisle—bride’s side, groom’s side—or Cameron side, cop side, in this case. Most FBI agents stood, it seemed, including Gary Reedy.
The trick was keeping Thea away from her renowned family. Not from her son, Alonso, who attended under guard, wearing a cheap blue lightweight suit, obviously provided by the public defender, and manacles that restrained his wrists and feet. Thea had greeted him with a kiss, assured him that everything would be all right. Alonso sat like a man in a dream, sniffing the fresh-mown lawn, unaware of his surroundings at first. Slowly his eyes moved down the row of chairs, came to a full stop at Marissa’s.
She was wearing bright campaign yellow, sleeveless and clingy, her hair tucked under a wide-brimmed straw. He couldn’t have seen her face. She’d chosen her hat well.
Garnet straightened his tie for the umpteenth time. He couldn’t keep his eyes off Thea. He made no approach; after the scene at Weston Psych, he must have realized his sister would run to avoid him. Tessa Cameron looked utterly bewildered in her widow’s weeds. I wondered whom she’d donned the black silk shirtwaist for—her lover, Drew Manley, dead four days, her “lost” children?
Tessa studied Thea carefully, standing, and pivoting on spindly heels. Saw the steely hair, the undistinguished profile, the utter plainness of the pret
ender to the throne. Yet, there was something, some memory that kept Tessa turning her head in her daughter’s direction. Tessa seemed, I thought, beyond all else, puzzled.
The digging took two hours and twenty-seven minutes, with several breaks, during which the rhythmic noise would abruptly halt, and the audience hold its collective breath. When they finally struck the metal casket, it pealed like a muffled church bell. Tessa shivered. I searched the area for Edith Foley, for a man who might be one of her sons. No. There’d be no need to involve them yet. I was glad I wasn’t a Swampscott cop, glad I wouldn’t be bringing the news to Edie’s house.
“Tell me,” Thea said, clinging to my arm.
I knew what she wanted to hear; we’d been through it before. “It’s simple,” I said. “They had to have a murder so you could be buried in holy ground.”
“Yes,” she said, her fingernails nearly piercing my skin. “My mother was—is—so religious, so Catholic.”
I tried to pry her hand from my elbow.
“And they had to have a body,” she continued, prompting me, urging me to speak.
“So they could bury the gardener.”
“The man I killed,” Thea said, “with a trowel. The first man I killed.”
I nodded. Her stubborn commitment was past argument. She saw her duty clearly: The way to save Alonso was to claim Manley’s murder; the way to claim Manley’s murder was to admit Alonso’s.
“It should be over soon,” I said.
Mooney tapped me on the shoulder.
“Time to toss some tinder on dry brush?” I whispered.
“They’re opening the casket,” he announced.
Garnet stood, clearing his throat. “If it’s a question of identity,” he said, “I believe proper procedure would dictate taking the casket, unopened, to a mortuary or funeral parlor of the family’s choosing—”
“To the Medical Examiner’s Office,” Mooney corrected. “It will eventually be conveyed there.”
I left Thea with Roz—Thea’s protective lioness, as if she needed one with all the attendant cops and son, Alonso, too—and entered the stifling tent. The smell hit like a clenched fist. I backtracked blindly, reaching for the tent’s opening fold, retreating into the sunshine, gasping for air.
