Back in the front seat, I clean off my raccoon eyes with a makeup remover wipe from my purse, pencil a finer line for my eyebrows, and delicately apply mascara. As I smear a nude gloss on my lips, I think about how much this constant costuming calms me down. And the comfort I feel the second I let my fingers roll over the die from the wall. I’ve begun to return to it again and again, counting the dots on its six faces like it is my own secret Braille.
I’m worried about DeeDee back in Calvert. DeeDee DeeDee DeeDee. Her silly little name trills in my ears. DeeDee recognized Carl. Of course, she doesn’t know who I am or my aliases or that we are now driving a ubiquitous white truck instead of a granddaddy Buick.
I stare out the dirty windshield at the door that swallowed Carl. His absence is making me antsy. “OK, Barfly,” I say. “We’re going in.” I dig my gun out of the console and slide it into the holster. Girls might walk in that door every week and disappear. Human trafficking is a bigger network than drugs, a cop used to tell me. No matter what he said, I never thought that’s what happened to Rachel. So why am I thinking about it now?
As soon as I open the door, I’m overcome with the sensation of falling. The wall in front of me is papered top to bottom with a photograph swooning from the top of a skyscraper—the suicide jumper’s perspective.
I have to look at a spot on the dirty carpet to win my equilibrium back. When I lift my eyes, I’m alone in a tiny, fluorescent-lighted room. A black curtain is slung shut over the room’s only other door.
Voices murmur behind it, one of them Carl’s. My fingers wrap around the gun at my hip.
On every side, on every glass shelf, one-eyed things peer at me.
Cameras. A hundred, maybe more. Used cameras that know things they’ll never tell. Old instamatics and high-tech aliens. Some with lenses that appear as heavy as tanks; others that are the size of a box of kitchen matches. None of them feel friendly.
Carl hadn’t brought up his No. 1 condition for miles, and neither had I. But he certainly hadn’t forgotten. He was here for a camera. As I try to make out the muffled, intimate conversation, I think he might also be here for something else.
“Sit, Barfly,” I whisper. I regret not leaving him in the truck. I don’t want him to get hurt.
The narrow curtain puffs and floats. A Hispanic man whips out from behind, laughing hoarsely, about forty-five, wearing a black Willie Nelson T-shirt that says Outlaw. His hair is Willie-like, too, tucked into a man bun with a few scraggly gray pieces hanging over his eyes.
Suddenly, he’s not laughing. He’s staring at my right hand and reaching behind a wooden podium in the corner. A rifle is pointed at my face before I realize why. He thinks I’m going to rob him. I hadn’t remembered taking my gun out of the holster, but it is clutched in my fingers, pointed at the floor.
Carl is right behind him. “They’re with me, Angel. Put the gun away.”
“You don’t need a camera,” I say to Carl, not moving.
“You don’t need a gun,” Carl replies. He steps forward and pushes down the nose of Angel’s rifle. “Relax, Angel. I said she’s OK.”
Carl is cradling a Nikon. A yellowed paper tag dangles off it like it’s been sitting in a morgue. I continue to aim the gun at the floor. My uneasiness lingers. Not because of Angel, who is now on his knees, sweet-talking Barfly.
A camera is Carl’s weapon. It gives him power. When he points the camera, people either do exactly what he says or throw their hands up to their faces for cover. Don’t move, he says, and they don’t. Was that Rachel’s mistake?
Carl shoots, and everything bleeds black and white. The ordinary transforms into the profound, the beautiful, the sinister.
I don’t know for sure all that Carl has done. Not yet. But his documentary photographs, which I’ve examined a hundred, a thousand times, make me see everything in terms of something else. They beg dark questions.
What made the black stains on that mattress by the curb?
Will the stitches leave a scar over that old man’s eye?
What if the shiny penny wishes in that fountain didn’t come true?
Is the cat curled in the cardboard box dead or sleeping?
Is the man with his hand raised high about to strike that child knee-deep in a river or baptize his soul?
You can’t turn away from Carl’s pictures. You can’t help wondering about the way his camera is manipulating you. About what happened to these people and objects long before the shutter clicked, and after.
I’m certain it is the mystical creepiness of his photographs that made a jury with very little evidence take two days instead of ten minutes to set him free. The bit of DNA could be explained away. The little boy witness was a joke.
Angel is now cross-legged on the floor, scratching behind Barfly’s ears. “The lady’s too young for you, Carl.”
“They’re always too young,” Carl says.
“What happened to this dog?” Angel asks grimly.
“He was shot,” I say. “Dumped. We picked him up.”
“He’s going to be a real good dog,” Angel says. “I can tell.” I don’t like the way his arm is now curling around Barfly. Possessive.
Carl hooks the camera’s strap around his neck. “My friend here is giving me this Nikon. He knows I’m good for it.”
Angel’s eyes are roving over me. I can’t tell if it’s sexual or an assessment of my mental health. “If you feel bad about Carl not paying,” he says to me, “I’ll trade you for the dog.”
“I’ll give you cash for the camera,” I say immediately. “How much?”
“More than Carl can afford.”
I pull six fifty-dollar bills from my back pocket and put them on the counter. “Please don’t mention us, OK?”
“I’ve never seen you before in my life,” Angel says. “Next time I don’t see you, leave your gun in the truck.” He pulls a package off a rack and tosses it to Carl. “Take a memory card for the road.”
We are back in the truck and I’m twisting the key in the ignition when Carl remarks slyly, “You didn’t give him Barfly.”
“We’re not keeping him,” I reply.
As we feed back into the traffic, I think how I just blew another three hundred bucks when I already have what Carl really wants.
George, the camera he mourned on the witness stand with actual tears, is riding along in a box in the bed of the truck.
Carl thinks his beloved Hasselblad is missing. Lost forever. That’s because I stole it out of an evidence box. In the end, it may be all I have to barter.
TITLE: LADY IN THE RAIN
From Time Travel: The Photographs of Carl Louis Feldman
Gelatin silver print
Photographer’s note—She came out of nowhere in the rain, running ahead of me, fleeing on a street that shone like wet mirror. She was mist and moonlight. Liquid silver. Cinderella. A girl in a time machine, chasing her other life. She held a small black umbrella high, like it had floated her to earth. I found her shoes up ahead by a tree. I wanted to follow. To see her face. But I knew that would break the spell.
27
Two days of my life are always running back to back like a double feature.
The day my sister disappeared.
And the day I knew Carl took her.
It was my senior year. I was sitting in an empty classroom before school, waiting to ask my art teacher a question.
At that point, I’d been obsessing over suspects for almost six years. The back of my closet was a maze that even I was beginning to have trouble following.
The book, titled Time Travel: The Photographs of Carl Louis Feldman, was lying on my teacher’s chair. A student had just returned it, and walked out.
This particular book had become so morbidly popular that it required its own special sign-out sheet and an overnight return. Three parents had protested to the principal that it should be censored despite its complete absence of obscenity. The year before, the same parents had tried to ban any mention o
f Robert Mapplethorpe and the picture of the naked Napalm Girl.
The teacher was late. I was curious. My name was at least a dozen down on the waiting list to check it out. Carl’s name was somewhere on one of my suspect lists at home, but it was really just a chicken-scratch question mark. He’d been acquitted. During the recent trial, he had become the most famous photographer in Texas, maybe the whole country.
I flipped from one page to another and another, thinking how dark and transcendental his photos were, like haunting poems. I decided someone so talented had to be innocent. Maybe I should cross him off the list entirely. The eleventh time I turned a page, I moved him to the very top.
I knew this picture by heart. I was staring at two little girls in white veils standing in a forest. The same little girls I hid and played with in the back of my closet. The same white dresses, the same scraggly blond hair, the same lovely faces, the same blur of motion. In this book, Carl called them The Marys. In the artist’s note on the opposite page, he said he stumbled across them by accident.
I sat in that classroom, stunned. There were no windows. A prison architect had designed the high school where I spent four lightless years, so I couldn’t see the rain but I could hear it pounding like rubber hammers on the roof. I didn’t understand my connection to this photograph, just that it meant something terrible.
My hands stumbled and fell to the back flap of the book where a much younger Carl stared out of a self-portrait. Handsome. Jeans. Boots. Cowboy rugged. And he was ominously, nauseatingly familiar—that relentless itch I still can’t scratch even though Carl now sleeps in my passenger seat and I can stare in his flesh-and-blood face whenever I want.
When the teacher walked in, I’d already shut the book and was fumbling with her tissue box.
I remember her name, Alegra with one l, because that’s what she made us call her instead of Mrs. Bukowski, and that her glasses were sharp black squares with an aqua edge that made her eyes piercing and invasive. Her hug that day was stiff, maybe because neither of us had enough fat to melt into the other or because we were both standoffish huggers.
I don’t know how much she knew about me during that awkward embrace, but enough. My Greek tragedy family was pretty famous, too.
Alegra and I may have had a whole conversation. All I remember is that she dropped her arms and backed up when I mumbled, “He killed my sister.”
While she called my parents, I tried to remember elusive details about the trial in Waco but couldn’t. There was something about one of Carl’s photographs in that case, too.
Questions were thumping my brain, relentless.
Did Carl Louis Feldman, an accused serial killer, slip one of his photographs under our attic staircase? Why?
Could I really have seen him before?
28
Carl is snapping off shots of me from the passenger seat. Real ones this time, digitally recorded. We left the photography store two hours ago, yet we’re still crammed in Houston traffic, a mile from the hotel. We’ve traveled six miles.
Every minute we sit here, I’m a minute angrier. Not once has Carl stopped fiddling with his new toy, the one I paid for with blackmail money so a man in a Willie Nelson shirt wouldn’t snatch my dog.
“I don’t know if I killed anyone,” Carl is saying, “but I’ve always considered every picture I take to be a little murder. My Hasselblad sounded like a gunshot when I fired it. A solid, good sound. That, and it’s inevitable that my subjects will be dead someday when someone looks at their pictures.”
“How about you give it a rest with the camera.” I can’t keep the edge out of my voice. “The traffic’s tough. It’s very distracting.”
He adjusts the lens and shifts it back up to his eye. Snaps off another shot. “The traffic is standing still,” he says. “All you have to do is keep your foot on the brake. But all right. How about a game of Twenty Questions?”
“Whatever makes you stop.”
He presses the shutter. Three more rapid-fire shots. “You’re very hard to resist. Your face has intriguing angles. Forgive me, but I haven’t had a camera in my hand for over a year.”
“I don’t like my picture taken.” Forgiveness does not apply to you, Carl.
“That’s why you take a good picture. It’s a myth that traditional beauties make the best photographs. You, you’re real. Hurting. Hell-bent. My camera appreciates that kind of honesty.”
“That’s some irony—that you think I’m honest.” I press lightly on the gas and inch forward two feet.
“My camera is deaf. It’s not listening to the lies coming out of your mouth. When I look through this little hole, I see a sweet, ordinary girl. I see the soft heart beating away. The taut muscle on your arms and legs that is a layer of pretend. A brain that is quick but frankly maybe not quite quick enough.”
“You can’t analyze me like those women in the diner. You have no idea who I am.”
“It’s…animal.”
I turn my head sharply. “What?” You’re the freaking animal.
“Animal, vegetable, or mineral. The game. I’m giving you the first answer for free. It’s animal.”
I swallow hard. “Can I see it with my little eye?” I hope the sarcasm hides the fact that he is once again drilling into my nerves. “Is it Barfly?”
“No. And no. You just wasted two questions.”
“Is it furry?”
“No.”
“Scaly?”
“No.”
“Does it have smooth skin?”
“Yes. Fifteen questions left.”
“Does it have a tail?”
“No.”
“Is it fast?”
“Dumb question. Everything is fast when it’s scared.”
“Is it something found in the sea?”
“Yes, it could be found in the sea.”
“Is it that octopus with the weird ears that you liked on Discovery Channel?”
“That’s nine questions, and you’re way off track. Think more broadly. Animal was a very broad category when my brother and I played. Didn’t you ever have a brother or sister to play this game with?”
I slam on the brakes as a blue Toyota whips in front of me.
“Jesus, watch out. Now you seem distracted. Maybe we should stop playing.”
“I’m fine.” I’m beginning to have an uneasy feeling about Carl’s game, a game I’ve never been good at. “Does it have wings?”
“No, it does not have wings.”
“Eight legs?”
“No.”
“Six?”
“No.”
“Four?”
“No.”
“Two?”
“Two?” Carl echoes.
“Two legs. Carl, is this animal a human being?”
“Yes. Good job. You are thinking broadly.”
“Is this person…female?”
“Yes. You’ve got four questions left.”
“Is she…dead?”
“Yes. Dead people are allowed in this game. People from the past. Historical figures. Dead celebrities. People you know.”
“Does her name start with an N?” I stutter.
“No.”
Not Nicole.
“Does her name start with a V?”
“Nope.”
Not Vickie. Not Violet.
“One question left and there are twenty-four more letters of the alphabet,” Carl says. “Your odds aren’t good if this is the route you are taking.”
“An R? Did her name start with R?” I can’t bear to say my sister’s name to him.
“You’re out of questions,” Carl says. “And you’re barking at me. You lose.”
29
I apologize to Carl for barking at him. How crazy is that? I apologize to a killer who is dangling a dead female, possibly my sister, in a game of Twenty Questions. Smooth skin. Could be found in the sea.
Did he drive all his victims to the ocean?
His arm is trembling again. I don’t t
hink he is faking. Tremors, Mrs. T called them. Part of the disease. I have to get Carl in good enough shape to pretend to be my father when we hit the boutique hotel where I’d made reservations. Mellow enough for an appointment tomorrow that Carl doesn’t have a clue about. It has nothing to do with Violet. It was a long shot I’d been working for days.
An hour later, when we pull up in the wide celebrity drive, Carl is back in a decent mood. I almost cheer when I see six other late-model white pickups parked along the entryway. I plan to let our truck get lost in this herd of white ponies for the next two nights.
“Now you’re talking,” Carl says, as a bellman pulls open his door.
“Don’t get used to it,” I reply.
The Hotel ZaZa lobby is spacious and dark with deep red undertones, low-lying modern couches, and complicated oriental rugs. Carl has already declared the art on the walls “pure crap”—black-and-white photos of sleek hipsters and skillfully painted murals with cartoonish, distorted people who seem only part human and a lot angry about their career in a hotel lobby.
Two young women are efficiently operating behind the front desk, comfortable in their prettiness. I choose the one with the ultra-black bob, Lady Gaga pale skin, and “Harriet” name tag. Carl, directly behind me, slumps on the luggage cart that displays our cooler, two suitcases, Carl’s patriotic pillow, Walt’s sleeping bag, a brown sack with Barfly’s food and bowls, and my backpack. At my instruction, Carl has posed Barfly with his best side showing.
“I’m Meredith Lane,” I say, so that I match the name on the credit card with the red-haired ID that I’ve laid down on the desk. “I have a reservation for my father and me.”
Paper Ghosts_A Novel of Suspense Page 11
