by Alan Russell
“Thank you, Mrs. Macauley.”
That was the name she had checked in under, and the name on her credit card. If Elizabeth’s purse was ever snatched, the thief would wonder at his take. She always carried half a dozen different driver’s licenses, with matching credit cards. Only one of those IDs had her real name on it, a name she rarely used when traveling.
“Will that be smoking or nonsmoking?”
“Non.”
Her credit card, or at least Vera Macauley’s, was processed. The banks had never questioned her fictitious names. They had only been zealous about raising the credit limit on her cards and encouraging her to spend more.
Henry handed back her credit card. “Will you be needing any help with luggage?”
“No, thank you.”
“One key or two?”
“Two, please.”
Elizabeth had a room at another hotel under the name of Sue Price. She had considered switching hotels but had decided against it. The Shame story was breaking, and as much as she didn’t like it, Elizabeth was part of that story. Journalists would be trying to track her down because of her past association with Gray Parker. She didn’t want to lead them inadvertently to the Parker family.
The night auditor handed her the keys, pointed out the direction she should go to park, and told her to enjoy her stay. Henry looked more asleep than not by the time she left the desk.
Elizabeth had parked her car out of sight of the front desk. She opened the door to a different make and model car than what she had written on the registration card and for a moment wondered if there was a good reason for her having lied, or whether she just lied from habit.
Janet and James were asleep in the backseat, but Anna was only too awake. Her eyes were wide open, and she kept shaking her head as if to deny all that had happened.
Elizabeth handed her a key. “Room two-two-four,” she said. “Better remember the number. All the rooms here look alike.”
“Remember when hotel keys used to have the room numbers on them?” Anna said, looking at the key. “Lots more security these days, but nobody feels more secure.” Her head kept swiveling ever so slightly, saying, No, no, no.
“The name you’re registered under is Vera Macauley. Say it aloud three times.”
“What?”
“I always do that when I check into a hotel under an assumed name. It makes me remember who I am while I’m there.”
“I’ll remember.”
“In the middle of the night? When the phone rings and a voice you don’t know says, ‘Mrs. Macauley?’ It’s easy to forget.”
Anna reluctantly complied: “Vera Macauley, Vera Macauley, Vera Macauley.”
“And now put a mental picture in your head of being near a tamale.”
“Near a tamale?”
“Rhymes with Vera Macauley. It’s easier to remember images than names.”
“You always travel under an assumed name?”
“Yes.”
The man from the radio show wasn’t the first to tell her he wanted her dead. There had been others. Many others.
“Do you like living like that?”
Elizabeth didn’t answer. It was a way of life, but in hindsight she wasn’t sure it was the life she would have chosen. She remembered how Gray Parker had warned her of the consequences of “looking into the abyss.” Too bad he hadn’t offered her a warning about his own son.
“You’re going to have to explain your new name to the children,” Elizabeth said. “I suggest that you, and you alone, answer the phone.”
“How long do you think we’ll be hiding?”
“It’s hard to say.”
It actually wasn’t. They would be the media’s big game until her husband was captured, but Elizabeth didn’t want to tell her that, at least not yet.
Anna sighed. “Now I know why people confess to crimes they didn’t commit. You get so beaten up by the questioning, you just want it to end.”
The questioning wasn’t over, just deferred, but Elizabeth didn’t remind her. Anna had promised to keep Lieutenant Borman informed of all her movements. Not that he had taken her at her word. Detectives Holt and Alvarez had followed them in an unmarked car to the hotel.
“You and the children are going to have to keep a low profile while you’re here,” Elizabeth said. “If the media track you down, I’ll find you another place to stay.”
“Under yet another name?”
“Yes.” Elizabeth noticed that Anna’s head shaking had stopped—a good sign. She offered up a division of labor: “I’ll bring up the bags,” she said, “and you bring up the kids.”
“Deal.”
Elizabeth caught her head dropping forward. There was no time for sleep, she knew, but her body needed to be reminded of that. She forced her shoulders back and took a deep breath. Anna was in the next room, trying to coax her children to sleep for a few more hours. Janet and James had slept through all the excitement of the night before. It was just as well. They’d missed their father on the eleven o’clock news. The Sheriff’s Office had identified him as a fugitive wanted for questioning in the murder of Teresa Sanders, but the whole story was yet to be told. Those revelations would come out at the sheriff’s nine o’clock news conference. Instead of wearing his usual designer suit, Elizabeth thought, the sheriff should consider wearing asbestos.
She looked at her watch. Less than three hours until the news conference, and so much to do both before and after. There were interviews to arrange, sites to visit, and research begging to be done. Her finished books always surprised her the way they looked so neat and tidy on the bookshelves. They reminded her of processed meat, with the blood all but absent in the final packaging. That’s how her words were marketed—the blood implied but kept under wraps.
Elizabeth’s head dropped again. She let her eyes close, not to sleep, but just to rest them. She could hear Anna’s soothing voice, lulling her children back to sleep again. Once upon a time, she thought. Being around children always spoke to her own regrets, and her own once-upon-a-times.
“Doing anything right takes its toll. Are you sure you want to pay the toll?”
Gray Parker stared at her, assessed her.
“Yes.”
“If you do this book right, you’ll never look at the world in the same way again.”
“You’ve already made me look at it differently.”
“If you do this book right, you’ll find yourself on a roller coaster ride, and the ride won’t stop with my death. You’ll get into my head, but you might not get out of it.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“Yes, you will. And you’ll keep taking them, like Russian roulette. If you keep doing your books right, you’ll have the same bug as the people you write about.”
“Bug? Do you think of yourself as some kind of diseased person?”
“I’m the plague.”
“And that makes me what, a potential carrier?”
“If you do this book right, you’re going to be marked, sure as I marked those women.”
Elizabeth felt sick, dirty.
“If you do this book right, you’re going to get a glimpse of the face of God.”
“How could you possibly,” she said, her voice cracking with anger and disdain, “show me that?”
“No one can look directly at God’s face without going insane. It’s too complicated, too brilliant, too unfathomable. So what we do is use little funhouse mirrors, and we take our peeks, and we look at him from angles. We find roundabout ways to glimpse God, like how we look at the sun through our fingers, or the way we track an eclipse through reflection instead of direct observation.”
“You might be able to show me the devil, but I doubt whether you can show me God.”
“If you do this book right, you’ll see both. Sometimes you never see God so clearly as through the devil.”
“Is this some kind of jailhouse conversion you’re going through?”
“If you do this book r
ight, you’ll know what I’m talking about.”
“I have to go,” Elizabeth said.
But she didn’t leave before hearing his last assertion.
“If you do this book right,” he told her, “you’ll fall in love with me.”
“No,” she said—what she always said.
“Excuse me?”
It was Anna Parker in the flesh, not Gray Parker and his demons, standing in front of her.
“Nothing,” Elizabeth said. “I was just talking to myself.”
“I’m making coffee,” Anna said. “Would you like some?”
“Please.”
While the coffee was perking, James walked into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes. He was a handsome boy, had his mother’s brown eyes and square features. There was little resemblance to his father. Or his grandfather.
“Mom, Janet’s on the bed I want.”
Anna was expert at officiating. “Let her have that bed today, James, and if you still want it tomorrow, it will be your turn.”
“We’re going to be here tomorrow, too?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Anna, her tone saying, “I’m afraid so.” But her son didn’t share those sentiments.
“Oh, good,” he said.
“Go to sleep now.”
“Okay.”
He walked out of the room, giving Elizabeth a small, shy glance as he passed.
“They think their dad’s going to join us soon,” Anna said. “I almost believe it myself.”
She served the coffee, and both women sat and sipped quietly for a minute. They still weren’t totally comfortable with each other.
“I hope you don’t mind my asking you some questions this morning,” said Elizabeth.
“No,” Anna said. “At least I don’t think so.”
Elizabeth pulled a document out of her purse. Cops had their Miranda, and she had her release forms. “I’d like you to read this at your leisure. If you consent to what’s on there, I’ll need your signature. Boiling down all the legalese, what it translates to is your giving me permission to quote you.”
“So you’ll be writing about this?”
“I expect so. But I don’t want you to think I’m coercing you into signing the release form. Even if you choose to not sign it, I still intend to help you. I made that promise to your husband, and I intend to keep it. I want you to be comfortable in my presence. I can’t promise much, but I swear I won’t stab you in the back. I may upset you, though, because I do write what I perceive to be the truth, and sometimes that is upsetting.”
Anna touched the piece of paper, then drew her hand back. “I’ll read it later,” she said.
“Good.”
“And I’d like to thank you for all you’ve done.”
“I’m glad I could help.”
Both women concentrated on their coffee for a minute. Finally Anna cleared her throat.
“I’m thinking of sending the children to stay with my mother,” she said.
Elizabeth sighed inwardly and wondered if she’d ever have any good news to offer Anna. “I’d advise against that. If your goal is to spare them from the media, that won’t work. When the reporters don’t find you, they’ll take to dogging your friends and relatives. If they’re not on your mother’s doorstep today, they’ll be there tomorrow. You also don’t want your children to think you’ve abandoned them. What they need now more than anything else is a parent staying close to them, someone who can explain what’s going on.”
Anna’s head shook again. “As if I could explain what’s going on.”
Elizabeth nodded.
“It’s so bizarre. And it’s my fault.”
“Your fault?”
She avoided answering the question directly, choosing to approach it in a roundabout way. “Those detectives are so wrong about Caleb.”
“In what way?”
“In how they’re thinking.”
Anna’s eyes strayed to the back room, then returned to Elizabeth. She lowered her voice. “Did you hear, did they tell you...”
“That you were involved with Dr. Jennings?”
Anna looked relieved that she didn’t have to explain. “I guess Donald and I deluded ourselves into thinking that no one knew,” she said. “It seems that everyone did.”
She bit her lip, again made sure her children couldn’t possibly hear, and said, “They think Cal took revenge on Donald’s daughter because he found out what was going on between us.”
“I know.”
“I asked them how that explained the other murders, and they said it was Cal’s suppressed rage coming out, that his dam just broke, and that he copied his father. But Cal would never, ever murder.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Cal doesn’t get angry, or if he does, he doesn’t show it. I think he’s always been afraid of his emotions. When he can’t deal with a situation, he just withdraws and gets quiet. In all our years together, he’s never raised his voice or gotten physical. He was afraid of any kind of confrontation, afraid, I think, of being that involved with anyone.
“I suppose that’s how...Donald and I...that’s why we came together. I hungered for someone to talk to, someone open, warm, and communicative. But I know that Donald and I shouldn’t have become involved. It was wrong. I’d never done anything like that before—”
Elizabeth interrupted to stop the woman’s self-recrimination. “Anna, how did you and Caleb meet?”
The memory brought a fleeting smile to Anna’s face. “We first saw each other in an emergency room. Caleb came in with a nasty gash on his arm. He was really stoic about it, said that it was his fault because he never should have trusted the branch that gave out under him in the first place.
“I remember thinking that he was the handsomest man I had ever seen. I expected him to be stuck-up, but instead he was shy. I had trouble getting him to say much, but while I was dressing his wound I got him to tell me a little bit about his job. Working with trees sounded romantic to me. He probably could have told me he was a used-car salesman and I would have found something wonderful about that. I told him how much I loved the look and feel of sycamore leaves, and he did a lot of nodding like he felt the same. I got the impression he wanted to talk to me, but I also sensed reluctance. When he left the ER without even saying good-bye, I figured he probably had a girlfriend, and that was that. Two days later, though, I received a huge manila envelope in the mail. Inside was a gigantic sycamore leaf. On it he’d written a thank-you note and his phone number.”
Elizabeth didn’t step on Anna’s memory. She let her sit there and think about fonder days.
“I still have that leaf,” Anna said.
“Were you shocked to learn who Caleb’s father was?”
Anna shook her head. “It was almost as if I expected that, or something like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“With Caleb there was always this...darkness. He had places in him that no light could penetrate. I don’t know if I’m explaining myself very well, but there is this shadowy side, this sense of tragedy, that Cal always carries around with him. I wanted to help ease that burden, but he made it his alone. For most of our marriage I went to him. I’d massage his neck and shoulders, and then I’d sit on his lap and ask him what was wrong, and he’d tell me that nothing was wrong. I always knew he was lying. I knew there were secrets, things he wasn’t sharing with me, but over time I began to accept his distance, and then I began to participate in it.”
“You make him sound as if he was never happy.”
“Happiness makes him feel guilty, as if he doesn’t deserve it.”
“Are you angry at him for not confiding in you?”
“Yes. But now I can understand how he thought he was doing the right thing.”
“Did you have a whirlwind courtship?”
Anna shook her head. “No. We fell in love right away, but it was a year before Cal asked me to marry him. And when he finally did ask me, I could see how conflicted he w
as. At the time I thought it was just a guy thing. I only saw him that torn up two other times.”
“What happened on those occasions?”
“When he learned I was pregnant with Janet, Cal wanted me to get an abortion. For a time he was adamant. ‘It’s a bad world,’ he kept telling me. ‘It’s not a fit place to bring a child into.’ But I told him, ‘If a child is loved, the world isn’t so terrible.’ He kept coming back to me with his what-ifs, though. His favorite was, ‘What if the baby’s deformed? What if the baby isn’t right?’ He was terrified of that. I think he had the same fears with James, but by then he was head-over-heels in love with Janet, so he wasn’t quite as terrified.”
“What happened the other time he was upset?”
“Nothing really. It was so long ago....”
“I’d still like to hear about it.”
“I guess I remember it so vividly because it’s the only time I ever saw Cal cry.”
“What happened?”
“Cal was taking some junior college courses to please me. I had nagged him for what I thought was his own good. He was so smart, I couldn’t imagine him not excelling in, and enjoying, college.
“At first, everything seemed to be going fine, but one night I walked into the study and I found him sobbing. He tried to explain his tears away by saying he was just tired, but as I comforted him he opened up a little. He said he’d been reading something that bothered him. I didn’t pry; I knew better than that. I just held him, rocking him in my arms, and that’s when he opened up a little more. At the time it was hard making sense of what he said. He told me that his psychology class was studying nature-versus-nurture, and that he felt doomed either way. ‘My whole life’s been a Harlow experiment,’ he said, and then he stopped talking, sealing himself up again. I kneaded his shoulders, and chest, but he wouldn’t say anything else.
“I made him some cocoa and told him he needed a good night’s sleep. We went to bed, and we made love. I used to think I could take all of Cal’s troubles and make them explode between my legs. Eventually he slept, but I didn’t. Maybe I always counted on him being Cal the stoic, and maybe I’m partly to blame for the way he’s acted over the years. I don’t know. I only remember feeling that my world was a less secure place.
