Deirdre leaned forward on her folded arms. “You knew the pub needed clearing of innocents. Yet you lured one away and left the other unwarned. Did you choose Michael, or was he just the most susceptible?”
“What does it matter, Deirdre? Here they are again, holding hands on the table. If I thrived on destruction, as you say, it didn’t work.”
“It matters to me.” Deirdre’s passionate intensity matched Kathleen’s for the first time. “I risked my life to save the boy you left behind. What made him the expendable one, Kathleen? What were you thinking besides the need to see innocent emotions toyed with and innocent blood shed? Why Sean and not Michael?”
“No,” Max said. “We don’t need to know. I doubt even Kathleen knows or can be trusted to speak the truth of it.”
“You were more daring,” Sean told him. “I thought you were taking a risk, to your soul or even health, but certainly not your life, when you went off with her. The idea was exciting, but I could never have gone through with anything. I really didn’t want to win the prize. And,” he added, smiling that slightly off-kilter Huck Finn smile at Deirdre, “I got the real prize.”
“I may be sick,” Kathleen said.
“You are. Then and now.” Deirdre’s judgment was unsparing.
“She’d spent her time in hell three times over by the time she was twelve,” Max told Deirdre.
“Don’t you dare defend me,” Kathleen told Max, flaring to hiss-and-spit life. “That’s not what I needed from you.”
“You needed it from someone, and didn’t get it.”
Deirdre wouldn’t do it for sure. “So Sean and I should be put through Purgatory again, Max? I think not. You’re asking me to have her under my roof? I say no to even one night.”
“We can’t chain her outside, like a dog, Deirdre,” Sean said.
Deirdre looked pleased at the idea.
“We’ll drive on.” Max checked his watch. Cell phone reception in these rural areas was patchy, just as in congested Las Vegas.
“You’ll not go off alone with her again,” Sean said, “save in sober daylight.”
“What will we do with her, then?” Deirdre asked. “’Tis like having a scorpion under one’s pillow.”
Kathleen had sat back, swirling the whiskey in her glass, dropping out of the conversation, probably reveling in being considered so dangerous.
Max eyed her. Thought of the razor. “I’m a risk-taker, as you say, Sean. I’ll leave with her now.”
“No, man. These unlit rural roads are treacherous for a stranger. I won’t let you go,” Sean said.
“Wished that had worked the first time.” Max grinned ruefully. “All right, I’ll take her away in the morning. Meanwhile, you can put her in the main bedroom with me and lock your door for the night.”
“Be gone wi’ ye!” Deirdre exclaimed. “Do ye never learn?”
“On the contrary, I learn too much.”
Kathleen stood. “You expect me to accept such shabby hospitality? I’ll see you in hell.”
Sean nodded. “’Tis certain you know that terrain well.” He looked at Max. “You’re the super-agent man. Guard yourself well this night.”
Sean led Kathleen inside, but Deirdre stayed to catch Max by the sweater-clad arm. “You’ll not make the same mistake again with her. No shenanigans?”
“Not in a thousand years.”
Kathleen was quiet, even lamb-like, her shawl clutched around her, going upstairs. At the bedroom door she turned to look up at him, the spitting image of Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara. “How noble of you to have sacrificed yourself again.”
“Inside,” he told her. “I know about the steak knife.” He tested the pocket of her silk blazer and pulled out the suspected plum.
He stuck his head into the hall before anyone disappeared for the night. “Deirdre, a lost lamb from the tableware for your dishwasher.” He flourished the knife.
“That’d be the chef’s,” Sean said. “You’re crazy, man.”
“Yup. But I enjoy a challenge. Do you mind taking custody of Kathleen’s traveling bag for the night?”
He handed it out and locked the door.
Kathleen spread her arms wide, the shawl serving as wings. “Do you need to search me for a nail file? A dangerous hangnail?”
“As tempting as ever. No. We’ll sleep in shifts. You in the bed first. I on the chair.”
“You don’t intend to sleep at all.”
“No. Do you?”
“No.”
“Luckily, it’s nearly midnight and this bedroom is on the east side of the cottage,” Max said. “The sun will bathe us in spotlights in no time.”
“Luckily for you.”
He took the chair and nudged the ottoman nearer with his foot. “Really, Kathleen? Can you never separate sex and homicide? You should be a cop.”
“I’m not a murderer. At least, not directly.”
“Perhaps yes, perhaps no. I suppose you could argue that you never intended your hired doubles to die for you. What you do excel at is seducing other people to do your dirty work. I understand why you have so little faith in humanity.”
“Oh, shut up. You ‘understand’. I’m sick in the head, and you’re a long-suffering hero.”
“I do like the sound of that, but I’m giving up the martyr thing. Can you give up the psychopath thing?”
She sat on the edge of the bed and kicked off her shoes. “I didn’t think.”
“About what? And when”
“At the pub. Who’d get blown up, who wouldn’t…other than that it wouldn’t be me, and, thanks to me, you. I knew Deirdre would take care of Sean. She’d been making cow’s eyes at him for an hour, but all he could see was me.”
“You were a sight to behold.”
“You can’t mean that.”
“No. I can’t mean that.”
She stared at him, seeking truth. “Your memory’s untrustworthy.”
“Yes. But…I can see what I might have thought.”
“And that was?”
“That was what those who’d worst abused you thought. That you had the passionate spirit of an innocent child bracketed in beauty. It inspired them to envy, and to commit torment and destruction. It must have inspired me with a need to capture it, but the only word the world knows for that is lust. Pity. I know why you had to become them to escape memories of the abuse, but it’s a goddamn shame.”
Kathleen leaned against the headboard, arms crossed, and shrugged.
“Did you know about Sean surviving right after the bombing, or find out later?” he asked.
“No. I left soon after you vanished. They’d been wanting me to go to the Americas to solicit money for the resistance, and it was better I lay low after having been at the pub before the explosion. In fact, I was listed as among the lost.”
“Is that when you started using the name Rebecca sometimes?” Max asked. “And why Rebecca?”
“Because she was a bad girl,” Kathleen said with sudden vehemence.
“In a book.”
“I see Miss Temple Barr has been refining your literary tastes to potboilers.”
“She mentioned the book, so I looked up a movie review. Rebecca was dead, but her selfish, manipulative spirit haunted everyone who’d been in her life. I suppose she was your role model? That’s why you used the name?”
Kathleen crouched like a cat at the edge of the bed, while her lips spelled out the answer. “‘Rebecca’ was the name the nuns assigned me in the asylum.”
“They didn’t use your given name?”
“They always changed the inmates’ names to show them what they had been and who they were meant to be…was nothing anymore. It also kept us hidden and unable to find even each other afterwards. I found the novel, though. The so-called heroine was a sheep.”
“But you were born there, to an…inmate. She couldn’t even name you?”
“My mother’s name was Kathleen, but they called her Dolores because her beauty brought her s
o much sorrow. I took her birth name back after I escaped.”
Max was confounded again by the endless cruelties piled on these young girls, innocents preyed upon by boys and men, some even in their own homes, all of them surrendered by their families with shame and rejection, and with no other place to go.
“Most of the records have been destroyed, the Church says,” Max mused. “Changing given names would further confuse any oral history. Clever and cruel.”
“The Church lies.”
“Doubtless. So does the government. Those severe, strict Old World attitudes of punishing women for their sexuality live on in the third world and even in the U.S., all in the name of religion.” Max paused. “Maybe not in Canada. Canada seems more civilized than most.” The dry comment put her off guard. “I’ve tracked you. The records say you and your daughter died.”
“They couldn’t admit I was able to run away with her.” Kathleen’s smile was radiant. “I was always a bad girl.”
“You were a formidable girl. And admitting you’d escaped might have caused an investigation into the pedophile priest who raped you.” He paused. “Why did you name your daughter Iris?”
“You’ve found her every secret. Not mine.” She smiled smugly. “Those I chose to take her to were atheists. I wouldn’t burden my child with a saint’s name or any variety the unBlessed Virgin’s name. The flowers have no denomination.”
“Well…Iris is the Greek goddess of the rainbow. You can’t escape religion in world history.”
“Do you say so? I didn’t get much education in Greek, although I learned Spanish and Portuguese in my travels.”
“Rebecca,” Max repeated, returning to Kathleen’s Magdalene name.
And then…he understood something more about her, something deep and devilish and unutterably sad. His feet pushed the ottoman away as he leaped up.
“Now I see it. Rebecca, the book and movie. That’s why you burned down my house! The housekeeper who was insanely devoted to dead Rebecca burned down the manor house, Manderley, so Rebecca’s husband and new wife would never have a place to call home. Maxim de Winter was her husband, and murderer. That’s why you torched Garry’s and my house. You wanted to destroy my memories of someone, anyone who loved me.”
“You’re mad.” Kathleen’s laugh was forced. “I don’t live my life by a book. You humiliated me there, in that house, for the first time since the Magdalene asylum. All of you people and even a pack of cats, as if one of you were a witch or warlock.” Her fingertips smoothed the fading quartet of slashes on her cheek.
“You had the satisfaction of inflicting some damage and humiliation yourself that night.” He rubbed the back of his neck.
“Did I knock some memory back into you?” She was sitting on the edge of the bed now, swinging her stocking-clad feet, which didn’t reach the floor, like a child. She was only a couple inches taller than Temple, Max reminded himself.
And here they were, reminiscing like classmates, as if they shared an advanced degree in Abuse and Terrorism 101.
“No,” he said. “No memories. And, I imagine, a lot of possible memories I could have resurrected died in the fire.”
“I should have torched that hellhole while we all were there.”
“You can’t afford repercussions of failed mayhem now. Sean knows you’re back. He was influential in the IRA in fairly recent years.”
“Influential in giving up the battle.” She narrowed her eyes. “Where do you think I hid my razor?”
“I’m hoping in the travel bag I sent away.”
“You can’t send me away.” She looked to the locked door. “You promised to control me.” She looked at the LED numbers on the bedside table. “We’ll not sleep and we’ve already discussed the only two books we have in common, Mr. de Winter.”
“Wait. But not the film.”
“I never saw the film of Rebecca.”
“I’m talking about the film of another kind of woman entirely.”
“Oh, that Philomena. Named after a girl martyred at fourteen in the early days of the Church.”
“Lord,” Max said. “That sounds like Malala Yousafzai and other schoolgirls attacked and even killed by a religion desperate to keep women controlled. When was this?”
“I learned my church history. In 304 Rome. She is the patron saint of babies, infants, and youth.” Kathleen’s voice reeked with irony.
“Oddly amazing.”
“Why?”
“Think about it. The book the film is based on, The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, has inspired thousands of Magdalene-adopted children to seek their birth mothers and information. It isn’t easy, as we’ve said, with the girls in the convent forced to use other names and they never knew each other’s true identities.”
“Philomena went by ‘Marcella’—” Kathleen shook her head, her beautiful black hair as glossy as onyx. “It’s Martin Sixsmith who’s the hero, the detective, who followed the few clues there were. Philomena didn’t have the nerve to question the nuns and the Church. But Sixsmith…he was a fallen-away Catholic enraged by what he found. He had balls. He found the truth and created the exposé, not her.”
Max wanted to smile. Kathleen didn’t see that he was now playing Sixsmith to her Philomena Lee. She didn’t want to confront the reality of her grown daughter, as Philomena had. She wanted only to nurse past grievances. Max needed to keep her off-balance, blinded by the roles that had always worked for her in that past.
“I understand why your keepers gave you the name they did,” he said. “Google says Rebecca means ‘beautifully ensnaring’.”
“Oh, don’t think the nuns back then had Google to underline their evil, only a wrathful God. We shall see how true I am to that name on this trip,” she said, softly, seductively.
What really was her endgame? he wondered. She had his exclusive attention at last…but did she hope or need to seduce him again, or did she intend to kill him or get him killed?
32
Show Off
It had become dismayingly evident, during my earlier walkabout of the home site with the Misses Temple and Electra, that something dark and dirty is transpiring too close for comfort.
All my fringe senses (those a bit beyond the usual five) tell me that the Circle Ritz residents have only scratched the surface of what criminal or even mystical schemes may be deploying under our very noses.
This is not something I can share with the ever-skeptical Miss Midnight Louise. She is a modern girl, and scoffs at my seasoned intuition.
So. The next step is clear. I must prepare to humble myself in pursuit of deeper intelligence. The only question is whether I begin this quest with the insufferable Karma, Queen of Metaphysical Mumbo-jumbo, or with the equally annoying Ingram, who sits literally atop books and books of information, and presumably has more private access to Google than I would ever dream of.
I decide that Ingram is the better bet.
I also decide that I will not boldly go via the bookstore front door, where Ingram can see me waiting and not make one attempt to attract Miss Maeveleen Pearl’s attention to admit me. Arranging an audience with Ingram is always complex. So I hunker down at the building’s side and wait for an opportune customer to appear, alongside of whose ankles I can slip within.
In my hunting days when I had to crouch in a prey-blind, I was prepared to wait patiently for hours upon a likely prospect. Alas, we are all now in an era of fast food, me included. Once I discovered I could work at the Crystal Phoenix with a nearby fishing hole, the koi pond, and tourists spreading their bread upon the waters by dropping tidbits for my maintenance, patience flew out the window.
I had heard about the Great Bookstore Recession, whereby such enterprises large and small and independent and franchised faced terrible losses at the advent of digital books and online retailing, but until you have sat for four hours on a weekday waiting for a customer to come, you do not realize what a travesty all this is.
At last some soul with a late lunch
hour walks by and straight for the front door. I am almost catatonic with boredom by then and barely shake myself into action in time to streak for a disappearing pair of ankles.
“Oh, my goodness,” the woman says, spinning as I whisk past her and behind a table display. “Did you know,” she asks the approaching Miss Maeveleen Pearl, “there is a cat in here?”
“Yes. He is sleeping in the window display. His name is Ingram. If you are allergic, I can remove him to the stockroom.”
Stockroom? I visualize pairs of feline-size Old Salem penal stocks imprisoning Ingram, who already wears prison stripes. I see Ingram’s fore-and-aft soft pink footpads (mine are Bad Boy black) sticking through the wooden manacles, for passing vermin to tickle with their feelers. A comforting picture.
“I love stores with resident cats,” the woman customer is saying. “Ingram is a strong presence. I could swear I felt a welcoming fur-rub on my leg coming through the door.”
“I do not doubt it,” Miss Maeveleen says, leaning confidentially close. “I often think cats can astral-project.”
“That is just what I am looking for, a fun mystery series. So there is one about a cat that astral projects?”
“If there is not, there soon will be,” Miss Maeveleen assures her, guiding her to a shelf where every book cover features homebody tabbies surrounded by images of food, items from every imaginable domestic hobby, and things that go bump in the night.
Holy Sam Spade! I shake my head. These domestic slaves do not walk the walk (the mean streets) or talk the talk (though several seem to be more than somewhat chatty with their amateur sleuth owners). I am sworn not to talk to humans by my own druthers. I lead; they follow if they are smart.
Unfortunately, I can and do talk to the animal kingdom. A P.I. must have some reliable sources.
A low, slow, advanced-degree East Coast drawl unrolls behind me. “So, Louie, what brings you to my cozy nook?”
Ingram apparently resided with a Yale professor early in life. I turn and face the music, probably something maddeningly repetitive, like Bach.
Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit Page 22
