“How are you feeling?” Dad spoke first.
“I’m not,” I answered. “And I don’t want to feel anything ever again.”
“Yeah.” He said. “I get that. But it’s not the way it works.”
“I know.”
“I called Chuck Benson.”
“I wish you hadn’t. The last thing I need is more forced time off or more therapy sessions added to my jacket.”
The scalpel silhouette shook its head. “I’m not sure if either of those things is true.”
Dad could always be counted on to give it straight.
“But I didn’t say anything about what you’re going through. I filled him in on a few of the things the feds should have told him already. Then I asked him to encourage you to take some vacation to spend with us because, he and I agreed, it would be good for you and you wouldn’t take it on your own.”
“Work is the only thing that keeps me sane, Daddy. The only thing I understand.”
“That’s part of the problem,” Uncle Orson chimed in. “You need to . . .” He shook his hands in front of himself like he was looking to grab the word he wanted out of the air. Finally he said, “Diversify.”
That at least got a little laugh out of me. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means life is bigger than you. It can’t all be lived in your own head no matter how hard it is to step out.”
“Again,” I said. “What’s that mean?”
“It means you’re a woman with options, Katrina.” My father had found his lecture voice. “You have more choices than just about anyone on the planet. You have more resources than vets like Damon, or even Nelson had.”
“I don’t want to talk about Nelson,” I said. “And I don’t want to talk about the options he left me. He died. Even twenty years later, his war killed him.”
“Do you think he wanted that for you? You were his chance at life and he was just one of yours.”
“That’s an awful thing to say, Daddy.”
“Maybe it is in a way. But a lot of awful things are true.”
“Is there a point?”
“Just a question,” my father said, his voice gentle again. “With the life you have already had, and the choices you have available—heck, girl, you’re rich by any standards—you can run the empire, get Nelson’s paintings in big museums or on more T-shirts. Do charity work or write a book. Sit on your behind and eat ice cream until you get too fat to waddle.”
“I thought you said there was a question.”
“Here’s a question, with so many choices at hand, you stay with the dangerous work. You wallow in the violence and the despair of other people’s lives. Ask yourself if, maybe, you traded one Iraq for another.”
That was a question I knew the answer to. I’d puzzled it out a long time ago. That didn’t mean I felt like sharing or talking about it. It was something I couldn’t explain, at least not well enough to satisfy myself, so I assumed it would sound like more feeling-sorry-for-myself crap if I said it out loud.
He was right though. I was afraid of being anything other than what I was, a cop in a sometimes violent world. I thought of it like fighting a forest fire with more fire. I only felt safe on scorched earth. How terrifying is that?
They tried to get me to talk more but I wouldn’t.
Dad ended up saying, “If you feel like joining us in the shop, there’s food on the grill and someone I want you to meet.”
All of a sudden I felt like throwing up.
I should have done it. If I had eaten at all that day I would have lost it anyway as soon as I walked into the shop.
The woman standing next to Dad was dressed in the kind of casual clothing that cost more than the most expensive dress I’d ever worn. Worse than that was the fact that it worked for her. She was beautiful, and graceful, stylish in a way that terrified me, and she was a four-term US Representative from Missouri.
Understanding can come in a lot of ways and at the strangest times. This was a mystery in my life that was suddenly solved. After I’d been raped in Iraq, I was victimized a second time by the Army and CID. I identified the two men who had assaulted me, both captains. I was a lieutenant. It’s a crime to accuse a superior officer without proper evidence. My only evidence was that I knew who they were. They had friends and were after all, officers in a combat zone.
It was an ugly back-and-forth that was about to lead to me being prosecuted and dishonorably discharged. Except for the intercession of a member of congress on my behalf.
Once my father introduced her, Congresswoman Whilomina Tindall smiled something more than warmth and barely less than sunlight. I was almost ready for a handshake, not at all for the embrace. She stepped in and wrapped her arms under mine with her palms against my shoulder blades holding tight.
“I’ve kept an eye on you for a long time,” she whispered within the embrace.
I’m sure it was meant as a kindness, an acknowledgment that she had been the one to help me. How could she have known how vulnerable it made me feel? Two years before I would have told anyone who asked that my father was lobbyist and a veteran booster. One of those harmless old guys who looks back on his war service with fondness for the comradeship and a blind eye to any horrors. Since then I’ve learned so much.
The last time Army CID showed up in my life they were using me to get to my father. Could it be coincidence that both the CID and the FBI were here just as Dad was introducing me to a congresswoman with whom he’s having a relationship?
“How long as this been going on?” I asked as soon as Whilomina stepped back. I tried to make it sound light and cheerful but I failed. It came out as half suspicion and half accusation. Not very light at all.
Uncle Orson was seated beside Damon at the table. It was piled with steaks and vegetables, still steaming and ready for a feast. My uncle looked at the food and for a moment I thought he was going to tell me how long dinner had been going on. But he kept his attention focused on watching butter melt over roasted ears of corn.
“It’s been a while, sweetheart.” My father stepped forward to stand beside Whilomina as he spoke. “It just never seemed like the time to tell you.”
“A while?” I asked sounding much shriller in my ears than I did in my thoughts. “How long is that?”
“There hasn’t really been a good time to tell you,” he said as his shoulder nestled into hers.
“A good time?” I looked over at Uncle Orson still studying the flow of butter. “Obviously you found a good time to tell him.”
“That’s not really fair.” Daddy was using his explaining voice. Never a good tactic when I was already mad. “Your life has been in kind of a delicate place for so long.”
I laughed but it didn’t sound happy to anyone I’m sure. “But it was still my life wasn’t it?”
Dad looked at his feet. Whilomina looked at me. I couldn’t tell if she was angry or hurt or had any feeling at all. Hers was a perfect political face, open but unreadable.
“You can’t choose for me what I should know or what I’m too delicate to feel.” I looked straight into Whilomina’s eyes. They were as gray and firm as granite. She didn’t blink. Then I said, “You knew all about me didn’t you? What happened in Iraq? You helped me then.” No reaction. “When I married Nelson? You knew. And when he died . . .”
“I was at his funeral,” she said, and her eyes had become as gentle as her voice. “I stayed in the back and out of your way, but I wanted to be there for you and your father.”
“I’m sorry,” Daddy said, and he was. I wasn’t sure if he was sorry enough though.
“You don’t need to be sorry,” she said to him. To me she said, “And you don’t need to blame him. It was my fault.”
“No it wasn’t—” Dad began.
“Yes,” she cut him off. “It was. Even if it was your choice. It was my fault. Katrina, you asked how long.”
She paused and that little hesitation told me something was coming that I didn’
t want to hear. “We’ve been seeing each other—we’ve been together—for thirteen years.”
I looked at my father and red flushed up his face.
“Don’t look at him,” Whilomina said. This time the granite was in her voice. “Look at me.”
I did.
“Until a month ago I was married.”
“Married?”
“Your father was embarrassed and I wanted discretion so that was how we dealt with it.”
“I wasn’t embarrassed,” Dad said quietly.
“You were completely embarrassed,” she chided. “You didn’t want your little girl to judge you and look where it’s gotten us.”
It had to be all true. She spoke to him as though they’d been together for a lifetime. I had to wonder if I even had a lead role to play in my own life.
“You’re telling me now because of the investigation? The CID and FBI—is that about you?”
“No and yes,” Daddy said. “The investigation intersects with some work I’m doing.”
“And,” Whilomina interjected, “We’re telling you now because we want to be married.”
“But you just got divorced.”
They all looked at me like I had missed some obvious point. Even Damon sitting at the table behind piles of cooling food seemed to know more than I did. Then they laughed. I think it was more out of relief than humor, but it was sudden and noisy.
Whilomina stepped forward and hugged me again. “I’m sorry. I guess we didn’t tell our story very well.” She retreated from the hug but kept her hands on my shoulders. “My husband, David, passed away a month ago. He’d been brain damaged and bedridden for twenty years. You father didn’t break up my marriage and I didn’t take a secret lover to spice up a dull life.”
It was foolish to feel as relieved as I did to hear that. Then, when I realized just how foolish I felt, I doubled down, feeling foolish about being foolish. For a moment I was the girl just out of college on her way to induction, looking at her dad. There were a whole lifetime’s worth of expectations then, mine and his, wrapped up in everything a family shares.
I couldn’t help but think of my real mother. She was a ghost in my life, a vague, misty haunting of which I rarely think or speak. She was a woman, younger than my father, a country beauty with fine, auburn hair like sunburned corn silk. Young Carmen Williams had liked the idea of being married to a military officer more than the reality. Even as a child I could feel her unhappiness. It was a sickness in our home that nothing seemed to heal.
One day, not long before I turned six, she packed up the car and told me it was for a vacation. Daddy was out of town, so it was just us girls, she said. Everything in the car belonged to her.
Carmen took me to Uncle Orson’s dock and came around to open my door. I thought she was going to walk me in. She didn’t. My mother’s hug was hard but quick. Her breath was hard with gin.
She said, “We have to do these things like pulling a bandage off a scab, baby.” Then she kissed my forehead. It was the last thing she ever said to me.
I watched her drive away. I didn’t cry. I never cried for her again.
Daddy had come straight home to me and struggled to explain things in ways to show me it wasn’t my fault. From then on, family had been him and me and Uncle Orson.
Suddenly, I was seeing that there was another female specter hidden from me for thirteen years.
The girl I had been wanted to begrudge my father this new woman. The woman I was . . . well she wanted to drink. She wanted to wallow in suspicions and ask some really tough questions. She wanted to be happy for her father and, more than anything, was ashamed she wasn’t.
I opened my mouth to speak with no clear notion of what words would come. There was not a chance in the world they would have been appropriate. I seemed to lack that gene.
The phone in my pocket began to ring. It was dispatch. It had literally given me one of those, saved-by-the-bell moments and I stood there looking a gift call in the mouth. Everyone was staring at me as I stood, stock still, with my mouth open and the phone ringing in my pocket.
“Are you gonna get that?” Uncle Orson asked me.
“I’m suspended.” I sounded to myself like a child claiming nothing could get me when I was under the covers.
“Do they know that?” he pressed.
“Who do you think suspended me?” I snapped and even before the words were gone I regretted them.
My phone stopped ringing.
“I’m sorry,” I said not exactly sure to whom I was apologizing or why. “Today has been—”
The phone started ringing again.
That time I accepted the gift and answered. “Detective Williams.” After that I listened without talking for a few seconds before hanging up. “I guess I’m off suspension.”
* * *
Only three minutes later, even after splashing water on my face, smoothing and tucking my rumpled clothes, and resisting the urge to grab a beer off the table, I was walking to my truck. I rinsed the taste of a long day and despair out of my mouth with the orange soda my uncle handed me as I went out the door. Then came one of those moments. I can’t describe them except to say that drunks seem to have them more than other people. They are moments of synchronicity where the things you crave and need and fear and hate and every confusing, conflicting, and ultimately dangerous, urge coalesces around temptation. Orange soda was still cold and bubbling in my mouth, when I opened the truck door to find a bottle of whiskey on the seat.
Synchronicity.
Need, temptation, and an open path to self-destruction.
It didn’t matter that someone had placed it in my way. There was no way it could matter. The only thing that mattered was the choice I made. We all say we hate lies. What we mean is that we hate being lied to. What I hated more than anything were the lies I, too often, tell myself. Because of that I won’t say I rejected the temptation easily.
No. It had come at the wrong time for that. Or the right time. Someone knew my weakness. Not my only one by any means, but my worst one.
In my mind, I gripped the neck of the bottle and cast it down onto the asphalt. Things in our minds are always so dramatic. There was little drama in the way I held the bottle. It was like my hands had come home to a long, lost lover. They shared the secret with my mouth. Suddenly if felt so dry and empty it was like the dust that infests my life had made a desert of my tongue.
Other people can tell you they want a drink. Drunks, like me, if we’re honest, will tell you, we want to be drunk. That was what I wanted more than anything.
I didn’t throw the bottle aside. I held it. I caressed the glass imagining feeling the liquid heat, smooth as the container, sliding down my throat. A waking dream, of blooming drunkenness, the loss and surrender of memory and responsibility seduced me.
But the bottle slipped.
I doubt that I had the strength to give it up at that moment so it may have been a simple, lifesaving accident. It fell and broke at my feet.
With a weird feeling of grateful disappointment, I climbed in my truck and hit the emergency lights. I drove even faster than usual.
The day had died and the night seemed to be taking raucous joy in its passing. Clouds, gray over black, had crowded into the sky from the southwest. In the darkness they would have been invisible but for the silent sparks of electricity they carried deep inside. The creeping warm front looked like lighting bugs captured in milk glass. With the windows up on the truck I could still smell the impending rain.
When the highway became a bridge I was able to look over the blurred railing to see the scene below to which I was rushing. We always hurry, as though death is not the most patient thing in the world. It waits and we run to it.
Shadow Rock Park was a little spit of land, a high point shaped by the rising and falling of the lake level. It curled around under the bridge so one side was a popular shallow water playground for swimmers. The other side was a campground and picnic area popular with touris
ts and locals alike.
Another kind of lighting, man-made in emergency colors, flashed and streaked over black water. It slashed the sheer orange sandstone bluff that held up the west end of the bridge and the modern town of Forsyth. Most people don’t know that the area that was now the park, was once a main part of town. That was before the dam was built and the town moved higher. So in a sense the park was already a graveyard. I couldn’t help thinking of the emergency lights as the legendary spook lights—lost souls haunting the Ozarks.
A pair of campers had found a girl. Her body was boldly dumped in weeds along the lakeshore, in clear sight of the highway and close to the most popular swimming area. Either her killer was foolish or she was supposed to be found.
It was a messy scene with way too many onlookers. The tattooed, tank top, and flip-flop crowd was bunched around the girl’s body pressing in closer than they should have. One of our deputies, was trying to keep them back and string tape at the same time. His job wasn’t being made any easier by another deputy, Calvin Walker, standing in the way and arguing with both Captain Keene and SA Givens.
I was watching the frenzy when I should have been paying attention to the road. As I pulled into the park entrance I barely missed getting crushed under the wheels of the same gleaming land yacht I’d seen Reverend Bolin emerge from two days before. There was no way for me to see who was driving but I knew where to find it. Another, smaller, RV, made less impressive by years and miles was coming up behind the first, running even faster. That was a whole other story.
Two vehicles speeding away from a crime scene, even one as ripe as this one had gotten, was never a good sign. There wasn’t any time for a quiet conversation about it so I stopped my truck, blocking the park’s road out. Then I ignored the skidding crunch of gravel and blaring horn as I called into dispatch and requested more units.
I climbed out of my big GMC feeling pretty secure about its utility as a barricade. “Stay off that horn.” I yelled at the RV driver. Had his window open and arm out so he could slap the aluminum siding. I guessed he thought I hadn’t noticed him somehow. “And stay right where you are. I’ll be back to talk to you in a few minutes.”
A Particular Darkness Page 13
