Undercurrents

by Mary Anna Evans

  Faye and Kali hadn’t been the only people of color when they were standing in the Peabody’s lobby, and they weren’t the only people of color in Chez Philippe, but Faye was realizing with the sting of a physical slap that socioeconomic prejudices hurt, too. When the maître d’ approached to ask whether they had reservations, she answered, “Yes, we do. We do have reservations,” and she said it just a little too loudly. The restaurant’s heavy draperies dampened the sound and none of the people sitting beneath them appeared to notice her faux pas. She would have been relieved by their failure to notice her error, but feeling that she was beneath their notice hurt, too.

  Faye took a deep breath and reminded herself that her name was on the reservation list and that she had the money to pay for their meal. Well, she had a credit card.

  She had as much of a right to be at Chez Philippe as anybody in the room, and so did Kali. She just wished that she’d remembered to shave her legs and polish her toenails.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The door to Chez Philippe looked like a wrought-iron fence painted gold. He’d never been inside, but he’d looked it up on the Internet and he knew that it was equally opulent inside. He also knew that this was the only way out.

  Fancy mirrors lining the restaurant walls served as fake windows. Fancy curtains fostered that illusion, but, in reality, nobody inside the restaurant could see out and nobody outside the restaurant could see in. Chez Philippe’s dining room was constructed like a blind canyon. This was the only door routinely used by the public.

  Oh, there were probably exterior doors labeled “Emergency Exit,” because fire marshals held sway everywhere, even over the Peabody. But the odds were small that his quarry would use any door other than the one in front of him.

  He liked it that the metalwork adorning Chez Philippe’s main door looked like a fence. He liked it even more that the restaurant’s layout made everyone inside sitting ducks, just like the pampered birds that swam in the restaurant’s fountain and lived in a penthouse that was finer than the homes of literally everyone he knew. The ducks even had a freaking pool. He knew this, because he had ridden the elevator up there and looked.

  He knew that there were security cameras on him, because places like this had them everywhere. Good luck identifying him from any video in this brand-new hat, pulled low over his eyes, and this oversized new jacket that he would never wear again. He’d even bought new shoes, a size too big, in case they found footprints beside the grave sized for two where he’d be putting little Kali and her interfering new friend.

  He didn’t know where the grave would be yet, and this left him feeling unbalanced. He’d always been so deliberate. Drive to a new town. Scope out a deserted spot. Dig a grave. Find a woman. Put her in that grave and drive away, disposing of the evidence as he passed from little town to little town. What had come over him to kill Frida, someone he knew, and to do it here where he lived?

  He had always idealized Ted Bundy, who had used his charm to lure women to their deaths. Bundy could make a woman disappear while walking down a public hallway, and so could he. But Bundy had lost control at the end, rampaging through a sorority house like a man begging to be caught. Was he losing control, too, just like Bundy?

  No. He was proceeding logically, as always. Or perhaps he was just pretending he was still in control of his actions, as he planned to charm a woman off the streets of a major city in broad daylight. If Bundy could do it, he could.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The maître d’ had the unflappable bearing that comes with working at a superlative restaurant, so he’d answered Faye’s nervous assurances that she had reservations with nothing but “Madame.” Then he had ushered her to a table that was perfectly lovely.

  As he led them to their table, Faye forced herself to take the first step into the restaurant’s intimidating dining room. Putting a hand on Kali’s back that said, “I’ve got you,” she moved forward and, in so doing, propelled the child into a space that was terrifyingly ornate. Ceilings of dizzying height were rimmed with gilded molding and supported by gilded columns. Small staircases with golden railings ushered them from level to level. Deep green walls were hung with mirrors and draperies, and marble was everywhere.

  Faye was grateful when they reached their table, where they could sit down and hide half of their inappropriate clothing under its richly draped tablecloths.

  Chez Philippe’s afternoon tea seemed to be a popular place for well-heeled mothers to take their daughters. Every one of those daughters had a cell phone in hand. Some of them were shooting photos of their food, probably to post on social media so that everyone would know they’d been to Chez Philippe. Some of them were taking selfies, probably for the same reason. And some of them were slumped in their chairs, using their thumbs to scroll or to play games.

  Faye slipped her phone under the table and laid it on Kali’s lap, so that it wouldn’t be obvious that the girl didn’t have one. The girl took a selfie of the two of them with a burnished wall sconce in the background.

  “You do that well. My selfie skills aren’t the best,” Faye said.

  “Sylvia lets me use her phone sometimes.”

  They had hardly placed their order when the first tiered tray, silver-toned and shining, landed on their table and Kali said, “Those are the fanciest sandwiches I’ve ever seen. Uncle Laneer has just gotta see these.”

  She would have put some in her purse for him, but Faye talked her out of it. “Take a picture.”

  “Can’t taste a picture.”

  “You can make him some. It’s not hard. I know a good chicken salad recipe.”

  Kali examined the morsel from all angles. “I think you’re right. It’s ain’t like it’s hard to cut off the crust and make little triangles.” Then she put the whole triangle in her mouth and reached for another one.

  The next course was blueberry scones with marmalade and clotted cream, and Kali approached the crumbly pastries with the same strategy: Admire them, declare that she could make them, and devour them. Faye saw culinary school in Kali’s future.

  She wished she could believe that Kali had forgotten that she was out-of-place here among the well-dressed women who were sending their food back half-eaten, but she saw a small hand reach up every now and then to straighten a barrette. She saw the lively eyes dart from table to table, checking to see whether the other girls were eating their sandwiches with their fingers or their forks. She might even have compared the small diamond engagement ring on Faye’s left hand to the massive rocks on the other women’s hands and earlobes, but maybe Faye was the one chafing under the conspicuous weight of the other women’s jewelry. She wished she could tell whether they were judging her for her clothes or for how much she was eating.

  Maybe these women who belonged here had already dismissed her as unworthy. Or maybe they hadn’t noticed her at all. Faye wasn’t sure which one was worse.

  No, they were looking. She could see them now, mother and daughters, their appraising eyes raking over a woman in sensible sandals and a girl in a faded dress dotted with elephants. She hoped Kali hadn’t noticed, but a girl who cared enough about her appearance to sneak into the bathroom and decorate her hair was old enough to feel the pressure of social judgment.

  The scones distracted them both from the scrutiny of their peers, and that was a good thing.

  “Best biscuits I ever had, but they’re just biscuits with blueberries stirred in. Don’t know why they call ’em scones. Laneer grows blackberries. Reckon I could make these with blackberries instead of blueberries?”

  Faye said she thought that would be delicious, but Kali was already musing that Laneer’s plums would make marmalade that was just as good as the orange marmalade ladled over her scone. And then another towering multi-tiered tray arrived, this time loaded with desserts, and Faye decided that she and Kali were going to rise the challenge of eating every last one of the
m, calories and all, and to hell with any judgment that might radiate from the socialites around her.

  He was not surprised to see his quarry exiting those cage-like doors, side by side and right on schedule, because Chez Philippe didn’t serve afternoon tea forever. He had a gift for predicting the motions of people who didn’t know they were being watched and, sure enough, Faye and Kali turned to walk down a short passageway, just as he’d expected. It led to the exterior door he had known they would use.

  He rose, put some cash on the table, and headed for another door nearby. From there, he could easily trail them from BB King Boulevard to their car. This was going to be easy.

  He had spent the afternoon waiting for a sign. If Faye had ever once left Kali’s side—to go to the bathroom, perhaps, or to pay a bill while the girl watched the ducks—he would have snatched her then, knowing that he was meant to kill the woman and spare the child.

  This hadn’t happened, so the converse must be true. He was meant to kill them both.

  As Faye approached the door to BB King Boulevard, her step slowed.

  “Kali, did you want to take a taste of what we just ate to your Uncle Laneer and Sylvia?”

  “Don’t have anything to take them. You told me it wasn’t polite to put anything in my purse.”

  “It’s not. But the hotel’s got a bakery in the lobby over there. I bet they sell the same stuff, plus a lot more.”

  Kali turned on her heel and said, “Show me where.”

  It was as if the woman and child had dropped down a rabbit hole, and he really didn’t think there were any rabbit holes in the Peabody’s grand lobby. They had been mere steps from the BB King door when he last laid eyes on them. By the time he exited his own door, they should have been right where he wanted them: close enough to tail but far enough away to be sure they wouldn’t see him. Soon enough, he would judge that the time was right. They would see him but it would be too late.

  He risked stepping back into the lobby a single time, scanning the area around the fountain, in case the little girl had demanded to see the ducks one more time. Woman and child were not there.

  When his prey were dead and buried, it would do him no good to be visibly obvious on the Peabody’s security cameras, prowling around the lobby mere moments after his victims were last seen. He couldn’t afford to keep looking for them, but they had to leave the hotel sometime. Until then, he needed to content himself with hovering on the sidewalk in an unobtrusive spot, waiting for them to emerge.

  Having secured a big bag of goodies for Laneer and Sylvia, Faye looked at her watch. “We can’t go yet! You have to see this.”

  The crowd around the fountain had grown too much to get near and Kali was grousing that she couldn’t see the ducks, but Faye said “Hang on,” and situated them in an area near the elevators where the crowd was thinner. Within seconds, a recorded Sousa march blared and Faye patted herself on the back for her good timing.

  A red carpet stretched from the elevator’s gleaming door to the stone fountain, and it carved an opening in the crowd, because nobody dared to step on the carpet. As the music played, the five mallard ducks descended a set of carpeted stairs and sashayed down the carpet, flicking their tails and waddling with determination. Faye thought that Kali might actually die of joy as the ducks proceeded along their triumphal route.

  Perhaps ducks can read human minds. Faye was telegraphing unfocused thoughts at the ducks that said mostly, “Make her happy,” and the green-headed drake seemed to have heard her. He stopped right in front of Kali and rose up tall, flapping his wings and looking her right in the eyes. Then he followed the four females into the elevator and its heavy door slid shut behind him.

  Kali looked suddenly deflated, as if she’d been left physically smaller when her excitement seeped out. “Is it time to go home now?”

  Faye knew that their exciting afternoon had to be over sometime, but she was happy to be able to tell Kali that they weren’t finished quite yet. “Did you forget? The river.”

  A short walk later, they were standing in Tom Lee Park, looking at a breathtaking amount of water fleeing to the Gulf of Mexico. Faye judged that it wasn’t quite a mile wide, but it was close. She knew that it carried a full load of the sediment that earned it the name “The Muddy Mississippi,” but it looked more blue than brown. From their vantage point on the bluff, the river looked almost peaceful. Ripples covered its surface, but they were so gentle that they gave no indication of the unimaginable power beneath.

  Faye considered saying all of these things to Kali, but trimmed it back to one obvious statement. “I told you it was big.”

  Then she showed Kali the monument to Tom Lee, an African-American man who had rescued thirty-two survivors of a wrecked steamboat in 1925 in his small boat, despite not knowing how to swim. They settled onto a bench nearby, taking a little time just to watch the river roll. Its elemental power led Faye’s thoughts to life and death. From there, they went straight to Frida.

  The river put Faye in mind of Frida’s killer. It was deadly in and of itself. The river didn’t seize its victims out of hatred. They merely found themselves sucked into whirlpools because drowning people is what rivers do. Why was that her impression of the killer?

  Maybe it was because Frida’s murder site seemed like an odd place for a woman to be killed out of passion. It was her impression that women who were killed by lovers died in their homes and at their jobs and as they went about their daily business. Frida’s ex-husband certainly knew her comings and goings, so it seemed like this would have been Linton’s approach. Mayfield, too, could easily know Frida’s routine. Faye had seen him strolling down her street just the day before.

  If the murderer was Armand, then he had kept Frida out all night and killed her at the end of their date. If so, then the murder site made a strange kind of sense. Perhaps Frida had refused to invite him into her house and he had lost his temper, dragging her into the woods and killing her in a fit of rage. But how did that explain the carefully dug grave? Either it had been dug before he took Frida out or else he’d somehow acquired a shovel. Since he would have been physically dragging Frida to her fate, he couldn’t have had a shovel in his hand, so it would have had to have been waiting for him by the creek.

  No matter what suspect she considered, the grave and the shovel that had dug it argued against a crime of passion. They argued for premeditated murder by someone who had already chosen the spot where he would bury her.

  As someone who dug for a living and occasionally encountered buried bodies, Faye found that she couldn’t quit thinking about Frida’s meticulously dug grave, straight-sided and square-cornered. Those square corners spoke of murder committed by a cold-blooded someone who was simply doing what killers do. Faye believed to her core that Frida’s murderer had no more remorse than the Mississippi and he had no more of a soul. He was a man who was practiced at killing, a man who would jump at the chance to do it again.

  She stretched an arm along the back of the bench. It didn’t touch Kali but it encircled her. Maybe her motive was to comfort Kali, but Faye felt more inclined to protect her. The river didn’t care much about what happened to little girls.

  After a time, Kali squinted upriver at Mud Island, sitting well off the river’s east bank.

  “It don’t look so far to that island. I got a lot of experience wading in the creek. I think I could walk there. What do you think, Faye?”

  Faye started sputtering things like, “It’s farther than it looks,” and “Deep! It’s deep!” and “You can’t imagine what the currents are like,” until Kali started to laugh and couldn’t stop.

  “I’m not stupid, Faye. You’re a real smart person, but you need to learn how to know a joke when you hear one,” she said. And then she laughed some more.

  The disappearance of his prey was disorienting. It knocked his mind into an unfamiliar groove. Or perhaps the mounting p
anic wasn’t unfamiliar, but he had successfully held himself together for a long time. With occasional outpourings of fear and rage, he had managed himself quite well, and he was proud of it, but frustrations like these brought out the unwelcome thoughts. They brought out the voices. His father’s voice was a roaring thing that told him he was no good and never would be. His mother’s voice was a tenuous screaming that reminded him of the times his father wielded his belt on both mother and child.

  His hands were shaking and that wasn’t good. He jammed them in his pockets and stood on Union Avenue, wondering where all the security cameras were.

  A series of big potted streetside shrubs showed that the city had put some effort into beautification. He chose one and stood close, practically hugging it, while pretending to talk on his phone. Bush, phone, and hat would obscure his identity on surveillance videos and he liked that.

  Where were they? He had asked the universe for a sign. When this opportunity had presented itself, he’d believed that the response had been, “Kill them both,” but maybe he had misunderstood. Maybe the message had been “Spare the girl and kill the woman, even if it means you have to try again another day.”

  He waited beside the bush for an interminable period, far longer than was safe, but he used the waiting time to his advantage. By the time he left, he had thought through five scenarios that would extricate him from this situation. All of them left Dr. Faye Longchamp-Mantooth dead and buried.

  If a bird, perhaps a duck in flight, could have looked down at the Peabody Hotel, nestled in the heart of downtown Memphis, it would have seen a woman and child leave via a door on South Second Street, then head south. It would also have seen a big man in a hat and a jacket too heavy for the summer day, waiting patiently near the corner of Union Avenue and South BB King Boulevard. The man would have stood motionless for quite a long time while the woman and child moved steadily away from him, making their way downriver and west.