Stephen L. Carter

by New England White

  There are three things you always seem to be running from, he had said. Your people, your past, and your God.

  Kellen had led her back to her people, through Miss Terry, and into her past, right here in Harlem. She supposed God would be next, but could not see how.

  “Julia?”

  “Hush,” she said, secretly gleeful at shutting up a billionaire.

  It worked, too.

  She stood in the front hall gazing into the long mirror—another cheval—and remembering, as a girl, watching Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte standing here to straighten their ties and collars before plunging into the waiting throng of a Veazie party. Once, when she was about five, the guest of honor was Martin Luther King, Jr. Another time Hubert Humphrey held a fund-raiser. And then there was the wretched day in the spring of 1972 when Mona, aided by her twins, swept a furious and unwilling Granny Vee into their Plymouth station wagon for the long ride to Hanover. Kellen, upon hearing that story, had said—

  That was it.

  She stepped away from the cheval and walked into the apartment, Cameron following her with his eyes, the children at the kitchen table eating ice cream, Kimmer hovering near them like a bodyguard. The minion was nowhere to be seen.

  “I came up here with Kellen a couple of times,” she said, not sure why she had decided to narrate, except that her instincts told her the story would distract. “When we were…together. I wanted to show him Harlem. But it was all different. This place was dilapidated. Boarded up. We snuck in anyway. Just pushed aside some plywood and climbed in the window.”

  I’m going to buy this place one day, Kellen had promised, standing amid the filth. For us. A kiss. For you. Another kiss. And for our children. A third. It has too much history to waste.

  I hate history, she had said.

  If I had your history, I’d love it, Kellen had answered—and that night went out to a meeting he had forgotten to mention and stayed away until morning.

  “What else do you remember?” prompted Cameron from behind, his urging quite unnecessary.

  “We must have come here twice when we were together, and we broke in both times.” She laughed. “They hadn’t even replaced the boards. The second time, some homeless guy was living in one of the rooms. I wanted to go, but Kellen booted him out.”

  “Did the two of you ever come here after that?”

  “No.”

  Yes. The final goodbye. Gathering the tatters of her Veazie courage, Julia had taken the train down to the city to tell the man who had wrecked her life that somebody else was on the verge of saving it. They met for lunch at Sylvia’s—a Harlem legend, and one of his favorites—and Julia looked him in the eye and told him she was pregnant, and marrying Lemaster. She watched the emotions work in his beautiful face. Anger. Astonishment. Jealousy? She had never worked it out. All through the months Julia had spent dating Lemaster—even when she had lived with him—Kellen would now and then call or send a note, either wanting to keep her on a string or trying to pry her loose. Now, hearing her news, he took his time, then smiled, said congratulations, and leaned across the table to kiss her, lightly, on the mouth. Afterward they took the subway up to Sugar Hill for a last look around.

  A month later, he accepted an appointment at the University of Chicago, never quite saying goodbye.

  But that day in early 1983, they had crawled in through the same window, even though it was more carefully boarded this time. Kellen had crossed to the fireplace, where ornately carved woodwork was all that remained of the huge decorative mirror above. She turned. A new mirror was in place, but the woodwork was the same. On that visit in 1983, Kellen had pulled a Swiss Army knife from his jacket and carved their initials and the date into the filigree. Followed closely by Cameron, she crossed the room. She looked in the mirror and saw reflected back not a middle-aged woman stalked by an anxious billionaire but a nervously pregnant twenty-something who felt her life slipping into other hands than her own. She smiled, but her younger self looked close to tears.

  Stop it, she mouthed.

  I can’t, she mouthed back.

  Cheeks burning, Julia fingered the woodwork, careful to stay away from the spot. She remembered how Kellen had carved KZ JV, and the year, 1983. Then he had tried, and failed, to draw her into a kiss considerably more passionate than the chaste peck they had shared in the restaurant. At the time Julia had been both proud and regret-ful of her newfound ability to refuse him. Now, like the hallmark on the Comyns mirror, the letters had been rubbed away, obscured, the scratches in this case shellacked into permanence.

  “What did you find?” said Cameron.

  “Nothing yet.”

  Intelligence, not luck, had pushed him to the top of his field. He pointed at the scratches. “What’s this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It says 83 and then some markings.” He leaned close. “I can’t make them out.”

  “I don’t think they’re anything.”

  “Why would Kellen carve this? It has to mean something.”

  “What makes you think it was Kellen?”

  She left the mirror and went over to the window opening on the back yard, where Amaretta used to make her sit on a wrought-iron chair for hours, practicing her table manners. Here, too, she studied the molding and reflections.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Think,” he suggested.

  “I’ve tried thinking. I can’t think of anything else.”

  She went into the kitchen, caressing Jeannie’s shoulder as she passed. But everything here was new. She opened a few random cabinets anyway. The dining room had preserved aged dentil molding, which she pretended to study. She examined the woodwork in both bedrooms.

  She shook her head.

  “What about all those mirrors he tried to send you?” Obviously the Senior Trustee had done a lot of homework. “They must mean something!”

  Julia shook her head. “I thought he meant them to lead me here. But I don’t see anything I…recognize.” A sad shrug. “Maybe I misunderstood. Maybe you did.”

  “You’re not trying to say—”

  “There’s nothing here.” She turned to face him. “It’s over, Cameron. I can’t find it. You can’t find it. If there was anything to find, it’s hidden someplace else. I’m done.”

  “Done?”

  “Done looking. I’ve had enough. I have a family to worry about—”

  “You can’t stop now!”

  “I can, and I will. I’m tired of this. Kellen wasn’t a good man, Cameron. You’re welcome to keep looking if you want. But I’m through.”

  “Right. Right.” Scarcely listening, so bright was his fury. If she could not help him and could not obstruct him, she was irrelevant to him. He was still fuming as she collected Kimmer and the children and went outside, where the black minion had spent the past half-hour guarding the car. She had what she had come for.

  (VI)

  “SO THAT WAS the great Cameron Knowland,” murmured Kimmer as Julia popped the locks. The street was dark but refreshingly quiet. “Why did he want to meet you in Harlem? I mean, it’s not like an assignation, right?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “With Saturday-night traffic, we’ve got hours and hours.”

  “Maybe another time.” She was scribbling frantically, drawing the curves she had memorized that Kellen had carved beside the 83 in the wainscoting. The squiggles were quite elaborate, with serifs and curlicues everywhere, to make reading them backward difficult. But Julia, who had brought her mirror, had no trouble. BCP, the carving, reversed, now read. Since Kellen had done nothing to the numbers, she assumed she should read them as they were. BCP 83.

  She did not know for sure where Kellen had meant her to look next, but this time, at least, she had a theory.

  “Mommy,” said Jeans, tugging at her sleeve from behind.

  “Don’t worry, honey. We’re going home now. And you can sleep all the way.”

  “No, Mommy, that’s n
ot what I’m talking about. Look. Look!”

  She glanced where her daughter was pointing, at a small park across the street. Kimmer was already on her cell phone again.

  “What am I looking at?” she asked her youngest.

  “He was there, Mommy!” Jeannie was thrilled and concerned at once. “He was! He’s gone now, but he was there!”

  “Who was?”

  “Jeremy!” Kicking the back of the driver’s seat to illustrate the stupidity of the question. “Mr. Flew! He was over there on the bench!”

  Julia laughed nervously, aware of Kimmer’s scrutiny. “Oh, honey, he works all the way home in Elm Harbor. I’m sure you imagined it.”

  At least I hope you did, she thought but did not say. Maybe Jeannie had spotted Jeremy. Maybe not. Certainly Julia had suspected for a while that she was being followed, and not only because Mary Mallard said so. She had felt the scrutiny of perfect strangers, like hot breath on the back of her neck. Perhaps some of them worked for Cameron Knowland. If she was going to complete her task, she could not afford to be tracked. Heading down from Sugar Hill toward Madison Avenue and the bridge across the East River to the Bronx and on to New England, Julia had a fresh idea. Ideas seemed to plague her constantly since what Mary called her liberation and Lemaster called something odd going on with her; and some of the ideas were pretty good. This time Kimmer’s incessant yakking had inspired her. Cell phones. Something about cell phones. According to Bruce Vallely, Kellen’s cell phone had vanished from police custody. Tony Tice, like Kimmer, seemed unable to put his down. Julia thought back to the night Janine Goldsmith had slept over, before Vanessa was, as she liked to say, Smith-grounded. Julia had caught the two teenagers playing with a device to clone cell-phone numbers, constructed from plans they found on the Internet.

  Cell phones. Of course.

  She wondered if Smith had ever tried to build…Hmmm.

  CHAPTER 48

  SAFETY IN NUMBERS

  (I)

  SUNDAY NIGHT was yet another committee of Ladybugs, and this time nobody pretended not to be interested in how Julia’s family was doing, and Vanessa in particular, the Sister Ladies smothering her with their fluttery concern. Julia finally pointed the Escalade toward home well past ten. Exhausted by their swarming attentions, she wanted nothing so much as to tumble into bed.

  She drove through town. She hardly ever took the expressway, especially at night, preferring the relative coziness of city streets. But the city streets were empty. Furtive flakes snuck through the bright cones of her headlights as if embarrassed to be falling so thinly. Later tonight they would be back, proudly, trillions of buddies in tow. Safety in numbers: the same theory that still fortified Ladybugs and Empyreals and the dozens of other groups to which middle-class African America aspired. Once upon a time, when the most professionally successful among the darker nation were yet segregated out of white social life, the fraternities and sororities and clubs had filled the need to rub shoulders with people of similar education and attainment. Today, even with most formal barriers gone, black Americans at the top of their professions seemed to feel the need from time to time to slough off the personas that brought success in the wider, whiter world—and to escape the small whispers and slights whose existence they secretly feared—and hang out instead with the successful of their own nation.

  Safety, still, in numbers.

  And Julia Carlyle, who had grown up surrounded by white kids in Hanover, whose closest friends most of her life had been white, and who lived now in Tyler’s Landing, the heart of whiteness, felt the same tug.

  Julia stopped for gas as usual at the Exxon station on Route 48 in Langford—she loved her car, but it seemed to need a tankful every two days—and set the pump, then went inside for a cup of foul coffee. She was alongside her car, pulling out her phone in defiance of the warning sign, when the skinny man in the windbreaker climbed out of the sedan that had pulled in seconds after she did and asked if he could talk to her for a minute.

  “I’m in a hurry,” said Julia, in her mother’s voice, for she assumed, although her accoster looked not at all penurious, that she was about to be hit up for money. She stopped pumping at once and hung the nozzle. She declined the receipt. “I’m sorry,” she said, reaching for the door.

  “I only need a moment, Mrs. Carlyle.”

  An instant’s astonished paralysis at the sound of her name, and an instant was all the stranger needed. He put a hand on her arm. She pulled free.

  “Don’t touch me.” It occurred to her that the stranger had chosen a moment when no other car was in the station. His thick mop of hair was an uneasy brown. He wore a diamond stud in one ear. “Who are you?”

  “I only have a few questions.”

  “I don’t have any answers.”

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist.”

  “Leave me alone,” she snapped, and opened the door, fast. The man grabbed her arm again, more firmly. Stunned, she struggled, but his grip was iron. He was dragging her away from her car. She threw her coffee in his face, and cocked her arm for a good hard slap, except that by now the man was on his knees, not from the pain of the scalding coffee, but because Bruce Vallely had him in an armlock.

  Bruce stepped back and the man stood up, hands at his sides, not saying a word.

  “Where did you come from?” said Julia, surprised and appalled. Safety in numbers indeed. She was trembling, and had already decided, incoherently, never to stop for gas again in her life.

  “I thought you were staying away from reporters,” said Bruce.

  “Reporters?”

  Bruce nodded. The light snow settled in his bushy hair. One hand was on the stranger’s shoulder. The other was out of sight. “This gentleman is a reporter. Tell Mrs. Carlyle you’re a reporter.”

  “I’m a reporter,” the stranger confirmed, tonelessly. In a perfect world, Julia would have noticed something amiss. But pounding adrenaline warps the judgment. Besides, she was growing tired of journalists as a breed and lately had not even returned Tessa’s calls.

  “We’re going to have a little talk, this gentleman and I.” Bruce gestured toward the man’s car, and the brown-haired man drifted toward it. “I’ll find out who he works for, and make sure you’re not bothered again.”

  “Wait,” said Julia. “What are you doing here?”

  “Buying gas.”

  “But—”

  “If you’ll excuse us, we have to be going.”

  After the two men drove away in the stranger’s car, Julia finally spotted Bruce’s Mustang, in the parking lot of the long-closed florist across the road.

  (II)

  SAFELY BACK HOME, having calmed herself with two glasses of a playful Monterey white Riesling, Julia decided to act on the impulse that had seized her when, in Harlem, she had noticed how Kimmer could not put down her cell phone. Tony Tice, Kimmer’s fellow attorney, could not live without his either. Julia had been about ready to chalk up Gina’s killing to Malcolm Whisted, but Cameron Knowland’s determination had set her back. She would have to talk to Mary, who said she had discovered startling information of her own. The two women would meet in a few days. Meanwhile, Julia found Vanessa in the kitchen, sitting at the shining black counter, a half-eaten apple and a glass of milk beside her, nose in a volume of Emily Dickinson from the school library.

  “Gina was right,” said the teen, not looking up.

  “Gina?”

  “I always thought Dickinson was overrated, but she’s not. She’s a genius.” She turned a page. “Or she was. I was never into poetry all that much, but listen to this.”

  “Honey—”

  “Listen.” She had found what she wanted:

  “Exultation is the going

  Of an inland soul to sea,—

  Past the houses, past the headlands,

  Into deep eternity!”

  Vanessa ran her fingers over the verses as if memorizing their feel, then slipped a cloth marker into the book and closed it
. “I’m going to post it on my blog,” she said, and, swiveling on the counter stool, brandished the volume like a fire-and-brimstone preacher holding her Bible. “This woman understood death.”

  Julia searched for the appropriate words. “I’m so glad you’ve found a—”

  “Heroine,” her daughter finished. “Don’t worry, Moms, I don’t expect to start communing with her spirit anytime soon.”

  “Oh, ah, well, good.”

  For a few minutes, Julia busied herself at the sink, scrubbing what needed to be scrubbed, rinsing what needed to be rinsed. These late hours still belonged to the two of them. Lemaster and Jeans slumbered upstairs, Mr. Flew in the basement. Vanessa, perhaps sensing that her mother wanted something, stayed at the counter, reading and clucking. Julia waited until she could wait no longer.

  “Honey?” Casually, casually, barely glancing up as she wiped the countertops. “You remember that electronic toy you and Janine were playing with last month? The thing that, ah, that cloned cell-phone numbers?”

  Color flooded Vanessa’s smooth cheeks. She was ready to get very angry indeed. “You told us to stop, and we stopped, okay? And we weren’t playing. It wasn’t a toy.”

  “No, no, I understand. I understand.” Holding her hands up for peace. “I’m not criticizing you, honey. I want to ask you about, ah, another device that I bet Janine has got lying around somewhere.”

  “Smith.”

  “Right. Smith. Until the violence stops.”

  “No, that’s the vow of silence. Her name is a protest against consumerism and regimentation.”

  “Oh, right. Right. Sorry.” She put down the rag, leaned back against the counter, and explained to her daughter what she had in mind. Vanessa shook her head several times, then, finally, said, “Those things aren’t illegal. Well, they are some places. Most places. And, well, this state is one of those places. This whole country, actually.”

  “Does she have one? That’s all I want to know.”