“So, if you kept it hidden,” said Julia, “how did Vanessa find it?”
“At that time I kept the cache in my study. It was inside a locked cabinet. A month or so after Vanessa returned from France, I got home one night and the lock had been jimmied. I was in a panic, I can tell you. I thought Scrunchy’s people had gotten in. Mal Whisted’s. But no. Somebody had been through the pages, but only the plane ticket was missing. It had to be Vanessa.”
“She finds everything,” Julia agreed. But, inside, she realized that she was at last one step ahead of her husband. The piano. Kellen had never taped anything to the piano. He had not gotten into the house. Vanessa had purloined a clue from Kellen and hidden it there to provide an explanation for the Audi knocking over the lamps on the night he drove her home. She said, “So what happens now, Lemmie? You have your hooks in both men.”
“True.”
“But they couldn’t both have done it. Jock drove the car. Mal Whisted was drunk, and probably doesn’t remember a thing, but his family doesn’t have the kind of money this conspiracy would have cost. And Scrunchy—well, he wasn’t there, was he? But maybe he helped with the cover-up. That’s your hook into him. Or maybe the Empyreals showed each of them some piece of manufactured evidence. And so, maybe to this day, they both think they killed her.” Counting off the points on her fingers, admiring the cleverness even as she despised the act. “That was Bay’s plan from the start. Get them all tripping over each other. Tell each of them, You did it, but we’ll set up a cover, so the others will think it was them. Why not? After all, the Empyreals didn’t know which one of them would rise the highest, but it was a nice bet.”
“A very nice bet.” He seemed sad. “All these years, all these decades, the Caucasians have assumed that they are in charge. The ideology of the Empyreals is that this need not be so. The darker nation can wield enormous power, as long as we hide our hand. Public power the Caucasians would never stand for. Hidden power they can do nothing about.”
“But if the hand is…hidden…then why did Jock and Mal ever believe that the Empyreals had so much power?”
“I believe that when the police turned their attention to DeShaun, all three men were persuaded that the Empyreals could do what they promised. And what they threatened.”
“And that was it. They signed the confessions. Stupid little college boys. They signed the confessions, the Hillimans provided the cash to spread around, and all these years, Mal Whisted has been sure you’re covering for him. All these years, Scrunchy has been sure you’re covering for him. Neither one of them knew the other was even a suspect. And of course they fired their assistants when they looked into it. You told them to, and they didn’t have a choice. I must be an idiot not to have seen it. Oh, Lemmie! Of course you can afford to be blasé about the election! The Empyreals win either way!”
“Remember, Jules, I came into the plan late. Things are as they are.” A pause as he stood up and went to the window. The glare did not seem to bother him. “So—tell me, Jules. What would you do? If you had the choice. What would you have us do now?”
“Take the hooks out. Tell both men they’re free.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen. Number one, it’s not my decision. I’m a relatively minor player in Empyreals, no matter what my title might be. Number two—well, there are a lot of sunk costs, Jules. We’ve gone too far to turn back.”
“Lemmie, come on! The President—Scrunchy—he’s innocent! So is Senator Whisted! They were drunk but they didn’t kill anybody! How on earth can you say it’s too late to turn back? You’re blackmailing the wrong men!”
“I suppose we are,” he said, finally turning back toward his computer. Tap-tap-tap.
She wanted to throttle the life out of him. She wanted to hug him forever. She wanted to grab the family and head for the hills. She stared at the man who had rescued her, a man who believed in duty rather than desire, twisted now by so many conflicting obligations that he no longer understood free will, especially his own. “This is wrong, Lemmie. Can’t you see why it’s wrong?”
“No, Jules. I cannot see why it’s wrong.” Glancing up at her at last, eyes weary. Stunned by a sign of actual physical weakness in her husband, Julia took a step back. “A few months ago, when you thought the President was guilty, you seemed satisfied—reluctant, but satisfied—that the course we had chosen would lead to the best outcome for our people. The darker nation. Have you changed your mind? Don’t you see that the possibility of helping our people is the same, no matter who did the actual deed?”
She sank into the chair.
Her husband eyed her with sympathy. “I’m surprised at you, Jules. Surprised. Our opportunity to win justice for our people does not turn in any way on the actual identity of the culprit in a crime the world has long forgotten. We are avenging a far larger crime, Jules. Remember that.”
Now she knew what frightened her. The confidence she had long admired in him, even when it swelled into pride, was really the zeal of the ideologue. All these years he had spent at the table deriding left and right alike had persuaded her that Lemaster possessed no politics to speak of, apart from an admiration of his own brilliance. Now she saw how wrong she was. His politics were the politics of pure and perfect righteousness. As his own favorite philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, had once pointed out, no cause has ever claimed more victims.
“But you can’t believe it’s going to stay a secret. Sooner or later, it’s going to come out. Everything does.”
“No, Jules. Not everything does. The world is full of secrets people manage to keep.” Tap-tap-tap. “This one wouldn’t have come out if Byron Dennison hadn’t been so arrogant. He couldn’t resist the temptation. He had to meet with the frat boy himself instead of using an intermediary. He had to go to the meeting in the Landing, for the pleasure of watching the Caucasians dance to his tune. He forgot about how our hand is supposed to say hidden.” Glancing up at her. “Anyway, now it’s hidden again.”
“What about DeShaun?” she said. “Are you willing to let that lie remain out there?”
He said nothing.
“You wouldn’t lose anything if you let it be known—leaked it somehow—that Jock Hilliman was the real killer. You wouldn’t let Scrunchy or Mal off the hook. They both think they killed him. They think the evidence of Jock’s guilt is manufactured. They think those confessions you made them sign—”
“The Empyreals made them sign.”
“—you made them sign,” she repeated, “are enough. They’ll be nervous, probably, to see the old crime reopened. But they’ll both still be yours.”
He shrugged.
“What kind of man are you?” she said at last, lungs aching as if she had attempted a very long climb. But she did not know whether she was climbing up or down. “Come on, Lemmie. Don’t you care about the truth?”
“The only truth that matters,” said Lemaster with solemn kindness, “is the truth of how much we can gain for our people.” He looked at her again. “I love you, Jules. I’ve loved you since the first day of div school. But this plan is now my responsibility. I cannot turn away from it on the threshold.”
She swayed in the long, bright room, overwhelmed, not knowing who he was. Had he lied to her a moment ago about being a minor player? His doubts seemed to have vanished, in the brilliant glow of a willed belief. He could always talk anybody into believing anything, and he had talked himself into believing that the Empyreals were right.
Probably just in the last ten minutes.
And the crazy part was, she saw his point. She didn’t. Lemaster was right. He wasn’t. The world cared. It didn’t.
“Are you going to leave me now, Jules? Take the children, run to France, call the papers, ask them to rescue poor Scrunchy and Mal from the clutches of a bunch of old men from the darker nation, some tiny unknown Harlem fraternity that secretly controls the destiny of the nation? Do you honestly think anybody but the far-right fringe of the far-right fringe would even cons
ider the possibility that it could be true?”
“I could try.”
“Yes, you could. And I’ll always love you, whatever you do.” He spoke gently, the way we do with the very ill. “I want you to stay. I want you with me. If you can’t bear it, I’ll understand. But, please, Jules, understand my position. I have to do this work. If I have you with me, I’ll do it better.”
“And Tony Tice? Why were you in touch with Tony Tice?” But she had already figured it out. “He was playing both ends against the middle, wasn’t he? This was your project now. You had to protect it. You and…and Jeremy Flew. The Empyreals sent him, didn’t they? To take care of us, but also to keep an eye on things. You knew what Kellen was doing. You had Tony to tell you how far he got in his research, except that Tony thought the chance for a buck was too good to pass up. He cheated you.” Another thought. “That hundred thousand he donated to the div school every year. Was that the Empyreals too? Oh, Lemmie! Did they buy me a job?” She swayed. And hardened. “I don’t think Tony Tice will do much time, will he, Lemmie? You’ll call somebody, and he’ll get a sweet deal.” She hesitated. “Bruce told me, Vanessa too, that Kellen started working on this project a year and a half ago. You were still at the White House. But the Empyreals needed somebody to keep an eye on things. To maybe run the whole project. And the best way to do that would be if you could be, say, president of the university. The most powerful man in the county. How did they do it? Did they have the Hillimans call Cameron? What was it?”
A warning tone when he finally spoke. “It was the search for justice. That’s all.”
The questions swirled. Did Frank Carrington really cause so much mayhem on his own? Had Jeremy Flew acted only as a bodyguard, or might he have played a more active role? And what about Kellen—how had he learned so much, so fast? Did he have a source inside the Empyreals? But she knew her husband would offer no answers. So she asked the one question that mattered most: “But who gets to make the call, Lemmie? Who decides when to use this…this influence? Who’s wise enough?”
Lemaster stared at his wife for a long moment, then leaped to his feet and stalked around the desk. Julia cringed instinctively away, all her suspicions rising. He took her by the shoulders and frog-marched her into the private bathroom off the study.
“Lemmie, what is it? Let me go!”
“Look,” he said.
“What?”
“You’re the one who loves mirrors! Now, look!”
She turned. And there was the answer to her question, staring back at her, the secret burden theirs to share.
EPILOGUE
THE MANSION OF ALL MOODS
(I)
SUMMER. Julia stood in a bay window at the back of the Mallard mansion south of Portland, Maine, watching the Atlantic through gauzy curtains. Waves rolled in, dark and majestic, patiently battering the boulders that today stood proudly against the assault and, in the fullness of time, like all that seemed solid and unchangeable, would crumble to dust.
“So—what am I supposed to do now?” said Mary Mallard from behind her. She was on the sofa, her bad leg stretched along the cushions. “Publish the truth? Tell me, Julia. What am I supposed to do?”
“You don’t know the truth,” said Julia after a moment. “Neither do I.”
“We know the lies, though.”
Julia nodded, said nothing. The house belonged to Mary’s mother, and was furnished with grand Yankee bad taste. The rear lawn swept down to the seawall, where Evelyn Mallard, related to so many Presidents that nobody could count them, walked with Jeannie. Maine summer sunshine sparkled on their trim white outfits. Jeannie—no, Jeans, always Jeans now—Jeans was laughing, having found in this rich seafront colony south of Portland a whole new world worth charming with her perfection. Aaron, summering at a program down at Babson for future business leaders, had been up last weekend. Preston promised to bring Megan, or her successor, as long as Lemaster was not around, and Julia hoped he would. Smith and Vanessa had left early on their cross-country trip, because their parents lacked the will to stop them. The two (or three) of them telephoned intermittently to assure their families that they were fine.
Lemaster kept calling to say he would be up in a few days, and his new assistant kept calling to say he wouldn’t.
“I’ve worked most of it out, Julia. Jock killed Gina, Whisted was there with him that night, and poor Scrunchy was at some frat party, drunk out of his mind. He was nowhere near the beach.”
“Maybe.”
“That’s a big story, Julia. A thirty-year-old murder, a black boy blamed for it and practically lynched, and now it turns out that Senator Whisted was there when it happened. A huge story. But I can’t print it, can I? I don’t have hard evidence. I can’t print that somebody somewhere suspects that maybe it might have been, et cetera, et cetera. You know and I know, but we can’t prove a word of it.” A pause to let Julia put a word in, but Julia didn’t. The curtains snapped in a sudden sea breeze. Upstairs on the guest room desk was an unfinished letter to Julia’s mother. She had tried writing to Lemmie, too, but could not think what to say.
Behind her, Mary was still talking, perhaps to herself. “Besides, we know it’s the kind of thing they kill people over, isn’t it? I mean, really kill them. If I printed it, they’d send somebody to kill me, wouldn’t they?”
“Maybe.”
“And that doesn’t bother you?”
Julia remembered her conversation with Vanessa after they left Frank Carrington’s house a million years ago. “Of course it bothers me. I think every life is precious.” She nibbled her lip. “But, Mary, the thing is—”
“That’s not what I mean.” The journalist was impatient. “I meant, doesn’t it bother you that Whisted will never be brought to justice? That he might make it all the way to the White House?”
“He didn’t do it. Being asleep in the back seat isn’t a crime.”
“He was there, Julia. The voters should know that.”
Julia surprised herself with her answer. She had been in Maine the better part of a month. Needing a confidant, and realizing how much Mary had worked out for herself, Julia had shared much of the story, omitting, however the roles played by the Empyreals—and her own husband. She had not seen Lemaster in weeks. Yet here she was, channeling his argument. She remembered his hand gripping her upper arm, making her face the mirror, telling her to look at who would make the decisions.
“Let me tell you about justice,” she said. “If you could write about Mal Whisted—suppose he even did it, and you could prove it—what would happen? He’d go to prison, right? He’d get what he deserved. But where would that leave the darker nation? Why shouldn’t the darker nation have the chance to get what it deserves? Lock up Whisted, and you get the satisfaction of knowing that a man who did a terrible thing thirty years ago is behind bars. And that’s it. But leave him free to rise, maybe all the way to the White House, and you get this powerful ally to push his party in the direction it needs to go. You can give Whisted justice, or you can give African America justice. It’s as simple as that.”
“That’s not simple, Julia. It’s…amoral.”
She quoted Astrid. “You can’t win the war against evil with one hand tied behind your back.”
“Do you really think America is evil?”
“No. I think America has a short attention span.”
(II)
MALCOLM WHISTED HAD WON the primaries. The press still loved the story of the two college roommates squaring off for the Presidency, and, in the excitement, paid no attention to various low-level resignations from their staffs. Everybody was still trying to dig up dirt, discounting the other side according to political preference: Your guy’s military record matters! Looking at my guy’s military record is gutter politics! Oddly, nobody seemed to consider the two men’s college years a fruitful field of inquiry—perhaps because the reporters and editors and activists had all had their own college years, and liked to think of them as comfortably, e
ven passionately, off limits. Nobody even hinted at the perfect balance of terror, the possibility that an obscure Harlem men’s club, membership limited by charter to “four hundred colored gentlemen of quality,” held both men’s futures in its hands, because it owned evidence that each had committed a murder, evidence each man fully believed, even though neither one of them had done the deed.
Patience can be a strategy all by itself, as Lemaster liked to say—and, in this case, an Empyreal patience had won the day.
Julia had considered leaving her husband after that final confrontation, just taking the kids and going—somewhere. Her growing sense of duty held her back—duty, and, vaguely, gratitude. Lemaster was a stranger, but he had rescued her, after all, and had never betrayed or hurt her. The stern, locked-in convictions in which he bound his life did not, she had discovered, bind her equally. He lived his way and she lived hers. They could accomplish this under one roof. They could ride together through life. They had done it for twenty-one years, even with her confused and lingering feelings for Kellen between them like a sword. They could continue, and not only because Lemaster and his Empyreals gripped the reins with such fearsome and oppressive goodwill. Kellen had liberated her. Whatever his motive—justice or jealousy—his search for Gina’s killer, and his mad plan to drag Julia into his scheme, had released her instead from the prison of other people’s expectations.
She enjoyed her new job, and not only because she was away from Lemaster’s campus. She was helping young people who served, too often, as props for politicians and as applause lines for activists. Everybody sympathized with their plight and everybody avoided any more contact with them than necessary—everybody who could afford to, anyway. Julia Carlyle, raised in New Hampshire, stood in front of the tiny classroom at Miss Terry’s school in the center of the most dangerous neighborhood in Elm Harbor, sharing her knowledge for no salary to speak of, and loving every minute. She had even attended the occasional service at the House of Faithful Holiness, and come away from her encounters, if not with her cup running over, at least with a heightened sense of the desperate needs of the darker nation, and the unlikelihood that either political party, left to its own devices, would ever pay more than lip service to the moral imperative to meet those needs. Certainly in the heated presidential campaign shaping around her nobody gave any serious consideration to what should be done about race and poverty—not when there were important issues to confront. There were always important issues to confront. Race and poverty could come later. Maybe that was why Jesus had said the poor we would have with us always: He knew where they would rank, even two millennia later, in the list of political priorities. What Mona had said so long ago, quoting some writer, resonated more and more strongly with Julia as the weeks flew past: white people were far more interested in the equality of their wives and daughters than the equality of their servants.
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