Mislaid

by Nell Zink

  Ten

  That evening Karen wrote a long letter to Meg.

  Meg read the letter three days later, sitting on the porch swing at the post office on the Eastern Shore. She didn’t get back on the road and drive like a bullet straight to Charlottesville. She didn’t even write a reply. She just shuffled to the car, sat in the driver’s seat, and looked in the rearview mirror, thinking of Luke.

  I was happy, she thought. I was finally happy.

  She put the car in gear and drove slowly back to the squirrel sanctuary. The sun pierced the charcoal-gray clouds with golden light that made even scraggly pines lining the roadside seem to burn like torches, and the water on the back bay was jiggling like mercury. But she felt like shit. More than anything, she was afraid. Joining Flea and Lomax in the living room, she started with the chief locus of her fear: “My baby’s a narc.”

  “What?” Lomax said, jerking upright.

  “Not about me, or us. But listen to this.” She unfolded the letter. “‘Dear Mom,’ bla bla bla, ‘the police showed up and somebody took me home, but I only know that because when I woke up I found a note thanking me for a good time and, believe it or not, all these hits of acid in my pocket. Temple told me what it was. I guess I dodged a bullet there.’” Meg rolled her eyes. “‘But don’t worry, nothing happened. I was just wasted because they soaked all these strawberries in 151. I felt like crap the day after, but now I’m fine. So this morning the police came to my dorm asking do I know anything about any acid, because somebody said he gave it all to me. Ratting me out to save his own ass! But it was okay, because we knew where we basically buried it, so me and the cops dug out what was left and I could prove that I didn’t want his stupid acid in the first place. What an asshole. They said next time if I find drugs to bring them to the lost and found. I still had a note from that asshole, so I gave it to them as well. I cooperated and was very polite like you say. It will all blow over, but of course Temple’s scared shitless,’ bla bla bla.”

  “How is she a narc?” Flea asked. “I don’t get it.”

  “The acid was gone. She could have denied all knowledge of it. But she remembered it for them, dug it out of the ground for them, and handed them written proof that it was intended for her personal use. It’s not going to blow over. She’s going to be testifying at some asshole’s trial.”

  “Oh.”

  “Ça veut dire, my baby the narc.”

  “You scared me bad,” Flea said. “Karen is so cute, and I thought you wanted to sell her out.”

  “You have no idea,” Meg said. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve been living a lie.”

  Flea looked at Lomax for a moment and said, “We know you’re a lesbian. I think of it as possession by the moon goddess.”

  Meg rolled her eyes. “And what if . . .” She hesitated.

  “What if what?”

  “What if I told you my name was Margaret Randolph Vaillaincourt Fleming and I’m probably wanted for kidnapping?”

  “Kidnapping who?” Flea asked.

  “Karen.”

  “For sexual purposes?” Lomax asked.

  Meg’s facial expression was indescribable. “She’s my daughter!”

  Lomax thought it over. “Adopted, or real? She looks so white.”

  Meg sighed.

  “Does she know anything about our business dealings?”

  “Offhand I would say, nothing whatsoever, if she thinks acid in her pocket is a reason to sell somebody down the river.”

  “Well, shit,” Lomax said. He lit a bong and passed it around.

  Flea said, “You know what you should do. You should go home right now and give your place a really good exorcism. Like, get some of that Haitian floor wash against bad vibes and make sure you get it into every corner, and lay down a new coat of paint. You do not want them finding one single molecule if it comes to them searching your apartment.”

  “Thank God this place isn’t my property,” Lomax said. “They can’t divest the squirrel huggers for ill-gotten gains, I don’t think.”

  “That’s true,” Flea said. “Nobody can civil forfeit a squirrel. But now tell me about this kidnapping.”

  “It was a marital spat,” Meg said. “We split the kids down the middle.”

  “You have another kid? That’s so sad! Is it a boy or a girl? Older or younger?”

  “Boy, older,” Meg said. “Five years older than Karen. Only three and a half now, though, because Karen’s actually this dead baby whose birth certificate I stole.”

  “So what’s her real name?”

  “Mickey. Mireille.”

  “Maray?” She rolled the word around her mouth with her tongue and needed several lessons to say it with the proper Languedoc growl. “Is the father French?”

  “The father is Lee Fleming.”

  Lomax’s eyes widened and he said, “The Lee Fleming? La Fanciulla del West?”

  “What?” Meg said. “Fanciulla del West? I know he has some nicknames, but Fanciulla del West?”

  “People don’t tell wives everything.” Lomax paused for a moment to fake a discretion he did not possess and said, “Lee Fleming pulled a train in a club in Staunton that was a hundred and fifty guys. I kid you not.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Meg said. “Just the kind of pathetic crap straight guys with nothing to their names say to comfort themselves over the fact that a stud like Lee can give it to anything or anybody he wants.”

  “Look who’s still in love,” Flea said.

  “Oh, man,” Lomax said, pouring himself a glass of Jägermeister. “Back to your daughter the moray eel. What are we going to do about her?”

  “Is that a threat? She knows nothing. I raised her right. She’s a good girl. Too good if you ask me.”

  At that very moment, Karen was saying to Temple, “If I stick my tongue in your mouth while your dick’s inside me, we’re a human yin-yang symbol.” She demonstrated.

  He got to his feet on the bed with her clinging to him like a limpet and said, “Au contraire! I alone am Abraxas! All forces are combined in me! Male, female, good, evil!” He shoved her against the wall and fucked her until she turned her face away and came with a series of minor screams, then turned around to lean his butt on the wainscoting and let her push off with her feet, caressing him with her cunt in a way that was truly obscene and continuing to have occasional orgasms. Temple was reordering his priorities in life at an alarming rate. Schoolwork, what’s that? Physics, who cares? He was considering taking a year off, maybe make the Grand Tour of historic European capitals with Shadow, working on his French.

  Meg took Flea’s advice and spent early November in Centerville, scrubbing and wallpapering. She burned nearly everything she owned—anything that might have a trace of white powder on it anywhere—in a clearing in the woods. She made a New Year’s resolution to change her life.

  Not her clothing this time, but her life. She would tell Luke and Karen the truth . . . or not. If her life changed enough, maybe she could skip the explanations. That recurring thought generally inspired her to pour herself a glass of wine for courage.

  In Centerville, Thanksgiving and Christmas came and went uneventfully. Luke was off with her clan in Brooklyn. Nobody was interested in admitting that anything had happened.

  And in a sense, nothing had happened. Karen and Temple were not charged with any crime. Like Temple, Karen was not the kind of student the police in Charlottesville were after. She was black.

  They were after her brother, but without drama. To the prosecutor’s mind, Byrdie had by surrendering agreed to help his career, in a way, and might even be owed a certain amount of gratitude. Submitting to be tried was a deeper genuflection before the law than any guilty plea. The prosecutor wanted the case to stay in Charlottesville where his voters lived, so he held off going to the papers. All in good time.

  Of course no one in the family told Meg’s parents. Byrdie visited them over t
he holidays as he always did. In conversation he stayed with the topic that had become his standard with them: his vocation for public service. They never mentioned his mother or sister, hadn’t seen them in a long time, and didn’t know how to get in touch with them. The Vaillaincourts were great respecters of privacy.

  Karen and Temple didn’t come out of Karen’s room much. She said she had homework, and Temple had to catch up on his reading. Dee put her ear to the door and heard Karen say, “I think your mom is eavesdropping.”

  They talked a lot about Meg. They agreed that she was living vicariously through Karen. “We should make her read some Jane Austen,” Karen said. “If she knew how happy men make a person, I know she’d relax and meet somebody. When I was at home, I figured she was just holding back because of me, but now I think she might be shy around guys. I mean, didn’t you ever notice Lomax’s way cute friend the Seal?”

  “Not really.”

  “He likes Mom a lot. We ought to send them out in the boat together when there’s a storm coming. They’d get trapped, and the Seal would save her. It would be so romantic.”

  “But you wouldn’t actually try to kill your mom to get her laid, right?”

  “I just wish she had a life, so she wouldn’t pay attention to me.”

  Christmas at Lee’s parents’ place was less relaxed than usual. Lee boycotted Byrdie’s legal situation. If the subject came up, he would leave the room. That helped him stay calm, but it made the conversation revolve around Byrdie for several minutes every time.

  Byrdie’s grandfather always took the same line: Go straight to the top, highest court you can. Don’t get a judge who reads case law, get a judge who makes it. Trip said it would never come to that—a trial—because the judge he had chosen had the case well in hand. Byrdie agreed that a trial would not be necessary. They were all a little drunk, nearly all the time. It was Christmas!

  The facts of that long-ago October were mentioned only once. Byrdie remarked, “I don’t see how they can convict me. The plant gave the drugs to the dweeb, and the dweeb gave them to the blondette. We subpoena the informant and the dweeb and make them give sworn testimony. Case closed.”

  “You’re thinking again,” Trip said, shaking his head. “Think harder. Prosecutorial misconduct as a defense! So far it’s nothing personal. You’re a martyr for the cause of freedom. Keep it that way.”

  Byrdie’s grandfather said, “It would break my heart if they went after Lee.”

  “He’s safe,” Byrdie said. “I’ve been over the house with a fine-tooth comb. And the yard, too. You know how visitors hide stuff and forget it. But it’s been years since I found anything good.”

  “You should have known him when he was younger,” Trip said. “People always left something on the nightstand, and your mother was such a good hostess, whatever it was, she’d bring it downstairs and dump it on the coffee table. And the doors of perception were opened.”

  “Do not tell me,” Byrdie said.

  Lomax became antsy. He would get hunches that a raid was coming, and send Flea out at odd moments—in the middle of a meal or the middle of the night—to inspect the driveway and report back with a walkie-talkie. They had their first disagreement.

  Meg and Luke had gone to bed, and Flea sat down next to Lomax and played with the little wreath of hair over his ears. “Stop that,” he said.

  “I need tenderness,” she said. “Maybe if you didn’t smoke so much pot you could get it up?”

  He said, “Maybe if you weren’t so big and heavy?”

  She looked down. She was as slender as ever, but there was no denying that she was five foot eight, with breasts. “I can’t help it. I’m not a little girl anymore.”

  “Are you accusing me of something?”

  “I’m just saying I’ve been with you for ten years. My body’s changed.”

  “Well said. You’re free, white, and twenty-one. Maybe Luke likes her ladies voluptuous.”

  “Why are you hurting my feelings? You know I never look at anybody twice, especially not a woman.”

  “When’s the last time you met a man? Being my prisoner and all. I could sell you to the Seal for a night. Would you like that?”

  “You are seriously shitting all over my love for you!”

  Seeing her tears, Lomax felt a pang of remorse. “Come here, Flea. Don’t pout. You’re still cute as the first day I saw you. We can be an old married couple forever and ever! I promise!”

  “I’m sorry, sweet pea,” she said, nestling into his lap.

  “And you got one other thing wrong. I am habituated to the chronic. That means it is physically impossible for me to smoke too much pot.”

  By January the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office and the police force were unanimous: Prosecuting the case was an exercise in frustration. Mike had gone overboard as state’s evidence, taking responsibility for things that contradicted all their best theories. He said he put twelve hits of acid in the girl’s pocket. But it didn’t wash. He had never been alone with her. No one had seen him do it. It was obviously a false confession, intended to protect someone he was afraid of. Whom the girl had incriminated directly—a big fish, a much more desirable catch. But the big fish was stonewalling.

  They had indicted Byrdie on felony charges of distribution of a hard drug. And he seemed to find the indictment something approximately as troubling as . . . as nothing at all. He showed up to his arraignment unshaven, in boat shoes and ostentatiously wrinkled natural fibers. He asked his taxi driver to wait for his lawyer since he was fresh out of cash. He said not one word. He just marked time until they finished, like someone waiting to get the check in a restaurant with service issues.

  The prosecutor was pleased to be frustrated. A garrulous penitent is useless in a trial situation.

  The legal process known as “discovery” entitled the defense to see Byrdie’s previous criminal record, copies of his statements to the police, and the physical evidence.

  Since there was no criminal record and no statement, there wasn’t much to discover. His lawyer looked at the damp, dirty blotter paper (the actual LSD had washed away in the rain), the friendly note from “Thetan Hegemon,” the cryptic postcard, and Karen’s lost coin purse containing twenty-one cents. De jure, that was all Byrdie’s attorney could uncover about the prosecution’s case.

  De facto, the pretrial hearings were exclusive affairs, conducted over afternoon cocktails at the country club. As an experienced criminal defense attorney with a high caseload, Byrdie’s lawyer led with a motion to dismiss. “I don’t have time for a trial, but I can’t negotiate with a mandatory minimum sentence,” he said.

  “Well, I can’t dismiss out of hand,” the judge replied. “It’s bad enough that I’m trying it. Calling it off would be blatant nepotism. The press would have my ass in a sling.”

  “I don’t want to go to trial. It’s too big a risk.”

  “But you said it yourself. I got zero latitude.”

  “A year and a day suspended and he retains his civil rights?”

  “Who are you working for, anyway?” the judge asked. “Do I have to explain myself?”

  “You see a chance?”

  “Look. You’re forgetting that a different boy confessed. Now, you can’t talk about that in court, but you and me know it. And on the other side, what’s the prosecution got? Some pieces of paper and a little high yellow girl. That’s what indicted Byrdie. How hard would it be to stop her from testifying? And if she does get on the stand, who’s saying she didn’t steal that LSD from the other boy, or sleep with him for it? Go to trial! Ask her about it. There won’t be a trial to speak of, not one worthy of mention.”

  “To me, that sounds too much like a sensational case all over the papers.”

  “So I’ll put a gag order on it. I’ll venue this in a little courtroom with, I don’t know, maybe six spots for the public? We’ll get a few friends in there early on, and there won’t be room for any gentlemen of the press. The only question mark is
can we trust Lee and Trip to get up that early in the morning.” He drained his third martini.

  Soon after that, the prosecutor called a press conference to present the results of the Thetan House sting to the waiting world.

  He worked hard to prepare his talk. It was a tour de force of dialectics in which hundreds of task force members contributed details to a picture that assembled itself in his mind alone, so that all the credit was his. The villain: R. Byrd Fleming, wealthy degenerate. The prosecutor knew Byrdie didn’t have money. Byrdie was money. He was “old money,” and the prosecutor was the kind of suburbanite whose wife blows his salary hunting a quarter horse sidesaddle in a blue veil and chirps (Lee’s term for a fake riding habit, chaps plus skirt—he was not a famous poet for nothing!). Byrdie was money incarnate, and the prosecutor looked up to him as slightly glamorous and decadent in spite of himself. That’s what he thought the First Families of Virginia were: aristocrats. Not a passel of redneck landlords who think their serfs have cooties. He expected the reporters covering the case to feel as he did, since at that time it was still mostly rich people who owned newspapers.

  But the press conference was canceled at the last minute. The gag order came through, and he had to stand up in front of the reporters and say the case had been affected by unanticipated developments. He looked helpless and unhappy and refused further comment.

  During the winter, Karen saw Byrdie a couple of times on campus. She glanced at him and thought, Asshole! It made her feel brave.

  Byrdie saw Karen only once. She was kicking a vending machine that refused to turn loose the bottommost soda she’d just paid for. He thought, I should go give her thirty-five cents now. Then he thought, No contact with the witness. Could be construed as pressuring. Plenty of time for that later.