Playing Dead

by Julia Heaberlin

  “Here’s the truth,” he said. “I’m working on a profile of Anthony Marchetti tied to him getting out on parole. You know who Anthony Marchetti is?”

  I barely nodded, immune to surprise, remembering the reason I followed him here. Information.

  “I thought you might. Come in and close the door, will you?”

  I shut the door, knowing that this is how young women disappear. The braided rug on the floor didn’t look large enough to roll me up in without my feet sticking out. A plus.

  I watched as he walked from window to window, pulling down the shades.

  “Keeps it cooler in here,” he said nonchalantly. “Texas sun is a bitch.”

  Jack sat on the edge of the bed still close enough to reach the Magnum.

  “I’m here because Marchetti threw out a few bribes to get transferred from Illinois to a Texas prison right before his parole. Odd, don’t you think? He clammed up when I tried to interview him a few months ago. But I’m a pretty diligent investigator. I stumbled across a few things he didn’t want me to know about. Like your mother. I’m pretty sure he sent those guys in the garage to suggest I drop the story.”

  “There’s been a mistake.” My voice sounded more vulnerable than I would have liked, especially in front of this man, this Jack, who had busted his way into my life. What an idiotic, ubiquitous name. Jack Ryan. Jack Bauer. Jack Ruby. Jack the Ripper. Jackass.

  “None of this has anything to do with me or my family.” I realized that a very small part of me still believed that.

  He studied me. “Just what do you know about Marchetti?”

  “Practically nothing.”

  “I don’t think that’s the truth.” His voice was suddenly taut. “I have a source who tells me that Marchetti’s wife has contacted you. Rosalina. You know that name, don’t you?”

  Jack was bearing down on me now. Soft. Cruel. He was the frat boy who used to take pledges out for beers and then force them to their knees with a paddle, I thought. The one with the big smile on his face and a piece inside missing.

  “OK, don’t answer,” he said. “But I’ve checked you out and found a few strange details.” He angrily pushed himself off the bed with the arm not encumbered by a sling.

  “Like what?” I stuttered.

  “For starters, your Social Security number belongs to a dead girl.”

  My mother’s first name was Ingrid. I learned later that wasn’t the truth. That it was the name she chose for herself.

  When I was sick, my mother wiped my face with a damp washcloth and told me a family legend, a fairly morbid one, looking back on it.

  Her great-grandmother was also an Ingrid—Ingrid Margaret Ankrim, who crossed the unforgiving Atlantic from Germany as a teenager in the late 1800s. By the time the ship docked in New York harbor, battered and carrying a lighter human load than it started with, her sixteen-year-old hair had turned completely gray. Stress, they told her. Ingrid wanted to die herself when the captain buried three of her brothers and a sister at sea, wrapped in sheets and tossed like dolls into the ocean.

  My mother’s voice always dropped to a whisper at this point in the story. She said Ingrid watched her own mother grow silent and still on the voyage, imagining her babies lying in pitch-black, freezing waters with God knows what brushing by them.

  She told me that we both inherited Ingrid’s eyes—a bottomless green. My mother also inherited the other Ingrid legacy—she turned gray early. Her gray hair first appeared at twenty, a single stylish streak. One afternoon, as she colored it away in a monthly ritual in our kitchen sink, she told Sadie and me that strangers used to stop and ask “where she’d gotten it done.” It never occurred to us to ask why she made it disappear.

  Maybe every little girl thinks her mother is beautiful. Mine really was. You could tell by the way men acted around her, even happily married ones, with a charming awkwardness that made you embarrassed for them. Her soft blond hair, when she let it loose, fell, as Granny said, “right to her rear.” The needle pointed to exactly 110 pounds whenever she stepped on a scale. She fit snugly into 27 × 27 Wrangler jeans, one of those rare women who could walk into a western store, pull her size off the shelf, and leave.

  She hated violence—even spiders that wandered into our house got a free ride out on a magazine.

  She never got used to the terrible storms that kicked up every spring in Texas. When the black wall clouds appeared on the northwest horizon, she’d orchestrate us in a dance of panic. We’d run from one window to the next, opening and shutting them to achieve the perfect air flow that a scientist she’d heard on National Public Radio said would keep the house from blowing away.

  She was a terrible cook and a formidable chess player.

  She was sad.

  Sadie and I would wake up in the middle of the night to the mournful notes of her piano floating up the stairs. Sometimes we peeked over the landing to watch her play dressed in a black silk nightgown, her body moving like a sensual snake, to an audience of one cowboy, our father. We didn’t understand the depths of her talent until much later. We just knew she was the best church pianist Ponder, Texas, had ever seen because everybody said so.

  But these are not the things I told Jack Smith while I wondered whether every sentence falling out of his mouth was a lie.

  “You look like you might faint. Sit down.” He patted the side of the bed. “I’ll stand over here if it will make you feel better.”

  Soft again. I wouldn’t fall for it.

  “What’s my mother’s name?” I fought the desire to put my head between my knees.

  “Genoveve Roth.”

  Genoveve.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I said, struggling for control. “You don’t know her. She wasn’t the kind of woman … she wouldn’t have anything to do with the mob. Or a killer. It’s ridiculous.”

  “You tell me what you know about your mother, then I can fill in details.”

  Jack’s hand was poised with a pen over a hotel scratch pad, ready to take down my words.

  I answered reluctantly. “Before she was married, her name was Ingrid Kessler. She was born in a small town in New York. She lost her parents in a house fire when she was a senior in high school. She had no other close relatives. She told us that every piece of her past, everything she loved, had burned. She didn’t have enough money to go to college, so she headed to New York City to pursue a music career. She played piano in bars, waitressed, and got pregnant with my brother, Tuck, on a one-night stand.”

  I could hear voices in the room below us, a suitcase plunking down, the door of the room shutting. A man and a woman. Laughing. Separated from my nightmare by a floor. By inches.

  “I’m sure she was lonely when she met my father,” I continued, stronger. Maybe the man and woman could hear me, too.

  “He wandered into the diner where she worked. He ordered four eggs over easy with salsa and almost an entire side of bacon. He was a huge guy. Six feet, five inches. He drank two pots of coffee before she agreed to go out with him. Four months later, they married.”

  I’m not sure why all of this was spilling out. Maybe because, out loud, it sounded more true. Maybe because I’d never gotten tired of Mama telling the story.

  “She told us that my father saved her. He carried her and my brother away to his Texas ranch and his big family. Daddy always joked how she transformed herself from a Yankee to a Texan. I was born quickly; Sadie, four years later.”

  “And they lived happily ever after?” Palpable sarcasm.

  “You know, you’re an ass. I’m surprised you’re not beaten up every day.”

  Jack’s phone beeped. A text message. He glanced down.

  “We’ll have to continue this later,” he said. “I’ll call you.”

  I was back on the sidewalk in forty seconds, dazed, angry, wondering how a professional like me, trained to strip away the layers of the human soul, had extracted so little from Jack Smith. He’d played on my fear brilliantly.

 
I uneasily entered the parking garage where I’d left the truck a couple of hours earlier. It was a different parking garage from the one where I fired a gun, at the opposite side of town, conveniently located near the Bank of the Wild West. Nonetheless, it was a parking garage.

  It helped that I rode up in the elevator with a beautiful, ethereal-looking young couple, professional orchestra musicians, lugging their instrument cases from Bass Hall and arguing whether Rostropovich or Casals was the greatest cellist of all time.

  Mama would have an opinion, I thought.

  I got off by myself on the second floor, my eyes sweeping every corner of the garage as I walked to Daddy’s truck. Neurotically, I peered in the pickup bed, then at the cars parked on either side of me. An empty blue Mustang convertible on the right, and, on the left, a green late-model Jeep. The interior of the Jeep appeared piled to the top with trash, leaving about a six-inch view out the back window.

  A hoarder, I thought. Hoarders usually start their habit as teenagers. Most don’t seek treatment until reaching fifty. A lifetime of pointless shame.

  As I moved closer, I could see that there was more organization to the mess inside than I’d thought. The car was crammed to the top with papers and files, not garbage. Still, it appeared obsessive. A delicate chain with a small gold medallion hung from the rearview mirror.

  As I pulled out of the parking garage, I mentally kicked myself again.

  I hadn’t asked Jack for the name of the dead girl, the one he said shared my Social Security number. And maybe something much worse.

  CHAPTER 10

  I no longer know who I am.

  I said it out loud, in the pickup, halfway home to Sadie.

  I am a product of lies.

  The knowledge was making me reckless.

  I shouldn’t be doing this alone.

  I should never have followed Jack Smith into that hotel. My cell phone buzzed in the seat beside me and I jumped, skittering into another lane, nearly hitting a Volkswagen Beetle.

  I straightened out the wheel, grabbing the phone, staring at the readout, my heart tripping erratically.

  Marcia. W.A.’s secretary.

  I stabbed at the touch screen.

  “Hello? Marcia? Hello?”

  She started in immediately.

  “Hi, honey. Just wanted to let you know that W.A. is in a five-foot hover. As you know, he does not like loose details. He had no idea, no idea ta’tall”—she emphasized these last two syllables with Texan flair—“that your mother was carrying on secretly with that bank. He’s over there right now. Made ’em open up past quittin’ time just for him to get things settled. Thank goodness, I calmed him down a bit before he called the bank president.” She drew in an audible breath. “Wild West. Even for Texas, that’s a silly name for a bank. I’d sooner shoot off my right pinkie toe than put my money there or shop at Walmart on a Sunday afternoon. But the president was quite cooperative. Turns out his dad was Billy Bob Jordan, who used to go up against W.A. back in the day. You remember him?”

  Marcia was always asking whether I remembered people I never knew. If I didn’t hop in quickly, she was sure to give extensive details of Billy Bob’s lineage going back to the Confederacy.

  “Well, at least he’s not in an eight-foot hover. Or a ten-foot hover.”

  Marcia had been assessing W.A.’s hovers for many years. Anything past five feet required a bottle of whiskey and a policeman.

  “Do you know when I’ll be able to get into the box?”

  “Well, honey, it’s late. I told W.A. it would be best not to put out the bank any more than we have to. A Miss Billington over there seems to have quite a bird up her skirt. But they open right up at 8:30 a.m. I suggest you hustle over there first thing. Want me to have W.A. meet you there?”

  Her curiosity was clearly piqued, but I didn’t take the bait even though I trusted her to be discreet. Marcia once told me that a man with a hot cattle brand couldn’t get a scrap of information out of her, and I believed it. What she knew and kept to herself about W.A.’s rich and powerful clients could fill every safe deposit box in Tarrant County.

  “Thanks, but I’m good,” I said, watching the yellow Bug disappear ahead of me over a hill.

  Daddy always said life was a game of inches.

  A few more inches when I had swerved the wheel, and all of this could be over.

  I could be over.

  Just like Tuck.

  Sadie’s trailer door was unlocked.

  Until two days ago, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. I also wouldn’t have moved my .45 from under the seat to the glove compartment or put Daddy’s pistol, which I’d stopped at the house to load, back in my purse. Or stood outside for five minutes after pulling up by the trailer to make sure that headlights weren’t following me up the dirt road.

  “Sadie, why the hell isn’t the door locked?”

  I had made my entrance into the trailer, fully meaning to say hello first, but spewing a furious admonition instead.

  An iPod blaring in her ears, Maddie waved cheerfully while stirring yellow, toxic-looking cheese powder into overboiled noodles. Crumbled browned hamburger was in a skillet waiting to be tossed in. Two empty blue boxes stood on the counter. A double recipe. I was invited for dinner.

  Sadie, immersed in her task at the red booth, looked up when I shot the deadbolt with more vigor than necessary.

  “Maddie just fed the cats and probably forgot. No need to overreact.”

  You don’t get it. Something evil is parachuting into our universe. And you’re playing cards.

  “Maybe she left them in the same order,” Sadie said, acknowledging my presence, but as if we’d only been away from each other for five seconds instead of five hours.

  Now I realized what she was doing. Laying each of Granny’s cards in consecutive rows on the black Formica top. They stood out starkly, each one a knife in my chest. It seemed like a sacrilege to Tuck’s memory to take ourselves back to that awful day. Sadie was too young to remember this, I reminded myself. All that pain. The sobbing and the screams. It was just a story to her.

  “She probably did a quick spread,” she said.

  Granny favored two techniques when telling fortunes. The more elaborate was called the Four Fans. Her subject randomly picked thirty-two cards out of a deck and she arranged them into four fan-shaped spreads of eight cards, each fan representing an aspect of the person’s life—past, future, relationships, work. She’d do this mostly at Bible study teas for the ladies in her Sunday school class, who considered it blasphemous while believing every bit.

  Before Tuck’s death, Granny had always used the same cards—this dog-eared deck with two entwined pink swans. After his death, if you could talk her into a reading, Granny employed decks that Daddy and the ranch hands dealt at their Friday night poker games. I’d seen her use this deck only once after Tuck died.

  For us kids, she favored a method she called “the quick spread,” often accompanied by the words, “We don’t have time for this nonsense.”

  She took fifty-two cards, plus one joker, and laid them flat on the table, facedown. We’d be instructed to move our hands over the top, spreading them into a chaotic mess until Granny told us to stop and pick exactly twenty-one cards.

  We watched, hearts in our throats, as she flipped them over one by one.

  Sadie continued her own reading. “The jack of diamonds represents Tuck, followed by the three of hearts, which stands for celebrations. And his birthday was on the third of September. I bet Granny didn’t think that was a coincidence.”

  She flipped over the next card. The ace of spades. Why did it hold such power? “The closer that ace is to the card that represents Tuck, the sooner the tragedy,” Sadie said.

  She flipped over four more cards. The king of spades. The queen of diamonds. The queen of hearts. The joker.

  “Look at all these face cards. At the king of spades. He represents someone evil, a man. Or it could be an authority figure.
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br />   “The two queens in a row suggest some kind of betrayal. Queen of diamonds could represent Mama—it’s a blond woman—or she could be the queen of hearts—that’s a mother figure. I’m not sure what the joker means.”

  Clearly, Sadie had paid more attention to Granny’s readings than I had. As if reading my mind (and maybe she was), she nodded to her laptop and said: “I just gave myself a quick lesson online.”

  My favorite reading from Granny included the ace of hearts—love, of course—and a jack of clubs, a promise that I’d meet a mysterious dark stranger. I kept my eye on one of the handsome young migrant workers on our farm all that summer. I blew off her warning about the card that followed—the two of spades. Deceit.

  Snap out of this.

  “Sadie, stop. Don’t put another card down. It’s crazy to think these are in the same …” I lowered my voice. “That these are in the same order after all these years.”

  Maddie was reaching into the refrigerator, pretending she wasn’t listening.

  “It’s morbid,” I continued. “And silly. Tuck had an accident because some stupid, selfish man got drunk. Unfortunately, it happens every day. How do you even remember Tuck’s birthday?”

  “Because it’s the same date as his death. Because Granny told me to stay out of Mama’s way on that day every single year. Didn’t she tell you the same thing?”

  She hesitated, picking up the cards.

  “I know you believe,” she told me. “You saw the cane.”

  “The cane?” Of course I knew what she was talking about.

  “The night of Granny’s funeral. Mama let us sleep together in the guest room downstairs, in the big feather bed. In the middle of the night, I woke up. You were sitting there, just staring at the floor. On the carpet, we could see the shadow of Granny’s cane.”

  The cane, with a brass snake’s head handle, that our grandfather massaged smooth out of an oak branch. The cane that trudged up and down Bailey Street on Granny’s Saturday walk. The cane that snapped in two when she slipped and broke her hip on the back porch steps two weeks before her death from pneumonia.