Playing Dead

by Julia Heaberlin

I turned to Jack, enunciating each word.

  “I’m. Sick. Of. Your. Games.”

  Two nurses walking by turned their heads and slowed.

  “A little quieter, please,” he said. He smiled at the nurses. “Everything’s fine, ladies. She’s just stressed out.”

  “You’re a patronizing jerk,” I said loudly as they disappeared into a patient’s room. “Was that quiet enough for you?”

  “You call me a lot of names. I’m going to eventually take offense.” He tested a door to his left and pulled me into a linen closet, an insulated cocoon, every shelf stuffed to the top with white-gray sheets, pillowcases, blankets, and towels. Plenty of stuff to suffocate me.

  “More than thirty years ago, your mother entered witness protection, along with a young boy,” he said, as soon as the door clicked shut. “Your brother. And a baby. Labeled ‘unspecified.’ ”

  His words made no sense. My mother was in witness protection? Tuck? Was I “unspecified”?

  “And you know this how?”

  “Sources. I laid my hands on some FBI and witness protection files.”

  A rapid knock startled us, and the door cracked open. A gray-haired nurse peered in.

  “Mrs. McCloud?”

  “No, no, I’m not married,” I replied automatically, realizing how inane that sounded as soon as it came out.

  “Your sister told us to update you. She needed to run out and pick up her daughter. Your mother is now sedated and her vitals are improving. She’s stable. Why don’t you go get some rest?”

  “I haven’t even seen her yet.”

  “It’s really best not to disturb her right now.” She hesitated. “Regardless, you need to get out of the closet. We don’t allow this kind of thing in here. It’s not sanitary.”

  “No,” I said, horrified. “There is nothing going on. With him. He’d be the last person …”

  “We all say that, honey,” she said serenely, piling a stack of sheets and pillowcases into her arms and holding the door wide open for us with her considerably sized right foot.

  “Perfect,” Jack said cheerfully. “We can finish the conversation that we started in the hotel.”

  I glanced toward Mama’s room and decided to take the nurse’s advice. I moved toward the elevator. Jack followed. We rode down six floors in silence.

  “How about this,” he said, as it jerked to a stop on the lobby level. “I’ll buy you lunch.”

  “I want to see those files,” I demanded.

  Jack held the door while an elderly man wheeled in a teenage girl sporting a signed Texas Rangers baseball cap and the white pallor of chemo treatments.

  Another of life’s cosmic mistakes.

  I needed to stop my whining.

  Find the way out of this maze.

  Even if it meant sucking up to this bastard to do it.

  “You’re a cheap date. That’s nice.” Jack bit into his third pork taquito, which he’d slathered with about a half cup of Conchita’s extra-hot sauce.

  A red river dripped unattractively down his chin, leaving an unfortunate, bloody-looking spot on his sling. I knew his mouth must be in some category of hell, but he showed no signs of it. More braggadocio. He reminded me of a goat roper I once dated who ordered his steak “so rare it’s still alive.”

  Conchita’s Taqueria consisted of an outhouse-sized shack with an aluminum roof that barely contained the plus-plus-sized Conchita, much less the giant metal canister of sweet tea, a grill, a small refrigerator, a metal cash box, and three Igloo coolers stocked with ice and Coke, the real kind, bottled in Mexico with so much Imperial Sugar it made your teeth hurt. It was the only soft drink she served.

  Conchita was famous for telling new customers: “If you want a diet drink, you are sheet out of luck. Go to Taco Bell.”

  Last year, Conchita had sprung for a purple polka-dotted umbrella for one of the three metal tables that sat outside the shack on a blistering patch of concrete. It was the best seat in the house. Today she’d cleared it off for us, yelling out her window at the two startled power suits finishing up their lunch, “Vamos! It eez time for you to go!”

  Conchita didn’t hand out this preferential treatment for me, even though I’d been a loyal customer for years. Conchita liked men, preferably tall ones who looked capable of throwing a punch. She’d been robbed in broad daylight more than a few times. Conchita never exactly smiled, but she served Jack with her most charming grimace and threw in an extra-spicy taquito for free.

  “So,” Jack said, wiping his mouth. It was clear he hadn’t wanted to talk until his stomach churned happily. I wondered how happy it was going to be around two in the morning.

  “So … why did my mother enter witness protection?”

  “Tommie, we’re kind of exposed here.”

  He gestured to a nearby table of four: a small boy punching at an iPhone, a toddler sucking his pacifier like it was a chocolate milkshake, a tired mother with a pink zebra-striped diaper bag that could hold enough to feed and entertain a small nation, and an irritated-looking Texas grandma.

  “I can’t get Wi-Fi here,” the boy whined, shaking the iPhone like an Etch A Sketch.

  “Eat your taco, Evan,” his mother said, while the grandmother opened and then shut her mouth, thinking better of it. “Put my phone down.”

  “It has little white and green things in it,” he complained, pushing away the foil wrapper. “I want to go to On the Border.”

  “Evan …”

  “Take them out!” the little Nazi ordered, stabbing his tiny forefinger imperiously at the offending items in his taco.

  “Jack, I really don’t think these people are paying attention to us,” I said, watching the mom get to work obediently with a toothpick. “I’m going to make a guess that the little boss over there isn’t mob-connected. So what is my mother’s link to Anthony Marchetti? And why are you so interested?”

  Jack peeled the wrinkled Saran Wrap off a half-melted homemade praline the size of a hockey puck. “I’m interested in anything to do with Anthony Marchetti. The trail leads where it leads.” He stuffed his mouth and chewed in an exaggerated fashion. “Sticky,” he said, pointing to his mouth, “but tasty.”

  “What did you mean in the hotel when you said that part of the story my mother told me about her past was true?”

  “Both her parents died in a fire.”

  “Do you know if there was anything … suspicious about it?”

  “No. Meaning, no, I don’t think so.”

  “For the record, I feel like calling you a name right now, but there are children nearby. How did you know that Rosalina Marchetti contacted me?”

  He shrugged. “I told you, I have a source. The FBI is wiretapping her. She’s the wife of a mob boss who’s running games from prison. The Feds have been trying to get at him and his wad of cash for years.”

  “You have a source in the FBI?”

  “Yep. I’m terrific with sources. Most people find me charming. Smart, even. Phi Beta Kappa. Princeton. Lots of connections.” He grinned. “Don’t look so shocked.”

  “Do you really believe Rosalina Marchetti is my mother? That Marchetti is my father? That I was kidnapped? Do you know who Tuck’s father was? He was my brother, wasn’t he? And who’s the dead girl with my Social Security number?” The last question rolled out of my mouth in an unexpected screech.

  The boy looked up from thumbing the phone, ticked off.

  “Mommy,” he said, pointing at me, “that lady made me lose my place in Doodle Jump. I died.”

  “Shut up, kid,” Jack said to him.

  The mother had the grace to look embarrassed. The grandmother smothered a smile.

  To me, Jack said, “I don’t know who Tuck’s father was. That’s your brother, the one who died, right?” He paused, sounding … sympathetic. “I had a brother who died. Something else we have in common.”

  Before I could respond, the toddler spit out the pacifier with enough velocity that it ricocheted off Jack’s cheek
. It took only seconds for the pacifier addict to recognize his terrible mistake in judgment. His wail resounded like a tornado siren.

  Jack seemed a little stunned, by both the plastic missile and the decibel level a two-year-old can reach. I got up and retrieved the pacifier from under our table while the mother dug furiously through the sixty-three Velcro pockets of her diaper bag.

  “Pacifier wipes,” she muttered. “Where are the pacifier wipes? Oh, here they are.” She pulled out a small plastic tub with antibacterial promises stamped all over it.

  Grandma was now on her feet. “Christ almighty, you actually paid for those? This is how you clean a pacifier.”

  She grabbed the pacifier out of my hand, stuck it into her Styrofoam cup of iced tea, gave it a few good swirls, and plopped it in the mouth of the wailing boy.

  Then she grabbed the phone out of her other grandson’s hand and said firmly, “Eat your damn taco.”

  The kids shut up.

  “Grandma should have a reality TV show,” Jack said.

  “Smith, focus on me, OK? I want to see those FBI files. And my mother’s. And my brother’s. Uncensored.”

  “Impossible. What I got is already censored. Stuff blacked out.”

  I reached into my purse and pulled out a key.

  “I recently discovered the contents of a safe deposit box in my mother’s name,” I said. “She never told anyone. Not even her lawyer.”

  Jack leaned in, practically salivating.

  This dance was one I had practiced over and over again with patients. Give some, get some. However, I was reluctantly coming to terms with the fact that Jack Smith was different, like no one I’d ever encountered. A whole new can of beans, Granny would say. My usual tactics weren’t going to work.

  “Tit for tat,” I said. “That’s the deal. And I’m not talking about my 34Cs.”

  It was my first pitiful attempt at a joke in two weeks.

  Inside, I wasn’t laughing.

  Something else we have in common, Jack had said about my dead brother.

  What the hell did that mean?

  CHAPTER 14

  Christy King was a sixteen-year-old sent to Halo Ranch from the Las Vegas foster care system, a one-time runaway who hyperventilated every time she stuck her foot in the stirrup.

  I was suddenly, irrationally consumed with guilt about her.

  Had I been kind enough?

  Before the state snatched her up, Christy had been beaten by a pimp almost daily for a year. She had arrived at Halo near comatose emotionally. A couple of times at the stables, when I pushed her too hard to get on the horse, she keeled over at my feet.

  I think I had been kind. After ten lessons, she was able to saddle up. After eighteen lessons, she sat on the horse. After twenty-five lessons, she walked the horse around the pen with me holding the reins. After thirty lessons, she rode the horse, by herself, fifty yards and back. She never worked up to a trot, but we declared victory.

  I must have been kind, because she made progress both in the stable and away from it. She hugged me goodbye on her last day, as a social worker and her new foster family waited awkwardly by a Volvo station wagon. She said that I’d changed her life. That she’d never forget me.

  Yes, surely I was kind.

  But I didn’t really understand. I didn’t have a clue how it felt to have her breath sucked away, her body and brain collaborating in a war against her soul.

  The helplessness.

  The desire to run.

  Not until now.

  After lunch, I returned to the house, opened the door to Daddy’s home office, and fired up his copier. In three hours, Jack Smith would be breathing down my neck again.

  He promised to meet me back at the ranch with his notes and files on the Marchetti case. I promised to reciprocate with the contents of the safe deposit box.

  I didn’t mention to Jack that Lyle would be joining us. Lyle wanted his own copies of the checks and newspaper articles and didn’t mind the drive over to pick them up. Neither of us thought it was a good idea to copy them in the middle of a curious newsroom. And he was eager to get a good look at Jack himself.

  As for me, I wanted to spend a little alone time with the newspaper articles before either of them arrived.

  I left my MacBook charging on top of the dryer and spread the seven yellowed articles out on Mama’s desk. The late-afternoon sun drifted in like the cone of a spotlight, doing its best to comfort me.

  My mother was a fan of riddles. Every kid in elementary school wanted an invitation to our Halloween parties because of the elaborate treasure hunts she devised.

  Blood red and dead in a bed. A clue stuck in the thorns of a withered rosebush. The only place where death comes before life. A slip of paper peeking out of the D’s of our ancient Webster’s dictionary.

  I pushed away the memories. My clever mother’s mind was gone, poof, like it had been sucked out by a vacuum cleaner, leaving a few dust bunnies and me struggling to figure out the most difficult riddle of her life.

  These newspaper articles meant something important to her, I was sure.

  I started with the murdered girl in Oklahoma. It was hard to glean much from the faded picture of Jennifer Coogan, except that she was pretty and wore a crown. The headline was brutal and to the point: OU STUDENT SHOT, RAPED, AND DUMPED IN LITTLE RIVER, with an insensitive underline: Police Say Former Miss National Teenager Runner-up Unrecognizable When Found.

  Twenty-five years ago, on the last night of her life, Jennifer Coogan was nineteen. She had just finished her freshman year at the University of Oklahoma and was waitressing back home in Idabel for the summer, living with her parents. Idabel surely was the safest place in the world for her to be that summer, except it wasn’t. After closing up after a late-night shift at a local restaurant called the Cedar House, she walked to her ’72 baby blue convertible and met the devil that her Baptist preacher ranted about on Sunday mornings.

  If I’d learned anything from Grandaddy, it was that small towns were microcosms of big cities. Evil thrived quietly behind the screen doors.

  The article was brief and didn’t get into a lot of detail. Nineteen-year-old Jennifer was raped, tortured, shot twice in the back of the head, and tossed into a local river. No suspects yet. The first inexplicable murder in Idabel in forty years. End of story.

  I shivered despite the sun’s efforts. Was Anthony Marchetti involved in this? Was that the connection? The murder could be his work, but why would a Chicago mobster care about a young girl in the boonies of Oklahoma?

  I moved on, poring over every word of every article with Mama in mind, trying to find anything that would connect her to the stories or at least something that tied them together. Most had been clipped from unremarkable newspapers from far-ranging cities in Oklahoma, South Dakota, New York. Four out of the seven contained either misspellings or grammatical errors, a sad commentary on the future of the English language and journalism in general.

  My favorite wasn’t a story but a captioned picture of an ambulance driver in Boone, North Carolina, with a little gap-toothed girl who held the large bean he’d pulled from her nostril. The EMT looked about eighteen, the kind of skinny, pale kid who sat unnoticed at the back of science class until you needed a pencil and then he’d always loan you one. His sheepish grin lit the photograph with an element of wonder that he’d achieved the kind of hero status where flashbulbs go off.

  Wait a minute. Staring at that ambulance driver, I suddenly saw a connection, one that seemed unlikely to be coincidental.

  The picture and the six other stories each appeared on an inside page, at the top right or left corner, so every one included a dateline and the name of the newspaper. With the bean hero’s photograph, the clipper had taken extra precautions to include the date and city, making an awkward dogleg with the scissors.

  Maybe the stories weren’t important. Maybe the places and dates were. I ran to the kitchen and rummaged through the junk drawer that used to hold our school s
upplies.

  Way at the back, I found what I wanted, an old but extra-large map of the United States, last used for a weekend-killing geography project assigned by Mrs. Stateler, known less affectionately in the halls of Ponder Middle as Mrs. Hate-her.

  I grabbed the newspaper articles from the desk, along with a black marker, and spread the map on the kitchen table. I attached a number, 1 through 7, to each of the articles, organizing them chronologically by date. Then I wrote the corresponding number for each town and city on the map. With an unsteady hand, I drew a crooked line on the map, connecting them.

  1. Norman, Okla. (Oct. 7, 1986)

  2. Idabel, Okla. (June 22, 1987)

  3. Austin, Tex. (August 1, 1987)

  4. Boone, N.C. (Dec. 24, 1989)

  5. Boulder, Colo. (March 25, 1990)

  6. Sioux Falls, S.D. (Sept. 7, 1992)

  7. Rochester, N.Y. (Jan. 17, 1996)

  Could this be the path of a serial killer? If so, why wasn’t every story about a murder? Was it another of Mama’s clues, the answer encrypted in the words? Or in the numbers? I stared at the map, trying different approaches, before total frustration kicked in.

  Then I piled the newspaper articles onto the map and carried the whole mess back to the utility room. With random tacks from Mama’s drawer, I stuck the map to the wall above the desk and tacked the newspaper articles near their cities of origin.

  I still couldn’t see a pattern.

  I turned to my laptop with the idea of researching the newspaper stories further, but the internet refused to connect despite the twenty-year-old technician who assured me this morning that it was up and running like a jackrabbit.

  What the hell.

  Was someone messing with that, too?

  Lyle’s T-shirt read: “My Kid’s an Honor Roll Student at CHHS.”

  Lyle didn’t have any kids at CHHS. He didn’t have any kids.

  “Jack Smith seems to check out,” he said, without preamble, as soon as I opened the door. “The switchboard operator at the magazine did direct me to a voicemail box for a Jack Smith. I’d feel better if I’d been able to talk to my friend who works at Texas Monthly, but he’s out of town.”