Playing Dead

by Julia Heaberlin

  I pointed to a gray Buick sedan speeding up the road. “Let’s wait here. It will take him one minute and twenty seconds to reach the driveway.”

  Lyle raised an eyebrow.

  “Daddy exacted a curfew. In high school, Sadie and I put a stopwatch to almost every route we traveled.” Seconds mattered. Another of Daddy’s life lessons.

  I was wrong. Jack made it in half my time, kicking up a long tsunami of dust. He slammed the car door, striding up to the house with one hand empty and the other still encased in a sling.

  “Damn GPS,” he grumbled. Then, rudely, “Who’s this?”

  “Lyle, an old friend of the family’s,” I answered. “A journalist, just like you. An editor at the Fort Worth newspaper. Where are the files you promised me?”

  Of course he wouldn’t live up to his word, I realized furiously. What was I thinking?

  “Nice to meet you, Lyle.” Jack stuck out his hand, surprising me.

  He stared at Lyle’s manic hair, the T-shirt that advertised him as a proud papa. “What’s your kid’s GPA?”

  Lyle grunted something unintelligible.

  We settled into three chairs near the fireplace in the living room. I didn’t offer the standard glass of iced tea, a requisite for any guest in the McCloud household when it was under Granny’s thumb, even those guests we harbored ill feelings toward. Love your enemy and all that. Offer extra lumps of sugar.

  “No files,” Jack said. “My source started to freak out.” Before I could protest, he added, “However, I want to share what I can. Do you remember someone named Angel Martinez?”

  I shook my head.

  “He was one of the federal marshals on the case when you were a kid. Your grandfather trained him in one of his recruiting classes and then handpicked him years ago to protect your family one summer.”

  “I don’t know an Angel Martinez,” I insisted. But apparently my grandfather did. How many other people had lied to me? His days as a federal marshal were well behind him by the time we played the horsey game on his knee.

  “Angel spent three months here at your place when you were little. It was the last time your mother accepted official witness protection.”

  “You mean Martin?” I asked, numbly. Martin, the beautiful Mexican migrant worker, the beneficiary of my first crush. The dark stranger who showed up, just like Granny promised after she read my cards, with the word deceit attached to him.

  In my mind, I was right back there at the kitchen table, wearing my best demure nightgown after a cool shower, twisting my wet hair into a long braid while Mama and Martin played chess by a dim lamp. At night, Mama always liked the lights low and the shades drawn. The radio blared tinny Tijuana brass, Spanish radio’s Saturday night special.

  Martin stayed by Mama’s side for three months. Somewhere in the back of my brain I always wondered why it didn’t make Daddy jealous, even though she called Martin mi hermano pequeño—my little brother. After all, I was jealous. Martin drove Mama everywhere—to the grocery store, to the Dallas symphony, even to church choir practice.

  “She told me she was teaching him English,” I said softly. “And he taught her Spanish. That’s why he didn’t work as much in the fields.”

  “Angel was born in America. He has a criminal justice degree from Berkeley. He wrote one of the old reports my source gave me. I’m trying to reach him. Where’s the stuff from the bank?”

  “You aren’t exactly living up to your part of the bargain. Is this all you have for me?”

  “What do you want to hear? I don’t know why your mother needed the services of WITSEC. I’m sorry. It’s completely blacked out in the documents.”

  I stared at him, exasperated. Angry.

  “Give him the contents of the box,” Lyle said calmly.

  “I was beginning to think you were some kind of mute,” Jack said to Lyle, “but it turns out you’re a very smart guy.”

  “Mute does not mean you are stupid,” I spat at him, seething. “Children can go mute at a young age after a trauma. Sometimes for life. But they are still in there. You can reach them.”

  Lyle whispered in my ear, “Trust me. Give him the stuff.”

  I stalked to Daddy’s office and retrieved the manila envelope with Jack’s name on it. I tossed it at him like a Frisbee despite his sling, hoping for at least a paper cut.

  Jack caught it easily. I had to comfort myself that he still had a small purple spot under his left eye from the pacifier bandit.

  “This is it?” he asked, feeling the envelope. “All of it?”

  “Yes.”

  He pulled out the contents and laid them in his lap, disappointed. “Newspaper articles. Weird. And checks. From the Shur Foundation. That’s an old sham company the government set up to provide monthly allowances to witnesses. This kind of financial aid usually ends after two to five years.”

  “In that case, there would be no reason to keep the checks,” I said. “Especially since she didn’t cash them.”

  “Maybe it was a very mundane reason. My uncle stored ten boxes of canceled checks in the attic in case we were ever audited. People don’t trust the government.”

  This wasn’t going anywhere helpful.

  “Would you guys like a drink?” I moved toward the kitchen, both of them trailing after me. I popped open the refrigerator, sticking my head inside.

  I heard Jack mutter, “What the hell is this?” and I banged my head on the top shelf in my hurry to get out.

  Jack and Lyle had halted by the door to the laundry room, mesmerized by my map display. “I’m plotting my next vacation,” I said sarcastically, thrusting two bottles of water at them.

  My phone, abandoned during my research frenzy, suddenly vibrated impatiently on Mama’s desk, rattling the smiling Hummel girl. I brushed past Jack and Lyle to grab it.

  “I’m going to the bathroom,” I said, letting it buzz away in my hand. “Please don’t follow me.”

  I strode out of the room and down the far hall, through Mama and Daddy’s room and into the master bath, which smelled like the cloying “vanillaroma” air freshener the maids had plugged into the wall. Unnatural. Mama would have hated it. I snapped the lid of the toilet shut and plopped on it. The call had already gone to voicemail. Actually, I had two voicemails. I punched in my code.

  “How ya doin’, honey?” The drawl was unmistakably Hudson. “My job is taking me a little longer than I expected, but you can reach me at this number anytime, even in the middle of the night. I hear from my friend Rafael that Marchetti wasn’t too forthcoming in your little session. But I’m not sure that’s why you went. I’ll check back in tomorrow. Remember, night or day. Program this number into your speed-dial. You hear me? Now.”

  The phone automatically rolled into the other voicemail, a female voice chirping away, and I hastily turned the phone around and stuck it up to my ear.

  “… ummmm, you don’t know me but I’m Charla Polaski?” She squeaked it out, a question. “I’m in prison out here in Odessa. I’m innocent, though. I like people to know that right off. I’m accused of shooting my asshole of a husband, but if I would have done it, I’d have used that knife he used to gut his deer and I would have gone real, real slow, startin’ with that ugly callus on his big toe that bugged the hell out of me during sex. You could have named that thing. Long story short …”

  Then nothing. Empty air. She’d been cut off.

  The phone buzzed again. Another call coming through.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Whoa, I didn’t expect you to answer.”

  Her voice was unmistakable. It had the squeaky, grating quality of a seven-year-old’s first attempts to play the violin. Or a duck with a Texas twang.

  “Charla?”

  “That’s creepy. How do you know who I am?”

  “You just left a voicemail,” I said impatiently.

  “Oh, you got that. Sorry I hung up, but Bitchy Becky was walking by and I couldn’t risk her overhearing. She’s in the cell
two over from mine and she’d rat out anybody for a bag of Skittles.”

  “I think you have the wrong number—”

  “Nope, I don’t think so. He wrote the number right here on my hand in impermable ink. You’re Tommie, right?”

  Impermeable, I thought, but she didn’t wait for me to answer.

  “I’m gonna take that as a yes. Is anybody with you?”

  “Yes. I mean, no, not right with me, I’m in the bathroom.”

  “Oh. I haven’t had a private poo for two years. I’d die for one. I’ll be quick. It’s probably best if you just answer yes or no anyway, in case someone is listening. They were real picky about you and me not telling anybody.”

  Her voice started to quiver. “This badass guard from the G Unit came into my cell last night. He told me I had to use my one phone call today to give you a message from a new prisoner here. He said it would be very bad if I didn’t.”

  “This is insane,” I muttered, my finger poised over the button that would end the call.

  “Your father,” Charla said. “Your father says to tell you to trust no one. And that he is protecting you. Who is your damn father? And why the hell did I get picked to call you?”

  A pause, an “Oops,” and a click.

  “Charla? Charla??”

  The line was dead.

  CHAPTER 15

  By the time I finished wiping a cold washcloth over my face for the third time, Lyle was rapping on the door to the bathroom.

  “Tommie? Are you OK? I’m sorry. This is a little embarrassing. I’m worried. It’s been twenty minutes.”

  I opened the door and pasted on a fake smile.

  What does “trust no one” mean, exactly, Mr. Marchetti?

  Does that include Lyle? Hudson?

  “Sure,” I answered, flipping the wet cloth into the sink. “I’m good. Where’s Jack?”

  “He took off. To do a little research.”

  “That’s just great,” I said dully. “What do you think of him?”

  “He doesn’t operate like any reporter I’ve ever met.”

  “But you trusted him with Mama’s stuff.”

  “Can’t hurt. Why antagonize him? Texas Monthly has an impeccable reputation. At this point, we just want answers, right? The more help, the better.”

  I had to admit that Jack had been on his best behavior.

  We moved down the hall, past the stern eyes of a black-and-white framed collection of ancestors. Daddy said they never smiled for pictures back then because it was considered too vain. Wonder what they’d think about “reality TV star” as a legitimate job title on a résumé and tweets like, “Hey gang! Let’s synchrofart at 20:00!”

  “I feel like I’m getting nowhere,” I said. “That it’s hopeless.”

  Lyle hesitated. He pulled a folded wad of paper out of his back pocket.

  “I found the dead girl with your Social Security number. These are a few printouts. I’m trying to get your family’s FBI files … another way. And we’re working on tracking the anonymous email.” He hesitated. “At some point, we should consider talking to the FBI ourselves.”

  I nodded, wondering who Lyle’s “we” included. Reporters suspected him of superior hacking abilities, although I suspected that Lyle was too smart for that. He just knew superior hackers.

  “You don’t need to go over this right now,” he told me. “Or at all. Just know that my posse is on the case, too.”

  “Do you know who Charla Polaski is?”

  “Sure. A seventy-two-point headline. She found her husband naked and soaped up with their daughter’s gym coach, who happened to be the wife of a city councilman. Shots were fired to their hearts and genitals. A very messy scene in the middle-school shower. The story was a publisher’s wet dream.”

  “Was she for sure guilty?”

  “A slam dunk for the prosecutor. The jury deliberated twenty minutes. Polaski claimed she was set up to the bitter end. Why are you interested in this?”

  “Just something I … heard.” I didn’t want to get into Charla’s bizarre phone call.

  “I’ve got to get back to work and rip up the front page. The Dallas Cowboys’ star receiver broke his ankle in a team workout. It’s bumping Afghanistan off the front page. But I hate to leave you alone. I take it you haven’t hired protection yet.”

  “Working on that,” I said.

  As we reached the door, I could tell he was struggling with the decision about whether to hug me goodbye. I threw my arms around him first.

  “Somewhere up there, Daddy is very grateful,” I said quietly, even though I knew Lyle was a staunch agnostic.

  As soon as he left, I gave Sadie a call. Mama wasn’t speaking at all, she reported, still on IV fluids. The hospital wanted to keep her a few days for observation. Most important, she and Maddie were now tucked into a Worthington suite. I grabbed a Dr Pepper out of the fridge and headed to the porch swing with the four printouts from Lyle.

  He’d found the girl with my numerical identity, Susan Bridget Adams, by simply paying a fee to a national genealogy website and browsing the Social Security Death Master File.

  I had heard of the Social Security Administration index. Because of a cousin who was fanatically into that sort of thing, I knew it was widely used by genealogists. What I didn’t know was that it provided the Social Security number and date of birth and death for about sixty million people, plus the zip code of their last known address.

  It was disturbing that the girl who shared my Social Security number was so easy to unearth. It certainly didn’t bolster my confidence in WITSEC, but then again, thirty-two years ago when I was born, who could have imagined this stuff would be right at your fingertips?

  The last printout, a single page, was different. No website marking, no hint at all of where it came from. The page listed people named Adams as if it had been ripped out of a phone book, except that instead of addresses and phone numbers, it gave their Social Security number, date of death, and a file number with an asterisk. The asterisk was explained at the bottom of the page. Police case files. Suspicious deaths? I wondered. Had this info been hacked out of a government file?

  Susan Bridget Adams, born in 1977, was highlighted in yellow marker right beside her police case file number. She died a three-year-old toddler. It was shocking to see the nine-digit number I’d recited automatically for years at doctors’ offices and banks beside the name of a little girl on an official death list, to know that her premature dying somehow brought me protection.

  After swallowing the last drop of Dr Pepper, I headed back inside to my computer, praying the wireless internet gods were shining on me. And they were. I connected immediately and typed the zip code of Susan Adams’s last known address into the search engine. The zip code matched someplace on the south side of Chicago. More links to the Windy City.

  Then I searched “Adams and genealogy.” With such a common name, I didn’t expect much but was rewarded twenty minutes later at a website ranked fourteen on Google’s list. A fuzzy black-and-white photograph of an angry-faced man named Uncle Eldon welcomed me to his surprisingly sophisticated page for the Adams Family.

  I clicked “family tree” and almost immediately found “Susie” Bridget Adams and the single word description of her death: fall.

  Her father still lived in the same Chicago zip code, possibly in the same home; her mother died in the late 1990s of cancer. It consoled me to see that she gave birth to five other children after Susie, all still living when the site was updated two months ago.

  This page shared a link to “Southlawn Cemetery Records.” Once there, I typed in Susie’s name, all the while thanking Uncle Eldon for his overzealous details.

  In seconds, the screen displayed a crude hand-drawn map, studded with coffin-shaped rectangles. I don’t know why it bothered me so much. I’d seen a similar computer-generated map two days before we buried Daddy. In little Susie’s case, someone scanned in the original pencil rendering in the old family plot where she
rested.

  Each rectangle bore a number. The numbers were assigned to ten names, all Adamses, all listed in old-fashioned, respectful calligraphy at the bottom of the page. It wasn’t hard to find little Susie’s coffin, a rectangle half the size of the others, crammed at an angle in the corner.

  Grave number 426—Susie’s grave—wasn’t expected. Grave diggers had made room.

  She had been reduced to another number, a piece of geometry on a page. I hit the “print” button and listened to Daddy’s machine down the hall clear its throat.

  Frustration gnawed at me, mostly because I knew that I was only working on the periphery of my own story. Susie was a single, sad note that led to a Chicago gravesite, more proof of my family’s secrets, but little else.

  An hour later, I lay on the couch wrapped in my old fluffy Peter Rabbit comforter. I was sailing on a highway with no speed limit after tossing five milligrams of Xanax from Daddy’s bottle down my throat and chasing it with a whiskey. The Rangers/Yankees game hummed pleasantly on the 42-inch TV nestled in the corner.

  I closed my eyes and pictured my little place at Halo Ranch. The Tahitian beach scene that hung over the fireplace, the bright Mexican rug that covered the beat-up pine floor, a friend’s photograph in the tiny kitchen of a heart-patterned quilt blowing on a clothesline in a West Texas landscape as bare as the moon. I’d have to arrange to move all of it back home. And harder, I had to break the news to colleagues and kids at Halo that I wouldn’t be coming back.

  I dozed and when I opened my eyes again, a large shape was slouched in Daddy’s chair.

  And he had something gripped in his hand.

  “You had me worried there for a second,” Jack Smith told me. “I knocked. Called your name a couple of times.”

  His eyes lit on the prescription bottle on the coffee table and the empty glass. “How much did you take?”

  “Not enough to kill me.” I tried to claw my way out of the fog. How did he get in? The object in his hand appeared to be a small vat of blood.