Under the Beetle's Cellar

by Mary Willis Walker

  “When Agent Conroy gets here, we’ll want to record the two of you reading your parts into your little recorder.”

  He took his hands off her back, picked up a file folder and opened it. “Her name—the mother—is Cynthia Jenkins. She lives in Houston, on Terrace West in the Memorial area. She’s a third-grade teacher, a widow with no kids. She has spent her life mourning the infant child she abandoned. The interview took place last night, around eight, at a restaurant near Hobby Airport. You flew in to talk to her.” He handed her the folder. “We’ve got a driver’s license and a passport for her right here. The photo on them is Loraine Conroy’s.”

  Molly picked up the passport and opened it. The woman in the photo had gray eyes with thick, dark eyebrows, short brown hair going gray, a straight nose, wide mouth, and sallow skin.

  “What’s her story?” Molly asked.

  “Apparently she’s legendary. The best marksman in agency history. She once shot two possibles in a morning.”

  “What’s a possible?”

  “I guess it’s like shooting off a gnat’s eyelash; it’s theoretically possible, but rarely done, and never twice in a row. Conroy’s a former nun, quit the Church and joined the agency in ’72, when they started taking women. Speaks three languages, has been everywhere in the world—foreign counterintelligence, all kinds of undercover assignments. Now teaches at Quantico. She’s done this sort of thing before, although it never gets any press—very hush-hush. A real stand-up guy, they all say.”

  Molly looked at the photo again.

  “Can I get you anything to prime the creative process?” Grady asked.

  “I lie better with a Coors Light on the desk.”

  “It shall be yours.”

  Molly raised her hands to the keyboard and started to type:

  M.C.: I have something very difficult and very urgent to talk to you about, Mrs. Jenkins. I believe in a woman’s right to privacy about matters of reproduction, but we have some extraordinary circumstances here. It has to do with a baby boy who was abandoned in the summer of 1962.

  C.J.: Oh, my God. My God.

  M.C.: Mrs. Jenkins, I hate to cause you distress, but I have to ask if you are the mother of that child.

  C.J. (with a sob): What happened to him? I have wondered about him every day of my life.

  M.C.: I’ll tell you about him, Mrs. Jenkins, but first would you tell me the date and some of the circumstances surrounding the birth? So I can verify it.

  Grady was reading over her shoulder. “Don’t you think C.J. should stonewall a little? She collapses awfully quick.”

  Molly took her hands off the keyboard. “You promised me a beer, Grady. Go fetch it. You can critique when I’m finished.”

  “Okay, but don’t forget to include—”

  “Grady!”

  The scene flowed out of her fingertips into the keyboard and surfaced as a line of words moving across the screen. Molly moved her lips, saying the words as she typed them. In the scene, the tough but empathic journalist pushes for all the details. The miserable and tender repentant mother tells about the birth, the panic, the need for secrecy, the two bewildered and terrified young girls not knowing what to do, the beer cooler, the robe, the creek—vivid details only the mother could know.

  When the journalist is satisfied that this is the woman she seeks, she tells her about Samuel Mordecai’s adoption, his searching for his real, birth mother.

  She finished the scene like this:

  C.J.: Do you think he might talk to me? You say he searched. That must mean he wants to find me. If the world is coming to an end I want to see him, speak with him first. I want to tell him what happened, how I’ve felt. I want to hear about him, everything about him. Do you think he might talk to me?

  M.C.: I don’t know.

  C.J.: I’m not afraid. I’d like to go there. As long as I could speak to him privately, without lots of other people around. I need to talk to my son. You understand?

  M.C.: Yes. What I’ll do is give all this to the negotiators. They’ll have to decide what to do about it. Thanks for talking to me, Mrs. Jenkins. I need to catch my plane in a half hour. Here’s my card.

  Molly glanced at her watch. Eleven. She’d done it in a half hour. This scene was so much more satisfying than the real one in San Antonio. It had the right emotion and it came to closure. It felt wonderful to channel her lying urges into something constructive. You could make things turn out the way you wanted, make people feel the way you thought they ought to feel. You could improve on life.

  She told the computer to print and stood up to stretch.

  By the time Pat Lattimore finally returned from the airport, Molly and Grady had gone over Molly’s script, refined it, and printed out three copies. To Molly’s delight, Andrew Stein had declared it ready for opening night.

  Lattimore, looking even more exhausted than usual, introduced them all to Agent Loraine (Rain) Conroy, a tall, lanky, handsome woman. She wore gray slacks, low heels, and a blue blazer. A heavy-looking canvas duffel hung from one shoulder. Conroy stowed the duffel carefully under a table and gave Jules Borthwick a long hug. Then she stood back and regarded him with a grin. “I know you’ve got a show opening, sweetie, but when they asked me to do this, I said only if you’d do my body. You’re the best, and for this we need perfection.”

  “We need to start right away on the body cast, Rain,” Jules told her. “It will take me all bloody night to do it. I’ve got the alginate ready in the kitchen.” He opened his arms wide. “Baby, is your body ready for me?”

  “Wide open,” she said.

  “I need the weapons now. You brought your own?”

  “Of course,” the agent said, pointing to her bulky duffel. “The reason the plane was delayed. I don’t check, ever, and the security guys were new and didn’t know the procedure.”

  They went right to work on recording the scene Molly had written. Rain Conroy read it over to herself once, and when they started the tape turning, she gave a perfect, tear-jerking performance. Molly was astonished; the woman should be on Broadway. She brought the words on the page to throbbing life. She could even cry on cue. To simulate the restaurant, Grady and Andrew clattered some plates in the background and turned a radio on low.

  By the time Molly and Grady left at 1 A.M., they had assembled a folder containing the tape, the adoption file, the police report, Molly’s genuine notes, plus some fabricated ones, and the Pi Alpha Omega directory—a complete record of the successful search for Donnie Ray Grimes’s mother.

  They drove home in Grady’s unmarked car, with the dog hanging out the window, sucking in the smells of the spring night.

  As they passed the entrance to the Hearth Jezreelite compound, Molly leaned her head back and closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look at it. She told Grady once again about the encounter in the garage, about Annette Grimes being lifted screaming into the van. “Grady, she had a new baby and her face was like a flower.”

  “I know. And what happened to her was the worst possible way to go. If you have the slightest reservation about your contribution to the plan to take Mordecai out, shake it off.” He kept his eyes on the road. “Molly, I’m grateful you escaped it. I don’t think I could bear it if something happened to you. How are you feeling?”

  “Exhausted, but I’ve never felt more alive, more … whatever the opposite of a blood statue is.”

  “Escaping death is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Grady put his hand on her leg. “You know that.”

  She moved closer to him, hoping the dog wouldn’t notice. “Yes, but don’t you feel it’s inappropriate somehow? A betrayal?”

  “Oh, no. I’ve always felt it honors the dead.” His light touch progressed slowly up her thigh.

  “Mmmm, I like that. We’ll go home and honor the dead.”

  “Home—that sounds good. Have you thought any more about my lease problem?”

  “No.” After a silence, she added, “Yes. I have thought about it. I’m worried. I
t attracts me and repels me at the same time. Grady, I’ve gone feral. Like an animal who would love the warmth and affection that comes from being a house pet but can’t give up its bad habits. I’m not housebroken anymore. I eat when I feel like it. I read all night when I want to. I never cook. I still do vigils. I don’t hang up my clothes. I keep some bad company. I follow my obsessions. I work all the time—it’s what I love.”

  “Ditto, ditto, ditto,” Grady said. “We’re a match made in heaven.”

  “Maybe, but I live like a man, and in my experience, that works better for men than women. There is something about domestic life that, over time, makes women feel guilty and stressed when there’s no toilet paper.”

  “How about a prenuptial agreement whereby I pledge never to ask ‘Where’s the toilet paper?’ ”

  Molly laughed. She snuggled into his side and snaked her arm around his neck.

  A menacing growl emanated from the back seat.

  She pulled her arm back. “Let’s do this, Grady. Let’s hold off on a decision, see if the world ends on Friday. I filed for an extension on my taxes. I don’t want to waste the time and agony if it’s not necessary.”

  “Are you equating my moving in with paying taxes?”

  “Oh, no. More like an audit where all your vices and faults and sloppy record keeping are laid bare.”

  “Molly, Molly,” he said, sliding his hand between her legs, “the only thing I want to lay bare is your body, and the sooner, the better.”

  She glanced in the back to see if the dog was sleeping. “That is fine by me,” she whispered.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  “They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of water; and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.”

  REVELATION 7:16–17

  It had been the hardest night.

  After the kids all understood that Josh had died, Sandra had suggested some singing, but the songs she tried to start were church songs that none of the others knew, so it fizzled out. Walter couldn’t think of any songs either, so he suggested each of them talk about Josh, tell a memory that they would like to keep alive. So they took turns. Each of them told something. Hector told a school memory that made them laugh and cry at the same time. He imitated Josh trying to get out of PE, which he hated, by telling the teacher that he felt his heart had been programmed for only a certain number of beats and he didn’t want to waste them on playing touch football because he didn’t see the point of it. Walter told about Josh saying that he’d discovered one day, while Samuel Mordecai was preaching, that the Book of Revelation would make a great Saturday-morning TV cartoon—the Revelation Roundup, Josh called it. After that, Josh had entertained himself during the longer sermons by imagining Mordecai as one of the characters—Mr. Preachy Prophet. When they were all finished, Conrad had closed with a prayer. Walter thought it was as good a memorial service as he’d ever attended.

  Then he had carried Josh out of the bus into the pit and settled him there, intending to go back to spend the night with the living children who needed him. But he couldn’t do it. His legs would not let him leave. It defied all common sense, but he needed to stay with Josh, keep him company. So he sat down on the dirt and took Josh’s head into his lap so it wouldn’t be resting on the damp earth. He leaned back against the crumbly side of the hole and closed his eyes. It reminded him of the first night he had sat with Jake in the field hospital, after Jake’s legs had been amputated. It had felt then, and it felt now, that morning could never come because he couldn’t imagine life just going on about its business after so cataclysmic an event.

  He dozed, off and on.

  During the night, the kids kept waking up, crying and calling out. They would get up and pad out to the pit to see if it was really true or just a bad dream. Around 3 A.M. Philip came out and sat down close to Walter. He rested a hand on Josh’s head. “I never saw anyone dead before,” he said. “Did you?”

  “Yes. I was a soldier in Vietnam. When I was ten years older than you are now. I saw lots of people dead.”

  “Did you kill people?”

  “Yes, I did. I thought it was my job to do that. I was trying to stay alive.”

  “Where do you think Josh is now?”

  “I just don’t know about heaven, Philip. I believe Josh is alive in our memories. In our hearts. In his family’s memories. He’s here whenever one of us is thinking about him. Or like now, when we’re talking about him.”

  They sat silent for a while.

  Walter said, “Philip, I feel really bad about something and I want to apologize to you.”

  Philip looked up at him.

  Walter slid his arm around the boy. “I think you couldn’t talk because you thought I didn’t want you to tell the truth. And you were right. I didn’t want anyone to talk about why we’re down here. I didn’t want you kids to talk about it and I didn’t know how to. I guess I was afraid we’d all panic and wouldn’t be able to take it.”

  “What do you think now?”

  Walter looked down at Josh. “I think we can take anything that comes our way,” he answered softly. “And it’s better to talk about it, so you say anything you need to, anything that is true. You can keep me honest.”

  Philip leaned against him and let his fingers play with Josh’s lank blond hair. “What will happen to him?”

  “His body? I don’t know. I suppose when Martin comes down in the morning we’ll figure it out.”

  “He’s not scary.”

  “Josh? No, he’s not scary at all.”

  Philip’s eyelids were lowering. “I know that Jacksonville’s going to get away,” he said in a drowsy voice.

  “How do you know that?”

  “He’s the good guy. And in stories the good guys get away.”

  “But in real life, it doesn’t always happen that way.”

  “I know,” Philip said, “but Jacksonville’s a story.”

  “Yeah.”

  When Martin dropped down into the pit in the morning and saw Walter sitting with the dead boy across his lap, he sucked his breath in, but that was all. No expression of grief or regret or even annoyance crossed his face. He called for help and two men in fatigues appeared with a paint-splattered plastic tarp.

  Walter took it from them and wrapped the small body. They tried to take over then, but Walter calmly asked them to go above and let him hand the boy up to them. They pulled themselves up the hole and reached down. Walter lifted the body and let them pull it up. Even as dead weight, Josh was a lot lighter than he was forty-nine days ago when Walter had lifted him down and staggered under the weight. Now he was leaving. Walter watched dry-eyed as Josh disappeared and the wooden slab slid into place.

  He knew one thing now for sure: He would not stand here and watch another one of these children leave dead. Whatever horrors might be ahead, that was one he would not allow to happen again.

  It had taken Walter a few weeks to recognize the advantage of having the bus seats so easy to unbolt. The Jezreelites must have started to take all the seats out as they had done with the back ten rows, and then changed their minds. The bolts had been loosened, so that even the kids could unscrew them with bare fingers. In the third week, he’d started thinking about using the seats to barricade themselves in an emergency.

  The seats were heavy and awkward to move, but with Walter and several kids lifting together they could do it. They’d picked their times carefully. When they were pretty confident neither Martin nor Mordecai would come down, they had done some fast experimenting.

  One seat on end could be braced in the doorway to block it. When they dragged another seat behind it, and wedged that one against the driver’s seat, it made a formidable barrier that would prevent anyone from getting inside the bus for a long time. And it was solid enough to prevent someone from shooting at targ
ets inside the bus. The Jezreelites could fire through it, but they couldn’t get the necessary angle to hit people in back.

  To make another barrier, in the back of the bus, they had figured out how to build on top of the last seat in each row. They unbolted one seat and lifted it on top of the back of a fixed one, and tied it in place. Then they unbolted another seat and tied it to the fixed seat, to make the structure twice as high and twice as thick as one seat alone. Walter thought bullets would not make it through. It wouldn’t save them indefinitely, but it might buy them time, give them ten minutes of protection, which could be critical in an assault. All they had to do was survive until the federal agents could find them. The trick would be getting the barriers in place quickly when the action started.

  So they’d worked out the teams and had held regular practices. Hector was the captain of the Bong Tongs, who would take shelter on the right side of the bus behind the barricade. Kim was the captain of the Jacksonville Six, who would take shelter on the left. When Brandon pointed out to Kim that, with Josh dead, they were now really the Jacksonville Five, Kim punched him—the only physically aggressive act Walter had seen her make. She said they were still the Jacksonville Six and always would be.

  Walter had assigned team members to try to balance physical strength and speed. Two from each team were stackers, whose job was to unbolt a seat and, with Walter’s help, stack it on one of the fixed back seats. Two others were tyers, who would secure the two seats together with belts and friendship bracelets and sweaters and jackets.

  One from each team, Sue Ellen and Conrad, were to help Walter unbolt seat number one and tip it on end in the doorway. Hector and Walter would then brace it with seat number two.