Under the Beetle's Cellar

by Mary Willis Walker

  He nodded toward the book in her lap. “That.”

  Molly ran her fingers over the stained and wrinkled cover. “So what did you and Lattimore decide the Granny Duc message meant?” she asked.

  “Like we first thought—that he’s underground and he’s going to hunker down and wait till it’s safe to come up. But I think there’s another message there: He’ll kill if he has to.”

  Molly must have looked stricken.

  “Here,” Jake said, “you look like a woman in need of a mantra. Try this with me: ‘The atmosphere of Titan is like the atmosphere outside the back door of an Earthling bakery on a spring morning.’ ”

  Molly said it along with him a few times and by the end she was laughing.

  “What’s your bakery?” Jake asked.

  She used her sleeve to wipe her wet face. “The Upper Crust, on Burnet Road. Cinnamon rolls.”

  CHAPTER

  EIGHTEEN

  “We shake our heads in amazement over people falling prey to communal cults like the Hearth Jezreelites. They walk away from their families and their middle-class lives, sign over their worldly goods to the cult, and submit themselves to the harsh authority of a despot who dictates every detail of their existence. Why, we wonder, would anyone subject himself to that abuse? Cult experts say that those of us who express the strongest aversion are ripest for the picking.”

  MOLLY CATES, “TEXAS CULT CULTURE,”

  LONE STAR MONTHLY, DECEMBER 1993

  After she had settled Officer Valdez in front of the house, Molly took a very hot bath and washed her hair. It was painful because the slightest pull on her hair made the cut at her temple sting. Getting out of the tub, she noticed a purple bruise on her hip. It must have happened when she’d been knocked down on the garage floor. As soon as she saw it, it started to hurt.

  She wrapped a towel around her wet hair and went downstairs in her terry-cloth robe. She didn’t open the mail. She didn’t survey the contents of the refrigerator. She didn’t look at the newspapers. She didn’t check her fax. She didn’t even listen to the messages on her phone machine.

  Instead she did something she’d been thinking about all day. She rummaged through the stacks on the kitchen counter and found the book Theodora Shea had given her to pass on to Walter Demming—The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ever since Theodora had read that poem over the phone yesterday, it had been calling out to her.

  She found it—poem 949—and read it through several times, first silently, then aloud.

  It could have been written for her.

  It spoke directly to her lifelong preoccupation with the dead. As a child, she’d had recurring nightmares about people she loved being buried in the black, cold earth. It seemed like the ultimate banishment, exile to a dark realm, under the light, under the grass, under the dirt. ‘Under the beetle’s cellar’—that’s just the way she had always seen it—a frightening, lonely, primitive place, cold and distant, at the bottom of the food chain. To consign the bodies of people you loved to the beetle’s cellar was hideous.

  Her mother, who had died when Molly was nine, was buried under brown dirt in a small family cemetery east of Lubbock, and her father, who had been murdered when Molly was sixteen, was buried under the rich black earth near Lake Travis. After each of them was buried, Molly felt they were impossibly far away, beyond conjecture, beyond light. So far that the longest arm in the world couldn’t reach out to them, so far sunlight could never warm them.

  But it was the last two lines of the poem that had really caught her interest:

  Oh for a Disc to the Distance

  Between Ourselves and the Dead!

  She had no idea what Emily Dickinson meant by a Disc to the Distance, but what she pictured was a flat Earth with the dead at the dark, far side, in the shadow of the Moon. If Molly could just turn it, or tip it, or if she could change her position slightly, she could bring them closer into view. That was what her vigils were about, she thought now—trying to find a disc to the distance between herself and her dead.

  Each time she stared into the dark window, she was trying to bring the dead into focus, rotate them closer, communicate with them. There was something about this Apocalypse business that seemed to accelerate the process. It was useful to have a constant reminder that one tilt of the disc we live on will send us flying into eternity.

  Tonight there was a growing crowd to commune with. She wanted to tell Annette Grimes how valiant she’d been in risking her life for the hostage children. She wanted to commend Gerald Asquith for his premonition about being blown toward God. She wanted to ask Geronimo Joe Barbour if he really had died outside the bakery door in Memphis with the scent of cherry pie in his nostrils. She wanted to tell Granny Duc that she understood how obsession and the desire for revenge could make you do horrible things. She wanted to sing a lullaby to young Josh Benderson, and tell him about places where the air was so sweet and easy you could take it in through your pores. And she wanted to tell Vernon Cates that he was present still, every time she used his old Webster’s dictionary, every time she started up her Chevy truck.

  She turned off all the lights. Vigils came easier in the dark. She settled into the wing chair and stared at the huge black picture window. Slowly she began to sink into the darkness beyond the glass.

  She was called back up by the sound of nails clicking against the wood floor. The faint jingle of dog tags and the swish of a tail announced Copper’s presence. He stood in front of her, a dark shape with two glowing eyes—a wild beast who’d wandered in toward the campfire. Molly recalled the snarling demon he’d become that morning in the garage. If he got it into his demented head to attack, she was lost.

  The dog rested his head on her bare knee. His breath was hot on her leg. His head was heavy, as though the entire weight of the dog were behind it. She sat still, feeling the solidity of his head and the warm wetness of his jowls. After a few minutes she felt saliva slowly pool and dribble down her knee.

  Molly rested her hand on his head. “Of course. You have your own dead to sit for, don’t you? It’s been only a few months and you’re still waiting for him to come home.” Molly looked down at the dark shape. “Join me. We’ll make a night of it.”

  The dog turned around in place a few times, then thumped down at her feet.

  Molly didn’t know if it had been hours or just minutes until the phone rang. She ran to catch it before the machine took over.

  “Molly, thank God. Patrick Lattimore here.”

  Her breath caught. “What’s going on? Did he call?”

  “Yes. But we’ve got a major snafu, and it has to do with you. Could you come out here right now?”

  “Why? What is it?”

  “I’d rather wait until you get here to discuss it.”

  “It will take me a few minutes to get dressed.”

  “Molly, would you wear a skirt and a T-shirt, something that fits pretty close to the body? Nothing baggy. And flat shoes.” There was a jumbled conversation at his end of the speakerphone. His voice came back. “Oh, yeah, and panty hose.”

  “Why?”

  “We can talk about it when you get here. Bring the dragon robe, too, please, and let me talk to your officer. What’s his name?”

  “Valdez. David Valdez. He’s outside. I’ll call him.”

  Molly beckoned the officer inside to the phone and ran upstairs to get dressed. This was so crazy, to go running out there to Jezreel. But she’d let herself get sucked up in it. It was too late to say no. She pulled on a short, straight denim skirt. She could think of only one reason for the dress code—to show someone she had nothing concealed. This was dangerous, out of her area. She was no Rain Conroy. She grabbed a white T-shirt from the pile of clean laundry. Her hands were shaking. She should not be doing this. She was a writer, an observer. Her job was to chronicle, not get involved. But how could she possibly turn her back on this?

  She pictured Thelma Bassett and her pink-haired daughter who was having difficult
y with long division. She thought about Walter Demming, who had taken a vow of noninvolvement. She thought about the little boy with the cowlicks—Bucky DeCarlo—she’d learned his name in spite of her efforts not to. She didn’t want all those names added to her vigil list.

  That list was already too long, and Samuel Mordecai was adding to it daily. She thought about Josh dying with no medical care and no family to comfort him, the look of terror on Annette’s face as she was wrested into the open van. She thought of Gerald Asquith and what his last minutes must have been like. She pulled the T-shirt over her head and looked in the mirror. Those were compelling reasons to get involved, but they were not the reason she was going out there, the reason she would end up doing whatever they asked her to do. It was something else. She didn’t know what to call it, but it seemed to lie somewhere between obsession and acquiescing to fate.

  She slipped her feet into black loafers, then stuffed a pair of panty hose in her bag.

  Downstairs, she switched on the kitchen light and added the book of poems to the jumble in her bag. She picked up the box Dorothy Huff had given her and looked around. Copper was still lying in the dark living room, faithful to the vigil. Maybe after all these years she had found a partner as devoted to his dead as she was to hers.

  Valdez greeted her with his usual lack of expression. They sped up I-35 at eighty miles per hour with the lights whirling. No siren.

  When they turned off the Interstate, he turned off the light bar. A quarter mile before the compound entrance, they came to a new roadblock that was diverting traffic—a sign that things were on the move. The policeman manning it had their names and descriptions in his book and waved them through. As they passed the Hearth Jezreelite compound, Molly took a good look. The huge portable searchlights outside the front gates and all around the perimeter flooded the compound with a stark white light, bright as a baseball stadium. In the slit windows at the top of the stone towers, she thought she could make out gun muzzles. The covered windows of the boxy main building showed only faint light inside. Early on, the negotiators had threatened to cut off electricity to the compound, and Samuel Mordecai had replied they could do that, but if they did, he would send them a child’s finger each day they kept it off. The electricity had stayed on.

  All around the complex, for hundreds of yards in all directions, the ground was flat and barren. There was no place to take cover. How would the tactical force make its approach? Molly wondered. Maybe they’d crash through the fence in tanks or personnel carriers. It was ten-thirty. They must be getting ready to move in, but there was no indication of it. The only sign of life was the usual DPS and FBI contingent standing guard. And the press, of course. On the outer circle, they sat in groups outside their vans and trailers drinking and talking. Her colleagues of the Fourth Estate keeping their own sort of vigil, waiting for disaster.

  A mile down the road, there were more cars than usual parked in front of the old farmhouse. All lights were blazing.

  The communications room was packed with people, and it was hot, vibrating with tension. Grady Traynor leaned against the wall with his arms crossed tight over his chest, glowering at the activity. Molly knew that body language well; it meant he was totally hostile to something going on. She thought she could anticipate the issue.

  Curtis was working at the computer. Holihan and Stein stood in front of the diagram of the compound, talking to two burly men dressed in full night-assault gear—black jumpsuits, black balaclavas and ballistic vests, holsters worn low on their thighs, gas masks hanging around their necks. Stein kept his left index finger on the barn and his right one on the main building just to the left of the front door. Molly’s stomach dipped. They were really going to do it. She stopped to glance at the photographs of the children whose names she had tried not to learn. Someone had updated the label under Josh Benderson’s photo. Under his name and age was typed: “Deceased.”

  Pat Lattimore was watching Rain Conroy, who stood in the middle of the room. She was naked except for a pair of black bikini briefs. Molly was transfixed by a body that gave only a grudging nod to her sex. Small breasts and the slightest suggestion of flare at the hip marked her as female. But the rest of her seemed beyond gender. Broad shoulders and a flat belly that had never even thought about pregnancy. Long legs with pronounced muscle definition down the thigh—runner’s legs. Her arms were long and muscled, ropy with veins—the arms of a woman who could do push-ups all day.

  She looked less naked than most people would in such a setting, maybe because her skin was olive-colored, maybe because she seemed to have a total lack of self-consciousness.

  Jules Borthwick was squatting next to her holding a bizarre object that looked like a vest or a teddy made out of her own skin, but several sizes too big.

  Lattimore was saying, “The bulk isn’t a problem. It’s an asset. Just look around you at the mall, Jules. Don’t you ever go to the mall? Most women of this age are broad as barns. It’s expected. This is a woman with a thirty-three-year-old son. She’s had a hard life, eaten lots of junk food. She’s fat, frumpy, and nonthreatening, the absolute last person in the world who might be carrying a concealed H and K P7 automatic. We want her to look solidly middle-aged.”

  “Middle-aged is no problem,” Borthwick muttered. “It’s making her look like a woman that’s hard.” The makeup artist was scowling.

  Rain smiled down at him fondly. “It would be easier for us to make you look like one, Jules.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not sufficiently nuts. You, however, are going to walk through that gate with a gun and explosives concealed where your boobs would be if you had boobs! Ah, sweetheart, what a job you’ve got.” He wrapped the vest around her torso.

  Patrick Lattimore said, “If only you could figure out how to add a Kevlar layer, Jules, it would be perfect.”

  Borthwick paused for a few seconds. “Patent pending,” he said.

  Rain studied Molly with level gray eyes. When they had met the night before, the agent had barely glanced at her, but now she looked Molly over, assessing her, as if she were choosing up sides for some very important athletic event.

  Pat Lattimore approached her. “Molly. You’re here.” Crisis, she noted, had got them to first names. His face was gray with tension. “Molly Cates, meet Blumberg and Kroll.” The two men in fatigues turned and nodded impassively at her. “This is such a zoo. Let’s go in the other room so we can talk. I need to tell you what’s happening.”

  Grady pushed away from the wall. “I’m coming, too.”

  Lattimore shrugged. He led the way to the back of the house, through a kitchen that looked and smelled as if it had been turned into a laboratory. The counters were covered with gallon cans of gooey-looking substances, jars, tubes, rolls of gauze, clumps of clay, brushes, knives and spoons, and tools she couldn’t identify. The room reeked of turpentine and Elmer’s glue. On the linoleum table sat a statue that looked like it was made of gray cement. It was clearly an exact life model of Rain Conroy from crotch to shoulder.

  Lattimore took them into a small room that contained a few file cabinets, four folding chairs, and a telephone on the floor. “Sit down,” he said.

  Molly sat at the table. Grady leaned against the wall and folded his arms over his chest. Lattimore pulled a chair close to Molly and sat knee to knee with her. “It worked perfectly. You did good. He called before the news was even over, at six-twenty. Said he wanted her to come see him. Molly—his voice was shaking. We got him by the short hairs.”

  Watching a tic at furious work in Pat Lattimore’s cheek, Molly wondered who had whom by the short hairs. The agent was wired.

  “Here’s the problem: He wants proof. We anticipated that, of course. Stein told him no problem, we’d send it in. But that’s not enough for him. Mordecai says he wants you to bring it in and walk him through it.”

  A chill swept through Molly. “I can do that over the phone, can’t I?”

  “That was our first suggestion. No go.”
r />   “How about a videotape?”

  “Our second suggestion. He said he wants to look in your eyes while you tell him about it … in person.”

  Molly’s arms were prickling with goose bumps. She wished she’d thought to bring a jacket.

  Grady was staring down at the floor. Molly could feel his anger radiating out. She tried to will him to look at her, but he refused.

  Lattimore said, “We told him that sending a civilian into a hostage situation was against all agency rules and regs. He said then the deal was off. He needs you to guarantee that this woman is his mother. He wants you to take him step by step through your search.

  “Lieutenant Traynor got on the phone to say that he had done most of the work in tracking her down, and he could come in and show him the documentation. Mordecai just laughed. He wants you, Molly. He thinks you will tell him the truth. And he sees you as someone on the edges of the power structure, not part of it. Also, he knows we have allowed members of the press into some situations in the past. There is some precedent.”

  Molly rubbed her arms to warm them. “So, Pat, you want me to go in there?”

  “I’m not asking you to do it because—”

  “The hell you aren’t!” Grady sprang up from his slouch. “This is so fucking dishonest. Of course you’re asking her. You’re putting her in an impossible situation.” A man who rarely lost his temper and never shouted, Grady was shouting now. His face was darkening.

  Lattimore held a hand up to stop the outburst. “Hold on a minute, Lieutenant. Molly, you need to know we’ve been going back and forth on this for”—he checked his watch—“four hours. Lieutenant Traynor dissents from everything I’m going to say. If he will wait until I am finished he can have his say and I know he has an inside track with you. So if he will just let me finish.”

  He shot Grady a harsh look, then turned back to Molly. “Ordinarily I wouldn’t even consider letting you do this. It’s risky. But I am convinced that the only way we have a prayer of getting the children out alive is if we take Mordecai out first. If we buy what Annette Grimes told you, and I do buy it, he’s the one who has to do the killing tomorrow. If he’s out and we get in there quick, we could grab the kids before the others decide what to do. Also it will make things easier for our strike force. All available intelligence agrees there’s no chain of command in there, just Mordecai at the top. If we neutralize Mordecai, their resistance will flag. The assault could be over quicker, with less loss of life.