Ghost Country

by Sara Paretsky

  Harriet foresaw no difficulty in proving Madeleine Carter’s psychosis to a jury, if it got that far: she’d found that Madeleine’s delusional episodes began when she was twenty and pregnant with her first child. After four children in seven years, a number of hospitalizations, and a deteriorating home life, her husband divorced her. Madeleine lived for a time with her parents, but when her mother died, her father found it impossible to care for his troubled daughter.

  During the next few years she was fired from a series of low-skilled jobs, while passing in and out of mental hospitals. She had no medical insurance; in the absence of publicly funded mental health programs or useful halfway houses, she’d ended up on the streets, where she managed to survive another three years. She was dead now at thirty-five: three years older than Harriet. Curiously, although husband and father had both abandoned Madeleine years before, both were anxious parties to the Triple-F suit. The husband had found the snapshot of Madeleine with her children stuck in a drawer in the utility room.

  Harriet saw herself, in navy gabardine, presenting all this information to a jury: she would be pitying but understanding—a wasted life, four children left behind, a woman who couldn’t tell fact from fantasy living out her last days under a leaking pipe. The hotel’s tolerance until the flood, when they had to shore up the wall for the safety of passersby; the tragedy of a woman so disturbed, she couldn’t understand that there was a danger her beloved wall might start shelling her with masonry.

  Harriet’s optimism wasn’t shared by her senior partner. Leigh Wilton pointed to the flock of miracle seekers, and told Harriet that a jury would be swayed by their intense religious faith—the hotel would look like a rich bully trying to stop women from worshiping the Virgin. Leigh was angry with Harriet for not handling the situation more tactfully from the outset. What was all this about hosing down the wall to try to drive Madeleine away? Why couldn’t they have let her worship in peace?

  Harriet flushed, stammered that Madeleine was hurting the client’s business, that she’d attracted a crowd of rowdy people (including your sister, Leigh Wilton snapped) who made it hard for the hotel’s guests to use the garage. And hadn’t that been Leigh’s own advice, that the hotel make the garage wall too unpleasant for Madeleine to stay there?

  Not at all, the senior partner said, at his coldest. Harriet’s paralegal had done that unilaterally, while Harriet was away from the office, failing to attend to her clients, not giving her staff appropriate supervision. Harriet was left to gape at him. The past is always rewritten to serve the needs of the present, but she had never been aware of it before.

  For the first time since Grandfather rescued her from Beatrix all those years ago, Harriet felt herself awash in disapproval. Her mother used to terrify her: Beatrix drunk, smelling of cigarette smoke (probably also marijuana, but the little Harriet wouldn’t have known that), dark hair hanging tangled down her back, leaning over her daughter’s bed, crooning snatches of lullabies intermixed with muttered threats against her husband: when I find him I’ll cut off that dangling piece of meat so he can’t stick it anywhere anymore.

  Then Grandfather appeared, heroic, miraculous, calling Beatrix a drunken disgrace, turning that overpowering creature into something small and weak. Harriet, dressed in blue the color of her eyes, Mephers combing her silky hair until it shone, allied herself completely with Grandfather. Beatrix showed up from time to time, laden with gifts, which Harriet politely studied and put down: Grand-père gives me everything I need, thank you very much. No, thank you, I’m not allowed chocolates, they’re bad for my teeth and hair. No, thank you, I don’t wish to go to the movies … the zoo … shopping for a new dress. Especially I don’t want a new baby sister, but that apparently was the one surprise she couldn’t turn down.

  Excelling at Chicago Latin and at tennis, charming Grandfather’s dinner guests, his colleagues, Mephers, knowing that if she smiled, never complained, was always tidy and well dressed, and most of all, worked hard and did her tasks (homework, a few household chores to make sure she wasn’t spoiled, later her job) perfectly, that no one would ever show her the disdain Grandfather felt for his only child, her mother.

  And now Leigh Wilton, who had always treated her with an indulgent courtesy like Grandfather’s own, was warning her about her work.

  Even Grandfather was angry. Of course she had often seen him angry with Beatrix, or Mara, or his junior colleagues, but now his fury with Mara was spilling over onto Harriet.

  I’m embarrassed to walk the halls of my own hospital. People are pitying me—pitying me, the man who made that hospital the modern surgical benchmark that it is. Mara on television accusing you, accusing us, of mistreating the poor. That psychotic woman was yours to manage, Harriet. I hate to criticize you, but you mishandled this one badly.

  And Harriet, stung for the first time into snapping back at him: your precious hospital had a chance to treat Madeleine Carter, but because of your obsession with cost containment, you released her back to the streets. In worse shape than when she entered.

  Harriet was shocked by her own outburst: Grandfather, protector, stern only with those who threw away life’s chances, not with the good and hardworking. Feeling herself changing, changing physically, turning into something large and coarse like Beatrix or Mara, the feeling so intense that she ran to the health club and worked on the machines until she was a small focused body again.

  Only Mephers, usually a mirror of Grandfather’s feelings and opinions, continued to put the blame exactly where it belonged, on Mara’s head: another dramatic production from young Mara Bernhardt, Mephers called it.

  Instead of cheering Harriet, Mephers’s criticism left her feeling hollow and confused. Mara was right about one thing: Mephers was cold. Whatever feeling she had for Harriet was a small thin bar from a space heater, not enough to warm either of them.

  Mephers learned from Patsy Wanachs at the church how Mara had swept the women out of the shelter and stormed down to the wall: an intolerable embarrassment to her two icons, the doctor and the granddaughter. In an emergency meeting of the parish council, Mrs. Ephers urged the Orleans Street Church to ban from Hagar’s House anyone who showed up at the garage. Many of the shelter’s clients, like LaBelle, Jacqui, and Nanette, were spending their days at the wall, then turning up at the shelter at night.

  The council agreed with the housekeeper: this wanton behavior was an insult to Rafe Lowrie, as well as to Dr. Stonds. Once they had made this decision, the council sent Patsy Wanachs to Underground Wacker to promulgate it. Patsy on a bullhorn told the women that someone from the church would be there—Rafe’s son, Jared, volunteering to video the group—to see who attended the protests at the wall. After today, anyone who visited the wall would be barred admission to Hagar’s House. Most of the homeless women promptly left, although LaBelle, still hoping that the Virgin might heal her, stayed on. Mara, of course, had no choice but to remain. Now that Patsy knew her with her bald head she couldn’t possibly go back to Orleans Street.

  Cynthia was already gone, shocked by a single night on the streets into returning to Rafe. She didn’t know why she’d let Mara drag her away from Bible study to begin with. Her shout at Mara: you got me in trouble one more time. Daddy was right, he warned me not to talk to you. You got me beat up so many times when we were kids, now look—I’ve lost my home because of you.

  You can have my sleeping bag, Mara told her. Or go over to Graham Street. If you tell Grandfather and Harriet how awful I am, how I got you in trouble, they’ll probably let you have my bedroom. Anyway, don’t you have a job? Can’t you rent a place? And learned to her jaw-dropping contempt that Cynthia gave her paycheck to Rafe, who decided how much money she needed and doled it out to her every Monday.

  Starr, whom Mara greeted with a rapturous cry—look, it’s my mother, look Cyn—appalled Cynthia. If that’s your mother no wonder your grandfather threw her out on the street. She looks like the whore of Babylon, dripping with the blood of the saints.
The two friends had a terrible argument and Cynthia left as soon as it got light. She returned to work, and then home.

  Home to Jared and Rafe, and even on Sunday she couldn’t walk well enough to come to church: home sick, Rafe said, bad eye infection—her right eye being swollen shut. Then Rafe came up to Abraham Stonds after the service, and lectured him, in front of Pastor Emerson, on how Stonds didn’t know how to keep order in his own house. You let that girl of yours run wild, and look what’s happened: she led my daughter and a whole lot of innocent homeless women partway to hell.

  As Grandfather and Harriet walked home from church—Mrs. Ephers staying behind for the meeting of the parish council—the doctor started snapping at Harriet again, criticizing her management of the hotel, her dress—that yellow is a poor color on you, makes you look old, and the neckline is a little indiscreet for church—even the arrangement of flowers in the vestibule of the Graham Street apartment: why red? Totally out of tune with my mood these days. Until Harriet suddenly for the first time began to wonder if not only Mara, but her own mother—maybe even her own grandmother—had a right to a grievance against Dr. Stonds.

  Harriet slipped out to look at the garage wall Sunday night, hoping that Patsy Wanachs’s decree would have cleared the street enough for the hotel to reclaim it. Unfortunately, miracle seekers were starting to arrive from around the world as the story got picked up by the networks and CNN. While most of the homeless women had left, the numbers of people in front of the garage remained high. And from the hotel’s viewpoint, the newcomers were more troublesome: street people could be moved off without much difficulty—the Orleans Street Church’s action had scarcely disturbed an electron on the airwaves. But tourists were another and more bothersome story—if you threatened them, they appeared on Oprah or Jenny Jones to discuss it.

  Mara was at the wall, but the sisters looked at each other without speaking. Harriet was furious with Mara, that went without saying: calling in the television cameras, siccing the First Freedoms Forum onto her, maybe even ruining Harriet’s career, who could tell? But when she saw the hollows in her sister’s face, her naked head—all that coarse black hair poor Mara had hated for so long, tried to straighten, to tame into braids, vanished so that she looked like a new-hatched ostrich—Harriet also found herself wishing she could be sure her sister had a place to sleep, and that she could bring her that great stack of bread and butter she used to wolf down at dinner. She tried to forget what Patsy Wanachs had told her about homeless women, that rape was a given in their lives if they were on the street for more than a few weeks.

  In the office on Monday, Harriet couldn’t escape her sister, the wall, or the barrage of criticism into her handling of the Pleiades’ problems. When she arrived, her secretary had a message for her from Leigh Wilton: He expected a report by noon on how she proposed to handle First Freedoms’ lawsuit on Madeleine’s death. It was a sign of Harriet’s plummeting status that Leigh sent the message through his secretary to hers, instead of phoning her directly.

  Harriet gave no sign that she felt the sting, smiling smoothly, asking her secretary about the day’s appointments, summoning her paralegals to prepare tapes for her on everything that had been said about the wall on air this weekend. Internally her feelings toward Mara veered once again from compassion to fury. The author of her current discord … she realized she’d watched twenty minutes of tape without registering anything, and felt even angrier with her sister for breaking her mental poise. She rewound the cassette.

  “Monsignor Alvin Mulvaney, an expert on miraculous expression for Chicago’s Roman Catholic Archdiocese, has assured Channel 13 that the red substance on the wall is not blood. It is rust. Why it continues to come through the wall now that the city has repaired the pipe which broke here no one can say,” Don Sandstrom intoned from the screen in front of her.

  “But for the women on Underground Wacker, this wall possesses special healing powers. One says that years of hemorrhaging stopped after a night spent under the crack, another claims to have conceived a child after years of infertility treatments—although it may be too early to be sure—while still a third says she had a spontaneous miscarriage of an unwanted pregnancy (Harriet, making notes, wanting names, medical documentation).

  “The Hotel Pleiades says they have no desire to keep devout women from worshiping at the wall, but want their garage accessible to their clients. They also want the area kept clean, which, given the rat population down here, is a reasonable request.”

  Here the camera drew back to show the street. It looked like a fairground after most of the rides had packed up; a few dozen women and a handful of men were milling around. Some had children, Three women, from the Downer’s Grove prayer group, were kneeling on the walk praying the rosary, as they had every day since Madeleine’s death.

  The hotel had removed enough of the scaffolding around Madeleine’s crack to form a primitive grotto, where three or four people at a time, depending on girth, could test the healing powers of the rusty seepage. Some carried signs, either attesting to the Virgin, or protesting the hotel’s treatment of Madeleine. Food wrappers and coffee cups were liberally strewn around the curb. The personal belongings of the homeless in the group were tied up in bags.

  Sandstrom continued, “Some think one woman more than others, more even than Madeleine Carter, lies at the heart of the controversy.”

  Harriet held her breath, waiting for Mara’s face to appear on the screen. Instead she saw the revolting creature who had been there the night of the flood, the one Mara screamed was Beatrix. The camera, zooming in on Starr, flattened her cheekbones and dulled the hawk’s eyes. The mouth glowed red, disturbingly sensual, against the greenish patina of skin shot with strobes in dim light. Harriet felt her toes curling inside her high heels as she retreated from the image on the screen. Next to Starr, although not clearly focused in the picture, were Mara, Luisa Montcrief, and a young teenager with a corona of hair not unlike Mara’s own, before she shaved her head.

  “Some of the women claim that the wall’s miraculous properties are only felt when this woman, whom they call Starr, is present,” Sandstrom explained. “Starr seems to be a sort of idiot savant, incapable of speech except in grunts. A local celebrity, Luisa Montcrief, the opera diva now in temporary retirement” (an old concert photo of Luisa in a flame-colored gown, briefly superimposed on the current raddled face) interprets for her.

  “However, Dr. Clyde Hanaper, chief of psychiatry at the Midwest Hospital, says Starr and Montcrief have both been patients at the hospital and there is no indication that they are anything more than a couple of drunks trying out a scam in the hopes of achieving celebrity status in our media-driven society. Furthermore, Monsignor Mulvaney of the local archdiocese says he has tested the wall both in Starr’s presence and in her absence, and there is no alteration in the chemistry or the electrical charge at the wall whether Starr is there or not.

  “Whatever the truth of the women’s claims, one thing is certain: Madeleine Carter may be dead, but the spirit the Hotel Pleiades tried to quench with fire hoses and scaffolding is alive and well. Reporting live from Underground Wacker, Don Sandstrom, Channel 13, First Report News.”

  38

  The Amusement Car-Park

  UP IN HIGHLAND Park, Karen Minsky watched the same newscast. Like Harriet she was scanning the crowd of women, looking not for Mara but for her daughter.

  Kim Nagel’s mother had called Karen around three-thirty. I thought you might like to know—the words that presage something you absolutely do not wish to hear. Mrs. Nagel went on to report a confession her own daughter Kim had just made, worried about Becca because she’d been trying to phone all afternoon—Becca wasn’t home, was she?

  No, Becca wasn’t home. Karen assumed when she left the house this morning she was joining Kim at the beach.

  Well, Mrs. Nagel just thought Karen should know about a dare the kids had put to Becca. You know your own business best, Mrs. Nagel said, but we would nev
er let our Kimmie go into Chicago alone the way you do Becca.

  Karen’s stomach fell, remembering her fight with her daughter at breakfast yesterday morning. Madeleine Carter and her wall were on the front page of the Sunday Herald-Star’s Metro section. Becca never used to read the paper, but since Luisa’s arrest she’d studied it, hoping for a sign that Triple-F was doing something for Luisa. Becca gave an excited squeak when she came on the story.

  The First Freedoms Forum’s Judith Ohana says the Hotel Pleiades is in violation of the First Amendment’s protection of public expressive activity when it makes it hard for women to worship at the crumbling masonry on Underground Wacker Drive.

  “Just because laboratory tests show the substance in the wall to be rust does not mean worshipers cannot also believe it is the blood of the Virgin Mary. After all, laboratory tests of communion wine might prove that it has the chemical composition of wine, not of blood, but that would not deter Catholics from believing it to be the blood of Christ.” She added that Triple-F was enjoining the hotel from blocking access to the wall for anyone who wanted to pray there.

  Mara Stonds, a spokeswoman for the women who are protesting at the wall, said, “The hotel, in putting significant barricades in the path of Carter’s worship—ranging from spraying her with a fire hose to putting a spiked scaffolding in front of the wall—threw this mentally ill woman into such despair that she committed suicide.”

  “Look at this!” Becca thrust the paper in front of her mother. “That hotel where they arrested Aunt Luisa pushed a homeless woman into committing suicide. Now the Freedoms Forum is filing a lawsuit against them to make them keep the wall available to anyone who wants to worship there.”