Ghost Country

by Sara Paretsky

  “I read the story,” Karen said shortly. “That’s in Mara Stonds’s opinion. She’s a very troubled girl who’s causing her family a lot of grief. Can you imagine, embarrassing her sister like that, in front of her clients? And she looks terrible. What was she thinking of to shave her head bald? The sister is so beautiful—didn’t you think so when she was on TV? Funny that they should both be from the same family.”

  “No, it’s not. Daddy and Aunt Luisa don’t look anything alike and they’re twins. I think Mara looks dramatic, like Joan of Arc: I dare you to arrest me and take me off to the stake.”

  “I see that your aunt’s dramatic ability isn’t going to die with her.” Karen returned to an interview with Germaine Greer in the Arts section.

  “You’d like Aunt Luisa to die, wouldn’t you? It would be so convenient, if only that garage guy wasn’t on disability leave maybe he could persuade her to commit suicide, too.” Becca glared at her mother.

  “Becca!” Harry, buried in the financial pages, didn’t look up. “I’ve asked you not to talk to your mother like that.”

  “Well, what would you do if it was me?” Becca muttered. “Make me live in some moldy SRO?”

  “Sweetie, please—not first thing in the morning, okay?” Karen said. “It’s going to be a scorcher today. If you go to the beach with Kim make sure you put on plenty of sunscreen. You, too, Harry: last week you looked like a very unkosher lobster when you got back from the club.”

  The phone rang before Becca could decide whether to make peace or not.

  Karen stretched out an arm to answer it. “Mr. Benedetti! … No, no, we’ve been up for hours.”

  Becca sat up straight when she heard the Met director’s name: maybe they wanted to give Luisa her chance at a comeback.

  “She did what?” Her mother’s voice rose in horror, dispelling Becca’s fantasy. “I’m sorry, but we absolutely cannot—No. Mr. Minsky has already covered over forty-five thousand dollars in other bills she ran up…. You can tell the Lyric that they’ll have to find the money themselves…. No, we filed a formal statement: we cannot be held liable for any of her debts, and we won’t accept any part of this one…. Tell Lyric to arrest her if she shows up again: maybe a few months in jail would jolt Janice into confronting her problems, since losing her career hasn’t done so.”

  Karen snapped the receiver down. “It’s just one thing after another with Janice. She was holed up in a practice room at the opera house with another woman, until one of the guards found them and evicted them. They created a horrible amount of noise and mess and even somehow wrecked a seventy-thousand-dollar concert grand. The opera called Benedetti, who thought we’d be willing to take care of the problem. I can’t imagine what Janice thinks she’s doing.”

  Becca’s eyes grew round. “A lesbian affair? I didn’t know that! And you think she should be in jail for it? Didn’t you ever hear of Stonewall—”

  Harry put down the paper. “Becca, enough of that. This isn’t about civil rights, it’s about destruction of opera house property. Please remember that before you turn your aunt into a martyr.”

  Becca stomped off to the beach, where she gave her friends a dramatic version of Luisa’s latest escapade, highlighting her own role in bringing the Triple-F into the situation. The more her friends talked it over, the more Becca thought she should join the crowd at the hotel garage. By the end of the day, when they were sharing a pizza in the suburb’s little shopping strip, Kim implied that Becca didn’t have the guts to take part in a demonstration, while Corie said only crazy women or dykey feminists did stuff like that. Becca, out of a confused anger—for her aunt (was Luisa crazy? a dyke?), for herself (was she not as tough as Mara Stonds?), announced that she was going into the city tomorrow morning, and they should watch for her on the afternoon news.

  Kim gasped: you wouldn’t dare. Corie snorted: she won’t, she’s only showing off.

  Am not, Becca fired back. Watch the news, you’ll see who’s a show-off then.

  On Monday, letting Karen think she was spending the day with her friends, Becca once more rode her bike to the train station and joined the late-morning shoppers heading into Chicago. This time she moved through the crowds easily. She was exhilarated: she was part of the city, she knew how to find her way around. Street smarts, Karen talked about them as something too remote for a suburban girl to attain, but she, Becca, already had them. True, a cop she stopped for directions growled at her to go back home. True, she went down the wrong staircase first and found herself behind a loading dock, where a group of men were smoking: they greeted her sudden appearance as starving tigers might hail an ibex that had strayed from the herd. Eventually, as she was secretly wishing she had never strayed from her secure suburb, she found the right stairwell and landed amidst the demonstrators.

  The atmosphere was a cross between an amusement park and a traffic accident. Street vendors were selling everything from T-shirts depicting the crack in the wall to rosaries guaranteed one hundred percent bathed in the Virgin’s blood. Mothers with small children waited in line to get at the crack in the wall; other people were kneeling and praying outside the small grotto in the midst of the scaffolding.

  A small battalion of Chicago cops forced people to line up right against the scaffolding: the sidewalk and entrance to the garage must be kept free for pedestrians and drivers, patrolmen snarled at anyone who escaped from their tightly defined boundaries. And if you weren’t in line to kiss the wall, or kneeling to pray, a cop would tap you on the shoulder and tell you to keep moving.

  Becca felt shy and out of place. When a cop asked her if her mother knew where she was, and told her no loitering, she quickly got in the line of miracle seekers. One woman invited her to pray the rosary with her Blue Aura of Mary circle. When Becca said she was a Jew the woman told her that the Mother of God loved her just the same. Someone else tried to hand her a picket sign, but for the most part no one but the cop paid any attention to her.

  As the day wore on and she shuffled forward in line, she began to get hungry and tired. She wished she hadn’t come, but she wanted some kind of proof for Kim and Corie that she’d been there. If she wasn’t at the wall when the television cameras showed up, which the woman with the rosary said happened around two-thirty, her friends would never believe she’d gone there at all.

  Around one, Becca went aboveground again for a hamburger and a Coke. As she descended the iron stairs—slowly, to make sure she was heading for the right place this time—she saw her aunt at the far end of the scaffolding. Next to her was Mara—Becca recognized her from her bald head—and a woman who looked a little like Aunt Luisa. Like Aunt Luisa would look if she were six inches taller, and not drinking herself to—Becca bit off the word death before it could pop into her mind.

  That must be Starr, who the paper said was either an idiot or the head of some mysterious cult. Starr’s hair was kind of bizarre, enormous amounts of it piled wildly on her head. On anyone else it would have looked like a pretty lame wig, but somehow it didn’t seem out of place on this woman. She was wearing a Bulls T-shirt that strained across her front and a funny kind of layered skirt that hung to her ankles. Becca couldn’t take her eyes off the woman, until she suddenly realized she was staring, which you should never do, only ignorant people were so bad-mannered.

  As Becca climbed the rest of the way down the stairs and tried to get to her aunt the crowd grew thicker. The police pushed people into a tight mass, but couldn’t really clear the sidewalk.

  Becca was short, barely five foot one, and in the press of bodies she couldn’t make out anything. At one point she thought she was going to be choked to death, just by the people pushing against her. She used her soccer training, stuck her elbows out, shoved back, created a lane for herself, and made it to the scaffolding. Here her shortness was an asset: she slithered between the spiked beams until she got to the far end where Luisa was standing.

  Her aunt was thrilled to see her and kissed her, European style, on
both cheeks. Luisa’s breath smelled faintly of beer, but she wasn’t as drunk as she’d been the last time Becca saw her.

  “Darling! How did you ever persuade Harry and Karen to let you come down here?” She turned to Starr. “This is my niece, Becca Minsky. This is Starr, darling.”

  Becca said hello, shyly. Starr ignored her outstretched hand, and Becca flushed, thinking perhaps the woman was angry with her for staring a few minutes ago. Close up she was gross, no bra, Karen would never let Becca go around like that. Starr smelled, too, of garlic and beer and something hard to identify, like the wet clay at Daddy’s plant on a rainy day. Becca turned from Starr and muttered to Mara how brave she thought the older girl was, but Mara didn’t respond to her, either. Becca had spoken so softly that Mara couldn’t hear her over the crowd, but Becca didn’t know that. Her eyes stung with humiliated tears.

  Becca started to back away, into the press of people, when she felt a hand on her head. She looked up to see Starr scrutinizing her. In the shadows under the scaffolding it was hard to make out Starr’s face, but Becca thought the big woman was laughing at her. That was the last straw, after a day spent in heat and discomfort, when she was trying to stand up for her ideas, for this gross woman to laugh at her misery, when Becca suddenly realized she wasn’t miserable, she was in the middle of an adventure, she was young, she was excited, and her feet in their high-heeled lace-up sneakers no longer hurt, but wanted to dance.

  It was at that moment that the cameras arrived. The picture Karen saw in Highland Park an hour later was of her daughter arm in arm with Mara Stonds, swaying in the confined space as if they were in a crowded ballroom. Nearby Luisa seemed to be singing, but the TV mikes couldn’t pick that up over the crowd noise.

  Karen watched numbly. Mrs. Nagel, and every other member of the Temple, would be whispering about her: sister-in-law a drunk, destroying an international career to live in squalor with a woman so obscene Karen’s mind shied from thinking about her. Daughter allowed to run wild in Chicago with perverts and the homeless. Everyone would be repeating what Mrs. Nagel had said on the phone to her, that they would never let their children go into the city unsupervised the way Karen let Becca.

  Karen watched until the news shifted, to Saddam Hussein and the Kurds, and then called Harry at the scrap iron plant. Janice is a menace. She’s corrupted Becca, drawn her down to that dreadful underground place with homeless women and God knows what all. Call the cops, call Hanaper, call someone and get your sister locked up.

  And when Becca came home, dirty, radiant: you’re grounded for the rest of the summer, young lady. I can’t trust you. From now on, you go out only if your father or I are with you. To Karen’s astonishment, instead of going into a teenage huff, Becca laughed. You should go down there yourself. You don’t know how cool she is, how totally awesome. No, not Mara Stonds, the strange woman who doesn’t talk. Starr. You can’t tell on TV, you have to see her in person. When she touches you it’s like she’s totally reorganized your brain. You really should check her out.

  39

  Miracles

  DAY TWENTY-THREE on Lower Wacker Drive,” Channel 13’s Don Sandstrom intoned.

  The television screen showed the scaffolding, with a calendar superimposed. “Since the Orleans Street shelter began barring any women who come to the wall, most of the homeless have left this site at the Hotel Pleiades garage. However, the church’s action has not halted the steady stream of miracle seekers. Channel 13 talked with Mathilde Ledoq from Belgium, whose five-year-old daughter Bette suffers from leukemia.”

  Don’s thick blond hair and square jaw were replaced by a still shot of a gaunt, anxious woman of about forty. “Madame Ledoq, speaking through an interpreter, says that after bathing her child in water from the wall for three days, Bette is already stronger…. Dr. Clyde Hanaper, head of psychiatry at Midwest Hospital where the little girl has been sent for examination, says it is not unusual for parents to delude themselves about the health of a child with a life-threatening illness.”

  A brief clip with Hanaper, looking sad but understanding in his richly furnished office, explaining the power of self-delusion that allowed people to believe in miracles. Sandstrom turned next to the archdiocesan miracle expert, Monsignor Mulvaney, who looked authoritative but caring as he explained that prayer can achieve many miracles, but if women are relying on pagan substitutes for the Christian faith, then God is unlikely …

  Day twenty-five on Underground Wacker. “Hector Tammuz, the doctor who treated Madeleine Carter while she was alive, continues to haunt the place where she died. On this Wednesday evening we caught up with him at the wall around seven P.M. He was on his way to his post at Midwest Hospital’s psychiatry department, where all the residents are working extra shifts because of the influx of tourists visiting the wall: a number end up needing emergency psychiatric care….”

  Hector haunted the wall at dusk because that was when Starr and Luisa often came. Some miracle seekers claimed it was Starr’s presence, not the wall, that healed them. They brought her flowers or money, or the strong beer she seemed to favor. Others believed in the wall’s powers, and hung wreaths from the scaffolding, or burned candles underneath the bleeding crack. They pasted prayers on the concrete around the crack: Blessed Mother, help Leon find a job … heal my arthritis … cure Melanie’s cancer … make me pregnant … end my pregnancy … stop Mark’s drinking … his infidelities … his beatings. Messages in Polish and Spanish and English, petitions in Korean, Russian, Arabic, in all the languages of the city.

  Don Sandstrom, knowing he was working the story of his career, attacked it from every angle. Did Starr speak some language of her own? Did the diva really interpret those grunts, or were the two involved in some elaborate con? Sandstrom dug up philologists and ventriloquists to debate the matter on the air. Starr and Luisa would not come to the studio, so Sandstrom had to use footage of the two at the wall, where it was difficult to make out what either woman was saying, or how the crowd reacted to them.

  Verna Lontano, from the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, agreed to be one of the panelists, along with three men from other area institutions. Ordinarily Lontano regarded that kind of program with a mocking contempt, but her connection to the Stonds family made her interested in what young Mara was doing.

  Before their on-air appearance, the four philologists gathered in a Channel 13 sound studio to go over tapes of Starr and Luisa. Starr was hard to hear amidst the noise from cops and miracle seekers, of traffic and road construction, but studio engineers pulled as many of her grunts as possible out of the mélange and made a ten-minute master that focused on her and Luisa.

  Lontano and the other scholars played it over and over. They couldn’t decide, privately among themselves or on the air, whether the sounds broke down into groups that might be a language. The only thing they did agree on was that despite Starr’s vaguely Middle Eastern appearance, with her bronze skin and beaked nose, whatever she was saying wasn’t in a modern Semitic language.

  The philologists lingered in the studio after their forty-five seconds on air, reviewing footage of Starr. The three men made no secret of their interest in Starr’s bosom, and kept stopping the tape on some of the more revealing shots. Lontano, impatient with her colleagues’ raucous jokes, studied Starr’s hair, with its elaborately coiled and braided loops on the side. If she squinted, they looked like the horns of figurines on old Sumerian cylinder seals.

  When she suggested this, her colleagues were scornful. No resemblance at all, Verna. Are you trying to suggest this creature might be a Sumerian, some science fiction figure who’s been in suspended animation for four thousand years and suddenly had her DNA reactivated?

  No, Lontano didn’t think that. She wondered, though, whether Mara had pushed her chants to the goddess Gula one step further. Perhaps the unhappy adolescent had persuaded some homeless woman to let Mara dress her hair to resemble a figure from an old cylinder seal.

  Lontano hesitated
to suggest that to Dr. Stonds: he was already so incensed with Mara for parading his name around town in such raffish company, that Lontano didn’t want to fuel the flames by accusing Mara either of delusions or malevolence. The professor did, however, go to Lower Wacker Drive several times after her TV debut to try to see Starr in person. The crowds were always heavy, and the professor, never tolerant of group hysteria, was unwilling to wait in the lines that formed whenever Starr and her entourage appeared.

  The police kept anyone from sleeping around the wall, or from simply standing and watching. If people wanted to pray, fine, otherwise they had to keep moving. So after a short stint at the wall Starr, Luisa, and Mara would disappear through the underground streets, occasionally appearing at one of the shelters, but more often dossing down with other homeless men and women in the warm sand beside Lake Michigan.

  After videotaping for a week, Jared Lowrie got tired of hanging out to see whether anyone from Hagar’s House was violating the shelter’s edict, and no one else felt like wasting their summer afternoons down there with a camera. A few women from Hagar’s House began to return to the wall, or to wander with Starr and Luisa. Jacqui and Nanette came most often, along with LaBelle, the woman who had been eager to test the wall’s healing powers to begin with.

  If the miracle seekers gave them money, Mara would buy food and hand it out to any other homeless people they encountered. A rumor even spread about an evening when Mara had fed a large crowd at the beach from one bag of day-old bread.

  When the TV crews heard about the story they were ecstatic: the fantasy of everyone in broadcast, to be live at Galilee. Channel 13’s Don Sandstrom joined the hunt for a reliable witness. He couldn’t find Luisa or Mara Stonds. He tracked down LaBelle at Hagar’s House, where she wouldn’t answer questions, fearful that Patsy Wanachs would bar her from the shelter if she saw LaBelle on television.