Stacy, Dr. Jackson, and Sadie Raincrow had missed the morning excitement. Faye could see that they were far from ready to go. Dr. Dell practically ran to the bar when she heard Joe and Faye make their goodbyes. Faye had known people who saw open bar situations as a challenge to drink up. Some of them were alcoholics and some of them were just cheap, but few people over thirty were this obvious.
Faye, on the other hand, had been nursing a Coke for the entire party and wanted to be rid of its watery dregs. The golden-haired young man who had been bussing their glasses was nowhere to be seen, so she headed for the kitchen.
Pushing open the swinging door, she saw someone at the sink, a woman wearing the hotel’s navy-and-white uniform and an air of authority. On the countertop were neatly arranged trays of hors d’oeuvres, ready for her assistant to whisk off the plastic wrap and carry them into the party. At her elbow was a tray of empty glasses, waiting to be washed.
Faye knew that she must have seen this woman throughout the party, making sure things ran smoothly, but her presence hadn’t registered in Faye’s mind. Service professionals were trained to be invisible, and this woman had paid attention to that part of her training.
Faye lingered for an awkward moment and listened to a sink full of glasses clank as the woman washed them. She felt terrible for having ignored a human being for at least an hour. The least she could do was say thank you.
“You did a wonderful job with this party. I really appreciate it.”
The woman half-turned in Faye’s direction, somehow accomplishing this without taking her hands out of the suds. She turned just far enough to reveal the name tag pinned to her uniform, and Faye saw that it read Lucia.
“Thank you, Lucia,” she said.
Lucia’s black hair was twisted into a large knot at the nape of her neck and covered by a hair net. Her thin face was dominated by prominent cheekbones and a pair of wary eyes that took in information while giving none away.
She said only “Thank you, ma’am,” then she turned back to her dishwashing.
Lucia’s accent was faint, as if she had learned English as a young child or perhaps had been raised by Spanish speakers, but Faye recognized it as Mexican. Faye read Spanish well and had even done some translation for her work, but she wouldn’t consider herself a fluent speaker. She toyed with the idea of speaking to Lucia again in Spanish, since she was always looking for an opportunity to practice, but Lucia had made it clear that she didn’t want to chit-chat. Faye knew she should respect that. She just set her glass at Lucia’s elbow with the other dishes waiting to be washed.
As the glass clinked on the counter, Lucia flinched, and Faye said, “I didn’t mean to startle you. I just wanted to put my glass someplace that was easy for you to reach.”
Lucia didn’t answer and Faye said no more, but she didn’t even try to stop staring. She kept her eyes on Lucia from that moment until she pushed her way back through the kitchen’s swinging door.
Lucia’s narrow shoulders, slim hips, and long thin legs were familiar and they were unmistakable. Faye had seen her just that morning, crumpled on a floor she’d just mopped while it was heaving beneath her.
* * *
Faye shed her clothes as soon as the hotel room’s door closed behind her. She did all the usual going-to-bed stuff, from showering to toothbrushing, before she took the other half of the sleeping pill. Apparently, though the doctor had told her it was only a mild sedative, this particular chemical spelled instant unconsciousness for Faye.
Ready for sleep, she washed the pill down with tap water. It was only then, when she left the bathroom and stood by her bedside, that she saw her pillow. Grace had left a fistful of the mints that Faye liked.
Maybe Grace was thanking her for the big tip, and maybe she was angling for another one. But Faye liked to think of the mints as a statement of solidarity, a hand reaching out to hers. She liked to think that Grace was saying, “I know what you went through this morning, because I went through it, too. We both could have died today. Here’s a bit of comfort.”
Faye picked up a piece of candy and listened to its foil crinkle as she unwrapped it. She laid it on her tongue and let the dark chocolate coating melt off of its cool, creamy mint filling, and she spent that moment of sweetness thanking God that she was alive to taste it.
Chapter Fourteen
On the day that my third brother died, I knew.
I knew what evil was and I knew whose heart harbored it. And evil must be obliterated.
Until that day, I didn’t even know where Lonnie had laid my other two brothers to rest. All I could do when they died was watch him drive away with them while I begged him to take me, too. But by the time Orly died, I was old enough to be stealthy. I was old enough to hide under the tarp that lay crumpled on the bed of Lonnie’s pickup truck.
It was late at night, so nobody saw him park near a concrete-lined drainage ditch at the river’s edge. Nobody but me saw him carry the blanket-wrapped body and a flashlight down into the ditch. Nobody saw me follow him down into the ditch, not even Lonnie.
Lonnie walked down that ditch into a round concrete pipe extending deep into the ground. It was huge to me, big enough so that even Lonnie could walk upright. I followed, hanging far back so that he couldn’t see me. There was no light to guide me but Lonnie’s flashlight, far ahead. In its way, the darkness was a blessing, because it hid me. Sliding my feet along the bottom of the big pipe, I made no sound, no splash that could reveal my presence.
Standing upright in the center with my arms outspread, I couldn’t even reach the pipe’s curved walls. If I leaned to the right, though, I could drag a hand as I walked. The faraway flashlight, the pipe beneath my feet, and the pipe against my hand gave me three points to keep myself oriented in space. The sound of my breath oriented me, too, reminding me that I was alive, even though my brother was not.
At intervals, my hand lost contact with the wall for a few terrifying steps. The first time it happened, I groped silently until I realized that these empty spaces were the mouths of smaller pipes entering the larger one that enclosed me. I shuffled on, aware that the side wall was getting slowly closer to me as the pipe narrowed and curved to the left.
Eventually, even the very texture of my surroundings changed and my hand began to drag across rough brick. My foot landed awkwardly on a brick’s edge, twisting my ankle. I almost went down in a splashing heap, but I was strong enough to hold myself upright and limp on. I was strong enough to do that, because I had to be. I had to know what he did with Orly. In my nightmares, I saw my brothers’ bodies dumped in trash cans or consumed in flames. I had to know.
I remembered what Lonnie said to my weeping mother as she begged him to let her bury their son, so she’d have a place to mourn him.
“Are you as stupid as you look, woman? Don’t you remember what happened at Waco and Ruby Ridge? The federal agents will come. We can’t be letting ‘em find graves and dead bodies. They’ll use ‘em to justify whatever awful thing they decide to do to us. I bet they’re watching us now, so we can’t be seen to be digging no graves. I’ll find a place for the boy, just like I did with the other two.”
As an adult with years of experience out in the world, I know now that this threadbare excuse for logic meant that Lonnie was either deceitful or stupid or delusional. If there were federal agents watching our pathetic little farm, then they would have noticed that three little boys had toddled around for a while and then disappeared. As a child, I was terrified of helicopters and people in uniforms, because Lonnie had convinced us all that such people would be firebombing us at any moment, but Lonnie had been the real bad guy.
All my life, Lonnie was the bad guy. Now that he’s gone, I’m going to have to figure out how to live without him. He has always been my yardstick for right and wrong. Next to Lonnie and the things he did, nothing seems wrong to me. Certainly murder didn’t, not when the v
ictim was Lonnie. I feel not a shred of regret at what I did to him.
He is the reason I am still, after all these years, essentially alone. I have work colleagues and casual acquaintances, but friendship is hard when any conversation can go south in an instant. Even a casual reference to an insanely popular movie or pop song from my childhood years leaves me helpless. My go-to excuse for these memory gaps is “We didn’t have cable,” but what I really mean is “We didn’t have electricity, running water, flush toilets, or any conception of what the outside world was like.”
Well, that isn’t fully true. As the firstborn, I lived with Lonnie and my first mother for five years before he acquired a second wife and lost his mind, moving his growing family far from the malicious government and from everything else. I and both my mothers remembered civilization, but the other children didn’t have a clue. They only saw the outside world on Sundays from the crowded cab of Lonnie’s pickup while on our way to the weekly service he held at The Sanctuary.
He never even rolled down the windows to let us smell free air. The children born after Lonnie fled the government didn’t even have birth certificates. Only I do. Nobody outside the family ever knew my brothers and sisters were even born, so there were no repercussions for Lonnie when some of them died, not as long as nobody ever found the bodies. Hence this long slog down a dark pipe with a dead child in his arms, a slog that I was dead-sure he had taken twice before.
I dogged his steps the whole way and he never knew. When he stopped at last, he stopped so suddenly that I almost skidded into the flashlight’s dim sidespill. I might have been discovered then, but his attention was diverted by a door set into the wall of the brick-and-mortar pipe.
I knew that door. I’d seen it before, from the other side, while I sat in The Sanctuary. For as long as my first mother worked at the Gershwin Hotel, we had easy access to the room where Lonnie liked to take his family for Sunday worship, the one that he pretentiously called The Sanctuary.
After my mother lost that job, we lost The Sanctuary, or so we all thought. When I saw Lonnie leave the storm sewer and crawl through the little door, I realized that he’d known how to get back in there the whole time, but he’d never told us. I had studied the door’s battered contours every Sunday for years during the interminable church services that Lonnie had loved so much. They had given him a chance to expound on his heretical beliefs in front of an audience, and he had seized the chance with both hands.
Lonnie was always happiest when he had an audience. Never mind that the audience was small. Lonnie never stopped dreaming of an ever-growing congregation, but he’d never had one that didn’t consist entirely of his wives and children. Only Orly was born after we lost The Sanctuary. The rest of us, the survivors, we will carry that place inside us always.
Orly. The name breaks my heart, even after all these years. All their names break my heart.
Gabe had been such a good boy during services, so sweet and quiet. Then Zeb had come along, also sweet and quiet, and then Orly.
Only now, as an adult, do I realize that babies aren’t supposed to be sweet and quiet all the time. My brothers were sick. They needed the help of a doctor, but all they got was The Sanctuary, transformed by Lonnie into a crypt just for them.
Lonnie deserved the pain of losing his children, but Gabe, Zeb, and Orly didn’t deserve to die. It would have helped me to believe that sickly sons were God’s punishment for Lonnie, but I do not believe that God punishes children for their parents’ evil. What kind of sense does that make?
After I saw my father tuck my brother under his arm and crawl through the little door into the Sanctuary, I crept slowly backwards and out of his sight. Without even the light from Lonnie’s flashlight, I retraced my steps with only the feel of the pipe beneath my feet and against the fingers of one hand to guide me.
Because of the danger that he would soon turn around and walk back the way he came, I moved quickly until I was back in the bed of the pickup, hiding under the familiar tarp and waiting for Lonnie. Eventually, I heard him open the driver’s door and start the engine.
I knew then that Orly, Gabe, and Zeb were in their final resting place, and it was The Sanctuary. No other explanation made any sense.
Years passed before I grew old enough to drive to the river, make my way down the storm sewer, force open the balky latch, and lay eyes on my baby brothers again.
From that moment forward, my entire life has pointed toward this day, my first day without Lonnie in the world. I should be so glad, but my mind keeps straying to the everyday evil that occupies the front page of every newspaper I ever saw, and the second page, and every page after that.
I was taught from a very young age that the way to righteousness was to obliterate evil. But how could anyone obliterate anything with so many faces?
Chapter Fifteen
The command center was already humming with activity when Faye arrived, despite the fact that the sun was barely up.
“Good morning, Madame Archaeologist,” Ahua said, handing her a cup of coffee the size of a medieval tankard. “I’m glad you’re here. I want to pick your brain about the paintings in that room we saw yesterday. Actually, I want to pick your brain about the room itself.”
She took the humongous cup in both hands. “For coffee? No problem! My professional opinion can absolutely be bought with coffee.”
“You don’t have to work for coffee. I told you yesterday that I want to hire you as a consultant, like Bigbee did last summer. Just invoice me by the hour for your time spent. And that includes yesterday’s underground adventure.”
“A budget? With money in it? And coffee, too? You, sir, just hired an archaeologist.”
“Okay, then. Today is the day you help me figure out what’s been going on beneath this building for the past century.”
“Well, we weren’t exactly beneath this building—” she began.
“Agreed,” he said. “We have no evidence of chambers directly beneath the Gershwin, except for a small portion of the staircase. I put some of my graphics people on the night shift and I woke up to this. They do good work.” He tapped the keyboard of a nearby computer and a map appeared on its very large display.
The person who made the map had considerately included an arrow pointing north, like any ordinary map, but Faye couldn’t relate that to what she’d seen underground. North doesn’t mean much when you can’t see the sun or a city’s street grid.
The map, though, was helpful in other ways. She could see that Ahua’s mapmakers had outlined the staircase and the landing at its foot in black. The site of the explosion was marked with a big “X.”
They had also marked the landing at the bottom of the staircase, where she knew that two doorways existed. One door led into a space labeled “Painted Room,” and the location of the metal door into the sewer was marked on the far wall. The other doorway opened left into apparent nothingness. A graphic artist with a flair for history had labeled it “Terra Incognita.”
Faye pointed at the upper portion of the stairway. “This is the only part that’s underneath the Gershwin, right?”
“Right. If he thought he was carrying a bomb that would take down the building over it, then the hotel wasn’t his target. Based on laser measurements, the downstairs room to the left of the stairs starts a few yards south of the Gershwin’s lobby and extends toward the river. If there’s a room beyond it, it goes under a street and a park. Eventually, it would go under the convention center, and wouldn’t a convention hall full of oil executives be a great target?”
“Is that what’s going on there now?”
“Yeah, but the bomb went off two hours before their first session.”
He tapped a key and a second map, drawn in red, overlaid the first one. It was a regular, ordinary map of the surface. The north arrow pointed away from the river, and that helped because Faye knew where the river was.
“I don’t know why else you’d want to set off a bomb down there.” Ahua stared at the map like the answer was written on it.
“To destroy the children’s bodies?”
“Why now? They’ve been down there more than twenty years. A bomb would only call attention to them, which suggests that the bomber wasn’t involved with putting them there. Maybe he didn’t know about them.”
This was true, and Faye was disappointed. She’d hoped that there was a link between the bombing and the bodies. Otherwise, they represented a very cold case and cold cases were hard to solve.
“Okay,” she said. “There’s no reason to link the bodies to the bombing other than geography. We don’t know why they’re lying underneath downtown Oklahoma City and we don’t know why the dead man took a bomb down there, either.”
“Whatever his goal was, he died for it. Maybe he was hoping to take down a building, then got cold feet, came back upstairs, and accidentally detonated the bomb. Maybe he intended to take out a lot of people in the Gershwin lobby, terrorist-style, but the bomb went off before he got it into position.”
“There weren’t all that many people there.”
“True. Maybe he was going to hide the bomb, wait until there was a bigger crowd, and detonate it remotely, but he screwed up. But if so, why go downstairs? There are plenty of ways to connect the dots on the facts we have, but none of them make sense.”
Faye agreed. “So what do you want me to do for you?”
“I hired you because, as an archaeologist, you can help me get my mind around the underground structure itself. When was it built? How was it built? Is there anything in the past that’s connected to the bombing or those bodies?”
“I’m on it. I’ll do whatever it takes to help you put away anybody that helped the bomber. And if we find out that somebody murdered those children—” Faye flailed for the right words but there were none. “I’ll do whatever you need to catch the person who did that.”
Catacombs Page 11
