Catacombs

by Mary Anna Evans

  Liu nodded, tears slipping out of the corners of her eyes. Faye could see that she had wept more than once this morning. She wasn’t much past thirty, but today she looked jowly and worn.

  “I was down there so long, looking for something. Anything. A wet handprint on the wall. A shoe in the water. Anything. I opened the door into that painted room, wondering if I was going to have to make my mistakes even worse by crawling in there to look for her. When I saw that,” she pointed at the computer display showing the vandalized walls, “I knew that I couldn’t go in there. Somebody did that, and it wasn’t Stacy. Maybe the person who did that has kidnapped Stacy. If I went in there, I might accidentally destroy evidence that might save her. Maybe I already did destroy that evidence by going down there to look for her.”

  The blotches of white stared back at them from the photos, like blank pages telling them nothing about what had happened to Stacy Wong.

  Ahua was still too angry to hide it. When he said, “Why didn’t you call and tell me what you did as soon as you were above-ground?” His voice began quiet and slow, but every word came louder and faster than the one before.

  “I wanted to tell you face-to-face. It cost us twenty minutes that I hope I don’t regret.”

  Faye remembered raindrops pelting the expansive windows of Cully’s penthouse during the party the night before. “It’s rained since we were down there yesterday. Was the water deeper in the storm sewer today?”

  “Maybe a little. Do you think Stacy got caught in a rush of stormwater after it rained?”

  “It rained right after dark for just a few minutes, but I don’t think it rained again,” Ahua said. “There should have been plenty of time for the water to make its way to the river.”

  Faye hoped he was right. She tried not to imagine the rushing water knocking Stacy off her feet, bashing her head into the sewer’s concrete wall, and dumping her unconscious into the river.

  “I walked along the river but I didn’t see any other outfalls where Stacy might have gotten out,” Liu said.

  Ahua pulled up the map he’d gotten from the city’s engineers and tapped at the screen. “There are a few. Here’s the closest outfall, but it’s pretty far upstream from the one we explored yesterday. It’s worth checking, but I’d say that outfall drains another area of the city.”

  Liu didn’t look hopeful. “But if she’d crawled out of another pipe, she’d have beaten me back here, right? I was underground a really long time. The whole time I was walking back, I was hoping to find Stacy waiting for me but knowing that I was going to have to face you, Micah. I knew it was time to come back and tell you what I did.”

  The expression on Ahua’s face would have frozen a summer day. Faye was glad she wasn’t the one who had put that look on his peaceful face.

  All he said was “Go home, Liu.”

  “You know I’m not going to do that. I’ll be driving upstream and crawling in that other outfall inside of fifteen minutes, looking for Stacy.”

  “I say this with all the love and respect in the world, Liu. You are an FBI agent and you have been a good one, but if I see you anywhere below street level, I will have you in custody before you take another breath. And then I will waste no more time on taking care of you, because finding that missing woman and finding out who blew up the Gershwin Hotel and finding out who left three dead kids underneath it are the most important things in my life right now.”

  Liu’s tears had dried. “Finding Stacy isn’t as important to you as it is to me.”

  They stood there a moment, like two people who knew how to work together but had no clue how to be adversaries.

  “Before I go,” she said, “I need to tell you something Stacy told me last night. It’s got nothing to do with her disappearance, not that I can tell, but the bombing? Yeah. I think this is important to that investigation. It’s about Cully Mantooth and his Chinese mother. Stacy told me that Cully’s mother lived underground with her family when she was a little girl. I asked if she was sure, and she said that it was common knowledge in her mother’s generation. I bet he hasn’t breathed a word to you or any other agent about that, has he?”

  * * *

  It had taken him a while, but Ahua had finally booted Faye out of the command center. He might be willing to argue with a rebellious agent in front of her, but he wasn’t willing to talk in front of Faye about her brand-new cousin-in-law, Cully, who seemed to be keeping secrets from the FBI.

  Faye wondered why she felt so immediately defensive about this man whom she had just met. He had been kind and genial, but even Hitler had managed to be kind and genial to his dog…until the day he decided to use her to test the effectiveness of his cyanide capsule supply. Who, really, was Cully Mantooth, other than a handsome and charismatic movie star who was talented enough to show her any face he chose?

  She thought hard about what Liu had said. Was Cully’s mother Chinese? She had thought his whole family was Creek. As she considered it, though, she realized that there wouldn’t exactly have been a guard at the top of the stairs in 1920-whatever, checking people’s bloodlines before they moved their stuff underground. Cully’s mother could have been Creek and still lived underground, but Faye doubted it precisely because Liu had said that Stacy was so sure.

  If Cully had really had a Chinese mother, people in a small, poor, marginalized community in a not-large city like Oklahoma City would have been pretty sure. They would have made a big deal about knowing Cully, because he was famous.

  But did any of this really matter? Even if Cully didn’t tell the FBI everything he knew about the history of Chinese people in Oklahoma City, Faye saw no straight line that led from that omission to suspecting that he was guilty of the bombing or Stacy’s kidnapping or both.

  If Cully had been keeping his past to himself, then Hollywood had been flat-out lying about their Native American star. But then, isn’t that what Hollywood always did? Its directors had cast Mickey Rooney as a Japanese man and John Wayne as Genghis Khan. People who believed anything that Hollywood told them were fools.

  Maybe Cully had his reasons for keeping his family history to himself but, as far as Faye was concerned, finding a bomber and a missing professor trumped those reasons. Cully was a generation or more older than Ahua or Liu or anyone else working on the case. When he was born, people may still have been living underground. He could turn out to be a critical resource for cracking these cases.

  Even if his mother had kept her earlier life a secret from her son—and why would she?—plenty of other people could have told him about it. Faye was pretty sure he knew a lot more than he was telling, and she planned to find out what it was.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Cully had been expecting the call from Ahua ever since the bomb cracked open a hole in his past. Fifty years had passed since he left Oklahoma City, but that didn’t mean nobody in the city remembered him.

  Of course, they remembered him. He’d worked his whole life to be memorable.

  In his case, the likelihood that he would be remembered was doubled, because he was spawned from two communities that had surely burst with pride as they watched his rise to fame. When Cully had been born in the 1940s, hardly a hundred years had passed since a big portion of the Muscogee tribe was uprooted by people who called them Creeks, driven from their homes in America’s Southeast and dragged to Oklahoma. A generation later, his Chinese ancestors came to North America to help build the railroad that spanned it. When it was finished, they came to know that they were in a place where they weren’t wanted.

  He guessed that his people had stayed in Oklahoma because being hated in one place is as good as being hated in any other place. Everybody needs a home, and the Muscogee Creeks and the Oklahoma Chinese had made theirs here, for better or worse.

  For both communities, Cully was the ultimate hometown boy who had done good. Every time one of his movies hit the theaters, h
e had known what was happening at home, as surely as if he’d been there to see it. He had known that there were people in Oklahoma paying money that they couldn’t spare to buy tickets, just so they could see Yu Yan and Wayman’s boy on the silver screen.

  Never mind that he hadn’t spoken to anybody in either community since he was a seventeen-year-old runaway. And never mind that people in both communities knew something about why he’d left and why he had stayed away. Or they suspected.

  As Cully rode the elevator down from his penthouse, he had time to think about how much of his story he wanted to tell Agent Ahua.

  He knew he should probably tell him all of it. He’d told Jakob the highlights on the plane from California. He’d told him about the boarding school and the beatings. He’d even told him about the car wreck that took both his parents in an instant, leaving him with no place to go. After they were gone, he had stood on the horns of a dilemma: He could choose to endure the beatings or he could choose to run. He had run.

  Telling the story in this way gave it a certain nobility. No, it gave him a certain nobility, but it left out a crucial detail. And that detail was Angela.

  * * *

  Ahua had launched his game of psychological chess. He had called Cully and set up an interview, establishing himself in a position of power by naming the time without asking if it was convenient. That time was forty-five minutes in the future. After the briefest possible conversation, he had broken the connection, staring at his phone for a moment.

  He’d learned the news about Cully’s connection to the underground Chinese community while surrounded by top-notch agents who were already seated at their workstations. Minutes after he sent Liu home and asked them to ferret out all of Cully Mantooth’s old secrets, they had found the 1962 newspaper articles reporting on two Creek runaways, both of them seventeen. One of them was Cully and the other was a girl named Angela Bond. The world knew what had happened to Cully since then, but it didn’t know what had happened to Angela. His researchers hadn’t found any newspaper report of her being found yet, nor had they found any evidence that she’d ever had a credit card, driver’s license, or any other marker of a modern human’s existence. Given time, they might find more, but he knew enough now to question Cully closely on the subject of Angela Bond.

  If Cully had any secrets about this Angela person, he’d had fifty years to come up with a story. Giving him long enough to prepare for an interview would not be in Ahua’s favor, but giving him forty-five minutes to get nervous? That was more Ahua’s style.

  He wanted to give Cully time to wonder what he knew. And he wanted to give himself a chance to meditate on the matter, so he closed himself up in his mobile office and did that. In forty-five minutes, the time would come to peel back an actor’s mask and see who Cully Mantooth really was, but that time had not come yet.

  * * *

  Faye knew that Joe had called and told his father she was safe, but she also knew that Sly would want to hear it directly from her. She owed him a call, but she’d truthfully been pretty upset and pretty busy and, for a time, pretty spaced out on tranquilizers. Now, though, she was ready to make that call, and it was only partly because Sly knew more about Cully’s early life than anyone else she knew. Maybe he knew more than anybody else still alive.

  She enjoyed talking to Sly. He sounded like Joe, but he didn’t. His voice had a graveled edge earned from uncountable cigarettes and uncountable miles spent in the cab of an eighteen-wheeler. It was nothing like soft-spoken Joe’s mellow speech. Yet there was something in his measured delivery and stealthy humor that was very like her husband. Or, since Sly had been on the earth longer than his son, she guessed the truth was that Joe sometimes sounded very like Sly.

  She and Sly exchanged hellos and she embarked on an effort to convince him that she was really and truly okay.

  “That bomb was no joke, Daughter. You might wake up tomorrow with some little ache or pain you don’t have today. If you do, I want you to promise to go get it checked.”

  She promised. And then she hesitated.

  “Sounds to me like there’s a reason for this phone call. Not that I don’t enjoy seeing your name on my phone’s screen when it’s ringing, whether you’ve got a reason or not.”

  “Yes, I have a reason. I want to talk to you about Cully. What do you know about his past?”

  “Well…”

  Faye waited. She didn’t often hear Sly hesitate before speaking, not like this. His conversational style was usually more like a congenial steamroller.

  “Well, I don’t know much. He’s a lot older than me, so I was maybe in first grade when he left. Not sure. I know it was before my brother, Joseph, caught the pneumonia and died, and I was ten then. I only remember seeing Cully in the summertime at the family reunions. Relatives would come to Sylacauga from far and wide, and they’d stay for a week. My grandmama’s house would fill up. People that couldn’t get a bed there would either pitch tents in her yard or they’d find someplace else to sleep. Usually, Cully’s family stayed with us. His parents would sleep in our room, mine and Joseph’s. Cully, Joseph, and me, we’d throw some blankets down on the hallway floor and sleep there.”

  “I had no idea you knew Cully at all.”

  “I haven’t seen him since I had most of my baby teeth. Well, except in the movies. I’ve seen a lot of Cully there. Plenty of water’s gone under the bridge. I had some hard years since Cully left, and he wasn’t part of them.”

  Faye wondered if there was any end to the trouble Sly had survived. She’d known about his time in the penitentiary. She’d known he lost his wife Patricia, Joe’s mother, when she was under fifty. But she had never once heard anyone mention his brother, Joseph, whose death was a loss so hard that Sly had named his only child after him.

  Sly was warmed up now, so Faye felt certain that she was about to hear everything about Cully that her father-in-law ever knew.

  “Lots of teenaged boys wouldn’t have wanted to be stuck with two little kids like me and Joseph, but Cully was always good to us. He made us flutes and taught us how to play ’em. My grandmama thought he couldn’t do no wrong, so she made sure his pockets was always full of cookies. We ate most of ‘em for him, and he’d just laugh at us making pigs out of ourselves. Whenever he saw us getting rambunctious, he’d sneak us away from the boring old folks and take us to the creek. Come to think of it, Cully taught me to swim. And to fish. I’d forgot that until this very minute.”

  Faye remembered Cully’s fatherly arm across her back as they were knocked off their feet by the bomb. “Sounds like he was really good with children, even when he was just a kid himself.”

  “He was. I remember one time when I’d done something I really shouldn’t oughta done. I hid in the pantry and listened while he asked my Daddy to go easy on me. He said, ‘Sly’s a good boy, sir. He’s just a little too smart for his own good. You gotta be smart to think up the kind of mischief Sly makes.’”

  Faye laughed. “He had you pegged.”

  “Yeah. He did. The family lost touch with him when he took off from school. I remember it was Eastertime, just a year before he was due to graduate. Woulda been the first one in the family to manage that, too, so you know he wanted to get out of there bad. It nearly killed my grandmama. As far as I know from the movie magazines, him and his wife never had any young’uns. Always thought that was sad, myself. There he was, sixteen years old, and telling Daddy how to raise me. And he was right, too. I heard him say in as many words, ‘Please, sir, don’t ever send them boys to that school.’”

  “The boarding school? The one he ran away from?”

  “Yep. The very same one that my daddy sent me to, right after Joseph passed. He said I was smart and he wanted me to learn things. He said maybe it wouldn’t be fun, but school wasn’t supposed to be fun. Daddy always meant well, but I’m here to tell you that Cully was right. Children shouldn’t ought
a be treated that way. And they belong with their parents. Cully’s the kind of person to just take hisself away from a situation like that. I ain’t. Know how I got away? I behaved like the devil’s own son until they done me a favor and kicked me out.”

  Faye wondered what kind of devilishness it could possibly take to get kicked out of an abusive boarding school. Knowing Sly, his transgressions were probably entertaining.

  “I remember the grownups doing a lot of talking when Cully took off, but I didn’t understand what they was saying. Not at the time. When I got older, I come to understand what they meant when their voices got real quiet and they said, ‘You know he didn’t go alone.’”

  This had to be the answer to the question that Faye didn’t know to ask.

  “One of the other students ran away with him?” she asked. “Do you know who it was?”

  “Her name was Angela. I remember thinking her name suited her, because she was pretty like an angel. So you know what the grownups must have been talking about when a young man and a young woman run away together.” Sly’s voice lowered, as if to echo the hushed voices he’d heard when he was too young to understand the gossip of adults.

  “You don’t know her last name?”

  “Nope. All I remember is the name Angela. Then, eight or ten years later, everybody was talking about Cully again.”

  “What happened? Did he call home?”

  “Nope, never did that. But ’bout ten years after he left, that’s when he got real famous, famous enough to get his picture in the movie magazines. Remember them? Before the internet, that’s how regular people kept track of famous people. My aunt was a beautician and she always had a big stack of movie magazines in her beauty shop.”

  “I remember them,” Faye said.

  “Everybody came to the beauty shop to see that first article about Cully. I remember there was a picture of him and his wife.” When my mama saw it, she said, “I always wondered about that, and there’s my answer. If you can call it an answer.”