by A. C. Fuller
"Wait a second. He left the table at the bar, walked through the hallway, stayed there for an hour, then went to Bice's room? And you can't see what he did in the hallway? Whether or not he went into a room?"
"We're contacting guests in those rooms now, but that's right. I was hoping you'd know who he met with."
Alex glanced at Camila, who was staring intently at the phone.
She glanced at him, shrugged, and whispered, "Bhootbhai?"
Nors continued, "We're still reviewing footage from around that time."
Alex looked back at the phone. "Thanks, officer. Please be in touch if you learn anything else, or if we can help in any way."
"I will."
Alex hung up. "That's it," he said to Camila. "James met with a source, then disappeared."
"And the source either is Bhootbhai, or knows who he is."
They left the inn and headed south on Ferncliff Avenue, past cedar-shingled houses with small yards, then turned west onto Winslow Way.
"This is the main street on Bainbridge," Alex said. He pointed toward a commercial cluster a few blocks ahead. "That's downtown."
"That's it?"
"Smaller than you thought, right? Locals prefer to think of it as quaint."
"Well, you said it was the size of Manhattan."
"In terms of land, yes. But the population is only about twenty thousand, or one-percent of Manhattan."
"You do like to do math in your head, don't you?"
They walked three blocks in silence and entered the commercial zone, which stretched for about five blocks in front of them. "Mostly little shops, restaurants. Great bookstore. Some Seattle folks have weekend or summer houses here, but there's a thriving full-time population, too. It's not like some of those New York hamlets that are vacant all week and fill up on Friday at five."
After a quick breakfast of muffins and coffee, they stepped into The Eagle Crest Bookstore, which sat between a fancy cheese shop and a five and dime, one of the last of the old-time shops left on the island. It had large windows and shining wood floors that matched the grain of the bookcases. A few customers milled around the bookshelves in the back, and as he and Camila stepped in, Alex noticed Betty behind the counter.
"How'd you sleep," she asked as he approached.
"Good, and Camila—" He turned, but she was gone.
Betty said, "I pegged her to be a bookstore lover."
"Yeah, I guess. But anyway, she slept well, too." He ran a hand through his hair. "Look, Betty, I can't really tell you why, but I need to talk with you about my parents. Yesterday you were . . . I don't know."
"Elusive," she said, stepping out from behind the counter.
Alex stared, and her eyes met his directly. "Why?" he asked.
"Your mom and I had a special kind of relationship. Like sisters. There are things women keep from their children, Alex. You know, you might find something of interest in the storage container your parents' stuff was put in after they died."
He had taken a few keepsakes from the house after the funeral, but had hired a local executor to handle the estate. The executor had sold most of their belongings, placing legal documents, personal papers, and a few odd and ends in a storage unit, which Alex had promised himself he'd go through sometime. Seven years later, he still dreaded the idea.
Betty knelt and began dusting a low shelf, looking up at him periodically. "I met them their first day on the island. You were six months old, and I had just opened the bookstore. They came in and asked about local authors, about doing readings. Your dad was a bit cold—not mean, just formal. He felt like a New Yorker. Your mom and I hit it off famously. I was ten years older than her, but we became very close, like sisters. And she fit in on the island right away."
"What made you two connect so well?"
"All the things women talk about when men aren't around."
He didn't want to know the details, but felt he had to ask. "Such as?"
"Sex. Drugs. Poetry." She stood and continued dusting. "It was the early seventies. Anyway, I got the sense that she'd had a wilder life than your father. He was a bit, I don't know, stiff. Your mother had had . . . other experiences."
Alex smiled and grimaced at the same time. "You mean boyfriends?" He had assumed that both of his parents had led active lives before meeting in the East Village and conceiving him, but he'd always avoided the details.
"That, and she'd dabbled in pot, dropped acid a few times. Like I said, the seventies. When people picture that time, most imagine San Francisco, but it was going on in the south, as well."
"The south?"
"I mean when she was in New Orleans."
Alex scanned his memory. He wasn't sure, but he didn't remember hearing anything about his mom living in or traveling to New Orleans. "When was she there?"
Betty dusted in silence until she reached the end of the shelf. "Well, she didn't like to talk about that time too much. You know, I still stock some of your parents' books."
He took hold of her shoulders and gently turned her toward him. "Why don't you want to talk about it?"
She smiled wanly as her gaze shifted to the floor. "Oh, I don't know, your mom didn't want you to know about that time."
"What time?"
"Her time at Tulane."
"She went to Tulane? No, she graduated from Barnard. I remember something vague about her going to college for a year or so somewhere else before that, but . . ."
"For a year, yes. She—" Betty paused to bid farewell to two customers exiting the bookstore. Once they'd left, she said, "She lived there for a year, had this whole fantasy of being a Southern writer. She did all the things nineteen-year-old girls did at that time."
"So, why didn't you want to tell me about it?"
"I don't think it's my place to tell."
"Tell me what?"
"She had an incident down there. It was why she left New Orleans."
"What incident?"
She looked around the store nervously.
"Betty, it can't be that big of a secret," Alex said. "She's been gone seven years."
"Still, it's a small town and people might talk." She leaned in. "She had a boyfriend there. A bad boyfriend. Your mother was beautiful. She had the style of Joan Baez. And she wanted to look like Joan Baez. She wanted to be Joan Baez, but with a more literary slant than a musical one. She even dyed her hair black back then. All that is to say that, in New Orleans, she was a standout. Tall, with long straight black hair. I can just imagine it. So, she had this boyfriend. Long story short, she ended up being afraid of him, said he was crazy. She broke up with him, but he wouldn't leave her alone. Letters, calls, cold stares across campus."
Alex held up his hand to stop her. "Wait, how do you know all this?"
"Some of it she told me, some of it is in her poems."
"So, what happened with the guy?"
"I don't know for sure, but she said he tried to kill her."
He rubbed his temples. "What?"
"That's what she said. They broke up, and a while later he tried to kill her."
"How?"
"Not sure, something about a fire."
Feeling hot and confused, he tried to imagine his mother—blonde his whole life—with long black hair, reading erotic poetry in a smoky New Orleans bar on open mike night. Then he started filling in images of men obsessed with her, stalking her.
Betty reached up and touched him on the shoulder. "I still have copies of her poetry book. Want me get one?"
He nodded and followed her to a low shelf beside the cash register. Betty kneeled and reached for a row of books labeled "Local Authors."
"We try to keep something in stock from all the locals. People don't buy much poetry." He knelt down next to her and scanned the books, looking for a name he recognized.
"Here it is," she said, grabbing a thin purple volume off the shelf and handing it to him.
He stood up while reading the title out loud. "Poems from the South, Poems from the North. Sh
e wrote this?"
"Yes, you knew she wrote."
"I knew she wrote, and I remember her saying something about putting out a book. Sometime when I was at NYU, right?"
"Would have been 1995. Not too long after you left."
Alex turned the book over in his hands, flipped the pages. The cover was linen, the paper thick, the ink a rich black. "It's beautiful," he said. "I can't believe I never—"
"Don't feel bad, deary. Most boys in college wouldn't want to read their mom's poetry book. Sex, feelings, stuff about relationships. Denis Diderot said that poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast, and wild."
"Yeah, not exactly how I want to think of my mom."
He flipped it open to a random page and read:
The sweet, sweet smell of magnolia
Your father hit your face often then,
Bruising your innocence
Now grown, your straight back tight, you penetrate me
And we rock, we rock
But your back aches, hurt forever
And my window is open, the magnolia
You can't smell it, but I can
I want to smell it
With or without you
He read quickly—half-wanting to not be reading—a sinking feeling in his gut and the dissonant note he'd felt in Bice's room filling the bookstore.
When he'd finished, he looked up at Betty, who'd been watching him. "Do you have that book about Standard Media?" he asked. "That ghostwritten piece of crap they put out to repair their public image?"
"Yeah, it's in the back. Didn't sell well."
"You mean this one?" Camila emerged from the back of the store, holding a white hardback book. She handed it to Alex, who read the cover. A Promise Renewed.
"Why did you want it?" Betty asked.
"Do you know the exact year my mom was at Tulane?" Alex asked.
"Well, first year of college—"
"And she was born in '51, so 1970 or 1971?"
He opened the book and flipped to the index.
"What are you looking for?" Camila asked.
He found the name Denver Bice and turned to the page listed. Standard Media's corporate communications office had done as much as possible to scrub their history clean of Bice, and he was mentioned only briefly in the book as CEO from 1996-2002, with no mention of the reason he'd been fired.
Alex scanned the page, which contained a brief list of his accomplishments as CEO and a standard bio. He turned to Camila and read out loud. "Mr. Bice received a BA in English from Tulane University in 1973."
27
Alex stumbled out of the bookstore, hearing only that Betty would locate the key to the storage unit later, and that Camila would head back to the inn.
The sun had come out over the small downtown, and he squinted against it as he stepped into the street, aware only of a blank space in his head, with a single name passing through it.
Martha Morelli.
He made his way to the edge of the commercial district in a daze, staring at the ground and hoping no one would recognize him.
Of course, he'd known that his parents had had their own lives before he'd been born. And he'd been aware of the fact that he didn't know much about those lives—even that he'd avoided learning the details on purpose. What kid wants to know about his parents' past careers, passions, or lovers?
But as he passed from the commercial district onto a tree-lined residential street, small memories began coming to him. Little snippets, now tinged with meaning. A look his mother gave his father when he mentioned a trip. A discussion in which his father tried to convince him to "explore his options" before accepting NYU's early admissions offer. And the dream he'd had, over and over, in which he asked his parents why they hadn't visited him in New York.
And the name.
Martha Morelli.
He continued into the residential neighborhood, past houses he recognized and others he didn't. After a block, he started running. Then sprinting. Faster and faster, pushing the memories away.
He passed a small yellow house, one level, where he'd lost his virginity to Tiffany Hedger. Her room had smelled like artificial rose air freshener. That night with Tiffany had always been a pleasant memory, but was now jumbled with others from that time and took on a sinister, unreliable hue.
Still at a full sprint, he glimpsed the water between two houses and turned down a familiar path that led through overgrown bushes to a small beach that was covered in pebbles, with only a small line of sand about a yard wide.
He fell on the sand, panting, and lay still for a moment.
Martha Morelli.
The story was coming back to him slowly.
When Alex had been researching Denver Bice two year earlier, he'd spoken with one of his classmates from Tulane, now a psychiatrist. Though the psychiatrist hadn't had proof, he'd convinced Alex that Bice was crazy enough to kill someone as he'd recounted the tale of Martha Morelli in his thick New Orleans drawl.
There was a girl, Martha Morelli, who went to Tulane with us way back when. Every man south of Baton Rouge was after her. She had that New York look that was rare down here in those days. Long black hair, attitude—you know what I mean? Anyway, Den got her.
Alex sat up and pounded the sand. Before he knew it, he heard a wordless scream echoing over the water. His own voice. A small group of seagulls lifted off the beach and flew across the water.
The scream died down and he breathed deeply, trying to regain control. "I need to calm down," he said to himself, quietly.
He fixed his eyes on the water. "They are already dead. They are not dying again. They are already dead."
Flipping over to lie on his belly, he tried to block out the smells and sounds, tried to place himself back in that conversation about Martha Morelli.
They dated for a few months but then she dumped him . . . But he was only sad for a day or two. After that, he cracked or something. When a man gets his heart broken, he usually drinks for a couple days, then just finds another woman to fill the hole. With Den, it was as though the breakup had hit a deep wound . . . He just became, I don't know, flatter . . . A few months after the breakup, Martha started going around with some other guy. I don't remember who, but he was older, maybe a grad student . . . And then her apartment burned down . . . Once she started going around with this guy, Den burned her apartment down, along with the rest of her building. Remember it like it was yesterday. Place was right down from campus on St. Charles Street. You track her down and she'll tell you he did it. She transferred out of Tulane after the one year . . . I heard she moved up north. New York, maybe.
Alex heard people walking toward him and sat up. The piece of him that was self-conscious kicked in, and he tried to look confident. A middle-aged couple passed him without looking over, walking briskly after a dog.
He stood and began walking slowly back toward town. Along the way, he passed benches he'd sat on, houses he'd played in as a kid, the building that had once housed the ice cream shop his dad took him to after long strolls around town.
And Tiffany's house. That small, yellow house.
He remembered the feeling he'd had walking home after his date with Tiffany. Of course, there'd been a part of him that was jubilant. He hadn't known about love, but he'd known he liked her—a lot. And, of course, he'd been physically satisfied.
But another part of him had been surprised that he didn't feel more different. Halfway home, he'd worried for a full block about the calculus test he had the next day. He'd had to remind himself that he actually was different, saying out loud to himself, "I'm not a virgin anymore."
He was experiencing that same kind of feeling now.
He repeated the words in his head. Martha Morelli is my mother, and Denver Bice burned down her apartment. But each time, he'd get distracted. He couldn't make it feel real.
Martha Morelli is my mother, and Denver Bice burned down her apartment. He knew it, but didn't know it. It was too strange, too new to be
true. And the implications were more than he could bear.
He pictured the blue Camry sliding into the cedar tree, then walked in a stupor the rest of the way back to the Inn on the Sound.
Camila met him at the guest room door. "Where have you been?" she asked, setting his mother's book of poems on the bedside table.
"You were reading it?" he asked weakly.
"Betty said I could borrow it. Nothing in there that helps, I don't think. Bunch of poems about some guy down in New Orleans. Scarred guy. Kind of a jerk, but she wrote about him like she really loved him."
He pointed at the book. "That's what my source was talking about."
"What?"
Alex stumbled around the room is silence, stopping every few seconds to fiddle with the venetian blinds, closing them and opening them.
Camila sat on the bed, watching him.
"My mom was at Tulane at the same time as Denver Bice."
"Bice was the guy all those poems were about?"
"I just read the one. But that means—"
"Your mom dated Denver Bice. And that means Bice . . ."
She trailed off as Alex flopped down in the window nook. "Did Betty give you the key to the storage container?" he asked.
"Yeah. And she said we can borrow her car. But . . . Alex, you're scaring me, what aren't you telling me?"
"Did I ever tell you the story of Martha Morelli?"
28
Northeast Bainbridge Island
James tried to stand as he heard the piercing creak of a metal door. His legs were cold and numb, and he immediately dropped back down to the floor, sliding over to the wall of what he assumed was some sort of small garden shed.
"Up."
He recognized Bice's voice.
"Now."
James sat up slowly, blinking against the gray evening light from the open door. "W-why?"
"We're going inside."
James followed Bice across the lawn toward a cedar-shingled house, walking a few paces behind him. He wore the same light blue jeans and black t-shirt he'd been wearing since he'd left New York, and they were dirty and wrinkled.
