The Clouds Roll Away

by Sibella Giorello

“Last night somebody burned a cross at Rapland.”

  “Please. ‘Rapland’ sounds like a theme park. You know very well the name of that plantation is Laurel.”

  Yes, I knew. I knew all kinds of things. By junior high I could recite long passages of internecine gossip about families who traced their heritage to the House of Burgesses, but I only had one foot in that world. David Harmon married my mother when I was five years old. To this day, I couldn’t trace my paternal heritage back one generation to my birth father. Not that I needed to: David Harmon was every girl’s dream dad.

  “The gentleman who owns Rapland thinks you’re trying to run him off his property. Is that true?”

  “Are you implying something?”

  “I’m not implying, Flynn. I’m asking flat out.”

  “He’s ruining that place,” she said. “I don’t want him there. I’ve never said otherwise. I’ve been saying it since he moved in four years ago.”

  The fine bones in her neck looked as brittle as glass rods. The pretty girl I once knew was lost to hard work. Several years ago, to keep up with expenses, Flynn and her husband had turned Belle Grove into a bed-and-breakfast.

  “Flynn, there were people in the house. Children. The flames were burning ten feet from the door.”

  She dropped the gardening tool, wiping the back of her wrist across her forehead. “It’s been awhile since you’ve been out this way, Raleigh, so let me explain it to you. My guests pay good money to stay here. They want a romantic retreat. They expect a visit with the historic past. We were doing fine until that rapper took over Laurel. Ever since, it’s been rap music blaring down-river, party boats up and down the water. How do you think that’s affected my business? Is this something I can call the FBI about?”

  “That fire could have burned the place down.”

  “Good.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Good,” she repeated. “Then maybe he’ll leave and somebody could rebuild Laurel. Somebody who will treat that beautiful property with the dignity it deserves.”

  I leveled my gaze. “Flynn, I want you to answer truthfully. Did you have anything to do with burning that cross?”

  She picked up the tool, waving it. “Look around. Do you see what I’m doing? I don’t have time to terrorize anybody. I’m working. But we’re old friends, so let me be very clear: when that guy goes back to Hollywood, or New York, or wherever he came from, I’m throwing the biggest party Richmond has seen since Antietam.”

  “Thanks for the warning.”

  “Oh, you’re invited.”

  “I’ll pass.”

  Her blue eyes flashed with indignation. “Here you come to Belle Grove and insinuate—”

  “Flynn?”

  We both turned.

  At the back of the conservatory, where fanned banana palms brushed the peaked glass roof, the stalks parted to reveal a man walking toward us from the door to the house. He looked familiar in some distant way, somebody I’d met but couldn’t place again.

  “Oh, Stuart.” Flynn pulled off her gloves. “Time got away from me. I’ve got everything ready. It’s all in the parlor room.”

  He wore tan chinos and a blue cashmere V-neck, his face more hard than rugged and capped by blond hair shaved to the scalp. He turned to me.

  “This is Stuart Morgan,” said Flynn with perfunctory politeness. “Stuart, Raleigh Harmon. Raleigh was just leaving.”

  I shook his hand. He gave an automatic sort of smile.

  “Raleigh was just leaving,” Flynn repeated.

  Just for that, I took out my card and held it out to her. After staring at it for a long moment, she accepted it with a noble sort of weariness. I walked down the aisle, feeling their silence behind me, and stepped outside. A man wearing an I ♥ NY sweatshirt and jeans sat in a rocking chair on the front porch. He smoked a cigarette and flicked ash on the floor.

  I drove down the oyster-shell road. A column of walnut trees reached for the blue sky like ancient black hands. It was mesmerizing land and I sympathized with Flynn’s devotion to it. But as I pulled onto Williamsburg Road, heading back to town, I wondered about the past’s magnetic hold. Flynn clung to her history like someone afraid of perishing, someone drowning who succeeds only in taking the saving grace down with her.

  But most of all I wondered about her statement and the question it left hanging in the conservatory’s moist air.

  She did not have time to terrorize an unwelcome neighbor, she said.

  And if she did . . . ?

  chapter three

  Having it my way, I ate two Whoppers with large fries and a Coke at the Burger King on Williamsburg Road in Sandston. For entertainment, I watched heads swiveling to look at my K-Car.

  A certifiable bucket of bolts, my Bureau ride was apparently designed by engineers hoping to wipe covetousness off the face of the earth. It was a white rectangle with windows like sandwich boards. Inside things got worse. The AM radio barely worked, the heater blew cold, and the bench seats were smothered with grooved vinyl. Over the years, the sun had bleached the plastic to a color resembling dead skin.

  And yet, as I licked salt from my fingers and headed back into town, it didn’t matter.

  I was home.

  Home.

  In September I got shipped out on a disciplinary transfer initiated by my supervisor, Victoria Phaup. She sent me all the way to Seattle but like a bad boomerang I came right back. The bosses above Phaup lifted my transfer for work above and beyond the call, and I was home for Thanksgiving. More importantly, I was home for the dreaded anniversary of November 29, the night four years ago when somebody shot my dad in an alley and left him for dead. His murder remains unsolved.

  Phaup was no dummy. Rather than reassign the hideous

  K-Car that she had handpicked for me in the first place, she kept it waiting for my return.

  But as I drove into town, my heart skipped at the sight of magnolia trees dark green even in the winter, and downtown Richmond where the buildings glistened in the sun like perfect crystals, and the mighty James River, rolling over its boulders.

  For all its troubled history and racial strife, this place was home.

  And few things ever feel as good as coming back to where you belong, and realizing the place waited for you.

  Since I wanted to stay, I went straight to Phaup’s office after parking at the Bureau compound off Parham Road. Among her accusations, she claimed I operated too independently. If daily check-ins kept me in Richmond, I could swallow my pride.

  My first instinct when I saw her office door was closed was to walk away, heart skipping with joy. But my second instinct made me ask her secretary, Claudia, how long before Her Highness was available—not in those exact words. Claudia picked up the phone and told Phaup I was here. After eight minutes I picked up a magazine from the coffee table in the reception area. A publication for retired agents. People who started another life after the Bureau. I read it twice.

  Thirty-six minutes later, Victoria Phaup granted me an audience.

  She was a stocky woman with short brown hair threaded with gray. She must have been pretty at one time, but twelve years of clawing her way through Bureau management had compressed her small features into a persistent expression of defensiveness, her eyes like fractured gray pebbles. Thin mouth locked, loaded for counterattack. And her office smelled like dry ice.

  “I appreciate your sending the e-mail this morning, Raleigh.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Taking no chances, I notified Phaup after speaking to RPM on the phone. My e-mail gave the time and place and that I was leaving to check it out. Baby-agent stuff.

  But hey, I was home.

  “Perhaps you’ve learned something from your transfer,” she said.

  I nodded. One thing I’d learned was to keep my mouth shut.

  According to office gossip, Phaup had been a rising star in the Bureau until she sent an e-mail to the wrong recipient—in fact, to the supervisor she criticized. Since
then, she had rotated among field offices, a path she clearly hoped I would experience too. When she landed in Richmond five years ago, it put her within physical striking distance of D.C., and while I was away, she was named head of the Richmond field office.

  I never doubted that my career—or its death—was part of her campaign to return to headquarters.

  Her desk grew paper in accreting layers, and she reached into one of the stalagmites, extracting a manila folder. She read to herself, then said, “Update on the cross burning.”

  Speaking to the top of her head, I described my interview with Rapland’s celebrity owner and explained my collection of forensic evidence. I said that right now the only leads were his suspicions, which included the preservation society. “They’ve apparently filed petitions against him. They don’t like his remodel. His other suspicion is . . . well, the county sheriff.”

  She looked up. “You’re surprised about the sheriff?”

  “I’ve only met the sheriff once, but—”

  I stopped.

  I’d met the sheriff once, last summer, when I got myself into a compromising situation. By the mirthful expression on Phaup’s face, she remembered it too. The compromising situation that precipitated my disciplinary transfer.

  “I don’t know the sheriff personally,” I said finally. “But it sounds like a long shot. I think the man was venting more than anything else.”

  “Cross burnings do not happen in a vacuum, Raleigh. That county might be twenty miles from town but it’s a century away from the rest of the world. It’s much too small for any hate group to operate independently.” She closed the file. “You will report directly to me. I want updates, continually. I’ll send the information to the hate crimes coordinator in D.C. And since this involves a celebrity, I’ve alerted media relations.” She didn’t sound disappointed by the last part. Phaup relished the attention, provided we looked like good guys. “And open a file on the sheriff.”

  “We’re going after the sheriff?”

  “‘Going after’ is not the correct term,” she said.

  “Ma’am, there are better places to begin—”

  “And I don’t want any dramatic permutations. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She rolled her right shoulder. I looked away, watching a string of cirrus clouds stretch a veil across the blue sky. Phaup could have been demoted for a misfired e-mail, but she also could’ve been banished to the hinterlands for adjusting her undergarments in public. The woman tugged, pulled, and shifted things like a third base coach at the bottom of the eighth.

  “The hate crime is your priority,” she said, extracting the hand from her blouse. “But we’re short on manpower. Holidays, vacations. The flu going around. Pollard Durant needs help on his task force. It would require three days a week, at least.”

  Suddenly caught off guard, I hesitated. She was offering task force work—a plum assignment—after what we’d been through? It didn’t seem possible. But then, maybe this was an olive branch.

  Maybe, like me, she was trying. And maybe, just maybe, I’d been wrong about her.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’d be happy to work the task force.”

  “No overtime. Headquarters isn’t compensating for anything over fifty hours a week. But that shouldn’t be a problem for you.”

  I waited. “Because . . . ?”

  “Because you’re on phones.”

  Phones. The dullest part of a task force.

  I wasn’t wrong about her.

  She smiled. “All right, then. Off you go.”

  Yes, I thought, standing to leave. Off I go.

  My new desk was tucked into a corner of the third floor, right next to the back stairwell. Four feet, three inches from the stairwell to be exact. Yes, I measured. To reach my chair, I had to duck under the heat vent, and when I sat down just before noon, I could hear an army marching down the stairwell to lunch, the voices echoing off the five-story cavern of concrete and steel.

  My old desk had been a pleasant fire hazard of notes, memos, triplicate forms, and weeks of snacks stashed in the desk’s bottom drawers. It had also been in the main squad on the second floor. Not only was the K-Car waiting, but Phaup put an entire floor between me and the rest of the squad. Reciting my chant about home, I pulled a bag of Fritos and a can of Coke—never, ever Pepsi—from my desk and consumed both while typing a letter to the forensics lab in D.C. Trained as a geologist, I came to the Bureau as a forensic technician in the mineralogy department. When my father was murdered, I went to Quantico, hoping to turn grief into something productive.

  In the letter, I explained to the technician that the soil inside the paint can was evidence from a hate crime, an automatic expedite for the lab. I wanted to know what substance was used to light the fire and what minerals were in the lawn soil itself, in case it could be matched later to somebody’s clothing or shoes. Ignoring the one-sided cell phone conversation echoing down the stairwell—“Hello? Are you there? Hello?”—I sent Phaup an e-mail offering a tedious blow-by-blow of my procedure. Ducking under the heat vent, I walked down to the second floor.

  The main squad room sat empty. For several moments I gazed at the gathered cubicles, the cartoons taped to partitions, the running gags and inside jokes, and suddenly I felt isolated and lonely, as if everyone had left for a party I wasn’t invited to.

  Giving my mood a swift kick, I rang the buzzer beside the Dutch door to Evidence Control. Get over it, I thought. Get to work.

  The top half of the Dutch door opened.

  “You’re back,” said Allene Caron.

  She wore a yellow satin blouse that lay on her brown skin like filaments of polished brass. Picking up my paperwork, she raised her chin and ran her dark eyes over my request.

  “Here to stay?” she asked, looking over the top of the document.

  “That’s the plan.”

  She harrumphed and circled a section of my paperwork. Fifteen years ago, Allene started here as a clerk. She now ran Evidence Control and nothing could convince her that agents wrote competent paperwork. She tapped the red pen on my intake form.

  “What day is it, Raleigh?”

  “I’m guessing it’s not the sixth.”

  “Not in this world.”

  “But I got December right.”

  Raising an eyebrow, she corrected the date, December 7, then initialed the correction. She stamped her official seal and assigned a bar code to track the evidence through the FBI system. Just before closing the Dutch door, she threw me an expression that conveyed her suspicions concerning my survival.

  “Be good, you hear?”

  “I promise, I’ll be good.”

  Harrumphing again, she closed the door.

  chapter four

  The Title III surveillance operations—known as the T-III room—was stashed with the heating and cooling equipment behind a gray door on the third floor. With half of the ceiling’s acoustic tiles missing, the place had a ghoulish jack-o’-lantern appearance. But it made it easier for the tech guys to run cables for routers and modems and phones and monitors.

  On Wednesday afternoon I opened the gray door and heard the loud whooshing of air pumps. An almost chubby young man sat at a dinged-up stainless steel table, his back to the door. Bose earphones connected to the laptop, and when I tapped his shoulder he jumped, kicking a yellow Hardee’s bucket, scattering gray chicken bones across the floor.

  He pulled off the headset and smoothed down pale tufts of hair.

  “Stan.” He shook my hand. “Stan Norton.”

  “I’m Raleigh.”

  “I know.”

  “We’ve met?”

  “No. But I came up from Savannah right after you . . . after you left for Seattle. Here, let me clean up this mess.”

  Brushing the biscuit crumbs off the table into the Hardee’s bucket, he picked up the greasy bones, placing the bucket near the garbage can where a delta formed of soggy tea bags, oxidized apple cores, wet coffe
e grounds, and paper napkins smeared with the primary-colored condiments. Although the room was kept cool for the electronic equipment, putrid odors filled the air. I sat down at the laptop.

  In the once-upon-a-time I was only too happy to miss, we recorded conversations on magnetic tape. Because tapes can break or get damaged, agents kept a separate log for each phone line, marking date, time, and every single on-off moment. I’d seen illegible notes blotched with coffee and grease but since September 11, 2001, we recorded digitally in real time, down to a tenth of a second. The work was easier now, but more boring.

  “Anything I should know before you leave?” I asked Stan.

  “Things stay quiet until about 7 or 8 p.m.”

  I was certain he wanted to say more, but the gray door flew open with a bang and a woman tumbled into the room calling out, “Halloo!”

  She carried a large embroidered bag and headed for the table at a run, hoisting the bag up, letting it land with a thud. She laughed, a high shrill sound. “I cannot believe who they give driver’s licenses to these days; is anyone testing these people? By God’s grace alone I got here in one piece. You must be Raleigh. I’m late!”

  I glanced at Stan. He shifted his eyes to his briefcase, which lay open on the table near the enormous bag. He began stuffing papers, clamping it shut without organizing any of it.

  “Excuse me,” I said to the blustery woman. “You must have the wrong room. This is T-III surveillance.”

  “Louise Jackson.” She stuck out her hand. “Only nobody calls me Louise. Except my brother. And he’s got Alzheimer’s so even he doesn’t call me that anymore. My name’s Beezus. My sister, may she rest in some kind of peace after what she did to me, she never could get Louise out of her cruel little mouth, and, well, you know nicknames. They stick like toad spit on a good dress.”

  She cocked her head, looking at me carefully. “What do they call you—no, wait, let me guess. They call you . . . Leigh.”

  “Raleigh. Just Raleigh.”

  “Okay, ‘Just Raleigh.’” She swatted at my arm. “I brought us all kinds of goodies.”

  From the embroidered bag she extracted two thermoses and a series of Tupperware containers, stacking them on the table like a small Eiffel Tower.