by Lila Shaara
“I already told him that I might not be back at all. But I’m not sure what to do. I don’t have any money in the bank.”
Harry said, “They don’t have as much power as you think they do. We’ll have to decide what to do about Jonathan later. Let’s at least set you free from those pompous assholes at Cantwell, and stop them from shutting you up.”
She stared at him for a moment and then said, “You think we could get some money out of them?”
“I’ll bet we could,” he said. “How much money do you want?”
She thought for a moment. “A lot. Tamara needs braces.”
Before they left, Maggie insisted that they visit Miss Tokay. Maggie put her hand on her stomach when they passed the shot-up shrine as though it hurt her in the middle to see it. There were chunks of purple concrete lying around the steps. The heart had been the main target; only a third of it remained intact, a jagged half-moon dotted with black holes the size of coat buttons.
“Was it the nephew-in-law?” Harry said.
“Of course it was,” she said, her voice bitter and hard. “He’s always hated it. He said it brings down the value of the property.”
The niece, Gretchen Covington, was there without her husband. She didn’t want to let them in, but Harry gently threatened her with a call to Social Services if she wouldn’t let them see the Purple Lady and make sure she was being cared for properly. The niece was easily intimidated; between that and the ruination of the shrine, Harry had an idea of what the husband was probably like. She was a thin, overly tanned woman, well dressed in pale silk slacks and blouse, and she talked incessantly as she led them through the dark hall into the sitting room, where Miss Tokay sat on her Victorian divan in her voluminous purple shawl. Maggie sat next to her, asking how she was, did she want a cup of tea or coffee, had she been eating. Harry was appalled at the poor woman’s face, shrunken and wrinkled. He didn’t know if what ailed her was mostly dementia, guilt, or sorrow at the destruction outside her front door.
Miss Tokay’s expression didn’t change at first, although she looked at Maggie through rheumy eyes; Harry wasn’t sure she was registering who Maggie was. But when Gretchen left the room to call her husband, the old woman’s face shifted into recognition, lighting up. “Maggie,” she said, so quietly he almost couldn’t hear her, though he was standing only a couple of feet from where they sat. She didn’t seem to recall that anyone had died on her porch recently, although she didn’t ask after Josie, so Harry had to wonder how much she really had forgotten. She seemed to notice him for the first time after a few minutes and told him to sit as though she had been remiss as a hostess, offering him something to eat or drink. He told her he was fine and sat down on the dainty little chair across the coffee table from her.
“We’re going out of town for a few days,” Maggie said. “Are they treating you all right? Anything I can do for you before we go?”
“I’ll be fine. You’re coming back, though, right, honey?” Miss Tokay’s voice had a trembling sharpness that Harry had never heard in it before, although he hadn’t talked to her much. Maybe she got this odd intensity often. But Maggie looked both worried and sad, and Harry suspected that the old woman’s need for her cut her heart.
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll always come back. Don’t you worry.”
Miss Tokay assured them that she wasn’t suffering any abuse from her niece or nephew-in-law. “They think I’m loony, of course,” she said with an unexpectedly lovely smile. Then she asked Maggie when they planned to return.
“Take this,” Maggie said, handing Miss Tokay a small piece of yellow paper with a string of numbers written on it. “Harry has a cell phone, so you can call us anytime.”
“It’s brand-new,” Harry interjected, then felt like an idiot as the two women looked blankly at him.
52
ACE OF SWORDS
The Seeker gets ready to kick some butt
“I don’t want to do this,” she said. They were on a plane to Atlanta, where they would catch another to Harrisburg in a few hours.
“I know,” Harry said.
“I’m afraid that Miss Tokay isn’t going to be alive when we get back.”
“Do you think Jonathan will try to do something to her?”
She shook her head, looking out the window at billowy clouds and a bleached sun. “He’s already done something to her. I think he’s just going to let the law take its course. Or nature.”
“Did you see something in her aura?” Harry said, surprised to hear himself ask the question.
She looked back at him and said, “It was sickly. But also, before we left, she asked me if I wanted her to tell Josie anything for me.”
They rented a car in Harrisburg. The closer they got to Lucasta, the more agitated and restless Maggie became. They checked in to the same hotel that Harry and Dusty had stayed in, and then they discussed for the third time when and if they would call Fay Levy. Maggie didn’t want to deal with the scene that would inevitably follow, so Harry agreed to at least wait until after they’d had their appointment at Cantwell. They got a take-out dinner at the nearby omelet house and ate in the room. For the first time since they’d been together, neither of them slept well. Maggie tossed so much that Harry pulled her to him and held her and murmured calming things to her until she put her hands on him. Afterward, her puffy blond hair tickled his chin, and he kept jerking and pushing it off his face to try to get her to laugh. It was only slightly successful. He said, “I’ll be with you every second. Remember not to touch me, though. It’ll be better if we don’t come off as a goofy in-love sort of couple. I’m going to act the part of your hard-assed attorney, as well as a crack investigator. It doesn’t matter that I’m not licensed here. They’ll know as well as we do that we can hire a local in seconds.”
She said, “What’s the name of Serge’s friend up here?”
“Rick Clooney. He’s a friend of a friend. I’m only going to call him if we need to. But we have permission to drop his name.” He stared at the ceiling, filled with dots on ugly acoustical panels. Why would they drop the ceiling in a nice old building like this? He wondered if these dots were anything like Maggie’s. Of course not, he thought, grimacing at the idea of a world that was made up entirely of cheap ceiling tiles and paneling. He said, “You could make better looking ceilings than that, I bet. Acoustically sound, and all that.”
“Hmmm,” she said, looking up.
He contemplated the offending ceiling, then said before thinking, “Do you miss him?”
She turned over onto her stomach, her fists on his chest making a support for her chin. The room was dark, but he could still see her eyes, gleaming as they caught the light from the open bathroom door. Her breath tickled his chest hair as she said, “I always wondered how those whales and dolphins at SeaWorld feel about their trainers. I imagine it’s kind of like I used to feel about Charlie. Grateful and resentful at the same time. They can swim and eat, but not like they want. Not like what’s natural for them. I suppose they’re happy when they get their buckets of fish. I didn’t get enough fish.” She kissed his chest, then put her chin back on her fists. “I like your fish better anyway.”
“I’m trying to figure out what that’s a metaphor for.”
She laughed and said, “Forget the fish.” She kissed his chest again. “The moment I saw you, I knew that you were going to be important to me somehow.”
“I was drunk and puking on your porch.”
Her smile was so beautiful, even in the dark, it almost hurt to look at it. “I never said that you were a sweet talker. And I didn’t know if I was going to be particularly important to you.”
He said, “I hope you know that now,” reaching for her again as she finally answered his question. “I don’t miss him anymore, Harry.” Then she added, “Have you found out about meetings up here?”
“Dusty e-mailed a list he got on the Internet.” He studied the dots in the ceiling one more time, then said, “He’s going to Ala
teen. I’m not quite sure how I feel about it.”
“He loves you.”
“Yes, he does. Do you love me?”
She smiled her beautiful smile. “Yes.”
“A lot?”
“More than anything.” She kissed his chest. “More than anyone.” He relaxed and after a while, slept.
53
TEN OF WANDS
REVERSED
A sweet talker. A demon
Jonathan Ziegart got a copy of the incident report of the shootings of Josie Dupree and Darcy Murphy from Serena. He had almost asked her out, but not quite, so the young divorcée had hopes of him. He told her that the information in the report would be useful for his dissertation research but promised that he’d change the names and dates and places so that the case itself would never be recognizable to anyone outside Stowe County. She believed him.
He read it with some care in his room, drinking a can of root beer from the minibar and making notes on a yellow legal pad as he sat at the small round table that the hotel provided for just such work. There was a search, he read, of the big garage at the old lady’s house. A junk dealer, Roy Crawley, used the space as a workshop. Jonathan thought, junk dealer my ass. It has to be Emily’s. The dimwits hadn’t found anything in it of interest. He could imagine the old lady conning them, or maybe Emily herself saying, Oh, Mr. Policeman, just some old notebooks, no need for you to bother to get anyone with any education to read it. And they would believe a propertied southern lady like Miss Tokay. God, he thought, the stereotypes were true; the sloppiness and stupidity of the southern swamp police were boundless.
He was so angry that he was scaring himself a little. He breathed in and out, deep cleansing breaths. Think of the positives, he thought. Darcy Murphy was dead, so he couldn’t tell anyone they’d ever met. No one else knew; there was no reason for anyone to even ask. His supervisor’s statement was in the file, as was the statement of Murphy’s wife. Both confirmed that he’d had an unhealthy interest in the fortune teller. He seemed to have it in for her for no other reason than his general distaste for the profession. Jonathan could have told them that Darcy had also had the hots for Josie Dupree, but no one else seemed to have gleaned this fact. Just as well, Jonathan thought. Murphy’s wife had also told them her husband had started drinking after having been sober for several months. Jonathan made himself smile, but the anger was still there, unmoved, like a cancer.
I could kill her, he thought. I might kill her. I might not. He sweated and thought. But maybe it would be better to watch her try to save herself against terrible odds. Maybe I could even rescue her. This brought a memory back to him, a violent memory that never failed to give him goose bumps, to make his heart race and shudder. Doug McNeill flailing and huge, a gargantuan choking thing, his airless moans almost musical, his eyes bloodshot in a blue face. When Fate had seen fit to kill an enemy of his father’s, it had seemed like marvelous luck. But it had forced Jonathan to discover a dead part of himself as well. Because he’d found Doug McNeill’s death dance beautiful, fascinating, awe-inspiring. And it never once occurred to him to try to save the man’s life.
Sorry, Emily, he thought; rescuing people is not my forte. Still, he thought, I could allow for it as a possible outcome. My redemption.
It might be a simple matter of putting something in the temple, something more interesting to the sheriff, or likely to catch the eye of Homeland Security. Then a few phone calls, an anonymous party interested in restoring the reputation of Wally Faber and the sheriff’s department in general. They’d have to take it seriously. Mention Emily’s name, or rather her new name. She was bound to have left fingerprints and DNA evidence all over the place, even if none of the crackers who knew her would fess up that the workshop is hers. He had notes of his father’s, some unfinished and impractical designs for weaponry. He remembered his father’s hopes that the so-called Star Wars initiatives would be reinstated. The software involved was not Charlie Ziegart’s strong suit, but the hardware, ah, his father told him about dreams that he had, literal dreams; he’d awakened one morning and drawn plans in the notebook he kept by his bed of a laser that could fry a scarab beetle on a tent flap while orbiting on a satellite two hundred miles above the ground. The computer simulations had never panned out; all the contracts Charlie won were for power systems, but he had hopes, always hopes. And Jonathan had some of the notes, a few abortive schematics, calculations, and spreadsheets. Not all of them, but a few. Enough. And he was on a roll.
It would be an interesting problem, he thought, how to generate copies without them being linked to any printer he was associated with. Laser printers left encoded signatures on documents. I’ll have to go to a chain copy store, he thought. But I’ve got time. I’ll have to see the place for myself first. Get the lay of the land.
I need her notes, he thought. She used to be obsessive about making them. Emily generated even more notebooks than Charlie. I can reorganize them; I’m sure I could come up with something absolutely fantastic for Homeland Security.
He mused for a while, thinking, It’ll come out that we’re connected. He liked the sound of it, so he said it aloud. “We’re connected.” How to explain that? Tell the truth, he thought; that’s always best. I found out she was alive from Gillian, or suspected that she was, and came down here to see her. She didn’t want to have anything to do with me. I had no idea that she was up to something so heinous, that she’d become so twisted. But she was always odd, a loner. He thought it would feel so good to say to a policeman at last, I always thought that she killed my father. But I just couldn’t believe it.
Maybe she’d be extradited. Pennsylvania had the death penalty. But then so did Florida. He would be her only visitor on death row. She’d look so beautiful in orange. At least he thought prison uniforms were orange. Easy enough to check.
An inspiration leapt into his mind from its underbelly, the way the best ideas always do, when you’re not trying so hard, when you’re thinking about something else. He thought, I’ll find a copy place in Orlando.
54
SEVEN OF SWORDS
A nasty bunch, but not as smart as they think they are
Gillian DeGraff and Pamela Ziegart had agreed to meet with Harry and Maggie in DeGraff’s office at eleven o’clock. Maggie couldn’t keep still all through breakfast and ate almost nothing. Her nerves made Harry drink too much coffee, and the eggs he’d ordered weren’t sitting well in his stomach. Afterward they went for a walk before their appointment. The campus was larger than was justified by the size of the student body. A section to the east gave way to a vast complex of formal gardens. Maggie explained that Cantwell had a horticulture school that maintained them.
“I used to walk here all the time. Sometimes with Fay, but mostly alone.”
“It seems tame compared to Gunhill Park and Miss Tokay’s land.”
She smiled. “That was one of the good things about my leaving here in disgrace. A wilder place to walk.”
Harry said, “Why Crane’s? I mean, why didn’t you just go to another school or get a job somewhere in a lab?”
She slowed, gestured to a stone bench by a sea of lamb’s ear. “I could use a breather. It’s been a long time since I walked where it’s hilly.” They sat, and she looked up at clouds that formed white fingers in the blue sky. Cornflower blue, Harry thought. She said, “I couldn’t get a letter from anyone. Gillian made it clear that they’d trash my name to anyone who inquired about why I was transferring.”
“You can sue people for that, you know.”
“I couldn’t,” she said. “You have no idea how frightened I was of Jon.”
“But what about after you came home? Couldn’t you have worked for an electrician? I know it’s not the same, but at least you could have been better paid and gotten to use some of your skills.”
She smiled again. “I did. I don’t have a license, and I didn’t want to have to go to a technical school to learn what I already knew. So I apprenticed.” Her
smile got wider. “Twice.”
She stopped talking, her smile fading. Harry said, “It didn’t work out?”
“No.” She leaned down and touched one of the soft gray leaves. “I kept questioning them. About every procedure, every material. I kept trying to improve things. The first man I worked for thought I was too uppity. The second thought I was crazy. They both thought I was hopeless. I couldn’t find a third. And I still didn’t have a license.” She inhaled the warm, sweet air of the garden. “I couldn’t shut up. I tried, but I just couldn’t.”
“So then you just shut up altogether.”
She shrugged. “I guess. But once Miss Tokay let me use the new temple, I was okay. Better than that, actually. Free.”
They went back to the hotel to clean up and change. Harry said if they smelled bad enough it might give them the upper hand in their negotiations. “They’ll give us whatever we want to get us out of the room.” Maggie laughed but showered anyway. Harry had gone with her before they’d left Stoweville to buy a brown tweed suit and some leather shoes; he’d brought his own best black pinstripe. He wanted them to look intimidating. As they stood side by side in front of the thin mirror in their room, he thought they’d succeeded, although Maggie looked too pale. “Deep breaths,” he said, and she nodded jerkily.
On their way to the appointment, they passed a building shaped like a large brick cube. Attached to it like an unsightly growth was a metallic addition, doubling the size of the building. Maggie stopped to stare at it. There was a sign mounted in the grass beside the concrete walkway leading up to the main door. It was bronze, half the size of a coffin lid, and announced that this was the home of the Charles Ziegart School of Physics and Engineering.
“That’s where I used to work.”
“I know,” he said.
“I forgot that you’ve been here. They added that thing”—she pointed to the huge architectural tumor—“after I left. I didn’t know they’d changed the name of the school.”
