Angels of Destruction

by Keith Donohue

  “He blames himself.”

  “I don't want to talk about Paul.”

  Diane switched tactics, opting for a little humor. “I can always change the subject. Have you ever thought of getting a pet? We never had one growing up. Mom always thought them too much work. But a pet would be someone to keep you company when I'm not around.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “You seem like a cat person, but then a cat can be aloof at times, and you're no better off than when you started. A dog might do the trick. Long walks through the neighborhood, fetch your slippers. But a dog is a lot of work and distraction. Birds are always nice.”

  “You never told me you were leaving.”

  “A canary is a first-rate singer. Or house finches. Have you seen all those singing finches at the Delarosas’ shop?”

  “What will I do if you go?”

  “Or how about a parrot? A parrot will talk your ear off. Not a real conversation, mind you, but they can be trained to have an impressive vocabulary.”

  A sharp knock unnerved Margaret, and she excused herself and rose to answer it.

  Diane kept on talking. “Illusion of a conversation makes them ideal companions, for a parrot will only tell you what you have already said. That could, if viewed through the proper lens, be considered affirming by some.”

  “I do not want a parrot,” she shouted in the foyer.

  “You should get that door before he gets away.”

  Through the side window appeared a middle-aged man in a dark gray suit, white shirt, and a narrow red tie. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, hopping with impatience like a runner on the blocks. Margaret opened the door, and the suit showed an identity card with a photograph laminated next to the name. The man in the flesh bore only a slight resemblance to the man on the card. “Harry Linnet,” he said as she read along. “Mon Valley resident agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Is this a good time, Mrs. Quinn?”

  “Come in, come in.” She ushered him to the living room. “You have some news about Erica?”

  “Sounded like you were in the middle of a conversation.”

  “I'm Diane Cicogna, her sister. We were talking about a parrot.”

  “A parrot?”

  “Yes, they make excellent pets, don't you think? Someone to talk to when you're alone?”

  “I guess, but they only say what they've been taught to say.”

  “That's their advantage over husbands.”

  He pulled at the knot of his tie and followed the women inside. Agent Linnet waited until the women sat on the sofa before claiming the outer inches of the easy chair opposite. “The Pittsburgh office sent me over to talk with you about your daughter, see if the Bureau can help. Actually, they were asked by headquarters down in Washington to look into this. You must have friends in high places. How long has it been?”

  Jackson, Margaret thought. He said he had a friend at the FBI. Still loves me in some small way. “That was thirty years ago.”

  Linnet frowned and snapped open his memo pad and took out a ballpoint pen. He dared not look either woman in the eyes. “I'm sorry. How long since you noticed your daughter was missing?”

  “Twenty-two days. I was away, visiting my sister in Washington, as a matter of fact. My husband was supposed to be keeping an eye on Erica.”

  “The truth is, nine times out of ten, a girl that age is a runaway. Had she been acting strangely at all before her disappearance?”

  “Tell him,” Diane said. “Tell him she was in love. She ran away with the boy just like you would have if—”

  “It wasn't a matter of courage.”

  “Courage, Mrs. Quinn?”

  “It was the boy. What teenager doesn't act a bit strange when she's in love?”

  Diane spoke over her. “You're wrong there. Love is always a matter of courage.”

  Linnet thumbed through his notes. “This boy, Wiley Rinnick, you disapproved? Had he been acting differently at any time before they went away? Were they in any way political? Would you consider him in any way dangerous?”

  “What are you driving at?” Margaret asked. “What are you suggesting?”

  “Nothing, really. Just, in your estimation, does he pose a threat?”

  With a clap on her knees, Diane drew his attention. “Not a threat, sir, but a promise. He has absconded with my niece.”

  Linnet nodded and put on a grave face. “Of course, of course. But I meant threat in a more general sense. These are strange times, Mrs. Quinn. Just last month, there were two assassination attempts on President Ford's life. Two troubled women. Women, for the first time in our history, and you would be doing your patriotic duty if you know anything about any threats your daughter or her boyfriend may have made against the president.”

  Diane slid forward on her seat. “That's what this is all about?”

  “No, she's not political,” Margaret said. “No more rebellious than any other teenager—”

  “I have to tell you, Mrs. Quinn, I've already been to the Rinnick house, and there's some evidence that your daughter's boyfriend has some un-American ideas. I've already spoken to the borough police, and I've spoken to your husband. He seems to think the boy is a radical.”

  “My husband thinks everyone who dated my daughter was a radical. She's not an enemy of the nation. She's missing.”

  Focusing somewhere below her chin, he sucked on the cap of his cheap ballpoint, leaving a dot of ink on his lips, and she felt exposed and crossed her arms across her breasts. She wanted to stand, go to the phone and call her husband to come home at once and be with her, but the agent held his gaze on her, his eyes focused on her folded arms. “Mrs. Quinn,” he said, “I don't mean to suggest… It's my job to rule out the possibilities. We're all concerned about the president, after all.”

  “Do you know anything about my daughter?”

  “Can we go to the bedroom?” Linnet stood and buttoned his jacket, holding the memo pad in front of him at belt level. “Have a look around at what Erica left behind?”

  Her daughter's bedroom was as still as a sanctuary. The bed had been made, of course, but the only item Margaret had removed was a round pink case that held birth control pills, which she had discovered that first day, and pocketed from her husband. The several doses remaining she had flushed down the toilet in private. Diane and Margaret watched Linnet poke about the room, opening drawers and fingering the contents. Diane whispered in her sister's ear. “This creep is making me uncomfortable. Ask him if he has information or did he come just to make these ridiculous accusations and to leer at us?”

  Linnet provided a running theory of the case as he snooped. “Without an actual crime, Mrs. Quinn, they'll be hard to locate, and his brother Dennis is unwilling to press charges against Wiley. Says he lent him the car. Erica's underage, but barely, and the truth is thousands of teenage girls run away each year, escape old mum and dad. Or run off with some boy or worse. Little to hold them in a little town.” He angled a writing pad to catch in the falling light any impressions on the surface.

  Like a firehouse alarm, the phone rang downstairs, and Margaret raced to answer it. Diane waited at the top landing, trying to eavesdrop on her sister's end of the conversation while keeping an eye on the detective. Under the illusion of privacy, Linnet stuffed an article of clothing into his jacket pocket, and the flash of robin's egg blue stood in relief against the dark wool as he thrust his hip forward to shut the bureau drawer. A claret stain of embarrassment rose and receded before he would look at her.

  Margaret returned, out of breath, clutching Erica's latest school portrait. “That was my husband. He told me to be helpful and give you whatever you want. He also said you came for this.” As she handed over the photograph, she felt a parent's pang of apprehension and remorse, wondering what this stranger would do with the image of her daughter.

  “There's nothing here,” Linnet said. “Your husband told me you have a theory. They're headed for the coast. Jersey, maybe, or Mar
yland.”

  A notion, an ocean. “I don't know where she is, it was just a stupid guess. Please find her.”

  He studied the photo for a few seconds, glancing quickly at Margaret to trace the familial resemblance. “We'll send this out on the wire to our field offices, ask them to share it with the local police. Keep an eye out.” He winked. “But I don't want to get your hopes up, Mrs. Quinn. It's a big country, and far easier to disappear in than most people imagine. Our best chance is that your daughter and her lover run into some trouble, nothing serious, but enough to get the local police involved. And then they think to give us a call. Missing people are missing for a reason. Some get lost, run into some nasty character, and stay lost. Some of these girls are just afraid to return home, and I'm hoping that's the case with Erica. That she'll come to her senses and give you a call before it is too late. But, if she's decided to stay lost for one reason or another, she might just vanish.” He held up the portrait. “Sometimes this is all we have to prove they were ever here.” He tipped his hat at the top of the stairs and jogged down to the door and out into the street, leaving the women quite alone.

  “Did you see him wink at me?” Margaret raised her eyebrows.

  “He took something else,” Diane told her. “Snuck it in his pocket. Panties, I'd say. Pervert.”

  For the first time in weeks, Margaret laughed. She clutched her sister's arm, and they sat on the edge of the bed, giggling until tears came to their eyes.

  22

  Waking in darkness, Erica sat up in bed and realized that Una had failed to bring her the nightcap of warm milk. Every evening since the arrival, they had shared the ritual, and just the smell of cardamom triggered an overwhelming desire for sleep, and she always drank the potion to the dregs, a trail of spices climbing the inside wall of the ceramic mug. But Una had passed over the moment that evening, her neglect linked to the fuss over Wiley's shorn head. The sight of him shocked Erica initially, but when she touched the short bristles, she thrilled to the new sensation and could not resist running her palms over and over the coarse nap, the skin and bone. The old woman, likewise, could not stop staring at him, her son's name loose on her mouth as she whispered what she had wrought, if only in appearance. Like Frankenstein's Prometheus: it's alive. Or the ghost made flesh again. Una did not know what to think or how to act, for she had betrayed her grandmother under the willow tree, let slip her desire and extracted the truth, their plot unspooling like a skein of yarn batted by a cat.

  “You could pass for Cole,” Mee-Maw had said, and then to Erica, “And you are growing more like her each day, pale and thin as a Madonna.”

  “But they're not, Mee-Maw. They're not them. We should ought to let them go.”

  “Whisht, child.” Her eyes were lit with rage.

  They passed an uncomfortable meal talking about the changing weather, the cool winds bringing in the real autumn. Wiley rubbed his scalp between courses, pondering his new haircut with his fingernails, grinning like a tot whenever he strayed into the field of Mrs. Gavin's be-maddened glances. When the dishes had been cleared, Erica registered her old complaint once more, the tiredness coming on despite the hours in the healing sun, perhaps too much sun, and she let herself be led to the child's room, where the rite of story and prayer continued, falling asleep as Una read Aesop's fable of the fox and the stork. When she awakened hours later and remembered there had been no sleeping potion, Erica put a hand to her cool forehead and thought her fever had broken.

  Kicking the quilt from her legs, she crawled from Una's tiny bed to hunt for the ladder leading to Wiley, but the room was dark and the hallway darker still. With arms stretched and hands extended, she closed her eyes and gingerly felt her way along the wall, step by step, until she reached the sharp edge of the corner. Her bare feet stuck to the wooden kitchen floor, and she counted the paces to where the parlor was supposed to begin and where she expected scant starlight to offer better illumination, but when she opened her eyes, Erica saw that she had entered a narrow curiosity box. All around her, the room's strange objects swelled and crowded close, pinning her to the center of the space. A huge globe rolled off its pedestal, its axis threatening to impale her. A riderless velocipede cranked its pedals in mad abandon, spiraling in figure eights around the dressmaker's mannequin, which arched its back like a magician stretching arms toward the hearth, where the fireplace sparked, then roared with flames. The creatures on the walls blinked to life: the deer head strained to escape the wall, a raccoon, trilling with ecstasy, scooped a crayfish from the acrylic waters, and a bird spread its cottony wings to fly once around the room before settling atop the bookcase. A pane shattered, and the butterflies escaped the shadow box. The glass doors popped open and the books tumbled in single file from the shelves, fanning their pages in freedom, their contents spilling out word after word, uttered in their authors’ voices, then falling like road signs into jumbled stacks of hot type. She stood in the middle of a pinball game, her gaze bouncing from bumper to bumper, like a toy in a penny arcade. A pair of giant eyes filled the picture window, the wizened head tilted for a closer look, and Mee-Maw screeched like a witch. Projected on the far wall were the larger-than-life faces of the Virginia state trooper pining for her, and Carl and Barry from the diner, talking with one another in hushed tones. Superimposed over their features appeared circular targets, and the shots rang out from behind her, the points piling high with each hit. A fierce wind roared through the trees outside, and the voices of her father and mother blew in, bored into her ears, and drilled into her brain.

  Una descended from the loft, her wings unrolled and shimmering like an angel's. Not the celestial kind, but a watcher, more sinister and threatening, as though the heavens had been emptied out and they roamed the earth in misery, unsure of their mission. She walked toward her, arms outstretched, crying Mother. The bohemian girl whose car they had stolen soared beneath the eaves, abandoning Wiley in the bed, shorn and spent, his life draining between his legs. Luminous and foreboding, she spread her wings to span from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall. In her hands she cupped a radiant fire, shielded its brightness in the knot of her fingers, and then released it all at once until the light and heat filled the room to sweep everything from its path and send Erica tumbling into the fathoms, falling up into the limitless sky. She reached out to be saved, and then cried once and collapsed to the floor, where he found her in the morning, dropped from the sky in a crumpled heap of bones and hair.

  “We are getting out of this place,” he said. “Let's go.” Wiley bent over her and slid his hand beneath her shoulders, but she did not recognize his face without the curtain of curls. Sharp against his skin, his skull flashed, and she thought he was dead. She had fallen away from him to the bottom, drowning in an ink blue sea pressing on her body and soul. Parting the blades of water, she emerged gasping and unsure of her whereabouts, cast away and waking in the middle of an endless ocean.

  “Let's go, Erica. We should have gone long ago.”

  Lifted to a sitting position, she wrapped her arms around Wiley's shoulders and pulled him to her, kissing the stubbled hair behind his ear, his jaw, the arch of his cheekbones, his lips, hungry for him, waking from a century of slumber, and he returned the embrace, filled with relief, and welcomed the tang of her skin, the pressure of her limbs, the course of her hair spilling into his hands.

  Together they saw the child watching from the kitchen. She had just awakened, her hair a bird's nest of knots, and trembled with suppressed indignation. “You called her Erica. I heard you.” Wiley helped Erica to her feet, and she leaned against him for strength. The child quaked like a banshee, her eyes darting from face to face, her hands balled into fists. “You've been lying to me all along—”

  Wiley said, “We're leaving. Today.”

  “Mee-Maw won't let you go. She'll never let you go. She'd kill you first—”

  “Una.” Erica stepped toward her, but the girl inched backward. “You're right. We're not who we say
we are, but that doesn't change anything, Una. That doesn't change how I feel about you. We had to lie to protect ourselves, to protect you. We had to pretend to be someone else.”

  “Mee-Maw says you are them come back.”

  “I'm not Cole Gavin,” Wiley said. “I'm not your father. She's not your mother.”

  “We are not who you want us to be.”

  The girl looked away, up to the ceiling, folded her arms and brought her hands to her collarbone, hugging herself and fighting tears. She crossed her feet, rested the right upon the left, gripped by the power of her own desperate confusion, gnawing at her lip, anxious for rescue from herself. Groping to become one of them. An uncertain angel. Erica held her close and felt the wild thump of her own heart drum against the child's ear.

  NO PROTESTS, NO negotiations, and no threats from Mrs. Gavin when they told her they were leaving, only a hint of resignation when she asked if they were sure, if it wasn't wiser to wait a day or so to see if they were well and fit for travel. The Gavins’ old Rambler station wagon had been hidden beneath a paint-splattered canvas in a locked shed, but once Wiley insisted that she drive them to town to catch the next bus heading west, it was uncovered and prodded till it started. Mrs. Gavin busied herself with the child while the fugitives packed their gear. She gave them a duffel bag in which to stow the broken-down guns, and cooked a last meal before their departure. She refused any payment for her hospitality, and on the road seemed preoccupied by the driving and occasional car passing the other way. Littering the roadside were strands of brown oak and poplar leaves, and when they pulled into the parking lot of a general store, the tires crushed a swath and ground the leaves to dust.

  The bus stop outside Parker's Cross Roads was nothing more than a bench beneath a small sign in the shape of a racing hound labeled “Dixie.” Tickets were purchased at the counter inside amid the dusty goods, the sweating soda cooler, the rows of cigarettes and ammunition, and plastic-carded fishing lures and wicked hooks. Arranged neatly in a rack next to the cash register, an army of stacked pamphlets trumpeted in red capitals: HAVE YOU BEEN SAVED? ARE YOU BORN AGAIN? THE COMING ARMAGEDEON. Wiley took the last of these, spread the folds like a roadmap, and chuckled over the contents as the clerk filled out their receipt for the bus to Memphis. He paid with a singed twenty-dollar bill and with the change bought four Cokes, which they took outside to drink. “How much time to your bus?” Mrs. Gavin asked.