“Hubert’s doin’ okay.”
“Where’s he working these days?”
“Little of this, little of that. Yard work. Got himself a truck, pickin’ up some towing business out on the highway. Never run out of that kind of business.”
Into the awkward pause that follows, I say, “Please give him my best regards.”
She nods, unsmiling. “I’ll do that.” Without another word, she starts to move on around me. I turn and watch her labor on up the stairs. I ache to ask if I may carry the heavy appliance for her, but she’d find that absurd. She has been carrying such loads most of her life. How can this possibly be fair or right, that these two courageous black Americans could still be piecing their income together from such laborious tasks as cleaning houses and towing wrecks? Where’s the justice in that?
And then it’s my turn to be startled.
At the top of the stairs, as if aware of my eyes focused on her back, she suddenly turns to glare down at me. “If I had a mama and a papa like you had I’d never ask a single question about them. You oughtn’t to be prying. You ought to just let it go. Hubert and I, we put up with you and all your questions one time, ’cause we felt sorry for you. It wasn’t your fault, what your parents did, but now here you are back again. You ought to just be ashamed of them and be done with it, instead of carrying on about writing a book about them, like they was something to be proud about. You ought to take yourself on home is what you ought to do, and forget about us, and don’t never come back to Sebastion.”
Stung, I shoot back, “Maybe it wasn’t their fault.”
Her expression is bitterly scornful. “And maybe the sun don’t rise.”
“Maybe they were murdered.”
But that only deepens her contempt. “You think everybody’s an innocent victim? You got a lot to learn, girl, but if you’re smart, you won’t try to learn it here.”
She picks up her vacuum again and turns her back on me.
Feeling shaken, I turn and continue on down the stairs.
Hardly aware of where I’m walking, I end up in the parlor.
There’s no one else around, but there could be a whole convention of people in here and I wouldn’t feel any less alone. There was something so alienating about what she said to me, the way she said it, the cold, determined way she froze me out when she walked off. I feel as if I’m my mother, rejected by her friend whom she once loved and trusted. There are all kinds of betrayals in the world and one of the worst is to think the worst of people who have never previously given you any reason to doubt them. If I were my mother, I’d feel terribly betrayed right now, which is really ironic, considering that Rachel and Hubert think they’re the ones who have the right to feel that way.
For reasons I can’t fully explain or understand, that brief encounter has left me feeling as if I want to cry, more than almost anything else in the past few awful days has done.
I need a balm, some kind of connection with other people.
Bless E-mail. When all else fails and I’m a long way from home, E-mail can still provide the illusion of connection. I find a comfortable armchair, sink into it, and then use the battery-operated modem capabilities of my laptop computer to access the Internet.
There’s nothing from Paulie Barnes.
I don’t know whether to feel relieved or worried by that.
Dr. Aileen Rasmussen has checked in to say she has been thinking it over and is now convinced that Paulie Barnes’s real issue is control and that any loss of that control could likely trigger the underlying anger, which could be directed against me. “Watch out,” she says in her E-mail. “Be careful.”
Gee, thanks, Aileen, that wouldn’t have occurred to me.
“I’ve studied the MacDonald novel closely,” she adds, in a rare complete declarative sentence in an E-mail. “Attack on someone close to you? Attempt on life of child? Those happened in book. Still looking for indicators.”
Me, too, Aileen. Busy looking for indicators here.
There’s also a message from Franklin. An outraged message that makes him sound so much like a Jewish mother that I end up smiling and feeling a little better, instead of feeling guilty. He has written:
You leave without talking to me? I get a message on a machine? You don’t tell me where you’ve gone, or why you left in such a hurry? Where the hell are you? Are you all right? Why did you leave? This was a lousy thing for you to do, Marie, I don’t care how worried you are about my children. Do you think I don’t care what happens to you as well as to them? Ithought I was already pretty clear about that. Do you think I don’t have a right to know where you go and how you are during a time like this? What do you think I’m made of, iron? Do you think it’s easy for me to go to work and do my job when every second I’m thinking about you, and where you might be, and whether you’re even alive?
Jesus Christ, Marie. All right, I’ll tell you what, let’s work on the assumption that you’re alive and reading this, shall we? That being the case—I hope—here is some information you may want to have about the items you saved for fingerprints.
There aren’t any. All clean except for one set on the FedEx envelope, two sets on the letter and book that came in it, and one set on the cassette tape. This accords with the number of prints that should be on those items based on the fact that only you, or Deb, or both of you touched them. No other prints. Of course we will need to make it official by getting your prints and hers to check them against, but I’m not expecting any useful surprises there.
The FedEx envelope was mailed from one of their freestanding mailboxes, so there was no attendant to witness who dropped it off. But here’s the surprise about that package: the credit card number? It’s one of yours, Marie. It’s your own credit card. How did he get hold of it?
I am stunned by this revelation. He used my own credit card?
He must have fished one of my receipts or credit card company bills out of my trash, or maybe he got hold of a bill I charged at a restaurant or store. That sort of thing is supposed to be all too easy to do.
Franklin’s E-mail continues:
As for the tape, Ernie doesn’t know how it got there. He says his men aren’t allowed to run the radio/CD/tape players in his customers’ cars. He says that would be like a housecleaner who uses a client’s entertainment center when they’re gone. He says now and then his customers wander around and people sometimes wander in off the street just to look at the cool cars. He tries to keep them from touching anything. Ernie is so upset about this that you’d think somebody had stolen your car instead of justleaving a tape in it—and I didn’t even tell him what this was all about. He says to tell you he’s sorry and the next time you come in he’ll only charge you an arm instead of an arm and a leg.
Good ol’ Ernie. He’s such a perfectionist himself, he may not even find it strange that we’re obsessing over a cassette tape.
Franklin then says,
I never heard back from Paulie Barnes after I sent him that E-mail. Either—like you—he doesn’t want to bother with me, or—like you—he thinks he doesn’t have to, or he’s smart enough to know he’d better not try.
He closes with:
For God’s sake, tell me you’re all right. We’re fine.
There’s a postscript that would be funny if it weren’t for the circumstances.
Dog’s fine, too. I can tell you what I found out about that, but you’ll have to respond to this if you want that information.
My return E-mail to Aileen says only, “Thanks.”
I take more time over the one to Franklin, finally settling on, “I’m really sorry. I didn’t have time to reach you. I want to tell you where I am and why I’m here, but I think it’s better that I don’t.” I don’t want him flying out here, in a fit of male protectiveness. “But please, will you tell me about the dog anyway?”
And then I close my computer and go back upstairs.
When I open the door I find two handsome men waiting for me, both dressed in
suits, although one suit looks about three times more expensive and stylish than the other one. They’re also both seated in chairs, and both staring at a television that is turned onto a sports show, and neither of them is talking to the other.
“You guys look great,” I tell them.
Nate looks over and smiles at me. “Your turn. I’m pretty sure we left you a dry towel, didn’t we, Steve?”
The big man just nods, looking stiff and uncomfortable.
“I’ll hurry,” I promise, mostly for his sake.
As I scurry into my bedroom and close the door behind me, I realize I may not have been very sensitive here. If Steve’s gay, I’ve put him in a bedroom with one of the best-looking men he’ll ever see, and there isn’t a chance in hell that he will benefit from that. The irony is that Steve looks like a man’s man—which I guess he is, in a manner of speaking—while my cousin looks just a little too pretty. But when it comes to sexual orientation, looks can be deceiving. If heterosexuality were a disease, Nathan would have all the symptoms of a chronic condition. In fact, I frequently tell him that seeing all those women is going to kill him someday. To which his standard reply is, “Yeah, but what a way to go.”
After a quick shower, I open the closet where I have hung my little black dress that travels almost everywhere with me. I wish Franklin were here to go with it.
A light supper with company?
Sounds like black strappy heels and my mother’s little pearl necklace, which can also go anywhere, with anything, and which I carry in a soft pouch in my purse when I travel. As I affix it around my neck I think of her backing up to my father, asking him to fasten it for her. I imagine his fingers brushing the nape of her neck while she holds her hair up out of his way. The latch clicks. He bends to softly kiss the back of her neck. She turns around, releases her hair, lifts her chin toward him, and smiles. He bends to kiss her again.
“Ready?” he asks her.
“Ready,” I whisper to myself.
27
Marie
It’s a picnic in the Fishers’ backyard, and it takes me a while to realize that it is in many ways nearly a duplicate of that other picnic almost forty years ago. The same people have been invited, with the addition of Nathan, Steve, and me. The only difference in the guest list is that there are no “neutrals,” as Eulalie called them; nor is she expecting any diehard racists to knock on her front door tonight, as far as I know.
But everything else looks eerily the same.
Clayton Fisher is serving mint juleps again, and in a strength sufficient to get any number of women drunk tonight, just as before. Eulalie has laid out a spread of dishes that matches almost exactly what she told me she served that night, from fried chicken to jambalaya.
“I can’t believe it,” I whisper to Nathan and Steve.
“What?” my cousin asks.
“This party . . . it’s just like the one they held here the night my parents disappeared.”
Both men stare at me.
“That’s weird,” Steve says, for all of us.
“How do you know?” Nate demands.
I give him a look. “I’m a writer. I know these things.”
He laughs a little and looks around us, taking it all in, just like the writer he is, too. Slowly, over the course of this long day of wandering down memory lane, the two of them have reached a kind of rapprochement, wary with each other, but polite. Nathan apparently still suspects that Steve will murder me in my bed, while Steve seems to suspect everybody who gets near me, just on general principles.
Eulalie Fisher and the other women guests have worn light summer frocks tonight. “You look like a black orchid among the daisies,” Nate whispers to me. He is his usual stylish self in an L.A. summer suit that makes the other men here look like high school principals. More than one person has commented that I am the “spittin’ image of your mama,” but nobody tells Nate he resembles his portly, conservative father. As for Steve, questions of style don’t even enter into it. He has on clean pants, an ironed shirt, shined shoes, and there’s nobody who’s going to remark upon it one way or another. The guests slide around him; even Clayton Fisher’s hospitality meets its match in Steve’s sober, watchful presence.
By the time I have my epiphany about the party, I have already drunk one of Clayton’s famous mint juleps. Feeling no pain, much less inhibitions, I walk over to my hostess and ask her directly about my theory.
“Eulalie, did you do this on purpose?”
“Do what, darlin’?” she asks me, all southern female innocence.
While Steve seems content to hold down a corner of the yard, arms folded against his chest, alone, and while Nate charms the socks off of everybody else, I refine my question for my hostess.
“Did you purposely duplicate the June twelfth, 1963, picnic?”
Her blue eyes widen—even at eighty, she is still the most beautiful woman here—in what looks like shocked surprise. Slowly, Eulalie turns around, carefully taking in the view of her own party.
“My Lord, you’re right as rain. It is.”
When she turns back to me, I see what looks like pain in this elegant woman’s eyes. “Child, I never meant to. I hope you’llforgive me. This was purely unconscious on my part. I don’t know where I dredged this up from my memory, but now I do so wish I hadn’t.”
I briefly touch her arm, wondering if her claim is true. Surely nobody’s subconscious can be this accurate without a little outside assistance. In fact, the only reason I have recognized the uncanny similarity between the two parties is that I possess a description of the original one in my notes, which were augmented by Eulalie’s diaries, bits and pieces of which she shared with me. Plus, she’s one of those incredible hostesses who keeps a written record of all of her dinner parties, of who attended, and what she served them and how they liked it, of how she decorated her tables and what she wore, of who said what memorable thing to whom, or who stole a kiss, got drunk, or otherwise made stars or donkeys of themselves. Without such written records as Eulalie’s, I’d have a much harder time as a true crime writer in recapitulating past events.
“It’s all right,” I assure her, even if a part of me persists in suspecting that she did this for some reason of her own. “I just wondered.”
“I don’t suppose anybody else will notice,” she says, probably accurately.
Now, standing near me, she claps her hands, as if punctuating the end of this topic. If she planned the party to match in this way, did she intend for me to notice, or did she intend to set some kind of mood, establish an evocative atmosphere for reasons I can’t fathom? Or is this truly the coincidence she says it is?
“People! Clayton has something to say!”
Her voice has weakened with age, her hair has bleached to silver, her bones have shrunk, but she still wields the power in her marriage to cause her husband to turn instantly and smile over at her.
With his white hair, and wearing an old-fashioned baby blue and white seersucker summer suit with a white shirt and red tie—other flashbacks to that earlier picnic—Clayton looks so dapper that it’s hard to imagine how he might have looked even handsomer on that June evening so many years ago. Now, as then, he gazes at his bossy wife with an amused, mock-surprised expression on his face.
I know more or less what he’s going to say before he says it.
“I do?” he calls out as several people begin to chuckle.
“Tell them to fill their plates!” she calls back.
Clayton Fisher gazes benignly around at the couples he has known for so many decades. “Fill your plates, people!”
They all laugh and start moving toward the feast.
They’ve heard all this before, and so have I.
I feel as if I’ve entered a time warp.
At first, it was terribly awkward when the party started.
“Have you met Anne and Marty Wiegan? And this is Michael and Lyda’s girl, Marie, can you believe it? And this handsome young fella is Joe and
Julia’s boy, Nathan. And, I beg your pardon, I’m terribly sorry, I’ve forgotten your name again—?”
“Steven Orbach.”
“Yes, of course, Steven is a friend of theirs.”
The dark oily strands of hair no longer drape across Marty Wiegan’s scalp, which now is bald and as shiny as kitchen tile. They’re all in their sixties and seventies now—except for the older Fishers—these former radicals, these daring couples who risked their lives and lost their reputations. Austin Reese has changed from eyeglasses to contact lenses, so he actually looks a little younger than he did when I interviewed him several years ago. Lackley Goodwin, formerly so rotund, is now so gaunt that I wonder if he joined the fitness generation; if diet and exercise don’t account for it, he might have cancer or some other wasting disease. Austin’s trying his hand at a novel, I learn, now that he’s retired from running the math department at the college. Lackley is playing “too much golf.” The Wiegans have retired to their little place outside of town, where Marty raises roses and tomatoes. Of the men, only Clayton—the eldest by far—still goes into hisformer job a few days a week, but then they’d have me believe that “bankers never die, they just lose interest.”
It’s obvious that Hostel was the high point of their lives.
“I’ll tell you the truth, Marie,” Marty Weigan confides over his own mint julep. “It was thrilling. We were spies, we were saboteurs of the status quo, we were soldiers of fortune, but it was all for love and not for money. We felt like heroes. This group”—his fond glance includes Austin and Lackley, who are chatting with us—“is like a band of soldiers who’ve fought a war together. I feel like a vet, don’t y’all?”
Austin’s face is wreathed in a smile of reminiscence.
“Got a few war wounds, too,” Lackley says, wryly, no doubt recalling the night of their public “humiliation.” In retrospect, it must feel as if it was a parade of pride, their shining moment in life, never to be equaled again.