When Venus Fell

  I didn’t know what to say. Suddenly I heard the muffled sounds of angry men arguing inside a trailer across the lot. Grateful for the distraction, I pulled a small can of pepper spray from my shorts pocket and set it on the table. Gib’s dark gaze shifted to the trailer. The look in his eyes transformed his expression to one of deadly calm. Chilled, I sat there studying him. “Cheers,” I said finally, and gulped a deep swallow of wine.

  He didn’t stop watching the trailer until the noise faded away. Then he exhaled, blinked, and returned his attention to me. “The pepper spray won’t do you much good,” he said, “unless you’re about to cook dinner for me.” He frowned at my ridiculous lipstick-sized canister.

  “It works well enough. If you spot a biker with a purple ponytail coming this way, let me know. He has a drug habit, and he’s a little too obnoxious when he’s wasted.”

  He craned his head, staring past me suddenly. He was like a hawk. He didn’t miss a sound, a movement. The soft hum of the RV’s electrical system serenaded us. A long cord ran from the air conditioner to a post in the ground. “What’s that light in the window?” he asked. “Did you light a candle?”

  I swiveled to look, then faced him again. “My sister did it. She likes candles. Aromatherapy. She says the scent helps her headaches. I say they make our camper smell like soap.”

  He didn’t laugh. I studied his straight-backed posture with a sinking heart. “Look, Mr. Cameron, you’ve come a long way to see my sister and me. What do you and your aunt really want from us? What’s this offer I can’t refuse? You and I have never even met before. You only met my parents once, and you were just a little boy then.”

  “If it’s that simple, and you don’t give a damn, then why did you remember me so quickly? No matter what your father told you, you can’t deny that you didn’t forget us.”

  “My father wasn’t hostile toward your family. It was just that after my mother died, he felt we had nothing in common with you. He didn’t believe in cultivating relationships that had no room to grow. His and Mom’s wedding at Cameron Hall was just a sentimental memory to him.”

  “I see. Then why didn’t you listen to him and forget all about me?”

  We spent several long seconds studying each other in strained silence. I spread my hands awkwardly on the table, then curled them into my lap. “I’m twenty-nine years old and you’re, what? Thirty-five? We’re not childhood pen pals anymore. You wouldn’t have gone to the trouble to find me if it wouldn’t benefit you to do it.”

  The insult tightened his face and brought out a look of flat, cold-blooded scrutiny. It was a mask I’d seen on the faces of government agents. “There was a time when I believed in you,” Gib said in a low voice. “It sounds stupid now. I was the kind of kid who took things seriously. I’d lost my parents. I hated the world outside my mountains. You were the only part of that outside world that I wanted to know. But after your mother died I never got another card from you. I was afraid you’d died, too. Even though I knew you hadn’t, I decided to forget you.”

  “Wait a minute. You stopped writing to me.” I didn’t add that I’d grieved desperately over his silence, long after Pop told me Camerons had no place in our lives.

  He shook his head. “I sent you letters for years.”

  I stared at him. “That’s not possible. I would have gotten them. I—” My voice trailed off as I realized what had happened. Pop had intervened. I felt weighted down. “My father didn’t believe in sentiment,” I repeated wearily. “He must have thrown your cards away.”

  Gib and I shared a look of troubled understanding. “Thank you for telling me the truth,” he said finally. “Even though it gives me one more reason to dislike your father.”

  “He wouldn’t have judged you so superficially.”

  “Oh? If your father were sitting here right now, I expect he’d despise me.” He held out his good hand. He wore a heavy insignia ring on his third finger. “Recognize this?” he asked.

  “A college ring. So?”

  “Not just any college. The Citadel.”

  The Citadel. Southern bastion of military machismo, graduating generations of ultraconservative traditional males and shouting huzzahs to all-American manhood. My throat clotted on years of fantasy and the cold reality of disappointment. “No wonder you looked out of place in a lesbian bar,” I said. “You’re John Wayne.”

  “There’s more. I joined the Marines right after graduation.”

  “Do you want me to salute?”

  “I’m everything you were raised to hate.”

  Silence. We both looked away. I finally offered, “My father never said a bad word against the Camerons. He knew how it felt to be hated without good reason. No one deserves it. That was the code he lived by.” I paused. “And I certainly don’t hate you. All I ask is fairness. I give fairness in return.”

  “All right.”

  “So you were a career Marine until …?”

  He shook his head. “I did what I was best suited for. What I’d always wanted to do since my parents were killed. I loved feeling that I was standing between an innocent person and danger. I loved feeling like I was out there”—he waved his good hand at the world beyond—“keeping everything safe for what I loved. Can you sympathize with that, now that you know me a little?”

  “Of course. And I don’t need to hear—” I halted. “What kind of career did you go into after college and a stint in the Marines?”

  “I went to work for the U.S. Treasury Department.”

  The Treasury Department? “You were an agent for the Treasury Department,” I echoed blankly, scrutinizing him. Some unfound piece of this puzzle floated in my mind disturbingly, but I couldn’t place it.

  “I transferred around the country a lot, tracking counterfeiters, working on cases involving credit-card fraud, that kind of thing. But I finally got transferred to the division I’d wanted all along. Worked like a dog to win that honor. It was the proudest day of my life. The proudest day for my family.”

  The implications were spinning into place. Only my obsessive backtracking over other details kept me from making the connection. “I’ve worked all over the world,” he continued. “I’ve been privy to conversations with kings and queens and prime ministers. I’ve slept in the finest hotels, eaten the finest food, danced with the prettiest women, and traveled first-class. In fact, better than first-class.”

  “So you were some kind of corrupt bureaucrat in the Treasury Department.” I uttered a sharp laugh. “Not that there’s any such thing as an honest bureaucrat.”

  “My lifestyle wasn’t exactly glamorous,” he went on in a flat voice. “I’ve been spit on in public, and kicked, and hit, and shot at, and stabbed with a letter opener once, by a little old lady in Iowa who thought I was keeping her from the private meeting some tiny green Martians promised to set up for her. I was sworn to take whatever the world threw at me. Sworn to give up my life if need be to protect the symbol of everything your dad wanted to tear down.”

  Suddenly I understood. Shock washed over me. I pivoted toward him. Government agents were no better than Nazis to me, and he’d just told me he had belonged to their most elite group. “You were a Secret Service agent.” I almost choked on the words.

  He nodded.

  I had good reason to hate him now.

  Four

  “I’m with the United States Treasury Department,” the man in the dark gray suit repeated, unsmilingly, after I insisted he hold up his badge and his driver’s license.

  It was only a few days after Pop’s death. We hadn’t even buried him yet. It had been a week of constant interrogations, of men tearing our house apart and pushing me into corners. “You’re from around here,” I said to the man, as I inspected his credentials. Even his photo had the crisp look of a mortician. His chin was shaved so closely I could see a blue vein beside his mouth. “I thought the Secret Service was in Washington.”

  “I’m from the New Orleans office,” he explained. “We have
field offices everywhere.” He looked at me as if he had daughters but they didn’t talk back; he looked impatient. He stepped past me, latching a hand on the smooth, polished door framed by purple clematis. He didn’t say another word as he walked into the front hall and onward to the living room.

  He placed a tape recorder on the coffee table, removed a large notepad from his jacket, then sat down on the couch among the stacks of linen tablecloths I’d been folding. “Pull up that ottoman and have a seat across from the tape recorder here, Venus,” he ordered casually, “and answer some questions for me.”

  I was ragged in grimy jeans and a T-shirt. I’d slept only a couple of hours a night. Each morning I presided over the dumped-out contents of every drawer in the house. The chaos had reduced me to small, obsessive efforts to fix, to replace, to restore order that was lost forever. “I don’t understand.”

  “Sit,” the man barked.

  I continued to stand, swaying. My head felt like a balloon. “My father didn’t kill anybody. And he certainly didn’t threaten the President.”

  “That’s not my problem. How he manipulated money is my area of interest. Credit cards, illegal transfers, fraudulent accounts, interstate financial shenanigans.”

  “I don’t know anything. He never discussed any of it with my sister and me. I’ve told so many people already.”

  “He discussed it enough to make you understand which files needed to be gotten rid of once he was in trouble.”

  “I’ve told everybody. A friend said he needed the files. I thought my father wanted him to have them.”

  “Sit down, please.”

  “I don’t think I should talk to you. I thought the Secret Service protected the President and other VIPs.”

  “That’s part of what we do. Now, you don’t have any idea whether your dad messed with funny money, do you?”

  “I don’t have to talk to you without our lawyer here. Why don’t you leave, please?”

  He stood. He took two long steps around the coffee table, nothing urgent about him, then suddenly he snatched me by the shoulders and shoved me onto the ottoman. He bent over me, his face beet-red and his eyes furious. “You self-righteous young woman,” he yelled. “You’re gonna end up in jail just like your old Commie-lovin’ dad. You’ve got nothing and nobody to cover for your pampered little behind anymore. This is not a piano contest. Your dad raised you and your sister in a sewer of filthy money. Everything in this fancy house reeks with the stink. From the clothes you wear”—he tugged at the sleeve of my T-shirt—“to the food in your kitchen, you have not got one thing to your name that can’t be taken away under the law. Because there’s not a damned dollar of your father’s money or his business or his belongings that isn’t tinged with the dirty red color of death and crime.”

  “Nobody can claim our house and take away everything.”

  “Watch us do it,” he said. “I hope you and your sister have friends who can help you out. Because we’re about to confiscate every penny of your dad’s money and every square inch of his belongings.”

  And they did.

  That was my encounter with the Secret Service. Guardians of the world’s leaders. Protectors of the true-blue currency.

  Who sent moving vans and carted away every piece of furniture, every china setting and lamp and couch and chair, beds, pillows, paintings, and even the linens I had folded time and again. Our diaries, our school yearbooks, letters and birthday cards we’d saved, poetry we’d written.

  And Ella’s violin. And my piano.

  Our music.

  Our innocence. Our life.

  As my shock over Gib’s past career settled into leaden acceptance, I walked a few feet away, took a deep breath, then demanded in a low voice, “Did you ever harass women and girls? Did you ever bully innocent people and confiscate everything they owned?”

  “No,” he answered quietly. “I know you dealt with Treasury Department agents after your father died, and I’m sure it wasn’t pleasant, but the men and women I’ve worked with would die to protect your rights.”

  “Then you didn’t work with the ones who came to see my sister and me.”

  I’m sure he saw the disgust I felt. He had no nervous mannerisms except for subtle efforts to keep his disfigured hand out of sight, and now he planted the other broad, handsome hand on his left knee, as if showing me it was safely anchored there. “Be fair,” he said. “Don’t despise me on principle alone. At least let me give you good reason to despise me. Do you know what the first week in September is?”

  “It’s my parents’ thirtieth wedding anniversary.” I watched him like an angry cat.

  “That means it’s the inn’s anniversary, too. Thirty years ago your parents were our first guests.”

  “I know that.”

  “I don’t want to sentimentalize that history any more than you do. Your life’s been hard in the past ten years. I can see that. You’ve learned some ugly lessons. You’ve survived some bad treatment. You have a right to be suspicious of anyone who pokes around in your business. But there’s no excuse for your outright distrust when I haven’t given you any reason to distrust me.” He paused. “Unless you’re trying to prove you’re as paranoid as your father was.”

  I leaned toward him furiously. He just couldn’t resist the subject of Pop. “I know your type. I don’t like you because you remind me of all the smug, patronizing, holier-than-thou minions of Uncle Sam who’ve deliberately made our lives miserable. You don’t give a damn about my wishes or my opinion. Go back to Tennessee and leave me alone.”

  “I can’t fault you for defending your own daddy, but you could have honorably cooperated with the investigations, and you didn’t. You sacrificed any chance you had of going on with your classical career. You dragged your sister along on this odyssey to see how much punishment you could take while you thumbed your nose at the rest of the world.”

  “How dare you judge me! You don’t know—”

  “Isn’t it time to stop before your sister ends up back in a mental hospital for another round of treatment?” He paused, his eyes merciless on mine. “Yes. I’m talking about Detroit.”

  I had a hard spine but a soft underside, and he kicked me where it hurt. I balled my hands into fists. He’d gotten Ella’s medical files.

  “Go ahead. Hit me,” he urged in a soft tone. “You want to fight with the Man? The System? All right, I’ll take the rap. Let me have it. I won’t hit you back. I’m not the one who ruined your prospects. I’m not here to hurt you—or Ella.”

  “Tell me what you want.”

  He was silent for a few seconds, searching my eyes as if he needed to see my soul—to prove I had one. Then, in a quiet voice, he said, “Your father left you a hundred thousand dollars. I’ve got it.”

  I opened my mouth, shut it, tried to think, to absorb that unbelievable claim. Finally I simply pivoted and made my way to the concrete water fountain. I tracked the sluggish goldfish as if they were my own dizzy thoughts. Gib walked over and stood beside me, staring down into the algae-crusted water. “Surprise,” he said.

  “This is a bad joke.”

  “No. Ten years ago a stranger walked up to my older brother outside a building at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. My brother was there to accept an award from the College of Business. My brother—Simon. This man—this stranger—had obviously been following him, waiting for an opportunity. It was the same week your father died, after he was arrested. The stranger walked up to Simon and shoved a small briefcase into his hands. He said, ‘Max Arinelli begs you on his wife’s soul to keep this for his daughters. Just keep it until they come for it.’ The man turned and ran. My brother opened the briefcase. It was full of hundred-dollar bills.”

  My head swam. “I’ve never known anything about money being sent to your brother. Nothing. If you don’t believe me—”

  “Since you never showed up to claim it, I think you’re telling the truth.”

  He studied me with a troubled expression.
I shook my head. “I don’t understand. Everything my father owned was confiscated or—”

  “Obviously he had money hidden for an emergency. When he was arrested he got word to somebody he trusted. Somebody willing to go to Tennessee and deliver the money to my brother.” Gib leaned toward me, a muscle popping in his jaw. “I don’t understand why your father did that, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say he never forgot how he and your mother were treated by my family. No matter how much he rejected us—the same way he rejected all his old friends after your mother died—I guess when push came to shove he still thought he could count on my family for help.”

  “You don’t know what this means to me,” I whispered.

  “Here’s what it means to me: My brother agonized over that money. He knew he should turn it in to the authorities, but he couldn’t bring himself to do that. He stuck the money in his office safe and waited for you and your sister to come for it. When you didn’t, he never touched it again and he never told a soul. My brother wasn’t the kind of man who kept secrets from his family. I don’t doubt the deception worried him for years.”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m still waiting for you to laugh and tell me you made this up.”

  His face darkened. “My brother’s honesty and sense of duty isn’t a joke.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I wish it were that simple. The money’s dirty. Drug money. Gun money. From all that money your father laundered to serve his cause. That fact weighed on Simon’s conscience—but not as much as his compassion did. He was a father himself, and he understood what your father was trying to do. He left a letter in his safe-deposit box saying he felt like a coward for not finding you and Ella and handing you the money. He’d been afraid that somehow it could hurt our own family to be associated with Max Arinelli’s hidden money. But he said in his letter he’d been wrong. That only God could judge your father’s legacy to you.”

  “Your brother,” I said numbly. “Simon. What happened to him?”