“I searched the house for you.”
“And?”
“I didn’t find you. I was worried, but I knew the man I saw running hadn’t been carrying a child, so I wasn’t panicked. I figured you were hiding somewhere.”
“Did you wake Mom up?”
“No, I knew Gwen would panic. But she soon woke up on her own. She didn’t believe Luke was dead, so I walked her out to look at his body.”
“Did she ask where I was?”
“The truth? Not at first. She wasn’t in very good shape. She’d taken a sedative. I think she assumed you were asleep in your bed.”
How many mothers would assume that under those circumstances? “Was there a lot of blood around Daddy’s body?”
Grandpapa tilts his head from side to side, as though filtering his memory of my father’s corpse through decades of surgical experience. “Enough. The bullet clipped the pulmonary artery, and there was a good-sized exit wound.”
“Enough for what?”
“For someone to track blood into your room, I suppose.” My grandfather’s face gives away nothing.
“When did I turn up?”
“Right after the police arrived. I was telling them what happened when you walked up out of the dark.”
“From the direction of our house?”
“I didn’t see where you came from. But I remember the eastern slave quarters behind you, so I guess so.”
“Was I wearing shoes?”
“I have no idea. I wouldn’t think so.”
“Did I get close to Daddy’s body?”
“You were practically on top of him before anyone noticed you.”
I close my eyes, willing my memory of that image back into the dark where I keep it. “Was the prowler you saw running away white or black?”
“Black.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
“What kind of shoes were you wearing that night?” I didn’t mean to ask this aloud, but it’s too late to take it back.
“I wore boots during the day back then, but that night…I don’t recall.”
“Did you go into my room after the murder?”
“I did. To help your mother calm you down.”
“Was I upset?”
“Not that a stranger could tell. You didn’t make a sound. But I could see it. Pearlie was the only one you’d let hold you. She had to rock you in the chair like she did when you were a baby. That’s the only way we got you to sleep.”
I remember that feeling, if not that specific night. Pearlie rocked me to sleep on many nights, and long after I was a baby.
“Well.” He takes a conclusive breath. “Have I told you what you needed to know?”
I haven’t begun to get the answers I want, but at this point I’m not sure what the right questions are. “Who do you think the prowler was, Grandpapa?”
“No idea.”
“Pearlie thinks it might have been a friend of Daddy’s, looking for drugs.”
Grandpapa appears to debate with himself about whether to comment on this. Then he says, “That’s a fair assumption. Luke took a lot of prescription drugs. And I caught him growing marijuana down on the island more than once.”
“I never knew that.”
“Of course you didn’t. Anyway, I worried at times that he might be selling the stuff. When he was killed, I thought of telling the police to explore that avenue, but in the end I decided against it.”
“Why?”
“What could it do but bring calumny on the family name?”
Of course. The family name matters more than anything, even justice. I want to ask him the final question I put to Pearlie. But Grandpapa always saw my father as weak, and if he’d believed that fatal rifle shot had been self-inflicted, he wouldn’t have concealed from anyone this vindication of his instincts—not even to protect the family name. Because he didn’t really see my father as part of the family. And yet…there could be factors I know nothing about. My mother, for example.
“Did you really see a prowler that night, Grandpapa?”
His eyes widen, and for a moment I’m certain my blind shot has struck home. Before he speaks, he reaches out and drains the last of his Scotch. “Exactly what are you asking me, Catherine?”
“Did Daddy shoot himself that night? Did he commit suicide?”
Grandpapa raises a hand to his chin and massages the flesh beneath it. His eyes are unreadable, but I see a shadow of conflict in them. “If you’re asking me whether I think Luke was capable of suicide, my answer is yes. He was severely depressed a good deal of the time. But that night…everything happened just as I said. He died trying to protect his home and family. I’ll give the boy that.”
Only when I exhale do I realize how long I’ve been holding my breath. I feel such relief that it takes a supreme act of will not to get up and take a slug of vodka from the bottle on the sideboard. Instead, I stand and gather my fax pages from the table.
“You hardly draw anything from your trust fund nowadays,” Grandpapa remarks. “You don’t spend money anymore?”
I shrug. “I like earning my own.”
“I wish the rest of the family would take a page from your book.”
I take this for what it is, a thinly veiled insult to my mother and aunt, but most of all to my father. “You really didn’t like him, did you? Daddy, I mean. Tell the truth.”
Grandpapa’s eyes don’t waver. “I don’t think I made a secret of that. Perhaps I should have, but I’m no hypocrite.”
“Why didn’t you like him? Was it just oil and water?”
“A lot of it was the war, Catherine. Luke’s war. Vietnam. His mental problems, I guess.”
“He was wounded, too, you know.” I still recall the line of holes in Daddy’s back, caused by shrapnel from a booby-trapped artillery round. I always got chills when he removed his shirt.
“Luke’s physical wound wasn’t his problem.”
“You don’t know what he went through over there!” I cry defensively, though I don’t really know either.
“That’s true,” Grandpapa admits. “I don’t.”
“I heard some of the things you used to say to him. How Vietnam wasn’t a real war. How it wasn’t nearly as tough as Iwo or Guadalcanal.”
He stares curiously at me, as though wondering how an eight-year-old child could remember something like that. “I did say those things, Catherine. And in the time since, I’ve realized I might have been wrong. To an extent, anyway. Vietnam was a different kind of war, and I didn’t understand that then. But by God, I saw things in the Pacific that were about as bad as a man can see, and I didn’t let it paralyze me. A few men did—good men, some of them—and I guess maybe Luke was like them. Shell shock, the doctors called it then. Or battle fatigue. I’m afraid we just called it, well—”
“Yellow!” I finish, trying to resist a rush of emotion. My cheeks are burning. “Why didn’t you tell Daddy you’d seen good men react like the way he did? You called him yellow to his face. I heard you! I didn’t know what you meant then, but I did later.”
Grandpapa folds his still-powerful hands together and fixes me with an unrepentant gaze. “Listen to me, Catherine. Maybe I was too hard on your father. But at some point it doesn’t matter what you’ve gone through. You have to pull up your bootstraps and get on with living. Because one thing’s for sure, nobody else is going to do it for you. Your father’s job was to provide for you and your mother, and at that job he failed miserably.”
I’m almost speechless with fury. “Did you really want him to succeed?”
“What does that mean? I gave him three different jobs, and he couldn’t handle any of them.”
“How could he? You despised him! And didn’t you just love being the big man, the one who paid for everybody’s food and shelter? Who controlled us all?”
He settles deeper into his chair, his chiseled features hard as the face of a mountain. “You’re distraught, my dear. We’ll continue t
his at another time. If we must.”
I start to argue, but what’s the point? “I have to get back to New Orleans. Please don’t go into my old bedroom before I get back. You can’t see anything without special chemicals. And please don’t let anyone else go in there. Mom’s liable to try to scrub the place from top to bottom with 409.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll keep the room secure. Test anything and everything you like.”
I collect my papers and walk to the study door.
“You seeing anybody that looks like a potential husband?” Grandpapa asks.
A wave of heat shoots up my spine.
“I’m wondering if I’m ever going to see some children around here before I die.”
If he knew I was pregnant now, he probably wouldn’t even care that I’m not married. “I wouldn’t worry about that,” I say without turning. “You’re going to live forever, aren’t you?”
I open the door to find Grandpapa’s driver staring at me, an open leer on his face.
“Hey,” he says.
I brush past Billy Neal without a word, but as I walk away, I hear him mutter something that sounds like “Frigid bitch.”
On any other day I would turn back and bite his head off, but today…it’s just not worth it.
Today I keep walking.
Chapter
12
I’m twenty miles south of Natchez when the Valium starts to soothe my frayed nerves. Sean has called twice, but I didn’t answer. I needed a few minutes to decompress after meeting with my grandfather, and to prepare for questioning about Nathan Malik by the FBI. Whatever the reality of the night my father died, I have to put it aside for now and think about my two years in medical school. They will soon be the subject of intense scrutiny by the FBI.
The facts are simple enough. As Michael Wells heard through the grapevine, I had an affair with a married professor and it got out of hand. After four months, I tried to end it. He wouldn’t let me. To emphasize my point, I slept with an ER doctor the professor knew. The professor promptly attempted suicide. He didn’t end his life, but he did end his teaching career, and also my days in medical school. My grandfather could probably have used his influence to get me reinstated, but the truth was, I didn’t want to go back. Certainly not like that.
The FBI will want to know all about Nathan Malik—or Jonathan Gentry, as I knew him then—but I don’t remember much. I was drunk a lot of that time. What I do remember about those years begs a question. Why have I always involved myself with married men? Therapists tell me it’s the impossibility of such relationships that draws me. Single guys always fall in love; they end up possessive and wanting me forever. I don’t want permanence—I didn’t back then, anyway—and married men are a pragmatic solution. They’re romantic, sexually experienced, and committed elsewhere. I’m well aware of the Freudian implications of my lifestyle. I grew up mostly without a father, so I’m attracted to older men. What of it? The moral issue bothers me sometimes, but that’s ultimately the man’s problem. What’s dismayed me more is learning firsthand just how little love there is in many marriages—even those of relatively short duration. Yet here I am now, wanting Sean for myself. For my baby. Forever. The irony is almost too much. And despite my dreams of a blissful future, I’ve always sensed a dark truth in my deepest being: there’s no happily ever after for girls like me.
My cell phone is ringing again. This time I answer.
“Where are you?” Sean asks.
“Halfway to Baton Rouge, doing eighty-five in a forty-five zone. I’ve got my flashers on. If the Highway Patrol stops me, I’m telling them to call you.”
“No problem. Look, the FBI got their court order. They’ll have their odontologist at Dr. Shubb’s office checking Malik’s dental records long before you get here.”
“Damn.” I hate that it won’t be me who makes the comparison, but the point of all this is to stop the killer, as I scolded Sean this morning. “Good. That’s good. But X-rays may not be enough. He should take alginate impressions of Malik’s actual teeth.”
“That’s specified in the court order. If he needs impressions to make the ID, he’ll get them. They’re also going to swab Malik’s mouth for DNA.”
My foot depresses the accelerator, and the Audi zips up to a hundred miles per hour. Even if it’s not me making the comparison, I have to be involved in this. “Do they still want to talk to me?”
“Absolutely. John Kaiser wants to call you right now and ask you about Malik.”
“I’m ready.”
“Be totally honest with him, Cat. He’s FBI, but he’s a good guy. You can trust him. He was in Vietnam, like your dad.”
This admonition angers me. “Totally honest, you said? So if he asks about you and me…?”
“You know what I mean. I’ll talk to you soon.”
Sean cuts the connection. Less than a minute later, my phone rings. It’s Kaiser. The FBI agent’s voice is lower than Sean’s, and more measured in cadence. He asks me to summarize my time in medical school and my contact with Nathan Malik. I give him a concise account, and he doesn’t interrupt me.
“So you only met him a few times,” Kaiser says when I finish. “And never alone?”
“Right. I mean, we were alone in the sense of him cornering me in the next room away from a dinner party. But that’s it. All he did was hit on me.”
“What specifics do you remember about him?”
“He didn’t drink.”
“Why does that stick in your mind?”
“Because I did. A lot. We all did. But not Malik. He was the observer type. Superior and aloof. Sat back and judged everybody, you know? Sniped. It was when I was drunk that he came on to me. Which surprised me, because until he did, I thought he was gay.”
“Really?” There’s a pause. I picture Kaiser making notes on a pad. “And you’ve never seen him in New Orleans? Not in the supermarket? The mall? Nothing like that?”
“No. And I’d remember.”
“Do you have any idea why he changed his name?”
“No. Where did he get the name Malik?”
“It was his mother’s maiden name.”
“Huh. That’s pretty common, I guess?”
“Not so much with men,” Kaiser replies. “But it happens.”
The FBI agent is silent for a brief period. “So basically, Nathan Malik—then called Gentry—was a friend of this doctor you were having an affair with. So it’s the doctor I need to talk to.”
“Definitely.”
“Can you spell his name for me?”
“Christopher Omartian, MD. He’s an EENT. I think he practices in Alabama now. Mobile.”
“How do you know that?”
“He sent me a letter a couple of years ago.”
“Did you respond?”
“I threw it in the trash.”
Kaiser thanks me for my time, says he might need to call back, then starts to say good-bye.
“Agent Kaiser?”
“Yes?”
“What about the two female relatives of the victims? The ones you used to link Dr. Malik to the murders?”
“What about them?”
“Have you talked to them yet?”
“We’ve tried with one, but she’s very suspicious. Bordering on paranoid. Won’t tell us a thing about Malik. Look, I really need to run, Dr. Ferry. Thank you for your help.”
Kaiser signs off.
I figure Sean will call back immediately, but my phone doesn’t ring. Suppressing the urge to call him, I slow the Audi along the curving road to St. Francisville, where John James Audubon painted many of his famous birds.
The ANGOLA PENITENTIARY sign flashes past on my right, and my stomach does a little flip. Angola means many things to me. As a child I attended the prison rodeo and marveled at the cavalier way the convicts risked their lives with the bulls and broncos. But what Angola means most to me is the island. The prison road is the one we traveled to reach DeSalle Island from the eastern bank of th
e Mississippi. The old river channel that guards the island’s eastern shore had to be crossed by boat for most of the year, but during the summer, an oil company maintained a low-water bridge to service its wells on the island. That bridge led to an exotic world of shadows and light, of joy and terror, of memory and forgetting. I made childhood friends on the island—black friends mostly—then lost them to the realities of a social order I didn’t even know I was part of. I worked the ground only to see what I’d planted washed away by floods. I cared for animals only to see them slaughtered for food. I learned to hunt and to kill, and then to hate the killing.
Death and the island are inextricably bound in my mind. When I was ten years old, four hardened killers escaped from Angola by floating out into the river on a log. The prison chase team radioed my grandfather that the river’s current might drive the escapees ashore on DeSalle Island. They sent men with dogs to comb the island for a solid day. They found nothing. The next night, Grandpapa, his white foreman, and two handpicked black men rode off on horseback with four prize hounds. At dawn the next day, two escapees were locked in the dog run behind the barn, their hands and feet bound with bailing wire. The other two lay dead on the barn floor, their bodies ravaged by dog bites and bullets.
Last year my grandmother drowned during a picnic on the sandbar. One minute she was laughing, the next she was gone. Sluffed into the current with thirty feet of sand, her body never found. I wasn’t there that day, and it was probably best. I would have killed myself trying to save her. I know the Mississippi River in a way most people never will. Where most fear the great muddy tide, I respect it. When I was sixteen, I swam across it on a dare, to prove that I feared nothing. My reckless courage almost killed me that day. The island and the river have claimed many more lives than those convicts and my grandmother, but I don’t want to dwell on that now. Don’t borrow trouble, my grandmother used to say.
South of St. Francisville, the road broadens to four lanes. I open up the throttle and go flat out on the straightaway to Baton Rouge. I’m passing the main exit for LSU when Sean finally calls back.
“I’m in Baton Rouge now,” I tell him. “One hour away.”