A piece of plain, letter-sized white paper was push-pinned to one of the upright beams of the hangar just above the microwave. I began to descend the steel steps toward the hangar floor, although I didn’t need to get more than halfway down before I was able to discern that the handwriting on the paper belonged to my great-aunt Clarissa. In all likelihood she’d brought the message up from the house while we were all on the mountain; and I very much feared that the sound of the two Prowlers dashing about had been the thing that had prompted her to write. However, I was wrong, and unhappily so; Clarissa had a great deal more on her mind than just our escapades with the ATVs, as I found when I pulled the note from the beam and read it:
Doctors both: Don’t think for a minute that your various activities of late, as well as the presence of certain unusual guests, have gone unnoticed; however, I haven’t thought to bring the matter up, supposing that you had either been experimenting with the idea of starting some sort of reform school, or had been caught selling prescription medications to local youths. But I’ve now heard enough peculiar rumors from my acquaintances in local and county government to make me suspect that something even more disconcerting may be going on. Therefore, I am ordering the both of you to appear for dinner at my earliest convenience and explain yourselves. I have a political meeting to attend tomorrow evening, which means I will expect you on Tuesday—whatever the weather, Trajan! Don’t bother RSVP-ing or trying any other evasive tactics—just be here at 8:30.
—Clarissa
It was plain that, beneath her characteristically caustic humor, Clarissa was less angry than genuinely worried, for she really was not so stern as the note might make her sound. Her demand that we explain what was behind all the comings and goings, both of anyone connected to local law enforcement and of young Lucas, along with her revelation that her contacts in local government (which were quite extensive, given her position as a major landowner and one of the last independent dairy farmers in Burgoyne County) had relayed to her enough chatter about our involvement in the throwaway-children case to prompt her direct intervention, was genuinely alarming; yet she meant all these references to be first and foremost expressions of concern.
In all, it was something of the perfect conclusion to the evening we’d had; and as I limped over to lean against the side of the hangar door and let the unusually cool midsummer breeze toss my hair and cool my face, I looked down at the dimly lit porch of the farmhouse, knowing that Clarissa would not be in any of the rocking chairs on it, but would be firmly ensconced in her study, watching public television. There, fired by a crystal tumbler full of good scotch and cooled by an ancient metal table fan, she would be either arguing endlessly with those shows that she found biased and idiotic, or basking in the glow of those that she thought fair or simply entertaining. She was one of the loneliest people I knew, my great-aunt; lonely, that is, on an intimate level. It was a quality we shared, just as we shared the fact that our lonelinesses had both been caused by tragedy. Indeed, for as far back as I could recall, Clarissa and I had shared many traits, which was, of course, no accident: for she had been the only member of my family who—tough and caustic as her utterances might often be—had ever really given an honest damn about the quality of my life, not only during and after my cancer, but before, when I had been a sickly boy amongst robust siblings sired by equally robust parents, who had had no time and no kind words for a son who limped behind. It had therefore been only logical that I would model much of my behavior, not on my distant, vigorous father or on my drunken, codependent mother or even on my blameless brothers and sister, but rather on the small, iron-tough woman who had endured adversity of her own particular and intimate kind throughout the whole of her life, yet who had always opened Shiloh to me as a refuge and a kind of paradise—a paradise that was an education unto itself…
I was brought out of this relatively melancholy reverie by the sounds of Mike’s car pulling up to the barn below and his triumphal return march up the dirt path to the hangar:
“Oh-ho, yeah, baby!” he called out. “Don’t ever let it be said that Dr. Michael Li doesn’t know women!”
I pulled out my cigarettes as he arrived and offered him one. “I don’t know anyone who would dare make such a claim,” I said, taking another smoke for myself and lighting first his and then my own. “I take it things went well?”
“Brother,” Mike said, “we have not only got an absolutely locked mole inside the county and state investigation, but, based on the very long and deeply meaningful kiss good-night I got after I completed the explanation of why we think the whole thing points toward New York, and involves suicides instead of a serial killer, I would say that I have a very definite shot at finally scoring a relationship with Gracie—how’s that for a lesson in patience?”
“You’re sure she wasn’t just grateful for your protection and your confidences?” I queried, knowing that it would irk him a bit.
And it did: “Now, why do you have to say something like that, L.T.? I am trying to tell you that we shared a moment, motherfucker, a completely golden moment; sure, maybe it won’t pan out, but I’m betting it will—and who’s the gambler here, you or me?”
“I surrender superiority in that pastime to you,” I said, offering a smile, putting my cigarette in my cane hand, and extending my right to him. “Congratulations,” I said. “So long as you’re sure she’s on board with us?”
“Dude, I understand these things as you do not,” he answered, gladly taking my hand. “And I’m telling you, Trajan, we are solid, on that score. Tough evening—but things are starting to look up! When that first drink hit her, and she started to really relax—”
“You stopped for a drink in town?” I said, momentarily concerned.
“Yes, and don’t freak the fuck out—we cruised around a bit and made sure the BCI boys were long gone. And over that first drink, I’m telling you, she looked at me in a way she has never looked at me before. Oh, yeah, this is gonna be good…” He paused for a moment to glance around, then asked, “So what’s the deal up here? Everything okay?”
“A complication concerning Tuesday’s activities, but I’ll explain that to you later,” I answered. “Right now, I fear we really do have to start getting our classes ready…”
As we indeed did; or tried to do. On Monday I was scheduled to return to my Theory of Context course, to check on just which of my students had actually read and digested the pages from Dr. Kreizler’s lost journal that I had assigned to them, and which had decided that our class talks about the man would allow them to skate through this latest discussion. Mike, for his part, would continue his assault upon the sloppy trace-collection practices of nearly all forensic labs in the country, continuing to offer a special place to the supposedly hallowed halls of the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia; and he expounded long and loudly on how our current case—if I would only allow him to present it to his students, clothed in a web of fictionalized circumstances—would provide a particularly good example of all that was wrong with those incompetent procedures and institutions. After all, he declared, there had been nothing so exotic about the trace evidence he’d either collected or reinterpreted; it was in fact his independence that had allowed him to correctly follow and decipher the leads concerning the physical clues found on three of the victims, and their relation to each of their personal interests. But while I knew that, despite his protests, he had never allowed his talent to run ahead of his discretion, no such assurances could be given regarding his students. This was, after all, a real case involving real throwaway children: to make its details known, in whatever form, to a bunch of undergrads or even graduate students was to take a risk regarding security that I remained completely unwilling to accept. Mike continued to mumble protests about the need to train a new generation of evidence collectors, as well as about the ability of our students to add some welcome perspective on and insights into the matter; especially since the two of us had become, now, personally involved in the undertaking,
no longer able to offer completely objective opinions. This I took issue with, reminding him that I was not the one who was allowing his emotional life to bleed over into his professional work; and we kept at this exchange, fully aware that our class preparations would suffer, but feeling just confident enough about what we’d achieved in recent days to allow ourselves some amusement—until the Klaxon-like cry of the old telephone in the JU-52 began to sound about an hour later.
“I’ll get it, I’ll get it!” Mike shouted, bolting upright from his chair and speeding to the cockpit bulkhead. “That’s gonna be Gracie: when she got home, she probably realized that she can’t stand another night without having the great one at her side…”
I could only laugh quietly and continue to make notes for the next day’s classes, letting my partner run with his delusions. He quickly snatched the old Bakelite receiver out of its cradle and cooed into it: “Hell-oooo?” One or two seconds went by; enough time for me to look over to Mike. “Oh—Major McCarron…What? No, you don’t understand, this is—wait, what?” Mike’s face had suddenly lost its grin, along with most of its color; then he insisted, “No, Major, this isn’t—but—but that’s impossible….Wait—wait!” Letting the phone slip from his grasp and to the deck of the plane, Mike remained in stunned silence as his limp body followed the course of the receiver; then he finally spoke, very softly: “It’s…for you, Trajan. Major McCarron, he thought that—Jesus…” He stared straight at me, although I’m not at all sure that mine was the face he was seeing. “Jesus Christ, Trajan…” he went on, whispering, now, but desperately enough that I ran over, seized the quarter-full bottle of Talisker, and placed it in his grasp as I picked up the receiver and put my hand over the mouthpiece.
“Drink,” I ordered, and Mike did so, if very slowly. Then, hearing Mitch McCarron’s voice continuing to shout through the receiver as he tried to reestablish contact with us, I put the phone to my own face. “Mitch?” I said.
“Trajan? Is that you?” he replied urgently. “My God, Trajan, I screwed that up—I just assumed you’d be answering. I didn’t want Mike to hear it from me, I know that he—well, I didn’t want him to have to hear it from me, I screwed it up—”
“Whoa, whoa, Mitch,” I said, to the man whom I had rarely seen exhibit panic; at that moment, however, his voice had something of the quality it had assumed when he’d found the dead baby in the toilet back in Fraser. “What the hell’s going on?”
“An accident,” Mitch said this time; and I noticed, as he spoke, the sound of sirens and commotion in the background. “I’m at the site, now, we’ve got the Jaws of Life working—”
“ ‘Working’?” I repeated. “Working on what?”
“I can only talk for a second,” he answered, his ordinary confidence returning. “It’s Dr. Chang—her car was clipped on Route 7. Witnesses saw a pickup with a cap on the bed. She lost control, and went off the road. Sideswiped a tree at high speed, and wrapped her little rig right around it.”
I glanced down at Mike in horror, as he continued to slowly try to take in some of the Talisker. “What the fuck?” I murmured, moving swiftly into the cockpit and pilot’s seat of the plane, to try to spare Mike any more shocks. “Is she…?”
“She’s alive,” Mitch said quickly. “But unconscious—and the paramedics can’t revive her. It’s a concussion, at least, and a bad one—or maybe…”
“Got it.” Trying to harness my own emotions, I added: “Do you need us there?”
“No—I do not think that’s a good idea, Trajan,” Mitch replied firmly. “Unless Mike absolutely needs to be. Her family is on the way, and I’ll keep you posted. Besides, Frank Mangold’s here, and someone told him that she was driving back from your place.”
“Yeah?” I queried sharply. “Did he also happen to tell you that his people trailed her here?”
Mitch took a few seconds before he quietly but angrily replied, “Son of a bitch…No, he did not. Okay, Trajan—I’m gonna go and deal with that little issue. Right now.”
“You sure you should, Mitch?” I said. “If it was his people that—”
“Don’t go there, Trajan,” McCarron told me, in no uncertain terms. “I know Frank can be an asshole, and I’m mad as hell that he didn’t tell me about the tail, but—I don’t think he’d try anything like this, or let any of his people try it. He seems genuinely shook up—which is maybe why he didn’t let me know the full story. Anyway, we’re treating this fully as one of our own—it’s got priority. We’ve shut the highway down, and we’ve got a medevac chopper on its way from Albany Medical. Everything that can be done is being done—but if you guys show up, it might cause more problems than it’ll solve. So, like I say, unless Mike needs to be here—but it won’t do him any damned good to see it, Trajan, trust me. I’ll keep you posted.” He suddenly covered his own mouthpiece, in order to shout a command to someone that was muffled and unintelligible to me. Then he was back: “Shit, I’ve really got to go. But I’ll call you again from the hospital.”
And then, with awful finality, he terminated the connection. I sat in the pilot’s seat of the JU-52 for several seconds, absorbing this excruciating news, before remembering what was what: I then leapt up (or what passes for leaping up, in my case) and went back into the cabin of the plane, returning the phone to its cradle. I bent my right knee to get down as close to my wretched partner as I could, and said what little I could to console him:
“She’s alive, Mike—unconscious, but alive. Mitch thinks it’s nothing more than a concussion, but they’re bringing in a medevac helicopter, just in case. They’re treating it as one of their own, and he says even Frank Mangold’s upset about it—”
Mike turned to me suddenly, a kind of ghastly detachment in his eyes and voice: “And you buy that shit, L.T.? You really think Mangold wasn’t involved, somehow?”
“McCarron says that we shouldn’t jump to that conclusion,” I answered, trying to bring Mike around. “And I think he’s right—not even Mangold would be that outrageous, or that stupid. But just in case, I told Mitch about the tail, which Mangold hadn’t. Mitch’ll put him to the wall about it; but no, in short, I don’t think that Mangold—”
“Oh, come on, L.T.!” Mike shouted, although he didn’t move from where he sat. “You’re the one who doesn’t believe in coincidences—fucking Lucas told me that there was a sniper up there with us, tonight! You think he was just some guy, some guy that happened to have it in for us?”
“I don’t know for sure, Mike,” I answered, still trying to talk him down. “Nor do I know who the truck driver was. But I can’t believe that it was one of Mangold’s people. It’s just too extreme. As to who it was…We can’t know, not yet—we don’t have enough facts.”
Mike was about to protest further, but then I saw that glassiness lift from his eyes, and he nodded comprehendingly. “No,” he murmured. “No, I guess we don’t…” And then some tears welled up, although they did not escape his eyes as he moaned pitiably, “Oh, shit, L.T.—Gracie. Whoever it was, why the fuck did they have to go after her?”
“You know the answer to that,” I replied. “They were trying to send us a warning. Another warning. Now come on.” I stood, leaning heavily on my cane as I offered him a hand up. “We’ve done enough to be ready for classes.”
Mike nodded, reaching for my hand. “Fuck classes, I’ve got to get over there…”
As he pulled himself to his feet, I answered, “Mitch says that’s a bad idea all the way around—and I agree with him, Mike.”
“Oh, really?” he asked bitterly.
“Really,” I answered flatly. “Mike, they’re going to be a while getting her out of the wreck; she’s unconscious, and will likely be headed for some kind of surgery. Her family’s coming, and you don’t want to be the one they find waiting around—they’ll blame you, to your face or otherwise. Believe me, it’s all going to be a lot of sights and situations that will jolt you, and upset you even more—and it’ll be shocking and upsetting en
ough when you see her in the hospital after she wakes up. Save your strength for then.”
“Yeah?” Mike said in frustration. “So what do I do now? I can’t just sit around here.”
“Nor do I suggest that you do so,” I replied, my voice (once again, and as it always tends to be at such moments) perhaps too detached. “Instead, I’d recommend that we use the balance of tonight to try to figure out what is happening, and what we can do about it. Remember what a great man used to say: ‘Don’t fight the problem—decide it.’ ” Mike, somewhat encouraged by the notion of doing something, anything, to help Gracie (even though we both were aware, I think, that she might not live to appreciate it), considered the matter as, leaning on my right shoulder in a way that caused my left hip no little distress, he moved with me to his desk. “And, to apply that thought here, whoever is dogging our participation in this investigation, I don’t think we have the vaguest idea of who they actually are, or why they’re coming at us so hard. Most importantly, I don’t think we understand just how the hell they’re getting their information…”
“What do you mean?” Mike answered. “You said that Mangold’s people followed Gracie here. Hell, we saw them, Trajan.”