Aknock at my door. I am busy stashing my Mauser, my journal, and the jar of Olo witch sauce back in my box. It’s funny that through all this, my absurd hegira, I have never thought about avoiding the police. Because I haven’t done anything wrong, except maybe sink my father’s boat, and use some bad paper. And kill Luz’s mom, I always forget that one, because I can’t feel it was very wrong to defend myself and Luz. Ifa cut her line and used me as his instrument. But clearly my husband wants the police involved with me, or he wouldn’t have decorated Polly’s garden with his latest victim. A test? Does he want to see if I will rat him out? Does it matter to him?
A brief check in the mirror to insure as much invisibility as I can muster. The blinds are drawn, the light in my kitchen is out, my spectacles are on, my pathetic bangs are in place. I open the door, and my knees almost fail to hold me up. I must clutch at the doorpost. For an instant, I think I’m back in a dream, that my husband is standing in front of me with a police badge stuck, as a little joke, in the pocket of his sports jacket. He says, “Detective Paz, ma’am, Miami PD. Could I …” His face registers concern and he adds, “Excuse me, are you all right?”
But an instant later I see that it isn’t him. The structure of the face is different, with higher cheekbones and a lower hairline; he’s solider, too, with more muscle in the shoulders and neck; his eyes are yellow-brown, not hazel-gray, like Witt’s. And that jacket, no, Witt didn’t care about nice clothes, this all flashed through my mind while some ogga in there yells, “Asshole! He could show up in the dress uniform of the Grenadier fucking Guards?it’s a dream!”
But I back away and let him in, saying, “No, it’s … in the yard … horrible. Will they … take it away soon? I don’t want my daughter …”
I sit in one of my two chairs. He’s staring at me. “Yes, ma’am, the M.E.’s here now. It’ll all be gone in ten minutes or so.” He sits across the table. He brings out a notebook and mechanical pencil. I drop my head and work on getting my ki out of my throat and down where it belongs.
“You’re, um, Dolores Tuoey?” I confess that I am. I am finding it hard to meet his eyes. “Ms. Tuoey,” he says, “did you see or hear anything unusual last night, anything at all?”
“No, not really,” I say. “Jake?that’s Polly’s dog?woke me up. Then I heard Polly come out, to shut him up. We have raccoons and possums and sometimes he barks at them, and I heard her yell, and I went out to see what it was. I’m sorry I can’t help you more.”
“Okay, I assume you realize what you got out there in the yard …”
“Yes, it’s a dead newborn. I used to be a nurse-midwife.”
“Really? I meant do you know who did it?”
“No! How could I …” Protesting too much here. I focus on the next breath. The next.
“I mean you know we’re looking for a serial killer who attacks pregnant women. It’s in all the papers and the TV?”
“Oh, right, of course. Yes. And this is one of his. Yes.”
“Right. Now, can you think of any reason why our perpetrator would choose this particular yard to leave this dead baby? A man, maybe. Anyone you know, anyone you’ve seen hanging around?”
I am forming a neutral answer when little pounding feet sound above, and on the ladder, and Luz jets into the room in her nightgown. We both look at her and she stops dead when she sees the detective, and runs to me and hides her face against my side. I put my faithless arm around her.
The detective says, “This must be your daughter?”
“Yes. Luz, honey, say hi to Detective Paz.” More burrowing; a snatched peek. “She’s shy.”
“Yes. She’s real pretty, though.” He looks from me to her. I can see him thinking about Gregor Mendel and his rules of heredity and I wish I had learned to do chint’chotune, the thought spells that make people forget, or recall things that did not occur. No, I don’t wish that. I wish I were far away with Luz.
He puts away his notebook, slides a business card across the table, and says, “Here’s my card, ma’am. I’ll be by to check with you later. A lot of times we find that even though people don’t recall things right after a shocking event, they’ll come around in a couple of days, something will just pop into their heads. And if you do think of anything like that, please call me anytime, day or night. This guy, well, he seems to be very hard to catch. And he’s going to do it again, unless we can stop him. Another woman, another baby, the families …”
I say, too quickly, “I wish I could help, but really, I didn’t see or hear anything.” Now I see something cold pass into his eyes. I can’t look at him. He says, “Forgive me for asking, but you said you were a nurse-midwife. Where was that? Where you practiced.”
“In the Boston area. And in Africa. In Mali. I’ve just been back two years or so.”
“I see. Africa, huh? That must have been exciting. So, I guess Luz was born in Africa. Her dad live here, too?”
“No, he died in Mali.” Stupid! Why am I talking so much? I push the chair back and stand. “Excuse me, but I have to dress her and get her to nursery school and get myself to work, so if there’s nothing else …”
He gets up, too, and smiles, an unpleasant cat sort of smile.
“We’ll be in touch.” I let him out and I say, trained to politeness, “Good-bye, Detective Paz,” and he says, “So long, Jane,” as he pulls the door shut, not looking back, and I pretend I haven’t heard him as my blood freezes.
I sit stunned for a while in the dim kitchen, until Luz brings me out of it with demands for breakfast, milk in the special glass with the Little Mermaid on it, and also a discussion about the day’s outfit, and chatter about the Noah’s ark play she is to be in at nursery school. Who was that man, Muffa? He was a policeman. What did he want? He was looking for a bad man and he wanted me to help him. What did the bad man do? He hurt someone. Who? I don’t know, honey. Do you want your blue T-shirt or your purple? I can cope with this and breathe, just about. In fact, serving the tiny priestess my soul-daughter has become is probably the best thing I can do right at this moment, obsession being just the thing for keeping the demons at bay, as so many nuts have found over the years. What else can you do? So maybe that cop didn’t say that, maybe that was just an ordinary hallucination, brought on by tension and lack of sleep. Yes. Certainly. He must have said “So long, ma’am.” Okay, right: on with the day. I get Luz into her clothes and, after I have checked that the corpse is gone, we go out. There is crime-scene tape still up, and various technical people are floating around the yard, and my cop is standing there with another man, taller, with pale eyes and the face of a lynch-mob leader. As I walk to the car, their eyes follow me, and my cop is talking.
I have a big day today. Just like in dreamland, it is payday, my final day. At lunchtime, they even give a little party for me, and Mrs. Waley gives her usual speech, we will all miss Dolores, and Lulu and Cleo come over from admin and hug me and I get a nice box of Helena Rubenstein makeup from them as a going-away present. And I do my duties meticulously while squeezing in a class A felony on what will likely be the very last medical records pickup run of my life. For on my stop at the pharmacy department, where of course they know me, and where I am, while not as invisible as my husband can be, still pretty invisible, I wait until no one is looking and lean through the hatch where the little plastic boxes are waiting and snatch up the one that goes to the fat clinic. I put it on my cart with the records and roll away, and while alone for a moment in the elevator I transfer fifty or so 10 mg generic dextroamphetamine caps to my cheap purse, a few from each vial, and drop the depleted tray off at the clinic. It is better in any case for dieters to avoid harsh drugs. Perhaps, like me, they might rely on terror to maintain a desirable and healthy slenderness.
Am I still dreaming? Are you? In one of the damp hallways of the hospital I come across a giant flying cockroach of the type people hereabouts call palmetto bugs. I examine it closely. I prod it with my foot and it scuttles away. It’s big enough, but it doesn’t talk to me, or bring ten thousand friends to the party, or fly into my mouth. It is just a dear, cuddly, regular cockroach. So I am probably back in the dream we have all agreed is life.
After work, I go down to the credit union office in the basement of my building, cash my terminal check, close out my account, and walk out with about thirteen hundred dollars. Feeling a little heavy-lidded and logy now, I take a dex and exit into the steam bath of late afternoon. I will take the Buick to the transmission place and cab back. In a while, I am striding down the street, the speed is starting to kick in, I am feeling the tinglies, and that feeling of anticipation you get, something big is about to happen and I’m ready for it. What happens is that one of the louts who hang out at the corner store I have to pass twice a day decides to mug me.
It must have been something about the way I was walking, or maybe he just smelled the money and the dope. It would have been the score of a lifetime: I knock over this ugly white bitch, man, and she got near a grand and a half and a load of speed. I notice him peel off the knot of cronies and follow me. He is a good-sized, shoe-polish-brown kid, maybe sixteen, a little over six feet and lean, with the usual look of babyish meanness on his face. There is a vacant lot up ahead, and that’s where he will trot up behind me, throw a yoke around my neck with his left arm, extract my purse with his right, drag me into the weeds, hit me in the face a couple of times, and walk off.
What actually happens is that when his arm reaches around my neck I stoop a little and put both my hands around his wrist and whirl to my left on my left foot and step out, conserving his forward motion and adding to it, and now I have his wrist and his elbow up high, dancing in a big half circle across the pavement, because you always move circlewise in aikido. I apply some leverage so that his upper body overbalances and I run his face into the base of a phone pole, not too hard. Oshi-taoshi; I’ve done it a thousand times, but only this once in real life.
Then suddenly I’m pushed away and a man is kneeling on the back of my dancing partner and attaching handcuffs to his wrists. I see that it is Detective Paz. I start to walk away, but he shouts at me and leaves the boy and comes up and grabs my arm. I look pointedly at his grip and he lets go. He is breathing a little hard, but he is not sweating and his beautiful jacket, shirt, and tie are unrumpled. He says, trying a smile, “You almost got mugged. You can’t just leave.”
I stare at him through my tinted spectacles. I say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That guy, the homey. He was trying to mug you. You would’ve been in trouble if I hadn’t come along.”
I give him a look. He shrugs off the little lie with a grin. I say, “You’re mistaken, Detective. He tripped and fell. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment.” I take off before he can say anything else. Obviously, he has been following me. Terrific.
I drive down Flagler, past pets, which seems to be closed, and to my transmission guy, a few blocks west. I leave the car with him, and he promises three days, which means a week. Do I even need my car anymore? The notion of physical escape seems to have vanished, or at least escape by land. While I wait for whatever is going to happen, and still assuming that I am not still in dreamland, I can take Luz to school and shop on foot, or maybe I’ll buy a secondhand bike and a bike seat. I use the pay phone to call a cab and stand out on the street to wait. The transmission guy seems to be staring at me in an odd way. I check my reflection in the plate glass of his window. There seems nothing wrong. I move toward the curb.
Next to the transmission place is one of those hole-in-the-wall cafes that consists only of a service hatch and a row of stools outside. These are occupied by an assortment of middle-aged men sipping from tiny cups. They are staring at me, too; their faces are full of vague aggression; their eyes are dark and hot. I direct my gaze across the street to where a group of people are waiting for a jitney. I cross the street. I could take the jitney east on Flagler, to where I can catch a Metro train to the Grove. This would save some money, but I am reluctant. The configuration of the group is profoundly menacing; I read threat in the way they are standing: two Latina women in tan servant’s uniforms; a dark woman with shopping bags, with a little girl and an older boy in tow; a zombie; two thin Oriental guys in cook’s whites speaking Cuban Spanish; and a very fat copper-skinned woman with a cane and a palm fan, all typically what you would find at any such corner in low-rent Miami, except maybe for the zombie. The Olo call such creatures paarolawats.
They are staring at me, not directly, but sidelong, and when I look away, I can feel their eyes on my back. No jitney, then. Wait for the cab. The dispatcher said ten minutes, although, really, my Spanish is not that hot, maybe he said thirty. Or never.
The paarolawats comes a little closer to me. A faint breeze stirs (maybe from the fan of the fat lady!) and I catch his smell, a horrible reek of old alcohol and unwashed, perhaps even slightly putrid flesh, and, of course, dulfana. This one is a crumpled-looking man, anywhere from forty-five to sixty-five years, wearing wino rags, balding, whose freckled skin’s base color is that of a cardboard carton left out in the sun and rain. He’s looking right at me, out of his dead eyes; he shuffles a step closer, then another. The jitney arrives at the curb, an old Ford Econoline van driven by a skeletal Haitian. The waiting people board it, casting baleful looks at me as they pass, or so it seems.
The jitney pulls away, and I’m left alone with the paarolawats. He slips-slides toward me in that horrible way they have, which I remember even though I have only seen one before. You’re not supposed to let them touch you, I remember that, too. They’re loaded with all kinds of exotic chemicals; their skin is dripping with witch secretions. The horror movies have it right for once. I back away. I am thinking, This would be a good time to wake up, if this is a dream, and if not I am going to have to run for it, if that fucking cab doesn’t get here in one minute, and then a voice behind me says, “Hey, there, Eightball, what’s happening?”
It is the detective, again. He is walking toward the paarolawats, with his hand out. He is going to shake hands with a zombie! I move quickly to stand in his way and I say, “Detective, I just remembered something I forgot to tell you.”
“Yeah? That’s great, ma’am. Do you know old Eightball Swett, here? Mr. Swett is one of our colorful neighborhood characters …”
I grab his sleeve. “No, he’s not. Could we go to your car? I mean right now!” Because the thing has begun to move, a couple of quick shuffles and he’s reaching out his hand. They can move pretty fast over short distances, although, depending on how ripe they are, if they push it any they tend to lose bits and pieces.
The detective picks up my tone and lets me drag him to his white Impala. We both get in, and the paarolawats is right there as I close the door with a slam. He paws at the window and a bit of him sticks to the glass like bird shit. Now I’m practically crying, “Please drive, please drive drive drive drive drive!”
When we are well away, he says, “Would you mind telling me what that was all about?”
“I was just nervous. That man made me nervous.”
“Nervous?” he says. “That palsied piss-bum made you nervous, when less than an hour ago I saw you take down a big strong gangbanger practically without breaking stride?” I am silent. He says, “We need to have a talk, Jane.”
“I told you, my name is Dolores Tuoey,” I say, barely convincing myself.
“Jane Doe. I should say, Dr. Doe, really. I read your paper on the Olo. Some of it went past me, but what I could understand was pretty amazing.”
Last shot. “I’m not Jane Doe. People were always getting us confused.”
“Really? Whereabouts was this?”
“Bamako. In Mali. I was a nurse-midwife there and she was doing some anthro work upcountry in the Boucle de Baoule. We ran into each other from time to time and … people commented. Jane’s dead, I heard.”
“Yeah, and she must be buried under a plain tablet in Calvary Cemetery in Waltham, Mass., with ‘Sister Mary Dolores Tuoey, S.M.’ on it. You know, Jane, the problem with phony ID, especially if it’s based on a real person, is that it’s like a model of the Golden Gate Bridge made out of toothpicks. They look sort of okay, but they won’t bear any real weight.”
He gives me a bright cat smile. “So why’d you fake the suicide?”
“I have to pick up my daughter,” I croak. My mouth feels full of fine sand.
“Yeah, she’s at Providence. Okay, no problem.” He turned south onto Dixie Highway. “Actually there is a small problem: where did you get the daughter? You sure didn’t have one when you sailed away into the sunset. Your dad would have noticed it. I met your dad the other day, as a matter of fact. He doesn’t miss much, Jack Doe.”
I say nothing, feeling miserable, like a kid caught out in a dumb fib. In silence, then, we arrive at Providence. Luz is with her little gang of girls, gossiping. I wave and call out. Luz comes up to the strange car, her face clouding. I get out and hug her, and tell her our car is getting fixed and the nice policeman from this morning is going to drive us home.
Which he does, and makes no move to drive away out of my life, but gets out and follows us up the stairs as if invited. I make Luz her snack, carrot cake and lemonade, popping another two pills privily as I do so, and I offer some refreshment to him. He accepts, and we all snack away like a thermonuclear family. Luz is uncharacteristically quiet; she is used to the dyad, or Polly’s family, or school, and also she picks up the tension. I prod her about her day. She sang. Some of the kids got their costumes, but she did not. She hopes to be a robin or an owl. Or a fish. As we talk, I see that she keeps casting sidelong looks at him, at her little arm and his big hand and wrist on the table, and no wonder, they are almost exactly the same color. She asks if she can go play with Eleanor across the street. I watch her from the landing as she trots across and rings Dawn Slotsky’s bell.
“Nice kid,” he says. “She seems to get on with you pretty good. It’d be a shame to see her end up in some foster home.”
“Why? Are you going to arrest me?”
“I might. It seems to me you’re looking at obstruction of justice, imposture, uttering false instruments, conspiracy to commit murder. Or murders.”
In my worst nightmares, it has never occurred to me that I would be in undeserved danger from the police, that someone might think I had committed a crime that I actually didn’t commit. I sit down, collapse actually, in the chair across from him. Maybe this is also part of Witt’s plan! To stick me with his killings. Yes, that would be a Witt thing to do, to close all doors for me, leaving only one open, one that led to him. And amusing.
The cop says, “What you have to understand is that all the stops are out on this one. We have the closest thing to unlimited resources. We will, for example, find out where that kid came from, and we will find out what you did for every day of your life since you sank that boat. I’m not being a hard-ass here, but that’s just the way things are. If you’re not on our side in this, then you’re on his side, and if that’s the case, we’re going to drop the jailhouse on you. You’ll be under the jail. Do you understand me?” I say nothing. Things are emerging. They think I am some kind of accomplice? I have speed thoughts. Get the Mauser, kill this cop, grab Luz, take his car, escape?no, steal a boat, escape by water, Ifa said, oh, and the chicken, got to have the yellow bird, but what about the others? No, actually, the flaw is that I am not a murderer, or maybe I am, maybe I …
I start to shake, like someone with a bad flu. Perhaps it is the amphetamine, or more magic, all chemicals anyway. He is looking at me peculiarly. He can see inside my head. I wait; he is boring into my brain, and I am so ashamed; it is worse than being naked in Mrs. W.’s office. I can’t stay on my chair. I see myself lying on the floor, from a distance. I am getting smaller and smaller. Now I see Dolores Tuoey in my kitchen. She is wearing her funny little nun scarf on her head and her acacia-wood crucifix, and lugging that big canvas bag she always had with her; she is walking away from me, down a corridor that does not exist in my kitchen, it is a shady covered arcade, like they have in the Petit Marche in Bamako. I want to shout out, Hey, Dolores, where are you going? But there is something in my mouth, an extra-large tongue perhaps, or a fur-covered creature, or a young vulture. So I can’t shout at all and she gets smaller, and stops and turns around and smiles and waves, the way she did when our paths crossed in Bamako. Good-bye, Dolores, see you in heaven!
I am actually on the floor, I find, and he is bathing my face with a cold, damp, dish towel, very tenderly. I sit up, fast, and get to my feet; I am in the bold, self-confident phase of amphetamine now, with the appropriate teeth-grinding jaw lock. Also, I am completely Jane again. Running and hiding are over. I am so glad not to be waking up in my hammock in the moonlight! And am I ever ready to talk!
“Well, Detective Paz,” I say, “you got me.”
“You’re Jane Doe.”
“Yes, Jane Clare Doe, Ph.D., of Sionnet, New York.”
He nods, he is pleased with himself. “Okay, I’ll call an officer to take care of the kid and then we’ll go downtown and you can make a full statement.”
“No, actually, we’ll stay right here, and I’ll tell you what you need to know. I’ve got as much interest in stopping him as you do?more, probably. But the first thing you need to do is forget your usual procedure. If you insist on taking me downtown, I’ll shut my mouth and stand on my right to remain silent except for my phone call, which will be to the firm of lawyers that has been twisting the legal system on behalf of my family since 1811, and I assure you that they will leave your police department a smoking ruin. So I’ll help, but on my terms only. Your choice.”
It is so lovely to be bold Jane Doe again. Perhaps I’ve pushed him too far. He scowls, nods, sits down, takes out his notebook. “Okay, shoot; but if I smell any horse manure, it’s going to be a small room downtown, and bring on your lawyers.” I sit across the table from him. He says, “You said ‘him.’ That’s your husband, Malcolm DeWitt Moore.”
“Yes.”
“And you believe he’s the one committing these murders, the pregnant women, Wallace and Vargas and Powers?”
“It’s certain.”
“Did he kill your sister, too?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“You’d have to ask him that.”
“Why do you think?”
“He was practicing a ritual he learned in Africa. It gives him power.” A partial truth, but no matter.
“Did you help him?”
“No. No one helps him. It’s personal. It has to be done alone.”
“What has to be done alone? The killings?”
“Yes, that and the consumption of the extracted body parts. Portions of the posterior atrial wall, the spleen, and the anterior uterine lining of the mother, and from the baby, a piece of the midbrain, including the pituitary, the hypothalamus, and the pineal body.”
He gives me a long look. “So you know all about this stuff, huh?”
“A good deal. Not as much as he does, of course.”
“And why is that?”
“Because I’m just a fairly proficient apprentice sorcerer, while he is a fully accredited, extremely powerful witch.”
“Uh-huh,” he says, and I see he is starting to deflate. He thought he had a big piece of his big case and now he’s starting to think he’s got a mere nut who’ll walk on an insanity plea. I say, “Of course, he’s not as powerful as he will be. That’s why he’s doing the okunikua. “
“The …?”
“The okunikua. It’s Olo, it means the fourfold sacrifice. It’s a dontzeh thing, or it used to be?sorry, a witch thing. The Olo disapprove of it. But my husband enjoys revivals. He needs one more baby and then it’ll be done. It’d be nice to stop him before he gets it and completes. I’m not sure anything can stop him if he completes, except maybe Olodumare.”
“Who’s that?”
“God. The Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and all that is seen and unseen. The Ancient of Days.”
I smile helpfully. He puts on a false one, and leans back and knits his hands behind his head.
“How do you know he needs one more?” he says. “Maybe this last one, in your yard, was number four. Maybe he did one somewhere else that we don’t know about.”
“No,” I say. “They take the breastbone of the last one. It becomes an amulet. An idubde. “
“I hope you’re not being cute, Jane,” he says. “Crazy I can deal with, but not cute. Why don’t you drop the mumbo-jumbo and just tell me how he does it. What does he have, some kind of spray? He sprays a knockout drug, right?”
“He could. But he can make the stuff in his own body. The faila’olo, and the chint’chotune, sorry, I mean the invisibility and the? I guess the closest translation would be power over thought via sorcery, those he can do himself. Like sweating or breathing. He’s not a regular kind of person anymore. Olo sorcerers know how to modify their bodies, through programs of ingesting mutagenic compounds, combined with mental and physical disciplines. They’re walking drug factories. They can exude psychoactive drugs, extremely powerful, highly targeted ones, from the melanocytes on their skin surface. It’s all mediated by the pineal body. That’s how he made that paarolawats at the bus stop.”
“What’s a parlo … you mean Swett?”
“A paarolawats is what you would call a zombie. A person who is essentially dead, but the witch can give him certain simple tasks to do and can ride in him if he wants.”
I see pity appear in his eyes. The poor nutcase is what he’s thinking. This infuriates me. I shut my own eyes and take two deep breaths, centering. “Oh, Christ in heaven!” I cry. “Look, you think I’m some sort of pathetic cultist with a bundle of weird ideas, and you’re not listening, really, you’re not writing it down in your little book. Focus on this, Detective Paz: This is real! It’s as real as guns and cars. It’s a fifty-thousand-year-old technology that you don’t understand, and unless you do understand it enough to work with me, you have about as much chance of stopping Witt Moore as a bunch of savages have of stopping a locomotive by stretching a grass rope across the tracks.”
“Cute,” he says, smugly. “What we’re going to find here is that your guy’s got some powder in a jar that he’s immune to himself, and he’s got some way of shaking it out so it affects people in a certain area, and he’s got a gang of fellow fruitcakes who like to cut up pregnant ladies, which explains how he can be in two places at once. Occam’s razor, Jane. You’re a scientist, you know about Occam and the simplest explanation. So we don’t have to worry about zombies or the goddamn pineal gland.”
He pulls out a cell phone. “If you want to tell me about that version, Jane, I’m all ears. Otherwise, off we go.”
I had not thought it would be so exhausting, and I feel a pang of sorrow and regret about me and Marcel in Chenka, what it must have been for him trying to convince me. I say, “You are a moron, Detective Paz.”
He nods agreeably, makes a call and asks for a search team, and for someone from Family Services to take Luz to one of those friendly foster homes you read about in the papers all the time. I start to cry, and I say, “Please, couldn’t she stay here? My neighbor would be happy to take care of her. She’s had a terribly rough time and she’s very frightened of strangers.” I haven’t cried in a while, so that I am a little overwhelmed by the gush, especially since I am amphetamine bone-dry. Detective Paz is unmoved, however. He says, “Hey, listen, Jane, I’m really not a hard-ass. We can work any deal you want if you start talking sense.”
And more in this vein, which dries me up better than speed could; fury, the best antihistamine. I say, “If you are using a little girl as a bargaining chip to get me to tell you acceptable lies, which you must know are lies, then you’re not only a moron, but a sadistic moron. But have it your way?okay, you got me. My husband is the leader of a highly trained band of skilled assassins using African juju powder to cloud the minds of his victims and their guards.”
“Good,” he says, smugly. “And you’re a part of all this? The band?”
I say, “Oh, Christ! Don’t be stupid! Sorry, that’s not an option. Think, will you! I am a rich woman who’s been hiding in pauperage, doing menial work, for two and a half years. Who was I hiding from, and why?”
“The cops,” he says with assurance.
“Because I killed my sister?”
“Or helped him do it, and took the rap for it by faking that suicide.”
I see how this is so much simpler for him to believe, that criminal mastermind with hosts of minions and exotic drugs, simpler than what is really happening. I sink back into silence. There is no point in thinking further now.
Cars arrive. Cops emerge, one of them a female. I am read my rights, cuffed, and placed in the back of a patrol car. I see Paz talking to the lynch-mob man. The man looks at me with those eyes, which I am surprised to see are kindly and sad. Another car pulls up, with a Children’s Services badge on the side. Out of it comes a large black woman in a violet pantsuit, who could be Mrs. Waley’s long-lost sister. She talks to Paz for a while, and then, to my surprise and relief, gets back in her car and drives away. I see Paz walk across the street and speak with Dawn. I may have misjudged him, or perhaps he is a more subtle manipulator than he first appeared to be.
The policewoman drives me to police headquarters, where I’m placed in a cell by myself. After about forty minutes, Paz comes by and takes me to an interview room, windowless, tiled, with the usual one-way glass mirror/window, and asks me if I am ready to make a statement. I say I’m not, and I wish to contact my attorney. He seems disappointed, but tries to hide it behind the usual bland cop mask. I thank him, however, for not giving Luz to Mrs. Waley’s sister, and he shrugs it off. “No problem,” he says. I suspect that it will be a problem if his superiors ever find out. I’m pretty sure he knows who Luz really is, and he hasn’t blown the whistle as far as I know, which will be an even bigger problem for him, covering up on a homicide. Why is he doing it? Deep waters here. After he leaves, I wait ten or so minutes and then a female officer enters and takes me to a phone.
I dial one of the few numbers I hold in memory. A woman answers, “Mr. Mount’s office.” I ask to speak to him and she asks who’s calling and I say, “Jane Doe, his sister.” A considerable pause here. “Jane Doe is deceased,” she says. I say, “Yes, but I’m alive again. Get him for me, would you? And tell him I could smell the flowers of Bermuda when I died on the North Rock Shore.” I have to repeat this and chivvy her a little, but she does something and there is some light classical hold music, Boccherini, I believe. My brother comes on the line. “Jane?” His voice is hesitant and breaking, and I start to leak again.
I say, “Yeah, it’s me, Josey.” I listen to the hiss of the line. My hand on the phone is trembling and sweaty. I am not ready for this, for the terror of love.
“How could you!”in a yell that must have brought his secretary running. “How could you do that to me? And Dad? Jesus Christ, Janey! What the fuck!”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry? No, sorry is when you’re late for a dinner date, not when you fucking pretend to commit suicide. Ah, shit, Janey …”
Sobs come across the continent, minutes of them, in which I join. Then he asks me why. I say that I was afraid. I tell him that Witt has done it, that Witt is the Mad Abortionist of Miami, too. I tell him the whole story, as much of it as I could recall.
He listens in silence, and then?and here is why I love Josiah Mount?he doesn’t suggest a stay in a mental institution, he doesn’t ask a lot of questions about why I did this, or failed to do that. He just says, “What do you need?”
I tell him what.