The Prettiest Feathers (9 page)

The mayor’s office will tell Sinclair that there was no official guest list for the reception. And, if he dealt with the same public information officer I did, she will say, “Your Mr. Wolf probably was there. Both senators were present, and they had twenty or thirty UN types with them. We just don’t have a list.”

I parked beside Sarah’s car at the gate and walked up to meet her at the cemetery office as we had agreed. She stood
outside, her light blue dress moving slightly in the breeze. She was holding a small bunch of cut flowers.

“At least the day is beautiful,” I said.

She had a map of the place with Liza’s grave marked on it. She glanced at it as we walked up to the top of the hill.

The setting was sterile, barren of trees. There were no statues or headstones. Each grave was marked by a flat bronze plate resting in a slab of concrete. We were in the section reserved for children—the Garden of Enchantment.

“I think she’s over this way,” Sarah said, consulting her map.

When she found the grave, she removed a metal canister from the head of the marker and placed the flowers inside it, then put the canister back in its holder.

I was waiting for her to start in about Liza’s short life, Sarah’s own role as mother, how Robert did or didn’t fit into things. Instead, she knelt and bowed her head. If she prayed, she did it silently. It occurred to me that perhaps the mother should join the daughter. It wasn’t just a poetic whim, and it wouldn’t have been mere replication. It’s just that the opportunity had presented itself. There was a slag pile off to one side of the Garden of Enchantment where a shovel was stuck in a heap of dirt. It would have been so easy to peel back the sod on Liza’s grave, dig a shallow hole, make a small contribution to the slag pile, deposit Sarah atop her daughter’s casket, and replace the sod. Who would think to look for the missing among the buried dead?

It would have been so easy. I stepped closer to Sarah’s back as she continued to kneel. Swallows swooped in low arcs across the hill—splashes of orange and white against the pastel blue of the sky. The day was clear, the top of the hill empty. It would have been a simple matter of reaching out my hands and doing it.

But I had something else in mind for Sarah.

When she stood, she turned and explored my eyes.

“The color changes,” she said.

“Others have told me that.”

“They’re doing it right now. They were gray. Now they’re almost blue.”

She was finished at the grave. There were no tears.

“I feel as if I could never really know you,” she said. “Usually a person’s eyes will tell me something, but all yours do is change.”

“Doesn’t that tell you something?” I asked.

As we began walking down the hill, she said, “You aren’t who you said you are.”

“Oh?”

“Even the name—John Wolf—you made that up, didn’t you? And the way you handled that gun—what are you, CIA or something?”

Not a bad guess. This was the kind of perceptiveness I had expected from Sarah—the side of her that provided the challenge.

“John, or whatever your name is, who are you?”

“John is right,” I told her, offering my business card.

“John Wallingford,” she read aloud. “Wallingford Antiques, Landgrove. Antiques? Then what is all the mystery about?”

“I hope I don’t sound pretentious when I say this, but I am a wealthy man,” I explained. “I do most of my business in cash. That’s the reason for the gun. I never had to aim it at anyone before that day in your store, but I’m well schooled in its use, thanks to the range I visit twice a week.”

“But why the phony name?”

“I wanted you to like me for myself, not my money.” I could see her relax.

“I’m sorry I made you feel so nervous,” I told her.

After continuing for a while in that sympathetic vein, answering her questions, I said, “I assume it was fear that made you lie to me about where you live.”

“How did you know that? That I lied, I mean.”

“It was a point in your favor, actually,” I said. “You’re a lousy actress.”

“Okay,” she admitted. “Maybe I
was
a little bit afraid.”

“Well, let’s have no more of that. I would like to take you out to see Wallingford Manor. We can have dinner, then I’ll bring you back to the city to any address you wish.”

Sarah laughed. Then she told me her address, and we agreed that I would pick her up at 7:00 on Sunday.

When we reached her car she turned and lingered, as if she expected me to kiss her or hold her. A wave of revulsion surged through me.

“Sunday then,” I said.

W
hen I arrived home, I noticed Robert’s car parked down the street. He must have been waiting for me because he pulled into the drive behind me.

“What’s up?” I asked when he followed me up onto the front porch.

“What do you mean?”

“Why were you parked over there?” I asked, pointing down the block.

He looked away. “I don’t know. Just a hunch.”

“What?”

“Why don’t we go inside? I could use some coffee.”

I unlocked the front door, then stepped aside to let him enter. He headed straight for the kitchen, trailing fumes of beer. He immediately went about the business of preparing two mugs of instant coffee.

Handing one of the mugs to me, he said, “The mayor’s assistant is an old friend of mine. I talked her into faxing me the guest list from a party he had the night of the shootings.”

I sat down at the kitchen table.

“I suppose you have a reason for telling me that,” I said.

“Something just didn’t ring true about your Mr. Wolf. I had a gut feeling that something was wrong.”

“You
always
think something’s wrong.”

“Listen, Sarah, your undersecretary or ambassador or whatever the hell he says he is, is a fake.”

“Robert, please start at the beginning.”

“John Wolf. The guy who pulled the gun on those goons in the shop that day. He’s not who he says he is. And he wasn’t where he said he was when they got shot.”

I laughed. “I already know that John Wolf isn’t John Wolf. He’s John Wallingford. Rich. Divorced. An antiques dealer.”

“Jesus. What the hell’s going on here?”

“He
said
his name was John Wolf, then he said it wasn’t. It’s Wallingford.”

“Shit.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I didn’t even run this guy’s gun registration to make sure it was legitimate. I’m losing it.”

“What’s the big deal? He used a fake name. So what?”

“So
what?”
Robert hadn’t raised his voice like that with me for a long time. “A guy tells you one thing one minute, then another the next, and you keep on seeing him? The guy’s a psycho. Wake up and smell the Maxwell House.”

“I’m sick of your drunken tirades,” I said. “I divorced them, remember? Why don’t you get the hell out of here?”

He reached out, as if to touch me, but I pulled away.

“I mean it,” I said. “I’m tired of going to war with you every time we talk. John Wallingford is the best thing that has happened to me in years, and I don’t want you spoiling it.”

“I’m warning you, Sarah. There’s something really wrong here.”

“You’re jealous.”

Robert hit the table with his fist, causing the coffee mugs to jump. “I’m a cop. He’s a liar. There was a double homicide.
I think I’ve got a right to be concerned. This guy is bad news. I don’t want him hanging around here.”

“He’s not exactly hanging around, Robert. I’ve seen him only a couple of times.”

“I need to talk to him.”

“You already did that.”

“No. He sent some gofer over to the office with a bullshit story about the mayor’s party. That, and a copy of
The Swiss Family Robinson
.”

The Swiss Family Robinson?
I didn’t know what Robert was talking about, but his reference to a book made me think of Rimbaud.

“I suppose you want that book I bought from Maxine Harris,” I said.

Robert seemed to shift from drunk to sober. “Right,” he agreed. “I’d like to take a look at that.”

“You can even take it with you—if you promise to return it when the investigation is over.”

With Robert following, I went into the living room to get the Rimbaud paperback off the coffee table.

“Gee, that’s funny,” I said, staring at the empty spot where the book had been just a few hours earlier. “It’s not here.”

Robert gave me a sideways glance.

“No, really,” I said. “It was here when I left this morning.”

He didn’t say anything.

“This is weird.”

“If you want company, Sarah, just come out and say it. You don’t have to play games to get me to come over.”

He was edging closer to me with a teasing look in his eyes.

I put out my hand, keeping him at arm’s length. “Listen, Mr. Ego, I didn’t invite you here. You were sitting out front when I drove up, remember?”

He backed off.

“Besides,” I said, “I really
do
have a book that belonged to
Maxine Harris. It was here, on this very table, ten hours ago. Now it’s gone.”

“Maybe Maxine wanted it back.”

“You really piss me off.”

He left—but not without snickering so loudly, he had to know I’d hear it.

I had some amends to make with Dr. Street. I stopped by his office after work on Friday with a peace offering, hoping to repair some of the damage I had done with that Dr. Street/Dr. Streeter mix up. It was a copy of
Violent Attachments
by J. Reid Meloy. Dr. Street had mentioned it to me once, asking me to watch for a used copy to turn up at the shop. I’d had it for several weeks and was saving it for a special occasion like his birthday or Christmas.

Dr. Street was clearly pleased. “This is an excellent reference,” he said. “Thank you very much.”

“I read it, though not with the same understanding that you would,” I told him.

He looked surprised. “You read it? It’s a bit too graphic for most readers.”

“But that’s what I loved about it.”

I took the book back from him and leafed through it until I found what I was looking for.

“Look at this,” I said, pointing to a few words on page 108—in the chapter titled “The Psychopath as Love Object.” It was a description of a psychopath’s romantic partner: “One woman responded to Card I of the Rorschach with the response, ‘It’s two carnivorous wolves … I wish I could see doves mating.’”

After he finished reading, Dr. Street asked me what I had found so appealing about that section.

“It’s that woman. I feel like we have a lot in common. I keep wanting to see birds, but instead I see wolves. And even though they frighten me, I’m drawn to them.”

Dr. Street looked as if he expected me to say more.

I shrugged. “I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like there are two forces pulling me in opposite directions at the same time.”

“I remember the first day you came to see me. You compared yourself to a bird.”

“Yes. The swift. It flaps first one wing, then the other, but never the two at once. It’s a being, divided—like the woman in the book,” I said, nodding toward the volume I had just given him.

I told him about the birthday visit with Liza, but I had trouble concentrating. I kept thinking about John, about the swallows—how they swooped in low arcs across the hill. And I kept remembering two things about that moment: how I wished that I could fly, and how my feet were sinking more deeply into the grass that covered my daughter’s grave.

T
he plan has been in place for years, of course, but tonight I am closer to setting it in motion than I have ever been. It is the method by which I will guarantee my freedom and ensure that I will be able to continue living my life in whatever way I choose. But
I’ll
have to surrender the comfort afforded by these surroundings. I must relocate, and become one of the dozen different identities at my disposal. In some respects the prospect is exciting, but, on the downside, I’ve grown attached to my space in the country, and am loath to leave it.

It is some comfort to know that I can watch from a distance as the police and the media unearth the story of the psycho medical examiner who kept himself in business. It will be a national story, especially when they discover my land to the north, and begin their excavation—and exhumation. But, alas, I won’t be able to join Geraldo on location in Hasty Hills. I will be well on my way to my next challenge, my next adventure.