What Strange Creatures (26 page)

“Do you think he was after Kim?”

“‘After’ her? What does that mean?”

“Well, he was aware that she was trying to get him some bad press, right?”

Kyle studied me for a moment, then harrumphed. “Yeah. Typical Kim. She goes up to him on the street and gets right in his face.”

“Now, when was that?”

“Just a few weeks ago.”

“Did she mention the tapes to him?” I asked. This was why I had come here—to bring up the tapes and watch Kyle’s reaction. But I hadn’t planned for it to come out at exactly this moment.

He paused to breathe out a bit of smoke. “What tapes?”

“The tapes she got from Colleen Shipley. She didn’t tell you about those?”

Another draw on the cigarette. Kyle kept his gaze focused on Wayne and then, when he’d breathed out again, returned it to me. “I don’t know a Colleen Shipley. Should I?”

“Oh. Well, no. Um . . . what was Donald Wallace’s reaction when Kim confronted him? Do you know?”

“I wasn’t there. But she bragged about it later. She said he looked like a deer in headlights when she even brought up Andrew Abbott. You know who that is, I take it?”

“Of course.”

Kyle smoked silently for a moment. “I think what really surprised Wallace was to know he was talking to one of the kids involved in that old case—his most badly fucked-up case—all grown up. To be faced with such a person on the street, without any talking points. I don’t think there was anything in particular she said or did that really scared him. It was just a hell of an unexpected surprise.”

“But then what gave you the idea, later, that one of Wallace’s people had approached her?”

“Because one of his campaign people
did
approach her at her apartment. She called me up to brag about it.”

“Brag about it, really? Or did she seem threatened by it?”

“It seemed more like bragging to me. If she was scared, she didn’t tell me.”

“What did they say to her, exactly?”

“She said they acted like they wanted to negotiate with her.”

I thought of Kim’s question to Jeff right before she left—the “hypothetical question” she posed about being paid for silence. “Did they offer her money?”

“I don’t think so. She would’ve told me. She would’ve been
real
proud of that. No, they said they wanted to ‘understand where she was coming from.’ She probably was planning on jerking them around a little, enjoying getting to control the situation. Controlling powerful people. She kinda loved the idea of that, I think. Do you know what she was doing in Rowington before she died?”

“No.” I was startled by the question. “Do you?”

“I think so. There was supposed to be this town-meeting kind of thing, with Donald Wallace, in Fisherton, which is only about ten miles from Rowington. It was early that Saturday morning. She intended to go to that event and waylay him again. She told me.”

“Have you told the police this?”

“Yeah. Of course.”

Kyle was holding his cigarette so lightly, so casually, that I was afraid it would slip and drop onto Wayne’s fur.

“What do you think she wanted to get out of all this?” I asked, pulling Wayne to my side and wrapping part of his leash around my wrist.

“That’s a good question. I really don’t have an answer. You know, that’s a big part of the reason we had to break up. I got tired of trying to figure her out.”

Kyle sucked on his cigarette again and, when he released the smoke, added, “I do miss her, though.”

“You were together a long time. She told me that you were really young when you got together.”

“Yeah. We were.”

“All this must be hard for you.”

Kyle dropped his cigarette on the ground and smushed it with his shiny black shoe. To me, patent leather ought to be off-limits to any grown man who’s not either getting married or doing magic tricks.

“Is that what you came here to ask, Margie?”

“No. I just wanted to ask you about this Donald Wallace stuff. It’s starting to concern me, what I’m hearing about Kim’s interest in him recently.”

“Did you know her boyfriend?” Kyle asked.

I watched Wayne sniff at the cigarette butt. “Only a little.”

“Whatever she was up to . . . what they’ve got on him seems more significant to me.”

“Yeah. Well, in any case, I’d still like to get to the bottom of it. This Wallace thing.”

“Get to the bottom of it?” Kyle stared at me. Though his eyes had looked tired for most of our conversation, they now seemed to be brightening some and sharpening their focus. “What do you think you’re going to find at the bottom?”

The question was meant to make me appear foolish. I gripped Wayne’s leash hard and took a breath. “I feel like there was, in all the flailing she was doing, something she legitimately wanted to say about Donald Wallace, or at least about what happened in 1992. I’d like to help clarify that for her.”

“That’s kind of you.” Kyle gave me a sardonic little smile. “But if
she
couldn’t figure out what she wanted to say, how can
you
?”

I shrugged and avoided his gaze. “Maybe not clarify, then. Maybe see that she’s heard. However garbled the message is.”

Kyle extended his palm out to me. It took me a moment to realize he was beckoning back his coffee. His cold fingers brushed mine as I handed it to him.

“You know,” he said quietly, “she never mentioned you to me.”

“We’d only just become friends,” I said. “When she died.”

“And now you want to get to the bottom of things,” Kyle said, his voice lowering still.

He opened the door to the store.

“I’m freezing,” he said. “You want to come in here and warm up for a minute? Before you go?”

“No thanks,” I answered. “I have somewhere I have to be.”

“Okay. Then see ya, Margie. See ya, Wayne.”

Wayne stared after Kyle, as if trying to remember where he’d seen him before. I nudged him out of his sitting position and hustled him to the car.

“I have a feeling I’ll have more to say to Kyle,” I said to Wayne as I handed him a Burger King patty. I couldn’t find a Wendy’s in Ricksville. “A lot more.”

Wayne sucked the meat down in about thirty seconds.

“First, though, I have to get my hands on those tapes—or copies of their contents. My best bet for that is still Nathan. Right? And I need to look at whatever other footage Kim had saved. Plus see if there are any VHS tapes lying around. Probably she wouldn’t have left anything that important at his house, but if she hadn’t digitized it yet, you never know. . . .”

Wayne was too busy eating my cheeseburger wrapper to answer. I yanked it away from him and tossed him a couple of conciliatory french fries. While he gobbled them, I called Nathan to ask if he wanted to get together after his shift.

“Has Peaches ever gotten out of her cage?” I asked Nathan, playing with the pewter pendant hanging from his neck. It was a knotted Celtic symbol of some sort. Between his jewelry, his Asian tattoos, his Hare Krishna upbringing, and whatever else I had yet to learn about him, Nathan was like a dozen of Jeff and my I’m-thinking-of’s sewn together Frankenfashion.

“Not while I’ve had her,” Nathan said, pulling a blanket over us both. “But I know she did with her previous owner once. When she was younger and smaller.”

“So you know she has those skills.”

Nathan shrugged and put his hand on his upper chest. I tried to ignore the scratchy sound of his fingernails against his abundant chest hair.

“She didn’t have as good a cage then,” he explained.

Our “date” had started at The Lab, the insufferably hipster bar downtown. They were serving bacon and strawberries with dipping sauces—chocolate, maple, and caramel. I’d had three pieces of bacon. Nathan had stuck with the strawberries, since he was a vegetarian. When I’d kissed him, I wondered if I had hickory-smoked breath.

I’d like to see your place,
he’d whispered between kisses.

It’s a mess,
I’d whispered back. We’d come in separate cars.
Next time. Meet you at your house?

“Is this kind of fast for you?” Nathan asked now, changing the subject from Peaches.

“What?”

“What’s going on here with us.”

“Why, is it too fast for you?” I tried to sound casual and wondered if I sounded slutty instead. “Does it bother you?”

“No. It doesn’t. I just wonder what this is. Are you ever going to want to hang out during daylight hours?”

“Have we not?”

“No.”

Nathan fell back into his pillow. Crooking his elbow and resting his hand behind his head, he displayed his super-long, glistening underarm hair.

“You promised me you’d tell me more about where you grew up,” I said, snuggling closer to him and averting my eyes from his armpit.

I needed for Nathan to fall asleep at some point. And in my experience men fall asleep pretty fast after you request intimate conversation of this particular kind.

“We’ve already talked about me too much.” Nathan stroked down the flyaway hairs around my forehead. “I want to ask something about you.”

“Okay.”

“Why aren’t you finished with your dissertation yet?”

“How long have you lived in Thompsonville, Nathan?”

“Three years.”

“I see. Well, you should know by now—living that long in a university town—that unfinished dissertations are a dime a dozen. It’s nothing unusual.”

Jasper—the old greyhound I’d met briefly as I’d rushed out of Nathan’s house earlier in the week—crept into the room and made eyes at Nathan. Nathan patted the mattress and Jasper climbed onto the bed, settling on the other side of Nathan with a contented sigh.

“Sure, it’s nothing unusual. But there’s a story behind each one, right? Maybe a more interesting story than for the finished ones.”

“No. The story is almost always motivational deficiency.”

Nathan rubbed Jasper’s brown-spotted back. “There must be more to it than that.”

“Yes, well. I wrote about two-thirds of it. It was called ‘Margery Kempe and the Carnality of Piety.’ I took a really long break from writing when I got a divorce—like six months or something—and when I came back to it, it felt like I needed to start over. I’m about halfway through writing the new version. Sometimes I think maybe I just don’t want it to end. I was inexplicably sad the first time I finished Marge’s book cover to cover. It ends rather abruptly. You don’t get to know how she died, because of course she can’t narrate her own death. I didn’t want it to end, so I turned back to the beginning and started it again. As repetitive as some parts are, she’s so real and flawed that I found her book comforting. I think part of me expected her to go on and on, weeping and exasperating people into eternity.”

“Maybe she did,” Nathan said. “Maybe she doesn’t need you.”

“Of course not,” I sniffed, unsure whether to consider this reply dismissive or endearing. “But maybe
I
need her. You know, this is a depressing topic. I’m happy to talk to you about Marge’s life, but I don’t really want to talk about the thesis itself.”

“Okay. Then tell me another story about Marge’s life.”

I considered my catalog of Marge stories. “I think I’ve told you all my favorites. Or—Well, have I told you about the time she was interrogated by the archbishop of York?”

“No.”

“Oh. Great.” I could stretch that one out pretty well. “So it wasn’t unusual for Marge to raise suspicion in her travels. She didn’t ever curb her wailing and her lecturing for the sake of being a gracious visitor. Wherever she went, she raised the eyebrows and the ire of the locals, and she was arrested more than once for possible heresy. Probably the most dramatic of these incidents was the one in York.”

“Uh-huh.” Nathan’s eyelids were already drooping.

“She was dragged into the archbishop’s chapel on suspicion of heresy—but more generally for her usual perplexingly assertive and unconventional behaviors and simply overstaying her welcome. She’d promised a priest she’d stay two weeks but stayed on beyond that.”

Nathan’s eyes were closed now.

“On the day of her hearing, a crowd of locals screamed and swore at her and wished her a prompt burning at the stake. She turned to them and told them they’d go to hell if they kept up their swearing. Then, as she waited for the archbishop to appear at the chapel, she said a silent prayer to God, who assured her that all would be well. When the archbishop arrived, he asked her why she wore white, called her a ‘false heretic,’ and had her handcuffed. While she waited for him to return with his clerics, she shook with unaccustomed terror. Things had rarely gotten this serious. After their arrival, as they were arranging themselves in their seats, Marge gave one of her great and startling cries, astounding everyone in the chapel, by her account. When her fit was over, the archbishop demanded an explanation. And guess what Marge’s response was?”

Nathan murmured, “Hmmm?”

“She said, ‘Sir, you shall wish someday that you had wept as sorely as I.’”

Nathan’s eyes opened. “What does that mean? What did she mean?”

“Well, aside from being a very sassy answer from someone who was practically peeing her pants a few minutes before, she was kind of saying she was more righteous than he was. And she continued to imply that throughout the interrogation. Anyway, the archbishop and his clerics examined her on the Articles of Faith, and she answered everything right. That’s the thing about Marge—her
behavior
was weird, but whenever people asked her doctrinal beliefs, she was always by the book.”

Nathan closed his eyes again.

“One cleric came forward and said he’d heard Marge preaching, which was of course not permitted, since she was a woman. And Marge defended herself, saying, ‘I do not preach, sir. I do not go into any pulpit. I use only conversation and good words, and that I will do while I live.’”

“Mm-hm,” Nathan said, clearly struggling to sound more awake than he was.

“And the cleric added that he’d heard Margery telling a terrible tale about priests. So the archbishop demanded that Marge repeat it.”

Nathan was nestling his head deeper into his pillow, so I launched into the tale. It was about a priest who went for a walk and then spent the night sleeping beneath a pear tree full of beautiful blossoms. In the morning a bear came along, ate all the blossoms, turned his butt to the priest, and shat them all out. Then a pilgrim came along and explained to the priest the meaning of what he’d seen: that the priest was like the pear tree. He gave beautiful sermons, but he lived sinfully. So his “beautiful blossoms” came to nothing.