A Murder of Crows (14 page)

“Is now the time for—”

“Tell me the damned riddle.”

“Okay. So there are identical twin sisters who live at the fork in the road to London. One sister always tells the truth. The other sister always lies, and between them they will only answer
one
question. One and only one. Because they are twins, you don't know which sister answered your knock at their door—so what's the one question you ask to be sure to know which is the proper road to take to London?”

Yslan thought, then smiled. She never used to be able to figure out silliness like this, but since she'd spent time with Decker Roberts her way of thinking, her perception of the world had changed.

“So?” Decker demanded.

Yslan spoke slowly, completing the idea even as the words came to her lips. “If I was to ask your sister which is the correct road to take to London, what would she say?”

Decker nodded then said, “And?”

“And whichever road the sister said, take the other road. The honest sister will honestly repeat the lying sister's lie and the lying sister will lie about the truth that the truthful sister would say—so both sisters would point you to the wrong road.”

“Very good,” Decker said, but it troubled him that she could figure it out.

“What?” she demanded.

“Nothing,” he lied, then he turned to her. “I thought deathbed confessions were accepted in most courts. So why do you need me at all?”

“These folks didn't know they were going to die—that's an important element in a deathbed confession. They thought they were going to see another sunrise. They had no idea the end was around the corner.”

“I assume under their feet.”

“Yeah—that.”

“Okay, but Viola repeats people's final thoughts—their thoughts. People don't lie to themselves.”

Yslan's stare brought her brilliant translucent blue eyes into clear focus. And, as at the first time he met her, Decker was not able to hold her gaze.

“You think people lie in their thoughts?” he asked.

“Don't you?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“No.”

“Come on, people prepare lies in their thoughts. In their hearts sometimes. Speaking a lie is the end product, that's all.”

Decker heard far more than the words. A profound Z behind the Y that led to her statement. A rich subtext of pain was bolstering Special Agent Yslan Hicks' statement. He changed tack. “How many of us are you tracking?”

“You're not that special, Mr. Roberts.”

“How many?”

“More than thirty.”

Swirling lines—a lie. “That's not true!” He turned to leave. Immediately guards stepped forward to block his way. These were the marines he'd seen at the front of the building. When had they come in?

Decker turned back to her. “Where are Ted Knight and Mr. T?”

“Around,” she said.

“At least that's the truth. So spit it out, Special Agent Yslan Hicks; what do you want from me here?”

“Start by telling us which, if any, of Viola Tripping's recitations are true.”

“If I can.”

“You'd better.”

“Or what?”

She hesitated, then said simply, “Or I won't tell you where your son, Seth, is.”

Decker couldn't find words to reply.

Yslan said nothing. She just pointed toward the heavy metal door that led to Viola Tripping's windowless room.

“And after I finish will you—”

She took a key from her pocket and reached for the door.

Decker stared at her. “You locked her—”

“She wants it that way.”

VIOLA

The light from the open door is behind him, and—his silhouette—his death shroud—surprises me. It has such depth and pulses in the light. Never seen a death shroud like that. The door shuts behind him and someone turns the key. He lurches at the handle and tries to pull the door open. It won't open—it's locked. Good.

Then he doubles over and almost falls.

DECKER

The door's locked. The room has no windows! No fucking windows! The small figure across the way takes a step toward me. I'm falling—down a well, backward, at night—fuck, I'm going to vomit, but I don't. I look up at her. So small—so very small and fragile. And I stand. I don't feel any nausea at all.

“Why don't I feel—”

“Sick?” the small creature asked.

“Yeah.”

“Cause I'm not a pukerator to you or you to me. We're through the great woods. We're in the clearing—the others are lost in the woods unable to find the path to the clearing. But we are together in the clearing. Don't you know that? We're not at the glass house yet, but we're looking for it.”

Decker shook his head, trying to rid it of random thoughts that were whizzing back and forth—clearing? great woods? glass house?—but he asked, “Pukerator?”

“Pukerators make people like you and me puke—pukerators. But you and I are in the clearing in the middle of the great woods so we don't make each other sick.”

DECKER

In the clearing? I remember the profound nausea I felt when I was near Mike Shedloski and that guy Emerson Remi—and the admonition years ago from the pianist, Paul Scheel: “Your forest will infect mine.”

“Those lost deep in the forest who can sense the clearing but can't find the path to it—”

“Make those of us in the clearing sick?”

“Right.”

DECKER

Two worlds out of alignment.

He closed his eyes—cold surrounded him—two perfect cubes.

VIOLA

How funny he doesn't know that—I
thought all of us in the clearing knew that. He's holding up a hand.

DECKER

Don't come closer, I tell her.

VIOLA

Why? I ask him.

DECKER

I shriek, Don't!

VIOLA

I retreat to a far corner of the room and make myself even smaller than I usually am. He draws his sleeve across his mouth.

“Why have they locked you—”

“They haven't locked me anywhere. I need to be in enclosed spaces.”

“You're an agoraphobic?”

“Big word.”

“Frightened of open spaces?” She didn't answer, so Decker asked again. “Are you frightened of open spaces?”

VIOLA

I shake my head. My hair falls across my face. I like my hair across my face.

“Then what?” Decker demanded.

“I like the dark. I like closed spaces.”

“Like Tourette's?”

“No, I'm not sick and neither are you.”

VIOLA

Then I stop speaking.

DECKER

She's holding back.

She turned her face to the wall. “And?” Decker demanded.

“And?”

“Come on, and what?”

“And . . .”

VIOLA

I hesitate. I've never told anyone before, but his death shroud is so unique, so deep, so pulsing . . .

“And . . . in a closed room I know there's no portal.”

DECKER

It stuns me. I never thought of it that way before. Portals—I know of the one in Houston at the Rothko Chapel and I sensed I was near one in Namibia.

“How many portals have you seen?”

“None.”

“What? None? You've never seen a portal?”

“Once I see the hanging boy, I run.”

“What?”

“The hanging boys. They mark the portals. Haven't you seen them?”

“No. But I've sensed the portals.”

DECKER

Why can this creature see the hanging
boys but not the portals? And where was the hanging boy in Houston? But before I can think about my own question I know the answer. Mark Rothko was the hanging boy—his suicide was his hanging boy.

VIOLA

Then I'm screaming, “No more, no more, no more.”

DECKER

I put up my hand. I understand, even talking about the portals is panicking this strange creature. Then Special Agent Hicks' words, “one of your kind,” slide through my consciousness and other words float up in my head. My daughter—this girl is my daughter.

“Have you worked for the NSA before?”

“Who?”

“For Special Agent Yslan Hicks?”

“Funny name. Pretty lady.”

“Have you worked for her before?”

“Worked?”

“Been with. Helped?”

“No. Pretty lady.”

VIOLA

Then I stand and turn slowly with my arms out like when I speak for the dead—when I am awake and dreaming at the same time. When I do I always float in my dreams—arms wide,
upside down and spinning, the tips of my long hair just brushing the ground while my waking self has arms wide and spinning but my feet are on the ground—like I'm spinning now.

DECKER

She is turning slowly, almost elegantly, and somehow she's older and taller and incredibly beautiful, her hair now long to her waist, her smile so intense it seems to light the room and draw me to her. And then I am spinning, with her, and old—we are both so old, like ancient trees on Vancouver Island, then he is there, Seth getting into his wet suit—and crying, oh, Jesus he's crying—his hands to his face, tears squeezing through his fingers. Then her hands are on my face.

“Don't cry. He's just on another path. Just another path.”

DECKER

The same words Crazy Eddie had used to describe his wife's ALS all those years ago.

DECKER DIDN'T EXACTLY REMEMBER LEAVING VIOLA TRIPPING.
Somehow the door opened and a marine or two were there—he was confused—and he found himself, before he knew it, in Yslan's small makeshift office.

Yslan looked up as he entered. “Are you okay? You look terrible.”

“Thanks.”

“Want to tell me how it went with Viola Tripping?”

“No. Want to tell me where my son is?”

“When this is done. Okay?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“No.”

“Yeah, I get that.”

“Good.”

“Why bother asking me how it went with Viola Tripping; you had the place wired, surely.”

“Naturally.” Yslan stepped to one side and pointed at the photographs on the table. “I need you to see this.”

“This is the best—”

“Yes.” She didn't bother mentioning the work Homeland Security was doing on the photographs. “Some parent at the very back of the graduation tent took this shot two and a half minutes before the first blast.”

“Surely every parent had—”

“No. The college forbids photographs during the graduation.”

“So the parents have to buy the video the school shot?”

“Yeah.”

“So where's the video?”

“It was destroyed in the blasts.”

“Completely?”

“Yeah.”

“Wasn't there a wireless feed to a hard drive?”

“You'd think, but they were economizing.”

“This country's excuse for everything.”

“Be that as it may.”

“So, all you have is this photograph of the faculty members on the stage waiting for the ceremony to start? How could you ID them from that?”

“We have our ways.”

Decker didn't like the smile on Yslan's face.

Yslan handed him a large folder containing an outline of the achievements of each of the dead faculty members. Each had his or her own file within the folder. Several had red dots in the right-hand corner of the folder. Two had blue dots.

“What's with the dots?”

“Red means they had highest security clearance.”

“And the blue?”

“Those considered potential security risks.”

Decker looked at her. “You mean they were commies or something?”

“Let's leave it at ‘or something.' ”

“I thought the McCarthy trials ended long ago.”

“You have a problem with the McCarthy trials, Mr. Roberts?”

“Every thinking person has a problem with that little part of American history.”

“Why's that?”

“A lot of innocent people got hurt for no goddamned good reason.”

“Really? You don't think that Stalin, a man who was willing to kill thirty million of his own people, was a potential threat? And he had the bomb, at least in part thanks to the work of the Rosenbergs,
which is a fact that the released KGB files confirm. Those same files, by the by, also confirm that Alger Hiss was, as Senator McCarthy claimed, a Russian spy.”

“Paranoia,” Decker snapped back.

Yslan threw a wide-angle shot of the carnage at the graduation on the table. “Is that paranoia too?”

It was the first time Decker had seen the devastation caused by the bombs. It took his breath from him. He pushed the photo aside, picked up the files with the précis of the professors, and said, “Mark the professors' names beside the chairs they were sitting on and Viola and I can—”

“Yeah, when we have that information each chair will be numbered. The number will correspond to those on the top of each of the files.”

“Is the site secured?” Decker asked.

“Not yet. It'll take some time. In the meanwhile”—she pointed toward a laptop—“start with these.” She pressed two keys and the paused image of a very frightened swarthy-skinned man came up. She tossed Decker a thick yellow pad and a pen, turned, and left.

TWO HOURS LATER DECKER TOOK THE HANDKERCHIEF FROM HIS
pocket and dabbed at his eyes. As he did he noticed that his hand was shaking. It was doing that more and more since he'd returned from Namibia.