Frame 232 (3 page)

She took the steps cautiously. There was a faintly electric uncertainty to all her movements these days, resulting in a clumsiness previously unknown to her. She had already slipped and gone down this staircase three times, once resulting in a badly sprained ankle and a chipped bone in her right elbow.

When she reached the bottom, she crossed through the laundry area and went into the pantry. She did not turn on the bulb in here; there was enough light slanting through the ground-level window set high in the corner. Summoning all her willpower, she took the stepladder from its hooks and unfolded it, setting it beneath the ceiling tile in question.

She sat down on the ladder and took a pack of Parliaments from the breast pocket of her blouse, which was fashionable for the times but fairly wrinkled. Ron didn’t care much for the smoking habit she’d acquired a few years back. She told him she had smoked in college
 
—therefore it wasn’t really a
new
habit
 
—and that she only indulged occasionally. She was pretty sure he knew she was lying on all counts, even if he didn’t say as much.

She fumbled with the lighter, eventually got the cigarette going, and reveled in the curling threads of bluish gray. Her thoughts inevitably followed those threads upward, settling
on that accursed tile and the even more accursed package that waited behind it.

She was struck again by the fact that there was actually a point along the timeline when she could go days without the film even entering her mind, when it had become all but forgotten. She had even determined an exact date when this “era” began
 
—September 27, 1964. That was when the Warren Commission released their report to the public stating that Lee Harvey Oswald had been the president’s sole assassin and had not been part of a broader conspiracy. Those who believed otherwise scrutinized the evidence to the subatomic level and volubly protested the commission’s findings. But the eight-man team that produced it
 
—which included future president Gerald Ford
 
—stood their ground, and the lone-gunman theory became a matter of official record.

Margaret had been so overwhelmed with relief that she broke down in tears and thanked God for his infinite mercy.
It’s over
 
—at last. The verdict has been handed down and written into the ledger of history. That’s that.
And thus, there was no longer any need to worry about the accursed film. It would never be needed as evidence and could be recategorized as nothing more than a personal curio. A remarkable record of a remarkable moment in history, but nothing that would send shock waves through humanity.

She had thought again about simply throwing it away but decided instead to keep it as a family heirloom. At some point she’d tell Ron about it
 
—she didn’t know when because it just wasn’t that important
 
—then label the box and put it with all the other reels: the road trip to New Mexico, camping in Arizona, and that wild weekend in New Orleans, where they recaptured the spirited times of their premarital courtship. It was no longer radioactive, and that’s what mattered most.

Drawing in another lungful of smoke, she moved to the next significant point on that timeline
 
—1969. It was a turnabout year in so many ways, with the needle swinging in a wide arc across the emotional spectrum. On the joyful side, there was Sheila Marie, born on January 15, shortly after midnight. She was pink and plump and perfect in every way, and Margaret could not have been more delighted. Thoughts of the assassination were so distant on that day that it seemed amazing to her, even a little ridiculous, that she had been worried in the first place. The conspiracy crazies still stuck their heads up from time to time, and Margaret would occasionally invest a moment or two to listen. But they never came up with anything convincing, so she dismissed them and went on with her happy life.

Her blissful contentment was shattered just two weeks after Sheila’s birth when New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison hauled local businessman Clay Shaw into court in what would prove to be the only prosecution relating to the president’s murder. Garrison accused Shaw of working with both right-wing activists and the CIA to facilitate the killing, but he could not prove his case, and Shaw walked. While conspiracy theorists were disappointed, one aspect of the trial had such a powerful impact that it went all the way to Addison, Texas, and landed in the center of Margaret’s life
 
—for the first time in any public forum, the Zapruder film was shown in its entirety. This “new” evidence reignited the conspiracy frenzy, and Margaret found herself powerless to do anything except tend to the benign hope that the furor would once again die down.

Instead, Americans began to reconsider their stance on the assassination. To Margaret’s astonishment, the people who had railed for years about the Warren Report being
the product of a crooked government trying to cover up a brutally implemented coup now found an eager audience in the general public. New theories were being explored and new technologies utilized in private but well-funded investigations. Reenactments of the shooting were carried out, documentaries produced, and dozens of books and articles published. Some ideas were downright idiotic, but a few others seemed entirely plausible
 
—and from there public interest grew even further.

It was around this time that Margaret began to think of the assassination not as a historical event but a cancer that had awoken in her life on November 22, 1963. It had gone into remission for a while but was now active again. She also began to realize it had been one of the central governing factors in almost every major decision she had made since that sun-soaked Friday.

With the cigarette now half-gone, she glanced up briefly at the ceiling and shook her head. In her memory, she reached the most recent segment of this interminable nightmare. It also had a specific launch date
 
—March 6, 1975, just over a year ago
 
—and coincided seamlessly with the decline of her health. That evening, millions watched as two conspiracy theorists, along with host Geraldo Rivera, played the Zapruder film on ABC’s
Good Night America
. The public’s reaction was immediate and decisive, with renewed demands on the government to finally resolve the question of who really killed John Kennedy. This horrified outrage eventually led to the formation of the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations as well as a small army of neo-conspiratorialists, all of whom dedicated an abundance of time, energy, and money to the examination of virtually every piece of evidence that could be found. No
stone went unturned, no theory unstudied, and no witness unquestioned.

This was also when a small group of curious persons began to ponder the identity of the woman, previously overlooked, whom they provisionally named “the Babushka Lady.”

She was there in a few photographs, grainy and unfocused. One was taken a good distance behind her but clearly established her proximity to the president’s limousine. Another had the woman in midstride across Elm along with several others exiting the scene. And she was there, albeit briefly, in Abraham Zapruder’s grisly record of the killing.

Most researchers believed the Babushka Lady
 
—so dubbed because of her distinctive headscarf
 
—was holding a motion camera of her own and had witnessed the assassination from a unique angle. If this was the case, then perhaps her film had caught something equally unique. In particular, they wondered if there was clear evidence to support the growing theory that a second shooter was positioned behind the stockade fence that stood atop a tiny hill just a few yards away from the Bryan pergola, a region of Dealey Plaza that would eventually become known as the “grassy knoll.” If so
 
—if the Babushka Lady did, in fact, have such evidence
 
—why hadn’t she come forward with it? Had she been tracked down by the conspirators and killed, as many believed others had been? Or was she still out there now, waiting for just the right time to come forward? Perhaps she had already sold the film to some powerful media presence, like
Time
or
Life
, for an astronomical sum, and they were the ones sitting on it. There was also the suggestion that the woman in question wasn’t even aware of what she had and that the film had been innocently relegated to a forgotten box in her home somewhere.

Whatever the case, two points were now very clear to
Margaret Baker. One was that
she
was the person known as the Babushka Lady. The other was that many people associated with the assassination wanted to find her.

She took a final puff and dropped the cigarette onto the cement floor, crushing it out with her shoe. A part of her had always suspected this day would come. In the end, it wasn’t the film’s potential implications or the quest for justice or even the thought of shadowy figures searching for her that brought about this moment
 
—it was the blood she saw in the toilet three days ago following her morning routine. The hypertension that was gradually obliterating her strength had begun with the usual symptoms
 
—fatigue, occasional dizziness
 
—then moved to the more severe
 
—blinding headaches, irregular heartbeat, labored breathing. They made life difficult, no doubt, but she had tolerated them. There was something about the sight of that blood, however
 
—something about the thought of her insides
coming apart
 
—that pushed her past her limits. The time had come, she decided, to rid herself of this burden, to take the steps necessary to put the matter to rest once and for all. And the first step, she knew
 
—against every instinct and desire
 
—was to watch that film.

She let out a final, defeated sigh and placed her foot onto the ladder. With each step she felt increasingly sensitive to the sickness that was consuming her. It was as if the film still possessed a kind of emotional radioactivity after all and moving closer to it magnified the symptoms. Sliding the tile aside had a ghastly familiarity to it, like she’d stored the package up there only a day or so before. The actual interval between then and now shrank to zero, and she was reminded of the dim awareness she’d felt on that day
 
—and which had never
fully left her waking thoughts since
 
—that she would one day have to do this.

She felt around on the gritty surface, and at first there was nothing. What followed was an almost-relieved kind of confusion.
Is this the right tile? Did I forget where it was?
Then, slightly more alarming
 
—
Did Ronnie find it and do something with it?
And finally, almost inevitably, the paranoia
 
—
The men in the shadows . . . They found me and searched the house one day. . . . They know everything, and they know that I know.
This got her heart pounding like a parade drum.

It was only after she moved to the stepladder’s top rung that her fingers found the wrinkled paper bag. It had been there all along, right where it was supposed to be. She supposed she had subconsciously lingered on the lower step as a kind of passive self-sabotage.

Like everything else up there, the bag had been dusted by time. She gave it a shake before bringing it down. She could feel the hardness of the box inside, and it filled her with revulsion.

Stepping to the floor, she unrolled the bag and took the box out. A part of her fantasized that it had been damaged somehow, perhaps from a pipe leak. The box would be corroded, the film warped and water-stained. . . .

No such luck. The box was firm and solid, its corners sharp. When she lifted the lid, the reel was so healthy it still bore malodorous traces of the chemical processing that had been performed twelve years earlier. The first few inches of dark celluloid hung out like the tail of some sleeping beast.
Waiting for me,
she realized angrily.
It has
always
been up there waiting for me.
Once again, she entertained thoughts of destroying it, more aggressively than ever before.
Douse it with gasoline and throw a match on it, then pour the ashes
down the drain. If anyone asks, deny it all. There won’t be any evidence, so what can they do?
But it was too late for that now, and she knew it.

In another eerie reenactment of 1963, she went upstairs to lock the front door and secure the sliding chain. Ron had moved into a management position in 1971 and was rarely home early . . . but still. Their daughter was down the street with a retired schoolteacher who supplemented her income as a neighborhood babysitter.

Margaret went back to the basement with the projector in hand and set it up on a folding snack tray, aiming it at one of the bare walls. Her shaking hands made it difficult to feed the film through the spools. When it was finally in place, she took a deep breath and summoned all the nerve she had left. Then she turned the switch.