Ghost Country (47 page)
Authors: Sara Paretsky
“Please,
Grand-père
—” Harriet held out her hands, beseeching.
Mrs. Ephers appeared in the doorway. “Didn’t either of you hear the phone? It rang almost twenty times. It’s your boss, Harriet, and he’s got something more important to discuss than Mara and her infantile behavior.”
Force of habit sent Harriet to the phone, although she was not interested in anything Leigh Wilton might have to say. Like Grandfather, his voice puffed outrage at her as he told her about the collapse of the Pleiades wall, and the injury to Gian Palmetto.
“The Olympus people are meeting here right now, Harriet, on Sunday. We need you, badly: no one else in the firm is up to speed on their problems. Things are very serious. The Ohana woman from First Freedoms is going to make things difficult for us: she’s apparently claiming that since we were the Pleiades legal counsel we were a party to the decision to use violence Friday night. The head of the Olympus group is implying that our advice caused their problems, from the suicide of that crackpot in July to Palmetto’s injury last night. We need to stroke him, big time, and fast. I gave up a sailing weekend with my family. You have to put your personal feelings aside and think of the good of the firm.”
“Does that mean you want me to display my cleavage for him? Anyway, I’m not interested in the good of the firm: I’m resigning. You’ll get a formal letter from me tomorrow.”
Mustn’t feel that way … Bright future … Partnership vote in three weeks; Harriet a shoo-in … not like her to be childish and petty over an imagined slight from an important client …
It was all gibberish. She hung up on Leigh Wilton, but she couldn’t hang up on Grandfather. He was pacing up and down in front of her, not shouting, but biting off words as if they were cigar ends to spit out.
“What,” he demanded. “You’re turning your back on a golden job because of your wretched sister and her miserable companions? Are you bearing a grudge for my not telling you the truth about your mother’s death? I can’t believe you can be so petty, Harriet.”
No. She wasn’t bearing a grudge. The news had seemed shattering when she heard it—was it only two days ago?—but not important now. It didn’t matter how Beatrix died. All that mattered was that she separate herself from this house of coldness and find a place to start living. Tomorrow she would find an apartment, with Mara if her sister wanted.
“This house of coldness?” Grandfather was outraged. “This house where I rescued you from filth and chaos and gave you every opportunity?”
“Yes, yes, every opportunity. You did much for me. You gave me a shell that can move me from one end of life to the other. Now I need to put some life into it.”
“No mother ever loved a child as much as Hilda loves you, or I for that matter. She’s been through a great deal this past month, thanks to Mara. I don’t want her to have to face the shock of your ungrateful—your really ugly—attitude.”
Harriet nodded. “You loved that child Harriet as much as you could. Both of you. But you only loved the facade, and the child Harriet polished and polished that exterior to make it shine for you. I’m truly sorry,
Grand-père
, but I can’t do that anymore.
Maybe after I’ve been away for a while, in my own home, you’ll see—we’ll see—”
“I’m ready to make allowances for the shock you sustained yesterday,” Grandfather interrupted. “I’m even ready to give Mara one more chance to behave like a civilized, sane person instead of the histrionic hyena she’s chosen to emulate. What you need is a vacation, a chance to recover. I’ll call Air France. You can go to Paris tomorrow—that always does you good.”
“You don’t understand,” she said sadly. “I have recovered. Or at least I’ve started on the road to getting well.”
When she left his study she found Mephers hovering in the hall, wearing a smile that was shocking for its gloating edge.
“So you’re turning on him, too?” the housekeeper said. “That makes four of you I’ve seen. Selena, a whore dressed up like a lady. Beatrix, at least she didn’t make any effort to dress herself up. Mara—too ugly to dress up. I thought with you he had someone he could count on, but you’re all alike, you Vatick women.”
“Mephers!” Harriet, trembling from her confrontation with Grandfather, felt herself dissolving into tears at the housekeeper’s venom. She put an arm around the old woman but Mephers slapped it away.
“I’ve been trying to protect him from Vatick women since old Mrs. Stonds brought me here in 1942. Oh, that Selena, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, you can be sure of that. She was like a cat, creeping around the apartment on her patty-paws, smiling, then slinking off into the night.
He
was away fighting for his country for two years, and what was she doing? Not volunteer work for the Red Cross, I can guarantee you that. And then she up and leaves us with a baby, while she gallivants off to the Middle East. The day I learned she’d died I was a happy woman. Until it turned out Beatrix was just a blowsy frowsy replica of her mother—only without the outer charm, if you think that counts for anything.
“When the doctor wanted to take you in I begged him to think hard about it, about how difficult Selena and Beatrix had made our
lives, but he always sacrificed himself. He never put himself first, it’s always been his patients, his family, never his own needs.
“I thought you for one would never disappoint him. But now I find you’re as bad as the rest of them. I never said a word as long as you made us proud of you. But that was just a hollow shell, you say? Well, miss, you need to know you have no claim on him. None at all. I kept it to myself for eleven years, so he wouldn’t be hurt, so he wouldn’t lose his faith in you, but now—you deserve to know. You’ve earned the right to know, threatening to take him to court, standing up for Mara—I might have known, mongrel to mongrel. I thought you had class, but he’s right, blood shows in the end.”
Harriet stared at her, slack-jawed. The housekeeper thrust an envelope into her hand.
“Read that. It’s what your drunk spying sister found snooping around my room. And if you think it’s a lie, I suggest you check with that precious Professor Lontano.
She
knew from the outset and never said a word to stop him from taking you in.”
The Face in the Mirror
Chère Mademoiselle
,
Maintenant que je suis une femme âgée et seule, il est trop tard pour continuer à nourrir de vieilles rancunes. J’ai rencontré votre mère, Mme Selena Vatick Stonds, en Irak, il y a de nombreuses années mais je ne la connaissais pas bien. Elle était venue sur un chantier près de Nippur où son père et mon mari travaillaient au sein d’une équipe d’archéologues envoyée par l’Institut d’études orientales de l’Université de Chicago.
…
Harriet, her brain numb, read the difficult French script many times before it meant anything to her.
My dear Miss Stonds
,
Now that I am an old and lonely woman, the time for continuing to hold a grudge is long past. I knew your mother, Madame Selena Vatick Stonds, in Iraq many years ago, but did not know her well. She came to the site near Nippur where her father and my husband were part of a team of archeologists sent by the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. I must confess I disliked Madame Stonds intensely, but that was perhaps a by-product of our circumstances. We had only one interest in common: my husband, whom Mme. Stonds knew during the Second World War.
The war found him at the Oriental Institute in Chicago, where he was a student of Professor Vatick’s. It was inevitable that he should meet your mother, and even more inevitable, knowing my husband’s character as alas I do, that he and your mother
—
who possessed an extraordinary charm
—
should establish a liaison. The war ended, we returned to Nippur, my husband found other interests
—
there was a young Italian girl, an Assyriologist also
—
not the beauty your mother was, but of great spirit.
I ask myself now why I stayed with him. At the time it seemed a matter of pride as much as one of duty… I longed for children, and it was not possible, so when Madame Stonds arrived, claiming that the baby daughter she had given birth to eight months before was Emil’s child
—
I was furious, and wounded in a manner that beggars description. But Emil was not going to leave me, or the fortune of my family which helped fund his passion for archeology. And the prospect of being a father would be the last thing to change his mind. At any rate, you must surely know your mother died, pursuing Emil into the mountains on the ill-fated expedition that also claimed Professor and Mme. Vatick’s lives.
Emil survived that avalanche, and many other large catastrophes. He died a decade ago
—
ignominiously
—
struck by a taxi on a Lyons street, and I have lived alone in my family’s great house in the Auvergne ever since. Now the angers and jealousies I felt all those years have been replaced by a desire for some token of his life, no, perhaps not of his life, but of a hostage to the future. I am wondering if there is any truth to Selena Vatick’s story. I have no way of knowing how to find it out, but I enclose a photograph of Emil, taken when he was about forty. If you see a resemblance to yourself well, perhaps you would be good enough to write me back.
Zoe Farrenc
“Well?” Mephers was watching Harriet read, fury and triumph mixed in her face. “What do you have to say now, Miss Holier-than-thou?”
“You’ve known this for eleven years? And never said anything?
How did you even get this letter?” Harriet was shaking so hard that it was difficult for her to speak.
“She sent it to Beatrix, but Beatrix was already long dead. I don’t read French: no one ever spent a fortune on my education, only to have me stab them in the back! I took it to the French department at Northwestern University, and even then I refused to believe it. Of Beatrix and Mara, but not of you. But the photograph, it was too clear. Only you were bringing him so much pride—first in your class at the Latin school, earning honors at Smith—I wasn’t going to take that away from him by letting him know you weren’t his to be proud of. But now—you’ve chosen to ally yourself with weakness. You chose Mara. I never wanted her in this apartment, I argued with the doctor then: find someone to adopt her. But he insisted. Look what pleasure Harriet brings us, he said. Well, never a day’s joy did we get from this Mara. He named her rightly, Mara, for the Lord has dealt very bitterly with me.”
Harriet hadn’t noticed the photograph, so intent had she been on the letter. When Mephers pulled it from the envelope and thrust it under her nose, she was startled, as Mara had been before her, by the likeness to her own face.
“So Mara didn’t imagine this. You—you subjected her to life on the streets, accused her of lying, got her in trouble for the thousandth time—”
Before Harriet could say anything—before she knew what she wanted to say, Mephers slapped her across the cheek and swept from the room.
Harriet sat on the bed, rubbing her face, unable to think. At last she turned again to the letter. It must be a lie. But if it was a lie, what motive would Mme. Farrenc have to send it after all those years? Perhaps she had grown senile in old age? But, then, why else would Selena have abandoned her baby daughter, if not to go in search of its real father?
Harriet uselessly churned these questions. Finally she turned back to the photograph. It showed a man looking directly at the camera, blond, with fine features and sensuous lips beneath a
cropped moustache. It might be she herself, Harriet, dressed up in a moustache for a costume party.
She scrabbled frantically in a drawer for a handful of photos of her own father and studied them next to her face. It was no help. She still looked like Emil Farrenc.
The Lady Vanishes
T
HE DRAMA THAT
has been unfolding in this city since early July took a new and bizarre turn today, when Cook County Medical Examiner Dr. Clarence Ciliga confessed that his office lost the body of the woman known as Starr.”
The television showed a solemn-faced Don Sandstrom outside the county morgue. Internally he was jubilant: Channel 13 had reaped an incredible ratings coup from his footage in the church, but the story—and national network interest in him—had started to fade. The missing body brought it back to life. He hoped to be in New York by Labor Day.
“Starr was brought here Saturday afternoon from Midwest Hospital, where a pathologist issued a death certificate. It is standard procedure to bring the body of anyone who has died violently to this building.”
The producer inserted some footage of the mayhem at the Orleans Street Church to remind viewers that Starr had died violently.
“The medical examiner provides the police with forensic data which are essential for use in legal proceedings, from arrest through trial for murder or assault. Although those close to Starr asked that there be no autopsy, Dr. Ciliga did make a detailed examination of
her wounds. Despite what some of Starr’s supporters may have hoped, there is no doubt that the woman was dead.”
Hector gripped Harriet’s hand. They were watching the news together in his hospital room, with Mara. Hector realized he was one of the supporters who secretly hoped—wished, against the evidence of his own hands, clasping her bloody head in church—that Starr had survived the attack and left the morgue on her own.
Harriet was too numbed from the shocks of the last several days to feel much response to the report. Anyway, she already knew that Starr was missing: she learned that early in the afternoon at the funeral parlor, where she was waiting with Mara and Jacqui to receive the body.
Mara, insisting on a chapel that had never handled a funeral for an Orleans Street parishioner, got Jacqui to recommend a place on the South Side. When the sisters arrived, Jacqui and Nanette were already in the chapel with LaBelle, Caroline and a handful of other women from Hagar’s House.
Luisa wasn’t there—she had left for Philadelphia the night before, eager to begin her rehabilitation program. She sent a massive wreath (paid for by Harry, although he didn’t know that yet). Mara picked out the message:
“Cessarono gli spasimi del dolore; in me rinasce, m’agita insolito vigor.”
It was Violetta’s last line in
La Traviata:
“My pain has ended; I am reborn, stirred by an unusual vigor,” Harriet translated for the other women.
