Special Topics in Calamity Physics (69 page)

"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm just kind of, confused—"

"I didn't put it all together 'til later," she sniffled.

I waited—enough time for her to stitch together, however crudely, the hole in her voice. "You didn't put what. . . together?" She cleared her throat. "Do you know who The Nightwatchmen are?" she asked. " 'Course you don't. . . don't even know your own name, probably—"

"I do, actually. My father's a political science professor."

She was surprised—or maybe relieved. "Oh?"

"They were radicals," I said. "But apart from an incident or two in the early seventies, no one's sure if they actually existed. They're more a-a beautiful idea, fighting against greed—than something real." I was paraphrasing bits of "A Quick History of the American Revolutionary" (see Van Meer,
Federal Forum,
Vol. 23, Issue 9,1990).

"An incident or two," Ada repeated. "Exactly. So then you know about Gracey."

"He was the founder. But he's dead, isn't he?"

"Other than one other person," Ada said slowly, "George Gracey is the only known member. And he's still wanted by the FBI. In '70 ... no, '71, he killed a West Virginia Senator, put a pipe bomb in his car. A year later, he blew up a building in Texas. Four people died. He was caught on tape so they made a sketch of him, but then he dropped off the face of the earth. In the eighties there was an explosion in a townhouse in England. Homemade bombs. People had heard he was livin' there, so they assumed he was dead. There was too much damage to recover the teeth on the bodies found. That's how they identify, you know. Teeth records."

She paused, swallowing.

"The Senator killed was Senator Michael McCullough, Dubs's uncle on his mother's side, my great uncle. And it happened over in Meade, twenty minutes from Findley. Dubs said it all the time when we were growin' up: Til fly to the ends of the earth to bring that sonuvabitch to trial.' When Dubs drowned, everyone believed the police. They said he'd had too much to drink and it was an accident.
I
refused to believe it. I stayed up all night goin' through his notes even though Archie cussed me out, said I was crazy. But then I saw how it all went together. I showed Archie and Cal too. And
she
knew of course. She knew we were on to her. We'd called the FBI. That's why she hanged herself. It was death or prison."

I was bewildered. "I don't understand—"

"The
Nocturnal Conspiracy"
Ada said softly.

Trying to follow this woman's logic was like trying to watch an electron orbit a nucleus with the naked eye. "What's
The Nocturnal Conspiracy?"
"His next
book.
The one he was writing on George Gracey. That's what he was going to call it and it was going to be a bestseller. Smoke tracked him down, see. Last May. He found him on a fantasy island called Paxos, livin' high off the hog."

She drew a shaky breath. "You don't know what it felt like, when the police called and told us our father, the one we'd just seen two days before at Chrysanthemum's baptism, was gone. Snatched from us. We hadn't heard the name
Hannah Schneider
in all our lives. At first, we thought she was the loud divorcée the Rider's Club had trouble nominatin' for treasurer, but that was Hannah
Smithers.
Then we think, maybe she was Gretchen Peterson's cousin who Dubs took to the Marquis Polo Fundraiser, but that's Lizzie Sheldon. So"—by this point, Ada had ripped out most of her punctuation, some of her pauses, too; her words stampeded into the receiver—"after
two
days of this, Cal takes a look at the picture I asked the police to get for us and what do you know? He says he remembers her talkin' to Dubs at the Handy Pantry way back in June, when they were coming back from Auto Show 4000—this is a
month
after Dubs got back from Paxos. So Cal says, yeah, Dubs went inside the Handy Pantry to get gum and this same woman shimmied up to him. Cal has a photographic memory. 'It was her,' he said. Tall. Dark hair. A face shaped like one of those Valentine chocolate boxes and Valentine's was Dubs' favorite holiday. She asked for directions to Charleston and I guess they stayed talkin' for so long, Cal had to get out of the car to go get him. And that was
it.
When we went through Dubs' things, we found her number in his address book. Phone records showed he called her at least once or twice a week. She knew how to play it, see. After my mother, there's never been anyone special—I-I still talk about him in the present. Archie says I have to stop that."

She paused, took another labored breath, started to speak again. And as she talked, I was struck by the image of one of those itsy-bitsy garden spiders that decide to make their web not in some sensible corner, but in a gigantic space, a space so huge and far-fetched, in it one could fit two African Elephants end to end. Dad and I watched such a determined spider on our porch in Howard, Louisiana, and no matter how many times the wind unrigged the mooring, how many times the web buckled and sagged, unable to hold itself up between the fake columns, the spider went on with its work, climbing to the top, free-falling, silk thread trembling behind it, dental floss in the wind. "She's making sense of the world," Dad said. "She's sewing it together as best she can."

"We
still
don't know how she managed it," Ada went on. "My father was two hundred and forty pounds. It
had
to be poison. She injected him with something, between his toes... cyanide maybe. 'Course the police swore they checked all that and there was no sign. I just don't see how it was possible. He liked his whiskey . . . won't lie about that. And there was his medication — " "What kind of medication was it?" I asked.

"Minipress. For blood pressure. Dr. Nixley told him you're not supposed to drink with it but he had before and it never messed with him. He drove home all by himself from the King of Hearts Fundraiser right when he first went on it and I was there when he got home. He was
fine.
Believe me, if I thought he
wasn't
fine I'd have caused a stink. Not that he would've listened."

"But Ada"— I kept my voice subdued, as if we were in a library—"I really don't think Hannah could've possibly—" "Gracey was in contact with her. He told her to kill Smoke. Like she'd done with all the others. She was the temptation, see." But— "She's the
other one,"
she interrupted flatly. " 'Other than
one
other person.' The other member—weren't you listening?"

"But I
know
she's not a criminal. I talked to a detective here—"

"Hannah Schneider's not her real name. She ripped it off a poor missing woman who grew up in an orphanage in New Jersey. She's been livin' as that girl for years. Her real name's Catherine Baker and she's wanted by the FBI for shootin' a police officer right between the eyes. Twice. Somewhere in Texas." She cleared her throat. "Smoke didn't recognize her because no one's sure what Baker actually looks like. 'Specially
now.
They have old testimony, a composite that's twenty years old—in the eighties everyone had weird hair, freaky looks—
you
know those awful leftover hippies. And she's blond in the sketch. Says she has blue eyes. Smoke
had
the picture, along with the stuff on George Gracey. But it's one of those things—it could be a drawin' of me, you know. Could be a drawin' of anyone."

"Could you send me copies of his notes? For research purposes?"

Ada sniffed and though she didn't exactly agree to send them I gave her my mailing address. Neither of us spoke for a minute or two. I could hear the end credits of the soap opera, the outburst of another commercial.

"I just wish I'd been there," she said faintly. "I have a sixth sense, see. If I'd gone to the Auto Show, I could've gone in with him when he went to get the gum. I would've seen what she was doin'—prancin' by in tight jeans, sunglasses, pretendin' it was a coincidence. Cal swore he saw her a couple days before, too, when he and Smoke were in Winn-Dixie pickin' up ribs. He said she walked right by with her empty shoppin' cart, all gussied up like she was goin' somewhere, and she looked straight at Cal, grinned like the Devil himself. 'Course, there's no way of knowin' for sure. It gets busy on Sundays—" "What did you say?" I asked quietly. She stopped talking. The abrupt change in my tone of voice must have

startled her. "I said there's no way of knowing" she said apprehensively. Without thinking, I hung up the phone.

31

Che Guevara
talks
to young People

The Nightwatchmen have always gone by a variety of names—
Nachlicht
,
or "Nocturnal," in German, also
Nie Schlafend,
or "Never Sleeping." In French, they are
Les Veilleurs
de Nuit.
Membership, in its supposed heyday, 1971 to 1980, is wholly unknown; some say it was twenty-five men and women across America; others claim over a thousand around the globe. Whatever the truth—and, alas, we may never know it—the movement is whispered about with greater enthusiasm today than at its zenith (an Internet search yields over 100,000 pages). Its present-day popularity as part history lesson, part fairy tale, is a testament to The Freedom Ideal, a dream to liberate all people, regardless of their race or creed, a dream that, no matter how fractured and cynical modern society becomes, will not die. Van Meer,
"
Nachlicht
:
Popular Myths of Freedom Fighting,"
Federal Forum,
Vol. 10, Issue 5,1998

Dad had raised me to be a skeptical person, a person unconvinced until "the facts line up like chorus girls," and so I had not believed Ada Harvey— not until she'd described the Winn-Dixie incident (or perhaps a little before, with "tight jeans" and "sunglasses"); then, it'd sounded as if she were describing not Smoke and Cal in Winn-Dixie, but Dad and me at Fat Kat in September, when I'd first seen Hannah in Frozen Foods.

If that weren't enough to knock the wind out of me, she had to go entirely Southern Gothic, dragging the Devil and his grin into it, and whenever someone with a fudgethical Southern accent said
devil,
one inevitably felt they knew something one didn't—as Yam Chestley wrote in
Dixiecrats
(1979), "The South knows two things through and through: cornbread and Satan" (p. 166). After I hung up, my bedroom stalagmited with shadows, I stared at my CASE NOTES on which I'd written in famished handwriting Officer Coxley-style haiku (NIGHTWATCHMEN CATHERINE BAKER GRACEY).

My first thought was that Dad was dead.

He, too, had been Catherine Baker's target, because he, too, had been working on a book about Gracey (it was the logical explanation for Hannah stalking us the same way she'd stalked Smoke Harvey), or, if he wasn't at work on a book ("I'm not certain I have the stamina for another book," Dad admitted in a Bourbon Mood, a sad acknowledgment he never made in daylight), then an article, essay or lecture of some kind, his own
Nocturnal Conspiracy.

Of course—I ran across the room to switch on the overhead light and thankfully, the shadows were instantly whisked away like out-of-fashion black dresses in a department store —I reminded myself, Hannah Schneider was dead (the petit four of truth I knew for certain) and Dad was safe with Professor Arnie Sanderson at Piazza Pitti, an Italian restaurant in downtown Stock-ton. Still, I felt the need to hear his sandpaper voice, his "Sweet, don't be preposterous." I ran downstairs, tore through the Yellow Pages and dialed the restaurant. (Dad didn't have a cell phone; "So I may be available to others twenty-four hours, seven days a week like some minimum-waged dunderhead working in Customer Service? Much obliged, but no thank you.") It took only a minute for the hostess to identify him; few sported Irish tweed in spring.

"Sweet?" He was alarmed. "What's happened?"

"Nothing—well,
everything.
Are you okay?"

"What—of course. What's the matter?"

"Nothing." A paranoid thought occurred to me. "Do you trust Arnie Sanderson? Maybe you shouldn't leave your food unattended. Don't get up to go to the bathroom — "

"What?"

"I've discovered the truth about Hannah Schneider. I know why someone killed her, or-or she killed herself—I haven't quite figured that part out yet, but I know
why"

Dad was silent, obviously not only weary of the name, but thoroughly unconvinced. Not that I
blamed
him; my breathing was a madwoman's, my heart was teetering like a wino in a jail cell—altogether an unconvincing figure of truth and forethought.

"Sweet," he said gently, "you know, I dropped off
Gone with the Wind
earlier this afternoon. Perhaps you should watch it. Have a piece of that chocolate cake. I should be no more than an hour." He began to say something more, something that started with, "Hannah," but that word yoga-twisted in his mouth so it came out "hands"; he seemed afraid to say her name, in case it encouraged me. "You sure you're all right? I can leave
now"

"No, I'm fine," I said quickly. "We'll talk when you get home."