The Clouds Roll Away (4 page)

Stan's face held a pained expression, like a gas bubble pressed against his diaphragm. He put one hand on my shoulder. “Good luck,” he said.

I didn't even bother. It was just so obvious.

Luck didn't exist.

The next morning I woke from crazy dreams knotted by two alternating threads: the incessant chatter of Beezus Jackson and the peculiar dialect of Ebonics spoken by gangsters. After a long, hot shower in the carriage house, I walked across the courtyard to the mansion on Monument Avenue.

Built by the Harmons in 1901, the three-story brick was creeping toward serious neglect. Maybe it was already there. Ivy invaded the top floor. Moss smothered the gutters. Autumn leaves, still not raked, swirled across the slate, hissing their opinion.

But a song was playing inside the house, a tune about deep and dreamless sleep, a place where silent stars go by. Nobody was in the kitchen, however. Or the den. The dining room was empty, along with the front parlor where the windows faced General Robert E. Lee's statue on Monument Avenue. I stared at the record, the RPM, spinning on my grandparents' hi-fi. I thought of the man with a cross burned into his lawn, and I listened to verses about hope and fears.

Three cardboard boxes rested on the velvet chairs, dusty tops open.

“Anybody home?” I called out, walking up the walnut staircase to the second floor. I knocked on my mother's bedroom door. No answer. Her four-poster bed was crisply made with red and green Christmas pillows lined up against the headboard. Down the hall, I could hear another kind of music. It sounded nothing like a Christmas carol.

We rented a room in the big house to Wally Marsh, a local photographer who helped take care of my mother. He'd lived with us for about a year and had proved a loyal friend, although since our return from Seattle, I'd noticed some changes. Like the music, loud enough to rattle the iron hinges on his bedroom door. A rapper rhymed
town
,
down
,
crown
,
frown
—

I knocked. No reply.

I pounded. “Wally!”

The door finally opened. “I didn't hear you,” he said.

No kidding. “Can you turn that down, please?”

His flat expression drained warmth from his brown eyes. A cold breeze blew through the open window, lifting the heavy scent of his cologne. Another new element, cologne. And jewelry. The rapper rhymed
dawn
,
con
,
turned on
.

“Seriously,” I said, “it's too loud. Turn it down.”

He shuffled over to the desk, his thin frame swallowed by baggy jeans. He lowered the decibels on the boom box from assault to annoying. The CD player glinted with chrome next to a computer whose monitor measured roughly the size of my television.

“Whazzup?” he said.

I let it go. “I can't find her.”

“Nadine?” he said, as if another woman lived here besides my mother. “She's been creeping around the attic all morning, putting on holiday tunes, giving me a headache. I was trying to get some work done.”

I glanced at the computer monitor. Four black guys wearing baggy black clothing flexed their hands in gestures that reminded me of dive-bombing crows. After years as a struggling freelance photographer, Wally hit the mother lode. Rappers.

“New clients?” I nodded at the picture.

He crossed his arms. “Be glad I'm not scrounging up rent every month. These guys pay.”

I couldn't count the months we bartered dog walks, handyman services, and taking my mother for drives. Freelance photography paid enough to feed a houseplant and I knew that when we signed the lease. “Do you know a guy named RPM?”

He gave a dismissive laugh.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“RPM? He's the bank. Dig?”

“Pardon?”

“His production company cuts my checks.”

The urban patois didn't fool me. Wally's true citizenship was Nerdville. That's what I liked about him. He read the gossip section in the newspaper and argued religion with my mom. His parents, now deceased, sent him to Catholic schools and none of this simulated rap-speak changed my mind. Wally was still a nerd.

“If you run into the bank or anyone in that crowd,” I said, “I'd appreciate it if you didn't say anything.”

“About what?”

“About your landlady being an FBI agent.”

His eyes opened so wide I saw the dendritic veins radiating from the dark irises.

“Me?” he said. “How about
you
don't say anything. Cut my ka-ching, ka-ching. Know what I'm saying?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

I found my mother downstairs in the front parlor, singing with Bing Crosby how she'd be home for Christmas, if only in her dreams. I watched her pull a crumpled mass of white tissue paper from a dusty box, peeling it back to reveal a red ornament. She held it to the window that faced Monument Avenue, as if waiting for General Lee's inspection. Winter light leaked through red glass, glistening like fresh blood. The last time I saw that ornament was the Christmas before my father died.

Madame, my mother's small black dog, jumped off the couch. Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, don't ask why. My mother plucked the name from thin air. I petted the dog's soft fur and Rosemary Clooney dropped under the hi-fi needle, insisting our troubles were miles away.

My mother turned. “You'll never guess who stopped by.”

“Helen.”

“Your sister's too busy,” she said without a trace of judgment. “DeMott Fielding!”

DeMott. My high school boyfriend.

“He heard you were back in town and rushed right over.”

Flynn, I suspected. If thousands of acres could be considered neighboring properties, Belle Grove was right next door to the Fieldings' estate on the James River.

“He said that—‘rush right over'?”

“Don't be difficult, Raleigh. He wants us to come to St. John's on Sunday.”

I walked over to one of the cardboard boxes, peering inside. “I'm working Sunday.”

“No more moping around,” she said. “I want Christmas like we've always had. Exactly like before.”

After my dad died, we no longer celebrated Christmas. We survived it.

Inside the box she hauled from the attic I saw my old handmade ornaments, things made for my dad. “You go ahead to church. I'm working.”

“What possible work could you have on a Sunday morning?” she said. “Rocks don't go anywhere.”

“It's an interview.” I pawed through the tissue paper. Even when I worked in the mineralogy lab, I never told my mother my job was with the FBI. My dad knew, but my dad didn't suffer from debilitating bouts of paranoia. His only fear was she'd wake up one day and decide I was investigating her. After his murder, I graduated from Quantico with no family in attendance. My sister, Helen—my only other close relative—believed FBI was English for KGB. I sometimes wondered if she was adopted twice.

“You're going to interview rocks, on a Sunday?”

“No, I'm interviewing another geologist. He's only available on Sunday.” I kept my hands inside the box, rewrapping a starfish lacquered with Elmer's glue and red glitter that spelled
Dad
.

“Young lady, you're going to church. It's what we do. It's where we belong.”

As I stuffed the ornament into my pocket, Wally came down the stairs.

“And we're getting a fir tree, just like we used to,” she continued. “Wally's offered to take me.”

“And it better not mess my ride,” he said.

“Oh, Wally.” My mother smiled at him. “Bless your heart.”

It was a whole lot nicer than what I wanted to say.

chapter five

L
ater that morning, I drove to Virginia's southern half where slumbering rural towns started and ended within a quarter mile. Whenever I drove through these places, with their little gas stations and grocery stores and tidy houses, I had the corny idea that the boys here grew up and married pretty local girls and propagated peace through generations, each generation recognizing the special beauty and safety of small-town life. Of home.

But human nature was human nature, and when I parked the K-Car just outside the town of Boydton, I headed for the concrete block where a fair share of country boys jogged in hooded sweatshirts around a fenced yard, looking like defeated monks in search of lost prayers.

I handed my gun to a female guard inside Mecklenburg prison. She sat in a steel-and-Plexiglas booth and locked my firearm in a safe behind her desk. Picking up the phone, she called for an escort. He was a brown-skinned guard with a neck like a fire hydrant. His badge said Thomas. Last name, I was pretty sure.

“We got the man sedated,” Thomas said. “You want to wait until it wears off?”

I shook my head and he signaled another guard sitting inside another steel-and-Plexiglas booth. The guard pulled a lever and tumbling steel cogs automatically rolled back the door. Mecklenburg was the wave of the future thirty years ago, a new design that put correctional officers in sealed booths that protected them from inmates. At the opening ceremony, the governor called the keyless facility “a monument to failure.” As if to prove the other meaning to his statement, Mecklenburg set records for violent assaults, death row escapes, and guards who feared for their lives. While the keyless design made theoretical sense, in practical terms the place turned into a detached day care center—for grown men begging for attention. Any attention.

“You need me to stay?” the guard asked.

We were passing down the main corridor, a vacant channel of steel that amplified the sound of tumbling locks. We waited outside the infirmary. Mecklenburg was reclassified for low-security inmates, including hospice patients.

“No, thank you. I'll be fine.”

The infirmary door slid back and I saw an emaciated white man in a hospital bed. His arms looked no wider than the side rails, his bony wrists handcuffed to the metal.

Hale Lasker lifted his head, moving his eyes over the guard. “This ain't your day, boy,” he rasped. “I'm still alive.”

The guard turned to me, his dark features barely concealing his thoughts. “If you have any problems, hit the emergency button over the bed.”

Thomas walked away and the steel door slid closed, locking with a final snap. Standing beside Hale Lasker's bed, I showed my credentials. His parched skin smelled sulfuric.

“FBI.” He pulled back pale lips. “You're the creeps put me in this hellhole.”

“You wrote your own ticket, Mr. Lasker.”

“And you're here to make sure I die?”

“Somebody burned a cross down by the James River,” I said. “The land belongs to a wealthy black man who—”

“Sorry I missed it.”

“Who lives there with his wife and children.”

“Your point?”

“That area's your old stomping grounds and I need a name. Who runs the KKK out there?”

“What're you offering—parole?” He pulled back his lips. “I got cancer in the pancreas, toots. I got no need to help the FBI.”

Blood pooled in ragged blossoms under his almost transparent skin, veins and arteries extending like plant stems. Nine years ago Ruth Lasker stumbled into our field office, her face swollen and distorted by bruises. Her speech slurred as she described the four-by-six cage where she was kept in a barn outside Lanexa. That morning, when her father left for his local KKK meeting, Ruth's five-year-old sister snuck into the barn and lifted the cage's key from its hook. Our agents had asked Ruth to sign her statement, and when I read through the file yesterday, I saw a shaky
X
.

Every one of Hale Lasker's cells was a palace compared to that cage.

“Do you care what's next?” I asked.

“What?”

“Heaven. It exists.”

He almost laughed. A dry sound at the back of his throat.

“Eight years I been in here, eight years with nothing but questions. You're not going to hear my answers.”