The Night Season (12 page)

“She said she knows some people,” Heil said. “They take in rescue dogs. Specialize in pit bulls. They can take all three dogs until the flood danger has passed. They’re good people. The woman volunteers at the Mission. Her name’s Violet.”

“I know her,” Nick said. “She works at the soup kitchen.” He turned to the others. “The one with the weird eyebrows.” They all seemed to know who he was talking about.

“So you okay with that?” Archie said.

Nick looked down at his dog, and then up in the direction of the river. “Yeah,” he said.

“What about us?” one of the women asked.

“The Mission’s full,” Heil said. He grinned, pleased with himself. “But she said she could find room for five more.”

“Sorry we weren’t more help,” Nick said to Archie.

“Do me a favor,” Archie said. “Ask around about the kid. Or about anyone down by the river who might have seemed suspicious.”

“You got it,” Nick said.

Gigi thumped her tail again.

“See?” Nick said. “She’s a good dog.”

CHAPTER

22

Susan had just
decided to close her eyes for only a second on the couch when the phone rang. If she hadn’t been so disoriented, she would have let it go to voice mail. But she’d had a bottle and a half of wine and wasn’t thinking straight. Her purse was beside her on the floor. She reached into it and felt around for the slippery surface of her phone, found it, pulled it to her face, and mumbled something that sounded like “Hello.”

“Is this Susan Ward?” a voice asked hesitantly. A woman’s voice. Elderly.

Susan blinked, trying to clear her head. “Yes.”

“From the
Herald
?”

Susan felt something pulling at her pant leg, and looked down to see the goat nibbling on the dirty hem of her jeans. The goat. Christ. How long had she been asleep? She could feel a sore welt on her face where her cheek had been pressed against the seam of the cushion. “Who is this?” she asked.

“My name is Mrs. Gloria Larson. I don’t sleep well.”

Susan waited.

The line was silent.

“So?” Susan said.

“I like to read the Internet,” the old woman explained. “They have a computer room set up for us here. I go down there at night when I can’t sleep and I read the news. I saw your column on the computer. About the skeleton.”

She was a reader. One of the
Herald
’s many elderly busybodies. Old people were the only ones who read newspapers anymore—the dead tree kind. At least this one was shuffling into the digital age. “How did you get this number?” Susan asked.

“I called the paper and pressed the numbers for your answering machine and a recording had this number.”

Ian had changed her outgoing voice-mail message. And left her personal cell phone number on it. Dick.

“Mrs. Larson, if you want to write a letter to the editor—”

“You said they found an old skeleton near the slough.” Gloria Larson paused. Something caught in her voice. “A man.”

“Yeah.”

“I was at Vanport,” the woman said. “In 1948. I was there for the flood.”

The photographs from the hospital flashed in Susan’s mind. “Really? I mean, wow. Sorry.”

“That skeleton? That man they found? I think his name was McBee.” She took a breath. “I have to go. Someone’s coming.”

The phone went dead.

“Wait!” Susan said quickly. “Vanport? You think he really died at Vanport?”

But she was talking to herself.

Susan dialed star sixty-nine and got the voice mail for the Mississippi Magnolia Assisted Living Facility.

She looked at the clock. It was four-thirty in the morning. There were bits of plant material scattered all over the living room. Shredded leaves. Petals. Broken pieces of earthenware and glass.

The surviving vases were empty.

The goat had eaten all her flowers.

CHAPTER

23

When Susan woke
up again, she had a headache and was in her bed. The goat had been banished to the back yard. The sun was up, or at least what passed for it these days. Behind the curtains, her bedroom window was a rectangle of gray light. She rolled over and turned on the radio to check on the flooding. They were in for more rain. It was warming up. Snowmelt was fierce. There’d been three more mudslides in the West Hills. Two houses destroyed. Susan switched the station to alternative rock.

Her head hurt.

McBee.

She wasn’t even a journalist anymore, at least not for the
Herald
. Identifying Ralph was not her problem. The old woman was probably just another one of the
Herald
’s kooks. Then again, if she did know something, and Susan had been on to something when she’d brought up Vanport in her column—that would be a vindication.

That would make her right. And Ian wrong.

She got up, took six ibuprofen, made coffee, and put on black jeans and a black sweater. (With the rainbow boots, raspberry hair, and yellow slicker, a neutral foundation was crucial.) She vacuumed up the smaller ceramic shards in the living room. Then she sat down and Googled “Mississippi Magnolia Assisted Living Facility.” They accepted guests from ten
A.M.
until seven
P.M.
And they were located on North Mississippi Avenue, not far from Emanuel Hospital.

It wasn’t Ian she wanted to prove something to. It was Henry.

She sat at the keyboard for a moment, gathering her courage, before she typed in the URL for the
Herald
’s Web site. If Henry had died while she was asleep, there would be a headline.

No update.

He was still alive.

Who was she kidding? Identifying Ralph wasn’t going to do anything for him. There was nothing that Susan could do for him of any real value. Unless she discovered some latent gift for toxicology, she was useless.

It was too bad Henry didn’t have a goat she could offer to take care of.

Then she had an idea. She couldn’t whip up an antivenom, but maybe there was something she could do to help. Her headache immediately lifted, and she found herself humming happily.

Good Samaritans lived longer. There’d been a study.

She tossed a couple of apples off the back porch to the goat, slammed her coffee, and headed out the door to the hospital.

*   *   *

Susan found Archie
and Claire in Henry’s ICU room, one on either side of his bed. Claire was asleep in one, curled up like a child, knees to her chest. Archie was out cold in the other, head back, body planked at a forty-degree angle, legs straight out, crossed at the ankles. A copy of that morning’s
Herald
was on his lap, folded open to Susan’s column,
THE DEAD GIRL ON THE OSTRICH
. Her last column, she realized.

Susan always felt a faint stirring of delight when she saw Archie reading her work. It made her feel a little ridiculous—like a kid seeking approval. He was only forty-one, just thirteen years older than her. So why did she feel like such a teenager?

She had already second-guessed this whole idea of hers. She’d had plenty of time on the way to the hospital to feel like an idiot. Half the streetlights were out, and a whole portion of the main one-way north on the east side was closed, forcing her to wind her way north taking side streets.

She’d had the radio on. The river had risen another four inches overnight.

Now she looked down at the white paper bag in her hand. She’d stopped at the coffee shop in the atrium and bought Archie a muffin. She hadn’t thought to get Claire anything. How could she have forgotten about Claire? Of course Claire would be there. And now here was Susan, with a huge muffin for Archie and nothing else. The muffin was the size of a cat’s head. It weighed like two pounds. Maybe they could split it. Crap. She should just go. Should she leave the muffin? With a note?

Archie stirred and opened an eye.

For a half second, Susan considered bolting.

“Hey,” Archie said, his voice still rough from sleep.

Susan searched for something to say. He looked so sad and rumpled, his clothes wrinkled, his face creased, eyelids swollen from lack of sleep.

He ran a hand through his curly brown hair. If the intent was to smooth it, it didn’t work. One side was still plastered against his scalp where he’d rested his head against his shoulder as he slept.

“I thought Henry might need someone to feed his cats,” Susan said. She said this quietly, so as not to wake Claire.

Archie’s eyes widened and he sat up in the chair.

“I mean, I know Claire’s busy,” Susan said quickly. “And you are, too. And I know where he lives. So if you give me the keys, I can stop by.” She took a small step toward the foot of the bed. Henry was still hooked up to the respirator, the machine inhaling and exhaling for him. IV tubes threaded into his veins, wires monitored his heart rate. The blood vessels in his face, the ones that bulged bright and red when Henry was angry at whatever idiotic thing Susan had done, had vanished—replaced by a bloodless ceramic sheen. There were women who’d eat glass to have skin like that.

She didn’t know the first thing about cats.

“That’s nice,” Archie said. “But I can do it.”

Right. Now she was embarrassed. It had been presumptuous of her. It wasn’t her place to feed Henry’s cats. That was something a friend would do. She should have listened to her rational side when it had tried to talk to her in the car.

“How is he?” Susan asked.

“Holding on,” Archie said. He lifted the newspaper off his lap. “I bought the paper,” he said.

Susan had seen it. The story of Archie rescuing the kid had made the front page, below the fold, with a big photograph of Archie in his Beauty Killer Task Force days.
BEAUTY KILLER COP SAVES BOY
, the headline read.

“The paper had already gone to press by the time he went missing,” Susan said. “It’s online. But won’t be in the print edition until tomorrow. I didn’t write that headline.”

“I read the story about Henry.”

Henry hadn’t even made the front page. He’d been relegated to Metro.

“You didn’t write it.”

He’d noticed.

“It’s Derek’s beat.”

“He doesn’t even quote you. You were there. You and Claire found him. You were at the hospital. No quote.”

Susan didn’t want to go into it. She held the paper bag out stiffly. “I brought you a muffin.” She might as well give it to him. It had cost three bucks. He looked hungry. “I don’t know what kind of muffins you like, so I just grabbed one.” In fact, she’d spent ten minutes debating whether to get lemon poppy seed or banana nut, but she wasn’t going to tell him that.

He opened the bag and peered inside. She thought she saw him smile. “This looks great,” he said.

The machine breathing for Henry heaved in and out. Claire mumbled something unintelligible in her sleep and then was quiet.

“Any news on the tox screen?” Susan asked.

Archie hesitated. He reached into the bag and pulled out a chunk of banana nut muffin and put it in his mouth and chewed. He looked away from her, his eyes heavy on Henry. “Nothing yet.”

They lapsed into silence again. Susan felt big and loud in that place, like when Bliss signed her up for ballet class and Susan had been tall and clumsy and had worn the wrong color leotard, a terrible pea-green turtleneck leotard that zipped up the back and snapped at the crotch and was made out of a thick ribbed fabric that made Susan flop-sweat.

“I was fired,” Susan blurted out. She wasn’t planning on saying it. It just bubbled up. She could feel her eyes burn with tears. She’d been fired before. There was the time at the coffee shop in high school when the owner found out that she had been routinely closing a half hour early. In college she’d gotten a job as a checkout clerk at a grocery store, only to get fired her first day when, on her lunch break, she’d joined a bunch of migrant workers picketing the store. She didn’t remember what they were protesting, but she was sure they had a valid point.

She’d been fired before. But those times she had deserved it. This time, she wasn’t so sure.

“Why?” Archie asked.

Susan looked at Henry, half dead in his hospital bed. Archie had already noticed that Derek, not Susan, had written the story about Henry. He’d have to know that had cost her. But she didn’t want him to know how much. He’d feel responsible somehow. “Ian didn’t like my Vanport story. I wanted to follow up on it. He thought it was bad timing.” It was partially true. Ian hadn’t liked her Vanport story. It was the wrong flood. Old news. Just like Ralph. No one cared. Not when their riverside condos were flooding.

“It would have been a great story,” Susan said. And she believed it, too. “Identifying the skeleton. Especially if it turns out that he died in the flood. You know, some people think thousands died at Vanport? That the government covered it up. Stacked the bodies in the ice-storage building downtown. Buried them in school buses. Some people even thought they shipped them to Japan to be returned as dead soldiers.”

Archie looked skeptical. “But the official count was, what, fifteen?”

“Yeah. They only
found
fifteen. But there were so many people in Vanport who were there for work, didn’t have families, didn’t have anyone to report them missing. I mean, the river swept away the whole town. Everything. There were fifteen thousand people there. They found fifteen bodies. How many more were washed out to sea? Or ended up in the mud of the slough?”

Susan was getting excited, her voice rising.

“Ian acted like no one cares,” she continued. “Like it was so long ago. But it’s this amazing story. This entire town built for shipworkers during the war, integrated, working-class. Snowmelt. Unseasonable warmth. Rain. Sound familiar? They were told they were safe. The morning the levy broke, they were told they were safe, that it would hold, that there was nothing to worry about. Then fifteen feet of water washed away houses, cars, everything. It was chaos. But a lot of them managed to save each other. To get the children out. They formed human chains to pull people to safety. Black and white, working together. And people in Portland now? They know nothing about it. It’s been expunged from our history. Imagine if I could identify that skeleton. It could be some small bit of closure. Someone knew him. If nothing else, it will show that we still care.”

Archie put some muffin in his mouth, chewed slowly, and shook his head. “Cold cases like this, they hardly ever get solved. Witnesses are dead. Paperwork gets lost. There’s no physical evidence. You don’t even know if this guy died at Vanport. Maybe he was fishing and died of a heart attack years before Vanport was even built?”

Susan could barely contain herself. “I have a lead.”

She told Archie about Gloria Larson, McBee, and the Mississippi Magnolia Assisted Living Facility. “Anyway,” she said, “it’s probably nothing, but I thought I’d stop by after here and check her story out.”

Claire opened her eyes. “Good morning.”

“Sorry,” Susan said, whispering belatedly. “Did we wake you?”

Claire shifted her position in the chair and stretched. “When you walked in the door. God, you’re loud. Sorry you got fired.”

“I didn’t get you a muffin,” Susan confessed.

“Okay.”

“I’m so sorry,” Susan said.

“Did you say this old woman lives up on Mississippi?”

Susan nodded.

Claire jabbed in the air at Archie with her elbow. “You should go with her. Check it out.”

Archie hesitated.

“I will call you if anything changes,” Claire said. “You shouldn’t be in the ICU anyway with that cold.” She turned to Susan. “He needs to work,” she said. “Or he’ll go crazy.”

It had an extra weight, given Archie’s stay in the psych ward. Crazy was not such a faraway place for him. Crazy lived just up the road.

“There’s nothing you can do until Anne gets in anyway,” Claire added.

“Anne?” Susan said.

She saw Archie shoot Claire a look. It had to be Anne Boyd. She was an FBI profiler. They were bringing her in to profile the river killer. Which meant they had to have more than Archie was telling. They knew what poisoned him. But Henry was still lying there like Snow White, which meant that whatever the poison was, there wasn’t an antidote.

“It’s okay. I get it. You can’t compromise the case. But Claire’s right, you can’t just sit here. Come with me. It’ll be fun. Old people. There might be Jell-O.”

Archie coughed and looked unconvinced.

“I’m not a member of the press anymore,” Susan said. “This woman, she has no reason to tell me anything if I’m not writing a story.” Susan held up a strand of her raspberry hair. “I’m not exactly catnip to old people.” Old people crossed the street sometimes when they saw her coming. “But a cop? She’d talk to you.”