The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (39 page)

They’d just driven nine hours to Memphis from Tallahassee and they were all zonked but pleased with themselves for having found the place.

Finally the door was flung open by a bearded young man wearing shorts who looked disheveled and hassled, his wire-frame glasses askew. He held an empty cardboard box in his hands.

Caroline, Suzi, and Otis looked past him into the living room, into the house owned by Marylou Ahearn, alias Nance Archer.

“Help you?” asked the young man.

“We’re looking for Marylou,” Caroline said. She had trouble saying that name in connection with Nance. Nance and Marylou seemed like two different people.

“She was by here earlier this afternoon,” the young man said. “Around four thirty.”

“Was there an old man with her?” Suzi asked.

“And a dog?” Otis asked.

The young man wrinkled his brow and exhaled loudly. “Are you selling something? ’Cause I’m broke.”

Caroline explained that they were friends of Marylou’s from Tallahassee and that they were concerned about her and wanted to catch up with her to see if she was okay.

“Marylou has friends in Tallahassee?” he asked, stepping back to let them inside. “She sure didn’t have many friends in Memphis.” He shut the heavy oak door behind them and quickly locked it. They all stood there in the foyer beside an old player piano. “She did have a man with her,” the young man said. “Wilson somebody. And her dog. Butter. He’s in the living room.”

“Buster,” Otis said.

“Who is it, Trev?” A sturdy young woman with a long dark braid and fluffy bangs, wearing overalls, walked into the foyer carrying an armload of books.

Caroline explained that they were friends of Marylou’s, and the young woman, who’d introduced herself as Katya, said, “You just missed Elvis Week. Did you come to see Elvis?”

“Not hardly,” Otis said.

Katya invited them into the living room, where she turned on a floor lamp and then set her stack of books, which all looked old and serious, on the floor. Caroline and Suzi settled on a rose-colored sofa and Otis on a leather ottoman. Buster hopped up on the sofa beside Suzi, who bent over and kissed the top of his head.

Katya plopped down on an Oriental rug, crossing her legs underneath her. Her bare feet were dirty on the bottoms. The young man, Trevor, set down his empty cardboard box and perched on the arm of the leather chair.

It began to rain, and the raindrops blew against the tall windows in the living room.

“Marylou showed up here earlier today and told us we had to move out,” Katya said. “We were just house-sitting, but, yeah, we expected a little more notice.”

“I don’t expect anything from anyone,” Trev said. He had the entire alphabet tattooed around his hairy left calf.

“Um,” Katya said, hugging her knees. “We’re graduate students at Memphis University. English and philosophy. Trev’s getting ready to take his thingamajiggers. His exams.”

“If I don’t pass, I’ll be driving a bus,” Trev said.

Caroline looked around the living room. Old, comfortable furniture. Ceramic ashtray in the shape of Arkansas. Coffee table book about the Holy Land. Piano with a hymnal open on the music rack, old black-and-white pictures of dead people on top. This was a house that
Marylou had lived in for a long time. “Did the man with her, Wilson, did he seem okay?” Caroline asked the couple.

Katya pulled her braid over her shoulder and swung the end back and forth. “He seemed fine to me.”

“Nobody ever seems fine to me,” said Trev.

“He wasn’t, like, trying to get away?” Suzi said.

“Or signaling for help?” Otis said.

“Why would he be doing that?” Trev said, dropping down onto the chair. He was interested now.

Lightning flashed outside, too close, and when it thundered, the lamp wavered.

“Ooh, I hate storms,” Katya said, hugging her knees.

How much should they tell Trevor and Katya? How well did Trevor and Katya know Marylou? Had Marylou told them anything about why she’d moved to Tallahassee?

Before Caroline could decide what to say, Suzi blurted out, “She kidnapped my grandfather!”

“No kidding,” Katya said, exchanging a glance with Trevor.

“Well, not kidnapped,” Caroline said. “They left town without telling us, and my dad’s having memory problems. I’m not sure how aware he is of what’s going on. We think that she took him against his will.”

“This is unbelievable!” Katya exclaimed, clapping her hands together. “Marylou, a kidnapper! Wow!”

“Nothing anybody does surprises me,” Trev said.

“Where’d they go?” Caroline asked the young couple. “After they left here?”

“Sightseeing, probably,” Katya said. “Maybe she took him to Graceland! Everyone ends up there.”

“Are they coming back?” Caroline asked them. “Where are they staying tonight?”

“Assumed they’d stay here,” Trev said. “Otherwise, why’d they tell us to get out?”

Lightning loomed right out front of the house. Katya screamed. Suzi squealed and plugged her ears. Thunder rattled the windows. Afterward they waited a minute, but nothing else happened. Suzi cautiously removed her hands from her ears.

“My grandfather was a scientist,” Otis said. “He was a nuclear researcher. He wasn’t always as out of it as he is now.”

“He grew up here in Memphis,” Caroline added, “but I doubt he remembers much about it. He needs his medications. Are you sure he seemed all right?”

“He was smiling,” Katya said. “We thought they were a couple!”

“That’s false!” Otis barked out. “She hates him. He hates her.”

“Lots of couples hate each other,” Trev added.

“So you don’t approve of their relationship?” Katya said.

Suzi snorted. “They don’t have a relationship,” she said.

“Looked like it to me.” Katya smiled mischievously.

“If you call Marylou planning to kill him a relationship!” Caroline said, thinking
What the hell?
She needed to talk to someone about Marylou’s insane behavior. So she and Otis and Suzi related to Trevor and Katya how Marylou had been a subject in her father’s experiments in the fifties, and that she’d always blamed her father for her daughter’s death, and then how, just recently, thanks to Google, she’d located him in Tallahassee and plotted her revenge, and that she’d used a fake name and everything.

Trevor burst out laughing, a startling bray. “Marylou Ahearn? Kill someone? That figures.”

“No way!” said Katya.

“Way,” Otis said. “She told us herself, after she’d changed her mind and decided not to do it.”

“At least, we hope she really changed her mind. That’s why we’re a little worried.”

“So how did you know they came here?”

They told Trevor and Katya that Marylou had called them from
the road and left a message, explaining that she’d taken Wilson to visit Memphis and not to worry, she’d bring him back soon, etc. Since it was just Suzi and Otis at home with Caroline—Vic and Ava being down at Alligator Point—the three of them decided to go ahead and follow Marylou to Memphis, just to make sure everything was okay.

They knew Marylou had a house in Memphis, so they stopped at Marylou’s Tallahassee house—Suzi knew where there was a hidden key—and looked through some of her bills and letters and papers, hoping to find the address. They found the address, but they also discovered that Nancy Archer wasn’t her real name.

“That’s far out,” Katya said. “Nancy Archer.”

“
Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman,
” Trevor said. “Worst movie ever made.”

“Oh, Trev,” Katya said. “You would know that.”

There was a lull in the conversation. Caroline knew she should try to call Vic again. She’d left messages for him, telling him what had happened and that she and Suzi and Otis were leaving for Memphis, telling him Marylou’s real name and her address, but as time went on and he didn’t answer or return her calls, she got angry and turned her phone off. Otis never had his on, and Suzi’s battery was dead. She decided she’d check her messages and if he’d called she’d call him back when she was good and ready.

“You’re welcome to stay here and wait for them,” Katya said, unfolding herself from the floor. “Back to work, Trev.”

Caroline felt herself relax a little. Whenever she closed her eyes she saw green interstate signs. So far, it seemed, Wilson and Marylou were okay. And, although she hadn’t let herself acknowledge it yet, she was happy to be back in Memphis. The rain seemed to have stopped. “How about if I go get everyone some barbecue?” Caroline suggested.

“I don’t eat meat,” said Trev, pushing his glasses up on his nose.

“Since when?” Katya asked him, and he shrugged.

“Maybe Suzi and Otis can help you pack your things up,” Caroline suggested.

Trevor’s mouth lifted into a sort-of smile.

* * *

Last December, when she and Ava visited Memphis, she’d gone with Ava to Graceland one afternoon. While Ava pored over the exhibits in the house, Caroline zipped through and settled outside on a concrete bench in the Meditation Gardens, where the tour ended, to wait for Ava.

It was warm for December and flies buzzed here and there. Beside the Presley family graves were garish but touching arrangements of silk flowers and trinkets and teddy bears and cards and pictures of Elvis on easels. The fountain, between Caroline and the gravestones, sparkled and spattered. All the benches in the garden were painted black. There was a black iron fence around the fountain and another one around the semicircle of grave markers. An airplane droned overhead.

Caroline found herself watching the other visitors filing through. A late fortyish woman with bangs and chin-length hair, carrying a purse with a picture of Elvis on it, kept sniffling and patting the grave markers like someone who’d just lost her entire family. A younger blond woman wearing jeans and a jean jacket sat in front of Elvis’s grave and read a pamphlet which looked, from the illustrations, to be religious in nature. A British couple—a man with dyed hair and a toupee to match—were walking around talking, too loudly, about the thrill of finding their names, which they’d scrawled in pen, still visible on the wall in front of Graceland after all these years. A tall, thin, Asian man appeared, took pictures, and left. Two smiling short, stout, German-sounding women in their sixties relit a vanilla scented candle on Elvis’s grave. What was wrong with these people? They were acting like Elvis was some
martyred saint. What did they hope to gain by coming here? It didn’t make any sense to Caroline.

A man with a roaring leaf blower came along the path. A swirl of leaves eddied around her feet.

“Mama!” It was Ava, in her white T-shirt that said La La La I Can’t Hear You. Ava looked like an angel, standing there in the sunlight, with the drops of the fountain in an arc around her. Ava never called her Mama anymore, and Caroline cherished the sound of it. Ava darted over and sat down on the bench beside her mother.

“Mama, you know what?”

Caroline took Ava’s hand.

For a few seconds Ava allowed her hand to be held, but quickly, hating to be confined, she pulled her hand out of her mother’s grasp.

In spite of herself, Caroline felt hurt.

“I’ve been thinking. Elvis had Asperger’s. The way they described him as a child, always staying to himself, not having friends, not making eye contact. He was a total klutz. He dry washed his hands all the time, and walked sort of hunched over when he was a kid. And he was so good at music. Never had any lessons. A musical savant.”

“Well,” said Caroline. “That’s a possibility.”

“I just feel like …” Ava looked away. “I’m embarrassed to say.” For Ava to be embarrassed to say something was highly unusual.

“I’m listening.”

“Okay.” Ava took a deep breath and let it out. “I feel like Elvis can help me, with my life, with my, you know. My Asperger’s. Maybe he can heal me. Cure me.”

Was this the reason all these people came to the Meditation Gardens? Did they all feel the need to be healed? Like going to Lourdes? “You don’t need to be cured of anything,” Caroline told Ava. “You’re fine just the way you are.”

“Then why do you keep trying to fix me?” Ava said.

“I’m just trying to make things easier for you. Help you.”

“Huh,” Ava said. “Well stop helping me all the time.”

Caroline felt the familiar sting of being unappreciated, misunderstood, and hating herself for being so petty. Parents were never appreciated. She knew that. But knowing it and not caring about it were two different things. “All right, I’ll stop helping you. Elvis can help you.”

“Fine.” Ava got up and wandered down the path toward a split rail fence that overlooked a rolling pasture and in the distance a barn.

Although she knew better, Caroline stood up and followed her. Groups of visitors, wearing their headsets, were strolling along the paths between the house and Vernon Presley’s office, the racquetball court, and the Meditation Gardens.

She joined Ava at the fence, and both of them leaned against the rails and gazed at the horses grazing a few yards away—six horses, paired head to rump, swishing their tails in each other’s faces, the way horses do. One of them was a palomino.

“I wonder if Elvis rode any of those horses,” Ava said.

Caroline slipped her arm around Ava’s waist. “Elvis’s horses are long gone,” she said.

Ava scrunched up her beautiful, angelic face and began to weep.

These sorts of public meltdowns rarely happened anymore, but they did happen, and you could never predict or control them. You just endured them.

“Those poor horses never knew what happened, when he died,” Ava sobbed. “They waited and waited for him to come see them and feed them and ride them, but they never saw him again. They didn’t understand.”

“They had each other,” Caroline said, stroking Ava’s hair. “See? Look at them out there, taking care of each other.” Tears ran out of Caroline’s eyes, too. Whenever Ava cried, Caroline cried.

“Why’d he have to die? Why’d he take all those drugs? Why?”

Caroline was aware that other people were standing off a ways, staring at them, including the British man with the toupee. She had to think of something to say to calm her daughter down.