When Venus Fell (6 page)

“It means a pigeon died,” I said under my breath.

When I stepped out of the camper Gib was leaning against one of the trailer park’s metal picnic tables with his hands in his pockets. He didn’t look pleased as he surveyed the lines of campers squatting on gravel lots under yellow security lights. When he swiveled his attention to me I gave a small curtsy. “Is this more acceptable to your meat-and-potatoes idea of how a decent woman should dress?” I gestured toward my T-shirt, baggy shorts, and sandals. I’d pulled my hair back. The mass of tight cornrows was heavy enough to keep my head tilted back, a decidedly superior posture. I carried a half bottle of wine and a pair of plastic wineglasses.

“I miss the belly jewelry,” he said.

“You’ve seen more than your share, I expect.”

“How do you get past airport metal detectors?”

“I distract the guards with my tattoos.”

“Which one do they like better? The burning flag or the hammer and sickle?”

I bristled like a cat. “It’s the smiley face on my ass that really gets their attention.” I sat down at the picnic table and unceremoniously removed the wine bottle’s screw top. “Hope you like discount chardonnay.” He eyed the plastic goblets just as he seemed to study every other detail of my world. He made me feel defensive without uttering another word.

I poured wine. He neither took a glass nor said anything. His scrutiny focused suddenly on my bright yellow cornrows and braids. “I can’t figure out what kind of fashion statement you’re trying to make.”

“I’m sure you’re used to women whose idea of a fashion statement is the bill they pay for a tease job at Lula Ethel’s House of Beauty every month.”

“I like women with big hair. I admit it.” He sat down across from me slowly, gracefully, all long legs and broad shoulders, his knees brushing mine under the table before I twisted my legs aside. From his shirt pocket he pulled a folded sheet of notepaper and a yellowed envelope with a stamp so old it was peeling off. “Read this first,” he said, handing me the note.

I frowned at the mystery as I unfolded the paper. The handwriting was spidery but strong.

It was signed “Olivia Cameron.” Next, Gib laid the old, fragile envelope in front of me. “My great-aunt Olivia kept this. She asked me to give it to you along with her note. Your mother sent it to her.”

I plucked out a color snapshot of Mom, Pop, me at about five, and Ella in Mom’s arms. Little, dark-haired, innocent girls. A lump formed in my throat. “Read the inscription on the back,” Gib said. My hands trembling, I turned the photo over and read in Mom’s handwriting:
Dear Olivia, I’m going to bring my girls to meet you and yours as soon as I can coax Max away from his nightclub. Venus always asks me when she can meet “her” Gib. I promise we’ll visit someday. You have blessed us with a friendship we cherish. I think of your family as our own special angels
.

Gib cleared his throat. “My aunt says it’s time you made good on your mother’s promise to visit.”

I didn’t know what to say. Suddenly I heard the muffled sounds of angry men arguing inside a trailer across the lot. Grateful for the distraction, I pulled a small can of pepper spray from my shorts pocket and set it on the table. Gib’s dark gaze shifted to the trailer. The look in his eyes transformed his expression to one of deadly calm. Chilled, I sat there studying him. “Cheers,” I said finally, and gulped a deep swallow of wine.

He didn’t stop watching the trailer until the noise faded away. Then he exhaled, blinked, and returned his attention to me. “The pepper spray won’t do you much good,” he said, “unless you’re about to cook dinner for me.” He frowned at my ridiculous lipstick-sized canister.

“It works well enough. If you spot a biker with a purple ponytail coming this way, let me know. He has a drug habit, and he’s a little too obnoxious when he’s wasted.”

He craned his head, staring past me suddenly. He was like a hawk. He didn’t miss a sound, a movement. The soft hum of the RV’s electrical system serenaded us. A long cord
ran from the air conditioner to a post in the ground. “What’s that light in the window?” he asked. “Did you light a candle?”

I swiveled to look, then faced him again. “My sister did it. She likes candles. Aromatherapy. She says the scent helps her headaches. I say they make our camper smell like soap.”

He didn’t laugh. I studied his straight-backed posture with a sinking heart. “Look, Mr. Cameron, you’ve come a long way to see my sister and me. What do you and your aunt really want from us? What’s this offer I can’t refuse? You and I have never even met before. You only met my parents once, and you were just a little boy then.”

“If it’s that simple, and you don’t give a damn, then why did you remember me so quickly? No matter what your father told you, you can’t deny that you didn’t forget us.”

“My father wasn’t hostile toward your family. It was just that after my mother died, he felt we had nothing in common with you. He didn’t believe in cultivating relationships that had no room to grow. His and Mom’s wedding at Cameron Hall was just a sentimental memory to him.”

“I see. Then why didn’t you listen to him and forget all about me?”

We spent several long seconds studying each other in strained silence. I spread my hands awkwardly on the table, then curled them into my lap. “I’m twenty-nine years old and you’re, what? Thirty-five? We’re not childhood pen pals anymore. You wouldn’t have gone to the trouble to find me if it wouldn’t benefit you to do it.”

The insult tightened his face and brought out a look of flat, cold-blooded scrutiny. It was a mask I’d seen on the faces of government agents. “There was a time when I believed in you,” Gib said in a low voice. “It sounds stupid now. I was the kind of kid who took things seriously. I’d lost my parents. I hated the world outside my mountains. You were the only part of that outside world that I wanted to know. But after your
mother died I never got another card from you. I was afraid you’d died, too. Even though I knew you hadn’t, I decided to forget you.”

“Wait a minute.
You
stopped writing to
me.”
I didn’t add that I’d grieved desperately over his silence, long after Pop told me Camerons had no place in our lives.

He shook his head. “I sent you letters for years.”

I stared at him. “That’s not possible. I would have gotten them. I—” My voice trailed off as I realized what had happened. Pop had intervened. I felt weighted down. “My father didn’t believe in sentiment,” I repeated wearily. “He must have thrown your cards away.”

Gib and I shared a look of troubled understanding. “Thank you for telling me the truth,” he said finally. “Even though it gives me one more reason to dislike your father.”

“He wouldn’t have judged
you
so superficially.”

“Oh? If your father were sitting here right now, I expect he’d despise me.” He held out his good hand. He wore a heavy insignia ring on his third finger. “Recognize this?” he asked.

“A college ring. So?”

“Not just any college. The Citadel.”

The Citadel. Southern bastion of military machismo, graduating generations of ultraconservative traditional males and shouting huzzahs to all-American manhood. My throat clotted on years of fantasy and the cold reality of disappointment. “No wonder you looked out of place in a lesbian bar,” I said. “You’re John Wayne.”

“There’s more. I joined the Marines right after graduation.”

“Do you want me to salute?”

“I’m everything you were raised to hate.”

Silence. We both looked away. I finally offered, “My father never said a bad word against the Camerons. He knew how it felt to be hated without good reason. No one deserves it. That was the code he lived by.” I paused. “And I certainly don’t hate you. All I ask is fairness. I give fairness in return.”

“All right.”

“So you were a career Marine until …?”

He shook his head. “I did what I was best suited for. What I’d always wanted to do since my parents were killed. I loved feeling that I was standing between an innocent person and danger. I loved feeling like I was out there”—he waved his good hand at the world beyond—“keeping everything safe for what I loved. Can you sympathize with that, now that you know me a little?”

“Of course. And I don’t need to hear—” I halted. “What
kind
of career did you go into after college and a stint in the Marines?”

“I went to work for the U.S. Treasury Department.”

The Treasury Department? “You were an agent for the Treasury Department,” I echoed blankly, scrutinizing him. Some unfound piece of this puzzle floated in my mind disturbingly, but I couldn’t place it.

“I transferred around the country a lot, tracking counterfeiters, working on cases involving credit-card fraud, that kind of thing. But I finally got transferred to the division I’d wanted all along. Worked like a dog to win that honor. It was the proudest day of my life. The proudest day for my family.”

The implications were spinning into place. Only my obsessive backtracking over other details kept me from making the connection. “I’ve worked all over the world,” he continued. “I’ve been privy to conversations with kings and queens and prime ministers. I’ve slept in the finest hotels, eaten the finest food, danced with the prettiest women, and traveled first-class. In fact, better than first-class.”

“So you were some kind of corrupt bureaucrat in the Treasury Department.” I uttered a sharp laugh. “Not that there’s any such thing as an honest bureaucrat.”

“My lifestyle wasn’t exactly glamorous,” he went on in a flat voice. “I’ve been spit on in public, and kicked, and hit, and shot at, and stabbed with a letter opener once, by a little old lady in Iowa who thought I was keeping her from the private meeting some tiny green Martians promised to set up for
her. I was sworn to take whatever the world threw at me. Sworn to give up my life if need be to protect the symbol of everything your dad wanted to tear down.”

Suddenly I understood. Shock washed over me. I pivoted toward him. Government agents were no better than Nazis to me, and he’d just told me he had belonged to their most elite group. “You were a Secret Service agent.” I almost choked on the words.

He nodded.

I had good reason to hate him now.

“I’m with the United States Treasury Department,” the man in the dark gray suit repeated, unsmilingly, after I insisted he hold up his badge and his driver’s license.

It was only a few days after Pop’s death. We hadn’t even buried him yet. It had been a week of constant interrogations, of men tearing our house apart and pushing me into corners. “You’re from around here,” I said to the man, as I inspected his credentials. Even his photo had the crisp look of a mortician. His chin was shaved so closely I could see a blue vein beside his mouth. “I thought the Secret Service was in Washington.”

“I’m from the New Orleans office,” he explained. “We have field offices everywhere.” He looked at me as if he had daughters but they didn’t talk back; he looked impatient. He stepped past me, latching a hand on the smooth, polished door framed by purple clematis. He didn’t say another word as he walked into the front hall and onward to the living room.

He placed a tape recorder on the coffee table, removed a large notepad from his jacket, then sat down on the couch among the stacks of linen tablecloths I’d been folding. “Pull up that ottoman and have a seat across from the tape recorder
here, Venus,” he ordered casually, “and answer some questions for me.”

I was ragged in grimy jeans and a T-shirt. I’d slept only a couple of hours a night. Each morning I presided over the dumped-out contents of every drawer in the house. The chaos had reduced me to small, obsessive efforts to fix, to replace, to restore order that was lost forever. “I don’t understand.”

“Sit,” the man barked.

I continued to stand, swaying. My head felt like a balloon. “My father didn’t kill anybody. And he certainly didn’t threaten the President.”

“That’s not my problem. How he manipulated money is my area of interest. Credit cards, illegal transfers, fraudulent accounts, interstate financial shenanigans.”

“I don’t know anything. He never discussed any of it with my sister and me. I’ve told so many people already.”

“He discussed it enough to make you understand which files needed to be gotten rid of once he was in trouble.”

“I’ve told everybody. A friend said he needed the files. I thought my father wanted him to have them.”

“Sit down, please.”

“I don’t think I should talk to you. I thought the Secret Service protected the President and other VIPs.”

“That’s part of what we do. Now, you don’t have any idea whether your dad messed with funny money, do you?”

“I don’t have to talk to you without our lawyer here. Why don’t you leave, please?”

He stood. He took two long steps around the coffee table, nothing urgent about him, then suddenly he snatched me by the shoulders and shoved me onto the ottoman. He bent over me, his face beet-red and his eyes furious. “You self-righteous young woman,” he yelled. “You’re gonna end up in jail just like your old Commie-lovin’ dad. You’ve got nothing and nobody to cover for your pampered little behind anymore. This is not a piano contest. Your dad raised you and your sister in a sewer of filthy money. Everything in this fancy house reeks
with the stink. From the clothes you wear”—he tugged at the sleeve of my T-shirt—“to the food in your kitchen, you have not got one thing to your name that can’t be taken away under the law. Because there’s not a damned dollar of your father’s money or his business or his belongings that isn’t tinged with the dirty red color of death and crime.”

“Nobody can claim our house and take away everything.”