A Place of Hiding (79 page)

“Do you need to?”

“She was my sister. So, yeah. I God damn need to.”

Deborah left the bed and joined him. Gently, she took the cord from his hands. She raised the blinds to fill the room with daylight, and the distant sun of December struck their faces.

“You sold her virginity to Matthew Whitecomb,” Deborah said. “She found out, Cherokee. She wanted you to pay.”

He made no reply.

“She thought he loved her. All this time. He kept coming back no matter what happened between them and she thought that meant what it didn't mean. She knew that he was cheating on her with other women but she believed that, in the end, he'd grow out of all that and want to be with her.”

Cherokee leaned forward. He rested his forehead against the cool pane of the window. “He
was
cheating,” Cherokee murmured. “But it was with her. Not
on
her.
With
her. What the hell did she think? One weekend a month? Two if she got real lucky? A trip to Mexico five years ago and a cruise when she was twenty-one? The asshole's
married,
Debs. Has been for eighteen months and he wouldn't fucking
tell
her. And there she was hanging on and on and I couldn't . . . I just couldn't be the one. I couldn't do that to her. I didn't want to see her face. So I told her how it all came about in the first place because I hoped that would be enough to piss her off and break her away from him.”

“You mean . . . ?” Deborah could hardly stand to complete the thought, so horrific it was in its consequences. “You didn't sell her? She only
thought . . .
Fifty dollars and a surfboard? To Matt? You didn't do that?”

He turned his head away. He looked down into the car park of the hospital, where a taxi was pulling into the loading zone. As they watched, Simon got out of the car. He spoke to the driver for a moment, and the taxi remained behind as he approached the front doors.

“You've been sprung,” Cherokee said to Deborah.

She insisted, “Did you not sell her to Matt?”

He said, “Got your things together? We c'n meet him in the lobby if you'd like.”

“Cherokee,” she said.

He replied, “Hell, I wanted to surf. I needed a board. It wasn't enough to borrow one. I wanted my own.”

“Oh God,” Deborah sighed.

“It wasn't supposed to be such a big deal,” Cherokee said. “It wasn't a big deal for Matt, and with any other chick it wouldn't have been a big deal either. But how was I supposed to know how China would take it, what she'd think was supposed to grow out of it if she ‘gave' herself to some loser? Jesus, Debs, it was just a screw.”

“And you, in effect, were just a pimp.”

“It wasn't
like
that. I could tell she had a thing for him. I didn't see the harm. She wouldn't ever have known about the deal if she hadn't become a roll of human Glad wrap throwing her life away on a stupid son of a bitch. So I had to tell her. She gave me no choice. It was for her own good.”

“Like the deal itself?” Deborah asked. “That wasn't all about you, Cherokee? What you wanted and how you'd use your sister to get it? It wasn't like that?”

“Okay. Yeah. It was. But she wasn't supposed to take it so seriously. She was supposed to move on.”

“Right. Well. She didn't move on,” Deborah pointed out. “Because it's tough to do that when you don't have the facts.”

“She
had
the damn facts. She just didn't want to see them. Jesus. Why couldn't she ever let anything go? God,
everything
festered inside her. She couldn't get past how she thought things should be.”

Deborah knew he was right in at least that one respect: China had put a price tag on things, always feeling herself owed far more than was actually on offer. Deborah had finally seen that in her last conversation with the other woman: She'd expected too much of people, of life. In those expectations she had sown the seeds of her own destruction.

“And the worst of it is that she didn't need to do it, Debs,” Cherokee said. “No one was holding a gun to her head. He made the moves. I put them together in the first place, yeah. But she let it happen. She went on letting it. So how the hell could that've been my fault?”

Deborah didn't have the answer to that question. Too much fault, she thought, had been assessed upon or rejected by members of the River family through the years.

A quick knock on the door brought Simon into the room to join them. He carried what she hoped was the paperwork that would release her from Princess Elizabeth Hospital. He nodded at Cherokee but directed his question to Deborah.

“Ready to go home?” he asked her.

“More than anything else,” she said.

Chapter 32

F
RANK
O
USELEY WAITED TILL
the twenty-first of December, the shortest day and longest night of the year. Sunset would come early, and he wanted sunset. The long shadows it provided felt comfortable to him, giving him protection from any prying eyes who might inadvertently witness the final act in his personal drama.

At half past three he took up the parcel. A cardboard box, it had sat on top of the television set since he'd brought it home from St. Sampson. A band of tape kept its flaps closed, but Frank had earlier lifted this tape to check on the contents. A plastic bag now held what remained of his father. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. The colour of the substance was somewhere between the two, lighter and darker simultaneously, ridged by the occasional fragment of bone.

Somewhere in the Orient, he knew, they picked through the ashes of the dead. The family gathered and with chopsticks in hand, they lifted out what remained of the bones. He didn't know what they did with those bones—they likely used them for family reliquaries much as the bones of martyrs had once been used to sanctify early Christian churches. But that was something he didn't intend to do with his father's ashes. What bones there were would become part of the place to which Frank had determined to deposit the rest of his father.

He'd thought first of the reservoir. The spot where his mother had drowned could have received his father with little trouble, even if he didn't scatter the remains into the water itself. Then he considered the tract of land near St. Saviour's Church, where the wartime museum had been meant to stand. But he concluded that a sacrilege existed in disposing of his father at a site where men utterly unlike him were meant to be honoured.

Carefully, he carried his father out to the Peugeot and rested him snugly on the passenger seat, cushioned all the way round by an old beach towel that he'd used as a boy. Just as carefully, he drove out of the Talbot Valley. The trees were completely bare now, with only the stands of oaks still leafy on the gentle slope of the valley's south side. And even here, many of the leaves lay on the ground, colouring the comforting, large trunks of the trees with a cape of saffron and umber.

Daylight left the Talbot Valley sooner than it did the rest of the island. Folded into a landscape of undulating hillsides eroded by centuries of stream, the occasional cottage along the road already showed bright lights in its windows. But as Frank emerged from the valley into St. Andrew, the land itself changed and so did the light. Hillside grazing for the island cows gave over to agriculture and hamlets, where cottages with a score of greenhouses behind them all drank in and reflected the last of the sun.

He headed east and came at St. Peter Port on the far side of Princess Elizabeth Hospital. From there, it was no difficult feat to get to Fort George. Although daylight was fading, it was too early for the traffic to be a problem. Besides, at this time of year, there was little enough of it. Come Easter, the roads would begin to fill.

He waited only for a tractor to lumber through the intersection at the end of Prince Albert Road. After that, he made good time to Fort George, skimming through its thick stone archway just as the sun struck the picture windows of the sprawling houses inside the fort. This place had long since been used for any military purpose, despite its name, but unlike other of the fortresses on the island—from Doyle to
le Crocq—
this was also no ruin of granite and brick. Its proximity to St. Peter Port as well as its views of Soldiers' Bay had made it a prime location for exiles from Her Majesty's revenue collectors to build their sumptuous homes. So they had done so: behind tall hedges of box and yew, behind wrought iron fences with electric gates, set back on lawns next to which stood Mercedes-Benzes and Jaguars.

A car like Frank's would have been looked upon with suspicion had he chosen to drive it anywhere within the fort other than directly to the cemetery, which was situated, as luck and irony would have it, on the most scenically advantageous part of the entire area. It occupied an east-facing slope at the southern end of the old military grounds. Its entrance was marked by a war memorial in the shape of an enormous granite cross in which a sword—embedded in the stone—duplicated the grey cruciform into which it had been placed. The irony might have been intentional. It probably was. The cemetery thrived on irony.

Frank parked in the gravel just beneath the memorial and crossed the lane to the cemetery's entrance. From there he could see the smaller islands of both Herm and Jethou rising in the mist across a placid stretch of water. From there, also, a concrete ramp—ridged against the possibility of a mourner falling in inclement weather—sloped down to the graveyard which comprised a set of terraces that had been carved out of the hillside. Set at a right angle to these terraces, a retaining wall of Rocquaine Blue held a bronze bas relief of people in profile, perhaps citizens or soldiers or victims of war. Frank could not tell. But an inscription in the relief
—Life lives beyond the grave—
suggested that those bronze figures represented the souls of the departed laid to rest in this place, and the carving itself had been fashioned into a door that, when opened, revealed the actual names of the interred.

He did not read them. He merely stopped, placed the cardboard box of his father's ashes on the ground, and opened it to remove the plastic bag.

He descended the steps to the first of the terraces. Here were buried the brave men of the island who had given their lives in World War I. They lay beneath old elms in precise lines that were marked by holly and pyracantha. Frank passed them by and continued downward.

He knew the point in the graveyard at which he would begin his solitary ceremony. The headstones there marked graves more recent than World War I, each of them identical to the other. They were simple white stone with the single decoration of a cross whose shape would have identified them unmistakably had not the names carved into them done so.

Frank descended to this group of graves. There were one hundred and eleven of them, so one hundred and eleven times would he dip his hand into the bag of ashes and one hundred and eleven times would he let what remained of his father drift through his fingers and settle on the final resting places of those German men who had come to occupy—and who had died upon—the island of Guernsey.

He began the process. At first it was hideous to him: his living flesh coming into contact with his father's incinerated remains. When the first bone fragment grazed against his palm, he shuddered and felt his stomach heave. He paused then and steeled his nerves to the rest of it. He read each name, the dates of birth and of death, as he consigned his father to the company of those he'd chosen as comrades.

He saw that some of them had been mere boys, nineteen- and twenty-year-olds who may well have been away from their homes for the very first time. He wondered how they'd experienced this small place that was Guernsey after the large land from which they'd come. Had it seemed like an outposting to another planet? Or had it been a blessed rescue from bloody combat on the front lines? How must it have felt to them to have had such power and to have been simultaneously so utterly despised?

But not by all, of course. That was the tragedy of that place and that time. Not everyone had seen them as an enemy to be scorned.

Frank moved mechanically among the graves, descending tier after tier until he had emptied the plastic sack entirely. When he was done, he walked to the marker at the bottom of the cemetery and he stood for a moment, looking back up the hill at the rows of graves, at the way he had come.

He saw that, although he'd left a small handful of his father's ashes on every German soldier's resting place, no sign of them remained. The ashes had settled into the ivy, the holly, and the creeper that grew in patches upon the graves, and there transformed into mere dust, a thin skin lying like an ephemeral mist that would not survive the first gust of wind.

That wind would come. It would bring with it rain. This would swell the streams which would gush from the hillsides down into the valleys and from there to the sea. Some of the dust that was his father would join it. The rest would remain, part of the earth that covered the dead. Part of the earth that gave succour to the living.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A
S ALWAYS,
I
AM
indebted to a number of people who assisted me during the creation of this novel.

On the lovely Channel Island of Guernsey, I must thank Inspector Trevor Coleman of the States Police, the kindly people of the Citizens Advice Bureau, and Mr. R. L. Heaume, the director of the German Occupation Museum in Forest.

In the UK, I am continually in the debt of Sue Fletcher, my editor at Hodder & Stoughton, as well as her wonderful and resourceful assistant, Swati Gamble. I extend my thanks additionally to Kate Brandice of the American embassy.

In France, the generosity of my regular translator, Marie-Claude Ferrer, enabled me to create some of the dialogue in the novel, while Veronika Kreuzhage in Germany provided me with the necessary translations related to the World War II artifacts.

In the United States, Professor Jonathan Petropolous aided my understanding of the Nazi “repatriation of art,” both in person and through his invaluable book
The Faustian Bargain.
Dr. Tom Ruben graciously supplied me with medical information when necessary, Bill Hull helped me to understand the architect's profession, and my fellow writer wRobert Crais allowed me to pick his brains about money-laundering. I'm extremely grateful to Susan Berner for being willing to read an early draft of this novel, and I'm additionally grateful to my husband, Tom McCabe, for his patience and his respect of the time it takes to put a novel together. Lastly, of course, I could not have even begun this book without the constant presence, assistance, and good cheer of my assistant, Dannielle Azoulay.

Books which I found helpful during the creation of this novel were the aforementioned
The Faustian Bargain
by Jonathan Petropolous,
The Silent War
by Frank Falla,
Living with the Enemy
by Roy McLoughlin,
Buildings in the Town and Parish of St. Peter Port
by C.E.B. Brett,
Folklore of Guernsey
by Marie De Garis,
Landscape of the Channel Islands
by Nigel Jee,
Utrecht Painters of the Dutch Golden Age
by Christopher Brown, and
Vermeer and Painting in Delft
by Alex Rüger.

Finally a word about
St. Barbara.
Students of art history will know that while the painting I describe in this novel does not exist, the drawing which I attribute to Pieter de Hooch certainly does. It is, however, not by Pieter de Hooch at all but by Jan van Eyck. My purpose in callously altering its creator had to do with the period of time during which it was drawn and during which van Eyck painted. Had he actually painted
St. Barbara,
he would have composed his masterpiece on oak board, as was the practice at that time. For purposes of my novel, I needed canvas, which did not come into widespread use until a later period. I hope I'll be forgiven for this manhandling of art history.

There will, naturally, be errors in the book. These are mine alone and not attributable to any of the fine people who helped me.