Flightfall (7 page)

When you know you are dying, the world shifts into a pastel phase. All the tastes, sights, smells, and sounds of this life grow dull, washing like detritus onto some bone cold beach.

That’s how I have always imagined it, at least.

Now that I am actually closing in on the end I realize I need a new set of suppositions.

Tears fill my eyes at the sight of a hummingbird outside. The toast and honey I washed down with my afternoon coffee never tasted so sweet. From somewhere down the block, I hear the music of a baby’s cry, and even the roaring assault of my neighbor’s leaf blower rings of an orderly and benevolent domesticity. Nothing bad should ever happen when you are feeling and——maybe for the first time——really seeing such things.

Lori sits with me in the waning heat of the day, her gaze straying out the bedroom window at the rose bushes her mother used to tend. The light plays tricks with her cheeks. Still pretty, but I can’t help but notice the first signs of wrinkles around her eyes—shadows of things to come. The air smells of the lingering traces of Lori’s unidentifiable perfume. Her chair creaks as she kicks off her shoes and stretches her feet, legs suspended in midair.

“What did you eat for lunch today, Dad?”

She must have a million better things to do than hang around here with her old man.

“I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“You heard me.”

“Would you believe beet, string bean, and cauliflower soufflé?”

“Hardly.”

I smile, focusing on the quilt that covers my legs, double wedding ring pattern, one of Rebecca’s many family heirlooms. Perched on the edge of the dresser, my antiquated television plays something softly in the background. “Guess I’m not the only keen-eyed detective in the room.”

“And getting more keen-eyed by the day. You’ve been eating more of that leftover pizza, haven’t you?” Her gaze bores into mine.

“Pizza? What pizza?"

“Da-ad . . . You know there’s way too much sodium in that crap.”

“Sodium, schmodium.” I used to be much better at playing this game when I was a cop.

“You’ve got to start keeping a closer eye on your food intake.”

“You sound like some nutritional brochure.”

“You know what I mean.” Her voice grows quiet as she adjusts her skirt, picks up a paperback book from the bedside table.

She works at the public library now. Books have become her thing. She needs more time to get used to my unavoidable passing. To lose your last remaining parent is no easy thing.

“Whew." Lori begins to fan the side of her face with the book. "It’s hot in here. How do you stand it?”

“I don’t know.” I shrug. “It’s not so bad.”

She must wonder if my brain is beginning to deteriorate too. A stubborn old farm boy who grew up minus the comfort of cool inside air, I’ve taken to turning off the house air-conditioning and throwing open the windows all day to better appreciate the distant hum of traffic that floats through my Richmond West End neighborhood. Lying in wait for the tail of the occasional breeze, the smell of newly mown lawns. Lori starts to snicker, but catches herself in mid-sentence as if she needs to stifle any hint of cynical inevitability, the divided coda at which we seem to have arrived in our relationship.

“You have another doctor’s appointment the day after tomorrow, remember,” she says.

“I know. You don’t need to remind me.” I glance over her shoulder at the fading display of get-well cards on my dresser. A gift from some of my criminal justice students at VCU, it looks like it's suffering from some kind of time warp.

Lori's gaze wanders toward the open window again.

“Something is bothering you,” I say.

“What?”

“Something has you worried, I can tell.”

“No, Dad, I—”

“C'mon. Spill it.”

She manages a tired half-smile but says nothing.

“You and Alex have another blowup?”

Alex, the father of my two grandchildren, has a law degree from the University of Virginia and a lucrative practice defending well-to-do criminals to show for it. He and Lori have been married for nearly eighteen years but are “presently estranged”, as the polite like to put it. A couple of months ago Alex moved by himself into a fancy new condo downtown.

I began my career years ago with a modicum of respect for criminal lawyers and all that they go through to earn their education, not to mention uphold their end of the legal justice system. But that opinion has eroded over time. Alex hasn’t exactly been a boon for the lawyerly cause.

“No, Alex isn't the problem,” Lori says. “Not right now at least.” She hesitates, glances down at her hands. “I think I’m a failure as a mother.”

“What? What would make you say that?”

She shakes her head again and pulls her hand away.

“You're not a failure,” I tell her. “You’re one of the best mothers I’ve ever known.”

It’s Lori who has cooked breakfast for her two kids every morning for the past seventeen years, Lori who packs the school lunches, writes out the cards and wraps the birthday presents, fills out the school forms, shows up at the games and recitals and PTA meetings. She may not be the most organized person in the world, but I’ve watched her for years, and I know about the compromises she’s made. She has her mother’s heart. She has her mother’s eyes.

“Is Marnee okay?”

Barney Marnee, as her older brother Colin still likes to call her. Eight going on nine years old and not so little anymore. I still hang onto this image of Marnee when she was a toddler, jumping out of Alex and Lori’s car after it has pulled into the driveway, skipping down my walkway breathless with excitement——and I, rock-bound by an inability to show emotion, not knowing which way to turn until Marnee rushes into my arms. Something catapults time in that moment, pushing it to a spectacular radiance, like dancing, or make-believe kisses on the moon.

“Marnee’s fine,” Lori says. “The problem is Colin.”

“Oh . . .” I nod as if I really know anything anymore about teenagers. “Colin again.”

Sad to say, but I’ve been expecting trouble with my grandson. Colin isn’t a bad kid, compared with a lot I’ve seen. But unlike his sister, whose bond with her mother seems to be insulating her from the effects of the pending divorce, Colin has taken the parental breakup like a knife to the heart. He masks the pain the way any seventeen-year-old might, with an I don’t care attitude and occasional up yours kind of comment that in my father’s day would have earned him a back-of-the-hand clip across the mouth. To anyone really paying attention, the hurt leaks out of him like an oozing wound.

“You catch him smoking pot again?”

Lori shakes her head. An errant strand of hair drops over her forehead and she twirls it nervously, an ancient echo, I remember, from her own long-ago childhood.

“What then?”

“We got into an argument last night. Colin told me he wants to move in with his father.”

“Oh, he did, huh?”

The news is hardly a surprise. Alex, for all his many failings, has at least made an attempt to keep up his relationship with his son.

“The kid’s crafty, you’ve got to give him that,” I say. “You keep close tabs on him, but he knows he can get away with a lot more at his father’s. You think he blames you for the separation?”

“Could be.” She stares aimlessly into the sheet that is pulled taut against the mattress.

“Maybe I should have a talk with him.”

“I can’t ask you to do that, Dad. I mean——”

“Why not? It’s perfect, you ask me. Maybe he’ll listen for a change.”

She says nothing.

“Tell you what. You bring him by and the two of us will have a little chat, man to man.”

“Thank you,” she says. “. . . I don’t know what else to do.”

For a moment, I can't help but see her as an adolescent again herself, balanced on the precipice between innocence and worldliness, the heart-darkening knowledge that no one in this world can make everything right. I think again of her mother, wishing I could somehow reach back in time for some of Rebecca’s wisdom.

Lori’s wireless phone burbles from inside her suit coat. She reaches for it on reflex.

I’ve grown to despise the things. They intrude on life far too much for my liking. Lori stares at the display.

“It’s Colin. He’s supposed to be picking up Marnee at her day camp out in Chesterfield.” Looking annoyed, she pushes a button and welds the device to her ear. “Colin? Where are you?” She listens for a second. “You were late again? I keep telling you how important it is to be there on--”

She listens some more.

“What?” Her voice grows louder, registering anger mixed with something else, maybe fear.

I feel the need to move. I’m no invalid. Not yet, at least. I sit up and swing my legs off the bed.

The conversation goes on:

“What are you talking about?” Lori asks. More listening. “I want to speak to the camp director. Put her on the phone.”

Something must be wrong with Marnee. Maybe she’s sick of something. From the look on Lori’s face, it isn’t good. Lori slips her feet back into her shoes and, fumbling for her keys in her pocket, stands from her chair. “This can’t be happening . . . not now,” she mumbles. She smoothes the side of her suit jacket.

Memories stir in me, cases and concerns long past. When Lori gets the director on the line, she proceeds to interrogate the woman about Marnee. Listens again. “Do you even know what is happening with the children under your care?”

I can make out the director’s garbled female voice speaking into Lori’s ear, but little else.

“No. Listen, I want you to go find her right now. Do you understand? She must be someplace. I’m coming over there.” She disconnects the phone.

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“They can’t find Marnee at her camp.”

Hidden beneath a false bottom in one of the dresser drawers across from my bed, lies a thick sheaf of papers I have shown to no one—curled pages torn from a legal pad filled with my handwriting and bound together with a rubber band. I’ve been wondering if I should just go ahead and destroy the manuscript. Glancing at the top of the dresser, my thoughts race back to it now:

The Blue Hallejuah

A Memoir

By Jerry Strickland

The investigation that sent my wife Rebecca to prison started with fish. A lone fisherman on the James, at any rate, who caught more than he bargained for among the Belle Isle rocks: the partially decomposed body of a semi-nude young woman draped around a submerged log in sight of the Robert E. Lee Memorial Bridge.

The year was nineteen eighty-six. In the annals of homicide enquiries, no doubt many victims have been discovered in more exotic and colorful poses than Jacqueline Ann “Jackie” Brentlou. But the Brentlou girl was only thirteen. She was from a stable, middle-class family in Woodland Heights, the youngest of three children, and she had disappeared one beautiful spring day while walking home from school.

That made her killing far from typical of the murders my partner, Edgar Michael, and I were working in Richmond at the time. Our typical caseload consisted of gang and drug-related murders, drive-bys involving out-of-town players who plied the I-95 corridor from Miami to New York trafficking heroin or cocaine.

Officially, that didn’t make the Brentlou case more of a priority than any other. Unofficially, everyone involved, from the scene techs to the office of the Chief Medical Examiner, wanted in the worst way to find whoever was responsible killing Jackie Brentlou.

And find the killer Edgar and I did, if only too late. His name was Jacob Gramm and he had raped and murdered before. Rebecca was never able to tell the whole truth about how or why she came to know about and kill Gramm. Had she done so, she might have avoided spending the last six years of her life at the Virginia Correctional Center for Women.

During his summation at Rebecca’s trial, the Commonwealth’s attorney chose to gloss over Gramm’s guilt. Instead, he had a lot to say about vigilantism and Rebecca’s state of mind. It’s only fitting then that I rise here at the end of my days to set the record straight. If he knew what I knew, even that Commonwealth’s attorney would have to agree. Few have ever stood as falsely accused as my Rebecca . . .

END OF EXCERPT

COMING in 2012

The next full-length novel in the Frank Pavlicek series by Andy Straka:

THE K STREET HUNTING SOCIETY