Line of Fire (9 page)

14

T
he hallway was short. I held back. “Just a sec,” I said. “I want to see that deep bathtub you were talking about.”

She had a puzzled look. “Men don’t usually care much about the bathroom.”

• • •

Sam had told me that the tub was full during his visit to the cottage.

He had also described a fresh razor blade resting on the edge of the bathroom sink. Lauren had said that it was a single-edged blade. I imagined one like the ones painters use to scrape stray streaks or splatters from glass. Sam, I was sure, had added the blade to the tableau. One of the options for Currie was to make a precise vertical cut, or two, into a visible vein in her wrist.

I didn’t know the progression of events. Had Sam started running the bath after he arrived? Or had Currie been drawing her own bath at the moment he surprised her? The plan for the evening, either way, would have required that Currie accomplish the tough cut and bleed out into the tub.

Did Sam consider making that cut for her? It would have made for a most intimate murder. His ex-lover would have been naked in the bath. Sam would have been kneeling beside the tub holding her forearm rigid. The hand in which he gripped the blade would have needed to be steady.

If Currie struggled, she would have ended up with bruises from his grip or random slashes from the blade. Sam would have been concerned about premorbid bruising or awkward cuts showing up during a post.

No, the razor option would have had to be Currie’s wish. Her show. Sam would have had to wait while that played out. I wondered how long it had taken for her to decide she couldn’t do it. Had she undressed? Or entered the tub? I didn’t know. Sam would not show patience with her indefinitely. He would have been concerned about how long it would take for Currie to bleed out. The variables, of course, were the chosen vessel and the quality of the cut. Artery? Should be quick. The pump that was the beating heart would do all the heavy lifting. A dripping vein, though? That would mean a slow death. Sam would not have wanted to watch.

And he, literally, didn’t have all night.

• • •

The edge of the sink was adjacent to the bathtub. Grandma’s soaking tub was narrow but deep. Well-scrubbed stains around the drain were evidence of decades of struggle against the high mineral content of the local water.

“Nice tub,” I said.

“Told you,” Izza replied.

I gestured toward the stains. I said, “Well water?”

She nodded. “Couple of big cisterns, too. Plenty of pressure. We get the stains everywhere. If I still lived here I would use one of those water filter things. The pitchers? For drinking? All the fracking I hear about has me worried, too. That big Wattenberg Field? It starts right near here.”

“Good idea,” I said. “I can get one of those filters.”

All the damn fracking had me worried, as well. But I didn’t say that.

I didn’t recall Sam mentioning the bedroom of Currie’s house. It hadn’t been on the itinerary of the tour he’d described on the night of her death. I didn’t step into the bedroom because I didn’t see a need. From the doorway, the room appeared small and barren. As promised, it lacked a bed. A too-small for modern needs closet was on the far wall, door open. A solitary nightstand appeared to have been built from a kit. The dresser was beat-up honey oak—a Sears or Montgomery Ward catalog model from early in the last century, long before this house was built.

“I’d recommend an area rug over there,” Izza said. She pointed across the bedroom. Her breathing changed. “But maybe that’s just me. I hate getting out of bed in the morning and putting my feet on the cold floor.” I didn’t reply right away. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other.

I felt the awkwardness between us again. I stepped back toward the living room, stopping at the edge of the spot that we’d both avoided earlier.

Izza was half a step behind me—for the first time I could detect a sweet scent from her. In a voice that was halfway to a whisper, she said, “Somebody died here. I don’t
have
to tell you that, it’s not a legal requirement, but I think you sense it. Like I said, I’m an honest person.” I turned my head, trying to keep my expression neutral. “Do you feel something?” she asked. “Here? In this room?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Every old house has a spot where someone has died. Maybe that’s what I feel. Nothing . . . bad. Nothing that bothers me.”

Izza swept her right arm in a large circle in front of her. “Someone died
right
 . . . here. Gunshot. Suicide.” She strung out the long
i
at the end of the last word for a good two seconds. It gave me a chill, the way she highlighted the sound, as though she were determined that the
i—
the very personal pronoun—embedded in suicide not be forgotten.

“On this spot.” Izza touched the tip of her index finger below her chin, pointing it slightly upward. She pressed hard, deflecting her flesh inward.

I was grateful that she didn’t mimic the actual gunshot.

• • •

As I stood in that forlorn Los Alamos phone booth, Sam had left me with the impression that he’d aimed to impact Currie’s brain-stem with the slug. I didn’t doubt that he’d aimed well. My mental clip of the night’s events had Currie dead before gravity finished drawing her all the way to the floor.

• • •

I said, “Earlier, when we walked through? You walked around this area as though you wanted to avoid it. Did you see it? I mean afterward? What happened?”

“No. I was at school. At UNC. A few days later, the propane guy was here, topping the tanks, checking the lines. He smelled something coming from the cottage. He told Daddy that he thought there might be a dead animal under the stairs in back, or in the crawl space. Daddy saw the body on the floor when he looked through the front window.

“Everybody was gone by the time I got here. The cops. The coroner. The body.”

“Did you know him?” I said. “The tenant who died?” Then I offered a prophylactic, “I’m sorry, you know. If you did.”

“It was a woman. New tenant. Couple of weeks is all she’d lived here. She was somebody Old Elias met at a horse show. She mentioned to him that she was looking to live on a ranch. Hoped to get a horse. He told her about the cottage and that he thought there was a vacancy coming up. She came out to take a look. Daddy was still involved then. He liked her. Heck, everyone around here liked her. I’d only met her once. She was busy in the corral, working one of the boarded horses. She did it for fun. Daddy said it was like having a free hand living on the ranch, said he was sure she was going to be the best tenant ever. And then . . .”

I gave Izza a moment to complete her thought before I said, “With the smell . . . bad enough to get the propane guy’s attention, she must have been dead for a while.”

“Three days, they told us. But Elias Tres, bless his heart, said it was four. So . . . let’s say it was four.”

Izza had mentioned Elias twice. “Elias is . . . ?”

“Oh, sorry. The big house at the corner? Across the way. You passed it on your way in. With all those gables?”

I shrugged. It hadn’t made an impression.

“It belongs to Old Elias. Big Elias. Elias Tres is the one who said it was four days, not three, that the body had been there before the propane guy smelled it.

“Big Elias is . . .” Izza didn’t finish her thought. “Elias Tres?” She beamed. “He’ll talk to anybody about anything.” She shook her head and smiled. “I swear that boy’ll make your head spin.”

“The Eliases are father and son?” I asked.

“Grandfather and grandson. Elias Tres’s father was an Elias, too, so there were three. But nobody ever called him Elias. Everyone called him Segundo. You know, second. The second Elias.” Izza blinked quickly, turning her face away from mine. “Segundo was killed in Afghanistan, on his second tour. A marine. He’d survived one terrible year in Iraq. Having him back here after that was a blessing. And then . . .”

She was rushing the final thoughts from her mouth, as though she knew if she didn’t hurry she would never get the words out of her body. I thought I saw the shimmer of tears forming in Izza’s eyes before she turned away.

I made an assumption that a story of Segundo’s death would have a special chapter, written just for her. Or just about her, and the meaning of her loss. Every soldier who died for the rest of us left unwritten chapters behind for survivors like Izza, stories that the rest of us rarely took the time to know.

I was curious about Izza and Segundo, and what they’d shared that ended with his death. “Segundo’s death touched many people?” I said, hoping to draw her out.

“Oh yeah. That little boy still doesn’t accept, in his heart, that his daddy isn’t coming home. I mean, he knows. But . . . he doesn’t. Does that make sense? It is so sad.”

I pushed. “Is Elias Tres’s mother in the picture? Is it just the two Eliases?”

Izza said, “No, she’s long gone. She and Segundo never should have married. She got pregnant in high school.” She shrugged her shoulders at the mundanity of the story. “I used to babysit Tres. But not so much since Segundo died.”

“Is Big Elias married?”

“He was.” She smiled an uncomfortable smile. “He’s a hard man. People say he scared her off. I don’t know. That was right after I was born.”

I waited for Izza to offer more. She didn’t. I told her I understood. I didn’t.

Izza said, “Elias Tres was called Tercera when he was a little boy. Like his daddy was Second, Elias was Third. But after Segundo . . . didn’t come home from Afghanistan, Big Elias decided he didn’t like Tercera. As a name.

“One day he told Megan down at the bank that he thought it sounded gay—he called it ‘queer,’ of course.” Izza rolled her eyes. “And that day he began telling everyone to call his grandson Elias Tres. For three. Uno, dos, tres? Like that?”

I finally understood the genesis of the little boy’s name. In my mind, I switched the spelling from Elias T-r-a-c-e, which is how I’d been mentally translating the sound, to Elias T-r-e-s.

I decided to see what a hard turn would do to Izza’s composure. “Had to be upsetting for everyone,” I said. “The suicide? Does anyone know why she did it?”

Izza wiped at her eyes before she faced me again. The tears, I thought, were complicated. They had started when the conversation went to Segundo’s death, and accelerated when I asked about his son’s family.

“No one knows. It surprised Daddy and he probably knew her best. Him and Elias Tres. Tres was down here whenever she was here, is what I understand. But he was only five then. Is that right? Oh, ask him. He’ll tell you for sure. Down to the number of days. Hours. What the weather was on his birthday. Who came to his party. That boy.” She smiled before she tightened her jaw. “It was a difficult time.”

Is Big Elias the new witness? Is the boy?
I wondered.

“Difficult how?” I asked. Izza shook her head. I changed my tack. “Your father lives in the larger house on the other side of the barn?”

“When he’s well enough. He’s sick—in and out of the hospital a lot.”

If we were in my office with her, I would have said,
Tell me about your father,
or more simply,
Tell me
. Instead, I resumed my fact-finding. I asked, “Did she leave a suicide note?”

“I wish she did. What she left was a mess to clean up, some sad people, a brokenhearted little boy, and a whole lot of questions that will never get answered.”

I gave her a moment. “And a long story you feel compelled to tell when a nosy prospective tenant starts asking too many questions?”

“That, too,” she said. “You got me talking.” She wagged a finger at me while she forgave me with a small grin.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should mind my own business.”

“What do you think? About the place?”

“I like it. But it sounds like I may have only a few hours to decide if I love it.”

“It usually goes fast. The rent is fair.” She raised her arms halfheartedly and wiggled her hips. “And the landlord is a gem.” She ended her jig, looked down at my feet, stepped back, and tracked her eyes all the way back up to mine. “Can you drive a tractor? If you can, there’s a way to get a break on your rent. Daddy’s no longer able to move the snow off the drive. If you could do that, it’d be great. But you will have to be able to drive the tractor.”

“Could you show me how to do it?”

“I could try.”

I waited for her to meet my eyes. “Izza? Is there anything I need to know about your father?”

“Daddy?” She hesitated before she said, “No,” in a way that I didn’t find entirely convincing.

“Any neighbor issues? With Big Elias?”

She began leading me toward the front door. “Nothing that you have to concern yourself with.”

“You’re sure? I don’t like walking into . . . situations.”

She turned away from me before she said, “Daddy and Big Elias were friends. Now they’re not. It is what it is. They’re old. They get cranky.” She looked up while she nodded, as though she were convincing herself. “Daddy’s sick. No worries for you.”

Before we stepped outside into the wind, I asked, “What are you studying? At UNC?”

“Criminal justice,” she said.

15

T
he last time didn’t go as I thought it would,” was how Amanda began her second appointment. It was the first Monday in October. “I had an expectation that you would tell me what to do. I thought my time was going to be about helping my friend.”

She paused. She crossed her legs. She touched her hair. Her posture didn’t waver, not even a little. The silence between us grew to twenty seconds, then thirty.

“But you—” She stopped herself. “You kept insisting that it was about me. That what I was talking about, my concern, was about me.”

I could have offered her encouragement. I didn’t. I didn’t want to interrupt; that was part of it. I was also curious about the process, what would emerge next.

Amanda said, “My brother died when I was fourteen, almost fifteen. He was sixteen when he died. Almost seventeen.”

She smiled, the solitary asymmetrical dimple emerging for half a second.

My instinct—human, not therapeutic—left me tempted to say, “I’m so sorry.” I didn’t. Her words felt like preamble. Something about the way she began the narrative—the “almost fifteen” and the coy smile—left me with a hunch that the story about her brother’s death wasn’t entirely about her loss.

I thought,
This feels like last week.

“He was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma when he was fourteen.” She reached up, her fingertips grazing a hollow on the right side of her neck.

I guessed that she had absently touched the location on her body where his first lymphoma was discovered on his. I kept the guess to myself.

“Your brother was diagnosed young,” I said. I had treated a couple of non-Hodgkin’s patients for therapy over the years. The disease is relatively rare in younger teenagers, especially among non-African-Americans.

“Yeah. His cancer was aggressive. The treatment, too, right from the start. Chemo. Radiation. Surgery. His spleen was removed. God. I didn’t even know what a spleen was. The doctors were able to slow the growth at first, the spread, the new tumors, but they never really got the cancer under control. We’d have a few weeks of hope here and there, and then . . . a new lymphoma. He never really had a remission. The cancer was the first thing we thought about when we got up, and the last thing we thought about when we went to bed. He was sick from the day he was diagnosed until the day he died.”

I had my eye out for strands—perhaps one that would be as fine as spider’s silk—that might tie the story of her brother’s illness and death to the concerns that Amanda had voiced during our last session about her friend.

“We were living in Texas. In Austin. We’d just moved there like a year before for my dad’s work. From Ohio. He’d been unemployed—he was always unlucky with work. He got the job in Texas managing a big truck repair shop. Things were okay, then
bang
!
Cancer. My brother was being treated in Houston, at MD Anderson—it’s a big cancer center at UT. At first, he and my mom traveled back and forth for his treatments. I would stay in Austin, sort of look after my dad.”

Amanda made an incongruous face. I filed it. I began to wonder whether this story was about her sick brother or her feckless father, or both.

“The last year, my brother stayed in Houston. Eventually, I went, too, to help. Money was a problem. My mom had to get a job down there. She worked nights. Cashier, waitress. I’d stay with my brother while she worked. I enrolled in high school there. I didn’t fit in. No one else had a brother who was dying.”

I said, “You had been sort of caring for your dad in Austin. Then you began caring for your brother in Houston.” I was restating facts she had shared, but by juxtaposing them I was highlighting her roles.

She heard that part. “My dad was a mess. He needed my mom. Not me.”

Were the larger story not so grand, I might have encouraged a detour to reflect on the mess her father was in, and her inadequacy to help. But the larger story about her dying brother was that grand, and any detour determined by me was perilous.

I said, “What you’re describing must have been very disruptive. To move twice, for the reasons you had to move, to leave your friends and school behind each time. To feel the”—I chose the next word I spoke after some deliberation—“obligation to take care of your brother. I can only imagine how it felt.”

“It wasn’t an obligation,” she said. “I felt better in Houston. I belonged there.”

Amanda did something then that I would become more familiar with as I got to know her better. She bit down gently on one side of her lower lip. The asymmetry was a stark contrast to her almost perfect comportment. I thought she looked ten years younger when she bit down on her lip. I imagined I was seeing the girl who’d been in Houston.

“My brother had a lot of B symptoms by the time that I went down to help. They were my job. The B symptoms.”

“B symptoms?” I said. I didn’t know the term.

“Secondary symptoms. They got worse when the lymphomas got worse. God, let’s see, he had abdominal pain. Awful back pain, itching, oh the itching, fever, sweating. Night sweats. Muscle aches. I would do what I could.

“We were living at Ronald McDonald House. We had a little two-room suite thing. That was home. My mom and I had fold-up cots. In the evenings, my mom was gone. The nurses were great, but they had other patients. My big brother—my big, strong, tough brother—would . . . cry from the pain sometimes. He’d weep.”

Amanda bit down on her lip again. “He didn’t like narcotics. He would take them sometimes, he had to, but he hated the way they made him feel.”

I was beginning to sense the psychological terrain that Amanda was crossing, and was beginning to make some tenuous guesses about the reason she was crossing it that day with me. I was wary though, skeptical that what I was seeing indicated progress; patients without a significant psychotherapy history rarely demonstrate evidence of that kind of forward motion early in treatment.

She went on. “I started hating the sun going down. Mom would be at work. Often, by the time it was dark my brother would be in agony. I did what I could. I did what the nurses told me to do. They said to stay positive. To distract him. To make him laugh. Towels in ice water for his forehead. Hot packs for his gut. Creams on his skin for the itching. This medicine. That medicine. We played cards. I sang to him. I read to him. I was, like, Ronald’s apprentice clown. On bad nights? Nothing helped for more than a minute or two. Five, if I was lucky.”

Amanda’s shoulders sank. She seemed to deflate. “It was,” she said, “exhausting. Everybody who was staying in Ronald’s place had cancer. Or something just as bad. Everywhere I looked I saw sick kids. Cancer. Cancer. Cancer.”

“Everybody?” I said, repeating her word. “You felt as though you had it, too?”

“We all had it. He was the only one who was going to die from it. But we all had cancer. We felt its ups and downs. We felt these big forces, too. The things that could change a good day into a wreck, or a hopeful week into a crisis. Or any kind of future into a fantasy.” She stopped abruptly. “He’d have a good morning one day and I’d convince myself he was getting better. Then there’d be bad labs or a bad scan. Hope?
Poof
.”

Amanda shifted the focus of her eyes about twenty degrees away from mine.

I thought they were aimed vaguely, or specifically, in the direction of her past.

“Anyway,” she said. “One night I was out in the kitchen, a big communal space where family members would get together and cook and talk. Hoping I would see somebody I liked. A little break. Eventually it was time to go back. I walked in without knocking—before I left he’d started drifting in and out of sleep, and if he was asleep I didn’t want to wake him.

“He moved his hand the second I stuck my head in the door. I could see the outline of an erection below the sheet.”

Amanda took a quick breath before she continued. “I was a young girl—I hadn’t seen an erection, not in real life. But I knew about them. I looked away, at his face. That almost made things worse, because I could see his embarrassment. He raised his leg, bending the knee between me and his boner, but it didn’t hide . . . anything. His dick was pointing up toward his belly button. I was kind of embarrassed for him, so I just pretended nothing was different. I did what I did—I wiped his forehead. I gave him ice water—he always liked fresh water.

“And then I sat down beside him, and I took his hand—the same hand he’d been using to touch himself—and I probably began telling him about something funny that happened. I would make stuff up to distract him or get him to laugh.

“I remember thinking his eyes got sad as he watched his erection fade away below the sheet.”