Only Flesh and Bones (23 page)
Read Only Flesh and Bones Online
Authors: Sarah Andrews
The boys in suits had another twenty questions for me. I filled them in on what I knew of Fred Howard’s business dealings, finishing off with a thumbnail summation of the state of the oil business. “Foreign money’s buying out some of the midsized to small oil companies,” I said. “These are privately held corporations, so the buyout is absolute. I can only imagine what that does to boys like Fred Howard, who go from being biggish fish in the local pond to little guppies in the holding corporation ocean. Maybe he’s even looking down the barrel of a forced early retirement with reduced upside.”
The suits looked pensive for a moment,, then excused themselves. Ortega said, “They’ve been tracking Al Rosenblatt for years.”
“Who are ‘they’? FBI? DEA?”
“Don’t ask.”
“Carlos—”
He waved a hand at me. “Em, you know I can’t talk about this stuff.”
“Then they’re narcs.”
“Please, Em, you stay here with me awhile, okay?”
“But I’ve already told you everything I know.”
Ortega closed his eyes, said, “Even if they know that,
there’s such a thing as revenge.” When he opened his eyes again, they shone with moisture.
there’s such a thing as revenge.” When he opened his eyes again, they shone with moisture.
I think it was about then that I began to realize exactly how much trouble I was in.
Julia met me in the waiting room by her secretary’s desk and all but threw the journal into my lap. “There. Now it’s your problem,” she said.
“You read it, didn’t you?”
Julia set her jaw in anger. “You want to know who Chandler Jennings is? I’ll tell you who Chandler Jennings is. He’s a drug dealer, pure and simple. You wanted coke back in college, who’d you go to? Our boy Chandler. You want to know how he got that nickname? Chandler means a candle maker. ‘Go to the Chandler,’ they’d say, ‘he’ll light you up.’”
I hadn’t even gotten up from where I sat in the depths of yet one more swank overstuffed waiting room chair, so sudden had been her appearance and assault with the book, so I just sat there and stared.
Chandler. Drugs. Colombia. Oil. Miriam. I was finally beginning to connect the dots.
Julia stood in the middle of the waiting room. She stared not at me but at the book on my lap, and now that the strength of her anger had drained away, I saw at last the pain that dwelled beneath it. So Chandler had gotten through to Julia, too. What had it been, a lost weekend of experimentation with drugs and sex? Or had she found the experience pleasant but too short? And now she had read Miriam’s journal.
“Do you think he lit Miriam up?” I asked gently.
She shook her head. “Miriam? No. She was a cheap drunk. Hypersensitive even to aspirin, and she didn’t like the feeling of being high, or at least not on chemicals. Wouldn’t touch drugs with a barge pole.” A moment later, she turned and started back into her office.
“Wait. Do you know how I can get in touch with him?” I asked.
She let out her breath soundlessly, her shoulders falling, and only then did I know she had been holding it. “No,” she said tiredly. “Men like Chandler don’t leave a forwarding address.”
I took the journal to the privacy of the cab of my truck and opened it, my hands scurrying ahead of my sight. The whole case was flying open now; seemingly unrelated pieces of the puzzle were connecting. But here in my hands lay the beating heart of the mystery.
I found Miriam in a fugue:
August 2
Cecelia just
watches
me. I have to tell him it’s over, and then I’ll tell her not to worry, and somehow let her know that he won’t be coming again.
watches
me. I have to tell him it’s over, and then I’ll tell her not to worry, and somehow let her know that he won’t be coming again.
August 5
Chandler came again today and I tried to tell him that he couldn’t come here anymore, but every time I opened my mouth, nothing came out. I couldn’t stand the thought that I would never feel his touch again. Then when he came to me and put his arms around me, it was like he
knew.
He walked out the door with a look on his face that was
spooky.
I didn’t even have time to feel relieved before the longing set in.
knew.
He walked out the door with a look on his face that was
spooky.
I didn’t even have time to feel relieved before the longing set in.
As disgusting as I feel about my deceit with Joe, Chandler’s been a friend to me, and I didn’t want to hurt him. I keep staring at the telephone, willing him to call, so I can explain. But I must care more for Joe, or I would have left with Chandler. Or maybe it’s just what I’ve always known, ever since that time senior year: I don’t love Chandler.
I don’t know who I am anymore. I look out the window and wonder where I am, because I
am
that girl I was and I’d so much prefer that this present time and place hasn’t happened yet.
am
that girl I was and I’d so much prefer that this present time and place hasn’t happened yet.
August 21
I’ve tried to tell myself again and again that it isn’t
him
I need; it’s the
sex.
But sex smells like him now. Feels like him. Sounds like him. My body even smells like him. Belongs to him. And yet I don’t love him. I can’t find it in myself even to weep.
him
I need; it’s the
sex.
But sex smells like him now. Feels like him. Sounds like him. My body even smells like him. Belongs to him. And yet I don’t love him. I can’t find it in myself even to weep.
There was a break of several weeks. When Miriam started to write again, it was from another location. If I had to guess, I’d say it was Aspen, that ski resort in the high Rockies where the rich and famous try to look swell on skis. That’s where Cecelia’s refrigerator-door limerick had sent her, anyway. Except that wherever Miriam was, she was not there with “a friendly looking dope.”
September 30
There’s no beginning or end to this, so the middle is as good a place to start as any. I’ve been here over a week now, and the therapy is helping, I think. Julia said that this woman could help with whatever was bothering me, and at least it’s a relief to be away from home. I thought I was going to have to talk in a straight line, but that’s not how things happen around here.
Joe doesn’t know where I am. What a strange feeling. In all the years we’ve been together, I have always been right where he knew how to find me. Right where he’d left me. I guess he’ll know where I am when the bank statement arrives. I’m not so ignorant that I’d do this on a credit card. God knows, Joe knows how to track something as transparent as that a whole lot faster. I even paid cash for the gas to drive here so he wouldn’t know for just once in his life even which direction I took off to. I just hope he takes good care of Cecelia, and reads her note to him, or the parts that would be okay for her to see.
October 22
The therapist says I should write. What an irony. I’m the one who’s kept a journal since I was how old? and I can’t figure out anything to say.
October 30
Write something. What? Five days a week, I sit with this therapist, and words tumble out of my mouth, but I don’t seem to have anything to say. She says I’m depressed. She’s offered medication for it. I think I’d rather feel the pain for a while.
She’s asked about my parents and all that stuff, and we talk about it, but I’m beginning to get angry. Sure, my life as a little girl wasn’t perfect, and sure, there were jerks who didn’t understand me and all that stuff, but damn it, I’ve made a mistake and I feel sick about it! Can’t she understand that? I want to take the pain of it and ram it through my hand like a thorn so I’ll keep on feeling it and never stop. She asks if I think Joe or Cecelia were really hurt by it. I can’t understand that logic.
November 6
I’m supposed to write down my dreams. I don’t remember the dreams I have at night, never have. She says that if I keep paying attention to them and write, write, write, I’ll likely start to remember them. Bullshit.
November 7
I hate this.
November 8
I hate
her.
her.
Miriam had moved in her grieving from numbness into anger, and its strength was beginning to push matters to a head. How I wished she’d written more in those days, left greater detail of her flight into depression, and hiding, and psychotherapy. I hadn’t yet met the emotional beasts that stared at her from the edge of her campfire, and I knew nothing of the process she used to chase them away. But I kept on reading for the parts I could understand, looking for that strength that had helped her grow. Had that strength, ironically, been Chandler?
I read carefully, sifting her words for evidence, for any lead that would tell me what had brought about her death, and who had killed her. Experience had taught me that seldom was one person wholly responsible for a murder. One person might strike the killing blow, but it took often many to build the maze of loss and confusion that brought such moments into being. Certainly Chandler’s name was inscribed on every path that led to or from her, and it seemed more and more likely to me that he had been the vector of the killing dose. And yet I couldn’t see him feeding it to her, couldn’t see this man who had lain down with her on softest fleece and listened to her words with such tenderness rising up against her with killing vengeance. Certainly he had forced himself on her in college, not once but twice, first in his rooms and then days later in hers, pressing desperately against her for relief, but would a man like that kill the single thing that released him?
February 21
I’m going back. I thought for a while, how easy to just stay gone. I told myself that after all I’ve been gone five months, and that hasn’t hurt much, so why not just extend it indefinitely? But she says I need to confront things as they are, otherwise I’d probably just pick up where I left off in a new relationship. I suppose that’s true. Truth seems hard to identify anymore.
I wanted to think that what led me to Chandler was some universal need or truth or suffering, but she says I need to look first at just me and my one marriage, and try to leave the rest of the universe out of it for now. I asked her if she had a better perspective on it, and she says that I’m trying to cut myself off from feeling my needs. I guess that’s right. All I feel just now is sad. Sad that I can’t seem to have what I need. With Joe, I have all the security in the world, but no passion. With Chandler, it was the opposite. I try to push this need for passion away from me, but it keeps coming back, seeping into my dreams, both when I’m asleep
and when I’m awake. What are my needs? I need to be touched. I need to feel that one special body next to mine. And I need to love the man inside that body. Is the man I need just a phantom from my imagination?
and when I’m awake. What are my needs? I need to be touched. I need to feel that one special body next to mine. And I need to love the man inside that body. Is the man I need just a phantom from my imagination?
It isn’t just sex I want. I had sex with Joe, but it never filled me. I want my senses. Joe loves me, or at least as well as he knows how, but he has no sense of touch. Chandler knows how to touch me, but I’ve never kidded myself that he knows how to love. He’s not a man, he’s a ghost.
Phantoms and ghosts. I’ll have to learn to tell them apart.
February 22
Home tomorrow. She says I need to remember that it’s okay to have needs, even if they can’t be met. What a novel thought.
So Miriam was going home. Suddenly, I remembered another homecoming; Heather’s mother, the addict who was due home that afternoon from the Betty Ford Clinic. It could not be mere coincidence that this woman had succumbed to cocaine addiction just as Chandler had appeared in the neighborhood. She must know him. Might know where to find him. I looked at my watch: 2:45. If I made all the lights just right, I could be in Genesee by 3:15 and question the woman quickly before her daughter came home from school. I would have to be careful, make certain that Cindey Howard did not see me or my truck pass through the neighborhood, and it would make me a little late meeting Jim in Lafayette by four, but surely the lawyers would keep him waiting, and his aunt’s will had to be more complex than he had thought.
I can make it
, I told myself as I put the key in the ignition and turned the truck toward Genesee.
, I told myself as I put the key in the ignition and turned the truck toward Genesee.
I found Heather Wentworth’s mother sitting in a wrought-iron chair with gaily colored chintz cushions. She had placed it in the middle of the otherwise-empty back deck of her
sprawling cedar house, and she was leaning back, tipping the front legs up off the thick wooden planking, sipping at a glass of plain water as she beheld a stand of ponderosa pines and the mountains beyond.
sprawling cedar house, and she was leaning back, tipping the front legs up off the thick wooden planking, sipping at a glass of plain water as she beheld a stand of ponderosa pines and the mountains beyond.
I introduced myself and explained my presence. “I’m a friend of Cecelia Menken’s,” I began. “Her dad asked me to help her move past her mother’s death, and … well, that brings me, among other places here. I’m thinking you might know a little about a man named Chandler Jennings.”
Mrs. Wentworth hurled her glass of water into the grass beyond the deck and began to cry.
I felt deeply embarrassed.
Presently, she began to talk, her words thick with tears. “He
used
me, you know. Oh, at first I thought it was the real thing, that he truly cared about me, but that was a load of bull. Okay, I was drinking, and I did that part on my own, I
know
that, but
he
got me on the coke. Turned me onto it for sex, at first, like it would be so much more fun if we were high, but then it was coke first and the sex maybe, and then just the coke. You want to know about Chandler Jennings? He’s a
monster
!”
used
me, you know. Oh, at first I thought it was the real thing, that he truly cared about me, but that was a load of bull. Okay, I was drinking, and I did that part on my own, I
know
that, but
he
got me on the coke. Turned me onto it for sex, at first, like it would be so much more fun if we were high, but then it was coke first and the sex maybe, and then just the coke. You want to know about Chandler Jennings? He’s a
monster
!”
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