Palace Council (49 page)

Nobody guessed that Eddie was following the itinerary of Aurelia's honeymoon with Kevin Garland nineteen years ago; and not even Eddie could have said just why. He supposed he must have hated Kevin back then, and a part of him had nearly hated Aurelia for marrying him. But Aurie had stayed with her husband for ten years, and Eddie refused to believe she had been after the Garland money. No. Aurelia had come to love her husband. She had, unknowing, even changed him. She had turned Kevin Garland from a supporter to a skeptic of the Council's mad plan, and he had been blown to bits for his doubts. So much horror, for the sake of success. Wesley Senior had been righter than he knew twenty years ago, when he had written his son that the upside-down cross might be a symbol of devil worship.

Eddie's only bad moment came one night in a bar in Marseilles, where he was buying drinks for suspicious Corsican sailors, soaking up color for a scene he was considering for his next novel. He was struggling to memorize a wonderful story one of the men was telling in several languages at once, when he thought he saw, off in a shadowy corner, a lighter flicking rhythmically on and off before a hard white face topped with blond hair, but when he looked again the man was gone. Later, awake in his hotel room, longing for Aurelia, he told himself that George Collier had no reason to follow him. The man in the bar had been somebody else, and only Eddie's nerves made him imagine the killer's face. Collier had handed back the testament, shot Benjamin Mellor, and pronounced his own part in the proceedings done with. Yet, if he had lied—

The questions and doubts chased Eddie into sleep.

CHAPTER
68

The Opposite of Truth

(I)

O
N THE SNOWY SECOND MORNING
after Christmas, Eddie arrived at Mona Veazie's house on North Balch Street in Hanover, New Hampshire. He had gifts from Africa for all four children: colorful kente wraps from Bonwire for Julia and Zora, a Masai warrior's headdress for Locke, and an Umkhonto spear for Julia's brother, Jay, who, to his mother's chagrin, was keen on joining the military.

For the two grown women he brought nothing.

The seven of them lunched in town, Eddie's treat. He kept looking at Mona's children. So did poor Locke, whose crush on Julia was palpable, and hopeless. Julia, already a flirt at fourteen, played to him shamelessly, but Eddie knew neither mother would ever allow a relationship to develop.

Too risky.

After lunch, the children went off in Mona's four-wheel-drive to ice skate on Occom Pond. Eddie announced that he and Aurelia were going for a drive. Mona looked grim but only nodded. She had known this day was coming. They all had. Three minutes after leaving the house, the occasional lovers crossed the Connecticut River on the stone bridge connecting Hanover to Norwich, Vermont.

“Where are we going, honey?” Aurelia asked several times, but Eddie never answered.

The house lay just north of Main Street, on the western edge of the village green, a small, neat, whitewashed clapboard that could be lifted from any New England town and dropped into any other with nobody the wiser. They sat in the driveway for a moment. The mailbox said G. C
ULLEN
.

“What are we doing here?” said Aurelia. “Whose house is this?”

“It belongs to a woman named Gwen. Gwen Cullen. She teaches art at the local elementary school.” Eddie glanced at his beloved, who was staring wide-eyed at the house and nibbling on a fingernail. He had never seen her so nervous, not even when they faced Collier's gun at Jumel Mansion. “She's a friend of Mona's.”

“A friend?”

Eddie nodded. “Mona's been wanting me to meet her. I assumed she was trying to set me up.”

“Set you up? You mean, with a girlfriend?”

“That's what I thought. But now I'm pretty sure it was guilt.” He opened his door. When Aurelia followed suit, he put a hand on her arm. “Wait here.”

“Why?”

“I think you know why,” he said, and got out of the car.

The walk from the driveway to the front steps was probably fifteen feet, but it was the longest of his life. Through the window he saw a neat living room, all chintz and fluff. A chubby black cat watched incuriously from the sill. It took him a year to lift his hand to the doorbell and the rest of his life to push. The sound was a melodious twinkle. When nothing stirred, he rang a second time.

Still the house was silent. But somebody was home. He had spotted a car in the garage, and a shadow at an upstairs window. He would wait. Standing on the step, hands on hips, he glanced across at Aurie, who was nibbling harder on her nail. His breath gathered and danced and vanished in the crystalline air. He wondered if—

The chain rattled, and Eddie spun in place.

The pale woman who opened the door had put on a lot of weight since Eddie had seen her last, but last was almost two decades ago.

“Hello, sis,” he said.

(II)

T
HEY SAT
in the chintzy living room surrounded by abstract watercolors, pale pastels in soft New England shades, many pierced unsubtly with bolts of bright red. They had not hugged. They had barely spoken. Junie had selected an overstuffed armchair, and waved Eddie to the sofa. The cat was in her lap, and she was letting it paw at a bright-blue ball that she would then snatch out of its reach.

“Her name is Mira,” said Junie.

“Hello, Mira,” said Eddie, less sure of his purpose than when he first rang the bell. Maybe the Beretta his sister had been holding against her hip was the reason. The gun lay now on the side table.

“It's short for Miranda.”

“I figured.”

Another long moment, Eddie watching his sister tease the cat. She had done a lot of teasing these past seventeen years, leaving notes for poor Benjamin Mellor and for her mother, but never once contacting her brother. The room was thick with books. The shelves were packed, and volumes were heaped on the tables, most of them fiction. Eddie spotted none of his, but both of Aurie's. There were no newspapers. There was no television. This was Junie's world: novels, the cat, her own artwork, and days spent teaching small children. She had constructed a shelter of the imagination, protection not only from the past but from the present.

And she had a gun in the house. At least one.

“What are you doing here, Eddie?” she finally said, not looking up. “What do you want?”

For a moment he was wordstruck. Wasn't it obvious? “You're my sister. I wanted to find you.”

“Did it ever occur to you that I might not want to be found?” Before he could answer, she made a sound of disgust, somewhere between a snicker and a spit, what their mother used to call snupping. “I told them it was a stupid idea. I told them we wouldn't fool anybody.”

“By them, you mean Mona and Aurelia.” When Junie said nothing, he added, “And you've fooled everybody for a long time. I don't think anybody else knows.”

“Except whoever's following you.”

“Nobody's following me, Junie. That's all over.”

“My name is Gwen.” She had given the ball to the cat, who had leaped from her lap and was chasing it around the throw rug. “And I stopped believing in the Easter Bunny a long time ago.”

“You have to tell me.” He did not budge from the sofa but struggled to cross the space between them. “It's been almost twenty years, Junie. I know most of the story. I need the rest. No matter how terrible it is, I need the rest.” He considered telling her how he had almost died looking for her, but decided he would evoke no sympathy: his sister had surely been through worse.

“Terrible. Right.” She laughed without humor. Her hair was twisted into a long ponytail. From the table beside her chair, she took a pair of glasses. She did not put them on but toyed with the stems. “You don't know what terrible is, bro. You don't know what it's like to huddle in a safe house waiting for the battering ram that announces the arrival of the pigs, and then have the house blow up the next day, while you're out buying milk. To crawl across borders with your chin in the mud because you're on your government's classified shot-while-attempting-to-escape list. To know that one of your own bullets—” She stopped, bit her lip, eyes following the cat as it tumbled around the carpet. “Terrible. Right. It was terrible.”

“Junie—”

“I knew you'd figure it out. I just didn't know it would take you so long.” Her tortured gaze came up. “Or did Aurelia peach?”

“No. She kept your secrets.”

“I told her to marry you. She said she couldn't marry you, not with this on her conscience.”

“She was keeping me at a distance. For your sake. If she married me, how could she keep me from finding out?”

Junie made the snupping sound again. “That wasn't it. Aurelia's great at keeping secrets. She fooled you in Harlem, talking about her parents and her childhood. She might have fooled you about me for the rest of your life. She was just afraid, if you ever did find out, you'd be furious at her for not telling you. That's why she wouldn't marry you. She was afraid you'd hate her. Do you hate her?”

“No, Junie. I love her.”

“Gwen.” She tilted her head. “She's in the car?”

“But she didn't drive over. I did.”

Junie nodded. “Mona called. You must have known she would.”

“I thought she might.”

“She warned me to get moving, but I spent ten years on the run. I'm not running any more.” She tapped the gun. “And I'm not letting them lock me up. I've done prison already.”

This surprised him. “When did you do prison?”

“One of the countries where we hid for a while had this idea that we—Never mind. It doesn't matter.” Suddenly she smiled, bright and gay, Junie of the fifties. “Eddie. Look at you. The writer you always wanted to be. Famous around the world. Friend of Presidents and Prime Ministers. Are you happy now? Having everything?”

“I don't have everything—”

“No kids. No wife. That's because you're a silly romantic. Remember the Junie Angle? Disaster versus Godsend?”

“I remember.”

“Well, your life is a Godsend. You decided to pine over Aurelia. That was a silly choice, but it was your own choice. You could have married anybody.” Her face closed down again. “My life is a Godsend, too. I want you to understand that. Not disaster. Godsend. I was in a mess, and God led me out. I have a job I like, I'm near my children”—almost, but not quite, a sob—“and I'm enjoying it. I'm their silly old Aunt Gwen. I get to watch them grow up, I paint my pictures so I don't go out of my mind, and I wait for the pigs. Eddie, what are you doing here? Please, go away.”

“Junie—”

“I know what you want to ask. Was I Commander M? Yes. Was the first baby Lanning's? Yes. Yes. Whose was the second? Not your business. Who suggested this idea? Your girlfriend. We hit it off, Eddie. Back when I was pregnant the first time. We used to talk on the phone at night a lot. Then I graduated, and, well, after that, we kind of fell out of touch. When I wanted to come out, I got in touch with Aurie. Arranged a meeting. I wanted to see my kids. I didn't want to go to jail. There were things to arrange. Documents. A place to live. A job. It took almost a year, Eddie. By that time, Aurie had talked to Mona, Mona had agreed—okay? Happy now?”

“Why didn't you get in touch with me?”

“Because everyone in the world was watching you. They probably still are. Plus, you would've disapproved of what I've been doing. You don't know what it's like, bro, to face your disapproval. When your jaw juts out and your lip curls? It's worse than That Voice ever was. No wonder Torie Elden couldn't stand you.” She softened. The cat was back in her lap. “It wasn't a lack of trust, Eddie. And it wasn't a lack of love. But it wasn't a good idea. It still isn't. I'll probably be arrested tomorrow.” Her nervous eyes cut toward the window once more, then down at the gun. “Maybe tonight.”

“You won't.”

“You don't know that.”

“I do.”

Another long moment, the siblings finding uncomfortably little to say to each other. Three women, he reflected. Three brilliant, beautiful women who should have been the champions of the darker nation, all sacrificing, and suffering. Aurie never marrying again. Mona raising Julia and Jay as her own, calling them twins to put everybody off the scent, marrying a succession of white men she did not love so that everyone would think her obsession explained the interracial kids. And Junie herself, alone with the cat, the art her only therapy. All those watercolors, New England peace pierced by jagged red arrows of pain.

Eddie said, “There's a part you're not telling me.”

“There's a whole lot I'm not telling you. There's a whole lot I'm never gonna tell you.”

“I mean, about your babies.”

“What about them?” Defensively, almost snarling. Even the cat noticed.

“Your daughter. Julia. She was born in 1957.”

“So?”

“So, you're still protecting Aurelia, aren't you? No wonder my private detectives couldn't find any trace of the baby at the agencies around Boston. Little Julia was in the Midwest, wasn't she? Maybe even being raised by the same nuns who raised Aurie.” He was talking half to himself now. “Then you went underground. You got pregnant again—maybe you were still seeing Lanning, maybe it was somebody else—and it was two years later. That's when you got in touch with Aurelia again. Not when you wanted to come out. You wanted to make sure the kids were taken care of. You had the baby—Jay—and somehow you got him to Aurelia. Maybe Perry helped. I know you won't tell me. But you got Jay to Aurelia, Aurelia got him to Mona, and then they went to the orphanage in Cleveland to get Julia, so they could be raised together. Mona told everybody in Harlem they were twins, and then she went straight to New Hampshire so nobody could see that Julia was bigger than Jay. She stayed away for years, and by the time she came back to visit, she could just explain that Julia was taller because girls mature faster than boys. Mona must have known the truth, but—”

“Are you done?”

“Done?”

“Done proving how smart you are. I know you're smart. That's the other reason I never wanted you involved. There's such a thing as being too smart, Eddie. Too curious. Sometimes you have to leave things as they are.”

“Yes, but—”

“I'm not going to talk about this any more, and I don't want to listen to you talking about it, either.”

Eddie nodded. He said, gently, “I'm just glad you're all right.”

“Thanks.”

“And you are, aren't you? All right?”

“Sure.” But the eyes were haunted again. “I'm fine.”

“Do you need anything? Can I help you somehow?”

The snupping sound again. “I earn my own money.”

“That's not what I meant,” he said, although it was. He realized that he was talking to a stranger, that the little girl who used to crawl into his bed and whisper her dreams was gone forever. The special connection between the two of them had died long ago, everywhere but in Eddie's own rosy memories.

“If you want to help,” she said, oddly belligerent, “you can use some of your connections to get Sharon Martindale out of prison.”

“My connections don't run that high any more.”

“Or you think she deserves to stay in.” He said nothing. Probably Junie was right. “She's no worse than me, Eddie. The sooner you get that through your head, the sooner you'll see why you shouldn't have come.”