Shades of Eva (15 page)

I was shaking my head. “Did she look at
all?”

“Yes, she tried, Mitchell, but she got no
cooperation. The Asylum was closed off. The police weren’t any
help. Your father turned her away. And my father was too busy. I’m
sorry.”

I took a drink and took a longer look at
Amelia. She seemed saddened by all that, but as usual I couldn’t
tell if that’s what she was sad about, or if it was something else.
We were always carrying on about three conversations at the same
time with one another.

“When did your mom die?” I said, redirecting
the topic back to her mother, and away from mine.

“A few weeks ago.”

“And your Aunt Emily?”

“She died twenty years ago.”

I nodded. I wasn’t good with empathy or with
sympathy, and didn’t really know the difference between the two. So
instead of feeling sorry for Amelia’s loss, in all honesty all I
felt was disappointment. She had just told me something that made
my heart race a bit, and my stomach quiver. Despite the obstacles
her mother had encountered, she had essentially hung on her
sister’s request for the better part of my life! The things Amelia
(and twenty years ago her mother) had been asked to look into
happened to be rape, child abduction, and murder. Only when
Amelia’s mother was dying twenty years later had she thought to ask
her daughter, of all people, to finally look into a few
things. 

I think Amelia sensed my disappointment, for
lack of a better word, in her mother’s procrastination. I think in
a way Amelia was disappointed, too—disappointed that anyone—let
alone her own mother—would keep such a request to herself for so
long even though she had tried.

But neither of us addressed the delay right
then—or the disappointment—whichever it was. There was no point.
There were dead women involved, and I was as guilty as anyone for
forgetting about Mom, and Amelia’s mother had at least tried.

“You’re a private investigator, right?”

Amelia nodded.

“Well, what happens when you have a case
where you care, but the family doesn’t quite share your concern? I
know it sounds bad, but that’s essentially what you have here. I
mean, you’re probably always contracted by interested parties. In
my case, you don’t have that same interest—not that I’m not
trying.”

“Look, I don’t have a contract in this one,
Mitchell! No one’s paying me, so don’t get all sophisticated and
over-think this. The need rests with you, but I do have a dog in
the hunt.”

“What do you mean?”

“I told you, my aunt was a patient at the
Asylum, too. I have a need to know certain things.”

“Well, maybe you’d like to tell me why you
really came all this way to find Mitchell Rennix, then, the great
heir to all this.”

“Listen,” Amelia said, “your mother’s
reputation and the truth about what happened to her is the most
important thing to me as far as I’m concerned! My aunt wanted
justice for Eva and her baby, money aside, and right now addressing
the people who harmed them should be the top priority.”

“That’s all nice,” I said, “but what other
priorities do you have?”

 Amelia had finished her drink with
remarkable quickness, and was impatiently waiting on the waitress
for another. “The Asylum stole more from my aunt than her future,”
Amelia began to explain. I half-expected her to say something like
childbearing years, memory, or common sense, something abstract
like that, but I’d be wrong in any case.

“They stole her artwork!” Amelia
clarified.

I had to stifle a laugh. The crazies in the
nuthouse don’t make art, I was thinking, save your occasional Van
Gogh. I highly doubted Amelia’s backwater ancestor had painted
anything the likes of Irises in River Bluff, but you never
know.

“You mean they stole her poem?” I said,
grinning sarcastically.

The waitress put another rum and Coke on the
table and flashed me a look. I was only half-done with my Sour, but
nodded anyway.

“Yes, her poetry,” Amelia said. “That would
be art. I’d like all of her poems back. I’d like her songs back,
and I’d like her sculptures. I’d like those things in the family,
Mitchell. That would mean a great deal to me.”

Amelia was almost crying at the mention of
her aunt’s artwork. I wasn’t sure if it was that of the subject of
her mother’s death that had suddenly saddened her, or maybe the
booze. It had to be her mom’s death: I mean art is just art, isn’t
it?

The word widow suddenly appeared to me in
big blinking neon lights above Amelia’s head. We’d gotten to this
point because I was asking about Joe.

“What happened to your husband?” I tried
again.

“I told you he died.”

“No, you said you were widowed.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“Not really,” I said. “You could be widowed
for one hundred different reasons.”

“Why isn’t really important.”

“It’s important to me,” I said, reaching a
hand out to grasp Amelia’s hand. She pulled back almost
instantly.

“Do you want to know why I carry a gun?” she
asked, side-stepping the question in her usual manner.

I put both my hands back around my glass.
“You’re a PI.”

“I carry a gun because a lot of people I
look for don’t want to be found.”

“And this pertains to your late husband,
how?”

“A lot of people are a lot like you,
Mitchell. They go to extreme lengths to hide themselves. They will
kill to protect what’s most important to them. Sometimes that’s
anonymity.”

I was starting to become alarmed. Amelia was
giving off not just a widow vibe, but that of a black widow. 
“Have you ever had to use your gun?” I said.

“You mean shoot someone?”

I nodded.

“Yes. I’ve shot people.”

I was expecting her to say one person,
maybe—but not many!

Amelia’s mood seemed to change with her
confession. She wasn’t sad anymore. She wasn’t excited, either; nor
was she mad. In one sentence she became as determined as anyone I’d
ever seen. Her eyes seemed to darken and her body seemed to
stiffen. She became that stranger who was ready to pull the trigger
on Jake Meade the prior night in cold blood. The transformation
made me wonder just how quickly she might snap if pressed, and more
disturbingly, if she had somehow snapped on her husband. The image
of her pointing that Beretta at me and pulling the trigger in Neah
Bay General began flashing in bright neon alongside the word
widow.

But if Amelia was about to divulge
something, she held back. She leaned back, took in a deep breath,
and lit a cigarette. When she was content with the flame and
drawing a good fill of smoke, she flipped her right wrist over and
stared at the ink as if to ask the little girl pictured there if it
was alright to speak of her.

The little girl must have said yes.

“You asked about Joe,” Amelia said. She took
a long sip of her drink and stirred her glass with a straw. “There
are different reasons for shooting people.”

I swallowed uncomfortably.

“I didn’t shoot my husband,” Amelia said,
“if that’s what you think.”

“That’s not what I was thinking,” I said,
even though that’s exactly what I was thinking.

“Joe named her Amethyst, but we called her
Amy, for short. We went to see Monsters, Inc. at the theatre a few
months ago, and when it was over, Amy wanted an ice cream cone. So
we stopped at a Dairy Queen and went in. Amy got a small chocolate
cone with sprinkles. I got a Brownie Delight. Joe got a Peanut
Buster Parfait. Amy was done first. Typical two-year-old, you know.
So we left.

“Joe pulled out of the parking lot. That’s
when an SUV came out of nowhere and T-boned us.

“Our car was knocked on its side. I was
thrown clear, but Joe and Amy were pinned inside. Amy was
screaming. I couldn’t see Joe. I was lying in the road, dazed. Four
men had gotten out of the SUV. Two of them started punching Joe
through the window for pulling out in front of them, I guess.
That’s when I heard gunshots. Three of the men ran back to their
car, but the other one, the shooter, was just standing staring at
Amy, yelling at her to stop screaming.

“It was like slow motion. He pointed the gun
into the backseat and shot again before I could ever stand up. He
shot Amy in the face because she was crying. And then they left.
They just left.”

***

Shadow Journal

Entry 43 August 27, 1995

There’s a lot of stress in not knowing.
Perhaps there’s a hell of not knowing, maybe call it a hell of
ignorance. And maybe there’s a flipside hell of understanding, a
hell where one has to forge the tools necessary to deal with
knowledge he may not be ready to accept. Is it worse to wonder
where a missing brother is, or is it worse to find his dead body
and be left to wonder what in hell happened to him? Is it worse to
wonder where a killer is, or is it worse to finally find him and
then have to face up to the rage within you that demands vengeance,
to face up to the shadow figure inside you whom you thought you had
under control?

The two-hour drive back to Neah Bay was
quiet. The pain in my ribs was back, and a new pain had made its
way to my chest. The Whiskey Sours had done nothing to ease any of
it. I reasoned my chest pain had something to do with Amelia’s
story. My heart ached for her. For the first time in a long time, I
was sad for someone other than myself.

Amelia had reverted to some reflective
version of herself. Maybe she was a bit inebriated, but she didn’t
seem so. She was just distant. She had that thousand-yard stare
they talk about with combat veterans who’d seen one too many
battles. She was driving but I wasn’t quite sure who was behind the
wheel.

I presumed she was 2500 miles east, mulling
over her tragedy, trying to think of something different she might
have done to spare her family. Maybe she could have said no to the
extra Dilly Bar. Maybe if Amelia had hurried her family, maybe they
would have left just seconds earlier and might have beaten the
oncoming vehicle across the lane.

Maybe Amelia was just still. Maybe she
wasn’t someone who beat herself up thinking about what could have
been. Maybe she simply accepted life’s hand of cards and was just
driving. It’s like a drunk to read too much into things, sometimes.
And then she broke her silence. “What was she like, Mitchell? Tell
me about Eva.”

“I don’t really know what to say. I mean, we
had it hard.”

“What’s that like?” Amelia had a serious
look on her face as if she didn’t understand what I meant. I almost
shook my head at her naiveté, and then realized that we likely
weren’t cut from the same impoverished cloth. I hadn’t thought much
about it—let alone talked about—those difficulties in a long time.
That impoverished, abandoned little boy and his troubled mother
were people I really didn’t care to know anymore.

“You know, I changed my name for different
reasons,” I said, answering her question in a different way. “It
wasn’t just because I was ashamed of my mother.”

“You were ashamed of her?” Amelia asked,
turning to me as if she were surprised by that.

“Weren’t you ever ashamed to be the crazy
woman’s niece?”

“Are you suggesting that my aunt and your
mother were similar?”

It was a strange question to me. Of course
they were similar, I thought. But I didn’t know her aunt, or
anything about her beyond she was an artist and a mental patient.
“You said they were both at the Institution, that’s all.”

“It’s Asylum! And that doesn’t mean
anything. There were people there who were very ill, and there were
people there who had no good reason for being there at all! Which
one do you think your mom was?”

I honestly had no answer for that; although,
I figured Amelia knew the answer already. I think my ignorance was
tolerable, but the fact that I couldn’t venture a guess as to my
mother’s diagnosis seemed to bother Amelia. It should have bothered
me.

“I see your point,” I said. “I don’t know
much about my mom, aside from what I was told.”

Amelia apparently didn’t agree with that,
either. “You had five years with her!” She said as much as if those
five little-boy-years were an eternity. I suppose they were for a
mother who’d lost her daughter at age two. But how do you measure
such pain? I could only shake my head in frustration, for all of
us.

“Five years!” I responded. “Wow!” 

I didn’t want an argument, not after the
tragedy Amelia had just shared with me, but my defensiveness just
came naturally. It was almost as if it’d been provoked—and maybe it
was. As much as I hated to hear it coming, that awful, pre-argument
silence engulfed the car. I looked down at my lap. Five years with
a mother is nothing. It’s an evening together. I wanted Amelia to
sense the pain my ignorance meant to convey, to sense my longing
for more time with her. Amelia must have heard only the bratty
voice of a toddler who had just had his dessert taken away, and
shook her head in distaste.

The short silence left us.

“You had five years of memories and all you
can say is you were ashamed of her? That life was hard?”

I finally erupted. “What do you know about
it? Who the fuck are you to be judging me?”

Amelia laughed again. I was expecting fight.
Instead, I got mockery.

“Ooh, he says big words! Eva’s son who
changed the name she gave him and moved 2500 miles away can say
fuck! Well I can say fuck, too. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

I couldn’t believe her audacity. One minute
she was listening patiently, the next she was mocking me. On one
level it was the same mixed bag of emotions I offered myself just
about every day. Did she really think that I was fine with who I’d
become: a drifter at best? That I was happy to have morphed into
some shadow of my former self? Some alias?