Shades of Eva (58 page)

“Anna, this is confidential information!”
Ben said, trying to give back the envelope. Anna turned back
around, but she wouldn’t take it.

Dad spoke up. “You can look through the damn
thing, Ben! I’m still Eva’s legal representative.”

“This is part of her police file,” Anna
said. “It never was confidential. I should have shown you this a
long time ago.”

I could see Ben struggling with this, much
as I had struggled to open the pages of any of my mother’s things.
As Ben was reading through whatever Anna had given him, Abby had
gotten up and had retrieved something. It was her Beretta, and as
she was watching the screen flicker on ever so slowly, she began
loading a magazine into its grip.

Within minutes, Ben’s mouth seemed to fall
open and his eyes bug out from his head. He leaned forward and
dropped one of the pages. It was a picture. He seemed to jump
backwards, almost as if he had been struck, and then looked at my
father as if he was the one who had struck him.

Dad studied his reaction curiously, and so
did Anna. They studied him as Abby and I were studying him through
the screen.

We were all frozen by what had just
happened. Something he saw—or something he read—had shocked Ben. I
knew the feeling; I knew the reaction quite well. But what were
these photographs? Were they the photos of my mother after Fred
beat her the night Elmer was taken? Maybe it was a picture of her
face, post-lobotomy? Maybe these were crime-scene photographs from
the shooting incident in the toolshed.

I tried to zoom in on one of the pictures. I
could barely see it, but I could see enough. I’d looked at those
photos a hundred times over the last twenty-four-hours. They were
the toolshed shooting photographs of Fred Elms, the neighbor Mom
and I shot, photographs police had given the Asylum doctors when
Mom was committed that second time.

They were part of her record and I imagine
part of the justification for lobotomizing her. Their gore must
have alarmed the doctors; it certainly alarmed me way back when. It
alarmed everyone, even the police. It was alarming Ben, now, from
the looks of things. He was visibly shaking. It seemed an
overreaction, though, for someone as clinical as I thought Ben to
be, but Abby didn’t think so.

***

Ben Levantle

Anna had handed me a folder of pictures that
should have been in the police report Detective Ramsey and I had
just finished talking about. In fact, they were. However, Ramsey
hadn’t shown them to me, and I hadn’t asked to see them. Why would
I? I knew what Eva and Mitchell did to that man. I didn’t need to
see it. But Anna begged to differ.

The images were gruesome. They were
disturbing, but neither Detective Ramsey nor I had thought them
very important in the grand scheme of things. Why would we?
Paper-clipped together were five crime scene photographs with an
old note attached to them that read, ‘Dr. Norris, Here are the
photos you requested.’

The note was signed by a beat officer who
would someday claim the title of Chief of Detectives of River Bluff
PD, Hubert Ramsey. He was first on scene at the shooting, and
still, after all these years, remained very much a part of this
case.

Brad was looking on as Anna was, wondering I
suppose, what I was thinking as I looked the first photograph over.
What I was thinking was why show me these? They’re gruesome. I was
already about at my limit with all of this, and the information
just seemed to keep coming.

The top photo, dated October 2, 1970,
depicted the infamous Rennix tool shed in which the deceased,
Mitchell’s neighbor, lay sprawled out on his back, his face
obscured because of injuries attained and from the angle and depth
of the picture. He was half in the shed, half out. It was blurry,
and it appeared the neighbor had been disemboweled.

The shed itself was a faded red with a
barn-style door which lay wide open, the back of which was bright
white. It was the toolshed, the same shed I had peered into just
hours ago. I could see no trace of earwigs or spiders or roaches,
and then wondered why I was even looking for them except for the
fact that they’d fallen from that very door just hours ago before
me.

The second photo was of the gun used in the
shooting. It was smaller than I had imagined, yet effective in its
own right—a peacemaker revolver with a steel grip and black barrel.
I had never seen it before!

The third and fourth photos were of Eva and
her son, Mitchell, respectively. I stared at the eyes of each,
similar in their shape to each other and each full of beauty. Eva
still had those hunter green bedroom eyes, emerald some would call
them, eyes sporting soft, long eyelashes, eyes wide and bright as I
remembered them in their youth with a somewhat sad impression about
them. She was older, maybe thirty, and possessed a look of looming
terror in this picture—the same expression she had staring at me
from the back of her father’s car sometimes, or from the backyard
of her property.

The boy’s eyes were a spitting image of my
patient’s. The tiny eyes of his youth bore the fright of a child
having suffered a most horrific violation, and I felt intrusive for
even looking upon them. I studied Mitchell, studied those eyes
despite my reservations, trying to connect this little boy to the
man, trying as he had, to retell this tragic story in my office
behind years of blur and confusion.

The last photograph was another photograph
of the neighbor, this time an autopsy photo. His face was cleaned
up; his nerves and intestines likely replaced, or discarded,
however coroners deal with such things. The swelling in his face
had been reduced so that it relaxed more into its natural
posture.

And then it became clear.

My jaw must have dropped.
Anyone
watching me must have thought I was sickened or shocked by the
brutality or grossness of the images. And they’d be right. But
repulsion wasn’t all I was feeling. There was something deeper, far
more repugnant. After staring at the Elms picture for just that
long, I dropped it—or more accurately it leapt from my hand—much
like a tick that’s had his share of blood will leap from the skin
of its host.

I jumped backward, or fell perhaps, feeling
a sharp twinge of pain in the base of my skull. I heard a sort of
muted thunderclap follow it and I became as lightheaded as I’d ever
been. Subsequently, the most mind-splitting headache I’d ever
gotten emerged in sudden clusters wrapping themselves back to front
across my skull as if ten men were hitting me with a succession of
hammer strikes. 

I let the pictures fall to the floor, all of
them. In slow motion this last picture drifted, the face within
watching me from behind closed, dead eyelids. It was as if a ghost
were descending back into its grave, one watching my horrific gaze,
indifferently, with eyes wide shut. I let out a cry and tears
filled my eyes. This photograph, mislabeled by the Coroner as
Fredrick Elms, was a photograph of my dead older brother—Fredrick
Levantle.

Elms, an obvious alias to me,
was not
so to Anna, to police, or anyone else so far as I knew. But why had
Anna given these photographs? Why here? Why now?

I looked to Brad as if he knew the answer to
that. He was just watching me with an awe-struck expression. He
turned his gaze to the photograph and shook his head, wondering
what it was about that old photo that had racked me so.

I then turned my eyes to Anna, who was
kneeling over me and crying. I had fallen. She was holding my head
and just watching me, waiting for me to say something, waiting for
me to return from wherever, or whenever it was, I had just
retreated.

“Is it him?” Anna asked me. “Is this your
brother?”

I could not keep the tears from coming. I
felt faint. I felt as though I couldn’t speak, so I didn’t. I
simply nodded. It was my brother, and my brother was dead.

I looked once more to Brad, wondering if he
knew who Elms truly was; wondering if he was that sick and twisted
a man as to leave his wife to a stalker the likes of Fredrick.

Brad was shaking his head as if he could
read my mind. No one would do that—leave a girl like that with a
man who’d done those terrible things to her. But there was someone
who did just that! Eva’s brother. He left Eva with Fred time and
time again, and didn’t say a word until…until he was sent to this
place by a Gulf War POW and a grieving son—and he was just a
stone’s throw away from me.

I asked her one word, one thing. “Why?”

Anna’s answer to that question did not come
right away. Instead, she, with Brad’s help, helped me to my feet,
helped me to the chair beside the open window and folded back the
curtains to let the cold morning air wash over me. Anna handed me a
cup of water. Brad took a chair and began sipping his beer again. I
sat there in stunned silence wondering what in the hell we were
going to do now.

***

Mitchell

I turned the monitors off. I stood there,
motionless, almost unable to breathe. Abby had retreated to the
bedroom upstairs. When she returned, she was in full military
police regalia. She’d holstered her Beretta and was now snapping
the band of her knife’s sheath to secure it in place. She was
wearing a black beret with the Army’s MP logo on it, a white
t-shirt that read 8th Infantry across its front. She had a set of
dog tags on, and desert gray camo pants.

“What are you doing,” I said, my voice
quivering and my hands beginning to shake.

“I told you this is ending tonight.”

“What are you going to do?”

“The question is what am I going to do with
you?”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that.

“Mitchell, you have a life to live. You
deserve better than this. We found Elmer and now we found Fred, and
your mother has been vindicated in everyone’s eyes that matter—but
these things have a price. I don’t want you to be a fugitive for
the rest of your life. You’re going to have to turn yourself in,
and I’m going to get my aunt’s things.”

“Turn myself in? Are you kidding? What are
you talking about? I don’t want to go to jail!”

“You haven’t hurt anyone, Mitchell. I’ve
killed someone, and you never really had a choice in this.”

“I had a choice. You said that this was my
game—my family.”

“I know that’s what I said, but that wasn’t
the reality. This was my game all along! You’re sick, Mitchell.
You’re an addict and I took advantage of you for my own purposes.
This has to end.”

I stood there in my mother’s old house,
shaking my head in disbelief at what I was hearing, and also at
what I’d just witnessed. I wanted to continue to fight—to fight
whatever or whomever the enemy had become. Things still didn’t seem
fair. After all of this, was I really going to lose Abby? Was I
going to lose my freedom because I’d been hunting a dead man and a
dead baby? Surely the courts wouldn’t excuse the things that I had
done, and Ully was going to be walking in a day!

There was no way I was going to jail!

“I know you want a different ending to the
chase, Mitchell, but there isn’t going to be one.”

I was shaking my head. I was angry beyond
words.

Abby only smiled at me, withdrew her
Beretta, and wouldn’t you know it—she pointed it directly at me.
“You don’t have a choice anymore, Mitchell. You’re coming with
me.”

I grinned. We’d played this game before.
“I’m not turning myself in. I told you I was getting your aunt’s
art and I’m going to help you do that. And then I’m catching the
nearest train out of this—"

And before I could get the next word out of
my mouth, a shot rang out and the wall behind me seemed to explode.
A cloud of dust fluttered in the air behind me, and at once I felt
a sharp stinging sensation on the top of my left shoulder.

I put a hand to it. My shirt was torn. I was
bleeding.

I looked angrily at Abby. “You shot me!”

She shook her head. “I didn’t shoot you, but
I will if you don’t get your jacket and get in the fucking car.
You’re driving, Mitchell, and you’re turning yourself in.”

“And what about you?” I said, grabbing my
jacket from the sofa beside me.

Abby didn’t answer me. She gestured me to
the front door and opened it.

“You are turning me in!” I said, feeling a
sudden stabbing pain in my back.

I walked hesitantly to the door. Abby, like
Fred Levantle, wasn’t someone you said no to. She turned the light
out on the place and I said my silent farewells to the river
house.

I pointed the car in the direction
of
the Asylum as I was told. Abby was very quiet, and I guess I was,
too. What was there to say, really? What do you tell a woman
scorned in the manner Abby thought she had been scorned?

She finally broke her silence. She told me
to take my phone out and give Ben Levantle a call.

“Ben? Why Ben?” I replied.

“Pick up your phone and call Ben. I’m quite
sure they’re going to try and use him to bargain with you, like
they will use the art to bargain with me. I want to see what kind
of cards they’re holding.”

“What do I say? What do you want me to tell
him?”

“Just dial.”

I did as I was told and placed the call. I
turned the phone’s speaker on so that Abby could hear the
conversation. Ben answered his cell phone on the first ring.

“—
Mitchell?”

“You were expecting me?” I replied,
surprised for some reason that he’d picked up.

“—
Sweet Jesus, where are you,
kid?”

Almost as soon as Ben had picked up, my
phone’s tracking program was alerting us to his location.

“—
Mitchell? Are you there?”

Abby had taken the phone from me. “Yes, he’s
here,” she said. “I see you’re staying at the Knight’s Inn on East
Ridge, Ben.” There was a brief pause.