Son of Destruction (18 page)

But Brad! Brad belched insults. In the lexicon of blunt instruments, he was rummaging for the right one. As they rolled into the Fort Jude Club he came up with it, hissing wetly, ‘Lucy whispers when she comes.’

I could kill him now.
Walker rocked with pain.
Thank God we’re here.
He reached across Kalen’s baggy front, unbuckled his bulging belly and shoved him out.
Dump him and go.

But Kalen wasn’t going. As Walker leaned across the seat to close the door on him, Kalen yanked it wide. His head revolved like a cheap effect in a bad movie as he sprayed, ‘You want to know what she whispers? She whispers your name.’

Whose name, Kalen? Mine? Yours?

So Walker had to jump out of the car and beat the crap out of the baboon before the thing escalated, pushing him into a dangerous place. The valet parker and the
maitre d’
guy in the uniform vaporized.
Which of us are they afraid to touch? Kalen? Me?
He doesn’t know. In a way, Walker was glad nobody saw. He needed to re-organize his face before he delivered his package which, for reasons, he had to do.

Grimly, he dragged Kalen upstairs to the grand ballroom, astonished by how leaden he was. Pleased, really, that nothing worse had happened. No. Surprised and relieved. But that was last night.

Snapping awake at first light, he sits up and – God! Daylight crashes into his head, streaming into him through the crack.

Locking his arms around his knees, Walker shudders, rocked by loss.

This isn’t where Dan expects to be, but in a strange way, he’s finding it extremely pleasant.

Where he should be down at the
Star
digging up clips on the incinerations, he is in the McCalls’ sunny Florida room with Mrs McCall, who for the fifth time has instructed him to call her Nenna. They’re side by side on her flowered sofa, bent over Chaplin’s old yearbook. Mildew has turned the faux leather to silver. Flattened insects breathed their last between these pages years ago, and a smell he doesn’t recognize rises from the gutter between the glossy pages. Mrs McCall is pointing out pictures in
The FJHS
Swordfish
, although for reasons that are opaque to Dan, she hasn’t forgiven him for carbon-dating her.

He didn’t know what he wanted when he broke in to Chaplin’s house. God knows what made all that noise; he had to leave! With his search cut short, he grabbed
The Swordfish
and bolted. He got stupendously lost, escaping on back roads where everything looked like everything else. By the time he found his hotel he was too wired to sleep, but too wiped to do anything but crash. Maybe he slept, but if dreams are bookmarks, there’s nothing left to prove he did. Mostly he remembers thrashing.

His eyes popped open long before it got light.
Four. Colon. Oh. Oh
., the digital clock reported aggressively, taunting him.
Four. Colon. Oh. Eight
. Nyah, nyah. At
Five. Oh. Oh.
he declared the sun over the yardarm and opened the book. Sitting cross-legged in his briefs like a kid with a fresh porn mag, he scoured the pages, in hopes. Of what?

The answer fell into his hands like a gift. His mother’s photo led the senior class portraits: pretty Lucy Carteret, silenced for once, composed for her photograph. Smiling as ordered, but with that defiant glint. Looking into her face captured more than thirty years ago, he understood that Lucy had always been the same person. At eighteen, she faced the camera with her chin lifted in the proud, I-can-do-this way that Dan knows; seconds before the end she lifted her head and faced the future with that exact, intelligent glare.

The biography was like Lucy, short on detail. She’d listed only the necessary: May Court, 1, 2, 3, 4, May Queen, 4;
The Liveoak
, 1, 2, 3, editor, 4; president, National Honor Society, 3, 4. There was no nickname specified, even though high school kids without them usually improvised. There were no favorite sayings or flip mottoes to bring real Lucy to this page, no boyfriends named that he could interrogate and no girly lists of favorite flowers or songs to remember her by. The only thing personal about the entry was her smile. It hit him in the chest. These people, like their photos, began fading the moment the camera’s iris flexed and snapped shut, fixing them in time.

Maybe cows are right, he thought. The photographer who captures your image really has stolen your soul.

He wouldn’t have known the others. Chaplin’s text ran for several lines, beginning with
Nickname
: ‘Bobby.’ The list of achievements covered every sport, plus:
FJHS Swordfish
, 1, 2, 3, editor 4. Senior musical, 1, 2, 3, 4. Fort Jude Chamber of Commerce Sun King, 4. Science Club, 1, 2, president, 3, 4.
The things they did
, Dan thought, wondering if these itemized exploits carried the same freight as objects in that Vietnam vet’s story, ‘The Things They Carried.’

It was hard to reconcile this jaunty, bulletproof boy and the guy with the crumbling house in Pine Vista. At eighteen, with a fresh shirt and an untarnished grin, Bobby Chaplin was a different guy, brash and freshly minted. Chaplin is not a bad-looking guy but he looks – well, defeated. Thinner, with telltale shadows in the hollows at his temples and eyes making their inevitable descent into the skull.

Where other seniors cited songs and slogans, dropping hints about epic bashes they’d survived or naming their loves, Bob Chaplin included one personal item.
Favorite saying
: ‘Harvard Fair Harvard.’ His staff added an editorial comment in italics:
‘We always knew he was gonna be a star.
’

Yeah, right, Dan thought. Like
that
worked out. All those expectations, and now look.

He said to the photo, ‘I’m sorry.’

He found Mrs McCall accidentally, because she looked exactly like Steffy on a fat day. The plump teenager’s glossy hair had that freshly ironed look and her eyes gave back the bank of studio lights. She was smiling – happy and excited, open to whatever came next. Her thumbnail bio was touchingly girlish. GENEVIEVE HENDERSON, he read.
Nickname
: ‘Nenna.’ Pen Club, 4; Drama Club, 3, 4; FJHS Tarponettes, mascot, 4.
Slogan
: Puh-leeze.
Favorite color
: blue.
Favorite player
: Number 67, Now it Can be Told!
Favorite song:
‘The Way We Were.’

‘Oh, lady,’ he said to the photo, to all of them. ‘What happened to you?’

Looking for his mother in endless group photos, he studied all the group shots: May Court, N.H.S., kids lined up over cutlines identifying them, left to right. Lucy wasn’t among them. Pretty as she was, she didn’t show up among the laughing kids caught partying or mugging for the camera in the candids either. He had to wonder, did the woman have no friends? Skimming for anything that would link her to the guys in her cherished Polaroid, he overlooked the ragged spot where somebody razored out a page. He won’t find the photo of Lucy Carteret standing with Bobby Chaplin on the steps of City Hall over the cutline,
Most Likely to Succeed
.

He turned to the inscriptions in Chaplin’s yearbook, loving screeds in flashy colors, but Lucy wasn’t anywhere. Desperate to be different, girls wrote gushy notes with curlicues and flourishes, dotting their I’s with hearts or smiley faces, scrawling cliches like, ‘You’re the best.’ Sallie, Bethany, Betsy, Jane, began, ‘Remember that time’ or ‘houseparties!!!’ followed by paragraphs of bla, bla, bla, ending with multiple Xes and Os. He found Nenna Henderson’s timid, ‘Love ya Bobby,’ almost by accident, she wrote so small. The guys’ were briefer, scrawled in drunken haste. A gifted speed-reader, he skimmed them all.

At
Six. Oh. Oh.
he was still in lotus position, reading long after his feet had gone to sleep.

The last note he found was neatly printed. ‘Thanks for that.’ No explanation, no effusions in contrived script, just the signature in a spot so obscure that he had to look twice before he noticed it. ‘Sincerely, Jessie Vukovich.’ Flipping back, he found her photo. Less angular. Brunette back then, the woman who signed him in yesterday with the same brash smile, the same sultry toss of the hair. There it was. A plan.

He snorted orange juice and ate his way through the mini-bar before he showered and prepared for the day. Dumping the promotional bumph out of the Flordana’s complimentary goody bag, he slipped
The Swordfish
inside. Flash it at the people you know. See what they do when you point to Lucy’s photo. He took the stairs, peering into dim corridors as though he expected Jessie Vukovich to pop out and tell him everything.

What did she mean when she wrote, ‘Thanks for that’? Do she and Chaplin have a secret history? Yesterday she handed back his snapshots with an indifferent shrug. The woman graduated the same year as his mother, could they actually not know each other in a school that small? Perched on a tapestried love seat outside the coffee shop, he mainlined swash from the coffee machine, lying in wait for her. As if he really believed that aging, overtly sexy Ms. Vukovich could solve his life.

A skinny old guy with a comb-over came out of her office at seven sharp, straightening his black string tie on his nerdy white short-sleeved shirt. Dan retreated behind the
Fort Jude Star
and settled down to wait.

At nine – late enough to make house calls, he gave up on Jessie Vukovich, FJHS grad who owed
something
to Chaplin, and what else did he have? The inscription. ‘Love ya. Nenna.’ He stuffed the yearbook in his Florida Trends bag and drove to her house.

Mrs McCall opened it, grinning as though something – life? – had just delivered a present, gift-wrapped, and she could hardly wait to get it inside and rip the ribbons off. She went all actress on him, trilling, ‘Daniel, how nice!’

‘It’s Dan.’

‘Come in, come in!’ Was she playing to a full house or an empty one? He wasn’t sure. He never saw the husband yesterday, just heard him stomping out. The lady was carefully put together for a Saturday, good hair and full makeup, yellow shoes. Was she expecting him, or did she always fix herself up like Barbie, just in case? ‘Come on, you could get heat prostration out there!’

‘Ma’am, if you’re busy . . .’

‘Who me? You’ve got to be kidding. Please.’ She moved him along to the Florida room a little too fast. Still, it was nice to be welcome somewhere.

The Florida room was a little creepy. Where Lucy loved the light, Mrs McCall had layers of fabric covering all the glass. All Florida might be blooming outside but Nenna McCall kept this place hermetically sealed against the heat. The flowers were fake irises embellished with silk leaves so finely made that he could see the veins. Rose patterns crawled across the squashy chairs flanking the sofa and ivy crept up the legs of the wrought iron table and chairs. Underfoot, beige roses bloomed on the Chinese rug. On the walls, he saw gaudy hibiscus prints and watercolors of the Fort Jude scenes framed in bamboo. Having shut out nature, the intelligence that chose this room had tried and failed to replicate it inside.

It made him reluctant to sit down.

She reached as if for his arm but at the last minute bent and patted the sofa. ‘Sit here. I’ll get us some iced tea. Unless you’d prefer lemonade,’ she went on in that nervous, girlish way. ‘Or coffee. Peet’s, from California? It’s really good.’

‘Thanks, I’m pretty much caffeined out.’

‘Oh,’ Nenna looked at the shopping bag like a child jonesing for a present. ‘Is that for me?’

‘Kind of. I wanted to ask you a couple of things.’

‘Sure!’

He proffered
The
Swordfish.
‘You were in school with my mother?’

Guilty. She jerked away. ‘When?’

‘At FJHS?’ He sat down so she would sit. Then he opened the book. He couldn’t say what, exactly, happened to her face when he pointed out plump little GENEVIEVE HENDERSON. ‘You knew my mother, right?’

She jumped up, as if to prove it wasn’t true.

‘So, did you?’

Her tone chilled. ‘Wait here.’

What pissed her off?
Waiting, he leafed through the yearbook, wondering what just went wrong. It was sweet in a way, seeing these long-ago kids’ faces, because they were so
young
. Flashing on Lucy in her last hour, he saw the future; smart or stupid, pretty or not, these people were hostages to biology and destiny. Nothing that the eighteen-year-olds facing the camera with such hopes could say or do or buy or get would prepare them, or help them arm themselves against what was to come. Today Nenna wore white jeans and a tank top that exposed her tanned, buff upper arms. Her hair was almost perfect, but her face betrayed her; she worked too hard on it.

Right.
Now he gets it.
She’s pissed at me for knowing how old she is.

By the time she comes back, she’s forgiven him. Smiling, she puts down the tray and offers homemade cookies that he doesn’t want. Offended by being nailed as a late-late Seventies person at Fort Jude High in the Middle Ages, she makes him take two before she asks, ‘Who was your mother?’

He shows her the picture.

‘Lucy. Carteret. You kept her name.’

‘It’s the only name I have.’

Her head snaps back as if everything inside it just jerked to a stop. ‘I’m sorry!’

He flushes. ‘It’s no big.’

Recovering, Mrs McCall – sorry, Nenna – bends over the book with him, dropping details like breadcrumbs along a forest path. ‘Lovely girl but she kept to herself, which is why . . . OK,’ she says in that youthful tone aging women work to maintain, ‘OK. We thought she was snotty.’

‘She was shy.’

‘It’s not like we didn’t like her.’ Defensively, she adds, ‘She didn’t want to be friends. I’m sorry, we should have tried harder.’

‘Don’t feel bad.’

‘Maybe living with your grandmother makes you weird. Her mother died having her and the old lady flew to Charleston and scooped her up.’