The Devil Went Down to Austin (28 page)

"This is a celebration," I told her."I have a plan to solve your problem."

"If she's down there," the lieutenant said, "we'll find her."

I gave him credit for trying to drink coffee while standing on Mansfield Dam. The morning wind was strong enough to knock the breath out of us and make the lieutenant's hair do a Medusa number. But with every bout, he corrected his balance like an old ship's captain and kept drinking.

The clouds were laced with lightning on the eastern horizon. Vic Lopez, Maia, the lieutenant, and I stood on the twolane pedestrian road that ran atop the milewide dam. We were about a third of the way out from the east end, where the cement railing turned to riveted steel.

On the west end, the slope to the water was a gentle mountain of gravel, but here it was a sheer drop two hundred feet. Below, the lake's surface rippled in windsheets of green and silver. Lower Colorado River Authority and Travis County Sheriff's boats made a dotted line from shore to shore. Marker buoys and diverdown flags bobbed in the wind.

I had a clear view of Point Lone Star—the marina, Ruby McBride's tower on the hill.

The point would be a steep but short hike from here, down the hill through underbrush and woods.

"The Ruby, Too left from there," the lieutenant said. "We found it moored over yonder—Defeat Hollow."

He pointed toward a small wooded cove. "My men dived the area around the boat, then moved down here and started working a compass pattern upcurrent."

"Too rough for a jackstay?" Lopez asked.

The lieutenant nodded.

"Can they search in the rain?" Maia asked him.

"Rain, yes. Not lightning. We've got about fifteen more minutes before I have to pull them out. But a storm is good. It brings bodies to the surface."

The observation failed to comfort me.

I thought about Ruby McBride in her bloodsmeared clothes, barefoot, the small automatic pistol slipping from her purse. "She could be somewhere else. Not even on the lake."

Lopez and the lieutenant exchanged glances.

The lieutenant said, "You gentlemen excuse me? Miss Lee."

He walked back toward the east end of the dam, the wind flicking tiny brown waves off his coffee cup.

Lopez said, "Cheer up, Navarre. Maybe you're right."

He spoke with all the optimism of a Russian economist.

Down on the lake, the tiny blackhooded head of a diver came to the surface. Then another. I might've mistaken them for turtles or snakes. Neither diver made any sign that they'd discovered anything, but my stomach tightened anyway. I walked across the road to the opposite railing.

This was the Colorado River side. Here the hills were dotted with luxury homes, garlanded with power lines. A whitecolumned highway bridge spanned the river to the south.

Maia leaned next to me on the railing. "Don't beat yourself up."

"I let her go," I said. "I could've stopped her."

"That wasn't your job, Tres. It wasn't your decision to make—it was Ruby's."

The problem was, I didn't agree with her. Some guilty, chauvinistic part of me believed that maybe, this one time, the damsel really had needed a knight. And perhaps she'd run straight into the arms of the wrong one.

Lopez joined us. "I'll need to get a list of Garrett's friends. Also his hangouts."

"You're treating him as a fugitive?"

Lopez rubbed his chin. "Well, let's see. He's out on bail for murder. His own lawyer can't locate him."

"You don't believe your own case anymore," Maia told him. "You know Garrett didn't kill anyone."

"What I know is that the machinery is in motion. It's not about me anymore, counsellor.

I couldn't stop it if I wanted to."

The river was so clear I could see the bottom—a series of broken limestone sheets that looked like a submerged set of child's blocks. Against the base of the dam, a multicoloured beach ball bobbed and dipped, stopped from its meanderings by three million tons of concrete.

"Ruby's boat," I said. "I want to see it."

Lopez looked over. "You want to say why?"

I didn't answer.

He sighed. "I'll see what I can do. They should be through processing it by this afternoon."

"What are the odds they'll find her, Vic?"

He planted his elbows on the cement wall. "The waterline is low. That works in the divers' favour. I don't know . . . the area they're searching, the current ..."

"You used to dive recovery?" Maia asked.

"When I was a cadet. Sounded like a cool cop thing to do, right? Search and recovery.

You think that before you run into your first body underwater. Most frightening thing I've ever done—a hundred and thirty feet deep in some places, down in the old river basin—"

"What?" I asked.

"Nothing."

"Another landmark?"

His expression hardened. "The reason I got out of recovery was a kid who drowned.

Down that way—the public park, just before Point Lone Star."

"Kids must be the hardest," I said.

"Thirteenyearold son went into the water after lunch—I mean, this is a small swimming area, marked with buoys and everything. He went in, and the family said it was like he was sucked underneath. Family was Asian. They kept trying to tell us about some Chinese superstition—a dragon got him, an evil spirit or something."

"That's an old belief." Maia's eyes were on the beach ball, trapped and still pushing against the dam. "Every body of water has its own spirit. You always run the risk that the spirit will take a liking to you, make you pay a visit to the bottom."

"Yeah, well, this was a thirtyday visit, this kid had. We had a dozen volunteer divers.

The family would come down every day to watch, until it's like two weeks later and we had to tell them— there's nothing else we can do."

"But you found him?"

"I found him, Navarre. And trust me—you don't want to know about it. I don't work recovery anymore."

Lightning did a triple play across the horizon. The cicadas woke up with the storm, humming in the woods like electricity.

Maia didn't look well—as if Lopez's story had caused a tremor under her feet, somewhere down in the centre of the dam. "I should get going, Tres. You'll get Lopez that list?"

I nodded. "Call me."

She brushed my sleeve with her fingertips, told Lopez goodbye. She walked down the dam road, leaning into the wind.

"Might be a bad time for a reunion," Lopez said, watching Maia. "You and her."

"Vic Lopez, advice columnist."

"If they find Ruby McBride in the water, Navarre, after what went down between Ruby and Garrett, the way she screwed him on that business deal—then God help your brother."

"Maia's right, isn't she? You don't believe in your own case anymore."

He laced his fingers. I noticed again the strange scars on his hands, like permanent blisters.

He saw me looking, rubbed the back of his hand with one finger. "When I was a kid—playing at this friend's house—I noticed this brown stain on his bathroom wall, like somebody had held a match close to the wallpaper. So I told his parents about it.

They didn't pay any attention, told me not to worry. But I couldn't leave it alone. I went back and touched it, thinking maybe it would rub off, and my hand went straight through. It was winter. A nest of yellow jackets had eaten its way into the insulation of the house. The brown stain was them on the other side, thinning out the wall. I put my hand straight through the paper and into the centre of their nest."

He flexed his fingers, showing me the pattern of scars. "Later the doctors told me I'd gotten over a hundred stings. I almost died. They told me the nest in the wall was the size of a washing machine.

There's the lesson, Navarre—if you're the kind who likes to touch the dark spots, maybe you should think twice."

The beach ball bounced against the dam in the wind. Lightning flashed almost overhead now.

"Clara Doebler's death bothers you more than you let on," I told Lopez. "You don't want Jimmy's death mishandled the way hers was."

"Keep your assumptions."

"I've been there," I said. "I've seen a person killed right in front of me."

Lopez kept his eyes on the storm. "No, Navarre. You have not been where I have been. It's a place you do not want to go."

Down at the boats, horns were sounding. More divers were starting to come out of the water.

"I'll see you later," Lopez told me. "Go teach your class."

He met my eyes, and just for that moment I saw the anger behind his smile—the offense I'd done him by digging too deep.

And he was right. He was giving me fair warning. It was a dark spot I did not want to touch.

I got to UT five minutes late for my class, soaked, but no one seemed to notice. My septuagenarian student, Father Time, was standing in front, regaling everyone with his last trip to Roswell.

As soon as I'd brushed the water out of my hair and sorted my lecture notes, Father Time yielded the floor with a yellowdentured grin.

"Figured it wasn't any stranger than what you'd tell us," he explained.

Just what every professor needs—a warmup act.

I did a quick roll check, realized with mixed emotions that not a single person had dropped. I hear stories from other instructors about fifty percent drop rates, classes of five or ten with an accordingly small number of papers to grade. No such luck for Navarre. Like buzzards, my students tend to stick around to the bitter end. A colleague once told me I wouldn't have that problem if I just stopped doing lesson plans, got boring, and did my part to uphold the reputation of American higher education.

Of course, that colleague never had to use teaching as an escape from PI work. He'd never had to help himself forget, at least temporarily, that his brother was a murder suspect and a woman he'd just met had disappeared.

The thunderstorm drummed on the roof while we talked about the background of the Corpus Christi plays.

I fielded the standard questions. No, we were not talking about Corpus Christi, Texas.

The medieval English hadn't yet discovered

the joys of Spring Break at Padre Island. No, the plays weren't actually stage plays, but paradefloat shows, performed on travelling wagons as part of a street procession.

Yes, they really were all Bible stories. Yes, we really would read them in Middle English. Yes, they might be fun anyway.

"Corpus Christi was like Fiesta," I explained. "The Battle of Flowers, except religious."

Blank stares reminded me I was not in San Antonio anymore. A few students nodded like they'd hit Fiesta before. Most did not.

"Mardi Gras?" I tried.

Better. Still no consensus.

I searched my memory for an Austin equivalent. "Aquafest? South by Southwest?"

A tentative voice in back said, "The Gourd Festival?"

"Exactly," I said. "Just like the Gourd Festival."

A collective "Ohh." Satisfied nodding. We had bonded.

Father Time grinned at the ceiling, as if he were getting signals of approval from his friends in Roswell.

"Think of a Gourd Festival put on by the Catholic Church," I suggested. "A religious holiday, and all the entertainment based on something from the Bible."

"Dude," said a guy in the back. "That would suck."

"But if it's all you had," I countered, "if that were the only festival you were allowed every year, you'd make it count, wouldn't you?"

With that we launched into the Gourd Festival rendition of the Wakefield Noah.

It took most of the class period just to get the students used to the language, but we were rolling along pretty well by the time Noah and his wife started arguing about getting on the ark.

"Why won't she get on?" a student asked.

I let another student answer. "Typical woman. She doesn't trust her husband."

The first woman looked incredulous. "She's going to drown? She'd rather sit there and nag him than get on the boat?"

"Yeah," a younger girl in the back said. "She's cool."

A few lines later, another question stopped us. "What's Noah calling her there?

Ramskit?"

"Ram shit!" Father Time interpreted, thoroughly delighted.

We read through the fistfight between Noah and wife, the kicking and screaming, the insults. Uxor, the wife, sat down to knit in the rain while the flood came up around her ankles. Once the pleading family finally herded the old matriarch on board, the class was almost sorry to see her lose the argument and live.

"She should've held out," one contended. "Noah's a bastard."

We got to the end. The wife sent out a raven to find land. Noah sent out two doves. The raven's hunger for carrion kept him from returning, but the dove's gentleness and true heart brought it back to the ship with the olive branch.

There was a moment of silence after we read the last line.

"So women send out ravens," the girl in back said. "Is that an insult?"

We could've talked for another hour just on that point, but we were out of time. I told them we'd continue to discuss Noah tomorrow, then asked them to read the next play, The Crucifixion, on their own.

Thirty minutes later, I was sitting in Texas French Bread on Guadalupe, the rain beating down outside. My Bevington Medieval Drama was open, a blank yellow pad and portable Middle English Dictionary on top. My cell phone, a cup of coffee, a ham and cheese croissant, and a bottle of extrastrength Tylenol filled up the rest of the tabletop. All the comforts of home.

I stared at the phone, then at the Bevington book.

Planning for tomorrow's class seemed a lot safer than the other things I needed to do today.

And then the phone chirped.

Maia Lee said, "Hey."

"We win the lottery?"

"Finding Garrett—no luck. And nothing on Ruby. The search divers aren't going back in until later in the day."

I wasn't sure whether to be relieved by no news, or not. "Where are you? "

Rain static hissed on the line. "Tres, I went back to Faye DoeblerIngram's house.

She's gone."

"Gone as in gone?"

Maia told me how she'd found the Hyde Park house locked up, dark, no car in the driveway. Maia had taken a discreet look around