THUGLIT Issue Twelve (3 page)

The case haunts me of course. As I lie on my cot staring at the ceiling, day after day, night after night, I dwell on various aspects of the robbery and its aftermath. I thought the death of the security guard would be the thing that haunts me the most, but oddly, it
's not. What haunts me the most are the masks. Madison and I had walked around the city disguised as an old married couple, wearing those masks. And we had every intention of growing old together in real life, of becoming those doting old lovebirds that we pretended to be. But now, not only will we not grow old together, we'll never see one another again. And that, more than anything, torments me no end.

It
's funny, because if you think about it, that too fulfills the destiny Madison had envisioned. Our namesakes had gone out in a blaze of glory, dying together in a hail of bullets. But Madison and I, we didn't die together. No. We're doing life in prison, isolated and alone, separated, forever apart.

The opposite of Bonnie and Clyde.

by Edward Hagelstein

Ruben Caro had no fixed abode. For three years he
'd lived in an RV that he was ready to admit cost more than any sane retirement planner would recommend. Tall and narrow, it reminded him of a toaster. On the other hand, everything he owned fit inside.

Ruben tended to chase cooler weather. The first summer he worked his way from Maine across to Vancouver, then wintered in the southwest. The next season he reversed course and parked a few weeks in Nova Scotia before hopscotching do
wn the East Coast in the fall.

He stayed at campgrounds and sometimes overnighted in Walmart lots, parks or rest stops. He sought out bookstores and the occasional restaurant when he was near a town, but mainly cooked his own food in the RV, read his books, and didn
't seek out company. He avoided most places where students, especially girls, tended to gather.

Ruben was fifty-four, bereft, and sought no
other life, for the time being.

Snow was creeping down the mountains when he checked his e-mail on a Monday morning in Ruidoso, New Mexico. His wife, Carole, wanted him to call her cell, any time of day. His scalp tingled when he saw her name. They hadn
't talked in person since he departed France.

He
'd been in the campground for a week and was preparing to pull out and head south. He was leaning toward a slow easterly descent to Cudjoe Key with a two-day detour to Sanibel, where a former boss divided his time between eighteen holes and subjecting middle-schoolers to abridged, cantankerous tours of the shell museum. There were a few states between him and Florida, so it could take a month. He thought to stop in Oxford, Mississippi for a week. Austin and Marfa before that. Maybe New Orleans.

Carole used to say that wherever Ruben was, that
's who he was. In Paris he was Gallic. In Buenos Aires, Argentine. In America he fit in, although not of a particular region or state. Other than some Asian and African countries, people would often take him for a local and ask for directions in the native language. He was frequently able to reply in kind, even if in a rudimentary fashion.

Ruben had come back to the U.S. post-retirement, after they lost first Anne, then their marriage. It was simple for him here. He
'd never worked in his native country, didn't have to try and become someone else. Didn't have the gut-gnawing sensation of waiting to be exposed. Didn't have to fear the inadvertent flash of eyes on his in the street, or conversely, the studied refusal to meet his gaze. Overly alert faces or sudden jostles no longer sent him into high alert. It wasn't home any longer, but was comforting. He had no adult history here. He roamed anonymously at will.

Three years earlier he
'd walked out of the Paris apartment for good on the afternoon Carole finished a bottle of Bordeaux, one of many that year, and told him she hadn't been looking forward to Anne's teenage years in any case. After the trouble Carole had given her mother she could only assume Anne would have been the same. Ruben didn't care whether or not she was trying to shock him into acceptance of what was apparent to everyone else. Carole had already absorbed the loss in a way he could not. Anne had been buried under the ice and snow for five months.

He finished breakfast, packed the RV for travel and was on Highway 70 heading toward Roswell before he called. The apartment on Rue Vaneau had be
longed to Carol's late father, a Francophile since spending much of the 1950s there expending his G.I. Bill. The apartment was the one extravagant purchase her father had allowed himself in nearly forty years of teaching literature at NYU. Carole had spent summers in the city with her father and considered it home now.

A vivid morning in New Mexico, it was evening in Paris. The sky would be gloaming into night, and lights would be flowing on through the city. At times he missed the grubby tight spaces and bustle of a city. Other times he was able to enjoy wherever he happened to be. Like now, gliding between the dusty
foothills and distant, greener mountains with Telemann on the satellite radio.

Carole
's voice had a hollow quality over the phone. He heard her heels clacking on the floor of an empty room. A decade earlier she'd opened an agency that specialized in renting apartments to Americans and the British. The voices of a couple lilted in the background as she excused herself and allo'ed into the phone.

"
It's me."

"
Ruben…" Emotion was in his name. Emotion he hadn't heard in the last year they lived together.

"
Is it Anne?" Her name was difficult to say aloud.

"
Yes."

"
Have they found her?"

He
'd expected it during the summers, not this time of year. Two others had been uncovered during the first thaw.

"
No."

He waited.

"Something came in the mail." She was trying to keep control with her clients in hearing range.

"
Paperwork?" Not a death certificate. No.

"
Not that. Something of hers."

His breath stopped until he let it out. He had to concentrate to keep the RV in its lane.

"Something she had with her? On her?"

"
Yes. Can you come?"

He gazed out onto the
sparse earthen beauty surrounding him for a moment. "I'll text you when I book a flight."

Anne had been skiing Chamechaude with a friend from school and her family on a weekend. The girls apparently diverted from the trail and skied into the path of an avalanche triggered from above. The slope was thought safe, and Anne's friend had an Arva beacon.

Neither girl was found, and the signal was lost. It was surmised they were swept into a deep crevice and the beacon was damaged. Two older boys skiing several hundred feet below the girls were enveloped and their bodies were found in the spring. It was guessed that the girls had followed the boys off the piste. They were both sixteen years old.

Ruben entered through DeGaulle holding the only passport he had now—his own. With graying perpetual four-day stubble, in a dark tieless suit, he was mistaken in Europe for a bar owner or under-appreciated architect with few commissions. In retirement mode in the U.S. he was not usually noticed. He slumped in a cab in the morning traffic. His father-in-law's name was still posted at the door. Carole buzzed him in.

The
apartment was bright and fresh-looking. It lifted some of the blear from his mind. She'd had the kitchen redone and the other rooms painted. The windows overlooking Rue Vaneau were cracked open and admitted the subdued mid-morning street clatter he always found relaxing.

Carole looked better herself. She seemed more French now. Slim, well-dressed, urbane. The
situation couldn't be helping, but she didn't show it. He saw no evidence of drinking. No empty glasses, no wine bottles, even for cooking.

They didn
't touch each other.

A package sat on the dining table, flaps open, contents exposed. Inside was a ski boot that he stared at for a moment. White and aqua in a distinctive pattern. He recognized it as the same model that Anne had been wearing.

"The police examined it?"

"
They couldn't get any fingerprints."

He picked it up. The boot had been used, but
didn't appear to have been sitting under the ice or snow for any amount of time.

"
We don't even know if it was hers," Carole said. "Do we?"

He folded the lids of the box down.
"What did they get from the postage mark?"

"
They narrowed it down as being mailed from a certain La Poste in Grenoble."

"
Grenoble?"

He
'd spent a month there after the avalanche trying to organize a search for the Anne and the others. The worst month of his life. If there was one city associated with pain, Grenoble was it for him.

Carole was looking at him. He was conscious of her blue eyes and expensively cut hair.

"Did they give you the address?"

"
I have it written down. What's the point of the whole thing Ruben? What could someone want?"

"
I don't know."

"
Is it because of your job?"

"
Stranger things have happened. Do you have that paper?"

Carole went into the kitchen and emerged with a sheet of notebook paper.
La Poste Grenoble, Av. Jean Perrot.
She watched him fold it and slip it into a pocket. She didn't object.

The box was addressed to Carole
with black marker in shaky script.

"
The police had a quick handwriting analysis done. I don't understand it all, but the upshot was that the writer appears to have been educated in both the U.S. and France at different times."

"
Did they give you anything in writing?"

"
No. It was fairly informal since there's no real crime."

Ruben was impressed, but slightly skeptical without seeing a report. Still, it was something to go on. "No note in the package?"

"
Nothing."

He gazed around the apartment that had
been his home and now was not. "Can I use a spare set of keys? I'll be back later."

The hardware store two buildings down that his friend Patrice had presided over for twenty years now still had chipped plum paint on the façade and the familiar display window packed with aging electronics
and fading hand-written signs.

A muffled bonjour drifted out from behind a crowded
counter in response to the doorbell. Ruben stood at the front of the store and whistled the first ten ominous notes of
Finlandia Opus 26
.

After a delay, something fell to the floor as a body attempted to brush quickly past a display of rubber door stoppers. Patrice came bursting to the front of the store, his arms held open, a wide genuine smile on his face. He might have been forty, or sixty. He wore a chambray shirt with a pocket protector and khaki pants. His eyes were the liveliest part of a jowly face.

"My friend," he grabbed Ruben in a bear hug. "Close to four years and you have the nerve to come in here and try to stump me by eviscerating Sibelius? You are batshit crazy."

"
That's not right?" Ruben said innocently.

Patrice licked his lips and whistled a version infinitely better than Ruben
's, using appropriately dark facial expressions until they both cracked up.

"
You've got me there," Ruben said. "Mine was weak."

Patrice hustled him to the back of the store and brought out a battered wooden stool for his guest behind the counter. He poured black coffee in mugs for them both and pulled up another stool for himself.

"I did receive your kind postcard last year however and now have remembrance of the Alamo."