Out at Night (27 page)

Grace stared.

“You had to be there.”

“He sent down trash. . .and the john.”

“Right. I sent up granola bars and books.”

“You and Ted were—”

“Tight. We started with protesting the war, then added in the environment. We lived in this commune in the woods. We were arrested and convicted of vagrancy, creating a public nuisance—bunch of stuff. They tried to pin attempted assault with a deadly weapon on us, but it didn’t stick.”

Grace shifted the phone.

“What was that about?”

“Tree spiking. We were monkey-wrenching the trees so that if they got serious, trying to saw them down, they’d get hurt. Nobody got hurt, Grace.”

“They just as easily could have.”

“I was stupid. It was a nature preserve they were tearing down, going to put up condominiums. It seemed wrong then, still wrong now, but the way we did it, that was wrong, too. The rest of it—car bombings. House explosions. Businesses burned to the ground; whatever other shit they want to pin on me, I didn’t do.”

“Co-conspiring to bomb a forest genetics lab, a dam in Northern California, and two power stations.”

Jeanne’s face turned pale. “Oh my God. No. I left before any of that. If Ted were still alive, he could vouch for me, although I don’t know if they’d believe him.”

“I take it when you knew him, he didn’t have a face recognition problem.”

Emotions darted over her face: loss, love, and the click that comes when a piece falls into place. “So that’s why he took my picture in Gerry Maloof’s. I guess I thought—”

She looked young for an instant, and very vulnerable.

“He did it with everybody,” Grace said gently.

“It’s okay. What we had was a long time ago.”

Grace nodded. “Uncle Pete showed me a photo of the two of you. It was sent anonymously to the
Desert Sun
. They’re running with it tomorrow.”

“I hope I have my clothes on.”

“You were linking arms, rocking, and yes. It’s ripped. Looks like somebody else was in it.”

A shadow passed over Jeanne’s face. “Probably Tasha. She broke us up. She was the reason I left the commune. She saved me, actually, from the worst of the bad stuff that came down, so I should be thanking her. Tough to come home, though, after a hard day of tree hugging, and find your man on an ergonomically, environmentally sensitive futon boinking his brains out with another woman.”

Grace absorbed that.

“So you left.”

“Walked off a work-release detail. We were sleeping in jail at night, cleaning roads by day. I only had two months to go on a six-month sentence. Dumb dumb dumb.”

“What happened to Tasha?”

“No idea. One thing I remember from that period. We all knew how to shoot bows and arrows.”

Grace nodded as if it were something she’d already heard. Inside, a train roared, exploding through her mind, blowing pieces of shrapnel and waves of debris.

“The guys were into hunting game, although most of the time that meant we were vegetarians. Nobody’s aim was worth a damn and the idea of bringing down Bambi was a little too intense.”

“Bartholomew know how to shoot?”

“Even I did. Haven’t done it in years. But I was thinking, since that’s how he was murdered, I don’t know, maybe it was somebody from back then.”

“You mean, somebody besides you.” The instant she said it, she regretted it.

Jeanne swallowed. “They had me flagged as an escapee from a work-release program; I don’t know if it’s like having a late library book or owing something to the IRS, if they just keep piling on the penalty, but in any event, I’m here now, and it will be what it is.”

She shifted the phone.

“Grace, what am I looking at?”

“You mean sentence-wise? Hard to say, Jeanne. After you left, you never saw Bartholomew, until last Wednesday.”

Jeanne nodded. “Right.”

“So he recognized you.”

She nodded. “Maybe the way it works is, he recognizes faces from before the injury. Probably one of those bombs took that away. I think I heard through the grapevine he was hit once. He definitely knew who I was; it scared the hell out of him. Frank told me where Bartholomew lived—of course he didn’t know what I was planning—and on my way out of town, I stopped by. I threatened him; told him unless he left the convention and Frank alone I was going to turn him in. He flipped it; said all he’d have to do was pick up the phone and I’d go down, too.”

“So you kept silent.”

“Grace, I’m about as imperfect as a sponsor can be. I’ve worked the steps, but I haven’t lived them, not as deep as I should. It all came down to turning myself in, but I had to tell Frank first. I owed him that much. And telling him when he was under such stress at the convention—well, that just seemed wrong.”

“So you cut a deal with Bartholomew.”

“I cut a deal. Bartholomew and the Radical Damage bunch he ran with would stay out of Frank’s face, I’d stay out of his. That was my plan. Then I’d turn myself in Tuesday. I’d turn in John, too—Ted—although I hadn’t told him that.”

Grace thought of something. “You were protesting the war and then you went into tree spiking. You mean Vietnam. You’re in your early sixties. Not midfifties.”

“I’m here in a jail cell and you’re upset because I lied about my age?” But even as she said it, her voice cracked.

It was the core of everything Grace had been wrestling with. The substance of her despair, the dirt and dust of her potential rebirth. “All that stuff about honesty. Did you ever think about telling me? Who you really are?”

Jeanne’s eyes locked onto hers. “All the time, Grace. All the time.”

The jailer came through the door on Jeanne’s side. “Time’s up.”

Grace stood. “What’s your real name?”

Jeanne hesitated. “Jeanne,” she said finally. “Spelled differently, but Jeanne. Erica Jean.” She put down the phone and went with the jailer back through the door .

___

Grace took a hot shower, put on her favorite nightgown and a fresh pair of socks and went to bed.

But sleep did not come easily.

Jeanne had saved Grace with the simple words
honesty, Grace. That’s it. Getting clean. Staying sober. Speaking truth.

Grace had counted on Jeanne to be her moral compass.

Broken. No true north for her. Not anymore.

And how was Jeanne’s withholding truth from Grace worse than what Grace had done to Katie?

Grace had lied for no better reason than it was convenient. Through the years, she’d stolen moments alone watching Mac on television, hording a secret as guilty as any Jeanne had, and far more corroding, because Grace had used the clay of her daughter to mold it.

All the predators came out at night, the ones in the desert, the ones in her mind. Tethered on a short cord were the ones with fangs, guarding a dark house of self-loathing and pain.

She shifted in bed, punched the pillow, made a small sound in the dark.

She had to make this work, get to the bottom of it.

Save her friend.

Save herself.

Find her way home.

Chapter 32

Monday

It was two in the morning when the hotel phone rang. She was still awake, staring at the ceiling, but it took a moment in the unfamiliar room to find the receiver.

“Hey.”

It was Mac.

“Is she okay?” She came straight out of bed, her heart hammering.

“Oh God, of course she is. I’m sorry. Grace, it’s okay, it’s okay. I shouldn’t have called. It was a bad idea.”

“No, no.”

She fumbled for the light switch and found it and then remembered she’d pulled the blackout curtains open and left only the sheers so the sun would wake her up in the morning. She reached up and turned off the light. There was a slight moon and it streamed through the gauze. Exactly the way it had the first night they were together in Guatemala. “You okay?”

There was a pause on his end and she feared they’d been disconnected. He exhaled. “I find myself thinking, Grace. You did this funny thing with your toes, when we were together. Sort of—curling them into mine. Did you even know that?”

She swallowed.

“Grace?”

“I’m here.”

“She had an accident today—not big, don’t worry, please don’t. She was running and she tripped on the sidewalk at the pool and got this scrape on her knee. And she started to cry.” His voice was low. “And the first word she said was your name. Mommy.”

Grace closed her eyes. She felt herself unraveling, sitting in the dark in a strange room, her knees up. She opened her eyes and studied the pattern of light coming through the curtain.

“Do you miss medicine?”

Mac was the only one who could ask that question; the only one entitled to an answer.

“I miss how easy things were.”

“Before the end.”

“Yes. Before that.”

“Do you want other kids?”

She considered it. “Yes. You?”

“Katie could use a sister or brother.”

A tear spilled and she touched it with her finger. She felt, through the phone line, him slipping away and wasn’t sure why, as if he’d turned a corner in his mind, as if he was rooting through a variety of boxes, opening one and examining the contents, tossing it and reaching for the next, the tempo stepping up, shaking some of them to see if they rattled. She could picture him on his end, standing hip deep in boxes, contents scattered.

“So this visitation thing. Is that the way we do it?”

“I can’t do this now.”

A silence. “I shouldn’t have called.”

“Mac—”

“No, no, I shouldn’t have called. I’m sorry I woke you up.”

“Wait.”

But he was gone.

__

The air conditioner hummed and the sound mingled with an insistent rapping on the door. Grace rolled onto her back and frowned at the ceiling, trying to remember where she was.

The rapping again. She sat up. The clock radio glowed on the bed stand closest to the bathroom wall, and she got up and crawled over the wide expanse of the king-sized bed and focused.

Three-thirty.

“Grace.”

She got up, groped back the other way, bumped into the love seat, hopped on one foot, and cracked open the door.

Her uncle stood in an FBI flak jacket. He straightened when he saw her and snapped his phone shut. “Ever hear of leaving your cell on? I’ve been trying to reach you for the last half hour.”

“Why don’t you just call the house line, everybody else does.” She yawned.

He rolled his wrist and stared at his watch. “You’ve got thirty seconds to throw something on, if you want to be there when it comes down.”

Chapter 33

“See, the thing is, they have the infrareds, too, so it’s like looking through binoculars off a balcony, seeing some other guy with binoculars staring back.”

Her uncle kept his voice quiet. They were on their bellies in the sand behind a stand of spiky agave, looking down at the railroad tracks. It was the same slope she’d hiked up with Stuart. Against the dark soil gleamed oblong patches of wood. She wondered what they’d been building, and what they’d left behind.

There was a single outdoor light on at Windlift, but no traffic. No boxcars on the industrial spur track connecting the building to the switching yard. No activity. Grace wondered if all the wind turbines had left the yard. The factory looked deserted.

Darting among the abandoned buildings, she saw the unmistakable heat-sensor forms of animals: dogs, maybe a coyote. No people.

“Why no transients?” She kept her voice down.

“We did a sweep about a week back,” he whispered. “Takes them a couple of weeks to slide back in, after we pull out.”

A signal light flickered and stopped, as if the wind had blown out the light. From a great distance came the shrill whistle of a train approaching. Almost immediately, coming from the highway, there was an outline of a truck bouncing over the road toward the switching yard.

Pete cocked his head and said something low and unintelligible into his handie talkie.

The sand was damp; it already had soaked through her sweatshirt. The desert clicked with skittering creatures and Grace had the uneasy desire to look behind her and recheck the status of her ankles.

“Stop squirming.”

A choking cloud of dust funneled down the hill and sprayed like yellow ocean spume over the desert floor. There were agents behind them on the hillside, too, Grace was sure, but she couldn’t see them.

“If you’ve got something to say, say it.”

Grace thought of Jeanne, how she had to hang on to the wall to steady herself without her cane as she was turning to go back to her cell.

“If somebody does something stupid when they’re a kid, and then goes on to lead a good life—an exemplary life—does the good life in some way help pay for the mistakes?”

“You’re talking about an escapee from a work-release program who jumped a lawfully mandated sentence, went underground, and resurfaced only by accident.”

“She was going to come in.”

“Yeah, and there’s enough water here that we can export it, ship it in barrels to some little pissant country that just happened to have run out.”

“I can see why Vonda’s pissed at you.”

His jaw worked.

“I’m serious.”

“Grace, you’re asking the wrong man about forgiveness. Mistakes are the one thing I plan on doing up until the day I die; in fact, the day I die I want to go out saying I was wrong; I want to take it back.”

He shifted on his elbows and slapped a sand fly away from his face. “But the thing is, Zsloski and me and all the guys with us—we’re the guardians at the gate. We take all that shit seriously about protecting and serving. We don’t make the laws, we just take the scummy bad guys and trot their pornographic, skinny, smelly bad asses down into a holding cell where an irritable judge with a haircut that costs more than my golf clubs bangs down an arraignment gavel, and for a while, at least, we’ve got their shuffling, ankle-chained sorry selves in a place where they can’t hurt anybody else. At the end of the day, that’s all we care about.”

“Good, that’s good, literary, even. But not very helpful.”

“Maybe not to
you
. But believe me, it is to the folks trying to get some sleep at night without getting raped, bludgeoned, maimed, or murdered. Let me tell you about this bunch. Those guys in the truck down there. The Palm Springs police and the Union Pacific police have been working with the CAT team from L.A.—”