The Bones of Old Carlisle (11 page)

“I’m going, that’s all there is to it,” Arrowroot replied
shortly. “My life has been a nightmare since Robert stopped coming by.
Nothing I find out there is gonna make things any worse.”
“Hernie,” said Hatfield, reaching into his pocket for the keys to
the patrol car, “I’m gonna ride with the Army folks, you can take the
car back to the station.”
“Sure, Chief,” said Juarez.
“But do a full tour up here, will ya?” Hatfield continued. “And
if you see that girl, just stop and ask if she’ll talk to ya. We’re
going to need to get all her info eventually. See if you can find out
where she’s planning to go. But no heroics. Don’t argue with her.
Don’t try to pick her up. Just find out what she’s gonna do next, and
if there’s a place where we can reach her or whatever.”
“Okay,” Juarez said, and he took the keys and headed for the
door. If the request made him nervous, he didn’t show it.
“Hernando, just a minute,” Hatfield said.
“Sir?” Juarez replied.
“Don’t talk about what you saw here,” the chief instructed. “Not
a word. This is an active investigation, we don’t know what we’ve got,
and I don’t want to spook people unnecessarily.”
“Yes,” agreed Juarez, and he headed out the door.
“Karl,” Hatfield said, “can I ask the same of you?”
“Eh, what’s that?” Arrowroot queried.
“Can you keep all this to yourself for the time being?”
“I can’t make any promises,” Arrowroot said, “but I’ve got no
reason to say anything for now. If that changes, I’ll let you know.”
“Mr. Arrowroot,” Guillaume said quietly as he rose from his seat
on the bottom step. “Mr. Arrowroot.”
“What’s that?” Arrowroot asked. “Hey, Guillaume, how’s your stay
been so far? Did you expect to meet so many interesting people?”
“Karl,” Guillaume repeated, stone-faced, “Danielle asked if you
could speak to her up the stairs.”
A lot of foreign people don’t understand American humor,
Arrowroot reminded himself.
“Thanks, I’ll run on up,” he said, hopping up the steps two at a
time. When he reached the top, he shouted back down. “Floyd, I’ll be
up here just a second, don’t let her leave without me!”
Arrowroot found his daughter standing in the middle of her room,
her back to him. She heard his steps and turned, and Arrowroot saw
that she was crying, and that she was mad.
“Everything’s so funny to you, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Humor gets me through, that’s all,” Arrowroot replied. “And I’ve
had a lot to get through.”
“I bet you’ll keep making jokes all the way out there, won’t
you?”
“More than likely,” he admitted. “How’s your hand? Nothing that
needs medical attention, I hope?”
Danielle bent her wrist and wriggled her fingers. “It’s fine,”
she said. She paused, and then she spoke again. “If you find him, try
to be serious, okay?”
“He’s not out there,” Arrowroot said. “I’m just going to go.”
“What?”
“Didn’t you hear Stapleton?” he said, lowering his voice. “It’s a
bunch of special ops out there, doing some kinda training that no one
knew about. Then someone killed them. Someone, or some
thing
. That’s
not something Robert would have been mixed up in.”
“Then you just want to look at dead bodies?” she asked, sniffing.
“I’m the mayor here, in case you’d forgotten,” he retorted. “If
something’s killing people a few miles from the city limits, I
probably ought to know about it, especially if they’re sending
representatives into town to, you know, raise hell and use living
people’s bodies as human footballs and whatnot.”
Arrowroot drew close to his daughter, put his hand on her
shoulder and whispered, “Even if I don’t find him, I’m gonna look high
and low, as much as they’ll let me get away with. I might find
something he left behind. A notebook or a letter or something, you
know?”
“That reminds me,” Danielle said, wiping her eyes and reaching
for a folded piece of paper on her dresser. “Tamani said to give this
to you.”
Arrowroot opened it quickly, looking over his shoulder before he
peered at it.
“Daddy,” it began. Then Tamani had crossed out “Daddy” and wrote
“Carl” and then “Karl.” Her penmanship seemed to be an attempt to
exactly duplicate the letters from the books she’d read the night
before, including the little line over the a, and all the serifs.
“You told me you wanted to know what happened,” Tamani had
written. “To do that, you will need two crystals which I left there,
and which I think contain the information I have forgotten. This shows
where they are.”
Underneath the words was a picture with a large rectangle
Arrowroot assumed was the outline of the Carlisle home, with several
trees nearby. Tamani had drawn two shapes beside one of the trees,
vaguely resembling the letters u and i, and between them were two
smaller shapes, both square.
Under the picture, Tamani had added, almost as an afterthought,
“This is a map. The small squares are the two crystals. They are not
the same size as—” Then she’d crossed out “the same size as” and had
written “to scale.”
“Thank you, this might be helpful,” Arrowroot said, and then he
hugged Danielle. “It’s been nice to have you here,” he said. “I’m
sorry for— I’m sorry. You know.”
Danielle was about to start crying again, but instead she just
hugged him back, in a tentative way that told Arrowroot she was
conscious again of the gulf between them, of all the darkness that can
grow between two people while they’re just living their lives. Then
she opened her mouth wide. “Guillaume!” she shouted.
“That’ll bring him running,” Arrowroot observed, and he set his
troubled thoughts aside, breathed in and reminded himself of the
project before him. “Say, can you take care of Othercat before you
leave? Litter box probably needs cleaning. She wouldn’t mind some food
either.”
“Sure,” Danielle promised.
“Tamani called Othercat a happiness this morning,” he recalled,
and he chuckled. “That girl was the ass-kickingest philosopher I’ve
ever met. But she’s probably right, you know. Make sure to pet her,
too, probably do you as much good as it’ll do her.”
Arrowroot was leaving Danielle’s bedroom as Guillaume appeared at
the top of the stairs, so Arrowroot stopped in his path and stuck out
his hand.
“Guillaume, it’s been a pleasure, hope I’ll see you again soon,”
he said. “And I’m sorry you couldn’t quite see eye-to-eye with some of
my other guests this morning. A little cranky, they were.”
“Yes,” agreed Guillaume.
“How’s that place where they tasered you?”
“I don’t feel it,” Guillaume said.
“But kind of attention-getter when it was happening, eh?”
Arrowroot inquired.
Guillaume stared blankly, so Arrowroot just burst out laughing
and continued down the hall.
Downstairs, Hatfield, Stapleton and Bonaventure were all standing
in the middle of his living room, waiting for him.
“Shall we?” he ventured. As on the previous day, he was wearing
cargo pants, pith helmet and a flannel shirt, but this time light
blue.
“One question before we get started, Karl,” Hatfield began. “If I
may?”
“Well,” Arrowroot replied, “you can try.”
“You said Tamani screamed earlier this morning,” Hatfield noted.
“Do you know why?”
“I think I’ve already answered that,” replied Arrowroot. “I said
she screamed just as you got here.”
The answer was literally true. Arrowroot had indeed answered the
question before, telling the officers Tamani had screamed just before
they banged on the door. His theory at the time was she’d seen them or
their cars and gotten frightened.
But since he’d made that statement, Arrowroot had received some
new information. Tamani had been looking out his bedroom window when
she screamed. From that window, she wouldn’t have seen the officers or
their cars, because of where they’d parked.
It was a small detail, and something Arrowroot decided to keep to
himself. She couldn’t have been looking at the police from his bedroom
window when she screamed, but she had a perfect view of Fort Shergawa.

Karl Arrowroot admitted. “Barely started on it before I hit a wall.”
“Hmph,” replied Chief Hatfield, trying not to sound like he
wanted to know more.
“That’s right,” said Arrowroot. “What’s the question? I didn’t
know. You want to understand everything, first you have to know what
question to ask. And I didn’t.”
Hatfield stared at his phone.
The two of them were sitting in the back seat of an Army SUV.
Major Stapleton was driving, silent and, very likely, supremely
annoyed. Captain Bonaventure was up front in the passenger seat, his
shirt pulled up to his chest so he could continue to study his ribs.
The four had just left Arrowroot’s home.
“You need to know the question, if you’re going to look for the
answer,” Arrowroot continued. “That goes without saying. So what’s the
question?”
“I have no idea,” Hatfield mumbled.
“Neither do I,” Arrowroot admitted. “I still don’t. What’s the
meaning of life? That could be it. What’s the purpose of life? Maybe
that’s it. How should you, you know, how should you live? That could
be it. Or what does God want you to do? Maybe that’s it. You know, if
you believe in God and all.”
“Hmph,” said Hatfield.
“Got an atheist in the car, folks,” Arrowroot announced. “Right
here, sittin’ next to me.”
The officers were silent.
“Wrote me a damned ticket last fall,” Arrowroot said. “Reckless
driving. Took my eyes off the road for a second, that’s all it was,
demolished a mailbox. I mean, splinters and scrap metal. Bought ‘em a
new one the next day, of course, better than what they ever had. But
Floyd had to write a ticket. They put it in the paper, too.”
After another moment of silence, Arrowroot continued. “Not
knowing the question, now that was a problem,” he said. “But you know,
that’s not why I gave it all up. I had the damndest dream, and that’s
what did me in.”
Arrowroot paused, waiting for someone to ask him about his dream,
but no one spoke.
“Be happy,” he said. “How can I be the happiest I possibly can
be? Maybe that’s all it is.”
Silence.
“You know, that’s how wedding girl seemed to think of it,”
Arrowroot said. “She was always on about happiness. Except she didn’t
call it just happiness. She said ‘happinesses,” like ‘how many
happinesses have you had today?’ I swear to God. Floyd, she talked to
you that way too, right?”
“She did,” Hatfield agreed.
“So here’s a normal conversation between her and her husband,
say, at the end of the day and all: ‘Honey, did you have a nice day at
work?’ That’s what she’d ask. And he’d say ‘Oh yeah, it was great, I
had five happinesses, I’m about to fall out with happinesses. How
‘bout you?’ And then she’d say, ‘Well, I had three happinesses, or
maybe three and a half.’ And he’d say, ‘Well, how the hell can you
have half a happiness?’ and she’d say something back, and they’d just
go on like that, probably until bedtime.”
Arrowroot fell silent, leaned back and wrapped his hands around
one knee. It was almost time for church to start at most of the places
in town, so the streets of downtown Heligaux were busy.
No one said anything again until they had reached the bridge over
the Mittelkopp, when Stapleton inquired, “Who is wedding girl?”
“What’s that?” Arrowroot replied.
“You mentioned wedding girl,” she repeated. “Who is that?”
“Oh, that girl you met in my house today,” he said. “Not my
daughter, the other one, I assume you remember. Until she confirmed
her name was Tamani, I thought of her as wedding girl. You know,
because of how she was dressed.”
“And how was that?” Stapleton asked.
Stapleton tapped Bonaventure on the shoulder. He looked at her
and she pulled one hand off the steering wheel, brought her fingers
together and moved her hand as if she were writing. Bonaventure
exhaled, slid down his shirt and, with what appeared to be supreme
effort, pulled a notebook from his shirt pocket.
“Well, you know, in a wedding dress,” Arrowroot replied, trying
not to sound exasperated. “White sheath dress, taffeta, fine
embroidery.”
They were on the bridge now, and Arrowroot looked out over the
water, back toward the Promenade, the pier and the Eden Hotel. The sun
had risen up over the mountain, but the light was going to be
intermittent today, blocked here and there by a fleet of puffy clouds,
moving slowly in perfect whiteness against the blue sky over the
valley.
“Where did she get the dress?” Stapleton asked. “Did you give it
to her?”
“Okay, okay,” Arrowroot replied, and he issued a sort of sigh
that indicated impatience while pretending to mask it. “Now, you know
you’re going to get my full cooperation, so I want you to take this
next question in the spirit it’s being given, okay? As an expression
of full cooperation. Okay?”
No one said anything, so Arrowroot continued. “So what I want to
ask is, do you actually have any idea what happened yesterday? You
know, where she was found, what was said on the radio, who brought her
to town, what she was wearing, all that?”
“We’re not at liberty to share what we know,” Stapleton replied
curtly. “Can you just answer the question?”
“Oh, sure,” said Arrowroot, “sure I can, I just don’t want to
waste your time with things you already know. No, I did not give her
the wedding dress. She was wearing it, far as I know, when she turned
up yesterday at the fort and took that fella’s M16 and all. In fact,
she told me she found it out at one of the houses out there, most
likely—”
“What M16?” Stapleton interrupted.
“Well, now I’m in the realm of hearsay,” Arrowroot admitted, “but
it sounded on the police scanner yesterday morning like she met up
with one of your patrols, took his gun, then fired it a few times, I
guess for the hell of it, then dismantled it. Oh, and then last night
over dinner she tells me she thought he was gonna eat her. She was on
about that quite a bit.”
Bonaventure made a few marks in his notebook, closed it and
sighed.
“Did you get all that?” Stapleton asked.
“Most of it,” he said. “Some of it, anyway. What was worth
getting.”
Stapleton looked in the rearview mirror at Arrowroot. “What’s the
nature of your interest in this person?”
“She’s been to the fort,” Arrowroot said. “To the forbidden
areas. Someone important to me may be out there. Somewhere.”
“Who?” she asked.
“My son. Robert Arrowroot.”
More silence followed, and they drove wordlessly through the
forests of Steeple Mountain, toward the main gate of Fort Shergawa.
“Anyway, about that dream I was telling you about,” Arrowroot
said finally. “Damndest thing. You know, I had been reading all kinda
philosophy and theology and science and such, and it was all just
getting jumbled up in my mind. I was all confused like, and I still
didn’t even know the question I was supposed to be asking, much less
the answer.
“So I go to bed one night in the midst of that time, and that’s
when I have this dream, you know? So in my dream, I’m in this
building, and I’m just meeting one person after another, famous people
all, the kind I’d been reading. I mean, Nietzche, Darwin, Einstein—“
“You read Darwin?” Hatfield interrupted.
“Darwin, bunch a nonsense,” said Arrowroot, “but I read him,
sure. Hubble, Freud, St. Augustine, Newton. So I’m in this building,
and one of ‘em walks up to me, Einstein I think, and I’m not saying
anything, so he starts in on me, like, ‘Hey, boy, you know orange is
the answer. Orange is the answer to everything.’ And I’m like ‘Huh,
that wasn’t in your book,’ and he says ‘Nope, where you find orange,
that’s where there’s the truth.’ Then next it was Nietzche, I guess,
and he’s saying ‘Hey, boy, everything’s in threes. You want to
understand everything, it’s all in threes, so look for that.’ So I’m
just listening, and then it’s Darwin probably, and he’s all on about
circles. Circle this, circle that, just look for circles, that’s where
all the truth lies.’” Arrowroot paused. “So, you get the drift?”
There was only silence in the vehicle, so Arrowroot nudged
Hatfield and asked again, “So, you see where all this is going?”
“Have to admit I don’t,” Hatfield responded.
“That’s right, it was all nonsense,” Arrowroot declared.” But
that’s not the damndest part. That happened at the end. One of ‘em,
maybe Freud or whoever, one of ‘em walks up to me, says ‘Say, fella,
where you gonna stay?’ You know, ‘Where’s your room and all?’ So I
look around, and then I see where I’m at. So guess where I was. Eh?
Just guess where I was.”
“Hmmph,” was all Hatfield would say back.
They reached the gate and slowed. Today there were three soldiers
out front, including the one from Arrowroot’s visit to the fort the
day before. As soon as Stapleton rolled her window down, Arrowroot
shouted from the back seat, “Yo, Lt. Charlemagne! Fine day to be
outside, ain’t it?”
Charlemagne peered at Arrowroot over Stapleton’s shoulder, then
shot her a puzzled look.
“Material witness,” she said flatly. “Official business.”
The soldier grabbed two badges from the little guard house and
handed them through the window. “Pinch these to your pocket or your
lapel,” he said, “so they can be seen at all times while you’re within
the facility.”
“They made you general yet?” Arrowroot shouted, but the soldier
turned away and Stapleton rolled up her window. The gate opened and
they passed through.
“Top of his class at West Point, that’s what they told me
yesterday,” Arrowroot said. “So can you guess where we were at? Floyd,
any guesses?”
“I’m drawing blanks,” Hatfield admitted, studying his phone.
“At an insane asylum,” Arrowroot announced. “Everyone in there
was sideways as hell. And they thought I was one of ‘em. That’s the
damndest part of the whole thing. They thought I belonged there,
asking about my room and all. That was my dream. I mean, that was my
dream. Damndest thing.”
Arrowroot had been to Fort Shergawa’s headquarters complex dozens
of times, but this time they turned left, away from the main buildings
and down a narrow two-lane path that led to the old estates and the
bombing ranges.
Silence reigned once again -- silence among the officers because
this was apparently the way they preferred to travel, and for
Arrowroot because he didn’t want to miss any clues. But nothing to see
here, he quickly realized, just a wall of pine trees on either side of
the road.
“So, what do you think it meant?” he asked. “What do you think my
dream meant?”
No one was willing to hazard a guess.
“Okay then, I’ll tell you,” Arrowroot said. “It was God. Not to
get too poetic, but it was God, sending me a message from heaven. Can
you guess the message?”
“I can,” Hatfield said. “Don’t eat pizza before bedtime.”
Arrowroot paused for a moment, considering. “Naw,” he said, “that
wasn’t it at all. The message— The message was just as clear as if
he’d spoke it. He was sayin’, ‘Now, boy, just drop all this, quit
dabblin’ where you shouldn’t dabble. You ain’t ever gonna figure it
all out, so quit tryin’.’”
Arrowroot leaned back, waiting while his words sunk in.
At last, Hatfield spoke. “That’s a shame,” he said.
“What’s a shame?” Arrowroot shot back.
“That you gave up,” Hatfield replied.
“Well, Floyd, I just got done telling you that I didn’t give up,”
Arrowroot countered. “God told me to stop, so I did.”
“You thought he told you that,” Hatfield said. “Dreams come from
your brain.”
“Well, that one came from God.”
“What if it didn’t?” Hatfield asked. “Just a little more courage
and you might still be learning.”
“There’s a fine line between courage and blasphemy,” insisted
Arrowroot.
“I’ll take courage every time,” said Hatfield.
“Well,” replied Arrowroot, “if it makes you feel any better, I
still read about astrophysics. Picked up a new book last night. Damn
thing started with poetry, though. Why can’t they just tell you things
anymore? Gotta go embellish everything, lather it up with doilies at
every turn.”
“Hmph,” said Hatfield.
“Bad poetry, too,” Arrowroot said.
“Why astrophysics?” Hatfield asked.
“Well, that’s the thing,” Arrowroot began. “I was starting at the
end of the inquiry, and God didn’t like that, I guess. Astrophysics,
that’s the very start, that’s like looking at God’s birth certificate.
Big Bang, that’s him drawing in his first breath, in this universe at
least, and then just breathing out, except it’s God so all hell breaks
loose. Then you got stars and galaxies and superclusters of galaxies
and the Milky Way and the rest, those are the echoes, of that, of that
first time he’s hollerin’. You know what I mean? You want to
understand the system, you start with the blueprint, with the original
things and the designs and all.” Arrowroot paused. “I think you could
almost say that I haven’t given up the inquiry at all, just decided to
go in through the basement instead of bustin’ through a second-floor
window. If God minds, he hasn’t told me yet.”
Hatfield snorted.
“But tell you what, Floyd, here’s what I’ll do,” Arrowroot
continued. “If I have another one of those dreams, you know, where say
it’s Hubble this time, or Hoyle, and they’re all ‘boy this’ and ‘boy
that,’ like ‘boy, you know what, the universe is all just
marshmallows’ or some such, you know what I’m gonna say back?”
“What?” Hatfield asked gamely.
“‘So tell me, Mr. Hubble,’ I’ll say. ‘So tell me, did God send
you this time?’ And if he says ‘Hell no, boy, I’m just messin’ with
ya,’ then I’ll keep reading. I promise, I’ll keep reading.”
“Deal,” Hatfield replied.
The trees gave way to a cleared area, and to the right of the
rutted dirt road, Arrowroot spotted evidence of the human presence
that pre-dated Fort Shergawa. It was a humble little outbuilding,
without walls, barely large enough for two trucks to park side by
side. The structure consisted of a stone foundation, from which rose
four rough wooden beams that held up a roof of wood and shingles.
Arrowroot guessed it had been built before 1900, when ugly metal roofs
came into fashion in and around Heligaux, most gone to rust now.
Ahead lay more thick woods, and Stapleton eased the SUV down the
path into them. Branches on either side scraped the windows with a
screech. No one ever came out this way, Arrowroot knew, except for the