The Liar's Lullaby (31 page)

Jo reached out and took his hand. He let her take it, but didn’t squeeze back.

“I thought—shit, the dude actually shanked me. Never saw
that
coming.” He wet his lips. “I wondered, is this where I float overhead and watch the scene from above? Where’s the light?”

Jo held on.

“I started crawling toward the restaurant. The cops came, and an ambulance. They took me to surgery and patched me up.”

Jo’s throat was dry. She knew “patched up” was a euphemism.

He went quiet. She thought: Was that it? Horrible as the attack was, where was the problem for Gabe? He was the hero. He saved his pregnant girlfriend from a gang of rapists.

“But?” she said.

“Nobody saw the fight. Dawn had split. There was just me and the guy I kicked the shit out of, and he was spitting teeth and telling everybody I tried to kill him. Nothing about the other two guys. Nothing about how he grabbed Dawn.” He shrugged. “So, yeah, the cops put me under arrest in the hospital. Said they were going to prosecute me for assault, maybe attempted murder.”

Jo leaned forward. “But they didn’t.”

“They found the broken bottle. The fingerprints on it didn’t match the guy I took down. They matched his buddy, who had a record.”

“And?” She was confused. “And that was the end of it?”

He stared at the ground. A feeling of dread settled on Jo’s shoulders.

“Dawn’s parents made her come forward,” he said. “She said it was a prank that got out of hand.”

“Dear God.”

“She wanted to scare me into staying in town. To protect her. She knew all three guys. It was a setup.”

Rage, a bright spike of steel, seemed to cut through the dusk. Jo stood and walked to the center of the lawn, trying to get a grip on herself. After a minute she walked back and put her hands on Gabe’s shoulders.

“I know why you didn’t tell me. I’m not going to explode, or spend the next year constantly harping on what a bitch Dawn is, or staring at you funny.” She made sure he was looking at her. “But don’t ever hold back again.”

His lips parted. Not a smile, not a frown. An expression, maybe, of surprise. “You sure about that?”

“Yes.”

“Really sure?”

They were talking about the war now. She nodded. “Trust me.”

It was a plea, and a pledge, and an expression of her hurt. He took her hands from his shoulders, covered them with his, and put his lips against her knuckles.

“Can you see why I didn’t want this story to come out? How the hell is Sophie going to take it when she finds out what her mother did?” he said.

“I know.”

“Thank God for Dawn’s parents. They suffered more than anybody. I mean, I healed. The cops got footage from a CCTV camera behind the restaurant, and once they saw it, they uncuffed me and never mentioned the possibility of rearrest or prosecution.”

“But you don’t want me to talk about this to anybody, do you?” Jo said.

“No. The guy I put in the hospital, he left with his jaw wired shut and his knee pinned together. I don’t think he’ll ever walk without a limp.”

Jo held on to his hands. His shadows took on texture.

“You didn’t need to keep this from me,” she said.

“Talking doesn’t come easy to everybody. And it doesn’t always help a situation,” he said. “I have to handle things like this. And I don’t want people to worry about stuff it’s my responsibility to deal with.”

“I understand. But keeping secrets isn’t the only way to keep control.”

“Really? If I tell you things, you won’t judge me and try to influence my decisions?”

Jo’s throat tightened again. He’d told her something beyond painful and difficult. But she couldn’t shut down her anger completely: He’d kept something so fundamental from her for so long, despite her open desire to know.

But he’d also just promised her that he would not keep secrets in the future. And she hadn’t told him her own fear, her own dark knowledge: that his call-up was a message to her. She screwed up her courage.

In the kitchen the phone rang. Gabe squeezed her hand and jogged inside to pick it up. Jo tilted her head back and stared at the stars. After a minute she headed in. Gabe was still on the phone. She went to the living room and sat down on the floor beside Sophie.

The little girl was leaning close to the construction paper on which she was drawing with colored pencils, her face intent.

“I like the Appaloosa,” Jo said.

“Thanks.”

“Are the horses fighting the vampires?”

“Just the evil vampires. And the werewolves are on the horses’ side.” Sophie picked up a crimson pencil and colored a wound on the flank of a wolf. “Dad doesn’t think I know that stuff is going on.”

“He knows you know.” Jo picked up a pencil and a sheet of paper. “You mind?”

Sophie shook her head.

Jo began to draw. “What has he talked to you about?”

Sophie stopped coloring. Her eyes were anxious. “He’s going overseas on Friday.” Her lips fought a quiver. “But not to Africa. To Afghanistan.”

She stared at Jo with a gaze like flame, challenging Jo to say otherwise. Then she blinked and inhaled in jerking breaths.

“I want him to stay here,” she whispered. “I wish they would call up somebody else. Don’t tell him.”

Gabe’s footsteps creaked on the hardwood floor. Sophie turned her face to hide her tears, but he walked in and saw her. Looking stricken, he crouched at her side and hugged her. Slowly, like a cramped muscle, she shuddered and turned to him.

Jo sat, hands loose on her knees. Her phone rang. She saw
Tang
on the display. “Excuse me.” She stood and stepped away to answer. “Amy?”

“And by the way, Tasia’s medical records from the time she was married to Robert McFarland are missing.”

“No kidding.”

“I’m not talking ‘unavailable.’ I mean they should be accessible from the army, but they’ve gone poof. Imagine my surprise.”

Jo thought about it. “Thanks.”

“That’s the kind of information that would create a ruckus if it became public.”

“It’s not quite time for that. But it could be useful.”

“Let me know if you need an assist.”

“Will do.” Jo hung up.

A moment later the phone rang again. It was Vienna. “Lewicki said yes.”

Jo’s ears pricked up. “When and where?”

“My office, one P.M. tomorrow. He’s coming straight here from the plane. I still seem to have powers of persuasion. Or maybe the shrimp is just afraid of big women.”

Jo felt a buzz of hope. “I’ll be there. Thanks.”

Gabe approached, holding Sophie’s hand. She was wiping her eyes.

“We have to go. I’m meeting with my lawyer. I’ll take Sophie to Regina’s.”

Jo nodded. She opened her mouth to tell him her fears, but closed it again. Wrong time, wrong place.

“What?” he said.

“It’ll keep.”

As if that would make it any better.

J
O WALKED BAREFOOT INTO THE KITCHEN AT SIX THIRTY A.M. SHARP sunlight angled across the house. Tucking messy curls behind her ear, she turned on the coffeemaker. The air was cool, the sky cobalt. Three thousand miles east, she calculated, Air Force One was taxiing Three thousand miles east, she calculated, Air Force One was taxiing into takeoff position at Andrews Air Force Base.

While the coffee brewed, she laid out her notes on the kitchen table: the information she knew, and needed, and planned to cajole and berate out of White House Chief of Staff Kelvin T. Lewicki.

Three issues touched her like a burning brand. First was her apprehension that Tasia McFarland’s death might not be an isolated event. Second was her fear that the president’s imminent arrival might put more people in danger. She kept hearing Tasia’s recorded warning:
Things have gone haywire . . . If I die, it means the countdown’s on.

Third was her conviction that Lewicki, or the president’s political machine, had managed to change Gabe’s military orders.

She needed to find out whether Tasia McFarland had been murdered. And she wanted to put Lewicki on his knees, moaning like a sick baboon.

She reread her notes, trying to untangle the final days of Tasia’s life like a skein of string. Tasia had stopped taking the medication that controlled her moods. Longing for a manic high, during the spring she instead suffered a major depressive episode. She then got a prescription for Prozac, which probably sent her into a mixed state. Several days before her death, she rendezvoused with Robert McFarland at a hotel in Virginia. She returned to San Francisco agitated, wild, and frightened. The night before the concert at the Giants’ ballpark, she wrote two songs to be played if she was assassinated. The next evening, she was shot to death with McFarland’s Colt .45.

“The Liar’s Lullaby” and “After Me” were never meant to be hits. They were weird and moody, ambiguous and elliptical. But effective: songs that burrowed under the skin. At Tasia’s house Jo had snapped photos of the sheet music. She printed them and spread the music on the kitchen table.

Along with the ominous lyrics, the music featured dissonant arrangements and compulsive melodic motifs.

Repetitive melodic progressions and chord arrangements that, put together with the lyrics, seemed puzzling.

Almost literally puzzling.

Jo thought back to the med school lecture series on the mind and music. She went to her office and dug through the file cabinet. After fifteen minutes she came up with some notes she’d sketched. She read them and her pulse quickened.

People with bipolar disorder could, when manic, play elaborate word games and become obsessed with puns. And bipolar musicians could turn their compositions into puzzles.

They did so by sampling famous melodies, secretly referencing the work of other composers. Or by hiding codes in their own melodies and orchestration.

Jo picked up Tasia’s sheet music. She realized how a composer could embed a code in a song: with the notes of the scale. C, D, E, F, F-sharp, and so on.

Tasia’s music was written in both the treble and bass clefs. No sharps or flats. The notes on the staff clustered around middle C. At the top, Tasia had scrawled
Counterpoint/Round.

Jo tapped her foot. According to Tasia’s stunt coordinator, Rez Shirazi, Tasia had steamrollered him with talk of martyrdom and conspiracy—and music. She insisted that her music could protect her, and that it held the truth. Melody, harmony, counterpoint, lyrics. She threaded her manic monologue with musical references. Round, round, get around.
Do, re, mi, fa, so long, suckers.

The doorbell rang.

Jo went to her office window and peeked through the shutters. The street was quiet. She saw no reporters—just Ahnuld the robot racing along the sidewalk. Behind Ahnuld came Mr. Peebles, teeth bared. Then Ferd, chasing them both. She went to the front door and squinted through the peephole.

Outside, her sister, Tina, stood on tiptoe, waving a sack of muffins. Jo opened the door and yanked her inside.

Tina was dressed for work at the coffeehouse in a black Java Jones blouse and jeans. Her hair was piled in a ponytail on top of her head, spilling brown curls. The silver ring in her nose flashed in the sun as she jerked through the door.

“Your caffeine problem is much worse than I thought,” she said.

“The media’s been hounding me.”

“We know. The whole family’s talking about how you looked on TV.”

Jo led her to the kitchen. “What do they think?”

“Aunt Lolo says that running from the press makes your butt look big.”

Jo spun on her, eyes bugging.

Tina handed her the muffins. “Take the edge off.”

Jo tilted her head back and groaned.

“Seriously, sit down and eat, before you burn your little wings off like a moth flying through a candle,” Tina said.

Jo scooped up her notes, dropped onto a chair, and opened the sack. “Thanks.”

“Were you really at the Saint Francis yesterday when—”

“Yes. It was a nightmare. But I’ll deal with it emotionally later.”

Tina sat down across from her. “What do you call that? Displacement? Denial?”

“Suppression.” Jo leaned her eyes on the heels of her hands. “If I keep moving, I won’t feel the arrows when they hit me.”

Tina said nothing. Jo looked up. Her sister’s sunny face had clouded.

“Been a heavy twenty-four hours.” Jo tried to keep her voice even, but heard a hitch creeping into it. “Gabe’s shipping out in two days.”

“Oh my God.” Tina put a hand on her arm. “Tell me everything.”

Jo explained. “Hence my desire to deflect all those arrows.”

“Cut yourself some freakin’ slack. This is major.”

She rubbed her eyes. “I’m just . . . at sea.”

Tina’s head tilted. She looked acerbically thoughtful. “Are you in love with Gabe?”

Jo looked up. “Yes.”

Slowly, completely, Tina’s face split into a smile. “Hot shit. That’s awesome.”

Jo’s face warmed, and she smiled too. “It is, isn’t it?”

Tina shot both her fists straight overhead and threw her head back. “She shoots, she scores.
Woo
.”

Jo laughed.

Tina brought an arm down and pointed a finger at Jo, like the wrath of God. “And it’s inevitable.”

“Meaning what?”

“Don’t act like Gabe’s a bolt from the blue. You’re an adrenaline junkie.”

“This again?”

“You’re a thrill seeker.”