Blood Memory

Chapter 47

I’m five thousand feet over the Mississippi River, flying north at two hundred miles per hour. Michael Wells is beside me, piloting his Cessna as if he’d rather be doing this than anything else in the world. Natchez is thirty minutes ahead.

The shocks of the past twenty-four hours have pushed me to the point that fl;ight in a small plane produces no airsickness at all.

“What are you going to do now?” he asks, his face somber.

“What I should have done in the beginning. Find out who killed my father. I’m going to exhume his body.”

Michael looks at me like I’ve taken leave of my senses. “What will you learn from that?”

“For one thing, it will give me DNA to compare against any body fluids I find on my bedroom floor. I’m hoping I’ll find preserved semen.”

“Are you going to work the bedroom yourself?”

“No. I’m going to bring in a first-string team to do it, no matter what my grandfather says. I’m also going into the barn to see if my father’s green bag is still under the floor. It’s padlocked, but I shouldn’t have much trouble breaking in.”

“Do you think that green bag really exists?”

“Absolutely.”

“Technically the barn is Kirkland’s property, isn’t it?”

“I’m not sure, actually. Some of the old DeSalle holdings are held in trust for me. I don’t really know what Grandpapa owns and what he manages for my mother and me. It’s very complicated. But if he tries to stop me, I’ll go to the DA and make it an official murder investigation. It’s not my father’s body I really want, though. It’s Lena.”

Michael looks away from the Plexiglas windscreen long enough for me to see his confusion. “Your stuffed leopard?”

“Leopardess. I don’t know what she’ll tell me, but I know she’s important. May I use your cell phone?”

He unclips it from his belt and hands it to me. My pride tells me not to do what I’m about to do, but I have no choice. I dial Sean Regan’s cell number.

“Detective Sergeant Regan,” he says.

“It’s Cat.”

“Jesus. They’ve got a statewide manhunt going for you, and you call my cell phone?”

“Sorry to be an inconvenience.”

“Shit, it’s not that. But Karen wants to see copies of my cell phone bill from now on. I’m sure Piazza will be reviewing it, too.”

So, the women in Sean’s life finally got wise to him. “Well, I’m sorry. This is a business call.”

“Somehow I knew that.”

“I need you to do me a favor, Sean, no questions asked.”

“What favor?”

“That sounded like a question.”

In the silence that follows, I sense him remembering what it’s like to deal with me on a daily basis. “Okay, Cat. Whatever it is, I’ll do it.”

“Thanks. You know my aunt committed suicide last night?”

“I heard. I’m sorry.”

“There’s going to be an autopsy today in Jackson, Mississippi. Kaiser’s expediting it. I need to see that report, or at least know what the findings are.”

“Didn’t Kaiser tell you I’ve been suspended from the department?”

“Yes, but I know you’re still wired into the task force. Like knowing my aunt committed suicide. You’re already angling for a way back into this case. And if you help me, I might be able to give you one.”

More silence. “You need an actual copy of the autopsy report?”

“Whatever you can get. I’m particularly interested in anything the pathologist finds out about Ann’s reproductive organs. Scarring, old operations, anything like that.”

“Uh-huh.” Sean sounds anything but excited.

“I need this as fast as you can get it. Like yesterday.”

“I can’t give you what I don’t have yet.”

“I know. I just want you to understand-”

“Cat?”

“What?” I snap, realizing I’m trying to avoid any personal conversation whatever.

“How are you doing? I mean with the baby and all.”

Anger surges up from a well deep within me, darker and more intense than I could have imagined. “Fine,” I say in a taut voice. “You don’t need to worry about me. Us. Whatever. I’m not your problem anymore.”

“You never were a problem.”

Cut the cord, orders the voice in my head. “We both know that’s a lie. Lookgood luck piecing your life back together.”

“Yeah. Hey, I’ll get that report for you.”

“Thanks.”

“I miss you, Cat.”

Not badly enough. “Hurry, Sean.”

I hang up and punch in my mother’s cell phone number. As it rings, I feel Sean touch my arm. Then I realize it’s not Sean, but Michael Wells. For a moment I actually forgot I was sitting beside him in his plane.

“You’re crying,” Michael says. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t think okay is something to be aspired to at a time like this. I just have to keep moving forward.”

He withdraws his hand and goes back to flying.

Just as I expect to be kicked over to voice mail, my mother answers in a sleepy voice that makes me think sedatives.

“Dr. Wells?” she says.

“No, it’s Cat.”

“Cat?” A brief pause. “I don’t understand. Are you at Dr. Wells’s house?”

“No. Mom, listen, I know about Ann.”

“Well, I figured you must have heard by now.”

“How are you doing?”

“Fine, I suppose. Considering. I’m at work, and it’s a very busy time for me. Which is good, I guess.”

At work? She sounds like she just woke up from surgery.

“I always knew this was a possibility with Ann,” she says. “One of her doctors even told me to prepare for it. He said that if this ever happened, I should know ahead of time that there was nothing I could have done to prevent it.”

“But is that how you really feel?”

She sighs heavily, and in the background I hear the Muzak she runs in her shop. “I don’t know. Look, I told you, I’m really busy today. I have to get out to Dunlieth to show the owner some new drapery fabrics.”

“Mom, I need to talk to you. Will you be at home this afternoon?”

“That depends on how long Dunlieth takes, doesn’t it?”

“Please try to be home. This is no day to be worrying about work.”

“Life goes on, Cat. I figured you of all people knew that.”

“What about the funeral arrangements?”

“Your grandfather’s taking care of all that.”

Of course. Nothing but the best for one of my daughters

“I don’t mind talking to you,” she says, “but I don’t want you to start trying to tell me how to feel about this. I deal with my own feelings in my own way. You know that.”

“Or you don’t deal with them.”

Chilly silence. “I may not wear my heart on my sleeve like some people, but I’ve managed just fine so far.”

“Have you, Mom? Has life really been fine all these years?”

“I think I’ve done a pretty good job, considering the obstacles life put in my way.”

God “How is Pearlie taking it?”

“I don’t know. She’s gone to the island. Deserted me with barely a word.”

This throws me. “The island? Pearlie hates the island.”

“Well, that’s where she went, right after she heard the news about Ann. I’ve got to go, Cat. If I don’t see you later, make sure you’re at that funeral. Ann would want you there.”

Like I would miss my aunt’s funeral? “Mom, why did I go riding in the orange truck with Grandpapa on the island?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been having this dream about riding in that old truck with him, and it’s always raining.”

“Ohhh,” she says, her voice suddenly musical. “Daddy always got so tense when it rained, because no work could be done. You were the only one who could calm him down. He’d ride around the island showing you the birds and cattle and deer, and when he got back, he’d be tolerable to live with again. I think children are the only thing that keep men from being altogether savage. I just-”

“Mom,” I cut in, stopping what could become an endless flow. “Try to come home this afternoon, okay?”

“Bye-bye, darling.”

I hang up and pass the phone back to Michael, more dazed than upset. John Kaiser described my mother as furious over Ann’s death, and suspicious that she’d been murdered by her husband. Now Mom sounds like she’s on Thorazine. She often sounded that way when I was a child. Distracted, bored, out of it. Sedated. For some reason, I sense my grandfather’s hand in this. How easy it would be for him to give her a shot and remove the inconvenience of her emotions from his life.

“Cat?”

“I’m fine, Michael. Can you fly us over the island? Is it too far out of the way?”

“Well, the river’s just over the horizon to our left. You said the island is opposite Angola prison?”

“Just south of it.”

He banks the Cessna in a wide arc to the west, and almost immediately I see the silver line of the river ahead.

“Can you fly low?”

“Sure. We can buzz the treetops.”

“No thanks. Just low enough to make out cars and people.”

Michael laughs and begins descending.

Soon the river is a great silver serpent slithering across a vast green floor. On the near shore, endless ranks of trees march over the hills. On the far bank, flat fields of cotton and soybeans stretch as far as the eye can see. The river cuts through the land with implacable abandon, bisecting the continent almost as an afterthought.

“Can you believe we were right down there the night before last?” I ask. “Or all that’s happened since then?”

Michael tilts the plane a little and looks down. “I can’t believe you swam that river. I mean shit. ”

“Do you see an island?”

“I see a half dozen of them.”

“This one’s four miles long.”

Michael whistles low. “I think I was looking right at it without knowing it. There’s Angola prison. So that must be DeSalle Island.”

I can’t see it from my side, and Michael quickly realizes this. He banks and drops the nose, and suddenly we’re boring in on the long, humped mass of the island like a fighter plane on a strafing run.

“How high are we?”

“I’m going to stay at four hundred feet. You can see all you need to from there.”

In a matter of seconds, we’re roaring over the island. I’ve seen it from the air before: once long ago from the cockpit of a crop duster, then later from the basket of a hot-air balloon. Today’s view reminds me of that first trip, the landscape below flashing past at a hundred miles an hour. I see the hunting camp, the lake, the lodge, the pastures and the pond, and then we’re banking left to avoid what might be restricted airspace over Angola.

“Can you make another pass?”

“Sure. What are you looking for?”

“A car. A blue Cadillac.”

“I’ll climb to a thousand feet. You’ll have a better view between the trees.”

Michael executes a 360-degree turn, climbing as he goes. This time the island looks more like a satellite photo, the chaos caused by proximity now softened into geometric patterns. I see the road that runs the perimeter of the island and the branch that cuts south of the hunting camp, widening into an open space near the cluster of cabins that house the workers. Four white pickups are parked by the cabins. To the left of them, a baby blue sedan stands gleaming in the sun.

Pearlie’s Cadillac.

“Okay!” I tell Michael. “Let’s go home.”

“You saw the car?”

I nod and point northward, toward Natchez. I don’t really feel like talking now. I just want to know what drove Pearlie Washington to travel to the island where she was born, a place where, according to her, she is no longer welcome. One more mystery among many. Yet something tells me that if I could read Pearlie’s mind, all the other mysteries would be solved.