Chaos

CHAPTER 24

WHAT ABOUT IN THE very beginning?” I ask Lucy. “Are you sure you didn’t mention Carrie when you started your internship at Quantico? It would make sense when you went home to Miami or talked on the phone if you might have said something to Dorothy about your FBI supervisor, your mentor-especially one who gave you so much special attention.”

Carrie couldn’t have been more generous or charming, and Lucy was flattered out of her mind. She didn’t have a chance.

“I know you don’t like to think about it,” and I don’t want to be provocative, “but you were bowled over by her in the beginning. You couldn’t talk enough about her. At least to me.”

“I think you know why I didn’t mention her to Mom.” Lucy’s stare has turned hard and edgy. “I didn’t talk about Carrie or anybody else I so much as had a beer with.”

Dorothy is bitterly disappointed by her only child’s “lifestyle,” as my sister continues to refer to being gay. It doesn’t matter how many times I tell her that who any of us falls in love and partners with isn’t a lifestyle like belonging to the country club or living in the suburbs. My sister doesn’t get it. In my opinion she doesn’t want to get it because it’s easier for her to define Lucy as a bohemian or a tomboy, which is Dorothy’s euphemism for being gay. It’s easier if Lucy and I both suffer from penis envy, and that’s my sister’s euphemism for not being male-dependent the way she is.

Penis envy really is a thing, she loves to declare, preferably in front of our mother. Or more recently, in front of Marino when we were in Miami this past June and he was giving Dorothy motorcycle rides and who knows what else.

“There’s quite a lot Benton and I don’t discuss with Dorothy,” I reassure Lucy. “She wouldn’t have any idea who Carrie Grethen is unless you’ve shared that part of your life. Or someone else has.” Marino enters my thoughts, and I hope Benton is mistaken.

It gives me a sick feeling to think of Marino being sweet on Dorothy, of him talking to her about us or anything else that’s none of her business and is possibly dangerous. The idea is too galling, and I dismiss it.

“You’re saying that Tailend Charlie mentioned Sister Twister.” I get back to that because I want to make sure I’m clear on where it came from. “As you know, Lucy, I’ve not listened to the audio clip yet. So I’m assuming it’s not been transcribed or translated unless you got someone else to do it.”

“I haven’t and won’t,” she answers. “It’s important you do it since you’re the intended target. The recording was made for your benefit.”

“It hasn’t been translated and yet you know what it says?”

“Bits and pieces. Easy ones.” Lucy takes another swig of Gatorade. “My Italian may be clunky but I know sorella means sister, and I recognized Sorella Twisted or Sister Twister when I played the clip. I’ve heard the nickname from Mom when she’s regaled me with stories of how terrible you were to her.”

I feel another rush of resentment that’s as fresh as it’s old.

“I recognized your name, your initials, and the word chaos,” Lucy continues to describe what she could make out in the most recent audible harassment. “Apparently chaos in Italian is pretty much the same thing in English.”

“In Italian there’s no h. It’s spelled c-a-o-s.” I pronounce it for her.

“Yes.” Lucy nods. “That’s exactly what I heard. Chaos is coming, or something like that.”

She goes on to explain that the audio file is consistent with the others I’ve received since the first day of fall.

“Cheesy rhymes, insulting, and promising your death,” Lucy says.

In each of them the Italian-speaking voice has been synthesized. The lyrical baritone sounds like my father, who died when I was twelve.

SHE FINDS THE AUDIO file on her phone and turns up the volume as high as it will go, touching PLAY. The familiar computer-manufactured voice begins loudly:

Torna di nuovo, K.S. A grande richiesta!

The rhyming cyber-threats greet me with the same opening line every time. Translated: Back again, K.S. By popular request, no less! And as I listen, I feel blood vessels dilate in my face. My pulse picks up.

I don’t want to hear a voice that sounds like his because then he’s in my mind again. As if my father’s still here. As if he’s still alive. But he’s not. What I’m hearing isn’t him, and he would never talk to me unkindly. He would never wish me dead, and pain flares. I go hollow inside.

“I don’t have time to deal with this now.” I tell Lucy to stop the recording, and she does. “You think Tailend Charlie is Carrie Grethen. That’s what you’ve come to tell me,” I address the elephant in the room.

“I think she’s behind it, that it’s part of something else she’s up to. Yes. That’s where I am in this.” Lucy’s face is defiant.

“You’ve decided it.”

“Because I know.”

“And I needed to be told immediately because if Carrie is Tailend Charlie?” I fill in the blanks. “Then maybe she’s also the one who disguised her voice and called nine-one-one about me. Maybe she’s doing everything that’s going on right now including magically interfering with the damn tent so I can’t work the damn scene.”

“Try not to get so irate. Especially not in this heat. It’s not good for you.”

“You’re right, it’s not.”

“I believe she’s in league with whoever Tailend Charlie is.” Lucy’s green eyes are unblinking. “Carrie’s found someone to help her. It’s her MO. It’s what she does when she’s mounting her next major offensive. She builds her army of two.”

“Her latest Temple Gault, Newton Joyce, Troy Rosado.” My mouth is as dry as paper, and I take another swallow of water, careful to keep my sips small so I’m not constantly looking for a piddle pack.

“She’s taken about a year to regroup after her last bloodbath when she killed Troy’s father. Then when she’d used up Troy she almost killed him. Carrie’s easily bored.” Lucy says these things as if there can be no debate. “You don’t really think she’s been sitting around doing nothing since then, do you?”

I keep my eyes on her and don’t say a word. There’s not much to say. She’s either right or she isn’t, and I have nothing to add.

“Hell no,” she answers her own question. “We know Carrie better than that by now. She’s been industrious while she’s been away.” Lucy’s tone lacerates. “And her newest minion is some techy-geek anonymous worm who calls himself Tailend Charlie,” she adds, and for an instant I’m stunned by her jealousy.

Lucy is threatened by my latest cyber-stalker because so far she’s failed at tracking him, and Lucy doesn’t fail. Yet she’s rather much failed at everything she’s attempted since Tailend Charlie’s mocking communications began. Failure is Lucy’s Kryptonite. She can’t endure it.

“I don’t know who he is but Carrie isn’t working alone,” Lucy says as I’m distracted by my phone on the countertop.

The display suddenly has illuminated for no apparent reason.

I pick it up, unlocking it, taking a look. The ringer is turned on, the ring tone on vibrate, exactly as I set them. Apparently I haven’t missed any more calls due to some sort of glitch, and nothing looks out of the ordinary.

I place the phone back on the counter I’m leaning against, and it unsettles me that Ruthie Briggs hasn’t tried me again. Nor has she texted or e-mailed.

“After a while certain things can suddenly make more sense.” Lucy is talking about Natalie’s death a year ago almost to the week, on September 18, and I’m becoming obsessed with the damn tent.

It’s now past ten and nothing from Rusty and Harold. Not a peep from anyone. What the hell could be taking so long? I start to send Marino another message but I hold my horses. I don’t need to drive everyone crazy. When they’re ready for me, they’ll let me know.

“Janet had been careful about getting the necessary passwords,” Lucy is talking about Natalie’s electronic devices now. “I just figured she was so overwhelmed she forgot or wrote down something wrong.”

After Natalie died it turned out Janet and Lucy couldn’t access the most important device of all: the personal laptop that had been in Natalie’s bedroom and later in the hospice facility. The password she’d given Janet didn’t work.

“And getting into it wasn’t a piece of cake.” Lucy avoids the word hack. “Natalie worked in digital accounts management. She was computer savvy.”

I look at Lucy as she talks, and her eyes are windows to the carnage inside her. It wouldn’t show up on a CT scan. It wouldn’t be visible in an autopsy. But evidence of the massacre is beneath the surface like the footprint of a fort rotted away centuries ago and buried by layers of sediment and soil. Lucy has rebuilt her big powerful life on top of what Carrie ruined, and were the two of them face-to-face in mortal combat, I no longer wonder who would emerge liberated and whole.

I’m confident that neither of them would.

“I honestly thought Natalie was going overboard in her worries about spying,” Lucy continues to explain, and I can tell she feels guilty. “I worried she was getting demented, that the cancer had spread to her brain.”

“Understandably,” I reply, but what I’m thinking is there are some things that can’t be restored anymore.

There are some battles that can’t be won. And if I imagine Lucy and Carrie in a duel, who would kill whom anyway? I hope I’m wrong. I hope it won’t prove to be the case that they can’t go on without each other. What would motivate either of them in their endless bloody tennis match if the other wasn’t across the net? I don’t know the answer but as Benton likes to say about dysfunction, It’s hard to give up your iron lung.

“I remember you telling me that Natalie had covered her computer cameras with tape,” I bring that up. “A lot of people do it but apparently she didn’t until she knew she was dying.”

“She put black tape over the webcams on her desktop, a tablet and also the laptop,” Lucy replies. “It’s an easy low-tech way to prevent someone from using your own computer to spy on you. Natalie routinely disabled built-in cameras on any personal electronic device she owned because she knew they can be activated remotely. And if the hacker is really skilled he can remotely alter the camera chip, disabling the indicator light so it no longer turns on when you’re being secretly recorded.”

“So taping over the camera lens was added for good measure,” I reply.

“At the time it just seemed wacky.”

“But what if it wasn’t?”

“That’s why we’re talking about this,” Lucy says. “I should have taken her seriously. If she hadn’t been so sick and saying such weird shit, I would have.”

“Did she ever mention concerns about Carrie?”

“No reason. All of us thought she was out of the picture for good.”

“Because she was locked up in a forensic facility for the criminally insane,” I presume. “And then after she escaped she got killed. Or that’s what we believed.”

“Like the rest of us, Natalie was convinced Carrie went up in flames with Newton Joyce when his helicopter crashed off the coast of North Carolina,” Lucy says.

“Who did she think was spying on her?”

“The Feds. Or maybe a foreign government, other lawyers, lobbyists, reporters. You name it. The law firm she was with dealt with a lot of heavy-hitting politicos.”

“And when she was moved to the hospice facility, this personal laptop went with her.” I envision it on the bedside table where Lucy had set it up.