Emperor of Ocean Park

CHAPTER 56

Three days later, Sally finally agrees to see me. She has been in her rehab facility past the requisite two months and can receive visitors. The old brick house perches on a bluff overlooking the Delaware River: if you happen to be crossing the bridge from New Jersey, you can probably see it, looking like the tumbledown mansion that it is. A high brick wall surrounds the property on three sides. The fourth is the river.

Sally and I walk the lavish grounds trailed at a dozen yards or so by a male orderly and the center’s chaplain, the Reverend Doris Kwan, who is present because Sally wanted her to be. The orderly is present because of some rule. Before I was allowed to see Sally, I had a talk with Reverend Kwan in her sunny office. She is a compact, muscular, imperious woman of perhaps fifty, dark hair tied back heedlessly. The air around her crackles; if she turns out to run marathons in her spare time, I will not be surprised. She has a doctorate in social work to go with her divinity degree. The diplomas hang on her walls, along with a bad reproduction of The Last Supper. During our brief conversation, her skeptical glare never strayed from my face. I was against this meeting, she told me, but Sarah insisted. She explained the program: two group meetings a day, four one-on-one counseling sessions a week, mandatory chapel every morning, an hour in the gym every afternoon. We are trying to heal her mind, body, and spirit. We take faith very seriously here. Sarah is coming around, but she has a long way to go.

I assured Reverend Kwan that I am not going to upset the program. She allowed her patent disbelief to show on her face. I wondered what Sally had disclosed in therapy.

Now, walking with Sally, I marvel at the changes in her after her months of sobriety. She is a little slimmer and a good deal more graceful. She is wearing a track suit and sandals. She says she has seen her mother a few times but misses her kids, who are not old enough to visit. Her voice is quieter, her interjections are more contemplative. She has lost a bit of her spark, which grieves me, even if there was no other choice. The dark circles under her eyes tell me how hard it has been.

“I was so worried about you when I heard,” Sally murmurs. She sounds tired but calm. “I would have come to see you, you know, in the hospital, but”-a small flick of the wrist, indicating the center, the grounds, the wall.

“I’m okay.”

“You’re limping. You didn’t use to limp.”

I shrug, my heavy cane plunging ahead like an extra leg. “I’m blessed to be alive,” I assure her. Then it is my turn to ask how she is doing, and we go through the same routine the other way around.

Sally tells me she has learned a lot about herself over the past few months, and likes little of what she sees. I murmur something meant to be reassuring, but Sally does not want reassurance: she wants to discover the brutal truth of what she has done to herself, to help her avoid doing it again. And she wants, she adds, to fix what she can of the damage she has caused. “I’m sorry for the things I’ve said to you over the years, Tal. Especially about your wife. Your ex-wife.”

I make a face. “Not ex just yet.”

“Give it up, Tal. You’re single now. Get used to it.”

“I don’t want to get used to it.”

“You won’t have to.” Sally giggles and punches my shoulder gently. The laughter sounds tinny and determined, a faint echo of the way she used to effervesce. “The sisters will all be coming after you, just wait and see.”

“I doubt it.”

“Are you kidding me? A single black man, doesn’t do drugs, doesn’t drink, really into kids? Sweet, goes to church, doesn’t have a temper? You’ll be fighting them off with a stick.”

I shake my head, genuinely less interested in these possibilities than Sally and my few friends seem to think. But I play along.

“You forgot good-looking.”

“I didn’t forget. I just don’t want it to go to your head.” Another soft punch.

We walk on in silence through the corridor of wise old maples, Doris Kwan hovering protectively like one of Jack Ziegler’s bodyguards. Sally’s smile is starting to look pasted on, and I know my visit is a strain. Whatever other demons might have been driving her, the family, my father’s side, certainly helped carry her over the edge. Right now, the less she sees of us the better. We emerge into a clearing overlooking the river. We sit side by side on a wooden glider, all painted white, gazing together at the Jersey shore. A chain-link fence spoils the view, but the hospital, obviously, cannot take chances.

“You didn’t come here just to see how I’m doing,” Sally finally says. She sounds less censorious than regretful. She misses being loved. I wonder if she knows about Addison.

“That was the main reason.”

“It’s maybe one of the reasons, but it’s not the main reason.”

I cannot meet her eyes. Down near the fence, an older woman is holding a younger, who is sobbing. They could be mother and daughter, but I do not know which is the patient. As they embrace, a pair of attendants keep anxious watch.

“I do have another reason,” I say at last.

“Okay.” Now I chance a look at her, but she is keeping a close eye on the grass, her slippered toe scraping the dirt.

“I need to ask you something.”

“Okay.”

“Why did you take the scrapbook?”

Sally slowly raises her head, the carefully crafted half-smile still in place. Her eyes are bright but wary. They glisten with a hint of tears, or perhaps pain. “What scrapbook?” she asks, unconvincingly.

“From Shepard Street. The day after the funeral. The scrapbook with all the hit-and-run accidents in it. You took it with you when you left.” I can see the image again, Sally prancing down the front walk while I spoke to the fake FBI men, her tote bag hanging gaily from her shoulder. “Why did you take it, Sally?”

At first I think my cousin is going to persist in her denial. After a moment, she whispers a single word, a tender curse: “Addison.”

“Addison? What about Addison?”

“He asked me to take it.”

“But why? If he wanted it, why didn’t he take it himself?”

“He couldn’t take it. He had that stupid poet with him.” She laughs unhappily. “He… he called me the day after your father died. At the house. You remember? He told me to go into the study and get the book, but I went in and you were there and… well… I guess I chickened out. But after the funeral, he asked me if I had the book yet, and I said no, so he said to please get it out of the house, it was important. So I did, the next day.”

I think for a moment. “There must have been something in it he didn’t want anybody to see.”

She nods, toe still scuffing the lawn. “That’s what I thought, too.”

The million-dollar question: “So, what was in it?”

Sally draws in a sharp breath. The worried Reverend Kwan, who argued against this encounter, floats at the edge of my vision. “Addison said… he said Mariah was going to be looking into… into the Judge’s past. He wanted me to take the scrapbook so she wouldn’t find it. Then he asked me to work with Mariah, to… to keep an eye on her. To let him know whatever she found.”

I can easily picture my brother manipulating poor Sally this way; her crush on him, as everybody in the family knows, never quite vanished. Watching my cousin as she sits here remembering and aching, I wonder whether the sexual side of their relationship really ended as long ago as everybody thinks, but I push the unworthy thought away, because it would be too easy to start hating him. Addison probably knows more about what is going on than the rest of us put together, but he has taken his knowledge with him to South America.

I must tread carefully now, asking my questions in the right order. “So he never told you what was in the scrapbook?”

“Never even mentioned it again. Had me on a string. ” The smile is gone.

Gently, gently: “And he also asked you to take Mariah’s ledger, I guess. The one where she wrote down her notes when the two of you were in the attic? So he could read it?”

“I took that on my own. I wanted to impress him, if you can believe it. I was afraid Mariah would guess where it went, but she never did.”

“And did it impress him?”

She shakes her head. “I called him up and told him, I was all excited, but he didn’t even want it. All he ever cared about was the scrapbook.”

“But why did Addison care so much, Sally? Did he say what he was worried about?”

The answer is a long time coming, as though even now she is working out how much to tell me. Worried that Doris Kwan might cut off the interview at any instant, I fight the urge to beg Sally to rush. “He told me… he said your father had done something terrible, a long time ago. And he said… he said if people found out he could get into trouble.”

“Who could get into trouble? The Judge?”

“Addison.”

“Addison could get into trouble?”

“Who do you think?” Somehow her voice has grown screechy.

“I just meant-”

“Who else would he ever worry about?” A strangled sob. “What a bastard! He made me lie for him, he made me steal for him, he turned me into a little spy! And he treated me like a whore! He always did! That bastard! I hate him!”

“Sally-”

She shoves at me. “You’re all bastards! All you Garlands! You didn’t love me! You loved each other and you loved yourselves, but you never loved my father and you never loved me!”

Reverend Kwan is beside us. “I think we’re through here,” she says firmly, drawing an unresisting Sally to her feet, and away from me.

“Wait,” I protest, wanting to repair all her misconceptions, to assure her that I am one of the good guys.

“You have to go, Professor. Your cousin has been through enough.”

“But I need to tell her-”

She shakes her head, putting her trim body between us. She has already handed Sally off to a female attendant who materialized from somewhere. The male orderly stands next to the good Reverend, the two of them an impenetrable barrier. Mariah and Howard have paid for the best. “I understand that you are in pain, Professor, that you, too, are suffering. But you cannot make your cousin the instrument of your deliverance. Sarah is a human being, not a tool. She has already been used by far too many people. She has been used up.”

The rest of what I have to do makes me feel grubby, but at least I am doing something. From a pay phone, I call Mariah in Darien, and ask her for Thera Garland’s address and phone number, which, in the fashion of the men of the family, I do not seem to have written down anywhere. My sister is inquisitive, but she meets the brick wall I learned from the Judge how to build, and finally subsides and tells me what I want to know, exacting in return a promise to share “all the juicy details” later on. My sister still believes in the conspiracy and will be happy to fit into her model whatever I happen to be looking for.

Thera lives in Olney, Maryland, about fifteen miles north of Washington, and the drive from the hospital is less then two hours. Because of my bad leg, I ache all the way down. I stop twice, but I do not call until I am in the area, because I do not want to give her the chance to say no. Sally was Thera’s only child, and her mother is fiercely protective of her-too protective, probably, because she has often shielded her daughter from the consequences of her own bad habits. Family legend says Thera has even lied to the police a time or two, and once committed insurance fraud to cover for the true driver in a car wreck.

Thera’s unenthusiasm deadens her voice. I tell her I want to see the kids, which is true but incomplete. Although openly reluctant, she eventually yields to the inevitable and tells me to come over. She gives me directions to her condo, near the center of town.

I thank her and rush back to my car.

I am pursuing Thera on a simple theory: I have to get into Sally’s apartment. Sally said Addison asked her to take the scrapbook. She also said he never mentioned it to her again, because he had her on a string. That he had her on a string can only mean he knew she would do what he asked. So, when she said he never mentioned it, she meant he never even asked if she had taken the book.

Which means she never gave it to him.

When I reach the sprawling development where Thera lives, I pause at the head of the driveway, letting the traffic pass me, for I have felt again that cool, alarming sense of being watched. But none of the cars behind me even slows down to see where I am going, so it is probably my imagination.

I ring the doorbell, and there is Thera, massive and dark, looking much like the barricade she always tried to build around Sally. She has Sally’s fire, but uses the energy it generates to intimidate rather than to charm. She does not seem happy to see me, and I can hardly blame her: the Garlands, at least the men, have not been kind to her daughter. She is wearing loose jeans and a white blouse, and Sally’s two shy children, ages seven and eight, are peering anxiously from behind their grandmother’s strong legs.

“Hello, Thera.”

She nods unpleasantly, then steps aside and sweeps me grandly into the small foyer. I stand on the blue ceramic tiles, which match the pale walls. In the front hall hang pictures: a black Jesus, a white Jesus. On the opposite wall are photographs: Derek, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King. Derek’s is the largest. I lean over to shake hands with Sally’s children, who goggle hopefully. When they ascertain that I have not brought them anything-an egregious omission in a relative they rarely see-they run off into the house to play.

“What’s it been, Talcott? Four years? Five?”

“Something like that. I’m sorry, Thera.”

Thera grunts what might be forgiveness. She leads me to the kitchen, where we sit on opposite sides of the counter drinking tea. A Bible is open on the Formica. Beside it is a book by Oswald Chambers. Next to the window hangs needlepoint: AS FOR ME AND MY HOUSE, WE WILL SERVE THE LORD. Thera sits there, seventyish and somber and strong, surrounded by her faith, worried sick about her daughter, wondering, maybe, why Sally seems to have more of her father than of her mother in her. Except, to hear Just Alma tell it, Thera, too, was a bit wild in her day.

“What do you want, Talcott?” This part of Thera’s personality, this emotional honesty, she has indeed passed on to her daughter. Neither one of them is any good at pretending to feel what she does not, or at hiding what she is thinking. “You didn’t come all this way just to see Rachel and Josh, so don’t tell me that lie.”

“I went to see Sally this afternoon.”

Something moves in her face, and her voice grows less gruff. “How was she?”

“She’s still having a hard time.”

“I know that. What I mean is, how did she treat you?”

The question surprises me, both perspicacious and mean. I choose a diplomatic tone. “We apologized to each other.”

Thera has no patience with euphemisms. “Oh, yeah? How come? Were you screwing her, too?”

An instant’s silly panic. “No, no, please don’t think that. No, of course not.”

“Your family hasn’t been good to her, Talcott.” Your family. Thera herself was only married into it. And bore Sally before joining up.

“I know.”

“You shouldn’t have gone.” A beat. Perhaps she decides to forgive me. “So, okay, why did you go?”

I have had time to think about how to answer this. “Thera, I can’t tell you everything. I wish I could, but I can’t. But Sally was… She and my sister have been looking into what happened to my father. I didn’t want to disturb her, but there was a question I realized only she could answer. I went there to ask her.”

Thera seems amused. She takes a sip of tea. Her massive hand swallows the cup. I cannot tell whether she believes me. “And did you get the answer?”

“Yes. Yes, I did.” She waits. I hear the children whooping in the next room. Time to bite the bullet. “Thera, I have to get into Sally’s apartment.”

“What, you think I’m just gonna give you the key?”

“It’s important. I wouldn’t have driven all the way down here otherwise.”

“What’s important? What are you looking for, Talcott?”

“There’s something… something I think Sally has hidden in the apartment. Something that came from my father’s house. I need to find it.”

“You’re saying she stole something?”

I shake my head emphatically. “I think she was trying to help. I think she… thought she was doing the right thing by hiding it.”

Thera’s eyes narrow. “Help who? Your brother, right?”

“Why do you say that?” I fence.

“Because when she was crying for days before she… before she tried to do herself in? She kept talking about your brother and what he had done to her.” A moment while we think that one over. Her next question takes me by surprise, but it is a mother’s question: “Is the thing you want the reason she had her breakdown?”

“I don’t know. I think it might be… a part of the reason.”

“If you find it, will you take it away with you?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“And that’s why you want the key? So you can find it and take it away?”

“Yes.”

“Wait here.”

Thera trudges off down the hall. I hear her asking the children to quiet down. She is back a moment later with a shopping bag. “I think this is what you want, Talcott.”

She hands it to me. I look inside. I see my old raincoat, the one I loaned Sally the morning she snuck out of the Hilton. I turn toward Thera, on the verge of explaining that this is not what I am worried about at all, that I still need that key, when I realize that the bag is heavier than it should be. I delve once more and discover, at the bottom of the sack, Mariah’s missing ledger. I am about to protest that this still is not what I need. Then I unfold the coat and find, wrapped inside, the blue scrapbook.

“Get that devilish thing out of here,” Thera orders me. “I knew it was from Satan the moment Sally brought it in. Can’t you feel it?” She shudders, wrapping her arms around her chest. “I should have burned it. It’s ruined too many lives already.”

I have not come this far to grow impatient. Like my brother, I do not really care about the ledger, for it holds no secrets any longer. Only the blue scrapbook draws me. But I do not look at it, not at first. Instead, I head north again, quickly reaching I-95. I zip along for another hour, watching the rearview mirror, wishing Maxine were here to advise me. But maybe she is. I finally stop at a standard-issue motel in Elkton, just inside the Maryland border, to spend the night. Dinner is a chicken sandwich from McDonald’s, after which I settle down at the not-quite-wooden table in the spartan room, fighting to concentrate through the reek of disinfectant. From the shopping bag I pull my ancient green coat, so badly wrinkled that the dry cleaner may not be able to rescue it.

Then I remove the blue leather scrapbook and center it on the table.

A thing of the devil.

I remember the day I discovered it, the Friday after my father died, and my panic when I thought poor Sally might see it. Even then, instinct told me it was better that it not see the light of day.

Well, now it is night, and I can open it and try to figure out what frightened Sally so thoroughly that, added to the other, obscene pressures from my side of the family, she tried to take her life. So, once again, I flip through the nasty pages, the catalogue of deaths of others than my baby sister, every one a hit-and-run, every one a tragedy for some family somewhere: all of these people, I am sure, were loved.

Ugly, yes. But what were Sally’s words?

I don’t know why he had to get them both. That’s what Sally said just before she took the pills. Paula, her Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, assumed Sally was talking about me, because she also kept saying, Poor Misha. But maybe she didn’t mean me. Maybe somebody else had to get them both.

I have made it all the way through the album again. The last pages are blank, because the Judge stopped collecting the clippings after he got well. But how did he get well? What led to the sudden change in attitude that my siblings and I remember so keenly?

I flip back to the last clipping, the final item my father pasted into the book before he stopped. Like all the others, this one is a story of a hit-and-run accident. Phil McMichael, I record, Dana’s old boyfriend and the son of the Judge’s old friend Senator Oz McMichael, run over in his Camaro by a tractor-trailer rig.

So? An interesting coincidence, but so what?

One of my father’s crabbed annotations is in the margin. It takes me a moment to decipher it. Then I have it: Excelsior.

Excelsior?

Not a chess problem, but a page in a scrapbook? Or both?

Wait a minute. Had to get them both.

I begin to read the article, trying to figure this out. The first line of the third paragraph is underlined. Ironically, Mr. McMichael’s fiancee, Michelle Hoffer, was killed in a similar accident three months ago…

My fingers are sweating as I fumble my way to an earlier page where, sure enough, I find a picture of Mchelle Hoffer, daughter of some other wealthy family, dead in a hit-and-run accident. And, right in the margin, the same word: Excelsior.

The Double Excelsior.

The folks in the car.

The folks. A driver and a passenger.

I can see Sally, sitting up in her apartment night after night, studying the scrapbook, trying to figure out why Addison wanted her to take it, waiting for Addison to call, which he never did. One day she hits upon the translation of the Judge’s cryptic handwriting and she soon understands the whole mess. And wishes she didn’t. So what does she do? She gives the book to her mother, trying to get it out of her life, trying to get the Garlands out of her life for once and all, but it isn’t enough. She knows what my brother is hiding, and what the Judge did, and, in her fragile emotional state, she tumbles right over the edge.

No wonder the police did nothing about Abby’s death. Back in those days, nobody was about to go after the son of the most powerful Senator on the Hill. Certainly not for running over a black girl who had been smoking pot and was driving without a license in the middle of a rainstorm in a car that wasn’t even hers. Nobody would touch this case.

Nobody except Oliver Garland.

Nobody except Colin Scott.

And it wasn’t just vengeance, an eye for an eye. There were two people in the car that killed Abby, and the Judge decided in his madness that he had to get them both.