Lightning

9

In his office on Magellan, Carver examined the letters given to him by Adelle Grimm. For the most part they were the usual nutcase notes, written or typed with misspellings, deliberate or otherwise, and for some reason with very narrow margins. They conveyed the sense that while they were threatening and irrational, the writers were unlikely to pose an actual danger.

Two of the letters, however, interested Carver. They were signed, and they seemed to amount to more than the venting of paranoia and frustration.

One, from a man named Xaviar Demorose, with a Del Moray address, went into detail as to how he was going to abduct, torture, then murder Dr. Grimm. The other letter was more temperate but quoted scripture fluently and was signed by a Mildred Otten, who identified herself as a member of Operation Alive.

Carver folded both letters and slid them into his shirt pocket. Then he dragged the desk phone over to him and pecked out the number of A. A. Aal Memorial Hospital and Beth’s room extension.

Her voice sounded throaty and weary when she answered the phone by her bed. Maybe she’d been asleep, or she was groggy from her medication.

“You feeling better today?” he asked.

“Fred?”

“Yes.”

“Just a moment.” There was a pause. Then, “I had to switch the receiver to my left ear. I keep forgetting I still can’t hear well out of my right.”

“The doctor didn’t tell me you suffered a hearing loss.”

“Told me,” Beth said. “Whispered it in my left ear.”

Carver almost smiled. It was good to hear her usual acerbic tongue. “Has the hearing in your right improved any?”

“Yeah. They tell me it should return to eighty or ninety percent normal eventually.”

“We can settle for that,” Carver said. “If you’d walked into the clinic a few seconds sooner you might have been killed.”

“Timing and luck, maybe they’re the same thing.” There were faint sounds in the background, as if someone had entered the room, and Beth said something he couldn’t understand, muffled, as if she had her hand over the mouthpiece. “The nurse was here looking in on me,” she explained a few seconds later. “And McGregor was here about an hour ago, Fred. He was looking for you.”

Carver glanced again at his answering machine; the digital counter registered no messages. McGregor hadn’t called. “Did he say why?”

“No. He was only here a few minutes. He urged me to leave you and sleep with men of my own race, then he left.”

“Did he upset you?”

“No. I wouldn’t let him. I know how he is, how he tries to draw out people’s rage or humiliation so he can feel superior.”

“If he comes back, don’t tell him I called. I’ll avoid him.”

“That would be my advice, Fred. To anyone.”

“Can you get through the afternoon without me? I’ve got to talk to some people.”

“Concerning the bombing?”

“Yes.”

“About Adam Norton?”

“More or less.”

“You don’t think he’s the bomber?”

“I want to make sure. And if he did the actual deed, I want to know who if anyone put him up to it.”

“What about tonight?”

He smiled. “You’re full of questions.”

“That’s my job, just like it’s yours.”

“I’ll be there tonight to see you.”

“Good. But don’t worry so much about me, Fred. I’m on the mend.”

“I know you are.”

“It’s just that . . .”

“What?”

“The baby.” There was a catch in her voice.

Something bent and broke inside him with an abruptness that surprised him. Was he that vulnerable?

“I’ll drive over there now,” he said. “I should have come earlier today.”

“Don’t you dare.” She sounded angry with herself. Determined.

He listened to his own breathing for a moment. “You sure you’ll be okay alone?”

“I’m not alone, Fred. Including staff, there are about a thousand people in this building. Half of them come and go in this room, checking on me, giving me medication.”

“So you don’t need me.”

“I didn’t say that. Bring my Toshiba when you come tonight.”

“Why would you want a notebook computer?”

“I’m going to write a piece on the clinic bombing for Burrow. I talked on the phone with Jeff Smith about it this morning.”

“You shouldn’t be thinking about work.”

“I’m thinking about my work and yours, Fred. I’ll need you to keep me up to speed on the investigation.”

He almost cautioned her again, but in truth he was glad to find her well enough to be interested in her work. He knew how work could displace pain.

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll brief you when I get there this evening.”

“The nurse just walked in again, Fred, this time with something that looks like a turkey baster. I’ve got to hang up.”

“Beth-”

“Don’t forget the computer.”

The line went dead.

Carver, whose cooking skills and experience were limited, sat thinking that it had been years since he’d seen a turkey baster.

Xaviar Demorose’s address turned out to be the Golden Time retirement home in West Del Moray, not far from Women’s Light. Carver had to drive past the clinic on his way there. The low brick clinic looked normal except for the boarded-up front doors and windows, and the wreaths and bouquets of colorful flowers laid out on the step that led to the entrance. Across the street, two dour looking men were walking back and forth with signs. One sign appeared to show a blown-up photograph of a fetus with a red X slashed through it. The other said simply HIS TERRIBLE SWIFT SWORD beneath a crude drawing of an explosion. Carver pushed down his anger and drove on.

Beneath whatever they used to scent the air, the lobby of the retirement home still smelled like medicine, stale sweat, and desperation. Three very old women sat side by side in wheelchairs, staring at a television set showing a soap opera. On the other side of the lobby, where sunlight fell through a high window to the tile floor, an old man with long white hair sat in a rocking chair, a knotted sheet wrapped around his midsection holding him in place. His head was bowed and he was staring vacantly at his lap. A thread of saliva caught in the sunlight stretched from his slack lips down to his chest.

From behind a reception desk, a young woman with brown hair and bangs smiled at Carver inquisitively. Her right hand was poised with a pencil, but there was nothing she might have been writing on beneath or anywhere near the hand. She had a round face that swelled when she smiled and made her look overweight even though her body was quite thin. She seemed incredibly young in contrast to the residents in the lobby. The brass plaque on the desk said her name was Claire. Lucky Claire, Carver thought, with all that life ahead of you.

“I’d like to talk to one of your residents,” he said, returning Claire’s smile. “A man named Xaviar Demorose.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” she said in a despondent tone that made both smiles disappear. “Are you a relative?”

“No. I’m acquainted with the family.”

“Mr. Demorose passed over this morning.”

“Passed over?”

“Died.”

That was better, Carver thought. Dying wasn’t like flying over the roof. Or maybe it was.

Claire was absently pressing the sharp pencil point into her left palm, as if she’d somehow been responsible for Demorose’s death and was punishing herself. “He suffered a heart attack two days ago, and he pass-he died early this morning.”

“He had a heart attack the day of the Women’s Light Clinic bombing?”

“I’m afraid that’s so. The news excited him to the point where his heart couldn’t take it.” She realized what she was doing and put down the pencil. “He’d had three bypass operations, you know.”

“No,” Carver said, “I didn’t. Can you tell me, was Mr. Demorose in the habit of writing letters?”

“Oh, sure. He wrote to everyone in the news. And when he wasn’t writing to them, he was sending letters to newspaper editors and politicians, just about anyone he could think of. People in here get awful lonely sometimes. Their families forget them after awhile, and they need outside contact. Mr. Demorose, he had an opinion about almost everything, and he needed to share his opinions.”

“Were they, uh . . . rational opinions?”

“Sometimes,” Claire said, not willing to speak ill of the passed over.

“How old was Mr. Demorose?”

“His ninetieth birthday would have been next Tuesday.” She seemed especially moved by the fact that Mr. Demorose had come so near and then missed making yet another round number. “It’s all so sad, isn’t it?”

“It’s sad,” Carver agreed, and told Claire good-bye.

Mildred Otten, the second letter writer, was a different story.

She lived in an apartment on Evers Avenue a mile from the ocean, where the neighborhood began to decline. Her building was a four-story white stucco structure with green iron balconies and a front walkway that passed beneath a rotted wooden trellis rich with flaming red roses. Her unit was on the fourth floor, rear, and when she opened the door to Carver’s knock, heat rolled out at him.

Mildred Otten didn’t seem to notice the heat, though her thin yellow-and-white cotton dress was plastered with perspiration to her gaunt body. Her face, narrow as a board and with a mottled red birthmark covering most of its left cheek, was gleaming with sweat and she was blinking her tiny green eyes as if they stung. A lock of damp hair dangled down over one ear in a spiritless little curl. It was a strange color between blond and gray, as if she’d begun to dye it and then changed her mind.

Carver identified himself and showed her his license with its color photo that looked a little like him. She seemed satisfied, as if she didn’t distinguish between private and public cops, and stepped back and invited him in. He was careful not to step on her toes; she was wearing sandals made out of tire tread with rubber loops over the big toe of each foot. On several of her toes were the kind of flesh-colored, circular bandages used to treat corns.

The apartment was steaming hot. The furniture was cheap and stained, and there was a woven oval rug on the scarred hardwood floor. On gray walls that needed paint were hung various untrained religious prints that appeared to have been clipped from books and magazines. One print was of Prometheus chained to a mountain while his liver was being devoured by a vulture. Carver wondered if Mildred realized she was mixing Greek mythology with scripture. Maybe it didn’t matter. The theme seemed to be suffering. There was no sign of an air conditioner, and only one window was open-about two inches. There was no screen.

Mildred saw him looking at the window. “I don’t open it wider because of the gulls,” she explained in a firm, positive voice. “They’re the devil’s agents and they might fly in and pluck my eyes out if I allow it.” She glared at him. “It happened to a woman down in Boca Raton.”

“I think I read about that,” Carver said.

“Two summers ago, it was.”

“Yes.” Carver pulled out the letter she’d sent to Dr. Grimm. The paper was damp now, and some of the printing was blurred. “Did you mail this, Ms. Otten?”

She studied it. “Of course. Isn’t that my signature?”

“The letter’s a death threat,” Carver pointed out.

“The other police have talked to me already about that. Didn’t they tell you? I explained to them it wasn’t a death threat, it was a vision from the Lord. The sower hath reaped the whirlwind.”

“Dr. Grimm, you mean?”

“Of course. He took lives, and someone took his own. Wasn’t that just?”

“It depends on your point of view.”

“Just is just,” she said, shaking her head.

“Were you at the clinic the day it was bombed, Mildred? May I call you Mildred?”

“Yes and yes. I saw the wrath and lightning of the Lord loosed on the house of death.”

“Innocent people were killed,” Carver pointed out.

“Innocent people are killed there every day, day after day.”

“Again a matter of opinion, Mildred.” Carver was trying not to get angry, remembering Beth flying backward out of the clinic in a sunlit shower of glass fragments.

Mildred shook her head again, this time violently, as if flinging away his words before they might stick in her mind. “As you know not how the wind blows, nor how a babe within the womb grows.’”

“The Bible?”

“Ecclesiastes. We haven’t the wisdom to judge living tissue other than alive. It is the Lord’s work. That is plain in the Word.”

“I understand you’re a member of Operation Alive.”

“I am that, and proud of it. ‘Look at my agony; my maidens and my youth are in captivity.’”

It took Carver a few seconds to realize that she was quoting again.

“Ecclesiastes?”

“Lamentations,” she said. “ ‘He slaughters and kills the children, the delight of our eyes.’ That verse refers to Dr. Grimm and his kind. So I do what I can, Mr. Carver. I make picket signs, I stand before passersby whose eyes are blind and try to make them see. Ever since they released me from that place of doctors and sins, I’ve worked for the force of life and the reward of life everlasting.”

“What place was that?” Carver asked. But he knew.

Mildred suddenly appeared sly. She grinned like a mischievous schoolgirl. “Ask your friends among the Romans.”

“Romans?”

“The police. The ones who are crucifying Adam Norton.”

“Do you know Norton?”

“He is me and I am he.”

Carver stared at her. She smiled broadly. He decided she’d had nothing to do with bomb making or conspiracies; they were beyond her. Whatever anger he’d felt toward her dissipated, leaving only pity. She was probably certifiably insane.

“The police know that when the lightning struck, I was on the other side of the street picketing,” she said, “toiling in the service of the Lord. He is my salvation and my alibi.”

Maybe not so insane, he decided, thanking her for her time and easing his way out the door.

Maybe it was the heat.