Sacrificial Ground

17

It was almost midnight two days later before Alvin pulled over to the curb at Waldo Street to let Frank out.

“Well, I thought the funeral went about as well as could be expected,” Alvin said.

Frank glanced toward the backseat. Alvin’s wife and Sheila were both dead asleep. “Give them my best when they wake up,” he said.

“I will,” Alvin said. “Hey, listen. Maybe I could drop them off and come on back over here.”

Frank shook his head. “I don’t think so, Alvin.”

Alvin leaned toward him. “Don’t go on a drunk over this, Frank,” he said.

“I won’t,” Frank assured him.

“You got a good case. Don’t mess it up.”

“Good night, Alvin,” Frank said. He closed the door and headed up the stairs to his apartment.

The single lamp he’d left burning days before was still on in the living room, and the light, as it passed through the red shade, colored the air like a spray of blood. He wanted to turn it off, but he didn’t have enough energy to do it. It was as if he had returned to a different planet, one whose greater density and more rapid spin held things down with an enormous, insurmountable force.

He lit a cigarette, and watched helplessly as his mind went back over the last few days. He saw his father in the coffin, his face rouged and powdered, in his makeup for God. He could hear the preacher at the funeral, his voice flowing over the congregation: His life was goodness. His reward is glory. There was no doubt that his father had believed all that, and for a moment Frank felt himself all but captured in the mystery of such belief. And yet he knew such faith was lost to him, lost entirely.

He took a long drag on the cigarette and tried to think of something he believed in. Only the most negative ideas emerged. He believed that if you hit a man very hard in the face, he would pay attention to you after that. Everything else seemed soft and inconsequential when compared to the finality of sudden violence. “If I was God,” Caleb had said, “I’d keep one hand on everybody’s balls.” Caleb had said it more or less as a joke, but to Frank it was the one true reality of life, the hard bedrock of everything else. But it was without comfort. It had no place for love or hope or mercy, but only raw and dreadful force, and the aching need for vengeance which it left behind.

He glanced about the apartment, taking in its usual disarray. He thought of Karen’s house, then of Angelica’s room, its immaculate walls, perfectly made bed, polished mirror. It seemed as little a part of the real world as his own, and he wondered if a balanced life did not have to be lived somewhere in between order and disarray, in a borderland of neither too many rules nor too few.

The smoke from the cigarette gathered in the far corner of the room. The light from the lamp gave it a distant, lavender hue. It was graceful in the way it moved, and for a time he watched as it coiled and spun in the reddish light. Slowly, his mind drifted to Karen, and he saw her as she had appeared to him on the day they met, a woman in an artist’s smock. He wanted to see her, more powerfully than anything else he could think of.

Within a few minutes he was in his car, heading toward West Paces Ferry Road. It was past midnight and the city seemed to sleep peacefully in a dark cocoon. The air was still warm with the day’s heat, but he could feel a coolness in it now, a comforting relief, and he hung his arm out the window, as if dipping it into a mountain stream.

For a time, he hesitated at her door. The house was dark, but he felt certain she was not asleep. Finally, he knocked gently, and when she opened the door, she did not seem surprised to see him.

“I heard about your father,” she said. “Mr. Stone at the police station told me. I’m sorry.”

“I wanted you to know that it won’t have any effect on how I handle your case.”

“You could have told me that in the morning.”

“I know,” Frank said weakly. “But I didn’t want to wait until then.”

She stepped back from the door. “Come in.”

Frank followed her into a small study toward the back of the house. It was not like the rest of the house. It was more cluttered. A few paintings lay scattered about, and there was a battered wooden desk and a few metal filing cabinets. A single bookshelf rose almost to the ceiling and, beside it, an ancient manual typewriter rested on a paint-spattered metal stand.

“This is my room,” Karen said. “This is where I work.” She smiled slightly. “I even sleep here sometimes. There’s an old mattress in that closet.”

“Are you going to stay in this house now?” Frank asked.

“No,” Karen told him, “I’m not even going to stay in Atlanta.”

Frank felt something very small break inside him. “You’re not?”

“No.”

“Where are you going?”

“New York.”

“Why?”

“I just can’t stand Atlanta anymore.”

“I see,” Frank said quietly. “Well, I’ll be sorry to see you go.” Because there seemed nothing else to do, he took out his notebook. “I wanted to let you know that we found out a few things about Angelica.”

Karen pointed to a small wooden rocking chair. “Sit down.”

Frank sat down, and watched as Karen pulled up another chair and took a seat opposite him. She took in a slow breath as if in preparation for more bad news.

“You remember that I took down the number of Angelica’s phone?” Frank asked.

“Yes.”

“She hardly ever used it.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Karen said. “She never seemed to have any friends.”

“Since April first, she made only three calls,” Frank said. “And all of them were on the fifteenth of May.”

“May fifteenth,” Karen repeated softly.

“That’s right,” Frank said. “We found out that Angelica had gone to a doctor on May eleventh, an obstetrician named Herman Clark. Have you ever heard of him?”

Karen shook her head.

“She’d suspected that she was pregnant,” Frank said. “She just wanted to make sure.”

“I see.”

“Well, Clark confirmed that she was pregnant. He told her on the fifteenth of May.”

“So the calls were to him?”

“No,” Frank said. “They were made to a young boy from Northfield Academy. He lives over in Ansley Park. His name is Stanford Doyle, Junior. Have you ever heard of him?”

“No.”

“Angelica never mentioned him?”

“She never mentioned anyone from Northfield,” Karen said flatly. “Why did she call him in particular?”

“Because he is probably the father of her baby,” Frank said.

Karen narrowed her eyes. “Did he kill my sister?”

“I don’t think so,” Frank said. “And according to the boy, they were only together one time. He says they hardly knew each other.”

“Do you believe him?”

“Yes.”

“Then so do I,” Karen said. She stood up and pressed her back against the bookshelf. “So you’re not any further along than you were at the beginning?”

“No, I think we’ve made some progress,” Frank said.

“In what way?”

“Well, the night they were together, Angelica was acting very oddly.”

Karen looked at Frank pointedly. “Of course, for Angelica, acting oddly would not be unusual.”

“Well, she more or less picked him up at random,” Frank explained. “She seemed angry, according to the boy. They went for a drive in her car. She appeared to know where she was taking him.”

“Where did she take him?”

“Straight downtown. Not too far from where her body was found a few weeks later.”

“I see.”

Frank looked at his notes. “She didn’t talk much that night. She circled Grant Park a few times, then drove down to the Cyclorama and parked.”

Karen’s eyes shot away from him. “Is that where they made love?”

“No,” Frank told her. “They only stopped there awhile. The boy doesn’t remember for how long. It seems they didn’t talk much then, either.”

“Well, she must have said something to him,” Karen said fiercely.

“Not according to the boy.”

“Are you telling me that Angelica just picked this boy up and … fucked him?”

“Yes,” Frank said bluntly.

“And you believe that, too?”

“Yes, I do,” Frank said. “But I believe she had some kind of reason for doing it.”

“What reason?” Karen asked crisply.

“I don’t know.”

Karen shook her head despairingly. “I don’t know if I can go on with this.”

For a moment Frank let her rest in silence. Then, after a moment, he continued.

“They only parked at the Cyclorama for a few minutes,” he began cautiously. “Then Angelica told the kid that this was his lucky night.”

“Oh, God,” Karen whispered.

“They drove around a little more after that,” Frank went on. “The kid doesn’t know exactly for how long. He doesn’t know exactly where they went, either. He doesn’t know the south side of town.”

“Of course not.”

“But Angelica did,” Frank said. “That’s the strange thing. She seemed to know exactly where she was and where she was going.”

Karen looked at him wonderingly. “The area around Grant Park?”

“Yes.”

“How would she know that part of town?”

“I don’t know.”

“She didn’t say anything to this Stanford Doyle about it?”

“No,” Frank said. “Had she ever mentioned anything about it to you?”

“No.”

“Do you know if she had any friends out that way?”

“No.”

“Any reason at all for her to be familiar with that part of the city?”

“She never mentioned anything about any place,” Karen said firmly. “And she certainly never mentioned anything about Grant Park or the Cyclorama, or anything downtown for that matter.” She shook her head wearily. “As far as I knew, she lived her whole life between this house and Northfield Academy.”

Frank flipped a page of his notebook. “How about Stanford Doyle? Have you ever heard her mention his name?”

“No.”

“People call him Stan.”

“Nothing.”

“He said she was very angry that night,” Frank went on. “That was on the night of April first. Can you think of anything that might have made her angry?”

“No.”

“Some little argument. Anything.”

Karen began to pace slowly back and forth across the room. “No,” she said. “Nothing.”

“A bad grade,” Frank pressed her. “A disappointment of some kind.”

Karen whirled around. “Nothing, nothing, nothing,” she said loudly. “I didn’t know my sister! Can’t you understand that!”

Frank stood up. “Something was happening to her, Karen,” he said hotly. “Something very bad.”

She turned away from him and drew in a long, deep breath. “I know,” she said softly. “I could feel that something was going wrong. But I didn’t know what it was.” Her eyes closed slowly, as if searching for something inside herself. “I would have saved her if I could have.” She looked at Frank. “I knew that something needed to be done, but I didn’t know what it was. All I had was a feeling.”

Frank thought of Sarah, of all the little hints she’d given, a sudden break in the middle of a sentence, a little gasp of fear when there was nothing threatening around her.

“I always thought that something was waiting for Angelica,” Karen said. “It was as if some shadow was always gathered around her.” She glanced away for a moment, then her eyes returned to him, very firm and determined. “I want to see where you found her.”

“It’s a vacant lot,” Frank said. “Weedy. There’s an old car in it, rusting away.”

“I don’t care what it looks like,” Karen said.

“There’s nothing to see,” Frank said insistently. “We didn’t even find footprints. The ground was too hard from the drought. A little brush was broken, where he dragged her. That’s all.”

“I don’t care,” Karen said. “I want to go there.”

“All right.”

“When can you take me?”

“We could go now, if you like,” Frank told her.

Karen nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, I think I would.”

During the long ride downtown, Karen sat silently beside him. Her face, as he glanced at it from time to time, appeared almost blue in the light, and just beneath it, he could see the same features, muted and less radiant, but clearly visible nonetheless, which others had seen, and probably adored, in her younger sister. And yet, to Frank, Karen’s beauty seemed deeper and more completed. There were faint creases about her eyes, and here and there in the deep black of her hair, he could see a strand or two of gray twining upward like a flower, which gave her a beauty that was beyond the scope of youth, larger, richer, more to be desired.

“I went out to the lot myself one night,” Frank said, as he turned the car onto Peachtree.

She looked at him. “Alone?”

“Yes.”

“To do what?”

“I don’t know. To take it in, I guess.”

“Take it in?”

“To see if I could feel something.”

She turned back toward the street, her eyes fixed on the road ahead. “But you seem so meticulous. That little notebook. You’re always writing in it.”

“Yes, I am.”

“So what did you expect to ‘feel’?” Karen asked.

“Her death. Maybe her life. Something.”

“And did you feel anything?”

“No.”

“Then I probably won’t feel anything either,” Karen told him.

“No, with you it may be different,” Frank said. “You were her sister. In one way or another, you’ve always been together. Something might be jarred loose. I’ve seen it happen. People suddenly remember some little fact or incident they hadn’t thought of before. It happens all the time.”

He turned off Peachtree and headed toward Glenwood. The glitter of the city fell behind them and the other world of squat brick buildings swept in around them like a wave.

“The day Angelica died,” Frank said after a moment, “did you notice any change in her?”

“No.”

“A sudden coldness or harshness, anything like that?”

“Nothing at all.”

Frank turned the car onto Glenwood and edged it over toward the vacant lot.

“There it is,” he said. He stopped the car at the edge of the field. The lot rested to the left, its shrubs and weeds utterly motionless in the summer air.

“Oh, God,” Karen whispered.

Frank pointed toward the middle of the field. “We found her over there. She was lying on her back.” He looked at Karen. “We have a witness who saw someone carry a large bundle to the same area. Right now, we think it was a carpet, and that Angelica’s body was rolled up in it.”

Karen bowed her head slightly. “It’s still so hard to believe.”

“Do you want to get out?”

“Yes.”

They got out of the car and walked to the edge of the field. The air was thick with the day’s lingering heat, and in the streetlight, Frank could see a thin line of perspiration as it beaded on Karen’s upper lip.

“Follow me,” he said. “I’ll show you exactly where I found her.”

Together they waded slowly out through the thick brush. The surrounding streets were quiet, except for Glenwood, where the night traffic continued in a steady stream.

Finally, they reached the place where Angelica’s body had been left.

“Here,” Frank said. “She was on her back. And her hair was spread out around her head. I believe her killer arranged it that way.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because if he’d just laid the body down, her hair would have been beneath her head,” Frank said. He stooped down to the ground and moved his hand in a circular motion. “Instead, it was all spread out around her.”

“What kind of night was it?” Karen asked.

“Like this one.”

“No wind?”

“No wind.”

“Then we can find out for sure.”

“How?”

“My hair is like Angelica’s,” Karen said, “so all you have to do is lay me down and see how my hair falls.”

Frank walked over and very slowly lifted her into his arms. Then he bent forward and lowered her softly onto the ground. Her hair fell beneath her head and gathered there like a pillow.

“Like you thought,” Karen said.

Frank nodded. “Yes.” He could still feel the weight of her body in his arms, and for an instant he thought it came from his desire, but then, suddenly, it faded, and he could feel the moment of Angelica’s death moving through him like a steady, electric charge. He stiffened.

“What’s wrong?” Karen asked as she got to her feet.

“Nothing,” Frank said, “nothing at all. Let’s go.”