Sacrificial Ground

27

Caleb was buried on a bright, sun-drenched day. The heat settled into the small gray stones of the crowded municipal cemetery, and as Frank stood silently beside the open grave, he could feel the thick, stifling air like a pillow pushed down upon his face.

Karen stood beside him, her eyes on the plain brown coffin, her lips tightly sealed. She remained in that same motionless position until the police honor guard had fired its salute, and the last of the mourners had made their way out of the cemetery.

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am, Frank,” she said finally.

Frank looked at her. “He deserved better than this.”

“Yes.”

“When something this wrong happens, you ought to be able to appeal it somehow, take it to a higher court.”

Karen curled her hand around his and gently tugged him away from the grave.

“I’m leaving tonight,” she said.

“I thought so.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. A look.”

“I’ll come back for the trial,” Karen said. “I promise you that.”

Frank shook his head wearily. “That’s between you and the district attorney.”

Karen stopped cold and stared at him piercingly. “No, it’s between us.”

“You know how I feel about that.”

“I can’t stay here, Frank,” Karen told him. “There’s just no way I could endure it.”

“I know,” Frank said with a slight smile. “Believe me, I understand.” He started to drape his arm over her shoulder, but suddenly Toffler’s face rose in his mind, and for an instant he was back in the interrogation room, the two of them facing each other over a splintered brown table.

“Frank?”

“Do you know what Toffler said, Karen?” he asked her. “He said that if we found dirt in her mouth, it was because she was dirt.” He shook his head wonderingly. “He is alive to say a thing like that.”

Karen pulled herself under his arm. “Don’t, Frank. It’s over. Everything is over.”

But it seemed to Frank that just the opposite was true, that nothing was over. He could still see Toffler’s face in his mind, his long hair nearly white under the lamp, his translucent blue eyes, at times languid, at times blazing, but always open, terrible and sleepless, staring out forever.

“They’ll get him off on insanity,” Frank said, almost to himself. “He’ll end up in a state hospital. But he isn’t insane. He’s just rotten at the very core of himself.” He looked at Karen. “The air is always cold around him. He has no appetites. He doesn’t care about food or sex, or anything like that. He says he never touched Angelica, never wanted to. I believe him.”

“No more, Frank,” Karen said pleadingly. “Please, enough of this.”

Frank looked at her pointedly. “A person is lost, isn’t he, Karen, when he no longer cares about anything pleasurable?”

Karen stepped away from him. “I won’t talk about him anymore, Frank,” she said firmly. She walked quickly over to her car and got in. “I wanted you to take me to the airport tonight,” she said. “But now, I’m not so sure.

“ Frank tried to smile. “When’s your flight?”

“Two in the morning. Everything else was booked up.”

“I’ll pick you up at home,” Frank told her. “Be ready at midnight.”

But first he had some more questions to ask.

“You must be drawn to me,” Toffler said quietly, as he took his seat across the table.

Frank peered into his eyes. “Why do you say that?”

Toffler shrugged. “Second day in a row you’ve come to see me.” He folded his arms on the table and leaned forward. “What do you see when you look at me like that?”

“I don’t know.”

Toffler smiled confidently. “And you never will.”

Frank took out his notebook and flipped to the last pages. “It must have taken her a long time to die. Did you enjoy that?”

“I didn’t enjoy it. I wasn’t there to enjoy it. A thing lives. A thing dies. No one has to be there.”

“Thing? Angelica?”

“Whatever she was.”

“You never felt anything for her?” Frank asked.

“Felt?” He laughed. “You mean love?”

“I mean anything.”

Toffler sat back slightly, and the blue of his eyes suddenly deepened to the shade of the gray prison uniform he was wearing. “She could be used. That’s what a thing is for. “ He nodded toward Frank’s notebook. “Like that thing there, that little notebook, and that little yellow pencil. Used. Like that.” He shrugged. “I wasn’t jealous. She could have fucked that old queer until he died, and I wouldn’t have cared.” His eyes drew together into two small slits. “But she had lost her use. And when you can’t use something anymore, then you throw it away.”

“And so you just threw her away?” Frank asked.

Toffler shook his head despairingly. “This girl, she means everything to you.” He smiled. “She liked old men, though. Sick old men. He’s probably the only guy she ever fucked.”

“You mean Linton?”

“Him, yes.”

“They weren’t lovers,” Frank told him.

Toffler looked at him. “Of course they were.”

“You think Derek Linton was the father of Angelica’s baby?” Frank asked.

“Who else could it have been?”

“It was a boy she knew. We blood-typed the fetus.”

Toffler’s eyes drew in, and his lips parted slowly. “So she was wrong,” he murmured.

Frank leaned forward. “Angelica?”

Toffler’s face stiffened. Nothing Frank could do would get him to say another word.

For two hours after he left Toffler, Frank sat alone in one of the remote corners of Piedmont Park. Something was missing. He had missed something. He could see Toffler’s lips as they parted in surprise. So she was wrong.

Who? Who was wrong? Angelica was wrong about who the father was? But she’d called Doyle three times on May 15. No, she knew who’d gotten her pregnant. Then what?

He remembered what he’d always been told about a murder. Follow blood or follow money.

He saw the old man in the portrait which hung from the white walls of Karen’s foyer. Blood. There was so little left for the Devereauxs. Both parents gone, and after that, Angelica. Devereaux blood had been reduced to a single set of veins.

He set his mind adrift, let blood flow in a steady red stream. Arthur Cummings’ face swam into his mind. It was a calm, reasonable face. His voice was the same, stable, solid, matter-of-fact. Frank could hear it very clearly: She’s all alone now, Karen. Angelica’s money will go to her, of course.

Of course it would, Frank thought, for there was no other Devereaux. There was only Karen. Angelica was dead, along with her baby. But Karen? He could not see Karen having anything to do with Angelica’s death. He could not. There must be something else.

Desperately, he took out his notebook and went over the details of the case yet another time. There were hundreds of them, separate, isolated. Blood or money, he whispered to himself, as he turned one page after another.

Then suddenly he stopped, his eyes staring at a single note. It was blood, yes. And it was money. But they were both arranged in a different configuration. Money might be gained by murder, but it could also be spent for it. And though blood usually meant kinship, it might also mean passion—sudden, fiery, beyond explanation, and yet to all mankind still the one lost clue.

He was surprised that she answered the door herself.

“Good afternoon, Miss Castle,” Frank said.

“Edna has the afternoon off,” she explained.

She looked at him solemnly, then closed the door behind her.

“Let’s stay out here, if you don’t mind,” she said. “Did you have any more questions, Mr. Clemons?”

“Yes,” Frank said. He took out his notebook. “I suppose you read about the arrest.”

“And the man who murdered Angelica?” Miss Castle asked. “Yes, of course.”

“Did you know him?”

“What?”

“His name is Toffler. Vincent Toffler. Did you know him?”

Miss Castle sighed. “Yes, I know him. The Atlanta art world is small, Mr. Clemons, you can’t help running into such people. A disagreeable person, I always thought, and a bad artist.”

Frank glanced down at his notebook. “Yet I’ve done a little research tonight,” he said. “Toffler hung a lot of his paintings in one of the galleries on Hugo Street. It was the only gallery that hung his works.”

Miss Castle looked at him steadily.

“You own that gallery, Miss Castle.”

Miss Castle said nothing.

Once again, Frank drew his eyes down to his notebook. “I was looking through all my notes,” he said. “All the interviews, that sort of thing. Something struck me.”

Miss Castle turned away slightly, resting her eyes on the distant stream.

“When we went for that walk, you said something about truth,” Frank said. He flipped a page of his notebook. “Right here it is. You said that you were feeling like you were ‘full of things.’ Then I asked you ‘what things?’ And you said, ‘Truths.’” He looked up at her. “Then you said that even difficult truths could be beautiful.”

“Yes,” Miss Castle said, without looking at him.

“Something else, too,” Frank said. He flipped to another page. “You said that Angelica was trying to inflame people, and that there was a danger in that. You said that a person might get engulfed by the flames.”

Miss Castle nodded quickly. “You are very thorough in your notes, Mr. Clemons.”

Frank closed the notebook and put it in his pocket. “You believed that they were lovers, Angelica and Derek Linton.”

Miss Castle’s eyes lowered slightly. “Yes.”

“You were close enough to Toffler to know that he knew Angelica,” Frank added.

Her eyes stayed closed.

“The gallery on Hugo Street,” Frank said. “The one you own. It hung all of Toffler’s paintings the morning after Angelica died.”

She looked at him now. “That was the greatest pain, I think, having to hang that dreadful man’s work on my walls.” She turned to Frank. “I have loved Derek Linton all my life. I could endure his lifestyle. I could endure that. His men did not betray me.”

“But when you thought it was another woman,” Frank said.

“That was unendurable, “ Miss Castle said. “And I knew that she would destroy him, rob him, in the end, of what little he had left. I couldn’t let that happen.” She stepped off the porch and walked a little way out toward the stream. For a moment she stopped, stood very still, then turned back toward Frank. “You don’t have to worry about my leaving,” she said quietly. “I’ll be there when you come for me. I’ve spent my whole life waiting.”

It was close to midnight when he pulled up to the house. He’d sent a car for Miss Castle, but had refused to stick around for Brickman’s questions. There was one thing left to do, one piece of unfinished business. Standing at Caleb’s graveside that day, he had promised he would take care of it, but now, sitting in the car outside the man’s house, he wondered if he could go through with it.

And then he thought of Caleb again, of the chisel rising and falling into his neck, his face, of Angelica’s abused body lying in its shallow grave, of all the bodies he had seen for so many years and all the faces, battered, bruised, of those not quite dead. And he knew he owed it to them all.

He could see a single light shining in the front room, but he could not see any movement inside. He took a deep breath and, when he thought he’d achieved a certain, vague calm, he got out of the car and walked quickly up to the front door.

It opened just enough from him to see a single, brown eye.

“Yeah?” the man said harshly. “What do you want?”

“Are you Harry Towers?” Frank asked.

“Who wants to know?” the man asked coldly.

“Ollie Quinn,” Frank said. He stepped back slightly, then slammed into the door. “And Caleb Stone.” Towers’ body crashed backward and tumbled over a small wooden table. He scrambled to his feet, and reached for the pistol in his belt.

Frank hit him in the stomach, then jerked him up and punched him twice in the face. Towers staggered backward and fell on his back, moaning loudly. He tried to rise, but Frank fell upon him, grabbed his head in his hands, and pounded it twice against the floor.

Towers groaned again, as his eyes closed, then fluttered open.

Frank tossed the pistol across the room, then grabbed his own. For a moment, he wanted to press the barrel into Towers’ gaping, toothless mouth and pull the trigger. He wanted to see Towers’ head explode beneath him, but he saw Karen in the darkness, the rose still in her hand, and heard her voice over his shoulder, whispering Caleb’s words: Not yet.

Instead, he put the gun beside Towers’ head, the barrel pointing toward the floor, and fired. The house shook with the reverberating roar.

“If I ever come here again,” he said, “you won’t hear a thing.”

“You’re late,” Karen said, as she walked quickly out of the house.

“Sorry,” Frank said.

“That’s all right. We’ll make it. There won’t be much traffic at this time of night.”

“No,” Frank said. He glanced down at the single suitcase she carried in her hand. “That’s all you’re bringing?”

“I’m having other things shipped up,” Karen said.

Frank took the suitcase and tossed it into the backseat of the car. “Well, let’s go,” he said.

It took a little over a half-hour to reach the airport, and for most of the ride, Frank said nothing. It was as if he had gone to the very brink of what he could feel, and now, there was only heat, night, silence. Perhaps there could be nothing more.

They were already boarding the plane when Frank and Karen reached the gate.

Karen took her suitcase from Frank’s hand.

“I’ll be back soon,” she said.

Frank nodded silently.

“I really will,” Karen insisted. “I promise.”

“Good-bye, Karen,” Frank said softly. Then he kissed her.

She disappeared into the crowd of passengers more quickly than he could have imagined, and he sat down in one of the bright red chairs and watched the lights of the plane as it waited for clearance beyond the enormous window. In his mind, he could see her as she settled into her seat, fastened on her seat belt, then lifted her eyes toward the front of the plane and thought, he knew, of him. He saw her once again as she had first appeared to him, somber in her artist’s smock, her dark eyes full of things that were immense and unsayable, and it struck him that this deep, abiding gravity was the badge she carried with her all the time, and that others possessed it, too, a way of looking into the heart of the general misfortune. He drew out his gold shield and stared at it for a moment. It belonged to Atlanta, but he knew now that he could take it anywhere.

The ticket agent looked up slowly as Frank approached the booth.

“May I help you, sir?”

“Is it too late to get on the flight to New York?”

“No.”

“Then I’d like to go,” Frank said. “One way.”

The agent made out the ticket and handed it to him, glancing curiously at Frank’s face. “What happened to you?” he asked.

For once, Frank realized, he had an answer that seemed right.

“A woman,” he said. Then he walked onto the plane.