Gathering Lies Page 10

  “I never would have believed we’d end up with such a mess. China and crockery, the best and the oldest, all in tiny pieces.”

  “Not to worry,” I said. “As soon as we revive ourselves, we’ll all go back to Ransford. We’ll have to carry over whatever we’ve salvaged here, but we can do that. And Luke’s here to help.”

  I looked at him, and he nodded.

  “Let me take a look at that generator, too,” he said. “Maybe I can figure out how to get that anti-theft lock off, and we can siphon some fuel out to use in the generator at my house.”

  “I’ll help,” Dana offered. “I’m sort of mechanical. I fixed my toaster once at home.”

  “I can change the spark plugs on a VW,” Kim said. “Unfortunately, that’s all I know anything about, and our cars are where we left them, by the ferry dock in Seattle. Probably under rubble now.”

  “You should worry,” Grace said testily, keeping to form. “They’ll probably send a chopper after you.”

  “And see if I give you a ride if they do,” Kim retorted.

  Amelia looked at me. “Have they been doing this all day?”

  “Bonded at the hip,” I replied.

  “Come to think of it, where is Jane?” Timmy asked, looking around. “I don’t know where my mind is! I just realized she isn’t here.”

  “We had to leave her at Ransford,” I said. “She was afraid to walk back here, what with the aftershocks, and the storm.”

  “How is she doing?”

  “She’s worried sick about her children. I think she’ll be all right once we get some word that they’re safe.”

  Timmy looked doubtful. “Provided that word ever comes. I hate to think—” She broke off, seeing our faces. “I’m sorry. We must endeavor to keep our spirits up…no matter what.”

  She laughed then, a short, nervous laugh, while patting her frizzy white hair with one hand. The diamond ring flashed and glittered, as if it were real.

  We finished dinner at six, and, since the rain had let up, decided to use the remaining daylight to go through our cottages once more. We still hoped to find personal items—toothbrushes, in particular, and warm clothes and sturdy shoes.

  It was agreed we would meet back at the farmhouse in an hour, and then set off for Ransford together. If the hour passed and not everyone had returned, Amelia would signal those still missing with one of the air horns she’d found in the remains of the Thornberry office. That way, we could all leave together, at the same time. Meanwhile, Luke would work alone on the generator. Thanking Dana and Kim for their offers of help, he told them with a smile that he was relatively certain he wouldn’t run across any toasters or spark plugs out there.

  While the rest of us had been over at Ransford, Timmy and Amelia had handled one more difficult task, that of burying Lucy. No one spoke about the small mound in the yard, though it could be seen through the hole in the wall that once was a kitchen window.

  “We weren’t able to go very deep,” Timmy had said apologetically. “We simply hadn’t the strength.”

  Amelia had patted her arm. “It will do for now,” she’d reassured her.

  The two women had found early wildflowers in the woods and had placed them on Lucy’s grave. Timmy had also fashioned a tiny cross out of twigs. “Lucy wasn’t particularly religious,” she said, her eyes tearing, “but she had a good heart. I don’t suppose a cross and a bit of a prayer could hurt.”

  I agreed, and on the way to my cottage I stopped by the dirt mound to say a small prayer. Dana and Kim followed me and stood by my side. Grace stood a few yards off, watching us, but made none of her usual snide comments.

  I was glad when we all went our separate ways, to our cottages. I hadn’t had a moment to myself since before dinner the night before, and my nerves were raw. Hurrying down the path to my cottage, I tried not to think about Dana’s theory that spirits of dead Native Americans inhabited the grounds of Thornberry.

  At any rate, there was more to worry about now than spirits. In particular, I had to find the slender metal box I’d brought with me to Thornberry. Only eight inches long by five wide, and an inch thick, it resembled an oversized powder compact. I’d brought it here with me in my purse, then taped it to the bottom of a desk drawer. This morning I’d panicked when I couldn’t find it. It had been like looking for a needle in a haystack amidst all the debris.

  It has to be here, I told myself over and over now. It must have fallen free, and it’s buried beneath the heavy items I wasn’t able to lift this morning.

  This time I did lift them, running on the same kind of adrenaline one hears that a mother has when her child is trapped under a car. Tossing overstuffed chairs and end tables aside as if they were mere feathers, I scrabbled in the rubble of my cottage, rushing to beat the encroaching dark.

  These past three months can’t have been for nothing. If I’ve lost that evidence, I’m lost, too.

  The small metal case held Lonnie Mae’s fishnet stockings. In the beginning, I’d given them to my friend, J.P. Then I’d hired J.P.—Judith Patrice, a name she loathed and never used—to investigate the backgrounds of the Seattle Five for something that could be used against them in court. Other rapes, perhaps. Anything that might tarnish their reputations.

  My thinking was that unless the fire investigators came up with something suspicious about that fire in Lonnie Mae’s building—something leading them to the Seattle Five as the murderers of Lonnie Mae and the others in the building that night—I didn’t stand much of a chance of nailing the cops for anything but rape. And knowing the light sentences they might get for raping a black woman, especially one who was no longer alive to speak for herself, I wanted more on them. I wanted the bastards crushed. Annihilated. Put down for all time.

  So I hired J.P., and just to make sure the stockings were protected, she had hidden them in her accountant’s office with those tax papers. The Seattle Five, we hoped, would never in a million years think to search for them there.

  Holding a prime piece of evidence back from the courts was hardly the best way to go, and I was certain I’d be in very hot water when all this was over. Still, with any luck, I wouldn’t be dead.

  Then, several days before coming to Thornberry, I had opened a plain brown envelope in my mail, to find the stockings inside it. There was no return address, and no note of explanation. I tried to reach J.P., but calls to her office turned up only the information that she was “away.” I left messages, but none were returned.

  J.P. wasn’t the kind to ignore a client, or a friend, without some explanation. I began to worry, and tried to reassure myself that she had simply gone off somewhere to follow a lead. She hadn’t had time to write a note, but had sent me the stockings thinking I might need them before she returned. Certainly, I wouldn’t have been able to just waltz into her accountant’s office and ask for them, so that made sense.

  I decided finally to sit tight. Anything I said to the police at this point might only complicate matters for her. J.P. was smart. She was tough. She could take care of herself.

  Not that anyone would have known it. At five foot four, with long honey-colored hair and sky-blue eyes, J.P. looked like an angel. She was, in fact, often called “Angel” by co-workers and friends. I had met her for the first time four years ago when she worked on a case for a client I’d defended. There was little money to investigate the alleged crimes of those in need of public defenders, but J.P. had donated her time—something she did on a regular basis. J.P.’s mother had once been convicted of shoplifting, and without the kind of money needed to prove her innocence had gone to jail for ninety days. J.P. was twelve at the time, and she swore that when she grew up she’d do some kind of work that would help those who were innocent, like her mother.

  Angel…a woman who was, indeed, one of those “angels amongst us.”

  Given that, I knew she wouldn’t have gone off like that without a good reason. Even so, when she sent those fishnet stockings back to me, I felt a swift, sickenin
g sensation. Something told me I had to put them where no one could find them—and quickly.

  I’d found the metal case in my father’s office. It was something he had used to carry a few cigars in, when he traveled, and it was right there where he always kept it, in his desk drawer. Solid silver, it had been engraved in gold on its lid with just one word, Allegra, and when I had asked him years ago what that meant, he said he didn’t know. He’d found the case in an antique store. Intrigued by its unknown history, which I thought mysterious, I had called it the Allegra case after that, making up stories in my head in which it had belonged either to a rich man’s mistress or a royal courtesan.

  That day I had squeezed the stockings into it, still in their plastic bag. Then I slipped the Allegra case beneath a corner of loose carpeting in my father’s study, and tacked it down. I’d have done that in the first place, if I hadn’t been afraid something would happen to me despite my threat to Mike Murty. If I were to be murdered, or die in an “accident,” the entire house might be searched by the authorities, and Lonnie Mae’s evidence found and taken into custody. After that, it could all too easily disappear.

  I know how that sounds—like paranoia. But it was the way I’d come to think. Finally, I had brought the Allegra case with me to Thornberry, just in case the Five broke into my parents’ house and searched it while I was gone. I had taped the case beneath that drawer of my desk. Not the sharpest of hiding places—but then, why, I reasoned, would anyone on this remote little island be looking for it? I wasn’t so far gone as truly to suspect anyone here.

  Continuing my search through the wreckage of my cottage, however, I was no longer so sure. Even my manuscript pages seemed to have disappeared.

  I hadn’t thought to look for my manuscript, at first. There had been all kinds of papers scattered on the floor that morning, and I’d assumed it would be a simple matter of picking them up and putting them in order when I had more time. Now I saw that the fallen pages were blank—fresh new bond, not printed on yet.

  For weeks my manuscript had piled up alongside my computer at home. Then, this past week, it had piled up in a box beside my laptop here at Thornberry. Every day the stack became a bit higher, and with every rising inch my spirits rose. I was coming closer and closer to getting my story out—to nailing not only the Seattle Five, but crooked cops from NYC, to L.A., to Chicago and beyond. My research had uncovered more than I’d bargained for: new details about the problems in L.A.’s Rampart Division, the shooting of unarmed blacks by police in NYC, and similar abuses of police authority all across the country.

  My inability to find even one of the pages of my manuscript now, and the Allegra case, heightened my level of panic. The script had been in a box five inches deep. On top, I had placed a heavy, lichen-covered rock I’d picked up in the forest for a paperweight. “Brain,” I had called the rock, because the gray lichen reminded me of the weblike connections in a brain. I’d hoped it might inspire me.

  And here it was—Brain—lying up against a baseboard, alongside my fallen laptop. The laptop was beneath a two-by-four, broken; the screen was in several pieces.

  No manuscript pages, however. And no box.

  It was then I remembered my backup disk. That, too, I had always placed on top of my manuscript at the end of a day’s work. JUST REWARDS, I’d written on it in thick black ink, next to a Mickey Mouse logo. The box of disks had been the kind they make for kids, the cheapest I could find at the time. Thank God I always back up, I thought.

  But the disk was nowhere in sight. I looked everywhere it might possibly be, and ended up cursing myself for not hiding it somewhere safe. That sickening sensation hit me again. Who was here? Who at Thornberry would do this?

  No, stop it. There’s no one here. No one knows you, or knows anything about you.

  There was Timmy, of course. I had told her, briefly, about my arrest, before I’d accepted her invitation. I thought she should know, and wasn’t sure if she would still want me here. But Timmy had been understanding about my troubles, expressing only sympathy. She had urged me, strongly, to forget all that and come here for a month of relaxation.

  Besides, Timmy would have no reason to take anything from my cottage. Especially not those particular things.

  She had been here all day, of course, while we were gone. She could have come to my cottage alone. She could have—

  For God’s sake, Sarah! You’re getting as bad as Grace.

  I was tired, strung out. There had been too much happening in the past twenty-four hours, and I was seeing shadows under the bed—or the pile of junk that used to be my bed.

  One possibility remained. The cottage’s small kitchen range was now halfway across the room, on its side by the desk. I couldn’t lift it alone, and would need help. But the disk, and the manuscript, might have been tossed there by the quake, the stove then landing on top of them. The Allegra case might be there, as well.

  I was grasping at straws, I knew. But anything was better than believing that one of the women at Thornberry had come here to get her hands on Lonnie Mae’s evidence—and my work. That was just me, thinking crazy thoughts.

  And not for the first time. In Seattle, there had been a night in February when I’d thought I heard someone in the house, downstairs. I’d become so paranoid, I’d even thought seriously of buying a gun for protection. But then the noise proved to be trees scratching a window, and I never heard it again.

  I sat on an overturned bookcase now and surveyed the mess in my cottage. I couldn’t be sure those items weren’t here somewhere. There was far too much debris; it would be an all-day job to go through it thoroughly.

  So my worries were needless—weren’t they? What’s more, they were ridiculous. I would go to Ransford with the others tonight, and come back in the morning to search some more. I might even get Luke to come with me, and help me get that stove off the floor.

  On my return to the farmhouse, I learned that Dana had uncovered two backpacks in her cottage, as well as assorted vitamins and herbs. Grace had dug up an extra pair of hiking boots that fit Kim, and Kim had found a pair of sweatpants almost identical to the ones she’d been wearing since the day before. Amelia’s offering was a large bottle of aloe hand lotion, which at first seemed frivolous, but turned out to be a blessing: everyone’s hands were raw and inflamed from scavenging through wreckage for the past twenty-four hours.

  I added my own salvaged items to the mix—two pens, a yellow legal pad, a backpack and a copy of a book titled, How To Survive Life’s Little Challenges.

  Everyone laughed at that, which had been my reason for bringing it. Kim, however, latched onto it and said she’d enjoy some good bedtime reading.

  Looking at our “insignificant” little finds on the kitchen table, we all had to agree there was a time when we might have turned our noses up at them—especially since everything was wet from the rain. Now we glommed on to them as if they were gold. Everything would dry out, even shoes.

  When reminded by Grace that Ransford was fully furnished with linens, Amelia argued that with no heat throughout the night, they might need extra blankets. She was all for searching through the debris outside, from Thornberry’s upper floors. Luke said don’t bother, they would have heat at Ransford, after all. He had managed to get the anti-theft lock off Thornberry’s fuel tank, and had siphoned some fuel to take with us.

  Everyone had her own opinion about what we should take from Thornberry to Ransford, and Timmy showed signs of breaking when she said tearfully, “I can’t leave my things behind. I just can’t.”

  “Well, you can’t take them with you,” Grace argued. “What do you think we’ve got here, for God’s sake, a covered wagon?”

  The walk back to Ransford, she argued, was too long to be carrying all the sentimental odds and ends Timmy refused to leave behind. The two of them argued back and forth until I thought I would scream. I restrained myself from telling them both to shut up, but did wonder aloud why I couldn’t have been invited to somep
lace comparatively peaceful to write my book, like a third world country on the brink of war. That had some small effect—enough, anyway, that Timmy compromised on what she brought with her. Grace gathered her own contributions together, declaring that she, at least—if no one else—was prepared to hit the road.

  Timmy had found an old map of the island showing a three-mile-long utility road through the forest to the other side. The map was so old however, she couldn’t be sure the road was still there, or if it was, that it wasn’t overgrown. We took a vote and agreed to try it, hoping to save time. Before we left, we nailed a note to a tree for potential rescuers.

  Luke and I hadn’t had a moment to talk alone, and again I wondered if I only imagined that he was avoiding me. He led the way along the narrow, half-overgrown trail, brushing fir and cedar branches aside with a large walking stick, and warning us of potholes. In his other hand he carried a gasoline can full of diesel fuel. Grace and I each carried cans, as well. We had found them, old and rusty but usable, in a storage shed on the Thornberry property. A miracle, we called it, as these would be better than the plastic gallon milk bottles we had been planning to use.

  Grace, Dana and I followed Luke in a single line at intervals of a few feet, while Kim, Timmy and Amelia brought up the rear. Each of us carried either backpacks or lunch baskets, filled with whatever supplies we’d thought might be helpful over the next few days. Three of us carried flashlights, which gave only minimal illumination in the darkness of the woods. Overhead, the wind whistled through the tall trees like the cries of demons mocking our stupidity in thinking we might actually survive all this.

  Once, Grace drew up alongside Luke and said something I couldn’t hear. I saw him shake his head angrily and stomp on ahead of her.

  As Grace dropped back, Dana moved up to her and said, “What was that all about?”

  “Nothing,” Grace said scornfully. “He’s an idiot. Like all men.”

  Dana fell back next to me. Hefting her lunch basket full of supplies, she said, “I feel like Little Red Riding Hood.”