Shades of Eva, page 38
“Dad was here?”
Amelia sat up and then stood. She walked across the room to the window to stare out into the night. After a minute, she said, “Let’s go back outside,” almost playfully. “There are some things happening tonight that you need to know about, and I made a fire.”
***
Chapter 40
It was a quiet midnight save the gentle whishing sound of the river brushing the banks. Amelia had built a bonfire of semi-arid elm wood and a bundle of pine branches that smelled good. It was a quiet night much like the nights I remembered in Neah Bay, and it almost made me miss the simplicity of ignorance I had found there. Amelia tossed some pine needles and some sugar cubes into a pan and set it over the fire, bringing it to a boil. After a few minutes, she poured some of it into a cup and handed it to me. “This is pine needle tea,” she said. “We used to drink it in boot camp. It’s full of vitamin C. Have some.”
I took the cup and thanked her. It tasted good, somewhat sweet and somewhat earthy. “What the heck happened?” I asked her. “I remember sitting by the swing, and then the world just sort of went black.”
“You had a seizure. I’d been trying to warn you.”
“A seizure? I’ve never had a seizure.” I took another sip of my tea.
“I gave you an anti-convulsive to relax you. You need to stay on them for a little while until you dry out. I shouldn’t have given you those other pills. I should have gotten something else for you. I’m sorry.”
I just shook my head. I was done arguing about pills. I changed the subject. “Tell me about my father. What was he doing here?”
“I brought him here. I went to see him today.”
“You went to see him?”
“Well, you didn’t think he’d find us, did you?”
I was shaking my head. Instead of asking if Dad cared where I was, I asked her if he wanted to see me. That was a different question. It was hopeful.
“Yes, he did want to see you, Mitchell. I told you before that he regrets the past.”
“Why did you bring him here?”
“He’s part of plan B. And I told him you were sick. I didn’t make him come here.”
“Where is he? What’s he doing?”
Amelia poured herself a cup of tea. “Brad checked into the halfway house a few hours ago at the Asylum. He’s already located some of Emily’s things.”
“What?” I nearly hollered.
Amelia dropped two sugar cubes into her brew and said, “He’s found some of Emily’s art.”
I couldn’t believe what I just heard. I’d spent an entire day in that place and hadn’t an inkling where any patient art archive might be. I had barely located the blueprints to the place, and hadn’t even set foot in a tunnel. Dad had checked in a couple hours earlier and had apparently found the freaking gallery?
“I thought he might know something about the art,” Amelia went on, “so I asked him. He knew exactly what I was talking about. And we’re helping him,” she added. “He needs to know what Ully did, and he deserves the chance to confront him.”
I nodded and took another long drink.
What Dad was going to have to confront was the realization that Ully had abused his first wife, and quite badly, and that Mom was not lying about that abuse—or Elmer’s murder. He was also going to have to confront his own infidelity, for I was sure Amelia had told him about Ully’s confession and the inheritance Dad never received because of that infidelity. I was failing to see how Dad was going to work through that sort of information peacefully, seeing as Ully had now turned on all of us.
“I wish you could have seen the look those two exchanged,” Amelia said, sipping her tea and smiling. “For the ages!”
“Ully and my father? They saw each other?”
Amelia was nodding. “Doc Norris had them both in the main boardroom, with three or four attendants standing guard, of course. It’s all on tape. Watched it inside while you were sleeping! It was quite a reunion.”
“And Dad didn’t try to rip Ully’s head off?”
“Your Dad accused him of murder, but Ully denied everything…the rapes, being at the Asylum with Fred, and of course ever burying a toolbox. Typical Ully.”
“But you told my father the truth…about what he’d confessed to you, right?”
“Yes. I told him. I did more than that, anyway. I showed him.”
“You showed him?”
“I showed him the video; the one of you talking to Ully in the halfway house yesterday. The transmitters were working perfectly. He heard everything. I showed him the toolbox, Elmer’s remains, all of my paperwork. He knows everything we know, Mitchell.
“I tried to prepare your father. I told him not to overreact to Ully’s lies.” Amelia was grinning as she said so, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking out over the water again to about the same spot of air she’d fired a couple mock rounds at earlier.
“So what came of the meeting in the boardroom, then?”
“Brad accused Ully of killing Elmer and burying him. Ully accused your father of working with us. Said it was likely why Brad had checked in, in the first place. He told Anna who I was and what I wanted. They just bantered back and forth.”
“So then how is it that Dad was able to get into a gallery if Anna was tipped off?”
Amelia shook her head and stared at me. “There is no gallery, Mitchell! The Asylum is the gallery. The whole place is one big fucking gallery, and I didn’t even know it! Your Dad did, though. All he has to do is to keep his cool, roam the place, and gather Emily’s things. He’s already retrieved some of them.”
“You’re telling me Emily’s stuff is out…as in on display?”
“Like a bunch of drawings hung on a refrigerator in plain sight.”
I was shaking my head again, which was becoming quite a habit.
“We’re heading there tonight,” Amelia continued, dumping the last of her pine needle tea on the ground beside her. “I’m going to get Emily’s artwork. Then we’re ending this.”
And before I could offer Amelia a reply, she hushed me. “There are a few more things you need to know,” she told me, “before we put this to bed. There are some things you need to know about me.”
***
Chapter 41
The bonfire had sizzled to a low flame. I dumped the last of my tea into the fire, and followed Amelia back inside the house. I didn’t know it right then, but the South Bend Tribune and the River Bluff Gazette were about to make my uncle Ully’s story front page news for the day.
According to Ully’s new upheaval, Amelia and I were working together to locate a former friend of Ully’s, as well as a missing brother of mine. And that, of course, was true—to some extent. We’d found Elmer, although Ully wasn’t admitting to it. It was a worst case scenario: my search for my mother’s rapist had now turned into a search for me.
Heading into the living room, Amelia didn’t seem concerned. In fact, she tried to reassure me. “Our documentation is in place,” she said. “And we have Elmer’s remains. Whether or not Ully wants to confess in public is one thing—”
“That’s right,” I said, my spirit suddenly lightening. “We have his confession on tape.”
She gestured us on toward the staircase and started up. When she reached the upper landing, she turned back to me and extended a hand as if she had something else to show me.
We walked back into my mother’s bedroom. Amelia crossed to a dresser in the room’s corner and opened the top drawer. Amelia withdrew another manila envelope and handed it to me, then told me to open it. The last time I opened an envelope like that, it had my mother’s autopsy report in it. I almost didn’t want to take it, but I did.
I withdrew a photograph. It was a five-by-seven inch picture of a white female, approximately thirty years old, who I had never seen.
Amelia smiled. “This is Sophia, Mitchell. This was my friend.”
I took a good look at the picture. It was a candid photograph of a young woman in Army fatigues, with sunglasses on. She had a rifle suspended by a belt hanging over a shoulder, and she looked angry. Surprised, more like, as if whoever had taken the picture had startled her. She was pretty. She looked confident.
“What happened to her?” I said.
Just as quickly as Amelia’s smile had appeared, it vanished. She began rubbing her temples as if she had momentarily forgotten something vital. She took in a deep breath and moved across the room and sat down on the boxed springs. She laid down facing the wall, as if she didn’t want to look at me.
I sat down beside her and put a hand on her head and swept her hair back.
After a few moments, Amelia seemed to soften some. I felt her body relax a bit. Her breathing slowed. I put a gentle kiss on the back of her neck and then one on her ear. I took in the scent of her perfume tinged with just a hint of the bonfire, and just listened.
She turned over to look at me. She had tears in her eyes. I told her it was okay, that whatever she was about to tell me was not going to scare me away.
“Sophia and I were together in the Army. She’s been working for me. I sent her to the Caymans to cash out the Wilson account. She did, but she never made it back to her car. Your uncle must have sent someone to the Caymans to watch the bank. She was gunned down, and the money was taken. I’m sorry, Mitchell.”
I didn’t respond right away. I didn’t care about the money. I wasn’t sure what to say, because it wasn’t just Ully who had supposedly gotten Sophia killed. Amelia and I were as much to blame. I’d set the penalty on my uncle, and Amelia brought the penalty to bear, and for that want of revenge, Sophia paid the ultimate price.
Amelia must have sensed the blood drain from my body, just as it must have drained from hers when she got the news of Sophia’s death.
But she wasn’t finished. “There’s something else you need to know about me before we finish this. My name’s not Amelia. It never was.”
I picked up Amelia’s left arm and looked at the tattoo there, the one with the two dancers. It read, Joe and Abby.
“Abby is you, isn’t she?” I said, gesturing to the ink there.
Amelia smiled. “Sophia was helping me as long as I didn’t hurt anyone.”
“You haven’t hurt anyone,” I countered.
Amelia—or Abby—shook her head. “I have hurt someone, Mitchell. Someone has been hurt very badly.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Sophia wasn’t—
Abby cut me off. “I’m not talking about Sophia. I’m talking about someone else.”
“Who then?”
“Take a guess!”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes you do. You’ve been asking about him since Neah Bay.”
And then it dawned on me. “The fourth man? The shooter?”
Abby didn’t respond right away. I took her silence as a yes.
“You killed him,” I said. It was a statement, not a question.
“Yes, I killed him, Mitchell.”
Sometime in 1991, somewhere near Fallujah in Iraq, Abby and five other MPs were dispatched to a security detail near an Iraqi prison camp. She was riding in an armored vehicle when it strayed off course. She and five other officers were overtaken by a group of Iraqi fighters. Two soldiers in her outfit were killed. She and the remaining three were separated, and each taken to different locations. She was held hostage for twelve days in a home in a nearby residential village. Abby was thrown like trash into the cellar of that home. She was interrogated and beaten. She said her captors found her cries amusing. They entertained themselves with them, and by caning her.
“Your scars!” I said. “That’s how you got your scars?”
Abby nodded.
“One day there was a knock at a door upstairs,” she continued. “I could hear scrambling and then a man came down. He gagged me and then bound my hands and feet, then hurried upstairs and locked the cellar door. And then I heard gunfire.”
A local rebel who’d heard about the incident and suspected some of the MPs were being housed nearby, reported his suspicions to Iraqi civilians working covertly with the US forces, who then did door-to-doors looking for the prisoners. The search team was ordered to sweep each house in the village. When they got to the house where Abby was being held, a young man posted to guard the premises got scared and opened fire on the team.
Two MPs were killed, leaving Sophia Bermicelli—Abby’s friend and sister MP—and one other soldier to finish the sweep. The Iraqi guard was taken out.
“There was a woman who lived in the house,” Abby said. “I saw her once a day when she’d bring me meals. She was indifferent to me, but not mean. I heard her and some other man shouting at Sophia and the other American to get out. The Iraqi woman had a little girl—a daughter. Her name was Annan. She brought me water, sometimes. I could hear her crying. Things got quiet and I thought they’d left. They would have, if it wasn’t for Annan.”
Sophia had told Abby that as they were removing the bodies from the house, the little girl pointed to a rectangular rug on the living room floor.
“Sophia said time stopped,” Abby said. “You could hear a pin drop. The cellar entrance was a door in the floor beneath that rug. Annan was a sweet little girl, and they killed her for giving me up.”
Abby began crying and wouldn’t stop. I did my best to comfort her, but I didn’t know what to do or what to say. Between sobs she was saying, “Everyone around me dies, Mitchell. Everyone!”
“That’s not true!” I kept saying, holding her as tightly as I could. “That’s not true. I’m not dead, and you’re not dead. Don’t talk like that!”
Abby wiped at her tears and eventually calmed. She continued on with her story. She spent a few days in an infirmary somewhere outside that town. It was there, recovering, she said, where she learned that the little girl had been killed for giving her up. “She died for me,” Abby said. “She saved me and she died for it.”
Abby’s disappearance had been devastating to her family. While she was being held captive, officials had notified her parents of her capture, and upon hearing the news her father collapsed and went into a mild coma. This couldn’t get much worse, I remember thinking. But it did.
Tests revealed her father had suffered a stroke, and had been suffering from lung cancer for quite some time. By the time the news of her rescue had gotten to him, he had just hours to live. The medics at the infirmary broke the news to Abby, and against their wishes, Abby took the next flight home.
Her father died just hours before she arrived.
The funeral was that week. She told me that Anna Norris from the Asylum had attended, just as she had attended her aunt Emily’s funeral several years ago, just as she would attend her mother’s funeral, and those of Joe’s and Amy’s in the subsequent years to come.
“Anna was nice like that,” Abby said. “Considerate. I always appreciated that about her. She knew a lot about her patients, and she cared to check up on them and their families.”
Abby said that her mother was beside herself after her husband died, and went into a depression. After that, she was never the same. It made me think of my grandfather Oren, and how he must have felt when he learned that his wife, Ida, had died.
A year after her father died, Abby was forced to take a leave of absence from the Army to care for her mother. A few months later, her mother recuperated, somewhat, but Abby never went back to the Army. She landed a job with the Holland police force in Michigan. That’s when she met Joe. There was a short engagement and within the year, Abby and Joe were married and Amy was born.
“Amy was the light of everyone’s eyes,” Abby said. “Amy loved her father and her grandmother, but Mom started going downhill again. She wasn’t eating. She wasn’t sleeping. She’d just pace the house like she was lost, like she was searching for someone—and I suppose she was. She was looking for Dad.”
Abby turned her right hand over to show me her arm. She pointed to a small series of numbers etched into the holly which wound around Amy’s tiny tattooed face. It was a date: April 24, 1993, which was little Amy’s birthday.
And there was another series of numbers in another strand of holly: February 25, 1995.”
“What is this?” I said, referring to the February 25th date.
“That’s when my mother was buried. That’s when Amy and Joe were killed.”
Joe and Amy had been killed on the day of Abby mother’s funeral. I could hardly comprehend the pain this must have brought Abby on top of all the agony she’d been enduring.
“Sophia and another MP, his name’s Christian, came home for Mom’s funeral. When it was over, they went back to their hotel. Joe and I took Amy to a movie, and then to the Dairy Queen for ice cream. That’s when our car was T-boned and Joe and Amy were shot.
“I called Sophia. I was frantic. She sat with me all night. Christian started looking for the men. It took us a few weeks to find them, but we found them. Mom had asked me, just before she died, to look into your mother’s case. After the funeral I was driving this way and saw your Mom’s house was for rent. So I rented it. I found your grandfather’s disappointments room and sent Sophia out to look for you. That’s when Christian found the shooter.
“He identified him as Jackson Greer, and told me where he was staying. He told me to call the police, but I didn’t.”
“You went to find him yourself.”
Amelia nodded. “Christian told me he was a gang member and they’d probably want SWAT to bring him in. He’d driven down into Indiana and was staying at an aunt’s house.”
“What happened?”
“I made a couple plans—for you, and for Greer. I sent Christian up to Lansing to meet with someone to get some fake IDs for you, and to get your pistol permit. I grabbed my Beretta and drove down to Plymouth where Greer was. I watched the address for about an hour and then he came out.”
“You confronted him.”
“I took him at gunpoint. I made him drive a few miles away into the country. It was remote. Greer was trying to bargain with me. Then he started crying. We were in a corn field. I told him to get out and walk. There was a woods to the east and I pointed him toward the trees. I didn’t know what I was going to do at that point. I kept seeing a flash, like he was shooting Joe and Amy all over again.
