Fault Line (Em Hansen Mysteries) Page 23

  I took in one mighty inhalation, ready to tell him, ready to blast him about skiing with another woman, ready to skin him alive for cooperating with his hideous sister, about—

  A funny little connection began to form in my head.

  His sister. Enos. “Ray? Enos works in the family business, right?”

  “Enos has nothing to do with this!”

  “Oh? But what is the name of the family business?”

  “Hayes Associates. Answer my question!”

  My mouth opened again. “Your family’s wealth comes from that—” Suddenly, the feeling I’d had—that I was unworthy of his family—fell out of my heart, and a more impartial—and more separate—reality trickled in. My universe had shifted slightly, and I didn’t feel like I had to be nice about his family anymore. By the same token, I noted that I didn’t hate them as much, either. I took a breath. I heard myself say simply, “I fell down skiing. At Alta. I was not there because of you. But I fell because I heard your voice over the radio. You were talking into one just like it, which your sister Katie had set to match the frequency of mine. You said—”

  Ray’s dark indigo eyes grew wide with horror. “What in God’s name—”

  “You were thanking her for what a good time you were having. With … Jenna, I think her name is.”

  Ray’s face went slack. I wondered if he might begin to flow, like rubber.

  My thoughts wavered, swinging wildly between the roiling source of terrible hurt that stood before me and the itty-bitty cushion of abstraction that was beginning to formulate in my mind. As if someone else were speaking, I said, “Don’t you get it, Ray? Katie’s manipulating you.”

  Ray peered at me like I was some strange insect he’d found on his salad. “You think …” He left it hanging. “You take it easy on Katie, Em. She’s been under a lot of stress!”

  My mind whizzed back and forth, now observing Ray, now escaping from the horror of what was happening between us, now soaring up past feeling anything, hiding in my head, the perennial observer, never involved. Now piecing together something Pet Mercer had said. Something about … Sidney Smeeth’s funeral. About seeing Ray and his brother-in-law there. Tom said to think this through. Did “brother-in-law” mean Enos? So confusing, in a family so large. But why would they attend that funeral, and why together?

  Ray was saying something. “Yes, I had a good time skiing. It was fun.” He was leaning forward, glowering at me.

  About then, I remembered that I was in the middle of a fight with the man I had hoped to marry. I felt wobbly, and cold and tingly, almost as if I were falling through the darkness of outer space toward a planet I no longer wanted to inhabit. “I’m not fun?” I asked, with the little wisp of breath I managed to force up through my tightening throat.

  Ray’s eyes were almost black with feeling, a wild mixture of anger, frustration, and fear. “You’re so serious all the time!”

  I began to lose my sense of what was vertical. I was still holding on to the edge of the bed, so I sat down on it. Ray. Thinks I am too serious. What in hell’s name is happening here? “Get out,” I said.

  25

  … The firm and stable mass of the earth trembled and shook, and the sea withdrew, its waves flowing backward. The sea floor was exposed, revealing fishes and sea creatures stuck fast in the slime. Mountains and valleys that had been hidden in the unplumbed depths since the creation of the world for the first time saw the beams of the sun. Boats were left stranded in these newly created lands, and men wandered fearlessly in the little that remained of the waters, collecting fishes with their bare hands. But then the sea returned with an angry vengeance. As if resentful of its forced retreat, the sea roared and rushed through the seething shallows, dashing through every open space and leveling countless buildings in the cities and wherever else they are to be found, so that amid the mad discord of the elements the altered face of the earth revealed marvelous sights. For the great mass of waters, returning when it was least expected, killed many thousands of men by drowning; and by the swift recoil of the eddying tides a number of ships, after the swelling of the wet element subsided, were found to have been destroyed, and the lifeless bodies of shipwrecked persons lay floating on their backs or on their faces. Other great ships, driven by the mad blasts, landed on the tops of buildings (as happened in Alexandria), and some were driven almost two miles inland.

  —Ammianus Marcellinus, Roman historian, describing his experience of the earthquake and tsumamis in A.D. 365 that leveled the city of Kourion, Cyprus, knocked down the lighthouse in Alexandria, and devastated ancient Meditenanean civilization

  AFTER CLOSING THE DOOR FIRMLY BEHIND RAY’S RECEDING back, Faye was kind enough to stay until ten. She ordered Chinese food delivered, but neither of us ate much. We played double solitaire. We talked about everything but the irresolvable turmoils that had both of us wondering if we would survive the night.

  That night, I did not sleep. Or very little, anyway, and what sleep I got, I cannot call rest. Exhausted as I was, I fell asleep quickly, but did not stay asleep. I awoke after an hour, or at most two, then lay awake far into the waxing hours that touch the wrong side of dawn. As it finally began to grow light, I began drifting off again, but what sleep I found then lay in sick, uncontrolled oscillations shot with horrifying dreams, like riding the crest of a freak wave in a cold, dark ocean.

  Let me tell you about insomnia.

  I know it well. Have had it again and again, in so many of its forms. The can’t get to sleep, mind racing form. The awake from two until five, feel like shit when the alarm goes off at seven form. The so buzzed that sleep is something that comes in narcotic blanks between jolts of wakefulness form. The list goes on. But this one was different. This one was a corker. This was the big kahuna of all sleepless nights. This was: Sleep won’t save you, Em; your life is crumbling.

  I was thirty-five years old, I was living in a bed-sitter on a dwindling bank account, I had no job, no real prospects, not even the guarantee of further education, and I had just shot my prospective mate out of the sky.

  I could not sleep because I was scared. Right down to the core. Past it. I felt like the fault that ran underneath Mrs. Pierce’s house had let fly the big one, flattening a city of a million souls, except that this fault ran right through me. It had opened up inside me, and there was a gaping hole through which life as I knew had disappeared.

  My ankle hurt terribly, and, having been so stoic that I’d refused to see a doctor, I had no painkiller stronger than aspirin. The pain soon took on a life of its own, not growing huge or insurmountable, but making my foot seem like a separate entity that had come into the room to sit like a ghost at the other end of that limb I used to call my own. And yet it was also me, looking back at me, telling me the terrible truth about myself.

  Em, it said, you shouldn’t have tried to build your life here. Now it is broken, damaged beyond repair. It’s not just your ankle, or your love relationship, or the world you live and move in. This uncontrollable chaos you call life. This place where stadiums have lethal wounds in their roofs. This place where people who try to change that are slaughtered like rabbits. And worse. This is that and everything else, too, all the horror of human existence swirling like a whirlpool into that hole you call a life. This is the big telegram, but it’s not from some friendly creature called God; no, it’s from the guy who’s really running the show, and he’s not your friend. He’s an engineer with the heart of a bureaucrat, the jig’s up, and the unfunny joke’s on you. You thought this was all going somewhere nice, that all your sprained ankles and broken legs and concussions and shredded heart strings were teaching you something, taking you somewhere important, some big next step, but life’s not really like that—get it? It’s not wine and roses, no big romance, no road to triumph, and you’re not special. It’s just the gaping death’s-head, dear heart. Rot. Degeneration. Give up. You’re just a chemical factory waiting to reproduce, like your friend Faye. Swap your genes out quickly
into the next generation and get done with it. It’s not even laughable. It’s not even so organized as to justify your grief.

  I’d felt despair before, but this was far beyond that. This was icy, bottomless fear at its corrosive worst. This was: Suicide won’t even fix it, and opium won’t ease the pain, so just get down on your knees and weep.

  Crying is an amazing thing. They say water is the universal solvent, but I say it’s tears. They carry messages from the brain to the child who lives beneath it. They teach her that her pain is real. In rolling over her skin, they give it shape.

  It took hours of feeling so freaked that I wanted to puke before those tears came, but when they did come, I began to face a few things, and I entered a small, quiet place deep inside, where things didn’t exactly seem better but where my suffering was less.

  In that place, I faced the fact that Ray wasn’t going to love me the way I needed him to love me.

  I faced the fact that I was tearing myself to shreds trying to fit into his world, and everybody else’s, for that matter, and that none of it was working for me. And that I had no idea what other world I could try fitting into next.

  I faced the fact that life was tenuous, and frightening, and that I was not in control of it, or when it happened, or to whom. Nor was I in control of Faye’s womb, or Tom’s seed, or old brick houses, or the restless ground on which they stood, or a whole community of people who lived in ignorance and denial of the devastation that was coming with the next big snap of the thin crust of solid Earth on which we were all just trying to live.

  And I faced the fact that I was deeply, viscerally angry about all of the above, even though being angry wasn’t going to change anything.

  With that, my feelings became unstuck and began to move. Call it a nervous breakthrough.

  I drew up a list, first inside my head and then, finally sitting up and turning the light on, on a pad of paper. On that paper, I first listed all the things I did not want to know, such as the facts I named above, the big mortality chunk. Then I listed the wishes that had been driving me without my admitting them. My wish for a happy family. My wish for children to love. My wish for magical deliverance from feeling scared and crappy most of the time.

  Then I made a list of unfinished business.

  That list was much less consistent and more miscellaneous, being a mixture of things that had to do with me and things that did not, but it went like this:

  ACTION ITEMS

  (Underlining those words seemed to help.)

  1. Figure out who killed Sidney Smeeth, Pet Mercer. (Same person?)

  2. Clean house emotionally. a. Ray

  b. His family

  c. My family

  d. Life, the universe, and everything

  3. Quit getting hurt instead of getting the point (physically, emotionally).

  4.

  I couldn’t think of a good number four, so I put down the pad of paper, picked up Faye’s book, and read until dawn, taking special note of everything it said about insomnia.

  26

  There were several large aftershocks. During one of them, my husband called down the stairs, “That was a three point four!” A few minutes later, I heard on the radio, “That aftershock measured three point four.” I was very impressed. When Doug came downstairs, I asked him how he had known, and he said, “Madam, I was on the toilet, and when my balls are swinging free, I know these things.”

  —Mary Madsen Hallock, recalling the 1969 Santa Rosa, California, earthquake

  IT WAS SNOWING AGAIN, AND THE HEAVY CLOUDS DELAYED the dawn. I had put down the book and turned out the light to watch it arrive, but it came like gray flannel, barely discernible.

  I lay in bed, staring at the thin crack that ran across the ceiling. It was visible even in the darkness, like the cavern into which my life had fallen. It reflected my pain. I held on to the pain, stabbing myself with it to stay alert, to avoid being fooled again by my wishes and needs. Ray had chosen his family over me. I wondered only why I felt so surprised.

  I promised myself that I would maintain the mental high ground, and not again lose sight of reality—that Ray was stuck in his family, that they had no real place for who I was—no matter how painful. It was over with Ray. I did not belong. That was abundantly obvious, but there was still some emotional stickum holding me invisibly in place, making me hope he would call and say I was mistaken. It was like cosmic flypaper, and it had in its grip not only my feet but also my self-confidence.

  In the past, I had used mental exercises to distract myself, so I could slither back to sleep, but this morning, the only puzzle I could conjure involved the deaths of Sidney Smeeth and Pet Mercer. They were like ladies floating in the lake, their unseeing eyes open to the sky. Submerging that image, I dived in myself and swam into the depths of their mystery. Tom said I should connect some dots. Dot connecting is a good thing. It raises the unconscious to consciousness. It throws light into shadows.

  I began, at last, to piece things together. I had seen Sidney Smeeth being interviewed on the front steps of the new stadium. She already knew that the roof had been damaged. The stadium had just been hit by an earthquake, so she knew that it would soon be inspected. She tried to say something about it, but she was cut off by someone in the control booth at the TV station. Had that been a coincidence? And what had she been about to say?

  The broadcast of her interview had been interrupted, and not to switch to something more … earth-shattering. What did that mean? TV stations answer to their owners, and owners have agendas. Might someone have been trying to muzzle Screaming Sidney?

  From the stadium, she had gone home and been murdered.

  Tom Latimer had sent me to read files. I had found evidence of shoddy or nonexistent geologic hazards reviews for major developments.

  Jim Schecter had indeed inspected the stadium roof, had found cracks in the welds, and had been told to keep his mouth shut.

  Pet Mercer had figured out that Sidney Smeeth’s death had been not an accident, but a murder. She had gotten Jim Schecter’s stifled report out of him. She had made a phone call to someone who “would know.” Then she, too, had been killed. Was the timing of her death coincidental, or a decisive blow meant to keep her quiet?

  There was one obvious commonality that might connect almost all those dots: Hayes Associates. They had built the stadium. They—or their consultants—had prepared the reports Tom had had me read. And Sidney Smeeth had, according to Wendy, set her cap toward kicking developers in the teeth.

  From there, things got stickier.

  Enos Harkness worked for Hayes. Enos was a structural engineer, the kind of guy who specifies what type of steel goes into a building, and what type of trusses. Ray had been housed, fed, and educated on money that flowed from Hayes Associates. And Enos Harkness was his brother-in-law. Enos was the dreaded Katie’s husband. And Enos had not been home much lately.

  Could Enos have been sent by Hayes Associates to muzzle Sidney Smeeth? No, that didn’t make sense, or not enough sense to spell murder. But it did make sense that Pet Mercer’s telephone call would have gone to Enos, and in no time at all, she, too, was dead.

  What could Enos have to hide? Had he gotten himself stuck in a web of corrupt building practices? Had Sidney Smeeth threatened to expose him? Could it be that simple, that personal?

  No. Tom Latimer was investigating a scheme that went much deeper, and it involved bribes on a scale that Enos Harkness could not possibly have conjured. Besides, he was only an engineer, an employee. The big money would change hands much higher.

  But he was an employee of a company owned in part by Ava Raymond, his mother-in-law. Ava, who turned tail and ran away when she heard that I was interested in earthquakes. The rest of Faye’s words to Ava floated back to the surface of the lake. She had mentioned Sidney Smeeth!

  It was dizzying; every time I connected two dots, Enos was somewhere along the line.

  Enos, Katie’s husband.

  Katie, whom I
wanted to see boiled in oil.

  I told myself, Your judgment is clouded, Em. You’re seeing things. And while you’re at it, you were trying to get disentangled from this family, remember? So think about something else!

  So then, what should I do?

  Tell the police and let them do their job.

  But Ray is the police.

  Then tell Tom. Let him deal with it.

  But if Ray’s brother-in-law is behind the killings, it will be a terrible embarrassment to Ray.

  Yes, it will. Why do you care?

  Because I do, damn it!

  Nonsense. You’re just trying to be a hero. You think that if you save Ray by tipping him off, he’ll realize that you’re right and he was wrong. You think he’ll take you back—no, more foolish yet, you think he’ll abandon his family, his religion, his way of life, and magically turn into something or someone who could live with you. Good one, darling; what does that look like?

  I can’t argue any of that.

  But still I asked myself, Should I go to Ray about it?

  At length, I decided, Yes, but leave yourself a back door, Em.

  WHEN THE SUN had risen and the rest of humanity was up and about, I got to work.

  First, I phoned Tom Latimer and made an appointment to see him later that morning.

  Second, I phoned Ray. I had decided, as a matter of courtesy, that I would inform him of my concern that his brother-in-law was involved somehow in the murders. That way, he could do what he would—probably just laugh in my face, but at least then I would feel that I had done the noble thing, and even false pride was some kind of pride.

  I hoped that I would get his answering machine. On his machine, I could be detached, efficient, smart. When he listened to the message, he would wonder how he could have been so stupid, and, as it was too late for reconciliation, I could bask in the knowledge that he was a fool who was painfully aware of his foolishness.