Altar of Bones (19 page)

“Mike? Who was Mike?”

“Mike O’Malley. My stepfather, or I guess it would be more accurate to call him Mother’s husband, since he was hardly much of a father to me. But then they were only married for a couple of months before we took off.”

“Husband?”
Zoe stared at her mother. “This is the first time you’ve ever mentioned you had a stepfather.”

“Like I said, it was only for a couple of months, and even then he wasn’t around the house all that much. He was a location scout for the studio and on the road a lot of the time, and before your mind can leap to any movie-of-the-week scenarios—no, he didn’t beat her, and he never touched me inappropriately, as they say. He barely seemed aware of my existence.”

“Beatings and child abuse aren’t the only reasons women leave their husbands.”

Anna Larina shook her head. “If you say so. Only I was there, and on our way out of town that night she pulled over at a stoplight so she could
bawl her eyes out and moon over his picture—the whole sad, broken-heart drill. So, no, I don’t believe she left him willingly.”

“Just because she loved him doesn’t mean she didn’t have a good reason to be afraid of him.”

“Again I bow to your vast experience, Zoe. All I know is she threw me and a few things in the car and we didn’t stop driving—I mean, we literally did not stop except for taking naps alongside the road until we hit the Scioto River. And now we’re back to where we started this little trip down memory lane, with her dumping me in that orphanage full of kisses and promises that she’d be back in a few weeks and me believing her.”

“But she didn’t come back. So what happened? No, not that tale you told me about her dying in an automobile accident. The truth.”

“I don’t know what happened to her. There’s no reason for me to lie about it now. I don’t know. The weeks went by, then months, then years, and during all that time I still believed she was coming back for me. No phone calls, no letters, not even a card on my birthdays and I still believed, and then one day I just stopped believing. Did I think she was dead? I really don’t know. Maybe I hoped so. I just knew I was dead to her.”

Zoe didn’t know how much of that to believe, except for those last five words.
I knew I was dead to her
. They sounded as if they had truly come right from the depths of Anna Larina Dmitroff’s soul.

“Did she ever tell you anything about her past before she was born? About her family? Where she came from?”

Anna Larina uncrossed her arms, turning away from the window. “She never said so outright, but from what little I know, she was probably illegitimate. Like I am. She used to tell me she was her mother’s only child, like I was her only child, and that her mother always crooned to her about how she was born a blessed girl child, from a proud long line, and she couldn’t be the last. Like it was supposed to be a special thing, to mean something, although what I haven’t a clue.”

But she did have a clue, Zoe thought, for again she’d caught that sheen of secret knowledge in her mother’s eyes.

“It sounds sweet,” Zoe said. It certainly didn’t sound like anything
else Anna Larina had ever said to her, and Zoe felt a deep ache from the loss of this grandmother she’d never known. “What else? Was she born here or in Russia?”

Anna Larina gave Zoe an impatient look, then she shrugged. “She was born in Shanghai, of all places. On the very day the Japanese invaded. She used to tell this crazy story that her mother, whose name was Lena, Lena Orlova, had escaped from a prison camp called Norilsk in Siberia and walked all the way to China, if you can believe that.”

Anna Larina paused, shrugged again. “At some point after the war, though, Lena hooked up with a gem dealer from Hong Kong, and he brought her and my mother to live with him there. A few years later Lena went to buy some fish off a sampan, slipped on the gangplank, hit her head, and drowned in the harbor. I think my mother was fifteen, maybe sixteen at the time. Old enough, anyway, to make it on her own.”

Zoe had never heard any of this before. It sounded exotic, adventurous. Until you really thought about what life would have been like in a Siberian prison camp and a city ravaged by war.

“Did she ever tell you how she got from Hong Kong to L.A.?”

“No, she never did. Although she had plenty of stories, full of the most amazing details, about her own mother, Lena. And that miraculous escape out of Siberia.”

Her mother’s words dripped with their usual sarcasm, but Zoe got the feeling that some small corner of Anna Larina’s shriveled heart was as fascinated with this family history as she was.

“Like what sort of details?”

“Oh, how Lena walked only at night, so that her fur-wrapped silhouette wouldn’t stand out against the snow-shrouded tundra, and how she built snow huts for shelter and made fires with moss scraped from rocks and tree trunks. And how she fed herself by milking reindeer and fishing from holes cut in the ice.

“Finally, after months of walking she ended up on a grassy hill overlooking the river that separated Russia from Mongolia, eating wild potatoes she’d dug up from a field and staring at the red poles that marked the border. The poles, topped by round metal signs painted with a hammer and sickle, were spaced every quarter mile or so, and she watched
for two days and two nights, but she never saw any patrols. So in the end she simply walked from one side of the poles to the other, just one more step in a life of thousands that she’d taken since escaping from Norilsk.”

It seemed impossible to Zoe to even imagine the courage and the strength of will that must have taken, and she felt small in comparison to this great-grandmother that she’d never heard about until now.

“So then what happened?”

“She kept on walking. Until one day she came across a shriveled old man with a rotting sampan, who took her downriver with him as far as he could, then turned her over to a great-nephew who gave her a ride on his vegetable cart. The great-nephew had a friend who worked as a brakeman on the railroad, and the brakeman had a brother, and so on, and she was passed from one person to another down the length of China. Until she found herself floating into Shanghai on a garbage scow and going into labor with my mother.”

“Katya.”

“Yes.” Anna Larina stubbed her cigarette out in a crystal ashtray on the desk. “And God alone knows who the father was…. Is this really all that important, Zoe? Who cares? Lena’s long dead, and now her daughter is, too, and from the looks of her, she was homeless, pathetic. Old. Someone probably knifed her for the pint of cheap whiskey she had in her pocket.”

“God, what is wrong with you? She was your
mother
. All those years missing, cut out, a mystery—and now, suddenly, she’s here and someone kills her, and you act like you couldn’t care less. It’s obvious she’s been running from something all this time.”

“Is it?”

“You know it is. So what scared her so badly that summer and then kept her scared for so long? Who would want her dead, and why?”

“I don’t
know
,” Anna Larina shouted, slamming her fist down on the desk so hard the lamp rocked. But it wasn’t anger. Zoe had seen her mother angry before and this wasn’t it.

Zoe picked up the crime-scene photograph and tucked it back into her satchel. “I’m going to the morgue to see her. Do you want to come?”

Her mother didn’t bother to answer, just gave her a look.

“Then I take it you won’t mind if I make the funeral arrangements.”

Her mother laughed at that. “Really, Zoe. You can’t shame the shameless—you should know that by now.” Anna Larina waved a hand. “Do whatever you like with her. Although if it matters, she was Russian Orthodox. You may send me an announcement after you decide.”

The room fell into a heavy silence. Zoe stood in the middle of the ivory silk rug. She felt suddenly lost, drained. She could think of nothing more to say to this woman.

But then, on her way to the door, she did think of something else. “Have you ever heard of the altar of bones?”

Anna Larina was back in her designer chair behind the black marble desk, closing up her laptop. She looked up and said just a shade too casually, “No. Why?”

“Never mind. It’s not important.”

Zoe started to turn away again, but her mother’s voice stopped her. “It was your father’s choice to put that gun to his head, Zoe. His choice to pull the trigger. He
left
you, deliberately took himself out of your life forever, but you couldn’t accept that. You had to blame someone, and so you blamed me.”

Zoe fought back the pain. Even after all these years, it was still an unutterable pain. “Daddy loved me.”

“Oh, I have no doubt he believed he loved you. He simply loved himself more. He was a vain man, and he was weak. He turned the family business over to me, and then he hated me for doing the very things he wanted done but didn’t have the guts to do himself.”

“He loved me,” Zoe said, shaking inside. “And that’s always been your problem, hasn’t it, Mother? You’re jealous. Jealous of your own daugh—”

A sudden, sharp knock on the door cut her off. Her mother stared at her a moment longer, the color for once high on her pale cheeks. Then she dismissed her with a turn of her back. “Come in.”

The door opened and a big man walked through it. Black, black hair, violent blue eyes, cruel mouth. He didn’t look much older than Zoe, only in his midthirties. But the brutality in him was two lifetimes older.

He looked from her to her mother, than said in Russian, “Two cops are at the front door.”

“Thank you, Sergei.”

Zoe looked him up and down. A gun in a shoulder holster worn over a black T-shirt that clung to every well-buffed muscle. Black jeans and steel-toed boots. A colorful tattoo of a dagger dripping blood ran the full length of the inside of his thick forearm. It was Russian prison scratch, the tat your fellow cons gave you inside on the day you became a made man.

Zoe said, “Are you running so low on homegrown
vors
, Mother, that you now have to import them from the old country?”

The violent blue eyes flickered, swung back to her, dismissed her.

“Good-bye, Zoe,” Anna Larina said.

On her way out, Zoe found Mackey and Wendy Lee standing in the middle of the enormous white, marble-tiled foyer. Wendy was admiring a sculpture of twisted bronze that shot up all the way to the top of the cathedral ceiling. Mackey was fuming.

“I saw your frigging car in the driveway,” he said. “I’m calling Traffic. They should’ve jumped on your ass.”

A
NNA
L
ARINA
Dmitroff stared down at the blank screen of her laptop, but what she saw were other images playing out in her mind. Her mother kissing her good-bye on the steps of that orphanage, and her sad, pathetic, little-girl self, clinging to her cardboard box of useless treasures, watching her mother go down those steps, turn the corner, and walk out of her life forever.

Until now.

So imagine my surprise, Mama, when you turn up here alive after all these years. Alive until last night, that is, when someone finally killed you. Now who could that have been, dear Mama?

Never mind. The who didn’t matter, and the why Anna Larina already knew. They’d killed her for the altar of bones, of course.

And that serves you right, dear Mama, because I know why you came, and it wasn’t for me. I don’t exist for you, I haven’t existed for forty-nine years. So of course you wouldn’t come for me. You came for Zoe
.

Anna Larina snatched the framed photograph from her desk and almost flung it against the wall, stopping herself just in time. She had to control the soul-eating rage that filled her, but it was so hard sometimes. Higher and higher it would rise until she thought it would choke her and she would die, strangling on her own fury. It was stronger some days than others, but it was always there, in her very bones, she sometimes thought. In the marrow of her bones.

The altar of bones.

You promised it to me, Mama. It’s mine. Not Zoe’s. Mine
.

Okay, okay. She could handle this. She could handle Zoe. She’d fed the girl such a clever stew of truth and lies, so clever she’d almost lost
track herself at times of what was fact and what was fiction. But Zoe …

Zoe, Zoe, Zoe. Have I been underestimating you? You’re such a righteous little crusader, charging out into the world to do your good deeds to make up for all my wicked sins—it’s saccharine enough to make my teeth ache. But maybe you have some of me in you, after all, huh, Zoe? A little of the hard and selfish and merciless bitch?

How much do you know, child of mine? Not everything obviously, but more than you were letting on
.

She needed to think, to plan what do. Starting with Zoe—

“Pakhan?”

Anna Larina looked up, startled. Sergei Vilensky, one of her enforcers, still stood at the door, apparently waiting for her to say or do something. Oh, yes, the cops. They were downstairs, and no doubt fairly brimming with questions about dear Mama.

“Those
menty
,” Sergei said, using the vulgar Russian slang word for the police. “Do you want me to get rid of them for you?”