Black-Eyed Susans (33 page)

MR. VEGA
: Just do your best.
Maybe you could start by telling us about the time you stood outside in the middle of a
bad storm and your father couldn’t get you to come in.

MS. CARTWRIGHT
: I was
thinking that if I stood out there long enough the rain would wash out all the
Black-Eyed Susan glitter.

MR. VEGA
: Can you see this
glitter?

MS. CARTWRIGHT
: No.

MR. VEGA
: And when did you
first notice it?

MS. CARTWRIGHT
: The day I
got home from the hospital. Again, I can’t see it. For a while, I decided it was
in my conditioner. In the
Ivory soap. In the detergent we put in the
washer. I decided that’s why I could never get it out.

MR. VEGA
: Do you have
glitter on you now?

MS. CARTWRIGHT
: Just a
little. The worst time, it was in the Parmesan cheese I put on my spaghetti. I threw up
all night.

There are no Susan bones on Jo’s
conference table. Just that lonely brown Kleenex box. My heart feels like someone
hammered a nail into it.

I was worried I would be late for Jo’s
meeting, but it’s apparent as I open the door to the conference room that everyone
else is even later. The room is empty except for the table and chairs, unless you count
the requiem of pain that Hannah’s mother and brother left behind. If there were a
black light to reveal grief and anger, it would surely be streaked in graffiti,
Dalí-like, on these walls. Not only sucked from Hannah’s family, but all of
the others who sat here waiting for their loved ones to be reduced to the stubborn rules
of science.

The door clicks shut behind me. The
fluorescent glare feels like it’s restricting the flow of blood to my head. I
slide into the chair where Hannah’s brother sat at attention in his dress blues
not so long ago and, for a few minutes, try not to think.

The door opens, and all of them spill into
the conference room at once. Bill; Lieutenant Myron; Jo; and her Russian friend, Dr.
Igor Aristov, the genius from Galveston.

“Igor, as in Igor Stravinsky,”
Jo had told me last night on the
phone, knowing that I was, of course,
imagining the hunchbacked Frankenstein one and not the one who composed
The Rite of
Spring.

This Igor, though, is not hunched, or
wearing a black hood, or creeping me out with white golf ball eyes. He is tall and fit,
wearing khakis and a red Polo. His eyes are warm and hazel. Fine wrinkles run out of the
corner of his eyes and stop short. There are the tiniest shreds of gray at his
temples.

He immediately crosses the room to take my
hand first. “You must be Tessa. It is a pleasure.” His accent is thick as
paste, and most women would want him to say their names over and to never let go of
their hands. Not me. I’m only in this room as a conciliatory gesture to Jo. I
don’t want to hear Igor’s maybes and ifs. Unless this lab genius is about to
pull a miracle out of his ass, I need to listen to Bill. I need to come to terms with
Terrell’s fate.

Lieutenant Myron is the first to slide into
a chair. I wonder if I look as raw as she does. “Everybody, sit,” Jo says.
“We’re going to make this as quick as possible. Ellen had a rough
night.”

“A cop and his bride of six
months,” Lieutenant Myron explains. “He fired a shot into her face for every
month of marriage. Go ahead, Jo.”

Jo nods. Her hands are agitated with no
place to go. I’ve never seen her this visibly on edge. “Usually,” she
says, “I will send Igor samples of powder from the bones and he emails his
findings to me. But that’s white paper between two scientists. I want the three of
you to hear everything straight from his mouth just in case some detail tickles your
brain.” She is careful not to look at me. It is obvious I am the one whose brain
needs the most tickling.

Igor has settled himself at the head of the
table. “I am a geochemist. A forensic geologist. Do any of you understand the
basics of isotope analysis?

“I will keep it as simple as
possible,” Igor continues, without waiting for an answer. “I will refer to
each case as Susan One and Susan Two. I received samples from the femur of Susan One and
from the skull and teeth of Susan Two. I also received a scraping
from
a fetus that belongs to Susan Two. I was able to determine that one of the women lived
much of her life in Tennessee, and the other was most certainly from Mexico.”

“What?” Bill’s surprise
pops the tension in the room. “How can you possibly know that?”

Igor shifts a level gaze to Bill.
“Your bones absorb the distinct chemical markers in the soil where you live. Some
of it has retained the same ratio of elements—oxygen, lead, zinc, et
cetera—for hundreds of thousands of years, all the way back to when rivers and
mountains formed. And then there are more modern markers. It’s easy to tell that
Susan One is American, not European, because America and Europe used different refinery
sources for leaded gas.”

“We’re soaking crap from the air
into our bones?” Lieutenant Myron is pressing forward, suddenly engaged.
“Regardless, we don’t use leaded gas for cars anymore.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he
replies patiently. “The residue from leaded gas, even though it’s been
banned for years, still clings to our soil and soaks into our bones. Susan One’s
markers also indicate that for a significant portion of her life she lived near a
specific set of mines, probably near Knoxville, Tennessee. I can’t tell you how
long exactly. Or specifically where she died. I might have been able to if I had a rib
bone. Ribs are constantly growing and remodeling and absorbing the environment. We can
usually use them to guess at a victim’s residency for the last eight to ten years
of life. And, of course, a lot of the bones were lost, so the grave only provided random
puzzle pieces.”

“Mexico. Tennessee.”
Bill’s eyes are trained on Lieutenant Myron. “Your killer could be a
traveler. Terrell was a homebody.”

“He’s not
my
killer.” Lieutenant Myron’s sarcasm gets zero reaction from Bill, who
continues tapping notes into his phone.

“Come on, guys, let him talk,”
Jo says.

“It doesn’t bother me,”
Igor says. “It’s thrilling to be out of the lab, frankly. To meet you,
especially, Tessa. I rarely meet any victims. It makes my science … alive. And
this case is particularly
interesting. I was able to discern even more
from Susan Two and her unborn fetus. Susan Two’s bones reflect a corn-based diet
and the elements of volcanic soil. If I could hazard a guess, I’d say she was born
in or near Mexico City. I concur with Jo that she was in her early twenties when she
died.”

“What else?” Bill asks.

Igor lays his palms flat on the table.
“There was only one skull in that grave, which belonged to Susan Two. I asked Jo
to send me scrapings of very specific teeth because the teeth can give us a
timeline.” His voice, so far in college lecture mode, has picked up a little
excitement. “It’s fascinating, really, what this science reveals. As
children, we put things in our mouths. The teeth enamel absorbs the dust. The first
molar forms when a person is three, and freezes the isotope signal for that period of
time. So I can say that Susan Two’s first molar tells us she was living in Mexico
as a toddler. The incisors close at age six to seven. The chemical markers in one of her
incisors indicate she was still living in Mexico. The third molar’s signal shuts
down in the teen-age years. For Susan Two, still Mexico. After that, I don’t know.
Sometime in her late teens or early twenties, she moved, or was kidnapped.”

“This is remarkable.” Lieutenant
Myron glances around the table. “Isn’t this remarkable?” I can’t
tell whether she is genuinely engaged or giddy from lack of sleep and a steady diet of
savagery.

“How are you certain she left Mexico
alive?” Bill asks. “We know the bones were moved at least once because they
didn’t originate in that field of flowers where Tessa was dumped.” He flicks
a look up at me, as if remembering I’m in the room. “Sorry, Tessa. My point
is, maybe her bones were simply moved across the border.”

“Her baby tells that part of the
story,” Igor says quickly. “This young woman lived in Texas for at least the
last few months leading up to her death. I know this because fetal bones are the most
current marker we can get. They were still developing and therefore still absorbing the
current environment at the time of death.”

Lieutenant Myron shoves fingers through her
uprooted hair. “If
she was an illegal immigrant, or kidnapped,
that makes our job nearly impossible. Her family wouldn’t want to reveal its
illegal status and certainly wouldn’t stick their DNA in a database. If they
thought a drug cartel grabbed their daughter, there’s even less of a
chance—they wouldn’t want to piss them off. Those guys hang headless bodies
from bridges. The family would need to protect their other daughters if they have
them.”

Jo nods her head in agreement.
“She’s right. I’ve worked on some of the bones of girls and women who
have been murdered and buried in the desert near Juarez. Talked to the families.
They’re scared shitless. There are hundreds of girls in that desert. More every
year.”

“I can only share my science.”
Igor shrugs. “And, frankly, I drummed up a lot more than is usual in cold cases
like this. This is a fairly new strategy in forensic science. We are lucky these women
lived in places where we have established soil databases. My dream is that we can map
out a good portion of the geological world in the next decade, but it’s spotty as
hell at the moment.”

Bill’s face is inscrutable, but I know
what he’s thinking. It’s too late for this. Someday, science may give the
Susans back their names, but not in time for Terrell.

It’s Lieutenant Myron who jumps up,
newly animated. She walks over and gives Bill a playful punch in the shoulder.
“Cheer up. You’re one of those Texans who believes in evolution,
aren’t you?” She turns to the rest of us.

“We’ll get busy with missing
person and newspaper databases,” she says. “In an hour, we’ll be
looking for missing girls in their late teens or early twenties from Tennessee and
Mexico that fit our time frames. I’m most hopeful on the Tennessee angle. Good
job, Dr. Frankenstein. This is something real. Y’all think I don’t care? I
care. I just like real.”

She wouldn’t want to be in my head.
I’m wondering why none of the Susans speak to me in Spanish.

I enter the house quietly
and see my Death Row clothes folded and stacked neatly in a kitchen chair. I wonder if
Charlie or Lucas alienated them from the others; it’s a toss-up as to which one
sees through me better.

Charlie’s volleyball clothes are piled
on the coffee table. A vacuum cleaner has swallowed up the popcorn crumbs in front of
the couch. Lucas has been taking care of the mundane, important details of my life while
I’ve been trying to fathom how we are so deeply connected to the earth and wind
that it is cooked into our bones.

I have no problem believing Dr. Igor. It
wasn’t exactly science, but there was a period when I believed that if someone
brushed my shoulder by accident or shook my hand that black-eyed Susan pollen would rub
off like a sticky curse. People had thought I was obsessive-compulsive because I ignored
outstretched hands. I was just protecting them.

I’m a big girl now. I offer strangers
the firm grip of my grandfather and swallow my daughter in a hug twice a day and let
friends take a sip from my Route 44 Sonic iced tea, all without breaking out in a sweat.
That doesn’t mean
Black-Eyed Susan
isn’t still who I am. It’s
a brand. Like
schizophrenic. Fat. ADD.

Lucas rises briefly from the couch, then
falls back down when he sees me. He’s already asleep again, a soldier grabbing
zzz’s while he can, so I don’t call out for Charlie. She’s probably in
her room doing her complicated dance. Jane Austen, calculus, Snapchat. Repeat.

It’s at moments like these that I find
it hard to explain to myself and to Charlie why Lucas and I don’t work as a
permanent team. How many lieutenant colonels would fold girls’ underwear? I smell
potato soup gurgling in the Crockpot because that is about the sum total of
Lucas’s dinner repertoire. Potatoes, onions, milk, salt, pepper, butter. Bacon
bits, for Charlie. If pressed, he can also kick out a pretty mean bologna and mustard
sandwich.

Normal always tries to cuddle up with me but
I tend to push it away. My mother was making brownies one second and then she was
dead on the kitchen floor. That is my baseline for normal. After
that, it’s a very jagged graph.

I set my purse on the kitchen counter.
Beautiful Ghost
has been shoved off to the side with some unopened mail. I
want to read it, and I can’t bear to touch it. It will hold answers about Lydia I
can’t fathom knowing, or I’ll prick my finger on its paper and fall into a
cursed sleep. My fingers absently examine the foil-wrapped brick on the counter, which
wasn’t there this morning. The scrawl on the masking tape label declares it to be
Effie’s Carob Fig Bread Surprise.
Almost all of Effie’s recipes
have the word
Surprise
tacked to the end, and if they don’t, they
should.

I wonder if her daughter is next door right
now trying to politely chew and swallow. As I pulled in the driveway, I noted the Ford
Focus with New Jersey plates parked at Effie’s. She had told me last week in
excited tones that her daughter was venturing down South for a visit. I discounted it,
thinking she was confused with the time that Sue made that false promise a year ago, or
even three years ago. I don’t know what her arrival means after years of staying
away, but I hope it’s good for Effie. Maybe Sue got a peek of the digger snatcher
who lives in Effie’s brain, too. He’s a first-class thief all right, just
not the kind Effie thinks. The sight of all those diggers lined up in a row still sends
a chill through me.