Cold Black Earth (9 page)

9    

Greenview Terrace did offer a view of green slats in a chain-link fence along the back of the parking lot; in addition Rachel estimated that the concrete walkway along the front of the building might just qualify as a terrace. Beyond its compliance with the truth-in-advertising statutes, however, Rachel did not find much to recommend the institution in which her seventy-eight-year-old aunt had come to rest.

The odor that pervaded the place was a delicate blend of overcooked food, poor hygiene, chronic disease and inevitable decay, with a subtle undertone of pine-based cleaner. The hallways were starkly illuminated by fluorescent tubes and populated by shambling disheveled ancients supporting themselves on walkers, harried by attendants dressed like hospital personnel but with the dead-eyed stares of prison warders. The place made Rachel want to cry.

“I do miss a good home-cooked meal,” her Aunt Helga said, looking out the window at the fence. “The food here isn’t fit to give to the hogs.” Helga’s hair was cobweb-white and imperfectly subjugated with bobby pins placed at random; arthritis, osteoporosis and myriad unguessable afflictions had reduced her to a frail collection of limbs in a chair. But the eyes were still bright and the voice, while cracked, still had breath behind it. Her room was crowded with pictures and knickknacks but still looked like a hospital room.

“I’m sorry,” said Rachel. “I can bring you something if you want.”

Helga smiled. “It’s not your fault, honey. You didn’t put me in here.”

“I just meant . . .” Rachel foundered. In truth she was appalled that her cousins had deposited their mother here, but then it was easy for her to pass judgment; she and Matt had been spared the tough calls by the simplifying expedient of death.

“You’ve been away, haven’t you?” said Helga.

Rachel nodded. “I worked for the State Department. I lived overseas for a long time.”

Helga raised a crooked index finger. “You told me. I remember now. My memory’s going, you’ll have to be patient. You were married, I seem to recall.”

“I’m divorced now. He was Lebanese.”

“And a very handsome fellow. Your mother showed me the pictures.”

Rachel smiled. “That’s why I fell for him, I suppose.”

“You’re not the first gal who ever did that.” Helga shook her head once, a slow uncertain gesture. “Your Uncle Clay was a handsome fellow, oh about sixty years ago.”

“Steve looks just like him.”

“Yes, he got his father’s looks. And his father’s land. Where he got the expensive tastes, I don’t know.”

“Steve seems to have done pretty well for himself.”

“Oh, he’s made himself a lot of money. I think he needed to, to keep that wife of his in the style she was accustomed to.”

“I don’t really know her.”

A couple of seconds went by. “Must have been the government that taught you to be diplomatic like that.”

Rachel laughed. “It’s the truth. I never had a chance to get to know Becky. I missed out on a lot, being gone.”

“We were all so proud of you. Your mother would pass your letters around. When something would come on TV about the Middle East we’d all wonder if you were in the middle of it. You should have seen the way your father talked about you. I swear, his chest would swell up. ‘My daughter’s in the State Department, and she says the PLO’s finished.’ And people would be so impressed.”

“I wasn’t a big deal at all. If I had any opinion about the PLO, it wasn’t particularly authoritative.”

Rachel sat and watched her aunt’s gaze wander. Eventually her eyes came back to Rachel’s and she said, “And now you’ve come home. For good?”

“I don’t know, Aunt Helga. For the holidays, anyway. And then we’ll see.”

“Did Matt tell you to come home?”

Irked, Rachel opened her mouth to tell her aunt things didn’t work that way anymore, not in her family. She hesitated and said, “No. It was my decision. It was time.”

“Well, it’s a good thing you’re here. That house could use a woman.”

“They just need a good nutritionist.”

“Such a shame, Matt’s wife. To do that, right there in her home. At least he found her, and not the boy.”

“I don’t know if it was any easier for Matt.”

“Better him than the boy. Poor Esther Johnson was never the same after she found her father hanging in the barn. That was before your time, I guess.”

“Esther’s father killed himself? How awful. I never knew that.”

“People do. And they never consider that somebody’s got to find them and deal with the consequences.”

“I think if you’re severely depressed you may have trouble thinking through the consequences.”

“Depressed? My heavens, girl. All it is is what they used to call feeling
sorry for yourself. They’ve given it a fancy name, and now if you feel sorry
for yourself long enough you get to go to the doctor and get pills. You think I’ve never felt bad? I used to stand at the sink washing dishes and looking out the window at the fields and thinking all I would ever have to look forward to in my life was more dishes to do and nothing but beans and corn to look at for the whole rest of my life. But you keep getting up in the morning and sooner or later it passes. That girl just didn’t have the faith to wait for it to pass.”

And I don’t either, thought Rachel. “Not everybody’s as strong as you are.”

“That boy’s gone off the rails, too. My Lord, that hair. And running around with a bad crowd. All that started after his mother killed herself.”

In the silence that followed Rachel stared out the window and wondered about train schedules. With any luck she could be on a jet at O’Hare within twenty-four hours, taking off for some place that had not yet been soured by death and failure.

“It’s good you’ve come home,” said Helga. “The family needs you.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Oh, yes they do. And you need them, too. You’re still grieving.”

“It shows, does it?”

“Honey, you look so sad it makes
me
want to cry. You’re grieving for your husband, aren’t you?”

Rachel could not speak. She nodded, looking out the window, determined not to break down.

“And you’re doing the grieving for your parents you didn’t get to do because you were far away. You’re going to have a hard time for a while, but then it’ll get better. And you’ll be glad you came home.”

“Maybe,” said Rachel after a few seconds had passed. “It’s early yet.”

It looked as if there were snow coming. In the west the sky looked like sheet steel. Rachel was suddenly anxious for a comforting fall of snow, something to brighten the dark earth, soften the hard edges, muffle the sharp sounds. She wanted a white Christmas, lighted windows glowing across the fields, her mother and father silhouetted in the doorway as she pulled up in the yard.

That’s all gone, Rachel thought. You could have had that, but you left. She turned down the gravel road that led to Ed Thomas’s farm.

After what she’d heard from Debby Mays the day before, this errand had a distinct whiff of being invited up to look at etchings. But Rachel remembered Ruth Thomas too fondly to let her husband pitch her life’s work, however amateurish, into the trash. Kindly and patient, Ruth had taught her how to see line and color, how to wield pencil and brush. There had always been cookies at the end of the lesson and affection from a woman who had, inexplicably, no children of her own.

And Rachel could remember Ed Thomas with both his hands and her father’s approval, and had always tried to make allowances for his misfortune.

She turned into the Thomases’ drive, noting the peeling paint on the barn, a rusting harrow nestled in a patch of weeds, the general dilapidated look of the place. Since his accident nearly forty years before, Ed had been a semirecluse, renting out his land and watching the farmstead slowly deteriorate. The house needed paint as well, and had plastic tacked over the windows; the lightning rod on the roof had fallen and dangled over the eaves, unrepaired. Rachel pulled up under a bare maple and cut the ignition, steeling herself.

There was no vehicle in sight, and she was faintly relieved to think that Ed might not be home. She got out of the car and stood for a moment, listening. There were the usual sounds of vast openness, wind whistling faintly around edges of buildings, but there was something else as well, a scrabbling sound difficult to locate. A brief quiver of distaste shook her.

She quelled it and tried to locate the source. It seemed to be coming from beyond the barn, and she walked toward it. “Ed?”

Her call silenced the noise. She took a few steps and it began again, something rustling, scraping, dragging on the ground. She called out again as she drew near the corner of the barn, not quite as loudly.

She stopped in her tracks as the coyote came out from behind the barn. For an instant she was simply bewildered, thinking wildly that she must be prey to some strange form of déjà vu.

Clutched in its jaws the coyote held a human arm, bone and red meat showing obscenely where it had been severed from the shoulder. It might have taken Rachel a moment to recognize it had it not been for the shreds of cotton twill still wrapped around it and the hooked prosthesis still in place where the hand had once been.

“I heard it. I heard it happening.” Rachel had finally stopped trembling, but she felt cold, chilled to the core. Roger had left the cruiser idling and turned on the heater, but it wasn’t helping. Outside the car, lights flashed in the dark like a carnival midway along the road to Ed Thomas’s farm. Two more sheriffs’ cars, an Illinois State Police cruiser, a useless ambulance and half a dozen unmarked cars were clustered at the entrance to the driveway.

Matt sat beside her on the backseat, his arm around her. Rachel wanted to be strong; she had kept a cool head in a crisis many times and she wasn’t going to go all girly and hysterical in front of the men. But it was good to have her big brother’s arm around her. As a local first responder Matt had been one of the first to show up. He had found Rachel at the intersection of the county hard road and the Thomases’ road. That was as far as she’d gotten before she began to think clearly enough to stop and fumble for her cell phone. Matt had gone to look at the scene and come back white-faced to pull her into an embrace. Fifteen minutes after that, Roger had come tearing up from the south, his lights visible two miles away and closing fast, skidding to a halt a few feet from them.

Now Roger twisted to look at her over the seat. “When?”

“Last night. I heard it. I went outside for some fresh air and I heard the saw going, off in the distance. I didn’t think anything of it. I just thought somebody was cutting firewood or something. I should have done something.”

“Like what?” said Matt. “Could you tell where it was coming from?”

“No. I don’t know. I don’t know what I should have done.”

The feeble dome light gave Roger’s long-jawed homeliness a touch of the sinister. “About what time was that?”

“Near midnight, I think.”

“Make sure you tell the detectives.”

“I know I saw it, too, but I can’t remember it,” she said. “It’s like I erased the image.”