Gibbon's Decline and Fall (50 page)

In the suite Bettiann had arranged for, they took the brown manila envelope containing what Bettiann called her “spirit writing” and dumped it onto the table.

“All Sophy's stories were about women,” said Aggie.

“These aren't anything like that,” said Bettiann.

“There's a lot of paper here,” Faye commented. “How long you been doing this, girl?”

“Too long. A couple of years, I guess.”

They leafed, stopping to read bits, sometimes silently, sometimes to one another. Suddenly Agnes said in a voice that was almost amused, “Listen to this!

“I remember that one.” Bettiann shook her head. “I was on the phone with this man who wanted a donation to his church, and he wouldn't stop talking, and I doodled and doodled, and when he finally hung up, that's what was on the paper. Later on I saw a nature program on PBS and they showed a lizard doing that, lifting its feet so they wouldn't burn on the hot rocks.”

Aggie said firmly, “You didn't write this, Bettiann.”

“I wasn't conscious of having written it, no. Sophy wrote it.”

“It doesn't sound terribly Sophy-like, either. She didn't do jingly stuff like that.”

“She did, too. She wrote songs for us all the time. You just wouldn't sing them.”

Faye moved between them. “Come on, Aggie! Don't get in an uproar over Bettiann's subconscious. We're looking for clues, so let's look for clues.”

“I deny lizards in my subconscious,” Bettiann said firmly. “And I can't rhyme cat and mouse.”

“I'm still wondering why the FBI would be interested in an almost forty-year-old dossier,” snapped Faye.

“We don't know that it's all that old,” Bettiann replied.
“All we know is that's when Carolyn's cousin started it. Maybe he's been adding to it right along.”

“We don't even know he's still alive. And adding what?” Agnes cried, turning to them. “For heaven's sake, what could he have added? We're all boringly blameless!”

Bettiann replied, “Rumors. Myths. Conjecture. Remember when we met with Carolyn last time and Hal was talking to us about the old FBI paying informers for information? How the informer makes his living that way, so if he doesn't have anything real, he makes something up.”

“Right. Maybe he's got the Sisters of St. Clare down as a terrorist organization.” Faye stretched, snarling. “So far we've got nothing except the name of a place. Sophy's letter of application to the foundation is three paragraphs. The three people who wrote in support could be anybody. Her high-school transcript is unremarkable; most of us had better ones. She sent a couple of essays along with the application; they're no more subversive than her books were.”

“Still, we'll want to talk with the people who wrote letters in support.”

“Tess somebody. Flo somebody. All in Piedras Lagartonas, New Mexico. No point going back with this little bit. Let's finish what we have to do here in the area. Let's find some of the women Sophy used to take in.”

“From Mystic?” asked Agnes.

“I don't even remember any names from there,” said Bettiann.

“From Vermont, then,” said Faye.

“Jessamine will know.” Bettiann yawned widely. “She used to send outgrown clothes for the children. Lord, it's almost midnight. Let's call.”

Carolyn, Jessamine, and Ophy were assembled in Carolyn's bedroom, waiting for Faye's call, which came at about ten o'clock. Faye sounded appropriately weary as she recited the facts they had elicited thus far: Piedras Lagartonas, the names on the support documents, Agent Crespin of the FBI, and Sophy's writings. They were going to Vermont first thing in the morning. Did the western contingent remember the names of any of Sophy's abused women?

Jessamine ran to get her address book, returning momentarily to prop the phone on one shoulder and leaf through the entries. “Names, yes, but no addresses. I used to send packages
of clothes my girls had outgrown, but I always sent them in care of Sophy. Here are the women I used to send things to: Laura Glascock, Betty Hotchkiss, Sarah Sourwood. You remember Sarah. She made that marvelous chowder.”

Ophy sat up, staring at Jessamine. Sarah. Sarah Sourwood. It was Sarah Sourwood who had been sitting in the waiting room at MSRI with her friends, the bag ladies. It had to be coincidence. It couldn't be the same woman.

Jessy went on. “Here's one—Rebecca Rainford. She was Sophy's lieutenant, her assistant. I can't imagine it will be easy finding any of them.”

“Probably not,” Faye replied. “Though I'm amazed at how capable Bettiann manages to be.” She gave them the phone number at Middlebury Mansionhouse, where they'd be staying, and Jessamine wrote it down.

They had put off having dessert until after Faye's call, and now they went back to the kitchen and got out the brownies they'd made during the afternoon, topping each with a mound of vanilla ice cream. Brownies with ice cream, cocoa with marshmallows, popcorn in gallon lots—ritual foods of the DFC, reminiscent of dormitory gatherings in a time when their dormitories had been all female and pigging out was the limit of their depravity.

“Middlebury,” mused Carolyn around a mouthful. “That takes me back. Remember when we stayed there?” She got up to fetch a pad and pencil and jotted down quick notes between bites. Piedras Lagartonas wasn't a name she recognized. “Hal? Piedras Lagartonas. Mean anything?” When he shook his head, she reached for her Spanish dictionary.
Piedras
was “stones,” of course, but
lagartonas?

“Lizards,” she said. “Lizards, female. It also means ‘sly minxes.' We'd say ‘foxy.' The stones of the sly ones, clever ones, something like that. Hell, I've never heard of it!” She reached for the state atlas, with its series of maps of every road in the state.

“I don't much like the turn this is taking, this FBI involvement,” said Jessamine.

“I see Albert Crespin's filthy little mind in that,” said Hal. “Are you finding it, Carolyn?”

Carolyn shut the atlas with an irritated shake of her head. There was no Piedras Lagartonas.

Ophy asked, “What is he—are they—up to?”

Hal laughed without humor. “If you mean the FBI,
they're looking for terrorists! They're after Ophelia Gheist and Carolyn Crespin and Jessamine Ortiz-Oneil. As soon as this sex thing happened, I'm sure the whole Bureau went crazy, burrowing off in all directions, digging into old files like a bunch of rabid gophers. I haven't the slightest doubt that Albert lied to me about erasing the DFC file.”

“I don't think I'd like Albert,” Jessamine grated between clenched teeth.

“I never liked him, either,” said Hal as he left them and headed down the hall toward his den.

Carolyn sighed. “I was young and stupid then. Teasing him like that was just dumb. Like smarting off at your mother, telling her you're going to try drugs, or move in with your boyfriend.”

“What you told him was true, in a way,” said Ophy.

Jessamine tapped her fingers on the table, a drumroll. “We wanted fewer nasty old men saying they were controlling us for our own good.”

“I wouldn't have put it that way,” Ophy said chidingly. “But, yes.”

Carolyn agreed. “Of course we did. Of course we do! But Albert was FBI, and he was
Albert
. He was rigid, self-satisfied, totally sure that his view was the correct one. If Albert were growing up today, he'd join a militia because he'd be positive that he knows what's right for America! I knew what he was like. I just wasn't paying enough attention to that, or to what was going on in the world.”

“A lot of antiwar stuff in the sixties,” Ophy mused. “Protests. Sit-ins. Students occupying administration buildings or turning into terrorists overnight. Even some unlikely women robbing banks, driving getaway cars, like that one who turned herself in a few years back. Given the context, I can see why he believed you.”

“Simon is going to love this,” Ophy said with a lopsided grin. “His wife, the subversive. I'll never live it down.”

“Faye said they couldn't find anything informative in the scraps Bettiann's been writing,” Jessamine fretted. “I wonder if Sophy's books had anything in them.…”

“I have them,” Carolyn said. “We can look.”

Hal was in the study, immersed in another road atlas. Carolyn leaned across him to fetch Sophy's three slim volumes from the corner they had occupied for years.

“Nothing in there,” he grunted. “I've looked.”

“Well, Jess wants to look again.” She went back to the kitchen and passed the books around. “One for each of us. We can take them as bedtime reading tonight.”

They leafed through the books between spoonfuls, without much energy. Ophy gathered up the empty plates, put them in the sink, then picked up book one.

“I'll take it to bed with me.”

Hal returned to report no progress on finding Piedras Lagartonas.

Carolyn yawned. “Let's not lose sleep over it. Despite all this furor, the trial has to be put out of the way first.”

Jessy and Ophy trailed off to bed, leaving Carolyn and Hal alone.

“I wish Albert's mother had believed in abortion,” growled Hal.

“Aunty Fan? She loved Albert dearly. According to Aunty Fan, Albert could do no wrong. I'm so thankful you saved me from Albert.” She laughed quaveringly. “Sometimes I scare myself, thinking what might have been, instead of what was. If I hadn't met Faye, or Ophy …”

“It's been a good life.” He tilted her head down and kissed her on the lips, a soft, lingering, lovely kiss. Not passion. Something better, more lasting, than passion—the complete understanding they had always had, from the beginning. A mated pair, they were. Like geese. Hal had always said so.

“How's your leg?” she asked, caressing it with her fingertips. “Able to get you back to the bedroom?”

“Always able to do that.” He rose, leaning on her slightly. She turned off the lights behind them.

Sunday morning Jagger went into town for a meeting with Raymond Keepe. Keepe had asked for the meeting, at Webster's direction.

“I tried to call you yesterday,” said Jagger. “But you were away.”

“I was away, yes,” said Keepe through his teeth. “Mr. Webster summoned me back! The place was like an anthill. Now that we know what's going on, all the weirdness makes sense. Have you heard about the lab in Washington that's been doing hormonal assays? Testosterone levels in men are only one fourth what they were six months ago.”

“All men?” asked Jagger tonelessly.

“I haven't heard that anyone is immune.” Keepe scowled,
drew his lips back in a grimace. “According to Mr. Webster, all our allies are in a tailspin. They're threatening World War Three. Iran and Libya have pulled out of the Alliance. They're blaming the Great Satan for infecting the Islamic world with this disease. They've proclaimed a jihad against all unbelievers, and they've started stoning women in the streets, sort of indiscriminately, for supposedly having spread the disease. The U.S. military has been put on full alert.

“Japan accused China of putting birth control in the water supplies to control its population, thereby affecting the fish that are eaten by Japanese. The commentator said there were rumors of nuclear threats having been made. Three countries not known to have atomic weapons are claiming to have them. The President's going to appear on TV this afternoon—”

“So what?”

“So Webster has put the Alliance plan on hold. For now. Until this sorts itself out, any move might be in the wrong direction. All active political campaigns are off for now. We're going into a holding pattern.”

Jagger heard this as he might have heard the clamorous echo of a tomb door slamming shut with him inside. It was all he could do to keep from screaming in frustration. “Until when?”

“Until somebody finds out what caused this. The U.S. has evidently had every available laboratory working on it for some time. This is what all that CDC nonsense was about, of course. Other nations are no doubt doing the same. Webster says the cause will no doubt be found very shortly, and someone will figure out how to fix it.”

“Like we fixed AIDS,” said Jagger in a heavy voice.

“It's nothing like AIDS.”

“You don't know what it's like! Nobody knows.”

Except, he thought, a group of women near this very city, who had said on Sunday that one or more of their members had started this thing.

He asked, “What if I could tell Mr. Webster who caused it?”

Keepe looked up alertly. “Foreigners? What? Iranians? Chinese?”

“Americans.”

Keepe smiled thinly. “Oh, come on, Jake.”

“Women.”

“Women? Some kind of psychological castration? Chop it
off you—yes, they're good at that. But something like this? Women haven't the brains for something like this. They don't think that way.”

“Most women don't, right, but there's always a freak.” His eyes were fixed on something distant. “Anyhow, suppose it was people I could name? Would that make a good campaign issue? Would that move me up in the estimation of the Alliance?”

Keepe thought about it. “If you could prove someone specific was responsible, male or female, and if you could get them to cough up the cure or antidote or whatever, I suppose you might come off as a hero.”

“The public likes heroes.”