Shades of Eva (20 page)

“No, no house anymore. I put it up for sale
after Joe and Amy—"

Amelia cut herself off and reached into that
brown bag between her legs she’d been neglecting. She unscrewed the
cap off the bottle, but kept the bottle concealed, and took a long,
patient sip of something that smelled like whiskey. It took me
right back to the toolshed. The smell of whiskey always did for a
second or two.

Alarmed though I was at Amelia’s drinking
while she drove, we were just blocks from our destination. I was
more interested in whether or not her face was going to turn inside
out when she swallowed the stuff. It didn’t. She drank whatever it
was straight up with the unconcern of Miss Kitty in the Long Branch
Saloon on Gunsmoke. I had met no woman who swallowed whiskey with a
face straight as Kitty’s, save Amelia, and only a handful of women
who even bothered with the stuff. But I said nothing. She took one
more sip, put the cap back on, and tried to hand me the sack.

“No thanks,” I said.

“Well then just hold the damn thing!”

“And if we get stopped?” I asked, taking up
the bag and looking inside it. It was Jack Daniels.

“We’re almost there!” she replied, another
welcome smile breeching her pretty face. “Quit worrying! It’s
starting to piss me off.”

I shrugged and we drove on.

“Where are you from?” I said.

“Holland, Michigan.”

Holland was a lake town just north of South
Haven, but not quite to Muskegon. “Pretty town,” I commented.

“Parts of it,” she said. There was an
awkward pause, after which Amelia grabbed the bottle from me and
worked another swig, this time a longer one, then handed it
back.

“This is the part where you want to know
everything else about me, right?” She said as much without
bothering to look at me.

“I would like to know more, yes.”

“I’m twenty-five years old. Grew up in
Holland. Went to Michigan State. Got bored and dropped out. Joined
the Army. Went to the Persian Gulf. Killed some people. Buried a
bunch more. Dad died. Came home. Mom died. Went to her funeral and
watched my husband and daughter get shot the same day. That’s about
all there is to know.”

I sat frozen, unable to comment on any of
that. Her tragedies rained like a deluge over me, yet Amelia
recounted them as if she were describing the steps of assembling a
rifle. Then came that uneasy silence. I watched Amelia struggle
with whatever came next, or with whatever she had skipped in her
brief history of time. She worked her cigarette until there was no
more tobacco to be burned, then flipped the butt out the window and
took another drink.

I took in a deep breath and tried to think
of something to say, trying to come to terms with the reality that
it was a soldier I’d been dealing with for the past twenty-four
hours, not just an aspiring PI. Things were starting to make
sense.

“I’m sorry—"

“Don’t!” Amelia said, interrupting me. “Stop
apologizing. Nothing is your fault.”

I wanted to know everything. I wanted to
know where she served, and in what capacity. A military background
would certainly explain a lot of things—like the men, plural, she
said she’d shot and killed, and that stoic personality of hers. It
might also explain why she drank like a sailor and changed her
moods like you change sleeping positions.

I asked about her mother. “How did she die?
Your Mom?”

“Blood clot broke off in her leg and settled
in one of her coronary arteries. She had a surgery, but she was too
weak.”

“I’m—"

Amelia cut me off, again. “She lived a full
life, Mitchell. Speaking of which,” she said, changing the subject
without batting an eye, “what did you make of the autopsy report I
gave you?”

“It was a bit surprising,” I said. “I mean,
my father and uncle said Mom died of a heart attack.”

“It didn’t piss you off?”

I was trying to remember. I had a
kaleidoscope of emotions battling it out in my head when I was
reading it, so it was difficult to pinpoint one response. “Yes it
made me mad,” I said, “but it also clarified things.”

“How so?”

This was the part I feared. Did I tell her
about my pledge, or did I keep it to myself? I decided to tell her
and dispense with the secrecy. If I failed at sobriety, then
embarrassment was the least of my worries.

“I decided part of grieving was allowing
myself to be angry, to sort of accept things—to try and remember
them, like you said—but to do it soberly. I can’t do that drunk. I
can’t feel…angry.”

Amelia gave me a long, slow look of
bemusement, and then nodded. She then took another cool sip of her
whiskey and smiled at me.

“So since we’re telling secrets,” I said,
cutting her off before she could make a joke about my pledge, “you
hadn’t mentioned you were in the Army.”

“Military Police.”

I raised my eyebrows. “When did you
enlist?”

“1988. My freshman year at MSU.”

I rolled my rolodex of memories back to that
year. A memory card surfaced. I distinctly recalled watching a
buttoned-up President Bush, Sr. on TV one night address an
awe-struck nation on the verge of Operation Desert Storm. I
remember he quoted one of his Marine Lieutenants, a General Walter
Boomer to be exact. I had to look this up, but Boomer had said, and
I felt this sentiment rang true for Amelia, “There are things worth
fighting for. A world in which brutality and lawlessness are
allowed to go unchecked isn’t the kind of world we’re going to want
to live in.”

I had a better understanding, and dare I say
appreciation, for the bored college student once Amelia relayed a
few tidbits of information to me. I had to believe the General’s
words had become a sort of mantra for people like Amelia, for most
all soldiers aspiring to rid the world of injustice as they saw it,
and for all those specifically heading off to expel Saddam Hussein
from Kuwait that season, Amelia included, and I was right.

“I suppose you wondered about all those
lives I said I took,” Amelia said, “or if I was just blowing smoke
up your ass!” Amelia took another rather long swig of whiskey.

“I suppose I was wondering,” I replied,
waiting for a look of regret, or sadness, or something fretful to
appear on Amelia’s face, something other than the quite satisfied
look of rueful indignation that had settled itself in her
eyes. 

“Well, now you know!”

I gave a cursory glance to the
MEGA
MILLIONS lotto ticket clipped to the sun visor in front of Amelia,
then to Viktor Frankl who seemed to be grinning at me. I hadn’t
thought to ask her if she had a brother or sister, or any cousins
out there. She said she was an only child. I asked her about her
aunt Emily, and if she had any cousins.

“Emily was my only aunt. Her husband died
shortly before she was committed. She never had kids. She wanted
them, but my uncle wouldn’t give her any. He was very cruel.”

She took in a long draw of smoke.  This
time, she returned to the subject of the money.

“I’m sure you’re wondering about the money.
As I said, this is your penalty on your uncle. But you need to know
certain things. I already told you about the two-hundred-fifty
thousand dollars your mother never inherited. Your uncle received
it, by the way. But anything over that—let’s call it what it is:
it's blood money. That’s what you’re after, Mitchell. Getting any
other money from Ully is going to be difficult. We’re going to be
forcing him to revisit his will, one that’s not very appropriate.
That’s not going to be a clean thing.”

When I asked her what she meant by an
inappropriate will, she told me that should Ully perish, his entire
estate was to be liquidated and the assets given to charities at
the discretion of his one beneficiary, save one-million dollars,
which this beneficiary was to keep.

“How did you discover all this?” I said.

“I had a contact look into your uncle. And I
know the combination to his safe where he keeps the damn
thing.”

“How did you get the combo to his safe?”

“Cameras.”

I had to laugh at her stealth. “So who’s
this lucky beneficiary if it isn’t me?”

Amelia threw the butt of yet another
cigarette out her window. “His limo driver! His name is Tom
Quail.”

The name Quail caused me to flash
back to my mother’s funeral—to the last time I saw Dad or his
mistress-second wife, Meryl—not to flowers or a descending casket,
but to a limousine and its driver. If this was the same driver as
the one who brought Ully to the funeral that day, then I did
remember him.

It was at that funeral where Ully asked my
father if he was going to take me in. He asked this
matter-of-factly, using the language of someone on the verge of
adopting a puppy, as if I were but a stray dog to be boarded.
Ully’s was an ill-considered question looking back: who asks that
sort of thing at a funeral in front of the little dog in
question?

My mind flashed then to the answer to that
question—to Dad’s response, which was mere laughter. It was a
laughter that was ringing in my ears as Amelia made our final turn
toward the old McGinnis river house. Dad let me know with that
laughter, in no uncertain terms, that when he divorced my mother,
he had divorced me, too.

I flashed then to Ully putting me in the
back of that limousine in response to that laughter, and to a vague
memory of the driver. He had opened a tinted window that separated
the front compartment from the back of the vehicle where Ully and I
were sitting. The driver looked disapprovingly at me, and said, “So
your Eva’s kid, huh?”

I looked to my uncle who wasn’t responding,
as if to ask him for permission to answer. He just stared at me. I
put my head down and nodded.

And then the driver said, “I want you to
obey your uncle. He’s a good man to take you in.”

Ully nodded.

The driver said all that as if I owed my
uncle a thank you for what was happening to me, as if I hadn’t just
wriggled myself free from the grasp of my mother’s corpse. He acted
as if I were a dog just spared from euthanasia, as if my father
hadn’t just laughed off the idea of taking me in. He acted as if
all of this was expected, as if my apparent ungratefulness to my
uncle, to his friend, to his employer, was but a forgone
conclusion. He was chiding me for a presumed insolence, and I hated
him for it.

“Don’t be ashamed of who you are, Mitchell,”
Amelia offered. She must have sensed my despair at being excluded
from Ully’s will. “None of this is your fault. You didn’t do
anything to harm your mother. I’ve read letters she wrote to her
sons in her diaries when she was just a girl, before she ever had a
child. You were all that she ever wanted. Just remember that.”

“Somebody’s got to pay!” I said, and I asked
Amelia what we could do—what I should do. I asked her what penalty
Ully deserved for pimping out his sister—for his presumed role in
Elmer’s death.

“As I said, your mother deserves justice,”
Amelia replied. “Your uncle—and this friend of his—they deserve
justice, too. So does your brother. Your entire family deserves
justice. That means some people are going to have to pay, and they
aren’t going to want to do that.”

“Not without persuasion!” I said.

“As far as who deserved the money,” Amelia
continued, “your mother deserved it. I’m not sure you deserve any
of it, and I certainly don’t, and I wouldn’t take any anyway, but I
have a hard time believing your mother would leave anything she had
to anyone else—granted you aren’t the most deserving creature there
is. But I know one thing for sure: your uncle Ully has had a good
life reaping the benefits of your mother’s suffering, and better
men than him have adopted nephews and nieces without the gratuity
of blood money!”

No wonder Amelia was so averse to the issue
of Mom’s money. It was blood money. It was all bloody money. It
didn’t matter where my grandfather’s inheritance came from. It
didn’t matter what Ully’s estate was worth. Anything we exacted
from him, or from Fred Levantle for that matter, wouldn’t be ours.
It would always be my mother’s money—or Elmer’s. And they were both
dead. 

Corrie Ten Boom seemed to be smiling at the
words Amelia chose. Blood money never should have entered any of
our lives, but it had, and now it was something I was going to have
to deal with. An inheritance of blood money and a bloody legacy to
boot!

Perhaps I could be the new steward of Ully’s
undeserved landfall—at least my mother’s share of it—a steward who
would see to it that that landfall was directed toward something
more noble than the fund of undeserving beneficiaries. Perhaps
Amelia’s hundred-acre compound was a noble direction. Perhaps a
contribution to some charity or some agency that finds missing
persons was worth consideration.

Amelia made the last turn without signaling.
And then again, why would she signal. There was no car within
eyesight of us. We were, at last, home.

***

Chapter 17

A Shadow conversation

August 15, 1995

Virgil: Well, what did you expect to find,
grandchild of mine? Did you think Amelia went to get you because
she found some old comic books up there?

Me: Why did you do it?

Virgil: We are all tired of this pining,
Mitchell. Elmer is dead. Your mother is dead. Why can’t you just
let it go?

Me: I’m going to haunt you Grandpa! If I
can’t find you in this life, then I’ll find you in the next and
when I do, there’s going to be a reckoning.

Virgil: Find me? Hell, you’re talking to me,
son. I’ve never left your side.

We made our left onto Circle Bluff
, a
semi-circular, winding gravel road that led into a long-standing,
near forgotten sector of riverfront homes. If you weren’t looking
for it, or had no reason to be in that neck of the woods, you’d
never know the street was there. The homes were set way back behind
a wood with nary a street sign to tell you you’d arrived, at least
not one I could see.