Shades of Eva (24 page)

I dug on. I withdrew what proved to be
Elmer’s paternity document, next. On the father line, my father had
signed his name—Bradford Addison Rennix.

I held the document in one hand, weighing it
as if its truth depended upon some measure of its mass. “Do you
think it’s him?” I asked Amelia, referring to my father. “Do you
think he fathered Elmer, or was he just saying that because it was
the noble thing to do?”

“I think he wanted a life with your mother,
and I think it was a noble thing to do. But your father isn’t the
father.”

“And how would you know that?” I said.

“Your father told me why he signed this. He
was pressured, in part, by his mother. But that’s not all. He said
he and your mother didn’t consummate their relationship until after
they were married. He can’t be the father, Mitchell. He believes
your mother was raped now, for whatever that’s worth to you.”

I almost couldn’t believe what I was
hearing. Dad believed Mom? He’d suddenly changed his mind after all
these years of calling her deluded? Amelia’s words—supposedly Dad’s
words—weren’t quite sinking in.

Amelia was expressing a sort of second-hand
confession on behalf of my father, a tardy, heretofore unexpressed
confession to me. I didn’t know how to react to it, or if I should
believe her for that matter, so it fell on about as deaf an ear as
my mother’s teenage pleas for release had.

“Did you hear what I said?” Amelia asked me,
pressing me to respond.

“You went to some effort for me,” I said. “I
guess I owe you a thank you.”

“That’s not what I meant. You don’t believe
what I’m telling you about your father, do you?”

I had to be honest. I didn’t trust my
father. So no, I didn’t believe her—or him. It was as if I needed
proof. A DNA type of proof.

“You’ll see him in due time,” Amelia said.
“Then you can talk to him, yourself.”

I nodded, but I was nowhere near ready to
talk to Dad—let alone see him. His triple-D poem was still ringing
in my ear and his meanness still resonating in my bones: 

Defiant as child, deluded as a wife.

Demented from birth to the end of her
life!
 

Whatever Dad would say to me would have to
be backed up by forensic proof! Our family had suffered too much in
his absence. We’d suffered too much in his presence. But if Amelia
was right, if he had expressed some sort of remorse for denying my
mother, for lying about Elmer’s paternity to her, then it was a
start. It was something I needed to think about, and it was between
my father and me. So I said nothing more of it that night and
turned again to the last of the items in the chest. 

Amelia directed my attention to a postcard
paper-clipped to a newspaper article. I turned the card over. It
was addressed to the entire McGinnis family. It read simply, and
unapologetically:

Good knowing you!

It bore no signature. The postcard had a San
Diego, CA postmark, dated July 12, 1954, the day after Elmer went
missing.

“This is the evidence you were talking
about, the smoking gun?”

Amelia nodded. Again, I looked to her for an
explanation.

“From the message,” Amelia explained, “I can
only assume that whoever sent it didn’t have any plans of seeing
any McGinnis anytime soon.”

I asked Amelia about what San Diego meant to
her.

“Fred Levantle disappeared that day. The
last person to see him, according to police reports, was a flight
attendant on an outbound flight from San Diego to Osaka that very
day. He was heading back to Korea, Mitchell. He was in the Army.
But he never made it to base. He went AWOL.” Amelia was shaking her
head as she tapped the postcard. “I think Fred sent this to this
house just to thumb his nose at everyone.”

Then Amelia told me to turn the card
over.

I did. I studied the front image of the old
water tower from the Asylum courtyard. It was the courtyard in
which my father had first met my mother. That tidbit of information
was not withheld from me, because it was a sort of historical
proof, in Dad’s eyes, that his marriage was doomed…an insane idea
from the get go.
Who meets a wife at an insane asylum?
He
had once asked me. I remember the question because I proffered an
answer. I was barely five, but I answered him. "You did, Daddy," I
had said, almost as meekly as a mouse, but audible nonetheless. Dad
slapped me for answering him and called me insolent, and in that
attic, I could almost feel the sting of his palm again as if Father
Time, himself, had just reached out and white-gloved me.

“Look very closely, Mitchell. What else do
you see on the postcard that’s out of the ordinary?”

I scanned the picture, and sure enough,
something else was written on it: two sets of numbers stacked one
on top of the other on the postcard’s front. Decimals. Two strings
of them. One was a negative decimal, the other positive, each about
ten digits long.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “It’s scribbling.
It’s arithmetic. Looks like a subtraction problem.”

Amelia told me that it wasn’t scribbling and
it wasn’t a math problem. “These are geographic coordinates,
Mitchell—and very specific ones.”

“Coordinates to where? Of what?”

“To the Asylum! These are points that
converge directly on the Asylum property across town.”

Again, all I could do was shake my head. I
stared at the numbers, then at the image behind them of the water
tower. Could Elmer’s remains be located at the very place my
parents met?

“We used coordinates like this in the Army
to radio in certain locations all the time: our location, an enemy
location, or other locations of interest or LOIs. Sometimes the LOI
was an assassination site. Coordinates were kind of a proof of
death, a relay point where ground troops could verify those deaths,
destroy the bodies, or confiscate them depending on the order.
Sometimes tactical ops would simply order a stealth fighter to drop
a cluster bomb on the place to just bury the entire location,
bodies and all.”

Amelia explained that there were different
ways to indicate latitude, longitude, and altitude, what the
military calls a location’s sexigesimal bearing: north-south,
east-west, and height or depth relative to the Earth’s surface. The
decimal numbers were just that, she said—and they were pretty
specific.

“You think Fred wrote these coordinates on
this?”

Amelia hesitated. “I’m not sure. He could
have, or they could have been added later. Your mother might have
found this, and she might have written them there. Or maybe Ully
did.”

That was confusing. Mom always said Elmer
was alive. “If Mom put them there—then how? How would she know
about geographic coordinates anyway?”

“I’m not sure, Mitchell. There are numbers
like that written on quite a few of your mother’s drawings. I don’t
know if she wrote them, or if someone else wrote them on her
things. Regardless, I think it’s a proof of death and a marker for
Elmer’s grave.”

“But she said he was alive!” I almost yelled
this.

“She wished for a lot of things Mitchell,
and she was lobotomized, don’t forget.”

Amelia added, “We won’t know for sure if
it’s a burial site until we can find the exact spot and excavate
it. We won’t know for sure until we talk to Ully or Fred.”

In that instant this journey became more
than an investigation. An excavation, the kind and type Amelia was
referring to, was something else altogether. What she was talking
about was an exhumation. She was talking about excavating human
remains—presumably a little baby’s remains that had been buried at
the State’s oldest mental institution—and buried since 1954.

I was a lot of things in 1995, but I wasn’t
a grave-robber, or an archeologist. An excavation of that sort
simply terrified me. The thought of interrogating my uncle wasn’t
sitting well with me either.

Amelia had mentioned that Elmer deserved a
proper burial, but I hadn’t fully comprehended what that meant. In
my world, people spoke metaphorically. A proper burial for a
missing brother meant purchasing a gravesite and erecting a
symbolic marker. But symbolism wasn’t what Amelia had in mind! I
don’t think she knew what a metaphor was. Most soldiers don’t live
their lives by metaphors and simile. Soldiers didn’t leave fellow
soldiers to rot in a foreign land, which was exactly what Amelia
believed happened to my baby brother. Soldiers haul their own out;
they don’t leave them in a foreign land to rot.

A proper burial meant excavation,
exhumation, and digging—true digging—not metaphorical surmising.
And that terrified me. A proper burial for Elmer meant locating the
site of his improper burial, excavating that site and his remains,
and then re-burying him in a proper place—in his proper
station.

It was literal and straightforward. And all
that had to be done outside the law, because the law would never
order the exhumation of a missing person without proper cause.

This little postcard with a set of possible
coordinates and a cryptic message was not what I would consider
proper cause, and neither would police. They would require
something a little more tangible than that—like a confession. That
meant finding Fred Levantle. Finding Fred Levantle, I would soon
learn, meant interrogating Ully McGinnis. It also meant
infiltrating Coastal State to get to those remains. It also meant
interrogating, so to speak, the brother of my mother’s rapist.

It was a little too much to digest at the
time.

And this is where my life turned upside
down. Amelia had a plan.

***

Amelia wanted to break in to the Asylum, and
she didn’t just want to break in to burgle the place. She wanted to
break in from the inside. But Coastal State wasn’t some arbitrary
mental hospital. Amelia wanted, in essence, to infiltrate the
state’s oldest insane asylum, a property that spanned four-hundred
acres. She wanted the blueprints to the place, details of the
Asylum’s tunnel system: passageways, she thought, between Asylum
basements, one of which comprised a so-called art gallery where her
aunt’s—and some of my mother’s artwork—were purportedly
confiscated, and she wanted the gallery raided.

And she wanted my brother’s remains!
Heirlooms and a body.

You could apply any of the adjectives Dad
and Ully used to describe my mother to describe Amelia’s plan:
crazy, fanatical, maniacal. You name it and it applied.

The adjective I gave it was insane. After
all, I was many things, but as I said, I wasn’t a grave-robber. I
also wasn’t some covert operative in some military scheme. I didn’t
believe in ghosts, despite what I had seen in my grandfather’s
house, and I didn’t believe in tempting fate by rustling the spirit
of dead babies from their graves, either.

The congregation of voices and the specter
whose laugh I attributed to my grandfather Virgil were mere mental
projections, certainly nothing super-natural. But if there were
such things as ghosts, I had always thought they were attached to
the bodies they once inhabited, housed, if you will, in the graves
those bodies belonged to. Belief in ghosts or not, I didn’t think
it wise to open the lid of a coffin for legal reasons any more than
it was to withdraw the skeleton of a baby from a simple hole in the
earth. In my life, all autopsies brought me were words such as no
anatomical cause of death, and the idea that my mother’s body had
been disemboweled, disheartened, and eviscerated, mutilated for a
conclusion as vague as the one she received, horrified me. Why
would I put myself through that kind of inevitable disappointment
again?

Each seemed to me an act of betrayal,
anyhow—exhumation for legal reasons as well as moral—each akin to
popping the cap off a sealed oil well. Once whatever was inside
that well, or that grave, was out, you weren’t getting it back in
there very easily, and that scared the hell out of me.

I had to ask myself if Elmer’s disappearance
was important enough to risk everything, important enough to find
the people who possibly murdered him, and to find Fred Levantle,
Amelia’s family art, and give Elmer a last name. We had freedom at
stake, and our lives, perhaps. As Amelia said, some people don’t
want to be found and they’ll sometimes kill to protect their
anonymity! This whole trip was a risk, and doing it sober seemed to
have compounded things by a factor of ten. The floor of the attic
was shaking ten times worse than the floor was downstairs, and even
Amelia said she felt like it was shaking; and the butterflies
bouncing around in my stomach weren’t helping.

I was thinking of that forensic proof I
needed, and all at once regretted having ever mentioned it. “Even
if we are able to get in and by chance find a bone, there,” I said,
setting the postcard back into the chest, “can we even extract DNA
from a bone?”

Amelia was straightforward. “We can extract
DNA from bone.”

“What about this gallery?” I said. “Say we
get in there. All you want are a few sculptures and some poems?
You’re willing to risk everything—arrest, career, reputation, life
even, if say one of those wacko guards they probably have roaming
that place decides to shoot us?”

“All I want is what’s mine,” Amelia said.
“That’s it. All you should want is what’s yours.”

“Okay. How do we get in then? Just walk
in?”

“We have to get in from the inside. We hire
in.”

“Hire in? As in go to work there?”

“There’s no other way,” Amelia replied.

“Well, I’m a descendant. They probably don’t
hire descendants of former patients to work there.”

Amelia smiled. “They don’t. But they will
hire a Mark Engram.”

“Are you suggesting that I do this using an
alias?”

“You took a plane from Washington as an
alias. If you hire in there as—hell, make up a name—if you hire in
there as an alias, they won’t know you from Adam. We need to get in
to do certain things. We need access to the grounds. We can’t leave
Elmer’s grave untended, marked like this!” She pointed to the
postcard lying in the chest. “We can’t leave his remains in the
Asylum, and I’m quite sure that’s where he was buried. We can’t
leave him without an identity and give these guys a pass, and the
Asylum isn’t keeping my family’s art.”