Shades of Eva (29 page)

We exited the north property and got back
onto Sacramento Drive. We drove a little ways toward the main
entranceway of Kern Circle. Amelia pointed it out, but we didn’t
pull in. She had something else to show me first.

Amelia continued down Sacramento
until she stopped the rental curbside about a half-mile from the
Asylum. We were looking at the front of an old Victorian house. “We
have a few minutes,” Amelia said. “I want to show you your new
place.”

Amelia gestured to the Victorian. “You’ll
need a launch pad,” she said. “The river house is out of the
question. A hotel is too risky. Too many people in and out. This is
close, and you’ll have your privacy.”

We stepped out of the Bonneville and stood
on the sidewalk staring at the two-story home, a far cry from the
tiny cabin I was used to, but nothing too extravagant.

Amelia handed me a set of keys. “Four beds,
two baths, two-thousand square feet and only $800 a month.”

The house was clean on the outside. No
cracks in the foundation. No peeling paint. No dilapidated porch or
overgrown grass. The roofline was intact. It was a nice contrast to
Mom’s river home, but it felt premature.

“You’re jumping the gun aren’t you?” I said,
giving the porch the once over. “You said there was competition for
the job and they haven’t even met me yet.”

Amelia just smiled and said, “I have faith
in you.”

“Anyhow, I can’t afford this. I have a cabin
in Washington I’m still paying rent on. I don’t think the salary of
a security guard—

Amelia cut me off. “Don’t worry about that!
I paid the rent on your cabin for May, and this house is on me.
It’s month to month. We actually won’t need the place for any
longer than a few days.”

“I told Whitcomb Brothers two weeks—

Again, she cut me off. “Mitchell, listen to
me! If this goes to plan, you aren’t going back to Whitcomb
Brothers. And besides, let’s get something straight: you’re working
for me, now. All expenses paid. We’ll be here a few days. I need an
inside man. You need my protection, a job, and a place to stay. Am
I right?”

“Oh, I’m working for you, now?” I said,
rather sarcastically.

“Mitchell, we’re in this together,” Amelia
said, “but there can’t be two heads in this. One of us has to take
the lead.”

“If this fails, I’ll be the one on the
inside. Just remember that,” I replied.

“Then trust me,” she said, “and follow my
lead.”

I guess I hadn’t fully considered the nature
of our relationship. We were still strangers, albeit strangers
who’d somehow found their way into bed with one another. But I
wouldn’t have called us friends, even at that point. Friends trust
one another, and they don’t typically harbor secrets. We didn’t
exactly trust one another, even though Amelia just told me that she
had faith in me. She didn’t know how’d I’d hold up to the mess we
were about to get into, or if I was going to overdo it on the new
pills rattling around in my pocket. 

I didn’t know what she had in store for
Ully, for Fred Levantle the Rapist, or for my father at that point.
She wanted heirlooms from a hidden art gallery, and bones from an
unmarked grave. She wanted confessions from men who’d probably kill
to keep their secrets—or die in the attempt. And did I mention she
wanted something called justice, which implied not just confession
from those men, but some form of restitution that was beginning to
reek of extortion?

Amelia scared me, come right down to it—and
friends typically don’t scare one another.

We walked up the steps toward the
front
entrance and stood on the porch overlooking the front
yard. Amelia withdrew something from her handbag and handed it to
me. It was a pair of leather driving gloves. “Put these on,” she
told me. “Wear these at all times in this house. I don’t want your
prints showing up in this place. Wear them at work, too, when you
get hired. They will be one of your trademarks. We don’t need any
of your prints there, either.”

Then she withdrew and handed me a pair of
Ray Bans sunglasses. “Wear these, too, as often as you can. The
fewer times that pretty face of yours shows up on their cameras,
the better.” Amelia pinched my cheek. “Be camera-conscious. If this
goes sour, the fewer images they have of you the better.”

I thought that a good time to ask her what
exactly she had in store for us if things did sour. At the time,
she stressed not to worry, but in time, I’d come to learn that
Amelia was ready to run. She had no plans to stick around Michigan
and do jail time should things not go the way she’d planned. She
wanted her aunt’s artwork, as much or as many items as she could
recoup; she wanted Elmer’s remains located, and as I said, she
wanted confessions from two men—which meant we needed to start
making some demands from Ully and meet old Ben, Fred’s brother,
somehow. Only then could we hope to find Fred Levantle. And in the
meantime, we had to hope our charade held up.

But there was more to Amelia plan if this
all went south. She was setting this up to appear to be an act of
coercion. Specifically, I was the coerced, and she was the coercer.
If worse came to worse, I wasn’t working for her—I was doing her
bidding. I wasn’t assisting her—I was doing her grunt work. Truth
be told, this is why she tolerated my meeting Fred’s brother, Ben,
in the manner in which I would in the days and hours to come. I
would become his mental patient, and he, my counselor. It would be
the legitimization of my mental illness—proof, Amelia would call
it, of my insanity—although insanity wasn’t the word she chose. It
would be proof of my incompetence—my alcoholism, my paranoia, and
yes, my brutal past. It would all serve me if things went south. My
meeting Ben would not be coincidence—it was all part of a grand
scheme intended to sniff out Ben’s brother’s location—which in a
way was the only reason I’d want to meet Ben.

Turns out Ben had more to offer me than I
imagined.

So if it came down to my freedom, I’d be set
free by virtue of that incompetence. I would have to turn myself in
and freely admit to all that we’d done under Amelia’s tyrannical
direction. We—the unknown, unidentified accomplices of hers—the
ones she referred to as contacts.

But was I alright with all of that? Setting
myself up in such a way? Leaving Amelia to run with the wolves like
that, just to spare me?

No, I wasn’t okay with that. It was part of
my healing process. I had begun to care for Amelia. Not just
because I’d slept with her; I cared for her before that. I cared
what happened to her. I feared what would happen. I loathed the
people who’d harmed her.

I wasn’t coerced. I never was. I made the
choice to come, and I had a lot of choices to make in the days to
come. But it was all conjecture back then. She warned me to be
careful, and instructed me to take my medications. She demanded I
follow her lead, and so I did.

At that point, Amelia withdrew something
else from her bag. It was a cellular telephone. In 1995, cell
phones weren’t that common if you recall. To a drifting woodsman
like myself, I’d never had use for one and had never so much as
used one. I took it up as if Amelia had just handed me a sea urchin
to cook.

“This has to be on at all times,” she said.
“Get familiar with it. It’s an Army-issued satellite telephone with
signal encryption.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means no one can trace your calls, and
no one can listen in. It has a lot of functions: it’s an audio
recorder, a video recorder, and there are some wireless
applications that allow you to tap into the Internet,
closed-circuit feeds, and bugged rooms, for instance.”

Wireless applications?

My head was spinning. To me, the Internet
was an area between two basketball rims. Bugged rooms were
toolsheds with earwigs in them. I was a hobo. I’d never had use for
technology much beyond a microwave oven, train, or chainsaw. Talk
of bugs and wire taps and closed circuit feeds didn’t make a lot of
sense to me.

“You’ll figure it all out,” Amelia said. “My
number’s in there. Just don’t lose the thing.”

The next thing she gave me resembled a
walkie-talkie. This was smaller, though; about the size of the cell
phone. The logo on it read GARMIN, and in smaller letters beneath,
portable GPS.

“I feel like a kid at Christmas.”

I studied the device then turned it on. A
series of numbers began populating the screen, and a launch bar
appeared. A menu came up that asked if I wanted track mode or map
mode.

“How does this work?” I said.

“You want to find a location, select track
mode. Enter the northing, then the easting, and select enter. Those
are your coordinates. We’re interested in the location from the
postcard in your granddad’s attic. The GPS keeps the last set of
coordinates you enter into it. I already typed them in. All you
have to do is hit track mode, and then press enter.”

“That’s it, huh?”

 “A small map will appear with two dots
on it—one is the location you entered, the other is where you are.
Play with it. You can track a path to the location, zoom in, and
zoom out. It will direct you. When you are near the coordinates you
entered, it will beep like a metal detector. When you are spot on,
it will be a constant beep. You can toggle between an audible sound
or a flashing light if you need silence.”

“And map mode?”

“Map mode simply tells you where you are and
displays that on a regional map. It gives you street names, county
by county maps, what have you.”

“Okay. How accurate is it?”

Amelia cleared her throat. “It’s accurate to
within eleven square meters of a point.”

It didn’t take a genius to figure out just
how inexact that was when you were looking for a grave.

“That’s about ninety square feet,” I said,
which was about the area of a major league baseball infield.
“That’s not very exact!”

“Whoever buried Elmer will be more
accurate,” Amelia replied, confidently. “But if that doesn’t work
out, then this is the best estimate.”

I was confused, as usual. “What do you mean
whoever buried Elmer? You planning on bringing someone to the
Asylum to point out Elmer’s grave?” I said this with a sarcastic
speck of humor, but Amelia wasn’t smiling.

“That’s exactly what I intend to do. So be
prepared to get reacquainted with your uncle. I’ll let you know
when—just as soon as you get hired on, Chet.”

Amelia’s demeanor changed from businesslike
to something like curious, and then she said, “Mitchell, what would
you like to see happen to these guys—assuming my theory holds
up?”

I scratched my head. “I guess I want to see
them confess,” I said. “I don’t know.”

Amelia pulled a cigarette from her purse and
lit it. “Well, assuming they confess: what would you like to see
happen to them?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think they’ll
confess, but—

Amelia took in a long draw and smoke and
interrupted me. “The Army uses a lot of different techniques to
extract information from people. I need to know if you’re serious
about this. You say you want confession, but there’s a process to
get there—and another process once you have a confession.”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” I said.

“That’s what scares me. You aren’t sure of
much.” Amelia took in another long drag. “You have pills if you
need them. Just don’t take too many. Keep your phone charged and
on.”

I asked Amelia if she was going to show me
inside, but she said first there was something else to see around
back. She led me around the house to the garage. She withdrew a
garage door opener, pushed its button and then handed it to me. The
garage door began to raise.

“This is yours, too.”

I watched the garage door rise
and
slowly, something came into focus from inside. I could see the
headlights of a car, then a hood, jet black, then a windshield.
Inside was a brand new 1995 Chevrolet Impala.

“Are you kidding me?” I said. “Is this
mine?” I was already inside the garage and running a hand along its
grill.

“Here!” Amelia called. I turned to her and
she tossed me a set of keys. “It’s all yours, Chet. You’ll need
something to get around in—and you have an appointment to schedule
down in South Bend with your new shrink.”

I almost didn’t here that last part. I was
fumbling with the keys to open the door and take a seat in my new
ride. I sat down in the driver’s seat and took in the smell of the
new car, nestling into the car’s cool leather beneath me.

Amelia got into the passenger side, but left
her door open.

“Appointment? South Bend?” I asked, opening
and then closing the glove box. I did the same to the console.

“I put a number in your phone to Ben
Levantle’s office.”

Ben was Mom’s childhood sweetheart, the
psychologist practicing down in South Bend. He was also Fred the
Rapist’s brother. But Amelia could have told me I was going to have
to parachute out of a 747 at that point and I wouldn’t have
cared.

“Ben has an office on the campus of Notre
Dame,” Amelia explained. “I guess he’s a pretty big name over
there.”

“Catholic?” I asked, adjusting the rearview
mirror.

“Don’t know. Why?”

“Thought I might have to brush up on the
Catechism or something.”

“Just be yourself. Maybe he can figure you
out. Just don’t mention too many names—particularly not your
mother’s. If he asks, don’t give him her name. You can talk about
her, but don’t give away too many names or details about her life.
She died when you were young and you moved to Indiana to live with
a rich uncle. Don’t mention his name, either. He’ll sense shades of
Eva, but we don’t want him recognizing you right away.”

“Do I tell him my name?”

“Yes. Use your real name. I doubt he knows
who Brad Rennix is, but you might not want to tell him Brad’s real
name, either.”