Shades of Eva (46 page)

“They’re blunting me. I’m forgetting things.
They’re giving me a headache.”

“—
Listen, we’ll get some more. You can’t
quit whiskey cold turkey—or Valium! Jesus! I’m coming up there.
I’ll bring more.”

“No,” I said. “I’m putting my foot down. I’m
done with the pills. They’re handicapping me!”

She asked me what I meant, but I think she
knew. You don’t give mercenaries with morals sedatives and then
expect them to bring a war down on someone. You give them
adrenaline, if anything. You wind them up and then stand the hell
back.

Then again, I wasn’t moral, and I wasn’t a
mercenary.

“—
All right. Listen, get up there and see
your uncle. I have the DNA sample I need from Ben. We have to rule
him out. All we need is some infant DNA to compare these
to.”

“And what if it’s Ben?”

Amelia laughed.
“—If it is Ben, then you
have a step-uncle to get to know.”

“So if Ully tells us where Elmer’s buried,
we just go there and dig him up?”

“—
Right!”

“And then we do a DNA test?”

“—
Correct!”

“Just that easy?”

“—
Just that easy! Listen, Ully confessed
today to being with Fred on the night Elmer was killed.”

“Did Anna call police?”

“—
Police were contacted, but like I
thought, they want a full assessment of Ully’s competence before
they move forward. I don’t think they believe him just
yet.”

“I have an appointment with Ben in the
morning. Am I going to get to go?”

“—
Go. They aren’t going to want to burden
Ben with this prematurely if Ully has just gone senile.”

“So what if Elmer’s father isn’t Ben or Fred
Levantle or my father? Then what? Then who?”

“—
Then your mother was a little more
forgetful than I thought. We will have done our best.”

“Tell me again, why are we doing this?”

With that, Amelia took me back a few days to
Neah Bay.
“–Do you remember when we first met,
Mitchell?”

“Yes, you were gun barrel to knifepoint with
Jake Meade.”

“—
You’re so romantic! Do you remember
lying in that hospital bed in Neah Bay and saying something about
physical proof?”

I hesitated to answer. I wasn’t
recollecting.

“—
I’ll refresh your memory, Don Juan. You
said, ‘I want physical proof of a rape and murder, not a bigger
bundle of my past.’”

I remembered.

“—
I thought it important, too—and a
legitimate thing to say. So we’re going to make it happen.”

I had wished to know, but the reality of
that wish was hitting home again. No more metaphors. To that I gave
pause. I had asked a soldier to prove something to me, and that’s
exactly what this soldier was doing.

In two minutes I was heading downstairs in a
halfway house to get an exact location to my presumed murdered
brother’s remains from an uncle who used to beat the hell out of
me. I was supposed to dig those bones up, and I hadn’t even
considered what I was to use. I didn’t have a spade. Would a spade
even work if little Elmer was buried in a cluster of tree roots?
Did I get a garden shovel from the toolshed, or would I need a
front end loader? Hell, how deep was he, even? And wasn’t he buried
in a metal toolbox? Did we even need Ully’s pointing finger?
Couldn’t I just run a metal detector over the damn area and call it
good? And isn’t there some sort of ironic comparison to be made
between the whiskey and the Peacemaker pistol and Elmer, who all
found their homes in a toolbox?

And how could I do something like this
without getting caught? How did I just unbury a toolbox without
someone setting eyes or ears on me? And would his bones, if by
chance I found them, reveal evidence of a murder, anyhow? And who
would even examine the bones? What could they show? Surely no
coroner would be assigned to the case because this wasn’t a legal
matter—it was a damned grave-robbery, and I was turning into a
resurrection man! I hadn’t even asked Amelia who was going to do
this DNA analysis. Who was going to look at Ben’s and my father’s
and Elmer’s pulverized DNA? And what in the hell was I doing in an
Asylum attic?

“—
Listen!”
Amelia said.
“—I’m
getting something from the weather station. We have a thunderstorm
warning for 9:30 tonight, which is actually perfect. That’s good
weather for digging, and it will be dark.”

“We?” I asked, meekly.

“—
Yes, we.”

I took that as my cue to move, and dropped
my worries for the moment.

“—
Mitchell?”

“What?”

“—
For what it’s worth, I’m
sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

“—
For all that these men have done to
you. You aren’t that little boy anymore. You’re a good man. Make
sure Ully knows that!”

At approximately 3 p.m. I made
my way
out of the attic. The attic entrance was inside a coat closet
inside an empty store room. I opened up the window in the storeroom
to get a breath of fresh air. The air was pregnant with the
precipitation of a brewing thunderstorm just like Amelia had said.
I looked into the sky and it was pewter gray. It was as if someone
had just pulled a giant window shade on the earth. I closed the
window and pulled a shade on the room and left.

I walked slowly down the hall toward the
nursing station. I flashed my ID to a nurse sitting there.

“Room eight. He’s expecting you, Chet.”

I walked down a well-lit hallway to the last
room on the right and turned the knob. The door was unlocked. I
stepped into a breezy, darkened room and shut the door. Ully had
pulled the blinds on the room. I heard nothing. It took me a moment
for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. When they did, Ully appeared
sitting in a chair by a south facing window.

I took a seat in a chair opposite him. We
must have sat there staring at each other for a good minute before
either of us said a word.

I was studying his body language, vague as
it was in the muted light. He seemed tired. His bandages had been
removed. There was still some swelling and quite a bit of bruising
above his left eye. There was a reddish line above his right
eyebrow and some bruising there, too. I crossed my arms and
continued staring at him, expectantly.

“Hello, Mitchell.” He finally spoke. His
voice sounded old.

“Uncle.”

“Odd place to want to meet, isn’t it? Your
mother’s old asylum bedroom?” He ran a finger across the laceration
on his forehead as if to draw my attention there.

It was an odd place to meet, but it didn’t
feel like an odd place to meet Ully.

I uncrossed my arms and withdrew the
postcard I had been carrying in my back pocket, the postcard mailed
to Grandpa Virgil’s river house 40 years ago. I tossed it at Ully.
It landed in his lap.

He picked it up and held it out in front of
him. He looked it over with a blank expression, and then began
reading its message, aloud. “Good knowing you!”

He looked to me and handed it back. “Ah,
this is what your little bitch friend was talking about last night.
Fred sent this to my father. You must have been wondering who sent
that. Dad wondered, too, way back when.” 

“Fred sent it?”

“Yes, Fred sent it. It’s clearly his
handwriting. He had a layover in San Diego on his flight back to
Korea.”

“And the numbers?” I said. “What do they
mean?”

“Numbers?” Ully seemed unaware of what I was
talking about.

“Yes, the numbers on the postcard. Amelia
didn’t tell you about the numbers? Do you need to see it
again?”

“What numbers?” Ully reached for the card
and I handed it back to him. He appeared genuinely mystified. He
studied the card and the numbers. I had to point them out to him.
He looked at them without expression, and then handed the card back
to me.

“Eva wrote those!”

“What?”

“I said your mother wrote those.”

“I don’t understand!” I said. “These are
geographic coordinates. How did Mom know to write something like
that at that age?”

Ully was shaking his head as if I should
have known the answer to that. “Dad couldn’t keep any secrets from
Eva. She found everything he tried to hide until he built that room
upstairs in the attic.” He pointed to the postcard. “She found the
card when she was home recuperating after Elmer was taken. She
about killed Dad over it. She pushed him down a flight of stairs.
He got hospitalized and she got another three years in here.”

“But the numbers!” I said. “What do they
mean?”

“You said they were coordinates. Your mother
was a fan of maps, Mitchell. When she was a girl she wasn’t reading
Little House on the Prairie or Nancy Drew. She was reading the
books in her Dad’s den. War books. Tactical operations manuals.
Combat techniques. She was obsessed with geographical coordinates
of all things. She liked the idea that every place on earth had its
own number, like its own name. If she saw a landmark, she’d work
out its coordinates. If she saw a person connected to a place,
she’d write them on his picture. She did the same thing to the
water tower. That’s just what she did.”

“But these aren’t the coordinates to the
water tower,” I told him. I think Ully knew what I was getting
at.

“No, they aren’t.” He agreed.

I stared at him, expectantly again.

Surprisingly, he was direct. “It’s the last
place she saw Fred Levantle, Mitchell. And Elmer. You’re right.
Those aren’t the coordinates to the water tower. Didn’t Amelia tell
you what they mean?”

Now, Ully was eying me, expectantly.

“She thought they were coordinates to
Elmer’s grave.”

Ully just shook his head. My answer seemed
to have amused him. “She wrote those numbers everywhere, Mitchell.
Not just on this postcard.”

“What do you mean?”

“I told Amelia this, already. Didn’t she
tell you anything?”

“What do you mean she wrote these numbers
everywhere?”

“How about on a thousand other drawings of
the ravine out back here! How about in the dirt when she was
sitting outside! How about in the fog on the mirror after she
bathed! How about on just about every scrap piece of fucking paper
in the house! She wouldn’t let it go, Mitchell. And I don’t blame
her.”

“We didn’t see anything else in her diaries
with these numbers! Or in the attic? Just this postcard.”

“Just this postcard.” Ully was growing
agitated. “That’s because Dad burned almost everything. Any
reference to those numbers, he burned it. References to this place.
Most of her diaries. Her pictures. Her drawings. It was a power
struggle between them. Her songs. He tried to destroy them all, and
he destroyed her mind in the end so she’d stop writing this stupid
number.”

“What’s it mean?”

 “It means it’s the last place she saw
Elmer!”

“What?”

“It’s not a grave, Mitchell. Right over
there.” Ully was gesturing over his shoulder and out the window
toward the ravines.

“What do you mean the last place she saw
Elmer?”

“The night Fred took him.”

“You were there, weren’t you?”

“I was. But Eva didn’t see me.” Ully then
stood up and turned to the window. He pushed the curtains aside and
began lifting the blinds. He stood there for a moment staring out
into the gloom seemingly at nothing, and then said, with a slight
hint of sorrow, “I was there, but I can’t dig.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about the toolbox.”

“Come again!”

“Isn’t that what you guys want? Elmer’s
remains?”

“You said the numbers were the last place
she saw Elmer—is that where you guys buried him?”

Ully was nodding. “It’s a pretty good
estimate.”

“I don’t need an estimate! I already have
that. I need a fucking point.”

“Mitchell, I can’t dig. And I’m sorry. It’s
not going to work.”

Apparently, Ully thought I was going to make
him do the digging, a thought that hadn’t crossed my mind. Isn’t it
like abused children to assume the burden of the heavy labor, labor
meant for more responsible parties? I suppose I had been chopping
rocks my entire life in a quarry made for other men.

“Did you kill Elmer?” I said.

Ully turned back to face me. “No, I didn’t
kill Elmer,” he replied, taking a step toward me to accentuate the
denial. “I went through this with your friend.”

“Now you’re going through it with me!”

“I didn’t know Fred killed Elmer. Not right
away. Not until afterward—and even then I wasn’t sure.”

“You weren’t sure? What the hell happened
that night?”

Ully turned away again. He spoke slowly.
“You didn’t know Fred, Mitchell. I was a scared kid!”

“Are you saying this because you think we’ll
hurt you if you don’t admit to something?”

He continued to walk toward the window. “No.
You need to know this…apparently. Fred wanted to see your mother
before he went back to Korea. He was leaving the next morning, and
I came here, with him.”

“Why?” I said.

“He wanted sex!” Ully turned to face me. “He
wanted sex and I brought him here.”

“You brought him here for twenty dollars!” I
responded, heatedly.

“I did. But I didn’t bring him here to kill
anyone. I didn’t know what happened in here until the next
day.”

“What do you mean you didn’t know what
happened? Mom was beat up in here. He left her laying in here
unconscious, and then went into the orphanage and kidnapped her
baby!”

Ully was shaking his head. “It didn’t happen
that way.”

“Well then what happened?”

Ully turned away again. He seemed almost
despondent. “I was waiting down there.” Ully indicated the ravine.
“He was in here five minutes, tops. That was it. He never went to
any other building.”