Shades of Eva (51 page)

And before I could offer Amelia a reply, she
hushed me. “There are a few more things you need to know,” she told
me, “before we put this to bed. There are some things you need to
know about me.”

***

The bonfire had sizzled to a low flame. I
dumped the last of my tea into the fire, and followed Amelia back
inside the house. I didn’t know it right then, but the South Bend
Tribune and the River Bluff Gazette were about to make my uncle
Ully’s story front page news for the day.

According to Ully’s new upheaval, Amelia and
I were working together to locate a former friend of Ully’s, as
well as a missing brother of mine. And that, of course, was true—to
some extent. We’d found Elmer, although Ully wasn’t admitting to
it. It was a worst case scenario: my search for my mother’s rapist
had now turned into a search for me.

Heading into the living room, Amelia didn’t
seem concerned. In fact, she tried to reassure me. “Our
documentation is in place,” she said. “And we have Elmer’s remains.
Whether or not Ully wants to confess in public is one thing—”

“That’s right,” I said, my spirit suddenly
lightening. “We have his confession on tape.”

She gestured us on toward the staircase and
started up. When she reached the upper landing, she turned back to
me and extended a hand as if she had something else to show me.

We walked back into my mother’s bedroom.
Amelia crossed to a dresser in the room’s corner and opened the top
drawer. Amelia withdrew another manila envelope and handed it to
me, then told me to open it. The last time I opened an envelope
like that, it had my mother’s autopsy report in it. I almost didn’t
want to take it, but I did.

I withdrew a photograph. It was a
five-by-seven inch picture of a white female, approximately thirty
years old, who I had never seen.

Amelia smiled. “This is Sophia, Mitchell.
This was my friend.”

I took a good look at the picture. It was a
candid photograph of a young woman in Army fatigues, with
sunglasses on. She had a rifle suspended by a belt hanging over a
shoulder, and she looked angry. Surprised, more like, as if whoever
had taken the picture had startled her. She was pretty. She looked
confident.

“What happened to her?” I said.

Just as quickly as Amelia’s smile had
appeared, it vanished. She began rubbing her temples as if she had
momentarily forgotten something vital. She took in a deep breath
and moved across the room and sat down on the boxed springs. She
laid down facing the wall, as if she didn’t want to look at me.

I sat down beside her and put a hand on her
head and swept her hair back.

After a few moments, Amelia seemed to soften
some. I felt her body relax a bit. Her breathing slowed. I put a
gentle kiss on the back of her neck and then one on her ear. I took
in the scent of her perfume tinged with just a hint of the bonfire,
and just listened.

She turned over to look at me. She had tears
in her eyes. I told her it was okay, that whatever she was about to
tell me was not going to scare me away.

“Sophia and I were together in the Army.
She’s been working for me. I sent her to the Caymans to cash out
the Wilson account. She did, but she never made it back to her car.
Your uncle must have sent someone to the Caymans to watch the bank.
She was gunned down, and the money was taken. I’m sorry,
Mitchell.”

I didn’t respond right away. I didn’t care
about the money. I wasn’t sure what to say, because it wasn’t just
Ully who had supposedly gotten Sophia killed. Amelia and I were as
much to blame. I’d set the penalty on my uncle, and Amelia brought
the penalty to bear, and for that want of revenge, Sophia paid the
ultimate price.

Amelia must have sensed the blood drain from
my body, just as it must have drained from hers when she got the
news of Sophia’s death.

But she wasn’t finished. “There’s something
else you need to know about me before we finish this. My name’s not
Amelia. It never was.”

I picked up Amelia’s left arm and looked at
the tattoo there, the one with the two dancers. It read, Joe and
Abby.

“Abby is you, isn’t she?” I said, gesturing
to the ink there.

Amelia smiled. “Sophia was helping me as
long as I didn’t hurt anyone.”

“You haven’t hurt anyone,” I countered.

Amelia—or Abby—shook her head. “I have hurt
someone, Mitchell. Someone has been hurt very badly.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Sophia
wasn’t—

Abby cut me off. “I’m not talking about
Sophia. I’m talking about someone else.”

“Who then?”

“Take a guess!”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do. You’ve been asking about him
since Neah Bay.”

And then it dawned on me. “The fourth man?
The shooter?”

Abby didn’t respond right away. I took her
silence as a yes.

“You killed him,” I said. It was a
statement, not a question.

“Yes, I killed him, Mitchell.”

Sometime in 1991, somewhere
near
Fallujah in Iraq, Abby and five other MPs were dispatched to a
security detail near an Iraqi prison camp. She was riding in an
armored vehicle when it strayed off course. She and five other
officers were overtaken by a group of Iraqi fighters. Two soldiers
in her outfit were killed. She and the remaining three were
separated, and each taken to different locations. She was held
hostage for twelve days in a home in a nearby residential village.
Abby was thrown like trash into the cellar of that home. She was
interrogated and beaten. She said her captors found her cries
amusing. They entertained themselves with them, and by caning
her.

“Your scars!” I said. “That’s how you got
your scars?”

Abby nodded.

“One day there was a knock at a door
upstairs,” she continued. “I could hear scrambling and then a man
came down. He gagged me and then bound my hands and feet, then
hurried upstairs and locked the cellar door. And then I heard
gunfire.”

A local rebel who’d heard about the incident
and suspected some of the MPs were being housed nearby, reported
his suspicions to Iraqi civilians working covertly with the US
forces, who then did door-to-doors looking for the prisoners. The
search team was ordered to sweep each house in the village. When
they got to the house where Abby was being held, a young man posted
to guard the premises got scared and opened fire on the team.

Two MPs were killed, leaving Sophia
Bermicelli—Abby’s friend and sister MP—and one other soldier to
finish the sweep. The Iraqi guard was taken out.

“There was a woman who lived in the house,”
Abby said. “I saw her once a day when she’d bring me meals. She was
indifferent to me, but not mean. I heard her and some other man
shouting at Sophia and the other American to get out. The Iraqi
woman had a little girl—a daughter. Her name was Annan. She brought
me water, sometimes. I could hear her crying. Things got quiet and
I thought they’d left. They would have, if it wasn’t for
Annan.”

Sophia had told Abby that as they were
removing the bodies from the house, the little girl pointed to a
rectangular rug on the living room floor.

“Sophia said time stopped,” Abby said. “You
could hear a pin drop. The cellar entrance was a door in the floor
beneath that rug. Annan was a sweet little girl, and they killed
her for giving me up.”

Abby began crying and wouldn’t stop. I did
my best to comfort her, but I didn’t know what to do or what to
say. Between sobs she was saying, “Everyone around me dies,
Mitchell. Everyone!”

“That’s not true!” I kept saying, holding
her as tightly as I could. “That’s not true. I’m not dead, and
you’re not dead. Don’t talk like that!”

Abby wiped at her tears and eventually
calmed. She continued on with her story. She spent a few days in an
infirmary somewhere outside that town. It was there, recovering,
she said, where she learned that the little girl had been killed
for giving her up. “She died for me,” Abby said. “She saved me and
she died for it.”

Abby’s disappearance had been devastating to
her family. While she was being held captive, officials had
notified her parents of her capture, and upon hearing the news her
father collapsed and went into a mild coma. This couldn’t get much
worse, I remember thinking. But it did.

Tests revealed her father had suffered a
stroke, and had been suffering from lung cancer for quite some
time. By the time the news of her rescue had gotten to him, he had
just hours to live. The medics at the infirmary broke the news to
Abby, and against their wishes, Abby took the next flight home.

Her father died just hours before she
arrived.

The funeral was that week. She told me that
Anna Norris from the Asylum had attended, just as she had attended
her aunt Emily’s funeral several years ago, just as she would
attend her mother’s funeral, and those of Joe’s and Amy’s in the
subsequent years to come.

“Anna was nice like that,” Abby said.
“Considerate. I always appreciated that about her. She knew a lot
about her patients, and she cared to check up on them and their
families.”

Abby said that her mother was beside herself
after her husband died, and went into a depression. After that, she
was never the same. It made me think of my grandfather Oren, and
how he must have felt when he learned that his wife, Ida, had
died.

A year after her father died, Abby was
forced to take a leave of absence from the Army to care for her
mother. A few months later, her mother recuperated, somewhat, but
Abby never went back to the Army. She landed a job with the Holland
police force in Michigan. That’s when she met Joe. There was a
short engagement and within the year, Abby and Joe were married and
Amy was born.

“Amy was the light of everyone’s eyes,” Abby
said. “Amy loved her father and her grandmother, but Mom started
going downhill again. She wasn’t eating. She wasn’t sleeping. She’d
just pace the house like she was lost, like she was searching for
someone—and I suppose she was. She was looking for Dad.”

Abby turned her right hand over to show me
her arm. She pointed to a small series of numbers etched into the
holly which wound around Amy’s tiny tattooed face. It was a date:
April 24, 1993, which was little Amy’s birthday.

And there was another series of numbers in
another strand of holly: February 25, 1995.”

“What is this?” I said, referring to the
February 25th date.

“That’s when my mother was buried. That’s
when Amy and Joe were killed.”

Joe and Amy had been killed on the day of
Abby mother’s funeral. I could hardly comprehend the pain this must
have brought Abby on top of all the agony she’d been enduring.

“Sophia and another MP, his name’s
Christian, came home for Mom’s funeral. When it was over, they went
back to their hotel. Joe and I took Amy to a movie, and then to the
Dairy Queen for ice cream. That’s when our car was T-boned and Joe
and Amy were shot.

“I called Sophia. I was frantic. She sat
with me all night. Christian started looking for the men. It took
us a few weeks to find them, but we found them. Mom had asked me,
just before she died, to look into your mother’s case. After the
funeral I was driving this way and saw your Mom’s house was for
rent. So I rented it. I found your grandfather’s disappointments
room and sent Sophia out to look for you. That’s when Christian
found the shooter.

“He identified him as Jackson Greer, and
told me where he was staying. He told me to call the police, but I
didn’t.”

“You went to find him yourself.”

Amelia nodded. “Christian told me he was a
gang member and they’d probably want SWAT to bring him in. He’d
driven down into Indiana and was staying at an aunt’s house.”

“What happened?”

“I made a couple plans—for you, and for
Greer. I sent Christian up to Lansing to meet with someone to get
some fake IDs for you, and to get your pistol permit. I grabbed my
Beretta and drove down to Plymouth where Greer was. I watched the
address for about an hour and then he came out.”

“You confronted him.”

“I took him at gunpoint. I made him drive a
few miles away into the country. It was remote. Greer was trying to
bargain with me. Then he started crying. We were in a corn field. I
told him to get out and walk. There was a woods to the east and I
pointed him toward the trees. I didn’t know what I was going to do
at that point. I kept seeing a flash, like he was shooting Joe and
Amy all over again.

“I was so filled with hatred, Mitchell. I’ve
never felt that way before. Not even in Iraq. I expected it over
there. You don’t expect it here, not from your own people. Do you
understand?”

I was nodding. I did understand. You
expected killings in a war. You expected enemy fire. It was like
what happened in Oklahoma City. You didn’t expect your own citizens
to attack you in your own backyard.

“He started telling me he didn’t want to
shoot Joe and Amy, but they’d made him mad. He said he couldn’t
take hearing little kids cry, and that’s why he shot Amy. He was
apologizing, but he wasn’t sorry. I’d heard that fake sorrow one
too many times before.”

“What did you do?”

“I had him kneel beneath this weeping willow
tree and turn away from me. I shot him in the back of the head. I
put every bullet I had in him, just like you and your mother put
every bullet you had into Fred Elms. And then I buried him there,
in a shallow grave right next to that tree.”

Abby looked as though she was about to be
sick and began breathing heavily. I held her. There was nothing
else I could do. I asked her if Christian knew what she did.

“He knows,” Abby said. “He knows now. A
hunter’s dog uncovered Greer’s remains yesterday. They identified
him from some tattoos he had on his body. Police have been looking
for me ever since. My picture is all over the news. And guess who
recognized me?”