Shades of Eva (53 page)

When asked what Ully meant by it being in
the Institution’s best interest, Ully said that his sister once
claimed that her two sons were going to return someday, kill Eva’s
brother (which was Ully), her rapist (whom she alleged was my
brother), and burn the Institution to the ground.

Ully said that Eva predicted this
retribution in a poem, and that Angstrom had recited this poem to
him when she was interrogating him. He also claimed that she beat
him about the head, and he had the wounds to prove it. He
remembered the poem because his sister once recited it to him after
her son was abducted. He said the only way Angstrom would have
gotten the poem was through her connection to Mitchell.

Of course it all sounded incredible to
police—I know that because the chief investigator out of River
Bluff, the man who would end up handling this madness, would tell
me just that. His name was Hubert Ramsey.

When Ramsey called me to make me aware of
Ully’s story, and his relationship to this security guard whose
true name, I was informed, was Mitchell Rennix, my thoughts turned
to my client. I had no choice but to tell Ramsey that I’d been
counseling a patient by that very name.

I also had no choice but to give him the
phone number Mitchell had given me. Police informed me it was a
bogus number.

I sat there shaking my head at the whole
thing. It reeked of conspiracy and it was frightening given Ully’s
statement regarding what was motivating these people.
Notwithstanding the $1.2-million extortion plot, police were in
agreement with Ully that the primary object for these two was the
capture, if not murder, of my brother, and they’d used me, they
believed, to try and get to him.

I felt a certain sense of relief in that I’d
not been harmed in this charade, thus far, and a simultaneous dread
because the milieu was far from over.

I didn’t liken Mitchell to be this cunning,
but it wasn’t the first time I’d underestimated a patient. But
again I wasn’t sure who the hell I’d been counseling. Was it
Mitchell or was it one of his alters?

Maybe Elmer was alive and running the show.
Maybe it was Eva sitting in the chair across from me. Maybe these
were Eva’s sons working together to find my brother. Maybe her poem
was about to come true. The whole thing was simply terrifying.

The next picture on screen was
a
picture of my Eva. I call her mine because since 1950, I’d never
felt closer to her. She was in her thirties in this picture and had
the look of someone very troubled, but there was no mistaking who
she was. I knew her the instant I saw her picture.

As for my brother’s photograph, his pictured
eyes were staring at me as if they were pleading for an end to
this. I couldn’t help feeling a bit of rage toward him. Something
had told me that Eva wasn’t lying when she was young. Something
told me that ignoring her in the way that I had was going to come
back to haunt me.

Allie, however, seated right beside me all
the while, saw something other than pleading in Fred’s eyes. She
said that when she looked closely at the image of my then youthful
brother’s Army ID photo, she saw mischief at best, and at worst she
saw the eyes of a criminal.

“Why would he run off,” she was asking, “if
he didn’t do it? I know this is your brother, Ben, but why would he
go AWOL and just disappear if he wasn’t guilty of these
things?”

It was hard to hear that sort of question
about your own brother, and there was no easy answer to it except
that he must have been scared.

Allie disagreed. “He wouldn’t run away from
a battle or a gunfight in Korea, so why would he run from a teenage
girl?”

Fred wasn’t sensitive to the moral issues
surrounding war, and he did not object to our country’s fight.
Maybe he was simply afraid of jail. I could only shrug my shoulders
as to why Fred had truly gone AWOL, which was the response Ully had
given police to that question. Shrugged shoulders.

I turned the television off and sat back in
my chair, waiting for the inevitable to come. I remember Allie just
staring at me, waiting I suppose for the explanations that came
like pulled teeth. I just stared back at her from the fog I was in.
I’m sure I must have had the look of a man who’d just had his life
turned upside down.

“And this Mitchell Rennix—or Chester
Imil—whoever, called you for some counseling a few days ago?” Allie
asked.

I nodded yes.

I’d explained to her that my patient was
having a hard time remembering such things as his mother’s name, an
amnesia which now seemed all too convenient in retrospect. He was
investigating her—and me—and he knew that I wouldn’t likely take
him as a patient if I knew who he really was. I suppose it was the
same reason he hired into Coastal State using an alias. They
wouldn’t have taken him, either.

Information does sometime come at a price, I
remember thinking. Sometimes that price is anonymity.

Allie’s thoughts turned to my safety. “Is
this Mitchell out to hurt you?”

I wasn’t sure, but I said no in the most
definite way I could muster.

By the look of concern on Allie’s face, I
don’t think she believed me.

I stood up and moved to the kitchen to pour
myself some tea. In my mind I was rehashing Mitchell’s epiphany
that his mother hadn’t shot his rapist in that shed—that he had. I
was also considering the possible whereabouts of my brother. He
could be dead. He could be living an ex-patriot’s life in another
country. He might have returned to the States and assumed a
different identity. Maybe he was watching the news just like Allie
and I were watching the news, shaking his head in contempt the way
we were shaking our heads.

Anonymity might also be the price of
freedom, I thought.

Fred never returned to the States following
the war as far as I knew. I’d never seen him since the war. If I
had, I would have certainly told police. He defected during, which
made him a war criminal at the time. Twenty-two other soldiers
defected from the Korean War, as well—mostly into China. Fred was
branded a traitor in the States by many of those who knew him.
After 1954, I never saw my brother again.

But there was something left out of the news
summary. I had to tell Allie the whole story—not just the story
most convenient to tell.

Allie asked what ever came of the
investigation into Elmer’s abduction.

I told her police never found him. I told
her everything save the most important thing—that Eva and I had
made love. I left that out like my client had left out a few
inconvenient truths.

But I couldn’t leave it out for long. The
subject was hanging in the air like a raincloud. I could tell Allie
sensed something was amiss. You get a sense for these things when
talking is your business. She wanted to know how much I truly knew
about Eva’s child, and how much, if anything, I had covered for my
brother.

“I didn’t cover up any rape,” I told her.
But that wasn’t what Allie was thinking. She was wondering if Eva
had ever confided the rape to me. That was a different
question.

“No,” I told her. “She never told me
directly. I learned of her allegation through police like everybody
else after the abduction. She kept it to herself. I loved her,
Allie. I would have done something had she told me that.”

I sat back in my chair and sipped my tea.
Allie just stared at me, stunned, I think, by the verb I had chosen
to describe what Eva meant to me. I had said it so off-handedly
that I hadn’t even realized I’d used the word love. 

Allie asked me to repeat what I said, and so
I did. “I loved her,” I echoed. That time I heard the word. Love
was the right word. It was the way I felt for Eva back then.

“But then again,” I added, apologetically,
“I wasn’t available to her.”

Allie gave me a disappointed look to add to
the one of surprise. “What do you mean you weren’t available?”

“It was a crazy time, Allie. Eva was going
through a tough time to say the least, and I was heading off to
Notre Dame. I was a scared kid.”

Allie nodded, but not very
sympathetically.

Surely she could understand the idea of
being scared. What I think she was disappointed at, however, was
the idea of being unavailable. Allie could have pursued her
interrogation, but she didn’t. She left it there—at least for the
moment. My unavailability to Eva was the space that allowed for
Allie and I. Allie knew that. That space, and what it meant to our
marriage, seemed to tame some of that interrogative ire of hers.
Our future, our past, our everything—they had always, each and
every one, depended on me being unavailable to Eva, or to any prior
loves. Unavailability allowed me into college. It allowed me my
freedom. It brought Allie and me together.

So that’s what I told Allie—that I ignored
Eva, that I knew she had a baby, and that I had broken things off.
And now, after all these years, it appeared that there was a chance
that this child was alive.

To Allie, it appeared that my unavailability
had turned into something else—something that reeked of
abandonment—and I was quite sure Mitchell, or his brother if he
were alive, weren’t too happy with that.

“What happened to that girl, Lev? What
happened to Eva?”

Allie’s was a question I had been asking
myself for many years but had simply ignored. I’m not sure why I
reacted so defensively to it, but hearing that question out loud
provoked an anger in me as questions often do when they dig at old
scars.

“Damn it, Allie! Don’t do that!” I slammed
my cup down and threw my head back in frustration. “I’m not the one
to blame here!”

“But you said you loved her.”

“I did love her.”

“Did you…did you and her ever—”

I knew what she was asking, but I didn’t
want her to have to ask it. How do you tell your wife what I was
about to tell Allie? How did I tell my wife the truth after all of
those years?

I closed my eyes and mustered a long sigh. I
suppose I deserved this. For all my presumed wisdom, it seemed to
pale in comparison to Allie’s intuition.  She suspected, and
she deserved the truth.

“We made love, Allie. Is that what you
wanted to hear? We made love.”

I looked at my wife of nearly forty years. I
looked to her for anger, for forgiveness, for something other than
the detached gaze she was giving me. Whatever I was looking for, it
didn’t come right away.

She merely asked, “How many times?”

“One time,” I replied, “and now, after all
these years, there’s a chance that I might be a father. I’m sorry,
Allie.”

Allie stood and walked to the stairway,
looked back at me with the saddest expression I’d ever seen on her
face, and said, “You need to see this client again. He needs to
come clean with you, Lev, and you need to come clean with him.”

Then she left me as alone as I’d ever
been.

***

Thursday, April 25, 12:13 a.m.

Ben Levantle

It hadn’t been an hour since Allie had
strolled off to bed when police called back. It was Detective
Ramsey from River Bluff PD again. He had excitement in his voice,
as if things were coming together.

In the last half hour police had received an
anonymous fax from a yet unidentifiable Internet café patron in
Indianapolis, IN. The information in that fax left me feeling
confused, frightened, and relieved all at once. It was a two-page
summary of results from a couple paternity tests that had been
completed at an anonymous DNA testing lab.

Apparently the DNA of two men—I was one of
them—had been compared to the presumed DNA of a sample bearing the
moniker: the Elmer sample. That’s what police were calling it.
Mitchell’s father, Brad Rennix, was the other comparison.

“This is allegedly Mitchell’s brother,”
Ramsey said.

“Elmer with no last name?” I commented.

“Nothing’s been verified until we verify it,
but according to these people you aren’t the daddy, and neither is
Brad Rennix.”

It was way too early for relief. “I haven’t
given anyone any DNA sample,” I told Ramsey. “It can’t be
mine.”

“Well, they seem to think it is. We’ll need
you to come in and give us some DNA material if you don’t mind and
we can compare your sample to their pattern. Brad’s already given
us a cheek swab. We’ve got forensics in Lansing ready to evaluate
everything. Since this is interstate, we called the FBI, too. We
can’t really draw any conclusions until these people decide to turn
the remains over, if these are, indeed, the human remains of Eva’s
firstborn.”

“This is what Ully thought they were going
to do,” I added. “Paternity testing.”

 “But he said there wasn’t any baby
there.”

“Maybe there was, and maybe he’s changed his
mind and he’s recanting.”

“Like I said, we’re going to need some
harder evidence than what we have. We just don’t know, yet. There’s
no way to determine who’s who right now, so this is all just
conjecture until we get some real leads, a tip, or we find these
creeps.”

“What’s Brad Rennix’s opinion of all
this?”

 “He isn’t doing so well. Took a room
at the halfway house up at Coastal State where Ully is.”

I almost laughed. This was turning into some
bazaar homecoming for Eva’s family. It was almost comical.

“He claimed paternity for Elmer back in
1953,” Ramsey explained. “He even signed a document attesting to
it. He’s probably scared out of his gourd.”

“But, according to the fax, he was ruled
out.”

“Outright ruled out! Two ways to look at
that, however: one, he’s not it. Lucky man. And two: he was lying.
He claimed Eva’s son in 1953. If these people are as sympathetic to
Eva as I suspect they are, they don’t appreciate lies of any kind,
particularly those that make Eva look nuts.”