The Mountains Bow Down (13 page)

Neither Jack nor I said another word until we had turned the corner and stood alone by the elevators.

“You're buying this?” I said.

“You saw those pictures. Women throw themselves at that guy.”

“I hear envy.”

“Probably.”

He said it so calmly it deflected my blow. Which only annoyed me more. “Jack, I saw her. She wasn't some weeping willow. That woman took herself—and her worthless husband—from rags to riches, literally.”

“And the pictures upset her. Can you imagine the pain she must have felt?”

“Then why bring them on board?” I hit the Down button.

“I don't know. But I checked his bathroom. He's got a monster prescription for Viagra and that stuff for thinning hair. She was taking Ambien, which might have made her spacey but not suicidal. I also checked the garbage.”

“Thank you,” I said begrudgingly.

“I don't think he killed her, Harmon. He truly believes she took herself out because he didn't love her anymore.”

“But sends out a self-glorifying press release.”

“He's an actor.”

I reached past him, pressing the button again. “He's practically dancing on her grave.”

“Actors are narcissists.”

“They lie for a living.”

“Have you ever seen one of his movies?” Jack asked.

“No.”

The elevator
bing
ed, then opened. It was empty.

“Watch one of his movies. He's not that good a liar. And he's a drunk. He would've messed up the story by now. But he's repeating it word for word.”

“Rehearsed.”

The elevator stopped at Deck Twelve and two couples shuffled inside. One of the men used a walker. Jack and I pressed ourselves to the mirrored back wall. As the door closed, Jack leaned over, whispering in my ear.

“You're dying to know how I got him to talk.”

“I can imagine.”

“I apologized.”

Staring at the numbers above the doors, feeling his breath on my hair, I decided this was the world's slowest elevator. “Apologized for what?”

“For the way you treated him.”

I turned. “You did what—?”

His face was inches away and he was grinning. “They're all narcissists. I told him he was right and you were wrong and he opened like a spigot. Spilled everything.”

Our next stop was Deck Ten, where two more couples got on. They wore phillumenist name tags.

“Five, please,” said a gray-haired woman.

“We're all going to five,” shouted the man with the walker.

Jack scooted closer, making room for the woman on his right side. “Why did you get engaged?” he asked.

I stared at the numbers, wondering if the elevator was defective.

“You won't tell me who he is?”

I did the calculus. The number of people onboard, divided by the number of elevators, then factoring in the disproportionately high percentage of passengers eligible for AARP—all the people who couldn't use the stairs—and when the door opened, we had only reached Deck Nine. Two more couples shuffled inside.

No more elevators, I decided.

Since I wasn't talking, Jack had struck up a conversation with the elderly woman next to him. She kept nodding at what he said, her trifocals flashing under the lights.

“And I'm heartbroken,” Jack was saying. “She went and got engaged to somebody else.”

Her wrinkled face melted with pity. “Oh, you poor thing!”

My face was enflamed, my lungs begged for air. When the elevator finally opened on Deck Five, the men turned, helping their wives out while Jack held the door for them.

“Hot dog!” exclaimed a man named Bill. His name tag said he was a phillumenist from Florida. Snapping his fingers, he escorted his wife to the atrium where a swing band played to a sea of white hair. “Listen to that, honey!”

Jack and I waited for the last of them to leave.

“Want to dance?” he asked.

“No. I want to know what's wrong with you.”

“I can tell you over a drink.”

“Over my dead body.”

“On this cruise, Harmon, that's not a joke.”

I checked my watch. Geert's curfew was 10:00
PM
—no “bothering” passengers after that. It was now four minutes to, and the ship docked tomorrow in Juneau at 5:00
AM
.

“Did you call the Juneau office?” I asked.

But he was watching the old folks dance, a faint smile on his face. The music played like oscillating ribbons of sound.

“He's an old pal from Quantico,” Jack said finally. “He said he'll meet us at 6:30. Come on, Harmon, one dance?”

“He'll have background checks on the movie people?” I asked.

“Harmon, listen to that.” He moved his head to the beat. “That's ‘Mack the Knife.'”

“And this is Good Night Jack.”

His reply was cast to my retreating back and I almost turned around. It was what he said and how he said it.

“Sweet dreams, Harmon.”

But I kept walking, past the art gallery closed up for the night, and the pastry café, and though the music began to fade, I could still hear the singer looping back to the song's chorus, going over those shark teeth pearly white, how Mack he keeps them outta sight. And as I headed to my cabin, I rubbed my hands over my bare arms, smoothing down a sudden case of goose bumps.

In the great white north in June, ten o'clock at night wasn't really night. Around the edge of our blackout drapes, the sun drew a golden line, reminding me that the world beyond was still glowing.

Beneath the window, my mother snuggled under a white duvet, her back turned to the nightstand between our beds. The phone blinked with messages and a slip of paper was stuck under the phone's base. Leaning into the window's ambient light, I read my mother's graceful handwriting.
Where are you? Where. Wear. Ware
.

I stared down at her curled form. Her breathing was steady, slow enough to tell me she was gone to the world. Her word riddles, the lettered solitaire, was no game. Her mind was fracturing, and I vowed to spend time with her tomorrow.

Picking up the phone, tiptoeing through the dark, I stretched the phone cord to our small closet and pushed the message button.

It was DeMott. And his voice sounded close, as if he was hiding here with me.

“I'm trying the room phone,” he said, “since you're not answering your cell.”

At first I didn't mind when DeMott began calling my cell phone several times a day. I was just grateful he agreed I should take this vacation by myself. But his need for constant contact began to remind me why I wanted to get away. The relentless questioning, the dismay when I needed solitude. The inability to appreciate FBI work. And now, with Judy Carpenter's death, I had a legitimate reason for not returning his calls—but couldn't tell him. It was an open case, and DeMott complained that I worked too much, that I didn't know how to “just live.”

“Richmond's on high broil,” he drawled. Weather was a favored topic, probably because nothing else changed at Weyanoke. Occupied by Fieldings since the early 1700s, his family's plantation on the James River was a fabled estate, where Robert E. Lee once danced the Virginia reel across the walnut floors and where a Confederate cannonball still lodged in the dining room's brick wall. DeMott wanted us to get married on Weyanoke's lawn. But the battle over that was nothing compared to the fight over where we would live as man and wife. Just the thought of living at Weyanoke made me hyperventilate.

“And we've got fireflies at night, your favorite,” he continued. “I sit out on the porch and watch them light up the dark, and I think of you.”

His desultory Southern voice never rushed, never sounded urgent. The voice that turned weather into a narrative. And now, listening to him describe the night, I pressed the phone to my ear. I loved his voice.

I loved him.

“Tell your mama her dog's happier than a pig in mud,” he said.

Madame, my mom's dog. DeMott was taking care of her while we were away.

“That creature loves running these fields, sniffing out the rabbits, jumping in the river.” He paused. “Raleigh, you're going to love it too. I promise. It'll be different than what you think.”

I dropped my head. My heart ached.

“I've put pressure on you,” he said. “And I'm sorry. We don't have to hurry. You just enjoy your vacation. I mean it. And when you come home, I'll be waiting. I love you. Call me. Bye.”

The arid sound of a dead line rushed past, the nothingness of nowhere. And nobody. Still, I held the phone to my ear and calculated the time difference. Four hours ahead of Alaska, it was past 2:00
AM
at Weyanoke. His sister Mac would say I had no manners, then harp on it for days. Yet another hurdle for us: Mac, his sister who kept me atop her enemies list.

Replacing the phone on the nightstand, I stuck to the bedtime routine. Brush teeth, wash face, and ignore that question begging for an answer.
You can't return your fiancé's call and you're relieved. Wasn't that another bad sign?

I pulled the covers up tight and listened to the ship sliding through the Inside Passage. The ocean brushed against the side, whooshing and splashing, and once again I thought of Judy Carpenter.

I wondered if she was completely dead when she was hung there, or if her last moments were spent listening to this cold brush of sound, the silver splash of ocean as it escorted her to an end of days.

Chapter Ten

A
t 6:15 am Wednesday morning, the Juneau gift shops were already open, offering passengers the souvenir T-shirts and baseball caps and jewelry and native Ulu knives.

But I was looking for a place called the Hurff A. Saunders Federal Building.

“I know where it is,” Jack insisted. “If we hit Evergreen Cemetery, we've gone too far.”

Under the sun shining as though clouds didn't exist, Juneau clung to the bottom of two mountains, Mt. Roberts and Mt. Juneau. Near ninety degrees, the slopes fell with the long and lush lines of weighted skirts. Between the shops along the waterfront, strips of wooden stairs stitched up the hillsides, embroidering small houses to green forests. On the other side, across a wide band of water called Gastineau Channel, another mountain rose to an island, Douglas Island, and as Jack and I climbed the hill that was Main Street, I gazed at the beige sand rimming the shore. This landscape of fjords and steep mountains was far too young for such fine beaches. More likely the sand was a byproduct of the town's once-prodigious gold mines, when the bedrock was crushed and pulverized to release the precious metal within. But the beach reminded me of another hike I planned and wasn't taking, to the abandoned Perseverance Mine.

When I saw the federal building, it didn't exactly lift my spirits. The place was an aesthetic crime, especially amid such fulsome natural beauty. A block of steel the color of tarnished brass, the rectangular building rose nine stories from the street like some sick advertisement for all the soul-deadening bureaucracies inside, all those government agencies whose acronyms could be strung together like boxcars. EPA. DEA. OSHA. NOAA.

FBI.

Jack held the door. “It's called the SOB.”

“Pardon?”

“State Office Building. SOB.”

The FBI's resident agency occupied a corner of the ninth floor. A messy ten-by-ten room with two desks, the dark brown carpet couldn't hide the coffee and mud stains, or the winter salt-melt that covered it like dingy doilies.

Agent Kevin Barnes slapped Jack on the back—hard. Facial hair was rare among agents, unless they were working undercover. But the beard on Barnes's face was so thick his gray eyes seemed to peer from a brown fur mask. Dry mud coated the bottom of his jeans and his black sweater frayed around the collar.

He plunked down in a chair behind his desk. The seat was crisscrossed with duct tape. “How long have you known Romeo here?” he asked.

“Long enough to know he's trouble.”

“Barnes,” Jack said, “did you run the background checks or not?”

“Have you seen his plane?” Barnes kept his gray eyes on me.

I nodded.

“The paperwork?” Jack said. “You didn't do it, did you?”

“I did it,” Barnes said. “NCIS and CCH.”

National Criminal Information System, for outstanding warrants. And Computerized Criminal History, to reveal any arrests, convictions, sentences served, date of release from prison, etc. The CCH would also give us physical descriptions and personal data such as birth records and social security numbers.

“Thank you,” I said. “That's really helpful.”

“My pleasure.” His smile was an amber tear across the fur mask. “I also called a friend who's a detective with LAPD. Before I escaped to here, I worked in the LA field office.” He leaned back until he was almost horizontal, then suddenly lifted his feet, catapulting forward. At the last second, he grabbed the edge of the desk, preventing a collision with his computer monitor. “After working in LA, I can tell you for a fact that movie people are prone to doing all kinds of stupid stuff. So these records are long, and eventually boring. Speaking of which, you know Jack's reputation, right?”