Читать книгу Coyote Fork - James Wilson - Страница 8

4

THERE WAS ONLY ONE LISTING for Voss in the Riddick white pages: Michael G. & Virginia M., 2216 Middlefield Way. When I dialed the number a woman answered after just one ring, as if she’d been waiting for someone to call. She sounded shell-shocked but not unfriendly. I explained who I was, and said I’d like to ask her a few questions about her daughter. That would be fine, she said. Eleven tomorrow?

In the morning I looked into flights to London. There were plenty of seats available for the next week or so. If, after all, the Hazel Voss story led nowhere, I could simply cut my losses and head for home. I packed, grabbed a quick do-it-yourself breakfast in the hotel lobby, then checked out and fell into my car.

Riddick, California (pop. 6724) was one of those small American towns that seem to have been set down completely arbitrarily, as if it had just fallen off the back of a lorry en route to where it should have been built. The fringes were a shapeless straggle of scruffy shopping centers and boarded-up businesses. The main street had the provisional air of a Hollywood western set that was about to be replaced by a sci-fi metropolis. At one end was a flower shop called Stalk of the Town. On an impulse I went in and bought a bunch of lilies. It seemed like the sort of community where that kind of gesture might still be appreciated.

Ten minutes later I was in Middlefield Way, a clutch of unassuming, almost-identical little houses, all with picture windows and aluminum siding. Mask out the tropical-green hills and the blue sky, and you could have been almost anywhere in America. There were basketball hoops on the garages, and here and there a stars and stripes clinging to a pole in the front yard, as if it no longer had the confidence to let rip and show the world what it was made of. It was hard to imagine the street as a hotbed of political activism. I decided not to mention the Ohlone, at least to begin with. It would be safer just to stick with Anne.

I drove slowly along the street, identified 2216, then turned and parked a few houses along. I was still early, so I stayed put for a few minutes, trying to picture Hazel Voss’s brief life here: playing with the neighbors’ kids; perhaps watching Sesame Street in the family room; walking or taking the yellow bus to school; driving with her mother to the mall to shop or see a film or go bowling. The whole dreamlike panoply—dreamlike to a British eye, at any rate—of small-town America. And there must be plenty of worse places to grow up. But it was a tiny—I cast around for the word—a tiny snow-dome world. Not much of a preparation for finding yourself trapped in the labyrinth. Poor kid.

Snow-dome, said Anne. Nice touch. That’s something I’ll bet TOLSTOY can’t do: metaphor.

I clenched the wheel and screwed up my face, making my ears hum. When I relaxed it again, she’d gone.

“Please,” I said. “Let’s keep it like that. I can’t do whatever I’m supposed to do if I’m constantly doubting what I see or hear.”

I got out and walked back to 2216. Someone had tried to give the small front yard a lived-in feel by populating it with a miniature windmill, a spotted deer, a fiberglass horse-and-groom. But they were all being overrun by an invading army of weeds and grass, which only added to the forlornness. I picked my way through the tussocks to the porch. In the window hung a plastic sign, tricked out to resemble pottery: Bless our Home. The Little Prayer on the Housie.

Anne laughed: that familiar sound, like one of those old-fashioned tin openers hacking open a can of beans. It was so real this time that I glanced round, half-expecting to find her there.

“I’m following your instructions,” I shouted into the emptiness. “Now leave me in peace.”

I pushed the doorbell, setting off a few jaunty bars of Yankee Doodle somewhere inside the house, followed by an outburst of furious high-pitched barking. A woman appeared. She was late forties, wearing glasses and a frilly housecoat, her bare dough-stick legs potted in a pair of flounced slippers. Her face was a pale splodge, like a child’s drawing. The only definition came from an uneven daub of red lipstick.

“I’m Robert Lovelace,” I said.

“Ginny. Ginny Voss.”

As she took my hand, a little white dog ran towards us, yapping. It had mournful eyes, and long silky ears framing its face, giving it the haughty demeanor of some bewigged Restoration fop.

“That’s OK, Dulcie,” wheezed Ginny Voss. “He’s a friend.”

“These are for you,” I said, giving her the flowers. “I was so sorry to hear about your loss.”

She stared at them for a moment, as if she weren’t quite sure what they were. Then she mumbled “Thank you,” and led me into the living-room. It was dominated by a bulbous blue sofa facing an outsize TV. A breakfast bar marked the frontier with a small kitchen. One empty cup on it, one empty plate. No sign of a husband. No sign of anyone else at all. The whole place had the stuffy, dust-and-air-freshener smell of a cheap motel room.

“You say you’re from England, right?” she said.

I nodded.

“So they heard about Hazel all the way over there, huh? The other side of the pond?”

“Well, I hadn’t, to be honest. I’m only here because of a friend of mine.” I hesitated. “A colleague. Anne Grainger?”

She pulled her mouth down, shook her head.

“It was Anne who got the ball rolling. Pointed me in this direction.”

She shivered and pressed her hands together. “Well, I don’t know if she realizes it, but you know what? I been praying for this. A journalist wants to write something about Hazel. So you tell her thank you from me, OK?”

I sucked my teeth.

“Is that a problem?”

“No,” I said. “Of course I will.”

“Or maybe I should write and tell her myself? I will, if you give me her address.”

“No, no, that’s fine. I’ll be glad to do it.”

She nodded. “You like some iced tea?”

“Yes. Or . . . or coffee, maybe?”

She glanced towards the kitchen. There was a coffee-maker on the work surface, but it was half-hidden behind a clutter of jars, its power cable coiled on the lid.

“If I can figure out how to make it,” she said. “That was Hazel’s. She loved coffee. But I never cared for it. So—”

“Iced tea’s fine.”

“Sure?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll be right back.”

Had Anne known that the trail would lead here? I looked round, trying to imagine her in this house. It was hard. She was too much of the grande dame. The dinginess, the hideous sofa, the picture of a white-robed Jesus holding a lamb, the stained-pine display cabinet cluttered with photos, fake flowers, a china puppy playing with a china kitten—it would have all made her uncomfortable. Talking to Ginny Voss would have been a huge effort for her. But, at the same time, it was easy to see why she would feel a responsibility for Ginny Voss—view her as one of the voiceless mass of decent “ordinary” people whose views needed to be defended against the sneers of the bien pensants.

I walked over to look at the photos on the cabinet. Most of them were of a young girl, presumably Hazel. Aged seven or eight, with a big gap in her upper teeth. A few years older, holding the little dog as a puppy and smiling hammily at the camera. About the same age, standing at a kitchen counter, dressed up like a chef, one arm curved proprietorially round a mixing bowl. Late teens, wearing a mortarboard and holding a rolled-up graduation certificate.

“Yes, that’s her,” said Ginny Voss, re-entering with a tray carrying two glasses and a packet of biscuits. “That’s my little girl.”

“When . . . When . . .”

“When did she do it? A few months back.”

“And did you have any idea?”

She shook her head.

“You didn’t think . . . you saw her, or anything?”

“How could I? She was away at school. First I heard was when the police came to the door.”

She sounded rattled, as if I’d accused her of some failing as a parent. I pointed at the picture of Hazel in the kitchen. It was the one where she was looking the happiest. “That’s a nice shot.”

Ginny Voss nodded. “She loved to bake, my baby. Ever since she was tiny.” She waved at the Oreos on the tray. “If she was here now, she’d have made something special. You can bet on it. And she’d be standing right there”—glancing towards the kitchen—“watching, to see if you liked them.”

“I’m sure I would.”

“Yeah, you would. She had angel hands. That’s what our pastor said. Her pies and cookies were good enough for the folks up in heaven.” For a moment a glacier seemed to spread up her neck, freezing her face. Then she blinked and said, “Sit down, why don’t you?”

We each took an end of the sofa. She handed me my iced tea. It looked like a urine sample.

“That was how this whole—” She shook her head. “You know, the Global Village thing. When it started. We didn’t know what it was. But all the kids at her school were going crazy for it, so of course she wanted to join too. And pretty soon she’d found this, this—”

“Community?”

“Yeah, this Global Village community of people who like to bake. Bakersfield, that’s what they call themselves. And they’d, you know, they’d talk about which brand of flour was best, and they’d trade recipes, and I don’t know what all. And at first we thought it was great. I mean, it wasn’t like Hazel had ever been real popular. You look the way she did, you’re never going to get to be a cheerleader or Homecoming Queen. I know, I was the same.”

“You’re being very hard—”

She shook her head. “I’m telling you the truth, is all.”

The dog whined and jumped up suddenly, its front paws on her knees.

“Yes, baby, you know who we’re talking about, don’t you? Come on, then. Come to Momma.” She patted her lap. The dog clambered up and lay there, shivering and whimpering. She stroked it abstractedly, as if she were smoothing the wrinkles out of a sheet.

“And she was always kind of shy, too”—looking down at the dog—“wasn’t she? So when she was growing up, she never had a whole lot of friends. And then suddenly, wham, seemed like she did. I have to go, Mom, she’d say. I’m telling Becky how to make raspberry muffins. Didn’t matter Becky was some place the other side of the country. They were still friends.”

She glanced curiously at me, as if she thought I might disagree.

“Yes, of course,” I said.

“But then she went off to college. It was OK to begin with. I mean, she was homesick, but you expect that, don’t you? Then for a while there she seemed real excited, a little bit hyper, you know what I mean? Everything was great, she loved the school, loved her professors. Maybe too much. This one guy, he’s just a plain old-fashioned radical, he gets her involved with these people call themselves Native American Indians. Oh Lonelies or something-or-other. Mike says, they’re no more Native American Indians than you or me, they’re just trying to get their hands on some of our hard-earned taxes. But you figure everyone goes through stuff like that when they’re young, don’t you? So we thought she’d grow out of it.”

She looked at me for corroboration, for reassurance that they hadn’t done the wrong thing. I nodded.

“But then, her sophomore year, she comes home for Thanksgiving, and she’s like this.” She flattened her cheeks between thumb and forefinger. “Like she’d gotten sick, and it was eating her up inside. After that, it just got worse and worse.”

She shook her head. The flesh around her eyes was puffy. The dog whined again and licked her hand. Now that she was starting to unburden herself, you could feel the energy building in her, like water suddenly released into a pipe.

“And I said to her, What is it, honey? Some boy treating you bad? And she says, I’m OK. And I say, No, you’re not. I can see that. Come on, you can tell your Mom. And she goes, I’m all right, OK? Real ratty. I never heard her like that before.”

“But this wasn’t the people on Bakersfield?”

“No, no, she’d gotten into another . . . what they call a dark community.” She paused, trying to get her voice under control. Suddenly the tears started to come. “If she’d just have told me, I could have done something. Hired someone to protect her. Take those guys down. I’d have sold the house if I had to. But I just didn’t know.”

She frisked herself, patting at sleeves and pockets. Finally she pulled a balled-up tissue from her cuff and blew her nose heavily.

“How could you?” I said. “Isn’t that the problem with these dark communities? There’s no way of finding out who they are?”

But her own train of thought was too powerful to be derailed. “You show them to me, give me a gun, I’ll pull the trigger myself,” she said. “What they did . . . I just can’t believe there’s people would do that. Not to an innocent kid. Tell her she’s special. Ask her to join this, like this exclusive club. And then, when she’s in, and she can’t get out again, just . . . Just . . . The things they said to her. You’re stupid. You’re ugly. Who you think is ever going to want to do it with you?”

A double shock: the words themselves and hearing her repeat them to someone she’d met fifteen minutes before. She must have felt it too, because her shoulders collapsed suddenly, and she dropped her face into her hands and started to howl. The dog leapt to safety. I suddenly found myself sliding along the sofa to put an arm round her. She leaned against me, pushing her head close to my nose. The familiar smell of loneliness and neglect—dirty hair and clothes; stale scent not quite hiding the lardy reek of unwashed skin—was so strong that I had to breathe through my mouth to avoid it. I caught a glimpse of my newly-polished brown shoes gleaming up at me from the blue shag carpet and thought, What the hell am I doing here?

“I never told anyone that before,” she said. “I don’t know why. It just kinda—”

I held her closer. “And this was after she became involved with the Ohlone? Who just happened to be campaigning against Global Village at the time?”

She nodded. “And you know what he said . . . the head guy . . . Evan Bone? He said . . . He said . . .” She exhaled unsteadily, then pulled away from me. “I’ll show you.”

Below the TV was a flat-pack cupboard. She opened it and drew out a wallet folder. It took her a few seconds to find what she was looking for.

“Here,” she said, handing it to me.

It was a cutting from the local paper. The headline was: Evan Bone: “Tragic Hazel Just One of Thousands.” Most of the story I knew already. The thunderbolt came at the end:

“At a press conference yesterday to announce plans for a new state-of-the-art extension to the Global Village headquarters, Evan Bone was asked what he would say to the family of Hazel Voss. He replied, ‘That’s not why we’re here.’ When the reporter repeated her question, he shrugged and said, ‘Global Village has 1.6 billion members. Statistically, you’d expect a few of them to take their own lives every year.’”

She was watching for my reaction. Nothing I could say would be equal to the task, so I just raised my eyebrows and pursed my lips.

“Course, later on, he tried to wriggle out of it,” she said.

“Unfortunate choice of words. Taken out of context.”

She nodded. “And that sort of covered it up. Made everyone forget. That’s why I been praying someone like you would come along. To write something. Show people what kind of a guy he really is. And then maybe they’ll stop using Global Village. Make him wish he’d never said that. That’s what I’m hoping, anyways.”

I re-read the cutting. How to respond without either being dismissive or raising false hopes?

“Well,” I said finally, “you’re right, it’s ugly stuff. The man is obviously a deeply unpleasant piece of work. But the problem is, if that were enough to destroy him, this would have done it, wouldn’t it? In his world, I suspect, being an unpleasant piece of work is the norm. They probably vie among themselves for the distinction of being the unpleasantest. So we’d need more. The smoking gun, the bloody fingerprints. Evidence that he’d actually physically killed someone, say. Or raped someone. Or—”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“It is true, trust me. I know from bitter experience just how hard it is to get an editor interested—”

“No, I mean what you said. About his world. I don’t think they are all the same. You know who Stewart Crothers is?”

“No.”

“He was the guy actually came up with the idea of Global Village. When him and Evan Bone were both at college. He wrote me. After . . .”

She slipped another sheet of paper from the wallet file and handed it to me. A print-out of an email.

Stew@StewartCrothers.net

Dear Ginny and Mike,

I read about your loss. I am truly sorry. I want you to know that my intention was for Global Village to be a way to bring people together, create a space where someone like Hazel could make friends, broaden her horizons and grow as a person.

Evan Bone evidently doesn’t see it that way. And I guess I should have known, because—right from the day we met, back at Stanford—he was always, shall we say, just a little bit different, a little bit strange. So no surprise, I suppose, that he has turned my idea into something more like a police state than an open network. It won’t be much comfort to you, I know, but if I could have just one wish, it would be that I had realized where he would go with it and never given him the chance.

Please share my condolences with your family and Hazel’s friends.

Best,

Stew Crothers

“You’re probably wondering where Mike is,” said Ginny Voss. “Fact is, he couldn’t stand it. Going on living here. Where we raised our little girl. And I couldn’t stand to leave. So he shipped out, and I stayed.”

“You mind if I take a photo of this?” I said. “Just for my own reference?”

“Go ahead.”

I got a couple of close-ups on my phone.

“You think it’s important?” said Ginny Voss.

“It all depends what he’s talking about, doesn’t it?”

“You going to ask him?”

I shrugged. “I could try. But I very much doubt if he’d tell me.”

“That’s what journalists do, isn’t it? Ask people questions? Get them to tell them stuff?”

“Men like Evan Bone and Stewart Crothers aren’t people. Not in the ordinary sense of the word. They’re completely protected. There’s no way of reaching them, if they don’t want to be reached.”

“Well, if he doesn’t, maybe there’s someone else would.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

I could hear the despair in her voice. She glanced round, scouring the blandness for a glimmer of inspiration. After a moment she turned back to me and said,

“You want to see her room?”

“All right.”

She stood up and led me through the kitchen into a narrow hall at the rear of the house. There were three identical doors, arranged in an L pattern. She pointed to the one at the end.

“In there.”

“You’re not going to—?”

She shook her head. She squeezed against the wall to let me past, then stood there, shoulders hunched, hands clasped, as if she were cold.

I pushed open the door. The room was dark, except for a few razor-slashes of sunshine slicing through the blinds. I switched on the light. The bed had been stripped, but everything else looked as if it was exactly as Hazel had left it. Despite the dust everywhere, there was still the Mary Celeste feel of something momentarily interrupted and waiting to be resumed. In one corner, two shaggy-haired dolls and a teddy bear sat together in a chair, stoically watching—as they must have done for years—the long ebb of childhood. All around them, evidence of the world that had taken its place: a little basket cluttered with make-up; a stack of fashion magazines; a poster—four smiling black-shirted boys, all still sticky from the chrysalis—for a band called Guyz! For a moment, looking at it, I could feel Hazel Voss in my arms, the bulk of her not-quite-formed body, the weight of all that unlived life.

“Jesus,” I muttered.

“Excuse me?” called Ginny Voss.

I switched off the light and went back into the hall. She’d opened the door to the next room and was standing just inside the entrance, one hand stroking her throat. Behind her I could see a double bed, spread with a pleated satin coverlet. Above it hung another Jesus, this time sans lamb.

“You see?” she said.

I nodded.

“That’s what we lost.” She shook her head. “And I don’t have much, but there’s nothing I wouldn’t give, nothing I wouldn’t do, to make that man pay.”

She held my gaze for a moment. Then slowly, deliberately, she started fiddling with the top button of her blouse. For a second I glimpsed the bare, blue-veined curve of her breast. I looked away hastily and caught the baleful stare of Jesus watching me over her shoulder.

“Please,” I said. “You don’t have to do anything.”

She started to cry. Shame? Relief? Humiliation that I’d rejected her? Whatever it was, I wished I could comfort her. But to hug her again now would only make things worse.

“Let’s go back in the other room,” I said.

She nodded, unable to speak, and re-buttoned her blouse.

Ten minutes later, I left. I opened the car windows and lit a cigarette, my first since Global Village. By the time I’d finished, I’d made up my mind. I drove into the center of town and checked in to the Riddick Motor Inn.

In my room, I lay on the bed and googled Evan Bone and Anne Grainger. Had he said anything about her? Expressed regret, or even just sympathy for her family?

No, there was nothing. A British reporter who’d asked for a response had been simply told: Mr. Bone is not available for comment,

OK, Anne, I said, I get the point. Evan Bone is a monster. The question is, what can I do about it?

No answer. But there was really only one option at this point. It was, I knew, a long shot: the equivalent of putting a message into a bottle and chucking it into the sea. But I tried to shorten the odds by picking my words carefully: informal conversation; entirely off the record, of course. If I’d read his email to Ginny Voss correctly, he was hungry for absolution. He might just see me as a no-strings-attached confessor.

I pressed send. I’d done what I could. Now, suddenly, I found myself yearning for a decent meal. I traipsed the streets of Riddick, looking for one. In the end, I had to settle for a Caesar salad the size of a football at Cherie’s Garden Restaurant.