An Imperfect Process (40 page)

Malcolm waited in the air-conditioned pickup truck, his expression less lugubrious than usual. He was a good truck dog. "Malcolm, my lad, would you like to drive to Homeland to see your new house? Yes? Good, I was heading that way myself."

His phone rang within seconds of his turning the power on. A call from the Manhattan area code, he noticed. " 'Lo, Rob here."

"Hi, Rob, it's Phyllis Greene from
Time
magazine. Remember me?"

He suppressed his sigh. Phyllis had done a story on him during Jeff's trial. She had been fair and thorough, but nothing about that period made for pleasant memories. "How could I forget you? A saintly smile and the persistence of a pit bull."

She laughed. "You seem to have done your best to forget everything until this capital punishment case you got yourself involved with. I'm thinking of doing a follow-up story on you. I like the beard, by the way."

This time he did sigh. "I really wish you wouldn't do a story. There is nothing here with national implications. It's a Maryland issue."

"But this is great stuff. Grieving and guilt-stricken entrepreneurial brother of environmental terrorist reinvents himself as community and capital punishment activist. It might even help your cause."

"Nothing you write would come out soon enough to affect whether or not Daniel Monroe will be executed next week."

"Maybe not, but it might help the broader cause of opposition to capital punishment. One I privately agree with, speaking off-the-record."

He rubbed the short hair on Malcolm's neck, finding the contact soothing. The dog moaned softly and rested his chin on Rob's knee. "I'm no crusader. I only got involved with this case by chance."

"I think you're becoming a crusader in spite of yourself," she said seriously. "Will you talk to me? It's easier than if I have to work around you."

He hadn't thought of himself as an activist, but the label seemed to be coming after him. First Julia Hamilton, now this. Since Phyllis was determined to do the story with or without his cooperation, he capitulated. "Okay, what do you want to know?"

If he was being given a platform, maybe he had an obligation to speak.

Chapter 28

"I never knew Maryland was so pretty," Lyssie said as Val steered her car along the winding highway that followed the Potomac River for a couple of miles below Harpers Ferry. The girl's nose had been glued to the window for the whole trip.

"You've never been out this way?"

"I've never been out of Maryland until today. Both Virginia and West Virginia within a few minutes!" She pushed the bridge of her glasses up with a sigh. 'I've hardly ever been out of Baltimore City."

"No wonder you have a yen to travel." Val kept her voice light to disguise the pang of hearing how limited Lyssie's life had been. Amazing that the girl had such an active, inquiring mind. Or maybe her curiosity was a result of having lived within narrow limits. "I've been thinking. Maybe next spring, I can take a long weekend and drive down to North Carolina with you and your grandmother. You can visit your Lumbee relatives, and I'll go see a friend in Charlotte."

"Really?" Lyssie's head swung around, her eyes wide behind her glasses. "Please... please don't say that unless you mean it."

She had the ability to break Val's heart with a single sentence. Keeping one eye on the winding road, Val laid a hand over Lyssie's. "I won't ever say anything like that unless I mean it. And if I forget something important, call me on it! You're my sister—you have the right."

Lyssie didn't speak, but she did squeeze Val's hand. Each time they had an outing, progress was made. Val liked the deepening of their relationship. For whatever reason, it was easier to accept the commitment of relationships with females.

Turning right onto one of the roads that led up the hill into Harpers Ferry, Val said, "There used to be a big old hotel at the top of this hill. It's been torn down now, but the view from up here is world class. After we admire it, I thought we could get a bite to eat, then poke around down in the town."

Lyssie nodded enthusiastically. She seemed able to eat six times a day without adding any padding to her bony little body.

The hilltop looked bare with the hotel gone, but someday soon another building would rise to take advantage of the view. Val parked on the lot under a tree. "Come on, let's see if the view is as great as I remember."

It was. Lyssie gasped as they went to the flagstone landing at the end of the ridge. No one else was around, and from their vantage point they could look down at the confluence of two great rivers.

"That's the Potomac and on this side is the Shenandoah. A railroad line runs along the river below. See the railroad bridge over the Potomac?" Val pointed out the landmarks. "I think that ruined bridge down there was destroyed in the Civil War."

"Awesome." Lyssie pointed downward. "Are those eagles below us?"

"Could be. Some kind of raptor for sure. Watching them glide along the winds makes me want to fly." Val privately suspected that the birds were turkey vultures, but they soared as well as any eagles.

"To fly..." Lyssie said dreamily. She stepped off the flagged area onto the trimmed grass. To the left a cast iron fence guarded the edge, but here the hill dropped away with cliff-like suddenness only a foot beyond Lyssie. The grass was damp from the previous night's rain, and Lyssie skidded as she moved forward.

A horrific vision of the girl plunging over the edge to her death kicked Val's reflexes into overdrive. "No!"

She grabbed Lyssie's shoulder and yanked her back to safety. Lyssie shrieked and folded into a ball on the grass, her arms raised to protect her head.

"Dear God," Val whispered. Kneeling, she put an arm around Lyssie and drew the small, resisting body close. "I'm not going to hit you, I was just scared that you might fall. Foolish of me, but I'm responsible for you, and I'm new to being a big sister."

Lyssie didn't respond. She kept her head down and her body tucked as she breathed in short, panicky gasps.

"Who hit you, Lyssie?" Val said softly. "One of your parents? Your grandmother?"

That brought Lyssie's head up. 'Not Gramma, my parents. Mama only hit me when I deserved it, but Daddy... wh... when he was high...." Her voice broke.

"Oh, honey." Val couldn't stop herself from drawing the girl into a full hug. This time there was no resistance. Lyssie's quiet weeping tore holes in her heart. "Do you want to talk about your parents, Lyssie? You can tell me anything, and sometimes the bad stuff gets a little easier when it's shared with a friend. Or a sister."

Lyssie rubbed at her eyes, so Val pulled out tissues and handed them over.

After wiping her glasses and blowing her nose, Lyssie said, "Daddy wasn't around much, but I loved when he visited. He wasn't always mean. Sometimes he was the best and most exciting fun in the world. If I knew he was coming, I would stay by the window and watch for him all day. Sometimes he took me out to see the Orioles, or to the Inner Harbor or Mondawmin Mall. Even the Aquarium once."

"And other times he was angry and scary?"

Lyssie nodded. Val cast a longing glance at the park bench a dozen feet away, but they had the viewing area to themselves, and Lyssie seemed comfortable crouched on the grass. Better not risk stopping the flow of words by moving. "I felt the same way about my father. Since I almost never saw him, it was really exciting when I did. I would do anything to make him happy with me." Or even just acknowledge her existence.

"Did you feel bad because you wanted so much to see your father when your mother did all the work?"

Startled by the perceptive question, Val said, "I sure did. I loved them both, but my mother was the one who was always there. She made sure that I was fed and dressed and went to school. Seeing her wasn't special. My father—he was like a king who came to visit sometimes, and when he did, I felt like a princess."

Lyssie nodded again. "I loved to see him, but when he visited, he and Mama fought all the time. If... if he hadn't come to see me, they would both still be alive."

Sickened, Val recognized that it was probably inevitable that Lyssie would feel as if the death of her parents was somehow her fault. "Honey, when a man gets crazy and violent on drugs like your father, he's like a gun waiting to go off. It was only a matter of time till the trigger was pulled. What happened wasn't your fault. Men kill their wives and themselves so often that it has a name—murder-suicide."

"My father didn't kill himself," Lyssie said in a flat voice. "A policeman shot him. After he killed Mama, someone called the police, and they broke into the apartment because they'd been told there was a child in danger.

"When they broke in. Daddy grabbed me and held his gun to my head. He was screaming and threatening to kill me if the police didn't let him go. One of the policemen started talking to him, and when he lowered the gun a little, they... they shot him." She made a choking sound. "His blood was... all over me."

No wonder Lyssie hadn't told the whole story originally. Heart aching, Val rocked the girl in her arms. "No one should experience something like that at any age, Lyssie, especially not at the age of six. What an amazing girl you are."

Lyssie pulled her head back and blinked through glasses that were steamed again. "You think?"

Val nodded. "You survived, and you're developing into a really bright, thoughtful person. A European philosopher once said that which doesn't kill us makes us stronger. You're proof."

"Nietzsche." Lyssie frowned as she tried to see herself as a heroine instead of a victim. "Do you think surviving the... the murders will make me a better writer?"

"Guaranteed. You're already the most amazing girl I've ever met," Val said with complete sincerity. "Talking with you now is making me think differently about my father and how we got along. Changing how people think is part of what writers do."

Lyssie sighed and rested her head against Val's shoulder. "I'd rather have my parents alive even if they didn't get along."

Val brushed the springy dark hair with the texture so like hers. "We don't get to choose."

They sat quietly, cooled by the stiff breeze that blew along the river valleys. Val hadn't been kidding when she said that Lyssie's words had changed her thinking. She had grown up accepting that her family wasn't like others, but she hadn't really thought about how much her father's rare visits, and her even rarer visits to him, had shaped her childhood. She had been like a cat waiting by the refrigerator and hoping for cream. Though Callie had been a conscientious, down-to-earth mother, she always had her creative and romantic interests. Val had never really felt that she came first.

This had a lot to do with Rob, but she would ponder that later. Now was Lyssie's time to come first. "Shall we go inside the hotel and have some lunch? All the desserts you can eat, after you've had something healthy."

"I'm hungry." Lyssie scrambled to her feet. Though her nose and eyes were red, the tears had dried.

"Me, too." Val rose rather less lithely than her little sister. "Then we'll go down into the village. There are lots of neat little shops where we can get something for your grandmother, and the National Park Service has a terrific bookstore with practically all history books."

"Can we start there?"

Val laughed. "Start and end there, if you like." She linked her arm through Lyssie's, and they turned to the hotel.

"I'm glad I told you what happened," Lyssie said softly. "I can't talk to Gramma because she gets so upset."

"You can tell me anything, Lyssie. I know that when I'm upset, it always helps to talk to a friend."

"Helps, maybe." Lyssie smiled wistfully. "But it's never really going to go away, is it?"

"No, honey. We can get through the bad stuff, but we never really get over it. In the meantime, though"—Val smiled—"there's ice cream."

* * *

The next day Sha'wan and a couple of kids from the Fresh Air center would help Rob move, but this evening he was getting a head start by taking some of the more fragile items to the guest house. Not that he had a lot of breakables, but he suspected his work crew would have more energy and enthusiasm than finesse.