Playing Dead (13 page)

Enough. I changed the subject.

“I saw Jack Smith today. Now he claims to be working on a profile of Anthony Marchetti. He says Mama is messed up in this somehow.”

Sadie looked up from the cards and stared at me. “Do you believe him?”

“Yes … no … he’s not very specific. And he’s a liar. But what about the letter from the woman who claims I’m her daughter? My mysterious Social Security number? Jack Smith says it belongs to some dead girl.”

Maddie handed each of us a bowl of macaroni and cheese and hamburger coagulated with powdery clumps. The wedge of iceberg lettuce was almost hidden by the glop of Hidden Valley Ranch.

“Will you please eat?” she pleaded. “It’s starting to look gross. And y’all are freaking me out.”

Sadie smiled at her. “Just a minute, honey.”

To me, she said, “You need to call Hudson Byrd.”

I woke the next day in my little-girl bedroom after enjoying a dreamless seven hours of sleep thanks to a pink pill I found in Daddy’s medicine cabinet.

No hangover, no guilt, no worries about ill effects, at least not until the inevitable study years down the road finds otherwise. It seemed careless of me to knock myself out in an empty house with everything going on, knowing I wouldn’t hear an intruder. But if I didn’t sleep, I decided, there was no hope of surviving this anyway.

It worked. I met the morning with some semblance of the old me. The first thing I did was survey the living room, hands on my hips, dressed in a yellow cotton high-school-era nightgown I’d dug out of a drawer. I yanked the sheets off all the furniture, including the grand piano, and piled them in the laundry room. No more ghosts.

I took a deep breath before removing the old quilt from Daddy’s place, a worn brown easy chair that faced a large picture window.

The second move was to pop a Dr Pepper. The third was to call Wade and tell him to make the deal on the wind farm in Stephenville.

“But don’t give them the Big Dipper property,” I said. “I have plans for it. Also, you’re in charge, officially. Just run the big decisions by me, like you would Daddy.”

“You’re making a good call, Tommie,” Wade said. “I’ll take care of things. I’ll honor your Daddy. And Tommie … I’d still like to take that ride sometime.”

As I hung up, I wondered again how much Wade knew about my family’s secrets. His loyalty was impenetrable, like the black waters around Alcatraz.

Still in my nightgown, I headed back upstairs and dug a package of Post-its out of a backpack that held a tangle of printouts and notes related to my Ph.D., the one I was finishing up online, courtesy of Lydia Pratt, my thesis adviser and former college professor at the University of Texas.

I stopped briefly at a Xeroxed picture of Alex Wharton with his Harry Potter scar. Alex was a thirteen-year-old from Texas who visited the ranch a year ago. Daddy had read about him in the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
. He’d worked with social services to send Alex to me at Halo Ranch, paying his full scholarship.

Two summers earlier, Alex had watched his father knife his mother to death on the sidewalk in front of their rent house because he didn’t like his dinner. Pork chops with Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup topping, mashed potatoes, and a frozen Green Giant medley. When that son of a bitch found Alex cowering in the laundry room, he stood up and shot him three times with the gun his mother kept buried in a box of Tide.

He’d paralyzed his father for life. Some people won’t die.

“Put Alex back together,” Daddy told me.

I wondered if that was possible, if a soul could hold that much plaster, as I rolled up the gold cotton rug and set up trails of Post-its in the middle of the oak floor between the twin beds. This was my typical approach to research or to any problem with a kid at Halo Ranch that I couldn’t reach.

The word
Mama
stood out on a pink Post-it in the center of my little project, with every question I could think of trailing chaotically from her in blue paper spokes. I’d written the names of all the other players on yellow squares and lined them up vertically. Anthony Marchetti. Rosalina Marchetti. Jack Smith. The
mysterious “brother.” Even Sue Billington, who I was certain knew more than she said.

I jumped as the thirty-year-old air conditioner thumped on, the rush of cool air from the vent making me shiver and the Post-its tremble, ready to fly.

None of it made sense.

It was the web of a demented spider.

T
he high from the pink pill didn’t last. By eleven, my gut was back to churning. All I wanted to do was swallow another one, maybe two, and crawl back into bed.

Dream it all away.

But Sadie and I had agreed to meet at the bank and face down Ms. Billington together. She had an early rendezvous with her jewelry rep at the Dallas Market Center first, and by a miracle of God, the guys finally showed up about the same time to hook up my internet at the ranch.

I checked the parking lot for suspicious black trucks before dropping Maddie at a cheerleading day camp held four times a year by Ponder’s high school squad. The logical part of my brain assured me that Maddie would be perfectly safe here. She loved this camp, a fact Sadie and I were mildly distressed about. In Texas, girls take lessons in cheering on boys practically from toddlerhood. I dreaded the day Maddie headed to middle school with girls who carried tiny two-hundred-dollar Gucci bags and considered chewing gum and a laxative a good substitute for lunch.

I reminded myself that I’d survived.

Sadie was waiting for me in front of the bank, chatting up a homeless man sitting with his meager possessions against the
brick wall near the austere glass door, which discreetly advertised Bank of the Wild West in small gold letters. I immediately felt guilty about the four-dollar Starbucks in my hand. He laughed at something Sadie said, and she slipped him some cash. He tipped his dirty Dallas Cowboys cap in thanks.

“Hey, there,” Sadie said, spotting me. “Let’s do this.”

Our feet had barely touched the marble floor when Ms. Billington, wearing an identical JC Penney suit, this time in brown, walked briskly over to us.

“You must be the sister,” she told Sadie, giving her a suspicious look. I couldn’t wait to see who won this battle. I’d put my money on Sadie.

“What a beautiful set of pearls!” Sadie exclaimed, putting out her hand.

“Why, thank you,” Ms. Billington said begrudgingly. And then, “They’ve been in my family for seventy-five years.”

Ten minutes later, Ms. Billington was “Sue” and Sadie was the niece she wished she had, instead of the one in New Jersey who never called. Personal information flowed forth like a Las Vegas fountain—her cat, Shiloh, was diabetic; her Princess Diana roses were eaten up with black spot this year; she had almost saved enough for an over-forty singles cruise to Cabo.

Just who was the psychologist here? I asked myself.

Comfortably pulled up to Sue’s pristine desk, we signed our names on the dotted lines, scribbled our initials in the right places, and showed our driver’s licenses.

My hand shook a little; my signature was scraggly, uneven. I hoped Sadie didn’t notice.

As a final show of kinship with Sue Billington, Sadie pulled a Kleenex out of her pocket and wiped off a drip of coffee that spilled from the lid of my Starbucks cup.

Sue beamed.

Sadie whispered, “She’s not so bad.”

I wondered,
What would life be like if I was as nice to adult people as I was to kids and horses?

We trooped behind Sue in an obedient line, past wrought-iron teller windows and a life-sized Remington sculpture of a cowboy flying on a bucking horse. Surely it was a copy. I hadn’t noticed any of this yesterday.

When we reached the far back wall, Sue discreetly pulled out a keycard and slid it into a near-invisible slot in the oak panel. A small door slid open. I was beginning to think Mama knew what she was doing when she left her secrets in the hands of the Bank of the Wild West.

The door shut behind us and we stood inside a wood-paneled room, large enough to hold about ten humans with very little breathing room. It was otherwise bare of anything except for cameras on spidery black arms hanging from the corners and a flat screen glowing like a blue aquarium window. It was positioned near a steel door. Sue punched six numbers into a keypad and placed her hand flat on the screen. It scanned her whorls and lines in seconds. James Bond technology still amazed me, although even Disney World scanned thumbprints at the front gate these days to assure that customers weren’t sharing passes and avoiding Mickey’s ninety-dollar-a-day fee.

The lock on the door clicked, Sue braced her hips and pulled it open, and we walked right into the muzzle of a gun.

Instinctively, I jerked Sadie’s arm and yanked her behind me.

“Didn’t mean to scare ya,” the man drawled, as he replaced his gun into a holster. “It’s just procedure. Hi, Sue.”

The ID hanging off a cord around his neck read “Rex Ferebee, Security Systems Manager.” We now stood inside a glass box, the working digs of the overzealous Rex.

Through the glass, on three sides, we could see into a much
larger room lined floor to ceiling with hundreds of metal boxes, each embossed with a large number and the same insignia of the Wild West bank that had been stamped on the Yellow Pages ad: two derringers crossed over each other to make an X. Pendant lights hung from the ceiling, giving the room a cozy, modern glow. A gleaming maple conference table swallowed most of the floor space, along with a dozen overstuffed leather chairs.

“How much is it to own a security box here?” I asked, thinking this room was like something out of a John Grisham novel. His characters often started in hell and wound up on a sunny beach, I reminded myself.

Sue’s smile was smug. “They cost a lot. But our customers can well afford it.”

Rex waved his badge over a sensor. The glass wall on the right slid open enough for us to walk through. Sue marched over to Box 1082 and stuck in her key. I recognized this routine from the movies. I pulled out my keychain, inserting Mama’s key into the other keyhole. We heard a loud click. Sue pulled the box easily from the slot, placing it on the table.

“Toodle-loo,” Sue said, and she and Rex exited the room. I imagined their leaving was just for show. They were probably pulling up chairs to TV monitors with enough angles to see up my nose.

“Hey, I’m Pee-wee Herman,” Sadie said, twirling her chair in circles.

“Wave to the cameras,” I replied, trying to match her light tone, as I slid open the top of the box.

And then I hesitated, the dread ramping up again, and Sadie stopped her game with the chair. Her head reached about halfway up the back of the plush burgundy leather; her feet dangled a good six inches off the floor. I would have laughed on any ordinary day.

“Maybe this is where professional basketball players keep their
stuff,” she said. “Or billionaire giants. Are those newspaper clippings?”

I reluctantly turned back to the box. Not a million dollars in hot cash. Not a cousin of the Hope Diamond. Instead, an odd collection of old newspaper clippings cooked with age to a golden brown. None of them appeared to be from the same newspaper, or from the same town, for that matter.

They seemed perfectly benign, which is exactly why they scared me.

I glanced quickly through several of the headlines:
GARDEN CLUB MEETS THURSDAY, JOE FREDERICKSON WINS DISTRICT ATTORNEY’S RACE, WOMAN FOUND DEAD IN LITTLE RIVER
.

The box held no clue to Mama’s fascination with these particular articles or why she felt compelled to safeguard them. I set aside the rest of the clippings to look at later, and pulled out the last item in the box, a sealed plain white business envelope, thick with whatever was inside.

“Rip it open,” Sadie instructed. “And then let’s get out of here.”

I slid my nail under the flap and pulled out a wad of checks. Seven of them were made out to Ingrid Mitchell and the rest to Ingrid McCloud. My head was spinning. How many identities did my mother have? The checks were issued from the Shur Foundation, whatever the hell that was. They ran consecutively for five years starting in March of 1980, written on the first of each month for exactly the same amount of $1,500. I quickly multiplied: $90,000. Was it blackmail money? But she’d apparently never cashed them. Mama hid these checks for thirty-two years. Coincidentally, the same number of years I’d lived on this planet.