The Unquiet Dead Page 14

  “I can’t stay here long, Ray.”

  “Please, Zach.”

  He folded his straw in two, inserted it through the tab on his can, spraying himself a little in the process. “I live on campus. I’m a year from graduating. Then I head to Vienna for the summer to study the Viennese painters.”

  She thought of Mink Norman’s sister. “Have you ever heard of the Mozarteum?”

  Zach looked at her. “Sure. It’s in Salzburg. Different city. Why?”

  “It came up during an investigation I’m on.”

  “So you’re still in the police. No uniform though.”

  “I got promoted. I work at Community Policing now.”

  “That minorities crap?”

  “At least Da hates it. That’s a plus.”

  Zach grinned at her and she caught her breath. It was Zach, it wasn’t a mirage or her own hopes materialized into delusion. A cautious little ball of hope began to unspool itself in her heart. “Would it be all right if I asked how you got here? How you managed?”

  He didn’t flare up. If anything, his expression was pensive. “It wasn’t easy. I stayed with my friends, at first. Then I moved around a lot. I fast-tracked through school because I knew I could get loans for university and move out on my own.”

  Rachel’s heart seized up at the thought of it: so much danger, so much risk. Anything could have happened to him. “Weren’t you scared?”

  His level gaze said a lot about the man he was growing into. “I was a lot more scared at home. And I was sick of feeling that way.”

  Which made Rachel think of their mother. “Seven years is a long time to go without any contact, Zach. I don’t— I wouldn’t have expected you to want to have anything to do with Da, but what about Mum? You can’t let her keep suffering, wondering what happened to you. I mean, I’ll tell her, but at least you should make a phone call.”

  Zach looked at her so oddly that her heart constricted. He would bark at her, telling her she had no right to dictate his decisions when she’d done nothing to help him in the past seven years.

  “You’ve lived at home this whole time?” he said.

  She nodded. “I told you. I wasn’t going to leave if there was a chance you might come back.”

  “You were punishing yourself,” he concluded. “And now you’re lost in that house. You never found your way out. I don’t understand why she did that to you.”

  Rachel’s stomach lurched. She had a sick feeling that something bad was coming.

  “I wasn’t punishing myself.” But she had been. She knew it. She just didn’t know how Zach had seen it so quickly, so clearly. Maybe it was because he knew her better than anyone. “I hoped one day you might remember what it was like. Not with you and Da or even with Mum. I mean with you and me.”

  Zach’s eyes were wet. He stood up and brushed off his jeans with brisk movements. “Someone’s screwing with you, Ray. When I figured out what I wanted to do with my life, I called Mum. She’s been giving me cash since I started my program. She knows where I am because I call her once a week. On a cell phone that she bought me. I’ve gotta go.”

  There was no bombshell he could have delivered that would have shattered Rachel more.

  It simply wasn’t possible.

  In the desperate years of her search—years of turmoil and misery that nothing could set in balance—Lillian Getty could not possibly have known where her son was. Don Getty managed all her money. She didn’t have a dime of her own to give to Zach. Silent, timid Lillian didn’t have the wherewithal to find or arrange a cell phone for Zach.

  She’d stayed quiet and grieving in the corner of her living room without a word of consolation or hope for Rachel.

  Because she hadn’t known where Zach was.

  No. It wasn’t possible.

  Rachel trudged after Zach, elbowing her way through students and teachers alike.

  “Zach,” she called. “That can’t be true.”

  He stopped cold. She cowered inwardly, expecting his rage. But when he saw her ashen face, her pained incomprehension, he did something astonishing. He gathered her in his arms, shoving his face down into her shoulder.

  She didn’t know if he was crying or she was.

  “I’m sorry, Ray. I shouldn’t have told you like that. She told me that she told you. She said you didn’t want to see me again. I could hear you in the background sometimes. She said you refused to take the phone from her.”

  And it was clear that her brother still didn’t know what to believe.

  No, no, no, no, no!

  Pain sliced through her heart, exploded in her brain.

  What kind of woman would do such a thing to her children? Divide them from each other and kill the memory of the only love and security they had known?

  Lillian Getty—pale and timorous on her chair, reading her magazines.

  Knowing that Rachel wouldn’t leave as long as she held out any hope for Zach. Knowing that her dread for Zach had leached the happiness out of any small moment of personal achievement. Knowing that all Rachel cared about in the world was her baby brother Zach.

  Why had she done this?

  Don Getty used his fists and only his fists.

  Lillian had ripped out her heart.

  She gasped out her pain into Zach’s ear, her fingers clutching his neck like those of a drowning swimmer.

  All this time Zach had been safe and Lillian had known, while Rachel shouldered her burden of terror and guilt.

  “Ray-Ray.” He murmured her childhood nickname. “Come back another time. We can’t talk about this now.” He drew away from her, hastily wiping his eyes.

  “What if I lose you again?”

  “You won’t. Here.” He drew a napkin from his pocket and scrawled his number and address on it in blue ink that smeared as he wrote. She took it with shaking fingers.

  “Take this,” she said, fumbling her business card from her bag. “You can find me at this number anytime.”

  She touched her brother’s face, his hair, her fingers trying to memorize the man she saw before her now. She reached around him for one of his brochures and tucked it into her bag.

  “I have money now, Zach. I’m working. I could help you. We could find a place together, make some changes—”

  He cut her off. “I can’t think about any of that now, Ray. I have my own life here. I’m being graded on my exhibit, I have to focus.”

  She nodded helplessly. “But you’ll call me?”

  “I’ll call you.”

  “If you need anything—”

  “I’m okay, Ray. Try to believe that.”

  She smoothed her trembling hands over her face, tried to get her thoughts in order. “Don’t say anything to Mum, Zach. Don’t tell her that we saw each other.”

  Because if she could make Zach disappear once—

  “No,” he agreed. “You either.”

  She nodded again, knowing he wanted her gone but loath to leave.

  “Could I have one, Zach? One of your paintings to keep at work?”

  He studied her card. “I’ll send it to you. Now, please go.”

  She hugged him once more, aware that even though he was sending her away, insisting that she leave, he was bruising her shoulders with the fierceness of his grip.

  They looked at each other uncertainly, their faces mirroring the same pain.

  And then she forced herself to turn away and leave her brother behind.

  There would be a reckoning of all she had learned. And when it was done, she would walk away without looking back.

  18.

  Simply, they left no witnesses behind.

  The next morning, she called Nate. She’d stayed at the office overnight reading Apologia. She wasn’t ready to face her mother. Instead, she’d gotten her skates out of her locker, found an indoor rink, and raced around its perimeter for an hour. Spent, she’d ordered pizza and hurtled through Nathan’s last book. She’d been bleary-eyed and exhausted, taking her mind off her troub
les by focusing on Nate’s. She understood what the book was now, the meaning of the dedication. It was Nate nakedly displaying his longing for forgiveness.

  He was just as screwed up as she was.

  That was why she had called him. That, and for a tour of the Bluffs.

  He was waiting for her at the trailhead. She greeted him with a wave.

  “Have you ever noticed,” she said as an opening, “that everything about you matches your hair?”

  Nate blinked at her. He was wearing a tweed jacket the color of autumn leaves and narrow slacks in the same shade of amber as his eyes. On his feet were the sensible shoes Rachel had proposed for a walk along the Bluffs.

  She grinned, getting out of the car. “It’s like a palette—the country gentleman’s catalogue for fall. Do you have a valet?”

  “I have Audrey,” he said drily. “She hasn’t gotten out of the habit of thinking of me as her personal dress-up doll.”

  “She has an eye for things,” Rachel said. She felt safe in her compliment because it was directed at his sister. From the corner of her eye, she could feel the intensity of his regard.

  “Shall we walk?”

  He was guiding her down the path Drayton would have walked the night he fell to his death. The lake unfolded before them like a bolt of blue silk, a tangy breeze fresh against their faces. Rachel was glad she had opted for her ponytail and running shoes. The ground was uneven beneath her feet, covered with a sparse, thready grass that gave way in places. She could hear the rumpled murmur of water against the shore. The Bluffs rose in an illumination of chalk-white cliffs before them, the path winding its way above the headland.

  Rachel found the spot marked with yellow police cones without much difficulty, Nate trudging along behind her. Sixty-five feet below them, the detritus of the lake had scrubbed the shoreline clean.

  She looked around.

  It had rained often during the past ten nights. There were no tracks on the ground, no broken tree limbs, no indication of any kind of a struggle. She looked inland. The walk had taken them fifteen minutes. She could make out the barest outline of Nate’s house. Ringsong receded even further into the distance.

  If anyone had seen a figure walking on the Bluffs that night, there would have been no way of identifying the man as Christopher Drayton. If he’d been pushed to his death, someone would have had to have been following him closely. And why would he have stood there so obediently, making it easy for the person who wished him harm? Unless the relationship between Drayton and his pursuer had been one of trust—if it had been Melanie Blessant, for example.

  If it had been anyone at all, she reminded herself. As Khattak was fond of saying: a man fell to his death.

  She stood beside Nathan companionably, their hands shoved in their pockets, their faces reddened by the walk. She could taste the lake on her lips.

  “Rachel,” Nate said after a time. “Why would anyone push Chris to his death? Or why would he commit suicide? There must be something more to the matter here, and it’s obvious you think it has something to do with the museum.”

  She would tell him, she decided. This mucking about in the dark was pointless. It was getting them nowhere. “The chief got a call from a friend at Justice, from the War Crimes division. There’s some suspicion that Christopher Drayton was actually an alias. We think his real name was Dražen Krstić.”

  Nate stared at her, perplexed. “Dražen Krstić?”

  “An indicted Serb war criminal. One of the logisticians of the massacre at Srebrenica.”

  “That’s why they asked Esa to dig around?” He lost a little of his color. “They think that Chris was Krstić? That’s simply not possible.”

  “Why not?”

  She was curious as to how Drayton had submerged his true identity so thoroughly.

  “His English was perfect, for one thing.”

  “He spoke several languages fluently. Why not English?”

  “No. He was a patient man, immensely kind and vigorous. He had an appetite for life. He loved teaching kids. He loved beautiful things. He threw himself into the museum—my God, the museum!”

  Rachel waited. She was finding this most instructive.

  “A man like Dražen Krstić would have had absolutely no interest in the Andalusia project. It would be antithetical to his sense of himself—to the ideology that fueled the Bosnian war.”

  “You know something about it, then.” She filed away the troubling contradiction of the museum for later consideration.

  “Of course I do. When Esa went to Sarajevo with his student group, I was the one he wrote to about the siege.”

  “You didn’t go with him?”

  “I couldn’t. My father was a diplomat. It would have embarrassed him. I did what I could to help Esa from this end.”

  Rachel tried to remember her student years. She’d been hungry to learn, but her risk-taking had taken another form.

  The cops turned their backs on us, Ray. How could you want to be one of them?

  I don’t, Zach. I won’t be anything like them, you can trust me.

  She hadn’t begun to come to terms with the knowledge that she no longer needed to carry the burden of guilt and dread that had defined her life for the past seven years. She didn’t know if she felt lighter or merely empty. She wondered what Drayton had thought, venturing too close to the traitorous edge of the Bluffs. Had he jumped? Had the ghosts of Srebrenica haunted his peace too fully? Was his support for Ringsong meant to be an absolution? Had he accepted the things the letter writer had said about him?

  I would like to appeal to you Mr. Krstić, whether there is any hope for at least that little child that they snatched away from me, because I keep dreaming about him. I dream of him bringing flowers and saying, “Mother, I’ve come.” I hug him and say, “Where have you been, my son?” And he says, “I’ve been in Vlasenica all this time.” So I beg you, if Mr. Krstić knows anything about it, about him surviving somewhere …

  Were there tears in her eyes, or was it mist from the lake that spread below them?

  If she had received such a letter—a mother begging for the whereabouts of her missing son, one body among the thousands in Srebrenica’s mass graves—she knew she would have found herself standing at the edge of a precipice, praying for the ghosts to leave her in peace.

  But the man whose hands and brain had overseen so much death—how would such a man be moved by a letter? By a mother’s agonized plea?

  “Drayton was receiving letters addressed to Dražen Krstić. Letters that knew what he had done.”

  “Blackmail?” Nate asked, threading his fingers through the swoop of his straw-gold hair.

  “Reminders, the boss said. I think they’re accusations. We took them to an imam at the Bosnian mosque and had him look at them. There was an arms embargo, it appears.”

  “Yes,” Nate said. “It made my father furious, I remember. The matériel of the Yugoslav army remained in the possession of Greater Serbia while the Bosnian territorial units were disarmed in preparation for the war. The international arms embargo prevented any hope of self-defense. My father observed that it was the first time the United Nations had actually supervised a genocide.”

  “Too harsh a condemnation, surely.”

  “‘The tragedy of Srebrenica will haunt our history forever,’” he quoted, his voice soft.

  “Where’s that from?”

  “The UN report published after the war. My father used to wonder if the war could have continued quite as long or reached such a violent conclusion without the role that the UN played. Do the letters speak of it?”

  Defend us or let us defend ourselves. You have no right to deprive us of both.

  She supposed they did.

  “I just can’t believe it of Chris. It would have been too great a charade. The thing he loved best was time in his garden. You could find him there in the evenings, chatting with his lilies. People who create such beauty can’t possibly possess such ugliness within them.�
�

  Of course they could. People were full of contradictions, bewildering even unto themselves.

  She’d seen her Da at the marina with Zach, his face alive with joy. And she’d seen her Da take his belt off and beat Zach bloody with it. And when she’d worked the Miraj Siddiqui case with Khattak, she’d seen sides of the human mind she hoped never to see again. Death and loss and betrayal, wound up in each other.

  There was a fragile thread of connection between herself and Nathan Clare. He’d opened himself to her within days of knowing her. He’d directed her to Apologia. She wondered if she could say anything to him.

  “Isn’t that what you thought of Laine Stoicheva?”

  His head whipped round toward her, his gold eyes like flinty coins. And then he smiled. “Yes, you’re quite right. I should know better as a writer. I’m either observing contradictions or inventing them. It’s just that Chris was—too normal, too human. And then, why the museum?”

  Rain began to spatter lightly over their heads. They turned back.

  “Maybe it was a form of atonement.”

  Nate neither agreed nor disagreed. He struggled to twist his thoughts around this idea of a dual identity. He fell into step with Rachel, conscious of the solidness of her beside him, the fixed, dependable nature of her movements. She moved quietly, without fuss, her ponytail bouncing behind her.

  “You’ll need to keep this information to yourself, though I wondered: do you think any of the people that you know, perhaps someone you invited as a guest to one of your parties—could one of them have been the letter writer?”

  Nate considered this, his steps careful and sure on the precarious surface of the Bluffs.

  “I honestly can’t imagine so. Perhaps if I went back over my guest lists, something might stand out. Have you studied photographs of Dražen Krstić?”

  Rachel glanced at him sideways. “Yes. I’ve looked at everything I could find. We’re a bit restricted as to resources because the boss is keeping things quiet for now. The pictures I’ve seen are some fifteen years old. If it’s the same man, he’s greatly changed. Heavier. Older. We found a gun at his house. A JNA army pistol.”