“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“He was hit by a tractor-trailer when he was four riding his tricycle. Broke his back serving in Korea. Got trapped in a car that went over Feather Bridge and then went out the window like they do in the movies. He’d been bit twice—once by a Doberman, another time a Tennessee rattler, and almost had a shark attack off the coast of Way Paw We, Indonesia, only he’d watched a special on the Nature Channel and remembered to punch it straight in the nose, which is what they tell you to do when one’s comin’ at you only most people don’t have the guts to do it. Smoke did. And now you’re tryin’ to tell me his medication mixed with a little Jack was going to finish him off? Makes me sick. He’d been takin’ it for six months and it had no effect, period. That man could be shot in the head six times and he’d go right on — you mark my words.”
To my horror, her voice tore a hole on “words”—a sizable hole by the sound of things. I wasn’t positive, but I think she was crying too, an awful held-back hiccuping sound that faded into the mumbles and elevator music of the soap opera, so you couldn’t tell the difference between her drama and the one on television. It was very possible she’d just said, “Travis, I’m not gonna lie and say I don’t have feelings for you”—not the woman on the TV, and it was also possible the woman on the TV, not Ada, was crying over her dead father.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just kind of, confused—”
“I didn’t put it all together ’til later,” she sniffled.
I waited — enough time for her to stitch together, however crudely, the hole in her voice.
“You didn’t put what…together?”
She cleared her throat.
“Do you know who The Nightwatchmen are?” she asked. “’Course you don’t…don’t even know your own name, probably—”
“I do, actually. My father’s a political science professor.”
She was surprised — or maybe relieved. “Oh?”
“They were radicals,” I said. “But apart from an incident or two in the early seventies, no one’s sure if they actually existed. They’re more a — a beautiful idea, fighting against greed — than something real.” I was paraphrasing bits of “A Quick History of the American Revolutionary” (see Van Meer, Federal Forum, Vol. 23, Issue 9, 1990).
“An incident or two,” Ada repeated. “Exactly. So then you know about Gracey.”
“He was the founder. But he’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Other than one other person,” Ada said slowly, “George Gracey is the only known member. And he’s still wanted by the FBI. In ’70…no, ’71, he killed a West Virginia Senator, put a pipe bomb in his car. A year later, he blew up a building in Texas. Four people died. He was caught on tape so they made a sketch of him, but then he dropped off the face of the earth. In the eighties there was an explosion in a townhouse in England. Homemade bombs. People had heard he was livin’ there, so they assumed he was dead. There was too much damage to recover the teeth on the bodies found. That’s how they identify, you know. Teeth records.”
She paused, swallowing.
“The Senator killed was Senator Michael McCullough, Dubs’s uncle on his mother’s side, my great uncle. And it happened over in Meade, twenty minutes from Findley. Dubs said it all the time when we were growin’ up: ‘I’ll fly to the ends of the earth to bring that sonuvabitch to trial.’ When Dubs drowned, everyone believed the police. They said he’d had too much to drink and it was an accident. I refused to believe it. I stayed up all night goin’ through his notes even though Archie cussed me out, said I was crazy. But then I saw how it all went together. I showed Archie and Cal too. And she knew of course. She knew we were on to her. We’d called the FBI. That’s why she hanged herself. It was death or prison.”
I was bewildered. “I don’t understand—”
“The Nocturnal Conspiracy,” Ada said softly.
Trying to follow this woman’s logic was like trying to watch an electron orbit a nucleus with the naked eye.
“What’s The Nocturnal Conspiracy?”
“His next book. The one he was writing on George Gracey. That’s what he was going to call it and it was going to be a bestseller. Smoke tracked him down, see. Last May. He found him on a fantasy island called Paxos, livin’ high off the hog.”
She drew a shaky breath. “You don’t know what it felt like, when the police called and told us our father, the one we’d just seen two days before at Chrysanthemum’s baptism, was gone. Snatched from us. We hadn’t heard the name Hannah Schneider in all our lives. At first, we thought she was the loud divorcée the Rider’s Club had trouble nominatin’ for treasurer, but that was Hannah Smithers. Then we think, maybe she was Gretchen Peterson’s cousin who Dubs took to the Marquis Polo Fundraiser, but that’s Lizzie Sheldon. So”—by this point, Ada had ripped out most of her punctuation, some of her pauses, too; her words stampeded into the receiver—“after two days of this, Cal takes a look at the picture I asked the police to get for us and what do you know? He says he remembers her talkin’ to Dubs at the Handy Pantry way back in June, when they were coming back from Auto Show 4000—this is a month after Dubs got back from Paxos. So Cal says, yeah, Dubs went inside the Handy Pantry to get gum and this same woman shimmied up to him. Cal has a photographic memory. ‘It was her,’ he said. Tall. Dark hair. A face shaped like one of those Valentine chocolate boxes and Valentine’s was Dubs’ favorite holiday. She asked for directions to Charleston and I guess they stayed talkin’ for so long, Cal had to get out of the car to go get him. And that was it. When we went through Dubs’ things, we found her number in his address book. Phone records showed he called her at least once or twice a week. She knew how to play it, see. After my mother, there’s never been anyone special — I–I still talk about him in the present. Archie says I have to stop that.”
She paused, took another labored breath, started to speak again. And as she talked, I was struck by the image of one of those itsy-bitsy garden spiders that decide to make their web not in some sensible corner, but in a gigantic space, a space so huge and far-fetched, in it one could fit two African Elephants end to end. Dad and I watched such a determined spider on our porch in Howard, Louisiana, and no matter how many times the wind unrigged the mooring, how many times the web buckled and sagged, unable to hold itself up between the fake columns, the spider went on with its work, climbing to the top, free-falling, silk thread trembling behind it, dental floss in the wind. “She’s making sense of the world,” Dad said. “She’s sewing it together as best she can.”
“We still don’t know how she managed it,” Ada went on. “My father was two hundred and forty pounds. It had to be poison. She injected him with something, between his toes…cyanide maybe. ’Course the police swore they checked all that and there was no sign. I just don’t see how it was possible. He liked his whiskey…won’t lie about that. And there was his medication—”
“What kind of medication was it?” I asked.
“Minipress. For blood pressure. Dr. Nixley told him you’re not supposed to drink with it but he had before and it never messed with him. He drove home all by himself from the King of Hearts Fundraiser right when he first went on it and I was there when he got home. He was fine. Believe me, if I thought he wasn’t fine I’d have caused a stink. Not that he would’ve listened.”