“But Ada”—I kept my voice subdued, as if we were in a library—“I really don’t think Hannah could’ve possibly—”
“Gracey was in contact with her. He told her to kill Smoke. Like she’d done with all the others. She was the temptation, see.”
“But—”
“She’s the other one,” she interrupted flatly. “‘Other than one other person.’ The other member — weren’t you listening?”
“But I know she’s not a criminal. I talked to a detective here—”
“Hannah Schneider’s not her real name. She ripped it off a poor missing woman who grew up in an orphanage in New Jersey. She’s been livin’ as that girl for years. Her real name’s Catherine Baker and she’s wanted by the FBI for shootin’ a police officer right between the eyes. Twice. Somewhere in Texas.” She cleared her throat. “Smoke didn’t recognize her because no one’s sure what Baker actually looks like. ’Specially now. They have old testimony, a composite that’s twenty years old — in the eighties everyone had weird hair, freaky looks—you know those awful leftover hippies. And she’s blond in the sketch. Says she has blue eyes. Smoke had the picture, along with the stuff on George Gracey. But it’s one of those things — it could be a drawin’ of me, you know. Could be a drawin’ of anyone.”
“Could you send me copies of his notes? For research purposes?”
Ada sniffed and though she didn’t exactly agree to send them I gave her my mailing address. Neither of us spoke for a minute or two. I could hear the end credits of the soap opera, the outburst of another commercial.
“I just wish I’d been there,” she said faintly. “I have a sixth sense, see. If I’d gone to the Auto Show, I could’ve gone in with him when he went to get the gum. I would’ve seen what she was doin’—prancin’ by in tight jeans, sunglasses, pretendin’ it was a coincidence. Cal swore he saw her a couple days before, too, when he and Smoke were in Winn-Dixie pickin’ up ribs. He said she walked right by with her empty shoppin’ cart, all gussied up like she was goin’ somewhere, and she looked straight at Cal, grinned like the Devil himself. ’Course, there’s no way of knowin’ for sure. It gets busy on Sundays—”
“What did you say?” I asked quietly.
She stopped talking. The abrupt change in my tone of voice must have startled her.
“I said there’s no way of knowin’,” she said apprehensively.
Without thinking, I hung up the phone.
Che Guevara Talks to Young People
The Nightwatchmen have always gone by a variety of names—Nächtlich, or “Nocturnal,” in German, also Nie Schlafend, or “Never Sleeping.” In French, they are Les Veilleurs de Nuit. Membership, in its supposed heyday, 1971 to 1980, is wholly unknown; some say it was twenty-five men and women across America; others claim over a thousand around the globe. Whatever the truth — and, alas, we may never know it — the movement is whispered about with greater enthusiasm today than at its zenith (an Internet search yields over 100,000 pages). Its present-day popularity as part history lesson, part fairy tale, is a testament to The Freedom Ideal, a dream to liberate all people, regardless of their race or creed, a dream that, no matter how fractured and cynical modern society becomes, will not die.
Van Meer,
“Nächtlich: Popular Myths of Freedom Fighting,”
Federal Forum, Vol. 10, Issue 5, 1998
Dad had raised me to be a skeptical person, a person unconvinced until “the facts line up like chorus girls,” and so I had not believed Ada Harvey — not until she’d described the Winn-Dixie incident (or perhaps a little before, with “tight jeans” and “sunglasses”); then, it’d sounded as if she were describing not Smoke and Cal in Winn-Dixie, but Dad and me at Fat Kat in September, when I’d first seen Hannah in Frozen Foods.
If that weren’t enough to knock the wind out of me, she had to go entirely Southern Gothic, dragging the Devil and his grin into it, and whenever someone with a fudgethical Southern accent said devil, one inevitably felt they knew something one didn’t — as Yam Chestley wrote in Dixiecrats (1979), “The South knows two things through and through: cornbread and Satan” (p. 166). After I hung up, my bedroom stalagmited with shadows, I stared at my CASE NOTES on which I’d written in famished handwriting Officer Coxley — style haiku (NIGHTWATCHMEN CATHERINE BAKER GRACEY).
My first thought was that Dad was dead.
He, too, had been Catherine Baker’s target, because he, too, had been working on a book about Gracey (it was the logical explanation for Hannah stalking us the same way she’d stalked Smoke Harvey), or, if he wasn’t at work on a book (“I’m not certain I have the stamina for another book,” Dad admitted in a Bourbon Mood, a sad acknowledgment he never made in daylight), then an article, essay or lecture of some kind, his own Nocturnal Conspiracy.
Of course — I ran across the room to switch on the overhead light and thankfully, the shadows were instantly whisked away like out-of-fashion black dresses in a department store — I reminded myself, Hannah Schneider was dead (the petit four of truth I knew for certain) and Dad was safe with Professor Arnie Sanderson at Piazza Pitti, an Italian restaurant in downtown Stockton. Still, I felt the need to hear his sandpaper voice, his “Sweet, don’t be preposterous.” I ran downstairs, tore through the Yellow Pages and dialed the restaurant. (Dad didn’t have a cell phone; “So I may be available to others twenty-four hours, seven days a week like some minimum-waged dunderhead working in Customer Service? Much obliged, but no thank you.”) It took only a minute for the hostess to identify him; few sported Irish tweed in spring.
“Sweet?” He was alarmed. “What’s happened?”
“Nothing — well, everything. Are you okay?”
“What — of course. What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” A paranoid thought occurred to me. “Do you trust Arnie Sanderson? Maybe you shouldn’t leave your food unattended. Don’t get up to go to the bathroom—”
“What?”
“I’ve discovered the truth about Hannah Schneider. I know why someone killed her, or — or she killed herself — I haven’t quite figured that part out yet, but I know why.”
Dad was silent, obviously not only weary of the name, but thoroughly unconvinced. Not that I blamed him; my breathing was a madwoman’s, my heart was teetering like a wino in a jail cell — altogether an unconvincing figure of truth and forethought.
“Sweet,” he said gently, “you know, I dropped off Gone with the Wind earlier this afternoon. Perhaps you should watch it. Have a piece of that chocolate cake. I should be no more than an hour.” He began to say something more, something that started with “Hannah,” but that word yoga-twisted in his mouth so it came out “hands” he seemed afraid to say her name, in case it encouraged me. “You sure you’re all right? I can leave now.”
“No, I’m fine,” I said quickly. “We’ll talk when you get home.”