“She’s the loneliest girl in the room.”
“Precisely. Contrary to popular belief, no one wants anything to do with her. She’s too depressing to be around. Trust me, everyone prefers to dance with something a little sexier, a little more comforting. And so I sent flowers. I didn’t know what kind they were. I asked the florist to pick something—”
“They were barbaresco oriental lilies.”
Dad smiled. “Well, now I know.”
I didn’t say anything. The position at which Dad was sitting, turned away from the lamplight, made his face old. The wrinkles on his face textured him. Lines cut toward his eyes and along his face, in his hands, tiny tears all over him.
“So it was you calling that night,” I said.
He looked at me. “What?”
“The night I ran away to her house. You called her.”
“Who?”
“Hannah Schneider. I was there when the phone rang. She said it was Jade, but it wasn’t Jade. It was you.”
“Yes,” he said softly, nodding. “Maybe that’s right. I did call her.”
“See? You — you have an entire relationship with her and you—”
“Why do you think I called her?” Dad shouted. “That nut job was my only lead! I didn’t know the names or telephone numbers of any of those other pieces of fuzz you’d befriended. And when she told me you’d just materialized on her doorstep, immediately I wanted to come get you, but again, she proposed one of her squishy psychoanalytic ideas and I, being something of a fool when it comes to my daughter as we’ve well established this evening, I went along with it. ‘Leave her alone. We need to talk. Just us girls.’ Dear God. If there’s one supremely puffed-up concept in all of Western Culture, it’s the talk. Doesn’t anyone remember that cute little phrase, which I happen to find rather illuminating? Talk is cheap?”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“I suppose I was embarrassed.” Dad gazed at the floor, the landfill of books. “After all, you were completing your application to Harvard. I didn’t wish to upset you.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t have been upset. Maybe I’m more upset now.”
“Granted, it wasn’t the wisest decision, but it was a decision I thought best at the time. Anyway, this business with Hannah Schneider is finished. May she rest in peace. The school year’s nearly over.” Dad sighed. “It’s one for the books, is it not? I think Stockton is certainly the most theatrical town in which we’ve lived. It has all the elements of a good piece of fiction. More passion than Peyton Place, more frustration than Yoknapatawpha County. And it’s certainly up there with Macondo in terms of sheer elements of the bizarre. It has sex, sin and that most painful quality of all, youthful disillusionment. You’re ready, sweet. You no longer need your old pa.”
My hands were cold. I walked over to the yellow couch in front of the windows and sat down.
“It’s not all finished with Hannah Schneider,” I said. “You have blood here.” I showed him.
“You got me, huh,” he said sheepishly, touching his face. “Was it the Bible or An American Tragedy? I’d like to know for symbolic purposes.”
“There’s more about Hannah Schneider.”
“I might need stitches.”
“Her real name was Catherine Baker. She was an old member of The Nightwatchmen. She murdered a policeman.”
My words were like a ghost passing through Dad; not that I’d ever seen a ghost passing through a person, but his face drained of color — fell out of him like water poured from a bucket. He stared at me, expressionless.
“I’m not kidding,” I said. “And if you want to confess something about your own involvement, recruiting or — or murder or blowing up one of your capitalist Harvard colleagues, you’d better do it right now, because I’m going to know everything. I won’t stop.” The resolve in my voice surprised Dad, but especially me; it was as if my voice was stronger than I was. It threw itself onto the ground, leading the way like slabs of stone.
Dad was squinting. He looked as if, suddenly, he had no idea who I was. “But they never existed,” he said slowly. “Not for thirty years. They’re a fairy tale.”
“Not necessarily. It’s all over the Internet that—”
“Oh, the Internet,” Dad interrupted. “As powerful a source as they come. If we open that gate, we must also usher in Elvis, still alive and kicking, popup ads — I don’t understand why you’re bringing up The Nightwatchmen. You’ve been reading my old lectures, Federal Forum—?”
“The founder, George Gracey, is still alive. He lives in Paxos. A man named Smoke Harvey drowned in Hannah’s swimming pool last fall and he’d tracked him down and—”
“Of course,” Dad nodded, “I remember her whining about it — obviously yet another reason why she went bananas.”
“No,” I said. “She killed him. Because he was researching a book about Gracey. He was going to expose him. All of them. The entire organization.”
Dad raised his eyebrows. “Well, you’ve obviously done quite a bit of work figuring this out. Go on.”
I hesitated; Burt Towelson wrote in Guerrilla Girls (1986) to preserve the purity of any investigation one had to be vigilant about whom one spoke to concerning the scary truths that had emerged; but then, if I couldn’t trust Dad, I couldn’t trust anyone. He was staring at me as he’d stared at me a thousand times before, whenever we moseyed through my thesis for an upcoming research paper (his expression interested but doubtful he’d be wowed) and so it seemed an inevitable thing to walk him through my theory, My Grand Scheme of Things. I began with Hannah plotting her own exit because of what Ada Harvey knew, how she left me L’Avventura, “The Flying Demoiselle,” the costume party, a version of Connault Helig’s elimination technique employed to murder Smoke, Hannah’s history of the Bluebloods paralleling Catherine Baker’s history, her preoccupation with Missing Persons and, finally, my telephone conversation with Ada Harvey. In the beginning, Dad stared at me as if I were a lunatic, but as I went on, he began to hang on my every word. In fact, I hadn’t seen Dad this engrossed since he obtained a newsstand copy of the June 1999 issue of The New Republic, in which his lengthy satiric response to an article entitled “Little Shop of Horrors: A History of Afghanistan” had been printed in the Letters section.
When I finished, I expected him to hurl questions at me, but he remained thoughtfully silent for a minute, maybe two.
He frowned. “So who killed poor Miss Schneider?”
Naturally, Dad would have to ask the one question I had only a rickety-bridge answer to. Ada Harvey had said she thought Hannah had committed suicide, but since I’d heard that stranger bounding through the trees, I tended to think someone in Nächtlich had done it; Hannah had been a liability when she’d killed the State Trooper, and with Ada telephoning the FBI and the possibility of her capture, Gracey, the entire group’s clandestine existence was at risk. But I didn’t know any of this for certain, and as Dad said, one should never “dribble speculation like a leaky garbage bag.”