“You said your father was career military. Did you get the details of what happened to your brother?”
“He did, but he and my mother never really said anything to me. About details. I mean, they just said he was coming home soon, and I had gotten a letter from him saying he was coming. Then, like the next week, you know, they said he had been killed. He didn’t make it home after all. Harry, you are making me feel… What do you want? I don’t understand this.”
“Sure you do, Eleanor.”
She stopped and just looked down at the ground. Bosch saw the color in her face change to a lighter shade of pale. And her expression became one of resignation. It was subtle, but it was there. Like the faces of mothers and wives he had seen while making next-of-kin notification. You didn’t have to tell them somebody was dead. They opened the door; they knew the score. And now Eleanor’s face showed that she knew Bosch had her secret. She lifted her eyes and looked off, away from him. Her gaze settled on the black memorial gleaming in the sun at the top of the rise.
“That’s it, isn’t it? You brought me here to see that.”
“I guess I could ask you to show me where your brother’s name is. But we both know it’s not on there.”
“No… it’s not.”
She was transfixed by the sight of the memorial. Bosch could see in her face that the hard-shell resistance was gone. The secret wanted to come out.
“So, tell me about it,” he said.
“I did have a brother, and he died. I never lied to you, Harry. I never actually said he was killed over there. I said he never came back, and he didn’t. That is true. But he died here in L.A. On his way home. It was 1973.”
She seemed to go off on a memory. Then she came back.
“Amazing. I mean, to make it through that war and then to not make the trip home. It doesn’t make sense. He had a two-day layover in L.A. on the way back to D.C. to the hero’s welcome we were going to have for him. There was a nice safe job, arranged through Father at the Pentagon. Only they found him in a brothel in Hollywood. The spike was still in his arm. Heroin.”
She looked up at Bosch’s face and then looked away.
“That’s the way it looked, but that wasn’t the way it was. It was ruled an OD, but he was murdered. Just like Meadows so many years later. But my brother was written off the way Meadows was supposed to have been written off.”
Bosch thought she might be beginning to cry. He needed to keep her on track, telling the story.
“What’s going on, Eleanor? What’s it got to do with Meadows?”
“Nothing,” she said, and looked back along the trail they had walked.
Now she was lying. He knew there was something. He had the dreadful feeling in his gut that the whole thing revolved around her. He thought of the daisies she had sent to his hospital room. The music they had played at her apartment. The way she had found him in the tunnel. Too many coincidences.
“Everything,” he said, “it was all part of your plan.”
“No, Harry.”
“Eleanor, how did you know there are daisies growing on the hill below my house?”
“I saw them when I-”
“You visited me at night. Remember? You couldn’t see anything below the porch.” He let that sink in a little. “You had been there before, Eleanor. When I was taking care of Sharkey. And then the visit later that night, that wasn’t a visit. That was a test. Like the hang-up phone call. That was you. Because it was you who put the bug in my phone. This whole thing was… Why don’t you just tell me?”
She nodded without looking at him. He could not take his eyes off her. She composed herself and began.
“Did you ever have one thing that was at your center, was the very seed of your existence? Everybody has one unalterable truth at their core. For me, it was my brother. My brother and his sacrifice. That’s how I dealt with his death. By making it and him larger than life. Making him a hero. It was the seed that I protected and nurtured. I built a hard shell around it and watered it with my adoration, and as it grew it became a bigger part of me. It grew into the tree that shaded my life. Then, all of a sudden, one day it was gone. The truth was false. The tree was chopped down, Harry. No more shade. Just the blinding sun.”
She was quiet a moment and Bosch studied her. She seemed all at once to be so fragile he wanted to rush her to a chair before she collapsed. She cupped one elbow with her hand and held the other hand to her lips. It dawned on him what she was saying.
“You didn’t know, did you?” Bosch said. “Your parents… nobody told you the truth.”
She nodded. “I grew up thinking he was the hero my mother and father told me he was. They shielded me. They lied. But how could they know that one day a monument would be made and they would put every name on it… Every name but my brother’s.”
She stopped, but this time he waited her out.
“One day a few years ago I went to the memorial. And I thought there was some kind of mistake. There was a book there, an index of the names, and I looked and he wasn’t listed. No Michael Scarletti. I yelled at the parks people. ‘How could you just leave someone’s name out of the book?’ And so I spent the rest of the day reading the names on the wall. All of them. I was going to show them how wrong they were. But… he wasn’t there, either. I couldn’t-Do you know what it’s like to spend almost fifteen years of your life believing something, to build your beliefs around one single, shining fact, and have… to find that all that time it actually was like cancer growing inside?”
Bosch smeared the tears on her cheeks with his hand. He leaned his face close to hers.
“So what did you do, Eleanor?”
The fist against her lips squeezed tighter, her knuckles as bloodless as a corpse’s. Bosch noticed a park bench farther down the walkway and he took her by the shoulder and directed her there.
“This whole thing,” he said after they were sitting. “I don’t understand, Eleanor. This whole thing. You were the-You wanted some kind of revenge against-”
“Justice. Not revenge, not vengeance.”
“Is there a difference?”
She didn’t answer.
“Tell me what you did.”
“I confronted my parents. And they finally told me about L.A. I went through all my things from him and I found a letter, his last letter. I still had it in my things at my parents’ house but I’d forgotten it. It’s here.”
She opened her purse and pulled out her wallet. Bosch could see the rubber grips and the handle of her gun in the purse. She opened her wallet and pulled out a twice-folded piece of lined notebook paper. She delicately unfolded it and held it open for him to read. He didn’t touch it.
Ellie, I’m getting so short here I can practically taste the soft-shell crabs. I should be home in two weeks or so. First I have to stop off in Los Angeles to make some money. Ha Ha! I have a plan (but don’t tell the OM). I’m supposed to drop off a “diplomatic” package in L.A. But there might be a way to do something better with it. When I get back, maybe we can go up to the Poconos again before I have to go back to work for the “war machine.” I know what you think about what I’m doing but I can’t tell the OM no. We’ll see how it goes. One thing’s for sure, I’m glad to be leaving this place. I’ve been In Country for six weeks before getting some R & R here in Saigon. I don’t want to go back, so I’m having them treat me for dysentery. (Ask the OM what that is! Ha Ha.) All I had to do was eat some of the restaurant food in this town and got the symptoms. Anyway, that’s all for now. I’m safe and I’ll be home soon. So get those crab traps out of the shed. Love, Michael
She folded the letter carefully and put it away.
“The OM?” Bosch asked.
“The Old Man.”
“Right.”
Her composure was coming back. Her face was taking on the hard look Bosch had seen the first day he met her. Her eyes dropped from his face to his chest and his arm in the blue sling.