“What are you not telling us?” I asked.
“Vick Atlas doesn’t decide who dies and who lives. His father gives the orders. If the old man has somebody tagged, it’s about money. This isn’t about money.”
“How do you know that?” she asked.
“I don’t. If I had to guess, I’d say Vick Atlas created a setup where he’d be your savior, Miss Epstein. Then somebody else got involved.”
“Who?” I said.
“Somebody with no conscience at all,” he said. “Have you seen a woman named Cisco Napolitano around recently?”
THAT AFTERNOON I DID something I would not have dared think about a few months before. I called the information officer at the Houston Police Department and told him I was a reporter for the Houston Press doing a feature on several outstanding members of the department.
“He was with the OSS, right?” I said. “That’s something else, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but you ought to talk to him about that,” the officer said.
“That’s okay. I have most of what I need. I forgot the number of years he was in law enforcement in California. Or was it Nevada?”
“It was Nevada. Five years, I think. Check with him. What’s your name again?”
“Franklin W. Dixon,” I replied.
“Who?”
I COULD SEE MY mother slipping away by the day, maybe even the hour, convinced that her public humiliation of Mr. Krauser had caused his suicide. The western sky could be strung with evening clouds that looked like flamingo wings; rain might patter on her caladiums and hibiscus and hydrangeas and roses and fill the air with a smell out of The Arabian Nights, the book that probably saved her sanity as a child. But no matter how grand a place the world might be, my mother’s eyes had the hollow expression of someone staring into a crypt. My father and I took her out for Mexican food at Felix’s, and as I looked at the misery in her face, I knew that voices no one else heard were speaking to her and soon our family doctor would have her back in electroshock, a rubber gag in her mouth, her wrists strapped to a table.
At that moment in the middle of the restaurant, I made a decision to lie or do whatever else was necessary to keep her from descending into the madness that the Hollands carried in their genes and the scientific world further empowered in its own hothouse of quackery and ignorance.
“I talked to one of the detectives who investigated Mr. Krauser’s death, Mother,” I said. “The detective says Mr. Krauser may have been abducted and thrown from the roof of the building.”
She ate with small bites, her gaze fixed on nothing. I waited for her to speak. My words seemed to have had no effect. Then she looked at me, her eyes empty, focused on a spot next to my face. “Why would they do that?”
“Maybe Mr. Krauser was mixed up with people who send homeless boys to indoctrination camps,” I said.
“He did that?” she said.
“No one is sure,” I said.
My mother took another bite, chewing slowly. My father watched her as he would someone walking a wire high above a canyon. The only time my father ever drank in front of my mother was when the three of us were at a restaurant, as though a geographical armistice had been declared between the forces of his addiction and my mother’s intolerance. Tonight he had not ordered a beer with his dinner. It was the first time I had ever seen him not do so, and I suspected it had not been easy.
“Listen to Aaron,” he said. “I think he knows what he’s talking about.”
She stopped eating and placed her fork and knife in an X on her plate.
“Are you not hungry?” he said.
“I shouldn’t have eaten a sandwich this afternoon,” she said. “Do they have a dessert menu here? I can’t remember. What’s the name of that dessert made with ice cream and cinnamon and mint leaves?”
“It’s called ice cream with cinnamon and spearmint leaves,” he said.
“I’d love to have that now. Yes, something that’s cold and sweet with a taste of mint in it. When I was a little girl, we used to make hand-crank ice cream on the porch, up on the Guadalupe. It was wonderful to eat ice cream on the porch on a summer evening. We should go up there for a weekend sometime.”
“I think that’s a fine idea,” my father said. “What do you think, Aaron?”
Maybe there was some truth to my lie about Mr. Krauser’s death. Or maybe a lie can bring mercy and grace upon us when virtue cannot. I didn’t want to research the question. My mother seemed happy. It was a rare moment in what had been the declining arc in an afflicted person’s life.
Chapter