the Bureau can would put you back into her good graces, wouldn’t it?”
More silence. “I need this, Cat.”
“Maybe so. But jailing this killer is more important than your job.”
“I know that. I’m just—”
“No way, Sean. I’ve broken a lot of rules for you, but I’ve never put a conviction in jeopardy. I won’t do it now.”
“Okay, okay. But look … at least tell me if you know the dentist. His name is Shubb. Harold Shubb.”
I feel a quick rush of excitement. Harold Shubb is part of the disaster identification unit made up of volunteer dentists across the state of Louisiana. I organized that unit. Shubb took one of my seminars in forensic odontology, and he would love a call from me.
“You know him. I can tell,” Sean says.
“I know him.”
“Is he an okay guy?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t change anything. Get your court order, and Shubb will do you right. You should also be trying to find out if this Malik had any orthodontic work done as an adolescent, or even later. Orthodontists keep their patient models for a very long time, as a defense against future lawsuits.”
Sean sighs heavily. “I’ll tell them that.”
“Kaiser probably knows already.” I picture the former FBI profiler in my mind. I can’t imagine much getting by him.
“I know you won’t make the call,” Sean says in a wheedling tone, “but at least let me fax you what I have on Malik. You want to see that, right?”
I don’t answer. My thoughts have wandered back to the bloody footprints in my bedroom.
“Cat? Are you there?”
“Send me what you’ve got.”
“Give me a fax number.”
I give him the number of my grandfather’s fax machine. I know it because we sometimes have to exchange documents dealing with my trust fund.
“I’ll get it to you as soon as I can,” Sean promises.
“Fine.”
There’s an awkward pause. Then he says, “Are you coming back tonight?”
I actually hear loneliness in his voice. “No.”
“Tomorrow, then?”
“I don’t know, Sean.”
“Why not? You hardly ever go home, and when you do, you don’t like it.”
“Something’s happened up here.”
“What? Is somebody sick?”
“I can’t explain now. I have to go.”
“Call me later, then.”
“If I notice anything interesting in the stuff you fax me, I’ll call. Otherwise, it’ll be tomorrow at least before you hear from me.”
Sean is silent. Then, after a few moments, he says, “Good-bye, Cat.”
I hang up and look back at the slave quarters, then up at the rear of Malmaison. I want to talk to my mother, but she’s still twenty minutes away. Suddenly, from the roiling mass of thoughts that is my mind in this moment, a clear image rises. Breaking into a trot, I head into the trees on the east side of the vast lawn, following a path first beaten by my own feet fifteen years ago.
I need to be underwater.
As I jog through the trees, I spy a dark figure standing in the shadows about forty yards ahead. A black man in work clothes. I bear left so that I won’t pass him too closely, but as I near the figure, I recognize Mose, the yardman who has worked at Malmaison since before I was born. Once a strapping giant who could carry railroad ties on his back, Mose now has a bent spine and white stubble that grows almost up to his watery yellow eyes. He lives alone in a small house at the back of the property, but once a week he commands an army of younger men who groom the grounds like a crack army platoon. I wave as I pass to his left. The old man lifts his arm in a vague way. He doesn’t recognize me. Probably thinks I’m one of the suburban housewives from Brookwood. The scary thing is that I’m old enough to be one now. I quicken my pace, my mind racing ahead to a place I haven’t visited in far too long.
Years fall away as I run.
Pounding through the trees at the eastern border of Malmaison’s grounds, I suddenly emerge behind the houses of Brookwood Estates, a subdivision built on DeSalle land sold to a developer during the 1930s, when Malmaison was out of the family’s hands. The homes in Brookwood are mostly single-story, 1950s ranch houses, but a few at the back are two-story colonials. I came here countless times during my youth, and always for the same reason. One of the colonials belonged to the Hemmeters, an elderly couple who owned a swimming pool.
I came because my grandfather, despite his enormous wealth and my fanatical dedication to swimming—three consecutive state titles—refused to build me a practice pool. My request was not that of a spoiled child. My high school, St. Stephen’s, had no swimming pool, so our team was forced to practice wherever we could get permission at different times of the year. My mother and grandmother gave my suggestion their usual shaky support, but since the original Malmaison had no pool, my grandfather refused to desecrate “his” grounds with one. To remedy this, I did my daily laps in the Hemmeters’ pool in Brookwood. The old couple always sat on their patio to watch, and they became my biggest fans at local meets. Mr. Hemmeter died a couple of years ago, but his widow kept the house.
Something about the place looks different as I approach, but that’s only to be expected after the man of the house has died. At least the pool is being kept up. Mrs. Hemmeter stopped swimming several years ago, so the clear water sparkling in the sun strikes me much as my bedroom did—something maintained in the hope that I will return to it someday. Vanity, perhaps, but I suspect I’m right.
I jog around the house and check the garage. Empty. Returning to the pool, I strip off my jeans and blouse and dive cleanly into the deep end, leaving hardly a ripple behind me. The dive carries me halfway to the far wall. I breaststroke to the shallows, then get out and search the flower bed until I find a flat, heavy rock about the size of a serving platter. This I carry down the steps into the shallow end. After a period of pre-immersion meditation, during which my heart slows to around sixty beats per minute, I lie down on my back beneath the water and set the rock on my chest.
The water is just under ninety degrees, like the sea under an equatorial sun. I lie on the bottom for three minutes, until my chest spasms in its first “physical scream” for oxygen. Free divers train themselves to ignore this reflex, which would send a normal person into full-blown panic. After enduring a varying number of these spasms, humans can move into a far more primitive mammalian state, one the body dimly remembers from its genetic heritage as a waterborne animal. In the beginning, I endured as many as twenty spasms before entering the primitive
