Unspeakable Read online

  They came tripping over in their little silk Chinese slippers. Their faces were caked with thick layers of dead-white rice powder so that their five-o'clock shadows were covered, and their eyebrows were plucked into thin, startled arches.

  "LieutenantKavanagh!What a wo-oh-onderful surprise!"

  "Did you get that job atEmbers Avenue ?"

  "Are youkiddingme?" shrilled the girl in the blue cheongsam.

  "They were so cruel to us, you don't have any idea," added the girl in the red cheongsam. "They werebeasts."

  "They said, 'Who are you supposed to be,The Three Stooges Meet Fu Manchu?'"

  "Hey, you'll get over it," said Mickey. "You know you've got talent. When I saw you three singing 'Getting to Know You' that time what can I say? Whoa, unforgettable."

  "Who's the car candy?" asked the girl in the blue cheongsam, nodding toward Holly.

  "Oh, I'm sorry. This is a good friend of mine, Holly Summers. She's a caseworker for the Portland Children's Welfare Department. One of the city's finest. Holly, this is Lotus Flower, August Moon, and Bruce."

  "Good to meet you, honey," said Lotus Flower, reaching into the car and gripping Holly's hand. "You just watch this guy: He's got a reputation with us women."

  They drove on. "Some characters, huh?" Mickey remarked. "Portland, City ofRoses ? More like the City ofFruits ."

  A Birthday Wish

  Daisy was already in her pink Barbie pajamas when Holly turned the key in the door. She was sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of hot chocolate, watching television. Marcella, the nanny, was standing at the sink, washing dishes.

  "Hi, Ms. Summers. You came back early."

  "I guess I was a little tired, that's all."

  "Hi, Mommy. Did you have a good time?"

  Holly kissed Daisy on top of her head. Daisy was eight and a half, both pretty and gawky at the same time, all arms and legs, with long blond hair and a snubby little nose. She had her father's eyes: blue as bellflowers and with the same sparkle of suppressed mischief. For Holly's birthday, Daisy had made her a scrapbook crowded with pictures cut from magazines, recipes, poems, and Polaroid photographs that she had taken of places they had visited together, like theJapaneseGarden and the Oregon Zoo andMultnomah Falls . It must have taken her hours and who could guess how many bottles of glue, and Holly had been so touched that her eyes had filled up with tears.

  "You want a hot chocolate?" asked Marcella.

  "No, thanks, Marcella. I think I could use a glass of wine. I have some work to do on the computer."

  "Won't you be able to test me, then?" said Daisy brightly.

  "I have some work to do on the computerafterI've tested you."

  "All right I go now?" said Marcella, hanging up her apron.

  "Oh, sure. And here's your money for last week. Sorry it's late."

  "You don't worry, Ms. Summers. I would look after Daisy free and for nothing, you know that."

  Finding Marcella had been a godsend. She was forty-five, Italian, small and plump, with sweet, doll-like features and tiny hands and feet, like a Madonna figure from a church altar. Her three sons had all grown up and leftPortland and her husband Luigi had been taken by lung cancer. ("He smoke likeMount Saint Helens .") Holly had met her when she moved into her third-story apartment on top of the Torrefazione Restaurant in the Pearl District. Marcella had been working in the restaurant kitchen, and she had offered to keep an eye on Daisy while Holly struggled up and down the stairs with cardboard boxes and suitcases and clothes. After that she had agreed to look after Daisy every afternoon, after school. She called Daisymia bomboletta, meaning "my little fritter."

  Holly opened the fridge and took out a bottle of Duck Pond chardonnay. She poured herself a large glass and then sat at the kitchen table and kicked off her shoes.

  "Did you have a cake?" asked Daisy.

  "Uh-huh. I had bread-and-butter pudding with three candles in it."

  "And did you make a wish?"

  Holly took hold of Daisy's hand. "Sure I made a wish. But I can't tell you what it is or it won't come true."

  Not only that, she didn't want to tell Daisy what her wish had been: that five-year-old Daniel Joseph wouldn't have to suffer anymore. Daisy knew all about Holly's work, but she wasn't yet old enough to understand the mundane horrors that parents are capable of inflicting on their own children. Yesterday afternoon at four forty-five Holly had been called to a house inHappyValley where a mother had pressed her six-year-old daughter's hand onto a sizzling skillet and kept it there for over ten seconds. The reason? "She said wicked things. She said my brother kept touching her under her nightdress and she didn't like it. My brother would never do a thing like that." Her brother was twenty-nine, with two convictions for theft and aggravated assault.

  Portland's Most Wanted

  Like Holly, Daisy had always found math difficult, and it took over an hour for her to answer all the questions in her test paper. Holly felt sorry for her, because she could remember sitting alone at the back of the class when everybody else had finished their tests and gone out to play, tearfully trying to understand why 248 and 507 didn't add up to 779.

  The trouble was, numbers didn't look like numbers. She thought that 2s looked like swans and 4s like sailboats and 8s like hourglasses, and how could you possibly add up swans and sailboats and hourglasses?

  At last it was time for Daisy to go to bed. She had a small room directly opposite the converted bedroom that Holly used as her office. It had flowery pink-and-green wallpaper and flowery pink-and-green drapes and her pink-painted bed was covered with a patchwork quilt that Holly had bought at a secondhand store onEverett called Quilty Party. On top of Daisy's desk stood a jostling throng of Barbies: ballet Barbies, beach Barbies, walking-the-poodle Barbies, headless Barbies, one-armed Barbies, and Barbies dressed up in clothes that Daisy had cut out herself from cotton scraps (she wanted to be fashion designer when she grew up). All these Barbies were Holly's only material concession to Daisy having no father.

  "I feel sick," said Daisy, as Holly tucked her in.

  "I know. That's because you have a math test tomorrow."

  "No, I feel really sick. Like I'm going to hurl all over my pillow. I mean,bleagghh,all my meatballs, all my spaghetti, all my Jell-O, everything."

  "That's because you have a math test tomorrow."

  "I might have meningitis."

  Holly laid a hand on Daisy's forehead. "You do not have meningitis, I promise you."

  "AIDS, then."

  She went into her office and switched on her orange Mac. Compared to Daisy's clutter, this space was sparse and cool and painted in plain magnolia, with only three decorations on the walls: a glaring Tillamook mask made out of varnished wood; a color photograph of Daisy two days after she was born, with Holly's parents; and a black-and-white photograph of Holly sitting with her feet in the glassy water of Ira's Fountain, with David sitting a few feet away, his Dockers rolled up to the knee, staring in alarm in the opposite direction as if he had just caught sight of his future walking toward him.

  In this photograph Holly looked painfully young and vulnerable, her blond hair cropped like the young Mia Farrow, her thin knees knocked together. These days she cut her hair in a more businesslike bob, but there was still something of the same breakable quality about her.

  Next to her desk stood a stark black iron standard lamp and a fig tree in a black-varnished basket, and that was all. Yet, somehow the room gave her away, almost as explicitly as a signed confession. It was almost too sure of itself.

  She logged on to the Portland Police Bureau's Most Wanted page. She tilted back in her captain's chair as she scrolled through the mug shots, sipping her wine. One dumb-looking meathead after another, dozens of them, and they all shared the same look of bewilderment, as if they couldn't quite believe that they were human beings like the rest of us.

  John Shine, thirty-seven, wanted for kidnap and homicide. Ernest Valdez, twenty-three, wanted for kidnap and rape. Leon Broughton,
twenty-six, wanted for robbery, arson, and assault with a deadly weapon. Emily Card Venue, thirty-three, wanted for triple infanticide.

  Anybody who didn't know much about children's welfare would have found it hard to understand what had led these faces to be wanted for such serious crimes. But Holly had seen too many little girls with third-degree burns on their hands, like the little girl in Happy Valley yesterday afternoon, and too many baby boys with maroon bruises on their cheeks and reeking diapers, and she knew exactly why these people couldn't quite believe they were human beings and why they resented the rest of the world so deeply.

  An instant message rose up on her screen.

  "Good evening, Holly. Sorry to introduce myself this way. My name's Ned Fiedler. Doug tells me he mentioned me at your birthday dinner tonite. And, btw, happy birthday."

  "Hello Ned," Holly typed back. "What can I do 4 U?"

  "Maybe I'm being too pushy here Holly but I'd VERY much like it if you could join us at the lake this weekend."

  "Don't think I can make it Ned. I have a whole lot of work 2 catch up on. Laundry too."

  "Well, can I respectfully ask you to consider it? From what Katie says, I'd really enjoy your company."

  "OK, I'll think about it."

  "You can contact me at [email protected] anytime. I'm waiting for your call. With bated breath."

  Holly smiled and shook her head in disbelief. Men had come onto her in bars and restaurants and even in the office, but nobody had approached her by Hotmail before. She found herself wondering what he looked like. Short and fat, probably, with a drape-over hair-style, a shiny mohair suit, and a personalized license plate sayingWOODGOD.

  She went back to the mug shots. Roman Fischer, forty-two, wanted for armed robbery. Christopher Friekman, thirty-four, wanted for narcotics offenses and extortion. Billy Positano, nineteen, wanted for rape, assault with a deadly weapon, and grand theft auto.

  Then she stopped and scrolled back up again. On the right-hand side of the screen-although he looked fifty pounds thinner and his head was shaved-was the man she had seen talking in Poor Richard's this evening, she was sure of it. Merlin Krauss, fifty-two, wanted for extortion and attempted homicide. The same acne-eroded cheeks, the same jawline, but more important the same mouth that she had been watching so intently, with a question-mark-shaped scar on the left side of the upper lip. Holly could tell that he had actually been saying something when this mug shot was taken, because his upper teeth were lightly balanced on his lower lip, his lower lip was slightly rolled over, and his cheeks were drawn in. It was the letter F, and Holly could imagine the rest of the word.

  She dialed Mickey's number and sent him a text message.

  "Believe suspect Merlin Krauss."

  There was a long pause, but then Mickey texted back.

  "100 pc?"

  "110 pc."

  "Yr an angel. Talk 2 U 2mro."

  For a long time Holly sat finishing her wine and staring at Merlin Krauss.I wonder what made you what you are, Merlin,she thought.I wonder what nightmares you were brought up with. Or are you just what you look like, evil and stupid?

  Daisy's Nightmare

  In the middle of the night, her bedroom door was hurled wide open and Daisy leaped onto her bed, sweaty and tangled up and shaking. Oh God. Holly put her arm tightly around her and then she reached over for the bedside lamp.

  "What's the matter, pumpkin? What's happened?"

  Daisy lifted her head so that her mother could see what she was saying. Her face was pale and her hair was stuck to her forehead. "I had a horrible dream. I dreamed that I woke up and I couldn't hear anything."

  "Well, shush, don't you worry, that's never going to happen to you."

  "It was like all these people were screaming at me and I couldn't hear anything at all, and they were all angry with me because I couldn't hear. They had black eyes with just holes in them and they kept screaming and screaming."

  Holly gave her a squeeze and then she folded back the white loose-weave bedspread and allowed Daisy to crawl into bed next to her. "There you can stay with me for a while. How about a glass of water?"

  Daisy shook her head. "I was so frightened. It was horrible."

  "I know. But it was only a nightmare, wasn't it? And it isn't the end of the world, being deaf. Even if they invented a way of helping me to hear again, I don't think I'd want to try it."

  Daisy fiddled with the ribbons on Holly's nightshirt, tying them into an elaborate knot. "Tell me when you got deaf."

  "Oh, come on. You know how I got deaf."

  "I know but I like it when you tell me."

  "It's a quarter of three in the morning, sweetheart, and you have your math test tomorrow."

  "But it won't take very long."

  "Daisy "

  "Please,Mommy. If I go back to bed now, all those screaming people with no eyes will come back."

  Holly sighed. "All right, then. One day when I came home from school I felt hot and I had a headache."

  "No, no. Tell me about the house and the singing lesson and the chicken pie."

  Oh, well, thought Holly, and started to repeat the time-honored version, word for word. "When I was just about your age I used to live with my daddy and mommy and my brother Tyrone in a tall, thin house on Nob Hill. The house was painted cinnamon red and we had a canary in a cage on the back porch that used to whistle all day. One morning in April I went to school and we had a singing lesson. I used to love singing. We sang 'Green Grow the Rushes-O.' When I came home my mommy had made chicken pie and that was my favorite, but I felt all hot and I had a headache and I couldn't eat more than a mouthful. My mommy took me upstairs to bed and then I was sick.

  "I was sick again and again and my headache got so bad that I was screaming. My mommy gave me some Anacin and put me to bed, and that was the last thing that I remembered. When I woke up I was lying in the hospital, and my daddy was sitting in an armchair watching me. I said, 'Daddy, where am I?' and he got up from his chair and sat down next to me and gave me a cuddle and he was crying. I'd never seen my daddy cry before.

  "I kept on saying, 'Where am I? Where's Mommy?' but he didn't answer me. It was then that I saw that his lips were moving but no words were coming out. I couldn't hear him talking, and I couldn't hear anybody walking around, and I couldn't even hear the bedsheets rustling. I said, 'Daddy, I can't hear you,' and I couldn't even hear myself saying it.

  "It was like my head had filled up with water."

  "You were very sad, weren't you?" said Daisy, prompting her.

  "Yes, I was very sad. My daddy and mommy took me to an ear specialist but the ear specialist said that I would be deaf for the rest of my life. No more 'Green Grow the Rushes-O.' No more dogs barking or bells ringing or canary whistling on the back porch. And the strange thing was, I didn't just feel as if I couldn't hear, I feltinvisibletoo. When people found out that I was deaf, they stopped talking to me. They even stoppedlookingat me, as if I had vanished.

  "But my mommy didn't allow me to feel sorry for myself. She came from a strong family ofOregon pioneers who always believed that you had to make the best of things, no matterhowlousy your luck."

  Daisy nodded and softly said it with her: "No matterhowlousy your luck."

  "She took me for a walk along the Wildwood Trail one morning, when the sun was shining through the trees. She brought a picnic, and there was cold chicken pie. She held it up and said 'Chick-en pie,' very slowly and carefully, and pointed to her lips. Then she held up a bottle of Coke and said 'Coke.' I guess I'd already started to lip-read by myself, because I was so desperate to know what people were saying, but it was only then that I realized I couldlearnto lip-read better and better.

  "After that I spent hours watching people talking on television, and when I was out shopping with my mother I used to stare at people's lips until they thought I was cracked.

  "But one Saturday morning my father came downstairs and I could see him saying 'Where's my slippers, Claudine?' and I said, 'Un
der the couch.' Well, that was the second time I saw my daddy cry. He just stood in the middle of the living room and he burst into tears."

  One Hell of a Day

  The next morning it was raining-heavy, cold curtains which trailed acrossPortland from the northwest. After she had driven Daisy and Daisy's friend Arlo to school, Holly crossed theBurnsideBridge to the Southeast District. Below her, theWillametteRiver had the dull gleam of polished lead, and the tourists who were lining the decks of the sternwheeler paddle-boats were all kitted out in bright yellow slickers.

  Holly's windshield wipers flapped wildly from side to side but visibility was down to twenty feet, and like everybody else she had to drive at a crawl. Scarlet brake lights flared through the rain.