Downbelow Domino, Chapter Thirteen
April 2nd, 2008
“Mr Boyd,” she said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t meet clients. I only work on the phone. If you want to purchase some photos or used clothing items, we could arrange that, but –”
“Okay,” he said. “Look. I guess it wouldn’t have to be in person. I just need you to talk to this guy for me. I was on the phone last week, I thought it was with you — it turned out it wasn’t. We didn’t talk last week, right?”
“Not that I recall.” She was getting progressively cooler.
“Okay, so he just needs to ask you some questions. It’s — it might be a blackmail situation. We aren’t sure. I spoke to someone who claimed to be you. That doesn’t concern you at all?”
“Should it?” she asked. “It’s a little weird, but I can’t see making a big thing out of it. Look, I don’t like getting a lot of this kind of attention. I’ve had people ask to ‘interview’ me before — usually for divorce cases, you know, testify that the husband was getting off, or the kinds of fantasies he had, things he said about his wife, whatever. That kind of thing isn’t confidential, you know. It’s not like I’m your priest or your lawyer.”
“Sure,” he said, “but that’s not what this is about.”
“I just don’t like doing it. I’ve got a pretty simple job. I like to keep it that way.”
“I understand, but this would really help out –” Castle made a helpless gesture at McCall as he returned.
“Katrine or Charity?” McCall mouthed at him, and Castle held up two fingers. McCall took the phone from him. “Ma’am,” he said, in a suddenly twangy lower Atlantic accent. “This is Deputy Marshal Wayne Clintock, I’m going to have to ask for your assistance in some matters pertaining to the issue already communicated to you? I can subpoena your work record if I have to, but I don’t think either of us needs that kind of bother.”
He paused, nodding along. “That’s right. Well then, let me give you my Massachusetts FAX number, you can send a copy to me there, off the record, as a cooperative witness in this investigation. Right, ma’am. Now the time in question is, we’re gonna need to know about that last Wednesday there, when I understand Mr Boyd says he spoke to someone using your usual modus operandi of what we might call ‘narrating.’ What’s that? Uh-huh … no, the way he described it to me was, he’d be observing a girl, and you’d narrate along with what he was seeing, like explaining a story? Uh-huh. I see. Well you get that information to me, then, for every call you’ve had from this number. Can you do that for me? Thank you, and have a nice day there.”
McCall clicked the phone shut, tossed it to Castle, and picked up the mug of coffee Castle’d poured for him. “Says it was just the one time, the first time you told me about. A shower thing?”
“Yeah,” Castle said. “Yeah, the girl next door was in the shower.”
“Both times, you were watching the neighbor girl.”
“Yeah, the second time was pretty much because of the first time, if you see what I mean. What was with that accent, anyway?”
“A lot of phone sex operators have ties one way or the other to the drug trade — usually a boyfriend who’s dealing on the side, so she does the work to fill in the blanks, so to speak. It’s the kind of job you can work five hours one week, eighty the next, and the kind they can do when their boy’s out of town, keep a nest egg on the side. They’re skittish about cops — federal cops in particular. And nothing says federal cop better than a Virginia accent. It’s as good as a badge.”
Castle eyed him. “Is that true?”
“No idea. But it worked. Maybe she just needed a good excuse to cooperate, so she wouldn’t lose face. Anything funny happen during the first call?”
Castle frowned. “Sort of. Maybe. It wasn’t like the second — Charity didn’t seem to be making things happen. But the girl, at the end, when I was — you know –”
“Yeah.”
“– she seemed to be looking at me, and she was singing. ‘I don’t know where I came from, and I don’t care.’”
McCall nodded. “You’ve mentioned that line before.”
“Yes.”
“Do you have internet here?”
Castle nodded, “Wireless broadband. Is it a quote from something?”
“It sounds familiar.” McCall nodded his head over to one of Castle’s computers, and Castle nodded. “Doesn’t sound familiar to you?”
“It does now, but you know, I’ve heard it a few times. Before that — I’m not sure. It’s plain enough, it’s not like ‘remember the Maine’ or ‘headless body found in topless bar’ or something.”
McCall sat down at the computer, opened the browser, and rattled a few keystrokes here and there with secretarial efficiency and rhythm, opening up multiple tabs, running searches in different engines and with slight variations on the phrase. “Okay,” he said after a few moments. “Let’s sidebar the fact that most of these results are from first-person accounts of multiple-personality disorder. That’s interesting, potentially relevant, but not where I know it from: here’s what clicked it for me.” He brought up a screen and leaned away from the monitor so Castle could see.
It was a page about Oz — not the Wizard of Oz specifically, but the other books and movies that had come out related to it, dozens of them by the looks of it. He vaguely remembered having read a few as a kid, with bright secondary-color covers and “Oz” in all the titles. Ozma of Oz, The Tin Woodsman of Oz, Three Men and a Baby in Oz, things like that. McCall’s search terms were lit up in yellow, as the quote of the day for an old version of the page, June 1st 2004: “I don’t know where I came from, and I don’t care.”
“His Majesty the Scarecrow of Oz,” Castle read. “Never read it.”
“The quote’s actually from the movie version,” McCall said. “Old silent film. I think Button Bright’s in some of the other books, though, the name’s familiar.”
“Gotta be some kind of asshole to name your girl Button Bright,” Castle said, and pulled a chair over while McCall typed some more.
McCall snorted. “It’s worse than that: Button Bright’s a boy. Looks like … a young boy a few years younger than Dorothy, who’s always getting lost, and always forgetting things. From Philadelphia before he ends up in Oz. Real name Saladin Paracelsus de Lambertine Evagne von Smith. Not sure that’s any better than Button Bright.”
“Kids would’ve called him Sally.”
“Exactly. Anyway, it looks like Button Bright just shows up in the movie, wanders in, gives his line — it’s one of the title cards, of course — and wanders off. The rest’s about a king forcing his daughter to marry someone she doesn’t want to, et cetera. I’ll find a copy.”
“Huh,” Castle said. “Still. Alice’s Adventures Underground. And now Oz.”
“And Mia’s childlike bedroom. Yes. Care to guess what Button Bright was doing when he first appeared in the Oz stories?”
“Haunting a house? Playing a music box?”
“Digging a hole as far down as he could, with no idea why.”
#
McCall phoned a few hours later with the polygraph results. “You lied about a few things,” he said. “But you told the truth about enough that I’ll pass you.”
“So you’ll take the case?” Castle asked.
“Yeah. Assuming you don’t think you’re in any immediate jeopardy, I’ll make my run of the downbelow and the rest of the house a week from today. That gives me time to finish my research, exchange notes with Ricky, and send a secretary over to organize your ephemera for you.”
“How do you mean?”
“The letters, diaries, all that. That might tell us what we need to know quicker than anything Ricky or I can dig up outside.”
“All right.” Castle frowned, disliking the idea for reasons he couldn’t put his finger on. “All right. Let me know when –”
“I figured I’d send someone the day after tomorrow, after I interview the call girl. I don’t want to go through a temp agency, so it’s a matter of calling my usual people or I’d have someone there today.”
“Oh. Sure. Okay.”
“Something wrong?”
“No, no. It’s a little soon. And — ah, I’ve got an appointment that day. People coming by.”
“Okay. Would this be a problem?”
“I don’t know. See, it’s — well, I called an exorcist, too. Not really called an exorcist, but I called a friend in the Church, and –”
“Jesus Christ.”
“No, not him.” Castle chuckled. He knew it was a fake chuckle and knew how fake it sounded.
“You’re at liberty to handle this situation however you like, Mr Finch, but I don’t think you went the right route there. I’ll leave it at that. I’ll wait to send someone over until after you’re done with that. All right?”
“Sure. Sure, okay.”
“And the girl next door? She’s fine. Name’s Jessica. Just broke up with her boyfriend, it seems, but she hasn’t been choked.”
“So there you go. And to think you didn’t trust Katrine.”
“I haven’t met Katrine. But I will tomorrow, and we’ll see what’s what then.”
“Yep.”
“Okay. And Castle –”
“Yeah?”
“Do you feel in jeopardy at all? Do you feel like you’re in danger?”
“No. Christ, no. Spooked a little. I feel like I’m making a big deal out of nothing, to tell you the truth, but in my family — that’s sort of what we do.”
“Well, look. I’m not saying your house is haunted, but I think you can safely say it isn’t nothing. You know, sometimes you call the termite guy, and it turns out you don’t have termites — but better safe than sorry.”
#
The moment McCall left, Castle had the urge to join him, to walk out the door with him. He’d started recognizing these urges: it was like when he’d quit smoking, and might go a week, two weeks, a month without thinking about smoking at all — and suddenly, out of nowhere, start craving a cigarette. The first time it happened it took him several minutes to even identify what he was craving; the second time, it made him understand how wistfulness could be a physical thing, something that bubbled through your chest like an antacid commercial. He’d used the analogy — not the antacid, but physical wistfulness — on a girl not three nights later, just another face in the Monaco-and-Milan set but someone he hadn’t seen in a few months. She’d sucked his cock an hour later and reprogrammed his cellphone.
He left the door open and just watched the outdoors for awhile. The hedges blocked most of the world beyond Domino, which had probably been the point once. But with the door open he could hear the jetskis and motorboats on the lake on the other side of the house, the sound of children shrieking somewhere, and a car or two driving through what was now a development and had once been a scattering of manor homes. Most of the land on this road had probably belonged to the owner of Domino once — Michael Van Der Linden, or Copland before him. One or both of them had decided that owning Domino was more important than owning the land around it, and had let it be sliced and diced into a patchwork quilt.
It was weird, trying to remember the neighborhood, the part of it he couldn’t see in the slice above his hedges: fringes of lawns and driveways, part of a house, lots of street. He’d only seen it once, and only for a few minutes before Reynolds brought him inside. He could picture the front of Jessica’s house but wasn’t sure if he really remembered it or was only inferring it from the side facing Domino. He could sort of picture the three houses as they spun out from the large cul-de-sac, and remembered at least three more — maybe four, maybe more — along the street. Wasn’t there a McDonald’s near the corner where the street ended in a T, joining the town proper? Or a gas station? Maybe it was one of those gas stations with a McDonald’s Express inside. Hell, maybe it was a Dunkin Donuts.
He could smell grass — not cut grass, just the simple smell of grass warmed by the sun, its tiny grains of pollen floating imperceptibly in diffuse clouds large enough that some of them tickled his nose. He could smell the lighter fluid someone — a teenager, probably, since it was still afternoon in the middle of the week — had used to ignite a charcoal grill, and the clotted greying hamburger fat dripping and sizzling into the heat. He could smell asphalt, the way it gets when it’s hot and sunny out all day and waves shimmer up from it. Dogshit, left to desiccate on the sidewalk that tapered away before it got anywhere near the main road — to discourage children from wandering too far, or to symbolically avoid creating an egress from the world to the development. Castle could see one of the tapering-off edges from his front door: it vanished several steps before the horizon, like that Far Side cartoon with the vanishing point.
He couldn’t see any people: they were obviously around, and he could hear them here and there, smell their evidence, but he couldn’t actually see any people. It was one of those things that wouldn’t have struck him before coming to Domino — because on an ordinary day he would have kept walking, past the front door, down the walk, out to and beyond the driveway, and no matter what kind of day it was, no matter what hour, he’d see someone eventually.
But right now, it could have been one of those Twilight Zone episodes where he woke up in a world populated by lizard people or photographic negatives.
Welcome to the circus, Sebastian.
He was tempted, more strongly than he’d been since the first day, to just walk through the door. Just walk through the door and fucking call Jonathan’s bluff. Did he believe the old guy really had the stones? Had the cold blue dick for it? Sure, Castle had spent hours under anesthesia and the next few days feeling like shit for it, and he had scars on his ankle and chest that weren’t there before. But wouldn’t those be good deterrents in of themselves?
Wouldn’t it be enough just to convince Castle that he’d die if he left the house? Didn’t that explain Jonathan’s almost entire lack of explanation as to the means?
He knew one of the things they said they implanted was a chip, a basic locater chip like pets got, and potential kidnap victims. But the other? An explosive? A poison? Another chip, in case he lost a foot or some damn thing?
Or just nothing at all?
Would they really risk killing him? If so, wouldn’t they have just done so from the start? Kill him and cover it up like they did with Rachael, making a strangulation look like a drug overdose as long as all you looked at were coroners’ reports and a death certificate.
The most likely case was that nothing would happen if he left the house except for an alarm being triggered. Some security guard would be paged, or some local crooked cop who had no idea what favor he was doing for the esteemed Senator would call Jonathan, or a SWAT team would surround him and the family would let him be arrested for two counts of murder and a side of manslaughter. He’d get a country club incarceration with minimum time served, but it’d be the end of everything for him, as much so as if he stayed in Domino forever.
The damage to the family would be immense. They’d never be the Kennedys. Never had been, although a cousin of a Finch cousin-in-law was married to a sister of a Kennedy brother-in-law. Hadn’t spread the power enough, had never had enough people in power at the same time, or gotten as far as Jack. But they’d never had the scandals, either. Sure, a little of this, a little of that, conspiracy one-sheets about “Nazi gold” because of a 19th century Finch’s dealings with German bankers, the usual Trilateral Commission nonsense, and a sideline of public spectacles — but nothing like Chappaquiddick. Castle’d been the worst, he’d been told over and over, but the worst he’d ever been charged with was misdemeanor reckless endangerment: trashing hotel rooms, drunk driving, bitchslapping a waiter, that was the kind of thing he got in trouble for.
Not murder.
Not yet.
He kept standing there. No one was going to force him to close the door. No one was going to care. No one, unless they happened to be far enough away to be up the hill of the street and looking at the far end of the cul-de-sac over his hedges, was even going to notice him, with his grape-purple face swollen like a Cronenberg movie. He’d be that guy: that quiet guy, who kept to himself, that the neighbors didn’t talk about until there was a reason to. None of them was even likely to know what he looked like, except Jessica.
Hours must have passed, because the shadows changed shape entirely, and the smell of grilling hamburgers dissipated as the air cooled, microdegree by microdegree. For a moment he caught a whiff of delivery pizza, the kind with the thick spicy red sauce and cheese that was yellow where it wasn’t golden — and then it was gone. Crickets, or those little frogs, or something, began to chirp, and citronella candle smoke wafted from someone’s yard. The sky slowly bruised.
He may well have fallen asleep, standing there, watching things change. It might have been fascination keeping him in place, or longing, or fear, or indecision. He was suddenly aware, after the sky had gone black and speckled, that dew had condensed on his shoes and the fine hairs on his skin: the suddenness of realizing this may have been because a sign of waking up, or he may simply have lapsed into a daze.
The dew, which meant it must have been the early pre-dawn hours, reminded him of summers at the Finch estate when he was very young, and for a moment he could swear he smelled wild strawberries. They’d grown along a gentle eight-foot slope in the borderlands where the carefully trimmed, landscaped, choreographed property tapered out into the wilder areas that were kept untamed — lightly forested, with a stream running through undiverted — as a buffer between the Finches and neighboring old money.
After his father died, when Castle was alternately coddled by everyone and ignored while they tended to their own directionlessness, he used to wander those scrublands all the time. The Finch lands extended for acres in every direction — even the groundskeepers didn’t traipse all of it, because there was just no reason to bother much with the wild brambles and johnny jump-ups of the fringe when there were award-winning rose bushes and finicky Norwegian ferns to tend to in time for the Better Homes and Gardens photoshoot.
He’d play all those games you play when you’re a kid that can eat up the day before you realize it but can’t remember ten years later, and he’d break off milk-leaking branches from the fuzzy-barked sumac trees and whip them back and forth to hear them whistle, or brave the hornets hovering near the peach trees, the prickers of the blackberry bushes, the sharp sourness of the wild leeks he kept thinking he liked because the smell reminded him of the French onion soup Cook made on Sundays. He’d make forts out of palm-leaf-shaped spruce branches, and try to follow deer tracks to find where they lived, and search the creekbed for frogs and skipping stones. He dug holes to China, knowing he wouldn’t reach China but figuring it was a good excuse for digging holes. He got dirty as allfuck, and sometimes his mother would yell at him and sometimes she wouldn’t notice.
And he ate wild strawberries.
He recognized the flavor years later when he had fraises des bois, the French wild strawberry gourmands went so nuts for: but this wasn’t quite the same, this was an American cousin, small — the size of a Cheerio — and heart-shaped and almost as juicy as a raspberry. There was a whole patch of the plants — each of them might have two fruits at a time, if that — on the side of that slope, overlooking the creek, with the guest house looming overhead and the manor visible to its north.
A chef in Madagascar, who’d trained in France and did a Master’s thesis for Princeton on the biology of taste, had told Castle that certain tastes, certain flavors, certain foods — because of the context in which they’re encountered, and especially because of seniority — set a standard against which all others would be measured. The western world thought everything tasted like chicken because chicken is a mild meat with an easy texture that children can handle, so chicken became the go-to “meat taste”; citrus fruits were always defined in terms of how they differed from the orange; and every family in North Carolina had a different recipe for barbecue, simply because every family in North Carolina had a different recipe for barbecue.
Wild strawberries were one of his primary tastes. Certain candies — a sharpness in Wild Cherry Lifesavers, Austrian strawberry pastilles, the wildfruits ganache in the chocolates from that place in Prague, and the smell but not the taste of Bubbalicious strawberry bubble gum — would always trigger a sense memory of those wild strawberries, often without him even realizing it. The smell of the gum on a girl’s breath would remind him of summer; the ganache would bring him back to Ander’s again and again. The first time he tripped, for what felt like days but was probably a passing fancy, he could taste strawberries: tiny, sharp, floral, sweet.
The wandering around the grounds didn’t last long: a few months after the election (in which Jacob Finch received a significant number of symbolic votes, which exit pollsters said were intended to “send a message”), the Widow Finch had remembered her son and sent him to boarding school in Spain for the spring, to some school she read about in a Time sidebar, a place pegged as “first of many to come, the Montessori school for the future,” and which eventually turned out a healthy number of wealthy theater majors with strong interests in non-European languages and conflict management theory. It was probably a good school. Castle had no memory of it whatsoever, and years later when he drove through its Toledo neighborhood, he noted to himself that he recognized none of it. But he knew his grades had been exceptional.
He had two more strawberry seasons, in between various schools and tutoring sessions, migrating from home to home like Wharton’s buccaneers while his mother tried to find that part of the world where nothing would remind her of the man she wanted everyone to remember her for. He didn’t remember much of them, either. Or maybe more truly, more tellingly, he remembered anecdotes: the things he said in interviews, answering the same questions over and over again when everyone came back to “check in on him.” Jacob Finch’s son is 13! How has this bright teenager dealt with living in the shadow of his father’s death? Jacob Finch is going to college! Will he go into politics? The law? Will he tease at the fringes like John-John, and start a magazine? Will he use his shares in those movie studios to start an acting career for himself?
If he did talk in his sleep, maybe the habit started with interviews.
Two years after Jacob’s death, Jonathan began to assume more public command of the family, and in doing so, he commissioned several minor construction projects at the estate: the greenhouse was modernized, the garage expanded to accommodate more cars, and a “spring pavilion” was built, perfect for large outdoor parties. Many of the wildflowers were trained to climb the trestles, and the slope was leveled to lay down the dance floor and the series of teardrop-shaped in-ground pools — barely too small to comfortably swim in, too cool to be hot tubs, too still to be jacuzzis, and ultimately only decorative.
The strawberry bushes were destroyed in the process: not through any design, but simply because no one but Castle knew they were there, and it never occurred to him to tell anyone, or suggest they be transplanted, or even to pick the berries one last time. No one noticed them: wild strawberries grow very low to the ground, looking like little more than clover or other weeds if you aren’t watching with a child’s or farmer’s eyes. The ridged tires of the construction vehicles macerated the plants, tearing them up roots and all, and there wasn’t so much as a bit of pulp left as a reminder when Castle came home from the Greek islands to see the pavilion.
A few years later, when Craetius Lightman was about to become his stepfather, he asked Castle if there was anything the boy would like, anything he wished he had — as a wedding present, he said. For whatever reason, “wild strawberries” popped out of his mouth, and the next day brought a gilt-wrapped videocassette of the Ingmar Bergman movie.
Castle leaned against the doorframe, his legs suddenly aware of how tired they were. He could have spent years picking wild strawberries, in Maine or Virginia or Alaska — or fraises des bois in France and Sweden. He could have become the guy to finally learn how to cultivate them without crossbreeding them with domesticated species and winding up with the palatable but bloated and somehow ridiculous fruit you found in gardens and supermarkets. He could, if nothing else, have used his money to perfect the technique of drying or conserving them, producing the finest strawberry conserves in the world, or crispy-chewy morsels of dehydrated strawberries for artisanal granolas and trail mixes.
There were a dozen other things he could have done instead, all of which would have been better, made more sense, been less Howard Hughes-y — not just a dozen, a hundred, a thousand, and that was the thing. Even the strawberry thing was better than what he had done, which was not a damn thing, a trickle here and a tickle there. Just pisstrails and fingerprints.
He could leave. Surely they wouldn’t poison him, or blow him up, or whatever it was Jonathan implied. They’d just look for him. It was a big world: he could hide. Not even hide so much as disappear: stop being Castle Finch. He had plenty of money. Just grabbing a painting from the house would give him a nest egg to kick off with, but cash alone, he could have a few hundred grand to run off with.
Just run. Just go away. Just stop being Castle. First you put on the mask, and then you become the mask. You think like the mask and they never catch you, never find you, never know who you are. It would be easy. He wouldn’t be where they’d look for him, wouldn’t do what they’d expect him to do, because he wouldn’t be him: he’d be Jack, or Max, or Paul, or Johnny, just some guy with money, and he wouldn’t even have to dye his hair or get plastic surgery or anything. They’d be looking for him in Prague and Vienna, Bangkok and Sydney, places where people with money went. They’d be checking five-star hotels, and St John’s in London, and Nobu in New York: not Motel 6 and Der Wafflehaus.
They’d be looking for money, and he’d be showing nothing but shoe leather.
He could vanish. He could disappear.
Just run.
Just go.
While you still can.
You just have to be someone else. He’d never find you if you just left. The only reason it never works is because no one does it. No one ever really runs away. They just avoid. Avoiding isn’t the same as disappearing. It’s all he had to do, just ditch, just skedaddle, just cheese it, hit the road with a thumb to the wind and a wad in his back pocket, stay out of trouble and set down roots somewhere where nobody knew him. He just had to stop being Michael, and everything would be all right, and he could have everything he wanted.
Just stop being Michael, and show a little teeth. There’s always another barndance. There’s always another round-and-round.
Castle closed the door on the dawn and promptly sank to his knees, legs buckling in a forest of pins and needles. He didn’t know what frightened him more: that the voice he was thinking in wasn’t his; or that his reaction to that fear had been to shut himself inside Domino, wrapping it — her — him — around himself like a blanket that would keep the monsters away.