Decimate, p.20
Decimate, page 20
There was a pattern to the nonsense, Agatha realized, and if she tried to write it down, she might capture it. She went for a pen and paper on her desk.
Die jooden warden oons am indie alle beganen . . .
Am induh sind weir alle eins und dies . . .
She was still scribbling when her baby sister began wailing down the hall.
Then, a hard, echoing slap ended her mother’s screams.
In response, Banjo, their Australian cattle dog, began barking up a storm inside the barn.
Dr. Theodore Caldwell had never raised a hand to anyone in Agatha’s presence, and now he’d struck her mother with such precise force it was as if he’d been practicing for the blow all his life. Pen forgotten, she watched him lead her mother toward the faraway guesthouse, as if she were infected by something that could not be allowed within range of her daughters.
Her mother didn’t fight him. That single blow had driven the strength from her bones.
But when they passed under the guesthouse’s porch light, Agatha saw the man wasn’t her father at all.
It was the junior partner in his medical practice, Dr. Hall.
She did not like Dr. Hall. His attempts to engage her in political discussions—Did she think Nixon was getting a fair shake in the press? Did she find the bombing of Cambodia justified?—always seemed vaguely bullying and inappropriate coming from an adult. And now he’d slapped her mother.
She scanned the shadows, looked back to the truck. There was no sign of her father at all.
In the nursery, Agatha collected Catherine from her crib, held her close. She bounced the baby against her chest, stunned by the nation of distance that seemed to lie between the mother who’d left the evening before and the one who’d just returned. Her parents had planned to spend a long weekend away at one of their favorite inns in Sandpoint, Idaho, and here it was, early Friday morning, and her mother was already back and in a state of hysterical nervous collapse. She’d sat with Agatha for an hour the night before, as she always did before their weekends away, as if she worried her daughter might feel excluded from the getaways and wanted to make her feel recognized. But she’d been calm and controlled, as always. A picture of poise, the other mothers called her. Who despite her lack of pretension always wore her wealthy background and her European education like fine but understated outer garments.
Now she was undone.
The door to the nursery opened, and Hilde entered, fastening the tie of her robe around her ample frame, her gray hair piled atop her head and speared with wooden pins.
“German,” Agatha said before she could stop herself.
The word seemed to root Hilde in place. It was too dark to see her expression, but their maid and nanny reacted as if it were a slur. She was the only German in their house.
“Did you hear her?”
“Who?” Hilde asked brusquely.
“My mother. She was yelling. It was German, wasn’t it?”
“Of course not.” Hilde crossed the room and tugged Catherine from Agatha’s arms.
“What’s going on?”
“Some sort of quarrel. Your father will handle her.”
“It’s not him.”
Hilde froze next to Catherine’s crib. “What?”
“Dr. Hall’s with her. Dad didn’t come back.”
For what felt like a full minute, Hilde was silent. Then she moved to the window and stared out into the dark. Finally, she muttered, “You go rest. I’ll see to it.”
Agatha wanted to argue, but with Hilde, it was no use.
Once she’d returned to her bedroom, she pulled a chair close to the window, waiting for a sign of anyone from the guesthouse, but it was quiet. A little while later, Hilde’s shadow started for it, and when she finally passed under the porch light, Agatha saw she carried baby Catherine in her arms. Maybe she thought Agatha’s mother would be calmed by the presence of her younger child. Agatha waited for someone to emerge, but no one did. After a while, she nodded off in her reading chair, the echoes of her mother’s incoherent screams piercing her fitful dreams.
When her alarm clock went off at six, she dressed hurriedly, found her parents’ bedroom empty, and rushed downstairs. Hilde was waiting for her in the front room. She was a stout woman whose pale cheeks blushed easily, but this morning she was milk white, and her hair was still as tangled as it had been the night before.
“Your mother has had an accident,” she said. “She takes medicine for her nerves, especially for long car rides. Before they left yesterday, she took too much and had a reaction. That’s why your father brought her back to Dr. Hall’s. And Dr. Hall thought she’d be more comfortable here.”
“Where’s Dad?” Agatha asked.
“He has meetings scheduled in Sandpoint he must attend to. Dr. Hall will stay with your mother now.”
Nothing about this story made sense. Sandpoint was an isolated lake town. The nearest city to it was Spokane, and her father never did business there. He was a doctor with a small family practice. Most medical-supply folks came to him while making a circuit through the more populated parts of Montana. Her parents crossed the border into Idaho to escape, not work; it’s why they never brought her along. Who could her father possibly be meeting with there? And how could the meeting be so important he’d abandon his wife in the midst of an emotional crisis so wildly out of character for her as to seem like a possession?
And nerve medicine? The idea seemed absurd. Her mother had taught her how to fire guns and ride horses with icy calm. Agatha had never seen her take so much as an aspirin.
“She needs to be watched, is all,” Hilde said.
“I didn’t know she took medicine for her nerves,” Agatha said.
“She didn’t want you to know. I’m sorry you found out this way.”
“I want to see her.”
“Not right now. You go on to school. All should be right by the time you’re home.”
“And I can see her then?”
“You’ll see her when I say.”
There was a flash of anger in Hilde’s eyes. This was not the matronly aggression with which their housekeeper usually sought to bend Agatha to her will. This was the ego of someone who had either forgotten her station or come into some knowledge that made the limitations of her station irrelevant.
Agatha knew better than to ask again about the German. In light of the lies she’d just been presented with, and there was no other way to think of them, the paper containing her hurried transcription had become an object of immense and secret value.
Driving to school took all her focus. Occasionally she would stay up too late reading, and the long, winding drive to Whitefish the next morning would test her sleep-deprived reflexes. To keep herself focused, every few seconds she had to squeeze the steering wheel until her hands hurt.
She knew who she should talk to next, but she wasn’t sure of the right approach.
An idea came to her during lunchtime, thanks to the chatty complaints of her good friend Lucy Merriweather, who was going on about another one of her nerdy little brother’s obsessions. Agatha suspected Lucy was mostly jealous of the attention these fixations, the latest of which was shortwave radio, earned from their father. Their father had been hiking with him into the park at night so he could test a theory. “The little dweeb thinks he’ll hear the Soviets if he goes up high enough.”
“How’s he going to do that?” Patricia Collins asked. “They’re all the way east, not on Mars.”
“I don’t know. Something like how the shortwaves bounce off the sky and then back down, but the Soviets aren’t broadcasting a damn thing they’ll let us hear. Hey, Aggie, you going to eat that potato salad?”
Agatha pushed the little Styrofoam bowl toward her friend without another word, fighting the urge to kiss Lucy on the cheek for giving her something that felt like hope.
Mrs. Deville taught French but was quick to tell anyone who’d listen that she was proficient in multiple languages, many of which she’d be able to teach as soon as the school decided the students were worthy. Agatha wasn’t sure if German was among the languages, but if anyone at their school spoke it, Mrs. Deville would know. She was a tiny woman whose flowing brown hair brought a little eruption of hippie mystery to their otherwise-staid high school, but she tempered her hints of wildness with outfits of muted floral prints and tweeds. When Agatha caught up with her in the hallway between classes, the older woman seemed overjoyed to encounter a student genuinely curious about something besides their sports teams’ scores or the mysteries of the opposite sex. Agatha’s heart raced as she turned over the paper she’d written on that morning.
“I can certainly give it a go,” Mrs. Deville said. “German’s not exactly my forte, but I’m reasonably proficient, and I have a few friends I might call. Where did you hear all this, Agatha?”
At the prospect of her mother’s words spreading out beyond the radius of Whitefish High School, her heart started to race. Whatever story she gave now might be repeated, which is why she’d practiced it several times since lunch.
“Shortwave radio,” she said, as if she’d been saying the term all her life. “My dad’s got one and we take it into the park. Sometimes we go up as high as we can to see what we can pick up. A couple nights we kept hearing this . . . and well, I wasn’t even sure it was German, so I just started writing it down.”
“Well, it certainly looks like an approximation of German. Phonetically, I mean. You did your best, I’m sure.”
She smiled and Agatha returned it.
“I’ve got some time this afternoon,” the teacher said. “Stop by after the end of last period and we’ll see what I have.”
Mrs. Deville departed. Agatha stayed rooted in place, waiting to see if there was anything close to suspicion on her face. But the teacher was so busy reading Agatha’s scribbles she almost collided with a knot of students heading in the opposite direction. By the time she rounded the nearest corner of the hallway, she’d barely looked up from the paper once.
Agatha sleepwalked through her afternoon classes. With the paper out of her hands now, she was without an action plan, and if Mrs. Deville hadn’t pulled something together by final bell, there’d be nothing to do but return to the ranch, where she’d no doubt be subjected to more of Hilde’s lies.
Mrs. Deville rose from behind her desk as soon as she saw Agatha standing in the doorway to her classroom. She approached with a look of muted concern. The paper was still folded as it had been when Agatha had handed it over, and she thought for a moment that might mean the teacher hadn’t managed to translate anything. Then Agatha noticed fresh red ink bleeding through the paper and realized the woman had done plenty of work on the assignment but was afraid of exposing any of it to passing eyes.
“Shortwave radio, you say?”
Agatha nodded, afraid that if she repeated the answer aloud it would start to sound like the lie it was.
“I imagine it was some sort of play,” the teacher said. “Radio plays were a big deal when I was a girl, not so much anymore. The Green Hornet. Did you ever hear of it?”
“Is that what it was?” Agatha asked. “The Green Hornet?”
“God, no,” Mrs. Deville muttered, shaking her head. “The Green Hornet was a great deal of fun. And I’m not sure they ever did a German version. Certainly not back then. Whatever this is . . . well, it’s quite dark, I’m afraid. Perhaps it’s religious . . . I don’t know. They’re talking about the war. That much is clear.”
The word war curled something in Agatha’s gut.
“Vietnam.” Agatha was deliberately playing dumb in hopes her teacher would speak more.
“World War II, I’m afraid. I asked for some help from Mr. Clark. He wrote his master’s in college on Goethe and knew more German than I realized.” She handed over the paper and then fell silent, as if she were expecting Agatha to read it in front of her. But reading the translation here, with school not yet entirely drained of students, would be akin to exposing her mother’s fresh madness to all of Whitefish High.
“Thank you, Mrs. Deville. I owe you one.”
“Let’s not go spreading this around, Agatha. I’m not sure the administration would be pleased should they . . . Well, let’s just say the contents were not what I expected. Not obscene, exactly. But disturbing. Quite disturbing.”
“I won’t tell anyone. And maybe Mr. Clark shouldn’t either.”
“No, no. He won’t. I’m sure. He was very rattled.”
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t know . . .”
“There’s nothing to apologize for. But if this is what you’re picking up on your radio, perhaps you’d benefit from a less distressing hobby.”
She nodded, tucked the paper inside her bag, tried not to break into a run as she reached the Pinto. Once she was inside the car with the doors locked, she unfolded the paper. At first it was soothing to see how the teacher’s block printing had turned Agatha’s scrawl into a clean paragraph of highly legible text. Then she began to read the translated words.
She felt like her breath was a thread being pulled quickly away from her and she’d better grab at it before it was out of reach, but she couldn’t move.
The Jews will meet us at the end and they will take our bodies. We will become them and they will become us. All become one, and no God waits for us. In the end, there are no bodies but what we have done with our bodies in life will be visited upon us. . . . I blinded her. I blinded her and so she was waiting to show me what I had done, and I could feel the blindness I had inflicted upon her inside of myself, and the wound became ours. We shared the wound because we are one. In the end, we are all one and this will be our punishment before it is our reward.
Agatha lost track of time in the parking lot, read and reread the translation so many times the sun had started to sink behind the mountains by the time she felt as if she were back inside her skin. On the way home, she pulled over and read the paper again.
Her mother was not German. Her mother was an American whose wealthy parents had died while she was away at European boarding schools. She was brought home just before Hitler’s invasions rocked Europe, where she met Agatha’s father while he was putting himself through medical school.
They’d worked for the government.
The US government.
They lived on a ranch in Montana because they loved the mountains, and the government had paid them well for their services, and their families were all dead. And they did not put their families’ pictures out for others to see because their deaths had been premature, and this made them sad. And her parents did not like to be sad. It was a wasted emotion, they said.
Instead of driving through the gate to the ranch, Agatha drove past it, then onto the shoulder, parking as far into the brush as she could.
On foot, she hurried to the ranch’s pedestrian gate, unlocked it with her key, then slipped into the dense pines that traveled along the property’s southern border all the way to the guesthouse where she’d seen Dr. Hall take her mother in the hours before dawn. She was surprised when Banjo didn’t rush to meet her. Was he still locked up inside the barn? He was an Australian cattle dog, which meant he was a runner and roamer and would probably drive the horses insane if they’d been let out into the pasture.
She was sneaking around the back, paces from the bedroom’s window, when she heard Hilde and her mother speaking to each other. This time she was certain the language was German. But it was the tones that struck her. Hilde did not sound submissive or deferential. She did not sound like the woman who was able to scrub their kitchen without making a single sound that disturbed them at the breakfast table. It sounded like she was giving Agatha’s mother orders, and her mother had no interest in complying.
The drapes were drawn, so there was no peering inside. As Agatha pressed herself against the wall, she closed her eyes, used sound to build a mental picture of the scene.
Her mother’s words were suddenly muffled, as if she’d swallowed her own tongue midsentence. Then came several metallic clangs. Small sounds, but made by something pulling against the bed’s metal frame. Footsteps followed, along with an eruption of wails from Catherine as Hilde carried the baby into the front room of the house. The choking sounds continued, then stopped, followed by more metallic jerks.
She could envision it all as if she’d seen it with her own two eyes.
Her mother had been gagged and tied to the bed.
Heart racing, she moved around the side of the house, waited for the sounds of Hilde crossing the front porch, her shoes crunching twigs. They never came. Hilde was standing guard, and now, Agatha couldn’t tell if the old woman was keeping Catherine in the guesthouse to comfort her mother or if the presence of the baby was meant to ensure her compliance.
Agatha snuck back out to the road, drove through the front gate as if she’d just arrived home.
It would be dark soon. When she entered the main house, she saw the dining table had been formally set, but with a single place setting. There were even long white candles in the silver candelabras her mother loved. There was a note on the counter, written in Hilde’s spiking, rigid cursive, alerting Agatha to the plate of food in the oven that she’d only need to heat for ten minutes.
There was an eruption of screams from the guesthouse, so eerily similar to the night before Agatha’s first thought was that she’d been seized by a flashback. But it was two women this time, and one was attempting to shout English to drown out the other’s German.
Hilde and her mother, and it was coming from the guesthouse. And then a third voice, baby Catherine, crying in response.
Agatha shot to her feet and ran.
The guesthouse’s front door was cracked, and as soon as Agatha threw it open, she saw Hilde and her mother wrestling in the front room. A plate of food had overturned and smashed to the floor. It was impossible at first to see whose raised arm formed the center of their strange dance, because there was so much blood on their hands. But as they stumbled together, it became clear Hilde was gripping one of her mother’s wrists, and in her mother’s hand was one of the wooden pins Hilde often used to spear her great pile of hair. Hilde must have removed Maryanne’s restraints in order to feed her, and her mother had then managed to yank out one of Hilde’s hairpins.
