Her great-grandmother was also an Ingrid-Ingrid Margaret Ankrim, who crossed the unforgiving Atlantic from Germany as a teenager in the late 1800s. By the time the ship docked in New York harbor, battered and carrying a lighter human load than it started with, her sixteen-year-old hair had turned completely gray. Stress, they told her. Ingrid wanted to die herself when the captain buried three of her brothers and a sister at sea, wrapped in sheets and tossed like dolls into the ocean.
My mother’s voice always dropped to a whisper at this point in the story. She said Ingrid watched her own mother grow silent and still on the voyage, imagining her babies lying in pitch-black, freezing waters with God knows what brushing by them.
She told me that we both inherited Ingrid’s eyes-a bottomless green. My mother also inherited the other Ingrid legacy-she turned gray early. Her gray hair first appeared at twenty, a single stylish streak. One afternoon, as she colored it away in a monthly ritual in our kitchen sink, she told Sadie and me that strangers used to stop and ask “where she’d gotten it done.” It never occurred to us to ask why she made it disappear.
Maybe every little girl thinks her mother is beautiful. Mine really was. You could tell by the way men acted around her, even happily married ones, with a charming awkwardness that made you embarrassed for them. Her soft blond hair, when she let it loose, fell, as Granny said, “right to her rear.” The needle pointed to exactly 110 pounds whenever she stepped on a scale. She fit snugly into 27 × 27 Wrangler jeans, one of those rare women who could walk into a western store, pull her size off the shelf, and leave.
She hated violence-even spiders that wandered into our house got a free ride out on a magazine.
She never got used to the terrible storms that kicked up every spring in Texas. When the black wall clouds appeared on the northwest horizon, she’d orchestrate us in a dance of panic. We’d run from one window to the next, opening and shutting them to achieve the perfect air flow that a scientist she’d heard on National Public Radio said would keep the house from blowing away.
She was a terrible cook and a formidable chess player.
She was sad.
Sadie and I would wake up in the middle of the night to the mournful notes of her piano floating up the stairs. Sometimes we peeked over the landing to watch her play dressed in a black silk nightgown, her body moving like a sensual snake, to an audience of one cowboy, our father. We didn’t understand the depths of her talent until much later. We just knew she was the best church pianist Ponder, Texas, had ever seen because everybody said so.
But these are not the things I told Jack Smith while I wondered whether every sentence falling out of his mouth was a lie.
“You look like you might faint. Sit down.” He patted the side of the bed. “I’ll stand over here if it will make you feel better.”
Soft again. I wouldn’t fall for it.
“What’s my mother’s name?” I fought the desire to put my head between my knees.
“Genoveve Roth.”
Genoveve.
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said, struggling for control. “You don’t know her. She wasn’t the kind of woman… she wouldn’t have anything to do with the mob. Or a killer. It’s ridiculous.”
“You tell me what you know about your mother, then I can fill in details.”
Jack’s hand was poised with a pen over a hotel scratch pad, ready to take down my words.
I answered reluctantly. “Before she was married, her name was Ingrid Kessler. She was born in a small town in New York. She lost her parents in a house fire when she was a senior in high school. She had no other close relatives. She told us that every piece of her past, everything she loved, had burned. She didn’t have enough money to go to college, so she headed to New York City to pursue a music career. She played piano in bars, waitressed, and got pregnant with my brother, Tuck, on a one-night stand.”
I could hear voices in the room below us, a suitcase plunking down, the door of the room shutting. A man and a woman. Laughing. Separated from my nightmare by a floor. By inches.
“I’m sure she was lonely when she met my father,” I continued, stronger. Maybe the man and woman could hear me, too.
“He wandered into the diner where she worked. He ordered four eggs over easy with salsa and almost an entire side of bacon. He was a huge guy. Six feet, five inches. He drank two pots of coffee before she agreed to go out with him. Four months later, they married.”
I’m not sure why all of this was spilling out. Maybe because, out loud, it sounded more true. Maybe because I’d never gotten tired of Mama telling the story.
“She told us that my father saved her. He carried her and my brother away to his Texas ranch and his big family. Daddy always joked how she transformed herself from a Yankee to a Texan. I was born quickly; Sadie, four years later.”
“And they lived happily ever after?” Palpable sarcasm.
“You know, you’re an ass. I’m surprised you’re not beaten up every day.”
Jack’s phone beeped. A text message. He glanced down.
“We’ll have to continue this later,” he said. “I’ll call you.”
I was back on the sidewalk in forty seconds, dazed, angry, wondering how a professional like me, trained to strip away the layers of the human soul, had extracted so little from Jack Smith. He’d played on my fear brilliantly.
I uneasily entered the parking garage where I’d left the truck a couple of hours earlier. It was a different parking garage from the one where I fired a gun, at the opposite side of town, conveniently located near the Bank of the Wild West. Nonetheless, it was a parking garage.
It helped that I rode up in the elevator with a beautiful, ethereal-looking young couple, professional orchestra musicians, lugging their instrument cases from Bass Hall and arguing whether Rostropovich or Casals was the greatest cellist of all time.
Mama would have an opinion, I thought.
I got off by myself on the second floor, my eyes sweeping every corner of the garage as I walked to Daddy’s truck. Neurotically, I peered in the pickup bed, then at the cars parked on either side of me. An empty blue Mustang convertible on the right, and, on the left, a green late-model Jeep. The interior of the Jeep appeared piled to the top with trash, leaving about a six-inch view out the back window.
A hoarder, I thought. Hoarders usually start their habit as teenagers. Most don’t seek treatment until reaching fifty. A lifetime of pointless shame.
As I moved closer, I could see that there was more organization to the mess inside than I’d thought. The car was crammed to the top with papers and files, not garbage. Still, it appeared obsessive. A delicate chain with a small gold medallion hung from the rearview mirror.
As I pulled out of the parking garage, I mentally kicked myself again.
I hadn’t asked Jack for the name of the dead girl, the one he said shared my Social Security number. And maybe something much worse.
CHAPTER 10
I no longer know who I am.
I said it out loud, in the pickup, halfway home to Sadie.
I am a product of lies.
The knowledge was making me reckless.
I shouldn’t be doing this alone.
I should never have followed Jack Smith into that hotel. My cell phone buzzed in the seat beside me and I jumped, skittering into another lane, nearly hitting a Volkswagen Beetle.
I straightened out the wheel, grabbing the phone, staring at the readout, my heart tripping erratically.
Marcia. W.A.’s secretary.
I stabbed at the touch screen.
“Hello? Marcia? Hello?”
She started in immediately.