Heaven Should Fall Read online

  First we drove down to the National Mall and Dodge dropped me off at the curb. I had my messenger bag with me and also a plastic shopping bag, in which was a box containing one of the pipe bombs I’d built. It was a crappy little thing and chances were fair that it wouldn’t even go off. I didn’t care, since the object of it was to draw every emergency vehicle and cop in the city to this one little corner, not to be the big event. I jogged down the stairs into the Metro station, left the box next to a bench, then jumped on the train to Union Station. All over every Metro station are these signs that read, If You See Something, Say Something, and I had my fingers crossed that somebody would. Otherwise the day was going to involve a whole lot of waiting.

  In Union Station I dropped all my letters in the mailbox and stopped at the Au Bon Pain to get coffee and a croissant and kill some time. Standing there in front of the bakery rack, looking at the chocolate croissants, I had this automatic thought that I ought to pick out something healthier. The irony—even in the midst of a plan to blow up a Senate building and off myself in the process, the fear of developing love handles was still as pure as ever. I got the plain croissant anyway just on principle of staying true to what I believed in, right down to the last minute, and went outside to sit on a planter and watch for signs of chaos. Dodge was circling the block, listening to the handheld police scanner for news to call me about, and every time his truck passed by I felt a little edgier. This was the plan: I’d walk over to the usual lunch spot and wait for Fielder to show up, act surprised to see him, tell him I was in town for a job interview, then mention I still had some of Bylina’s campaign binders in my car that I ought to give to him. That was the kind of stuff that needed to be locked up or shredded, so he’d want them back for sure. Once at the truck, Dodge would pull him in, and that would allow me to take his badge and get past security—they’d still recognize me, and so as long as I had the badge I could breeze through—and set off the chemical bombs packed in Coke bottles in my bag. They were powerful things, way more effective than anything Jill had seen me working on. Dodge and I had tested them down at the quarry last week, and those things went off like napalm.

  But that was only the part of the plan Dodge knew. His job was to get rid of Fielder, and he still harbored this crazy fantasy that once this was finished we’d drive straight west and live off the grid somewhere in the deep woods of another state, most likely with some of his contacts in Montana. Eventually we’d bring our families out, and it would be cool because Jill knew how to live that way and liked it. He’d floated that idea during the planning stages and I hadn’t contradicted him, even though anybody who really knew me would have known I’d rather die than live in that kind of isolation, hiding from everybody and pretending not to be myself. What I knew was that, one way or another, I wasn’t going to make it out of this event alive. If I fled the building and made it back to the car, well, I had Elias’s gun under the passenger seat. Because once all of this was finished, it wasn’t only Elias who would be reckoned for. In a few days my letter would arrive at the Vogels’ house, and they would finally know that Candy had admitted it to me and Elias, that very night. How she watched Lindsay slip and then slide across that ice, crack and break through, and how the girl had reached her hands out toward her, met her eye, before she went under. And how Candy had just stood there for one minute, two, maybe as many as five, before she yelled to everyone else. Letting the seconds tick by, holding her own breath like a gauge. She told us in a voice so calm that we didn’t really believe her, not then. At the time I thought she was only trying to attach herself to the attention the whole sad story was getting, but I don’t think that anymore. I know her better than that now.

  I don’t know what you do with knowledge like that as long as you’re living. You just carry it, I suppose. But if I was going down, I sure as hell wasn’t going to leave this world and take that with me. If this whole thing was about accountability, and Dodge agreed with me on that one, then so be it. Because Candy had her part in this, too, adding that burden to all the other ones Elias had to carry, stacking on her part of that crushing weight. Dodge would not be pleased, not one bit, but that wouldn’t affect me.

  Now I could hear the sirens in the distance, plenty of them. I brushed the crumbs off my fingers and sauntered up to the curb to climb in when Dodge came by again. Back in the truck, he asked me, “You ready to do this thing?”

  I popped one of the mints into my mouth. “‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,’” I told him. I was quoting Jefferson. “‘It is its natural manure.’”

  “Just do it right the first time,” he said. He was driving slowly, scanning the street. “And don’t let it be any of your own blood. We don’t need any complications.”

  It was twelve-thirty. I looked out the window and saw, right there, Fielder walking down the sidewalk in the sea of people leaving the building for lunch, hair flouncing up and down from his forehead. He had his laptop bag slung over his shoulder and was holding the strap with both hands. “Stop here,” I said, and as he swerved to the curb I felt that same gut feeling as when a plane is landing, the forward motion, the wheels suddenly grinding against the ground.

  Chapter 32

  Jill

  I packed while Cade was in Maryland. Into the diaper bag I sorted the simplest and most necessary elements of what I had carried with me into the Olmstead house only the year before. Nearly everything was TJ’s—his toys and clothes, the blanket that Leela had crocheted, sized to fit around him in the laundry basket. On the surface of our dresser, in a modest display, rested the small tokens of my romance with Cade: the tickets from our first football game, a Valentine card he had given me, a pressed rose from our wedding day. All these things I left behind.

  I zipped the bag and set it heavily on the bed. When Cade had first told me he was going to Maryland, a red flag had snapped up in my mind, but he had said he wouldn’t miss the surgery, and I believed him. No matter how angry he was about Elias or what he was plotting, Cade loved his son. Knowing that would add to my grief and guilt, a day from now, when I would call the police from the hospital and turn him in.

  I wished I could call Leela, or see her one last time. Even though I couldn’t tell her that I was leaving, I wished I could hear her voice again, asking me how the garden was doing or chuckling over TJ’s baby mischief. She was a good woman. For a long time after I figured that out, I had puzzled over why a person as clear minded as her had tolerated a life with people like Dodge and the younger Eddy. But I couldn’t judge her; I had tolerated so much from Cade in the name of keeping the peace and hoping, through my faith in him, that things would turn around. I might have kept on doing that forever had Cade not lost sight of the difference between a patriot and a traitor. It reminded me that some lines might blur but others stand surely apart, and one can’t be a good mother and also a coward.

  In the laundry basket, on top of a folded wool blanket, TJ slept. For the remainder of the day I could give him no food, only breast milk, in preparation for the next day’s surgery, and I dreaded the struggle when he awoke expecting dinner. I watched him from the corner of my eye, attuned to signs of wakefulness, as I quietly packed our bag. Gray shadows from the window fluttered against his chest, which rose and fell in a rhythm so drowsy and content that it soothed me, even in my agitated state. His cheeks moved to suckle, his fists clenched and loosened. The shape of his brow was just like Cade’s. I wondered if he would hate me one day, looking into the mirror through his own eyes and seeing his father’s reflected back at him. I gave all I could, I thought. I would have to be the most perfect mother, because only the existing parent is real. The other is made all out of myths.

  I stepped into the hallway and then, with a tentative turn of the knob, into Elias’s room. The bed, stripped to its white sheet, lay stark along one wall; the blue desk with its hutch empty, its chair slightly askew to face me, seemed to expect a visitor. The air felt co
oler than on the rest of the floor, and the stillness and silence of it gave it the feeling of a grotto. I ran my hand along the dresser; it was clean of dust. Candy must have been in recently. I wanted a memento of some kind to take with me, but saw none. In a way that seemed fitting.

  What I could really use, I thought, is his phone. Elias had owned the kind you could restock with minutes from phone cards, and on this day, with escape so imminent and the need so great, I would have gladly spent the money and run the small risk someone would discover I was carrying one. But I had no idea where it had gone. Earlier in the day, before TJ’s pre-op checkup down in Liberty Gorge, I had searched our bedroom high and low to see if I could find where Cade had stashed it, after he had been given Elias’s personal effects at the hospital. But not a thing had turned up, and his room was the only remaining place it might be.

  I opened Elias’s dresser drawers and rooted around a little. His clothes were still there, folded neatly. They smelled like him, in a tidy, muted sort of way. Finding nothing else, I decided to brave a search through his old army duffel, slouched in the room’s far corner. But all it contained was a set of pressed BDUs, an old Bible with his name inscribed on the cover, an army-issue folding knife and a plastic wallet insert filled with photos of his family and a girl in a multicolored ski hat. No sign of the phone, not even a charger.

  I sighed. That morning I’d called Dave from the pediatrician’s office phone under the pretense that I needed to reach my husband. Dave was already in Laconia. Ready when you are, he had said. My sense of gratitude to him was so profound that it twisted into discomfort deep in my gut. I didn’t like feeling so beholden to anyone, not for a favor so immense. But I had to get through this first so I could have choices again.

  In the next room, TJ stirred, fussed. A sudden sleepy cry broke the air. I walked backward out of Elias’s room and shut the door silently, as though his spirit resided there and was owed absolute peace. Wherever he was, I hoped he had found a full measure of that.

  * * *

  The sound of the truck pulling into the gravel driveway woke me from a light sleep. Beside me TJ lay sprawled on his back in his diaper and undershirt, his plump cheeks moving in a faint rhythm as though dreaming of milk. The clock beside me said it was three-thirty in the morning. A car door slammed; beside me TJ shifted at the noise, but did not open his eyes. I felt relieved they had come home before morning, just as Cade had promised. I hated the thought of taking TJ away for good without seeing his father one last time.

  I turned over and attempted to fall back to sleep, but within a couple of minutes the front door creaked open and I heard the heavy footfalls of Dodge’s boots, then the sound of something being dragged. Cade’s voice came in low and clipped. Dodge muttered a reply, and the dragging sound was replaced by grunts that indicated a heavy object being hoisted by both men.

  I rolled over and lay still, my mind attuned to the puzzle of noise from downstairs. Perhaps they had hit a deer, like the day Cade had wrecked his car and Candy had butchered the doe in the front yard. But if that were the case, why would they have brought it inside in one piece? I lay there a while longer, listening. Then I eased myself past TJ and tiptoed down the stairs.

  The front door was still open, the screen door propped with a brick, but the porch light was off. Dodge and Cade were both outside, unloading the truck. I looked around the downstairs. The only light came from the lamp next to Elias’s chair that we typically left on all night no matter what. I wandered toward the darkened kitchen. No blood or soil, no sign of whatever they had carried. A basket on the kitchen island overflowed with sweet corn. The beagles’ food bowls sat beside each other on the counter awaiting the day’s breakfast. On a slate square above the stove hung a tole painting of a house with a curl of smoke emerging from the chimney, beside a quote in country-primitive script: “He restoreth my soul, Psalms 23:3.” I could read it by the narrow band of light that blazed beneath the tightly closed door of the cellar. I looked at that door for a moment, considering. Then I threw it open and ventured down the stairs.

  In the center of the room, tied with bungee cord to Eddy’s good Windsor chair, sat Drew Fielder. Above the strip of duct tape that covered his mouth he looked out at me with hollow, doomed eyes. The sleeves of his blue pin-striped oxford shirt were pushed above his elbows; his wrists were bound behind his back, and one leg of his khaki pants was slashed with a dark wet stain that appeared to be urine. Drew’s ankles were bound to the legs of the chair with tape, and his shoes were gone. Above his head the metal cord of the lightbulb swung slowly, like a pendulum marking time with great cans of milk powder and freeze-dried meats.

  I screamed and, by instinct, jerked the tape from his mouth. He spit out a wadded paper towel and gasped in a deep breath of air. “Jill,” he said, “get me out of here.”

  Already I could hear the rapid footsteps of the men returning to the house. “That had to be Jill,” I heard Cade saying. At the sound of his voice Drew strained his shoulders toward me, bumping his head against my arm, and I skittered back from his desperate touch. Cade’s boots and Dodge’s were quick and hollow against the stairs. Before I could turn I backed into Cade, who clapped his hand over my mouth when I startled, whispering a shushing noise like the one he used with TJ.

  “Goddamn it,” Dodge muttered, coming down the stairs behind Cade. “You better not scream, boy. We don’t got neighbors anyhow.”

  “Cade,” Drew said. “What the fuck, man.”

  Cade let me go, and I turned to him with a look of mute shock. “Don’t, Jill,” he said. “The guy’s had it coming for three years now. He’s alive, so chill.”

  “Call the cops, Jill,” Drew said.

  Dodge pointed at him. “You, shut up.”

  “You better pick your loyalties wisely right now,” Drew told me. “They’ll be here by tonight, busting down his door.”

  “In your dreams,” said Cade.

  Drew looked him in the eye. “Watch and wait. You’re already on the shit list, man. You made a bad, bad move.”

  Dodge grabbed the chair by its sides and dragged it backward toward the wall, tipping Drew back. The legs scraped the concrete with a broken and dissonant squeal before Dodge roughly righted it again and set to work securing it to the wall with a length of chain. I turned to Cade, who was moving his baseball cap up and down with a nervousness that belied his glowering expression. This wasn’t his idea, I knew all at once, knowing from that gesture that he was on the edge of a panic he couldn’t reveal. “Will one of you tell me what’s going on?” I demanded.

  “We’re on plan C,” he informed me in a curt voice. Dodge tossed him a pack of zip ties pulled from his back pocket, and as Cade caught it I saw Elias suddenly clear in my mind’s eye, the way he was in the woods that day—the bulk of his curled shoulders, the sweat on his temples, the dreadful distance in his gaze. Cade pocketed the bag as if it meant nothing to him, and said to Drew, “I’m not on any shit list anywhere. So sit tight.”

  “The hell you aren’t. Why do you think you didn’t get my job?” Cade looked at him sharply, his hand stilled for a moment on the brim of his cap. To Dodge, Drew said, “Are you the Powell guy? Richard or something? Yeah, he’s the guy on the watch list. The antigovernment nut job. No chance Bylina’s guys were ever going to clear you for my job when your family runs with this guy.”

  “Shut up,” he said, but Dodge fixed the chain against a second hook and rose grinning. I stopped at the base of the stairs and looked at Drew, momentarily halting my effort to leave. If Drew already knew about Cade’s family, we were all in more trouble than I could have imagined. For all these months I had written off Dodge’s claims as paranoia, but if they were true, then I was already an accessory. I had known so much and said so little, and whatever agency knew Dodge’s name might also know about me and my silence. The fact that I had reasons for it wouldn’t matter. People always did.

  “They got me on a watch list, huh?” he said, ignoring Cade’s scow
l.

  “Gag that asshole back up,” said Cade.

  “Why? Let him talk. I’m interested.”

  Cade gave a shake of his head and moved toward Drew, but the sharpness of my voice stopped him. “This matters, Cade. Let him say what he knows.”

  The way Drew’s arms were fixed behind his back made it impossible to fully raise his head, but he looked up as best he could and trained his glance on me. “Call them, Jill. They’re coming anyway, and you’ve got a lot to lose.”

  “She’s not on your side, little buddy,” said Dodge.

  “Is that true, Jill?” asked Drew. His voice was plaintive. “You really on the side of this yuck-a-puck and your jackass baby daddy? I always thought you were better than that.”

  “I’m on my son’s side. Tell me what watch list you’re talking about.”

  “Will you help me if I do?”

  “She can’t do a damn thing for you,” said Cade. He looked to Dodge and asked, “What do you want to do about the truck?”

  “I’ll go clean it out once we’ve got him situated. You can hold down the fort.”

  “We can get Scooter to do it. He should be over any minute now. I texted him from the road.”

  Drew’s piercing eye contact kept drawing me back in. “C’mon, Jill, don’t be a bitch right now,” he said, and what sympathy I had built for him turned sour. “Who kept you company on Christmas? When this guy abandoned you for his real family. Who bought you dinner when he left you behind?”

  That evening flashed into my mind. “I paid for my own dinner. And then you tried to get me to go to bed with you.”

  Cade looked at him sharply. His face turned pink. Dodge made a noise that sounded like the yowl of a cat, all the while tightening the bungee cords that Cade had secured too loosely for his taste.