Colin Harrison - The Havana Room

We pried open the trunk of the car, and in it were the following items: a plastic gasoline can, a beach chair, an aluminum baseball bat, and rubber flip-flops. No suitcases, no items suggesting a flight from a bad marriage. I turned to Marceno. He and his men stood silently, understanding what the artifacts meant, tribally respectful of them and the earthen rituals of death.

Martha Hallock sat in her car, weeping fitfully. "My girl," she sobbed. "My sweet girl." How had I not figured out that she was Jay's grandmother?

Marceno and I walked away from the car toward the ocean.

"She sold me the land, you know," he said. "He owned it but she sold it to me."

"I think she knew somebody was buried here, feared it might be true."

"Who?"

"Her daughter, Jay Rainey's mother. Her nephew, Poppy, knew for sure, must have been the one to bury her. There was an accident with herbicide. The mother disappeared that same night, everyone thought she'd left the husband. But Martha knew, somewhere inside her."

Marceno ran his fingers through his hair, demoralized by the waste and stupidity of everything. "Poppy was just putting a little more earth on top of the car, that's all?"

"It looks that way."

"And this man Herschel happened along," confirmed Marceno. "Said what are you doing? And they got in a fight. That could cause a heart attack right there."

"Or Poppy told him what he was doing. Or Herschel figured it out. Or Herschel knew what had happened and was afraid it'd be discovered."

Marceno studied the rusted hulk of the Toyota.

"Poppy was desperate," I went on. "Once the vineyard was planted it would be a very long time, if ever, before the car would be discovered."

"He would be dead."

"More importantly, Jay Rainey would be dead."

"I don't understand."

"Poppy was probably the one who left the herbicide sprayer on. He killed Jay's mother. Found her, panicked, buried the car."

"Even if the ground was soft, that would still take hours."

"He had a bulldozer. He could've found her a few hours before dawn."

Marceno knelt down to touch the earth. "So he was trying to spare Jay Rainey from finding out?"

"I think he probably didn't want to face manslaughter charges. You could begin there."

"But did Rainey know?"

"I don't think so. At least not until recently," I said. "He found out in the Havana Room."

Marceno dusted off his suit and faced me, ever the tidy international businessman. "So, are we done then?"

"Not quite."

"Hmm?"

"I want to know why you didn't come to the steakhouse when I called and told you Poppy had arrived there."

He inspected his fingernails. "I didn't feel it was necessary, Mr. Wy-eth."

"But I had the information you wanted."

No answer. Marceno's silence felt cold. He adjusted his watchstalling, I figured, preparing an explanation. "This man H.J. came to my office," he finally said. "Full of threats." He looked at me and shrugged, as if the rest of it was obvious.

"What happened?"

"We made an agreement. We were both looking for the same people. It wasn't supposed to-" He appeared to sense that I could still cause him enormous trouble. "I owe you an apology."

"It was just business for you," I muttered.

But this was not the way Marceno chose to understand himself, and his eyes found their way back to the rusted hulk sitting atop the earth, the blanket of mushrooms inside. "Men died for nothing. For money, for wine."

Not Jay, I thought.

I will tell now four more things. I will tell why I slept very poorly the next few days; I will tell what I did with Jay's estate, including his letters to his daughter, Sally Cowles; I will tell what I said to her about her true father; and I will tell what passed between me and Allison Sparks in our last conversation, during which we discussed the terrible events in the Havana Room.

Knowing only two things, that Jay lay in the field near death, and that his mother stopped her car before him, one can surmise the horror she felt as she saw her son fallen to the earth. She would naturally have wanted to open the door and rush to him. But did she pause? In an instinct of self-preservation, perhaps smelling or tasting the herbicide that had already come in through the window or air vents? Did she sense that she needed to back up in the soft earth and flee? And was Jay in any way aware of the headlights upon him, did he know it was his mother? Perhaps she called to him. Perhaps he knew that she was affected by the herbicide. In any case she must have looked upon him, seen him dying, and then known she was dying herself. These are the lost seconds of Jay Rainey's lost life. Seconds that yet tick forward unknown. And, I wondered, did Jay have any remembrance of the lights of his mother's car or her voice or perhaps even the sight of her slumped form against the dashboard, or even out the door, dying in the field? Had there been one molecule of this memory? Did he think that she had gone looking for him, that he had unknowingly drawn her to her death? That, too, was undiscoverable. One might infer from his pursuit of his lost daughter that the answer was yes- that there was within him a hidden call of the flesh, to find the flesh that was of him and of those from whom he'd come. These are the deep pressures of being human, and those of us who are parents feel the forwardness of our flesh even as we know our own is failing. The rhythmic scything away of the previous generation forces our attention to our children, for if we do not have our children, then, knowing ourselves to be doomed, we do not have anything. People who don't have children often take violent exception to the idea that their lives are in any way existentially different from the lives of those who do have children, and to this I only laugh darkly to myself and think, Well yes, you may think that, but you are already dead, my friend. I am also already dead, yet live on in my son, who will have his son or daughter when I am dispersed with the fluorocarbons, part of the mist of ozone cooking the earth. Yes, I will yet live. And I think this is in all of us. And in Jay Rainey, too. The will to live. To pursue life is always to flee death, including murders in which one is somehow complicit, and this pursuit of life is not only essential to the survival of the species but also a courageous pull from the terror of biological anonymity. We want to be known. We want someone to know us. And there is something more, which obtained in the case of Jay Rainey. If you are a man, you cannot live without women, whence men come. I don't mean that men cannot live without women sexually, which of course they can, but rather without the fact of them, in the man's past, as mother and sister, as mitigating influence against all that is the most awful in man's murderous endocrinological nature. Women, it should be admitted, often make men better than they otherwise would be, save them from themselves. Jay could find lovers, of course, but except for Martha Hallock, his grandmother, he had no female who knew him, no woman who had insight into his essence, no female blood. Is it unreasonable to think he hoped, if only instinctively, that his daughter might someday look upon him and know him as no other female might, with the knowledge of shared flesh? As daughter to him, her father? On this, the answer is not lost. The answer is yes.

And then there is the matter of Jay's letters to Sally and what she might know.

This was the hardest thing of all. I studied the question. I really did. She did not understand why she had been kidnapped. She had not been harmed, at least not physically. Not a hair. She had spent less than one hour of her life in the company of some strange men. If she was traumatized, perhaps her stepfather and stepmother had seen to it that she had a trip to Disney World or a ski trip, some distraction that melted and obscured that one strange hour. An hour in a girl's life, what might it mean?