59 REMEMBERING MOTHER

59

REMEMBERING MOTHER

Frank Trott, now engaged in the pursuit of Vida, is the son of Tatum Tyler Trott, an associate of the Bead crime family. Tatum was a nonbeliever so serious about his atheism that he brutally murdered a minister and his wife, used a reciprocating saw to cut them into manageable pieces, bundled each of the twelve grisly portions—legs, arms, heads, and torsos—in a segment of plastic tarp with a ten-pound plate from the weight stack for the bench press he hadn't used in years, sealed the tarps with epoxy, and dropped the packages into a nine-acre lake on his property in a mock baptismal ceremony. Tatum was a good manager of the Bead family's illegal gambling activities and a successful debt collector for them. However, all his energy in high school had gone into bullying other students and terrifying teachers and building a record as a legendary truant, so that he lacked the most rudimentary scientific knowledge. He was undone by ignorance and a tendency to miserliness. The epoxy that he purchased was an inferior brand that succumbed to the acidity of the water. Although the lake appeared placid, the inflow and outflow of the stream feeding it and the action of wind created currents that worked at the edges of the tarps and rolled the bundles this way and that on the lake bed. Even wrapped in plastic, the gruesome packages contained enough oxygen to assist decomposition, which produced foul gases, creating disassembling pressure within the tarps. Frank, eighteen years old at the time, had been fishing when a corrupted, somewhat greenish arm wallowed into sight, fingers curled and thumb raised as if soliciting a boat ride. Frank's first thought was that this must be his mother's arm, because she had supposedly run off with a traveling salesman. But that had been five years earlier, and this limb had not been rotting in the lake that long. He netted it, brought it aboard, and studied it for a while. One decaying finger still wore a ring that declared J ESUS H EALS , like the one long worn by Abigail Costigan, wife of Reverend Wayne Costigan, both of whom had gone missing two months earlier.

Although Frank recently graduated from high school, he was very much his father's son, with little interest in education and less interest in honest work, but with a keen eye for opportunity. He wrapped the reeking arm in a beach towel and took it directly to Horace and Katherine Bead, who were parishioners of All Faiths Church of the Holy Nativity and who in fact had financed the building of it and the installation of the minister who preceded Wayne Costigan and the one who followed him. Everyone in Kettleton knew that Horace and Katherine loved their church and were devoted to God. Frank's father, Tatum, also knew the Beads' reputation as devout Christians, but when arrested he assumed his detailed and highly incriminating knowledge of the family's gambling operations would protect him from prosecution.

He was wrong.

The lake was dragged on a Monday, when all additional pieces of the Reverend and Mrs. Costigan were recovered, although nothing of Frank's mother, Enola, was found. Tatum was arraigned that same day. His trial commenced on Wednesday. He might have been pronounced guilty by Friday if he hadn't hanged himself in his jail cell in the early morning hours of Thursday. Although Tatum left no will, the grateful county government, impressed by young Frank's sense of civic duty and his refusal to be cowed by his violent father, passed a special statute conveying to the young man his father's land and other assets. On a stormy night a year later, when Enola returned, announced that she was moving in, and declared herself the rightful owner of the place, Frank did not make the same mistakes that Tatum had made. Along with a few twenty-pound plates from the remains of his dad's bench press, he stuffed his mom's corpse into a metal drum to which he had welded four wheels and a strong tow chain. With Enola packed and ready to go, he welded a lid to the barrel. Having hitched the wheeled casket to his F-150 pickup, he towed it not to the lake but instead overland to a portion of his property that had been a bog since time immemorial. On the brow of a hill, he detached the barrel from the truck. He pushed it over the brink and watched as it gathered speed in the light of the full moon. As if it were some hellish conveyance serving as an alternative to a boat on the river Styx, trundling damned souls from the freedom of life into eternal servitude, it rattled down the slope, launched off the bank below, and landed with a tremendous splash in the swampy muck, where it sank out of sight into such deep, viscous sludge that it might eventually come to rest among dinosaur bones.

Because of the things he has done and the things that have been done to him, Frank Trott has an intuitional awareness of when he is in deep shit and exactly how deep it is. When the chopper appears, when Monger and Rackman—Tweedledum and Tweedledee—insert what appear to be communication devices in their ears and make contact with someone aboard the aircraft, the nature of this operation proves not to be what he believed it was, and he thinks he is in shit above his ankles. Then a guy aboard the helo begins to disperse swarms of objects with what looks like a tennis-ball gun, and Frank recalculates the depth as somewhere around his knees.

Following the departure of the helicopter, Monger begins to consult a device with a screen—not a phone, something Frank has never seen before. Then Monger announces, "She's been tagged."

"Tagged?" Galen Vector says. " Tagged? Since when have we been playing tag? What do you mean—tagged?"

Monger's deadpan expression conveys less emotion than an iron skillet, but Rackman says, "The little lady has a real bad case of cootie bots."

Monger smiles. It's the first time Frank has seen either of the brothers manage a genuine smile, and it is as disturbing a sight as a severed, rotting arm floating in the family lake. Monger says, "Cootie bots calling out to us wherever she goes."

"Song of the cootie bots," Rackman says to Monger.

Monger says to Rackman, "Coo-coo-cootie."

For a moment, it seems as if the brothers might laugh, which will be another first and not good. Instinct tells Frank that if the brothers break into audible mirth, they will punctuate the laughter with gunfire, and there will be blood.

"What the hell's going on here?" Galen Vector demands.

Although Vector appears angry, even enraged, Frank senses something greater than anger in his boss's demeanor, an underlying wariness that suggests he understands that Boschvark's confidence in him has diminished and that his position might not be secure. Worse, the billionaire's bold poaching of Bead family enforcers—Monger and Rackman, who now seem to work for him—suggests that Boschvark's decided to terminate his arrangement with the Beads and proceed with his Kettleton project without their assistance.

Evidently, Sam Crockett has reached a similar conclusion. "If the woman has been tagged," he tells Vector, "if she can be tracked electronically, my dogs have done their part getting you this far. No point paying us when we're not needed."

"Screw that," Vector declares. "I'm supposed to believe in cootie bots? I believe in what I can see myself, not what a couple sellouts tell me to believe. The dogs still have the scent. I can see they have the scent, how they're straining at the leash. Get them on it. You answer to me. Everyone here answers to me whether they think so or not."

With his torched face, Crockett isn't easy to read, but Frank is sure the dog handler is furious that he was lied to about their intentions toward the woman and wants out of this. Crockett's also perceptive enough to know that Vector is incensed that Boschvark has hired away the brothers without approval, that he is not going to tolerate even the smallest additional threat to his authority. If Crockett tries to walk away, Vector will kill the dogs. Therefore, Crockett won't walk away, but his simmering resentment will add to the instability of the situation.

As they move upland in pursuit of the tagged woman, Frank realizes that the brothers have separated without drawing attention to the maneuver; one now leads the procession and the other is at the back of it. Although Frank and Vector are armed, having Monger behind them with an AR-15 does not inspire an intuitive conviction that the shit they're wading through is growing shallower.

How odd it is that Frank keeps thinking of Enola, his mother, in these circumstances, when he should be concentrating intently on the threats of the moment. She cheated on her husband. She abandoned her son when he was thirteen. She came back only to cheat her son out of his inheritance. She was deceitful and greedy. Nonetheless, as never before, Frank is troubled by how she looked when he stuffed her into the barrel, before he welded the lid on it, how she gazed up at him as if her death-blinded eyes could still see. He doesn't believe he needs to make amends for what he did to her; he doesn't believe anything done to make his life easier or more pleasant ever needs to be justified. Yet he feels something unfamiliar and kind of creepy that might be regret or remorse, one of those words that mean almost the same thing but not quite, words that he would look up in a dictionary to get a clearer sense of their meaning if he was the kind of person who had the time and inclination to look things up. To suppress this strange feeling, he summons memories of his ex-wife, Cora, who has remarried, and step by step a more useful emotion, anger, burns the regret or remorse out of his mind.