Ghost Country Read online

  PRAISE FOR SARA PARETSKY AND

  GHOST COUNTRY

  “Paretsky’s books are beautifully paced and plotted, and the

  dialogue is fresh and smart.”

  —Newsweek

  “May be her best book yet; it shows amazing depth and emotion,

  offers richly complex characters and a stunningly original plot, and

  provides subtle but caustic commentary on today’s social problems.

  …This book is rich, astonishing, and affecting, and Paretsky

  deserves rave reviews for taking a huge risk and doing so with

  amazing success. An outstanding novel and a great read.”

  —Booklist

  “Paretsky, as always, is a superior storyteller and keeps her

  strong plot line moving briskly.”

  —The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

  “Paretsky is still the best … she doesn’t pull punches.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “A thought-provoking, sensitive look at class struggles, a poignant

  look at the plight of homeless women without being didactic. Ghost

  Country constantly blends droplets of mysticism while

  retaining a firm hold on realism,”

  —Florida Sun-Sentinel

  “Vivid characters … Ghost Country demonstrates [Paretsky’s] ability

  to go in a different direction … A good read that also prods one’s

  social conscience at least a little.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Lyrical, witty … Highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal

  Also by Sara Paretsky

  TOTAL RECALL

  HARD TIME

  WINDY CITY BLUES

  TUNNEL VISION

  GUARDIAN ANGEL

  BURN MARKS

  BLOOD SHOT

  BITTER MEDICINE

  KILLING ORDERS

  DEADLOCK

  INDEMNITY ONLY

  For Enheduanna, and

  All Poets Misssing in Action

  Thanks

  The Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois, provided privacy and time to work on portions of this book.

  Dr. Jeremy Black, Assyriologist at Wolfson College, Oxford, and Dr. P.R.S. Moorey, director of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, shared their knowledge of ancient Sumer, including a private tour of the Ashmolean’s Sumerian artifacts.

  Lorian Stein-Schwaber taught me fundamentals of vocal technique and allowed me to sit in on her own master class with diva Judith Hadden.

  The Rev. Walter Green and his staff at Thresholds, who provide mobile assistance to the mentally ill homeless, took me to visit clients in parks, shelters, and encampments on the streets below Chicago’s Loop. The Rev. Gail Russell and her staff at Sarah’s Circle, a drop-in shelter for women, allowed me to spend time there as a volunteer. Cathy St. Clair, of the Community Emergency Shelter Organization, gave me information on Chicago’s homeless. Alice Cottingham made all those connections.

  Isabel Thompson helped me understand current diagnoses and medications for psychotic disorders. Beth Blacksin explained how managed care is affecting the treatment of mental illness.

  Cass Sunstein, Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, advised me on free speech issues.

  Dr. Don Hogue provided essential help at a difficult point in the manuscript. R.D. Zimmerman made that connection.

  Jo Anne Willis assisted with research on various topics.

  An early version of this novel involved a composer who didn’t survive the final cut. For help with that version, Chicago composer Gerald Rizzer worked with me on music theory. Thea Musgrave, composer in residence at the Virginia Opera, allowed me to sit in on rehearsals of Simon Bolívar and to attend the opera’s world premiere. Ardis Kranik, whose passing I mourn, introduced me to Ms. Musgrave, and shared some of her own great experience of the opera world.

  As is always the case, any errors of fact or fancy are due to my own shortcomings, not the words of the illustrious band who advised me.

  Ann, Eve, Joanna, and especially SCW supported me on the difficult journey to the end of this novel.

  For those worried about V.I. Warshawski, the detective has been on strike, but we are currently in mediation and should resume work together soon.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  1. The Diva Warms Up

  2. Resident in Purgatory

  3. The Ugly Duckling

  4. The Woman at the Wall

  5. Offstage Performance

  6. Hagar’s House

  7. Open-air Clinic

  8. Rude Awakening

  9. Bible Study

  10. Down for the Count

  11. Past Upheaval

  12. Are You Washed in the Blood?

  13. Call for a Goddess

  14. Barroom Balladeer

  15. Tossed in the Tank

  16. Lost in Space

  17. Thunder and Lightning from the Great White Chief

  18. Reception Room in Hell

  19. The Ice Queen in the Underworld

  20. The Ice Queen Adrift

  21. Saint Becca Slays a Dragon

  22. Free at Last?

  23. The Fatherless Orphan

  24. Breaking Camp

  25. Digging Up the Past

  26. Deluge

  27. Starr

  28. Escape from the Booby Hatch

  29. Big Sister Lets Go

  30. A Night at the Opera

  31. A Death for the Virgin

  32. Ulcers and Scurvy and the Itch

  33. The Great White Chief’s Errand Boy

  34. Once More unto the Breach, Dear Friends

  35. Wailing Wall

  36. Operatic Performance

  37. Princess in Trouble

  38. The Amusement Car-Park

  39. Miracles

  40. Show Us Some Cleavage, Honey

  41. Gathering the Posse

  42. Castle PLevolt

  43. Under a Gibbous Moon

  44. On the Run

  45. Supplicant Lawyer

  46. Heretics in Church

  47. Grapes into Wine

  48. Diva in Peril

  49. Mother of Harlots

  50. Murder in the Cathedral

  51. And the Wall Came Tumbling Down

  52. Bravest of All the Trojans

  53. Hospital Sideshow

  54. The Face in the Mirror

  55. The Lady Vanishes

  56. Funeral Games

  57. The Swan

  1

  The Diva Warms Up

  SOMEWHERE IN THE distance a bass viol vibrated. She struggled to remember what it meant: an angry person coming who wanted to hurt her. She tried to get to her feet but the floor was so heavy it pulled her down. Or maybe someone had attached weights to her legs while she was kneeling in front of the Madonna. The bass sounded more loudly and she panicked. She wrestled with her nightdress, which bunched above her waist as she thrashed about. Then saw the man leaning over her, his face red-black with fury.

  “No, don’t kill me! I didn’t do it, it was someone else, they put weights on my legs!” She could hear herself laughing as she exposed herself to him, her voice bouncing from ceiling and walls and echoing over and over. “Look: I’m not hiding anything!”

  “You goddamned bitch!” he hissed. “I wish I could kill you!”

  He grabbed a pillow and pushed it toward her face. Someone else wrapped her flailing arms and legs in sheets and tied them tight around
her body. She was coughing, gagging, praying for air, and then she was awake.

  She fingered her throat. The muscles were so tense that it hurt to touch them. She couldn’t remember the dream now, or even the events of the previous night, but the shadow of the ominous hovered below the surface of her mind. She stretched an arm out for her robe and snatched at empty air. Fear choked her: she was in a twin bed, not her own canopied throne, and she’d gone to bed—been put to bed?—in her clothes. Her silk skirt had bunched up as she slept, making an uncomfortable knot against her lower back.

  She flung the covers away and jumped up, much too fast: the room rocked around her and her pantyhose-clad feet slid on the floorboards. Her stomach heaved. She looked about and found a waste can just in time. She hadn’t eaten much recently; all that came up was a sour mouthful of green fluid.

  Shuffling along on her knees, she scrounged on the bedside table for a Kleenex. A clock radio caught her eye. One o’clock. Could that be right? The blinds were pulled but sunshine seeped around their edges: it couldn’t be one in the morning, but what was she doing in a strange bed in the middle of the day? Unless the clock was wrong.

  She had been going to La Bohème. It might be amusing to see what a community company could do with it, that was why she was wearing her black shantung skirt. She remembered dressing, and even, if she concentrated hard, having a drink with her escort before they set out. That had been around six. She had a vague recollection of the restaurant, of a waiter being rude to her, but none whatsoever of the performance. Maybe they’d skipped it. What had her escort’s name been? An admirer, there were too many to remember them all. This man had even opened his home to her for the last six weeks, but he often drank so much at dinner that he couldn’t stay awake through the theater.

  Next to the clock radio was a family photo: Becca dressed as Queen Esther for a Sunday school pageant, dark curls springing in wiry corkscrews around her head, Harry gazing at her with mushy fondness. Becca was a ringer for Harry, the same round face, dimpled cheeks, but pretty—on Harry those features looked like a frog’s. She herself had always preferred Queen Vashti, the beauty standing up to the king’s pointless commands, over the bleating, vapid Esther.

  So she was in Harry and Karen’s guest room—silly of her not to recognize it straight away when she’d lived there after Harry forced her to leave Italy, yammering as he always did about her extravagance. If only she were home—her real home in New York, not the apartment where she’d been staying the last few weeks—she could send someone for tea and a masseuse.

  At least she could take a shower. She pulled off her pantyhose and dropped them on the floor. The guest bathroom was at the other end of the hall, so she couldn’t undress in here, but she could take off her bra: it had slipped up on her in the night and was digging into her breasts. No wonder she felt as though she were being choked.

  There was a large stain down the front of the blouse. Had that been there when she put it on? She hoped she hadn’t embarrassed herself by wearing dirty clothes to a restaurant.

  She draped the blouse around her shoulders, the silk cool against her nipples. Maybe it was long enough to use as a dressing gown. As she measured the ends against her thighs Harry’s bellow sounded.

  “Is she going to sleep all day? Where does she think she is? Goddam New York in the goddam Plaza Hotel?”

  A female murmuring, too soft for her to tell if it was Karen or Becca, and then Harry’s bellow again. “Go in there and get her up. She’s been asleep since four, which God knows is longer than I have, and I want to talk to her royal highness.”

  A diffident knock followed by Becca’s head poking around the door. “Oh! You’re awake. Daddy wants to talk to you.”

  She pointed to her throat and shook her head.

  “You’ve lost your voice?” Becca asked, coming all the way into the room. She was fourteen now, her teeth white behind the barricade of braces, but her hair still a wiry cloud. Instead of Queen Esther’s blue flowing robe she wore layered tank tops over shorts and combat boots.

  “Janice? Are you up? We need to talk!” Harry’s blare made her wince.

  “She’s lost her voice!” Becca called back, enjoying the drama.

  “Then she can goddam find it.”

  Harry stomped into the room, but seeing her breasts exposed beneath the draped silk blouse he blushed and looked away. He grabbed Becca and tried to frog-march her from the room.

  Becca wriggled free. “Oh, Daddy, you act like nobody I know has breasts. We see each other naked all the time after soccer. I look at my own, for pity’s sake.”

  “And don’t talk to me like that: I’m not one of your classmates.” It was an automatic plea, lacking conviction. “Janice, button up your damned shirt and come into the kitchen. We’re going to talk.”

  Someone had dumped her jacket and purse on the floor by the dresser. She picked up the jacket and made a great show of arranging it neatly on the back of the chair, pulling on the sleeves to straighten them while Harry snapped futilely behind her. Another show of fussing in her purse for a pen. Hot tea, she wrote in block capitals on the back of an envelope that she found on the dresser. Shower. She gave Becca the envelope and went down the hall to the bathroom, drowning Harry’s protests by turning on the taps full blast.

  When the room was filled with steam she stepped under the shower and started kneading the muscles in her shoulders. She let the spray bathe the back of her throat, gargling slightly, then turned her back to the water and gently trilled her tongue along the edge of her front teeth. Using the trill, she moved up and down a half scale in the middle of her range, barely making a sound. When her neck muscles started to relax, she began a series of vowel exercises, still staying in the middle of her range but letting the sound increase a little.

  After perhaps twenty minutes of vocalizing someone hammered on the bathroom door, but there wasn’t any point in responding: it was undoubtedly Harry. Not only did she know what he had to say, she’d only get a chill and have to start over again if she stopped now. For another ten minutes she eased her voice into shape within the protective steam, until she deemed it safe to get out of the shower and finish exercising in the music room.

  She carefully wrapped her throat in a towel before leaving the tub, keeping her neck covered as she dried herself, then kicking the used towels into a pile in the direction of the clothes hamper.

  A cotton dressing gown hung on the back of the door. Karen’s, no doubt, judging by the vivid magenta flowers and tiers of lacy sleeves, but no one she cared about would see her in it and it was better than putting on that soiled blouse again.

  The gown had a complicated set of ribbons; she tried to tie it up high enough to protect her chest from the air conditioner’s drafts. To be on the safe side she took another clean towel from the shelf and draped it across her neck. She held her silk blouse over the heap of damp towels: surely Karen would have enough sense to dry-clean it instead of throwing it into the washing machine? She’d remind her as soon as she finished her workout.

  Of course, Harry didn’t have a real music room, but the family room held a badly tuned piano, the one from her parents’ house she’d used when she first started singing. As she walked back past the bedroom and down the half flight of stairs she hummed, letting the sound fill her head with the tickling that told her her breath was flowing well. Becca ran up behind her and handed her a mug of tepid tea. She didn’t break stride or stop humming, but did nod a regal thanks.

  In front of the piano she let the humming turn back into vowels, and then into trills. At the end of half an hour she was sweating freely but feeling pleased with her flexibility. Partway through she had gulped down the tea and held the cup out for a refill. When Becca didn’t respond she turned, surprised, to find the room empty. The child used to like to listen to her practice. Still humming, she walked back to the bathroom and filled the cup with hot water from the tap.

  Karen popped out of the kitchen as she passed. “Oh
! When you’re done will you put the towels in the hamper? I’m not doing a wash until Tuesday. Do you want some lunch? Harry had to—”

  She turned her back on the nagging voice, not interested in anything Harry might have to do, and returned—still humming—to the family room to finish her workout. In the past she always concluded with “Vissi d’arte’ from Tosca. Her own voice, soaring to that final high D, exhilarated her with its freedom and power. But today she knew at some unacknowledged reach of her mind that she would never manage the aria, and that failure to do so would crack her self-control in front of Karen and Becca. She contented herself with a couple of German art songs that did not place great demands on the voice.

  Drying face and chest with the towel in which she’d swathed her throat, she left it on the floor by the piano. The mug she took with her to the kitchen, even placing it in the dishwasher. Harry would not be able to say she showed absolutely no consideration for his wife.

  Karen had moved to the backyard, bending over in faded shorts and shirt to do something with the garden. A dull vibration overhead meant Becca was upstairs listening to a pounding bass that passed for music with today’s teenagers. The child had actually preferred that to her own workout? She snorted like a high-bred racehorse.

  Mercifully, Harry had disappeared altogether. Maybe the mounds of scrap iron called to him even on Sundays. She could eat lunch in peace. Not that there was much in Karen’s refrigerator to tempt her: the remains of the family’s Sunday bagel breakfast, with bright-colored squares of lox that looked like linoleum scraps; leftover roast lamb; cheese—which would produce phlegm in her throat—and iceberg lettuce. Wrinkling her nose she took out a bagel and a grapefruit and put on water for coffee.

  Becca thudded down the back stairs into the kitchen. “Did you get your voice back?”

  “Well enough to vibrate the glasses.”

  Without raising her voice, simply by using perfect airflow, she threw out a sound that returned a high-pitched whine from Karen’s crystal. It was a trick that had delighted Becca as a toddler, and even now made her grin.