Read Online The Prettiest Feathers by John Philpin - Free Book Online Page B

cards, plus the information I glean from my computer, and an occasional visit to a bank, convention, or embassy, I’ve been able to assume whatever identities I’ve needed. I’ve also educated myself so that I can step into a man’s professional life and live it, passably, for as long as I wish.
    Later, as I drove toward the cemetery to meet Sarah, I knew that her ex-husband would be tied up for the next several days in bureaucracy, on both the local and the international level. The embassy would accept a message for their courier, Mr. Carver, but they wouldn’t tell Sinclair that Alan Carver was on holiday with his wife in the British Virgin Islands.
    Nor would they tell him that they had no undersecretary named John Wolf. They would assume, as they had when I called, that he wanted to speak with Jeremy Wolf, and they would provide him with the number at his office in Washington. When I called that number, I was politely given a telephone appointment for the middle of November, nearly a month away—an expedited time frame because I had claimed to be an investigator for the Department of the Treasury with an urgent need for information.
    The mayor’s office will tell Sinclair that there was no official guest list for the reception. And, if he dealt with the same public information officer I did, she will say, “Your Mr. Wolf probably was there. Both senators were present, and they had twenty or thirty UN types with them. We just don’t have a list.”
    I parked beside Sarah’s car at the gate and walked up to meet her at the cemetery office as we had agreed. She stoodoutside, her light blue dress moving slightly in the breeze. She was holding a small bunch of cut flowers.
    “At least the day is beautiful,” I said.
    She had a map of the place with Liza’s grave marked on it. She glanced at it as we walked up to the top of the hill.
    The setting was sterile, barren of trees. There were no statues or headstones. Each grave was marked by a flat bronze plate resting in a slab of concrete. We were in the section reserved for children—the Garden of Enchantment.
    “I think she’s over this way,” Sarah said, consulting her map.
    When she found the grave, she removed a metal canister from the head of the marker and placed the flowers inside it, then put the canister back in its holder.
    I was waiting for her to start in about Liza’s short life, Sarah’s own role as mother, how Robert did or didn’t fit into things. Instead, she knelt and bowed her head. If she prayed, she did it silently. It occurred to me that perhaps the mother should join the daughter. It wasn’t just a poetic whim, and it wouldn’t have been mere replication. It’s just that the opportunity had presented itself. There was a slag pile off to one side of the Garden of Enchantment where a shovel was stuck in a heap of dirt. It would have been so easy to peel back the sod on Liza’s grave, dig a shallow hole, make a small contribution to the slag pile, deposit Sarah atop her daughter’s casket, and replace the sod. Who would think to look for the missing among the buried dead?
    It would have been so easy. I stepped closer to Sarah’s back as she continued to kneel. Swallows swooped in low arcs across the hill—splashes of orange and white against the pastel blue of the sky. The day was clear, the top of the hill empty. It would have been a simple matter of reaching out my hands and doing it.
    But I had something else in mind for Sarah.
    When she stood, she turned and explored my eyes.
    “The color changes,” she said.
    “Others have told me that.”
    “They’re doing it right now. They were gray. Now they’re almost blue.”
    She was finished at the grave. There were no tears.
    “I feel as if I could never really know you,” she said. “Usually a person’s eyes will tell me something, but all yours do is change.”
    “Doesn’t that tell you something?” I asked.
    As we began walking down the hill, she said, “You aren’t who