Chapter 40 #2
She immensely admired Harriet but not her controversial brother. G.G. had strong feelings about adultery after her husband ran off with her best friend and moved to California. Eventually, he returned to Miami, dying from a cerebral thrombosis in 1949. G.G. would outlive him by almost forty years.
While I was spending time with Joan Hedrick, I thought about my grandmother, wishing she’d lived long enough to see what was happening in my life.
I would have loved taking her on a helicopter ride.
I can imagine her on a spin in one of my 600-horsepower Ferraris, or maybe riding the waves in a dive boat, exploring shipwrecks in the Bermuda Triangle.
She would have applauded my doing research at fabled places like New Scotland Yard, Interpol, the FBI, the French Préfecture de police, the Carabinieri in Rome.
G.G. would have wanted to see the videos of me flying in a Zero G plane and floating.
She would have laughed at photographs of me in a NASA Advanced Crew Escape “pumpkin” space suit or learning to spacewalk.
I can imagine the questions she’d ask when I told her that I got to know Jay Raymond, a four-star general and first commander of Space Force.
I worked closely with NASA astronaut Jack Fischer to have Scarpetta work a death scene on a spaceship orbiting the planet.
G.G. would have been fascinated to know that nothing is the same up there in microgravity.
Blood doesn’t drip. It floats and spatters everywhere as fans blow constantly.
If the air isn’t stirred, when you exhale, carbon dioxide forms a bubble around your head.
It will suffocate you while you sit in your chair or sleep.
If you die on the International Space Station, there’s no place to store your body, and it will be jettisoned out the air lock.
G.G. would have been delighted when I began hanging out with the U.S. Secret Service, touring the White House, ogling the presidential Beast SUVs. Assistant Director Kyo Dolan would become one of my closest friends, helping me understand the demands of protecting the highest officials in the land.
I can imagine the look on my grandmother’s face if I told the story of visiting a Richmond tattoo parlor that featured a gynecologist’s chair with stirrups in the middle of the floor, the walls covered with flash.
I hired the artist to tattoo a design onto a turkey roaster I bought in the grocery store.
The point was to see what would happen if someone tried to eradicate one tattoo by covering it with another.
What would that look like when the body is decomposing? It’s not the sort of research anyone volunteers for, including me. I wasn’t going to get a tattoo covered with another tattoo and then have it cut from my decomposing body. I spent two days watching the artist work on my turkey.
It wasn’t in good shape by the time I carried it to the OCME.
Marcella excised the double tattoo, and we studied it under crime lights.
I wanted to know if Scarpetta would be able to see the original tattoo that was obliterated by the one on top of it.
I had to make sure what I wrote was accurate, and it was.
Marcella dropped the turkey tattoo into a jar of formalin just like she did tissue sections from autopsies. The toe tag she placed inside read, Cornwell’s tattoo. I hope someday it’s not assumed it came from my hide.
In late August 1994, I flew to Asheville and spent several days with Ruth and Billy.
I slept in a downstairs bedroom with their very fat cat Chester.
I remembered the reclaimed split logs with mortar showing between them, the wide board pine floors, the brick fireplace.
A handmade quilt covered the canopied bed, and in a corner was a spinning wheel.
Silvery spiderwebs festooned panes of glass, forming intricate patterns in the corners of casements.
The fine threads were shimmering highways from forgotten furniture to drapery hems. A hummingbird hovered eye-to-eye with me in the bay window before vanishing.
The German shepherds were barking in hopes Billy would emerge from the house with treats.
I’d often stayed in that same room while working on Ruth’s biography some fourteen years earlier.
Nothing had changed except the two of us, and we’d sit up late talking as trusted friends.
No longer was I that young girl walking past her car hoping she’d give me a ride.
I was one of the few people she confided in.
She kept a canary in a cage that she’d hang from hooks in the exposed beams, often moving the bird room to room depending on where Ruth was. She’d had the canary for many years, and it wasn’t vocal anymore, only peeping when startled. Ruth had once told me that it sang because it was lonely.
“Maybe that’s why I write,” I replied, and she understood perfectly well.
We’d both spent a lot of time alone, and not always by choice.
We kept journals and wrote poetry. She wasn’t making research notes like I do, but she’d write what she was feeling while leaving a history of her day-to-day.
She used to tell me that when Billy headed out for his long trips, the shutting of the front door was like a little death.
A week after that visit I was back in Montreat to attend Calvin Thielman’s retirement dinner.
During lunch while I was staying with the Grahams, Billy and I had another chat about his memoir.
He hated writing it, preferring to look forward and not back.
He was in his late seventies, and we talked about getting older.
I suggested we were better at some things while worse at others.
“I’m not better at anything at this stage,” he lamented with a touch of pique.
While he and Ruth rested, I went for a walk alone on their steep, winding road. It hadn’t changed much since my family’s Jeep ride with Mr. Rickman when I was nine. The sound of running water was constant as streams flowed over rocks and through a riot of mountain weeds and shrubs.
“I can’t help but think my life is entwined with all of this more than I ever imagined,” I wrote while there.
Whenever I visited, I didn’t want to leave. I’d feel a strong desire to retrace my footsteps on that mountaintop and roam the streets in my childhood small town.
“Sometimes I wish Scarpetta was from a place like here because I’d rather write about it than Miami,” I noted. “But what’s done is done, and she has her own life and history.”
I hired a limousine to drive us to Assembly Inn for Calvin Thielman’s retirement celebration.
Billy roasted him and was wildly entertaining.
He might have thought he wasn’t as good as he used to be, but I saw no evidence of it.
As I ran into former neighbors, I was reminded that not all of them were pleased with my success.
Ruth’s brother-in-law John Sommerville, for example.
A retired missionary to Korea, he used to coach the local kids in baseball, and I couldn’t wait for our games on Saturday mornings.
My brothers and I would meet at the Sommervilles’ house and walk to the baseball field together.
I was maybe eleven or twelve, and sometimes I held John Sommerville’s hand.
His wife, Virginia, was Ruth’s sister, and the Sommervilles were fond of me.
No doubt, they’d heard a lot about my family from Ruth.
One day Virginia came to my house to have a private conversation.
She invited me to live with them in Korea and go to school with her children.
This was soon after Mom’s second hospitalization, and I thanked Virginia but declined her offer.
At Calvin’s retirement dinner I was crestfallen when John Sommerville criticized me endlessly about how inappropriate I was to ride around in stretch limousines.
As this was going on outside Assembly Inn, he didn’t seem like my former neighbor and baseball coach.
I could tell he didn’t approve of me. He was offended and angry.
He wouldn’t be the only one who made me feel that way.
People I’d grown up with had heard about me in the news, and thought I was wayward, a sheep that had wandered far from the fold.
The Grahams’ oldest child, Gigi, said as much to me once.
I was the “most experienced sinner” among them.
She was being playful and funny but meant it.
Many people I grew up around think I’ve made a mess of my life.
They consider my books secular and perverse.
Not to mention how they view me as a person.
Divorced and bisexual. An alumnus of Appalachian Hall and a treatment center.
I didn’t measure up to the standards of my former Montreat neighbors.
Ironically, the only ones who didn’t judge me were Calvin, Billy, and Ruth. During that visit with the Grahams in the late summer of 1994, she and I were talking in the living room one night after Billy went to bed. Ruth said she wanted me to be buried with her on her mountain one day.