Gargantuan_ A Ruby Murphy Mystery - Maggie Estep [111]
BEN NESTER
39.
Ether
Crow lies down next to me and rests his head on his paws as the train pulls out of the station. All around us, people are speaking French. It’s sort of soothing to not understand them, to be surrounded by something melodic and incomprehensible. I’m inclined to like France. In the few hours I’ve been here, I’ve noted that dogs are treated like royalty. And so it is that Crow is sitting next to me on the train, being given full rights.
It’s the middle of the day and the train is half empty. Two seats ahead of me are three high-school-aged girls discussing something in lively voices. To my right is a man in a business suit speaking with a woman in a red dress. The woman says very little. The man sounds like he’s trying to talk her into something. As the train picks up speed, Crow sits up and looks out the window, watching the French countryside slip by. We’re not far from Paris, passing through suburbs but they aren’t bad looking. Even generic apartment houses seem more attractive than their American counterparts.
In a half hour, we’ll be in Versailles. I have no idea what I’ll do once I’m there, but I have to go. My mother had always wanted me to go to her hometown of Versailles, Kentucky, but I can’t do that now. I figured maybe Versailles, France, was the next best thing. Not that I knew that’s where I was going that day when I accidentally killed the jockey and his wife. I hadn’t really meant to kill those people but they were trying to hurt Crow and I couldn’t stand for that. Once I realized what I’d done, I knew I had to hide. I drove to Manhattan and me and Crow slept in the car. When I woke up the next morning, I figured people might be looking for me. I shaved off all my hair and decided to grow a beard. I even thought about dyeing Crow’s off-white fur but I thought it might make him sick so I didn’t.
I didn’t have much money or ideas on how to get more. The one thing I knew was that I should go to Versailles. I went to a vet right then that first day in New York to find out what all I had to do to take Crow to France. I had to get him shots, a health certificate, and have him microchipped for ID purposes. I hated to have something implanted in his body like that but there was no way around it. I had to get a passport for myself too. Thankfully, I’d been calling myself Ben Nester for a long time, but that was just the name I’d been using since age sixteen when I’d decided to stop going to school and give myself a new start. Being Ben Nester hadn’t turned out that well so now I would go back to being Carver Brown. The police, however, would be looking for Ben Nester. Carver hadn’t ever done anything wrong and, besides, he had a birth certificate and even an expired driver’s license.
I used most of what money I had left to get Carver Brown a rush job passport. But I still had to get a ticket to France.
I was dirty and broke, living in my car in one of the most expensive cities in the world. I was starting to feel trapped.
I figured I’d do one more thing my mother had always wanted to do. She had loved classical music and she’d always told herself she would go to New York one day and go to Carnegie Hall. Once I came along though, she didn’t go much of anywhere. So I thought I should go for her. I didn’t look that good and I only had sixty dollars. I left Crow in the car and went to the Turkish baths and got myself cleaned up some then I went up to Carnegie Hall. I wasn’t even sure if it would be open or what would be happening but I got there at seven and there were people milling around everywhere. I couldn’t figure out where I was supposed to buy tickets, so I was standing in the lobby, packed between all sorts of people and not knowing what to do, when an opportunity presented itself. There was a lady in a disgusting fur coat