The capital of the commonwealth is scarcely recognizable, especially its grandest thoroughfare, Monument Avenue. We can see the marble pedestals left from statues removed, some of them forcibly pulled down by angry crowds. Only the graffiti-shamed Robert E. Lee on his horse remains, his ousting tied up in litigation.
“Apparently, some good Samaritans go out before dawn every day to scrub off the obscenities,” Clare says over the intercom. “And then they just get spray-painted on again once night falls.”
“It will never end,” Marino says. “But you ask me, it’s stupid. You can’t erase history.”
“You also can’t rewrite it,” Lucy says from the right seat where she’s pilot in command, and I can see only the top of her head. “They shouldn’t have built the monuments to begin with. Last I checked, Jeb Stuart, Stonewall Jackson and those other dudes lost the war.”
“It would be like putting a statue of Bobby Riggs in front of the Astrodome instead of Billie Jean King,” Clare agrees. “The implication is you won when you didn’t.”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that,” Bob confesses, downtown’s buildings all around us. “The thing is, where does it end when you start destroying monuments, statues, artwork and other things right and left? I hear they’re even going after Winston Churchill.”
“Christopher Columbus. Abraham Lincoln.” Marino is shaking his head, looking down on where we used to live.
“I can understand Columbus.” Clare again. “He was pretty brutal to the Native Americans.”
“Yeah, well, remember what they did to us at Jamestown,” Marino retorts, and he’ll never win awards for being politi cally correct. “Starving everybody to death, shooting arrows at them if they stepped foot out of the fort.”
“I’m beginning to think everybody’s awful to everybody,” I decide, and Lucy lets us know we need to stop chatting so she can deal with the radio.
“Richmond tower.” She gets on the air, announcing her tail number and how far we are from the airport. “Requesting the Alpha Corridor, inbound for HeloAir,” she says.
We can’t hear the tower’s reply but she continues her calls, wending around the pristine Capitol grounds, and it’s a beautiful morning. The temperature is mild, the sun out, and Virginia is always green even in the winter. There are multiple cranes, a lot of construction going on, but the skyline is pretty much the same as it was when I was getting started here.
It’s not much more than a modest cluster of high-rises, and the tallest among them is the twenty-nine-story James Monroe Building. I know it very well. In days of old, I had many trips to the health commissioner’s suite of offices, and I didn’t get along with him all that well, either. But he was a prince compared to Elvin Reddy.
I imagine him looking out from his lofty perch. I wonder if he might see us flying by as Lucy does a loop around his building. Then she does another, keeping the tower informed, indicating that we’re filming. I suppose we are. At least Marino is taking video with his phone.
“I thought it only polite to buzz him,” my niece explains, and I can see workers looking out the windows.
If Elvin is in his office, he hears us for sure as Lucy holds the chopper in a high hover long enough to make her point. All he has to do is Google her tail number, and he’ll know it’s us. But I don’t care. What’s done is done, and I’m resigned to a fate that likely was set into motion long before I returned to Virginia. As Marino likes to say, payback’s a bitch.
Or to quote my father, revenge is best served cold, and what Elvin has masterminded couldn’t be colder. We curve toward the river past the gothic redbrick Main Street Station, its tower announcing the time of almost nine. Across from it is a parking deck where my headquarters used to be.
I remember watching as it was demolished. And how that felt. Empty. A sense of disbelief. Even though the old morgue was a horror. The new central district office is near the coliseum, in the heart of Virginia Commonwealth University, which has taken over most of downtown. What never changes is the James River, winding and sparkling deep blue in the sun, its unnavigable rock-choked waters a metaphor for the city’s proud stubbornness.
Richmond didn’t used to be all that welcoming to outsiders like me, and I’m reminded that feeling like a misfit and a nuisance is nothing new. When I moved here from Miami as the first woman chief, the person I replaced was of the same cloth as Elvin Reddy. I was called in to clean up some other person’s mess, and when I did it was suggested I quit.