What the Night Knows
Dean Koontz
Evil never dies…The stunning thriller from the bestselling author of Velocity and Breathless.Billy Lucas confesses to a shocking crime. He's only fourteen years old but he's a sadistic killer and proud of it. He's in the secure wing of the state hospital but … he seems too wise for his age, not crazy, too knowing about the nature of evil, and whether it lives on beyond death. Too knowing about other crimes that took place before he was born …Other murders from twenty years ago surface in the mind of Detective John Calvino as he interviews young Billy Lucas Calvino carries away a signed confession … and a sense of great danger. That night he feels that somehow Billy has come home with him, to his family.Over the next weeks, this haunted feeling does not go away, it only gets worse. Then another killing spree happens, just as and when John Calvino dreaded it would. Billy is safely locked away, but not the ghost, if the ghost exists, that links these murders with past crimes, and with John Calvino.Anything could happen, and surely will … again.
DEAN KOONTZ
What the Night Knows
Dedication (#ulink_4e0df7a9-2dec-5f7c-a936-6b11a57aa5dd)
To Gerda, who has haunted my heart since the day we met
Epigraph (#ulink_76093c5b-c739-5c96-8d6e-779504a49ede)
Death, the undiscovered country, From whose bourn no traveller returns …
–Shakespeare, Hamlet
Contents
Cover (#uf0120396-b9fc-5aed-a90a-0e7d7a809d39)
Title Page (#u864e8b27-94c2-5f44-ac57-1d8a82b7fbe3)
Dedication (#uf7fb60fc-8109-5da3-82b0-3b4a1dc33e3d)
Epigraph (#u8d20cb37-e415-5db7-bc39-ee65daaf6b0a)
Chapter 1 (#u87703e52-e997-500c-ba6f-925c24b37657)
Chapter 2 (#uec136951-fa5a-5b65-9fcc-41e7cbbe8b2b)
Chapter 3 (#uf8dc91b4-46ea-5a83-9f13-2cf249346098)
Chapter 4 (#u97e38053-31b9-523b-acf6-e615dba1ee36)
Chapter 5 (#u31525a67-3bdb-5fe0-be32-6370a59ff20a)
Chapter 6 (#uea74ccec-b5a9-5ba8-b861-8b3c1cc244bc)
Chapter 7 (#uc55c5ea0-ddba-52c6-bcc5-3fd1bccdb6a6)
Chapter 8 (#u12b52149-a0f1-57c8-87ee-a26d85be96da)
Chapter 9 (#u8390e3be-760c-522a-ac9e-8ec836488b28)
Chapter 10 (#ud23d2bba-bd4b-5c09-9825-760f7dcef8fd)
Chapter 11 (#u58d976a1-60f6-509e-9a61-fe1473042983)
Chapter 12 (#u1f93db29-3920-5473-834c-c9bf5d5cc979)
Chapter 13 (#ufa60ce3f-a19a-56b4-9d45-ee4259c28aa5)
Chapter 14 (#u9c654282-e1cb-58df-a7fb-a254520e17c9)
Chapter 15 (#u4315dc0b-d2ae-58e3-92b3-28090ea6ab94)
Chapter 16 (#uf6544be0-24f5-59e3-a694-7bb16ea24c6c)
Chapter 17 (#u41a35e3c-10a6-5b9a-99d6-d76e7ed613e9)
Chapter 18 (#u9448b04d-3336-5f22-9659-96ae3cdff658)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_77ef0b36-72aa-5da8-b109-eb58d28b9d15)
What year these events transpired is of no consequence. Where they occurred is not important. The time is always, and the place is everywhere.
Suddenly at noon, six days after the murders, birds flew to trees and sheltered roosts. As if their wings had lanced the sky, the rain fell close behind their flight. The long afternoon was as dim and drowned as twilight in Atlantis.
The state hospital stood on a hill, silhouetted against a gray and sodden sky. The September light appeared to strop a razor’s edge along each skein of rain.
A procession of eighty-foot purple beeches separated the inbound and the outbound lanes of the approach road. Their limbs overhung the car and collected the rain to redistribute it in thick drizzles that rapped against the windshield.
The thump of the wipers matched the slow, heavy rhythm of John Calvino’s heart. He did not play the radio. The only sounds were the engine, the windshield wipers, the rain, the swish of tires turning on wet pavement, and a memory of the screams of dying women.
Near the main entrance, he parked illegally under the portico. He propped the police placard on the dashboard.
John was a homicide detective, but this car belonged to him, not to the department. The use of the placard while off duty might be a minor violation of the rules. But his conscience was encrusted with worse transgressions than the abuse of police prerogatives.
At the reception desk in the lobby sat a lean woman with close-cropped black hair. She smelled of the lunchtime cigarettes that had curbed her appetite. Her mouth was as severe as that of an iguana.
After glancing at John’s police ID and listening to his request, she used the intercom to call an escort for him. Pen pinched in her thin fingers, white knuckles as sharp as chiseled marble, she printed his name and badge number in the visitors’ register.
Hoping for gossip, she wanted to talk about Billy Lucas.
Instead, John went to the nearest window. He stared at the rain without seeing it.
A few minutes later, a massive orderly named Coleman Hanes escorted him to the third – top – floor. Hanes so filled the elevator that he seemed like a bull in a narrow stall, waiting for the door to the rodeo ring to be opened. His mahogany skin had a faint sheen, and by contrast his white uniform was radiant.
They talked about the unseasonable weather: the rain, the almost wintry cold two weeks before summer officially ended. They discussed neither murder nor insanity.
John did most of the talking. The orderly was self-possessed to the point of being phlegmatic.
The elevator opened to a vestibule. A pink-faced guard sat at a desk, reading a magazine.
“Are you armed?” he asked.
“My service pistol.”
“You’ll have to give it to me.”
John removed the weapon from his shoulder rig, surrendered it.
On the desk stood a Crestron touch-screen panel. When the guard pressed an icon, the electronic lock released the door to his left.
Coleman Hanes led the way into what appeared to be an ordinary hospital corridor: gray-vinyl tile underfoot, pale-blue walls, white ceiling with fluorescent panels.
“Will he eventually be moved to an open floor or will he be kept under this security permanently?” John asked.
“I’d keep him here forever. But it’s up to the doctors.”
Hanes wore a utility belt in the pouches of which were a small can of Mace, a Taser, plastic-strap handcuffs, and a walkie-talkie.
All the doors were closed. Each featured a lock-release keypad and a porthole.
Seeing John’s interest, Hanes said, “Double-paned. The inner pane is shatterproof. The outer is a two-way mirror. But you’ll be seeing Billy in the consultation room.”
This proved to be a twenty-foot-square chamber divided by a two-foot-high partition. From the top of this low wall to the ceiling were panels of thick armored glass in steel frames.
In each panel, near the sill and just above head height, two rectangular steel grilles allowed sound to pass clearly from one side of the glass to the other.
The nearer portion of the room was the smaller: twenty feet long, perhaps eight feet wide. Two armchairs were angled toward the glass, a small table between them.
The farther portion of the room contained one armchair and a long couch, allowing the patient either to sit or to lie down.
On this side of the glass, the chairs had wooden legs. The back and seat cushions were button-tufted.
Beyond the glass, the furniture featured padded, upholstered legs. The cushions were smooth-sewn, without buttons or upholstery tacks.
Ceiling-mounted cameras on the visitor’s side covered the entire room. From the guard’s station, Coleman Hanes could watch but not listen.
Before leaving, the orderly indicated an intercom panel in the wall beside the door. “Call me when you’re finished.”
Alone, John stood beside an armchair, waiting.
The glass must have had a nonreflective coating. He could see only the faintest ghost of himself haunting that polished surface.
In the far wall, on the patient’s side of the room, two barred windows provided a view of slashing rain and dark clouds curdled like malignant flesh.
On the left, a door opened, and Billy Lucas entered the patient’s side of the room. He wore slippers, gray cotton pants with an elastic waistband, and a long-sleeved gray T-shirt.
His face, as smooth as cream in a saucer, seemed to be as open and guileless as it was handsome. With pale skin and thick black hair, dressed all in gray, he resembled an Edward Steichen glamour portrait from the 1920s or ’30s.
The only color he offered, the only color on his side of the glass, was the brilliant, limpid, burning blue of his eyes.
Neither agitated nor lethargic from drugs, Billy crossed the room unhurriedly, with straight-shouldered confidence and an almost eerie grace. He looked at John, only at John, from the moment he entered the room until he stood before him, on the farther side of the glass partition.
“You’re not a psychiatrist,” Billy said. His voice was clear, measured, and mellifluous. He had sung in his church choir. “You’re a detective, aren’t you?”
“Calvino. Homicide.”
“I confessed days ago.”
“Yes, I know.”
“The evidence proves I did it.”
“Yes, it does.”
“Then what do you want?”
“To understand.”
Less than a full smile, a suggestion of amusement shaped the boy’s expression. He was fourteen, the unrepentant murderer of his family, capable of unspeakable cruelty, yet the half-smile made him look neither smug nor evil, but instead wistful and appealing, as though he were recalling a trip to an amusement park or a fine day at the shore.
“Understand?” Billy said. “You mean – what was my motive?”
“You haven’t said why.”
“The why is easy.”
“Then why?”
The boy said, “Ruin.”
Chapter 2 (#ulink_ffdb646e-bb52-59ac-b7a9-97def160e6d5)
The windless day abruptly became turbulent and rattled raindrops like volleys of buckshot against the armored glass of the barred windows.
That cold sound seemed to warm the boy’s blue gaze, and his eyes shone now as bright as pilot lights.
“‘Ruin,’” John said. “What does that mean?”
For a moment, Billy Lucas seemed to want to explain, but then he merely shrugged.
“Will you talk to me?” John asked.
“Did you bring me something?”
“You mean a gift? No. Nothing.”
“Next time, bring me something.”
“What would you like?”
“They won’t let me have anything sharp or anything hard and heavy. Paperback books would be okay.”
The boy had been an honor student, in his junior year of high school, having skipped two grades.
“What kind of books?” John asked.
“Whatever. I read everything and rewrite it in my mind to make it what I want. In my version, every book ends with everyone dead.”
Previously silent, the storm sky found its voice. Billy looked at the ceiling and smiled, as if the thunder spoke specifically to him. Head tilted back, he closed his eyes and stood that way even after the rumble faded.
“Did you plan the murders or was it on impulse?”
Rolling his head from side to side as though he were a blind musician enraptured by music, the boy said, “Oh, Johnny, I planned to kill them long, long ago.”
“How long ago?”
“Longer than you would believe, Johnny. Long, long ago.”
“Which of them did you kill first?”
“What does it matter if they’re all dead?”
“It matters to me,” John Calvino said.
Pulses of lightning brightened the windows, and fat beads of rain quivered down the panes, leaving a tracery of arteries that throbbed on the glass with each bright palpitation.
“I killed my mother first, in her wheelchair in the kitchen. She was getting a carton of milk from the refrigerator. She dropped it when the knife went in.”
Billy stopped rolling his head, but he continued to face the ceiling, eyes still closed. His mouth hung open. He raised his hands to his chest and slid them slowly down his torso.
He appeared to be in the grip of a quiet ecstasy.
When his hands reached his loins, they lingered, and then slid upward, drawing the T-shirt with them.
“Dad was in the study, at his desk. I clubbed him from behind, twice on the head, then used the claw end of the hammer. It went through his skull and hooked so deep I couldn’t pull it loose.”
Now Billy slipped the T-shirt over his head and down his arms, and he dropped it on the floor.
His eyes remained closed, head tipped back. His hands languidly explored his bare abdomen, chest, shoulders, and arms. He seemed enravished by the texture of his skin, by the contours of his body.
“Grandma was upstairs in her room, watching TV. Her dentures flew out when I punched her in the face. That made me laugh. I waited till she regained consciousness before I strangled her with a scarf.”
He lowered his head, opened his eyes, and held his pale hands before his face to study them, as if reading the past, rather than the future, in the lines of his palms.
“I went to the kitchen then. I was thirsty. I drank a beer and took the knife out of my mother.”
John Calvino sat on the arm of a chair.
He knew everything the boy told him, except the order of the killings, which Billy had not revealed to the case detectives. The medical examiner had provided a best-guess scenario based on crime-scene evidence, but John needed to know for sure how it had happened.
Still studying his hands, Billy Lucas said, “My sister, Celine, was in her room, listening to bad music. I did her before I killed her. Did you know I did her?”
“Yes.”
Crossing his arms, slowly caressing his biceps, the boy met John’s eyes again.
“Then I stabbed her precisely nine times, though I think the fourth one killed her. I just didn’t want to stop that soon.”
Thunder rolled, torrents of rain beat upon the roof, and faint concussion waves seemed to flutter the air. John felt them shiver through the microscopic cochlear hairs deep in his ears, and he wondered if perhaps they had nothing to do with the storm.
He saw challenge and mockery in the boy’s intense blue eyes. “Why did you say ‘precisely’?”
“Because, Johnny, I didn’t stab her eight times, and I didn’t stab her ten. Precisely nine.”
Billy moved so close to the glass partition that his nose almost touched it. His eyes were pools of threat and hatred, but they seemed at the same time to be desolate wells in the lonely depths of which something had drowned.
The detective and the boy regarded each other for a long time before John said, “Didn’t you ever love them?”
“How could I love them when I hardly knew them?”
“But you’ve known them all your life.”
“I know you better than I knew them.”
A dull but persistent disquiet had compelled John to come to the state hospital. This encounter had sharpened it.
He rose from the arm of the chair.
“You’re not going already?” Billy asked.
“Do you have something more to tell me?”
The boy chewed his lower lip.
John waited until waiting seemed pointless, and then he started toward the door.
“Wait. Please,” the boy said, his quivering voice different from what it had been before.
Turning, John saw a face transformed by anguish and eyes bright with desperation.
“Help me,” the boy said. “Only you can.”
Returning to the glass partition, John said, “Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t do anything for you now. No one can.”
“But you know. You know.”
“What do you think I know?”
For a moment more, Billy Lucas appeared to be a frightened child, unsettled and uncertain. But then triumph glittered in his eyes.
His right hand slid down his flat abdomen and under the elastic waist of his gray cotton pants. He jerked down the pants with his left hand, and with his right directed his urine at the lower grille in the glass panel.
As the stinking stream spattered through the steel grid, John danced backward, out of range. Never had urine smelled so rank or looked so dark, as yellow-brown as the juice of spoiled fruit.
Aware that his target had safely retreated, Billy Lucas aimed higher, hosing the glass left to right, right to left. Seen through the foul and rippling flux, the boy’s facial features melted, and he seemed about to dematerialize, as if he had been only an apparition.
John Calvino pressed the button on the intercom panel beside the door and said to Coleman Hanes, “I’m finished here.”
To escape the sulfurous odor of the urine, he didn’t wait for the orderly but instead stepped into the hallway.
Behind John, the boy called out, “You should have brought me something. You should have made an offering.”
The detective closed the door and looked down at his shoes in the fluorescent glare of the corridor. Not one drop of foulness marred their shine.
As the door to the guard’s vestibule opened, John walked toward it, toward Coleman Hanes, whose size and presence gave him the almost mythological aura of one who battled giants and dragons.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_5591166c-f158-5e2d-b7b6-944736d94199)
On the second floor, one down from Billy Lucas, the hospital-staff lounge featured an array of vending machines, a bulletin board, blue molded-plastic chairs, and Formica tables the color of flesh.
John Calvino and Coleman Hanes sat at one of the tables and drank coffee from paper cups. In the detective’s coffee floated a blind white eye, a reflection of a can light overhead.
“The stench and the darkness of the urine are related to his regimen of medications,” Hanes explained. “But he’s never done anything like that before.”
“Maybe you better hope it’s not his new preferred form of self-expression.”
“We don’t take chances with bodily fluids since HIV. If he does that again, we’ll restrain and catheterize him for a few days and let him decide whether he’d rather have a little freedom of movement.”
“Won’t that bring lawyers down on you?”
“Sure. But once he’s pissed on them, they won’t see it as a civil right anymore.”
John glimpsed something on the orderly’s right palm that he had not noticed previously: a red, blue, and black tattoo, the eagle-globe-and-anchor emblem of the United States Marine Corps.
“You serve over there?”
“Two tours.”
“Hard duty.”
Hanes shrugged. “That whole country’s a mental hospital, just a lot bigger than this place.”
“In your view, does Billy Lucas belong in a mental hospital?”
The orderly’s smile was as thin as a filleting knife. “You think he should be in an orphanage?”
“I’m just trying to understand him. He’s too young for adult prison, too dangerous for any youth correctional facility. So maybe he’s here because there was nowhere else to put him. Do you think he’s insane …?”
Hanes finished his coffee. He crushed the paper cup in his fist. “If he’s not insane, what is he?”
“That’s what I’m asking.”
“I thought you had the answer. I thought I heard an implied or at the end of the question.”
“Nothing implied,” John assured him.
“If he’s not insane, his actions are. If he’s something other than insane, it’s a distinction without a difference.” He tossed the crumpled cup at a wastebasket, and scored. “I thought the case was closed. What did they send you here for?”
John didn’t intend to reveal that he had never been assigned to the case. “Was the boy given my name before he met me?”
Hanes shook his head slowly, and John thought of a tank turret coming to bear on a target. “No. I told him he had a visitor he was required to see. I once had a sister, John. She was raped, murdered. I don’t give Billy’s kind any more than I have to.”
“Your sister – how long ago?”
“Twenty-two years. But it’s like yesterday.”
“It always is,” John said.
The orderly fished his wallet from a hip pocket and flipped directly to the cellophane sleeve in which he kept a photo of his lost sister. “Angela Denise.”
“She was lovely. How old is she there?”
“Seventeen. Same age as when she was killed.”
“Did they convict someone?”
“He’s in one of the new prisons. Private cell. Has his own TV. They can get their own TV these days. And conjugal visits. Who knows what else they get.”
Hanes put away his wallet, but he would never be able to put away the memory of his sister. Now that John Calvino knew about the sister, he read Hanes’s demeanor as less phlegmatic than melancholy.
“I told Billy I was Detective Calvino. I never mentioned my first name. But the kid called me Johnny. Made a point of it.”
“Karen Eisler at the reception desk – she saw your ID. But she couldn’t have told Lucas. There’s no phone in his room.”
“Is there any other explanation?”
“Maybe I lied to you.”
“That’s one possibility I won’t waste time considering.” John hesitated. Then: “Coleman, I’m not sure how to ask this.”
Hanes waited, as still as sculpture. He never fidgeted. He never made a sweeping gesture when a raised eyebrow would do as well.
John said, “I know he was transferred here only four days ago. But is there anything you’ve noticed he does that’s … strange?”
“Besides trying to pee on you?”
“Not that it happens to me all the time, but that isn’t what I mean by strange. I expect him to be aggressive one way or another. What I’m looking for is … anything quirky.”
Hanes considered, then said, “Sometimes he talks to himself.”
“Most of us do, a little.”
“Not in the third person.”
John leaned forward in his chair. “Tell me.”
“Well, I guess it’s usually a question. He’ll say, ‘Isn’t it a nice day, Billy?’ Or ‘This is so warm and cozy, Billy. Isn’t it warm and cozy?’ The thing he most often asks is if he’s having fun.”
“Fun? What does he say, exactly?”
“‘Isn’t this fun, Billy? Are you having fun, Billy? Could this be any more fun, Billy?’”
John’s coffee had gone cold. He pushed the cup aside. “Does he ever answer his own questions aloud?”
Coleman Hanes thought for a moment. “No, I don’t think so.”
“He doesn’t take two sides of a conversation?”
“No. Mostly just asks himself questions. Rhetorical questions. They don’t really need an answer. It doesn’t sound all that strange, I guess, until you’ve heard him do it.”
John found himself turning his wedding band around and around on his finger. Finally he said, “He told me that he likes books.”
“He’s allowed paperbacks. We have a little hospital library.”
“What kind of thing does he read?”
“I haven’t paid attention.”
“True-crime stories? True-murder?”
Hanes shook his head. “We don’t have any of those. Not a good idea. Patients like Billy find books like that … too exciting.”
“Has he asked for true-crime books?”
“He’s never asked me. Maybe someone else.”
From a compartment in his ID wallet, John extracted a business card and slid it across the table. “Office number’s on the front. I wrote my home and cell numbers on the back. Call me if anything happens.”
“Like what?”
“Anything unusual. Anything that makes you think of me. Hell, I don’t know.”
Tucking the card in his shirt pocket, Hanes said, “How long you been married?”
“It’ll be fifteen years this December. Why?”
“The whole time we’ve been sitting here, you’ve been turning the ring on your finger, like reassuring yourself it’s there. Like you wouldn’t know what to do without it.”
“Not the whole time,” John said, because he had only a moment earlier become aware of playing with the wedding band.
“Pretty much the whole time,” the orderly insisted.
“Maybe you should be the detective.”
As they rose to their feet, John felt as if he wore an iron yoke. Coleman had a burden, too. John flattered himself to think he carried his weight with a grace that matched that of the orderly.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_e94ac853-998f-5cca-a781-8a596125cab0)
The engine obeyed the key and turned over smoothly, but then a hard thump shuddered the Ford. Startled, John Calvino glanced at the rearview mirror to see what had collided with the back bumper. No vehicle occupied the driveway behind him.
Still under the hospital portico, leaving the engine idling, he got out and went to the back of the car. In the cold air, clouds of white exhaust plumed from the tailpipe, but he could see clearly that everything was as it should be.
He stepped to the passenger side, which likewise revealed no damage, and got down on one knee to peer beneath the car. Nothing sagged from the undercarriage, nothing leaked.
The knock had been too loud and too forceful to have been of no importance.
He raised the hood, but the engine compartment revealed no obvious problem.
Perhaps his wife, Nicolette, had stowed something in the trunk, and it had fallen over. He leaned in through the open driver’s door, switched off the engine, and plucked the keys from the ignition. When he unlocked the trunk, he found it empty.
Behind the wheel, he started the engine again. The thump and shudder were not repeated. All seemed well.
He drove away, under the dripping limbs of the purple beeches, off the grounds of the state hospital, and more than a mile along the county road before he found a section of the shoulder wide enough to allow him to park well clear of the pavement. He left the engine running but switched off the windshield wipers.
The car seat had power controls. He put it back as far as it would go from the steering wheel.
He had stopped in a rural area, flat fields to the left of the highway, a rising meadow to the right. On the slope were a few oak trees, almost black against the tall pale grass. Nearer, between the shoulder of the road and the meadow, stood a ramshackle split-rail fence, waiting for wood rot and weather to bring it down.
A skirling wind shattered rain against the car windows on every side. Beyond the streaming glass, the country scene melted into the amorphous shapes of a dreamscape.
As a detective, John was a cabinetmaker. He started with a theory just as a cabinetmaker started with scale drawings. He built his case with facts as real as wood and nails.
A police investigation, like crafting fine cabinetry, required dimensional imagination and much thought. After interviews, John’s habit was to find a quiet place where he could be alone to think about what he’d learned while it remained fresh in his mind, and to determine if any new clues dovetailed with old ones.
His laptop computer rested on the passenger seat. He opened it on the console.
Days ago, he had downloaded and saved the 911 call that Billy had placed on that bloody night. John replayed it now:
“You better come. They’re all dead.”
“Who is dead, sir?”
“My mother, father, grandmother. My sister.”
“Who is this?”
“Billy Lucas. I’m fourteen.”
“What’s your address there?”
“You know it already. It came up on your screen when I called.”
“Have you checked them for signs of life?”
“Yes, I checked them very closely for signs of life.”
“Have you had any first-aid training?”
“Trust me, they’re dead. I killed them. I killed them hard.”
“You killed them? Son, if this is a prank—”
“This isn’t a prank. The prank is over. I pranked them all. I pranked them good. Come see how I pranked them. It’s a beautiful thing. Good-bye now. I’ll be waiting for you on the front porch.”
Along the county road came two vehicles behind headlights. Seen through the smeared and misted windows, through the deluge, they had little detail and resembled bathyscaphes motoring through an oceanic trench.
As John watched the traffic pass, the puddled blacktop blazing in their beams, bright reflections coruscating along his streaming windows, the afternoon was further distorted and made strange. He was plagued by confusion, disconcerted to find himself – a man of reason – wandering in a fog of superstition.
He felt adrift in space and time, memory as valid as the moment.
Twenty years earlier and half a continent from here, four people had been murdered in their home. The Valdane family.
They had lived less than a third of a mile from the house in which John Calvino was raised. He knew them all. He went to school with Darcy Valdane and nursed a secret crush on her. He’d been fourteen at the time.
Elizabeth Valdane, the mother, was stabbed with a butcher knife. Like Sandra Lucas, Billy’s mother, Elizabeth had been found dead in her kitchen. Both women were wheelchair-bound.
Elizabeth’s husband, Anthony Valdane, was brutally bludgeoned with a hammer. The killer left the claw end of the implement embedded in the victim’s shattered skull – as Billy, too, had left the hammer in his father’s head.
Anthony had been attacked while sitting at the workbench in his garage; Robert Lucas had been clubbed to death in his study. As the hammer arced down, Anthony was building a birdhouse; Robert was writing a check to the electric company. Birds went homeless, bills went unpaid.
Victoria, Elizabeth Valdane’s sister, a widow who lived with them, had been punched in the face and strangled with a red silk scarf. Ann Lucas, Billy’s grandmother, a recent widow, was punched and subsequently strangled with such ferocity that the scarf – red this time, too – cut deep into her throat. The women’s relationships to their families were not identical, but eerily similar.
Fifteen-year-old Darcy Valdane endured rape before being stabbed to death with the same butcher knife used on her mother. Twenty years later, Celine Lucas, sixteen, was raped – and then butchered with the same blade used on her mother.
Darcy had suffered nine knife wounds. Celine, too, was stabbed nine times.
Then I stabbed her precisely nine times …
Why did you say “precisely”?
Because, Johnny, I didn’t stab her eight times, and I didn’t stab her ten. Precisely nine.
In both cases, the order of the murders was the same: mother, father, widowed aunt/grandmother, and finally the daughter.
John Calvino’s laptop directory contained a document titled “Then-Now,” which he had composed over the past few days, listing the similarities between the Valdane-family and the Lucas-family murders. He didn’t need to bring it to the screen, for he had committed it to memory.
A flatbed truck, transporting a large and arcane piece of farm machinery, roared past, casting up a spray of dirty water. In the murky light, the machine looked insectile and prehistoric, furthering the quality of unreality that characterized this drowned afternoon.
Cocooned in his car, as wind ceaselessly spun filaments of rain around it, John considered the faces of two murderers that phased like moons through his mind’s eye.
The Lucas family had been destroyed by one of their own, by handsome blue-eyed Billy, honor student and choirboy, his features smooth and innocent.
The Valdanes, who had no son, were murdered by an intruder whose looks were less appealing than those of Billy Lucas.
That long-ago killer had committed additional atrocities against three other families in the months that followed the Valdane murders. During the last of those crimes, he’d been shot to death.
The journal that he left behind, hundreds of handwritten pages, suggested that he had killed often prior to the Valdanes, generally one victim at a time. He didn’t name them or say where those murders were committed. He didn’t care to brag – until he started to kill entire families and felt that his work was then worthy of admiration. Aside from the story of his detestable origins, the journal consisted mostly of a demented philosophical ramble about death with a lowercase d and about what it was like to be Death with an uppercase D. He believed he had become “an immortal aspect” of the grim reaper.
His true name was Alton Turner Blackwood. He had lived under the false name Asmodeus. Itinerant, he had traveled ceaselessly in a series of stolen vehicles or hobo-style in boxcars, or sometimes as a ticketed passenger on buses. A vagrant, he slept in whatever vehicle he currently possessed, in abandoned buildings, in homeless shelters, in culverts and under bridges, in the backseats of twisted wrecks in automobile junkyards, in any shed left unlocked, once in an open grave covered by a canopy raised for a morning burial service, and secretly in church basements.
He stood six feet five, scarecrow-thin but strong. His hands were immense, the spatulate fingers as suctorial as the toe discs of a web-foot toad. Large bony wrists like robot joints, orangutan-long arms. His shoulder blades were thick and malformed, so that bat wings appeared to be furled under his shirt.
After each of the first three families had been savaged, Alton Blackwood had rung 911, not from the site of the murders, but from a public phone. His vanity required that the bodies be found while they were fresh, before the flamboyant process of decomposition upstaged his handiwork.
Blackwood was long dead, the four cases were closed, and the crimes occurred in a small city with inadequate protocols for the archiving of 911 calls. Of the three messages the killer had left, only one remained, regarding the second family, the Sollenburgs.
The previous day, John had solicited a copy of the recording, ostensibly as part of the Lucas investigation, and had received it by email as an MP3 file. He had loaded it into his laptop. Now he played it again.
When Blackwood spoke in an ordinary volume, his voice was a rat-tail file rasping against a bar of brass, but in the 911 calls, he spoke sotto voce, evidently to foil identification. His whisper sounded like an utterance by the progeny of snake and rat.
“I killed the Sollenburg family. Go to 866 Brandywine Lane.”
“Speak up please. Say again.”
“I’m the same artist who did the Valdane family.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not hearing you clearly.”
“You can’t keep me on the line long enough to find me.”
“Sir, if you could speak up—”
“Go see what I’ve done. It’s a beautiful thing.”
In his 911 call, Billy Lucas had said, Come see how I pranked them. It’s a beautiful thing.
To any police detective, the similarities between these two crimes, committed twenty years apart, would suggest that Billy Lucas read about Alton Turner Blackwood’s murder spree and imitated it as an homage to the killer.
But Billy had not mentioned Blackwood. Billy said not one word about his inspiration. Of motive, he said only Ruin.
Thunder came and went, thunder with lightning and without. A few cars and trucks seemed to float past as if awash in a flood.
The state hospital was an hour’s drive from the city, where John lived and where he had an appointment to keep before he went home. He powered the driver’s seat forward, switched on the windshield wipers, released the hand brake, and put the Ford in gear.
He didn’t want to think what he was thinking, but the thought was a sentinel voice that would not be silenced. His wife and his children were in grave danger from someone, something.
His family and two others before it were at risk, and he did not know if he could save any of them.
Chapter 5 (#ulink_a637b4c5-19d2-52fc-875b-61c5de6fa9ab)
Using two spoons, Marion Dunnaway scooped dough from the steel mixing bowl, deftly shaped it into a ball, and deposited it on the baking sheet, where eight others were arranged in rows.
“If I’d ever had children and now had grandchildren, I’d never let them near the Internet unless I was sitting beside them.”
She kept a tidy kitchen. Yellow-and-white curtains framed a view of the storm and seemed to bring order even to the chaotic weather.
“There’s too much sick stuff too easily accessed. If they see it when they’re young, the seed of an obsession might be planted.”
She scooped up more dough, spoon clicked against spoon, and a tenth cookie-to-be appeared almost magically on the Teflon sheet.
Marion had retired from the army after serving thirty-six years as a surgical nurse. Short, compact, sturdy, she radiated competence. Her strong hands attended to every task with brisk efficiency.
“Say a boy is just twelve when he comes across such trash. The mind of a twelve-year-old is highly fertile soil, Detective Calvino.”
“Highly,” John agreed from his chair at the dinette table.
“Any seed planted in it is likely to thrive, which is why you have to guard against an ill wind that might blow in a weed pip.”
Under a helmet of thick white hair, Marion’s face was that of a fifty-year-old, though she was sixty-eight. Her smile was sweet, and John suspected her laugh would be hearty, though he doubted that he would ever hear it.
Warming his hands around his coffee mug, he said, “You think that’s what happened to Billy – some weed pip from the Internet?”
Having pressed an eleventh ball of dough to the baking sheet, she said nothing as she shaped the final cookie in the batch.
Then she raised her face to the window, staring toward the house next door. John assumed she was seeing beyond that place, imagining the house two doors away – the Lucas residence, the house of death.
“Damned if I know. They were a solid family. Good people. Billy was always polite. The nicest boy. So very considerate of his mother after the accident that put her in the wheelchair.”
She opened the oven. With a quilted mitt, she took out a tray of finished cookies and put it on the sinkside cutting board to cool.
A flood of hot air poured the aromas of chocolate and coconut and pecans through the kitchen. Curiously, instead of making John’s mouth water, the smell briefly nauseated him.
Marion said, “I served in field hospitals, battle zones. Frontline emergency surgeries. Saw a lot of violence, too much death.”
She slid the tray of neatly arranged dough balls into the oven, closed the door, and took off the quilted mitt.
“I got so I could tell at first sight which ones would survive their wounds, which wouldn’t. I could see death in their faces.”
From a drawer near the refrigerator, she extracted a key and brought it to the table.
“I never saw death in Billy. Not a glimpse of it. The Internet theory is just twiddle-twaddle, Detective Calvino. Just the jabber of an old woman who’s afraid to admit some evil can’t be explained.”
She gave him the key, which dangled from a beaded chain with a plastic cat charm. The cat was a grinning golden tabby.
Billy’s parents loved cats. They’d had two spayed British spotted shorthairs, green-eyed and frisky, named Posh and Fluff.
When the killing started, Posh and Fluff fled through a cat flap in the kitchen door. A neighbor, at the house across the street from the Lucases, found them shivering and crying under his back porch.
Pocketing the key, John rose. “Thank you for the coffee, ma’am.”
“I should have thought to turn the key in the day it happened.”
“No harm done,” he assured her.
Wondering if the Lucases might have traded house keys with a trusted neighbor, John had that morning made four cold calls before hearing what he hoped to hear from Marion Dunnaway.
“Let me give you some cookies for those kids you mentioned,” she said. “The earlier batches are cool.”
He sensed that he would disappoint her if he declined.
She put six cookies in a OneZip bag and escorted John to the front door. “I think of going up there to see Billy one day, if he’s allowed visitors. But what would I say?”
“Nothing. There’s nothing to say. You’re better off remembering him as he was. He’s very different now. You can do nothing for him.”
He had left his raincoat on the front-porch swing. He shrugged into it, put up the hood, went to his car at the curb, and drove two doors east to the Lucas house, where he parked in the driveway.
Perhaps an hour of daylight remained before the rain washed darkness down the day.
Fat snails, with eye stalks questing, crossed the wet front walkway, venturing from one grassy realm to another. John avoided crushing them underfoot.
To accommodate Sandra Lucas in her wheelchair, the porch offered both steps and a ramp.
He took off his raincoat, shook it, and folded it over his left arm because the only other place to put it was a glider with stained yellow cushions. After Billy finished with his sister and called 911, he had come to the front porch and had sat on the glider, naked and drenched in blood.
In most jurisdictions, after attaining the age of fourteen, children are presumed to have sufficient capacity to form criminal intent. Neither moral nor emotional insanity – as distinguished from mental – exempts the perpetrator from responsibility for his crimes.
To the first two police officers on the scene, Billy offered his sister for ten dollars each and told them where she could be found. “Just leave twenty bucks on the nightstand,” he said. “And don’t have a cigarette after. This house is a no-smoking zone.”
Now the police-department seal had been peeled off the front door. Two days previously, long after the criminalists collected trace evidence and prints, after a review of that evidence supported Billy’s confession in every detail, after the boy was evaluated by psychiatrists, and after he was remanded to the state hospital under a preliminary finding of insanity to be reaffirmed or reconsidered in sixty days, the house ceased to be an active crime scene.
No one from the department would have come by merely to remove the seals from the exterior doors. Because the Lucases had no family nearby, perhaps an attorney, serving as executor, had been here to review the condition of the house.
John used the key with the dangling cat charm. He went inside, closed the door, and stood in the foyer, listening to this home that had become a slaughterhouse.
He possessed no authority to enter these premises. Technically, the case file remained open until Billy could be evaluated in sixty days, but the investigation was inactive. Anyway, this had never been John’s assignment.
If he’d been unable to discover a neighbor with a key, his only alternative would have been to force entry. He would have done it.
With his back against the front door, he sensed that someone waited for him in one of the surrounding rooms, but this was a false perception. In other murder houses, after the bodies were removed and the evidence collected, when he returned alone to consider the scene in solitude, he usually experienced this disturbing impression of a presence looming, but it always proved to be unfounded.
Chapter 6 (#ulink_ebac7cde-3c6a-5e06-9aa6-3e99e72c62bf)
Thunder no longer roared, and the rain subsided from drumming torrents to a drizzle too soft to press a whisper through the walls.
According to the real-estate records at the county assessor’s office, the residence had six main rooms on the ground floor, five on the upper level. As John stood in the dusky foyer, the house felt larger than described. The hollow silence had a quality of vastness, as of caverns coiling countless miles through deep strata of stone.
Eight-pane sidelights flanked the front door, but the mummified sun, enwrapped by sodden clouds, would soon be setting.
He waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. He intended to turn on as few lights as possible.
Sometimes the visible aftermath of violence so disturbed him that he couldn’t properly work the scene. One gang thug capping another in a territorial dispute never fazed him. An investigation involving a murdered family brought him to the brink.
He wasn’t here in an official capacity. This was personal. Therefore, shadows wouldn’t hamper him. Shadows soothed.
Compassion and pity were desirable in a homicide detective. In some cases, however, a capacity for intense empathy tended to depress and to discourage rather than to motivate.
In spite of his sometimes anguished identification with victims, John could have been nothing but what he was. He became a detective not because he thought the job glamorous or because the benefits were generous. He felt compelled to follow that path. His career became a necessity; no alternative existed either in thought or in fact.
Ahead, on the left, a gray glow might have defined an archway to a living room. Above, a window on the stairwell landing admitted just enough daylight to suggest a handrail, balusters.
Soon his dark-adapted eyes identified the newel post at the foot of the stairs. He draped his raincoat over it.
From an inner sport-coat pocket, he produced a compact LED flashlight, but he did not at once switch it on.
He wasn’t seeking nuances of crime-scene conditions critical to a prosecution. The premises had been well-tramped; what evidence once existed had been gathered or contaminated, or obliterated.
What he sought was more ephemeral this time, more elusive: a keener intuition than the one on which he currently operated, some insight, some revelation, an enlightenment that would either confirm or put to rest his hunch that the Lucas family would be only the first of four to be massacred.
John followed the dark hall to the kitchen, where the door and casing had been removed to accommodate a wheelchair. The windows were curtained with translucent fabric that filtered the dismal light.
A rancid smell halted him one step past the threshold.
The flashlight fanned a wheelchair near the breakfast bar, the chair in which Billy’s mother died when he slammed the knife through her throat.
Now on the floor in front of the fridge, the LED beam revealed the source of the odor. A quart of spilled milk marbled with the mother’s blood had congealed into a yellow-and-purple scum peppered with patches of mold. The mess glistened, still not entirely dry.
According to Billy’s confession, his mother tried to scream but couldn’t raise more than a rasp-and-rattle, a whistling wheeze. She could not summon the help of other family members – or warn them.
As if those sounds had been recorded on the walls, John heard them, imagined in his mind’s ear but as real to him as the thunder earlier and as his wife’s voice would be when he went home to her.
Sandra Lucas had been disabled in a traffic accident. She coped elegantly with her new circumstances but also volunteered to counsel others in her condition. She gave motivational speeches stressing the importance of family, the strength a spouse could provide, and the reward of being an example of grace and courage for your children.
She bled to death, but drowned, too, from aspirated blood.
The radiant green numerals in the digital clock on the oven had displayed the correct time. Now, inexplicably, the numerals began to flash midnight or noon.
Maybe the electrical service failed for a moment, requiring that the clock be reset. Because he had not switched on any house lights, he wouldn’t have been aware of a brief power outage.
He watched the numbers flashing. He watched them and wondered.
The rancid odor seemed to intensify.
After backing away from the odor but not all the way out of the past into the present, John went next to the study. Here, Robert Lucas had been bludgeoned with a hammer while paying bills.
Robert’s desk was along the far wall, facing a window, so that he could look up from his work to enjoy a view of the three paper birches in the yard. This put his back to the study door.
Darkness shrank from the flashlight beam, and a collage appeared on top of the desk: an artful scattering of envelopes, invoices, and a sheet of postage stamps against a desk-blotter background, all of it unevenly glazed with a lacquer once bright red, now red-black and rust and purple.
In his audio imaginarium, John Calvino heard nothing of Robert’s death cries, perhaps because the first blow had rendered the man unconscious before a sound could escape him.
The flashlight found a spattered pen set on a white marble base, a sprayed windowsill, spotted draperies. The spatter, the spray, and the spotting comprised a kind of scream, a shrill shriek that seemed to arise in John’s bones, but this was not a sound that had been made by the victim; this was his own unvoiced cry of moral revulsion.
As he retreated from the study into the hallway, he thought he heard a jingling of tiny bells, a cold silvery sound lasting but an instant. He became as still as any living thing could be still.
The flashlight beam did not quiver on the mahogany floor.
In the sidelights that flanked the front door, the panes of glass were nearly as dark as the wooden muntins that separated them from one another. The sun had sunk far down the gullet of the storm.
John could not be sure that the sound had been real. He might have summoned it from memory, from twenty years in the past.
He went to the living room, from where the ringing might have come. The double doors – added to the archway after Sandra’s accident, to convert this space to a ground-floor bedroom – stood wide open. Bedclothes had been neatly turned down, but Sandra had died before retiring for the night. No one, with or without bells, waited there.
John had no interest in any remaining ground-floor rooms. No one had been murdered in them. The stairs did not creak. At the landing, he paused to gather his resolve.
The worst would be on the second floor. The mother and father had died quickly. But upstairs, the grandmother and the sister had struggled and suffered. Their cries would come to him.
On the landing wall, a print of John Singer Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose was spectacular even in the cold LED beam. Two lovely little girls in white dresses were lighting Chinese lanterns under a bower of lilies, in a twilight English garden.
Perhaps the most charming painting of the entire nineteenth century, the scene had often elicited a smile from John when he came upon it in books of art. He didn’t smile this time.
As he turned from the picture, he had the impression that one of the girls was sprayed with blood. When he looked again, the blush on her face proved to be light from the Chinese lantern in her hands.
Upstairs, John went to the grandmother’s quarters at the front of the house, on the left side of the hall. The door stood open.
No dishwater daylight leaked through the heavy draperies. A combination night-light and air-freshener emitted a peach-colored glow and the fragrance of carnations.
Except for the punch that, to her grandson’s amusement, knocked out her false teeth, the assault on Ann Lucas had been bloodless. The aftermath John dreaded waited not here but in the sister’s room.
He flicked a switch, lighting a lamp. Half the grandmother’s room still lay in shadow. Tangled bedclothes trailed onto the floor.
On the dresser stood a collection of framed photographs. Six featured Billy alone or with others of his family. His open face seemed untouched by deceit. His eyes revealed no hint of dementia.
Celine, the sister, had a face made for mirrors and a smile of such innocence that she looked as if she knew nothing of death and everything of eternity. In a swimsuit at the shore, surf breaking around her ankles, she seemed to be a sprite spun from spray and sunlight. John couldn’t bear to look at her.
A taped outline on the carpet marked the position in which the grandmother’s body was found. In his confession, Billy had described punching her out as she sat in bed watching TV, dragging her to the floor, and waiting for her to revive before killing her face-to-face.
Staring at the taped outline, John expected to hear desperate sounds of death by strangulation – but he heard instead the silvery tintinnabulation of tiny bells, clear and icy. The tinkling lasted longer than before, perhaps two or even three seconds, and he knew this time the bells were real, not imagined.
In the subsequent brittle silence, he stepped into the hallway and switched on the ceiling fixture. The beveled-glass bowl speared that space with blue-edged blades of light.
Directly across from the grandmother’s quarters, the door to the sister’s room stood ajar. Darkness beyond.
Again, the bells. Two seconds, three.
He pocketed the extinguished flashlight and drew the pistol from his shoulder rig.
Chapter 7 (#ulink_ab6cb2f2-3e08-5c8b-92c9-4202cb39c552)
Clearing a doorway under threat was always the worst. He pushed through fast, found the switch, pistol in one hand but then in both as light bloomed in a pair of bedside lamps. Left to right, head and gun tracking as one, registering few details of the room, focusing instead on target identification and places where someone might be concealed.
A closet offered the only possibility. Two sliding mirrored doors. Approaching himself and the black bore of his weapon, gun in one hand again, reaching toward the door, toward his own reaching reflection, sliding his second self aside. He found only hanging clothes, shoes, boxes on a high shelf.
He still believed the silvery ringing had been real.
He slid the door shut and looked past his reflection at the room behind him, which seemed to be filled by the deathbed, by the evil of it, the mattress like the altar of an abattoir religion.
Celine had been sitting on the edge of the bed, one leg bent and her foot on the mattress, painting her toenails. Listening to music through the earphones of her iPod, she could not have heard the struggle in her grandmother’s room.
Before throwing open the door and attacking, Billy had stripped out of his clothes and tossed them on the hallway floor. Naked, knife in hand, hot with the thrill of having garroted his grandmother with a tightly twisted red silk scarf, he burst into his sister’s room and overwhelmed her. Pain, shock, and terror robbed her of the ability to resist effectively.
The mirror image of the bed filled John Calvino with revulsion, and he heard himself breathing through his open mouth to avoid the coppery smell of the blood-soaked mattress batting that had not yet dried and would not for a long time. But the humid air had a coppery taste – or he imagined it did – that offended worse than the smell, and he clenched his teeth, his nostrils flaring.
Holstering his pistol, he turned to face the abomination, which was immeasurably more terrible than the reflection of it. His disgust was twined now with anger and pity, three threads on a needle sewing this moment into his memory, not only the moment, the scene, but also the raw emotion of it.
Then he could hear Celine, the Celine of his quasi-clairvoyant imagination: crying out in pain and terror, weeping with the shame of violation, pleading for her life, beseeching God to save her, receiving no mercy from the beast who was her brother, receiving no grace until at last, at last, the final thrust of the knife put an end to her misery.
Shaking uncontrollably, hands covering his ears without effect, John turned from the hateful bed, returned to the hallway, leaned his back against the wall, and slid down to sit on the floor. He was in three places simultaneously: this present hallway, this hallway on the murder night, and another house in a distant city twenty years in the past.
Because his father and mother had been artists and art teachers, he had perpetual access to a memory museum of renowned images. Now, before his mind’s eye rose a painting by Goya, the chilling and despair-filled Saturn Devouring His Children.
John had to sit in silence for a while, letting time past wash out of time present. The horrors of the past and of the present were unredeemable, but he held fast to a hope – wild and unreasoned in its character, but ardent – that the future could be shaped so that it would never need redemption.
Although he would have preferred to switch off the lights in Celine’s room and retreat from the house, he eventually got to his feet and crossed her threshold once more. He did not, however, look again at the dead girl’s bed.
Across her desk spilled glossy magazines published for teenagers and, by way of implausible contrast, a paperback of The Everlasting Man, by G. K. Chesterton.
Display shelves held an eclectic collection of things pleasing to Celine. Twenty ceramic mice, the largest no more than two inches tall. Seashells. Glass paperweights. A snow globe containing a quaint cottage.
Bells. Behind the mice, between two plush-toy bunnies in white bonnets and gingham dresses, on a green box in which they evidently had come, lay three miniature silver calla lilies all sprouting from one silver stem. The spathes were exquisitely shaped, but instead of a yellow spike, each enclosed a tiny silver clapper.
The stem, by which the bells could be rung, was dark with dried blood and with tarnish the blood encouraged. If the criminalists had noticed the bells, they would have bagged and taken them.
From a box of Kleenex on the desk, John plucked a tissue. He folded it into a pad and gripped the silver stem, not to preserve evidence – too late for that – but to avoid touching the blood.
On the lid of the green box under the calla lilies, in silver script, were the words Piper’s Gallery.
Shaken, the bells produced the crisp, cold ringing that he had heard three times since entering the house.
Unable to suppress a tremor in his hands, he placed the bells and the Kleenex in the box, tucked the box in a sport-coat pocket.
Back in the day, Alton Turner Blackwood had carried with him three silver bells, each the size of a thimble, clustered at the end of a handle. They were not shaped like flowers and were not as finely made as those on Celine’s shelf of small treasures.
Blackwood had been a psychopathic ritualist with an elaborate post-homicide ceremony that suggested both a strange belief system and obsessive-compulsive tendencies. When everyone in his target family was dead, he returned to the victims in the order the killings occurred and arranged them on their backs. With a drop of epoxy, he glued coins on the cadaver’s eyes: quarters that he’d painted black, always with the eagle facing up. In the mouth, on the tongue, he placed a brown disc that the crime lab identified as dried excrement.
Then the killer folded the corpse’s hands at the groin, around a chicken egg. To be sure the hands would not release the egg, he tied thumb to thumb and little finger to little finger with string.
Days prior to a slaughter, he prepared the eggs by drilling two tiny holes in each to drain the contents. Then he inserted a tightly rolled slip of paper through a hole into the well-dried, hollow shell. If the body was male, the paper carried the hand-printed word servus; if female, serva. They were the masculine and feminine forms of the Latin noun that meant “slave.”
After the cadavers had been accessorized to suit him, Blackwood had stood over each, ringing his triune bells.
Billy Lucas had not rearranged his four victims but had left them lying as they died. He didn’t conduct a ritual using black quarters, dried excrement, or hollow eggs. Evidently, however, he rang the tiny bells.
The delicate silver calla lilies featured no engraving.
On each of Blackwood’s bells had been the word RUIN.
John clearly remembered Billy with the almost wistful smile, standing on the farther side of the glass partition.
You mean – what was my motive?
You haven’t said why.
The why is easy.
Then why?
Ruin.
John switched off the lights in Celine’s room and left the door ajar as he had found it.
In the hallway, he stood listening to the house. No floorboards protested, no hinges creaked. No shadow moved.
He went to Billy’s room.
Chapter 8 (#ulink_48bd89bc-692e-5057-96f0-7b72a7d88680)
The case detectives – Tanner and Sharp – had searched Billy’s room, leaving a bit less disorder than a burglar would have caused.
A few drawers in the highboy were half open. Tanner or Sharp had rummaged through the clothes therein, leaving them in disarray.
When they searched between the mattress and the box springs, they had not entirely disarranged the chenille spread.
On the nightstand stood a digital alarm clock. The numbers were not flashing as they had flashed on the kitchen clock.
John searched the desk, the closet, the nightstand, with no expectation of finding anything the other detectives had overlooked.
Previous to his killing spree, Billy Lucas’s interests had been, judging by the evidence, entirely wholesome. Sports magazines. Video games, but not particularly violent ones.
Bookshelves held a couple hundred paperbacks. John read each spine. Science fiction, fantasy, mainstream fiction: The boy’s interests were varied, but he possessed not a single true-crime book.
The computer on the desk was operative. Current department procedure in a case of this kind would have been to make a full backup of every document in the directory and take that, instead of the entire hard drive, for review later. With Billy’s confession and his commitment to the state hospital, no detective would have discovered – might ever discover – what the computer contained.
Before reviewing the contents in alphabetical order, John scanned the directory for intriguing key words. In less than half a minute, he found a document titled CALVINO1. Then CALVINO2.
The first contained photos downloaded from an Internet site devoted to serial killers and mass murderers. Here were Tom and Rachel Calvino, John’s mother and father. Also Marnie and Giselle, his sisters, at the ages of ten and twelve.
The photos accompanied the account of Alton Turner Blackwood’s fourth and final massacre of a family. The document did not contain a picture of the killer; apparently none was ever taken of the drifter during his life, and the postmortem shots in the medical examiner’s file were sequestered under a court order that protected young John’s privacy and that was never revoked.
For the same reason, John’s photo was not included. Besides, the site depicted only victims, and he was the sole survivor.
On the screen, his sisters were so lovely.
Many years had passed since he’d been able to look at photos of them. He had avenged them, for what that was worth. But if he had done something differently on that long-ago night, if he had not done a thoughtless thing that he had done, one of his sisters or perhaps both of them might still be alive.
Although he loved their faces, he could not bear the sight of them. He exited the document.
The atmosphere in this murder house grew more oppressive by the minute: the rain streaming down the windows, the humid air, a deathly stillness yet a persistent impression that someone listened, waited, and prepared for him in the nearby hallway or in another room.
He closed his eyes and summoned in memory a favorite painting, Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow. This scene of a sixteenth-century Belgian town in a winter twilight, illuminated by a recent snowfall, was full of movement yet serene, somber yet enchanting. Contemplation of it always calmed John – until now.
Johnny.
At the state hospital, the boy had called him Johnny. Having read about Alton Blackwood, the kid knew John had slain the killer.
Here seemed to be proof that Billy patterned his killing spree after Blackwood’s murder of the Valdane family twenty years earlier.
When John retrieved the second document, CALVINO2, he discovered five photographs, the first of himself. It was part of a newspaper article about a citation for valor that he and his sometime partner, Lionel Timmins, had received more than two years earlier.
In the picture, he appeared uncomfortable; in fact, he had been embarrassed. Having survived, as a boy, when everyone else in his family had died, he could do nothing as long as he lived that would make him, in the balance, deserving of an award for valor.
He had tried to decline the presentation, but Parker Moss, Area 1 commander – who oversaw Homicide, Missing Persons, and Robbery, in addition to other bureaus, details, and units – insisted he attend and accept. Awards for valor were good PR for the department.
The second photo in CALVINO2 was of Nicolette. Nicky. It was from the website of Lannermil Galleries, a fine-art dealer, the primary representative for her work. She looked radiant.
John’s palms were damp. He blotted them on his pants.
The file also contained photos of their son, thirteen-year-old Zachary, and their daughters, eight-year-old Minette – whom they all called Minnie – and Naomi, eleven. These three were snapshots, taken a month earlier, on the evening of Minnie’s eighth birthday. The only people present had been him, Nicolette, and the three kids.
John could think of no way that these pictures could have been transferred to Billy Lucas’s computer. No way.
Nevertheless, he recognized the document for what it must be: a file of homicidal desire, photographs of targets, the beginning of a murder scrapbook. Evidently Billy had intended at some point to kill them all, just as Alton Blackwood had wasted all but one member of the previous Calvino family.
After exiting the document, John looked at the nearest window down which rain washed in the fading daylight, and he thought of the dark urine flooding across the glass partition between him and Billy.
His disquiet quickened into fear. The house was warm, but he was chilled. He shivered.
He did not feel less of a man or less of a cop for being afraid. Fear was useful if it didn’t foster paralytic indecision. Fear could clarify and sharpen his thinking.
Calling up the directory again and scrolling through it, John searched for other document titles that might be surnames. Perhaps Billy had selected and researched other target families.
Whatever the young killer’s plans had been, surely they were now of no concern. The security at the state hospital was layered and reliable. He could not escape. The psychiatric board would not deem him cured at least for decades, if ever; they would not turn him loose.
Yet intuition warned John that his family was a target. The taut wire of his survival instinct vibrated, it hummed.
When he found no obvious surnames used as document titles, he closed out the program and shut down the computer.
From within the desk came a few bars of a song that John didn’t recognize. When he pulled open a drawer, the bars repeated, and he picked up a cell phone that must have belonged to Billy Lucas.
No caller ID appeared on the display.
John waited through fourteen repetitions of the song bite. When the call was not sent to voice mail, the caller’s persistence gave him the reason he needed to answer.
“Hello.”
He received no reply.
“Who’s there?”
Not a dead line. The hollow silence was alive, the caller unresponsive.
The best way to engage in any game of intimidation was to play boldly by the rules of the would-be intimidator. John listened to the listener, giving him no satisfaction.
After half a minute, a single word whispered down the line. He could not be sure, but he thought it sounded like Servus.
John waited another half minute before he terminated the call and returned the phone to the drawer.
At the door, when he extinguished the bedside lamps with the wall switch, rhythmic strobes of green light drew his attention to the fact that the clock radio, which had been keeping time when he first entered the room, was now flashing 12:00, 12:00, 12:00. …
When he stepped into the upstairs hallway, where he had left the overhead lights on, a more conventional ringing came from a telephone toward the back of the house. After a hesitation, John followed the sound, pushed open a door, clicked on a light, and found the former master bedroom, where much of the living-room furniture was now stored. The phone rang and rang.
He didn’t know what might be happening. He suspected that the worst thing he could do was encourage it, and he switched off the lights, closed the door.
In the hall, at the head of the stairs, he extinguished the ceiling fixtures – and darkness folded around him like great black wings, the landing window offering no relief.
His heart beat faster as he fumbled for the flashlight in one of his sport-coat pockets. The LED beam painted coils of light on the walls, made the pattern in the stair runner seem to wriggle with life, and darkled down the polished-mahogany railing.
Descending past Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, he was peripherally aware of something new and monstrous about the painting, the Chinese lanterns too bright, their orange color smeared across too much of the canvas, as if one or both of the little girls in white dresses had been set afire, but he refused to look directly.
The telephones shrilled in the living room, study, and kitchen. The pause between each ring seemed to be shorter than usual, the electronic tones harsher and more urgent.
He snared his raincoat from the newel post, didn’t pause to put it on. When he threw open the front door, the phones stopped ringing.
Stepping onto the porch, which lay now in the grip of night, he thought he saw a figure on the padded glider to his left, where Billy Lucas had once sat naked and blood-soaked to wait for the police. But when John swept the glider with the flashlight, it proved to be unoccupied.
He locked the house, slipped into his raincoat, found his car keys, and hurried into the rain, forgetting to put up his hood. On his head and hands, the downpour felt as cold as ice water.
In the car, as the engine turned over, he heard himself say, “It’s begun,” which must have been an expression of a subconscious certainty, for he had not meant to speak.
No. Not certainty. Superstition. Nothing had begun. What he feared would not come to pass. It could not. It was impossible.
He reversed out of the Lucas driveway, into the street, fence pickets flaring bright and shadows leaping.
The wipers swept cascades off the windshield, and the rain seemed foul, contaminated.
In the fullness of the night, John Calvino drove home to his family.
From the journal of Alton Turner Blackwood:
I am Alton Turner Blackwood, and I remember …
The south tower was chiseled stairs and stone walls spiraling up four stories to one round room, fourteen feet in diameter. Four pairs of leaded windows, beveled glass, crank handles to open. A truss-and-beam ceiling. From one of the beams, she hanged herself.
The family’s fortune started from railroads. Maybe it was honest money then. Terrence James Turner Blackwood – Teejay to his closest associates, who were not the same thing as friends – inherited the whole estate. He was only twenty-one, as ambitious as a dung beetle. He grew it bigger by publishing magazines, producing silent films, developing land, buying politicians.
Teejay worshipped one thing. He didn’t worship money, for the same reason a desert dweller doesn’t worship sand. He worshipped beauty.
Teejay built the castle in 1924 when he was twenty-four. He called it a castle, but it wasn’t one. Just a big house with castle parts plugged on to it. Some public rooms were accidentally lovely. Outside, from every angle, it was an ugly pile.
He worshipped beauty, but he didn’t know how to create it.
In one sense, the house was the opposite of Teejay. He was so handsome you could call him pretty. His worship of beauty was in part self-worship. But inside, he was as ugly as the outside of his house. His soul was not bejeweled, but encrusted. Not even Teejay could have named some of the needs that formed that crust.
The immense house was called Crown Hill, after the knoll on which it stood. The 280-acre property lay along the northern coast, which has always been a dangerous length of shore. Every coast is dangerous, of course: Land falls away to the chaos of vast waters.
Jillian Hathaway was the most famous and beloved actress of silent films. She made two talkies, as well. One became a classic: Circle of Evil. She supposedly married Terrence Blackwood in Acapulco in 1926. They were never wed. She moved in to the castle that wasn’t. In 1929, at the age of twenty-eight, she retired from films.
Jillian gave birth to Marjorie, her only child, also in 1929. The once-glamorous star hung herself fourteen years thereafter. She was still very beautiful. Even in death, she was very beautiful. Perhaps especially in death.
The Blackwood family continued to produce new generations. Decades later, Anita Blackwood gave birth to Teejay’s great-grandson. Terrence, connoisseur of beauty, wanted the deformed infant placed at once in an institution. The father, of course, agreed. But Anita would not allow her son to be discarded like trash.
In time, perhaps she regretted her decision. Over the years, though she taught the boy to read well at a young age, she otherwise distanced herself from him. Eventually she abandoned him at Crown Hill, to the mercy of the merciless old man.
She just went away. No good-bye. They said she had grown scared of the boy, her own boy, repelled by his form and face.
When he was nine years old and abandoned by his mother, the ill-made boy was moved from the guest house he had shared with her into the round room at the top of the south tower.
The boy wasn’t me yet. In time, he would become me.
The boy hated old Teejay. For many reasons. One reason was the beatings.
Another reason was the tower room.
An electric heater made the room warm in winter. Because of the ocean influence, the summer nights were seldom sweltering. A toilet and shower stall were added at some expense. A mattress on the floor made a good bed. There were as many pillows as the boy wanted. A fine armchair and a desk were built right there in the room because they couldn’t be hauled up the spiral stairs. Breakfast and lunch were sent up by dumbwaiter. Using an in-house phone, he could request any treat he wished. At night, he could borrow whatever books he wanted from the immense library off the main hall.
The boy was comfortable enough but lonely. The tower room lay high above everything and far from everyone.
In the evening, after others retired, if there were no guests, he was permitted into the house. A late dinner was brought to the boy in the library. He ate off disposable plates with disposable utensils. What might have touched his mouth must never touch another’s, although he had no contagious disease.
The staff was forbidden to interact with him or he with them. If a servant violated this rule, he would be fired. The old man paid them exceedingly well not merely to maintain silence toward the boy but also to remain silent about him to the outside world, about him and everything that occurred at Crown Hill. None would risk losing his job.
If the boy initiated conversation, they reported him. Then came the beatings in the privacy of the old man’s suite.
He hated Teejay. He hated Regina, too, and Melissa. Regina was Anita’s sister, the boy’s aunt, the old man’s granddaughter. Melissa was Regina’s daughter. They were beautiful, as the boy was not, and they could go anywhere they wished, anytime they wanted. Regina and Melissa spoke to the staff and the staff spoke to them. But because Teejay forbid it, neither of them spoke to the boy. Once he overheard Regina and a maid mocking him. How she laughed.
One evening when the boy was twelve, in the library maze, in a far corner, on a high shelf, he found an album of black-and-white photos of Jillian Hathaway. Many were glamour shots of the movie star in elegant gowns and costumes.
The last photo in the album might have been taken by police. The boy suspected old Teejay, then her young husband, took it. In the picture, Jillian hung like a wingless angel from a tower-room beam.
She stripped out of her clothes before climbing on the stepstool and slipping the noose around her neck. The boy had never before seen a naked woman.
The boy wasn’t embarrassed to be half bewitched by the nudity of a woman from whom he was directly descended. He lacked the moral training that would allow such embarrassment. He had the capacity to be ashamed of only one thing: his appearance. By cruel experience, he had learned that deformity was the only sin. Therefore his sin was that he existed.
She was some kind of grandmother to him, but nonetheless voluptuous. Her pale breasts. Her full hips. Her slender legs.
He removed the photograph from the album, returned the album to the high shelf, and took the picture to his round room in the tower.
Often the boy dreamed of her. Sometimes she just hung there in the dream, dead but talking to him, though he never remembered what she said after he woke.
In other dreams, Jillian descended from the beam like a spider on a silken thread. She removed the noose from her neck. She held it for a moment above her head, as if it were a halo. Then she tried to slip the loop of rope over the boy’s head.
Sometimes it became a nightmare as she struggled to strangle him. On other occasions, he accepted the noose and let her lead him to the stepstool. Although she never hung him, he woke rested from such dreams.
One night the dreams changed forever.
For the first time, he was naked in a dream. Naked, Jillian Hathaway descended but this time didn’t stop at his bedside. With the noose around her neck, she slipped beneath the covers, and the rough rope trailed thrillingly across his body. He felt her breasts against him, more real than anything he ever before felt in a dream. The boy woke trembling, wet, and spent.
For a while, he thought it was a thing that could happen only in a dream with a dead woman. Eventually he learned that the photo of a dead woman worked as well as a dream of her.
The boy wasn’t me yet. But he was becoming me.
Chapter 9 (#ulink_d1fbc505-760d-53c2-9c2b-132834be059a)
They lived in a handsome and spacious three-story house – four, if you counted the subterranean garage – that no police detective could afford, a consequence of Nicolette’s success as a painter, which had been growing for a decade. On a double lot, they had generous grounds for a city house and distance from their neighbors. Made of brick and painted white, with black shutters and a black slate roof, the place appeared Georgian, but it was not a scrupulous example of the style.
John parked in the underground garage, between Nicolette’s SUV and the Chevy belonging to Walter and Imogene Nash, the couple who kept the house well ordered and the family well fed. Because mornings were sacrosanct in the Calvino residence, the Nashes came to work at 11:00 A.M. five days a week, and were usually gone by seven.
An elevator served the garage and the three floors above. But the sound of it would announce his arrival and the kids would come running. He wanted a moment alone with Nicky.
On the drive home, he had called her and discovered she was in her studio, far past her usual quitting time. The master suite and the studio occupied the entire third floor.
In the corner of the garage where a few umbrellas dangled from a wall rack, he hung his raincoat on a hook.
Now that he was home, where life made sense and the madness of the world did not intrude, the events at the Lucas place seemed to have been dreamed more than experienced. He reached into his sport-coat pocket, half expecting the tiny silver bells would not be there.
As his fingers found the small box from Piper’s Gallery, three knocks and three more issued from the farther end of the garage, from beyond the parked cars. Sharp, insistent, the rapping knuckles of an impatient visitor at a door.
In spite of fluorescent panels, shadows swagged here and there. None moved or resolved into a figure.
Directly overhead, the rapping came again. John looked at the plastered ceiling, startled – then relieved. Just air bubbles knocking through a copper water line, rattling the pipe against a joist.
From a pocket of the hanging raincoat, he retrieved the six cookies that Marion Dunnaway had presented to him in a OneZip bag.
He unlocked an inside door and stepped onto the landing at the foot of the back stairs. The lock engaged automatically behind him.
The door at the top opened on Nicolette’s large studio. Working on a painting, her back toward him, she didn’t know he had arrived.
Girlishly slim, brown hair almost black and tied in a ponytail, barefoot, wearing tan jeans and a yellow T-shirt, Nicky worked with the litheness and physical charm of a dancer between dances.
John smelled turpentine and under it the fainter scent of stand oil. On a small table to the right of Nicky, from an insulated mug, the aromas of black tea and currants rose on ribbons of steam.
The same table supported a vase of two dozen so-called black roses that were in fact dark red, darker than a corrupted vermilion pigment in the process of reverting to a black form of mercuric sulfide. The striking flowers had no scent that he could detect.
When painting, Nicky always kept roses nearby, in whatever color her mood required. She called them humility roses, because if she became too impressed with any canvas on her easel – which could lead to a sloppiness born of pride – she needed only to study a rose in full bloom to remind herself that her work was a pale reflection of true creation.
Her current project was a triptych, three large vertical panels, a scene that reminded John of Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street: Rainy Weather, though her painting depicted neither Paris nor rain. Caillebotte’s masterly work was an inspiration for her, but she had her own style and subject matter.
John liked to watch his wife at moments she thought herself unobserved. When she lacked all self-awareness, her characteristic ease of action and elegant posture were so pure and unaffected that she became the essence of grace, and so beautiful.
This time, his belief that he had arrived with perfect stealth proved wrong when she said, “What have you been staring at so long – the painting or my ass? Be careful what you answer.”
“You look so delectable in those jeans,” he said, “it’s amazing you’ve painted something that could be equally mesmerizing.”
“Ah! You’re as smooth as ever, Detective Calvino.”
He went to her and put a hand on her shoulder. She turned her head, leaned back, and he kissed her throat, the delicate line of her jaw, the corner of her mouth.
“You’ve been eating coconut something,” she said.
“Not me.” He dangled the bag of cookies in front of her. “You could smell them through an airtight seal?”
“I’m starved. I came up here at eleven, never stopped for lunch. This bitch” – she indicated the triptych – “wants to break me.”
Occasionally, when a picture proved a special challenge to her talent, she referred to it as either a bitch or a bastard. She could not explain why, in her mind, each painting had a specific gender.
“A lovely army nurse baked these for the kids. But I’m sure they’ll share.”
“I’m not so sure, the little fiends. Why are you hanging out with army nurses?”
“She was older than your mother and just as proper. She’s a sort of witness on a case.”
John knew many cops who never discussed active investigations with their wives, for fear that evidence would be compromised during beauty-shop gossip or over coffee with the neighbors.
He could tell Nicky anything, with confidence that she would not repeat a word of what he said. She was warm and forthcoming at all times, but regarding his police work, she had the virtue of a stone.
As for his current and unofficial investigation, however, he intended to keep it to himself. At least for the moment.
Nicky said, “Better than a cookie – cabernet.”
“I’ll open a bottle, then freshen up for dinner.”
“I’ve got maybe a dozen strokes to make and one sable brush to clean, and then I’m done with this bitch for the day.”
Another door opened on a large landing at the head of the front stairs. Directly across from the studio stood the door to the master suite: beyond, a bedroom with a white-marble fireplace featuring ebony inlays, a sitting room, two walk-in closets, a spacious bath.
The retreat included a compact bar with an under-the-counter refrigerator and wine cooler. John uncorked a bottle of Cakebread cabernet sauvignon and carried it, with two glasses, into the master bathroom, where he put everything on the black-granite counter between the sinks and poured for both of them.
When he glanced at himself in the mirror, he didn’t look the least bit apprehensive.
In his closet, he took the boxed bells from his coat pocket. He put them in the jewelry drawer with his cuff links, tie chains, and spare watch.
He slipped out of his shoulder rig and put it, with the pistol still contained, on a high shelf.
He hung his sport coat on the to-iron rod and tossed his shirt in the laundry basket. He sat on a dressing bench, slipped out of his rain-wet Rockport walking shoes, and set them aside to be shined. His socks were damp. He stripped them off and put on a fresh pair.
These mundane tasks were slowly taking the supernatural shine off the day. He began to think that in time he might find logical explanations for everything that had seemed outré, that what appeared to be malevolent fate in action might look more like mere coincidence in the morning light.
At his bathroom sink, he scrubbed his hands and face. A hot washcloth, like a poultice, drew the ache out of his neck muscles.
As John was toweling dry, Nicky arrived, took her glass of wine, and sat on the wide edge of the marble tub. She wore white sneakers on the toes of which, as a joke during play with Minette a few weeks earlier, she had painted LEFT and RIGHT, each word on the wrong shoe.
Picking up his wine, leaning on the counter with his back to the mirror, John said, “Walter and Imogene are still here?”
“They had a mini-crisis with Preston this morning. He’s been hospitalized again. They didn’t get here until two o’clock.”
Preston, their thirty-six-year-old son, lived with them. He had been through rehab twice, but he still enjoyed washing down illegally obtained prescription medications with tequila.
“I told them to take the day off, no problem,” Nicky said, “but you know how they are.”
“Responsible as hell.”
She smiled. “Not much call for their type in the modern world. I told them you expected to be late, but they insisted on staying to serve dinner and do the initial cleanup.”
“Has Minette eaten?”
“Not without Daddy. No way. We’re all night owls here, and she might be the most nocturnal of us all.”
“The Cakebread’s nice.”
“Bliss.” She sipped her wine.
On her driver’s license, her eyes were said to be blue, but they were purple. Sometimes they were as bright and deep as an effulgent twilight sky. At the moment, they were iris petals in soft shadow.
She said, “Preston worries me, you know.”
“Doesn’t worry me. He’s a self-centered creep. He’ll overdose or he won’t. What worries me is the toll he’s taking on his parents.”
“No, I mean … Walter and Imogene are such nice people. They love him. They raised him well, did all the right things. Yet he became what he is. You never know.”
“Zach, Naomi, Minnie – they’re going to turn out fine. They’re good kids.”
“They’re good kids,” Nicolette agreed. “And Preston was a good kid once. You never know. You can only hope.”
John thought of Billy Lucas, the clean-cut honor student and book lover. The rancid puddle of milk and blood. The blood-glazed collage of unpaid bills. The throttled grandmother, the sister’s crimson bed.
“They’ll be fine. They’re great.” He changed the subject. “By the way, something happened today that made me wonder about those snapshots we took at Minnie’s birthday party. Did you email them to your folks?”
“Sure. I told you.”
“I guess I forgot. To anyone else?”
“Just Stephanie. Sometimes Minnie reminds me of her when she was a little girl.”
Stephanie was Nicky’s younger sister, now thirty-two and the sous-chef at an acclaimed restaurant in Boston.
“Would Stephanie or your folks have forwarded the pictures to anyone else?”
Nicky shrugged, then looked puzzled. “Why? Suddenly this seems like a gentle grilling.”
He didn’t want to alarm her. Not yet. Not until and if he could logically explain the reason he was worried.
“At work, I ran into someone who mentioned Minnie in the bunny ears at her birthday party. Someone emailed him the photo. He didn’t remember who.”
“Well, she’s supercute in those ears, and you know how people swap things that tickle them. The photo’s probably up on any number of websites. Cute Kids dot com, Bunny Ears dot com—”
“Predatory Pedophiles dot com.”
Getting to her feet, she said, “Sometimes you’re all cop when half cop would be tough enough.”
“You’re right. The problem is you never know when it’s going to turn out to be a half-cop or an all-cop day.”
She rang her glass against his, a single clear note. “You can’t go through life always in high gear.”
“You know what I’m like. I don’t downshift well.”
“Let’s go have dinner. Later I’ll shift your gears for you.”
She carried her wineglass on high, as if it were a torch with which she revealed the way.
Carrying his glass and the bottle, he followed, inexpressibly grateful for his life with her – and more aware than usual that what is woven will inevitably unweave, the wound will unwind, the raveled will unravel. The thing most worth praying for was that the moment of the un would come only when you were old and tired and filled to the brim with this life. Too often, that was not the timetable that Destiny had in mind.
Chapter 10 (#ulink_b716b405-325c-5252-97a6-58266c0f9f56)
Before dinner, John visited Walter and Imogene Nash in the kitchen, though not to commiserate with them about Preston’s latest fall. They were too self-reliant and possessed too much self-respect to want to be seen as victims, and they were too considerate to want others to shoulder any smallest part of their burden.
Walter toiled as a navy cook for twenty-four years, most of it at a harbor base rather than aboard ship, and Imogene worked as a dental hygienist. When he grew tired of measuring ingredients in hundred-pound and five-gallon increments, when she wearied of staring into gaping mouths, they retired from their professions and, at fifty, went to a school to learn estate management.
In ultrawealthy Montecito, California, they ran a twelve-acre property on which stood a forty-thousand-square-foot main house, a five-thousand-square-foot guest house, horse stables, two swimming pools, and vast rose gardens. Walter and Imogene thrived, managing a staff of twenty, until drunken Preston, then thirty and intending to reunite with his parents for the purpose of negotiating a guilt stipend, had slammed back into their lives by crashing his rental car into the gatehouse, collapsing half the structure, narrowly missing the security guard, and cursing out the owner, who helped extract him from his vehicle before it might burst into flames.
Preston in tow, the Nashes left California and returned to their roots, hoping that by dedicating a year to their son’s rehabilitation, they could restore him to a life of sobriety and self-sufficiency. Instead, he became the thing that lived in their basement apartment, sullen and reclusive, occupying himself with video games, smut, and drug-induced stupors. For weeks and even months at a time, Preston remained as elusive as the Phantom of the Opera – until one too many chemical cocktails gave him the screaming whimwhams so bad that he saw evil clowns climbing out of his toilet, or the equivalent.
Even in his silent and reclusive periods, Preston took a toll from his parents. Expectation of his next collapse was almost as emotionally draining as the event itself.
Estate managers usually were required to live on site, but no employer wanted the Nashes to bring along their pale and stubbled basement dweller. Instead of managing a major property and its staff, they were reduced to cleaning house and cooking for the Calvinos, a position they’d held for more than four years. Overqualified, they never acted as though the job might be beneath them; they worked hard and were cheerful, perhaps because work provided escape from worry.
When John entered the kitchen, Walter was plating salads at the center island. Five eight, trim, with steel-rod posture, he might have passed for a jockey if he had been a few inches shorter and ten pounds lighter. His small, strong hands and his economy of movement suggested he would be able to control half a ton of horseflesh with the subtlest pressure of a knee or the slightest tug of the reins.
“There’s no need to serve us dinner when we haven’t any guests,” John said. “You’ve had a long day.”
“You’ve had a long day, as well, Mr. C,” Walter said. “Besides, there’s nothing like some extra work to ensure against a sleepless night.”
“Well, don’t think you’re staying all the way through cleanup. The terrible trio can help Nicky and me. We’re nearly three-quarters through the year, and they haven’t yet broken twenty dishes. We don’t want to deny them every chance to exceed their personal best score.”
He drew a deep breath, savoring the aromas of onions, garlic, juniper berries, and well-cooked beef. “Ah, carbonata.”
Laying aside her ladle and setting the lid ajar on the stew pot, Imogene said, “You’re a regular bloodhound, Mr. C. No wonder you close so many cases.”
In youth, Imogene must have been a pocket Venus. Her features were still delicate and her skin as clear as morning light. In spite of her petite stature, she was not now – and likely never had been – fragile either in body or spirit. She had the air of one who could readily assume Atlas’s burden if he could not carry it any longer.
“But I don’t detect even a hint of polenta,” John worried.
“How could you smell polenta through such a cloud of stew? But it’s here, of course. We’d never serve carbonata without it.”
After another deep breath, he said, “Piselli alle noci,” which was an Italian dish of buttered peas and carrots garnished with walnut halves.
To her husband, Imogene said, “He’s got a better nose than you do, Wally.”
“Of course he does,” Walter agreed as he shaved fresh Parmesan on the salads. “After all those years of navy cooking, I’ve ruined my nose for nuance. Which reminds me, sir, leave the laundry-room door closed, we’ve got an ugly stink in there. I only discovered it ten minutes ago. I’ll deal with it in the morning.”
“What’s wrong?” John asked.
“I’m not sure. But my best guess is a sick rodent found a way into the dryer exhaust duct and met his fate just on the farther side of the lint trap.”
“Wally,” Imogene said with some exasperation. “The man’s about to sit down to his dinner.”
“Sorry, Mr. C.”
“No problem. Nothing could turn me off carbonata.”
“It’s just curious,” Walter said, “how the smell came on so suddenly. One minute the laundry room is fine, and a minute later, it reeks.”
Chapter 11 (#ulink_64e10c64-2c3e-5663-aca7-c418590999a3)
John sat at the head of the dining-room table, Nicolette to his right, Minnie to his left and boosted on a pillow. Naomi sat beside her little sister, Zachary across from Naomi.
For the first time, the sight of his family gathered in one place didn’t at once warm John but instead inspired a cold tightness in his chest, a greasy sliding sensation in his stomach. The dining room seemed too bright, although the lighting was the same as ever at dinner, and every window invited hostile observation. The stainless-steel flatware flanking his plate had the sinister gleam of surgical instruments. His wineglass was indeed glass, a potential source of jagged shards.
For a moment, this curious uneasiness threatened to disorient him – until he understood the cause of it. Together, the family was five targets clustered, therefore vulnerable to quick annihilation. Although he had no incontestable proof that any enemy waged war against him, he was thinking like a man embattled.
His hyperbolic suspicion embarrassed him, and more important, he recognized that if not controlled, it would cloud his judgment. If he permitted his imagination to paint a gloss of evil on all things, he would provide camouflage for true evil. Besides, if you painted the devil on the walls often enough, you got the devil on the stairs, his footsteps approaching.
When John allowed his children to delight him, they soon lifted from him this pall of foreboding.
After grace, during the salad course, the primary subject discussed was the brilliant, the magnificent, the incomparable, the current that’s-who-I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up, Louisa May Alcott, immortal author of Little Women, which Naomi had finished reading just that afternoon. She wanted to be Louisa May Alcott, and she wanted also to be Jo, the young writer in the story, but of course she wanted to be herself, embodying all the Alcott-Jo qualities while writing and living in her unique Naomi style.
Naomi seemed destined, as an adult, to appear on Broadway in the title role of a revival of Peter Pan. She contained both a tomboy who yearned for swashbuckling adventures and a perpetually breathless girl who saw romance and magic everywhere she looked. She wanted to know how to throw a perfect sinking curveball every bit as much as she wanted to know how to arrange roses to the best effect, and she believed both in Truth and in Tinker Bell. As likely to dance along a hallway as to run it, more likely to sing away a sadness than to sulk, she exhausted the possibilities of each new enthusiasm just as inevitably another one came along to captivate her.
As Walter whisked away the salad plates, Zachary said, “Little Women sounds like a giant bore. Why can’t you go nuts about vampire novels like every other dorky sixth-grade girl? Then we’d really have something worth talking about at the table.”
“I don’t find the living dead the least bit attractive,” Naomi said. “When I’m old enough to have a boyfriend, I don’t want one who drinks my blood. Imagine his bad breath and what a mess his teeth would be. All these girls swooning over hunky vampires, what they really want is to give away their freedom, to be controlled and told what to do and not have to think – and never die, of course. It’s sick is what it is. I don’t want to be a forever-young living corpse, I want to be Louisa May Alcott.”
Minnie said, “It’s stupid how she has three names.”
“We all have three names,” Naomi said. “You’re Minette Eugenia Calvino.”
“But nobody calls me all three, like you guys said a thousand times already ‘Louisa May Alcott, Louisa May Alcott.’ It’s stupid.”
“Celebrity-shooters always have three names,” Zach said. “Like Mark David Chapman and Lee Harvey Oswald. There’s a bunch of others, but I can’t think of them right now.”
“Good,” his mother said. “I’d be very disturbed to have a thirteen-year-old son obsessed with three-name celebrity-shooters.”
“Zach is totally obsessed with the United States Marines,” Naomi said. “He’s got like eighty-six books about them.”
“I only have thirty-one books about them,” Zach protested, “and I’m not obsessed with the marines. I just like military history is all. Lots of people are interested in military history.”
“Relax,” Naomi said. “I wasn’t implying your interest in the marines is a homosexual thing. After all, you’re also obsessed with Laura Leigh Highsmith worse than you are the marines.”
“Three names,” Minnie observed.
John said, “Who’s Laura Leigh Highsmith?”
Minnie said, “Is she related to Louisa May Alcott?”
“She’s just a girl in my human-head class.”
The children were primarily home-schooled. For educational purposes, Naomi went out of the house only to music lessons and to junior-orchestra practices. Zach attended group lessons twice a week as part of an art-institute program for gifted children. Currently he was enrolled in a pencil class to learn the fine points of drawing the human head.
Teasingly, Naomi said, “Hey, does Laura Leigh Highsmith draw portraits of you?”
“She’s just a challenging subject,” Zach said. “Hard to get right. Other than that, she’s nobody.”
“Are you gonna marry her?” Minnie asked.
“Of course not,” Zach said. “Why would I marry a nobody?”
“What’s wrong with your face?” Minnie asked.
Naomi said, “It’s sure not sunburn. He’s blushing.”
“I’m not blushing,” Zach declared.
“Then it’s a bad rash,” Minnie said. “Mom, he’s got a bad rash.”
“Permission to leave the table,” Zach said.
John said, “Denied. You’ve eaten only a salad.”
“I’ve lost my appetite.”
“It’s the rash,” Minnie said. “Maybe it’s conflacious.”
“Contagious,” Naomi corrected.
Minnie said, “Permission to leave the table.”
“Why do you want to leave the table?” John asked.
“I don’t want no rash.”
“He’s drawn at least ten thousand portraits of Laura Leigh Highsmith,” Naomi revealed.
Zachary had inherited his mother’s talent – and his father’s grimace. “What’re you doing, snooping in my drawing tablets?”
“It’s not like reading a diary, for heaven’s sake. I like to look at your drawings, you’re so good, and I can’t draw for beans. Though if I was a good artist, I’d draw all kinds of things, variety, not a gazillion portraits of Laura Leigh Highsmith.”
“You always exaggerate everything,” Zach said. “First it’s ten thousand, now a gazillion.”
“Well,” said Naomi, “it’s at least a hundred.”
“A hundred’s a whole lot less than a gazillion.”
Nicolette said, “You’ve drawn a hundred portraits of the same girl, and this is the first I’ve heard of her?”
“That’s a really, really bad rash,” Minnie said.
For the main course, everyone but Minnie enjoyed the carbonata with polenta and vegetables. Walter served the girl spaghetti and meatballs because she had the culinary stubbornness of the average eight-year-old.
The conversation turned to Italian history, possibly because Naomi noted, rightly or wrongly, that the Chinese invented spaghetti, not the Italians, and Minnie wanted to know who invented meatballs, and to forestall any further diminishment of their Italian heritage, John invented a colorful story that placed the origin of meatballs squarely in Rome. They talked about Michelangelo lying on his back to paint frescoes on ceilings (according to Minnie, here was another guy with three names – Michael Ann Jello) and about Leonardo da Vinci inventing airships that would have flown if only the technology had existed to build them. Because there was no Italian front for the marines in World War I and because during World War II they served primarily in the Pacific theater, Zachary changed the subject to France in general and specifically to the Battle of Belleau Wood, one of the finest hours in the history of the Corps, while Naomi hummed “The Marine Hymn” and Minnie made surprisingly quiet machine-gun sounds to enhance her brother’s anecdotes of war.
For dessert they had lemon cake with layers of ricotta and chocolate. Minnie did not ask for vanilla ice cream instead.
The five of them washed, dried, and put away the dishes without breakage. Unthinkingly, Naomi pirouetted with a stack of clean salad plates, but catastrophe did not ensue.
Had they eaten earlier, there would have been games or contests or a story read aloud. But private time had arrived. Kisses, good-nights, and wishes for sweet dreams were exchanged, and suddenly John found himself alone, walking the ground floor to check that all the exterior doors were locked.
Standing in the dark at a front window, he watched the lamplit street bubble as if boiling. He had forgotten the rain, but it still fell, without pyrotechnics now, straight down in the windless night. The trees were flourished silhouettes, the yard black. The graceful arc of the porch, styled as an elongated temple portico, was crowded with shadows, but none of them moved or revealed a gleaming eye.
Chapter 12 (#ulink_38d8d605-9a0e-5f76-99d9-49372f06f422)
Zach sat at his desk with his art tablet, reviewing recent drawings and wondering if he might be turning into a girl. Not the way the usual bonehead in a movie goes walking alone at night in a godforsaken forest where only the terminally stupid would go walking, and he gets bitten by some godawful thing and on the next full moon he morphs into the Wolfman, with no interest anymore in vegetables or cereal grains. If Zach was becoming a girl, it was a less dramatic transformation, slow and quiet, with no thrashing or snarling or howling at the moon.
His room was certainly not a girly room; it was a shrine to the Marine Corps. Crowding the walls were images of a present-day marine in dress blues with white gloves, an F/A-18 Hornet in flight, a supercool V-22 Osprey vertical-lift aircraft, the famous Iwo Jima flag-raising photo … Most striking of all was a print of Tom Lovell’s horrifying but thrilling painting of World War I marines attacking German troops in close combat in Belleau Wood: poisonous mist, gas masks, bloody bayonets, facial wounds …
If the marines would have him, Zach intended to be one of them eventually. Even if he was turning into a girl, they accepted girls in the marines now.
His dad’s parents had been art teachers, and his mom was a big deal in some quarters of the godawful art world. Zach’s talent had two origins, and he knew he ought to use it, but the question was What should he use it for? He didn’t want to teach art any more than he wanted to cut off his freaking ears and make a sandwich with them. You didn’t get to kick much butt teaching art. You didn’t get to blow up a lot of things for all the right reasons. And he would never care about what the freaking art-world snobs thought of him. His mom was the only non-idiot among her idiotic art-world friends. He wasn’t as nice as his mom, didn’t have her tolerance for snotty people, and he couldn’t always see the good side of them like she could. If he ever had his own godawful art-world friends, he would end up throwing them out ten-story windows and off overpasses, just to hear them splat.
Being an actual combat marine who, during lulls in the action, found moments to sketch scenes as they had been, as no photographer could ever catch those moments – that struck him as important work.
Other kids his age were big on sports stars and pop singers. These days, sports stars and pop singers were as real as steroids and lip-synching. Phonies. Fakes. Something had happened to the world. Everything was plastic. It wasn’t always that way.
Zach knew the names of marine combat artists the way other kids knew pop stars. Major Alex Raymond, who had become famous for his Flash Gordon comic strip. Pfc. Harry Jackson, who did great work at the Battle of Tarawa. Tom Lovell, John Thomason, Mike Leahy in Vietnam …
Zach’s determination to make a life in the Corps was almost two years old. For a long time, he didn’t give a thought as to why this enthusiasm gripped him, but lately he began to understand.
When he grew up, he didn’t want to do boring monkey work just for the bucks. He needed to be part of something where people cared about one another, would die for one another, where they set high standards, where they respected tradition, honor, truth. These were qualities of his family, and the way they lived – to their own rhythm, pursuing their enthusiasms with little interest in the fads of the day, with respect for one another that still left room for poking fun – was something he would need for the rest of his life because he was addicted to it. His family had addicted him to living with purpose and fun. When he became an adult, he wanted his working life to be as much as possible like life in the Calvino family.
And he wanted to be a marine also because of his sisters.
Naomi was hyper but smart, flighty but so talented, frustrating but funny, and sometimes she talked at you until it was like being caught in a flock of fluttering birds, nice bluebirds and canaries, but an infinite number of them, twittering forever. Life with her was often like tumbling through a humongous rotating barrel in an amusement park, but when you came out the other end and got your balance, you realized it was better to be in the barrel sometimes than to be stuck forever on some boring dumb-ass merry-go-round moving at like a tenth of a mile an hour with freaking organ music.
And as for Minnie – well, Minnie was Minnie. A couple years back, when Minnie came down with a mysterious illness nobody could diagnose for what seemed like forever but was probably just a week or so, Zach hadn’t been able to sleep well or draw well, or think well. Although he wasn’t sick like she was, he threw up twice, just because Minnie was sick, like a sympathy puke, though he didn’t tell anyone.
Bad things were going to happen to Naomi and Minnie because bad things happened to everyone. Zach wasn’t able to protect them from viruses and runaway trucks. But out in the wider world were a lot of evil men and insane dictators, and being a marine was a way to help protect his homeland, his home, his sisters, and their way of life.
Semper Fi.
He hoped he wasn’t turning into a girl, because he wanted to be their brother, not their sister. As he paged through recent drawings of Laura Leigh, he wondered about his gender because, although she was seriously pretty and though he had drawn her from observation and from memory more often than Michelangelo had drawn God, Jesus, saints, and angels combined, he felt no stirrings of desire for her.
Well, all right, now and then there were stirrings and a couple times the stirrings were so embarrassing that, to distract himself, he chewed on ice cubes until his teeth ached.
But maybe ninety-five percent of his obsession with Laura Leigh had nothing to do with sex. Mostly he felt about her the way he felt about his sisters, but even more so. She seemed so fragile, delicate, slender, so small and vulnerable that Zach worried about her, which struck him as weird because, although petite, she wasn’t a dwarf with brittle-bone disease, she was a normal size for a thirteen-year-old girl. He wanted to protect her, wanted her always to be happy, wanted everyone to see in her what he saw in her, not just beauty but also merit, virtue, kindness, and a precious something he couldn’t even name. His feelings for Laura Leigh were so tender and affectionate that they didn’t seem to be the kind of masculine things that a boy should be feeling. Sometimes the sight of her left him breathless, and sometimes when he was drawing her from memory, his throat grew so tight that he couldn’t swallow, and when at last he did swallow, though it was just spit, he sounded as if he were a pig taking down an entire apple. Surely only girls – and boys turning into girls – were swept away by their emotions like this.
He turned the tablet to a clean page, propped it on the slanted drawing board atop his desk, and took his pencils from a drawer. He intended to draw only Laura Leigh Highsmith’s nose. Her nose was a constant challenge to him because of its perfection.
After Zach sharpened his pencils and arranged them, before he began to commit carbon to paper, from the corner of his eye, he saw something move. He swiveled in his chair and sat watching the door to his closet swing slowly open.
Although the door had never done this before, no expectation of danger passed through Zach’s mind. He possessed a good imagination, but it didn’t lead him into bogeyman territory, either of the zombie-vampire-werewolf kind or of the guy-in-a-hockey-mask-with-a-chainsaw kind.
In real life, people who wanted to kill you were one of two varieties, the first being your freaking nutcase true believers who wanted to fly a plane through your window or get their hands on a nuclear weapon to blast you into bone dust. There was nothing you could do about them. They were like earthquakes or tornadoes to an ordinary citizen, so you had to leave them to the marines and not worry about them.
Then you had your everyday criminals who were motivated by envy or greed, or lust, or a desperate need for drugs. They looked so much like law-abiding citizens that more often than not they jammed the muzzle of a gun inside one of your nostrils and demanded your wallet or your booty before you realized they weren’t the kind who ever said “Have a nice day.”
Neither an al-Qaeda operative nor a convenience-store-robbing junkie could have found his way into Zach’s bedroom closet.
When the door drifted to a halt, all the way open, he got up and went to investigate the cause of its movement.
His walk-in closet was deeper than wide, with clothes hanging and shelved along the two longest walls. The overhead light glowed, though he felt certain that he had switched it off earlier.
Toward the back of the closet, a pull-ring on a rope dangled from a trapdoor in the ceiling, access to the crawlspace between the second and third floors. If you pulled the trap open, a wooden ladder unfolded from the back of it.
With the ladder down, a draft sometimes blew out of the space above and into the closet, strong enough to move the door if the latch hadn’t been engaged. But now the tightly fitted trap was closed, shutting off the only possible source of a draft.
They didn’t live in earthquake country, but like nearly every place on the planet, this city stood above at least one inactive fault. Although a minor temblor might be unlikely, it couldn’t be ruled out; however, he hadn’t felt the ground move.
Maybe the house had been settling. Houses did that. Maybe it slowly settled in such a way that the closet door no longer hung plumb. Then its own weight might pull it open if it wasn’t latched.
No other explanation presented itself. Case closed.
He switched off the light and stepped out of the closet.
Attached to the back of the door was a full-length mirror. Zach solemnly saluted himself, thinking of the day when on very special occasions he would wear dress blues and carry an officer’s Mameluke sword in a scabbard at his side.
As he closed the door, leaving the mirror to reflect only the dark closet, he listened to the latch click solidly in place. He was then overcome by a vague sense that something about his reflection, as he saluted, had not been right.
Maybe his salute or his at-attention posture had been sloppy. He had practiced them a lot when he was eleven, less when he was twelve, and lately not at all because when you were still years away from being a real marine, practicing such things too much seemed childish.
He returned to his chair at the desk, in front of the blank page of art paper, and picked up his pencil. He called forth the memory of Laura Leigh Highsmith’s singular and exquisite nose, and contemplated it with the hope of a sudden insight that would precisely define why it was so exquisite.
As far as he knew, there were no hairs in her goddess nose. He had never glimpsed any bristling from it, nor had he ever seen a ray of light catch a hair shape in the shadowy ovals encompassed by her porcelain-smooth nares. Of course he never walked right up to her and peered up her nostrils, so he couldn’t be sure they were in fact hairless.
“Idiot,” he said.
She was human, so of course she had hairs in her nose. She would die or something if she didn’t have hairs in her nose. Her nose might be as hairy inside as a freaking gorilla’s armpit. Hair or the lack of it had nothing to do with why her nose was a work of art beyond his talent to depict.
Hoping for inspiration, he set to work with his stupid pencil and the stupid blank sheet of paper. As slowly he drew, he thought of Laura Leigh, of course, but he also thought from time to time of the somehow-wrong reflection, and even though the latch had firmly engaged, he half expected the closet door to swing open again.
Chapter 13 (#ulink_2c3fec69-6e71-5e85-939e-bd06a2ec1ade)
Naomi had a walk-in closet like Zach’s but somewhat bigger, and on the back of the door hung a full-length mirror, a really splendid beveled-edge looking glass of such sparkling clarity that she half believed, when the stars were aligned properly, that the mirror might become a doorway between her world and a magical realm into which she could step and pursue fabulous adventures and her true destiny.
This world where she had lived for eleven years was magical, too, in so many ways, if a person was perspicacious enough to notice the numerous wonders of it. Perspicacious was her new favorite word. It meant “having keen insight,” an almost uncanny ability to see through – and to comprehend – what is dark and obscure. Unfortunately, there was a terrible shortage of perspicacity these days but veritable oceans of dark and obscure.
Anyway, this world was magical, but just not magical enough for Naomi’s taste. She yearned for wizards, flying horses, talking dogs, rainbows at midnight, and for things she could not even imagine, things that would leave her speechless and her heart swollen, not swollen in a bad way, like with disease or something, but swollen with awe and delight. If she ever had a chance to pass through a mirror or through a door that suddenly appeared in the trunk of a great oak tree, she would go – though of course she would have to take Minnie and Zach and her parents with her, and they were not as likely to want to go as she would be, so she might have to Taser them or something. They would be angry, but later they would thank her.
As she thought about perspicacity and magical realms and how a girl her age might obtain a Taser, Naomi tried on hats in front of the mirror, making several facial expressions under each one until she felt that with her face she reflected the character of the hat. This was an acting exercise she read about somewhere, and while she doubted she would ever be an actress, she definitely had not ruled out the possibility if, in the next few years, a magical door didn’t appear for her.
While Naomi mugged in front of the mirror, Minnie sat at her play table, building something with LEGO blocks. She was a whiz with LEGOS, she could build just about anything she wanted, but mostly she put together bizarre structures like nothing in the real world, some of them totally weird abstract shapes that ought to have collapsed but did not.
Naomi and Minette shared a room because in a world practically crawling with demented, drooling predators, Minette was too young and defenseless to sleep by herself even though Daddy set the perimeter alarm every night before bed. Besides, Minnie got scared sometimes and refused to be alone. Her fears were fraidy-cat stuff, nothing real, but of course she was still a child.
A brimless cloche hat with feather trimming on one side inspired Naomi to look mysterious and dangerous, as if she were a woman on a train between Paris and Istanbul, carrying priceless stolen diamonds in the lining of her suitcase. A blue straw hat with an open crown and a spotted veil said, I am chic, competent, and have no tolerance for nonsense. I will shoot you with the .32 pistol in my purse, step over your corpse, and mix for myself a positively divine martini.
Naomi had gotten her collection of hats at vintage-clothing stores while with her mother. Mother enjoyed browsing in such shops, though she never bought anything for herself other than an occasional piece of costume jewelry, which she never wore. She said recycled party and formal-occasion dresses were “hopes and dreams on hangers, moments from lives, delightful and intriguing and terribly sad at the same time.” Naomi couldn’t get her mind around delightful and terribly sad at the same time, but that was okay because gradually she acquired a fabulous collection of vintage hats.
When the strange thing happened, she was wearing a red straw hat with a narrow upturned brim, petersham band, and bow decoration. She thought the correct expression to match the hat ought to be comic or perhaps prim, but she couldn’t find it in her face. She was focused so completely on the hat and her face that the person passing behind her registered only as a quick dark shape that darted from right to left.
Minnie sat at her play table, in plain view, and no one in this house ever entered without knocking and announcing themselves, and there had been no knock, yet someone passed behind her, and Naomi spun around to see who it might be, but no one was there.
The open closet. No one in there, either.
Puzzled, she turned to the mirror again, wondering if something was wrong with her eyes, something dreadful and incurable, so that she would be blind by thirteen, a tragic figure, the blind musician, bravely forging on with her lessons until she became magnificently accomplished because of her fierce dedication to her only remaining pleasure, her music. She might become an international sensation, people traveling from all over the world to see her play, because her music would be so pure, the music of the virgin blind girl who performed melancholy passages with such power that even gangsters wept like babies, and always at her side would be her pure-white German shepherd Seeing Eye dog. She played the flute, but she couldn’t conjure an image of a concert hall full of people who had come from all around the world to hear a blind flautist, so perhaps she would need to stop with the flute and take up the piano. Yes, she could see herself at the piano, tossing her head dramatically as the music enraptured her, so tragic, so brilliant, the audience electrified by her playing, the guide dog gazing up adoringly at his mistress as her hands danced across the keys—
The mysterious form flashed behind her again, from left to right this time, a dark blur. Naomi gasped, turned to the closet, where the intruder surely must have gone, but again no one was there.
Minnie had gotten up from the play table. “What’s wrong?” she asked as she came to Naomi.
“I saw someone. A reflection. In the mirror.”
“It’s probably you.”
“I mean besides me, of course. Someone passing behind me.”
“Nobody’s here.”
“Maybe. I guess not. But still … something happened. I saw him in the mirror, sure enough. Real quick. He had to be here in the room with us.”
“You better tell me true, Naomi. You trying to spook me?”
Minnie had her mother’s black hair but her father’s green eyes. As was the case with Daddy, too, this emerald gaze could freeze you in place, like an interrogator’s spotlight in a screamproof room deep in a dungeon where you understood that you would lose a finger every time you told a lie. Naomi knew that neither Daddy nor Minnie would cut off her fingers, but when either of them focused this narrow-eyed green stare on her, she never fudged the truth even the littlest bit.
“You trying to spook me?” Minnie asked again.
“No, no. It wasn’t spooky. Not much. A little spooky. It was mainly just weird. I thought I might have to be a blind pianist.”
“You’re weird,” Minnie said.
“I saw some guy reflected in the mirror,” Naomi insisted.
“Really? Swear on the grave of Willard.”
Willard, their dog, had died two years earlier. Losing him was the hardest ordeal they ever endured. It still hurt to think about him. He was the best, sweetest, noblest dog in the world, and if you swore the truth of something on his grave and you lied, then you were surely going to burn in Hell with nothing to eat for eternity except spiders and maggots and brussels sprouts.
“I swear,” Naomi said, “on the grave of Willard.”
Impressed, Minnie peered in the mirror, talking to her sister’s reflection. “What did he look like?”
“I don’t know. I just … it was … no details … just a blur, superquick, way faster than a person should be, as fast as any animal, but it wasn’t an animal.”
In the mirror, Minnie’s eyes moved from her sister’s eyes to survey the reflection of the room behind them. Naomi also studied it.
“Maybe it wasn’t a guy,” Minnie said, “maybe it was a girl.”
“What girl?”
Minnie shrugged. “Whoever.”
Across the mirror, the thing swooped. Because Naomi was prepared for it this time, she saw it more clearly than before, but there was not anything to see, really, no face, no arms or legs, just a blur and ripple of darkness, here and gone, zoom.
Naomi cried, “Chestnuts!” which was something her grandmother said when she was startled or frustrated, and Minnie said, “Whoa!”
Instead of something, this seemed to have been only the shadow of something, and Naomi looked up at the ceiling light, expecting to see a moth darting about that cut-glass globe, but there was no moth.
When she returned her attention to the mirror, the phantom swooped across the glass again, and she said, “There must be a moth in the room, it keeps flying past the lamp. Help me find it.”
Solemnly, Minnie said, “It’s not a moth. Not in the room. It’s in the mirror.”
Minnie was just eight years old, and all eight-year-olds were kind of screwy because their young brains had not yet grown to fill out their skulls or something like that, which was a known scientific fact, so they were likely to say or do anything, sometimes mortifying you, though this was absurd rather than embarrassing.
“You took one too many silly pills this morning, Mouse. How could a moth be in the mirror?”
“It’s not a moth,” Minnie said. “Don’t look at it anymore.”
“What do you mean it’s not a moth? It was like a wing shadow – swoosh! – I saw it clearly this time, it must be a moth.”
“Don’t look at it anymore,” Minnie insisted. She went into the closet and began selecting a change of clothes for herself. “Get what you’ll wear tomorrow, put everything on your desk.”
“Why? What’re you doing?”
“Hurry!”
Although Minnie was a fraidy-cat with some empty space waiting to be filled in her eight-year-old skull, Naomi suddenly had the creepy feeling that her sister’s advice might be worth heeding. She stepped into the closet and quickly put together an outfit for the next day.
“Don’t look at the mirror,” Minnie reminded her.
“I will if I want,” Naomi said, because she was the older of the two and would not allow herself to be bossed around by a sister so young that she could twist spaghetti onto a fork only if she guided it with her fingers. But Naomi did not even glance at the mirror.
After they put the next day’s clothes on their desks, Minnie carried the chair from the play table to the closet. She closed the closet door and braced it shut by tipping the chair backward and wedging its headrail under the doorknob.
“I have to put all these hats away,” Naomi said.
“Not tonight.”
“But we have to go in the closet sometime.”
“After we figure what to do with the mirror,” Minnie said.
“What do you want to do with the mirror?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“We need to have a mirror.”
“We don’t need that one,” Minnie declared.
Chapter 14 (#ulink_4e0ade6d-0950-540f-a6a2-cc83485bc6aa)
In their third-floor suite, she shifted his gears as she had promised, but he shifted hers as well. Their lovemaking didn’t have the character of a race toward pleasure but was instead an easy and familiar journey, full of affection and tenderness, fueled less by need than by devotion, and the final stretch a long sweet coast to the finish and the flag thrown down, and joy.
Until he met Nicolette, John had been incapable of a sexual relationship or at least incapable of pursuing one. The killing of everyone in his family by Alton Blackwood, rapist and murderer, had knotted sex and violence in young John’s mind, so that it seemed to him that all desire was savage lust, that the gentlest longing for connection and release was in fact a sublimation of the urge to destroy. Blackwood’s sexual satisfaction had been a prelude to murder; and for years John felt that his own ecstasy would be an affront to the memory of his mother and his sisters, that a climax reduced him to brotherhood with their killer. His ecstasy would inevitably remind him of their humiliation and agony, and he could no more find pleasure in climax than in stabbing or shooting himself as they had been stabbed or shot.
If Nicolette had not come along, John might have traded his police uniform for a monk’s habit long before he achieved the rank of detective. She restored to him the understanding that desire is corrupt only if the soul is corrupt, that the body and the soul can both be elevated by giving pleasure in a spirit of love, and that an act of procreation is in its essence always a grace.
After the events of the afternoon, he expected to pass the night awake and restless, but in the shared warmth of the sheets, lying on his back, her hand still in his, he listened to her breathing change as she found sleep, and soon he, too, slept.
In the dream, he visited the city morgue as he had visited it many times in real life, though now the corridors and rooms lay in an eerie blue half-light, and he was – or so it appeared – the only living person in this ceramic-tiled, air-conditioned catacomb. The offices and file rooms and hallways were hushed, his footsteps as soundless as they would have been in a vacuum. He entered a chamber where the walls were lined with the gleaming faces of steel drawers, refrigerated body drawers in which the recently deceased awaited identification and autopsy. He thought that he belonged here, that he had come home, that one of the drawers would roll open, chilled and empty, and that he would feel compelled to climb into it and let Death kiss away the last breath in his lungs. Now the stillness relented to a single sound: the solid hammer strike of his heartbeat.
Retreating to the door by which he’d entered, he discovered that it no longer existed. Turning in a circle, he saw no other exit, but in the center of the room stood something that had not been there before: a slanted autopsy table with blood gutters and reservoirs. On the table lay a corpse under a sheet, a corpse with motivation and intention. A hand appeared from out of the white shroud, and by its great size, by its long spatulate fingers, by its knobby wrist as graceless as the gears of a nineteenth-century machine, the identity of the cadaver was revealed. Alton Turner Blackwood pulled the sheet off himself and cast it to the floor. He sat up and then descended from the table, standing fully six feet five, lean and bony yet powerful, his malformed bat-wing shoulder blades straining at the yoke of his shirt, subtly insectile, as if they were features of a bug’s exoskeleton. John’s heart beat harder than before, harder than fast, a stone pestle pounding a stone mortar, steadily hammering his courage into dust.
Blackwood wore what he had worn on the night he invaded the Calvino house: black steel-toed boots similar to ice-climbing boots with the sole crampons removed, khaki pants with four front pockets, and a khaki shirt. He lacked the wounds that had killed him, and appeared in the condition that John had first encountered him on that night.
His face was not so deformed as to be freakish, but he suffered from the degree of ugliness that, in most people, evoked pity but without tenderness. On the heels of pity, discomfort arose at the thought of inadvertently offending by staring or by an ill-considered word, followed by a distaste that compelled people to turn guiltily away, an antipathy that was intuitive rather than considered.
Snarls of greasy dark hair lay close to his scalp, his eyebrows bristled, but his face appeared beardless. His skin was pale where it wasn’t pink, as smooth as the flesh of a baby doll yet unhealthy and not at all an asset, seemingly without pores and therefore unnatural. The proportions of Blackwood’s long face were wrong in ways John could not fully define, beginning with a slab of brow that beetled over deep-set eyes. His hatchet nose, elongated ears reminiscent of the goatish ears of a satyr, jawbones as flat and hard as chisel blades, too-thin upper lip and too-thick lower one, sharpened his countenance to a spade of a chin that he raised in the haughty manner of Mussolini, as if at any moment he might chop at you with his face.
His eyes were so black that no differentiation existed between pupils and irises. Sometimes it seemed that only the whites of his eyes glistened and had substance, that the black must not be color but instead absence, holes in the eyes that led back into the cold and lightless hell of his mind.
Blackwood took three steps away from the autopsy table, and John retreated three steps, until he backed into a wall of body drawers. The killer’s yellow-toothed grin, a wolfish sneer, seemed to be the prelude to a bite.
He spoke, his deep raspy voice transforming ordinary words into obscenities: “Your wife is sweet, your children sweeter. I want my candy.”
Around the room, the big drawers flew open, and the dead came forth, legions in the service of Alton Blackwood, who reached for John’s face as if to tear it off—
He woke, sat up, stood up, damp with sweat, his heart knocking hard enough to shake him. He felt certain that the house had been violated.
Two indicator lights shone on the security keypad – one yellow, one red. The first meant that the system was functioning, the second that the perimeter alarm – but not the interior motion detectors – was engaged. No one could have entered without triggering the alarm.
His sense of imminent danger was nothing more than a remnant of his nightmare.
In the glow of Nicky’s clock radio, John could just make out her shape beneath the sheets. She did not stir. He had not awakened her.
Near the door to the adjoining bathroom, a night-light fanned the floor, and tiny variations in the wool yarn of the tufted pile stippled the illuminated carpet with nubby shadows.
He had fallen asleep naked. He found his pajama bottoms on the floor beside the bed, and pulled them on.
The door to the master bathroom opened onto a short hallway flanked by their walk-in closets. Quietly, he closed the door behind him before clicking the wall switch.
He needed light. He sat on Nicky’s vanity bench and let the fluorescents fade his memory of Alton Turner Blackwood’s double-barrel stare.
When he glanced at the mirror, he saw not only a worried man but also the boy who he had been twenty years earlier, the boy whose world imploded under him and who might never have found the fortitude and resolution to make a new world for himself if he had not met Nicky when he was eighteen.
That boy had never grown up. During a few minutes of horror, an adult John Calvino had been formed, and the boy had been left behind, his emotional maturation arrested forever at fourteen. He had not evolved gradually from boy into man, the way other men experienced their passage out of adolescence; instead, in crisis, the man had leaped from the boy. In a sense, the boy, so abruptly left behind, remained in the man almost as a separate entity. It seemed to him now that this part of himself, this unevolved boy, must be the source of his adolescent fear. Fear that the similarities between the Valdane and the Lucas murders, twenty years apart, could not be explained by police work and cool reason. The inner boy, as imaginative and as thrilled by the supernatural as were all fourteen-year-olds, insisted that the explanation must lie beyond the power of reason and must be otherworldly.
A homicide detective could not entertain such ideas and still do his work. Logic, deductive reasoning, and an understanding of the human capacity for evil were his tools, the only ones he needed.
The nightmare from which he had awakened was not that of a grown man. Boys dreamed such comic-book scenarios, boys with their newfound fear of death that came with hormonal changes as surely as did an interest in girls.
John’s and Nicky’s cell phones lay on the granite top of the vanity, recharging in a duplex plug. His cell rang.
Infrequently, he was called out at night on a murder. But the summons usually came on the third line of the four-line house phone, which was his private number. Charging, the cell phone should have been switched off. No caller ID appeared on the screen.
“Hello?”
His mellifluous church-choir voice at once recognizable, Billy Lucas said, “Did you have to throw away your shoes?”
John’s first thought was that the boy must have escaped from the state hospital.
He put his second thought into words: “Where did you get this number?”
“Next time we meet, there won’t be armored glass between us. While you’re dying, I’ll piss in your face.”
Conversation would serve only Billy; he was not likely to answer what he was asked. John did not respond.
“I remember them soft against my tongue. I liked the taste,” Billy said. “After so long, I still remember the sweet and slightly salty taste of them.”
John stared at the cream-colored marble floor with its diamond inlays of black granite.
“Your lovely sister, your Giselle. She had such pretty little training-bra breasts.”
John closed his eyes, clenched his teeth, and swallowed hard to quell his rising gorge.
He listened to the killer waiting, to a gloating silence, and after a while he seemed to be listening to a dead line.
When he attempted to ring back his caller with *69, he had no success.
Chapter 15 (#ulink_ea162808-e928-5822-9797-d2c66a8203a1)
The wide nightstand between their beds accommodated two reading lamps. Minnie left hers on the lower of two settings, the goose neck straight, so that the cone shade directed soft light at the ceiling. One of the little fraidy-cat’s dreads that sometimes tested Naomi’s saintlike patience was bats, specifically the possibility that a bat might get tangled in her hair, not only clawing and chewing open her scalp but also driving her insane so that she would have to pass the rest of her life in an asylum where they never served dessert. In this case, Minnie probably wasn’t worrying about bats, even though she had adjusted the lamp to the bat-banishing angle.
They were both reclining against piles of pillows, a position from which they could see the closet door and the barricading chair.
Although their parents expected a great many things of the Calvino brood, going to bed at an established hour was not one of them. They were permitted to stay up as late as they wished, for any purpose except to watch TV or play video games; however, they must be showered, dressed, and ready for breakfast with their mother and father promptly at 7:00 A.M. and alert during their home-schooling, which began at seven forty-five.
This coming Saturday, like every glorious Saturday, they would be allowed to sleep in as late as they wished, and breakfast would be an individual responsibility. Of course, if the shadowy thing swooping through the mirror was as hostile as Minnie seemed to think it must be, they might not survive until Saturday, in which case Saturday breakfast would be moot.
“Maybe we should tell Mom and Daddy,” Naomi said.
“Tell them what?”
“Something’s living in our mirror.”
“You tell them. Hope you like the nuthouse.”
“They’ll believe us when they see it.”
“They won’t see it,” Minnie predicted.
“Why won’t they see it?”
“Because it won’t want them to see it.”
“That’s the way it would be in a story, not in real life.”
“Real life’s a story, too,” Minnie said.
“What does that mean?”
“It doesn’t mean nothing. It just is.”
“But what are we going to do?”
“I’m thinking,” Minnie said.
“You’ve been thinking.”
“I’m still thinking.”
“Chestnuts! Why am I waiting for a pathetic eight-year-old to figure out what we should do?”
“We both know why,” Minnie said.
The chair under the knob of the closet door looked less sturdy than Naomi would have liked. “Did you hear something?”
“No.”
“You didn’t hear the doorknob turning?”
“Neither did you,” Minnie said. “Not this time, not the nine times you thought you heard it before.”
“I’m not the one who thinks a flock of bats will carry me off to Transylvania.”
“I never said flock or carry off, or Transylvania.”
A disturbing idea rattled Naomi. She eased up from her pillows and whispered, “There’s a gap under the door.”
Minnie whispered, “What door?”
Whisper discarded, Naomi said, “What door? The closet door, of course. What if it comes out of the mirror and slips under the door?”
“It can’t come out of the mirror unless you ask it.”
“How do you know? You’re in third grade. I’ve been through third grade – the spectacular tedium of it – I finished it in three months, and there was no lesson about shadowy things in mirrors.”
Minnie was silent. Then: “I don’t know how, but I know. One of us needs to invite it.”
Sinking back against her pillows, Naomi said, “Well, that’s never going to happen.”
“You can invite it all kinds of ways.”
“What ways?”
“For one thing, by staring at it too much.”
“Mouse, you’re just making this up.”
“Don’t call me Mouse.”
“Well, you are making it up. You don’t know.”
“Or if you talk to it, ask it a question, that’s another way.”
“I’m not going to ask it beans.”
“You better not.”
The room seemed colder than usual. Naomi pulled the blanket under her chin. “What kind of thing lives in a mirror?”
“It’s a people, not a thing.”
“How do you know?”
“I know in my heart,” Minnie said so solemnly that Naomi shivered. “He’s people.”
“He? How do you know it’s not a she?”
“Do you think it’s a she?”
Naomi resisted the urge to pull the covers over her head. “No. It feels like a he.”
“It’s definitely a he,” Minnie declared.
“But he who?”
“I don’t know he who. And don’t you ask him who, Naomi. That’s an invitation.”
They were silent for a while.
Naomi dared to look away from the closet door. Backlit by a streetlamp, silvery worms of rain squiggled down the windowpanes. The scarlet oak on the south lawn loomed huge, its glossy green leaves here and there reflecting the lamplight as if crusted in ice.
Eventually, Naomi said, “You know what I’ve been wondering?”
“Something weird, I bet.”
“Could he be a prince?”
“You mean Mr. Mirror?”
“Yeah. If he’s a prince, the mirror might be a door to a magical realm, a land of tremendous adventures.”
“No,” Minnie said.
“That’s it? No. Just like that?”
“No.”
“But if he lives beyond the mirror, then there’s got to be another world on that side. The fabulous world beyond the mirror. That sounds like a magical but true thing, doesn’t it? It could be like in all those stories – an heroic quest, high adventure, romance. My destiny might be to live over there.”
“Shut up when you say that,” Minnie said.
“Shut up when you say shut up,” Naomi bristled. “You can’t know my destiny. I might live over there and be queen one day.”
“No one lives over there,” Minnie said solemnly. “Everyone over there is dead.”
Chapter 16 (#ulink_f274d9d5-7ab4-51be-80fb-438ff3a85d73)
Wearing a dark-blue robe over his pajama bottoms, John stood before the gallery in his ground-floor study. There were photos of the kids when, as infants, each had come home from the hospital, and others taken on every birthday thereafter, a total of thirty-five pictures. Soon the gallery would be continued on the next wall.
The girls liked to come in now and then to recall favorite birthdays and to make fun of the way each other had looked when younger. Zach was less inclined to enjoy photographs taken when he was a toddler and a grade-schooler because they didn’t comport with his image of himself as a young man in preparation to be a tough marine.
More than he could have expressed even to Nicky, John looked forward to seeing his daughters become women, because he believed that each had a great good heart and would change her small corner of the world for the better. He knew they might surprise him but would always delight him by the way they lived their lives. He knew, as well, that Zach would become anything he wanted to be – and in the end would be a better man than his father.
One of two windows in the study provided a view of the flagstone terrace and the deep backyard, which now lay in absolute darkness. Their house stood on a cul-de-sac, on a street that was a peninsula between two converging ravines, quiet and sequestered for an urban home. Beyond their back fence, the land dropped off steeply, into brush-choked woods. On the farther side of the ravine, the lights of other neighborhoods were smeared and faded by the rain. Between the study window and that distant glow, nothing could be seen: not the terrace or the lawn; not the arbor twined with climbing roses; not the great deodar cedar, its boughs drooping gracefully.
Although not remote, the house was sufficiently secluded to allow a rapist-murderer, hot with need and icy with determination, to come and play and go with little risk of being seen by neighbors.
Also out there in the dark lay Willard’s grave. City ordinances forbade the interment of animals on a residential lot unless they were cremated. An urn containing their beloved golden retriever’s ashes was buried under a black-granite plaque beyond the rose arbor.
The girls had suffered such grief at the loss that they remained reluctant to risk losing another. But perhaps the time had come to bring a new dog into their lives. Not a golden retriever who counted everyone his friend, but instead a breed with a greater reputation for aggressively protecting its family. Maybe a German shepherd.
At his desk, John switched on his computer and sat in thought for a minute before keying in the number for the state hospital. The voice-mail system offered options, although the reception desk and various offices were closed until eight in the morning. He pressed the number for psychiatric-ward security.
A man answered on the second ring.
John pictured the stark security vestibule on the third floor, where Coleman Hanes had taken him just the previous afternoon. He identified himself, learned that he was speaking with Dennis Mummers, and inquired if Billy Lucas had escaped.
“Where did you get that idea?” Mummers asked. “Nobody’s ever walked away from here, and I’d bet a year’s wages nobody ever will.”
“I assumed he didn’t have a phone. But I got a call from him.”
“Phone in his room? Of course he doesn’t.”
“If legal counsel wants to talk to him without coming out there, how is it done?”
“He’s fitted with restraints and taken to an obcon room that has a no-hands phone.”
“What’s obcon?”
“Observed-conference room. We watch him through a window, but it’s a privileged conversation, so we can’t hear what he’s saying. He’s in restraints and he’s watched to be sure he doesn’t pry anything out of the phone, anything sharp that might be a weapon.”
“He called me a little more than ten minutes ago,” John said. “On my home-office line. He must have gotten possession of a phone.”
Mummers was silent for a moment. Then: “What’s your number?”
John gave it to him.
“We’ll have to toss his room,” Mummers said. “Can I get back to you in half an hour?”
“I’ll be here.”
While he waited to hear from Dennis Mummers, John went online to a series of dot-gov sites, accessing information available to the public, but also restricted information that he could view only with his police pass code.
The need had arisen to confirm that Coleman Hanes was the man he appeared to be. John had given the state-hospital orderly the unlisted number that Billy Lucas had called, and he could think of no other way that the killer could have obtained it.
In minutes, he ascertained that the Marine Corps emblem tattooed on the palm of Hanes’s right hand was not in support of a fraudulent persona. The orderly served admirably in the Marine Corps, was decorated and honorably discharged.
Hanes had no criminal history in this state or in any state with which it shared information. Even his driving record was without a blemish.
The truth of military service and the lack of a police record did not clear him of having colluded with Billy Lucas, but it made the possibility less likely than it otherwise might have been.
When Dennis Mummers called back, he said, “Billy doesn’t have a phone. Are you certain it was him?”
“His voice was unmistakable.”
“It is distinct,” Mummers acknowledged. “But how often have you spoken with him before your visit here?”
Deflecting the question, John said, “He mentioned something to me that only he could know, related to my interview with him.”
“Did he threaten you?”
If John confirmed the threat, they would expect him to file a report, and if he did so, they would learn that he had no authority to involve himself in the Lucas case.
“No,” he lied. “No threat. What did Billy say when you searched his room for a phone?”
“He didn’t say anything. Something’s happened to him. He kind of cratered. He’s funked out, withdrawn, not talking at all to anyone.”
“Is there a chance maybe someone on the staff might have allowed him to use their cell phone?”
“Depending on the circumstances,” Dennis Mummers said, “that could be a reason for dismissal. No one would risk it.”
“In this work, Officer Mummers, I’ve learned some people will risk everything, everything, for the most trivial of reasons. But thank you for your assistance.”
After he hung up, John went to the kitchen, where he turned on just the light in the exhaust hood over the cooktop.
Most of their friends drank wine, but for the few with a taste for something stronger, they kept a small bar in a kitchen cabinet. Certain that he could get back to sleep only with assistance, he poured a double Scotch over ice.
He was disturbed less by the threat Billy Lucas had made than by the last words the murderous boy had spoken on the phone.
To the best of his recollection, John had never shared with the police any of what the murderer of his parents and sisters, Alton Turner Blackwood, had said before he died. John had been mute with grief and terror, but Blackwood had tried to distract him with talk.
The next-to-last thing Blackwood said on that long-ago night was word for word the last thing Billy said on the phone less than an hour earlier: Your lovely sister, your Giselle. She had such pretty little training-bra breasts.
Chapter 17 (#ulink_51a72269-a842-5a0d-b18b-b3ab91160788)
Zach dreamed that he woke in his dark bedroom and saw a blade of amber radiance slicing out of the closet, under the door. In the dream, he lay staring at this narrow brightness, trying to remember if he had extinguished the closet light before going to bed, and he decided that, yes, he had turned it off.
He switched on his nightstand lamp, which left most of the room still in shadows, and he got up from the bed and slowly approached the closet, behaving exactly like your typical bonehead in a brain-dead horror movie where everyone dies because everyone is terminally stupid. When he put his hand on the doorknob, the light in the closet went out.
Someone or some godawful thing had to be in there to operate the switch, so the worst of all dumb-ass moves would be to open the closet without having a weapon. Nevertheless, Zach watched his hand rotate the knob, as though he had no control over it, as though this also must be one of those movies in which a clueless dork undergoes a hand transplant and the hand has a mind of its own.
This was when he began to realize he was dreaming – because his hands were the same pair with which he’d been born, and they always did only what he intended them to do. With that fluid transitional dissolve common to dreams, he never opened the door, yet abruptly it stood wide, and he was poised on the threshold of the pitch-black closet.
Out of that lightless hole, enormous hands seized him, one by the throat, the other gripping his face, meaty palm crushing his nose, stoppering his mouth, his scream, his breath.
He seized the hand that cupped his face, frantic to break free, the wrist as massive as a horse’s hock, hard gnarl of bones, thick tendons. Cold, greasy fingertips bigger than soup spoons digging at his eyes, and no breath, no breath—
Sucking breath at last, Zach startled up in bed, the nightmare bursting away like a shattering shell.
The thunder of his heart pealed through him, but even as his dream fear quickly subsided from its peak, he saw that the fright-flick scenario of his sleep played out also in the waking world. In the true darkness of the real room, the blade of amber light knifed through the crack between the bottom of the door and the floor.
Earlier, when the door swung open on its own, he dismissed it as the house settling, the door out of plumb and moved by gravity. When it seemed, as an afterthought, that something had been wrong with his reflection when he saluted himself in the mirror, he didn’t dwell on it, didn’t hurry back to take a second look, because he recognized who were the actual-factual, sure-enough villains in the world and didn’t need bogeymen to distract him from worrying about real evil.
Some quality of the just-ended dream changed him. Suddenly he knew a kind of fear he hadn’t felt before, or maybe it was a kind that hadn’t rocked him in so long that his memory of it faded the same way that his memory of infancy had receded beyond recall.
Most nightmares were less ordeals than they were entertainments, infrequent rides through a funhouse of the mind. You drifted in your stupid gondola past one weird tableau after another until one of the horrors turned out to be real and the totally improbable chase was on. After a brief terror, you woke, and if you were able to remember the details, they were usually ridiculous and they made you laugh, just a brainless spookshow no scarier than the kind of half-assed monsters you’d find in a TV cartoon for little kids.
This freaking dream had felt as fully real as the room into which he awakened: the cold, greasy hardness of the assaulting hands; the pain of his nose pressed flat, nostrils pinched; the sense of suffocation. Even now, a lingering ache in his eyes suggested that the soup-spoon fingers had been real and would have gouged him blind if he hadn’t thrashed up from sleep.
He switched on the nightstand lamp and sprang out of bed, though not to rush the closet as the idiot Zach had done in the dream. In the corner near his desk stood a replica of a Mameluke sword, which he drew from a highly polished nickel-plated scabbard.
Modern-day Mamelukes were strictly for show, cool badges of rank carried by officers during ceremonies of various kinds. This one was stainless steel, the ricasso engraved, the quillon and the pommel handsomely gilded. And like any ceremonial sword, the edge was dull and useless as a weapon. The point wasn’t battle-sharp, either, but it could still do damage that the edge of the blade couldn’t.
Standing to the side of the closet, Zach threw open the door with his left hand, the Mameluke ready in his right. No assailant flew into the room to test the point of the sword.
The walk-in closet harbored no one, but it did hold a surprise. The ceiling trapdoor had been dropped, the folding ladder unfolded. Between the second and third floors, the dark crawlspace waited for him.
Zach hesitated at the base of the ladder, peering up, listening. He detected only the susurration of the ring burners in the two gas furnaces that heated the second and third floors, a hollow whispery sound like the roar of a waterfall heard from a great distance.
The crawlspace was actually a half floor, a five-foot-high service mezzanine, so you could almost stand erect. It housed the two furnaces, humidifiers, a few hundred feet of flexible ductwork running every which way, copper water lines, both iron and PVC drain pipes, and who the hell knew what. Just the farther side of the trap, you could switch on garlands of work lights, which were used whenever plumbers or electricians needed to go up there to perform periodic maintenance or to make repairs.
Little more than a month before, a geeky exterminator with bug eyes and a long mustache like insect antennae had climbed into the service mezzanine to search for signs of vermin. Instead of rats, he found a nest of squirrels that entered through a torn vent screen.
Nothing as innocent as a pack of squirrels had opened the trap and put down the ladder while Zach slept.
He didn’t lack the courage to search the space above; however, he would have to be the bonehead of all boneheads if he went up there at night with no weapon other than a cool but cumbersome dull-edged sword. He needed a good flashlight, too, because the strings of bare bulbs by which repairmen worked didn’t chase the shadows out of every corner. The following afternoon, after lessons and lunch, he might climb into the service space, have a look, poke around, see what he could see.
Maybe he would tell his father. They could search the mezzanine together.
With his left hand, Zach lifted the bottom of the ladder and folded back the lowest of four hinged sections, whereupon a clever automatic mechanism took over and accordioned the whole thing onto the back of the trapdoor, which swung up into place with a thump.
He stood in the closet for a while, until the pull-ring on the trapdoor rope stopped swinging like a pendulum, and then another minute or two. No one tried to put the ladder down again.
Exterior doors were kept locked even during the day. Dad said bad guys weren’t like vampires, they didn’t hide from the sun, they were up to no good 24/7, so you never did anything to make their work easier. No one could have sneaked inside and ascended to the mezzanine to hide.
More likely, the settling of the house that brought the closet door out of plumb was also to blame for this. Because of a slight shift in the structure, the weight of the ladder and gravity could have overpowered the spring-loaded closure, causing the trapdoor to drop open and the ladder to unfold on its own.
In fact, that must be exactly what had happened. Any other explanation was stupid kid stuff for gutless bed-wetters.
Before killing the closet light, he studied himself in the full-length mirror. He slept in briefs and a T-shirt. Although not superbuff, he wasn’t by any definition scrawny. Yet he appeared smaller than his image of himself. His legs seemed thin. Pink knees, pale feet. The sword was too big for him, perhaps for any thirteen-year-old. He didn’t look laugh-out-loud, bust-a-gut stupid, but he for sure didn’t look anything like a guy on a recruiting poster, either.
After turning off the closet light, he braced the door shut with his desk chair, although doing so embarrassed him a little.
He placed the sword on his bed and slipped beneath the covers, only his head and right arm exposed. His hand lay lightly on the hilt of the Mameluke.
For a few minutes, he considered the nightstand lamp, but at last he decided that leaving it aglow was what a spineless jellyfish would do, a fully wilted wimp. He had no fear of the dark. Zip, zero, nada. No fear of darkness itself, anyway.
With the lamp out and the gloom relieved only by the pale-gray rectangles of curtained windows and the clock-radio light, Zach became convinced that, as earlier in the night, something had not been right about his reflection. He assumed that he’d lie awake until morning and that before dawn he would figure out what troubled him, but after a while an avalanche of weariness overcame him. As he was carried down into sleep, he saw himself in the mirror, pale feet and pink knees and too-thin legs, all of that quite true and right even if dismaying. Then he realized that the eyes in his reflection were not gray-blue like his eyes really were, but black instead, as black as soot, as black as sleep.
Chapter 18 (#ulink_760b551a-7eee-5f28-862f-f2a3ea7cb0db)
Barefoot and in a blue robe, sipping Scotch to foil insomnia, John paced the kitchen by the light of the stove hood, brooding about the events of the day. Sooner or later, he would have to share his suspicions with Nicky. But considering the bizarre and fantastic nature of what he would be asking her to believe, he wanted to lay out his case only when it seemed ironclad. They were as close as a husband and wife could be, committed to each other, with full trust in each other, but of course he could not tell her that invisible little creatures from Mars were living in the attic and expect her immediate belief even though she couldn’t see them.
So much of what happened during this past day could be dismissed as psychological phenomena arising from the profound emotional trauma of the murders that occurred twenty years before. In any homicide investigation or in a court of law, such evidence would be considered hearsay at best, delusional at worst.
The tiny ringing bells that he heard in the Lucas house could have been an auditory hallucination. Yes, he had found the calla-lily bells in Celine’s room, but no one had been there to ring them. He believed that, sitting at the desk in Billy’s room, he had heard the murderous boy’s cell tone, and he thought he had heard a faint voice say Servus, but without a witness to corroborate these experiences, they could have been auditory hallucinations, as well.
John knew that he had not imagined the recent call from Billy, and he assumed an investigation of telephone-company records would confirm an incoming call at the time he had received it. But nothing about Billy Lucas was apparently supernatural, nothing that supported the idea tormenting John: the possibility that Alton Turner Blackwood – his spirit or anima, or ghost, or whatever you wanted to call it – must be in the world once more, and must be somehow in the process of restaging the brutal murders he committed twenty years earlier, with the Calvino family as his fourth and final target.
The peculiar things he had seen were either in his peripheral vision or were arguably insignificant. While passing the print of John Singer Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose on the staircase landing in the Lucas residence, he glimpsed – or thought he did – one of the little girls in the painting sprayed with blood, the next time set afire. He had to acknowledge that in his agitated state of mind, he could have imagined those manifestations in the image. And the digital clocks in the Lucas kitchen and in Billy’s room, suddenly flashing high noon or high midnight, were not irrefutable evidence that an entity from outside of time had been present; they were not evidence of anything.
Nicolette knew what had happened to John’s family and that he killed their murderer on that same night of monstrous evil. He had told her every detail of the event in order that she might understand the psychology – the anguish, the guilt, the quiet paranoia, the dread that lingered – of the man she intended to marry. He withheld from her only one thing, which he would have to reveal when and if he told her why he now feared for their lives.
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