The final message was the one that he had expected. The sonorous voice of Marcus Rearden, “Hello, Loche. Listen, you need to call or come by. There is now a warrant out for your arrest. All of this with your client, Bethany, can be fixed easily— by simply explaining your case. Trust me. But you disappearing doesn’t look good—and if I’ve taught you anything about this profession of ours, abandoning your practice is not an option, and certainly not one of my lessons. Call me so we can meet and talk things over. I can help you with this.” Marcus pauses. His tone shifts to impatience, “And what about this painting you left with me?” Loche’s eyes snap to the paint brushes on the floor. “What in the hell am I supposed to do with it? Just call me, will you? Damn it. Where the hell are you?” He looks at his hands stained with red and black paint.
Loche sets the phone on the table and raises his face to the big window. Night has climbed into the trees. The sky is black and heavy. MURDER MARCUS REARDEN is still painted upon the glass. The room spins. A wave of nausea forces him to his knees. He bends and presses his forehead on the cool wood floor and waits. Slowly it passes. Hot tears sting the cuts on his cheeks.
He crawls to a nearby pile of newspaper clippings and books. The word murder is in nearly every headline and within the articles Dr. Marcus Rearden’s name is highlighted in yellow. The details of each story come flooding back to Loche. How Rearden managed to discover yet another insight to the minds of the criminally insane—how he had become sought after as an expert in catching the most dangerous minds—his achievements —photos of him with political leaders, attorneys, judges. Two text books written by Rearden, their covers creased and weathered, sit beside the pile of clippings. Rearden’s latest book, an autobiography entitled Getting Away With Murder, is there, too. Loche opens it up to the acknowledgement page. Rearden thanks his wife, Elanor, for helping him through the difficult years and dark visions, he mentions many of his close friends in law enforcement and politics, and finally he thanks Loche Newirth as the new hope for the profession of psychology.
“Daddy?”
Loche drops the book and spins around. Standing behind him and rubbing his eyes is Edwin, his son. “Hungry, Daddy.” Loche rolls back and away, unsure of what he is seeing. “Daddy?” his son says.
“W-what—where did you come from?” Loche gasps.
The boy points to the back bedroom. He is wearing pajamas. One sock is missing. “Hungry,” he says again with a yawn.
Loche grapples with his memory. Has he been here the whole time? He feels like crying. There is that feeling that something is missing. He reaches out to his son and pulls him close.
“Pancakes,” Edwin says.
Hours before dawn, Loche gathers a few items into a bag, pulls his coat on and picks up the umbrella from the corner of the room. He pulls the bright red envelope down from the window and tucks into his coat pocket. He turns the lights out. The fire in the hearth is low. All around the room are the artifacts he is leaving behind, the sticky notes, the map of Italy, the open myths —the leather bound book upon the desk full of his writing.
Standing in the door he looks down into the pale light of his cell phone. His fingers tap out a quick message.
Marcus, i am at my cabin at priest lake. Come alone. I need your help.
He presses send, locks the door and steps out onto the stoop. The car is idling. Edwin is asleep in his car seat. The air is brittle. He climbs in, closes the door and stares through the driver’s side window. There are no stars. The sky is black. The breakers down below rush against the shore. If there is an eye down there, in the water, it is now closed.
Marcus Rearden wakes when he hears his cell phone vibrate on the bedside table. There is a cold space beside him. His wife is not there. He is not surprised. Her trips to the bathroom have become more frequent these days, and she often creeps out of the sheets in the middle of the night for what she calls little emergencies. Rearden rolls his grey head toward the bathroom and looks for the slit of light at the bottom of the door. There is no light.
“Elanor?” he calls into the darkness.
No answer.
“Elanor?”
He sits up. His back aches, and the sickly pop of his bones after sleep is a cause to curse quietly. Since he hit seventy-one his use of morning expletives has become more frequent, like Elanor’s little emergencies.
He lifts his cell phone up and squints into the bright screen. The text is from Loche Newirth.
Marcus, i am at my cabin at priest lake. Come alone. I need your help.
“Finally,” he whispers. “The cabin. I should have known.” He lifts his robe and slides his phone into the pocket. “Sweetheart?” The quiet of the bedroom stifles his voice. He can see the shape of her clothes draped on the bed. A half glass of wine from last night is atop the dresser. Her purse is hanging on the doorknob. She’s probably down in the kitchen, he figures, and he swings his legs out of bed and pulls his robe over his shoulders. Standing brings more expletives.
From the top of the stairs he calls again, yawns and waits. He rubs his eyes and tries to focus down the stairway. Below him is a pale glow casting long shadows, and he quickly notes that the light is not emanating from the kitchen. The light is coming from the opposite side of the house, near the garage and the storage room. The storage room. Rearden’s eyes dart while somewhere in his waking senses he feels that something is wrong.
Adrenaline surges through his limbs, and he lunges down the stairs toward the light—toward fear. As he approaches the half open storage room door he shades his eyes from the vivid and surreal shine, as if the light bulbs above had shattered into glowing shards and were swirling around the room like ice on the wind. But when he throws the door wide, the light appears suddenly normal. Bright and stark. Then horror.
Elanor Rearden is lying on her side, her thin arms twisted like tangled rope, and her eyes gaping into some distant place. Her face is frozen in terror. Clutched tightly in her hand is the corner of a length of black fabric sprawled across the cold cement slab. Leaning against a thin rectangular crate Rearden sees the back of a framed painting.
A roaring pulse swells in Rearden’s ears as he drops to his knees. “Jesus, God, no!” He had been warned. Loche Newirth, his friend and protégé had said, “The painting, don’t look. The painting, don’t look—it is dangerous.” With hands outstretched he pries the black fabric from her rigid grip. Then riveting his focus to his wife’s dead stare and keeping his back to the leaning painting, he hurls the shroud up and covers the frame without pulling his eyes away from his wife.
He lifts Elanor’s head into his lap. “No! Ellie no! Not yet! Oh God, not yet!” His eyesight again fills with circling dots of light, and his head feels heavy. He is on the threshold of fainting. He begins a series of deep breaths, struggling to master the pain —come to terms—think it through—do what he knows how to do, reason. Put the loss, the pain into some kind of order. Flashes of memory shoot through his mind—ones that make little sense —such as Elanor’s favorite tea cup, her desire to always make the bed in the morning, to keep things uncluttered, she would say. Then the memories that define him, the thirty-eight years of marriage. Her glowing tears when he proposed to her. Their fights. Their growing apart. Their hanging on. His bouts with depression. Their disconnection. Her little emergencies. Then the permanence crashes down upon him again. Where have you gone? “Oh God,” he cries. “Not yet. I haven’t told you everything.”
The shrouded painting stands tilted slightly back and away, cloaked like some hellish priest. Rearden scans the monolith and lets his gaze freeze upon that yawning black fabric cover—a deep, starless abyss. Behind that protective shroud is something Loche had described as dangerous. Rearden refused to fully believe the warning—until now.
With fear and need intermingled, Rearden reaches down and clutches a corner of the fabric and gently pulls. Words hum in his mind, Whatever it is that lay upon that canvas—whatever it is that took you from me—wherever you’ve
gone, Elanor, I will follow. The shroud slides slowly, like a tablecloth being dragged down by an infant—the delicate china nearing the edge.
Then a voice inside his head cries out, Stop, you fool! Stop! Rearden’s fist splits open and the fabric drops from his spreading fingers. The painting, don’t look. The thing is still covered and Rearden begins to weep again in thick sobs. He cannot do it, not yet.
“Elanor. Dear Elanor.” He looks down at her face. His trembling fingers search for life along the slope of her cheek, along her throat. Her head is heavy. There is a chill in her skin. Rearden wonders if he has been here before, cradling her lifeless body—a kind of déjà vu.
A few minutes later he is sitting in a kitchen chair staring through the open sliding glass door. Icy air claws at his robed body. His phone is in his hand. Lit up on the screen is Loche’s text message. Outside it is still dark. Gentle flakes of snow begin their silent descent. Little white lights streaming down from a black sky, like pieces of constellations that shook free. Marcus watches as the world around him slowly erases.
“You come to me. I’ll text you the directions. Come alone.”
Julia Iris turns her car toward Priest Lake and drives deeper into the mountains. One hand steers, the other grips an antique key that hangs around her neck by a long, delicate chain. She lifts it up. It is tarnished bronze and heavy. Loche Newirth had placed it into her hand a few days ago. It seems like a month —as if it never happened. “This opens my most guarded door,” he had said. He then climbed into the car that awaited him, and he was gone. She wonders, Why didn’t I go with him?
The warm colors of the autumn season had been erased. The usual ochers and greens of the northern Idaho woods are draped with a thick blanket of early snow. A dusting in October is not terribly unusual, but being buried by it this early is something that only a born and raised North Idahoan like Julia could describe with a sardonic “typical.” The change had come fast. Out of nowhere, Julia thinks.
High drifts have already been formed by the plows along the roadside, and fresh powder is still falling. This is not a day for amateurs. When she started out she hoped for no encounters with newbie southern drivers—drivers that are clueless when it comes to snow meets road—no idea of how to navigate on a road that will not let one stop when one wants. Julia knows these conditions and is not afraid to up her pace and let the car fishtail around some of the tight curves. Ordinarily she would be a little more conservative, but this afternoon, she feels hurried, and she is glad she has the chops.
Miles ahead the Dr. Marcus Rearden is waiting for her to arrive. The man is rather well-known. She knows this due to the quick Google search she had done just after his phone call. Rearden was the authority in criminal psychology at one time, and that fact troubles her already worried spirit. Known primarily as an expert for the criminally insane, his career is one long tale of success. A quoted author, a known international figure for the mental health profession and a loving husband. A novelist from the San Francisco area has even based a minor character on Rearden.
Their conversation was brief, Marcus sounded friendly enough, but there was something unsettling in his tone, like he was scared to say too much. “When Loche went missing I was worried—but then I got a text from him this morning saying that he was at his cabin up at Priest Lake. When I arrived, he wasn’t here. The fireplace was still warm, and I’ve found some of his writings,” he had told her. “A journal I guess you could call it. It will help us to find him. I’ve read it. You must read it, too. He writes about you, Julia.” Julia smiles. Of course he did, she thinks.
“You come to me. I will text you the directions. Come alone.”
The proud owner of The Floating Hope, a restaurant on the lake in Hope, Idaho, Julia is organized, decisive and professional. In her thirty-three years she has managed to graduate cum laude from Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, with a degree in business and philosophy as well as raise the capital to design and build her own restaurant; a restaurant buoyed by 500,000 pounds of concrete encased in Styrofoam floating near the Hope Marina on the north end of scenic Pend Oreille Lake. The Floating Hope has been called a knockout—a must-dine experience for local North Idahoans and tourists alike. The view of the majestic grey-green crags climbing out of the ice blue water was said to knock a patron’s experience into orbit, as well as the care that Julia put into the design of the building itself— and the food—and the staff. It is all in the way Julia presents her work and herself. Even friends call Julia a knockout. Sometimes a dangerous knockout.
A knockout due to the long burnt umber hair, the tall and slender lines, and eyes the color of candlelit brandy—dangerous because if the simple beauty of her smile did not knock you dumb, her wit would.
Julia, however, does not feel dangerous, nor does she see herself as a knockout. Most of her time is spent editing herself and the work that she cares almost too much about. She knows her strengths, both mentally and physically, but she is now all too aware of her weakness—a weakness that she has not experienced before. And as she presses down on the accelerator she quietly whispers the name of the man who has recently changed her life and then disappeared, as if he has been erased like everything else the October snow has hidden.
“Loche Newirth.”
Julia discovers her hand is again holding the key around her neck, and wishes that by holding it, Loche can feel her embrace no matter where he is.
“Loche,” she whispers, “where are you?”
“A little waker-upper. A little waker-upper,” Marcus Rearden puffs. His breath is ice vapor. “Oh shit! A little waker-upper.” The snow beneath his bare feet is like razor blades. Wearing nothing but a huge grin (of either joy or complete insanity), the old man is nude, running down a snow-covered trail in the sheer violet light of early afternoon. The words come in crystalline huffs, “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit—”
Freaking peculiar are the words that he hears in his head, but what hasn’t been freaking peculiar today? His wife is dead. The pain, profound. His career is over. Everything has changed, he thinks as his seventy-year-old lungs suck in the icy air. Everything.
When he had dropped his robe beside the cabin door and stepped out onto the icy trail, his feet immediately felt the sting. The sting turned to burning, until now—now his feet are numb stumps at the ends of his legs. “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!”
“Why are you doing this?” He says aloud. Don’t ask. Don’t ask, comes an answer from inside his head. “You’ve not lost it completely, have you?” Don’t ask. Don’t ask. He is certain, however, that he has not lost it—or at least, mildly certain. “My mind is clearer than ever,” he tells himself—but the supposed clarity is not due to the loss of Elanor, rather it is because he has just had an epiphany. The discovery of Loche Newirth’s writings that he read this morning have added extreme emphasis to the circumstance of freaking peculiar. Inside the volume he has found comfort, answers and a hope that everything might work out, after all. And a sad thankfulness that he had indeed heeded the chant in his head—it saved his life—the warning, the painting, don’t look, the painting, don’t look. But his wife—his dear wife.
Marcus was once quite tall, but age has given him a slight hunch. His pasty skin rivals the whiteness of the surrounding snow. But his body is spry despite his years. There is still a trace of muscle, joints that work well (some not so well), and in his face is the ghost of a boy. Many of his colleagues have remarked through the years that he doesn’t seem to age. Women would say that he has aged gracefully. He is still attractive. But he feels the years. Especially now, for he has not moved like this for a long, long while, and it takes very little time for him to recognize the pain of that fact.
Crazy, sure, to be out in this weather, he thinks, but what liberation, freedom, hope.
The early morning hours after his wife had looked into that damned painting are a blur. He had moved the painting to his car. The paramedics arrived along with some of his friends in local law
enforcement. They determined that Elanor died of a heart attack. It took every bit of his strength to stay in control while they moved his wife to the ambulance. They tried to console him, but Rearden would have nothing to do with their pity. He smiled instead and asked for some time alone—somehow his demeanor was convincing enough for them to allow his wish, and they left. A half hour later, Rearden was on his way to Loche’s cabin. There he found the leather bound book. The power of Loche’s writing has nudged the anguish of his wife’s passing to the side. He has a new perspective. A new set of eyes. And a plan.
He dashes along the snow-powdered path and plots the short incline ahead. On the other side is an empty space, cold and white. He noticed it when he drove in. He hurries up one side, looses his balance slightly, then dives head first into the soft flakes with a wail of painful delight. Once swallowed by the icy pillow he quickly emerges with a howl ending with a, “Good God in Heaven!” He struggles to his feet and circles back. Flakes of ice cake his beard and begin to melt as his body reels toward the warmth of the cabin—his stride a bit quicker than before.
Oh shit.
A woman is standing beside the cabin door. She is watching him approach. Marcus Rearden slides to a stop. His grin slides to a stop, too. The numb stumps of his feet flounder him behind a nearby tree, and peeking around he stammers, “Uh, hello?”
“Hello?” Julia replies, her tone midway between alarm and humor.
“Uh, Julia?”
“That’s right.”
Oh shit.
Rearden’s head disappears behind the tree.
“Uh,” he says. “Terribly awkward I’m sure—my apologies. Uh, pleased to meet you, I’m Marcus Rearden.”
The Invasion of Heaven, Part One of the Newirth Mythology Page 2
