Breathless
Page 22
feeling, there’s chaos brewing in it.”
Puzzle said, “What is leads to what will be, and all will be well if we do what is right.”
Lamar nodded. “If you say so.”
“She did,” Riddle told him. “She said so. And she’s right. Never fear the future. Whatever happens, the future is the only way back.”
The novelty of hearing them talk was probably years away from wearing off, and Cammy listened, rapt. “The only way back to what?”
“Back to where we belong forever,” said Riddle. “The future is the one path out of time into eternity.”
Grady returned with three flashlights. “Are we ready?”
“Absolutely,” Lamar said. “The coach just gave us a pep talk, and we’re in gear for action. I’ll scout the way.”
Lamar stepped onto the back porch, leaving the door open, and after a moment motioned for them to follow him.
Sixty-five
In Jim’s cramped study, Henry Rouvroy put down the hand grenade, looked over the books on the shelves, and removed the volume of his brother’s haiku.
The noise in the attic faded away. He took no comfort in the silence. He knew the rapping-out of meter on a ceiling beam would soon resume.
Or the torment would take another form. His tormentor had not finished with him yet; and would not be finished until he thrust in the knives, thrust again and again.
Restless, Henry walked the house, back and forth, around and around, carrying the hand grenade in one hand and the book in the other, reading haiku, thumbing pages.
He didn’t know why he felt compelled to read Jim’s haiku. But intuition told him that he might be rewarded for doing so.
When he found the harrier poem, his breath caught in his throat:
Swooping harrier—
calligraphy on the sky,
talons, then the beak.
Henry’s keen intuition served him well, and his classes in logic at Harvard prepared him to reason his way quickly to the meaning of this discovery.
The poem left on the kitchen notepad was not a new composition. Jim had written it long before Henry’s arrival, not just hours ago.
Therefore, the poem could not possibly refer to the harriers in the sky moments before Henry murdered Jim. The poem had nothing to do with Jim’s murder and nothing to do with Henry’s, either.
Not that he had believed for a minute that Jim had returned from the dead to compose verse and threaten him with it. Henry was not a superstitious person, and even immersion in the primitive culture of these rural hills could not so quickly wash away the education and, indeed, enlightenment that he received in those hallowed halls in Cambridge. But at least finding the haiku in this book confirmed his certainty that his tormentor must be someone pretending to be Jim.
Or did it?
Jim didn’t need to copy a haiku out of a book. Having written it, he would remember it. Remembering, he would see how useful it could be in the current circumstances.
No. Jim was not alive and was not one of the living dead. Jim was, damn it, as dead as—
In the attic, someone rapped out a few lines of iambic pentameter, then a few lines of dactylic heptameter.
Sixty-six
After more than thirty-one years, Tom Bigger remembered the way home as clearly as though he had left it only a month before. The street canopied with alders that were old even when he’d been a boy, the cast-iron streetlamps with the beveled panes, the grand old houses behind deep lawns all stirred in him a time when he was a boy, preadolescence, before he became so angry, before he was made angry by ideologies that now seemed insane to him and alien.
Like some others, his parents’ house had not been restored so much as remade into a greater grandeur than it originally possessed. Nevertheless, he could recognize it, and the sight of it thrilled as much as it saddened him.
The time had arrived to say good-bye to Josef Yurashalmi, and Tom fumbled for words to adequately express his gratitude.
But as the old man parked in front of the house, he said, “You don’t know they still live there, Tom. All these years … And though it pains me to say it, the way you look, you won’t inspire the confidence of whoever might live there now. If maybe your folks have moved and if maybe the people here know where they’ve gone, you’ll be more likely to learn their whereabouts if I’m at your side when you ring the bell.”
“You’ve done too much already. You should be heading home to Hannah, she’s not—”
“Hush, Tom. I’m an old man trying to do a gemilut chesed, and if you care about my soul, you’ll stop arguing with me and let me get it done.”
“Gemilut chesed? What is that?”
“An act of loving kindness, which I guess you haven’t seen much of in your years of rambling. At this time in his life, any old Jew like me starts wondering if he’s done enough of them.”
Humbled, Tom said, “I don’t think I’ve done any.”
“You’re young, you have time. I’m sorry if my slippers might embarrass you, but let’s go see if your tata-mama are waiting for you.”
The street was quiet, but Tom’s heart was not. Walking with Josef toward the front door, he lost courage step by step. He had rejected them, had spoken of despising them and their values, and after all this time, they would be justified in despising him.
“You can do it,” Josef said. “You need to do it. I’ll stay as long as it takes for the three of you to be comfortable. But your folks are my age, Tom, so I probably know how they think better than you know. And how they’ll think about this—they’ll thank God you came back, and they’ll kiss you and cry and kiss you some more, and it’ll be like none of it ever happened.”
On the veranda, Tom took a deep breath and pressed the doorbell.
Sixty-seven
With Puzzle and Riddle looking into the very bottom of the night, they found ways around three guards at different stations. The escapees made their way boldly toward the line of mobile laboratories, between two of them, south and then west toward the end of the yard, into the meadow.
From there they had to double back toward the north to find the entrance to the woods and the path that Merlin knew as well as any dray horse, in older times, knew and could follow its route without its driver’s direction.
Under the interlaced branches of the trees, the moonlight flickered and eventually went out. The way before them became black and forbidding. But Cammy knew that Merlin saw well in darkness, and his two new friends apparently saw even more clearly than he did.
Halfway to the Carlyle house, Puzzle halted them with a single word, “Bear,” and they waited for a while in silence. Perhaps the bear had paused to listen to them, for after four or five minutes, Cammy heard it moving off, through the woods.
After the bear, they used flashlights, and progressed more quickly, with less stumbling and thrashing through the brush that here and there intruded on the trail.
When they left the forest and entered the fields farmed by the Carlyles, the lights of Jim and Nora’s house were a welcome sight.
At the front-porch steps, on the lawn, someone had parked a Land Rover that Cammy had never seen before. She was prepared to reveal Puzzle and Riddle to the Carlyles, but she wasn’t pleased about taking the risk of bringing someone unknown into the picture.
When her flashlight revealed Virginia license plates on the vehicle, her concern grew, and she whispered to Grady, “Better take them to the garage back of the barn. Jim’s Mountaineer is there, and I think he keeps the keys under the floor mat on the driver’s side. Load everybody and drift down here as quiet as you can.”
“Come with us,” Grady urged.
“Tell you what—I’ll wait on the porch until I see you coasting down this way. Then I’ll knock on the door. If I get Jim and Nora’s okay, we’ll be able to go legally, and that’s a lot better, nobody looking for a stolen Mountaineer. But if something’s wrong here, we’ll go any way we can.”
Sixty-eight
He approached the house openly, carrying a clipboard and a small toolbox that he also bought at Pep Boys, as bold as anyone would be who belonged there. He might have been a meter reader or a repairman of some kind.
No one saw him, no one crossed his path, and he used a key that the attorney had provided to let himself into the side garage door.
During the day, the alarm system was not engaged. When Kirsten Wallace switched on the system later, Rudy would already be inside and comfortable in his hidey-hole, contemplating his enjoyment of her.
Because two housekeepers were in the residence, one until six o’clock and the other until nine, Rudy was cautious when he entered from the garage and through the laundry room.
He was prepared to kill the housekeepers if he encountered them, even if he was not attracted to them, so much did he want Kirsten. But if Kirsten came home shortly before six, as per her schedule, she would know something was wrong when she found the housekeepers gone. Rudy would have lost the advantage of surprise, and he would have to take her the moment that she came through the door, before her suspicion was aroused.
Happily, he found the mechanical room across the hall from the laundry. Here were water heaters, one of the furnaces, the water softener, and other equipment.
According to Wallace, the two maids cleaned the mechanical room on the first Friday of the month and otherwise never entered it. Nevertheless, Rudy crawled into a space behind the furnace and sat there in the dark, where he would not be seen even if someone turned on a light and came in here for some reason.
In his mind, he rehearsed all the things he intended to do to Kirsten. The afternoon and early evening passed so quickly that he was surprised when the authoritative digital voice of the security system announced, “Alarmed to night mode,” so loud that he could hear it clearly through the closed door, from the speaker in the hallway.
Just before the second housekeeper left at nine, she brought dinner to the table. At that point the boy, Benny, was in bed and asleep, and Kirsten could enjoy her meal uninterrupted.
Except that Rudy Neems would interrupt her tonight as she had never in her life been interrupted.
He waited five minutes before easing open the hallway door, just to be sure she would be sitting at dinner in the dining room. Even dining alone, she preferred to eat there, where she could spread out her newspaper on the big table.
Rudy Neems intended to spread out her newspaper as she had never had it spread out in her life.
Between the butler’s pantry and the dining room, one of the two swinging doors stood open. Kirsten sat at the table, her back to him.
She wore her blond hair short. So elegant was her neck that it entranced him.
When he had done her as much as he wanted, then part of the way he would kill her would be by strangulation. That neck.
He watched her turn a page of the newspaper. Her hands were slender, long-fingered, beautifully shaped.
Before strangling her, he could break her fingers one by one.
As he crossed the threshold of the butler’s pantry, a floorboard creaked underfoot.
She turned her head, more gorgeous than her photos suggested, and she screamed.
Rudy rushed her as she came up from her chair. She had a fork in her hand, raising it like a dagger, but he didn’t care about that. She was fast, but Rudy was immeasurably faster. He seized her wrist and almost broke it, she cried out in pain, the fork fell, he pushed the chair out of the way, he shoved her back onto the table, onto her dinner, and—
He heard the window shattering an instant before the alarm went off. Startled, Rudy relented from his assault just enough to allow Kirsten to get her breath.
She screamed again, she threw a wineglass at his face, Rudy dodged it. As the glass shattered on the floor, this guy appeared in an archway on the right, this big strange guy coming in from the hall, his face a ruin, a guy so bizarre that Rudy was for a fatal moment paralyzed.
When he subdued a woman, Rudy liked to force her into submission with nothing more than his hands, his body. He didn’t use a gun, a knife, a sap. He was a solid block, and he liked to start their time together with a fun demonstration of his great strength and his delight in using it.
The sight of this charging fury, this Frankenstein thing, shocked Kirsten’s scream out of her. Gasping, she backed away from both of them.
Rudy snared her knife off the table, but it was not a steak knife, just a regular dinner knife, and he didn’t get to slash with it anyway, because this giant hand closed around his wrist the way his hand had closed around Kirsten’s wrist, the biggest damn hand in the universe. In the broken face were the most terrifying eyes Rudy had ever seen either in a horror movie or in a mirror, eyes full of wrath. Now the broken-faced man had Rudy in a two-hand grip, twisting Rudy’s wrist, bending his hand backward. Everything had happened so fast that maybe six seconds after this thing burst into the room, Rudy was screaming instead of Kirsten, and when his wrist snapped like the wrist of a little girl, the pain was a white flash, as sharp and bright as lightning behind his eyes, and the monster threw him down out of the blinding white light into blackness and silence.
Rudy Neems was unconscious only a couple of minutes. When he came around, his assailant loomed over him, stared down at him, and he didn’t want to meet those eyes. He looked away from those eyes for the same reason he would have looked away from the challenging stare of a rabid wolf.
He did not see Kirsten, but a white-haired old man in slippers was shuffling around, gathering up the debris from the struggle: the fork, the dinner knife, pieces of the broken wineglass. He returned the silverware to the table and dropped the shards of glass in a plastic trash bag.
“Good thing she hadn’t poured wine yet,” the old man said to the monster. “What a mess that would’ve been. Oh, no, look at that—some fava beans smashed in the carpet.” He clucked his tongue. “Now, Tom, I’m not sure an act that violent qualifies as a gemilut chesed, even if I think it was loving kindness that motivated you. But who am I to say, one way or the other, I’m just an old fart trying to run a business and do what’s right in a time when neither of those things pays.”
The pain in the shattered wrist was so bad and the old man was so blurred through his tears that Rudy wondered if he might be hallucinating.
Sirens rose in the distance.
Sixty-nine
Henry Rouvroy could do nothing to keep Jim out of the house, because the poet would come in through the attic if he wasn’t able to enter through a door, because next he would walk through a wall, with no regard for the opinions of the enlightened professors and elite power brokers who would dismiss the idea of ghosts with a sneer or a laugh. He was in control now, the dead brother, and there was nothing to be done about it.
Consequently, because a grenade would be useless against a man who was already dead, Henry put it in the refrigerator. The choice of the refrigerator puzzled him for a moment, but then he decided he must be reacting to a subconscious awareness that the hand grenade resembled a pineapple.
In a despairing mood of resignation, he removed all the bracing chairs from the doors and returned them to the dinette table. When he opened the cellar door, he stood at the head of the stairs, peering down into the lower room, where the lights had been on for more than twenty-four hours. He heard nothing down there, but he said, “Jim?” When he received no reply, he said, “I shouldn’t have killed you myself, not my own brother. I should have hired someone to kill you and then killed him.”
He went fr
om window to window, opening the draperies and raising the blinds. He was finished hiding. He couldn’t endure another night of waiting for retribution.
At one of the front windows, he saw a woman on the porch. At first he assumed that she must be Nora, joining Jim for the next phase of the haunting, but when she became aware of him and turned, she proved to be a stranger. And an attractive one.
If an attractive woman came to him, rather than Henry having to go stalk and capture her, perhaps his fate wasn’t sealed, after all. Perhaps this was a sign that the Hour of Dead Jim was over, that the worst of the haunting lay behind him, that he had passed this initiation rite into the pagan reality of rural life, had won the approval of the earth spirits and fertility gods that ruled this world of farms and logging operations. If so, he could now establish his retreat and dig in to ride out the chaos that the senator and his friends were engineering.
He opened the door to her and smiled.
She frowned and said, “Jim?”
“I’ve tried to be,” he said.
“What did you say?”
“A little joke. It’s been a long day.” Evidently she knew the Carlyles, which encouraged him to step back from the threshold and say, “Nora and I were just going to start dinner. Can you join us?”
After a hesitation, she stepped inside. “I can’t, Jim. The most incredible wonderful thing has happened.”
Closing the door, he said, “I sure could use a wonderful thing. A day like this, I need a lift. Come tell me and Nora about it.”
“It’s going to be better to show than tell,” she said, following him toward the kitchen.
“Nora’s in the potato cellar. I’m supposed to go down and help her carry up some spuds.”
The door stood open. The light glowed below. He was pleased at how plausible the story sounded.
“The thing is, Jim, I really need to borrow your Mountaineer.”
“Sure. No problem. How about helping Nora bring up some baskets of potatoes, and I’ll get my car-insurance card for you just in case there might be an accident or something.”
“I don’t need the card,” she said.
“Oh, I know, I know. But the law does say you have to carry proof of insurance, and you know how I am, living by the law.”
In fact, Jim had written a poem titled “Living by the Law,” about the beauty of law, though it was about natural law, not the laws written by men.
The reference to the poem worked. The woman bought it and smiled. “All right, sure, get the insurance card. Straight-arrow Jim. I’ll help Nora.”
He watched her descend the stairs, and when she reached the bottom, he called out, “I just had a senior moment way before my time.” He hurried down after her, adding, “Forgot the insurance card is right here in my wallet.”
As Henry reached the lower room, the woman arrived at the potato-cellar door, which stood ajar. The light was on in there.
A pang of terror pierced Henry, and for a moment, he did not know why—and then he knew.
The woman opened the door and stepped inside, and on the floor lay Nora, the first woman in his planned harem.