Brain Child

by John Saul

  The words droned on and on in his mind, and then, finally, Alex turned away from the ancient oak.

  Standing a few yards away, staring at him, was María Torres. His eyes met hers, and then she turned and began walking toward the tiny plaza a few blocks away.

  As the strange mists gathered closer around him, Alex followed the old woman.

  * * *

  The plaza had changed, but as Alex sat on a rough-hewn bench, María Torres whispering beside him in the Spanish he now clearly understood, it seemed to him that the plaza had always looked this way.

  The mission church stood forty yards away, its whitewashed walls glistening brightly in the sunlight. Brown-cassocked priests, their feet clad in sandals, made their way in and out of the sanctuary, and in the shade of the building, three Indians lounged on the ground.

  Set at right angles to the church, the little mission school stood with its doors and windows open to the fresh air, and in the schoolyard five children were playing while a black-habited nun looked on, her hands modestly concealed under the voluminous material of her sleeves.

  On the other side of the plaza there was a small store, its wood construction in odd contrast to the substantial adobe of the mission buildings. As Alex watched, a woman came out, and though she looked directly at him, seemed not to see him.

  He began to listen as María whispered to him of the church and of the brightly painted images of the saints that lined its walls.

  Then María began whispering to him of La Paloma and of the people who had built the village and loved it.

  “But there were others,” she went on. “Others came, and took it all away. Go, Alejandro. Go into the church and see how it was. See what once was here.”

  As if in a dream, he rose from the bench and crossed the plaza, then stepped through the doors of the sanctuary. There was a coolness inside the church, and the light from two stained-glass windows, one above the door, the other above the altar, danced colorfully on the walls. In niches all around the sanctuary stood the saints María had told him of, and he went to one of them and looked up into the martyred eyes of the statue. He lit a candle for the saint, then turned and once more left the church. Across the plaza, still sitting on the bench, María Torres smiled at him and nodded.

  Without a word being spoken, Alex turned, left the plaza, and began walking through the dusty paths of the village, the whispering voices in his head guiding his feet.

  Marty Lewis woke up and listened for the normal morning sounds of the house. Then, slowly, she came to the realization that it was not morning at all, and that the house was empty.

  A nap.

  After Alan had left, and she’d cleaned up the house, she’d decided to take a nap.

  She rolled over on the bed and stared at the clock. Two-thirty. She had been asleep for almost three hours. Groaning tiredly, she rose to her feet and went to the window, where she stared out for a moment into the hills behind the house, and wondered if Alan were up there somewhere, sleeping off his bender. Possibly so.

  Or he might have walked into the village and be sitting right now at one of the bars, adding fuel to the fires of his rage.

  But he wasn’t at the Medical Center. If he were, she would have heard from them by now.

  She slipped into a housecoat and went downstairs, wondering once more if she should call the police, and once more deciding against it. Without a car, there was little harm Alan could do.

  She poured the last of the morning’s coffee, thick with having been heated too long, down the drain, and began preparing a fresh pot.

  When Alan came home—if Alan came home—he was going to be in need of coffee.

  She was just about to begin measuring the coffee into the filter when she heard the back gate suddenly open, then close again. Relief flooded through her.

  He’d come back.

  She went on with her measuring, sure that before she was done the door would open and she would hear Alan’s voice apologizing once again for his drunkenness and pleading with her for forgiveness.

  But nothing happened.

  She finished setting up the coffee maker, turned it on, and, as it began to drip, went to the back door.

  Two minutes later, her heart pounding in her throat, she knew what was going to happen to her, and knew there was nothing she could do about it.

  Alex blinked, and looked around him. He was sitting on a bench in the plaza, staring across at the village hall and at the black-clad figure of María Torres disappearing down the side street toward the little cemetery and her home.

  A thought flitted through his mind: She looks like a nun. An old Spanish nun.

  Suddenly he became aware of someone waving to him from the steps of the library, and though he wasn’t quite sure who it was, he waved back.

  But how had he gotten to the plaza?

  The last thing he remembered, he’d been at the Square looking at the old oak tree and trying to remember if he’d ever played in it when he was a boy.

  And now he was in the plaza, two blocks away.

  But he was tired, as if he’d walked a couple of miles, much of it uphill.

  He glanced at his watch. It was a quarter past three. The last time he had looked, only a few minutes ago, it was one-thirty.

  Almost two hours had gone by, and he had no memory of it. As he started home, his mind began working at the problem. Hours, he knew, didn’t simply disappear. If he thought about it long enough, he knew, he would figure out what had happened during those hours, and know why he didn’t remember them.

  * * *

  The back door slammed, and Marsh looked up from the medical journal he was reading in time to see Alex come in from the kitchen. “Hi!”

  Alex stopped, then turned toward Marsh. “Hi,” he replied.

  “Where you been?”

  Alex shrugged. “Nowhere.”

  Marsh offered his son a smile. “Funny, that’s exactly where I always was when I was your age.”

  Alex made no response, and slowly the smile faded away from Marsh’s face as Alex silently left the room, drifting upstairs toward his own room. A few months ago, before the accident, Alex’s eyes would have lit up, and he would have asked where, exactly, nowhere was, and then they would have been off, the conversation quickly devolving into total nonsense on the subject of the exact location of nowhere and just precisely what one was doing when one was doing nothing in the middle of nowhere.

  Now there was nothing in his eyes.

  For Marsh, Alex’s eyes had become symbolic of all the changes that had come over him since the accident.

  The old Alex had had eyes full of life, and Marsh had always been able to read his son’s mood with one glance.

  But now his eyes showed nothing. When he looked into them, all he saw was a reflection of himself. And yet, he had no sense that Alex was trying to hide anything. Rather, it was as if there was nothing there; as if the flatness of his personality had become visible in his eyes.

  The eyes, Marsh remembered, had sometimes been referred to as the windows to the soul. And if that was true, then Alex had no soul. Marsh felt chilled by the thought, then tried to banish it from his mind.

  But all afternoon, the thought kept coming back to him.

  Perhaps Ellen’s feeling on that awful night in May had been right after all. Perhaps Raymond Torres had not saved him at all.

  Perhaps in a way Alex was truly dead.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Kate Lewis listened to the hollow ringing of the phone long past the time when she knew it was going to go unanswered. For the fourth time in the last hour, she told herself that her mother must have taken her father to the hospital. But if she had, why hadn’t she left a message on the answering machine? Why hadn’t the answering machine even been turned on? Worried, she hung up the phone at the back of Jake’s and returned to the table she and Bob Carey had been occupying throughout the long Sunday afternoon.

  “Still nothing?” Bob asked as Kate slid back int
o the booth.

  Kate tried to force a casual shrug, but failed. “I don’t know what to do. I want to go home, but Mom said to call first.”

  “You’ve been calling all afternoon,” Bob pointed out. “Why don’t we go up there, and if they’re still fighting, we can leave again. We don’t even have to go in. But I’ll bet she took him to the hospital.” He reached across the table and squeezed Kate’s hand reassuringly. “Look, if he was as drunk as you said he was, she was probably so busy getting him out of the house and into the car that she didn’t have time to turn on the machine.”

  Kate nodded reluctantly, though she was still unconvinced. Always before, her mother had left a message for her, or if her father was really bad, not even tried to take him to the hospital. Instead, she’d called an ambulance.

  And this morning, her father had been really bad. Still, she couldn’t just go on sitting around Jake’s. “Okay,” she said at last.

  Ten minutes later they pulled into the Lewises’ driveway, and Bob shut off the engine of his Porsche. They stared first at the open garage door and the two cars that still sat inside it. Then they turned their attention toward the house.

  “Well, at least they’re not fighting,” Kate said, but made no move to get out of the car.

  “Maybe she called an ambulance, and went with it,” Bob suggested.

  Kate shook her head. “She would have followed it, so she wouldn’t have to call someone for a ride home.”

  “You want to stay here while I go see if they’re home?” Bob asked.

  Kate considered a moment, then shook her head. Her hand trembling, she opened the door of the Porsche and got out. With Bob behind her, she started up the walk to the front door.

  When she found it unlocked, she breathed a sigh of relief. One thing she was absolutely certain of—her mother would never leave the house unlocked. She pushed the door open and stepped inside.

  “Mom? I’m home!” she called out. An empty silence hung over the house, and Kate’s heart began beating faster. “Mom?” she called again, louder this time. She glanced nervously at Bob. “Something’s wrong,” she whispered. “If the door’s unlocked, Mom should be here.”

  “Maybe she’s upstairs,” Bob suggested. “You want me to go look?”

  Kate nodded silently, and Bob started up the stairs. A moment later he was back. “Nobody up there,” he told her. “Let’s look in the kitchen.”

  “No,” Kate said. Then, her voice quavering, she spoke again. “Let’s call the police.”

  “The police?” Bob echoed. “Why?”

  “Because I’m scared,” Kate said, no longer trying to control the fear in her voice. “Something’s wrong, and I don’t want to go into the kitchen!”

  “Aw, come on, Kate,” Bob told her, starting down the hall toward the closed kitchen door. “Nothing’s wrong at all. She probably just called an ambulance and—” He fell silent as he pushed open the kitchen door. “Oh, God,” he whispered. For just a moment he stood perfectly still. Then he stepped back and let the door swing closed. He turned unsteadily around, his face ashen. “Kate,” he whispered. “Your mom—I think … She looks like she’s dead.”

  Kate stared at him for a moment while the words slowly registered in her mind. Then, without thinking, she started down the hall, pushing her way past Bob and into the kitchen. Wildly, she scanned the room, and then found what she was looking for.

  Her knees buckled, and she sank sobbing to the floor.

  Roscoe Finnerty glanced up at Tom Jackson. “You okay?”

  Jackson nodded. “I can handle it.” He stared at Marty Lewis’s body for a moment, trying to get a handle on what he was feeling. It wasn’t at all like last spring, when he’d almost fallen apart at the sight of Alex Lonsdale’s broken body trapped in the wreckage of the Mustang. No, this was different. Except for the look on her face, and the pallor of her skin, this woman could be sleeping. He knelt and pressed his finger to her neck.

  She wasn’t sleeping.

  “What do you think?” he asked, getting to his feet once more.

  “Until I talk to the kids, I don’t think anything.” A siren sounded, and a few seconds later an ambulance pulled into the driveway. Two medics came into the room and repeated the procedure Finnerty and Jackson had gone through when they’d arrived a few minutes earlier. “Don’t move her,” Finnerty told them. “Just make sure she’s dead, then don’t do anything till the detectives get up here. Tom, you get outside and make sure none of the rubberneckers try to come inside, and I’ll have a talk with the kids.”

  Finnerty left the kitchen and went back to the living room, where he found Kate Lewis and Bob Carey still sitting on the sofa where he’d left them, Kate sobbing softly while Bob tried to comfort her.

  “How’s she doing?” Finnerty asked. Bob looked dazedly up at him.

  “How do you think she’s doing?” he demanded, his voice cracking. “Her mom’s … her mom’s …” And then he fell silent as his own emotions overcame him and he choked back a sob.

  “It’s all right,” Finnerty told him. “Just try to take it easy.” He searched his memory; then it came to him. “You’re Bob Carey, aren’t you?”

  Bob nodded, and seemed to calm down a little.

  “Have you called your folks yet? Do they know what’s happened?” Bob shook his head. “Okay. I’ll call them and have them come over here. Then I’d like to talk to you. Will that be okay?”

  “Nothing happened,” Bob said. “We just came over here, found her, and called the cops.”

  Finnerty patted the boy on the shoulder. “Okay. We’ll get the details in a little while.” He found the phone and the phone book, and spent the next five minutes assuring Dave Carey that his son was all right. Then he went back to the living room.

  Slowly he pieced together the story. The longer he listened, the more he was sure he knew what had happened. It was a story he’d heard over and over during his years as a cop, but this was the first time in his experience that the story had ever ended in death. Only when Dave Carey arrived did Finnerty return to the kitchen.

  Two detectives were there, and Finnerty watched in silence as they went over the room, methodically looking for clues as to what might have happened there.

  “How’s it look?” he asked when Bill Ryan finally nodded to him.

  Ryan shrugged. “Without talking to anybody, I’d say it was premeditated, and pretty cold. No signs of a fight, no signs of forced entry, no signs of rape.”

  “If what the kids say is true, it was the husband. He was drunk, and they were having an argument when the girl left this morning. In fact, that’s why she left—her father was pissed at her, and her mother was trying to get him to lay off. The girl thinks her mother was going to try to get her father into detox today.”

  “And he didn’t want to go.”

  “Right.”

  Suddenly the back door opened, and Tom Jackson appeared, his right arm supporting a bleary-eyed man whose hands were trembling and whose face was drawn. Without being told, Finnerty knew immediately who he was.

  “Mr. Lewis?”

  Alan Lewis nodded mutely, his eyes fastened on the sheet-covered form on the floor. “Oh, God,” he whispered.

  “Read him his rights,” Ryan said. “Let’s see if we can get a confession right now.”

  “I still can’t believe it,” Carol Cochran sighed. “I just can’t believe that Alan would have killed Marty, no matter how drunk he was.”

  It was a little after nine, and the Cochrans had been at the Lonsdales’ since six-thirty. All through a dispirited dinner which had gone all but untouched, the Cochrans and the Lonsdales had been discussing what had happened in La Paloma that day. Now, as they sat in the still only partially furnished living room, with Lisa and Alex upstairs and Kim asleep in the guest room, the discussion threatened to go on right through the evening.

  “Can’t we talk about something else?” Ellen wondered, although she knew the answer. All over La Paloma, t
here was only one thing being talked about tonight: did Alan Lewis kill his wife, or did someone else?

  “Don’t ever underestimate what a drunk can do,” Marsh Lonsdale told Carol, ignoring his wife’s question.

  “But Alan was always a harmless drunk. My God, Marsh, Alan’s not very effectual when he’s sober. And when he’s drunk, all he does is pass out.”

  “Hardly,” Jim Cochran observed. “Last time I played golf with him, he wrapped his putter around a tree, and took a swing at me when I suggested maybe he ought to lay off the sauce.”

  “That’s still a far cry from killing your wife,” Carol insisted.

  “But there weren’t any signs of a struggle,” Marsh reminded her. “As far as the police can tell, Marty knew whoever killed her.”

  Carol shook her head dismissively. “Marty knew everybody in town, just like all the rest of us. Besides, she always felt safe in that house, although God alone knows why.” Her eyes scanned the Lonsdales’ living room, and she shuddered slightly. “I’m sorry, but these old places always give me the willies.”

  “Carol!”

  “Honey, Ellen and I have been friends long enough so I don’t have to lie to her. Besides, I told her when she first started looking at this place that if she didn’t do something drastic to it within six months, I’d never visit her again. I mean, just look at it—it looks like some kind of monastery or something. I always feel that there ought to be chanting going on in the background. And what about the windows? All covered up with wrought iron—like a prison!” Suddenly running out of steam, she fell into a slightly embarrassed silence, then grinned crookedly at Ellen. “Well, it’s what I think.”

  “And in a way, you’re right,” Ellen agreed. “Except that I happen to like all those things you hate. But I don’t see what it has to do with Marty.”

  “It’s just that she always said that old fortress made her feel safe, and look what happened to her.”

  “Honey,” Jim protested, “murders can happen anywhere. It didn’t matter where the house was, or what it looked like.”