by Lis Wiehl
“Something about people fitting each other like pieces of puzzles, or not fitting, I don’t recall exactly, but it’s one of the stranger benefits of being famous,” Tommy said. “People give you a lot more credit than you deserve. I told her she needed to get help. She was just really messed up.”
Dani turned around to face him, their faces six inches apart. He was 99 percent certain that she wanted to kiss him, and 100 percent sure he wanted to kiss her.
“Can I just say—” she began.
They were interrupted by the sudden blare of a police siren, then by the white light of a squad car’s spotlight, its flashers flashing blue and red.
“Everything all right?” said a voice over the loudspeaker.
Tommy shielded his eyes with his hand.
“That you, Tommy?” the amplified voice called out.
Tommy told Dani to wait where she was and approached the squad car. Frank DeGidio was in the passenger seat. The cop behind the wheel was another local Tommy knew from the gym.
“Sorry, Tommy,” Frank said. “I didn’t know it was you. Is that that lawyer from the DA’s office?”
“Forensic psychiatrist,” Tommy said.
The cop in the driver’s seat turned off the flashers.
“She don’t look like any shrink I know. Sorry to bother you—we got a call from the neighborhood watch,” DeGidio said. “Somebody said they saw a suspicious motorcycle abandoned under a bridge.”
“It’s a Harley, Frank,” Tommy said. “What’s suspicious about a Harley?”
“Vigilance is one thing,” the cop said, “but I swear, somebody is going to hear a squeak on the front porch and shoot the paperboy. Crazy night. The wind blew a tree down on the lines and knocked the power out north of here, which happens like four or five times a year around here with all these old trees, and people are acting like it’s a sign of the apocalypse. Sorry to bother you.”
Dani met Tommy at the bike and offered him his jacket back.
“I should get home,” she told him. “It looks like the rain has stopped.”
“Keep it until we get to your place,” he told her. The moment had passed, but he felt confident there would be another. But in case there’s any doubt, he thought, show me a sign.
He put the bike in gear, let out the clutch, and accelerated slowly, then slammed on the brakes. The motorcycle skidded sideways and slid to a stop just as two dark shapes charged from the woods. He saw a pair of horses, one black, the other gray, eyes wild with fear, running without direction. The black horse slipped on the wet road, hooves clattering and screeching like fingernails on a blackboard. Then the big stallion righted himself, regarded the two humans with a snort, ears laid back, threw his head up and whinnied, kicked his front hooves out, and followed the gray across the road. The animals jumped the ditch and leapt over the stone wall, disappearing into the trees opposite as if they were being chased by something unseen.
“You okay?” Tommy asked Dani.
“Give me a second,” she said.
He felt her hands, inside the pockets of his rain shell, squeezing him and trembling.
“What was that?”
“A sign,” Tommy said. “But not the one I was waiting for.”
“Should we call somebody?” Dani asked.
“I’ll let the police know after I drop you off,” Tommy said. “This whole town is going crazy.”
26.
When she got home, Dani checked her BlackBerry and read an e-mail from Irene, who’d been busy obtaining subpoenas for Logan Gansevoort and Amos Kasden. Dani called Kelly to make sure she’d gotten to Philadelphia safely. She called Ed Stanley, her grandfather’s friend from the State Department, and left a message to make sure he had both her phone numbers and all three of the e-mail addresses where he could reach her.
When she checked the Friends of Julie Leonard Facebook page, the posts confirmed what Tommy had said about the town going crazy, a collective paranoia that fed on itself. Three women proposed forming a drum circle to perform a healing ceremony, while several men proposed different solutions, variations on a theme of “If the person who killed Julie Leonard is reading this, we’re going to find you and take the law into our own hands.” There were dozens of reports of supposedly “suspicious activities.” A girl said her dog wouldn’t stop walking in circles. A woman said her tap water had turned brown. A man said he’d recently parked his Mercedes in the driveway, where it had been damaged in the night by hail, even though there were no hailstones on the ground when he discovered the damage.
Hysteria had more than a foothold in East Salem.
Dani started running the tub upstairs, then went to the kitchen to check and refill the cat’s dishes. After she took a hot bath to chase the chill from her bones, she went back downstairs to turn off all the lights and only then noticed that her cat hadn’t touched his food or water.
“Arlo?” she called out. “Here, kitty kitty kitty …”
She listened but heard no yowling in reply.
She opened the back door. Sometimes the cat sneaked past her in the morning and made his escape without her knowing it.
“Arlo!” she called out loudly. “Here, kitty kitty …”
Now she was worried. She reminded herself that there was no connection between a missing cat and a town gone mad, but that was how paranoia worked. If you looked for things to be afraid of, you could find them everywhere.
In the kitchen, she called again. She called upstairs. She called into the living room, came back to the kitchen, and opened the door to the basement.
She screamed as the cat darted past her, racing to his food.
“There you are!” she said, profoundly relieved. She picked him up and stroked his fur. “You scared the daylights out of me, you bad boy.”
She set him down and left him to his meal, closing the door to the basement.
Then she remembered, clearly, that when she’d left the house in her usual hurry that morning, the basement door had been open. She was certain of it. She’d noticed the door, slightly ajar, and said, “Don’t go into the basement, Arlo—there are scary things down there.”
Arlo couldn’t have locked himself in the basement, because he would have had to pull the door shut behind him.
So who locked the cat in the basement?
27.
“I need you to come over right away,” Dani said. Tommy looked at the clock. It was almost midnight. Her voice held an urgency bordering on panic. “I think there might be someone in my basement.”
“Hang on,” he told her. “I’ll be right there.”
This time he went to his dresser, left his Boy Scout knife where it was, and took the .45 caliber automatic from its case, shoving the gun into the pocket of his leather jacket where Dani wouldn’t see it.
She was waiting for him at the end of her driveway, wearing her bathrobe over her pajamas and a pair of men’s Canadian Sorel winter boots. This time, Tommy had taken the Jeep. She climbed in, shivering. He turned up the heat.
“Love the outfit,” Tommy told her. “You look like a spokesmodel for the Hudson Bay Company.”
“My dad kept the boots in the garage for when he shoveled snow,” she explained, then told him about the basement door. “Just to rule out the obvious, it could have been the wind, right?”
“You get a lot of wind inside your kitchen?” Tommy asked. “Who else has keys to your house?”
“My sister, Beth, but she wouldn’t use them without telling me.”
“Do you have a spare key outside the door, maybe hidden under a rock?”
“I wouldn’t be so stupid as to hide a spare key under a rock.”
Tommy parked away from the house. She’d left the lights on. They sat in the Jeep for a moment. In his pocket, he moved the safety on the gun from the on position to off, then on again, just to make sure he remembered how to do it.
“Are there any lights on now that weren’t on when you ran to the garage?” he asked.
“Whisper!” she whi
spered.
“Dani, we’re fifty yards from—”
“Whisper!” she commanded.
“No one can hear us,” he whispered.
“Yeah—now,” she said.
Tommy told her to wait by the car. She followed him anyway, her hand lightly touching his back, the way a blind person might.
“Wait by the car—no way!” he heard her muttering. “Everybody knows it’s the girl who waits by the car who ends up hanging upside down from a meat hook. Wait by the car …”
As they approached the house, Tommy saw nothing suspicious. Walking softly, he mounted the back steps. When he tried the doorknob, it wouldn’t turn.
“It’s locked,” he whispered to Dani.
“I locked it behind me accidentally. The key is under the rock,” she admitted, pointing. “That one.”
Tommy went first. Dani clutched her robe closed at the throat. He kept his hand on the gun in his coat pocket.
Dani pointed to the basement door. Tommy put a finger to his lips and gestured to her to stay put.
“You’re not going to leave me here, are you?” she whispered.
“Do you want to come with me?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s got to be one or the other.”
“I’ll wait here,” she said.
Tommy searched the basement. He found nothing out of the ordinary, other than that the glass fill indicator for her boiler was below that red line. He turned the valve and restored the water to the required level so that she wouldn’t run out of heat in the middle of the night.
“Everything looks good,” he called out. “Did you check upstairs?”
But when he got back to the kitchen, he could tell that she was not all right. She sat at the kitchen table holding a can of Raid in her lap.
“What’s that for?” he asked her.
She set the can on the counter. “Self-defense.”
“From bees?”
She smiled weakly. Arlo did a figure eight around Tommy’s legs.
“He loves men,” Dani said. “I hope you’re not allergic to cats.”
“Can I make you a cup of tea or something?” he offered.
“Why would I want a cup of tea?”
“Don’t people always have tea at times like this?” he said.
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never had a time like this. This is …” She looked around the room, searching for something.
“This is what?”
“This is more than I can understand,” she said, looking up to meet his gaze. “I didn’t think I was the kind of person who got scared. It’s not just Julie Leonard. It’s your car, the water, my dreams—our dreams. I don’t know how I’m supposed to think about it. I can’t get a handle on it. I can’t think of anything I could read to explain it.”
“I know what you mean,” Tommy said. He sat at the end of the table and slid his chair closer to her.
“You’re not scared?” she asked him.
“Maybe a little,” he said. He took the gun from his pocket and held it in the air to show it to her, then put it back in his pocket.
She opened her eyes wide, then stared out the window for a moment before returning to him. “I’m afraid of something that can’t be shot at,” she said. “Maybe I’m just scaring myself.”
“Do you remember Darryl Dawkins? The basketball player?” Tommy said. “I met him at a celebrity golf tournament. He played center for the 76ers. An interviewer once asked him, ‘Darryl, you’re six eleven, 300 pounds—is there anything you’re afraid of?’ And he said, ‘I’m only afraid of two things. The unknown, and ice skating.’”
Dani laughed. Tommy wished he had more than levity to offer her.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.
“It means have faith,” Tommy said. “Or as Vince Lombardi once said, ‘It’s good to have faith, but it’s better to have faith and a gun.’ I just made that up, but it sounds like something he would have said.”
She laughed again, but the smile on her face soon disappeared. He waited.
“What do you make of it?” she asked him. “All these weird things going on. It’s just …”
“Just what?”
“Inexplicable,” she said. “I mean, any one thing, maybe, but add them all together and … Do you know what I mean?”
“I do,” he said.
“There’s no pattern,” she said. “At least none that I can discern.”
“Well … ,” Tommy began, wondering if he should share with her a thought he’d had earlier.
“Well, what? Tell me. No matter how crazy. It can’t get any crazier.”
“It’s just that I noticed …” He tried again to think how best to put his theory into words. “You remember me telling you about a call we got at the nursery from a woman in Willow Ponds about her solarium?”
“Grasshoppers?” Dani tried to recall.
“Locusts,” Tommy corrected her. “Similar. My pest control guy said they have to burn the palms she put in and order new ones.”
“Okay,” Dani said. “And this is related … how?”
“Well,” Tommy said, “when’s the last time anybody in East Salem had trouble with locusts?”
“I don’t know,” Dani said.
“So,” Tommy said, holding his hand out so that he could count on his fingers, “one, we’ve got locusts. Two, Abbie Gardener was holding a dead frog. Three, you told me your sister’s school was having problems with head lice. Four, you said two of the girls who rode horses at Red Gate Farm had botfly bites, which looked like boils, right? You with me so far?”
“Not even a little,” Dani said.
“Five,” Tommy said, bending back his left thumb, “botflies are flies, so we’ve got not just boils, but flies.”
He held out a finger on his right hand.
“Six,” he said, “I read on the Julie Leonard Facebook page that a man thought his car got damaged by hail but he couldn’t find any hailstones …”
“I read that too,” Dani said.
“Seven, Frank told me when he stopped under the bridge that there’d been a power outage north of here,” he continued. “That’s another one. Plunged into darkness …”
“Tommy …”
“Just hear me out,” he said, “because your sister said the horses at Red Gate Farm were sneezing, right?”
“Right,” Dani said.
“And the two we saw tonight didn’t look all that well. So that’s sickness of livestock. Plus,” Tommy said, holding up all ten fingers, “there’s Julie Leonard, and frogs, lice, flies, diseased livestock, boils, hail, locusts, and darkness. Ring any bells?”
“Bells?” she said. “You’re still losing me. This is related to the murder of Julie Leonard exactly how?”
“Death of the firstborn,” Tommy said.
“Meaning?” she asked. “I get the reference—it’s biblical.”
“Exodusical, to be precise,” Tommy said. “Is that a word? Exodusian? It’s from Exodus.”
Dani flashed on the word and recalled her dream, people fleeing a city. “What are you saying?” she asked. “You think God is sending us plagues?”
“Not necessarily,” Tommy said. “I would think that if any three or four of those things happened at the same time, it wouldn’t mean anything. But the odds against all ten happening at once is sixteen trillion to one, to quote a statistic I just made up.”
“Tommy …”
“I don’t know what it means,” he repeated. “But that’s not the same thing as saying I think it’s meaningless. It’s not disconnected—”
She held up a hand to stop him. “All I’m saying,” Dani said, “is that sometimes if you look for something long enough or hard enough, you’ll find it even if it isn’t there. I had a patient once, an old woman who was convinced that there was a secret organization that was taking over the world.”
“But—”
“She had rock-solid proof,” Dani continued, “because according
to her, and this is textbook paranoia, every time this sinister secret organization took over something, they put a circle around the logo. She had proof. The telephone company had a logo with a circle around the bell. At all the bus stops, there was a T with a circle around it. To everyone else, it stood for transit, but to her, it meant a secret cabal had taken over the bus company. There are circles everywhere, if you look for them. The consciousness sets up a screen or a filter, on the lookout for things that are threatening, so it screens out everything that isn’t a threat and locates everything that is.”
“So you’re saying I’m paranoid?” Tommy asked.
“Not at all,” Dani said. “I’m just saying that the perception of a pattern is not proof of design. Look at the constellations—the ancient astronomers saw hunters and swans and big dippers in the night sky. They saw patterns. To us, now, it’s just a bunch of stars distributed at random.”
“So you don’t think there’s anything strange about seeing ten biblical signs at one time?” Tommy asked her.
She considered what he’d said. “Yes,” she agreed. “I’ll give you strange. I just don’t know what else we can say about it.”
“Neither do I,” Tommy said.
“What was the story from Exodus?” Dani asked. “Remind me?”
“The pharaoh told the Israelites, ‘If your God is so powerful, prove it,’ ” Tommy explained. “So God sent the plagues, until the pharaoh finally said okey-dokey and let the Israelites go.”
“Pharaoh said okey-dokey?”
“Words to that effect, in ancient Egyptian,” Tommy said, joining the tips of his right thumb and index finger in a circle. “In hieroglyphics, it looks like this.”
Dani smiled again.
And again, the smile faded quickly. Tommy knew where Dani, the scientist, was coming from. In his Introduction to Investigative Theory class at John Jay, he’d been told that the investigator’s job was to look for patterns but to be wary of superimposing patterns on random facts, and to always remember that coincidence did not imply causality. He knew Dani understood that. Something else was bothering her.
“You seem a little shaky. Would you like me to stay?” he offered. “I can sleep on the couch. I just need to call Lucius and make sure he can stay with my dad.”
