Chill of Night

by John Lutz

  Everyone, including Adelaide, left the restaurant somewhat tipsy from too much wine.

  By the end of the short subway ride to the stop near her apartment, she felt slightly better about losing the Peel the Onion role. Adelaide had found the company misery so loves, and it had elevated her mood. But now, as she made her way up the concrete steps to the surface world, she was sober and hungry again.

  When she turned a corner, the dimly lighted sidewalk ahead was empty. She was vaguely aware of someone rounding the corner behind her. So quiet was this dark street that she could hear faint footfalls, but she didn’t turn around.

  The tip of her tongue worked on a morsel trapped between two of her molars, and her thoughts returned to the restaurant. She hadn’t eaten much of the angel hair pasta she’d ordered, concentrating instead on conversation and her wine glass. As she walked the shadowed pavement, she wondered about her earlier lack of appetite. Definitely, worry had caused it. But what had she been attempting to put out of her mind, losing the Off-Broadway part, or gaining a jury summons?

  Adelaide had served on a jury about six years ago, and she recalled that receiving the summons had been, more than anything, irritating. But after an initial attempt to get out of doing her civic duty, she resigned herself to serving and it hadn’t been such an ordeal. It had been a two day trial about a stolen car, ending in the conviction of the thief. Much of the time had been taken by the prosecutor explaining how to hot wire a car and jump the ignition. She’d found it interesting, but not so much that she wanted to repeat the experience, and not at all useful. Adelaide didn’t think she’d ever have to steal a car.

  The sound of leather soles on concrete behind her was getting closer, but she didn’t give it much thought. As she strode along the sidewalk with a dancer’s elegance, she squeezed her purse, feeling the jury summons still inside it. She was annoyed now by the summons, and moving beyond sobriety toward a headache and the queasy feeling she always got after she drank too much.

  Someone had told her that once the courts got you in their computer they never forgot you. That might be why so many people avoided jury duty—that the system kept drawing on lots of the same people over and over. Adelaide didn’t want to be one of those people, but she was afraid that in the eyes of the court she had become one.

  Afraid.

  She hesitated before regaining her stride. Yes, she wasn’t only irritated this time; she was afraid. The newspapers were full of stories about people doing bizarre things to get out of jury duty. They were afraid to serve, and why shouldn’t they be, with a maniac waiting to kill them if they arrived at the wrong verdict? Adelaide was sure she wouldn’t have been summoned at all if so many other prospective jurors hadn’t shirked their duty. Most of the people she knew said they’d never served on a jury. Supposedly the city was programmed to call on you every ten years or so, not six.

  Six years. Wasn’t it also about six years ago when the Justice Killer’s last victim, Tina something, had also been on a jury? She hadn’t been a foreperson or anything, either, just a common juror—like they wanted Adelaide to be—and now she was dead. Adelaide shivered. Tina something hadn’t exactly died a pleasant kind of death.

  A turning car’s headlights momentarily played down the block and the lengthened shadow of whoever was behind Adelaide almost reached the point where she might have glimpsed it in the corner of her vision. Then the street was dark again.

  Damn it! If she’d landed the part in Onion she surely could have gotten out of jury duty, or at least had it postponed. She would have had to rehearse—the court would have understood that the play depended on her. That would have been enough to be excused from sitting in a stifling courtroom, listening to something that was bound to be unpleasant; enough to be excused from being afraid until Mr. Justice Killer was killed or captured.

  One thing the experts seemed to agree on: the killer had widened his pool of potential victims. Adelaide knew she might be right at the edge of that pool, and she didn’t want to so much as dip a cute and dainty toe in it.

  The slight scuffing sound of footsteps behind her drew closer, and she sensed a presence very near. Not breaking stride, she saw a moving shadow merge with her own, almost completely devouring it.

  “You shouldn’t be out walking alone at night in this neighborhood, sweetheart. You want some company?”

  Adelaide stopped and stood still, then turned and faced a large, bearded man wearing a dark turtleneck sweater and jeans. His beard was jet black and trimmed so it came to a point. He was carrying a white plastic bag by its loops, and the way the plastic was stretched indicated there was something heavy inside.

  When he saw her face, his eyes changed in the way she expected. He gave her a smile surely meant to be disarming. “You are every kind of cute. I said—”

  “Back off, asshole!” Adelaide told him.

  He backed away a step, the smile freeze-framed in his beard, then spun on his heel and jogged across the street.

  “You don’t know what you’re missing!” he yelled from the opposite sidewalk.

  Adelaide didn’t bother to answer. More important matters occupied her mind. She wasn’t going to serve a single day of jury duty. First thing tomorrow she’d phone Barry. First thing!

  She dug a pen out of her purse and wrote a little reminder on her left palm, as she often did: Call Barry.

  Adelaide had an idea.

  29

  St. Louis, 1989

  “I’m exhausted,” April said, in the middle of putting away the groceries.

  Justice wasn’t surprised. April spent her days exhausted. Part of the reason was the depression, and part of it was the prescription medicine she was shoveling down. It seemed the proper cocktail of medications couldn’t be found to bring her relief. She’d tried doctor after doctor. She was seeing a psychologist regularly now for analysis, and a psychiatrist who prescribed medicines. The one thing the medicines seemed to have in common was that they sapped her of energy. April slept around most of the clock, and seldom left the house. She’d accompanied him to the supermarket this time only so she could choose some of what she wanted to eat, in an effort to improve her appetite.

  They could no longer afford to dine out, and they were living in a gray-shingled, rundown rental house in the wrong end of town. April’s surroundings were hardly calculated to help her escape the depression that held her in a vise, but then neither was their dwindling bank account.

  Justice opened the refrigerator and began putting perishables away. “Do you want me to fix you something to eat?”

  April shook her head no. “I’m gonna take a pill.”

  Justice felt his stomach tighten. To April, taking a pill was synonymous with taking a nap. Unless she took wrong combinations or dosages, which happened frequently. Then she’d be manically active, desperate, and heart-breaking.

  She’d once described her depression as falling down a slippery dark well that got more and more narrow and constricting. And as you fell, you knew with increasing certainty that you would never be able to climb back up to the light that now you could no longer even see.

  As Justice finished putting away the groceries, he could hear April clattering around in the bathroom. The old house’s pipes rattled briefly as she ran water to wash down whatever in her galaxy of medications she was taking.

  Twice she’d mistakenly taken overdoses that would have proved fatal if she hadn’t told Justice about them. Once in bed beside him in the middle of the night, and once by phone when he was working in a twenty-four-hour convenience store that had since closed. Both times he’d called 911 and they’d reached the emergency room in time, where April consumed what they’d both come to refer to as “the charcoal milkshake” that neutralized what was in her stomach, and was then pumped out.

  After the second overdose, a doctor had told Justice that April might have taken an overdose deliberately in a suicide attempt, but Justice knew better. April wanted to live. She fed off his own determination
that she should live, that everything should return to normal—but a different kind of normal, without their son, Will. It was possible. It must be. It seemed far away at times to Justice, but it was possible.

  He went into the bedroom and found April lying fully clothed on the bed that hadn’t been made for days. The old window air conditioner was humming and squealing away, not doing much about the humid St. Louis heat in high summer. The shades were pulled. Even if they didn’t fit well and light leaked in all around them; at least the room was dim. At times April got headaches that were unbearable, and lying perfectly still on her back in the dimness seemed the only thing that might help.

  Justice sat down on the bed beside her. “You doing okay?”

  She squeezed his hand. “I hate to put you through this shit.”

  He smiled. “It won’t be forever.”

  “It’s already been forever.”

  He sat and was silent, looking at her closed eyes, watching her pupils move beneath the thin flesh of her eyelids, knowing she might be exhausted but she wasn’t near sleep.

  “Headache, too?” he asked.

  “No. Just everything else.” Her breasts rose, fell. “It’s so goddamned hopeless.”

  He pressured her hand rhythmically with his own. “Don’t say it’s hopeless. It only seems that way sometimes.”

  “I know what I put you through,” she said, still with her eyes closed. “It isn’t fair.”

  “Maybe it’ll even out.”

  Her pale lips arranged themselves in a tired smile. New deep lines at the corners of her mouth. “You mean someday you’ll put me through the same thing?”

  “You know what I meant. Our life together will be better someday.”

  “You believe that? With Will gone from us?”

  “It won’t be as good as with Will, but it can be better than it is now.”

  “Isn’t that the truth.”

  She began to cry. He touched the backs of his knuckles gently to her cheek and she turned her head away.

  “I’m afraid,” she said. “I’m afraid all the time.”

  “Of what?”

  “I don’t know. The future. Nothing and everything. I’m tired of being afraid.”

  “You don’t have to be.”

  “If I didn’t—”

  “What?” He could tell by the tightness around her mouth that she was getting frustrated. With him. With everything. He knew he should think more before he spoke. If she didn’t have to be afraid, she sure as hell wouldn’t be.

  “Maybe you oughta take a drive,” she said. It was what he did when they both knew an argument was building like a summer storm on the horizon. “Get some ice cream and bring it back here.”

  “You didn’t want ice cream in the store.”

  “Go to Ted Drewes. Get me a chocolate chip concrete.”

  Ted Drewes was a frozen custard stand that was the most popular place in St. Louis when the temperature got over eighty. And it was over ninety today. “I’ll be in line behind a hundred people,” Justice said.

  She opened her eyes, looked at him, and smiled, not the way she usually was with a fight coming on. “The lines there move fast, and only frozen custard can make me feel better.”

  “Or ice cream.”

  “Not the same.”

  Justice leaned down and kissed her cool forehead. “Frozen custard it is.” He stood up, went into the bathroom, and splashed cold water on his face and wrists. When he came back in the bedroom, he was tucking in his shirt. “You said chocolate?”

  “Chocolate chip,” she said, with her eyes closed again. She seemed tired now. When he got back, she might be asleep. That would be okay; he’d put both frozen concoctions in the freezer and they could eat them later.

  When he left the house, he locked the front door behind him, then drove their five-year-old Ford to the custard stand.

  After maneuvering through traffic surrounding the tiny stand, he finally found a parking space in the rear of the lot, near an alley. The car’s air conditioner didn’t work worth a damn, and as soon as he turned off the engine the heat closed in.

  He joined a long line at one of the serving windows and stood in the sun and sweated for about twenty minutes before he walked away with two frozen custard specialties in a white takeout bag.

  The drive back took another twenty minutes.

  As soon as Justice entered the house, he made his way toward the bedroom, where he assumed April was asleep.

  Peeking in, he saw her still in bed, lying on her side, turned away from him. He went into the kitchen, put her frozen custard in the freezer section of the fridge, then sat at the kitchen table and ate his own chocolate treat.

  Something wasn’t right. Something about the silence in the tiny, stifling house. He was finished with his frozen custard, so he dropped the cardboard container into the trash, then went to the bedroom to look in again on April.

  She hadn’t moved. He started to close the door so he could turn on the TV and not disturb her, when it struck him that she was lying exactly as before. On her right side, left shoulder slightly hunched, left hand turned palm out, the tips of her fingers just visible over the curve of her hip.

  His heart went cold; his legs numb; even before he knew for sure.

  He didn’t want to walk over and examine his wife more closely, didn’t want to step into a new and darker world. But he had to. He couldn’t go back to the kitchen, sit at the table, and pretend it was five minutes ago. So he walked across the bedroom’s threadbare carpet. On unfeeling legs of rubber, he walked. He leaned. He looked.

  Her eyes were closed, but her skin didn’t look quite right. Already it had begun to acquire a slight waxiness, and her perfect stillness was that of something inanimate. On the carpet on her side of the bed was a litter of vials and bottles—her stash of untaken prescription medicines the doctors had warned Justice that she might have hidden somewhere in the house. He stared at the lidless, capless empty containers, at the empty water glass on its side nearby. She’d taken everything, every kind of pill, every pill.

  In her right hand was a crumpled scrap of paper, a message perhaps to him. But when he detached the object from her hand he saw that it was a photograph of Will, their lost son, taken on his fourth birthday, beaming behind a three-layer cake while a hand that had found its way into the frame—Justice’s own hand—was about to hold a lighted match to four waiting candles. The photo was an instant caught in time that stabbed him like a blade through the heart.

  He had just enough willpower to dial 911 and give them a brief explanation and an address. When the operator asked if he was sure April was dead, he said he wasn’t, but in fact he was. He didn’t want them to take their time, not for any reason.

  After hanging up, he sat down on the bed next to April and stared at Will’s photograph. His breathing quickened without him realizing it until he was short of breath, then he was sobbing, taking in great gulps of air.

  When the paramedics arrived, he couldn’t talk to them, couldn’t even manage to stand up by himself so they had room to do their job.

  He heard their instructions and conversation as if from a distance. They were going to transport April to the morgue, as they always did initially with suicides. It was the law. Taking one’s own life was a crime—not as serious a crime as what Davison had done to Will, but still a crime.

  Someone leaned over Justice, placed a hand on his shoulder, and asked him gently if he had any family or a priest or pastor. He told them no, he had no family and he had no religion. He no longer had a world to live in.

  They discussed him in the third person, as if he weren’t there, and decided he needed medical attention and counseling. He sat slumped on the sofa in deep shock and watched them remove April, the criminal. One of the paramedics hurried ahead to hold the screen door open.

  It all seemed so wrong. It wasn’t yet time. A mistake had been made and could be set right with a little reasonable discussion. Her frozen custard was still uneaten
in the refrigerator.

  They parted then forever, she to the morgue, he to hospital emergency.

  Forever.

  30

  New York, the present

  Beam settled into the soft gray leather chair in Cassie’s living room. Her apartment was furnished in restful, muted tones like her office. But while the office was in shades of brown, the apartment was blues and grays.

  Cassie’s broad, sturdy figure appeared in the doorway from the kitchen. Not much was different about her shape and features from the time she was a child, one of those rare people who somehow mature without changing; you recognize them at sixty if you knew them when they were six. She was holding two martini glasses. She came over to the gray chair and handed one of the glasses to Beam.

  “Gin,” she said. “Mine’s vodka.”

  He smiled and raised his glass in a toast. The gesture was returned, and brother and sister took ceremonial sips of their drinks.

  “I know you didn’t come to me for help,” she said.

  “Not professional help.” Beam tried his martini again. His sister had a real talent for mixing these things. “Personal help. It’s been almost a year now since Lani died. How should I…I don’t know, how should I feel?”

  He felt stupid even asking the question.

  Cassie settled down on the pale blue sofa opposite Beam’s chair and regarded him. “You’re seeing another woman,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t act surprised. Are you?”

  “Surprised? Yes. I’m not exactly seeing another woman. Not in the way you mean.”

  Cassie grinned. “Ah, you equivocate.”

  “The woman hates my guts,” Beam said. “And is it too early for me to be interested? I mean, since Lani?”