Beauvaque rose, began to pace. “I began to see Jeffrey, on my own. His mother had come to trust me. When she started to work hours that would not get her home in time to meet Jeffrey's school bus, she allowed me to keep him company for an hour. She was very grateful, Dr. Brennan.” Again the sad, fleeting smile.
“I don't think I'd ever been happier in my life. I don't think Jeffrey minded me. I think he sensed that I would be better at the job than his own mother. After a while I think he began to rely on me. We went places during our short time together each day. We went for walks or shopping at the market. He let me arrange his clothes. His mother even let me buy him clothing. His wardrobe certainly improved.”
Beauvaque's voice softened to a chilling whisper. “And then he changed.”
A line of cold crawled up Brennan's back. Beauvaque stood rigid in the half light, staring into nothingness. Brennan could almost physically feel the loss the other man was expressing.
“It happened quite suddenly, Dr. Brennan. At first, I became afraid that he had said something to his mother about my attentions, how I doted on him, or sang to him, or read him poems or brushed his hair. But that wasn't it.
“It was a Friday, I remember very clearly. His mother had asked me to keep him longer because she had to work late. I, of course, agreed. But I had to show an apartment, and so I arranged for Jeffrey to stay locked in his home between four and four-thirty. Then, I told him, I would take him for ice cream. That had seemed fine with him. I still remember his smile as he closed the door, promising not to open it for anyone else while I was gone.
“I was gone no longer than forty-five minutes. A young man and his bitchy wife went over every inch of the empty apartment, then began to haggle about the rent. After wasting all of my time, the woman—I can remember her bad blonde hair coloring: the roots showed mousey brown—took her husband by the arm and said, 'Let's go.' They left without a word of thanks.
“I was angry. By the time I arrived at Jeffrey's apartment, I was talking to myself, venting my spleen. I froze at the door because I heard voices within. Two voices. Jeffrey's and another. A woman's, but not his mother's.
“I knocked. I'm afraid I lost my composure. I was fearful he had opened the door to a stranger. I knocked very hard. I shouted, 'Jeffrey, open this door at once!'
“There was silence inside. I shouted louder. Then he opened the door and stared at me. He looked . . . guilty. As if I had caught him doing something bad.
“'Jeffrey, who is in this apartment with you?' I said. I stormed past him to see who it was he had been talking to.
“Well, Dr. Brennan, the apartment was empty. I checked it top to bottom. When I confronted him, he shrugged evasively and said it was the television I had heard.
“I knew it wasn't the television. I knew it. I was sure he was lying to me.
“The rest of the afternoon was a disaster. I think my own mood eventually turned Jeffrey sour, also. We ended up not speaking to one another. Even his cow of a mother noticed that something was wrong between us when she got home.
“I don't know if he said something to her then. But for the next two weeks I barely saw him. His mother was on vacation and was there to spend time with him. But it seemed that something had happened to turn her against me. As the two weeks came to an end, I delicately asked if she would need me to watch him again, and she declined. She was gracious enough. I would have to say she looked genuinely perplexed. Which led me to believe the breakup was Jeffrey's doing.
“Of course I was in agony. I blamed myself for my outburst. I told myself I should have trusted him when he told me no one had been in the apartment. There is nothing worse than mistrust. I began to have terrible dreams of Jeffrey going away, leaving by himself, leaving me behind.
“Dr. Brennan, I took to doing terrible things. It was unbearable for me not to see him. I began to sneak around, trying to catch a glimpse of him. But during those two weeks he never left his apartment, and after that, he left only to go to school. He stayed in when he came home. His mother had not been able to find anyone to watch him for the hour after school, and so he locked himself in the apartment alone each day.
“I stood outside the apartment when I couldn't stand it any longer. I was like a lovesick adolescent. I suppose that's what I was. But then I began to hear that voice again and became mortally afraid. My vigils became motivated by fear for his safety.
“I never heard the words that were spoken between Jeffrey and that voice, Dr. Brennan. They were just below my threshold of hearing. I think they were back in that room where Miss Hutchins did those horrible things. I can't be sure. When I did see Jeffrey, as he left for school in the morning or returned in the afternoon, he looked terrible.
“He looked haunted, Dr. Brennan. As I said, he was not a healthy-looking boy to begin with, but now he looked as though what health he possessed was being drained out of him.
“I was frantic. One night, when I couldn't sleep, I snuck like a thief and stood outside their door. I think I wept. Then I heard that high, thin female voice, and Jeffrey's voice in answer, and I suddenly became very jealous and angry. I nearly pounded on the door.
“There was only one thing for me to do. The next evening, when Jeffrey's mother came home from work, carrying a bag of groceries, I was waiting by her apartment door.
“She would not look at me, Dr. Brennan. She tried to hurry past, as if I had some sort of disease. I think she was afraid of me.
“I tried to speak to her, but she turned red and tried to push me away from her with the bag of groceries.
“I tried again to speak to her. My voice was climbing to hysteria. She was trying desperately to fit her key in her door. She dropped her groceries and turned on me.
“'Don't you ever touch my son again,' she spat at me. ‘If you even go near him the police will visit you.’
“I tried to tell her there was something wrong with Jeffrey. But she pushed me away.
“'You disgust me! You're little more than a woman!' Once again I tried to warn her about Jeffrey.
“'Do you think you'd make a better mother than me?' she shrieked. 'I hear you at night, talking to him, singing to him, turning him against me. How do you do it? Are there wires in the walls? Do you use your key and sneak in? I know you're stealing him from me!'
“ 'Please,' I said.
“She struck out at me with her fist. 'You can't have my boy! No one can take my boy from me!'
“With that, Dr. Brennan, she gathered up her fallen groceries and went into her apartment. She slammed the door in my face.
“I tried,” Beauvaque went on after a few moments, looking down at his hands, “to talk to her again. I left a note in her mailbox. I tried to make her believe it wasn't me taking her boy from her.”
He clenched his hands, hard. His voice remained almost a whisper. “Two days after his mother said all those terrible things to me, when he was coming home from school, he tried to run past me. I caught his arm. I couldn't help myself. I was scared for him.
“He had his head down as he rushed past. When I caught him, he looked up at me. I don't know if I'll be able to describe the look on his face—”
Beauvaque broke down. Brennan waited, stroking the cat, which had settled into a nap.
“I—the look on Jeffrey's face was like nothing I've ever seen on a human being before. He . . . smiled at me, Dr. Brennan. But it was such a malevolent smile.
“I let go of him. He continued to stare at me, smiling. Then he turned to go. But he stopped, turned, and said, `She's better than you or my mom. Much better.'
“He ran away from me.
“I never saw him alive again.
“I wanted to go down to his apartment that night. I wanted to listen at the door. But ... I didn't. I was afraid. Of everything. Of his mother, of that voice, of Jeffrey. I stayed in my room and cried like a fool.
“And, sometime during the night, Jeffrey's mother put a gun to his head and fired, and then she put the same gun to
her breast. They were both gone. Jeffrey was gone . . .”
Beauvaque wept.
When Beauvaque composed himself, he stood at the foot of the bed. “So what do you think, Dr. Brennan? Do you believe in bad things?”
Backlit, with the shadows of its own flesh magnifying its inscrutability, Beauvaque's face became unreadable. Brennan felt as if he was being tested.
“Yes, I believe in bad things.”
“Good,” Beauvaque said. He went back into his dark corner and retrieved something from the floor next to the chair he had slept in.
He returned to the bed and held out a marbled notebook, the kind schoolchildren scribble their lessons in. “You shall have this, Dr. Brennan. I found it in Jeffrey's apartment, before the police could take it.”
Brennan opened the notebook to the first page. He saw a well-executed pencil drawing of a young woman's face to the shoulder. She was pretty, with an odd, sad smile. Brennan found her strangely attractive. Beneath the picture, in neat script, was the name Bridget.
Before he could go further, Beauvaque touched his arm. “Later, Dr. Brennan. I want you to come with me.” He smiled his weak smile. “I do make a wonderful breakfast. The cats”—at mention of the species the animal next to Brennan's leg leapt from the bed and began to rub Beauvaque's ankle vigorously—”have not been fed.” He reached down to rub the cat's chin. “But first,” he said, his voice serious, completely untheatrical, “I want you to make me a promise. My giving you my dear Jeffrey's notebook implies a great trust.”
“What would that promise be, Mr. Beauvaque?”
“From what you've told me, you're looking for some sort of evidence that there's an afterlife.” His voice was almost chillingly calm. “That's why I let that girl Laura Hutchins rent the apartment. Do you think there's an afterlife, Dr. Brennan?”
“I think there may be.”
“I want you to promise, Dr. Brennan, that if you ever discover an existence after this world, that you'll see if my dear Jeffrey is happy. I know that what happened to him was not his own fault. I only want to know that he's happy.”
Forty minutes later, Brennan sat in Beauvaque's ornate kitchen, finishing what had proved to be a wonderful breakfast, a mixture of Cajun and Canadian. Beauvaque had been born in Louisiana; had spent his early life in the South, his middle life in the East, and what he referred to as the rest of his middle life in the far North, where “a man like me can be about as happy as is possible, Dr. Brennan. We're all haunted by something, sugar. Animal, vegetable, or mineral, there's something all of us want but can't have.”
When the phone rang in another room, Beauvaque politely excused himself to answer it, leaving Brennan alone with the marbled notebook that lay on the table next to his plate.
Brennan opened the notebook, studying the drawing of the girl named Bridget before looking at the following pages.
When he turned to the last page of the book, a shocked thrill went through him unlike any he had ever known. For a moment he couldn't breathe. Time stood still. It was as if a shadow he had chased for years, a shadow that had stayed just out of reach, insubstantial, had suddenly stopped dead, let him catch up, and whirled around to face him.
Then Ted Brennan began to breathe again, time went on, and the shadow was his immediate quest. Filled almost painfully with that amalgam of joy and dread he had felt the previous day, Ted Brennan stared once again at the page in the marbled notebook and said, barely believing his own words, “My God, I've found it.”
TWO:
THE COMPASS CROSS
16. WEST
For a few moments, Ray Garver felt his legs working.
He sat abruptly up in bed, feeling below his knees for what had been there in his head a moment before. He had been dreaming daylight, sun blasting slats of white light against the walls of his California home. He had jumped out of bed and shouted and thrown on his clothes and run out the front door to the lawn. The men were there doing the lawn, manicuring it to a green crew-cut, the way he insisted. He shouted to them to stop their work and come with him. They looked at him, puzzled, then dropped their tools and followed.
He ran to the garage, and there, behind the specially equipped Dodge Caravan with handicap plates that he never used, was an old tarp-covered wooden box. He pulled the tarp off the box and began to rummage through it, shouting like a boy on his first day of summer vacation.
There were old baseball bats in the box, some of them cracked from special hits. There were three or four footballs, some of them scuffed, all of them flat, various baseballs, and Spalding rubber balls, handballs, and Wiffle balls. He pulled them all out. There were three baseball gloves, stiff from disuse, craving oil, or, better yet, the Little Leaguer's cure: the glove closed over a hardball in the pocket and wrapped tight in rubber bands, then set in a bucket of water overnight. There was a yellow Wiffle ball bat with electrical tape wrapped around the handle right down to the scraped nub.
He found his basketball.
It was as flat as the football. He dug farther down into the box and came up, shouting, “Eureka!” brandishing a hand pump. It was a short-lived “Eureka!” since, naturally, there was no air needle screwed into the end.
After a moment of despair, he cried, “I know where it is!” and jumped up to feel around on the shelf above the wooden box. There was old fishing tackle up there, STP gas treatment, a small can of 3-In-One oil that had never been opened, a tube of Plastic Wood, a tube of Duco Cement still in its box.
He moved his fingers, careful as a surgeon, around the boxed tube of Duco. There, behind it, was the needle. “Yes!” He brought it down in his fingers and screwed it onto the end of the pump. He inserted the needle into the basket-ball and began to inflate it.
The gardeners watched all of this curiously from the edge of the garage door.
When the basketball was hard and tight, Ray pulled the pin from it and laid the pump back in the wooden box. “All right!” he shouted. He ran past the startled gardeners, cradling the ball, around the side of the garage to a flat, long, wide square of blacktop with a pole mounted on one side. An orange and white backboard was mounted on the pole, an orange rim mounted on the backboard, a white net hanging from that.
“Basketball!” Ray shouted, and the gardeners smiled and caught on, and took an early lunch.
He played; he was good. He was as good as he had been in high school, when he had played forward for two years before dropping the sport in senior year to concentrate on getting into college. He was better. The gardeners were good, and they formed two teams, and he played his heart and legs out, and then suddenly he realized, realized, that he really did have legs and bent down to touch them and sat up in bed.
A dreaming lie. His legs were gone and always would be. It wasn't even daytime; moonlight bled through the shuttered window at the end of his bed. He was not home in California, but in a small, bare bedroom in a nightmare house in New York. Suddenly, he wanted cocaine very badly.
He threw the covers off and lifted himself to the edge of the mattress. He found the wheelchair there and dropped himself into it, grasping the sides, wincing as always because he always hit the edge just a little off, banging his left side. He rolled the wheelchair purposefully to the dresser and pulled open the middle drawer. He reached in for the bag of powder.
It wasn't there.
He hitched his breath. He searched more carefully with his hand. He did not find it. He rolled to the light switch and flipped it up; the bulb behind a sallow lampshade behind him, on a bedside table, went on.
He went back to the drawer and searched.
The bag was not there. He had placed it in the drawer himself this afternoon, after his last hit. Now it was gone. Oh, God, he thought, what am I. going to do?
The dresser was a dark, enamel-painted monstrosity from the early 1900s, with big claw feet. He pulled all the drawers out, shaking his meager belongings from them. He put his head close to the openings, and looked for where the bag might have falle
n.
It was not there.
“Jesus bloody God!” he shouted.
His body was demanding cocaine.
He sobbed, whacking at the place where his legs had been in the dream.
Cold sweat broke out on his forehead. He locked his eyes shut. He didn't want to look at anything in this room. He wanted to go back to that basketball game for a little while. The coke would do that for him. It would do anything he wanted, grow his legs back and let him play real basketball for a little while, let him think about destroying Bridget, if that's what he wanted.
He anchored his torso on the wheelchair, took the edge of the dresser in both hands and yanked it out from the wall.
His wheelchair rolled forward, into the dresser, and the dresser only moved a little out from the wall. He cursed and braced himself, then stopped to lock the wheels of the wheelchair and yanked again.
The dresser groaned, pulled out an inch or two.
He pulled again and again, until it was out six inches from the wall.
He unlocked the wheels and rolled to the wall, pressing his head against it to look along the back of the dresser. There was nothing there.
“WHERE DID YOU HIDE IT?” he shouted, his head still pressed against the wall. “WHERE THE FUCK DID YOU HIDE IT?”
He heard the far-off echoing sound of laughter, the faint whisper of her voice calling his name.
“Ray . . .”
“WHERE?” he screamed, launching himself from the wall, pulling the dresser over with a crash on top of its drawers.
He rolled around the fallen dresser to the closet door. It had an old, oval hollow metal knob, greened with age. He twisted it, opening the door.
The closet was shallow in depth, dusty shelf paper curled on the empty top shelf, an old pair of man's wingtips butted against the back. There was nothing else. The floorboards were painted dull red.
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