by David Martin
Carl’s face turns red.
Quinndell straightens up but when he speaks now his voice is once again honey soft. “If the granddaughter does manage to evade you again, then simply bring Mr. Lyon here. I’m sure Mr. Gigli can convince him to cooperate with us.”
Carl coughs out a nervous laugh. “Yeah, good old Mr. Gigli.”
“Then when we have the two of them safely in our possession, Lyon and the granddaughter, we’ll take them to Randolph’s shack. It will be easy for people to believe that the little deviant has been killing children, that when the television star and his black helpmate got too close to the truth, Randolph murdered them too and in a suicidal rage set his own house on fire. Do you like that scenario, Carl?”
The deputy grunts an affirmative, though he has no idea what scenario means.
“Good. Because I don’t intend to leave behind any loose ends, none at all,” Quinndell says with a sense of the ominous that Carl misses completely.
Now the doctor is walking about his office, touching a vase, moving a finger along a picture frame — Carl watching, amazed.
“After bringing Mr. Lyon here, you will drive out to the hermit’s place one more time and wait for him. He has nowhere to go, he’ll eventually show up. And when he does, kill him.”
“Kill him?”
“Take one of his own guns, place the barrel under his chin, and pull the trigger.”
Carl’s underarms step up their already heavy production of sweat.
“Do you understand?”
“I ain’t never killed anyone.”
“You’ve assisted me and Mr. Gigli often enough.”
“But I never did it on my own, that’s different.”
“Suddenly everyone around me is revealing his principles.”
“Ain’t that, Doc, it’s just —”
“Do you have any idea what they’re going to do to a fat boy like you in prison?”
“Prison?”
“God, I hate your whining voice.” Quinndell steps behind the deputy’s chair and places a hand at the back of his neck. “You’re clammy.” Quinndell takes out the handkerchief and meticulously wipes his hands dry. “You wouldn’t try to run away from me the way our sheriff has apparently done, would you, Carl?”
“Not me, Doc.”
“Because believe me, Carl, my bite is worse than any of those dogs out at the hermit’s place.”
Carl struggles to rise from the chair. He doesn’t like the doctor standing behind him, gives Carl the willies.
“Kill the hermit for me,” Quinndell announces, “I’ll pay you the princely sum of twenty-five thousand dollars.”
“No shit?”
The doctor returns to his desk. “You’ll get your payment this evening.”
Carl is considering it.
“Give me your answer now.”
“If you wanted to, Doc, you could throw something in to sweeten the pot.”
“I’m listening.”
“You know, what you said before, about me and Mary.”
The doctor smiles his yellow smile. “Faint heart never won fair hand, Carl.”
“Huh?”
“You keep failing in your tasks, that’s why you haven’t sampled Mary’s favors yet.”
“But I mean if I do it, if I bring Lyon back here and then go out and do Randolph, then …”
“Then what?”
“Then could me and Mary …”
“Yes?”
“You know.”
“Say it.”
“Then could me and Mary … make love?”
Quinndell laughs. “Make love?” The doctor is laughing harder now, genuinely amused. “Oh, Carl, by all means, by all means.”
After the deputy leaves, Quinndell spends the next hour on the telephone. Making airplane reservations. Calling the local bank president at home and arranging for certain funds to be transferred first thing in the morning. Telephoning foreign countries. During his final call he gives elaborate directions to a man who has worked for Quinndell before, telling the man that once he gets within a mile or so of the hermit’s shack he’ll have no trouble finding it, flames will light his way.
Then Quinndell sits at his desk for a long time, going over in precise detail what has to be done. Finally he presses the button to summon Mary.
The doctor is bending over getting something from the safe, his back to the double doors, when Mary enters the office, one of the doors slipping from her grasp and knocking back against the wall, so startling Quinndell that he turns too quickly, hitting an elbow on the edge of his desk and dropping the envelope he had in his hand.
“Don’t you EVER sneak up on me.”
“I’m sorry, I thought —”
“That’s your first mistake, thinking.”
She begins chewing on her lips. “I thought … I assumed you heard me coming.”
“No, I usually smell you coming. I mean, you really should do something about the odor. A woman in your line of work? I would have thought you’d have learned by now how to keep it clean.”
Mary’s insides knot up.
Once he has picked up the envelope, Quinndell orders Mary to take a seat.
But she remains standing. “I saw Carl leaving earlier. If this is about me going to bed with him, I told you before, I’m not letting that man touch me.”
“Pity. Carl so has his heart set on making love to you. And the truth of the matter is that you would have sexual congress with an orangutan if the money was right, isn’t that correct?”
“No.”
He laughs. “Speaking of money.” Holding out the envelope. “Go on, open it.”
She does, finding inside a transfer of funds that Quinndell has signed, authorizing Mary to withdraw in her name a sum of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars from the local bank.
“I’m sorry it’s not a cashier’s check, no time for that now, there’s been a change of plans. I’m not going to make you wait until your one year anniversary with me, I’m paying off my debt to you tonight.”
She doesn’t know if she should allow herself to believe it. The bank transfer, which Mary keeps staring at, seems authentic.
“Mary?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you have anything to say?”
She isn’t sure if she should press her luck.
“Mary?”
“What about the other envelope, the one with her address, the pictures of her on her birthdays.”
“Of course. I haven’t forgotten that. She’s more important to you than the money, isn’t she?”
“Yes!” Mary gushes.
“You’ll be reunited with your daughter as soon as you complete one last task for me.”
She feels giddy.
“You will complete one final task for me, won’t you?”
“Yes!”
“Don’t even want to know what it is?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You’re right, dear. At this late stage, nothing matters except freedom. My freedom from persistent enemies, your freedom from me.” Quinndell is speaking to her in a voice of surprising kindness. “And oddly enough, Mary, I do think I’m going to miss you.”
She responds quickly, without thinking. “I’ll miss you too.”
Quinndell puts his head back, opens his mouth, and moves his shoulders up and down in that obscene parody of his, laughter without sound.
CHAPTER 30
Not without reason are these headaches called blinding. Lyon rides all the way back to the cabin with his face turned to the passenger door, his back turtle-humped toward Claire, his eyes tightly closed, both hands over his face — like a man who’s been shot inconclusively in the head. If he were given a red button that would end his life, ceasing pain, Lyon would press it gladly. And he can’t stop this goddamn crying either, though by now the sobbing has turned to a muffled and shamed weeping. Lyon keeps wanting to apologize to Claire.
She meanwhile says nothing, shaken not only by Lyon
’s condition but also by what happened at the house, so deeply ashamed of herself that she wishes she could be the one slumped in the seat with her eyes closed and her face hidden.
When they finally reach the cabin, she sits with Lyon for a long time in the car, wanting to say the right thing but unable to find the words, wanting to touch him but unable to find the opportunity to do that either.
Lyon finally takes one hand away from his face. Getting the door open, he manages to put his right foot out and then the left but can’t straighten up, so heavy is that engine of pain housed in his skull, Lyon walking bent over to the cabin, reaching out for a porch column, supporting himself there. At least he’s stopped weeping. And now instead of wanting to apologize to Claire, he’d like to crucify her.
Claire comes behind him and puts a hand on his shoulder, but when Lyon looks up at her from that hunchbacked position, his expression is so bitter that Claire has no choice but to withdraw. “I’m sorry,” she whispers.
He staggers into the cabin and through the living room, into the bedroom, opening a suitcase and finding a bottle of aspirin in his shaving kit, lurching into the bathroom where he takes four of the tablets, each washed down with a handful of water, standing there bracing himself against the sink, head down, eyes closed, the rag-knotted pain exquisite within his skull.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers from the bedroom doorway.
Ignoring her, he tries lying on the bed with a damp washcloth across his eyes but the skylight makes the room too bright, Lyon sweating and hurting and remembering back to the night he arrived here, a lifetime ago when he first entered this cabin and couldn’t get the lights to work, stumbling over that crate-coffin in the middle of the kitchen, kneeling on the floor next to it, opening the lid — and now, lying in bed recalling the scene, he remembers the warning he wanted to shout, Don’t do it, don’t open it — but now it is too late for warnings, Claire is out of her crate and Lyon’s head hurts too much for shouting.
Sometime later he rises from the horizontal at great cost, sick to his stomach as he lamely closes one suitcase and picks it up along with the other one, carrying them both into the living room and past Claire, who is sitting in a big easy chair looking stunned.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
He continues on out of the room, leaving her in that oversized chair, all balled up and watching his exit with the eyes of a frightened animal — prey, not predator, not now, not the way she was last night when she had eyes and teeth to terrify him.
The pain has hardened him, he says nothing more to her and does not wait by the car for Claire to join him.
Back in the living room she whispers, “I’m sorry.”
Lyon drives the mountain road, each pothole and rut ratcheting the head pain a notch or two tighter, unable to think things through — whether he should spend the night at some motel rather than trying to drive in his current state, whether he should have told Claire he intended to ask her to marry him but not now, not after she pulled that obscene prank with those two blind women, or whether saying such things would be too petty, whether he wasn’t somehow nobler leaving her without saying anything — or whether he should turn around right here and go back to get her.
A few miles from the cabin he brakes the car to a stop. Lyon hurts too much to keep driving. He lies down across the front seat, curling into a fetal ball. He feels like Job, his soul weary of his life.
By the time Lyon awakens, night is just arriving in the hollow and he knows what he must do, go back and get Claire, taking her by the wrists if that becomes necessary — just drag her into the car and force her to come home with him.
He turns around, driving slowly and with his lights off, trying to do nothing that might disturb the iron bolt of pain still lodged in his head.
The cabin is dark.
As soon as Lyon steps through the front doorway he looks into the kitchen wondering if the coffin-box will be there — it isn’t. Neither is Claire. Lyon doesn’t call out for her, however, or turn on any of the lights, his migraine more manageable in the darkness, quietly checking the living room, the bedroom, and then the bathroom. She’s gone.
Then, still standing in the bathroom, he hears a faint tinkling of bells, then someone crying, someone speaking softly and crying at the same time, the sound eerie because it doesn’t seem to be coming from a single source, instead the entire cabin has seemingly been wired with that soft weeping, that whispering voice, Lyon thinking, she’s done it again, Claire has found another brand-new way to terrify me.
But just as he is about to leave the bathroom he notices a narrow slit of light in the corner of the ceiling. Lyon steps up on the edge of the tub, getting right under that faint line of light and seeing that it comes from one side of a trapdoor that has been so ingeniously fitted into the pattern of the ceiling that it would remain unnoticeable if not for that faint light in the attic.
Moving stealthily — and as yet unaware that the excitement of this discovery is rather magically eliminating his head pain — Lyon spreads his fingers on the trapdoor and quietly pushes up one side, just a few inches, enough to see what’s in that crawl space which runs above the entire cabin.
Claire is naked except for a blue cord around her waist and a blue ribbon, hung with bells, around one ankle. She is sitting on a large suitcase balanced across three floor joists, leaning forward working on something, whispering and crying at the same time. She has placed candles on floor joists all around her, their flickering yellow light making Claire appear more apparition than real.
Although her crying is soft, containing none of the hoarse sobs and body wracks that have afflicted Lyon, hers seems the more wretched.
He sees her in profile, wondering what she is working on up there. Over in the shadows behind Claire is the coffin-crate, Lyon trying to imagine the effort it must have taken Claire to haul that heavy crate up through the trapdoor and into the attic. No wonder her forearms were scratched.
There is probably another trapdoor over the kitchen or back room, giving Claire access to all parts of the cabin.
He finally makes out what she’s whispering. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
She’s up here crying, Lyon thinks, because she’s convinced I’ve left her. She’s sorry for making me angry, for losing me. And his heart is breaking because no one has ever cried for him like this, not to his knowledge, never.
But then Claire raises up and he sees what she’s been working on: a foot-tall plaster statue of the Virgin Mary. Except Claire has carefully chipped out Baby Jesus from the larger statue, leaving the Virgin’s arms empty.
Claire cradles the three-inch plaster Jesus in one hand, holding Him to an upright post and gently wrapping colored string around Baby Jesus to keep Him against that post, tying Him there. She arranges the empty-armed Virgin Mary on a floor joist eighteen inches away, the Virgin facing her Baby but unable to hold Him — Claire crying and constantly apologizing for what she’s doing.
Rattled, Lyon eases the trapdoor shut and steps off the bathtub.
What the hell is she doing? Holding Baby Jesus hostage? And threatening the Virgin: You get your Baby back when I get what I want. Good God, what else is she capable of?
Only just now appreciating that his head has stopped hurting, Lyon creeps out of the bedroom, through the living room, and into the kitchen. He wonders if she’ll hear him run some water, needing a drink, needing to wash his face. He is just reaching for the tap when he notices something in the sink, jerking his hand back and immediately retreating a step. Something black, an animal, rat.
He steps again to the sink, carefully up on tiptoes, to peek in. Not a rat, it’s a wax figure of a man lying there in the sink.
In a kitchen drawer Lyon finds a box of matches. He strikes one and holds it over the sink. A photograph of his face has been cut out of a newspaper, a photograph taken from a television monitor, one of those news photos that appeared in Monday editions following his Sunday afternoon on-camera weeping.
This cutout face, barely an inch across, has been affixed to the wax figure.
Lyon nervously strikes another match to search the figure carefully for wounds. It seems to be intact but on the cutting board next to the sink are items — a variety of needles with colored thread through their eyes, for example — that turn Lyon ice-cold inside.
He’s outside by the rental car now, reaching in the window and sounding the horn, hitting it repeatedly and calling for Claire.
In a few minutes lights come on, then Claire steps out the front door. She’s wearing the white dress she had on before, Claire barefoot and waving to Lyon, then running to him.
“I knew you’d come back,” she says.
They’re embracing.
“Let’s go.”
She is suspicious. Does he still want her to return to New York with him? “Go where, John?”
Lyon thinks carefully about his answer. He sees Baby Jesus tied to a post, he sees that wax figure in the sink, and he hears again Claire’s soft and wretched weeping. Then he answers. “Dig up that grave.”
Claire is nodding. But before she gets into the car she tells Lyon she’s forgotten something. “You wait here.”
When she’s halfway to the cabin, he calls, “What’re you going to do?”
“Put on some shoes,” she tells him without turning around.
Yes, he thinks, but you’re also going to untie Jesus and put Him back in His Mother’s arms.
CHAPTER 31
During his first year on this isolated property, Randolph Welby nearly starved to death. He knew nothing about living off the land and after running through a supply of store-bought food the lawyer had helped him assemble, Randolph was reduced to wandering the forest, eating berries and roots he selected on a random, uninformed basis, some of it making him ill, the little man frequently hallucinating either from near-starvation or from the plants he was eating or both. He became adept at catching field mice with his hands. No wonder people thought he was mystical, an occasional hunter spotting Randolph in the woods, the old gnome wearing rags and pulling up roots or scurrying through the undergrowth, occasionally pouncing like a fox, this hollow-eyed man speaking to creatures no one else could see, calling for Mother and owl eaters.
