by G. H. Ephron
“You want me to finish the tests another time?” I asked, though I didn’t especially want to have to come back to this house, the atmosphere thick with Nick’s barely controlled paranoia and echoes of Lisa Babikian’s violent death.
“Just give me a couple of minutes.” He put his head in his hands. “I’ll be okay.”
“Take your time,” I told him, though I knew it was wasted effort to stay. Even if we finished, the results would be pretty empty with the flow interrupted and Nick as distracted as he was. Coming back wasn’t a great option, either—he’d already seen most of the inkblots.
Nick sat there motionless, his fingers making tracks through his hair as he pressed his forehead deeper into his hands.
“I’ll go outside,” I told him. Maybe a walk would freshen my mood. I was surprised when he didn’t object. Then I reminded myself: He probably had cameras out there watching me.
I went through the atrium doors to the back. In a little building to one side of the pool, a compressor pulsed and hummed. I crouched at the water’s edge, near the spot where Lisa Babikian’s body had floated, bumping up against the edge of the pool. I wondered if the pool had been drained and scrubbed down since then.
The garden around the pool was landscaped with little pathways through the bushes. Mrs. Babikian emerged from one of the paths. She was holding a spray of lilacs in one hand, the blossoms already drooping off the woody stems. She came toward me, holding out the flowers.
“Lilac,” I said. “So fragrant.”
She handed me the flowers. I took them, feeling her cool, hard fingers.
She put her hand heavily on my shoulder and lowered herself. She let her knees collapse until she was kneeling alongside the pool. I put my arm around her, afraid she might tip over into the water. But she seemed quite stable as she reached out, dipped her hands in the water, and drank from cupped hands.
When she looked back at me, her face was wet with tears. “She had to drink. What else could she do?” she said.
I remembered the heartbreaking story Mrs. Babikian had recited, of her mother’s forced march with the Turkish army, and how, parched with thirst, they’d drunk from the river that ran red with the blood of relatives and neighbors. Now Mrs. Babikian drank from the pool that had gone red with her daughter-in-law’s blood.
“Of course,” I said. “What else could she do?”
Mrs. Babikian’s eyes were focused on the air, somewhere above the water. “My mother hardly remembered her uncle, except for the way the Turks killed him. They burned his home, and he and his neighbors fled to the caves.” The story was told in a singsong. “The Turks followed. Stacked wood in the mouth of the cave. Lit a fire. And waited. When someone came out of the cave, they shot him. Inside, my great-uncle and his wife, their five-year-old son and a baby, were asphyxiated. They were never buried.”
Nick’s grandmother had immersed both Nick and Nick’s mother in her horrifying memories. In Nick, they’d found new life in his computer games. It was a way to make himself feel as if he had some control over the violence that had been visited upon his family. Now the images came back to Mrs. Babikian as forcefully as her own memories of waiting for Nicky to come home from school.
“They had to hide. They thought it was the only way to survive,” Mrs. Babikian whispered. “My mother saw a place. This was a place where many skulls were piled very high. Not bodies. Just skulls.”
Mrs. Babikian pushed herself up, leaving wet handprints on the concrete apron at the pool’s edge. She drifted off through the garden. I followed, not knowing if it was safe to leave her alone. The everyday world was a dangerous place for an Alzheimer’s sufferer. I’d seen patients eat flowers brought to them by caring family members, and a garden was full of poisonous plants. Even in a confined space, it was easy to become confused and lost.
She walked around to the back of the house, humming to herself. Here, the ground sloped away, and there was a door standing open to the basement. I followed her inside.
First we passed through a corridor. Midway along it, a door was ajar. Through the opening I could see what looked like an office—file cabinets, bookcases.
We emerged through a door at the end of the corridor into a large space. The room had black and white checkerboard tile flooring, white walls, dropped ceiling with recessed fluorescent lighting. It had no basement smell of damp or mildew. I realized why, at first, the police hadn’t found Babikian’s workroom. Closed, I’d have assumed that the door we’d just passed through led to the outside, not to a corridor and an office.
I followed Mrs. Babikian up the stairs. “Nicky?” she called when she emerged into the kitchen.
“Can I get you a drink?” I asked her.
She jumped at the sound of my voice.
“Juice?” I asked.
She nodded. I found a cup, opened the refrigerator. There was a bottle of apple juice. I opened it and poured. I followed Mrs. Babikian to the back of the house. Her room was large and sunny, and it overlooked the pool and garden. She sank into a wing chair opposite the TV and I handed her the cup. She drank, set the cup down on the table, turned on the TV, and began to watch a rerun of I Love Lucy, her eyes blinking and then glazing over.
I returned to the family room, hoping Nick had collected himself and was ready to finish up. He wasn’t there.
“Nick!” I called out.
I waited. There was no answer. It was annoying that he’d just vanish like that, leaving me to cool my heels.
I went into the living room. The masks on the walls stared impassively back at me. There seemed to be an empty spot between one mask that laughed and another that howled with rage. I wondered if the one Lisa Babikian had been wearing when they’d pulled her from the pool had hung there. And which ones were hiding miniature cameras? I approached the leering, red devil mask. Had Nick really turned the cameras off, or was he in his basement workroom now, keeping tabs on me, taking his good sweet time to reappear?
I headed back down to the basement. I passed through the door and into the short corridor. I knocked on the door. No response. I pushed it open. Nick was sitting at his desk, staring intently at a row of computer monitors on a shelf above eye level. Sure enough, one of them showed his living room, empty now. Another watched over the front of Nick’s house. Every five seconds or so, the images updated. A third monitor was blank. On a fourth was the back of the house, the pool and garden. He’d probably been watching me outside with his mother.
But he wasn’t watching that monitor now. He was watching the last one, another mask’s-eye view of his living room. These images must have been captured earlier, because he was running them fast-forward, figures streaking past, the living room going from light, to dark, to light again. It reminded me of the time-lapse photography you see in nature programs where a seed sprouts, flowers, and dies in a matter of seconds. Only in Nick’s living room, though day and night passed, people moved through, sat, and vacuumed, nothing changed.
Nick paused and watched Lisa sitting on the living room couch. She was reading a magazine. Her paleness was lost in a baggy gray sweatshirt and sweatpants. Her long blond hair was pulled back at the nape of her neck.
Jerkily, the image advanced as the time-lapse camera took a picture, then another. If the images were snapped every five seconds or so, she must have sat there reading her book for thirty minutes. Then she vanished.
Nick pushed the video into fast-forward, then slowed it again. Now, two figures were standing in the living room. Jeff Gratzenberg was talking to Lisa. He had a white sweater over his arm, in the next flash she had it. The image was too fuzzy to make out facial expressions. There was a quick embrace. A few more frames of conversation. Then the room was empty. Nick replayed it.
“Nick,” I said.
He whipped around. “What the hell are you doing down here?”
“Looking for you,” I said. “Remember, we were going to finish the test?”
Already his eyes were drifting back to the TV mo
nitor, as if drawn by a magnetic pull. “Just give me a couple of minutes, would ya?” He shifted the video into fast-forward. “Hang on.”
Nick fast-forwarded through more days, pausing here and there, then pushing on. Only Lisa, Mrs. Babikian, and Nick made appearances.
Finally, he pushed a button and the computer’s CD drive slid open. He lifted the CD from the drive, slipped it into a plastic case. Then he rolled over to a wide metal cabinet that had a stereo system and speakers on top of it. He pulled open one of three narrow drawers. It held six rows of CDs, lined up front to back.
I wondered if the police had checked the surveillance data on the CDs in this cabinet. Or had they overlooked it, thinking all the CDs were music?
He found a spot in the drawer and slipped the CD in. Then he lifted out the one behind it. He hesitated, staring at it. Instead of opening the case, he set it on top of the storage cabinet. Then, with a few clicks, Nick shut down the program.
How many places in the house could Nick watch from this hideaway? Could he flip the channels and see his bedroom, then check out the goings-on in the kitchen? Could he spy on his employees from here?
“Impressive setup,” I said.
“Pretty simple. Cameras collect the images, transmit them here.”
“And you back it up on CD?”
I didn’t hear Nick’s answer because just then, my beeper went off. I unhooked it from my belt. I stared at the readout. At first I didn’t recognize the number. Then I remembered—the security company. Saturday, middle of the day. A time I’d least expected a break-in.
Nick pushed a phone over to me. I set down the beeper and dialed. A woman from Argus Security picked up right away. She told me an alarm had gone off at home. They’d already called the police.
I hung up. I wanted to call my mother to be sure she was okay, but I didn’t want to waste any time getting home. At least there wouldn’t be much traffic. I could call her from the car once I got on the highway.
“You going to finish the test?” Nick asked.
“I’ve got to go. Someone’s breaking into my garage.”
Nick smiled. I didn’t have time to think what the hell that was about. I raced up the stairs, detoured to the family room and threw the remaining test materials and pencils into my briefcase, and hurried out. I ran out to the rental car, got in, and started it. There was a beeping. Instinctively, I reached for my beeper. It wasn’t hanging on my belt. I stared at the dash. A red icon was blinking at me—the beep was reminding me to fasten my seat belt.
Shit. For about two seconds, I considered taking off without my beeper. But I couldn’t leave the staff on the unit and my patients without emergency support. Cursing, I got out of the car and ran back to the house.
The front door was locked. I rang the bell and banged on the door. I waited. Rang and banged some more. Where the hell was he? And why the hell couldn’t he see me on one of his computer monitors? The garage was still open. I went inside. The door to the house was unlocked.
I hurried in and down to the basement. The door to Nick’s office was open. He was still at his desk, staring up at one of the computer monitors. At first, all I could see was a dark blur, a figure moving in a closed space that was nearly filled with a large object. A car. Then I realized what it was—the interior of my garage.
“What the hell are you doing?” I said, exploding.
Nick whipped around. He glanced up at the computer monitor. Then back at me. “Hey, take it easy. It’s not what it looks like.”
“I don’t have time for this shit,” I said. I reached for the cables that were snaking off the shelf and yanked, intending to pull the plugs. The monitors rocked forward.
“Stop!” Nick bellowed. He leaped up on the desk and held them in place. “You asshole! I haven’t been watching you.”
“Like hell you haven’t.”
“Well, just now, yeah. You said Argus got the alarm. I wanted to see …”
Could he have tuned in to any of the images beamed from any of the cameras that Argus monitored? The ones at my house? The ones at my mother’s? In trying to secure my boundaries, I’d made them more permeable. The thought left me feeling cold and exposed.
“It’s like cell phones,” he went on, climbing down from the desk. “Or shortwave. Or radio, even.”
I checked the monitor again. The guy in my garage was moving around. He raised something like a large mallet and brought it down. I cringed. There went my windshield. As he brought the weapon up again, a rectangle of gray light appeared behind him—it must have been someone opening the back door to the garage. Was it the police already? Didn’t look like a cop. The shadow in the opening was a small figure.
“Oh, shit,” I said under my breath. It looked like my mother. And she had what looked like a baseball bat over her shoulder.
I grabbed my beeper from Nick’s desk. I had to get out of there. I wheeled around and charged into the hall. Nick followed me up the basement stairs, protesting. “You just have to know how to pick up the signal.” Now I was in the kitchen, Nick still on my heels. “Why would I be spying on you? You have to believe me.”
I didn’t respond. We were in the laundry room when he grabbed my shoulder. I stopped, looked down. “Take your fucking hand off me. I don’t have to do a goddamned thing.” I flung his hand away, knocking over some laundry that had been stacked on the dryer. Nick lunged for the pile of dark pants, socks, and T-shirts, and I almost fell over him trying to get past.
“Would you just get the hell out of my way!” I pushed him aside and left.
Driving out of Weston, I ignored the stop and yield signs. Drivers on all sides honked at me as I zigzagged around them, crossing over the double yellow line to pass. I was being the quintessential Boston driver, driving with my middle finger instead of my brain. I kept seeing my mother’s silhouette, the baseball bat wavering. My own voice screamed in my head. Go faster! Get home now!
When I got on the highway, I called Annie. I told her what had happened and that I was on my way home.
“Meet you there,” she said. “I’ll use my scanner to tune in to the police dispatcher.”
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. Was everybody in the world eavesdropping on everybody else? Maybe paranoia wasn’t a disorder—maybe it was a sensible adaptation to the realities of life.
I stayed in the far right lane on 128, pushing ninety—I hate people who do that. When one of the quarters I tossed missed the collection basket at the tolls for the Pike, I cursed and blew on through, ignoring the blaring buzzer. Fortunately, there wasn’t a cop lurking to pick off toll evaders.
It wasn’t until I was back in Cambridge that I’d calmed down enough to think about how odd Nick’s behavior had been. How he’d chased me up the stairs. Scrambled to collect the pile of laundry, like he was hiding something. Conjurers do that. They create a flurry of activity to divert your attention from the thing that’s right in front of your face. Nick was trying to keep me from noticing something. But what?
Just then, I reached my street. Annie was a few cars in front of me. I followed her. There were two cop cars, nose to nose in front of my house, and an ambulance was pulled into the driveway. A precaution, or was my mother hurt? I double-parked, leaped out of my car, and raced up the walk.
The garage doors were open. Broken glass littered the ground. A pair of paramedics were huddled around someone lying on the cement floor alongside the car. Annie was pushing her way inside.
“Stand back,” a man’s voice boomed.
Then I heard, “No, you can’t have it.” It was my mother.
The relief I felt was nearly a physical blow, throwing me momentarily off balance. Mom was in the front yard, engaged in a tug-of-war with a large policeman. “It’s a family heirloom,” she said, tugging at my old baseball bat. Her voice rang with the same authority it had had when she ordered my brother and me to stop using the living room couch as a backstop. “You most certainly cannot have it!”
“I
t’s evidence, Mrs. Zak,” he said, pulling the bat his way. “I promise, you’ll get it back.”
“You’ll forgive me if I tell you that I don’t believe you,” she informed him, holding on tight. I watched with my mouth open. “And who says I used it to knock anyone out?”
“Well, the guy in there has a helluva bump on the head. And you’re carrying around a baseball bat.”
“And he’s carrying a sledgehammer. Maybe he hit himself in the head.”
“Mrs. Zak,” the officer pleaded. Gently, he peeled her fingers from around the bat. “I promise, you’ll get it back.”
My mother saw me. She relinquished the bat. “I should live so long.”
“What happened?” I asked.
My mother started to answer and stopped. She jerked her chin at the police officer. He took the hint and disappeared into the garage.
“I heard a commotion. I went to see what was what.”
“You heard an intruder and went to confront him? With a baseball bat?”
She looked as if this was news to her. “I didn’t think. I just did.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “I guess I’m where you inherited it from.”
The paramedics were taking a large man, dressed in jeans and a black parka, out of the garage on a stretcher. He had on reddish-brown construction worker’s boots. They lifted him into the ambulance.
“I must have been nuts,” my mother admitted.
“I’m just glad you’re all right.”
“Fine, actually.” She seemed quite pleased with herself.
Annie was standing by the open ambulance doors. I went over to her. She glanced back toward the garage. “I guess someone took the bait. He’s unconscious,” Annie told me. “Blow to the head. They say he’s going to be okay.”
“Mom whacked him in the head with a baseball bat.”
Annie’s eyebrows raised. She didn’t even blink.
I wasn’t ready to look at my car yet. “Who is he?”
“No ID.”
“You sure he’s going to be okay?” I asked. I wanted the guy to recover so I’d know, definitively, that Ralston Bridges was responsible for the break-ins, for the special-delivery packages. “They’ll be able to question him?”
