“I don’t know, buddy. We’ll see.”
“Why we’ll see?”
“I don’t know if he has trains. He might. Carl is a little older than you. He might have other cool toys. He might have trains…I think this is the place, buddy.”
Laurie invited Desmond in for a cup of coffee and a look around. “I trust you completely,” he said, trying to brush it off and get back in the car. It was obvious that the house was well kept. It sure was nicer than their apartment. The manicured lawn, polished floors, and antique furnishings reminded him of their old neighborhood and awakened an unexpected dissonance in him that made him anxious.
“You do,” she said, “but Lucas has never been here before. He doesn’t know me. Just come in for a few minutes while he gets comfortable.”
Desmond settled on the couch and waited as she got the coffee. Lucas scanned the room with wide eyes but stayed close to his father’s knee. Laurie called up the stairs for Carl, who came down with a gadget in his hand. In a whisper, Lucas asked Desmond what it was. “I don’t know. Go ask him.”
And that was all it took to break the ice. Carl started asking Lucas what characters he liked and then pulled them up on his handheld video screen. Lucas followed Carl upstairs without so much as a backward glance. Laurie handed Desmond a mug and sat down beside him. “Well, that was easy,” she said. “Carl likes younger kids.”
“Yeah. It’s nice to see Lucas with another boy. Thanks again for watching him.”
“Happy to. And don’t worry; I’ll get them out in the yard too. It’s too nice of a day to stay in and watch videos.”
“You aren’t planning on taking them anywhere…out and about, right?”
“No. Why?”
“Desmond sighed. “I’ve just become a little overprotective around playgrounds, that’s all.”
“That’s understandable.”
He realized that she would think it was because of what had happened to Sandy, and in a way it was, but she had no idea.
Laurie took a sip, set her mug down on a coaster, and said, “So…read any good books lately? Write any?”
Desmond smiled and felt gossamer webs that had been constricting his breathing let go and float away. She wasn’t going to ask him about the hard stuff. She knew better, and he felt a disproportionate gratitude welling up in response to this small kindness, this omission that he knew had nothing to do with her own level of comfort or skill when it came to heavier conversation. “Well, I’m always reading, it’s a great escape. And we should definitely talk books sometime, but speaking of escape, I should really get going while he’s distracted. I don’t know exactly how long this errand will take.”
“No worries, take your time. He can stay for dinner. In fact, why don’t we plan it? Does Lucas like macaroni and cheese?”
“Loves it.”
* * *
Desmond switched the car radio to a news station just because he could. When there was no weather report, he poked around and settled on a hard-rock station. He drove north toward the box stores by the highway. Bob, his landlord, had agreed to let him replace the locks, but Desmond had to do the installation himself and pay for the hardware if he wanted the expensive stuff. Desmond had protested that the place wasn’t safe; there had been a break-in. But when pressed about what was stolen he had backed down, admitting that nothing was missing. He didn’t want to tell Bob about the haiku.
“So nothing was stolen, but you reported a break-in to the police? I’m gonna see my address in the police log of The Tribune?”
“No. But the door was open, Bob, and I know it wasn’t me or Lucas who left it that way.”
“You’ve been through a lot. I’ll pay for the upgrade, okay? But you’re still doing the installation. Are you handy?”
Desmond lied: “You bet.”
There was a hardware store not too far from his first stop.
The Blue Fort was a complex of windowless buildings with powder-blue roll-down garage doors and heavy-duty locks, surrounded by a tall chainlink fence, with no barbed wire but plenty of video cameras. Sheds could only be accessed during business hours, and a small office guarded the entrance. Desmond had moved most of the family’s possessions into one of the sheds after Sandy’s death when he sold the house. He knew he should have had a yard sale before packing everything up and putting it in storage, but he just didn’t have the emotional grit to sift through all of Sandy’s things and everything they’d acquired as a couple and then leave half of it out on the street for strangers to pick over. Even if he’d been able, he sure as hell couldn’t put Lucas through that. And what if the wrong kind of people were interested? Was there a market for a murder victim’s personal effects on the net? The thought had chilled him.
He liked the anonymity of the Blue Fort. Whenever he drove past it, he couldn’t help glancing at the rows of sheds and thinking that one of those plain utilitarian garages was the most haunted place in town. It helped that he could never pick out exactly which unit was his; that made it easier to drive by. Lately, however, he’d been thinking about an object that was tucked away in there with all of the furniture, photos, and bric-a-brac. One item that, as Lucas’s workbooks would say, was not like the others. Over the past twenty-four hours Desmond had been ruminating on how terribly easy it would be for a determined person, a person with some skill, a person who wasn’t just taking a chance on robbing any old storage shed, but who knew what he was looking for with bolt cutters and a flashlight…how easy it would be for someone like that to break into his shed and leave no trace but some damaged video cameras. After all, he was paying a fair rate for storage space but not for maximum security.
Desmond pulled up to the office, thumbed the driver’s side window button, and presented his card. An employee scanned it, handed it back, and opened the gate for him to drive through. “Remind me where this one is?” Desmond asked. “It’s been a while.”
“They’re numbered,” the guy in the powder-blue polo shirt said, like he was talking to an imbecile. When Desmond didn’t take his foot off the brake, he said, “Third row back.”
With his SUV parked in front of the unit to provide some small measure of privacy, Desmond opened the padlock and rolled up the blue door. Sunlight flooded the contents of the shed like a time-lapse film of dawn breaking on a landscape. Couches, chairs, and stacks of boxes and bins were all covered with bed sheets, adding to the brief illusion of a snowy mountain range. Desmond had told Lucas that the sheets were for keeping dust off of everything, but they were really a precaution for this day—the day when he would have a reason to come back.
He stood frozen in the doorframe, surveying the threatening shapes and shadows. He needed to remember to tread carefully. There were a few bins here that would mess him up good if he chanced upon them. Sandy’s clothes would be the worst; those should have gone to Goodwill. What was he ever going to do with them but torture himself? Then there was her camera equipment: a digital SLR, some lenses and tripods, bags and filters. She had been in love with the hobby and scarcely ever went anywhere without a bag stuffed full of gear. In retrospect this provided the small mercy and sad omission that there weren’t many photos with her in them left behind. Desmond hated himself for not stepping up and making an effort to take pictures of her while she was alive. He could have asked her for a lesson, could have at least tried to get a decent shot occasionally, a shot with her and Lucas. But he had always figured that was her thing. He didn’t need to document their life because he knew that she always would. And now, with her gone, the document she had left behind was one that she was mostly absent from.
So there were few images of Sandy in this room amid the shells of their former life, but oh so many framed images of that life as seen through her eyes. In some ways it would hurt more to see what she’d seen than to see her. Desmond would need to be careful.
He walked through the minefield of sheet-draped boxes, between the couches and chairs to the corner where a folded stepladder rested a
gainst the armoire they had kept the TV in. Perched atop the armoire was a black footlocker with chrome corners and latches and another padlock. It had been hard to get it up there and it would be hard to get it down. Desmond looked back at the square of bright sunlight behind him framing his car. The motor aisle beyond was empty, just a row of blue garage doors, all of them shut tight.
He climbed the ladder, took the chest by the wide leather straps on the sides, and tried to lift it, but at this height, where he couldn’t get any leverage, it was too heavy. He stepped onto the precarious top step and dialed the combination on the padlock: his wedding anniversary. The latch popped. He put the lock in his back pocket and raised the lid.
Inside, a World War II Japanese infantry sword lay atop several stacks of hardcover first-edition books, a few shoeboxes of manuscript pages, and a portable hard drive. Things he’d wanted to keep above the damp concrete floor. Things he wanted to keep under a second lock and key.
Desmond took his wife’s murder weapon out of the chest, holding it hilt-up to ensure that it didn’t slide out of the metal scabbard. He stepped carefully to the floor and set the sword on the sheet-draped couch. Then he climbed back up the stepladder, took one wistful look at the treasure trove of novels past, closed the lid, and replaced the lock.
The sun moved across the floor while he sat on the couch with the sword in his lap. To a passerby, he could have been a statue. When he was ready, as ready as he would ever be, he pressed the wire latch that secured the handguard to the scabbard, and taking the hilt in his right hand, withdrew about six inches of steel.
The base of the blade was stamped with a number. He had done some research last year, looked at a few of these infantry swords on collectors’ web sites, and learned that if the number on the blade matched the number on the scabbard, it increased the value of the sword. In this case, they did match. He’d learned a few other things about Japanese swords, not much, but enough to know what he had here. He could remember very little of the traditional nomenclature, but he knew that unlike more expensive handmade swords, these general infantry swords had been mass produced by the Japanese military during the war. The scabbard was made of aluminum rather than carved wood, and the handle was cast from metal made to resemble the silk-wrap pattern used on a genuine katana.
The blade was also machine made, a product of the industrial revolution. It lacked the flowing, wavy line left on traditional blades by the clay temper process. There were collectors who analyzed the grain of the folded steel in antique blades, the carbon content, and the various styles of those wavy ghostlike lines that danced and played across the edge of a Japanese blade like incense smoke, or ripples on the surface of a lake. He had learned that such a line was called a hamon, and that it indicated the dividing line between hard and soft steel, a characteristic that gave a samurai sword great strength paired with a degree of flexibility. Swords forged by the ancient methods could cost tens of thousands of dollars. This one was only worth about five hundred dollars, and most of that value came from the fact that it was a war relic. Nonetheless, it had been designed with the same geometry that made the traditional swords so effective. It had been made for the same lethal purpose; it had been forged for war.
Desmond realized that he was studying the weapon that had killed his wife with the same eye for facts and details that he brought to researching books when he was avoiding the emotional commitment of writing. A defense mechanism. This object in his lap had probably killed allied soldiers in the war. Most of the history books and documentaries tended to focus on the technological advances of the war—the fighter planes, napalm, and rockets…the hydrogen bombs. But it was a lesser-known fact that more people had been killed by swords than by bombs in World War II. The Japanese hadn’t worn their swords as ceremonial uniform accessories. This was a weapon built to kill, and it had fulfilled its purpose on the body of an unarmed woman in the dewy grass of a suburban backyard in the early hours of a summer day. Desmond wondered what Arthur Parsons, Sandy’s grandfather who had been shot down over Okinawa, who had brought this sword home with him, would have thought about that.
Desmond had found her body in the murky light of a foggy predawn. His mind had rebelled against making sense of the shape, but there was no escaping the sight, or what it meant…and what it would mean for Lucas. That was the first crushing weight that landed on him—the unbearable fact that Lucas would be motherless and that Desmond would be charged with having to tell him, having to somehow make this make sense to his son. The poor kid didn’t even know the word dead yet except in relation to batteries. How could you tell a three-year-old that his mother wasn’t just gone but was never coming back?
Now, staring at six inches of burnished steel, Desmond knew that he hadn’t done a very good job of making sense for Lucas because it still made no sense to him. It was the definition of senseless violence. All he’d been able to do was to tell Lucas that Mama had a bad accident, that she didn’t want to go away, that she loved him and was still with him, would always be with him even though he couldn’t see her. But he could talk to her, he should talk to her when he wanted to, and she would hear him. It was the best Desmond could do. He never consulted a professional or a priest about whether these were the right things to say, and for once he didn’t pick up a book to find out. He just knew that he had nothing else to offer.
“I’m trying, baby,” he said to her murder weapon, “I’m trying to do the things you would do for him.” A tear landed on the gray metal and ran off the edge. “I know I fuck it up sometimes, but I’m trying.”
She had been lying in the red grass near the shed where he kept the lawnmower. She must have bled out instantly. The dog was beside her, like they were napping together on one of the hairy dog beds that they used to kick around the floors of the old house. Sandy used to pick those beds up and move them around all day to make sure Fenton always had a slice of sunlight to lie in, and sometimes she would lie on the floor with him to stroke his head. And there his head was a few feet away from his body and hers, attached by a thin strip of flesh.
Had she found the dog like that and bent down to make sure her eyes weren’t playing tricks in the foggy darkness? Had she been standing there, head bowed, comprehending the horror and drawing breath to scream when the blade came down and severed her windpipe? Desmond almost dropped the damned thing on the floor. The killer had wrapped his hands around this very handle, but left no prints. Desmond couldn’t conjure a face on the shadowy figure he saw in his mind’s eye, but now he could put a mask on him. A mad face. A face distorted into the very caricature of wrath, with fierce flaming thunderclouds for eyebrows. Maybe it was best to think of that man as a force of nature, no different than if a tornado or tsunami had swept his wife away. Equally senseless.
But there were aspects of that night that were not meaningless, God help him. There was guilt, there was failure, and there was the small betrayal that opened the door to terrible consequence.
Desmond had heard the dog whining at the door. He had opened his eyes to read the red numbers on the bedside clock: 4:36. And now he would never again be able to see those three numbers on a digital clock without a sharp pang of guilt, because he’d pretended to be asleep when she whispered his name the last time she would ever whisper it. He hadn’t wanted to get up at 4:36, not with the alarm set to wake him for work less than two hours later, because he knew he wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. But if Sandy let the dog out, she could sleep in until Lucas woke up. And so he sent the girl he’d fallen in love with in an English Lit class to her execution so he could get a little extra shuteye.
When he rolled over an hour later and found her side of the bed still empty, he was confused, even a little scared. Was she in the bathroom? He listened for a flush. He waited and listened for far too long.
She wasn’t in the bathroom. His stomach sank when she wasn’t in Lucas’s room either. He stepped into his shoes and went onto the back deck. He walked down the steps and called
her name. And then her form floated out of the murk and changed everything irrevocably.
It should have been him. He should have been the one to let the dog out. He should have been the one cut down by a psycho.
Greg Harwood.
It didn’t make sense then and it didn’t make sense now. Chuck Fournier must have known it too, or why would he still think Desmond had killed her? The crime seemed random. Sandy didn’t have an enemy in the world, but whoever had used this sword had broken into the house to take it without arousing Fenton’s attention or the barking would have woken them. The killer must have entered through the back end of the first floor where Desmond’s study was and taken the sword from the wall. But he hadn’t simply killed them all in their sleep. Instead he had gone back to the yard and waited for her. As if he knew their schedule, knew Fenton’s bladder, and knew he could count on one of them going out there alone in the wee hours if the dog didn’t come when called.
Desmond had been the prime suspect until the weapon was found in Harwood’s possession. Desmond, who had looked at the sword hanging above his desk every day. But neither Desmond nor Greg Harwood was expert in the use of a samurai sword, and someone had decapitated a woman and a dog with two clean, efficient strokes. Beginner’s luck? Desmond doubted it now more than ever. Someone was very handy with a blade.
He slid the exposed steel back into the scabbard with a shuck, then fished his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed three digits. At the prompt he told the voice recognition software what he needed: “Walpole Massachusetts. Cedar Junction Correctional.”
* * *
Chuck Fournier sat across the street from the Blue Fort in the maroon Honda Civic he had signed out of the impound lot. He’d been waiting too long and was getting antsy. His coffee was cold, and he was starting to wonder if the storage facility was just a ruse Carmichael was using because he’d spotted the tail. Was he even still in there, or had he just used his card to get into a private area where he could ditch the car and continue on foot? Maybe there was another way out of the lot during business hours. If so, Carmichael could be anywhere by now, might have even called for a taxi from his cell phone. And if he was still in there, just what was he up to? Checking on some piece of evidence they’d never found? Burning some document that gave him motive for Sandy’s murder? Nothing had ever turned up. But now, with the Parsons’ moving to take guardianship of Lucas, Desmond might be nervous, and might be covering old tracks.
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