Blind Sight (A Mallory Novel) (14 page)

Totally understandable. The little boxes were missing. The searchers were coming and—

When the mayor turned to face him, Tuck could see that the man
was
excited—but not in a
bad
way. Well, that was unsettling, but any speculation might be akin to opening a trunk full of spiders and other crawlies.

The four boxes had accumulated in the mansion while Andrew Polk had been aboard his yacht in local waters. Only a call from Cardinal Rice’s office could have ended that impromptu vacation. Otherwise—
oh, dear God
—those packages might still be wrapped and stacked on the desk upstairs—at
room temperature.
After opening the horrid little containers, refrigeration had seemed like the best idea—at least, until the return of the housekeeping staff, which was still days off. That
other delivery, the four dead bodies, had killed a plan for the mayor’s next escape to the open sea, a good dumping ground for unwanted mail.

“Tuck, tell me what you did with them,” said Mayor Polk, disregarding his own recent instructions, his desire to wish away all knowledge of the packages and their disposal.

“Well, sir, you wanted them out of the house.” And it was so convenient to have a great rushing body of water flowing by, only a stone’s throw from the mansion. “So I tossed them in the river. It seemed like the—”

“Good job, Tuck. They’re fish food by now.”

As the mayor walked away, Samuel Tucker’s head tilted to one side—lips parting, eyes rounding. What were the odds that some clever fish could open hermetically sealed plastic bags? He had not wanted to touch the contents of the boxes. Oh, just think of the germs. And so, in addition to the protection already offered by the thick plastic, and because bacteria were crafty little buggers, he had also donned the rubber kitchen gloves for the chore of hurling those . . .
things
into the water.

Well, no matter.

How buoyant could human hearts be?

 
  
7

Four hearts encased in plastic bobbed up and down among the waves. All of them were sucked into the wake of a cabin cruiser. They traveled against the current for a time and toward the open sea. The passage of a tugboat altered their course once more, sending them back to the northbound shipping lane of the East River, where they became the playthings of every passing tanker and garbage scow.

—

THE ARMS OF THE CHAIR
were rough wood. The seat cushion was plastic. In the mix with birdsong, there were spits of grease on hot coals, and the tantalizing smell of cooking meat mingled with the scent of—her. This was real, not like her voice spun from memory. “What color are your roses? Are they red?”

“Yeah,” said Cigarette Man. “What’s color to a blind kid?”

They were my favorites,
said Aunt Angie,
when I was alive.

“Just asking,” said Jonah.

“There’s a good story behind my garden, but nobody believes it. . . . I don’t tell it no more.”
Plop
went the flipped meat, and
spit
went the grease.

There were small things on the wing. The whine of a fly. The buzz of a bee. The only bugs in the wild that startled him were the quiet, mystery things that flew into his face or crawled up his body as silent attackers—like the one dancing on the back of his hand.

He smacked it.

“Congrats, kid. You just killed a butterfly.”

The smell of cigarette breath drew close to him, and the rasp of a paper napkin wiped the squished mess from his skin. “Thank you,” said Jonah.

Butterflies would always be problematic.

Caws in the sky. He recognized the ugly song of starlings.

And then—
click
—the cigarette lighter.

“That nun,” said the man, “was she musical?”

“Huh?”

“A long time back, I remember a girl—looked just like her. I saw her in a pizza joint, grabbin’ a slice after school. She had these bright red flip-flops on her feet . . . and little bells tied to ’em. She was just a kid back then, not much older than you are.”

The jingle bells. Yes, she had always been musical.

The sun was hot on Jonah’s face. He listened to the ritual sounds of a summer day. The meat sizzling. Plopping on plates. One burger. Two burgers. The rustle of wrapping. For the buns? A ping off the tabletop. Best guess—the cap to the ketchup bottle. Yes, it was followed by slaps at the glass bottom to get the thick juice running. A plate slid across the table. The smell of meat was under his nose. A few feet away, a chair scraped its legs on the flagstones. Then . . . nothing. The man was too quiet now.

And the dog’s wheezing was gone. Where
was
the dog?

Jonah rushed to fill this panicky silence with “Jingle bells. They were old Christmas-tree ornaments.” His aunt had worn them on her sandals in the summer months. In colder seasons, the little bells had
been threaded into the laces of her shoes and, in winter, the fringe of her scarf.

“Yeah, jingle bells. . . . So that was your aunt, huh?” This last part was a string of false notes. This man had known the answer before he asked.

He—knew—her.

When the meal was done and thanks given to the cook, who had murdered the one Jonah loved best in all the world—
click
—a cigarette was lit.

“So, how long was your aunt in the convent?”

“The
monastery,”
said Jonah. “There’s a difference. A convent has a mother superior. Her monastery has a prioress. . . . My aunt left me when I was seven.”

“You never saw her again?”

“Once.” When they had made that long trek upstate, his uncle had described an entry road thick with trees, but the centuries-old monastery was on open land, he said, with a crop field, and a barn to house a nun-driven tractor.

“Nobody can touch them. There’s this big screen made of iron curlicues between the nuns and the visitors.” Jonah had been silent during that visit, angry with her for leaving him—for loving God more. He hated God, her first abductor—for that had been a seven-year-old’s early theory of the ironwork that jailed her. In later years he had come to understand it as her protection from the rest of the world—and from him, the burden of him. But on that day, he had punished her with broody silence, believing that there should be a penalty for desertion. And then, in tears, he had jammed his small hands through openings in the iron screen, calling out to her, begging to be touched. Uncle Harry had pulled him back, saying that there was no one there anymore. She was gone.

Jonah had carried that day around with him for a long sorry time.

There was a lean-back creak to Cigarette Man’s chair.

On Jonah’s own side of the patio table, he sat spinning this story, and, like a blind spider, weaving a scheme. “So I never got to talk to her that day . . . but now she talks to me
all
the time. Last night, she—”

“What did you say?” The man’s chair legs scraped back. A slam hit the table and rocked it. Then its pedestal settled to ground with a thunk of wood on stone. The voice was rough, but there was another underlying tone when he said, “There ain’t no such thing as ghosts.”

Spoken like a true believer,
said Aunt Angie.

—

NEAR THE SHORE
, the curious fish of shallow waters watched the plastic bags float by overhead on the sun-bright surface. The bags were widely spaced, but all moving in the same direction, swimming in a school of hearts.

—

“
THERE AIN
’
T NO GOD
,” said Cigarette Man. “No heaven, no hell—and
nobody
comes back from the dead. You been to too many horror movies, kid. All that haunted-house crap.”

True. Jonah
loved
horror movies. “I don’t think ghosts haunt places. I think people are haunted. . . .
I
am.”

“Knock it off.” Another cigarette was lit. Feet tapped the flagstones. “So . . . you got a granny, huh? What about her?”

“A long time ago, we all lived with Granny. When she was having one of her crazy days,” she would hunt him in every hiding place, looking under beds, in closets and low cupboards, talking scary, but she never thought to look for him outside the window on the fire escape, where he would wait, scared out of his mind, listening for Aunt Angie’s bells, the sound of rescue from the sidewalk below, “and that’s why hide-and-seek was a different game at our house.”

“Christ,” said the man who did not believe in God the Father, much less God the Son. “That went on every day?”

“No, I spent lots of time in day care. Uncle Harry used to pick me up when his classes let out. When he left the apartment, he’d take me with him . . . when he could . . . or my aunt hung out with me. I was five when she got us another place to live, me and her and Uncle Harry. I never saw Granny again.”

“Angie saved you.”

Angie—not Sister Michael. How long had Cigarette Man known her?

“Yes, she saved me, and she always will. Today, she said—”

“I
told
you,” said the man in low warning notes, “there’s no such—”

“Listen.” Jonah raised his hand to beg silence, and he faked surprise. “I hear bells,” he lied, his eyes bugging out as he turned his face to the man who had murdered her, aiming for innocence when he asked, “Hear it? Jingle bells
?
”

—

“
THAT
’
S BULLSHIT
!” Iggy knew when he was being conned, and this kid was putting on a piss-poor act. “Don’t even
try
that on me.”

Ghosts were nothing like this kid’s dime-store haunt. Iggy knew what they were. Leftovers. Old habits left over from life, like the way his mother had always waited up for him till all hours. Ma would run to the kitchen to cook him a meal the minute he set foot in the house, even if he came home at three in the morning. “Food is love,” Moira Conroy used to say.

Years back, he had come home from an out-of-town job, dead on his feet from loss of sleep. After dropping his suitcase on the floor, he had fetched a beer from the frig. Beat to hell, too tired to pull off his shoes, he had lain his gun on the coffee table. Before sinking into the sofa cushions, he saw the shape of her hurrying across the wide mirror
on a darkened room, right behind his own reflection, running into the kitchen. Unalarmed, he had called out, “Ma, I’m not hungry,” forgetting in that moment that his mother had died the year before. His beer can held in midair, frozen there, Iggy had stared at his gun on the table. Never thought to touch it. Never thought to rise from the sofa. And
nothing
could have moved him to enter the kitchen—where
it
had gone.

A trick of tired eyes?

No, that lie told to himself a hundred times had never worked for him. But neither had
it
been his mother. Eight years ago, he had shut up that leftover
thing
in a room at the back of his mind—and bolted the door.

The boy should not come tapping at that door one more time.

—

AT THE WATER
’
S EDGE
, a toddling child, slathered in sunscreen, emptied the treasures of a small red pail onto her mother’s beach towel. The little girl had not yet learned to count, but there, at her mother’s feet, lay four pretty stones that still had the shine of wetness—and one human heart sealed in a plastic covering that bore the indelible message:
proof of death.

The child awaited praise for these finds, giggling now, unaware that Mommy was sliding into shock.

Farther along the sandy shoreline, other children were bringing their hearts to their mothers.

—

JONAH WAS LIFTED
off his chair to dangle by one arm. He could name a gang of cells and nerve endings on his skin that sent messages of pain to his brain, but this rough handling was a jolt to every inch of him, inside and out—as if he had tumbled from a plane—fear in free
fall. Then came a hard touchdown on the flagstones, and he was dragged across the patio. The pit bull picked up on his master’s cue, growling and snapping jaws.

Don’t show any fear,
Aunt Angie would say.
Not when that dog’s around.

“I can tell you the story about the bells,” said Jonah. “Her jingle bells.”

The man’s grip relaxed. The atmosphere changed with the dog falling silent and mooching off to lap water on the far side of the patio. Jonah knew he had cracked the code for Cigarette Man’s magic words,
calming
words, when he was led back to his chair.

And the pit bull came back, too. Under the table now. Too close to Jonah’s feet, the other monster panted and wheezed.

“Okay,” said Cigarette Man. “The jingle bells.”

“It started the summer she taught me to use the cane outdoors. I guess I was three years old.” All through the lessons, Jonah had repeated the words,
side to side,
as a mantra, while lightly sending his cane this way and that in advance of chubby baby feet, testing the pavement for obstacles. “She tied bells on her sandals so I’d know where she was.”

If he reached out for her, she would always take his hand, but he had to learn the cane so he would not be afraid on the sidewalk. “‘Just listen to the bells.’ That’s what she told me. After a while, I could walk down the street without grabbing her hand even once. She said I had to know how to be alone. But I never was alone, not on the sidewalk. I could always hear her bells.”

All that summer long and year after year, she had gone everywhere jingling. Jonah could hear her on the stairs up to Granny’s apartment. That music would set him in motion, racing round every obstacle mapped in his head,
running,
flinging himself at the door just at the very moment when the knob turned, and he was swallowed up in her arms, her perfume and bells.

If love could make a sound—