In the Night Season (14 page)

“Where what is?” she said.

“You’re asking us to believe your husband never spoke to you about it?”

“If you’d tell me what it is, maybe I’d know.”

“You don’t know, even with what I’ve told you?”

“No.”

“I’m sure I saw recognition in your eyes. Maybe
you’ve
sold them to someone.”

“Sold what?” Nora said. “Tell me what I’m supposed to have sold.”

“I wonder if you’re not hiding them, as your husband was, for your own use later on. You know the value is going down, even as we speak.”

She waited for him to go on.

“Well?
Are
you?”

“You’ve been watching me. What do you think?” she said. She was surprised at the aggressive sound of it.

“I think, from talking with you, that you might be a very smart lady.”

“Is it jewels?”

Reuther smiled. “Perhaps you sent the merchandise somewhere else?”

“How could I do that if I don’t know what it is.
Is
it jewels?”

He shook his head, regarding her with a disappointed expression.

“Well, then what—drugs?” She looked from one to the other of them. “I don’t understand.”

“You’re sure.” Reuther walked over to Jason again and took out the revolver. He aimed it at the boy’s head and pulled the hammer back.

“No!” Nora said and tried to run at him. Travis had caught her and held her, kicking and flailing, and now the fat man was holding her, too.

“I’ll count to three,” Reuther said. “And maybe you’ll tell us then.”

“Oh, God! I don’t know!” She was screaming now. “Please, I don’t know! I don’t know!”

“One,” Reuther said. He gazed at the boy, who was crying, his eyes closed tight. “Two.”

She opened her mouth on a long shriek.

Reuther eased the hammer down and put the gun in his coat. He nodded at the others, who let Nora go. She rushed to the boy’s side, kneeling, sobbing, trying to cover him with her body. “Please,” she was saying. “Please leave us alone.”

“Listen,” Reuther said.

She sniffled, holding tight to the boy.

“Are you listening?”

She looked at him.

“I think I’m satisfied that you don’t know what we’re here for. It’s now necessary to proceed with other plans.”

“Please, no.”

“We’re going to keep your boy here, hmm? And you are going to go back to your house, with Travis, to make a little search of your husband’s—effects, shall we say. A search of the house.”

“I don’t know what I’m looking for,” she said.

“That will become more clear, perhaps.”

Travis pulled her to her feet.

“None of this makes any sense,” she told them through tears. “Please.”

Reuther walked close again, suffocating her with the sharp peppermint odor of his breath. “Was my husband selling—drugs?” she said.

He said, “Drugs. You mean this.”

She was silent.

“Not drugs. No, this merchandise is not at all like that. This is something that one can get rid of much more efficiently than drugs.”

“Can’t you please just tell me what it is?”

“What you’re looking for will be in four Styrofoam cartons, about the size of a suitcase. And square, like that. Does this ring a bell?”

“No.”

“Yes, well. Perhaps when you’ve had some time to think about it.”

“What’s in the cartons?”

“It’s not important that you know that, hmm? And if you’re able to find them, or remember where you put them, we can disappear from your life, and you’ll never have to worry about us again.”

“It’s ten minutes to six,” Travis said.

Reuther touched her hair, smiling. “You and Travis will go in your car.”

“Please let me have my son,” she said. “I’ll help you find whatever it is you’re looking for.”

“Of course you will. But we’ll just let him remain here for safekeeping.”

“Jason,” she said.

“He’ll be quite safe.”

She moved around him and knelt at the boy’s side. His wrists were red and rope-burned, and she saw that his ankle had swollen to nearly twice its size. “He’s hurt,” she said.

“The more quickly you get this done, the more quickly you can get him to a doctor.”

She stood.

Jason said, “Go on. I’ll be okay.” But he had gasped out a spray of saliva, and she thought of him as she walked out to the car. He was still suffering through the death of his father. She began to weep again. “It’s not fair,” she muttered, following Travis, who was limping slightly.

He got in behind the wheel. “We’ll find what we’re after and then we’ll get out of your way, you’ll see.”

Had she heard a note of something like kindness in the voice—at least of concern? “How can you do a thing like this?” she said.

“Well,” he said, holding back a laugh. “It sort of goes with the territory.”

“Were you the one—my husband—”

“I knew him in the army, yeah. A couple centuries ago. We did some hanging out. He was a funny guy, your husband. Fun to be around.”

She saw the fat man standing in the window. The grayish sky beyond the line of the roof hurt her eyes.

Travis had started the car and put it in gear, but it stalled.

“You have to wait for it,” she told him.

He started it again. It caught and stayed on. He put it in gear and slowly began to pull out. Then he stopped. “Shit.”

“What?” she said.

“There’s blood on the backseat.” He turned the engine off, got out, and walked back to the house. The sun had come up through the trees—burning through the cloud cover, a blinding radiance beyond the shadows of pine branches. She sat waiting for him, her stomach churning, and when he came back, she stepped from the car. He carried a towel—one end of it sopping, dripping suds. She had a moment of a kind of wonder at the ordinariness of it. Soap. He opened the back door and began scrubbing the seat back. She watched. It was cold, and she shivered, turning to look at the house and the surroundings—woods all around, the pines growing thickly as grass, the dense undergrowth. She thought she saw water through an opening in the green boughs as the wind lifted and then died. She couldn’t be certain. When she faced the house again, she saw that in the near upstairs window Reuther stood, with a displeased cast to his features.

“I have the feeling your boss doesn’t think much of you,” she said.

Travis looked back over his shoulder. “Boss?”

“The foreigner.”

He went on working, scrubbing, then taking a dry part of the towel and sopping up the moisture. Finally he stood back. “Guess that’ll have to do.” He opened one of her folders and spread the papers on the seat. “Okay,” he said. “That ought to be okay.” Then he waved at the house, strode around to the driver’s side and got in. She saw Reuther step away from the window.

“Come on,” Travis said.

She got in and closed the door. The smell of the soap was strong; the window had fogged over.

“How do you work this?” he said, pushing the defrost button.

She set it, and they waited for the car to warm up again. “He’s not your boss?” she said.

“Who, Reuther?”

The engine made a whining noise when he pressed on the accelerator.

“You’re gonna call in sick today,” he said.

“Jack never talked about you,” she told him.

“He should’ve. You know how many crimes are committed in this country every day? You have any idea how many crimes I already got away with?” Something almost gleeful shone in his face.

“You can’t—” she began. She had been about to say,
You can’t kill us
, as though she would be describing the rules of some game to him. She thought about how careless the three men had been about saying their names. The only interpretation of this fact was that they planned to kill her and Jason. The logic of it was inescapable.

“Can’t what?” he said.

It took all her strength to speak at all. “Nothing.”

He put the car in gear and backed out of the space, then turned. She sought to place the surrounding woods, to recall anything about them. But the sun blazed like the wide bloom of a far-off explosion through the branches now, and it was difficult to see anything very clearly. This was somewhere near one of her husband’s unfinished sites—an unsold mansion he had been building for a man who lost
everything in the stock market crash of 1987. The site was in this area. She felt almost certain of it.

“Okay,” he said. “Get down.”

“Down—”

“Put your head down.”

She folded her arms on the dash and rested her forehead against them.

“Jack never talked about his buddy Travis, huh?”

“No.”

“I guess we weren’t all that close in the service. We knew each other. If you want to know the truth, I think I irritated him, pretty much. I was always after him to tell me jokes.”

It occurred to her in an obscurely detached way that this man with whom she had been speaking was an accomplice in the murder of her friend. She couldn’t stop shaking.

“More heat?” he said.

“No.”

“You gotta think about it like a game,” he said.

This sent a deeper chill through her and gave her the awful sensation that somehow he had access to her thoughts.

He went on: “A big game with a lot of interlocking pieces. Where we all fit into the thing. The country’d fall apart if it weren’t for a little criminal activity.”

“What happens after we find whatever it is you’re looking for?” She hadn’t known she would ask this. Her breath caught.

He appeared to be deciding to ignore the question—she was near to doubting that she had actually said the words out loud—but then he seemed definite, almost casual. “We’ll let you go, of course. And you’ll never see us again. I start my new life south of the border, and your life will go back to being dull.”

She recalled that they had been watching her.

“Admit it,” he said. “It was pretty dull before.”

No, it hadn’t been anything of the kind! She saw what it had been—a kind of puzzled dreaming-through, a haze of worrying and striving and being glad of moments or passages that were happy. Oh, it had been gloriously ordinary, ridiculously carefree!
And all of it was over there now, on the other side of Jack’s death and this trouble.

The last time she saw Jack, he was in a hurry. She brought groceries into the house, and he helped, wearing his coat. He was on his way out to a meeting in town—with a group of builders who gathered each week to discuss the loss of momentum in the market. “A lot of houses sitting empty,” Jack said. “And they want to talk about what we’re all gonna do. There’s nothing
to
do, of course. We’ve got ten million homeless people in this country and I can’t put anybody into three fucking houses. These meetings won’t help that.”

“Go to the meeting,” she’d said. “You’ll feel better afterward.”

“I’m sorry,” he said—something he had formed the habit of saying almost automatically.

“Don’t be sorry,” she told him. “Go.”

He kissed her on the cheek, waved at Jason in the other room, turned, and was gone, pulling the back door closed behind him. She didn’t go to the window to wave good-bye.

That was the last time she saw him alive.

Often enough, since then, she had wondered what she must have been thinking or doing the instant that Jack stopped being Jack in that burning mass of tangled metal. She lifted her eyes to the window. The road descended, around slow steep curves through bare trees. It was Virginia, somewhere near the Blue Ridge Mountains—or perhaps somewhere in them. She peered out, through the interstices of branches and tree trunks, at the rolling hills beyond the declivity to her right. He took the curves slowly, carefully. She saw the side of his face and thought of poor Ed Bishop, and she understood, without words, that she needed to know more—that her survival and the survival of her son depended on what she could find out. The first thing she must know was where Ed Bishop had made his mistake.

“What did—why—” she began.

“Yeah.” His voice was impatient. “Put your head down.”

“I don’t know where we are,” she said. “It hardly matters.”

“Just do it.”

She did so. “Mr. Bishop—” She stopped. She could feel her heart beating in her neck.

“Who?” he said.

“Nothing.”

“No—you wanted to ask me something.”

“Never mind,” she said.

“You know how many times people have begged me for things?” he said in that strange casual tone. “I mean kneeling down begging, too. The real thing.”

She held still.

“You really think Reuther’s my boss?”

“No.”

“Well, what were you gonna ask me?”

“I don’t remember.”

She heard other cars go by them—fortunate people, and once more she was fighting to hold back tears. This would end in violence and death, and there was nothing she could do about it, nothing she could think of to try doing.

“We’ll get these cartons, and you’ll never see us again,” he said. Again, it was as though he had been reading her thoughts. She remembered that she must learn from him, work toward knowing him well enough to increase her chances of extricating the boy and herself….

“What’s in the cartons?” she said. “If I knew what was in them, it might ring a bell. For all I know, Jack might’ve said something about it.”

“You really ain’t holding back?”

“Jesus Christ.” Her own anger amazed her. “Just tell me what’s in the goddam cartons.”

“I hate to hear a woman cuss,” Travis said.

“Yeah, well, fuck you.” Almost immediately, she wanted to call the words back. He reached over and took hold of her hair, and she cried out.

“You gonna behave?”

“Yes,” she said.

He let go.

She was fighting tears, squeezing her eyes shut. She thought of Jason.

He said, “That’s a girl.”

Perhaps a minute went by.

“I just hate to hear a woman talk that way,” he said.

She turned to him. “Would it hurt to tell me?”

He stared out at the road, half-smiling. “Jack was all over it when I brought it up to him. I mean it was picture-perfect.”

“What was? What was picture-perfect?”

He shook his head, watching the road. He was evidently going over it in his mind, some aspect of his own part in it that pleased him. There was something almost innocent about his face now, a boy’s excited face, relishing the memory of something good.