In the Night Season (25 page)

“Freedom from me?” he said.

The terms of her response were general: self-expression, fulfillment.

“How about vaginal aggrandizement, Carol? I think that’s an excellent purpose.”

“Talking to you is like talking to a child.”

“You know what you need to do, Carol? You need to manually bring yourself off in front of a picture of Karl Marx. I think that might be just the thing.”

“Fuck you,” she said.

“Oh, now we’re getting into the meat of the discussion.”

“I want you out. Okay? How’s that for vocabulary. I want you as far away from me as you can get, as soon as you can get there. Okay? Oh, how badly I want for you to have never happened to me!”

He struck her. He hadn’t known he would do it. And having done it, he was immediately contrite, following her through the rooms of the house, apologizing, agreeing to everything. Yes, it was best that he leave. He would give her a divorce, whatever she wanted. But he couldn’t have it be other than what he knew it was: the loss of the boy had broken them. “That’s what it is, Carol. That’s what happened to us.”

“No,” she said. “I felt this way before. I never admitted it to myself. I endured everything because I thought I was supposed to and I felt sorry for you, and when we lost Willy I stayed to nurse you through it. That’s what happened.”

All right.

Driving away from the house, he had again the sense of having failed to control himself in all the important ways. He recalled that when the two of them were drinking together, there had been a hazy kind of solace that made everything seem bearable.

Before going back to the station, he drove up to Darkness Falls and Eloise’s house. The dark water of the lake shimmered with a million flecks of reflected light in the distance. Her father was out in front of the house, bundled in a hunting jacket, digging in the dirt next to the stoop. He stopped and leaned on the shovel as Shaw got out of the car and came along the sidewalk. The windows behind him were bright, giving back the cold sun. The grass was brown, the shapes of shade lengthening in it from the naked trees. Bordering this acre of cut grass and bare, rutted clay, beyond the wide circumference of the lake with its diminutive white sand beach, there were steep hills, covered with tall pines, and you could see the sunny windows of several unfinished houses, more casualties of the real estate slump. The far edge of the lake was partly frozen. Shaw looked at the color of the grass, like broom straw. The old man kept digging.

“What’s up, Aaron?” Shaw said.

“She’s inside,” said the old man.

“What’re you doing?”

“Digging.”

“I can see that.”

“Go on inside,” the old man said. “Door’s open.”

The house smelled of something scorched. In the living room there were piles of laundry on one chair and stacked newspapers on another. The decor here was in the style of the midsixties. Eloise’s father had kept it very much as it had been thirty years ago, when he was a young man and lived here with his wife and daughter, supposing that he would live in other houses, on other streets. But he liked the place too much to move, finally, and so he had changed his mind. Eloise left for college and stayed away for almost a decade. She was home to stay now, having weathered a long, useless (her word) live-in relationship with a jazz musician in Chicago. The musician was gone; she didn’t know where. And she was home. The wall above the mantel was adorned with several framed pho
tographs of her in the stages of growing up. She harbored no unhappiness about coming home to live: her father needed her. He was slipping, just a little. At heart, she told Shaw, he had always been a child.

She was in the kitchen, head into the oven, scraping at the inside.

“Eloise,” Shaw said.

She bumped her head, backing out. “Oh, God—you scared me.”

He picked up one of the entertainment magazines on the table and paged through it, then let it drop. She had risen and now regarded him.

“What’s wrong?”

“Got any iced tea?”

“It’s cold as hell out. What’s going on, Phil?”

“I was just—I’d like something cold to drink.”

“What’re you doing here now? You’re not supposed to be here till six. The place is a wreck.”

“It’s been a bad day, Eloise.”

“Tell me about it. We started off this morning with an oven fire.”

“Sorry.”

She moved to the sink, reached into the cabinet above it, and brought out two coffee cups. She filled them both with water and brought them back. There was a languidness about her, a slow fluidity that made her seem almost somnolent.

“What’s he doing out there?” Shaw asked her.

“He buried a bird out back. I don’t know what he’s doing now. Probably trying to dig one up. Last night he went out for a walk and didn’t come back for two hours. I almost called you.”

They heard the door, the sound he made kicking his boots against the jamb to get the dirt off them.

Shaw sipped the water and felt her eyes on him.

“You’re wanting something a little stronger, aren’t you?”

“I’ll be all right,” he said.

“Poor Phil.”

“Listen,” he said to her. “I’ve got something bad going on—”

“I know,” she interrupted. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“You know about it?”

She frowned. “Your girl moving away—”

“No,” he said. “This is something I’m—it’s work. The job. I’m gonna be working tonight. I’m on my way back there now.”

The old man had come to the entrance of the kitchen. “That murder,” he said. “Am I right?”

Shaw nodded.

Eloise drank her water. It was as though she had decided not to respond. Her father came into the room, poured himself some coffee from the machine on the counter, then shambled to the table and sat down, chuffing through his nose and clearing his throat. He lifted his cup of coffee and blew across the surface and sipped, making a loud slurping noise. “Any ideas?”

“Not much,” Shaw said. “Some folks called to take the credit.”

“Heard that, too. Yeah.”

“I think somebody’s finally gonna buy one of those houses over on the other side of the lake,” Eloise said. “I saw some cars pulling in and out over there.”

“Never had a murder while I was sheriff,” the old man said. He had the look of someone who had just suffered an insult.

Shaw was silent.

“Just lucky, I guess.”

“Daddy,” Eloise said. “Could you leave us alone for a minute?”

He took a long time getting up—but it wasn’t intentional. His bones creaked, and he was clearly sore from the digging he had done. When he was gone, she moved into Shaw’s arms and kissed him on the mouth. They had not been intimate; he was not prepared for the kiss. He took a small step back, and her full weight came against him. Then she broke away.

“All right?” she said.

“Eloise.”

“Do you believe somebody can feel the future?” she demanded, turning from him.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I had a dream last night. It woke me up. I was standing at the edge of a cliff and you were down at the bottom.”

“I’ve got to go,” he said. “It’s a dream, Eloise.”

“Don’t you want to hear the rest of it?”

“I never liked listening to people’s dreams, Eloise.”

She faced him. A young woman with a strange, angular loveliness—fine skin, slightly crossed eyes, thin lips, high cheekbones—all her features combining to give a troubling sense of crisis, as though her emotions had worn through all the paths in the flesh and brought her countenance to the point of dissolution; there was something so sad in the eyes, an expectation of complexity, or trouble. It made her seem more vulnerable than she probably was. At any rate, he supposed she had the strength to handle living alone with her father, essentially serving as his nurse and housekeeper, while the decade of her thirties began. “You were pretending to be dead,” she told Shaw. “It was like you wanted to get away from me.”

He pulled her into his arms and held her. In the other room, the old man coughed deeply.

“I hate winter,” she said. “I’ve always hated it.”

T
HE RAIN HAD STOPPED
. R
ICKY
walked back and forth, holding the gun with both nervous hands. He had said nothing for almost an hour, had demanded that they keep still, pacing back and forth and going over everything in his mind. Gwendolyn watched him and worried about what Henry might do. The wait was driving Henry toward something desperate; she could feel it. Henry stood by the passage into the hallway, his hands at his sides. She knew it was getting to him, though he seemed patient, even calm, compared to the younger man, who stopped now and brought one hand up to his hair, pushing through, fingers spread, so that he appeared to be grasping at something painful right at the crown of his scalp.

“It’s not too late,” Henry said abruptly.

“I told you to shut up. The call’s gonna come.”

Gwendolyn, sitting near the telephone, tried with her facial expression to make Henry see that he should say nothing more. To her it was clear that Ricky’s own fervid mind had presented him with all he needed to consider. She feared that he might start shooting out of panic alone.

Henry went on talking low, soft. “They lied to you. They told you no one would get hurt. You don’t want to hurt anybody.”

“You better just—shut up, man.”

“Henry, please,” said Gwendolyn. She reached for him. Henry crossed slowly to where she was and sat next to her.

“Don’t keep walking around like that,” Ricky said.

He paced. The windows were black now, the sky clear, a moonlit night, almost eight o’clock. Gwendolyn thought of Nora and Jason, in the dark of Virginia, three thousand miles away, with murderers.

“Okay, look,” Ricky said. “Here’s the thing. The guy that’s running things, he’ll kill me if I back out now. He would’ve capped your son-in-law. I talked him out of it. Me. And then Jack goes and gets himself killed in that accident. We don’t get those chips, I’m dead.”

“He can’t kill you if he’s in prison,” Henry said.

Gwendolyn wanted him to be quiet. Ricky was reasoning with himself. Then he raised the pistol to Henry’s face. “Shut up!”

Henry blinked, but stood his ground.

“Shit,” Ricky said, pacing again. He went to the window and surveyed the dimly lit street, ticking off something to himself—reasons, chances, excuses—counting fearfully. Then he faced them again. “Your daughter’s husband had to get upright all of a sudden.” He appeared close to tears. “Goddammit, all your daughter has to do is give them what they want.”

“What is it they want?” Gwendolyn asked, squeezing Henry’s wrist.

“They want microchips. Okay? A couple million dollars. Fuck.” Ricky waved the gun at them, white-faced. He went back to the window, then turned and came toward them. “I’m not gonna die over this. And I’m not going to prison, either.”

Gwendolyn realized with a start that he was beginning to think he would have to kill them both to keep from being caught. In the next instant, it occurred to her that no matter what happened, he would believe that he must leave no one alive in this house.

“We don’t know your real name,” she said. “We won’t tell anyone.”

At the same time, Henry had spoken. He glanced at her, then turned to Ricky and said, “You hear me? I think we might have what you’re looking for.”

“Shut up, I’m telling you.”

“No, but you said microchips. Listen, there’s a safe in the basement.”

Gwendolyn understood that her husband had come to the same realization about Ricky, and she knew he was playing for time now, for an opportunity to use the younger man’s jitteriness against him. In the basement, there was a safe built into the cement floor. It had been one of the curiosities of the place when they bought it: a safe the original builder of the house had planted in the concrete, and then misplaced the combination which could open it. He had never bothered to write to the maker of the safe to get the combination, and the company had subsequently gone out of business. The safe contained nothing. The Spencers were using it as a table and as a conversation piece; it could not be opened, short of a small dynamite charge, or the skill of a safecracker.

Ricky stood with the black pistol aimed at Henry’s middle, staring.

“Do you understand me?” Henry said.

“
You
have them?” Ricky said. “Jack gave them to
you
?”

“I have a couple of packages he sent me. I put them in the safe. He said they were important, so I put them in the safe.”

Ricky shifted slightly. “Wait a minute, just a minute, here. You were—you must’ve—you’ve been pretending you didn’t know what this was about?”

“How would I have known?” Henry said. “You come in here waving that thing and I think you’re holding my daughter for some kind of ransom. How am I supposed to connect that to packages my son-in-law sent me last year? He didn’t say what was in them. He wanted me to store them for him in a safe place. For all I know, it’s records from his business.”

Ricky studied him, thinking. “No,” he said. “You work with computer people. I’ve been following you, man. You’d know if he sent you these chips.”

“How would I know? I’m not saying it
is
the chips, but it might be. Or there might be something in the packages that will tell you where to find them.”

Gwendolyn thought he’d gone too far. The story sounded too made up to her. She sought for something to say, something to distract the other from zeroing in on what Henry had decided to attempt.

But Ricky had bought the idea. “Jesus Christ,” he said. He put one hand to the side of his head—someone trying to blot out a rush of thoughts. “I gotta concentrate.”

“Let’s go down in the basement and see,” Henry told him.

“Wait a minute. Just wait a minute.”

Gwendolyn touched her husband’s shoulder, wanting him to slow down, to wait. As soon as Ricky knew the truth about the safe, he would kill them both. She was certain. It was only moments away. Whatever Henry was up to, it would have to break upon the gunman very soon now, and she wanted to be ready for it. She reached down and squeezed Henry’s wrist again, and he patted hers with his other hand. He kept talking. “It might be that you can do what you said you were going to do, Ricky. You can disappear, with what you wanted. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

Ricky approached him, arm extended, the black pistol barrel only inches from Henry’s nose. “You better be telling me the truth, man. Or I swear. Because I’m in a trap here. They already killed somebody.”

“They’re three thousand miles away,” Gwendolyn said.

“Nobody can hurt you,” Henry told him.

Ricky backed up a step. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”