Lasher (32 page)

He opened the door slowly. Silence in the big hall. Silence in the double parlor. But there was the envelope on the hall table—where all mail and deliveries were placed. He could see the familiar embossed name of Mayfair and Mayfair. He tiptoed out, took the envelope, fearful that any moment Eugenia or Henri would appear, and then he went into the dining room. He could sit at the head of the table and read the thing, and that way, if anybody went near that library door, he could stop them.

Sooner or later, she would wake up and get dressed. And then? He didn’t know. He just hoped she didn’t go home, that she didn’t leave him here.

Rotten coward, he thought. Rowan, would you understand all this? Funny thing was, Rowan might. Rowan understood men, better than any woman he’d ever known, even Mona.

He switched on the floor lamp by the fireplace, then sat down at the head of the table and removed the packet of Xeroxes from the envelope.

It was pretty much what they’d told him.

The geneticists in New York and Europe had gotten a bit sarcastic about the specimens. “This seems to be a calculated combination of genetic material from more than one primate species.”

It was the eyewitness material from Donnelaith that killed him. “The woman was sick. She stayed in her room most of
the time. But when he went out, she went with him. It was as if he insisted she go. She looked sick, very sick. I almost suggested that she see a physician.”

At one point, in Geneva, Rowan was described by a hotel clerk as being an emaciated woman of perhaps 120 pounds. He found that horrifying.

He stared at the Xeroxes of the forged checks. Forgery! It wasn’t even good. It was a great old-fashioned Elizabethan hand, by God, like something out of a parchment document.

Payee: Oscar Aldrich Tamen.

Why had he chosen that name? When Michael looked on the back of the check he realized. Fake passport. The bank clerk had written down all the information.

Surely they were following up that lead. Then he saw the law firm memorandum. Oscar Aldrich Tamen had last been seen in New York on February 13th. Wife reported him missing on February 16th. Whereabouts unknown. Conclusion? Stolen passport.

He slapped shut the manila folder. He put his hands up and leaned on them, and tried not to feel that little twinge in his heart, or to remind himself that it was very small, the pain, no more than a little nag, and he’d had it before, for years, hadn’t he?

“Rowan,” he said aloud as if it were a prayer. His thoughts went back to Christmas Day, to that last glimpse of her when she had torn the chain off his neck, and the medal had fallen.

Why did you leave me? How could you!

And then a terrible shame came over him, a shame and a fear. He’d been glad in his selfish little heart when they told him that demon thing had forced her, glad the investigators thought she was coerced! Glad that this had been declared in front of proud Ryan Mayfair. Ah, this meant his wily bride had not cuckolded him with the devil! She loved him!

And what in God’s name did this mean for her! For her safety, her fate, her fortune! Lord God, you selfish and despicable man, he thought. But the pain was so great, the pain of her going that day, the pain of the icy water of the pool, and the Mayfair Witches in his dream, and the hospital room, and the pain in his heart when he’d first climbed the stairs—

He folded his arms on the table in front of him, and, weeping silently, laid his head down against it.

He did not know how much time had passed. He knew everything, however. That the library door had not opened, and
that Mona must still be asleep, and that his servants knew what he’d done, or else they would have been hovering around him. That twilight had come. That the house was waiting for something, or witnessing something.

Finally he sat back and saw that the light outside was that shining white of spring evenings, making all the leaves distinct, and that the golden light of the lamp gave a little cheer to the vast room with its old paintings.

A tiny voice reached his ears, singing, thin, distant. And gradually as he sat very still, he realized it was Violetta’s song, on the gramophone. This meant his nymph had waked; she was about, winding the old toy. He must rouse himself. He must talk to her about these mortal sins.

He stood up and made his way slowly through the shadowy room, and to the library. The music came strongly through the door, the happy song of Violetta from
La Traviata
. The waltz they’d played when Violetta was strong and gay, before she began to die so wondrously in operatic fashion. Light came from beneath the door, golden and soft.

She sat on the floor, half risen more or less, resting back on her hands, naked as before, her breasts loose but high placed and the color of baby skin. The nipples the pink of baby’s nipples.

There was no music. Had it been some trick of noise? She was staring at the window to the cast-iron porch outside. And Michael saw that it was open. It was what they called a pocket window, and the sash had been thrown up all the way to make a doorway out of it. The shutters, which he had kept closed all the time himself, rather liking to see slats of afternoon sun, were open, too. A loud noise sounded in the street, but it was only a passing car, jetting too fast through the narrow shadowy intersection.

She was startled; her hair was mussed, her face still smooth with lingering sleep.

“What is this?” he said. “Someone came in that window?”

“Tried to come,” she said. Her voice was foggy with sleep.

“Do you smell that smell?” She turned and looked at him, and before he could make an answer, she started to dress.

Michael went to the window and cranked shut the green blinds immediately. The corner beyond stood deserted or so dark beneath the oaks that it might as well have been. The mercury street lamp was like a moon face snared in the branches above. Michael brought down the sash, and turned
the lock. Should have been locked all the time! He was furious.

“Do you smell it?” she said. She was dressed when he turned around. The room was all shadows now that he had shut out the corner light. She came to him and turned her back for him to tie her cotton sash.

“Goddamnit, who was it?” The stiff starched cotton felt good to his fingers. He tied the sash as best he could, having never done this for a little girl before, trying to make the bow pretty when he was finished with it. She turned around, staring past him at the window.

“You don’t catch that scent, do you?” She went past him and peered through the glass, through the slats. Then she shook her head.

“You didn’t see who it was, did you?” He had half a mind to go out there, charging through the garden, and around the block, to accost whatever strangers he might find, to search up Chestnut Street and down First until he found some suspicious person. “My hammer, I need it,” he said.

“Your hammer?”

“I don’t use a gun, honey. My hammer’s always been good enough.” He went to the hall closet.

“Michael, the person’s long gone. He was gone when I woke up. I heard him running away. I don’t think…I don’t know that he knew there was anyone in here.”

He came back. Something white was shining on the dark carpet. Her ribbon. He picked it up and absently she took it from him and fixed it in her hair with no need of a mirror.

“I’ve got to go,” she said. “I gotta go see my mother, CeeCee, I should have gone before now. She’s probably scared to death that she’s in a hospital.”

“You didn’t see anything at all?” he said.

He followed her out and down the hall.

“I caught that scent,” she said. “I think it was the scent that woke me up, and then I heard the noise of the window.”

How calm she was. He was in a blaze of protective fury.

He opened the front door, and went out first, to the edge of the porch. Anyone could have hidden anywhere out there, behind the oaks, across the street behind a wall, even low down among the big elephant ears and palms that crowded his own garden.
My own garden
.

“I’m going, Michael, I’ll call you later,” she said.

“You must be nuts, you think I’m going to let you walk off home like this in the dark? Are you crazy?”

She stopped on the steps. She had been about to protest, but then she too cast a wary eye on the shadows that surrounded them. She looked thoughtfully up into the branches and at the dark shadows of Chestnut Street. “I’ve got an idea. You follow me. Then when he springs out, whoever he is, you kill him with your hammer. You have your hammer?”

“That’s ridiculous. I’ll drive you home,” he said. He pulled her in and shut the door.

Henri was in the kitchen, just as he ought to have been, in white shirt and suspenders and drinking his whiskey from a white china cup so no one would know it. He put down the newspaper, and stood up. He would take the child home, of course. Or to the hospital? Certainly. Whatever Miss Mona wanted. He reached for his coat, which was ever ready on the chair behind him.

Michael walked out with them to the drive, distrustful of the darkness, and saw them safely to the car. Mona waved, a smear of red hair at the window. He felt an ache for her as they drove away, that he had let her go without a parting embrace, and then he was ashamed of it.

He went back inside, locking the kitchen door behind him.

He went back to the hall closet. His old tool chest was here, on the first floor under the stairs. This house was so big you had to have a tool chest for every floor of it. But these were his old tools, his favorites, and this was the claw hammer with the chewed-up old wooden handle, the one he had owned all his years in San Francisco.

A strange awareness came over him and he clutched it tight, and went to peer through the library window again. This had been his dad’s hammer. He’d taken it out to San Francisco when he was a boy, with all his dad’s tools. Nice to have something of his dad’s amid all the great carefully inventoried Mayfair wealth, just one simple tool or two. He lifted the hammer. Love to bash it through the burglar’s skull, he thought. As if we don’t have enough trouble in this house, and some bastard tries to break in the library window!

Unless…

He switched on the light nearest the corner and examined the little gramophone. Covered with dust. No one had touched it. He didn’t know whether or not he could touch it. He knelt down, put his fingers on the soft felt turntable. The records of
La Traviata
were in their thick old faded album. The crank lay beside the thing. It looked impossibly old. Who had made the waltz play twice now in this house, when this thing itself lay inert and dust-covered?

There was a sound in the house, a creaking as if someone was walking. Perhaps Eugenia. Or perhaps not.

“Goddamnit,” he said. “Son of a bitch is in this place?”

He set out at once to make a search. He covered the whole first floor room by room, listening, watching, studying the tiny lights in the control boxes of the alarm which told him if anything was moving in rooms beyond him. Then he went upstairs, and covered the second floor as well, poking into closets and bathrooms that he had not entered in all this time, and even into the front bedroom, where the bed was all made and a vase of yellow roses stood on the mantel.

Everything seemed all right. Eugenia was not here. But from the servants’ porch he could see the distant guest house in back, ail aglow as if there were a party going on. That was Eugenia. She always turned on all the lights. She and Henri swapped shifts now, and so this was her turn to be alone back there, with the radio playing in the kitchen
and
the television tuned to “Murder, She Wrote.”

The dark trees shifted in the wind. He could see the still lawn, the swimming pool, the flags. Nothing stirred but the trees themselves, making the lights of the distant guest house twinkle deceptively.

On to the third floor. He had to check every crevice and crack.

He found it still and dark. The little landing at the top of the stairs was empty. The street lamp shone through the window. The storage room lay with its door open, all empty shelves clean and white and waiting for something. He turned and opened the door of Julien’s old room, his own workroom.

The first thing he saw was the two windows opposite, the window on the right, beneath which Julien had died in his narrow bed, and the window on the left, through which Antha had fled only to fall to her death from the edge of the porch roof. Like two eyes, these windows.

The shades were up; the soft light of early evening flooded in on the bare boards and on his drafting table.

Only those were not bare boards. On the contrary, a threadbare rug lay there, and where his drafting table should have
been was the narrow brass bed, which had long ago been moved out of here.

He groped for the light.

“Please don’t turn it on.” The voice was frayed and soft, French.

“Who the hell are you?”

“It’s Julien,” came the whispered response. “For the love of heaven. I am not the one who came to the library door! Come in now while there is still time, and let me talk to you.”

He shut the door behind him. His face was teeming with heat. He was sweating and his grip had tightened on the hammer. But he knew it was Julien’s voice, because he had heard it before, high high above the sea, in another realm, the very same voice, speaking to him softly and rapidly, putting the case to him, so to speak, and telling him he could refuse.

It seemed the veil would lift; he would see the shining Pacific again, his own drowned body on the heaving waves, and he would remember everything. But no such thing occurred. What occurred was infinitely more frightening and exciting! He saw a dark figure by the fireplace, arm on the mantel, long thin legs. He saw the soft hair, white in the light from the windows.

“Eh bien
, Michael, I am so tired. It is so hard for me.”

“Julien! Did they burn the book? Your life story.”

“Oui, mon fils
,” he said. “My beloved Mary Beth burnt every page of those books. All my writing…” His voice was soft with sad wonder, eyebrows rising slightly. “Come in, come closer. Take the chair there. Please. You must listen to me.