The Snow Garden (51 page)

     Kathryn’s eyes shot to the giant harp. Frayed tassels of hemp rope dangled from the top of its spine.

     She shot to her feet when she remembered the open back door to the kitchen.

     “Where’s Mitchell?”

     Maria answered with a racked breath and another sob. She had rolled onto one side. It took all the strength she had to lift her head.

    
“
Where's Mitchell
?”

     Maria lifted her arm limply from her side and for a second Kathryn thought she was reaching out for help. Kathryn almost took her hand before Maria managed to extend her middle finger.

Eric stared down at the bottle of Vicodin in his hand.

     Half a bottle remained.

     But who exactly was he doing this for? For Pamela and Lisa, casualties of his lies? For Michael, who had finally punished him to his own satisfaction? For himself, a man who could no longer live with the reality that while he had never murdered anyone, he had engendered more than his fair share of death?

     He had already taken five, and would down the rest, pill by pill, once those made him good and numb.

     In the living room, he turned out all the other lights, but let the gas fire glow. He refilled his wineglass and sat down in his reading chair, waiting for the pills to sand the edges off the memories he assumed would loom inside him before death settled in.

     Outside, the wind knocked branches. But another sound, clearer and closer, distracted him. A metallic creak with a slow, swinging rhythm to it.

     Pain thundered against his skull, sending his body forward as the sound of shattering glass filled both his ears. He hit the floor knees first, his vision spinning. Glass sprayed against the hardwood all around him. He lifted his head. The back door was swinging in the wind.

     He fought to stay conscious, more out of curiosity than a desire to live. The pills seemed to cushion the pain. He rolled over onto his back.

     Mitchell rounded his reading chair, gripping the stem of the wine bottle he had just shattered over the back of his head. His overcoat slid off one shoulder, flaps parting, revealing bare chest beneath. His lower jaw hung open as if the bone had been torn free from the socket. His eyes were wide with the exertion to keep them open, and his pupils danced on Eric like flickering flames.

     “You . . . punish . . .
us
?”
Mitchell rasped.

     Eric didn’t move as Mitchell stared down at him.

     “You fuck . . . your little boy . . . and you punish . . . us?”

     “You murdered Lisa. I don’t think I could ever punish you enough,” Eric whispered.

     Mitchell groaned and lifted his arm, swinging the shattered wine bottle over his head. Eric crumbled to protect his head, then felt needles of pain stab the back of his neck. Mitchell retracted the shattered bottle with drugged slowness, and Eric’s face smacked against the floor. Blood, pleasantly warm, rushed down his back.

     Mitchell gripped the collar of Eric’s shirt, tugging and dragging him until he was on all fours. Searing pain spread Out across his upper back.

     “Tr-trai'tor!” Mitchell howled.

     Jerking like a puppet in Mitchell’s grip, Eric pawed at the floor beneath him, but when he managed to look up the gas fireplace filled his vision. Mitchell crouched down next to him, still gripping the collar of his shirt, the other hand pulling on the waistband of his pants, sliding him across the hardwood floor toward the flames.

     “Chapter Five ... Errric . .. What h-happens to th-those . . . who can never escape their .. .own b-bodies...”

     Heat flushed Eric’s cheeks and he flailed at Mitchell with one arm. He felt his fingers land on the hot metal grating, then slide free. Mitchell would not punish him. He would punish them both. His hand gripped the gas lever before Mitchell seized his wrist and pulled, but Eric held on. When he whipped his other arm out to grab at the edge of the fireplace, his weight shifted and he hit the floor face first. His other hand gave one final, desperate tug.

     The lever broke free, and gas hissed from the new opening. In a second, Mitchell had pinned his clenched fist to the small of his back, his other hand grasping Eric’s neck as he lifted him toward the fire.

     “Those souls. . . who never escape ... are doomed to spend eternity in a lake of fire!”

     Eric opened his eyes. The flames were only inches from his nose, and in the hand Mitchell held to his back he gripped the metal lever. Could Mitchell smell it? The fumes suddenly outmatched the heat in intensity.

    
“
Hey
!
”

     It was another man’s voice.

     Mitchell didn’t release his dual grip.

    
“
Let him go
!
Now
!
” shouted the strange voice.

     Mitchell’s mouth was at his ear. “Your wife would have k-killed her. .. self... anyway. But I couldn’t resist having your little whore t-try . . . to pin it on
you
!”

     “
I said let him go, asshole
!”

     Eric screwed his eyes shut. He saw water and ice, Pamela and Lisa. He made their fates his.

     When she heard the gunshot, Kathryn didn’t stop running.

     A second later the front windows of the Eberman house exploded outward with enough force to split the porch rail down the center.

     Kathryn hit the sidewalk on her knees, her head tucked to her chest, arms raised above her head. The thunder echoed shatteringly among the houses, followed by the squeal of car alarms down Victoria Street.

     When she lowered her arms, she saw twin tongues of fire curling up the front of the house from the shattered cavities of the front windows. In the middle of the street, half of the porch rail sat upended on a bed of blackened glass. The other half dangled from the front porch for several seconds before its thin tether of splintered wood gave way and it fell to the seared lawn with a thud.

     She got to her feet and saw she was standing next to the unmarked police car. Its windshield was a spider web. The driver’s seat was empty.

     She made it to the foot of the steps of the house and stopped. The front door was still shut on its hinges but the bottom half had been blown halfway down the steps. Through the splintered hole she could see a curtain of fire filling the foyer.

     With one hand on the rail, she closed her eyes and tried to force breath back into her lungs. Then she heard the plaintive mourning of sirens carrying across the hill.

TWENTY-FIVE STORIES OVER SECOND AVENUE, THE BOWERY TOWER
sent a halo of weak, golden light into the low, fast-moving cloud cover. Frosted green plate-glass windows, held together with exposed metal cladding, punched squares of light through the snowy fog. The taxi pulled away slowly from the curb, the driver carefully navigating through fast-accumulating drifts of snow spilling from the gutters. Randall crossed the street, bound for the massive stainless steel canopy that arched over the building’s entrance.

     His heart had stopped racing, and he moved down the sidewalks with a numbness that a stranger could have mistaken for determination. This visit to the birthplace of his new self would be his last, that was the thought he clung to as he visualized Jesse’s cell phone number, wedged in his wallet. But at some point, just not now, Randall would have to face the reality that Jesse might have either discarded the cell phone by now, or that it was too late for Randall to take Jesse up on an invitation he had already refused. For all he knew, Jesse was already in Cozumel by now, bound for the side of the island that had been destroyed by a hurricane years ago, where the telephone lines vanished midway across the island, leaving the poles empty.

     It didn’t matter, Randall told himself, he would find Jesse. He had no one else to run to.

     Mahogany-framed panels of frosted glass formed the lobby’s walls. Pin lights from the ceiling outlined a path on the marble floor, leading to the bank of elevators with their gold-plated doors. Behind his convex stainless-steel desk, the doorman lifted his head from a copy of the
New York Post.

     “Welcome back, Mr. Stone.”

     Randall managed a strained smile. “Merry Christmas.”

     The doorman nodded and returned his attention to the paper. He was one of the four building employees who knew that Michael Price didn’t live alone.

     In the elevator, Randall inserted his key above the button marked PH, turned it once, for what he hoped was the last time, and removed it. The button illuminated under his fingertip. As the elevator rose, he fished a copy of the
Atherton Journal
out of his Prada satchel. By the eighteenth floor, Randall’s heart was a steady hammer in his chest.

     He had weathered Michael’s volcanic mood swings for two years before leaving for Atherton. Had the past three months left him so out of practice that the sweat lacing his back was a sign of fear? The doors slid, open, revealing a sweep of white marble and plate-glass windows lit by the flickering light of a television. He muffled fear with anger, cursing himself for hesitating to take the first step out of the elevator.

     Randall announced his presence only with the echo of his footsteps on the marble floor. Above the fireplace separating the great room from the master bedroom, the flat-screen television displayed a silent barrage of flaring police lights and fire trucks to the empty assemblage of living-room furniture: a white leather sofa, a glass coffee table with a metal frame so spare that the table top seemed to float above the zebra-skin rug, and three empty chairs with steel frames and cow-skin upholstery intended to be beautiful and painful to occupy.

     Randall dropped the newspaper on the dining table. Looking beyond the fireplace, he could see Michael’s bed was made, the room dark. Beside him, the double doors to Michael’s studio were drawn shut, a sliver of light in the middle. Michael was not to be disturbed when he was working, but maybe tonight was an exception. Randall had done what he promised, even if he did have to force Michael into admitting it—that Eric’s downfall was what he secretly wanted before he’d even considered placing Randall at Atherton.

     “Michael?”

     No response from beyond the double doors.

     Downtown was almost invisible beyond the far rail of the terrace, which took up the remainder of the rooftop. New figures had been added to Michael’s cadre of wax sculptures, all of them apparitions emerging out of the blanketing snow. Beyond, spotlights angled up onto each piece had been partially covered, and the result threw chiaroscuro across their featureless white faces and extended limbs.

     He had loved this view once; it had elevated him above the streets where he had struggled to survive. Living here had once seemed like an accomplishment. Before the walls of Michael’s penthouse had begun to shrink inward, and Randall could taste his desire for renewed freedom and the hope of something close to a normal, autonomous life. But he had failed at that miserably, and now the view welcomed him back like a parent satisfied to see his dire predictions come true.

     Randall crossed to the terrace door, his eyes catching a view of the new sculpture. Male and muscled, it stood on a stone platform, its arms outstretched in an embrace of the driving snow. The perfectly proportioned body was evidence of Michael’s constantly improving technique, and Randall was surprised to see the skin textured with the accurate folds of muscle groups. But the accomplishment ended abruptly at the neckline; as with all of Michael’s sculptures, the face was a blank mask of dry, clotted wax.

     “Michael?” he called out as he turned from the glass.

     He noticed that the much-talked about chandelier had finally been installed, and the result was just as hideous as the sketches Michael had proudly shown him back in July. “It’ll bring life to the apartment, don’t you think?”

     “I think it’s scary," Randall had told him, meaning hideous.

     “I didn’t ask you what you thought.”

     “Yes, you did.”

     It was suspended from a gathering of wires that extended down through the raftered ceiling. Massive ceramic tentacles curled inward, all of them patterned with a Gaudi-inspired mosaic of tiles. Light bulbs were concealed in the cavities of each one, emitting an amber glow onto the black lacquer dining table. The whole thing looked like a giant octopus preparing to rest on the ocean floor. Randall assumed that Michael had loved the impossibility of it, for the electrical company had moaned about how impossible it was to wire, and after that it would be flat-out impossible to install the proper electrical lift system. Michael had shrugged off the advice, opting for an antiquated rotary crank system and vowing he would find some way to hang this insanely heavy monstrosity from his ceiling.

     The double doors to the studio slid open. Randall straightened up against the glass. He felt his best attempt at a smile tug at his mouth, but Michael simply met his eyes briefly and strode to the dining table. Fear forced its way up from Randall’s stomach, tightening__h is chest. Feeling suddenly powerless, Randall was reminded of the quiet, visceral terror he had felt the first time he saw the man who would end up being his last customer.

     Michael had not changed much in the last three months. If anything, he had grown larger, his body encroaching even more onto the particularities of his form and face. His pinpoint black eyes had been , forced into recession by his prominent brow and high, etched cheekbones. His thatch of salt and pepper hair looked too small for the crown of his head, which seemed to have grown, his skull Spreading its plates to enclose a brain flexing ever outward with visions so large they threatened to consume him. His hands, planted on either side of the newspaper, were bloated paws with swollen knuckles.

     Michael Price’s bulk was a product of the anabolic steroids and human growth hormone he injected and swallowed- they threw his hormones violently out of balance. Living here, Randall had learned to both weather and mitigate his drastic mood swings, but now he felt like a child thrown back into the water without a float to hold on to. Michael’s sullen and unreadable silences frightened Randall the most.