Whittaker looked at Monica, her face ugly with despair. No, not even the sex he’d initially enjoyed with her could compare with the emotions he’d awakened in himself as a child in his cousin’s barn. But that was decades ago. He’d left that strange desire behind, hadn’t he?
By ten o’clock there were no other vehicles outside the back parking lot of the Dew Drop. Monica and Whittaker loaded the body, Paul’s clothes and shoes, and the bathroom towel into the back of the SUV. He closed the tailgate as quietly as possible.
“Follow me home,” the professor instructed. “Stay in the car when we get there.”
“Then what?”
He barely heard her question. “Just drive, Monica, and for God’s sake don’t exceed the speed limit.”
“We finally got back to Isabel Island.” Whittaker turned toward Tosca, his eyes moist at the memory. “Monica arrived ahead of me. I’d already decided how to proceed from then on.”
Monica opened the garage door with the remote, and they slotted their vehicles side by side into the space. Once they had parked and turned their engines off. Whittaker pressed the button on his own remote to close the double door.
“No!” he said, getting out of his car as Monica prepared to exit the Range Rover. “I told you to stay in the car. Move over to the passenger seat.”
He watched until she did as he ordered. All right. What did he need to take? Two shovels. Two flashlights. A couple of towels and plastic grocery bags. That should do it. He placed the items on the rear seat of Monica’s vehicle, grunting as pulled himself up into the driver’s seat and silently cursing the SUV’s high doorsill. He pressed the remote to reopen the garage door and began to reverse. Just before pulling all the way out he glanced to the right and saw the hatchet, left by the previous owner, hanging on a nail near the door.
“Of course! How could I forget?”
He stopped the Range Rover, moved the transmission lever into park and slid off the seat. He grabbed the hatchet, still shiny and well sharpened, and threw it onto the rear seat alongside the flashlights and other gear.
“What’s that for, Haiden?”
He didn’t answer and got back into the car. Luckily, the Range Rover could go almost anywhere off-road. He checked the gas gauge. Almost a full tank. She’d finally got something right, at least.
Tosca held her breath as Professor Whittaker paused, his eyes on the blank space on the wall where the framed piece of music had hung.
“Haiden, surely that’s not the end of the story?”
“Of course not. Drink up, Tosca. There’s plenty of your mead left.”
Before she could reply, his cell phone rang. He excused himself and picked it up. He covered the mouthpiece, told Tosca he needed to take the call privately and went into the kitchen. Tosca immediately stood and switched her wine glass with the professor’s. She had read enough mysteries to be suspicious and wasn’t taking any chances. She’d barely returned to her seat before Whittaker came back to the living room.
“Sorry about the interruption,” he said. “Now where were we? Oh, yes, Paul’s burial. Driving to the desert.”
Whittaker headed south on the Interstate 5. Traffic was sporadic, and they made good time to the Highway 78 turnoff.
“Where are we going, Haiden?”
“Never mind. Just sit there and shut up. You’ve done enough damage for one night.”
The road passed through a couple of small towns, where no lights showed, and finally into scrub desert. At the crossroads Whittaker took the right fork onto a county road and followed it as it turned into a narrow, unpaved trail. They passed an abandoned tailings mine and continued driving deep into the desert wastelands, the vague, dark horizon etched by mountain crags against the sky.
“Where are we? Do you know this place?”
Whittaker didn’t deign to answer. He did indeed know this place and hated it. His father would bring him to Anza-Borrego State Park every summer during school vacation after he was no longer welcome to stay at his uncle’s ranch. He was taught to set up camp and handle a rifle, and he was told to enjoy target shooting. The weather was always sweltering, and he found no beauty in the dry wilderness. The only pleasure he took in their weekends in the monotonous desert was watching his father’s face turn purple when his son deliberately missed every designated target.
Driving across the desolate flatlands that were littered in spots with small, round boulders, Whittaker swung the wheel and drove onto a sandy gully. He stopped the car, switched off the lights and pulled on the hand brake.
“Get out.”
Monica opened her door and stood outside the car, shivering in the night air.
Whittaker took the flashlights and shovels out of the trunk and handed her a shovel.
“Start digging right near that small bush,” he said, waving the beam of his flashlight at a growth of chaparral near the rear of the car.
He followed her and set the two flashlights on the ground, directed toward the bush. He took the second shovel and began scooping out the coarse sandy soil, kicking aside several round rocks. Within minutes he was sweating and was forced to stop. He dropped the shovel, grabbed one of the small towels he’d brought and wiped his face. On the opposite side of the grave Monica paused, too. She had trouble wielding the heavy shovel, and with each load she lifted, almost as much fell back in.
“The sand is too soft here, Haiden. This isn’t working.” She put down the shovel and sat on the ground, weeping.
“It’s fine. You’re just not digging deep enough each time. Never mind, I’ll do it. Hold the flashlight for me and roll those rocks off to the side. They’re in the way.”
It took the professor, breathing heavily with the exertion and stopping frequently to rest, almost an hour before he was satisfied the hole was deep enough.
“Come over here and help me get Paul from the car,” he said. “Rigor mortis is probably beginning to set in, and then it’ll be much more difficult to move him.”
“How do you know that, Haiden?”
“One of my students told me.”
“How would a music student know something like that?”
“His father was a mortician, and the kid composed funeral music for the services.”
They laid the corpse next to the grave.
“Aren’t you going to put him in?” said Monica.
“No. Wait a minute.” Haiden went to the rear seat of the Range Rover and brought out the plastic bags. In his right hand he carried the hatchet. As he walked toward her, Monica screamed and began running blindly into the darkness of the desert.
Whittaker smirked again at Tosca, then went on. “I said, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Monica, come back here. I’m not going to kill you, as worthless as you are. Come back, and you’ll see. If you don’t come back, you’ll die out here. You’ll wander around for days. I’m not going to kill you, you idiot, I promise.’”
“What was her reaction?” said Tosca.
“Oh, she came back to the gravesite all right. She had no choice.”
“Go on.”
“Then what’s the hatchet for?” Monica’s words came out ragged and halting.
The professor smiled to himself. She’s scared out of her wits. Serves her right.
“Nothing. Sit in the car till I call you. No, come here. I need you to hold the flashlight.”
Whittaker unwrapped part of the tarp and beach blanket that covered the corpse. Monica watched in silence.
“Damn. Rigor mortis has set in.”
The professor placed one of the small towels he’d brought under each of Paul’s forearms and, giving two tremendous whacks of the hatchet, quickly chopped off the boy’s hands just above the wrist.
Dropping the flashlight, Monica shrank back in horror. “What are you doing? Oh, my God, are you insane?”
Whittaker folded the towels around the severed hands and set them inside the plastic grocery bags. He shoved the arms back inside the blanket and folded the wraps once more around the body.
“Nothing I haven’t done before, my dear. I just can’t bear to bury these brilliant, brilliant hands. The fingers of a true genius. I must preserve them. Pick up that damned flashlight and shine it over here.”
He gestured to his trembling wife to help him, and they rolled the body into the freshly dug grave. Sand was already beginning to fall back in. He picked up a shovel.
“Grab the other shovel,” he said. “Hurry up!”
It took little time before the grave was covered. He tamped down the sand. After sweeping the flashlight in a circle around the area, he used his shovel to erase their footprints as they backed over to the car. Still trembling, Monica climbed into the passenger seat of the Range Rover. Her husband closed the tailgate and got into the driver’s side.
He started the ignition, drove for ten yards, then drove around in two widening circles, ending facing the grave site. He stopped the vehicle and got back out. Whatever he was going to do, Monica told him she didn’t want to know and sat with her head in her arms, still crying.
“But she couldn’t resist watching,” Whittaker told Tosca, “as I took one of the shovels and erased the tire tracks that led to Paul’s burial spot. My footprints, too. Guess she wondered if I’d gone back for Paul’s feet.”
Whittaker laughed loudly and looked at his guest to see how she was reacting.
“After I got back in the car and started up the engine, I told Monica to find the pen and notebook in the glove compartment. When she had retrieved them, I told her to write down the numbers that were displayed on the GPS unit. After she’d done as I directed, she asked me, ‘Why do you need them?’ Need what? I said. Of course, I knew exactly how she meant it, but I wanted her to say the words. ‘You know,’ she said. ‘ No, Monica, I don’t, I told her. Oh, you mean the numbers? The shovels? The flashlights? Tosca, I must admit that I was really enjoying myself. When Monica kept silent, I said, oh, of course. Why didn’t I think of that? You mean Paul’s hands.” Whittaker paused to drink some mead and shook his head. “I told my wife she’d never understand.”
Whittaker moved to the piano bench and began playing softly, his eyes closed.
“Haiden. I’m sure you haven’t told me everything,” said Tosca.
He opened his eyes and rested his hands in his lap but continued to sit at the piano. “That’s true. All right. The next day I got up to find that Monica had already left the house. I fixed some breakfast and read the newspaper.”
Whittaker went on to tell Tosca there was no mention of a missing student in the news and probably wouldn’t be for several days, if then. He knew the grandfather was dead. As Paul’s music professor, Whittaker would certainly not report him absent, and his fellow students and teachers at UCI might let a couple of weeks go by before realizing he wasn’t attending classes.
“The freedom of college campuses is a benefit indeed.”
Tosca made no reply.
“After showering and dressing,” he continued, “I went out to the garage to the tall freezer Monica had insisted I buy to hold her bottles of vodka. She’d buy cases at a time, switching between brands and swearing the latest was the best before changing her mind.”
The professor described how he had opened the freezer door to check on the toweled bundles on the top shelf. What to do with them? Play-Doh or putty was not an option, of course. He smiled at the memory of his childhood. This time, he told Tosca, he needed something really permanent to preserve the hands that were as precious as trophies. Paul certainly deserved the best.
“I knew they had to be encased in some kind of material, then not boxed and buried or hidden but displayed where I could enjoy seeing them daily and openly.”
He told how he wandered out of the garage, through the house, into his front yard and down to the white picket fence, pondering the problem. He stared off into the distance across the bay, hardly noticing the fleet of small training sailboats with young grade-schoolers at the tiller as they coasted by. He strolled to his front door, noted the neglected area in the corner of the garden up against the house and knew he’d found his answer.
“A day later,” he said, “I went back to the desert where we’d buried Paul and selected a few of the round boulders we’d kicked aside when we dug the grave. I brought one home because I decided to construct a shrine to my beloved student. I planned to encase Paul’s hands in cement to resemble it.”
“The shrine is your rock garden,” said Tosca.
“Yes. So there you have it. You probably think I am a sociopath or something, right?”
“Perhaps there’s something in your family that ...”
“Oh, yes, genetics. I’ve read the books. How could I not when I think of my childhood? My parents were naturally alarmed at my activities, and they took me to for a few sessions with a clinical psychologist. I told the doctor I had a fetish for fingers, but he brushed that aside. I told him about the animal paws I’d put inside the clay and sculpted as animals as a kid. I told him I had no sense of shame doing it.”
He stopped to drink some wine before continuing. “The doctor told me I have no conscience, and we had some counseling sessions, but I knew he had no idea how to fix me. Look, I know I have compassion. I recognize beauty. I cry over beautiful music, especially my own. So what does that tell me? Or you? Whether the counseling helped or not, I certainly stopped my interesting hobby, and for most of my adult life that part of me disappeared. But the shock of knowing Paul was dead, of Monica betraying me with my protégé. Well, it all came back.”
“That’s quite a story,” said Tosca.
“It was her fault, the asthma attack. Paul was handling it. He had it under control, but Monica, damn her, had to go and seduce him.”
Whittaker glanced over at the brass bowl that brimmed over with ashes and shook his head.
“I couldn’t afford to have a scandal.”
“So you buried him in the Anza Borrego desert.”
“Yes, and five years later I killed Monica for causing Paul’s death.”
The statement was so matter-of-fact, Tosca recoiled. Not a flicker of remorse crossed his face. She struggled to retain her composure.