The Darkest Evening of the Year (9 page)

Chapter
21

T
he rustle and hiss and
crumpcrump-crumpcrump
rose behind Brian, quieter than the first time, almost stealthy. He turned in his chair to look, but he remained alone in the kitchen.

When the sound repeated, he glanced at the ceiling, wondering if wind might be troubling something on the roof. But the window revealed a morning as still as that on an airless world.

As he worked obsessively on the center of the current drawing of the dog’s eye, he broke a lead point. A second. A third.

While he sharpened the pencils, only the crisp scraping of the X-acto blade punctuated the expectant hush.

At its loudest, the unidentified sound had seemed terrible not because it struck fear in him—which it did, a little—but because it suggested an immense and humbling power.

Born in a tornado, Brian had considerable respect for the chaos that nature could spawn and for the sudden order—call it fate—that was often revealed when the apparent chaos clarified. This strange sound of many parts had a chaotic quality; but he sensed in it his fate.

Pencils sharpened, he returned to the drawing.

Moments later, when the sound occurred yet again, he was pretty sure that it had come from overhead. Perhaps from the attic.

The drawing had reestablished its hypnotic hold on him, however, and again he felt an impending revelation. Discovering the source of the sound was a less urgent task than completing the petal-over-petal pattern of light and shadow at the center of the image.

He bent forward. The drawing seemed to fold open to fill his field of vision.

After he’d been working for a few minutes, a shadow swept across the page. Although shapeless and swift, it inspired in him an alarm akin to what he’d felt at the first—and loudest—of the sounds, and he startled up from the chair.

Because it had one curtained window, the kitchen would have been gloomy without the overhead light.

A moth might have arced around the ceiling fixture, casting down an exaggerated silhouette. Nothing but a moth could have swooped so silently.

Brian turned in a circle, searching the room. If the insect had come to rest anywhere, he could not spot it.

To his right, at the periphery of vision, he glimpsed another shadow shiver up the wall. Or thought he did. He turned his head, raised his eyes, saw nothing—

—and then fleetingly caught sight of a sharkish shadow darting across the floor. Or thought he did.

His gaze descended to the unfinished drawing. His hands were trembling too badly to make good use of a pencil.

Alert, Brian stood in the center of the room. No more shadows took flight, but the strange sound issued faintly from elsewhere in the apartment.

He hesitated, then stepped out of the kitchen.

His reflection in a hallway mirror dismayed him. His face was pale except for the ashy look of the skin under his bloodshot eyes.

At the end of the hall, he stood under a trapdoor to the attic. To reach the recessed handle, he would need a stepladder.

The longer he stared at the trap, the more he became convinced that something crouched in the higher chamber, or hung upside down from a rafter, listening.

Exhaustion whetted his imagination even as it dulled his mind. Reason had deserted him. Nothing but dust waited in the attic, dust and spiders.

He’d had only one hour of sleep in the past thirty-six. Hour after hour of compulsive drawing had further drained him.

In the bedroom, without undressing, he stretched out on his disheveled bed, from which Amy’s phone call had roused him nearly twelve hours previously.

The blinds were closed. A fan of gray light spread through the open doorway, from the hall.

His eyes were hot and grainy, but he did not close them. On the ceiling, none of the mottled shadows moved.

From memory rose the crystalline voice of the child singing in Celtic.

Her eyes, a purple shade of blue.

Carl Brockman’s eyes like shotgun barrels.

The word
pigkeeper
on his computer screen.

Desperate for rest, Brian dreaded closing his eyes. He had the crazy idea that Death waited to take him in his sleep. In dreams, a winged presence would descend on him, cover his mouth with hers, and suck the breath of life from him.

Chapter
22

A
fter more than five hours of sleep, Harrow wakes past noon, not in the windowless room where they have sex, but in the main bedroom of the yellow-brick house.

The draperies are shut, but he can tell that Moongirl is already gone. Her presence would have imparted an unmistakable quality to the darkness because her mood, that of a perpetually pending storm, adds significant millibars to the natural atmospheric pressure.

In the kitchen, he brews strong coffee. Through a window, he sees her in the pocket yard, that small pool of grass so green in a sea of rock.

Carrying his mug of steaming brew, he steps outside. The day is warm for late September.

The yellow-brick house is anchored in a landscape of beige granite. Rounded forms of stone, like the knuckles of giant fists, press up against the perimeter of the sun-washed brick patio.

Harrow crosses fissured slabs of weather-smoothed rock to the yard. Over the ages, wind had blown soil into a deep oval declivity in the granite, and later had seeded it.

From the center of the grassy oval rises an eighty-foot Montezuma pine, its great spreading branches filtering the midday sun through tufts of gracefully drooping, ten-inch-long needles.

In feathery shadows and plumes of sunshine, Moongirl sits upon a blanket, aware that she is a vision. Even in this dramatic landscape, she is the focus and lodestar. She draws his gaze as irresistibly as gravity pulls a dropped stone down a well, into the drowning dark.

She is wearing only black panties and a simple but expensive diamond necklace that Harrow gave her. She is ripe but lithe, with sun-bronzed skin and the self-possessed air of a cat. Dappled with shadows and golden light, she reminds him of a leopard at leisure, fresh from a killing, fed and content.

Men have given her so much for so long that she expects gifts in the same way she expects to receive air every time she inhales: as a natural right. She accepts every offering, no matter how extravagant, with no more thanks than she expresses when she turns a spigot and receives water from a tap.

Beside her is a black-lacquered box lined with red velvet, in which she keeps an array of polishes, scissors, files, emery boards, and other instruments for the care of her nails.

Although she never visits a manicurist, her fingernails are exquisitely shaped, though shorter and more pointed than is the fashion these days. She is content to spend hours at this task.

Her fear of boredom turns her inward. To Moongirl, other people seem as flat as actors on a TV screen, and she is unable to imagine that they possess her dimension. The outer world is gray and empty, but her inner world is rich.

Harrow sits on the grass, a few feet from her blanket, as she does not encourage closeness in moments like this. He drinks coffee, watches her as she paints her toenails, and wonders what occupies her mind when she is in such a reverie.

He would not be surprised to learn that no conscious thoughts whatsoever trouble her right now, that she is in a trance.

In an effort to understand her, he discovered a condition called automatism. This is a state during which behavior is not controlled by the conscious mind, and it may or may not apply to her.

Usually, automatisms last a few minutes. But as with all things, there are atypical events, and Moongirl is nothing if not atypical.

In the grip of automatism, perhaps she can spend hours on her toenails without being aware that she is grooming herself. Later, she would have no recollection of trimming, filing, and polishing.

Conceivably, she could kill a man during such a spell, never be conscious of committing violence, and have no memory of murder.

He would like to watch her in an act of automatismic homicide. How breathtakingly terrible her beauty would be then: her eyes blank and her features without expression as she wielded a flensing knife.

He doubts that she has killed in such a condition or ever will, because murder—especially by fire—is the one thing the outer world can offer her that dependably staves off boredom. She does not need to kill in a trance when she can, without compunction and with deep satisfaction, kill while fully conscious.

Frequently she passes the better part of the day in grooming activities. She is eternally fascinated by herself, and her body is her best defense against boredom.

Sometimes she spends an entire afternoon washing her golden hair, applying to it a series of natural-substance rinses, slowly brushing it dry in the sun, and giving herself a long scalp and neck massage.

A restless man by nature, Harrow is nevertheless able to watch her for hours as she grooms herself. He is soothed by her flawless beauty, by her bottomless calm, and by her perfect self-absorption, and she inspires in him a curious hopeful feeling, though he has not yet been able to identify what it is that he hopes
for
.

Usually Moongirl grooms herself in silence, and Harrow is not sure that she is aware of his presence. This time, after a while, she speaks: “Have you heard from him?”

“No.”

“I’m tired of this place.”

“We won’t stay much longer.”

“He better call soon.”

“He will.”

“I’m tired of the noise.”

“What noise?” he asks.

“The sea breaking on the shore.”

“Most people like it.”

“It makes me think,” she says.

“Think about what?”

“Everything.”

He does not reply.

“I don’t want to think,” she says.

“About what?”

“About anything.”

“When this is done, we’ll go to the desert.”

“It better be done soon.”

“All sand and sun, no surf.”

With slow deliberate strokes of the brush, she paints a toenail purple.

As the earth turns slowly away from the sun, the feathery pine shadows stretch their wings toward the house.

Beyond the pocket yard, out of sight below the shelving slabs of granite, waves pound the beach.

To the west, a gunmetal-blue sea looks hard, cold. It alchemizes the molten-gold sunshine into shiny steel scales, which churn forward like the metal treads of war machines.

After a while she says, “I had a dream.”

Harrow waits.

“There was a dog.”

“What dog?”

“A golden retriever.”

“It would be, wouldn’t it?”

“I didn’t like its eyes.”

“What about them?”

She says nothing.

Then later: “If you see it, kill it.”

“What—the dog?”

“Yes.”

“It was in a dream.”

“But it’s real, too.”

“Not a dangerous breed.”

“This one is.”

“If you say so.”

“Kill it on sight.”

“All right.”

“Kill it good.”

“All right.”

“Kill it hard.”

Chapter
23

A
faint onshore breeze washed waves of golden grass up the meadow toward the hilltop, and the elongated oak-tree shadows rippled in the flow.

The sweet grassy scent, the brightness that fell from the air, and the majesty of the oaks was as close as Amy expected to get to Heaven this side of death.

Golden Heart had received these twelve acres from the estate of Julia Papadakis, who had fostered many a golden retriever between its rescue and its forever home.

Julia’s only living relative, a niece named Linnea, unhappy with a thirty-million-dollar inheritance, had challenged the will, seeking to add this valuable land to her portfolio. Linnea had millions for attorney fees. Amy’s counterattack was mounted on a budget.

Currently, even after years of operation, Golden Heart had no office other than Amy’s study, no care facilities for the dogs other than the volunteers’ homes. When she brought in more dogs than could be fostered by their members, she had to board them in the kennels of the animal hospitals that offered her a discount.

She was loath to board a single rescue. Even if they didn’t arrive beaten or tick-infested, even if they were healthy dogs, they were nevertheless anxious and in need of affection in excess of what any ordinary kennel staff could offer.

Here on this hill, in this meadow, with determination and the grace of God, she would oversee the construction of a facility where Golden Heart could receive new rescues, evaluate them, bathe them, and prepare them for their new homes. For those who couldn’t quickly be placed in a forever home or in a foster situation, heated and air-conditioned kennels of generous size, with clean bedding, would be staffed around the clock. There would be a simple clinic, a well-equipped grooming salon, a fenced playground, a training room, a playroom for use in rainy weather….

Until the bequest was successfully defended in court, however, only Amy’s kids could enjoy this sunny meadow and the oak shade. Fred and Ethel bounded now through the tall grass, chasing each other, tempted this way and that by rabbit scent, squirrel scent.

Nickie remained at her master’s side.

Amy had departed from the blacktop and had driven the Expedition overland, parking on the hilltop, while the Land Rover had pulled to the shoulder of the highway.

Evidently not tempted by the wild scents or by the prospect of play, Nickie remained focused on the vehicle far below.

Although Amy had brought Renata’s binoculars, she didn’t bother to use them. The driver remained in the Rover, and at this distance, even with the powerful field glasses, she would not be able to see his face.

She wondered if Linnea Papadakis had put her under surveillance.

Although an injunction prevented Golden Heart from developing this land until Linnea’s challenge to her aunt’s last will and testament had been adjudicated, Amy was not enjoined from visiting the property. She couldn’t imagine what Linnea hoped to gain by having her watched.

Low in her throat, Nickie growled.