The Wolf Gift (7 page)

He tried to move but he couldn’t feel his legs. Something heavy, the paw of the beast, was resting on his back. “Dear God, help me!” he said. “Dear God, please.”

His eyes closed and he went down and down into rolling darkness; but he forced himself back to the surface. “Marchent!” he shouted. Then the darkness rolled over him again.

Utter quiet surrounded him. He knew the two men were dead. He knew that Marchent was dead.

He rolled over on his back, and struggled to reach into the right pocket of his robe. His fingers closed on the cell phone, but he waited, waited in the silence until he was certain that he was truly alone. Then he drew the phone out and up to his face, and punched the button to turn on the small screen.

The darkness rose again, like waves coming up to wash him off the safe white beach. He forced himself to open his eyes. But the phone had slipped from his hand. His hand had been wet and he’d lost it, and as he turned his head, the darkness came again.

With all his strength he fought it. “I’m dying,” he whispered. “They’re dead, all of them. Marchent’s dead. And I’m dying here, and I have to get help.”

He reached out, groping for the cell phone, and felt only the wet boards. With his left hand he covered the pain burning in his gut and felt the blood coming through his fingers. A person cannot live with bleeding like this.

Turning on his side he struggled to right himself and climb up on his knees. But when the swoon came this time it took him down at once.

There was a sound somewhere.

A thin winding sound.

It was like a ribbon of light in the darkness, this sound.

Imagining this? Dreaming? Dying.

He had never expected death to be this quiet, this secretive, this easy. “Marchent,” he whispered. “I’m sorry, so sorry!”

But there was a second siren, yes, he could hear it, a second shining ribbon in the dark. The two luminous ribbons of sound were weaving in and out, weaving and coming closer and closer. And there was a third siren, yes.

Imagine that.

The sirens were very close now, winding down, someone spooling up that shimmering luminous ribbon and, once again, the sound of breaking glass.

He drifted, feeling the tug of the darkness again.
Ah, well, my friends, you are too late
. It didn’t seem so horribly tragic, really. It was all too immediate and exciting,
You are dying, Reuben
, and he didn’t struggle, or hope.

Someone was standing over him. Beams of light were crisscrossing above him, sliding down the walls. It was actually beautiful.

“Marchent,” he said. “Marchent! They got her.” He couldn’t say it clearly enough. His mouth was full of fluid.

“Don’t talk, son,” said the man kneeling beside him. “We’re taking care of her. We’re doing all we can.”

But he knew. He knew by the quiet and the stillness that had surrounded him, and by the sad tone of the man’s voice, that for Marchent it was too late. The lovely and elegant woman he had known for less than a day was dead. She’d died right away.

“Stay with me, son,” the man said. People were lifting him. Down came the plastic oxygen mask. Someone was ripping open his shirt.

He heard the snap and crackle of the walkie-talkie. He was on the stretcher. They were running.

“Marchent,” he said. The glaring light inside the ambulance blinded him. He didn’t want to be taken away from her. He panicked but they held him down and then he went out.

R
EUBEN WAS IN AND OUT
of consciousness for two hours in the Mendocino emergency room; then an air ambulance took him south to San Francisco General where Dr. Grace Golding was waiting with her husband, Phil, at her side.

Reuben was struggling desperately against the restraints that bound him to the gurney. The pain and the drugs were driving him out of his mind.

“They will not tell me what happened!” he roared at his mother, who at once demanded that the police come and give him the answers he was entitled to have.

The only problem with that, said the police, was that he was too drugged to answer their questions and they had more questions than he did at this point. But yes, Marchent Nideck was dead.

It was Celeste who got on the phone with the authorities in Mendocino and came back with the details.

Marchent had been stabbed over sixteen times and any one of ten different wounds might have been fatal. She’d died within minutes, maybe seconds. If she suffered, it was very brief.

Reuben willfully closed his eyes for the first time and went to sleep.

When he woke there was a plainclothes police officer there, and in drug-slurred words, Reuben volunteered that yes, he had had intimate relations “with the deceased,” and no, he did not mind if they took a DNA test. He had known the autopsy would reveal all this.

He gave the best account he could of what he remembered. No, he had not made the 911 call; he had dropped his phone, and been unable to recover it. But if the call had come from his phone, well, then, he must have done it.

(“Murder, murder.” That’s what he’d said over and over again? Didn’t sound like something he would have said at all.)

Celeste wanted him to stop talking. He needed an attorney. He’d never seen her so anxious, so near to tears.

“No, I don’t,” Reuben insisted. “I don’t need an attorney.”

“It’s the concussion,” Grace said. “You’re not going to remember everything. It’s a miracle you remember as much as you do.”

“ ‘Murder, murder’?” he whispered. “I said that?”

He so vividly recalled struggling to find the phone and not being able to do it.

Even through the haze of painkillers, Reuben could see how shaken his mother was. She was in her usual green scrubs, her red hair pinned down and flat, her blue eyes red rimmed and tired. He felt a throbbing in her hand as if she were trembling inside where people couldn’t see it.

Twenty-four hours later, when he was moved to a private room, Celeste brought the news that the killers had been Marchent’s younger brothers. She was powerfully energized by the perfectly outrageous story.

The two had driven a stolen car to the property and, wearing wigs, ski masks, and gloves, had cut off the power to the house, but not before bludgeoning an old housekeeper to death in her bed in the rear servants’ quarters. Obviously wanting the attack to look like the work of random junkies, they’d bashed in the dining room window though the back doors of the house were unlocked.

They’d caught Marchent in the kitchen, just outside her office. There was a small gun found near her, with only her fingerprints on the handle. Not a single shot had been fired.

The animal that had killed the brothers was a mystery. No real tracks were found at the scene. The bites had been savage and immediately fatal to the brothers. But what the animal was, the authorities could not at this point say.

As for the locals, some were insisting it was a female mountain lion, long infamous in those parts.

Reuben said nothing. He heard those sounds again, he felt that paw against his back. A violent shock passed through him, a flash of helplessness and acceptance.
I am going to die
.

“These people are driving me insane on this,” Grace declared. “One minute it’s the saliva of a dog, the next it’s the saliva of a wolf, and now they’re telling me maybe the bites were made by a human. Something’s happened to their lab results. They don’t want to admit it. The fact is,
they didn’t test those wounds properly. Now it was no human being that made these bites on Reuben’s head and neck. And it was no mountain lion either. The idea is patently absurd!”

“But why did it stop?” Reuben asked. “Why didn’t it kill me the way it killed them?”

“If it was rabid, it was behaving erratically,” Grace explained. “And even a bear can be rabid. Mountain lions, no. Maybe something distracted it. We don’t know. We only know you’re alive.”

She went on mumbling about the total lack of hair or fur samples. “Now you know there had to have been fibers at that scene, animal fibers.”

Reuben heard that panting breath again. Then the silence. There had been no smell of an animal, but there had been the feel of one, of hair, the long thick coat of a dog or a wolf against him. Maybe a mountain lion. But no scent of a mountain lion. Don’t mountain lions have a scent? How would they ever know?

Grace was thankful the paramedics had thoroughly cleaned up Reuben’s wounds. That was only proper. But certainly they could get a decent sampling from the bites on the dead men that would tell them whether the animal had been rabid or not.

“Well, they had a massacre on their hands, Grace,” said Celeste. “They weren’t thinking about rabies.”

“Well, we have to think about rabies, and we’re beginning the rabies protocol now.” It wasn’t nearly as painful as it had been in the old days, she assured Reuben. He’d have to take a series of injections for twenty-eight days.

Rabies was almost uniformly fatal once the symptoms presented. There was no choice but to treat for rabies at once.

Reuben didn’t care. He didn’t care about the deep pain in his gut, his aching head, or the ice pick of pain that kept stabbing his face. He didn’t care about the nausea he felt from the antibiotics. All he cared about was that Marchent was dead.

He closed his eyes and he saw Marchent. He heard Marchent’s voice.

He couldn’t quite grasp that all life had gone out of Marchent Nideck just that quickly, and that he himself was somehow improbably still alive.

They wouldn’t let him watch television news till the next day. People in Mendocino County talked about wolf attacks that happened every
few years. And then there were bears up there, no one could deny. But folks in the vicinity of the old house put their money on a mountain lion they’d been tracking for the last year.

The fact was, no one could find the animal, whatever it was. They were combing the redwood forest. People claimed to have heard howling in the night.

Howling. Reuben remembered those gnashing growls and snarls, that savage torrent of sound when the beast had descended on the brothers, as though it could not kill in silence, as if the sounds were part and parcel of its lethal strength.

More medication. More painkillers. More antibiotics. Reuben lost track of the days.

Grace said she wondered if plastic surgery would even be necessary. “I mean this bite has healed remarkably. And I must say, the incision in your stomach is healing too.”

“He ate all the right things growing up,” said Celeste. “His mother is a brilliant doctor.” She winked at Grace. It pleased Reuben so much that they liked each other.

“Yes, indeed, and she can cook!” said Grace. “But this is just marvelous.” Gently her fingers moved through Reuben’s hair. Gingerly she touched the skin on his neck and then on his chest.

“What is it?” Reuben whispered.

“I don’t know,” Grace said absently. “Let’s say you don’t need any vitamins through that IV.”

Reuben’s dad sat in the corner of the hospital reading
Leaves of Grass
by Walt Whitman. Now and then he said something like, “You’re alive, son, that’s what matters.”

Everything might be healing, but Reuben’s headache got worse. He was never fully asleep, only half asleep, and he overheard things he didn’t understand.

Grace talking somewhere, perhaps to another doctor. “I see changes, I mean, I know, this has nothing to do with the rabies virus, of course, we have no evidence he’s contracted it, but well, you’ll think I’m crazy but I could swear that his hair is thicker. You know, the bite marks, well, I know my son’s hair, and my son’s hair is thicker, and his eyes …”

He meant to ask her,
What are you talking about
, but only thought about it dully with a multitude of other tormenting thoughts.

Reuben lay there speculating. If drugs could really numb your consciousness,
they’d be a good thing. As it was, they slowed you down, confused you, kept you vulnerable to violent flashes of recall, and then agitated you and made you unsure of what you knew and didn’t know. Sounds startled him. Even smells woke him from his shallow uneasy sleep.

Fr. James rushed in a couple of times a day, always late for something back at his church, and with just enough time to tell Reuben he was obviously improving and looking better and better. But Reuben saw something in his brother’s face that was entirely new; a kind of fear. Jim had always been protective of his younger brother, but this was deeper. “I gotta say, though,” said Jim, “you do look quite ruddy and robust for someone who’s been through all this.”

Celeste did as much hands-on care as he would allow. She was amazingly capable. She fed him Diet Coke through a straw, adjusted his covers, wiped his face over and over, and helped him up for his required walk around the ward. She slipped out again and again to call the D.A.’s office, and then she’d be back assuring him he had nothing to worry about. She was efficient, matter of fact, and never got tired.

“The nurses have voted you the most handsome patient on the ward,” she told him. “I don’t know what they’re giving you here, but I could swear your eyes are actually a deeper shade of blue.”

“That’s impossible,” he said. “Eyes don’t change color.”

“Maybe drugs can change them,” she said. She kept looking at him, not in his eyes, but at them. It made him slightly uneasy.

Speculation about the mysterious animal continued. Couldn’t Reuben remember anything else, asked his editor Billie Kale, the feminine genius behind the
San Francisco Observer
. She stood beside his bed.

“Honestly, no,” Reuben said, pushing hard against the drugs to look and sound alert.

“So it wasn’t a mountain lion, you’re sure of that?”

“Billie, I saw nothing, I told you.”

Billie was a short, rotund woman, with neat white hair and expensive clothes. Her husband, after a long career, had retired from the state senate and bankrolled the paper, giving Billie a second chance at a meaningful life. She was a terrific editor. She looked for an individual voice in each of her reporters. She fostered that voice. And she had liked Reuben from the start.