A Single Eye (30 page)

“L
eo, you're boiling,” I said, hand on his forehead. His face was damp and red.

“Off and on,” he muttered.

“What do you mean?”

“Comes and goes. It'll pass.”

There was no thermometer, not that knowing his numerical temperature was going to help me. It would just suggest how panicked I should be. Cold compresses, wasn't that the treatment for fever? I'd heard of people being packed in ice. Damn it, where was the doctor? Justin ought to have had him back here hours ago.

But there was also “sweat it out.” Oh shit.

“Leo, how long—”

“It'll pass. Go to bed.”

Two o'clock in the afternoon, and Leo thought it was nine
P.M.
!

“I'm not leaving until your fever is down.”

He protested, but briefly. After stoking the fire I made a tea run to the kitchen, straining to catch the rumble of the truck, trying to assure myself Justin hadn't really lit out for San Francisco. But had he indulged himself with a side trip to Willits, or a few beers, or a big steak lunch? Or all three?

In the kitchen the cooks were chopping celery and breaking up cauliflower. Someone had moved the tea bags and I had to ask three of the cooks before one of them plucked the box from behind a stack of drying clothes. Every portion of the trip took longer than I had expected. When I got back to Leo his fever had abated some. His forehead still felt hot, but not alarmingly so.

“See,” he said, with a watery but still smug grin. “I told you it would pass.”

“‘Comes and goes,' was what you said,” I grumbled, covering my relief. If I'd even known what all was in that cup of cocoa—cyanide and what else?—I might have had some idea what to expect and what should strike panic.

“Help me up.”

I propped his pillows against the wall, and helped him sit cross-legged. He had slept so much his internal clock might as well be set for Istanbul. I poured the tea—his into a cup with a thick handle—and let it cool before holding it out to him. He took it in both hands, so carefully I thought of the commentary on Dogen Zenji's
Tenzo Kyokun, Use the property and possessions of the community as carefully as if they were your own eyes
.

Leo looked at his cup and winked. He was on such a high, such a fragile high, I hesitated to ask, but, of course I did ask.

“Roshi, Aeneas was something of a mirror, wasn't he? Was there more to him? Something that triggered events at the opening?”

“The opening?” he repeated in a hazy way that made me wonder if he was tracking.

“For instance, Rob looked at Aeneas and saw an ambitious competitor—Aeneas, who sat so motionlessly that the Japanese roshis were impressed.”

He inhaled slowly, but the movement seemed to focus him, and when he answered he sounded as if he hadn't been ill at all. “Aeneas was the only one who impressed them. Abbots in Japan have spent almost their entire lives in temples, leading services, performing ceremonies. They are paid for those ceremonies and doing them beautifully is important. To them, my students looked like a troop of monkeys. They squirmed, they galumphed in kinhin, and worst of all, they questioned everything.”

“Not Aeneas?”

“Oh, no. He sat still, walked slowly, and kept quiet. He was focused, tidy, and obsessive about whatever job he was given. In their eyes, he was my one success. I wondered, at the time, would they have consecrated the temple, had there not been Aeneas.”

He looked up and I thought maybe he shrugged but the movement was so slight I couldn't be sure. His fragile high was disintegrating. I reached out to help him lie down but he waved me off.

“Ironic,” I said, “because Aeneas was what—brain damaged?”

“Probably. No clear diagnosis, but . . . my guess. His condition . . . didn't change here.”

“But what could he have gotten out of zazen?”

Leo looked up at me. Something shifted as if he had channeled all his remaining energy into what had to be said. When he spoke his voice was as steady as his gaze.

“Who can speak for someone else? Maybe he just sat and heard the birds and felt the wind, and found his inhalations wonderful.”

We sit to sit, I've heard it explained. We sit zazen to experience being inseparable from the wonder of the moment.

“But if your mind is short-circuited,” I insisted.

“I don't know the answer, Darcy. Back then I was arrogant. I figured what was the point of Aeneas sitting drugged up in a locked ward. Wasn't he better off here where life suited him? What was the harm?”

“What about Maureen? To her he was the devil who had to be watched every moment. And Rob, he—”

“That was my arrogance. Their reaction was their practice, I thought. Maybe with a teacher with a better practice of his own, that would have been true. But . . . but, I failed them. And when I heard Aeneas was in Japan I assumed the Japanese teachers felt they could not abandon such a promising student to me.”

“But why did you think that—that Aeneas went to Japan rather than just off somewhere?”

“His postcard.”

Just one? He'd sent his family at least three. “From Japan?”

He pointed to a low chest in the corner by the fireplace. “Bottom left.”

I opened the door, anxious to see this card from the man who proscribed using the phone, sent from the country where he presumably had never gone.

The postcard's corners had rumpled with time. One edge had been ripped in two places. It must have sat on Leo's dresser for years, where he could be chastised by it. The pictured Japanese temple garden had faded to pale blue.

“Turn it over, Darcy.”

The address was printed in neat letters, in the message side, nothing but a large
A
with the bar scooped down like a smiley mouth and two dots for eyes above it.

“Is that how he—?”

Roshi nodded. “I insisted he write his family. He sent them postcards like that.”

“Couldn't he write?”

“He could. He didn't.”

“But that mark, anyone could have made it!”

“Yes, anyone.”

What color there was in his long face drained away, leaving those too-big features of his ludicrously bright. Poor Amber.

We sat there, he canted slightly to his right against the wall, me cross-legged on a cushion by the fireplace. I hadn't paid attention to the fire before but now the crackling sounded like fireworks and the smoke hung in the air. Somehow it seemed important to sum it up aloud.

I said, “Aeneas never went to Japan with the Japanese abbots. He didn't send that postcard. There is no reason to think he sent the postcards to his family later. Since he left here no one has heard from him at all.
If
he left here.”

“If he left here.”

Leo was still holding his tea mug. He sipped, though the tea had to be very cold by now. He looked so gray and empty I kept expecting him to ask me to help him back down, and yet I knew he wouldn't. He had stepped too far into the question of Aeneas.

“He's dead, isn't he?”

“I don't know.”

“But you suspect.”

“I fear.”

“And you fear he's buried right here.” I didn't need to make it a question. He didn't disagree. “You fear it's one of your students who killed him, right? The same person who poisoned your cocoa?” When he didn't respond, I insisted, “Right?”

“Yes.”

“Leo, you're the Roshi, for Chrissakes, why didn't you just ask them?”

He didn't respond to my outburst. In his same flat, sick voice, he said, “I am.”

The Fifth Patriarch sent the pot scrubber away to distant lands and kept Shen-hsui in the monastery, maybe to protect the pot scrubber, maybe to save Shen-hsui. Leo had failed his student, the poisoner, six years ago. Now he was giving him a chance to face himself.

I helped Leo down and he slept, fitfully at first, then more easily.

It was as if he had handed his agitation to me. I sat watching him sleep, listening for the sound of the truck that didn't come, and feeling the cold, solid weight of knowledge of a killer. One of us. Leo's acknowledgment made everything different. Before, I had worried about the killer, but there had always been a safety net of maybe I was wrong. Before, it had been like doing a high-fall gag off a five-hundred-foot cliff, but knowing there was a padded catcher basket out of sight ten feet down. Knowing it was all a stunt. Now it was real. No padded catcher. A real murderer. One of us.

Outside Leo's cabin nothing had changed. In here everything was different.

When I looked at the clock again it was nearly three
P.M.
Work period would end in half an hour and with it my chance to catch Maureen and force her to tell me what she'd raced away to avoid twice before. Next to Roshi, maybe even more than Roshi, she knew what had happened here. Repeating silently that outside the cabin nothing had changed, I tucked the covers around Leo and slipped out, veering first toward the parking lot, as if that would draw the truck to me. I peered into the bathhouse and kitchen. Barry was stacking boxes; I had the feeling he had seen me and slipped out of sight, but maybe I was imagining that.

Leo's poisoning stemmed from that weekend of the opening. Why hadn't Leo called the sheriff last month when the Japanese teachers wrote that Aeneas had not left with them? But what would he have reported?
An adult man disappeared six years ago. His family doesn't believe he's missing
. No sheriff would investigate that.

But why hadn't Leo or anyone else followed up on Aeneas when he “left?” Leo said he was too abashed to write to the abbots in Japan. Still, the group hadn't flown out of San Francisco till Monday or Tuesday. Why hadn't anyone driven into town and called them? Aeneas had lived for months here. Rob was jealous, Maureen felt put upon, Leo drank. But they weren't unkind people. Weren't they even curious? Didn't they find it odd that Aeneas should have a passport? The normal thing would have been for the four of them to sit on the overstuffed chairs Rob had bought, drink their cocoa, and chew on Aeneas. It didn't make sense that he just slipped from their minds.

Or he was pushed out of their minds.

Or something, that weekend—something more important than the briefly missing Buddha—pushed out everything.

I was at Maureen's cabin now. I climbed the steps, waited a moment—not nearly long enough for good manners—and pulled open the door.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-FIVE

I
t was Maureen's cabin I'd barged into, but it wasn't Maureen kneeling on the floor hunting for something under her futon. It was Gabe Luzotta.

“What are you looking for, Gabe?”

He bounced up, grinning with obvious relief.

“Darcy!”

“Didn't you have time to search Maureen's cabin yesterday when you were ‘napping'?”

A shock of fear froze his face; then it was gone and he shot me the grin again. But it was too late; I knew it and he did, too.

The first time I saw him he had made me think of a cat, sneaky but endearing. Now the feline he brought to mind was the one who turns belly up imploring you to scratch his stomach. You hesitate, but he's begging you, and he's so cute. Against your better judgment you give in and scratch. In an instant his claws are in your wrist. But I wasn't hesitating, not now.

“What happened to Aeneas, Gabe? Is he alive or dead?”

“I don't know.”

He looked ashamed, as if he knew better than to sink those claws, as if he really wasn't the type of guy to be poking under Maureen's mattress. Then I realized I'd been had once more.

“Jeez, you are really something, Gabe. You're not embarrassed to be here rooting through Maureen's stuff, or making use of Leo while you do it. You're just ashamed that you haven't dug up the facts yet, right?”

He laughed. “Well, yeah.”