Blood Music (29 page)

“Madeleine,” he said, “I have to. I didn't do it, back there. I wasn't sure, back there. And I can't bear to think about the consequences. But if the police take him they'll put him behind bars—and he'll still be alive. He'll be
alive.
Cheryl isn't alive. It's a miracle you're alive. Madeleine,” and she turned her head and her eyes were full of tears, “I have to kill him. Even you can't stop me, and I love you.”

Above them the man reappeared, rising like a swimmer out of deep water. John started his motor and backed catty-corner across the street away from the van. There seemed nothing to do but to wait for him to leave the apartment. The old woman watched his car from her porch.

When the man walked out of the building he stopped and looked up. John could see the thick wafer of the half-full moon; “I don't know what we're doing,” he said to Madeleine. The man began walking toward the van.

“We're giving up the future for the sake of the past,” she said. “Follow that bastard.”

T
he street was quiet. An old woman sat unmoving on the porch in front of the patrol car. An old man dozed next to her. There was a light on in the third-floor apartment of the row house next door.

“We have to wait for the Hoboken guy before we go up there,” said Scottie.

“I knew he wouldn't be waiting for us!” Blackman fumed. “Damn hick police.” Down the block two pairs of taillights turned the corner. “What was that?” he barked.

“The one in front looked like a van.”

“Follow it.”

“The lieutenant gave us specific orders to wait in front of the house.”

“I don't give a shit. Follow it.”

“If it was—”

“Go.”

The old woman watched the police with impassive eyes from where she sat on her porch in the dark. When the patrol car got around the corner the street was empty.

T
he needle scratched syncopation against the record:
ch ch, ch ch, ch ch.
Zelly lifted it, and she could suddenly hear sounds from outside her mother's house: the voices of people passing by on the street, as if from very far away, the whine of a siren far away. Even the leaves right outside the window seemed far away. The ordinariness of this room, this light, in her mother's house, insulated her from the terrible reality outside.

She had been waiting all evening for the phone to ring. This time her mother had not questioned her, seeing enough, perhaps, in her daughter's red-veined eyes to preclude interrogation. Zelly knew she couldn't tell her mother. Let her find out from the newspapers, from the journalists who'd bang on their doors and call on their phone as soon as the news broke. Let her find in their explanations, extrapolations, their guesses and innuendoes, what her own daughter could not bring herself to tell her now.

How could she convey to her mother the inside of the van: the stale air, the muted light, the dark spot glistening on the open tarp? She kept her fingers wrapped around the feather earring in her pocket almost the whole time she sat with her mother in the artificial brightness of the kitchen. Would her mother believe her if she saw that earring, if she saw the picture of Cheryl Nassent wearing that earring dangling in her honey hair?

Zelly's sister Linda had told her a story once about a woman in the Bronx. One day the woman's husband said to her, “Don't open the closet door.” After awhile the smell coming from the closet was horrific. And a young woman from the neighborhood was known to be missing. Linda's friend knew her, too. The husband squirted disinfectant under the closet door. “Don't open the closet.” The woman became pregnant and eventually the smell subsided to a musty staleness. “Don't open the closet door.”

After the woman had her baby she took it to her mother's for the night and went back to her apartment alone, and alone she opened the closet door. Inside was the missing woman. She took what was left of the body out of the closet and dragged it down the hall and into the elevator and out the back of the building and left it on the trash heap. It left a trail. When the police came to the apartment and asked her why she had finally opened the closet door, she said, “I couldn't bring the baby home with that in the house.”

Was that woman mad? Easy to say yes. But Zelly knew now that reality is what we tell ourselves to believe. If we don't open the closet door there is nothing in the closet. It was inconceivable to her mother that her son-in-law be the Symphony Slasher—so he wasn't. And no amount of evidence to the contrary would make it be so, if it could not be so. No earring, note, no bloody tarp could make it be so, if it could not be so. Her mother had waited a year to open her father's stamp book. What had her mother believed for a year? Zelly went to her mother's house dry-eyed, and made up the bed in her old room and said only, “It'll never work, Mama.” And her mother made tea, and hovered around her youngest child and her granddaughter, offering food. Sandwiches and soup and ice cream and nutbread and fruit. Tea and soda, and milk for Mary. Zelly's jaw hurt from not crying. Her eyes hurt. The baby was strangely lethargic, as though she sensed her mother's effort and it drained her, too.

Zelly tried to be normal but she no longer knew what “normal” was. She was able to laugh. Her mother told her stories about her nieces and nephews and she laughed. Then Mary snuggled into her neck or Zelly noticed the way the sun shone on the tablecloth and for a moment her eyes filled with tears.

Mrs. Thuringen didn't ask any questions at all. She made only one astrological observation: Pluto was conjunct Uranus, which meant violence and strange power. “That means you must not be drawn into an argument if Pat calls.” And then there was more fruit, and hot chocolate, and gingersnaps for Mary.

Just before her mother went up to her room for the night she took Zelly by her shoulders and said, “If you really mean to leave Pat I'll back you one thousand percent. You always have a home here, you know that. You and the baby just stay here as long as you like.

“But if you do change your mind again, you mustn't be afraid to let yourself do what your heart says is right. If you wake up tomorrow morning and discover you really just want to go home, I don't want you to be afraid to tell me.”

The needle scratched against the record. The silence contained within the walls grated like a jagged nail against the skin of her nerves. And yet she missed him. He was already in the past tense, in prison blues behind a high electrified gate, a photograph in a newspaper. And she missed him. Not what he was, and maybe not anything he had ever actually been, but the idea of him as she had always held it, hers, private and unseen by anyone; curiously, now, inviolable.

She hesitated above the old red portable record player, covered on the sides and around the edges with torn stickers: Fleetwood Mac, Bruce Springsteen, the Police. Pat was always telling her she had no taste in music. Remembering that hurt. They had stayed here last Christmas—before he had killed—and he couldn't listen to the records she'd left here, “The Eagles for Christ's sake?” so he'd brought something of his own; it was still there: Schubert's Quartetsatz. The record lay next to the record player; it was dusty. He must have forgotten it and then bought another copy, because he hadn't stopped playing it at home. He played it when the moon was full. Zelly surprised herself by knowing that—but she could see it, the moon fat through the window; she could hear the music now.

It was stupid; she was crying. It was worse than if he were dead. Bruce Springsteen—
The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle.
Her hand reached out but picked up the Schubert instead. She moved the needle over the record. The single strand of music soared up and away, plaintive and exhausted. There was no future outside the black squares of the windows. No tomorrow. No past, even. Zelly leaned back against the pillow and closed her eyes.

A door slammed downstairs. Zelly froze. The door slammed again and again in her brain, until, in an endless fraction of a second, she recognized the sound: a branch hitting against glass. When it came again she was ready for it.

W
ashington Street was crowded, with cars and people and movement and light. Madeleine's heart was racing; John could feel it. At a light they pulled up three cars behind the van and her hand found his across the cold awkward shift knob and the paper-cup holder. Third Street, Fourth, all the way up to Eighth. There was a stoplight at every corner. John made sure he kept two or three cars behind the van. The car in front of them was beating out a rhythm of rap music and drums that shook their bodies through their seats. The sound echoed off the four- and five-story buildings that lined the avenue, and every face turned toward it. The sidewalks were crowded with white metal tables; every other storefront seemed to be a restaurant, Tex-Mex, Italian, Thai. Every table outside every restaurant was full. The van slunk among the traffic on the busy street, it sucked up light and vibrated with threat. Of course it looked like any other van and nobody noticed it.

“I've never been to Hoboken before,” Madeleine said. “I didn't know it was such a happening place. I wonder why he said, ‘Help me.' ”

“If he said it.”

“If. This looks kind of like Bleecker Street on a good night. I thought this place was supposed to be dead.” The word “dead” sounded like an obscenity.

There were groups of people crossing everywhere along the crowded blocks; nobody paid much attention to lights or corners. Six or seven college students walked right in front of John's car. They were walking backward, looking at a girl walking backward away from them and saying something: “Cigarettes? I need to get cigarettes. Do you—” John became aware again of the knife at his side.

“This place reminds me a little of Bleecker Street, too,” he said. Where Cheryl had disappeared.

A horn blared right on their tail and John lifted his foot from where he had unthinkingly pressed it against the brake pedal. Suddenly other horns blared too, like dogs taking up a cry, and John looked up the street and slammed the brake again, and brakes around them squealed and crunched and for a second horns and voices reached a cacophonous pitch. But John didn't hear any of it. Ahead of them, half a block, a whole block, two, there were cars, and the lights were turning red.

The black van had disappeared.

P
oor Zelly. Mrs. Thuringen lay in bed looking at the patterns the leaf shadows made against the ceiling. Zelly was so fragile now, so brittle, like a chrysalis with something terrible inside waiting to take wing. Mrs. Thuringen had been wrong to send Zelly back to him, she knew that now. Something had obviously happened since then—Zelly would tell her in time—but she was at a loss to know what it might be. She could hear music from down the hall in Zelly's room. She recognized the piece, it was one of the only ones she knew the name of: the Quartetsatz. Pat was always playing that. Mrs. Thuringen felt a moment's irritation: Don't play that. That was music to wallow in, and Mrs. Thuringen would have no wallowing in her house.

He had humiliated her daughter in some way. Mrs. Thuringen was aware of the inadequacies of her imagination, which was not modern. Had Zelly found incontrovertible proof of infidelity? Had Pat done something that could not be explained or forgiven? She herself had not quite gotten over the panties-in-the-mail idea. Did he appear by the side of the bed one night
wearing
the panties? Mrs. Thuringen smiled to herself involuntarily, with a pang of guilt, and the back door closed.

All of her mind became a laser point of concentration. She saw the leaves moving in shadow shapes with preternatural clarity. Each leaf was serrated, like a knife. They intermingled in a meaningless slow-motion pavane on the ceiling above the bed. The back door had just closed. A little snick, a sound as familiar, after thirty years, as the sound of her own intake of breath. The door had been opened; somebody had just come in.

Mrs. Thuringen counted the seconds. On the seventh step the floor would creak. All of her ten children had come in late as teenagers and been caught out by that guilty seventh step. Five, six—and a small squeak. Somebody was walking across the kitchen floor.

John and Madeleine drove in controlled hysteria up and down the streets off Washington. Down one block, up another, John hastily scanning the parked vehicles and feeling his pulse race when he thought—but it was a gray one. Eighth Street, up to Ninth, past row houses and the occasional bar, keeping count in his head because there weren't any street signs. Madeleine looked out the window; he knew she was crying.

It was over. The police had the tip, let the police find the killer. But he would think, in years to come, whenever he looked at Madeleine over the breakfast table or over the heads of their children, that the man was still alive somewhere. The man would have a name and they would know where he was being kept, on some death row or in some hospital—but he would be alive. And Cheryl would turn to liquid and dust, and the man would be alive.

“There,” Madeleine said; it had all happened already in his head and so for a moment he didn't know what she was talking about. But the van was there, sliding silently into a long driveway at the side of a house with a tall green hedge.

Mrs. Thuringen lay absolutely still. The leaves intertwined obscenely. It was Pat, of course. Indignation welled in her breast and shot down her arms into her fingers. She clenched her fists and unclenched them, like a fighter limbering up for a bout, and got out of bed. Her feet found her slippers immediately, from long habit.

There was no sound now. Why didn't he just ring the doorbell? She had no doubt it was Pat. She wanted to ask him: What did you do to her? To make her look as if she had seen something. Mrs. Thuringen didn't know what Zelly had seen, but whatever it was had taken all the trust out of her eyes.