Blood Music (30 page)

It had been so hard not to say anything. Her daughter had hardly put the baby down all day. Her eyes kept seeing something else; the living room wasn't there for her, the sun room where she used to play with her brothers wasn't there. “I can feel autumn already,” she'd said once, looking out the sunroom window. But her mother knew that the chill was only inside her.

Mrs. Thuringen's feet did not falter: The rug was threadbare, if you didn't know it you would trip. The bannister squeaked just at the top of the stairs; Mrs. Thuringen put her hand just ahead of the spot. This time she wouldn't send her daughter back. There was no one at the bottom of the stairs.

“Pat?” Mrs. Thuringen spoke softly; no point in waking Zelly yet. A swift creak and then nothing. She could envision the foot poised to come down. Besides, she wanted to have a word with Pat herself.

“Pat, come here right this minute. I want to talk to you.” After ten children she could be anybody's mother, and almost anybody would find himself doing her bidding like a child. There was a moment's hesitation and then the foot came down. And footsteps could be heard, in measured pace, coming toward the living room.

Going up the dark path next to the house was the hardest part. The van's motor settled eerily in the driveway, next to a big stone house with a high box hedge surrounding it. A dark figure had disappeared up a narrow path. Following him was very hard. When he wasn't there, crouched and waiting with a knife, it got easier.

John motioned for Madeleine to stay in the car but he didn't know if she would. He couldn't hear her behind him; he couldn't hear anything but his own breathing.

A pane of glass was broken on the back door. There was a deep long yard that faded to nothing, and the houses on either side were dark. The imperfect moon lit the leaves of a bush silver—it was a creeping yew, and John surprised himself by noticing that. In a few months it would have little orange poison berries all over it.

The glass door was ajar. John's hand went where the man's hand had gone, grasping the handle (he half-expected it to move under his fingers), and he was inside. A kitchen, with a black-and-white linoleum floor. Step on a crack, break your mother's back. If he stepped on that floor, would it hold his weight?

He crossed the kitchen but he could hear nothing: There was a hallway and a lot of doors. There was a noise somewhere—a footstep? But he couldn't tell where. There was music, maybe classical, very faint. He started toward the sound. He was aware of every hair on his body and he was aware of nothing at all—the doors, closed, on either side of the hallway, the brown carpeting on the floor.

He stopped beside the first door and put his ear to the wood and listened. The wood made a seashell sound against his ear. Had there been a voice? He opened the door—the single bravest action of his life—and he couldn't see anything at all. Books, a desk, a vase full of leaves or a mass of spiders—there was a noise behind him. A voice? Not behind him, but the other way down the hall.

He didn't close the door. He backed out of the room and turned but the doors all looked the same this way too. Like Alice he chose one.

Mrs. Thuringen took two steps down the stairs and then she saw his face. His face was completely calm. He was saying something. It wasn't the knife he held in his right hand that frightened her, it was his face.
He is,
she thought, stepping backward up the stairs, her foot for the first time in thirty years unsure. Zelly had said it, they had laughed about it, the absurdity of it,
he is, he is, he is,
and he sprang up the steps and her arm went up and the first cut didn't even hurt she was so surprised—
he is
—and she found her voice to scream but could not find her daughter's name, or even, “He is,” but only a wordless howl like a dog or a cat.

In the dark in the kitchen Madeleine found the telephone where it hung on the wall, and with difficulty her fingers found the right buttons: 911. The phone rang once. “Jersey City Police, three-five-six?” A woman's voice.

“I'm in a house in Hoboken with the Symphony Slasher,” she whispered into the receiver.

“Did you say Hoboken, miss? The number for the Hoboken Police Department is five-five-five, two-one-hundred.”

“But I'm with the
Slasher.
Can't you send somebody? I think the house is—”

“I can't hear you, miss,” the voice said placidly. “Can you speak up?” Madeleine hung up the phone. This could not be happening. Breathe, she told herself. Two-one-hundred. She punched the buttons (with the little musical beep loud in her ear) and waited. Just breathe; they'll come.

There was a violin playing, and for a moment Zelly didn't know where she was. She was going to get new curtains for her room. She thought she heard her mother calling her. Then she snapped awake and all the particulars of her life fell back into place. The baby—that was the first thought, and then all the rest followed. Had there been a sound?

“Maybe he won't call until tomorrow,” she said to the stuffed bear next to the head of the bed where she'd been lying, against the wall. Mr. Brown. One of his eyes had come off once a long time ago and her mother had sewn it back on with blue thread. Zelly's fingers traced the button eye absently, lovingly. Mr. Brown. She reached down into her fanny pack where it hung around her waist. She missed Mary for a moment, fiercely, even though she was in the next room. She rooted through the fanny pack for Mary's little button-eyed bear to hold. It was a talisman, as her baby was a talisman, a guarantee that there would be a future.

The bear was gone. At least she couldn't find it—a pen, tissues, rosy lipstick, coins—anywhere in the pack. Not at the bottom either. There was the silver feather earring, wrapped in a pink tissue. It lay on the tissue like a tear. But where was the bear? When had she—the van. Last night in the van.

She'd thought she heard her mother calling. She couldn't hear anything now except the Quartetsatz. She couldn't have been asleep for more than a moment. No door slammed, no floorboard creaked. But there had been something, like a cry, while she'd been sleeping. Zelly got out of bed and walked out into the hall.

The kitchen, the hallway, doors. John had never seen so many doors. Every room seemed to have three or four. He was in what looked to be a sewing room. He had heard the scream—whose house was this?—and he had run toward the sound and hit his shin soundly on a box or a stack of something and he'd shoved open a door, his leg throbbing—he hadn't made a sound but he thought for an idiotic minute that somebody must have heard the pain screaming up his leg—and found himself in another empty room. He was furious with his leg. This room had three doors; he had heard a scream and the stomach-clenching sound of a short fall, a thud like a body falling down steps.

He headed through the door nearest the direction of the noise and found himself in the hall just outside the kitchen again. There was the very faint sound of music. The noises had been maddeningly close. Where was Madeleine? He realized he had never been afraid before. Really afraid. He kept forgetting to breathe. He had his knife in his hand and it didn't make him feel anything except more afraid. He could only hope with a sick feeling that Madeleine had stayed in the car.

The phone rang once, loud in her ear. “Hoboken Police Department, may I help you?”

Madeleine spoke low and fast. “I'm in a house with the Symphony Slasher.”

“Can you give me the address, please?” A man's voice now.

“I don't know the address. The house has a high hedge around it.”

“We'll need more information than that. Can you tell me the telephone number?”

Madeleine's eyes locked on the strip where the number should be. It was blank. She forced herself to breathe: in and out. “No,” she said. “Please. Can't you trace my call?”

“Well,” the man said evenly, “not if we pick up on the first or second ring. It doesn't get into the system.” Madeleine was holding the receiver so hard it hurt her hand.

“Do you know what section of town you're in?”

“No.” She couldn't breathe; she was going to cry, or scream. She forced herself to speak normally. “There aren't any street signs.”

“Listen, I'm going to put you through to somebody who can help you. You just hold on.”

There was a noise outside the room. Were those footsteps she heard, coming down the hall outside the kitchen door?

“Lieutenant Viscotti, may I help you?” The man's voice was loud. “Shh,” Madeleine said without thinking.

“Miss, you say you're in a house with the Symphony Slasher?”

“Yes!”

“May I ask who you are?”

“I'm Madeleine Levy. Call the Slasher Task Force, they know. Madeleine Levy. This is not a joke. I'm somewhere in Hoboken with the Slasher, he's in the house. I don't know whose house it is—”

“What are you doing there?”

“It doesn't matter. The
Slasher
is here. Can't you just trace the goddamn call?”

“It isn't that simple, Miss Levy. Just stay calm. We're checking our indicator system right now. If the phone rings more than twice over here—”

“The phone rang one goddamn time. Don't you have any equipment over there to trace calls?”

“If your number is not listed with our indicator system we will contact New Jersey Bell and have them trace the call. They will get back to us with the number—”

There was a noise outside the door. Madeleine heard it clearly. A noise, like footsteps, right outside. If he heard her she was dead. “Hurry,” she whispered into the receiver before soundlessly placing it back in its cradle. And then she was gone.

There was something lying at the bottom of the steps. Her mother was lying at the bottom of the steps. Zelly went down the steps as if she were just going down the steps, not as if her mother were lying at the bottom of them, probably dead. Her mother lay twisted, like a thing that had happened to break, and there was a stain and a bad smell. Zelly stopped before she got to the bottom, one foot poised in midair; then she turned and in one motion was running back up the steps.

She was thinking and she wasn't thinking. “Dead” had registered without content or emotional weight. Dead and “the baby,” and she was running, taking the steps two at a time, while her brain was still processing the information that if the bowels had voided the body was certainly dead.

The baby's room was at the end of the upstairs hall. Could he have passed her room before she came out? There was a light on in the baby's room; not the night-light. The hall was endless and she wasn't thinking but she had an image in her head: her mother's sewing scissors. Were they in the sewing room downstairs or had her mother left them in the living room or were they in the basket next to her bed on the second floor? The rooms on either side of the hallway jerked by at the periphery of her vision; would she see the gleam of her mother's scissors? The mirror of a bathroom cabinet glistened as she went by. The heavy books in her father's library, the hairbrushes on dresser tops, the ornate patterned rug in her sister Molly's room—and then she saw the gleam. It was only for an instant. The scissors were there, innocent and sharp, and Zelly ran over to the basket fast but carefully, quietly, and as she bent over the basket the baby began to cry. Everything froze for a fraction of a heartbeat and Zelly's hand was on cold, reassuring metal (
Mama's scissors, Mama's dead now
) and she had already turned toward the sound of her daughter crying, the scissors wedged between her fanny pack and her waist underneath her light summer sweater (
Mama's dead the baby's crying
) and she was at the door to the baby's room.

Pat was standing in the middle of the room holding Mary. He was holding her in one hand, and in the other he held a knife. There was blood on the knife. Mary hadn't liked being woken up, that's why she was crying. Mary loved her daddy, he never made her cry. She didn't know it was her grandma's blood.

“Give me the baby,” Zelly said. Her voice was calm.

“Hello, Zelly.” Pat's voice was calm and gentle. “In the park that time, I don't remember, was it a girl baby or a boy baby?”

“It was a boy baby.” Mary was working herself up into a fury. Her little face was beet-red. “Pat, the baby's crying. Please give her to me.”

“You know who I am.” Pat was smiling at her across the room. She was freezing and her palms were hot and wet. The metal of the scissors was freezing against her skin.

“Yes,” she said, “I know who you are.”

They looked at each other. “I have to kill you now,” Pat said.

“Put the baby down.”

“It's not because you know. Even though,” his voice rising suddenly, his arm where he cradled Mary tensing, his fist tensing, “you shouldn't have done what you did. You should not have gone into my van you know that don't you?” He was yelling and the baby was yelling and then he got quiet all of a sudden. “I would have anyway. I know now. Do you remember what I said?” Zelly stared into his eyes above Mary's crying face. “The greatest love—” he prompted.

“The moment of death is the moment of greatest love.”

“Yes. The greatest love.” He looked down and smiled. “I wish,” he spat out, raising his head, “that this brat would shut up.”

“Give her to me. I can shut her up.”

“Of course you can. You're her mother.” The word sounded like an obscenity and it sounded so sad. Zelly felt a bolt of anger like electricity. “Yes,” she said. “Give her to me.” Pat was halfway across the room. He had raped, and he had murdered. And he had murdered her mother.

“Come get her,” he said, and he smiled a little.

Zelly took one step toward him. “You don't want to hurt the baby, Pat. Just put her down.”