Boundaries (27 page)

~ * ~

Green with white shutters
. Christian remembered, now.
Green. White shutters
.

White shutters.

Green.

Green.

Walls.

Green walls and white shutters would certainly be easy to spot along this shoreline, as easy as spotting flies on a cake, on a pig, flies flying circus

clouds

cloudless day this day of salvation my salvation my salvation my salvation my salvation my salvation flies green shutters white

shutters green walls

Christian remembered now.

But there was no house with white shutters and green walls. There were brown houses, blue houses, yellow houses with green shutters, green shutters and white walls. He could see them all laid out along the shoreline, like Monopoly houses, to infinity.

He decided that he would walk the shoreline.

He knew that before long he would find David that way.

~ * ~

The faceless man asked, "Why can you tell me nothing?"

"Because," David answered, "very simply, we don’t speak the same language."

"But we do. It’s obvious. I speak, you hear, you respond; you talk, I listen, I respond; vice versa and over and over again—"

"We use the same words," David broke in. "Approximately." He paused, then went on, "If I were to tell you that I was dying, right now, as we speak, would you know what the hell I was talking about?"

The faceless man didn’t answer for a moment. Then the darkness covering his face moved from side to side. "No," he admitted.

"And if I told you that where I come from, people are born, and they die, and when they die, they’re buried, and their souls—"

"People are born here, too," the man cut in. "It happens all the time."

"And what do you mean by that? What does the word
born
mean to you?"

"It means what it means. It means they . . . arrive, they’re here—"

"And where," David asked, "have they come from?"

Again the man didn’t answer at once. He crossed the room, went to the bookcase, withdrew a particularly thick manuscript, opened it, and read:

"I saw a window, a room, a man. The man said, ‘I love you, I love you.’ Through the window a flat blue sky." The thin man paused. "I wrote this. So this, I believe, is where I come from. The place where there is a flat blue sky. It’s not the sky we have here. We have a sky that moves and changes, as you’ve seen. I think that the place I came from, to be here, is a place of stillness."

David looked at the man for a long moment. Then he said, "
You
come from the same place that I came from."

~ * ~

In another city, a woman felt her way along narrow streets, her hand reaching for walls that were never close enough.

She needed walls.

She needed closeness.

And she needed space, too. She felt hungry for it. But she was fearful of that hunger. The out-of-doors was so numbing, so overwhelming, as if it were hungry for her.

The two needs—for closeness and for space—fought each other within her and at times she wept because she felt as if she were being pulled apart and compacted at the same time.

~ * ~

"Detective Kenner?" Karen Duffy said into Christian Grieg’s telephone receiver, and told him who she was. She paused, then, uncertain how to continue.

"What can I help you with?" coaxed Leo Kenner.

She took a breath. "I’m a friend of David Case’s. He’s the brother of the woman who was murdered recently."

"Anne Case. Yes." His tone betrayed his piqued interest.

Again, Karen paused. She wasn’t sure what she was doing, talking to the police. So what if Christian had had an affair with Anne Case. And so what if he had never told her, or David, about it. He was entitled to a private life. And his letters, and Anne’s writings—on balance so . . . bizarre. But no. That wasn’t the right word. "I was simply wondering," she said to Leo Kenner, surprising herself by continuing the conversation, "how your investigation was proceeding."

"Actually," Kenner said, "there is no investigation, per se. We’ve pretty well established that...”

“Brian Fisher. Yes. I know." The words were coming out as if unbidden, now. "David told us.”

“Us?"

"Yes. I have a friend. His name is Grieg. Perhaps you’ve heard of him—he’s a writer—" She hung up.

She kept her hand on the receiver. Her hand was shaking.

~ * ~

The woman in the yellow cottage on Sylvan Beach Road was there only for the day. She was making the cottage ready for her employers, who were planning on staying there for the weekend. Her employers had asked her to "freshen it," meaning that she should open all the windows and fluff up the pillows and air out the sheets and blankets—to generally dispel the clamminess that a closed-up lake cottage gathers to itself over the course of a winter and spring.

There had been no actual cleaning up to do. The cottage was as she had left it the previous autumn—spotless. The woman’s employers had always insisted that it be that way, and she had always been only too happy to oblige. A dirty house—or even a house that wasn’t spotless—was, after all, a reminder that, as she put it, "we’re just one rung up from the animals." But, even though the cottage had been spotless, she had still cleaned it thoroughly, until it stank of lemon-scented spray cleaner, Lysol, and
Spic’n’Span
, a mixture of odors that—as she stood in the living room, her back to the front door—brought a broad smile to her pudgy, middle-aged face, a smile that said
God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world
.

That smile froze when she heard a loud knock on the glass door behind her. She did not move for a moment, both surprised and a little fearful because the knock had been so loud, then she turned her head a quarter turn, so she could get some idea, at least, who was at the door. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see that it was probably a man. The figure at the door was stocky, mannish. She did not turn her head further for a moment. She didn’t like the idea of a man being at the door while she was alone here. The neighbors had never been very friendly, and since none of the cottages nearby were yet in use for the summer, it was unlikely that the person at the door was a neighbor. So, by definition, it was a
strange man
at the door, and
strange man
easily translated, in her mind, as
dangerous man
.

Still, she realized, she had to be polite. She had to acknowledge the man—he could
see
her there, after all.

She turned, faced the door, studied the man in front of it for a moment, decided he looked harmless enough, except for the way his head was cocked, as if he were having a hard time seeing her, and except for his eyes, which seemed especially wide, somehow. And there was a queer sort of smile on his face—now that she thought about it. A crooked sort of smile, a Cheshire cat smile.

"What is it you want?" she said.

But the man did not reply. He continued to stare wide-eyed at her, continued to smile at her crookedly, his square head cocked.

"What is it you want?" she repeated, voice louder.

Still, he remained silent.

She quickly grew very afraid. People who
stared
that way were people she did not want to be around. She was certainly not going to open the door for him. Should she move away from the door? she wondered. Go into the kitchen? To the second floor? What would
that
gain her?

She glanced quickly at the telephone on a small glass-and-wrought-iron end table nearby. She whispered a curse. The phone wasn’t hooked up yet.

She looked ,back at the man at the door. She thought that he had shifted position a little. She wasn’t sure. Yes, she realized. He
had
shifted position. He’d cocked his head the other way.

She felt her breathing grow quick, and shallow.

She felt a sweat start under her arms.

This man, she realized, was a very dangerous man, and she did not have use of the phone, and running to another part of the little cottage would be stupid. It would gain her nothing. Only time.

She shouted at the man, "Get away!"

He did not move. He stayed silent.

"Get away!" she shouted again, and stepped quickly to the phone, visible from where the man was standing, picked it up, held the receiver to her ear, kept her eyes on the man all the while.

His lips moved. He’d said something, she realized. But she had heard nothing.

She kept the receiver to her ear. She planned to pretend to be talking to someone on it. She wondered frantically what words she would use. She didn’t know. She had no idea. Dammit! Her fear was making her light-headed, stupid.

The man’s lips moved again. Still she heard nothing.

She screamed at him, "What do you
want
?"

His lips moved again. Again soundlessly.

"Get away from here!" the woman screamed.

"This is private property!"

She threw the phone down. She ran to the narrow stairway that led to the small upstairs bedroom. There was an access to the crawlspace attic there. That’s where she’d hide.

She got halfway up the stairs when she heard the front door crash open.

~ * ~

In another part of Sylvan Beach, the small white dog that had gotten herself lost several days earlier was trying hard to get some sleep. It was very difficult. The dog had crawled under a porch, thinking she would be safe, but the darkness behind her was daunting, and every few moments she glanced around, certain that something was there, in the darkness—one of the dogs that had chased her, for instance.

The dog was so certain that something waited in the darkness behind her under the porch, in fact, that eventually she crawled out from under the porch, glanced anxiously about, and made her way through the bright sunlight, over the slippery rocks, to the beach.

K
aren Duffy realized that she couldn’t call Detective Kenner back. He’d think she was some kind of lunatic. Maybe he’d even think she knew something about Anne Case’s murder.

Maybe she did know something about it. Maybe she knew quite a lot about it.

Wasn’t that the reason she’d called Kenner in the first place?

She closed her eyes. Christ, yes, of course that was the reason.

She picked up the phone. Put it down. Picked it up again.

~ * ~

"Fred," Detective Kenner said to Fred Collins over the phone, "did you interview someone named Karen Duffy in connection with the Anne Case homicide?"

"No," Collins answered. He was at home. He was very tired. "I don’t think so. Why?"

Kenner told him about Karen’s phone call, then said he had tried to call her at home but there had been no answer.