Life Expectancy (22 page)

39

O
utdoors in winter, Grandma only wore full-body snowsuits, which she sewed from quilted fabrics.

Having no tolerance for cold weather, she believed that she had been Hawaiian in a previous life. Occasionally she enjoyed dreams in which she wore puka-shell necklaces and a grass skirt, and danced at the foot of a volcano.

She and everyone in her village had been killed in a volcanic eruption. You might think this would lead to a fear of fire. But she suspected that in yet another and more recent previous life, she had been an Eskimo who died with her dogsled team in a furious blizzard through which they were unable to find their way back to the igloo.

In a puffy white snowsuit with a closely fitted hood zippered snugly under her chin, leaving only her face revealed, Weena toddled toward me, arms wide in anticipation of an embrace. I couldn’t decide whether she looked more like a three-year-old togged out for play in the snow or like the Michelin Tire Man.

Neither Mom nor Dad had a taste for flamboyant couture—or if they did, they never indulged it, because they knew there were times when Grandma was determined to be the center of attention.

They were full of questions. With all the hugging and the excitement about the baby, I needed a minute to get their attention and make them understand that Beezo was back. Then they formed up around me with the steely determination of the Praetorian Guard, as though they had plenty of practice taking down would-be assassins.

This scared me more than if they had quaked with fear. I was greatly relieved when a few minutes later the first of Huey Foster’s officers arrived, uniformed and armed.

Soon a deputy had stationed himself in the stairwell. Two others covered the corridor that provided all access to the maternity ward, and the fourth took up a post in the elevator alcove.

The last of these men brought word that Nedra Lamm had been murdered in her home. Preliminary examination of the body indicated that she had been strangled.

By the time I settled my folks in the expectant-fathers’ lounge, a nurse brought me word that Lorrie was still in labor and that Huey Foster was on the phone for me.

Leaving Mom, Dad, and Grandma in the care of the deputies, I took the call at the nurses’ station, as before.

Huey was by nature an ebullient guy. Even a small-town cop sees more grisly sights than the average citizen; the consequences of catastrophic car crashes alone ensure that he will be familiar with bloody deaths. But Huey Foster had never allowed his work to twist him through an emotional wringer.

Until now. He sounded grim, angry, and sickened, all at once. Several times he had to stop and collect himself before he could continue.

Nedra Lamm had been strangled, as Officer Paolini reported, but no one could yet determine at what point in her ordeal she had been murdered.

As proudly self-sufficient as she was cranky, Nedra had been a deer hunter with an enormous freezer full of venison. Konrad Beezo piled the packaged deer meat on the back porch and stored Nedra in the Amana.

Before he consigned her to the big chill, he had stripped her naked. Then he painted her entire body—front and back, neck to toes—in the brightly striped and polka-dotted patterns of a traditional clown costume.

She might have been alive for this.

With what appeared to be stage makeup, he had grease-painted her face to resemble that of a clown. He blackened three of her teeth and colored her tongue green.

In a kitchen drawer, he had found a turkey-basting syringe. He removed from it the rubber squeeze bulb, which he painted red and glued over Nedra’s nose.

The makeup had not been applied in a slapdash manner. Judging by appearances, Beezo spent hours at the task, paying meticulous attention to detail.

Whether she had been alive for all of that, she had certainly been dead by the time he used a needle and thread to sew shut her eyelids. Then he painted stars over them.

Finally, he selected a set of deer antlers from the collection in Nedra’s garage, and he tied them to her head. To get her into the freezer with the antlers, in a position that assured her face would be turned up to greet whoever found her, he had to break her legs in several places, a task he accomplished with a sledgehammer.

Huey Foster said, “Jimmy, I swear, he did this ’cause he thought it was funny. He thought someone would open that freezer and laugh, that we’d all be snickering about Nedra in her clown getup for years to come, talking about what a joker that Beezo was.”

Standing there at the nurses’ station, I was colder than I had been in the woods, in the blizzard.

“Well, the crazy sick son of a bitch didn’t get any laughs from us,” Huey said. “Not one smile. This young state trooper, he bolted from the house and threw up in the backyard.”

“Where is Beezo, Huey?”

“Freezing to death in the woods, I hope.”

“He didn’t go back there for Nedra’s Plymouth?”

“It’s still in the garage.”

“He’s not in the woods, Huey.”

“Maybe not,” he admitted.

“If he made it back up to Hawksbill Road and someone came along, he could have hitched a ride.”

“Who would be dumb enough to pick him up?”

“What ordinary decent person
wouldn’t
pick him up on a night like this? You see a guy not dressed for the weather, maybe standing by the Hummer, you think he broke down. If you don’t pick him up, he’s likely to freeze. You don’t say to yourself,
Better not pick him up, he looks like a murderous clown.
”

“If he got a ride, he probably took the car.”

“And the guy who gave him the ride is dead in the trunk.”

“Hasn’t been a murder in this town in thirty years that this creep and his son didn’t commit.”

“What now?”

“State police are thinking roadblocks. There’s only five routes out of the county, and the snow already helps us.”

“He won’t leave tonight,” I predicted. “He has unfinished business.”

“I sure hope you’re wrong about that.”

“I have a built-in oven timer,” I told him.

“You what?”

“When I’ve got something in the oven, I always check it five seconds before the timer goes off. Always. I instinctively know when something’s finished baking—and when it’s not. Beezo isn’t done.”

“You get that from your dad. He could have been a cop as easy as a baker. You too, maybe. Me, I had no choice.”

“I’m scared, Huey.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

As I hung up the phone, a nurse arrived to inform me that Lorrie had given birth. “No complications,” she said.

Boy, could I have given her an earful.

In the delivery room, the red-haired nurse was at a basin in the corner, cleaning off our little miracle.

Mello Melodeon was waiting for Lorrie to expel the afterbirth, gently massaging her abdomen to control the flow of blood.

Whether or not I could have been a cop as easily as a baker, I could never have been a doctor. I’m not even a good patient.

The only thing preventing me from passing out and breaking my nose against the floor was the certainty that Grandma Rowena would toddle in here and take a picture of me. She would have a disposable camera tucked in a pocket of that snowsuit.

Using the photo as a pattern, she would needlepoint the scene of my humiliation on a pillow and give it a place of honor on the living-room sofa.

The head of the birthing bed had been elevated, so Lorrie was half sitting. She looked sweaty, sore, exhausted—and radiant.

“Well, there you are,” she said. “I thought maybe you went off to have dinner.”

Licking my lips, patting my belly, I said, “New York steak, baked potato, creamed corn, pepper slaw, and a slab of chocolate fudge
gâteau.
”

“When you make chocolate fudge
gâteau,
” Mello Melodeon asked, “do you always have to use ground almonds, or can you substitute hazelnuts?”

Lorrie said, “Good Lord, what does a girl have to do around here to be a
star
?”

Just then she expelled the afterbirth. There’s some spectacle involved in this final bit of business, but it’s not the stuff of stardom.

On my feet at her bedside, swaying, I gripped her hand, and she said, “You can lean on me, big guy,” and I sincerely said, “Thanks.”

When the red-haired nurse brought the baby, it was washed and pink and swaddled in a soft white cloth. “Mr. Tock, say hello to your daughter.”

Lorrie held the precious bundle, while I stood paralyzed and speechless. For nine months, I had known where this was leading, but it nevertheless seemed impossible.

We had chosen the name Andy if it was a boy, Anne if it was a girl.

Anne had fine golden hair. Her nose was perfect. Her eyes, too, and her chin, and her tiny little hands, all perfect.

I thought of Nedra Lamm in the freezer, Punchinello in prison, Konrad Beezo out there somewhere in the winter night, and I wondered how I dared to bring a vulnerable child into a world as dark as ours, and getting darker year by year.

On days when the universe seems cruel or at least indifferent, my dad has a saying that he relies on to cheer him up. I have heard it a thousand times:
Where there’s cake, there’s hope. And there’s always cake.

In spite of Konrad Beezo and all my concerns, my eyes filled with tears of joy, and I said, “Welcome to the world, Annie Tock.”

40

A
s you might remember, Annie came to us on Monday night, January 12, 1998, exactly seven days before the second of the five terrible dates foreseen by Grandpa Josef.

The following week was the longest week of my life. Waiting for the other big clown shoe to drop.

The storm passed. The sky became that hard pale blue familiar to those who live at high altitudes, such a clean and steely and sharp shade of blue that you felt you could reach up and cut your hand on it.

With Beezo loose and the fateful day ahead of us, our house on Hawksbill Road seemed dangerously isolated. We stayed in town with my folks.

Naturally, our worst fear was that Annie, with whom we had been so recently blessed, would be taken from us—one way or another.

We were prepared to die rather than let that happen.

Because Huey Foster knew all about my grandfather’s predictions and their unsettling accuracy, the Snow Village Police assigned an officer to my parents’ house around the clock, beginning Wednesday morning, when I brought Lorrie and Annie home. Indeed, we were driven from the hospital in a squad car.

Each officer came for an eight-hour shift. He patrolled the house every hour, checking door and window locks, studying the neighboring residences and the street.

Dad went to work, but I took time off and stayed home. Of course when the tension made me crazy, I baked.

Each of the cops chose the kitchen table as his post, and by Thursday all of them agreed that they had never eaten so well in their lives.

In times of loss and trouble of all kinds, neighbors usually express their concern and solidarity by bringing food. In our case, the neighbors were too intimidated to offer the usual casseroles and homebaked pies.

Instead, they brought DVDs. I don’t know whether independently each of them arrived at the conclusion that in this media-drenched era, DVDs were an acceptable substitute for consoling gifts of food, or if they had a community meeting to debate the issue. By Friday our home-entertainment needs for the next two years were covered.

Grandma Rowena snatched up all the Schwarzenegger movies and watched them on the TV in her bedroom, with the door closed.

We put the rest of the DVDs in a box in the corner of the living room and forgot about them for the duration.

Mom finished painting the potbelly pig and started work on a portrait of the baby. Perhaps she had restricted herself to animal subjects for too many years, because on her new canvas, our sweet little girl had a weird resemblance to a bunny rabbit.

Annie didn’t keep us as busy as I expected. She was a perfect baby. She didn’t cry. She hardly fussed. She slept through the night—baker’s night, from nine in the morning until four o’clock in the afternoon—better than any of us.

I almost wished she would turn cranky just to distract me from thoughts of the fugitive Beezo.

Even with a police officer in the house at all times, I was glad that I had a pistol of my own and that I had taken instruction in its proper use.

I noticed that Lorrie always kept a sharp knife close at hand—and an apple that she said she intended to peel and eat “in a little while.” By Saturday morning, the apple had withered somewhat, and she exchanged it for a pear.

Usually you peel fruit with a paring knife. Lorrie preferred the blade named for the butcher.

Dad, bless his heart, came home with two baseball bats. They weren’t those modern aluminum kind, but solid-wood Louisville Sluggers. He’d never had an interest in guns and had no time to learn. He gave one bat to Mom.

No one asked him why he hadn’t bought a third bat for Grandma. With no strain at all, each of us could conjure up a vivid mind movie to explain his decision.

Finally the terrible day came.

Monday was a day off for Dad, and from midnight Sunday until dawn on January 19, the six of us gathered in the dining room. We fortified ourselves with cookies and
kugelhopf
and
streusel
and pots of black coffee.

We kept the drapes tight shut. The conversation was as fluent as ever, but we spoke in softer voices than usual, and from time to time we all fell silent, heads cocked, listening to the settling noises of the house and to the snuffling wind in the eaves.

Dawn came without a clown.

The sky had aged again, gray and bearded.

Our police guards changed shifts. The officer leaving took a bag of cookies with him; the new arrival brought an empty bag with him.

As the rest of the world went to work, our bedtime came. Only Grandma and the baby were able to sleep.

Monday morning waned without incident.

Noon came, and afternoon.

Guards changed again at four o’clock, and little more than an hour later, the early winter twilight descended.

The uneventfulness of the day did not reassure me. Quite the opposite. As we came to the last six hours, every nerve in my body wound tighter than an efficiency expert’s watch spring.

In that condition, I would most likely use my pistol only to shoot myself in the foot. Another moment of family history worthy of a needlepoint pillow.

At seven o’clock, Huey Foster called to inform me that our house on Hawksbill Road was ablaze. Firemen reported that the intensity of the flames indicated arson.

My first impulse was to race out to the fire, be there,
do
something.

Officer Paolini—who happened to be our bodyguard that shift—made a convincing case that Beezo might have set the fire with the purpose of drawing me out in the open. I stayed with my wife, my daughter, my well-armed family.

By eight o’clock, we learned that our house had burned to the ground with such fury that nothing remained but hot coals. Evidently the interior had been liberally doused with gasoline before the match had been struck.

No furniture could be salvaged. No kitchen utensils, no clothes. No mementoes.

We returned to the dining-room table, this time for dinner, no less worried, no less alert. When ten o’clock came without further activity, however, we began to wonder if the worst that would happen had already passed.

Losing your house and all of your possessions in a fire is not a good thing, granted, but it’s a lot better than being shot twice in the leg and immeasurably better than having your beautiful infant daughter kidnapped by a maniac.

We were prepared to make this bargain with fate: Take the house and all our possessions, no hard feelings, as long as we know we’ll be safe until the
third
of Grandpa Josef’s terrible days—Monday, December 23, 2002. That price for nearly four years of peace seemed cheap.

By eleven o’clock, the six of us—and even Officer Paolini, who diligently set out on another patrol through the house—suspected that fate had accepted our offer. A tentative celebratory mood began to color our conversation.

Huey called with news that seemed to give us closure, but it didn’t inspire us to raise champagne toasts.

As the firemen had been mopping up the scene and stowing their hoses, one of them noticed that the drop door on our roadside mailbox was hanging open. In the mailbox, he found a mason jar. In the mason jar, a folded slip of paper.

The paper had a message for us in neat handwriting that police later matched to Konrad Beezo’s penmanship on the admission forms he had filled out when he’d brought his wife, Natalie, to the hospital on the night of my birth. More than a message, it constituted a promise:

IF YOU EVER HAVE A BABY BOY
,
I
’LL BE BACK FOR HIM
.