Nightlight (20 page)

“It rankles their pride. And so I usually wind up doing nothing. No use going around trying to be a father to the world. I just keep to myself. Mind my own business.”

“That's usually the best course,” she managed.

“Oh, of course it is. That's exactly right. It is usually the best course of action to take. No course at all. Just let people go their own way. But this time. This time it's different. This time I feel like I sent two young men out into the worst possible situation.”

He shut his desk with his knee and hitched his pants.

“This time I'm going to try and do something,” he said. “I'm going to see what I can do to help you. Because if I don't—well, if I don't I may not be able to stand myself.”

28

Ed's wife was a thin creature with red eyes. She crooned that it was a pleasure to meet Mrs. Lewis, and Mary sensed that this was the sort of woman who followed the society pages, and gave the invalid her best smile.

“We're going to be going out to look at some property, Sally. I don't know when we'll be back, but I called Tillie to come on over and look after you.”

“Oh, it's such a storm out, though.”

“That's all right.” One of his hands covered both of hers. “Don't worry about a thing. We'll be perfectly all right, and it's not raining half as bad as it sounds.”

Bric-a-brac. China birds nestled against each other. A woeful puppy. Handpainted pixies. Frightful junk, Mary thought, brushing by a chair with skirted legs. A Belgian carpet, and beyond, in the kitchen, a floor of green linoleum, split at one end, exposing a dark crack the shape of a knife.

“But she must have some coffee,” said Sally, looking toward Mary and, Mary realized, not seeing her.

“We had some coffee in the office,” said Ed.

“Oh, that stuff is pitiful,” said Sally. “Just awful. I wouldn't offer that stuff to a snake.” Sally looked in Mary's direction with a conspiratorial smile.

Mary said, in a tone that implied agreement, that her husband was very generous to offer anything at all.

“Oh, he's a good man,” she crooned. “A good man,” finding Ed's arm and patting it.

“What we need to do,” said Ed, turning on the car heater, “is borrow one of those sheriff department jeeps. Four-wheel drive, built like tanks. We'll do what we can with that. Or, we could always borrow some horses.” Ed grinned at the thought. “But there we're talking more man's work.”

“I can ride.”

“The main thing is we don't have to panic, or even work up a sweat getting up there. We just want to go on up there and check on them,” said Ed, swerving to avoid a dead skunk in the road.

The skunk odor sharpened the air for several moments afterward, and when it faded Mary said, “We should hurry before it gets dark.”

“It does get dark early when it's raining like this, especially this time of year. But I think we can make it all right.”

For the first time in hours she felt a speck of hope.

“Unless,” Ed added, “we can't make it at all.”

The sheriff's department was a green stucco building. The lights inside it looked bright through the windows. Men in dark khaki rain slicks got in and out of pickup trucks.

“The place is a madhouse,” said Ed, surveying the parking lot. “I've never seen so much activity.”

He hoisted himself out of the car, and told her to wait. He'd be back in a moment with a plan that would work no matter what. Mary did not like waiting, and got out of the car and hurried through the rain.

Asphalt tile was splattered with water, and mud was tracked down the hall. A man with a star on his chest flattened a mop against the worst of the mess, but did not begin mopping immediately, as if reluctant to destroy a masterpiece.

Ed leaned against a counter. A woman with a pinched face and a microphone across her mouth shook her head.

Ed put both hands over his face, then turned and bumped into Mary. “It's a very bad situation,” said Ed. He strode to a map on the wall. He touched it, and its plastic covering crackled. “The road out there has been covered by a landslide it'll take them a week to clear up. Not only that, there's minor flooding all up and down the highway beginning not five minutes from here.”

“We can manage.”

“Not only that, there aren't any jeeps at all. Not a single one. They are all over the county responding to this disaster and that disaster, and I don't know what all.”

“We'll have to do it ourselves.”

“I can't drive my Fairmont through floods and boulders and fallen trees. We'll have to completely rethink our plan.”

“I'm not rethinking. I'm going out there, and I'm leaving now. You can take me back and let me drive my car if you don't want to come along.”

“I'm not saying I'm giving up. I'm saying that we may have absolutely no way of actually getting there.”

She ran through the rain, and waited for him to hunch his way to the car. He jingled the keys for a moment, and a drop of water ran from his nose onto his gray pants, where it spread and soaked into the cloth.

He started the car, but did not drive. “What'll we do if we do get there? If. And there is a problem. The two of us. What are we going to do?”

“What could someone else do that we couldn't?”

Ed drove. The car slowed to wallow through water, and for an instant the car floated as a spurt of water knifed under the door. The water curled in on itself and made a pool at Mary's feet. The engine coughed, and the car continued to run badly long after they had left the flood behind.

“Just don't want to see anybody get hurt,” Ed said at last.

“Neither do I.”

“Some of these sick people do some terrible things.”

“Terrible things happen all the time,” said Mary, growing very cold.

“Like Estelle. A nice lady. Quiet, from what people could see of her when she came down into town. About your size, and looked a little like you.”

Vineyards unfolded in all directions, black and dark red vines, and yellow vines, with here and there a house behind dark trees.

“When she went mad she did something no one could have ever dreamed possible.”

“What, exactly?”

“I really don't want to go into the details.”

“Don't be ridiculous. I want to know everything.”

“Well, basically—”

“Everything.”

The road dipped and water arced on each side of the car. Water thundered beneath the floor of the car, and then the road curved over a rise, past a rusted truck on wooden blocks.

Mary opened her purse and found her compact.

Ed continued, “She broke an ice pick off in her sister's head, and when that didn't work she cut a big wedge out of her throat, like a piece of pie.”

Mary's own eyes looked into themselves, trembling with the movement of the car.

“I had an interview with her after she did it. The courts still hadn't decided she was altogether insane. In so many words. And we had always been friendly. Nod to each other outside church, that sort of thing. So one afternoon I drove down to the hospital to say hello, and maybe touch on a little business.

“I was reluctant, to be honest. I felt real bad about her, but I didn't want to talk to an insane person who had cut meat pies out of her sister's throat. But I went. I am prone to fits of responsibility from time to time. Horrible habit. Drives my wife mad. I stuffed some papers into my briefcase, and I drove down to the state hospital. All the people down there know me. Lion's Club drives and all that sort of thing. So they said, sure, she's harmless, sit right down here and we'll have the little lady out here in a jiffy.

“She not only didn't recognize me, I didn't recognize her. She had a terrible grin, and walked hunched over like she thought someone was trying to tickle her. She sat across from me, and looked right at me, grinning. I opened my folder, and then closed it right up again. I talked the smallest talk you can imagine, and then nodded to the attendant.

“There was no use. She was gone. Polished off as surely as if she had died. Ever since then, I've avoided the Parker cabin. I have a caretaker goes up there now and then, but he doesn't like it. One tenant went up there to go fishing, and got so drunk he passed out and paralyzed his arm. Just like that. The house picks at you, like a dentist picking at your teeth, and if you've got a weakness, it'll find it.”

“But you continue to rent the place.”

“Life is complex. Maybe I should destroy it. But I have to think of it as a building that people can rent for a weekend, or a week in summer. Now, some people have gone up there and had a great time. Never noticed anything wrong about the place at all.”

A place like that would destroy Len, she thought. She said, “What do you think would happen to you if you stayed there?”

Ed looked sideways at her. “You like to stir up trouble, don't you?”

“Well?”

“You're asking me to admit that I have a dark weakness.”

“Doesn't everyone?”

“No, not everyone. Some people are solid. Oh, we're all human. But some of us are capable of withstanding all kinds of horrible pressures.”

“I have always assumed that you could break anyone if you really tried.”

“Well, that's a way of looking at it. I always thought you could withstand anything if you really tried. One of us would rather do the breaking, and one of us would rather survive.”

Ed smiled, but Mary made a mental note: This was not a stupid man.

29

Ed asked her questions, which she parried, about her husband and where she lived. She explained that she was widowed and comfortable. At first she had the suspicion that Ed was interested in her in a bluntly sexual way, but then she recognized the garrulousness of a man who liked people and spent most of his time alone.

A dog-eared multiple listing book fluttered at her elbow and small calendars advertising North Coast Realty scattered across the dash. A business card bearing a blue-tinted photograph of a thinner Ed Garfield floated in water on the floor.

The car smelled of worn upholstery and the deep dust and oil scent that cars develop, as an attic develops the scent of mildew. A metal clip held a sheaf of notes in a scrawled hand, as if Ed had trouble remembering the small details of his life, and recalled all too vividly the larger ones, the families and the deaths.

“What, exactly, is the trouble your wife is suffering from?” she asked gently.

“Oh, a thousand things. A thousand things that might have killed a weaker woman a long time ago. But she's a fighter. A real fighter. I wish I had a fraction of her spirit.”

Fenceposts held barbed wire up into the rain, and No Trespassing signs were punched with bullet holes. Even the speed limit sign was gouged with ragged tears, and the skull of an animal, elegant and pale, stared off across the road as they passed.

“Coyote,” Ed said.

“I thought they should be larger, somehow.”

“They're small, really. Small and quick.” He said it as if sad, and when he turned off the road she thought that he had been overcome by a private grief.

They passed a sign: McC
ORCKLE
V
INEYARDS
. A gray horse watched them, and then turned away, up to his withers in gray grass. Ed stopped the car without any explanation and got out, squinting against the drops of rain that trickled down his face like sudden sweat.

He motioned her to follow, and she did, extricating her umbrella from the back seat. Ed's manners, she reflected, were a little shabby, but she could not manage to be offended.

A huge place, dark, and smelling of wine. Or of the wine process: a sweet decay everywhere. Her steps resounded off the concrete floor, and were lost in the quiet of the barrels.

“Ed,” echoed a voice.

A young man put down a book, and Ed shook his hand and made a casual introduction. Complaints about the weather, the lack of business, and human frailty in general.

“I sent someone out to the old Parker place a few days ago.”

“I know,” said the young man, whose name was Randolph. “They stopped by and did some tasting. They bought some. Seemed pleased with it.”

“Of course they were pleased with it. This is one of the very best. Bar none.”

Randolph turned a page in his receipt book. “Two of our sauternes. I could tell he liked it from the moment he tasted it.” He looked from one to another of them. “There's something wrong, isn't there?”

“That's what we want to know.”

“I hate that place!” said Randolph with such vehemence his voice resonated in the darkness above them. “I wish the place would burn, except burning would probably cast the evil all over the valley.”

Mary was stunned.

“Anyway, you won't be able to get in there,” Randolph continued. “The road has never been much. More of a rough sketch than a road. There's a landslide right where it meets the highway. Mud and boulders and roots. There's no way.”

“We can borrow your jeep,” Ed replied.

“The jeep won't make it over those boulders.” Randolph said this as if he didn't want it to.

“We can try,” Ed snapped.

“I'll be glad to compensate you for the trouble,” Mary said, twitching her purse.

Randolph laughed. “There are limits to what a jeep can do. It's not a helicopter. It's not a magic carpet. This thing is just a battered tin can. A four-wheel-drive tin can, okay, but it has big miles on it, and you just can't expect—”

He met their stares, and looked down.

“I'll snap an axle,” he murmured, finally.

“I'll buy the jeep. Whatever you ask. Money is not an issue.”

Randolph eyed her.

“So, you see,” Ed said, clapping a hand on Randolph's shoulder. “You can't lose!”

Randolph tossed the receipt book to the desk. “I can always lose.”