Second Nature (25 page)

She was whispering now, in a funny way, as if she might hit him or run away. There was no clear answer, not one he was certain would please her.

“I kept it just in case,” Stephen said. “That’s all.”

Robin quickly went to the cabinet beneath the sink and took out a spade. A box of detergent had toppled and a stream of soap powder fell onto the floor, but Robin paid no attention.

“Robin,” Stephen said, but she didn’t seem to hear him. Instead she went outside, not bothering with a coat. Stephen grabbed one of Connor’s old sweatshirts left on a hook by the door and pulled it on, then followed her. She was out behind the pear tree, down on her hands and knees.

“They could have found this,” Robin said. She attacked the ice with her spade until she could dig up some frozen earth. “Well, they’re not going to find it now.”

Her hair kept falling over her face, so that it was difficult for Stephen to see her.

“There,” Robin said, satisfied, when the hole was big enough. She placed the carpenter’s knife in the hole, then began covering it up until Stephen stopped her. He had knelt down beside her, but she hadn’t even noticed until he touched her. “What?” she said. Her voice was still sharp and she was out of breath.

“You don’t have to do this,” Stephen said.

“Oh, really?” Robin said. There was frozen dirt caked under her nails and streaks of black earth were on her face. “What do you imagine Roy and his friend would think if they found this knife on you?”

“What do
you
think?” Stephen said.

Robin pulled her arm away and stood up. She looked at him for a long time; her breath turned to smoke in the air.

“I’m going to bed,” she said.

She started toward the back door, but Stephen stayed crouching beneath the pear tree. The night was so clear he could almost believe those were the same stars he’d always seen, far away from here, in a place where it was impossible to hear a man or a woman cry.

“Are you coming?” Robin asked.

All she wanted at that moment was to be alone, and Stephen knew it.

“Not yet,” he said.

After she’d gone inside, Stephen went to the rear of the yard, away from the branches of the pear tree, to have a better look at the sky. He knew from a book he’d taken from Old Dick’s shelf that stars died, but he found this hard to believe. Make
a
wish, that’s what his mother had said to him once. Close your eyes.

Matthew Dixon, who was home for Christmas vacation and wouldn’t have to return for the spring semester until the end of January, had come outside. He was supposed to drag the garbage cans out to the curb, but instead he’d been watching Stephen. Now he zipped up his parka and came to his side of the redwood fence. Stephen heard him approach, but he kept on looking at the stars.

“I hear they’re really after you,” Matthew said. “I knew you weren’t like other people. I could tell right away.”

Don’t tell your wish, Stephen’s mother had said. Or it won’t come true.

“Wolves,” Matthew said now. “I think it’s fantastic. Of course they’re going to go after you. It makes perfect sense to a small mind.”

Matthew leaned his elbows on the fence; he was chewing peppermint gum and the scent was sweet every time he breathed out.

“You’re going to have to get out of here,” Matthew said. “I mean, you can’t sit around and think they’re going to treat you fairly, because they won’t.”

Stephen thought this over.

“You see my point,” Matthew said. “You’ve got to outwit them. You’ve got to go back.”

“I don’t know where it is,” Stephen said.

“I could find out for you,” Matthew told him.

“No,” Stephen said. “I’ve looked in the atlas. The maps don’t mean anything. I knew my way because of the way things were.”

“Rocks? Mountains? Landmarks like that?” Matthew was grinning. “Topography. I can get that.”

Stephen looked over at him.

“I’m serious.” This was just the sort of thing Matthew found exciting. “You give me the information, and I’ll tap into the USGS and do the graphics. It’s simple.”

From where he stood, Stephen could see Robin’s bedroom window.

“So should I?” Matthew said.

“Why would you?” Stephen said.

“Because I know how it feels,” Matthew Dixon told him, “when they all hate you.”

The night was filled with so many stars it would have seemed impossible for the streets to be dark, but the road to Poorman’s Point was filled with shadows. That was where Roy had headed after he was done drinking at Harper’s. He’d gone directly to the old estate; every tree that had been planted here had been chosen by his father, yet Roy couldn’t have given the correct name for more than half a dozen varieties. He regretted that now; it would have been so easy, if only he’d paid some attention.

He parked on the grass in front of the entrance to the driveway. Through the trees he could see the dark carriage house; the windows had all been left open, even though no one was home. He turned off the car headlights and settled back in his seat; he was wishing he’d thought to stop at the 7-Eleven for a six-pack of beer, when he saw the men from the green making their way along the black, looping road.

There were more than a dozen of them, and although it was difficult to distinguish one man from another in their down jackets and parkas, Roy recognized Jeff Carson and Fred Lester from the diner and several others. Either they didn’t see his parked car or they were so outraged and bold they just didn’t care. Roy grabbed the steering wheel and sat up straight. They were much too silent for such a large group, and when they turned into the driveway the gravel made absolutely no noise beneath the weight of their boots.

Roy realized that he was sweating; his shirt was drenched and his hands were too wet to keep hold of the steering wheel. He sat there and didn’t even think to try to stop them as they threw bucket after bucket of red paint on the carriage house, on the stucco walls and the mailbox and the arbor where the wisteria had always grown. One of the men, perhaps it was Jeff Carson, dipped his hands into the paint and drew a five-pointed star on the door, as if a sign like that could ever ward off true evil. By the time the men had finished, Roy had stopped sweating, and his skin had turned clammy. He had a siren under his front seat, and he could have radioed in to the station, but instead he just watched, exactly as he had the previous night when Jenny Altero was murdered, when he’d followed Stephen all the way back here from Robin’s and parked in this same place, watching through the open window as the Wolf Man read a book with a leather binding, and not turning for home until at last those few birds that could tolerate winter on this island began to sing.

IT MAY BE TRUE THAT marjoram sprinkled onto the earth helps the dead sleep in peace, but it does nothing at all for the living. The living can pick wild garlic and place pots of clover on their windowsills and still not be able to rest. They can cut down a larch and huddle around it on a cold winter night as it burns and smokes for hours, down at the Point, where the fire ignites the black sky, yet continue to be afraid of the dark.

For the next three days, as soon as the sun went down, the main street of town became deserted, all at once, as though a curfew had been set. There were no customers at Fred’s Diner, and Harper’s began closing at six because even the regulars had taken to staying home and drinking gin or beer in front of their own TVs. Boys stopped playing hockey long before dusk, even when their mothers hadn’t yet called them home. Dogs went unwalked, and scratched at front doors. Every single cat had a bell around its neck, and even the toms had to wait until morning before going out on the prowl.

The only ones who ventured out after dark were the men who had formed the patrol, and they always went out in groups of no smaller than five or six, unless one of them had a gun. Sometimes people were already in bed when they heard the patrol round their corners. The sound of those men, whose only mission was to protect their neighbors, should have been comforting, but it wasn’t. Flashlights made shaky white circles on the lawns and the front porches, garbage cans were rattled and turned upside down as the men searched for anything suspicious, though at this time of year, on nights such as these, almost everything was suspect.

Whenever Stuart heard the patrol inspecting Kay’s street, he went down to the kitchen for tea and Alka-Seltzer, and then he would never get back to sleep. As soon as the board of Kelvin Medical Center was informed by the police that their patient had never been transferred, Stuart was asked to resign. There was no proof to tie Robin to Stephen’s escape, and no evidence that Stuart had been an accomplice, but the board had already tried Stuart and found him guilty of gross negligence. He dutifully composed his letter of resignation and mailed it to the medical center; in return no criminal charges would be filed against him. A request had already been placed to return Stephen to Kelvin, where he would be reevaluated and most probably sent upstate to the locked ward that had been his original destination. The hospital would wait until the criminal investigation on the island was completed, and this time they would send not only three attendants but two armed guards as well, just to make certain there wouldn’t be any trouble.

Stuart had never suffered from insomnia before, and now he understood why his patients who did often felt persecuted, as though sleep had somehow singled them out and denied them their rightful rest. Kay begged him not to go back to the shack, at least not for a while, and he’d thought she was overreacting, until he went to his usual AA meeting and discovered that no one would sit on the same side of the room with him. No one would wait on him in the hardware store or the bait shop. Sofia Peters, down at the library, indexed an entire tray of the card catalogue before finally checking out his books, and then she wouldn’t look at him, not even a glance.

Robin was having an even worse time of it. Some people actually spat on the floor when she walked into the market. She’d left without buying anything, and when she phoned and asked Max Schaeffer, who’d known her since she was ten, if she could have her groceries delivered, he told her that the delivery boy would refuse to come to her house and that he himself wouldn’t walk up the front steps for all the money in the world. The Doctor had come over and sadly informed her that five of her clients had phoned to hire him, and spring was still almost three months away. He’d turned them down, of course, but that didn’t mean they would be coming back to Robin.

“This is all Roy’s fault,” the Doctor said as he drank the tea Robin served him, made from the peppermint that grew in her yard, since she’d used up her last tea bag and had intended to buy more at the market. “If he hadn’t screwed up, you wouldn’t have divorced him, and this wolf fellow would never have come here.”

After the Doctor left, Robin found five hundred dollars under his teacup. She knew he could ill afford the loan, and she would have run after him and forced him to take it back if she hadn’t been so totally broke. She and Stephen had taken to eating Minute Rice flavored with coriander, and winter potatoes from the vegetable bin. At night, when they slept in Robin’s bed, they didn’t touch each other. In the morning, when the wind howled down the chimney, they sat drinking the last of the coffee at the kitchen table, but they didn’t dare talk. Suspicion grows that way, between the sheets, in the teacups, with every word that isn’t spoken. One day, while Robin was at the sink washing out soup bowls, Stephen came up behind her, and she jumped. She tried to blame it on too much caffeine and the awful sound of the wind, but Stephen knew that wasn’t what had frightened her.

He moved out that afternoon. When he put on his black coat Robin didn’t try to stop him. He ran all the way to Poor-man’s Point. It was almost dusk and the patrol always began its rounds as darkness fell. The sky was as gray as stone when Stephen reached the carriage house; the oaks and the Russian olives no longer cast shadows across the lawn. He saw the pools of red paint in the driveway and the ruined stucco walls, but he walked right past them. Stephen refused to be stopped by the mark on the front door. He went inside and locked the door behind him before he went upstairs. He left the lights off and closed all the windows, then sat down in the overstuffed chair beside the bookcases to wait. They weren’t about to let him go, not when they had every advantage. That’s what men called a fair fight, when they were a dozen strong; not one of them would have approached on his own, except for Jeff Carson and a few of the others who had guns, and even they might have turned and run when the branches of the oaks shifted in the wind.

They didn’t come up the driveway until a little before eight, and they stayed for more than an hour, huddled around a fire they made in one of Old Dick’s garbage cans, after they’d chopped down the wisteria for kindling. The wood gave off a sour scent as it burned, and yellow sparks shot out, so that several of the men’s coats were singed. The carriage house looked abandoned, and after a while the men guessed that Stephen hadn’t come back, that he wouldn’t have dared to, and they left to patrol the town green, throwing a few rocks at the windows just for good measure.

Stephen didn’t bother with the broken glass. He didn’t sweep it away, although there were shards of it on the table and all across the orange-and-black Persian rug Old Dick had had carried across the bridge by two strong men whose knees buckled under its weight. He didn’t get up and light the stove to boil water for coffee or tea, or fix himself supper, although there were still cans of vegetables and soup in the pantry. He didn’t have to make a choice anymore; the choice had already been made for him. Robin had watched him put on his coat, and when he’d left she’d locked the back door. At that instant, when he heard the turn of the lock, he knew he had lost her. It was as simple and quick as that. One way open, the other closed.