The Darkest Evening of the Year (15 page)

Chapter
35

T
he severed limbs, the headless torso, the eyeless head, and the pried-out glass eyes of the doll are arranged beside the lunch tray on the desk, where Moongirl carefully placed them.

Not once during the dismemberment and beheading did Piggy appear to notice the destruction her mother was committing. Now she ignores the ruins.

Harrow suspects that, this time, Piggy has outwitted her mother. Instead of giving the most elaborate dress of her creation to her favorite doll, perhaps she has given it to her least favorite.

This is a small triumph, but in the child’s life, there is no other kind.

If Moongirl realizes that she has been deceived, she will make Piggy pay dearly. Even now, Harrow can see how the woman struggles to contain her fury at the child’s indifference to the savaging of the doll.

Like Harrow, Moongirl has the cold intellect of a machine and a body that is machinelike in the perfection of its form and function, but she only pretends to understand and control her emotions as Harrow understands and controls his.

The range of her emotions is limited to anger, hatred, envy, greed, desire, and self-love. He is not sure if she realizes this or if she thinks she is complete.

While she cannot exert iron control of herself, she understands that she empowers herself by
repressing
her emotions. The longer that anger and hatred are unexpressed or only partly expressed, the purer and more poisonous they become, until they make a more potent elixir than any that a wizard could concoct.

She sits beside the desk, glaring at her daughter, and though her long-distilled hatred is lethal, she will not strike a murderous blow yet. She will wait through this night and the following day, until—very soon now—she can have all the deaths that she most wants.

“I bought the potato salad special for you, Piggy.”

The blades of light penetrating the cracks in the storm shutters are not pellucid or golden any longer, but a murky orange. The cut-glass vase has gone dark. The auroral glimmer has disappeared from the ceiling over Piggy’s head.

Thin spears of orange sunlight touch only the wood surfaces of the furniture, here a decorative pillow, there an oil painting of a seascape.

Yet by some curious mechanism of soft reflection, elfin light twinkles in unlikely corners of the shadowy room: in the glass beads of the shade on the lamp that stands on the far side of the child’s bed, in the glass knob on a distant closet door….

“Piggy?”

“Okay.”

“The potato salad.”

“Okay.”

“I’m waiting.”

“I had two cookies.”

“Cookies aren’t enough.”

“And a sandwich.”

“Why do you do this to me?”

Piggy says nothing.

“You’re a little ingrate.”

“I’m full.”

“You know what an ingrate is?”

“No.”

“You don’t know much, do you?”

Piggy shakes her head.

“Eat the potato salad.”

“Okay.”

“When?”

“Later,” says Piggy.

“No. Now.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t just say okay. Do it.”

The child neither speaks nor reaches for the potato salad.

Diamonds dark at throat and wrist in spite of the desk lamp, Moongirl rises from her chair, snatches up the potato salad, and throws it.

The container strikes a wall and bursts open, splattering the plaster and showering the floor with spit-spiced potato salad.

Bright tears sting Piggy’s eyes, and her wet cheeks shine.

“Clean it up.”

“Okay.”

From the desk, Moongirl seizes the pieces of the ruined doll and throws them hard across the room. She grabs as well the open bag of cookies and throws that.

“Clean it up.”

“Okay.”

“Every smear and crumb.”

“Okay.”

“And don’t give me tears, you little fat-faced fraud.”

Moongirl turns and, diamonds darkling, strides from the room, no doubt to settle herself with her collection of cleansing solutions and emollient lotions for face and body, in a dreamy two-hour regimen that seldom fails to leave her in a better mood.

Perched on the arm of the upholstered chair, Harrow watches the child. As simple as she is, and plain and slow, she has about her a mystery that intrigues him and that seems in some way deeper than the mystery of her mother’s madness.

Piggy sits for a minute, unmoving.

As though her tears are as astringent as rubbing alcohol, they swiftly evaporate from her cheeks. In remarkably short order, her eyes are dry as well.

She opens the second lunchbox bag of potato chips and eats one. Then another. Then a third. Slowly she empties the bag.

After wiping her fingers on a paper napkin, she pushes aside the tray and picks up the doll on which she was working when her mother and Harrow first entered the room. She merely holds the doll, does nothing with it other than study its face.

The odd thought occurs to him that Piggy, plain simple Piggy, may be the only person he has ever known who is only and exactly who she appears to be, which may be why she seems mysterious.

And here, unexpectedly, is the Look that Harrow has lately seen subtly transform the child’s features, the quality that is not beauty but that might be akin to it. The defining word for the Look still eludes him.

Outside, the wounded day issues a bloody glow that lacks the strength to press through the cracks in the shutters. Only the desk lamp illuminates the room.

Yet elfin lights persist in the crystal beads of the lampshade in the darkest corner, in the glass doorknob far from the desk, in a gold-leaf detail of a picture frame, in window glass that is not at an angle to reflect the desk lamp.

Harrow has the peculiar feeling that he and the child are not alone in the room, though of course they are.

Piggy will not clean up the mess her mother made as long as Harrow remains to watch her. She stoops to such tasks only when she is alone.

He rises from the arm of the chair, stands watching her for a moment, walks to the door, turns, and looks at her again.

Rarely does he say anything to the child. More rarely still does she speak to him.

Suddenly the expression on her face so infuriates him that if he were a man without absolute control of his emotions, he would knock it off her with one hard punch.

Without looking at Harrow, she says, “Good-bye,” and he finds himself outside the room, closing the door.

“You’ll burn like pig fat,” he mutters as he turns the deadbolt lock, and he feels his face flush because this juvenile threat, while worthy of Moongirl, is beneath him.

Chapter
36

T
he man known as Eliot Rosewater to Vernon Lesley was known as Billy Pilgrim to the associate who had flown the two-engine aircraft to the abandoned military facility in the Mojave.

The pilot, who had worked with Billy on many occasions, called himself Gunther Schloss, and was Gunny to his friends. Billy thought Gunther Schloss sounded like a true name, a born name, but he would not have bet a penny on it.

Gunny looked like a Gunther Schloss ought to look: tall, thick-necked, muscular, with white-blond hair and blue eyes and a face made for the cover of
White Supremacist Monthly.

In fact he was married to a lovely black woman in Costa Rica and to a charming Chinese woman in San Francisco. He wasn’t a fascist but an anarchist, and during one bizarre week in Havana, he had smoked a lot of ganja with Fidel Castro. You could hire Gunny Schloss to kill just about anyone, if it was someone you for some reason didn’t want to kill yourself, but he cried every time he watched
Steel Magnolias,
which he did once a year.

After Gunny killed Bobby Onions and Vernon Lesley, he and Billy stripped the bodies of ID and dragged them to the intersection of the two cracked blacktop roads that served the surrounding cluster of abandoned Quonset huts. They pried a manhole out of the weed-choked pavement and dumped the dead men into the long-unused septic tank.

Even the desert got some rain, and the service-road gutters fed this tank, so the darkness below still stank, if not as bad as it had when the facility had been open twenty years ago, and both bodies splashed into something best not contemplated.

Billy heard movement below, before and after the dropping of the cadavers: maybe rats, maybe lizards, maybe desert beetles as big as bread plates.

When he had been a young man, he would have lowered a flashlight or torch down there, to satisfy his curiosity. He was old enough now to know that curiosity usually got you a bullet in the face.

They worked fast, and after they wrestled the cover onto the manhole, Gunny said, “See you in Santa Barbara.”

“Pretty place. I like Santa Barbara,” Billy said. “I hope nobody ever blows it up.”

“Somebody will,” Gunny said, not because he had any proprietary knowledge of a forthcoming event, but because he was an anarchist and always hopeful.

Gunny flew out in the twin-engine Cessna, and Billy walked the scene, kicking sand over the drag marks from the dead men’s heels, picking up what shell casings he spotted in the late sun, and making sure they had gathered up all of the major pieces of Bobby Onions’s skull.

When the woman disappeared, no one would care as long as she was a nobody named Redwing, living in a modest bungalow, doing nothing with her life except rescuing dogs.

Every week, so many people disappeared or turned up dead in a grotesque fashion that even the cable-news crime shows, with their insatiable hunger for shock and gore, could not cover every case. Some deaths were more important than others. You didn’t get killer ratings and book all your ad time at the highest price if your show’s philosophy was that the death of any sparrow mattered as much as the death of any other.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for the pretty twenty-something pregnant woman who is clubbed to death by her husband, cut into twelve pieces, packed in a footlocker with concrete blocks, and submerged in a pond. It tolls and tolls and tolls,
²⁴
/
₇
, until the only way you can escape hearing it is by switching to Animal Planet.

Amy Redwing’s disappearance would merit zero TV time as long as no one knew she had once been someone other than Amy Redwing. Because Vernon Lesley had done a good job of finding the mementos of her past that she had saved, he knew too much about her, and he had to die.

Maybe Lesley had not shared his knowledge with Bobby Onions, but Billy Pilgrim had not been willing to take a chance that Onions was as clueless as he looked. Besides, the moment Onions got out of the Land Rover, with his James Dean sneer and his swagger, Billy wanted to kill him on general principles.

After policing the area for evidence of the shootings, Billy dropped the dead men’s ID into the white trash bag that contained what Vernon Lesley had confiscated from the woman’s bungalow. With the bag on the passenger seat beside him, he drove out of the desert in the Land Rover and headed west.

Twilight came on like a big Hollywood production, saturated with color—gold, peach, orange, then red, with purple pending—ornamented with clouds in fantastic shapes afire against an electric-blue sky shimmering toward sapphire: the kind of twilight that could almost make you think the day had been important and had meant something.

Billy had a busy night ahead of him. They said there was no rest for the wicked. In fact, there was rest neither for the virtuous nor for the wicked, nor for guys like Billy Pilgrim, who were uncommitted regarding the whole idea of virtue versus wickedness and who were just trying to do their jobs.

Chapter
37

S
omething unnatural happens to you—judging by the evidence probably something
supernatural
—and at the same time your dead past suddenly comes alive and catches up with you, with the consequence that you have to make the most wrenching confession you’ve ever made in your life to the one person in the whole world whose opinion of you matters desperately, yet you still have to feed the dogs, walk the dogs, and pick up their last poop of the day.

When Amy had first come into his life and had brought an arkful of canines with her, she had said that dogs
centered
you, calmed you, taught you how to cope. He had thought she was just a little daffy for golden retrievers. Eventually he had realized that what she had said was nothing less or more than the dead-solid truth.

In his pantry, he had kibble and treats for those evenings when Amy came by with the dogs for dinner and two-hand rummy, or to watch a DVD together.

After feeding Fred, Ethel, and Nickie, they walked them through the twilight to a nearby park.

“If this works out,” he said, “and Vanessa really will give Hope to me, I’ll understand if at some point you decide it’s too much.”

“Too much what?”

“Some people with Down’s syndrome are highly functional, others not so much. There’s a range.”

“Some architects are highly functional, and some are more dense, yet here I am.”

“I’m just saying it’s going to change things, it’s a lot of responsibility.”

“Some architects are highly functional,” she repeated, “and some are more dense, yet here I am.”

“I’m serious, Amy. Besides the girl’s disability, we don’t know what Vanessa might have put her through. There may be psychological problems, too.”

“Put any three human beings together,” she said, “and three of them are going to have psychological problems. So we just cope with one another.”

“Then there’s Vanessa. Maybe she’s had enough of tormenting me, and maybe she just wants to take my money, dump the girl on me, and forget the two of us ever existed. Or maybe it won’t be that easy.”

“I’m not worried about Vanessa. I can bitch-slap with the best of them.”

“If Vanessa decides to be in our lives, one way or another, a Holly Golightly attitude won’t work with her.”

“Holly Golightly like in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
?”

He said, “If there’s a Holly Golightly in
Bleak House,
I’m not aware of it.”

“Listen up, nameless narrator, I don’t have a Holly Golightly attitude. It’s more like Katharine Hepburn in anything with Cary Grant.”

“Nameless narrator?”

“
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
is told in the first person by a guy who’s in love with her, but we never know his name.”

They let the dogs lead them in silence for a few steps, and then Brian said, “I am in love with you.”

“You said so back at the apartment. I said it, too. We’ve said it before. We don’t have to keep saying it every ten minutes, do we?”

“I don’t mind hearing it.”

“Dogs know when you love them,” she said. “They don’t expect you to say it all the time. People should be more like dogs.”

“No dog has ever asked you to marry him.”

“Sweetie, you’ve been so patient. It’s just that…I have some issues. I’m working on them. I’m not just being rotten to you, though I’m sure sometimes it seems like that.”

“It never seems like you’re being rotten. You’re the best. The way you’ve handled all this with Vanessa, Amy, you’re a wonder. It’s just…nameless narrator never got Holly Golightly.”

“He got her in the movie.”

“The movie was nice, but it wasn’t real. The book was real. In the book, she goes away to Brazil.”

“I’m not going to Brazil. I don’t like to samba. Anyway, you’re not nameless narrator. You’re much cuter than he was.”

The lampposts brightened as night pressed the last red wine out of the twilight.

Along the pathway, from lamp to lamp, across the grass, from bench to bench and back again, the dogs enjoyed the park entirely as dogs will, sniffing the messages left by legions of dogs before them, alert to the scents of squirrels in trees, of birds in higher branches, and of far places from which stories are carried on the breeze.

“Earlier, when I was doing all those drawings, I sensed—I
knew
—that Hope and Nickie are inextricably entwined, that I can’t have Hope without Nickie. There’s something so strange happening…yet Nickie acts like any other dog.”

“Most of the time,” Amy said.

She held Fred’s and Ethel’s leashes in her right hand. With her left hand, perhaps unconsciously, she touched the cameo locket at her throat.

“You want to tell me about the bedroom-slipper thing?” he asked.

“It doesn’t mean anything. It can’t. Anyway, it wouldn’t make sense to you without the backstory.”

“So tell me the backstory.”

“Sweetie, it’s not just a backstory, it’s a
big honkin’ backstory.
We don’t have time to get into it right now. In that last e-mail, Vanessa said ‘Stand by.’ We should see if she’s followed up while we’ve been out.”

When they got back to his apartment, an e-mail from Vanessa was waiting.