Tunnel of Night (13 page)

“It’s in the computer.”

Lane flipped open a small notebook and jotted down items.

“Add Charles S. Weathers, and share the list with the D.C police.”

She looked up from her writing. “You think he’d use a name he’s used before?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. We have to start with a shotgun approach—make use of what we’ve got. I’d also like a hard copy of your NYPD file on Wolf, and that computer journal he kept in his office in Vermont. I have to go back to the beginning with this bastard.”

“That’s all in the same file. No problem. I’ll get started right away.”

“The dialogue that any killer has with his world can be understood,” I said, as if I were trying to convince myself.

John Wolf was not “any killer.” While I was thinking about him, he was thinking about me. Wolf wanted me here. I was convinced that he had planned some performance, and that I was his audience. After the show, he could move to his endgame: killing Lucas Frank.

“He will want us to hear,” I muttered, “but not understand. We have to be ready to hear, to see, to comprehend.”

I stared up at the ceiling.

Long ago, I had learned to trust all the dimensions of the mind, to accept that I might not know where my thoughts were leading me, but to believe that they were offering something that I needed to experience. As the textured ceiling in my room began to resemble a pale version of the surface of the moon, I was only vaguely aware of Lane closing the door on her way out.

Willoughby was the key to this case. I still felt that there was more he could tell me, but would not. When he retrieved the Humphrey and Chadwick files, he had walked up his driveway, around the house to the back. I watched as he disappeared through the trees. The guy
obviously had an outbuilding that served him as an office.

I glanced at the clock and decided that it was time for a return to Vienna. This time, I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I wanted only to prowl.

I HAVE KILLED MANY TIMES, BUT I HAVE DIED
only once. It happened in Vermont, just a few days less than a year ago. Soon, I will celebrate the anniversary of my death.

On that day last fall, there was dirt in my mouth, in my eyes, my nose. All that was left of my world was a moist, loamy blackness. The earth shook, and more soil broke loose. A rush of shock waves and fiery air rolled over me from behind. The tunnel that I had dug as a child—the long, narrow hollow that I had scraped out of the muck with a spoon, a knife, and my fingernails— remained intact.

All of it was real. It happened.

Now, as I traveled the streets of Washington, that experience came back to me like an anecdote—a story that I had merely overheard, not one that I had lived.

When Lucas Frank threw me into the coal bin, and when I heard the hasp click shut on the door, I experienced only a moment’s panic I took a deep breath, thinking that the good doctor had found the bomb that I had buried in the cellar. It was to have been the vehicle
of his death, but then he had discovered it, and I was certain that he had dismantled it.

He must be calling the police,
I thought.

I even imagined heavily armed, uniformed, intensely dedicated, muscular young men with short hair and fierce eyes whipping open the coal-bin door to find that I had dematerialized.

I had underestimated Lucas Frank. The man had murder in him. He had not notified the police. He had not disconnected my device. He had moved it and changed the timer, intending to kill me. We were more alike than I had imagined.

I lifted the slab of sandstone, unsure if I would fit into the tunnel that I had dug so many years before. It was tight and my progress was slow, but I did manage to scrape my way down. When the earth moved, and my path to freedom survived the tremors, I remember smiling, continuing to inch my way toward safety.

I shoved through the thick cover of leaves and branches that concealed the tunnel’s exit. When I was free from the waist up, I slipped onto my back, turned my face toward the blowing snow, and inhaled the first clean air of a new life.

Pain ripped at my gut. There seemed to be as much blood as dirt crusted on my body.

When confronted by an experience that is accompanied by any strong feeling—pleasant or unpleasant— I leave the confines of my body and soar, like a soul, looking down and watching myself.

That’s what I did then, in that moment, in that pain.

When I crawled out into the light, I knew that my injuries were serious. I had no time to examine them. I began to walk, then lope, across the side of the hill and into the woods. If my strength held, I knew that I could
reach the village of Saxtons River in an hour, maybe two. And I did.

I crouched in a stand of snow-covered quince and lilac, watching the post office and general store. I had no sense of time. I guessed it to be midafternoon.

The bleeding had slowed, almost stopped. I don’t know how long I waited—minutes, a half hour—until an old man parked his Subaru in front of the store, leaving the engine running as he ambled inside.

This, like so much else, was meant to be.

The car was warm, stocked with five cans of Budweiser and a bag of corn chips. The radio spewed a bilge of country music and a local DJ’s musings on the state of the world. The verbose president said this. The pig-faced Speaker of the House said that. Then they shook hands. All was well.

There was no mention of any explosion. The world moves fast, but the local media move slow. My death would not be announced for hours—maybe not until the TV news at six
P.M
.

I remember picking up Route 11 at North Windham, and heading west. I drank a couple of the tasteless beers, ate some chips, and found a different radio station, a familiar piece of music.

I was alive, and the first order of business was to stay alive. That meant making it to Swanton.

My biological father was Gary Pease, an Abenaki Indian. He died in a logging accident the year I was
born, but his brother lived in Bellows Falls when I was growing up. “If you ever need help,” he had told me many times, “our people will take you in.”

He knew about Corrigan, my stepfather. “The guy’s a shit,” he said.

As I turned north on Route 7 near Manchester, headlights shot at me through the snow. I had rolled down the window so the cold air would keep me awake.

I sensed a leering presence beside me in the Subaru. Lucas Frank. I hammered my fist into the space the phantom occupied, sending my shoulder into spasms of searing pain.

It was a little after two in the morning when I reached Swanton, the largest Abenaki settlement remaining in Vermont. The loose association of native people who lived there was still not recognized by the state or federal governments. They, in turn, recognized no government but their own.

My people.

I turned right onto Linda Street, then drove until I came to an isolated trailer.

That was all I remembered, until I was lying on an overstuffed sofa that reeked of baby shit and sweat. I thought I was falling off—on my way to the floor. Each time I faded out, I was driving on Vermont 7 again.

A woman hovered above me—a blur of blue skirt, red jacket, long black hair. She didn’t say much, but she seemed to know what she was doing—as if she had treated gunshot wounds many times before. There were moments of clarity. I told her that my father was Abenaki, and I mentioned that the Subaru was stolen.

“My brother will know what to do with it,” she said,

I drifted off. When I opened my eyes again, a light flickered somewhere in the room. I was shivering.

I thought I saw Lucas Frank standing beside the gun cabinet.

I growled.

“Hey,” she said. “You’re burning up.”

“Are you real?”

“It’s the fever.”

She wiped my face with a cloth. I thought she said she was an echo—a sound coming back to me, a sound that I had sent into the wild. Then I understood that Echo was her name.

Sometime later, I looked up into the black eyes of Echo’s fifteen-year-old daughter. She stared back at me, not flinching.

The kid gestured with her hands.

“She doesn’t speak,” Echo explained. “Her name is Terry. She wants to know what animal you are.”

The Abenakis are the people of the wolf, so I said, “Like you.”

The girl read my lips and backed away. She sensed the danger that had entered their trailer. Her hands fluttered, then she walked off. She paused in the doorway, looked back, then disappeared.

I glanced around at what I could see from the sofa. There was an old TV, but they couldn’t use it because the electricity had been disconnected. There were kerosene lamps for light, but nothing to read by that light. It was unlikely that these people would know of, or care about, the drama that had begun to unfold 150 miles away.

Echo saw me staring at the cheap walnut-colored paneling. It was riddled with holes. “My husband was a drunk,” she said, standing beside me, her hands on her hips.

“Was?”

She shrugged. “He’s dead.”

“There was a man here earlier.”

“That’s Herb, my brother. He took care of the car. It’s at the bottom of Maquam Lake. Those are his clothes you’re wearing.”

I looked down at the plaid flannel shirt and jeans.

The trailer was clean, but in the disrepair and decay that accompany poverty. I asked about an odd collection of twigs and string that hung above the sofa.

“A dream catcher,” Echo said. “It holds the bad dreams, and lets only the good ones pass through.”

“Are those feathers?” I asked, trying to focus my eyes.

She nodded. “One is from the neck of a golden eagle. There’s a native legend that says if you find such a feather, you’ll always have good luck, never lose your way in the world. Terry put it there after you came. The power of the eagle cleanses your soul. She thinks you’re evil.”

“What about you?”

“I don’t know. I only know that it’s the way of my people to help our own. If my husband were alive, I would still take him in—despite the beatings. It’s what I was taught. I don’t know who shot you, or why. It doesn’t matter.”

I looked at her expressionless face. Echo was telling the truth.

I watched through the window as the snow continued to drift down. I knew that my body would heal, but my thoughts were in disarray. Disorganized. I didn’t know how long I had been in the trailer, or where it was that I thought I should be—but I felt as if time were slipping away, and I was late for an appointment. I felt a need to hurry—but hurry to where?

One morning while I was recuperating in Swanton,
Echo’s brother sat at the kitchen counter, cleaning his deer rifle. I still moved with difficulty, but gained strength each day.

“Where are you from?” Herb asked.

He was a tall, slender man with a weathered face, dressed in clothes similar to what his sister had given me,

“Bellows Falls,” I told him.

“Any work down that way?”

“Just over at the ski areas.”

“Shit work. Flatlanders in their pink and purple snow suits.”

He got up and walked to the door. “Goin’ huntin’,” he said. “HI be back by dark. Echo said she’s comin’ home right after the noon rush at the diner.”

“That’s where she works?”

“Waitress. Pushes plates of food in front of the down-country assholes on their way to Jay Peak. Dime tips. Quarters. That’s why she ain’t got no lights.”

I watched through the door as Herb climbed into an old Chevy pickup. The germ of an idea flashed through my mind, the first organized thought that I’d had since the explosion. It was the beginning of a plan, something to fit into a design.

I sat at the counter sipping tea and thinking back on better days. I’d had to re-create myself often over the years. Each time, I felt as if I had lost a piece of myself. The closest I ever came to losing myself entirely was at the hands of Lucas Frank in the cellar of the old house.

There would be another encounter. I knew that even then. This time, I would choose the time and place, and I would shake the earth. There were people who had betrayed me, placed me in a position where I was
forced to crawl through dirt and muck. They had disrupted the order of my life, the symmetry that I had labored to achieve. Each had provided Frank with a piece of his puzzle. When I gave them the opportunity to relive a small slice of their past, they would provide me with pieces of my own design.

MY DAYS IN THE TRAILER TURNED INTO WEEKS
, then months. On a Saturday near the end of March, I borrowed Herb’s truck and drove to a logging road, west of the town of Highgate. I parked, walked through snow to the crest of a small hill, then stepped through a line of maples and went to the stone wall that I knew was there.

I counted the trees and walked beside the rock barrier until I found the spot that I was looking for. I brushed away the snow, pulled out some stones at the base of the wall, and reached into the hole I had scooped out of softer earth months earlier.

I removed a box wrapped in plastic. I stuffed twenty-five thousand dollars cash into one coat pocket, and the loaded .44 Magnum with extra shells into the other, along with two complete sets of identification— one for Charles S. Weathers of Lincoln, Nebraska, and the other for Dr. John Krogh, anthropology department, Harvard.