Waking Hours (10 page)

She remembered the dream from the night before, her father holding a stone.

It occurred to her that she’d woken the night before at the very same time: 2:13. Weird.

She sat up in bed, found the remote, turned on the television, and channel-surfed, watching as many different shows as she could to drive the disturbing image from her consciousness. The news channels told of oil spills and environmental catastrophes, local crimes and tragic car accidents. She turned the television off and picked up
Moby Dick
.

“Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe
,
”
Melville wrote of the whiteness of the whale,
“and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depth of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning . . . ?”

But it wasn’t the color white or the lack of all color that kept Dani awake. It was the vivid red of the blood that fell on her mother’s head, and the feeling she had that she was the cause of it.

9
.

Tommy had two reasons to go see his friend Carl. One was because he wanted to do anything he could to help Liam. The other was that he saw helping to solve the mystery as a way to score points with Dani. He wasn’t sure exactly why he wanted to do that. Perhaps just to dig himself out of the hole he was in and get back to zero.

Carl Thorstein was one of the most learned men Tommy knew. They’d met at the local gas station, where they’d both stopped to fill the tanks of their motorcycles. Talking about Harleys and Indian Aces and 1952 Black Vincents had quickly led to friendship and talk of deeper things. Carl was a theologian and a scholar, and he had helped Tommy at a time when the younger man needed sage advice. Tommy came to believe he’d met Carl at the gas station that day for a reason. It was Carl who told Tommy it would be all right to walk away from football—much to the consternation of Ham Jeffers, the multibillionaire team owner. Carl had encouraged Tommy to do what he needed to do, which was not play a sport where he could kill a fellow human being.

Before the accident, Tommy had taken the sport he played seriously. Afterward, it seemed meaningless. How could he say,
“A man is dead, but we scored two more touchdowns than the other team, so it was worth it”
?

Ham Jeffers thought Tommy should be able to shake it off. “Get it through your thick skull,” he shouted at Tommy. “It was an accident!”

Carl told Tommy it was indeed an accident, but it was also a turning point, a crossroads. There was a reason it happened, or at least a way to
give
it a reason. Carl didn’t try to soothe him with pat answers.

“You may never know why God allowed it,” he told Tommy, “but maybe God wants you to ask that question. If life has meaning, then death has meaning, even if it seems senseless to you at the moment.”

Tommy was still asking. In the meantime, to make sure it would never happen again, he took the necessary steps. On a personal level, he’d walked off the field in the first quarter of the next game he played before he hurt somebody else, and because he knew he didn’t belong there anymore. He’d always played with an equation in mind:
(mass x velocity) = force
, and the greater force prevailed. Some players hit the brakes in the split second before impact. Tommy accelerated. After the accident, he found himself shying away from hits and decelerating. His heart was no longer in it.

The other thing he knew he had to do was open a fitness center to train athletes and teach them how to be strong. He took full responsibility for the consequences of his actions, but he also knew that Dwight Sykes, although a gifted natural athlete with blinding speed, had also been lazy. He rarely used the weight room and spent his off-seasons pursuing television acting opportunities and chasing girls. If Sykes had been stronger, he might have been able to take the hit Tommy delivered.

The fitness center was a way to make everybody who used it stronger. It wasn’t something Tommy wanted to do with the rest of his life, but it was what he needed to set in place before transitioning to the next thing.

The morning sun was still rising in the east when Tommy pulled up to Carl’s home and found his friend working in his garden, ripping out his withered tomato plants. Carl had lived alone ever since losing his wife to breast cancer. Tommy tried to set him up on dates whenever he met single women of an appropriate age, but Carl never called the numbers Tommy gave him.

Carl got to his feet when he saw Tommy and held his muddy hands out to his sides in a gesture that said,
To what do I owe the pleasure?
He had a salt-and-pepper beard, full-faced but closely trimmed, and was bald on top.

“What are you doing?” Tommy asked him. “Planting season is spring.”

“A friend from Holland brought me some bulbs,” Carl said. “Can I offer you a cup of coffee?”

They moved to the porch, where Tommy took a seat in an Adirondack chair while Carl went inside. He came back a little later with two steaming mugs.

Carl sat down heavily in the chair next to Tommy. “Wow,” he said, rubbing his back. “I can’t bend over like I used to. Or more accurately, I can’t stand up again like I used to. What brings you to this neck of the woods?”

“Research, actually,” Tommy said. “Did you hear about Bull’s Rock Hill?”

“Just a little bit on the radio,” Carl said.

“I’m sort of involved,” Tommy said. “I told you about my buddy Liam, right?”

“The skinny kid?” Carl said.

Tommy nodded. “They found his cell phone at the scene. He has no idea how it got there.”

“Is he the only suspect?”

“I don’t know,” Tommy said. “He gave the police the names of the other kids at the party. I believe they’re thinking one of them did it, but maybe someone unrelated to the party found her on her way home. Have you ever heard the name Abbie Gardener?”

“I know Abbie,” Carl said. “As much as anyone can, given her condition. I’ve seen her at High Ridge when I visited some other residents there. What’s Abbie have to do with this?”

“Probably nothing,” Tommy said, “except that last night she got out of the nursing home and ended up in my backyard. My alarm went off at three in the morning. The police think she might have seen something.”

“It won’t be easy to talk to her,” Carl said. “I understand she’s in the final stages of Alzheimer’s.”

“Can I show you something?” Tommy asked, digging his phone from the pocket of his jacket. He flipped screens until he’d queued up the video he’d taken the night before. “She was saying something when I found her, but it wasn’t anything I could understand. I thought maybe if I played it for you—you speak like a hundred languages, right?”

“Not quite a hundred,” Carl said. “Before you do—are you working on this as a case?”

Carl was one of the few people Tommy had told of his new career path.

“Sort of. I’m just an interested party. Did I ever tell you about Dani Harris?”

“Is that the party you’re interested in?”

“She’s a forensic psychiatrist with the DA’s office.”

“Did you tell her you’re studying for your PI’s license?”

“Not yet,” Tommy said. “I didn’t want to seem pushy. Anyway, she’s working on the case and she asked me to help her. Okay, she didn’t exactly ask me.” He handed Carl his phone. “Can you translate this?”

“I can try.” He pressed the screen’s Play arrow and listened.

Tommy watched the expression on his friend’s face change from curiosity to concern. “It’s crazy stuff, isn’t it? What’s ‘luck’s fairy’?”

“The first part’s in Italian,” Carl said. “Do you mind if I take this inside? I just want to check something on my computer. I’ll be right back.”

While he waited, Tommy watched a flight of geese fly overhead in chevron formation, headed in a northerly direction. He’d always had a remarkably good sense of direction, even on a cloudy day or night when the sun or the stars were hidden. It was the wrong time of year for geese to fly north, but he assumed they knew what they were doing. Circling back, perhaps, to pick up stragglers.

Carl returned to the porch carrying a book. When Tommy opened it, he saw it was written in Italian. He turned back to the cover and read the title,
La Divina Commedia, di Dante Alighieri
.

“It’s a nineteenth-century translation of the Ferrari original,” Carl said. “I thought I remembered the passage from the
Purgatorio
, but I was wrong. It’s from the
Inferno
. Haven’t read this since I was in seminary.”

He reached over and opened the book to the page he’d bookmarked and pointed with his finger to the exact line.

“
Le ali congoleare di mondo
. My Italian’s not as good as it should be,” Carl said, “but I would translate it as ‘His wings freeze the world.’ In context, ‘God’s most splendid being, who beats his wings and freezes everything that surrounds him.’ ”

He handed Tommy a printout he’d made of his translation.

“What about ‘luck’s fairy’?” Tommy asked.

“Well, it’s not l-u-c-k-apostrophe-s. It’s l-u-x.
Lux
, that means ‘light.’ In Latin, not Italian. And
ferre
, spelled f-e-r-r-e, means ‘to bring.’ ‘Bringer of light’ would be the translation. ‘Whose wings freeze the world.’
Lux ferre
is from the Bible. It refers to a person.”

“And who would that be?” Tommy asked.

“Lux ferre,”
Carl said. “Combined to make ‘Lucifer, whose wings freeze the world.’ At least according to Dante. But what’s he written lately?”

“So Abbie Gardener was ranting about Satan?”

“I would say yes,” Carl said. “Which would be consistent with her lifelong fixation on all things ghoulish and dark. I’ve done a lot of work with old people. Most find peace and have no problem getting old, but for some . . . the demons come out. It may have something to do with atrophy of the frontal lobes that govern impulse control and morality. Sometimes old people lose their self-control and start whacking each other with their canes. It sounds silly, but it’s not funny when you see it.”

“Saw it firsthand,” Tommy said, pulling down the turtleneck to show Carl the scratches on his throat. “She jumped me. Out of the blue. Unbelievably strong.”

Carl leaned in to have a look.

“One more question,” Tommy said. “She asked me if I believe in something I’d never heard of—I couldn’t even find it in the dictionary. Ecstaspizium?”

“Extispicium,” Carl corrected him. “E-x-t-i-s-p-i-c-i-u-m.”

“You know what it means?”

“It refers to the practice of sacrificing an animal so that you can predict the future by interpreting the entrails,” Carl said. “A form of soothsaying practiced by the Roman haruspices.”

“Haruspices?”

“Fortune-tellers,” Carl said. “Or maybe prophets.”

“That explains what she was doing with the frog,” Tommy said. “ ‘These are the first to go, you’ll be the last,’ she said.”

“Last to what?”

“Dissolve,” Tommy said. “And let me tell you about the doctor who looked at my throat.”

He told Carl the whole story as best he could. When he was done speaking, Carl leaned back in his chair, thinking.

“What do you make of it?” Tommy said. “Figment of my imagination?”