Waking Hours (33 page)

“Everything looks good,” he called out. “Did you check upstairs?”

But when he got back to the kitchen, he could tell that she was not all right. She sat at the kitchen table holding a can of Raid in her lap.

“What’s that for?” he asked her.

She set the can on the counter. “Self-defense.”

“From bees?”

She smiled weakly. Arlo did a figure eight around Tommy’s legs.

“He loves men,” Dani said. “I hope you’re not allergic to cats.”

“Can I make you a cup of tea or something?” he offered.

“Why would I want a cup of tea?”

“Don’t people always have tea at times like this?” he said.

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never had a time like this. This is . . .” She looked around the room, searching for something.

“This is what?”

“This is more than I can understand,” she said, looking up to meet his gaze. “I didn’t think I was the kind of person who got scared. It’s not just Julie Leonard. It’s your car, the water, my dreams—
our
dreams. I don’t know how I’m supposed to think about it. I can’t get a handle on it. I can’t think of anything I could read to explain it.”

“I know what you mean,” Tommy said. He sat at the end of the table and slid his chair closer to her.

“You’re not scared?” she asked him.

“Maybe a little,” he said. He took the gun from his pocket and held it in the air to show it to her, then put it back in his pocket.

She opened her eyes wide, then stared out the window for a moment before returning to him. “I’m afraid of something that can’t be shot at,” she said. “Maybe I’m just scaring myself.”

“Do you remember Darryl Dawkins? The basketball player?” Tommy said. “I met him at a celebrity golf tournament. He played center for the 76ers. An interviewer once asked him, ‘Darryl, you’re six eleven, 300 pounds—is there anything you’re afraid of?’ And he said, ‘I’m only afraid of two things. The unknown, and ice skating.’”

Dani laughed. Tommy wished he had more than levity to offer her.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

“It means have faith,” Tommy said. “Or as Vince Lombardi once said, ‘It’s good to have faith, but it’s better to have faith and a gun.’ I just made that up, but it sounds like something he would have said.”

She laughed again, but the smile on her face soon disappeared. He waited.

“What do you make of it?” she asked him. “All these weird things going on. It’s just . . .”

“Just what?”

“Inexplicable,” she said. “I mean, any one thing, maybe, but add them all together and . . . Do you know what I mean?”

“I do,” he said.

“There’s no pattern,” she said. “At least none that I can discern.”

“Well . . . ,” Tommy began, wondering if he should share with her a thought he’d had earlier.

“Well, what? Tell me. No matter how crazy. It can’t get any crazier.”

“It’s just that I noticed . . .” He tried again to think how best to put his theory into words. “You remember me telling you about a call we got at the nursery from a woman in Willow Ponds about her solarium?”

“Grasshoppers?” Dani tried to recall.

“Locusts,” Tommy corrected her. “Similar. My pest control guy said they have to burn the palms she put in and order new ones.”

“Okay,” Dani said. “And this is related . . . how?”

“Well,” Tommy said, “when’s the last time anybody in East Salem had trouble with locusts?”

“I don’t know,” Dani said.

“So,” Tommy said, holding his hand out so that he could count on his fingers, “one, we’ve got locusts. Two, Abbie Gardener was holding a dead frog. Three, you told me your sister’s school was having problems with head lice. Four, you said two of the girls who rode horses at Red Gate Farm had botfly bites, which looked like boils, right? You with me so far?”

“Not even a little,” Dani said.

“Five,” Tommy said, bending back his left thumb, “botflies are flies, so we’ve got not just boils, but flies.”

He held out a finger on his right hand.

“Six,” he said, “I read on the Julie Leonard Facebook page that a man thought his car got damaged by hail but he couldn’t find any hailstones . . .”

“I read that too,” Dani said.

“Seven, Frank told me when he stopped under the bridge that there’d been a power outage north of here,” he continued. “That’s another one. Plunged into darkness . . .”

“Tommy . . .”

“Just hear me out,” he said, “because your sister said the horses at Red Gate Farm were sneezing, right?”

“Right,” Dani said.

“And the two we saw tonight didn’t look all that well. So that’s sickness of livestock. Plus,” Tommy said, holding up all ten fingers, “there’s Julie Leonard, and frogs, lice, flies, diseased livestock, boils, hail, locusts, and darkness. Ring any bells?”

“Bells?” she said. “You’re still losing me. This is related to the murder of Julie Leonard exactly how?”

“Death of the firstborn,” Tommy said.

“Meaning?” she asked. “I get the reference—it’s biblical.”

“Exodusical, to be precise,” Tommy said. “Is that a word? Exodusian? It’s from Exodus.”

Dani flashed on the word and recalled her dream, people fleeing a city. “What are you saying?” she asked. “You think God is sending us plagues?”

“Not necessarily,” Tommy said. “I would think that if any three or four of those things happened at the same time, it wouldn’t mean anything. But the odds against all ten happening at once is sixteen trillion to one, to quote a statistic I just made up.”

“Tommy . . .”

“I don’t know what it means,” he repeated. “But that’s not the same thing as saying I think it’s meaningless. It’s not disconnected—”

She held up a hand to stop him. “All I’m saying,” Dani said, “is that sometimes if you look for something long enough or hard enough, you’ll find it even if it isn’t there. I had a patient once, an old woman who was convinced that there was a secret organization that was taking over the world.”

“But—”

“She had rock-solid proof,” Dani continued, “because according to her, and this is textbook paranoia, every time this sinister secret organization took over something, they put a circle around the logo. She had proof. The telephone company had a logo with a circle around the bell. At all the bus stops, there was a T with a circle around it. To everyone else, it stood for transit, but to her, it meant a secret cabal had taken over the bus company. There are circles everywhere, if you look for them. The consciousness sets up a screen or a filter, on the lookout for things that are threatening, so it screens out everything that isn’t a threat and locates everything that is.”

“So you’re saying I’m paranoid?” Tommy asked.

“Not at all,” Dani said. “I’m just saying that the perception of a pattern is not proof of design. Look at the constellations—the ancient astronomers saw hunters and swans and big dippers in the night sky. They saw patterns. To us, now, it’s just a bunch of stars distributed at random.”

“So you don’t think there’s anything strange about seeing ten biblical signs at one time?” Tommy asked her.

She considered what he’d said. “Yes,” she agreed. “I’ll give you strange. I just don’t know what else we can say about it.”

“Neither do I,” Tommy said.

“What was the story from Exodus?” Dani asked. “Remind me?”

“The pharaoh told the Israelites, ‘If your God is so powerful, prove it,’ ” Tommy explained. “So God sent the plagues, until the pharaoh finally said okey-dokey and let the Israelites go.”

“Pharaoh said okey-dokey?”

“Words to that effect, in ancient Egyptian,” Tommy said, joining the tips of his right thumb and index finger in a circle. “In hieroglyphics, it looks like this.”

Dani smiled again.

And again, the smile faded quickly. Tommy knew where Dani, the scientist, was coming from. In his Introduction to Investigative Theory class at John Jay, he’d been told that the investigator’s job was to look for patterns but to be wary of superimposing patterns on random facts, and to always remember that coincidence did not imply causality. He knew Dani understood that. Something else was bothering her.

“You seem a little shaky. Would you like me to stay?” he offered. “I can sleep on the couch. I just need to call Lucius and make sure he can stay with my dad.”

She didn’t answer right away.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m trying to figure out how I can stop myself from sleepwalking. The footprints on the deck . . . What if I’d climbed over the railing and kept on going? Feeling like you don’t know what you’re going to do after you fall asleep is a bit disconcerting.”

“I’ll sleep on the floor by the door,” he said. “I actually sleep on the floor at my house when my back acts up. I took a hit against the Patriots that gave me a compressed disk.”

Dani offered to inflate an air mattress for him. Tommy declined but accepted her offer of a foam rubber yoga mat. She found a sleeping bag for him in the basement. When she unrolled it, she found the Girl Scout sash she hadn’t seen since eighth grade.

“Impressive,” he said when he saw the sash and all her merit badges. It didn’t surprise him. She’d been an overachiever from the first day he’d known her in elementary school, where the students pasted small book-shaped stickers on a chart to record all the books they’d read over the summer. Dani’s count was literally off the chart and halfway to the guinea pig cage.

She led him to her bedroom and showed him where to put the sleeping bag. When she came out of the bathroom in her oversized flannel pajamas, he was already in the bag on the floor, blocking her from somnambulating out onto the deck again. She locked the bedroom door and left the night-light on in the bathroom.

She got in bed and pulled the blankets up to her chin.

“Would you mind taking the bullets out of the gun?” she asked him, eyeing his leather jacket, which hung heavily to the left.

“It’s not going to go off by itself,” he said.

“That’s not what I’m afraid of,” she said. “If I can walk in my sleep, I don’t know what else I might do in my sleep.”

“I think I’ll just take the bullets out of the gun,” he said, moving quickly to the jacket.

He’d locked all the downstairs doors and made sure the windows were secured. He tried to close his eyes and fall asleep, but within a matter of minutes he heard a whistle. He sat up. He heard it again. It soon became evident that the whistle was coming from Dani’s nose. It was almost cute, but he soon realized that he was not going to get much sleep with the sound repeating in the darkness.

The only solution he could think of was to move his pad and sleeping bag out onto the deck. The rain had stopped, and the bag was warm, and the spot beyond the French doors was dry, and the cool air was refreshing. Sleeping inside or out, he was still blocking the door. Dani was just as safe.

He was awakened in the middle of the night by a blood-curdling scream and Dani shouting, “Tommy! Where are you? Tommy!”

He found her in her bedroom, backed into the far corner, clutching her bedspread to her chest and sobbing.

“Where were you? Where’d you go? Tommy . . .”

“Calm down, I’m right here,” he told her, hugging her. She put her arms around him and buried her face in his chest, sobbing for a moment longer before pulling back.

“Where were you? I looked for you but you weren’t here . . .”

“Slow down and take a few deep breaths,” he told her. She did as he instructed. “I was sleeping outside, just on the other side of the doors.”

“Why?” she said. “I thought . . . When did you go outside? Why did you sleep outside?”

“You were snoring.”

“I don’t snore. I was snoring?”

“Just a little. Sort of a nose whistle. It was kind of cute, actually, but it was keeping me awake.”

“Tommy . . .”

“Shh, shh,” he said softly. “Just tell me what scared you.”

“I thought,” Dani said, taking a few more deep breaths. “I thought . . . I was certain . . . Tommy, do you promise me you were outside the whole time? Do you swear you’re telling the truth?”