What the Night Knows (14 page)

His biggest fear was not that something otherworldly had come home with him the previous day.

His biggest fear was that some flaw or weakness in himself would prove to be a door through which he might be entered as easily as a murderer, with a glass cutter, could enter a locked house.

To Billy he said, “You must be very broken now. He wouldn’t leave you whole. One good boy in a million pieces.”

John put one hand on Billy’s forehead, expecting to find him feverish. But though greasy with a scrim of sweat, the pale skin felt cold.

“If you find a way to talk and if you want to talk, tell them to call
me,” John said, without much hope that it would happen. “I’ll come back. I’ll come back right away.”

He could see himself reflected in the boy’s flat blue eyes, seeming to be transparent as he floated upon those irises, as if he were a man who had two spirits and was engaged in a double haunting.

Smoothing the lank hair away from Billy’s brow, he whispered, “God help you. God help me.”

In the third-floor corridor, after Coleman Hanes closed the door to the room, he said, “What the
hell
was that about?”

Heading toward the security vestibule, John said, “How long has he been like that?”

“Since late yesterday afternoon. What’s this glove and hand business?”

“He became like that immediately after I left? An hour after, two hours?” John pressed.

“Soon after. What is this, what did you want in there?”

“Like twenty minutes after, ten after, five?” John rapped on the window in the security-vestibule door.

Hanes said, “Right after, I guess. I don’t know to the minute. Are you going to tell me what you were doing in there?”

As the guard buzzed them into the vestibule, John said, “I don’t talk about evidence in an open case.”

“This is an open-and-
shut
case.”

“It’s technically open.”

Hanes’s usually pleasant face became a storm warning. He kept the pending thunder out of his voice, making a conscious effort to speak more softly. “Nine times he stabbed his sister.”

John retrieved his pistol from the guard and holstered it. “If he comes out of the trance or whatever it is, if he wants to talk to me, I’ll come back.”

Hanes loomed, intimidating. “He doesn’t belong out there. Not ever.”

“That’s not what this is about,” John said as he pushed the elevator-call button.

“It sure sounded like that’s what it’s about.”

“Well, it’s not. Call me if he comes around. Call me whether he asks for me or not.” The elevator door slid open, and John stepped into the cab. “I can find my way out.”

“That’s not the rules,” the big man said, staying close behind him, crowding him. “I have to escort you.”

After a silence, between the second and the ground floors, John said, “My son wants to be a marine. Any advice for him?”

“You remember her picture?” Hanes asked.

“Your sister? I do. I remember.”

“I don’t guess you’d remember her name?”

“I remember all their names. She was Angela, Angela Denise.”

John’s memory and his words clearly did not allay the orderly’s suspicion.

In the lobby, as they walked past the reception desk toward the main entrance, Hanes said, “Twenty-two years, she’s still dead—and the guy who did her, he’s got this woman admirer, she writes a blog about him. He’s got followers.”

“Billy Lucas is never going to have followers.”

“Oh, yes, he will. They all do. Every last sick damn one of them.”

Hanes spoke the truth.

John said, “I can only tell you that isn’t what this is about. I’m not his champion. He’ll never be freed either from these walls or from what he saw himself do.”

Still unappeased, Hanes followed John through the front doors, jostling him—perhaps unintentionally—when he fished his car keys from a sport-coat pocket.

The dropped keys rang off the pavement, and Hanes snatched them up. He held them in a clenched fist.

The orderly’s eyes narrowed in his bleak brown face. “ ‘What he saw himself do’? That’s a strange choice of words.”

John met the other man’s stare but only shrugged.

“The way you were with him in there,” Hanes said.

“What way was that?”

“Sad. No. Not sad. Almost … tender.”

John stared at the fist that held the keys, the fist of a man who had been to war and no doubt killed in self-defense.

Then he looked at his own hands, with which he had killed Alton Turner Blackwood twenty years earlier, with which he had wounded two men and killed another during his years of police work.

He said, “There was a brilliant artist, Caravaggio, he died back in 1610, when he was only thirty-nine years old. In his time, he was arguably the greatest painter in the world.”

“What’s he to me?”

“What are you to me or me to you? Caravaggio led a troubled life, brought to trial eleven times. He murdered a man, had to go on the run. Yet he was profoundly religious. He painted masterpiece after masterpiece on Christian themes, among other things.”

“A hypocrite,” the orderly said.

“No. He knew his faults, despised them. He was a tormented man. Maybe
because
he was tormented, he rejected the classical idealism of Michelangelo that other painters still embraced. He portrayed the human body and the human condition with a realism no one before him ever dared. The figures in his religious paintings aren’t ethereal and idealized. They’re deeply human, their suffering explicit.”

“What’s the point of this?” Hanes asked impatiently.

“I need my car keys. I’m explaining why you should give them
back to me. One of Caravaggio’s paintings is called
The Crucifixion of Saint Peter
. Peter is shown as a post-middle-aged man with a thick body and a worn face. There’s Peter nailed to a cross, three men lifting it, hauling it erect. There’s darkness and menace in the picture, such violence. The expression on Peter’s face is complex, compelling, you can’t stop staring at it. A man like you or me … we should see that painting for the first time alone, no one watching. Study it, give it an hour, and Caravaggio will show you the horror of what we are but the glory of what we could be, he’ll take you from despair to hope and back again. If you let him … he’ll reduce you to tears.”

“Maybe not,” Hanes said.

“Maybe not. But maybe so. Here’s the thing. I admire Caravaggio’s talent, the genius and hard work he brought to it. I admire the faith he tried—and often failed—to live by. But if I’d been a cop in his time, I would’ve chased him from one end of Europe to the other till I caught him, and I’d have seen him hanged. A hundred works of genius aren’t compensation for the murder of a single innocent.”

Hanes had a searchlight stare, and after a silent assessment, he relinquished the keys.

John rounded the car to the driver’s door.

The orderly said, “Your son, he wants to be a marine—what’s his name?”

“Zachary. Zach.”

“Tell him, it’ll be the best thing he’ll ever do.”

“I will.”

“Tell him, he’ll never regret one moment of it, except maybe the moment he retires from it. And one more thing.”

John waited at the open car door.

“Someday I’d like to know what that was about in there.”

“If I’m around at Christmas, come have dinner with us.”

“Deal. How do you spell ‘Caravaggio’?”

After spelling it, John got in the car and drove away.

In a few weeks, the purple beeches in the median strip between the two lanes would change to a rich shade of copper.

By Christmas, these trees would be bare.

He remembered other purple beeches in a park, their copper-leafed limbs draped with an early snow, a dazzling display.

Willard had been alive then, romping in a foot of white powder with the kids. The retriever and the trees had been the same shade of copper.

Again, he brooded about getting a German shepherd or another protective breed. But then he realized that perhaps an animal, as easily as a human being, could be the glove in which the hand of Alton Turner Blackwood might be hidden.

Weary from too little sleep, John wondered what condition he would be in by the tenth of December, Zach’s birthday, when and if a dead man came to visit.

20

FOR NICOLETTE, THE MORNING WAS FINE, FULL OF FAMILY, but the waking nightmare came at half past noon.

Mornings in this house were sacrosanct, beginning with breakfast prepared by Nicky and attended by all five Calvinos before John went off to work. During these early hours, no phone calls were made or accepted. Interruptions of routine were seldom sanctioned.

At seven forty-five, Nicky took the kids to the second-floor library, where she oversaw their lessons until lunch. They were a lively bunch, as eager to learn as to joke and tease and sass. Usually they engaged in too much of the latter three activities, yet always—frequently to Nicky’s surprise—a satisfying amount of learning occurred.

This morning, the conversation around the breakfast table was different from the usual chinfest, more subdued, and the children were less lively during lessons, as well. Nicky attributed their uncharacteristic reticence to their late dinner the previous night and to the fact that they must have subsequently settled down to sleep hours later than usual.

At noon, Walter and Imogene offered options for lunch, and as this was the one meal of the day that
wasn’t
a family event, Nicky took her Caesar salad with sliced chicken breast and a cold bottle of tea to her studio on the third floor. She didn’t want to suffocate her ducklings. They needed time with one another, no adults around. They certainly needed time alone, too, if only to discover if they were going to be healthy saplings who found solitude nutritious or bratlings who, when left alone, blew things up for sport. She didn’t mind if they suffocated
her
. They could hang out in her studio while she painted and they could quack at her nonstop, and she would relish every minute of it, though this proved to be a day when Zach took his lunch to his room and the girls retreated to theirs.

No out-of-house music or art lessons were scheduled for the afternoon, but Leonid Sinyavski, their math tutor, would be in-house from two o’clock until four. With his wild head of Einsteinian hair, bushy eyebrows, bulbous nose, and expansive belly, dressed always in a black suit and white shirt and black tie, he looked like a former circus clown who had decided to get serious. He was a dear man who seasoned his mathematics with magic tricks, and the urchins adored him, which was a good thing, because although Nicolette had a solid background in history and literature and art, she was no less undone by math than Samson by a barber.

In her studio, Nicky put the bottle of tea on the table that held her humility roses and sat on a stool to eat her salad while she studied the triptych that she suspected-hoped-believed was more than half finished. It looked like crap, which was okay because every painting in process seemed like crap when she returned to it on a new day. The longer she assessed a seemingly crappy canvas, the better it appeared, until sooner or later it didn’t seem to be crappy anymore. Or if it continued to seem crappy, often it was the kind of crappy that had the
potential to be transformed into something quite wonderful if only she could shift her sluggish talent into a higher gear, find that sweet spot between bitter self-doubt and dangerous overconfidence, and
get it done
.

John was one of the figures in the painting. He often appeared in her work. He wouldn’t recognize himself at first—if at all—because the face on the figure differed from his. This face was one that Nicolette imagined he might have had if his adolescence hadn’t been shattered by horror and violence, if his family had lived. She had painted him with many faces over the years because she had never known a man who held within him so many potentialities for goodness, even greatness.

At breakfast, before John left for the day, he had been a bit reticent, too, like the kids. Sometimes an investigation challenged him or emotionally involved him to such an extent that he lived half a step apart from everyone else, sometimes even from her, distracted by the scattered pieces of the puzzle that the murderer left behind.

Currently his primary case concerned a high-school teacher, Edward Hartman, who had been beaten to death in his cottage by the lake. Clues pointed toward the instructor’s students, though not to one in particular. John’s parents had been teachers—and murdered—so Nicky supposed he might be less himself for a while, until reason and intuition led him to a suspect and to case-clinching evidence.

Curiously, however, he had not mentioned the murdered teacher to her in perhaps a week, though he usually bounced ideas off her throughout the course of an investigation. If she didn’t know how committed he was to his work, she might have thought he had reached a dead end in the Hartman case.

After she finished the salad, Nicky stepped out of her studio,
crossed the third-floor landing at the head of the stairs, and went into the master suite, to the bathroom.

A month earlier, she’d undergone surgery to remove an abscessed tooth with roots fused to the jawbone. Although she had always been a twice-a-day flosser, the oral-surgery experience encouraged her to be obsessive about dental hygiene, and now she flossed after every meal.

With her tongue, Nicky could feel the gap where the tooth had been extracted. Eventually, when the bone repaired itself, she would receive an implant to fill the hole.

Because the storm clouds had begun to tatter, the clerestory windows high in the walls admitted enough sunshine that she didn’t switch on the bathroom lights.

She drew a glass of cold water and put it aside.

Flossing, she bent over the sink, closed her eyes. Two minutes later, finished, she opened her eyes, saw scraps of lettuce and tiny shreds of chicken in the porcelain basin, and felt virtuous. She took a mouthful of water from the glass, rinsed, and spat.

When she put down the glass, raised her head, and grinned at the mirror to look for any obvious remaining bits of lettuce, she saw a man standing close behind her in the bathroom.