When the Day of Evil Comes (13 page)

I wrote the sensation off as paranoia, but couldn’t shake it. I could feel eyes on me.

I turned my attention back to the article. I wondered if Joseph had been in Vietnam when his son died. Or perhaps he’d been home on leave and the couple had celebrated by booking a weekend at the Vendome. I did the math. This would have been almost ten years before Joseph Sr. had started Eagle Wing Air. The airline had been founded in 1983, the same year Erik had been born. If Zocci was still in the Navy, I doubted they would have been able to afford such a luxury.

What a grim twist on an already unthinkable tragedy. I
didn’t know what to make of it. Had Erik chosen the Vendome for his suicide in order to echo, in some sick way, his brother’s death? It was not an unreasonable conclusion. He and his brother shared a middle name. Probably he felt some special kinship with the boy. And suicides sometimes choose methods reminiscent of some tragedy in the past. Something that reflects the legacy that had driven them to the edge in the first place.

I reached in my bag and retrieved the article about Erik’s suicide, spreading it out on the desk in front of me. I studied the family photo again, focusing in on Mariann’s face. I couldn’t imagine her grief.

Curiously, I felt nothing for Erik’s father. I peered at his picture again, wondering why I felt such a profound lack of empathy for the man. Something about his face put me off. He oozed power, authority. He didn’t seem like a man given to softness of any kind. Or was this knee-jerk self-protectiveness on my part? Trying to steel myself against the enemy? He was, after all, the man who held my career in his very powerful hands.

The cold was starting to get to me. I made a quick copy of Joseph Jr.’s obituary and stuffed it in my bag with the rest of the articles, gathered my things, and got ready to leave.

I felt burgeoning paranoia as I stood up. I was certain someone was watching me. I’d read studies in graduate school in which subjects were blindfolded and then asked to guess whether or not they were being stared at. In a startling percentage of cases, the subjects had been accurate. Even blindfolded, they could sense when they were being watched.

I heeded the research and looked around again. Same students. Bent over the same books. No one seemed the least bit interested in me.

Finally I turned to leave, only to feel a surge of clammy fear
as I caught a glimpse of Peter Terry out of the corner of my eye.

I saw his face distinctly, staring at me from between the stacks at the other end of the room.

By the time I whipped around toward the image, though, he was gone. I shuddered, but vowed to myself that I would not back away out of fear. I remembered Tony DeStefano’s words, something about children of the King having protection.

I squared my shoulders, reminded myself that my Dad could beat up his dad, and stalked over toward the shelves.

I plowed the rows of books, one by one, passing a few students plucking tomes from the shelves. They looked up curiously at me as I whipped past them.

I realized for the second time that day that I was moving at a suspicious clip. To even a casual observer, my anxiety must have been obvious. I might as well have been setting off bottle rockets.

I slowed myself down and continued my search with ruthless, businesslike efficiency. Row after row. One by one.

About halfway through, I realized the futility of my effort. All he had to do was stay a few rows ahead or behind me, and I would never find him. The library had four floors, dozens of study carrels, and who knew how many closets, elevators, and bathrooms.

I went back to the reference section and stood in front of the microfiche desk, glancing again toward the shelves, hoping to convince myself I’d imagined the entire thing.

I walked slowly back to the spot where I’d seen his face and checked the label at the end of the aisle. Religions, Mythology, Rationalism.

I stepped into the aisle, studied the titles, and found myself in the comparative religion section. The selection was sparse. Most of SMU’s religion and theology books would be across
campus in the Bridwell Library at Perkins, SMU’s theology school.

My seminary education included exactly zero courses in comparative religion. I didn’t even recognize the authors’ names. I pulled a few titles off the shelves, but stuck them back in their slots after looking them over. This wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

I walked the aisles in the rest of the religion section until I reached the study area at the end. The large study table was unoccupied, except for one pile of books, a backpack, and a notepad with a pen sitting on it. The chair was empty.

I yanked a book off the shelf nearest me and sat down in the chair on the opposite side of the table, opening my book and pretending to read. Keeping my head as still as I could, I strained to see the titles in the pile of books.

On the bottom was an open concordance. The heading at the top of the page read “Flesh—Flock.” On top of it sat
Studies in Isaiah
and
Isaiah: Yahweh’s Salvation.
Apart from the pile, a Bible was open to the book of Isaiah.

The Bible looked brand new. The delicate silver on the edge of the pages was unblemished, and the pages still looked fresh and uncrinkled, as though the book had just come from the box.

A single sentence was underlined, in bloody red ink, on the otherwise pristine page. I strained to make out the words, reading them upside down and mouthing them slowly to myself as I deciphered them one by one:

The cold penetrated me then. And my flitty paranoia hardened into leaden terror, sinking into my heart so thoroughly and quickly that it pushed the air out of my lungs.

I sucked that same air right back in as a man’s voice came from behind me.

“Are you following me?” he said.

I turned slowly, expecting to see Peter Terry. Instead I saw Gavin. Angry. Pale. Frightened.

“No,” I said, my paranoia solid and icy now. “Are you following me?”

“Why would you ask that?” he said.

“Then what are you doing here?”

“Studying.” He raised his chin defiantly. “What are you doing here?

“Studying,” I said.

“Were you reading my notes?”

“Yes. How do you know about the flies?”

“How do
you
know about the flies?” he asked back.

“What flies?” I wanted him to say it.

“Exactly What flies?” he said.

“Have you had problems with flies? Big, aggressive black flies?”

“Maybe. Have you?”

“Yes.” I hesitated a minute. “Will you tell me about it?”

He shrugged, still mistrustful. “What’s to tell? They’re just flies.”

“Then why are you looking them up in Isaiah? Why don’t you just buy a flyswatter?”

“Is that what you did?” he asked. “Buy a flyswatter? Is that all there was to it?”

“There’s something scary about these flies, isn’t there?”

He nodded.

“Something evil,” I said.

His unease began to shift from me back to the flies. “Do you have them in your house?”

“I had them one night. I haven’t seen them since then. You?”

“Want me to show you?”

I was nervous about going to a student’s room, especially with the charges pending against me. It was a terrible idea, really. But my curiosity won out. I nodded, and he wordlessly gathered his stuff, shoving it into his backpack. I followed him to the exit, stopping to gather my things at the reference desk.

We walked the length of the campus in the heat, neither of us saying a word.

We arrived at his dorm sweating and unsettled, both of us. I followed him into Morrison and onto One South, filing along behind him past rooms that smelled of dirty socks and stale food, until we reached 105. He stopped and unlocked the door.

“My roommate moved out,” he said, as he swung the door into the room.

At first glance, it seemed I had stepped into a typical college dorm room. One mattress was bare, the other bed rumpled, unmade. A tiny refrigerator hummed in the corner. A computer sat on a fairly tidy desk.

And then I realized the refrigerator had been unplugged. The humming was coming from somewhere else.

I looked around more carefully now, spotting them at intervals around the room. Five of them on the wall over the bulletin board. Three on the post at the end of the bed. One walking slowly, zigzagging across his desk. Little black herds of them gathered in the corners next to the ceiling.

As we stood there, one broke loose from the corner and flew in our direction, buzzing between us and then circling around and returning to the corner.

I turned to Gavin. “When did they come?”

“They’ve been coming one by one for a week. I’ve swatted probably a hundred.”

“Where are they coming from?” I asked. “Can you tell?”

“No.”

“Is this why your roommate left?”

“That and the screaming. I keep having those dreams. With the white cancer dude.”

He walked to the desk and picked up a paperback, flicking away a fly. He handed me the book. “I think he meant this to be funny. He’s really not a bad guy—my roommate, I mean.”

I looked at the book jacket.
Lord of the Flies.
I handed it back to him.

“I’m sorry,” I said. There was nothing else to say. “Does the housing department know about the flies? I’m sure they’ll exterminate.”

“They’re coming today.” He looked around. “Somehow I don’t think it will get rid of them.”

I didn’t either.

“Do you have anyplace else to go?” I asked.

“No, I don’t really know anybody yet.”

“You don’t have family around?”

He looked up at me, utterly alone. “I’m from California. I don’t really have much family anyway.”

He had the haunted look about him that Erik Zocci had had. I resolved at that moment that I wasn’t going to let this one slip away.

“Do you want a place to stay?” I asked.

“With you?”

“No,” I said firmly. The implications of that terrible idea clanged in my head. “But I think I know a family that would let you stay with them.”

“Do they have kids?”

“Three. Loud ones. That might be a drawback.”

He smiled for the first time. “I like kids.”

I called Tony and Jenny and explained the situation, giving them the details of Erik Zocci’s suicide as well. They agreed immediately to take Gavin in, as I knew they would. We gathered his things quickly, shaking flies off each item before we stuffed it into his duffel. Then I dropped him at Fluff-N-Fold for a couple of hours to wash any remnants out of his clothes.

I took the time to go for a swim at the SMU pool, needing to feel the clean smooth water on my skin, needing to feel my muscles flex and my breathing regulate.

By the time I picked Gavin up, we both felt better. I dropped him off at the DeStefanos’, finding a deep sense of peace leaving him in their hands. When I left, he was giving his first piggyback ride to one of Tony’s kids.

I
AM NOT A MORNING PERSON
. I do not trust morning people. They are far too enthusiastic for me. But on occasion I find myself up with the dawn. I watch the sun come up over my cup of tea, heavy darkness dissipating slowly into watery blue and then the palest, most transparent yellow, and I feel the pull of the new day.

I am inevitably, in those moments, compelled by the universal force of morning. Watching the horizon show itself reminds me that somewhere, past the edge of it all, optimism awaits. That something else, maybe something better, is out there for the finding.

But I watched the sun rise that Monday, after another endless night, with no such hope. The dawn that morning brightened into the harsh, relentless light of scrutiny. Scrutiny I was certain I couldn’t bear.

I had never in my life felt so vulnerable, so exposed. This spiritual attack was earthy, menacing. I had never felt the presence of evil so profoundly.

I couldn’t shake the visual I had in my head of two Zocci sons, one an innocent little boy of three and the other a strong, seemingly healthy young man, flying over the railing at the
Vendome hotel. Screaming to their deaths. I had watched the scene over and over in my mind the night before.

I was beginning to have the same fear for Gavin. He was clearly being targeted by the same specter that had haunted Erik. I could see him beginning to slip. The traumatized young man I’d dropped off at the DeStefanos’ was not the same boy that had approached me in class only a week before.

My fears for my own sake gripped me as well. I was freshly aware of my own fragility, of my tiny, inconsequential little place in the world. Of the true frailty of my grip on my own well-being.

Helene had taken my cases at the clinic. My professional credibility seemed already shredded beyond repair. I was certain I was going to lose my job, and was already casting about neurotically for a new way to make a living.

My meeting with the university’s lawyers loomed over my afternoon. And with all this on my mind, I somehow had to manage to get through my day with some degree of aplomb and poise.