Friday morning, Junior resigned his position as a physical therapist at the rehabilitation hospital. He expected to be able to live well off interest and dividends for the rest of his life, because his tastes were modest.
Glorying in the cloudless day and the warmer than usual weather, he drove seventy miles north, through phalanxes of evergreens that marched down the steep hills to the scenic coast. All the way, he monitored the traffic in his rearview mirror. No one followed him.
He stopped for lunch at a restaurant with a spectacular view of the Pacific, framed by massive pines.
His waitress was a cutie. She flirted with him, and he knew he could have her if he wanted.
He wanted, all right, but intuition warned him that he ought to continue to be discreet for a while longer.
He hadn’t seen Thomas Vanadium since Monday, at the cemetery, and Vanadium hadn’t pulled any tricks since leaving twenty-five cents at his bedside that same night. Almost four days undisturbed by the hectoring detective. In matters Vanadium, however, Junior had learned to be wary, prudent.
With no job to return to, he dawdled over lunch. He was actually tumescent with a growing sense of freedom that was as thrilling as sex.
Life was too short to waste it working if you had the means to afford lifelong leisure.
By the time he got back to Spruce Hills, the early night had fallen. The pearly, waxing moon floated over a town that glimmered mysteriously among its richness of trees, flickering and shimmering as though it were not a real town, but a dreamland where a multitude of Gypsy clans gathered by the lambent amber light of lanterns and campfires.
Earlier in the week, Junior had looked up Thomas Vanadium in the telephone directory. He expected the number to be unlisted, but it was published. What he wanted more than a number was an address, and he found that as well.
Now he dared to search out the detective’s residence.
In a neatly groomed neighborhood of unassuming houses, Vanadium’s place was as unremarkable as those around it: a single-story rectangular box of no discernible architectural style. White aluminum siding with green shutters. An attached two-car garage.
Deciduous black oaks lined the street. All were leafless at this time of year, gnarled limbs clawing at the moon.
The big trees on Vanadium’s property also stood bare, allowing a relatively unobstructed view of the house. The back of the residence was dark, but a soft light warmed two windows at the front.
Junior didn’t slow as he passed the house, but circled the block and drove by the place again.
He didn’t know what he was looking for. He simply felt empowered to be the one conducting the surveillance for a change.
Less than fifteen minutes later, at home, he sat at his kitchen table with the telephone directory. The book included not only the phones in Spruce Hills, but also those in the entire county, maybe seventy or eighty thousand.
Each page comprised four columns of names and numbers, most with addresses. Approximately one hundred names filled each column, four hundred to a page.
Using the straight edge of a ruler to guide his eye down each column, Junior searched for Bartholomew, ignoring surnames. He had already checked to see if anyone in the county had Bartholomew for a last name; no one in this directory did.
Some listings didn’t include first names, only initials. Every time he came across the initial B, he put a red check mark beside it with a fine-point felt-tip pen.
Most of these were going to be Bobs or Bills. Maybe a few were Bradleys or Bernards. Barbaras or Brendas.
Eventually, when he had gone through the entire directory, if he’d had no success, he would phone each red-checked listing and ask for Bartholomew. A few hundred calls, no doubt. Some would involve long-distance charges, but he could afford the toll.
He was able to search five pages at a sitting before his head began to ache. He’d been putting in two sessions each day, starting this past Tuesday. Four thousand names a day. Sixteen thousand total when he finished the fifth of this evening’s pages.
This was tedious work and might not bear fruit. He needed to begin somewhere, however, and the telephone directory was the most logical starting point.
Bartholomew might be a teenager living with his parents or a dependent adult residing with family; if so, he wouldn’t be revealed in this search, because the phone would not be listed in his name. Or maybe the guy loathed his first name and never used it except in legal matters, going by his middle name, instead.
If the directory proved to be of no help, Junior would proceed next to the registry office at the county courthouse, to review the records of births going back to the turn of the century if necessary. Bartholomew, of course, might not have been born in the county, might have moved here as a child or an adult. If he owned property, he’d show up on the register of deeds. Whether a landowner or not, if he did his civic duty every two years, he would appear on the voter rolls.
Junior no longer had a job, but he had a mission.
Saturday and Sunday, between sessions with the directory, Junior cruised around the county on a series of pleasure drives—testing the theory that the maniac cop was no longer following him. Apparently, Simon Magusson was correct: The case had been closed.
As woebegone a widower as anyone could expect, Junior spent every night home alone. By Sunday, he’d slept without companionship eight nights since being discharged from the hospital.
He was a virile young man, desired by many, and life was short. Poor Naomi, her lovely face and her look of shock still fresh in his memory, was a constant reminder of how suddenly the end could come. No one was guaranteed tomorrow. Seize the day.
Caesar Zedd recommended not merely seizing the day but devouring it. Chew it up, feed on the day, swallow the day whole. Feast, said Zedd, feast, approach life as a gourmet and as a glutton, because he who practices restraint will have stored up no sustaining memories when famine inevitably comes.
By Sunday evening, a combination of factors—deep commitment to the philosophy of Zedd, explosive testosterone levels, boredom, self-pity, and a desire to be a risk-taking man of action once more—motivated Junior to splash a little Hai Karate behind each ear and go courting. Shortly after sunset, with a single red rose and a bottle of Merlot, he set off for Victoria Bressler’s place.
He phoned her before leaving, to be sure she was home. She didn’t work weekend shifts at the hospital; but maybe she would have gone out on this night off. When she answered, he recognized her seductive voice—and devilishly muttered, “Wrong number.”
Ever the romantic, he wanted to surprise her. Voilà! Flowers, wine, and moi. Since their electrifying connection in the hospital, she had been yearning for him; but she wouldn’t expect a visit for a few weeks yet. He was eager to see her face brighten with delight.
During the past week, he had ferreted out what he could about the nurse. She was thirty, divorced, without kids, and lived alone.
He had been surprised to learn her age. She didn’t appear to be that old. Thirty or not, Victoria was unusually attractive.
Charmed by the vulnerability of the young, he’d never slept with an older woman. The prospect intrigued him. She would have tricks in her repertoire that younger women were too inexperienced to know.
Junior could only imagine how flattered Victoria would be to receive the attentions of a twenty-three-year-old stud, flattered and grateful. When he contemplated all the ways she could express that gratitude, there was barely enough room behind the wheel of the Suburban for him and his manhood.
In spite of the urgency of his desire, he followed a circuitous route to Victoria’s, doubling back on himself twice, watching for surveillance as he drove. If he were being followed, his tail was an invisible man in a ghost car.
Nevertheless, being cautious even as he seized the day—or the night, in this case—he parked a short distance from his destination, on a parallel street. He walked the last three blocks.
The January air was cri
sp, fragrant with evergreens and with the faint salty scent of the distant sea. A curiously yellow moon glowered like a malevolent eye, studying him from between ragged ravelings of dirty clouds.
Victoria lived on the northeast edge of Spruce Hills, where streets petered into country lanes. Here the houses tended to be more rustic, built on larger and less formally landscaped lots than those closer to the center of town, and set back farther from the street.
During Junior’s brief stroll, the sidewalk ended, giving way to the graveled shoulder of the road. He saw no one on foot, and no vehicles passed him.
At this extreme end of town, no streetlamps lit the pavement. With only moonlight to reveal him, he wasn’t likely to be recognized if anyone happened to glance out a window.
If Junior was not discreet, and if gossip about the widower Cain and the sexy nurse began to circulate, Vanadium would be on the case again even if it had been closed. The cop was sick, hateful, driven by unknowable inner demons. Although he might for the moment have been reined in by those in higher office, mere gossip of a spicy nature would be excuse enough for him to open the file again, which he’d surely do without informing his superiors.
Victoria lived in a narrow two-story clapboard residence with a steeply pitched roof. A pair of overlarge dormers, projecting to an unusual degree, beetled over the front porch. The place belonged in a block of row homes in a working-class neighborhood in some drab eastern city, not here.
Golden lamplight gilded the front windows downstairs. He would sit with Victoria on the living-room sofa, sipping wine as they got to know each other. She might tell him to call her Vicky, and maybe he’d ask her to call him Eenie, the affectionate name Naomi had given him when he wouldn’t tolerate Enoch. Soon, they would be necking like two crazy kids. Junior would disrobe her on the sofa, caressing her smooth pliant body, her skin buttery in the lamplight, and then he would carry her, naked, to the dark bedroom upstairs.
Avoiding the graveled driveway, on which he was more likely to scuff his freshly polished loafers, he approached the house across the lawn, beneath the moon-sifting branches of a great pine that made itself useless for Christmas by spreading as majestically as an oak.
He supposed Victoria might have a visitor. Perhaps a relative or a girlfriend. Not a man. No. She knew who her man was, and she would have no other while she waited for the chance to surrender to him and to consummate the relationship that had begun with the spoon and the ice in the hospital ten days previously.
Most likely, if Victoria was entertaining, the visitor’s car would have been parked in the driveway.
Junior considered slipping quietly around the house, peering in windows, to be sure she was alone, before approaching directly. If she saw him, however, his wonderful surprise would be spoiled.
Nothing in life was risk free, so he hesitated only a moment at the foot of the porch steps before climbing them and knocking on the door.
Music played within. An up-tempo number. Possibly swing. He couldn’t quite identify the tune.
As Junior was about to knock again, the door flew inward, and over Sinatra having fun with “When My Sugar Walks Down the Street,” Victoria said, “You’re early, I didn’t hear your car—” She was speaking as she pulled the door open, and she cut herself off in midsentence when she stepped up to the threshold and saw who stood before her.
She looked surprised, all right, but her expression wasn’t the one that Junior had painted on the canvas of his imagination. Her surprise had no delight in it, and she didn’t at once break into a radiant smile.
For an instant, she appeared to be frowning. Then he realized this couldn’t be a frown. It must be a smoldering look of desire.
In tailored black slacks and a form-hugging, apple-green cotton sweater, Victoria Bressler fulfilled all the voluptuous promise that Junior had suspected lay under her looser-fitting nurse’s uniform. The V-necked sweater suggested a glorious depth of cleavage, though only a tasteful hint of it was on display; nothing about this beauty could be called cheap.
“What do you want?” she asked.
Her voice was flat and a little hard. Another man might have mistaken her tone for disapproval, for impatience, even for quiet anger.
Junior knew that she must be teasing him. Her sense of play was delicious. Such deviltry in her scintillant blue eyes, such sauciness.
He held forth the single red rose. “For you. Not that it compares. No flower could.”
Still relishing her little pretense of rejection, Victoria did not touch the rose. “What kind of woman do you think I am?”
“The exquisite kind,” he replied, glad that he had read so many books on the art of seduction and therefore knew precisely the right thing to say.
Grimacing, she said, “I told the police about your disgusting little come-on with the ice spoon.”
Thrusting the red rose at her again, insistently pressing it against her hand to distract her, Junior swung the Merlot, and just as Sinatra sang the word sugar with a bounce, the bottle smacked Victoria in the center of her forehead.
Chapter 33
OUR LADY OF SORROWS, quiet and welcoming in the Bright Beach night, humble in dimension, without groin vaults and grand columns and cavernous transepts, restrained in ornamentation, was as familiar to Maria Elena Gonzalez—and as comforting—as her own home. God was everywhere in the world, but here in particular. Maria felt happier the instant she stepped through the entrance door into the narthex.
The Benediction service had concluded, and the worshipers had departed. Gone, too, were the priest and the altar boys.
After adjusting the hairpin that held her lace mantilla, Maria passed from the narthex into the nave. She dipped two fingers in the holy water that glimmered in the marble font, and crossed herself.
The air was spicy with incense and with the fragrance of the lemon-oil polish used on the wooden pews.
At the front, a soft spotlight focused on the life-size crucifix. The only additional illumination came from the small bulbs over the stations of the cross, along both side walls, and from the flickering flames in the ruby glass containers on the votive-candle rack.
She proceeded down the shadowy center aisle, genuflected at the chancel railing, and went to the votive rack.
Maria could afford a donation of only twenty-five cents per candle, but she gave fifty, stuffing five one-dollar bills and two quarters into the offering box.
After lighting eleven candles, all in the name of Bartholomew Lampion, she took from a pocket the torn playing cards. Four knaves of spades. Friday night, she had ripped the cards in thirds and had been carrying the twelve pieces with her since then, waiting for this quiet Sunday evening.
Her belief in fortune-telling and in the curious ritual she was about to undertake weren’t condoned by the Church. Mysticism of this sort was, in fact, considered to be a sin, a distraction from faith and a perversion of it.
Maria, however, lived comfortably with both the Catholicism and the occultism in which she had been raised. In Hermosillo, Mexico, the latter had been nearly as important to the spiritual life of her family as had been the former.
The Church nourished the soul, while the occult nourished the imagination. In Mexico, where physical comforts were often few and hope of a better life in this world was hard won, both the soul and the imagination must be fed if life was to be livable.
With a prayer to the Holy Mother, Maria held one third of a knave of spades to the bright flame of the first candle. When it caught fire, she dropped the fragment into the votive glass, and as it was consumed, she said aloud, “For Peter,” referring to the most prominent of the twelve apostles.
She repeated this ritual eleven more times—“For Andrew, for James, for John”—frequently glancing into the nave behind her, to be sure that she was unobserved.
She had lighted one candle for each of eleven apostles, none for the twelfth, Judas, the betrayer. Consequently, after burning a fragment of the cards in each votive glass, she
was left with one piece.
Ordinarily, she would have returned to the first of the candles and offered a second fragment to Saint Peter. In this case, however, she entrusted it to the least known of the apostles, because she was sure that he must have special significance in this matter.
With all twelve fragments destroyed, the curse should have been lifted from little Bartholomew: the threat of the unknown, violent enemy who was represented by the four knaves. Somewhere in the world, an evil man existed who would one day have killed Barty, but now his journey through life would take him elsewhere. Eleven saints had been given twelve shares of responsibility for lifting this curse.
Maria’s belief in the efficacy of this ritual was not as strong as her faith in the Church, but nearly so. As she leaned over the votive glass, watching the final fragment dissolve into ashes, she felt a terrible weight lifting from her.
When she left Our Lady of Sorrows a few minutes later, she was convinced that the knave of spades—whether a human monster or the devil himself—would never cross paths with Barty Lampion.
Chapter 34
DOWN SHE WENT, abruptly and hard, with a clatter and thud, her natural grace deserting her in the fall, though she regained it in her posture of collapse.
Victoria Bressler lay on the floor of the small foyer, left arm extended past her head, palm revealed, as though she were waving at the ceiling, right arm across her body in such a way that her hand cupped her left breast. One leg was extended straight, the other knee drawn up almost demurely. If she had been nude, lying against a backdrop of rumpled sheets or autumn leaves, or meadow grass, she would have had the perfect posture for a Playboy centerfold.
Junior was less surprised by his sudden assault on Victoria than by the failure of the bottle to break. He was, after all, a new man since his decision on the fire tower, a man of action, who did what was necessary. But the bottle was glass, and he swung forcefully, hard enough that it smacked her forehead with a sound like a mallet cracking against a croquet ball, hard enough to put her out in an instant, maybe even hard enough to kill her, yet the Merlot remained ready to drink.
He stepped into the house, quietly closed the front door, and examined the bottle. The glass was thick, especially at the base, where a large punt—a deep indentation—encouraged sediment to gather along the rim rather than across the entire bottom of the bottle. This design feature secondarily contributed to the strength of the container. Evidently he had hit her with the bottom third of the bottle, which could most easily withstand the blow.
A pink spot in the center of Victoria’s forehead marked the point of impact. Soon it would be an ugly bruise. The skull bone did not appear to have been cratered.
As hard of head as she was hard of heart, Victoria had not sustained serious brain damage, only a concussion.
On the stereo in the living room, Sinatra sang “It Was a Very Good Year.”
Judging by the evidence, the nurse was home alone, but Junior raised his voice above the music and called out, “Hello? Is anyone here?”
Although no one answered, he quickly searched the small house.
A lamp with a fringed silk shade spread small feathery wings of golden light over one corner of the living room. On the coffee table were three decorative blown-glass oil lamps, ashimmer.
In the kitchen, a delicious aroma wafted from the oven. On the stove stood a large pot over a low flame, and nearby was pasta to be added to the water when it came to a boil.
Dining room. Two place settings at one end of the table. Wineglasses. Two ornate pewter candlesticks, candles not yet lit.
Junior had the picture now. Clear as Kodachrome. Victoria was in a relationship, and she had come on to him in the hospital not because she was looking for more action, but because she was a tease. One of those women who thought it was funny to get a man’s juices up and then leave him stewing in them.
She was a duplicitous bitch, too. After coming on to him, after teasing a reaction out of him, she had run off and gossiped about him as though he had instigated the seduction. Worse, to make herself feel important, she had told the police her skewed version, surely with much colorful embellishment.
A half bath downstairs. Two bedrooms and a full bath on the upper floor. All deserted.
In the foyer again. Victoria hadn’t moved.
Junior knelt beside her and pressed two fingers to the carotid artery in her neck. She had a pulse, maybe a little irregular but strong.
Even though he now knew what a hateful person the nurse was, he remained strongly attracted to her. He was not the kind of man, however, who would take advantage of an unconscious woman.
Besides, she was clearly expecting a guest to arrive soon.
You’re early, I didn’t hear your car, she’d said as she answered his knock, before realizing that it was Junior.
He stepped to the front door, which was framed by curtained sidelights. He drew one of the curtains aside and peered out.
The mummified moon had unwound itself from its rags of embalming clouds. Its pocked face glowered in full brightness on the spreading branches of the pine, on the yard, and on the graveled driveway.
No car.