clubbed-smothered-shot nurse, to the range, where he switched on the right oven, in which an unfinished pot roast was cooling, and the left oven, in which the dinner plates waited to be warmed. He cranked up a flame again under the pot of water that had been boiling earlier—and glanced hungrily at the uncooked pasta that Victoria had weighed and set aside.
If the aftermath of his encounter with Vanadium had not been so messy, Junior might have paused for dinner before wrapping up his work here. The walk back from Quarry Lake had taken almost two hours, in part because he had ducked out of sight in the trees and brush each time that he heard traffic approaching. He was famished. Regardless of how well-prepared the food, however, ambience was a significant factor in the enjoyment of any meal, and bloodstained decor was not, in his view, conducive to fine dining.
Earlier, he had placed an open fifth of vodka on the table, in front of Victoria. The nurse, no longer in the chair, sprawled on the floor as if she had emptied another bottle before this one.
Junior poured half the vodka over the corpse, splashed some around other parts of the kitchen, and spilled the last on the cooktop, where it trickled toward the active burner. This was not an ideal accelerant, not as effective as gasoline, but by the time he threw the bottle aside, the spirits found the flame.
Blue fire flashed across the top of the range and followed drips down the baked-enamel front to the floor. Blue flared to yellow, and the yellow darkened when the blaze found the cadaver.
Playing with fire was fun when you didn’t have to attempt to conceal the fact that it was arson.
Atop the dead woman, Vanadium’s leather ID holder ignited. The identification card would burn, but the badge was not likely to melt. The police would also identify the revolver.
From the floor, Junior snatched up the bottle of wine that had twice failed to shatter. His lucky Merlot.
He backed toward the hall door, watching as the fire spread. After lingering until certain that the house would soon be a seething pyre, he finally sprinted along the hall to the front door.
Under a declining moon, he fled discreetly three blocks to his Suburban, parked on a parallel street. He encountered no traffic, and on the way, he stripped off the gardening gloves and discarded them in a Dumpster at a house undergoing remodeling.
Not once did he look back to see if the fire had grown visible as a glow against the night sky. The events at Victoria’s were part of the past. He was finished with all that. Junior was a forward-thinking, future-oriented man.
Halfway home, he heard sirens and saw the beacons of approaching emergency vehicles. He pulled the Suburban to the side of the road and watched as two fire trucks passed, followed by an ambulance.
He felt remarkably well when he arrived home: calm, proud of his quick thinking and stalwart action, pleasantly tired. He hadn’t chosen to kill again; this obligation had been thrust on him by fate. Yet he had proven that the boldness he’d shown on the fire tower, rather than being a transient strength, was a deeply rooted quality.
Although he harbored no fear of coming under suspicion for the murder of Victoria Bressler, he intended to leave Spruce Hills this very night. No future existed for him in such a sleepy backwater. A wider world awaited, and he had earned the right to enjoy all that it could offer him.
He placed a phone call to Kaitlin Hackachak, his trollish and avaricious sister-in-law, asking her to dispose of Naomi’s things, their furniture, and whatever of his own possessions he chose to leave behind. Although she had been awarded a quarter of a million dollars in the family settlement with the state and county, Kaitlin would be at the house by dawn’s first light if she thought she might make ten bucks from liquidating its contents.
Junior intended to pack only a single bag, leaving most of his clothes behind. He could afford a fine new wardrobe.
In the bedroom, as he opened a suitcase on the bed, he saw the quarter. Shiny. Heads-up. On the nightstand.
If Junior were weak-minded enough to succumb to madness, this was the moment when he should have fallen into an abyss of insanity. He heard an internal cracking, felt a terrible splintering in his mind, but he held himself together with sheer willpower, remembering to breathe slowly and deeply.
He summoned enough courage to approach the nightstand. His hand trembled. He half expected the quarter to be illusory, to disappear between his pinching fingers, but it was real.
When he held fast to his sanity, common sense eventually told him that the coin must have been left much earlier in the night, soon after he had set out for Victoria’s house. In fact, in spite of the new locks, Vanadium must have stopped here on his way to see Victoria, unaware that he would meet his death in her kitchen—and at the hands of the very man he was tormenting.
Junior’s fear gave way to an appreciation for the irony in this situation. Gradually, he regained the ability to smile, tossed the coin in the air, caught it, and dropped it in his pocket.
Just as the smile curved to completion, however, an awful thing happened. The humiliation began with a loud gurgle in his gut.
Since dealing with Victoria and the detective, Junior had taken pride in the fact that he’d kept his equanimity and, more important, his lunch. No acute nervous emesis, as he’d suffered following poor Naomi’s death. Indeed, he had an appetite.
Now, trouble. Different from what he’d experienced before but just as powerful and terrifying. He didn’t need to regurgitate, but he desperately needed to evacuate.
His exceptional sensitivity remained a curse. He had been more profoundly affected by Victoria’s and Vanadium’s tragic deaths than he had realized. Wrenched, he was.
With a cry of alarm, he bolted to the bathroom and made it with not a second to spare. He seemed to be on the throne long enough to have witnessed the rise and fall of an empire.
Later, weak and shaken, as he was packing his suitcase, the urge overcame him again. He was astonished to discover that anything could be left in his intestinal tract.
He kept a few paperbacks of Caesar Zedd’s work in the bathroom, so that time spent on the john wouldn’t be wasted. Some of his deepest insights into the human condition and his best ideas for self-improvement had come in this place, where Zedd’s luminous words seemed to shine a brighter light into his mind upon rereading.
On this occasion, however, he couldn’t have focused on a book even if he’d had the strength to hold it. The fierce paroxysms that clenched his guts also destroyed his ability to concentrate.
By the time he put his suitcase and three boxes of books—the collected works of Zedd and selections from the Book-of-the-Month Club—in the Suburban, Junior had rushed twice more to the bathroom. His legs were shaky, and he felt hollow, frail, as if he’d lost more than was apparent, as if the essential substance of himself was gone.
The word diarrhea was inadequate to describe this affliction. In spite of the books he’d read to improve his vocabulary, Junior could not think of any word sufficiently descriptive and powerful enough to convey his misery and the hideousness of his ordeal.
Panic set in when he began to wonder if these intestinal spasms were going to prevent him from leaving Spruce Hills. In fact, what if they required hospitalization?
A pathologically suspicious cop, aware of Junior’s acute emesis following Naomi’s death, might imagine a connection between this epic bout of diarrhea and Victoria’s murder, and Vanadium’s disappearance. Here was an avenue of speculation that he did not want to encourage.
He must get out of town while he still could. His very freedom and happiness depended on a speedy departure.
During the past ten days, he’d proved that he was clever, bold, with exceptional inner resources. He needed to tap his deep well of strength and resolve now, more than ever. He’d been through far too much, accomplished too much, to be brought down by mere biology.
Aware of the dangers of dehydration, he drank a bottle of water and put two half-gallon containers of Gatorade in the Suburban.
&nbs
p; Sweaty, chilled, trembling, weak-kneed, watery-eyed with self-pity, Junior spread a plastic garbage bag on the driver’s seat. He got in the Suburban, twisted the key in the ignition, and groaned as the engine vibrations threatened to undo him.
With only a faint twinge of sentimental longing, he drove away from the house that had been his and Naomi’s love nest for fourteen blissful months.
He clenched the steering wheel tightly with both hands, clenched his teeth so fiercely that his jaw muscles bulged and twitched, and clenched his mind around a stubborn determination to get control of himself. Slow deep breaths. Positive thoughts.
The diarrhea was over, finished, part of the past. Long ago he had learned never to dwell on the past, never to be overly concerned about the worries of the present, but to be focused entirely on the future. He was a man of the future.
As he raced into the future, the past caught up with him in the form of intestinal spasms, and by the time that he had driven only three miles, whimpering like a sick dog, he made an emergency stop at a service station to use the rest room.
Thereafter, Junior managed to drive four miles before he was forced to pull off the road at another service station, after which he felt that his ordeal might be over. But less than ten minutes later, he settled for more rustic facilities in a clump of bushes alongside the highway, where his cries of anguish frightened small animals into squeaking flight.
Finally, only thirty miles south of Spruce Hills, he reluctantly acknowledged that slow deep breathing, positive thoughts, high self-esteem, and firm resolve weren’t sufficient to subdue his treacherous bowels. He needed to find lodging for the night. He didn’t care about a swimming pool or a king-size bed, or a free continental breakfast. The only amenity that mattered was indoor plumbing.
The seedy motel was called Sleepie Tyme Inne, but the grizzled, squint-eyed, sharp-faced night clerk must not have been the owner, because he wasn’t the type to have dreamed up cute spellings for the sign out front. Judging by his appearance and attitude, he was a former Nazi death-camp commandant who fled Brazil one step ahead of the Israeli secret service and was now hiding out in Oregon.
Racked by cramps and too weak to carry his luggage, Junior left his suitcase in the Suburban. He brought only the bottles of Gatorade into his room.
The night that followed might as well have been a night in Hell—though a hell in which Satan provided an electrolytically balanced beverage.
Chapter 41
MONDAY MORNING, January 17, Agnes’s lawyer, Vinnie Lincoln, came to the house with Joey’s will and other papers requiring attention.
Round of face and round of body, Vinnie didn’t walk like other men; he seemed to bounce lightly along, as if inflated with a mixture of gases that included enough helium to make him buoyant, though not so much that he was in danger of sailing up and away like a birthday balloon. His smooth cheeks and merry eyes left a boyish impression, but he was a good attorney, and shrewd.
“How’s Jacob?” Vinnie asked, hesitating at the open front door.
“He’s not here,” Agnes said.
“That’s exactly how I hoped he would be.” Relieved, he followed Agnes to the living room. “Listen, Aggie, you know, I don’t have anything against Jacob, but—”
“Good heavens, Vinnie, I know that,” she assured him as she lifted Barty—hardly bigger than a bag of sugar—from the bassinet. She settled with the baby into a rocking chair.
“It’s just…the last time I saw him, he trapped me in a corner and told this godawful story, far more than I wanted to know, about some British murderer back in the forties, this monstrous man who beat people to death with a hammer, drank their blood, then disposed of their bodies in a vat of acid in his workroom.” He shuddered.
“That would be John George Haigh,” Agnes said, checking Barty’s diaper before nestling him tenderly in the crook of her arm.
The lawyer’s eyes appeared as round as his face. “Aggie, please don’t tell me you’ve started to share Jacob’s…enthusiasms?”
“No, no. But being around him so much, inevitably I absorb some details. He’s a compelling speaker when the subject interests him.”
“Oh,” Vinnie agreed, “I wasn’t bored for a second.”
“I’ve often thought Jacob would’ve made a fine schoolteacher.”
“Assuming the children received therapy after every class.”
“Assuming, of course, that he didn’t have these obsessions.”
Extracting documents from his valise, Vinnie said, “Well, I’ve no right to talk. Food is my obsession. Look at me, so fat you’d think I’d been raised from birth for sacrifice.”
“You’re not fat,” Agnes objected. “You’re nicely rounded.”
“Yes, I’m nicely rounding myself into an early grave,” he said almost cheerfully. “And I must admit to enjoying it.”
“You may be eating yourself into an early grave, Vinnie, but poor Jacob has murdered his own soul, and that’s infinitely worse.”
“‘Murdered his own soul’—an interesting turn of phrase.”
“Hope is the food of faith, the staff of life. Don’t you think?”
From his mother’s cradled arms, Barty gazed adoringly at her.
She continued: “When we don’t allow ourselves to hope, we don’t allow ourselves to have purpose. Without purpose, without meaning, life is dark. We’ve no light within, and we’re just living to die.”
With one tiny hand, Barty reached up for his mother. She gave him her forefinger, to which the sugar-bag boy clung tenaciously.
Regardless of her other successes or failures as a parent, Agnes intended to make certain that Barty never lacked hope, that meaning and purpose flowed through the boy as constantly as blood.
“I know Edom and Jacob have been a burden,” said Vinnie, “you having to be responsible for them—”
“Nothing of the kind.” Agnes smiled at Barty and wiggled her finger in his grip. “They’ve always been my salvation. I don’t know what I’d do without them.”
“I think you actually mean that.”
“I always mean what I say.”
“Well, as years pass, they’re going to be a financial burden, if nothing else, so I’m glad I’ve got a little surprise for you.”
When she looked up from Barty, she saw the attorney with his hands full of documents. “Surprise? I know what’s in Joey’s will.”
Vinnie smiled. “But you have assets you aren’t aware of.”
The house was hers, free and clear of mortgages. There were two savings accounts to which Joey had diligently made deposits weekly through nine years of marriage.
“Life insurance,” Vinnie said.
“I’m aware of that. A fifty-thousand-dollar policy.”
She figured that she could stay home, devoting herself to Barty, for perhaps three years before she would be wise to find work.
“In addition to that policy,” said Vinnie, “there’s another…”—he filled his lungs, hesitated, then exhaled the air and the sum with a tremor—“seven hundred fifty thousand. Three-quarters of a million dollars.”
Certain disbelief insulated her against immediate surprise. She shook her head. “That’s not possible.”
“It was affordable term insurance, not a whole-life policy.”
“I mean, Joey wouldn’t have bought it without—”
“He knew how you felt about having too much life insurance. So he didn’t disclose it to you.”
The rocking chair stopped squeaking under her. She heard the sincerity in Vinnie’s voice, and as her disbelief dissolved, she was shocked into immobility. She whispered, “My little superstition.”
Under other circumstances, Agnes might have blushed, but now her apparently irrational fear of too much life insurance had been vindicated.
“Joey was, after all, an insurance broker,” Vinnie reminded her. “He was going to look out for his family.”
Excessive insurance, Agnes believed, was a temptation to fate. “
A reasonable policy, yes, that’s fine. But a big one…it’s like betting on death.”
“Aggie, it’s just prudent planning.”
“I believe in betting on life.”
“With this money, you won’t have to cut back on the number of pies you give away—and all of that.”
By “all of that,” he meant the groceries that she and Joey often sent along with the pies, the occasional mortgage payment they made for someone down on his luck, and the other quiet philanthropies.
“Look at it this way, Aggie. All the pies, all the things you do—that’s betting on life. And now you’ve just been given the great blessing of being able to place larger bets.”
The same thought had occurred to her, a consolation that might make acceptance of these riches possible. Yet she remained chilled by the thought of receiving a life-changing amount of money as the consequence of a death.
Looking down at Barty, Agnes saw the ghost of Joey in the baby’s face, and although she half believed that her husband would be alive now if he had never tempted fate by putting such a high price on his life, she couldn’t find any anger in her heart for him. She must accept this final generosity with grace—if also without enthusiasm.
“All right,” Agnes said, and as she voiced her acceptance, she was shivered by a sudden fear for which she couldn’t at once identify a cause.
“And there’s more,” said Vinnie Lincoln, as round as Santa Claus and cherry-cheeked with pleasure at being able to bear these gifts. “The policy contained a double-indemnity clause in the event of death by accident. The complete tax-free payout is one and a half million.”
A cause now apparent, the fear explained, Agnes held her baby more tightly. So new to the world, he seemed already to be slipping away from her, captured by the whirlpool of a demanding destiny.
The ace of diamonds. Four in a row. Ace, ace, ace, ace.
Already the fortune foretold, which she had strived to dismiss as a game with no consequences, was coming true.
According to the cards, Barty would be rich financially, but also in talent, spirit, intellect. Rich in courage and honor, Maria promised. With a wealth of common sense, good judgment, and luck.
He would need the courage and the luck.
“What’s wrong, Aggie?” asked Vinnie.
She couldn’t explain her anxiety to him, because he believed in the supremacy of laws, in the justice that might be delivered in this life, in a comparatively simple reality, and he would not comprehend the gloriously, frighteningly, reassuringly, strangely, and deeply complex reality Agnes occasionally perceived—usually peripherally, sometimes intellectually, but often with her heart. This was a world in which effect could come before cause, in which what seemed to be coincidence was, in fact, merely the visible part of a far larger pattern that couldn’t be seen whole.
If the ace of diamonds, in quartet, must be taken seriously, then why not the rest of the draw?
If this insurance payoff was not mere coincidence, if it was the wealth that had been foretold, then how far behind the fortune did the knave travel? Years? Months? Days?
“You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,” said Vinnie, and Agnes wished the threat were as simple as a restless spirit, groaning and rattling its chains, like Dickens’s Marley come to Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas Eve.
Chapter 42
THE SANDMAN WAS powerless to cast a spell of sleep while Junior spent the night flushing away enough water to drain a reservoir.
By dawn, when the intestinal paroxysms finally passed, this bold new man of adventure felt as flat and limp as road-kill.
Finally sleeping, he had anxiety dreams of being in a public rest room, overcome by urgent need, only to find that every stall was occupied by someone he had killed, all of them vengefully determined to deny him a chance for dignified relief.
He woke at noon, eyes gummed shut with the effluence of sleep. He felt lousy, but he was in control of himself—and strong enough to fetch his suitcase, which he’d been unable to carry upon arrival.
Outside, he discovered that some worthless criminal wretch had broken into his Suburban during the night. The suitcase and Book-of-the-Month selections were gone. The creep even swiped the Kleenex, the chewing gum, and the breath mints from the glove compartment.
Incredibly, the thief left behind the most valuable items: the collection of hardcover first editions of Caesar Zedd’s complete body of work. The box stood open, its contents having been explored in haste, but not a single volume was missing.
Fortunately, he’d kept neither cash nor his checkbook in the suitcase. With Zedd intact, his losses were tolerable.
In the motel office, Junior paid for another night in advance. His preference in lodgings didn’t run to greasy carpeting, cigarette-scarred furniture, and the whispery scuttling of cockroaches in the dark, but though feeling better, he was too tired and shaky to drive.
The aging, fugitive Nazi had been replaced at the front desk by a woman with messily chopped blond hair, a brutish face, and arms that would dissuade Charles Atlas from challenging her. She changed a five-dollar bill into coins for the vending machines and snarled at him only once in strangely accented English.