Directly ahead, the ground-floor hallway led to the kitchen at the back of the house. Living-room archway to the right. Past the archway, stairs also on the right. One flight visible, and the landing between floors. Two more doors on the right. Four doors on the left. Kitchen door closed at the farther end of the hall.
Silence. No blood on the floor. The fourth cultist had escaped the living room without being wounded.
I did not want to enter rooms to clear them and risk being cleared myself by a barrage fired through a window, felled by my own trick. The fourth cultist might be anywhere in the house … or he might be stalking me instead from outside.
By pushing a door open wide, I could scan most of a room and be reasonably content that no one lurked there. But the moment in the doorway, scanning, was an instant on the brink of death.
Yeats, the poet, wrote, Many times man lives and dies / Between his two eternities. The eternity before birth and the eternity after. Only in life do we die many times, from the mortal pain of loss and from all the griefs and fears with which this world can assail us. I wouldn’t die in every doorway, perhaps only in one. I would, however, expect to die in each, and the expectation of death could, much like psychic magnetism, draw it to me.
Since I had returned to Pico Mundo, my usually keen intuition had been sharper and more reliable than ever. If I could not trust it without reservation on this night of nights, then when?
I passed doors without determining what lay behind them, passed rooms and perhaps a closet, and most likely a half-bath. At the third room on the left, I stopped. The door was neither closed nor open wide, but ajar. I stood by the jamb on the left and thrust the door open. When I heard something other than gunfire, I leaned forward and risked my face.
A study. Shelves of books. Sofa. Armchair and footstool. A handsome mahogany desk.
The fourth cultist stood behind the desk, at the farther end of the room. A woman. Dressed all in black like the others. She had put aside the hot ski mask, as well as the goggles that were of no use here. She stood with the stock of the rifle firmly in the crook of her right shoulder, aiming at the doorway. Perhaps what I had heard was her thin mewl of frustration, which issued from her again, as she worked the two-stage trigger without success. She pushed down repeatedly on the dual-paddle bolt catch, but either it failed to send the locked bolt forward or the bolt wasn’t locked in the first place. Maybe she was out of ammunition. Whatever the case, she let loose a cry of vexation and threw the weapon at me, and it clattered to the floor short of the doorway.
I crossed the threshold, kicked the useless gun aside, and let her gaze into the muzzle of my combat rifle.
She preferred to stare at me, and with such hatred and anger that I could not doubt she wished me dead and by some method that would be intensely painful.
Returning her stare, I thought that my expression must have been a strange combination of dread and curiosity.
There might have been at least a bit of fear in her, too, because her contorted face reminded me of the faces of the drowned people in the submerged Pico Mundo of my dream.
But then it seemed that resignation took the place of rage. Her features relaxed. She shook her head. Wiped her face with one hand. Chewed her bottom lip for a moment. She let out a long sigh.
Regarding me now with weary indifference, she said, “Just do it already. Don’t toy with me.”
Although it is a cliché, appearances can be deceiving. Hers was so deceptive as to be fraud of the highest order. She was pretty, but her beauty alone was not the primary aspect of the deception. Skin so flawless that she wore no makeup, wide-set pellucid blue eyes that seemed incapable of guile, golden hair that an artist might bestow on paintings of angels, a brow so smooth it seemed never to have been furrowed by a negative emotion: She stood before me with an aura of childlike innocence that was belied only by the combat rifle with which she had tried to shoot me.
“Do it,” she repeated.
I said, “What’s your name?”
“Why do you care?”
“How old are you?”
She said nothing.
“You don’t belong in this,” I said.
“It’s the only place I’ve ever belonged.”
“With these maniacs?”
“They aren’t maniacs.”
“What are they, then?”
“Free,” she said.
“Free? Free from what?”
“From everything.”
“Freedom from everything is slavery.”
“Oh? What am I enslaved to?”
“The void.”
Her look of indifference was matched now by an insensibility in her voice that didn’t fit well with the words she chose. “Just kill me, asshole.”
I didn’t pull the trigger. “All this tonight … what’s it about?”
“Why do you care?”
“That’s what I do. It’s all I know. What’s the point of being here if we don’t care what happens?”
“The point is, there is no point.” Whether her apathy was real or feigned, I could not tell. “To be and then not be.” We stared at each other, as though the English we spoke was, in this instance, two different languages. Then she said, “Who are you?”
“Me? I’m nobody.”
“You’re somebody.”
“Just a guy.”
Her eyes widened slightly. “You’re him.”
“Nobody special.”
Another silence. If she really didn’t care how this ended, then it could end only in a way that would haunt me.
She said, “You can’t kill a girl, can you?”
“I’ve killed a few.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true. I wish it weren’t.”
“But not an unarmed girl.”
I didn’t confirm her suspicion.
She smiled. “See how it is?”
“How is it?”
“I know what free is,” she said. “You’re not free. If you were free, I’d be dead now.”
I understood her logic. It was the logic of the asylum.
“So I can just walk out of here,” she said.
“No. I can’t allow that.”
“Why not? You have to have a good reason. Your way of thinking requires good reasons.”
“You’re a murderer.”
“So are you,” she said.
“No. I kill. You murder.”
“What’s the difference?”
“I kill murderers.”
“Is this a riddle or something?”
“It’s just the truth.”
“I don’t get it,” she said.
With sorrow, I said, “No.”
After a silence, she said, “Now what?”
I indicated a door framed by bookshelves. “Maybe that’s a closet. Open it and show me.”
She did as I asked, and it was a walk-in closet.
“You’ll step in there,” I told her. “I’ll tip a chair under the knob to brace it, so you can’t get out. Then I’ll call the police.”
“What if I won’t?”
I thrust the rifle toward her. “Then I’ll have to hurt you.”
“Been established, hasn’t it? You won’t kill an unarmed girl.”
“No. But I’ll shoot to wound.”
She studied me, trying to calculate a way out.
“Get in the closet.”
She didn’t move.
“Get in the closet.”
When still she didn’t move, I squeezed off a three-shot burst past her left hip, into the shelves of books.
“Four inches,” I said. “That was the only difference between you walking normally or being crippled for the rest of your life.”
Again her words were too edgy for her apathetic tone. “How many girls have you murdered, choirboy?”
“Killed,” I corrected.
“How many? Are you ashamed to say how many?”
“Three.”
“All ju
stified, huh?”
“All in self-defense.”
“That makes you feel righteous.”
“No.”
“Sleep like a baby, do you?”
“Not in a long time.”
“You’re him, all right.”
“Like you, I’m nobody,” I said. “We’re two nobodies. But we’re different.”
“You’re gonna find out we’re somebodies,” she said. “Some of us are geniuses.”
“Geniuses create. They don’t blow things up.”
“Create, huh? Wait’ll you see what some of us created.”
“So tell me.”
She hesitated, and I thought she almost began to share some secret that thrilled her. But then she held her tongue and stepped backward into the closet.
I crossed the room and started to close the door on her, and she blocked it with one foot. “Please don’t. I’m claustrophobic, and I’m afraid of the dark.”
“You are the dark,” I said.
My mistake was getting too close to her. She was as lithe as an eel, as fast as a striking snake. She came in under the gun, and I’ve no idea from where she drew the knife.
She wanted to gut me, and I grabbed for her wrist, and although the blade didn’t slice open my stomach, the point of it pierced my left palm. Before my eyes, the point exited the back of my hand—an inch or more of it gleaming and slick with blood. Before she could twist the knife and disable me with pain, I reared back to get the gun on her again and poked her with the muzzle and squeezed off a three-shot burst and at once another.
She fell back into the closet, landed on her rump, and knocked the back of her head against a shelf. She looked down at her torn stomach, tried to raise a hand to the wounds, but found perhaps that she was paralyzed below the neck.
She raised her head and met my eyes. The hatred and anger with which she’d first regarded me now returned and revealed the ugly face behind the mask of beauty. “Murderer.”
I did not dispute the charge.
“See you in Hell, murderer.”
“Maybe. But you’re deceivers. All of you, deceivers. You’ve been deceiving me all night. One distraction after another. Sowing doubt. Hoping to sow despair. No more. I’m not listening anymore.”
Her eyelids fluttered, almost closed, then opened wide. “Hey, dog. That’s you. Just a dog. Know what?”
“What?”
Her voice grew thicker. “You a dog.”
She was on her way out.
“You a dog?” she asked.
I didn’t answer.
She found the strength to put a sneer in her voice. “Oh, yeah, you a dog.”
“I didn’t want this,” I told her.
“Hey, dog, you got papers?”
A glaze dulled her eyes. She was only half here.
“You got papers?” she asked again. “You … just a dog.”
And she was gone.
I put the rifle on the desk. The knife, a stiletto, hung from my left hand, stuck there. Not horrible pain. But bad enough. I gripped the yellow handle and with some care extracted the blade. On the way out, it felt as though it scraped a bone, and it must have touched a nerve, because I shivered head to foot and broke out in a sweat as cold as ice water.
Forty-five
After waking from the dream of the amaranth. The afternoon of the day that I would leave for Pico Mundo. The seaside cottage. Young Tim seeking seashells and playing in the surf. Annamaria and I on the sand side of the picket fence between yard and beach.
Then, as always, regardless of the place, the weather, she wore white athletic shoes, khaki pants, and a baggy sweater that could not conceal her pregnancy. Sometimes the sweater was pink, at other times yellow or blue or pale green, but it was always the same style. I had the strangest notion that Annamaria could have walked through a dusty marketplace crowded with women a thousand years before our time, two thousand, and have appeared to belong there, in spite of the shoes with rubber soles in an era before rubber, in spite of being clothed in fabrics unproducible then, in spite of the garments being in hues and having a consistency of color that no dye maker of that time could have achieved.
Watching Tim searching the shore for shells, she said, “Blossom Rosedale sold her house and wrapped up her affairs in Magic Beach. She’ll be joining us here tonight for dinner.”
“I wonder now,” I said, “if she should have done that.”
“She wants to be part of something that matters, odd one. And she believes that what you have been doing matters very much.”
“But she was a part of Magic Beach. An important part. Everyone knew her, knew the art she created, and the quilts that won national awards.”
“Being known by everyone is not the same as being loved.”
“But she was loved. She had so many friends in Magic Beach.”
Annamaria put a hand on my shoulder. She was petite, and her hands were delicate. Therefore, on those rare occasions when she placed a hand on my shoulder or took one of my hands in hers to impress upon me the importance of what she had to say, I was always surprised by the weight of her touch, by the strength of her grip.
“Young man, you have made many friends in your short life, and you are fortunate that a number of them love you, truly love you. But it’s a rare person who can without reservation love someone with a face like the face that Blossom was left with after the fire.”
“But in its own way, it’s a beautiful face.”
“Some people,” she continued, “will be drawn to her because being her friend supports the image of themselves that they want others to have of them, makes them feel they’re compassionate and tolerant and admirable. Such people may be her friends in a casual sense, they may even to some degree care about her. But when their true focus is always and all but entirely on themselves, they can’t love her.”
“Not all her friends can be like that,” I said.
“Others will befriend her out of pity, but pity very often—not always—comes with an unspoken and sometimes unrecognized element of contempt.”
I didn’t even try to argue that point.
“Others,” Annamaria said, “will befriend her out of sympathy, because they have suffered, too, though not as she has suffered. Sympathy is a nobler feeling than pity. But if sympathy is the principal reason that one person is drawn to another, there will always be an unbridgeable chasm between friendship and genuine love.”
I was distressed to think that many of Blossom Rosedale’s friends in Magic Beach might have been, for one reason or another, drawn to her because of her suffering, not mainly because of her clear quick mind and her great good heart. I refused to believe that there weren’t many who truly loved her as she deserved to be loved.
When I expressed my distress to Annamaria, she patted my shoulder and then slipped her hands into the pockets of her roomy khaki pants. “Her mother died when she was four. Forty-five years have passed since her father set her on fire, when she was six. At fifty-one, why would she choose to dispose of her house, uproot herself, and come here to be part of your work if she didn’t feel that, for the first time in her life, she was profoundly known for who she is, that she was at last cherished for who she truly is?”
And so we had come to one of those rare moments when I was speechless.
On the wet, compacted sand where the last of the purling surf reached before each rhythmic retreat, a sandpiper found something tasty and pecked the beach with a lack of skittishness that was unusual for its kind. The bird circled Tim, only a few feet from him, drawing closer each time it went around him, and the boy stood watching it, amused and enchanted.
“But I only knew Blossom for a few weeks,” I said at last.
Annamaria smiled. “Isn’t that remarkable?”
“If she wants to be part of … whatever it is I’m doing, what if something happens? What if I’m not … doing it anymore?”
“You’re too young to retire, odd one.”
“You know what
I mean, ma’am.”
She watched the boy and the sandpiper, and I thought she must be considering whether to be less mysterious than usual. Finally she said, “If you’re not doing what you do anymore, Blossom will find with Edie Fischer what she has found with you and me.”
“But Mrs. Fischer is eighty-six.”
“She won’t be retiring anytime soon, young man. Whatever may happen in Pico Mundo, Edie Fischer will have work to do for a long time. She will need a chauffeur, considering that you proved not to be well suited for that job. She said you dawdled.”
Tim stooped without frightening off the sandpiper. The bird met his gaze. They stared at each other. Tim held out one hand, palm up, and the bird regarded the hand for a moment before continuing to peck the sand, now inches from the boy’s right foot.
“The dream I had last night,” I said, “ended with the amaranth.”
“The flower that never dies.”
“It died in my dream.”
“Because that was just a dream. Things in dreams don’t always mean what they seem to mean.”
“It’s from Greek mythology. The amaranth, I mean. There’s no such flower.”
“The ancient Greeks were wise. They got many things right.”
I said, “The big white flowers you always have floating in bowls. Like the one on the dinette table now. And the one in the living room. What are they?”
She appeared to be amused and yet dead serious when she said, “Amaranths.”
“Where did you get them?”
“As I’ve said before, Oddie, I picked them from a tree in the neighborhood.”
“Ma’am, I’ve walked the neighborhood a hundred times in the past couple of months, and I’ve never seen such flowers on a tree.”
“Well, dear heart, you have to know where to look, and you have to be able to find a part of the neighborhood that not many people see.”
As the sandpiper pecked tiny bits of whatever lunch from the beach, Tim had continued to hold out his hand. Now the bird regarded the offered palm once more, turned its head this way and that, and accepted the perch. Tim looked at us, astonished, as if to say, Do you see this?