For a distance of fifteen yards, the snow around the residence had gone to steam and water, and the frozen ground had turned to mud. Farther out, a mantle of ash and filigrees of soot darkened winter’s coverlet. In front of the house, the pair of old starburst pines stood stripped of greenery, jagged and bristling and black and smoking, like ancient totems, the ground around them littered with their dismembered limbs transformed to charcoal.
The firemen had been defeated before they arrived, had been able to do nothing but watch the last of the inferno burn itself out. They were still present, however, as though superstitiously expecting that such an unnaturally fierce blaze might leap up anew even though it had consumed everything combustible.
Out where the driveway met the county road, propped against the mailbox, was a message from the arsonists, white letters painted on a slab of plywood: BURN IN HELL, YOU MURDEROUS BITCH.
Vance Saunders, who years earlier had been in charge of fire control on an aircraft carrier, said no ordinary accelerant could fuel such a fire. “Even had they soaked every room with gasoline,” he told Luther, “she’d never go up like this went up. There was something kind of napalm about this.”
After the firemen left, Lonny Burke walked with Luther to their cruisers. “If we give this a case number, then everyone who knew anyone who died at the hotel—he’s a suspect in this here arson.”
“Whoever did this, they aren’t county people,” Luther said.
Puzzled, Lonny said, “Who are they, then?”
Recalling how the FBI had been pulled out of the house by a man from the U.S. Department of Justice, their investigation prematurely terminated, Luther said, “Maybe we won’t ever know…and maybe we don’t need to.”
After Lonny returned to his patrol route, Luther slowly drove home through this high-latitude night, where, in clear weather, he sometimes stood transfixed by a sky coruscating with the aurora borealis. He knew that those luminous streamers of color were only charged solar particles bombarding the upper atmosphere and flowing along Earth’s magnetic lines of force, but the sight never failed to fill him with wonder. You could know the science of a thing and still find the phenomenon mysterious and mystical, and feel small and vulnerable in the face of it.
He was only halfway home when he phoned Rob Stassen, with whom he had searched Cora Gundersun’s house earlier. When Rob answered, not yet abed, Luther said, “It’s me.”
Talking around a mouthful of something, Robbie said, “Yessir. Just watchin’ some dumb TV.”
“Is that a cud?”
“Doritos and guacamole.”
“Listen, did you tell anyone what we found in Cora’s place?”
“Checked out, came home, crashed. Haven’t talked to anyone.”
“No one at all? It’s important.”
“No one. Except maybe myself.”
“What about Melanie?”
“She’s off in Idaho, visiting her mom—remember?”
“I do now, yes. Cora’s house just burned to the ground.”
“Why am I not surprised? People are stupid. You need me there?”
“No. What I need is you don’t tell anyone we were in that house earlier. No one. Not a word about the journals we found.”
“You got it.”
“I’m dead serious, Robbie.”
“I can hear you are, Sheriff. You spook me a little.”
“Good. We didn’t even have this conversation.”
“What conversation?”
Luther terminated the call.
The closer he got to home, the faster he drove, although he didn’t realize that he expected to discover something gone terribly wrong at his house, with his family, until he arrived and found that all was well.
32
* * *
Jane dreamed of Nick, the love of her life, a good and vivid dream, tactile as dreams rarely were, his hand on her throat, her breast, a kiss bestowed on her bare shoulder, his face radiant in the amber half-light and fluid shadows of a nameless place, and she enraptured not by desire but by a sense of safety in his arms.
But then, when he spoke, her expectation that his words would be those of her love and lover was not fulfilled, and he possessed instead the hateful voice of the man who, two months earlier, had met and charmed Travis and had later threatened Jane by phone: “He’s a wonderfully trusting child, and so very tender. Sheerly for the fun of it, we could pack the little bugger off to some third-world snake pit, turn him over to a group like ISIS or Boko Haram….” Nick’s tender touch had become rough, and when she tried to pull away from him, he held her fast. “Some of those badasses are as fond of little boys as much as they are of little girls….” His eyes were no longer Nick’s eyes, but viperous and cold. “He might be passed around until he’s ten or eleven before some barbarian tires of him and finally cuts off his pretty head.”
In a sweat, she sat up from the dream and could not turn the lights on fast enough, fumbling with one bedside lamp and then the other. Though she was alone, she drew the pistol from under the pillow on which Nick’s head would have rested if he had been alive and with her.
According to the digital clock, it was 4:08 A.M.
She would sleep no more this night.
The wind had escorted the rain to another part of the world. There was not even traffic noise from the street nor any sound from an adjacent motel room, the Southern California hive now stilled in anticipation of the dawn.
She had been propelled awake not by the fact that the dream became a nightmare, but by a realization that had eluded her when awake yet had come to her in sleep. Nick had been intelligent and tough-minded, with a profound sense of responsibility to his family. And yet…having been identified by the computer model as a candidate for the Hamlet list, having been at some point injected with a control mechanism, having been directed to self-destruct, he had done it. Therefore, what if instead he’d been directed to commit murder-suicide, as this woman in Minnesota had done?
What if Nick had been told to slaughter his wife and child before taking his own life?
That was a what-if on which she refused to dwell.
With the pistol in hand, she thrust up from the creaking bed and navigated the room as if hidden traps lay everywhere about to spring. In the bathroom, she turned on the light and swept aside the lime-scaled shower curtain, certain that no one waited there, but nonetheless compelled to look. She put the gun on the laminate top of the vanity and cranked on the cold water and cupped her hands and pressed her face into the bowl of palms and fingers, as though to wash away the tormenting what-if.
Watching the clear beads drip off her face and spatter against the chipped porcelain sink, she could too easily imagine they were drops of blood.
The trouble with the what-if game was that once you began to play it, you couldn’t just quit whenever you wanted. From one what-if grew another.
In some future confrontation, what if they captured her and injected a control mechanism? What if then they told her to return to her little boy and kill him and then kill herself? Or what if they told her to kill him but not herself, to live thereafter with the knowledge of what she had done to him after he had rushed into her embrace?
She had thought she understood all that was at risk. But the poets and the sages agreed that Hell had several levels; and she had just glimpsed a deeper stratum than those she had seen before.
33
* * *
Sheriff Luther Tillman had never needed—and never had the patience to endure—what others thought of as a full night’s sleep. Instead, he functioned well on four or five hours, with an occasional six. Sleep was rest to him, yes, but it also felt like a taste of death, waking to discover that, for hours, the world had gone on just fine without him, as one day it would go on forever. In a pinch, he could skip an entire night’s sleep with little ill effect. This would be one of those nights.
At 1:10 A.M. Friday, having returned from the ruins of Cora Gundersun’s house, he brewed co
ffee and put a tin of butter cookies on the kitchen table. He sat there to read more of the teacher’s writing. Page by page, Cora’s fiction didn’t just entertain but also educated him as to the complexity of her mind and the generosity of her heart. If he thought he had known her well, he found now that he’d hardly known her at all. It was as if he had waded out into a knee-deep pond with a placid surface, only to discover immeasurable depths teeming with life.
Yet nothing he read helped to explain what she had done. In fact, the beauty of her fiction made the ugliness of her actions more difficult to comprehend, so that shortly after 4:30 in the morning, he put aside her stories and returned to the journal in which she had struggled for so long to pry out of herself the four sentences about a spider crawling within her skull.
When he and Robbie Stassen had considered these words while standing in Cora’s kitchen, they had scanned quickly through the repetitions, which because of her precise cursive formed a pattern that lulled the eye but that changed dramatically when a new phrase began. Now he perused the pages with greater care, line by line, looking for he knew not what.
In time he was rewarded with the word iron where the word inside should have been: a spider crawling iron my skull…
He would have thought it meant nothing, a mere error, except that twenty lines farther, the word appeared in the same place, and later in another phrase entirely—speaks in an iron whisper—where it replaced the word evil.
In every investigation, a good cop looked for patterns and for the lack of patterns where patterns ought to be, and often, as now, he came upon telling clues.
After he had found twenty instances of the word iron where it didn’t belong, he encountered the word furnace where the word whisper should have been, and then in place of the words my brain.
There were nineteen instances of furnace before he discovered a third word embedded like code within the thousands of repetitions.
For days at a time became instead for days at a lake. That same substitution occurred twenty-two places in eleven pages.
Although Luther proceeded line by line through the remaining pages of the journal, he found nothing else of interest.
Iron Furnace Lake.
Cora’s struggle to express her bizarre fear that a spider was colonizing her brain appeared to be the work of a woman bewildered by her own rapidly developing paranoia, perhaps embarrassed by it, frightened not just of the imaginary spider but also of her belief in its existence, which part of her must have known was irrational.
The embedding of a place name within the pages of repetitive writing seemed like a different matter, as if while she consciously attempted to leave behind her a statement about the spider, her subconscious strove to transmit from its darker reaches the name of a place that either she had forgotten or she resisted remembering.
Having found this much, Luther didn’t know what it might mean, if it meant anything at all, or how he might go about establishing a connection between her paranoid fear and her assault on the hotel.
Anyway, there was no point in conducting such an inquiry. The unlikely perpetrator was dead. She couldn’t mount a defense based on an insanity plea. He had no need to prepare for a trial.
He couldn’t let it go, however, because of the FBI’s inadequate inspection of Cora’s house, because of the Department of Justice official who ordered the Bureau agents to cease and desist, and not least of all because someone had torched the house with a vengeance, destroying everything in it—and tried to make it appear as if vindictive locals had done the job.
Luther had gotten into police work because he believed in the rule of law. A civil society could not endure without it. When the rule of law was diminished, the strong preyed on the weak. If the rule of law collapsed, every barbarism would ensue, and the streets would run with blood in such volume that all apocalyptic biblical plagues and disaster-movie horrors would seem by comparison to be the musings of naïve children. He had long watched with concern as those who were corrupt became bolder in their thieving and lust for power, as corruption spread to institutions once immune to it.
He had two daughters. He had a wife. He could not turn away from this case merely because higher authorities had removed it from his jurisdiction, nor because finding the truth of the assault on the hotel seemed hopeless. Taking refuge in the hopeless nature of anything was just a form of cowardice.
In his study, he unlocked the handsome mahogany gun cabinet. Of the three lower shelves provided for the storage of ammunition, one remained empty. He put Cora Gundersun’s journals there and engaged the lock and pocketed the key.
At 5:50, as Luther sat at the computer, reading about the town of Iron Furnace, Kentucky, Rebecca entered in pajamas and robe. From behind, she put her arms around him and kissed the top of his head. “Up all night?”
“No way I could’ve slept.”
“Nothing you could’ve done or can do.”
“A wife has to say that.”
“Especially when it’s true. Now you need to be ready for this awful day.”
“The Feds aren’t letting me do anything but direct traffic.”
“They’ll want you center stage today.”
“Don’t see why they would.”
“Yesterday’s snow screwed up air travel. Last night it was mostly local and state media. But this morning it’ll be a world of them in town, and the Washington types will want your face out there in case down the road they need someone to blame.”
Switching off the computer, getting up from the chair, putting his arms around her, Luther said, “What happened to the Pollyanna I married, suddenly gone all cynical on me?”
“Didn’t happen suddenly,” she said.
“No, I guess it didn’t.”
“Don’t let them use you, Luther.”
He kissed her brow. “They won’t.”
“They will if you let them. If they throw a lot of dirt at you while they’re digging themselves out of a hole…well, we still have to live here.”
“The people of this county know me, dirt thrown or not thrown.”
“The people of Judea knew Jesus, too, and how did that go?”
“Woman, I’m no Jesus.”
“My point exactly.”
“Close your eyes, beautiful.” He kissed her left eyelid and then the right.
She put her head on his chest. “Anyway, I’m still a Pollyanna about you.”
They held each other as, beyond the windows, light pierced the bleak, curdled sky and formed into a new day.
34
* * *
Cruising, Jane saw them on a residential street in the flats of Beverly Hills, south of Wilshire. Two boys, perhaps sixteen. Faded ripped-and-repaired jeans so exquisitely distressed and tightly fitted that they must be high-end designer gear rather than thrift-shop retreads. Vintage rock tees. One of them with a faded black-denim jacket worn over his shoulders like a cape, the other making no such concession to the morning chill but sporting a gray porkpie hat. Carrying skateboards. Both of them smoking, though California had raised the legal age for tobacco use to twenty-one. Neither had a backpack or carried books, and it was a good bet they had set out so early not in anticipation of a day at school but to avoid it.
She drove two blocks and turned the corner and parked and came back to their street and took up a position ahead of them, leaning on a curbside car, under an Indian laurel. She wore the Vogue-punk black-shag wig and the eye shadow and the deep-blue lipstick and the nose ring. Whatever she might have worn, their eyes would have gone to her like magnets to iron, for boys past puberty and men of every age always looked her over, either indirectly or boldly. She had never resented their interest, though she had been impatient with them and often scornful—until a female martial-arts instructor at Quantico convinced her that the way she looked gave her an advantage over other agents, that being an attractant and a distraction, as she chose, could be a tool of great value.
As the boys approached, she saw that one o
f them wore a Guns N’ Roses skeleton-in-a-top-hat tee, the other a ZZ Top car-with-blazing-headlights tee from their Eliminator tour. Both garments were well scratched and butter soft, seemingly vintage, but she doubted these puppies had listened to the music of either group, certainly not to the deeper album cuts.
“You dudes as bad as you want to look?” she asked.
They stopped and stared at her. ZZ smirked, while Guns held a deadpan expression, neither of them replying to her, because one of the canon laws of coolness was that silence had power.
She knew the game better than they did. She met their stares and kept her face as solemn as that of a cruel goddess who expected to be honored with a lamb, an altar, a blood sacrifice.
Morning sun pouring through the tree spangled them with gold light and purple shadow, and though the city encircling them rose early to the clarion call of money, there was at the moment a hush worthy of an Iowa wheatfield.
After taking a drag on his cigarette and blowing smoke out of his nostrils, as if to convey that he had dragon genes, ZZ was the first to speak. He tipped his porkpie hat to her and said to his friend, with another smirk, “Is this a hooker zone now?”
To Guns, Jane said, “You hang out with him why—because he gives you hand jobs?”
ZZ’s smirk became a snarl. “Bitch.”
Still to Guns, she said, “He’s a real sensitive boy. I like sensitive boys.”
ZZ started to respond, and Guns said, “Cork it, bro. She’ll gut you with that tongue of hers.”
In every group of two or more males, there was an alpha dog, and in this case, Guns was it.
“What do you want?” he asked.
She said, “Are your best bad moves skipping school and sneaking ciggies…or do you have cojones?”
Guns evidently decided that the cigarette had ceased being a symbol of rebellion and had become an affectation. He dropped it on the sidewalk and ground it underfoot. “You have a line of shit to sell, so sell it.”