Passover

by Aphrodite Anagnost

  She tried to envision comforting scenes to come. Easter, with Dave and the children, was only weeks away. There’d be plastic pastel eggs hidden in the first lilies of spring, in the narcissus, radiant with purple petals. But the happy images escaped. The water was growing cool, with a smell of rust, an odd stickiness running down her back. Dave had installed a ten- inch, chrome rain showerhead a few days before, a taste of luxury. But something was wrong— too much pressure, maybe, too many minerals in the water.

  Rust poured from the nozzle tips, like milk from nipples. No, it was blood. It drenched her hair and streaked her naked body, covering her like a shroud. She opened her eyes and tried to scream, but no sound came from her locked throat. She struggled to break free, to turn off the spigot, but the drying coat of moisture, scab-like, held her in a cocoon.

  Where is Dave? I’m going mad, she thought. Insane. She cried, and hot tears melted crusted blood on her face. Eyes shut, she began to counsel herself. “This is a hallucination,” she whispered. “This is a thought disorder; too much dopamine in the brain, not enough GABA.” When she opened her eyes, the blood was gone.

  Panic, she thought. Just sleep deprivation.

  Back in the bedroom, she listened for the practiced Morse-code knock downstairs, drying herself off and searching for traces of blood. Dave stood at the window looking out over the pasture.

  Should she mention the new depth of her fear? No.

  The grass had been stunted by the unseasonable cold of middle March. The assistant trainer, Lev, was leading Magistrate out of his stall for an early morning workout in the sand-and-crushed-rubber outdoor arena. In the middle of the pasture, Deputy Ruiz sat on a stump, eating a big stuffed biscuit, rifle across her knees.

  “Her back is to the woods,” Dave muttered. “She should be facing it.”

  Rachel zipped up her half-chaps. Maybe if they rode across the field and into the trees, they would find a clue. Dave was already dressed; his polished paddock boots waited on the side porch, draped over an arm of the swing. But neither of them made a move to leave the bedroom, to walk downstairs.

  Fifteen or twenty minutes had already passed. The sheriff hadn’t knocked.

  “What if we die because of him?” Dave said, voice rising. Nijinsky loped down the stairs probably intending to crawl under the sofa. “What if we die because the sheriff’s having coffee and donuts at the fucking diner?”

  “I’m going to check the kids,” said Rachel, cursing herself because she hadn’t done so earlier, when at first she’d realized Wise was late. What did it mean? If something had happened to the sheriff, their first line of defense was down fifteen minutes after sunrise.

  She ran to Leo’s room and threw the door open. He was asleep. His blond hair and sweet face shone on his pillow. She took a deep breath, pulled the door shut and hurried down the hall. Rachel found him half-awake, looking up with half-closed eyes. Blue ear buds in his ears, he was hugging Wolfgang, the family dachshund.

  Satisfied, she tip-toed to Zack’s room. She looked around, and put a hand to her mouth, unable to speak.

  Every surface was usually covered with clothes, schoolbooks, CDs, sheet music, guitar picks, earplugs, spare change, condoms. Now the books were all shelved in alphabetical order, by author. The DVDs and CDs racked by category. The oak floor polished. As if he’d stayed up all night cleaning, getting ready for something momentous. She opened Zack’s closet. Even his shoes were lined up in neat rows on the floor. She closed the door, and gently lowered the bolt into its strike, making only a tiny click. She pulled open a drawer—underwear folded.

  “God!” she said. Zack stirred.

  “Honey, did you stay up late cleaning your room last night?”

  “No, Mom,” he groaned. “Too busy practicing. Need to sleep in.”

  A tingle iced Rachel’s neck and arms. He must’ve been lying, but he had no reason to. “Go back to sleep, honey.”

  “Love you, Mom,” he mumbled.

  She kissed his cheek, then shut the door.

  Dave stepped up behind her. He touched her waist with both hands. “Let’s get downstairs.”

  “Maybe we should wait for the—you know—secret knock.”

  “We can take the rifles.”

  “Good.” Back in the bedroom, she picked up the two rifles leaning next to the closet. Wait—hadn’t one of them been sitting like a paperweight on the newspapers on the dresser, under Dave’s latest of a series of oil paintings of black sheep? She walked back to the dresser to look at the painting and drew in a breath. Dave’s signature had changed. It slanted left now, not right, as it had been when he’d painted the mural of those poor cattle in a dry feedlot, waiting for death. Maybe the cattle mural, or something in the house, had caused his mind to take a bend to the left, a bend sinister, as Nabokov might have called it.

  She dismissed the thought as foolish.

  Rachel stomped into the hallway, a gun slung over each shoulder.

  “Did you move one of these?” she said.

  “What?”

  “They were both leaning against the wall.” She handed him one. “But I saw one on the dresser this morning.”

  He shouldered the rifle, looking bewildered. “No. I dunno.”

  “Guns don’t just get up and walk! Did you or did you not move it?”

  “No,” he snapped. “Maybe Zack did.”

  “Oh, here we go, again. Blaming Zack. How could he have moved it? He’s been asleep.”

  “Rachel.” Dave lowered his voice. “You’re being hysterical.”

  “I don’t like your tone.”

  “Well, I don’t like yours.”

  “If you want people to listen, you’ll whisper instead of yell.”

  “I’m not the one who’s yelling.”

  “Shut up.” She put a hand up. “Please. No, wait. Let’s start over. Sorry,” she said. He glanced at his wristwatch and swallowed. “The Harper boys were killed in Sharpsburg by blasts from a shotgun. So, I’m not worrying about wandering rifles.”

  The grandfather clock in the foyer chimed four times, off by hours, as usual. Dave looked up the way a startled dog might.

  “One boy got it in the head, the other in the chest.”

  “I said I don’t want to think about that. Why are you saying these things?” She pressed a palm against an eye. “I don’t want pictures in my head of little boys with blood and brains leaking out of bullet holes! Okay?”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just…I don’t think we have to worry about being shot. He, or they, have never killed the same way twice.”

  “Wonderful, Goddamn it!”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Her shoulders relaxed a little. But what if they went down and the furniture had been rearranged? In the parlor, the big sofa with eight cushions standing in place of the baby grand? The baby grand in place of the sofa? What if the black sheep Dave had painted were gone and her laptop with all of her important documents in its hard drive were drowning in the kitchen sink? What if someone was waiting, even now, holding his breath, bare feet making no sound on the thick Persian rug the color of pumpkin pie?

  The hallway was frigid, as if a window had been left open in the dead of winter. But it was spring. They were all shut.

  “Please turn off the air,” she said.

  “Okay. Let’s go down. Sometimes we don’t hear knocks on the door from up here. For all we know, the sheriff’s waiting on the porch, maybe waiting on the swing.”

  “I wish he’d stay off it,” she said, thinking of Wise’s girth.

  The garden was a checkerboard of crocuses and jonquils and tall unruly boxwoods. For the most part, however, the view was clear to the scattered houses across the road. But, on the east and west sides of the house, tangles of bushes and overgrown ivy were thick enough to conceal a crawling man. Sheriff Wise might be checking out the cottage where Rachel’s mother, Beatricia, slept. It was closer to the road than the main house, and off to one side. To the north was a pasture and to th
e east lay a dense thicket of pine and oak over a hundred years old, threaded with Virginia creeper, sweetbriar, and poison ivy.

  Last spring, while Beatricia was still living in the main house, she’d used masking tape to delineate her boundaries. “This is my domain,” she’d announced to them. The formal dining room, living room, parlor, and the downstairs bathroom with the claw-footed porcelain tub had been proclaimed part of the Kingdom of Beatricia. She’d gotten incensed anytime the boys had crossed into her realm and jumped on the bed.

  Finally, she’d hired a contractor to build an apartment in what had been the detached garage. A small price to pay to eliminate daily battles over which space was whose.

  But Rachel missed her company. Beatricia had provided comic relief and flashes of esoteric wisdom in a family packed with overachievers. A medical anthropologist, in her younger days she’d researched pre-industrial cultures that practiced pagan rites, including Kuru sorcery. Beatricia had learned “how to open the gates to other worlds,” from Dagara shamans of West Africa, and studied the use of rain forest herbs to induce altered states in Ecuadorian Carib Amerindians. Her monograph on voodoo rituals performed in forests, backrooms of churches, and government buildings was in the Library of Congress.

  Rachel’s mother believed in a creator beyond religion. Beatricia was also a collector of little pieces of truth to get a broader view of creation and was proud of her spirituality, her wide knowledge of world religions. She’d collected unmarked marble slabs around the Sheltons’ property that’d turned out to be old footstones, initials worn off by centuries of rain and wind. She’d leaned them upright against the brick foundation of the cottage, where they slumped like pale hunchbacks.

  Dave slipped into Leo’s room, past the sleeping boy, and looked out a front window. Rachel tiptoed in behind and scanned the empty road, too. No sheriff. No patrol car. No movement in Zebulon except a few guinea fowl foraging, sharp beaks stabbing bark for grubs. Only empty-eyed houses met her gaze. Most of their neighbors had fled, some to homes of friends and relatives, others to Washington—where they could convince themselves they’d be safe. Or any place they were unknown.

  Whoever had killed the Harper children were, evidently, willing to travel. How? Why?

  Rachel stared at the woods east of the cottage with narrowed eyes. She took Dave’s hand and squeezed it.

  “They’ll come from the east,” she said. “Under a full moon, they’ll need the trees to hide them, unless there’s a storm.”

  “Let’s get downstairs,” he said.

  He paused on the landing, looking out the bay window. “There’s no one outside.”

  There were ghost stories about this stairway, but Rachel couldn’t remember most of them and didn’t believe them anyway. She could recall there’d been at least one death on the stairs, long before she’d been born. Old Mr. Nelson, a former owner and barrister to the Middlemarch County court, having been wounded in the Powagansett Indian War, had fallen asleep on a window seat on the landing, where he’d quietly died. Or so the realtor had told her.

  No pain, no fuss. She had a feeling it wasn’t true.

  Still, she walked behind Dave, close enough to smell soap on his neck. She didn’t believe in ghosts. But hairs on her arms rose up and her nape chilled, as if Old Nelson had leaned out to touch her.

  By the time they reached the huge foyer downstairs, some of her fear had gone. The oversized wardrobe for coats, the eternally late grandfather clock had a comforting solidity. Other rooms still needed to be inspected. In the parlor, nothing had been rearranged. The fireplace wood stove in its proper spot, the wingback chairs still upright and holding down the pumpkin Persian carpet.

  Backtracking through the parlor, they found the entry bathroom in order. The faucet of the claw-footed tub still leaked in quarter notes. Beyond, the dining room table remained upright and still cluttered with files and books. Dave sat in a banker’s chair in front of a few newspapers describing the murders while Rachel stuck her head into the kitchen, the pantry, the utility room.

  “All clear,” she called. A roll of wrapping paper slid off a high shelf and hit her head. She shrieked and jumped. Snowmen, Joie Noelle, she thought. Will we see Christmas this year?

  She breathed easier sitting at the table, holding a rifle, waiting. Where is that damned sheriff? Rachel felt a second wave of nausea. She swallowed, and it passed.

  Dave was staring at her. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. I mean, okay. I need a scopolamine patch.” She laid her gun on the table pointing toward the window, away from Dave. She returned with a patch, peeled off the backing and stuck it behind one ear, tossing the packaging into a fireplace stove that still smelled like Christmas soot. “Does the sheriff think they’ll use a gun again?”

  “No,” he said. “For several reasons.”

  She felt briefly happy. The killer, or killers, would probably not use a gun this time. But then again, maybe they would.

  She wished for fewer windows. Theirs looked over the high shrubbery of the yard, the wide pasture of orchard grass and clover, the old stables behind the house, the woods and beds of vinca around the cottage where her mother lay sleeping. But they all had glass panes everyone had to sit by, and walk in front of. Bullets flew easily through windows.

  Dave, even now, looked like he was anticipating being shot. Skin pale and moist. A few minutes ago, he’d smelled like soap. But now he smelled a touch rancid, like an old acorn, like rusted metal, like fear. He fidgeted, moisture beading on his forehead and cheeks. Why didn’t he get up and do something instead of planting himself like a stump in front of the window?

  She could imagine a bullet spinning through the air as it flew, till it crashed through glass and his temple.

  “Why are you crying?” he said.

  She rushed into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee for the adults. Hell, why not the kids? Maybe they should all take Ritalin, too—a drug that enhanced intellectual performance in high- stress situations. And what could be more stressful than waiting to be murdered?

  Everything in the kitchen looked alive, sleek and groomed by light. The butcher-block centerpiece glowed honey-brown with streaks of aged black. No doubt germ colonies were festering in the moist spaces in the wood. Stacked Drabware glistened inside the hutch. She wiped her eyes with a dishtowel sticky with Palmolive, then folded it up.

  The quartzite countertop and backsplash were inlayed with stainless bumble bees that seemed newborn. They made her think of fragments of a favorite poem:

  This is paradise, he said

  This is the same sun that shone on Adam

  And the same wind too

  She clenched her fists. How dare anyone threaten all she had! Not just the house and farm, but her life. The lives of her husband and children, everything she’d worked for, everything she’d dreamed of, fought for, for so many years.

  To be a horse trainer, mother, doctor—none of it easy. Not the early mornings in the stables and saddle, the hours of cooking and cleaning, the twelve-hour shifts at the hospital where she went room to room trying to restart hearts or comfort the dying. And the coaxing of her computer into cooperative chatter. God, she hated computers. She was technologically impaired.

  Hot tears burned her cheeks. Finding herself in a trance before the opened refrigerator, holding a carton of cream, she slammed it shut. A magnetic photograph of Zack and Leo at the beach fell to the stone floor. She stuck it back on the stainless steel door.

  “Coffee ready?” called Dave, drumming his fingertips on the leather top of the dining table.

  “I haven’t…” she started, then saw the glowing red light of the machine on the counter, the coffee already hot and steaming. Where had she been the last five minutes?

  Rachel poured the brew into two brown mugs, and carried them into the dining room, glad that she’d only filled them half full. Her hands were shaking. Dave was at the door to the side porch, staring through its small window at the empty, waiting, s
latted swing.

  She offered him his coffee, frowning. “Look at that chandelier.” The crystal was gray and cloudy, even furry looking. Like a fungus.

  “What’s wrong?” He took a sip of coffee. Two heaping tablespoons of sugar in the cup. “It’s covered with dust.”

  “Can’t be. Sylvia cleaned yesterday.”

  She reached up to touch the central fob. Grease slid between thumb and forefinger. She held it under his nose. “Look.”

  “Cigarette tar?” he said. “Huh. Where’d that come from?” He sneezed. “I thought you’d quit.”

  She rubbed the schmutz on a napkin and slumped into a chair. “I did. Fifteen years ago. I haven’t smoked since medical school.”

  A brown shield-shaped bug clicked as it crawled across the table. Rachel smashed it under her napkin, then regretted it. The crushed body stunk like garbage, like death.

  “A brown marmorated stink bug.” Dave said.

  Looking up, Rachel glanced through the dining room window at a four-horse trailer pulled by a diesel pickup down Burnt Chestnut Road. The rusted old rig struggled, brown smoke curling from its exhaust pipe.

  “It’s making no sound,” Dave said. Rachel strained her ears to listen, but only silence came from the road. Dave was looking at her now, his eyes stunned.

  Wolfgang, the dachshund, stopped snoring under the table. The sparrows that had been chirping had also quieted, as if listening to something outside the range of human hearing. The chickens had ceased clucking, the whistle and hum of guinea fowl ceased. A solitary car passed without engine noise and the swoosh of tires.

  Rachel tensed. She dried her eyes and joined Dave at the door to the side porch, putting her arms around him. The empty slatted swing was rocking slowly back and forth. Sand-dollar wind chimes hung above it, suspended in silence.

  It had been twenty-nine and one-half days since the deaths of the children next door. Fifty-eight days since Petty had been axed in the head two doors down. Eighty-one days since the initial murder three doors down. The killer was moving east down Burnt Chestnut one house at a time. Now it was their turn.