by Dean Koontz
As the security guard shucked off his pants, the inner door opened and a middle-aged man with regal Roman features appeared, dressed in white and wearing a chef’s hat, evidently having come to see what the commotion was about. His expression was that of anyone into whose hand had been thrust a stick of dynamite with a burning fuse.
When the chef started to retreat, Jane swung the pistol toward him. “Stay where you are or take a bullet.”
“Please don’t, I have a dependent mother,” he pleaded, raising his hands, holding the inner door open with his body.
On his back on the floor, the guard struggled to get his rain-soaked pants off over his shoes, which might have struck Jane as farcical if she didn’t have to worry that, back in the library, the Egyptophile had already phoned the police.
To the chef, she said, “Pick up that umbrella and close it.”
He did as she said, and the guard freed himself from his pants.
“Chef, throw the umbrella over there by that handbag on the floor. Don’t even think about throwing it at me.”
He would have been a champion at horseshoes. The umbrella hit the handbag.
To the guard, she said, “Off with the boxer shorts.”
“Jeez, don’t make me.”
“You know who I am?” she demanded.
“Yeah, yeah, I know.”
“So I’m desperate. Naked or dead. Your choice. Quick.”
He skinned out of the shorts.
“Get up.”
Wincing, sucking air between his clenched teeth, he needed the metal shelves to pull himself to his feet. He couldn’t yet stand straight.
“Pick up your pants and shorts,” she ordered. “Open the door, throw them out to the middle of the alley.”
He did as she required, and when she told him to sidle over to the chef, he obeyed that command as well, though he declared with inarguable sincerity that he hated her.
Blocking the outer door from fully closing, Jane said, “You’re breakin’ my heart,” and picked up the handbag and umbrella with her left hand. “Chef, do I smell braciole?”
“It’s a special tonight.”
“Sure wish I could stay for it.”
She slipped out of the receiving room, tossed the guard’s pistol into the dumpster, and ran through sheeting rain that seemed colder than it had been two minutes earlier. Wind had blustered up in her brief absence, now that the door of night was swinging open, and it gusted along the alleyway, huffing like some phantom herd that had spooked into stampedes across this territory centuries before the first human being had set foot on it.
26
* * *
The dead woman’s kitchen. Cold, waxy bacon fat thick in a frying pan on the stove. Pale nitrile gloves cast off by Bureau agents, draped on chair backs and depending from counter edges and puddled on the floor, as if they were the collapsed remains of anemonelike sea creatures displaced from a distant ocean by means unknowable. Dirty plate and flatware on the table, left by a woman known to be uncommonly neat. And the journal containing thousands of repetitions of the phrases and clauses with which she laboriously constructed a message, evidence of an obsessive need to convey a condition or experience that frightened and oppressed her.
Sometimes at night, I come wide awake…
Sheriff Luther Tillman turned five pages before he found a further construction of the sentence, which was when Rob Stassen said, “I’ve got ice in my veins.”
On the page: Sometimes at night, I come wide awake, and I feel a spider crawling inside my skull…
Luther said, “The FBI must have pored through this. They aren’t so incompetent they’d have overlooked it.”
“But then they would’ve taken it with them,” Rob said. “Lord alive, it’s a key piece of evidence.”
The FBI’s behavior was inexplicable. But Luther was more focused on the awfulness of what they had found here, saddened to read this evidence that Cora Gundersun had indeed been suffering from mental illness of one kind or another.
He turned three pages before he found the point at which she had managed to extract from herself the next part of the sentence.
Sometimes at night, I come wide awake, and I feel a spider crawling inside my skull, and it speaks to me…
Two pages later, there was more, and three pages after that, and four pages after that, until her handwriting ended and all the remaining pages of the journal were blank.
Luther read aloud the complete message. “ ‘Sometimes at night, I come wide awake, and I feel a spider crawling inside my skull, and it speaks to me, speaks in an evil whisper. I believe it’s laying eggs in the folds of my brain. It tells me to sleep, and so I do. I forget the spider for days at a time. Until I come wide awake again at night and feel it crawling, feel it squeezing out its eggs in my brain, and the spider says, Forget me. The spider will be the death of me.’ ”
The refrigerator compressor switched on, and Luther looked up with a start.
“Poor Cora,” said Rob Stassen. “Sounds strange to say that, considering what she did today. But, Lord alive, she was sure sick. What now, Sheriff?”
Closing the journal, tucking it under his arm, Luther said, “Now we look through this place from end to end and see what else the FBI didn’t think was important.”
27
* * *
Jane needed a plain-wrap motel offering anonymity but minus cockroaches, where she could say she didn’t have a credit card and could pay cash without raising suspicion.
The entire San Fernando Valley was too hot for her after the business with the security guard. She avoided freeways flooded with traffic seeping around uncounted rain-related accidents. She drove west to Woodland Hills and took State Highway 27 south through the Santa Monica Mountains to the Coast Highway.
Will Rogers State Beach was closed. A chain between stanchions restricted access to the parking lot. The terrain lay inhospitable to both sides of the access lanes, but she piloted the Escape around the blockade. She turned off the headlights and drove slowly into the parking lot, through whirling skirts of coastal mist.
The shape of a structure gathered out of the fog, the public restrooms. She backed up to the building’s overhang and got out in the rain with her tote. At the tailgate, she retrieved one of two suitcases and the bag of wigs.
She could hear the ocean spending itself repeatedly on the shore, but she could not see the breaking surf through the fog.
There would be cameras at the entrance or outside this comfort station, or in both places. They weren’t likely to get a clear image in this weather. Anyway, she wouldn’t damage anything, so there was no reason for them to review later the video from this lonely hour.
The LockAid lock-release gun defeated the deadbolt guarding the women’s facility. Inside, she switched on only the bank of lights above the row of sinks. The air smelled of disinfectant underlaid with a urinous odor.
She opened the suitcase on the counter between two sinks and took from it a thirteen-gallon trash bag that she used when wardrobe changes were necessary en route. She put aside the baseball cap, took off her sport coat and the shoulder rig with pistol. Stripped out of her sweater and jeans and stuffed them into the bag with the sodden coat. She stepped out of the Rockports but didn’t take off her wet socks, wanting a barrier between her and a floor that needed a hard scrubbing. After donning dry jeans, a dry sweater, her rig, and a fresh sport coat, she tied on the wet shoes.
The auburn hair would be known to the police now. The rain had washed the curl out of it, but she would have to dye it soon.
From the bag of wigs supplied by the faux Syrian refugees in Reseda, Jane chose a chopped-everywhichway jet-black number, a high-style Vogue version of a punk do. In spite of having been in that gnome-guarded house where cigarettes were worshipped, the lush hair smelled clean, because Lois, she of the pink sweat suit, kept the wigs in a refrigerator set aside for that purpose.
Jane pinned up her own hair, fitted the wig, quickly brushed it,
studied herself in the mirror, and believed the new her. Now a little eye shadow with a subtle blue tint and lipstick to match. The horn-rimmed glasses and baseball cap would have to be put away for a future incarnation. She fixed a fake nose ring to the nare of her right nostril, a silver serpent with one tiny ruby eye.
Of the six forged driver’s licenses, she chose the one with a photo that matched her hairstyle—she was now Elizabeth Bennet of Del Mar, California—and put it in her wallet.
Among the contents of her pockets that she’d put on the counter before changing, a cameo carved in soapstone was the last one she retrieved. It was half of a broken locket, found by her son, Travis, where he was being hidden by dear friends. He thought that the shapen profile resembled his mother, that it must have been good luck to find it among the smoothed stones at a stream’s edge. The resemblance eluded her. Nevertheless, she accepted the gift and promised always to keep it with her, that it might protect her and ensure that she returned to him. She kissed the cameo now, as one might kiss a religious medal or the cross dangling from a rosary, kissed it again, and held it tight in her fist for a moment before stowing it in a pocket of her jeans.
Because the Ford’s tailgate was under the building overhang, she loaded everything into the back without getting wet, and she dashed to the driver’s door. Ten minutes from arrival to departure.
After a harrowing day, she felt somewhat confident about making it safely through the night. As the most wanted criminal in America, however, she would find tomorrow challenging, especially considering what she had planned for Randall Larkin.
28
* * *
If the contents and condition of Cora Gundersun’s modest house said one thing about her, it was that she lived a simple life of small pleasures. She cherished the company of her dog, Dixie Belle, for whom she’d purchased numerous toys and colorful small sweaters, memorializing their lives together in half a dozen photo albums. She enjoyed doing needlepoint wall hangings, subscribed to Guideposts, and covered one wall with framed photographs of dozens of the most-loved students she had taught over the years.
Although the woman was gone now and her right to have her secrets had been surrendered less by the fact of her death than by what she’d done to those people at the Veblen Hotel, Sheriff Luther Tillman nonetheless felt guilty of violating her privacy as he and Rob Stassen opened drawers and inspected closets and moved through the small house. She’d had little and wanted nothing more, and her modesty was inherent everywhere he looked.
They came across no other item as strange as the journal found on the kitchen table—although in the bedroom were thirty additional spiral-bound notebooks of a different character. Bookshelves covered one wall from floor to ceiling. Hardcovers and paperbacks occupied the higher shelves, but the bottom shelf held nine-by-twelve three-hundred-page journals filled with Cora’s precise handwriting. Luther examined a few, and Rob paged through a few others, and they both reached the same conclusion: Over the past two decades, the teacher had written short stories and entire novels at a prodigious pace.
“Don’t manuscripts have to be typed?” Rob wondered.
“Maybe she had them typed up by someone else.”
“Did she ever publish anything?”
“I never heard of it,” Luther said, turning pages.
“This much rejection would’ve been tough.”
“Maybe she wasn’t rejected.”
“What—you think she published under a pen name?”
“Maybe she never tried to be published.”
Rob read a few lines and said dismissively, “It’s sure not Louis L’Amour.”
Luther had been gripped by the opening paragraph of a short story and found himself wanting to read further. “Maybe it’s not Louis L’Amour, but it’s something.”
29
* * *
A motel in Manhattan Beach, nowhere near the sand, drab room and swaybacked queen-size bed, but clean and bug-free, at least until the lights were off. Rain in the night like ten thousand voices of a restless populace, the gusting wind a fierce orator urging them to violence as it periodically rattled a nearby metal awning and banged a loose shutter on an abandoned building across the street. More deli takeout, heavy on the protein. Coke with vodka.
As she ate, Jane reviewed her notes on the death of Sakura Hannafin and on the life, in general, of Randall Larkin, Lawrence Hannafin’s friend. Everyone connected to the billionaire David Michael lived in a mirror maze of deceit, each of them casting multiple reflections, no two alike, social and political elites whose secret lives—their true lives—were conducted in the gutter. If her loathing were a poison, they would all be dead.
With her second Coke-and-vodka, she switched on the TV to see what cable news had to offer besides stories about her—and for the first time learned of the incident in Minnesota, where the death toll now stood at forty-six.
A beloved teacher plotting a mass murder, one of those not in the name of Allah, had the hallmarks of a suicide attack programmed by a nanomachine implant. Cora Gundersun had been Minnesota Teacher of the Year. Maybe the conspirators’ computer model pegged her as one who at least in some small way would push society in a direction of which they disapproved. And among those she’d incinerated were a governor and a congressman with reputations as reformers.
Those chosen for elimination were on what the conspirators called “the Hamlet list,” a fact Jane had learned from one of the two men she’d killed in self-defense the previous week. With the self-righteous air of a politician justifying graft as a form of social justice, he had explained that if someone had killed Hamlet in the first act of Shakespeare’s play, more people would have been alive at the end. They seemed really to believe that this ignorant literary interpretation justified the murder of 8,400 people a year.
They were intellectuals, excited by ideas more important to them than people. Self-identified intellectuals were among the most dangerous people on the planet. The problem was, all intellectuals first self-identified as such before others accepted their status and sought them for words of wisdom. They didn’t need to pass a test to confirm their brilliance, didn’t appear before a credentialed board by which they needed to be certified. It was easier to be celebrated as an intellectual than to get a hairdresser’s license.
Jane turned off the TV, sickened. Something in the newscasters’ demeanor suggested that their solemn expressions and measured voices and emotional pauses were calculated, that each of them, down where the perpetual inner child and the reptile consciousness overlapped, was excited to be on air when tragedy spiked the ratings, when they could imagine that they were part of history.
Wigless, in T-shirt and panties, she sat in bed to finish her drink, listening to the rain and the quarreling wind and the traffic in the street. She closed her eyes and saw her son sleeping in the safe house of the friends no one could connect to her, saw the two German shepherds that lived there as well, imagined one of the dogs sleeping in the bed with the boy, as in ancient Europe a she-wolf had slept with the abandoned baby Romulus and kept him safe that he might live to found the city of Rome.
30
* * *
Just after eleven o’clock that evening, with Rebecca and Jolie asleep upstairs, Sheriff Luther Tillman sat shoeless but still in his uniform at his kitchen table, immersed in another short story by Cora Gundersun. The first two had been elegantly realized. This third might prove to be the best one yet. At times, the prose sang in his mind’s ear, and when he spoke it aloud, it sounded through the room with no less melody.
He wondered at the teacher’s long-harbored secret, that she could have filled thirty thick journals with fiction of a quality that any publisher would have rushed to print, but evidently had never said a word about her writing to anyone. As outgoing as she had been, as deeply involved with her community, she had also lived another life of feverish creation, alone but for her dog and the dog before Dixie Belle, creating a world of vivid characters to people he
r solitude.
As if Luther had spoken her name aloud, Dixie whined and looked up from her bed, which he had brought from Cora’s place and put in a corner of the kitchen.
“Go back to sleep, little one,” he said, and the dog sighed and lowered her head.
He had brought ten of the journals home with him, plus the one in which Cora obsessively wrote about her paranoid certainty that a spider was laying eggs deep in her brain. In the morning, he would need to go back to her house and gather her remaining journals. He couldn’t understand how a woman who had written so sensitively and so well could have driven that SUV bomb into the Veblen Hotel. As one who believed that any crime was a twisted growth with roots that could be unearthed, he felt sure that somewhere in these spiral-bound volumes, evidence could be found of her first instability, when the paranoia had begun; perhaps not just when, but also why.
Seated in a charger on a nearby kitchen counter, his smartphone rang at 11:48. He turned in his chair and snared the phone and took the call. Deputy Lonny Burke, assigned to one of the out-county patrol routes, reported that Cora Gundersun’s house was ablaze and that it was unquestionably a case of arson.
31
* * *
To Luther Tillman, this looked like more than an act of feeble vengeance perpetrated by some kin of those who died at the hotel.
With shingles, rafters, joists, studs, wallboard, doors, cabinets, furniture having been rendered into ashes and windblown to the far reaches of the night, the concrete slab issued a phosphorescent glow, as if from moonlight, but the moon remained submerged in clouds. The pale glow was retained heat, still so intense that window glass lay on the concrete in glistering puddles, just now starting to shape into whorls and ripples, and all the metal of ovens and refrigerator and cook pots—of even the furnace made for fire—lay in low half-melted masses, radiant and strange.