by Dean Koontz
Jane ordered a glass of good Chianti while studying the menu, and when Freya returned with the wine, she was willing to be chatted up here in the lull before the dinner rush.
“Quite a town,” Jane said.
“It’s just like a picture postcard, isn’t it?”
“Totally. Have you lived here long?”
“All my life. I’ll never move. No one would who’s lived here.”
“Never? Wow. Never is a long time.”
“Not in Iron Furnace. It’s so nice here all the time, the days just go by lickety-split.”
“If someone was thinking of moving here, you’d recommend it?”
“Oh, sure! Is it you thinking about it?”
“My boss. He visited last year, thinks he wants to move here if I can find him a place. He works from home, he can live anywhere.”
“Move from where?” Freya asked.
“Miami.”
“Miami must be real nice, huh? Palm trees and beaches.”
“Mosquitoes, killer humidity, flying cockroaches,” Jane said.
“Oh, you’re just poking fun.”
“Maybe a little. My problem is, I don’t see many suitable properties around here. I mean for a guy with his expectations. I guess there’s undeveloped land for sale, he could build a place.”
Freya shook her head. “Don’t know from real estate. Lionel and me have a place his folks left him, never did need to go looking.”
“Lucky you. It’s no fun. Anyway, there’s an estate out on Lakeview Road might suit my boss.”
“Estate? Big old stone wall around it, right on the lake?”
“That’s the place. I drove past it and thought it might suit him. Ever hear of it being for sale?”
Freya frowned. “I don’t think it would be. That’s the school.”
“School? Oh, someone said they thought it was owned by some megarich guy named David Michael.”
“Never heard of him. It’s been a school for a long time.”
“Like a private school or something?”
“Something like, yeah. For kids with personality disorders, mental problems, they need therapy and teaching together.”
“That’s sad, isn’t it?”
Freya said, “Well, I guess maybe it would be sad if they weren’t getting the help they are.”
“True enough. Poor kids. So much autism anymore. This school must be expensive, grand as it is.”
“I guess it would be. You know what you’d like for dinner?”
Jane ordered a caprese salad followed by a double order of the chicken marsala. “Hold the side of pasta, give me extra veggies.”
“We serve big portions,” Freya warned.
“Yeah, well, I’m eating for two.”
“Pregnant? Sorry for asking, but should you be having wine?”
“Not pregnant. I’m just eating for two. I always have.”
“Gee, and you have a real cute figure.”
“Crazy-fast metabolism runs in my family. Plus I’m wearing an industrial-strength girdle.”
Freya laughed. “That’s no girdle. You’re as real as it gets.”
After Freya served the salad and returned for the empty bowl, Jane said, “I have a nephew with a personality disorder. Maybe that school would be good for him. But I didn’t see any sign on it. You know the name of the place?”
“I don’t, really. That’s funny, isn’t it? We just call it the school.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’m sure I can look it up online.”
When Freya brought the double entrée, she said, “I warned you, we serve big portions.”
“Looks fabulous. Just smell that! I might want a third.”
“Gee, if you were pregnant, I guess maybe you’d be eating for triplets.”
“I wish I were. I wouldn’t mind a bit having a full house. You and Lionel have children?”
“No, and don’t intend to, the way the world is, with all the horrible terrorism. Anyway, there’s too many people already, and the climate changing.”
Jane shrugged. “The climate always changes, always has. I plan to have kids. Didn’t notice any around here, except those with tourists.”
“Town people here are mostly older. Lot of their kids are grown and gone.”
“Not a lot of children around, maybe it wouldn’t be the best place for my kids when I have them.”
“You thinking of moving here, too?”
Jane smiled. “I should have said, my boss is also my husband.”
“I suspect no one’s the boss of you. Anyway, I hope you find a place. Be nice having you in town.”
Later, after the waitress cleared the table and returned with the check, Jane said, “Ben and I—Ben’s my hubby—we’re dog people. How do folks around here feel about dogs?”
“Dogs? Nobody doesn’t like dogs.”
“I haven’t noticed any,” Jane said, as she counted out cash from her wallet, being generous with the tip.
“Me and Lionel had one for a while. A yellow Lab.”
“I love Labs. Beautiful dogs.”
“His name was Jules. But he got sick. There was this fever thing went around, it was terrible.”
“I don’t like the sound of that. Fever thing?”
“People lost their dogs. I don’t even like to think about it. But that’s done and gone.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“You could ask the vet over to Mourning Dove if it worries you. His name’s Dr. Wainwright.”
“Thank you, Freya. I might just do that. Wouldn’t want to put our dogs at risk. They’re family.”
“I miss my Jules sometimes.”
“Nice meeting you, Freya. You take good care of Lionel.”
“I will. I do. You take care of the boss.”
As Jane returned her wallet to her handbag and transferred her napkin from lap to table, a man got out of the booth behind hers and glanced at her and headed for the exit.
He was tall, black, and dressed as if he were a little effete, maybe a college professor. But there was nothing effete about him. He was formidable, carrying himself with the confidence of someone who had been in tight corners and had always come out of them with just a scratch or two. The look he gave her appeared casual, though it was calculated, and his eyes were detail magnets, gathering in more at a glance than most people saw in a minute of study.
She steeled herself for trouble.
11
* * *
When Jane stepped outside, the guy was standing by the nearest evergreen, backlit by its sparkle, waiting for her. There were no other pedestrians in the immediate area.
He said, “Excellent technique in there.”
“Excuse me?”
“The waitress didn’t realize you were grilling her. It all seemed like just easy girl talk.”
“Because it was just easy girl talk. You have some wrong idea, it would be good to get it out of your head.”
“Nice cut to that sport coat,” he said. “Does the job.”
If he knew her for some kind of cop, then he was some kind of cop himself. If he knew her for America’s most wanted fugitive, he most likely wouldn’t have been this cool. But his approach didn’t make clear his intent.
“Earlier,” he said, “I saw you in a gallery across the street, heard you with the manager, drawing her out. You didn’t see me.”
“Troubles me that I didn’t.”
“Some of us hick sheriffs know how to run a surveillance.”
He didn’t sound Kentuckian. Wasn’t in uniform. His coat was as tailored for concealed carry as hers. Though she figured she knew the answer, she asked, “You the sheriff here?”
“Hell, no. The place creeps me out.”
A young couple turned the corner, hand in hand, and walked toward them.
The sheriff raised his voice and colored it with delight. “You hardly look a day older. How long has it been? Is it four years?”
“Just a little over three,” Jane sa
id.
“How are Vernon and the kids?” he asked.
“We got Joey into that private school. Little Sarah is taking ballet lessons. Vernon…well, you know Vern. How’s Hortense?”
“Our twenty-fifth anniversary is next month. She’s planning some big to-do we can’t afford, but I figure we’ll make twenty-six.”
The couple had passed out of earshot.
The sheriff lowered his voice. “Once I saw you go in the restaurant, I went in by the back.”
“For what purpose?”
“I wasn’t sure. Curiosity.”
She waited for him to ask who she was, what badge she carried. He didn’t ask.
She said, “Sheriff where?”
“Minnesota. Mostly a rural county. But you might have heard about some trouble we had there last week, forty-six people dead.”
“The woman in the fire wagon took down the governor.”
“You didn’t say crazy woman.”
“How would I know if she was crazy or not?”
He considered her. There must have been reflections of the tree lights in her eyes. There were no lights in his.
“Cora, the fire-wagon woman, was a friend of mine for twenty years. She came here last August to a conference at the resort.”
“A conference about what?”
“Teaching special-needs children. Something happened to her here. She was never the same after.”
“Something? What something?”
“It’s chilly out here. If you can drink a second glass of wine and keep your edge, there’s a tavern at the end of the block.”
“In this town,” she said, “I could drink a bottle and still be stone sober.”
His rental Chevy was parked at the curb nearby. On the way to the tavern, he stopped at the car, opened the trunk, and retrieved a spiral-bound notebook. “Some of Cora’s fiction,” he said.
“She was a writer?”
“A damn good one.”
“I never heard of her…until.”
As they continued toward the tavern, he said, “Emily Dickinson wrote hundreds of poems, only had ten published in her lifetime.”
“It was maybe six, I think.”
“Compared to Cora, Emily was a media superstar in her day.”
“So why does her fiction matter in all this?”
“She also wrote about something that was happening to her. She thought there was a spider in her head, laying eggs in her brain.”
Jane halted. One of the suicides she had researched at the start of all this was a gifted twenty-year-old woman named Portia, a software writer in an entrepreneurial partnership with Microsoft, who’d had every reason to live. The good-bye note Portia left her parents was scored into Jane’s memory: There is a spider in my brain. It talks to me.
“What is it?” the sheriff asked.
She turned to look behind them, half certain that they were being followed. There was no tail.
She surveyed the street and the closed shops on the farther side of it. What she felt was not the threat of a lone observer, but the menace of place, as might be felt in Dachau or Auschwitz, in the Soviet gulags and in the Khmer Rouge killing fields of Cambodia. She had felt it before, on an isolated farm where a pair of vicious sociopaths had raped and killed and buried twenty-two women in five years. With another agent dead and no hope of backup, she stalked and killed both men, taking the second down in a former hog pen that had years earlier begun to serve as a graveyard. Twenty-two victims were buried there without markers, planted in that feces-rich ground as a final insult to their gender. Standing over the body of the man who had tortured and murdered them, she had in some far recess of her mind half heard the cries for mercy that had never been granted. And it had seemed to her that she was by some sixth sense aware of the sorrowful mystic shapes that the bones of these martyred had assumed, beneath where she stood, as the decomposition of flesh and the shifting of the earth had arranged them in a final peace. Now the menace of place was a dark radiance under the bright surface of this town, which was not like a real town, but rather a diorama of an idealized village, which at any moment would be put under glass and preserved in a vacuum that allowed no life within these streets.
“I need that wine,” she told the sheriff.
12
* * *
The tavern was a womb of soft shadows and softer lamplight, the air pleasantly scented with the draft beer that had spilled over the mugs and foamed away through the drain grille beneath the taps. The music was restricted to easy-listening country that celebrated love found as often as it did love lost, providing a comforting measure of sweet melancholy.
In a high-backed booth at the rear of the room, where no one sat near enough to hear, Jane and Luther nursed their drinks while he talked about Cora Gundersun: her notebooks full of stories; her repetitious writing during which she revealed, clause by tortured clause, that a spider lived in her skull; the curiously curtailed FBI search of her house; the intense fire that consumed the place; and the visit by Booth Hendrickson of the Department of Justice, which convinced him that a cover-up was underway.
Jane waited for him to ask who she was, for which agency she worked, but he unburdened himself as if she’d already won his trust.
Finally he put on the table the spiral-bound notebook taken from the trunk of his car. He opened it to a two-page spread of precisely scripted cursive. Cora had written, The strange man at my kitchen table says, “Let’s play Manchurian, Cora,” and I say, “All right,” and then something happens, but I don’t remember what, don’t remember, then he says, “Auf Wiedersehen, you stupid, skinny bitch,” and all I say is “Good-bye,” as if he never insulted me, and then he’s gone as if he were never really there, but, damn it, he was there, he was there, he was there, he was.
The woman had laboriously copied that same passage fifteen or twenty times, each repetition running into the next.
“In the stories of hers you’ve read,” Jane said, “does she ever use herself as a character?”
“No. Not herself and not a Cora Smith or a Cora Jones.”
“So you believe this is something that happened to her.”
“I think it’s one of the last things that happened to her, because if this was her current journal, then those are the last words she ever wrote.” He riffled through the remaining pages to show Jane that they were blank. “What do you make of it?”
“There’s one word that matters most, isn’t there?” she asked.
Luther didn’t at once reply. Decades of police work had surely taught him that successful investigations dealt with the world in its least fanciful interpretation, when the detective kept in mind that human motivations and the actions taken because of them were nearly always as predictable as the hours of sunset and dawn. He regarded stories of elaborate conspiracies as he would regard a claim of abduction by a flying saucer. The possibility that Cora was brainwashed and programmed must be to Luther sheer occult nonsense, and the supernatural had no place in a police investigation.
Yet if he had come this far, from Minnesota to Kentucky, he was a man of considerable intelligence, intellectually flexible in the best sense, aware that evil was real, not just one shade of gray on a spectrum of moral relativism. He also knew evil was industrious and unrelenting, always seeking new ways to express itself. Cora had left clues that led him down a path that he thought didn’t exist, but he was too honest with himself to cling stubbornly to that view when he could see the path lying straight and clear before him.
And so she pressed him by repeating the question. “There’s one word that matters most, isn’t there?”
“Is there?”
“You know the book, the movie.”
“The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon. But brains don’t wash that easily.”
“The book was published way more than half a century ago.” She took a sip of wine and put down the glass and met Luther’s eyes and said, “No one back then ever heard of nanotechnology.”
She saw that the term had full meaning for him, and his eyes widened enough so that she expected him to press her on the subject at once.
Instead, he spoke even more softly. “Is Quantico really the ballbuster they say it is?”
The FBI Academy was at Quantico, a U.S. Marine Corps base in Virginia. By referencing it, he meant to say that he intuited from where she graduated, but also that she was Jane Hawk.
“Didn’t bust mine,” she said.
13
* * *
With no sports talk, with no convivial conversations, with a clientele mostly of individuals rather than couples, none showing any intention of wanting to hook up with anyone else, the tavern offered a society of lone drinkers served by a bartender and two waitresses who seemed to have been infected by the cheerless nature of their customers.
If not for the country music, the quiet was such that Jane and Luther might have been overheard even if they had murmured.
“You knew me in spite of the hair, eyes, glasses?”
Luther Tillman shook his head. “No. It was how you pumped the gallery manager, the waitress. A lot of what you wanted to know was what I wanted to know. Cora kills herself. Quinn Eubanks, sponsor of the conference here, he kills himself. They say your husband killed himself. David James Michael was associated with Eubanks. You asked the waitress about him. I’ve never seen media and government work together to demonize a fugitive to the extent they have you. I see them pull the FBI out of Cora’s house, and a guy from the Justice Department threatens me. Only after I process all that, then I look closer at you and figure, Yeah, I know her.”
A new tune swelled in the tavern—“Wichita Lineman” sung by Glen Campbell—full of longing and melancholy. Jane had always found the song as eerie as it was beautiful. As she surveyed the lone drinkers on their barstools and at their tables, the music described their mood and inspired her to wonder about them.
She looked at Luther. “You have a family?”
“A wife, two daughters.”