by Dean Koontz
The immense house was called Crown Hill, after the knoll on which it stood. The 280-acre property lay along the northern coast, which has always been a dangerous length of shore. Every coast is dangerous, of course: Land falls away to the chaos of vast waters.
Jillian Hathaway was the most famous and beloved actress of silent films. She made two talkies, as well. One became a classic: Circle of Evil. She supposedly married Terrence Blackwood in Acapulco in 1926. They were never wed. She moved in to the castle that wasn’t. In 1929, at the age of twenty-eight, she retired from films.
Jillian gave birth to Marjorie, her only child, also in 1929. The once-glamorous star hung herself fourteen years thereafter. She was still very beautiful. Even in death, she was very beautiful. Perhaps especially in death.
The Blackwood family continued to produce new generations. Decades later, Anita Blackwood gave birth to Teejay’s great-grandson. Terrence, connoisseur of beauty, wanted the deformed infant placed at once in an institution. The father, of course, agreed. But Anita would not allow her son to be discarded like trash.
In time, perhaps she regretted her decision. Over the years, though she taught the boy to read well at a young age, she otherwise distanced herself from him. Eventually she abandoned him at Crown Hill, to the mercy of the merciless old man.
She just went away. No good-bye. They said she had grown scared of the boy, her own boy, repelled by his form and face.
When he was nine years old and abandoned by his mother, the ill-made boy was moved from the guest house he had shared with her into the round room at the top of the south tower.
The boy wasn’t me yet. In time, he would become me.
The boy hated old Teejay. For many reasons. One reason was the beatings.
Another reason was the tower room.
An electric heater made the room warm in winter. Because of the ocean influence, the summer nights were seldom sweltering. A toilet and shower stall were added at some expense. A mattress on the floor made a good bed. There were as many pillows as the boy wanted. A fine armchair and a desk were built right there in the room because they couldn’t be hauled up the spiral stairs. Breakfast and lunch were sent up by dumbwaiter. Using an in-house phone, he could request any treat he wished. At night, he could borrow whatever books he wanted from the immense library off the main hall.
The boy was comfortable enough but lonely. The tower room lay high above everything and far from everyone.
In the evening, after others retired, if there were no guests, he was permitted into the house. A late dinner was brought to the boy in the library. He ate off disposable plates with disposable utensils. What might have touched his mouth must never touch another’s, although he had no contagious disease.
The staff was forbidden to interact with him or he with them. If a servant violated this rule, he would be fired. The old man paid them exceedingly well not merely to maintain silence toward the boy but also to remain silent about him to the outside world, about him and everything that occurred at Crown Hill. None would risk losing his job.
If the boy initiated conversation, they reported him. Then came the beatings in the privacy of the old man’s suite.
He hated Teejay. He hated Regina, too, and Melissa. Regina was Anita’s sister, the boy’s aunt, the old man’s granddaughter. Melissa was Regina’s daughter. They were beautiful, as the boy was not, and they could go anywhere they wished, anytime they wanted. Regina and Melissa spoke to the staff and the staff spoke to them. But because Teejay forbid it, neither of them spoke to the boy. Once he overheard Regina and a maid mocking him. How she laughed.
One evening when the boy was twelve, in the library maze, in a far corner, on a high shelf, he found an album of black-and-white photos of Jillian Hathaway. Many were glamour shots of the movie star in elegant gowns and costumes.
The last photo in the album might have been taken by police. The boy suspected old Teejay, then her young husband, took it. In the picture, Jillian hung like a wingless angel from a tower-room beam.
She stripped out of her clothes before climbing on the stepstool and slipping the noose around her neck. The boy had never before seen a naked woman.
The boy wasn’t embarrassed to be half bewitched by the nudity of a woman from whom he was directly descended. He lacked the moral training that would allow such embarrassment. He had the capacity to be ashamed of only one thing: his appearance. By cruel experience, he had learned that deformity was the only sin. Therefore his sin was that he existed.
She was some kind of grandmother to him, but nonetheless voluptuous. Her pale breasts. Her full hips. Her slender legs.
He removed the photograph from the album, returned the album to the high shelf, and took the picture to his round room in the tower.
Often the boy dreamed of her. Sometimes she just hung there in the dream, dead but talking to him, though he never remembered what she said after he woke.
In other dreams, Jillian descended from the beam like a spider on a silken thread. She removed the noose from her neck. She held it for a moment above her head, as if it were a halo. Then she tried to slip the loop of rope over the boy’s head.
Sometimes it became a nightmare as she struggled to strangle him. On other occasions, he accepted the noose and let her lead him to the stepstool. Although she never hung him, he woke rested from such dreams.
One night the dreams changed forever.
For the first time, he was naked in a dream. Naked, Jillian Hathaway descended but this time didn’t stop at his bedside. With the noose around her neck, she slipped beneath the covers, and the rough rope trailed thrillingly across his body. He felt her breasts against him, more real than anything he ever before felt in a dream. The boy woke trembling, wet, and spent.
For a while, he thought it was a thing that could happen only in a dream with a dead woman. Eventually he learned that the photo of a dead woman worked as well as a dream of her.
The boy wasn’t me yet. But he was becoming me.
9
THEY LIVED IN A HANDSOME AND SPACIOUS THREE-STORY house—four, if you counted the subterranean garage—that no police detective could afford, a consequence of Nicolette’s success as a painter, which had been growing for a decade. On a double lot, they had generous grounds for a city house and distance from their neighbors. Made of brick and painted white, with black shutters and a black slate roof, the place appeared Georgian, but it was not a scrupulous example of the style.
John parked in the underground garage, between Nicolette’s SUV and the Chevy belonging to Walter and Imogene Nash, the couple who kept the house well ordered and the family well fed. Because mornings were sacrosanct in the Calvino residence, the Nashes came to work at 11:00 A.M. five days a week, and were usually gone by seven.
An elevator served the garage and the three floors above. But the sound of it would announce his arrival and the kids would come running. He wanted a moment alone with Nicky.
On the drive home, he had called her and discovered she was in her studio, far past her usual quitting time. The master suite and the studio occupied the entire third floor.
In the corner of the garage where a few umbrellas dangled from a wall rack, he hung his raincoat on a hook.
Now that he was home, where life made sense and the madness of the world did not intrude, the events at the Lucas place seemed to have been dreamed more than experienced. He reached into his sport-coat pocket, half expecting the tiny silver bells would not be there.
As his fingers found the small box from Piper’s Gallery, three knocks and three more issued from the farther end of the garage, from beyond the parked cars. Sharp, insistent, the rapping knuckles of an impatient visitor at a door.
In spite of fluorescent panels, shadows swagged here and there. None moved or resolved into a figure.
Directly overhead, the rapping came again. John looked at the plastered ceiling, startled—then relieved. Just air bubbles knocking through a copper water line, rattling the pipe agains
t a joist.
From a pocket of the hanging raincoat, he retrieved the six cookies that Marion Dunnaway had presented to him in a OneZip bag.
He unlocked an inside door and stepped onto the landing at the foot of the back stairs. The lock engaged automatically behind him.
The door at the top opened on Nicolette’s large studio. Working on a painting, her back toward him, she didn’t know he had arrived.
Girlishly slim, brown hair almost black and tied in a ponytail, barefoot, wearing tan jeans and a yellow T-shirt, Nicky worked with the litheness and physical charm of a dancer between dances.
John smelled turpentine and under it the fainter scent of stand oil. On a small table to the right of Nicky, from an insulated mug, the aromas of black tea and currants rose on ribbons of steam.
The same table supported a vase of two dozen so-called black roses that were in fact dark red, darker than a corrupted vermilion pigment in the process of reverting to a black form of mercuric sulfide. The striking flowers had no scent that he could detect.
When painting, Nicky always kept roses nearby, in whatever color her mood required. She called them humility roses, because if she became too impressed with any canvas on her easel—which could lead to a sloppiness born of pride—she needed only to study a rose in full bloom to remind herself that her work was a pale reflection of true creation.
Her current project was a triptych, three large vertical panels, a scene that reminded John of Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street: Rainy Weather, though her painting depicted neither Paris nor rain. Caillebotte’s masterly work was an inspiration for her, but she had her own style and subject matter.
John liked to watch his wife at moments she thought herself unobserved. When she lacked all self-awareness, her characteristic ease of action and elegant posture were so pure and unaffected that she became the essence of grace, and so beautiful.
This time, his belief that he had arrived with perfect stealth proved wrong when she said, “What have you been staring at so long—the painting or my ass? Be careful what you answer.”
“You look so delectable in those jeans,” he said, “it’s amazing you’ve painted something that could be equally mesmerizing.”
“Ah! You’re as smooth as ever, Detective Calvino.”
He went to her and put a hand on her shoulder. She turned her head, leaned back, and he kissed her throat, the delicate line of her jaw, the corner of her mouth.
“You’ve been eating coconut something,” she said.
“Not me.” He dangled the bag of cookies in front of her. “You could smell them through an airtight seal?”
“I’m starved. I came up here at eleven, never stopped for lunch. This bitch”—she indicated the triptych—“wants to break me.”
Occasionally, when a picture proved a special challenge to her talent, she referred to it as either a bitch or a bastard. She could not explain why, in her mind, each painting had a specific gender.
“A lovely army nurse baked these for the kids. But I’m sure they’ll share.”
“I’m not so sure, the little fiends. Why are you hanging out with army nurses?”
“She was older than your mother and just as proper. She’s a sort of witness on a case.”
John knew many cops who never discussed active investigations with their wives, for fear that evidence would be compromised during beauty-shop gossip or over coffee with the neighbors.
He could tell Nicky anything, with confidence that she would not repeat a word of what he said. She was warm and forthcoming at all times, but regarding his police work, she had the virtue of a stone.
As for his current and unofficial investigation, however, he intended to keep it to himself. At least for the moment.
Nicky said, “Better than a cookie—cabernet.”
“I’ll open a bottle, then freshen up for dinner.”
“I’ve got maybe a dozen strokes to make and one sable brush to clean, and then I’m done with this bitch for the day.”
Another door opened on a large landing at the head of the front stairs. Directly across from the studio stood the door to the master suite: beyond, a bedroom with a white-marble fireplace featuring ebony inlays, a sitting room, two walk-in closets, a spacious bath.
The retreat included a compact bar with an under-the-counter refrigerator and wine cooler. John uncorked a bottle of Cakebread cabernet sauvignon and carried it, with two glasses, into the master bathroom, where he put everything on the black-granite counter between the sinks and poured for both of them.
When he glanced at himself in the mirror, he didn’t look the least bit apprehensive.
In his closet, he took the boxed bells from his coat pocket. He put them in the jewelry drawer with his cuff links, tie chains, and spare watch.
He slipped out of his shoulder rig and put it, with the pistol still contained, on a high shelf.
He hung his sport coat on the to-iron rod and tossed his shirt in the laundry basket. He sat on a dressing bench, slipped out of his rain-wet Rockport walking shoes, and set them aside to be shined. His socks were damp. He stripped them off and put on a fresh pair.
These mundane tasks were slowly taking the supernatural shine off the day. He began to think that in time he might find logical explanations for everything that had seemed outré, that what appeared to be malevolent fate in action might look more like mere coincidence in the morning light.
At his bathroom sink, he scrubbed his hands and face. A hot washcloth, like a poultice, drew the ache out of his neck muscles.
As John was toweling dry, Nicky arrived, took her glass of wine, and sat on the wide edge of the marble tub. She wore white sneakers on the toes of which, as a joke during play with Minette a few weeks earlier, she had painted LEFT and RIGHT, each word on the wrong shoe.
Picking up his wine, leaning on the counter with his back to the mirror, John said, “Walter and Imogene are still here?”
“They had a mini-crisis with Preston this morning. He’s been hospitalized again. They didn’t get here until two o’clock.”
Preston, their thirty-six-year-old son, lived with them. He had been through rehab twice, but he still enjoyed washing down illegally obtained prescription medications with tequila.
“I told them to take the day off, no problem,” Nicky said, “but you know how they are.”
“Responsible as hell.”
She smiled. “Not much call for their type in the modern world. I told them you expected to be late, but they insisted on staying to serve dinner and do the initial cleanup.”
“Has Minette eaten?”
“Not without Daddy. No way. We’re all night owls here, and she might be the most nocturnal of us all.”
“The Cakebread’s nice.”
“Bliss.” She sipped her wine.
On her driver’s license, her eyes were said to be blue, but they were purple. Sometimes they were as bright and deep as an effulgent twilight sky. At the moment, they were iris petals in soft shadow.
She said, “Preston worries me, you know.”
“Doesn’t worry me. He’s a self-centered creep. He’ll overdose or he won’t. What worries me is the toll he’s taking on his parents.”
“No, I mean … Walter and Imogene are such nice people. They love him. They raised him well, did all the right things. Yet he became what he is. You never know.”
“Zach, Naomi, Minnie—they’re going to turn out fine. They’re good kids.”
“They’re good kids,” Nicolette agreed. “And Preston was a good kid once. You never know. You can only hope.”
John thought of Billy Lucas, the clean-cut honor student and book lover. The rancid puddle of milk and blood. The blood-glazed collage of unpaid bills. The throttled grandmother, the sister’s crimson bed.
“They’ll be fine. They’re great.” He changed the subject. “By the way, something happened today that made me wonder about those snapshots we took at Minnie’s birthday party. Did you email them to your folks?”
“Sure. I told you.”
“I guess I forgot. To anyone else?”
“Just Stephanie. Sometimes Minnie reminds me of her when she was a little girl.”
Stephanie was Nicky’s younger sister, now thirty-two and the sous-chef at an acclaimed restaurant in Boston.
“Would Stephanie or your folks have forwarded the pictures to anyone else?”
Nicky shrugged, then looked puzzled. “Why? Suddenly this seems like a gentle grilling.”
He didn’t want to alarm her. Not yet. Not until and if he could logically explain the reason he was worried.
“At work, I ran into someone who mentioned Minnie in the bunny ears at her birthday party. Someone emailed him the photo. He didn’t remember who.”
“Well, she’s supercute in those ears, and you know how people swap things that tickle them. The photo’s probably up on any number of websites. Cute Kids dot com, Bunny Ears dot com—”
“Predatory Pedophiles dot com.”
Getting to her feet, she said, “Sometimes you’re all cop when half cop would be tough enough.”
“You’re right. The problem is you never know when it’s going to turn out to be a half-cop or an all-cop day.”
She rang her glass against his, a single clear note. “You can’t go through life always in high gear.”
“You know what I’m like. I don’t downshift well.”
“Let’s go have dinner. Later I’ll shift your gears for you.”