by Peter Straub
I idly turned around to see who else was on the plane, and the alcohol in my system instantly turned to ice: two rows behind me, at the window seat in the last row of the first-class section, was my sister April. For a moment our eyes met, and then she turned away toward the gray nothingness beyond the window, her chin propped on her nine-year-old palm. I had not seen her for so long that I had managed to forget the conflicting, violent sensations her appearances caused in me. I experienced a rush of love, mixed as always with grief and sadness, also with anger. I took her in, her hair, her bored, slightly discontented face. She was still wearing the blue dress in which she had died. Her eyes shifted toward me again, and I nearly stood up and stepped out into the aisle. Before I had time to move, I found myself staring at the covered buttons on the uniform of the stewardess who had placed herself between April and myself. I looked up into her face, and she took a step back.
“Can I help you with anything?” she asked. “Another vodka, sir?”
I nodded, and she moved up the aisle to fetch the drink. April’s seat was empty.
4
AFTER I SAUNTERED DREAMILY out into the clean, reverberant spaces of Millhaven’s airport, looking for another upright gray wraith like myself, I didn’t recognize the overweight balding executive in the handsome gray suit who had been inspecting my fellow passengers until he finally stepped right in front of me. He said, “Tim!” and burst out laughing. Finally I saw John Ransom’s familiar face in the face of the man before me, and I smiled. He had put on a lot of pounds and lost a lot of hair since Camp Crandall. Except for an enigmatic, almost restless quality in the cast of his features, the man pronouncing my name before me might have been the president of an insurance company. He put his arms around me, and for a second everything we had seen of our generation’s war came to life around us, distanced now, a part of our lives we had survived.
“Why are you always wrecked whenever I see you?” he asked.
“Because when I see you I never know what I’m getting into,” I told him. “But this is just a temporary lapse.”
“I don’t mind if you drink.”
“Don’t be rash,” I said. “I think the whole idea of coming out here must have spooked me a little.”
Of course Ransom knew nothing of my early life—I still had to tell him why I had been so fascinated by William Damrosch and the murders he was supposed to have committed—and he let his arms drop and stepped back. “Well, that makes two of us. Let’s go down and get your bags.”
When John Ransom left the freeway to drive through downtown Millhaven on the way to the near east side, I saw a city that was only half-familiar. Whole rows of old brick buildings turned brown by grime had been replaced by bright new structures that gleamed in the afternoon light; a parking lot had been transformed into a sparkling little park; on the site of the gloomy old auditorium was a complex of attractive concert halls and theaters that Ransom identified as the Center for the Performing Arts.
It was like driving through the back lot of a movie studio—the new hotels and office buildings that reshaped the skyline seemed illusory, like film sets built over the actual face of the past. After New York, the city seemed unbelievably clean and quiet. I wondered if the troubling, disorderly city I remembered had disappeared behind a thousand face-lifts.
“I suppose Arkham College looks like Stanford these days,” I said.
He grunted. “No, Arkham’s the same old rock pile it always was. We get by. Barely.”
“How did you wind up there in the first place?”
“Come to think of it, which I seldom do, that must seem a little strange.”
I waited for the story.
“I went there because of a specific man, Alan Brookner, who was the head of the religion department. He was famous in my field, I mean really famous, one of the three or four most significant people in the field. When I was in graduate school, I hunted down everything he’d ever written. He was the only real scholar at Arkham, of course. I think they gave him his first job, and he never even thought about leaving for a more glamorous position. That kind of prestige never meant anything to him. Once the school realized what they had, they let him write his own ticket, because they thought he’d attract other people of his stature.”
“Well, he attracted you.”
“Ah, but I’m not even close to Alan’s stature. He was one of a kind. And when other famous religious scholars came out here, they generally took one look at Arkham and went back to the schools they came from. He did bring in a lot of good graduate students, but even that’s fallen off a bit lately. Well, considerably, to tell you the truth.” John Ransom shook his head and fell silent for a moment.
Now we were driving past Goethe Avenue’s sprawling stone mansions, long ago broken up into offices and apartment houses. The great elms that had lined these streets had all died, but Goethe Avenue seemed almost unchanged.
“I gather that you became quite close to this professor,” I said, having forgotten his name.
“You could say that,” Ransom said. “I married his daughter.”
“Ah,” I said. “Tell me about that.”
After Vietnam, he had gone to India, and in India he had turned back toward life. He had studied, meditated, studied, meditated, courted calm and won it: he would always be the person who had burrowed through a mountain of dead bodies, but he was also the person who had crawled out on the other side and survived. In all of this, he had a Master, and the Master had helped him see over the horrors he had endured. His Master, the leader of a small following containing only a few non-Indians like Ransom, was a young woman of great simplicity and beauty named Mina.
After a year in the ashram, his nightmares and sudden attacks of panic had left him. He had seen the other side of the absolute darkness into which Vietnam had drawn him. Mina had sent him intact out into the world again, and he had spent three years studying in England and then another three at Harvard without telling more than half a dozen people that he had once been a Green Beret in Vietnam. Then Alan Brookner had brought him back to Millhaven.
A month after he began working at Arkham under Brookner, he had met Brookner’s daughter, April.
John thought that he might have fallen in love with April Brookner the first time he had seen her. She had wandered into the study to borrow a book while he was helping her father organize a collection of essays for publication. A tall blond athletic-looking girl in her early twenties, April had shaken his hand with surprising firmness and smiled into his eyes. “I’m glad you’re helping him with this muddle,” she had said. “Left to his own devices, he’d still be getting mixed up between Vorstellung and vijnapti, not that he isn’t anyhow.” The incongruity between her tennis-player looks and allusions to Brentano and Sanskrit philosophy surprised him, and he grinned. She and her father had exchanged a few good-natured insults, and then April wandered off toward her father’s fiction shelves. She stretched up to take down a book. Ransom had not been able to take his eyes off her. “I’m looking for a work of radically impure consciousness,” she said. “What do you think, Raymond Chandler or William Burroughs?” The title of Ransom’s dissertation had been The Concept of Pure Consciousness, and his grin grew wider. “The Long Goodbye,” he said. “Oh, I don’t think that’s impure enough,” she said. She turned over the book in her hands and cocked her head. “But I guess I’ll settle for it.” She showed him the title of the book she had already selected: it was The Long Goodbye. Then she dazzled him with a smile and left the room. “Impure consciousness?” Ransom had asked the old man. “Watch out for that one,” said the old man. “I think her first word was virtuoso.” Ransom asked if she really knew the difference between Vorstellung and vijnapti. “Not as well as I do,” Brookner had grumped. “Why don’t you come for dinner next Friday?” On Friday, Ransom had shown up embarrassingly overdressed in his best suit. He had still enjoyed dinner, yet April was so much younger than he that he could not imagine actually taking her out on a date.
And he was not sure he actually knew what a “date” was anymore, if he ever had. He didn’t think it could mean the same thing to April Brookner that it did to him—she’d want him to play tennis, or spend half the night dancing. She looked as if she relished exertion. Ransom was stronger than he appeared to be (especially when he was wearing a banker’s suit). He jogged, he swam in the college pool, but he did not dance or play tennis. His idea of a night out involved an interesting meal and a good bottle of wine: April looked as if she would follow a couple of hours of archery with a good fast run up one of the minor Alps. He asked her if she had liked the Chandler novel. “What a poignant book,” she said. “The hero makes one friend, and by the end he can’t stand him. The loneliness is so brutal that the most emotional passages are either about violence or bars.” “Deliver me from this young woman, Ransom,” Brookner said. “She frightens me.” Ransom asked, “Was virtuoso really her first word?” “No,” April said. “My first words were senile dementia.”
About a year ago, the memory of this remark had ceased to be funny.
There had been a courtship unlike any Ransom had ever experienced. April Brookner seemed to be constantly assessing him according to some impenetrably private standard. April was very sane, but her sanity transcended normal definitions. Ransom later learned that two years earlier she had backed out of marriage with a boy who had graduated from the University of Chicago with her because—in her words—“I realized that I hated all his metaphors. I couldn’t live with someone who would never understand that metaphors are real.” She had recognized the loneliness in the Chandler novel because it echoed her own.
Her mother had died in April’s fourth year, and she had grown up the brilliant daughter of a brilliant man. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Chicago, she moved back to Millhaven to do graduate work at the Millhaven branch of the University of Illinois. April never had any intention of teaching, but she wanted to be near her father. Ransom sometimes felt that she had married him because she couldn’t think of anything else to do.
—Why me?, Ransom had asked her once.
—Oh, you were obviously the most interesting man around, she said. You didn’t act like a jerk just because you thought I was beautiful. You always ordered just the right thing in Chinese restaurants, you were kind of experimental, and my jokes didn’t make you mad. You didn’t act like your mission in life was to correct me.
After they married, April left graduate school and took a job in a brokerage house. Ransom had thought she would quit within six months, but April astounded him by the speed and pleasure with which she had learned the business. Within eighteen months, she knew minute details of hundreds of companies—companies of all sizes. She knew how the division presidents got on with their boards; she knew which factories were falling apart; she knew about new patents and old grudges and unhappy stockholders. “Really, it isn’t any harder than learning everything there is to know about sixteenth-century English poetry,” she said. “These guys come in drooling with greed, and all I have to do is show them how they can make a little more money. When I do that, they give me a chunk of their pension funds. And when that does well, they fall down and kiss my feet.”
“You have corrupted my daughter,” Brookner said to him once. “Now she is a money machine. The only consolation is that I will not have to spend my declining years in a room with a neon sign flashing outside the window.”
“It’s just a game to April,” Ransom had said to him. “She says her real master is Jacques Derrida.”
“I spawned a postmodern capitalist,” Brookner said. “You understand, at Arkham it is an embarrassment suddenly to possess a great deal of money.”
The marriage settled into a busy but peaceful partnership. April told him that she was the world’s only ironic Yuppie—when she was thirty-five, she was going to quit to have a baby, manage their own investments, learn to be a great cook, and keep up her elaborate research projects into local history. Ransom had wondered if April would ever really leave her job, baby or not. Certainly none of her customers wanted her to abandon them. The Millhaven financial community had given her their annual Association Award at a dinner April had privately ridiculed, and the Ledger had run a photograph of the two of them smiling a little shamefacedly as April cradled the huge cup on which her name was to be inscribed.
Ransom would never know if April would have left her job. Five days after April had won the hideous cup, someone had stabbed her, beaten her, and left her for dead.
He still lived in the duplex he and April had rented when they were first married. Twenty-one Ely Place was three blocks north of Berlin Avenue, a long walk from Shady Mount, but close to the UI-M campus, where April had once been enrolled, and only a ten-minute drive to Millhaven’s downtown, where he and April had both had their offices. April’s money had allowed them to buy the building and convert it into a single-family house. Now Ransom had a book-lined office on the third floor, April an office filled with glittering computers, stacks of annual reports, and a fax machine that continued to disgorge papers; the second floor had been converted into a giant master bedroom and a smaller guest room, both with bathrooms; the ground floor contained the living room, dining room, and kitchen.
5
HOW IS YOUR FATHER-IN-LAW handling all this?”
“Alan doesn’t really know what happened to April.” Ransom hesitated. “He, ah, he’s changed quite a bit over the past year or so.” He paused again and frowned at the stack of books on his coffee table. All of them were about Vietnam—Fields of Fire, The Thirteenth Valley, 365 Days, The Short Timers, The Things They Carried. “I’ll make some coffee,” he said.
He went into the kitchen, and I began to take in, with admiration and even a little envy, the house Ransom and his wife had made together. Extraordinary paintings, paintings I could not quite place, covered the wall opposite the long couch that was my vantage point. I closed my eyes. A few minutes later, the clatter of the tray against the table awakened me. Ransom did not notice that I had dozed off.
“I want an explanation,” he said. “I want to know what happened to my wife.”
“And you don’t trust the police,” I said.
“I wonder if the police think I did it.” He threw out his arms, lifted them, then poured coffee into pottery mugs. “Maybe they think I’m trying to mislead them by bringing up all the old Blue Rose business.” He took his own mug to a tufted leather chair.
“But you haven’t been charged with anything.”
“I get the feeling that the homicide detective, Fontaine, is just waiting to pounce.”
“I don’t understand why a homicide detective is involved in the first place—your wife is in the hospital.”
“My wife is dying in the hospital.”
“You can’t really be sure of that,” I said.
He started shaking his head, misery and conflict printed clearly on his face, and I said, “I guess I’m confused. How can a homicide detective investigate a death that hasn’t happened?”
He looked up, startled. “Oh. I see what you mean. The reason for that is the other victim.”
I had completely forgotten the other victim.
“The assault on April falls into an ongoing homicide investigation. When and if she dies, of course, Fontaine will be in charge of that investigation, too.”
“Did April know this guy?”
Ransom shook his head again. “Nobody knows who he is.”
“He was never identified?”
“He had no identification of any kind, nothing at all, and nobody ever reported him missing. I think he must have been a vagrant, a homeless person, something like that.”
I asked if he had seen the man’s body.
He shifted in his chair. “I gather the killer scattered pieces of the guy all over Livermore Avenue.”
Before I could respond, Ransom went on. “The guy who’s doing this doesn’t care who he kills. I don’t even think he needed an actual reason.
It was just time to get to work again.”
One reason John Ransom had wanted me to come back to Millhaven was that he had been talking nonstop to himself inside his head for weeks, and now he had to let some of these arguments out.
“Tell me about the person who did this,” I said. “Tell me who you think he is—the kind of person you see when you think of him.”
Ransom looked relieved.
“Well, I have been thinking about that, of course. I’ve been trying to work out what kind of person would be capable of doing these things.” He leaned toward me, ready, even eager, to share his speculations.
I settled back in my own chair, all too conscious of the disparity between what Ransom and I were discussing and our setting. It was one of the most beautiful private rooms I had ever seen, beautiful in a restrained way centered in the paintings that filled the room. I thought that one of these must be a Vuillard, and the others seemed oddly familiar. The soft colors and flowing shapes of the paintings carried themselves right through the room, into the furniture and the few pieces of sculpture visible on low tables.
“I think he’s about sixty. He might have had an alcoholic parent, and he was probably an abused child. You might find some kind of head injury in his history—that turns up surprisingly often, with these people. He is very, very controlled. I bet he has a kind of inflexible inner schedule. Every day, he does the same things at the same time. He’s still strong, so he might even exercise regularly. He would probably seem to be the last person you’d suspect of these crimes. And he is intelligent.”
“What does he look like? What did he do for a living? How does he relax?”
“I think the only thing that distinguishes him physically, apart from his being in excellent condition for his age, is that he looks very respectable. And I think he might live down in that area where the murders took place, because with one exception, he stuck with it.”