by Harker Moore
Willie curled in a fetal ball on the sofa, the chenille throw tucked around her. The fire she’d lit was nearing the ember stage, and she knew she should toss in another log before it went out. Instead she reached for the wine bottle and poured herself another glass of Chardonnay. She let the wine slide down her throat, tight from the fresh bout of crying she’d given in to.
Besides the tears, she had been unprepared for the selfish mean streak she’d recently encountered in herself. Before, there had been selfishness, but never meanness. And where was the understanding? She was a psychiatrist, after all. Yet it was understanding, in the simplest human terms, that she seemed to have lost. An understanding of the heart. Being in love with Michael should have inspired, not limited her compassion. He had every right to feel pain and anger and despair. His withdrawal was natural. He had suffered terrible loss his entire life—Elena’s murder, followed so closely by the death of his parents. What had he said? The accident had been the only act of mercy from a vengeful God. His parents had only been going through the motions of living; they had died with his sister.
And now Margot’s murder . . . and the twins. She reached for another Kleenex. Her tears had a will of their own. Everything she knew about kidnapping told her the boys were already dead. And their death was a death sentence for Michael. In a quick vision, she saw him putting his gun into his mouth and pulling the trigger. Please, God . . .
God? How dare she? Calling on a God in whom she had little faith, and then only in her need. She tossed the tissue onto the floor with the others. The mound on the carpet looked crazily like a bouquet of the carnations she’d learned to make as a girl. Back then, she had dipped the ruffled edges of the handmade flowers into food coloring. The colors bleeding . . .
She looked over at the dying fire and decided to bring it back to life. She stoked the chunks of charred wood. Amber fireflies rose in flight against the poker, and she set another log in place. She knew she should eat something, but she wasn’t hungry. Pretty soon she’d be drunk. When she turned to walk back to her nest on the sofa, she noticed she’d missed the table in the entryway and that her large satchel bag lay on the floor like a wounded animal.
She walked over and picked it up. Just as quickly she knew she should have left it. But she had retrieved it, and now she was unzipping it. Inside, settled into the bottom, was the small coin purse. Sometimes she would go for months without opening it. Her private little Pandora’s box. A pocket of guilt toted around like Sisyphus’s stone. For one stretch of time, she had gone almost three years without disturbing its contents. Good judgment told her now was the worst possible time to . . .
She reached into her handbag. Her fingers bypassing her wallet, cosmetic kit, cell phone, keys. Moving past a hundred small necessities that women carried with them. Seeking the tiny pouch of leather that held nothing and everything. She grasped the coin purse, feeling the cool metal of its crossed nubs, the smooth arch of its spine.
The black leather had cracked and softened over the years, the metal grown dull. She rubbed the dry surface, hesitating, and then with one economical twist, the coin purse was open. Her fingers went inside.
They were such simple things, innocuous, the two thin strips of plastic, one long, one short. Hospital identification bracelets, looped round each other, curling in the palm of her hand. Patient: French, Wilhelmina. Patient: Baby Girl French. The remains of the day.
Adelia watched him over the rim of her glass. In her estimation Michael Darius didn’t look so good. Oh, he was still plenty handsome. For a white boy. Those blue eyes could bring any woman to her knees. But tonight he seemed to wear the weight of the world on his shoulders. And his unshaven face looked like he’d been nursing a bottle of booze for days, though she knew better. She thought he looked marked by something. Like Cain from the Bible. Or like somebody had put the hoodoo on him. Of course, she reckoned she wouldn’t look so good herself if someone took her Samuel. Now if Tyrone Johnson up and got himself killed . . . well, that was another matter entirely. Though Mama had taught her better, not to hold grudges, and her Baptist breeding preached kindness toward those less fortunate. But her ex-husband was the most unfortunate son-of-a-bitch she’d ever had the misfortune to know.
She set the mug on the table in front of her. The cold brew had gone down easy.
“Everybody sends their best. . . .” Shit, what was she doing? Small talk never made it with Darius.
He looked up, read her mind and smiled.
“Well, that was nice.”
“What?”
“That smile.”
He shrugged and lifted his glass. “Want another?”
“Off duty, but one’s my limit. I don’t want some asshole to take advantage of me on the subway home.”
“Fat chance of that happening.”
“You think I’m that tough, Darius.”
“You know how to handle yourself.”
“And you, Darius, you know how to handle yourself?”
He gave her another look. “Not so damn well.”
“Probably better than you’re giving yourself credit for.”
“You sound like Hanae Sakura.”
“She been by? I like that woman.”
He nodded.
“Well, she’s right. I know it’s bad when you lose someone. Especially like your Margot died. But you haven’t lost those boys.”
“And how the crap you know that, Delia? No ransom note. No nothing. They might be lying dead in some ditch in Westchester County.”
“Shut your mouth. Besides, they searched Westchester. Had all those dogs out.” She stood. “Maybe I will take you up on that second beer. . . . Sit, I can find my way to the kitchen.”
When she got back, she noticed he hadn’t moved. His body stiff and hunched over like he was holding something inside him ready to spill out. His fingers clinched in a big knot between his legs. She hadn’t noticed before, but his feet were bare. He had pretty feet for a man.
“Listen, I know you can understand this, Darius. Because that’s just the way it is with you.” She relocated on the sofa opposite him. “You see that movie The Shining?”
“Jack Nicholson.”
She nodded. “Remember the old black man . . . Scatman Crothers. He told Nicholson’s son he had ‘the shining’ on him, because he knew things before they happened. You got the shining on you, Darius. That’s what makes you such a good cop. I guess all good cops have a little of the shining on them. Remember Kelly calling it a tightening in the gut?”
She saw him looking at her, but not seeing her.
“And right now I got a little of the shining on me. And it’s telling me that your babies are still alive. And they want you to come and get them.”
He refocused, was staring at her now.
“I know you’re on leave. But nobody says you have to sit on your ass in this apartment.”
Between his fingers, Michael held a small strip of wood, wood that might on another day have become a flying buttress or gothic arch for one of his models. But tonight it existed simply as wood. Holding it in his hands seemed to connect him to what he most needed. The objectiveness of the ordinary. He brought the wood to his nose, inhaling its scent. A smell that existed as did the wood itself, as something neither of good nor evil. On the side neither of gods or demons. And like the wood he simply desired to be. Without thought or feeling. Yet thought and feeling came.
He was a sophomore in high school before he ever saw a dead person, and that was his sister Elena. Dressed in a white lace dress with a ring of fresh flowers around her head as though she were a bride. Her gold hair precisely draped over her shoulders. Never had rape and murder fashioned a more beautiful sacrifice.
Out of the corner of his eye, he watched his great-aunts, seated in a short row, languid or stiff, filling the funeral parlor’s Victorian sofa, grieving in the manner of the old ways because the magnitude of this occasion demanded it. In dusty black, shrouded in black veils, they appeared to his
teenage eyes to be a line of crows, cawing, if not against death itself, then against the overwhelming pain of physical separation. He had suppressed a shiver as a pair of claw-bone hands reached for him. Holding his breath as she petted and kissed him, he still tasted her old woman odors that stained his cheek and the sleeves of his new black suit.
May you have abundant life. May her memory be eternal. They’d offered him condolences, squeezing his hand or embracing him. He had wanted to run away. Run from all the death and mourning. And the worst of it was he could not cry. Though his eyes and throat and chest ached for tears.
When the time had come to close the casket, his parents, one on each side of him, knelt and offered a prayer, and each in turn kissed first their daughter’s face, then the gold crucifix Elena bore upon her chest, as if in testament to some duty done for God. He remembered his father nudging him to do the same, and he had looked then at his father’s face, and it had seemed infinitely more dead than Elena’s.
He bent over the satin-lined coffin and observed his sister’s body, a soft waxen figure, where the line between her two lips had become almost indistinguishable. The curves where her nostrils met her cheeks vague. The discrete folds of skin of her eyelids lost. So that the whole of Elena was a soft beautiful blur, the rigid boundaries of death mercifully yielding.
He stood a long time looking down, then arched over into the deep of the casket and kissed her. He froze above her face. Then he was pulled away. In the dark of the car as he rode to the church, he touched his lips. Elena had felt hard. Like parched leather. But cold. Colder than anything he’d ever touched. The processors of death had tried to play a cheap trick on him with their clever cosmetic executions. Their pink plumping juices. But he’d not been fooled: His Elena was gone. That hideous masquerade in the coffin was to pacify the living.
Now he lay the wood on the worktable and rubbed his fist against his forehead. He had allowed himself to cry with Hanae. Yet grieving for Margot brought him no relief. Death did not fall somewhere between breathing and not breathing. Death was the end of breathing. But his boys . . . Were they still alive, as both Hanae and Adelia believed?
He stood and walked to the window and looked up at the flat black sky, made ragged by a tight crowd of ascending buildings. His head hurt, as the ancient memories played themselves out. His sister’s service at the big Greek Orthodox church, then the interment at the cemetery, where flowers were tossed into the dark deep hole. But it was the ripe wormy smell of earth he would recall. And how later, back at his grandmother’s, he’d thrown up the kolliva, hearing still the incessant whining of his crow-aunts.
And then the old memory stopped, and it was Margot’s voice inside his head, talking to him, telling him. His fist shot out toward the window, the glass shattering into a thousand pieces, as he glimpsed the warning in what she had spoken that afternoon, when love and life were still possible.
He was good with needle and thread, and had hand-sewn each of them costumes to wear in the Kingdom. Long pants full at the ankles, waists pulled tight with drawstrings. Collarless shirts with wide cuffs. And wide capes, gathered in rippling folds around their plump shoulders.
He had enjoyed the labor, which had endowed him with a sense of completion, a finality. Pushing and pulling at the weave of the lustrous fabrics. Small delicate stitches flowing from his fingers, the glossy material slipping between his thighs. Snip, snip, the scissors. Spin, spin, the thread.
He looked out now to where the twins hopped and jumped, watched the satin-sheathed bodies, the staccatoed movement under the twinkling white lights. His kits come home. His little princes in the Kingdom. They had worn him out with their play, and so he’d settled in a chair outside the borders of the forest and sucked in air, warm-flavored with chocolate and cinnamon. He knew he was feeding them too many sweets. But concessions had to be made. And in the end none of it would matter.
Damon stopped, suddenly finding him in the shadows. Damon, the weaker one. The needier one. He smiled, but Damon’s stare remained frozen. The inevitable would come. It always did. Slowly he stretched up out of the chair, and in the next moment entered the Kingdom, kneeling down, meeting Damon’s eyes. He reached and pressed one of his red curls between his fingers.
“Mommy coming?”
He kissed the top of his head.
“Soon, Damon. Soon.”
“I want my mommy. . . .” The words came out as little cat mews, high-pitched and anxious.
Jason stepped closer, lifting his arm round his brother’s shoulders, the shining cape, a carney-colored cloud sailing after him. Jason, the superhero. “Don’t cry, Damon.” His cheek nestled against his twin’s wet one. “Maybe tomorrow, Pun’kin Man?” he asked bravely.
“In the magic forest anything can happen, Jason. . . . Anything.”
CHAPTER
27
The hours of inaction had been killing Michael Darius. Sitting all night in his SUV wasn’t a whole lot better than sitting at home. But he welcomed any course at all that could pull him out of his skin, out of the hellhole of his mind where grief, and even hope, had the stink of self-pity.
It was a trinity of women’s voices that had sent him here to watch for hours in front of this particular apartment building. They wound within his consciousness—a wisp or a rope. Hanae’s and Adelia’s urgings. Margot’s struggle for a phrase to define her . . . fear?
Once he’d made his decision, the address had been easy to find within a professional list on the Internet. He had recognized the location as residential, made the simple deduction that the subject worked out of his home. A hang-up on a call made from his cell phone had confirmed that the man was in. He had only to wait here, for as long as that might take, grinding cigarette after cigarette into the ashtray.
He was opening a fresh pack when the man emerged from the building.
Coming into sunlight had no benign effect. Light glared from the pavement with a herky-jerky intensity that matched his mood. Pedestrians, moving toward him, seemed to shoot down the sidewalk like random parts of some exploded machine. The man paused, reaching into his jacket for the case with his sunglasses. Then, changing his mind about walking, he stepped from the curb to hail a cab.
In the closed taxi, the illusion continued of clockwork energy. Traffic signals and blaring horns, color and sound battering like fugitives at the windows. A manic Wednesday. The world grinding on.
He breathed in the stale and overheated air. He teetered at the edge . . . of what? It was hardly the time now to take off the blinders. Better to believe in fate, the life history set at the moment of oogenesis when the successful spermatozoon pierced the ovum, at the moment when the developing zygote . . . He shut off the thought.
Maybe it had been the morning’s early phone call that had set him on edge. Not waking him—he hadn’t actually slept since returning to the apartment yesterday, keeping to routine—but alerting him.
Had he been wandering the desert to fall asleep under the moon, a dark gypsy, trusting the lion who sniffed but never touched? Had he been assuaged from the first by forces not benign, though justified? Seduced by the mysteries of both will and weakness? Had he been a man sleepwalking in his arrogance? Untouchable in the safety of the unconscionable?
He had turned again in the bed, replacing the receiver. Then later, at the window, parting the curtain, a forehead’s breadth . . . looking down.
He glanced up now, focusing on the SUV that persisted as an image in the cab’s rearview mirror. The vehicle that he’d noticed parked on the street was two cars behind him now. The lion had quickened. Doing what a beast must do. Stalk its prey.
“Stop right here,” he said to the driver. He pushed a ten into the man’s hand and got out mid-block to a chorus of angry horns. He wound through cars and taxis, glancing back once at the SUV stranded in traffic. On the kaleidoscope sidewalk he slowed his pace to what passed for city normal. In another quarter block he’d descended into the underground.
Sakura s
at behind his desk observing the circular movements of the squad room, listening to the drone of voices, the routine noises that seemed to drift into his office like dust. So many files and forms, reams of paper invested in an investigation gone dry. Miles walked, interviews conducted, questions asked. Lab reports and autopsy results. Conjecture and theory. A journey which had borne little beyond the sighting of a dark van and a bite pattern with no suspect for comparison.
But the heart of the investigation had switched from the serial murders to the kidnapping. And to that end, their energies had to be realigned—establishing a list of persons who had recently come into contact with the twins, creating a minute-by-minute time line of their lives, interviewing, and recording, and reinterviewing. Understanding that in dealing with the very young, the most innocent of details—a wayward ball retrieved by a stranger, a mismatched glove found at the bottom of a closet, a missing toy only now just remembered—could be significant information.
He closed his eyes, the jade piece sliding through his fingers like a coin. He was remembering the day his older cousin Washi had told of his pilgrimage to the eighty-eight temples encircling the island of Shikoku. He had listened with keen ears and a hopeful heart. But he understood that he was too young to put on the white tunic and leggings, to don the coned straw hat, to walk the one thousand miles of the pilgrimage. Though his desire was strong, his skinny boy’s body would be no match for the fifty-day journey in the dark, in the cold and rain. His uncle Ikenobo, who had made the trek three times, had instructed him he would need to grow in many years and much vigor to match the strength of his good intentions, though it would be his will that would see him to the end of the journey.