Praying for Sleep

by Deaver, Jeffrey

  She walked closer to the lake. Above her, no stars. She couldn’t even discern the underside of the clouds; the sky was flat and smooth, a gray-blue monotone, like the flesh of a shark. Were the clouds moving or not? Were they a hundred feet in the air, or ten thousand? She couldn’t tell.

  Vague motion, nearby, startled her. The shell of the large tortoise jerked again as the ungainly creature lumbered toward the lake. Fiercely intent on its goal, the animal scuttled over rocks and roots too high for its reptilian feet, slipping often. Why the urgency? Lis wondered. Was some eerie premonition about the storm prompting the thing to seek the safety of the lake? But what would a tortoise have to fear from the rain? With a loud splash the animal caromed off a willow root and sliced into the water. There, it became a perfect airfoil and cruised eloquently just beneath the surface for a short distance then dove out of sight. Lis watched its wake vanish and the water turn once again to rippling black silk.

  She strolled back toward the house, through wide, trellis-covered patches of overturned dirt—her formal garden. She paused before the one rosebush that still retained a number of petals. When she was young, Lis had plotted to dye her hair the copper color of a plant this shade—an Arizona grandiflora—and paid for it with a whipping when her father, in one of his Saturday-morning raids on the girls’ room, discovered the Clairol, hidden beneath her mattress.

  She clicked a brittle thorn with her nail then lifted away a few dead petals. She rubbed them against her cheek.

  The horizon in the west flared brilliantly with a broad gray-green flash. It had vanished by the time her eyes flicked to that portion of the sky.

  The petals fell from Lis’s hands.

  She heard the kitchen door opening then closing. “I’m ready,” Portia called. “You have your suitcase?”

  Lis walked to the house. Gazing at the yellow windows she said, “Listen, I have to tell you—I’ve changed my mind.”

  “You what?”

  Lis set her suitcase inside the kitchen door. “I’m going to finish the sandbagging. Taping the greenhouse. It could take an hour or so. I’d really like you to stay too but if you want to leave, I understand. I’ll call you a cab.”

  Emil was sorely tempted by the aroma of grilling burgers and onions but he knew his job and kept his butt planted on the ground.

  Trenton Heck himself cast a longing eye toward the truck-stop diner but at the moment the reward money was his main thought and he too ignored the smell of a much-desired cheeseburger. He continued his discussion with the Highway Patrol trooper.

  “And he really seemed set on Boston, did he?” Heck asked.

  “That’s what the driver said. He was babbling about it being the home of our country or something.”

  Fennel, drawing nearby, said, “He was a history major.”

  Heck looked up in surprise.

  “Yup. That’s what I heard.”

  “He went to college?” This made Trenton Heck, with only eleven hours of credits toward an associate degree, feel very bad.

  “One year only, before he started to go wacko. But he got himself some A’s.”

  “Well. A’s. Damn.” Heck pushed aside his personal chagrin and asked the HP trooper if he’d have the truck driver step outside for a minute.

  “Uhm, he’s gone.”

  “He’s gone? Didn’t you tell him to wait?”

  The trooper shrugged, looking placidly into the civilian’s eyes. “It’s an escape situation, not an arrest situation. I got his name and address. Figured he didn’t need to stay around to be a witness or anything.”

  Heck muttered to Fennel, “Address isn’t going to be real helpful. I mean, what’re we supposed to do? Send him a postcard?”

  The trooper said, “I asked him a bunch of stuff.”

  Heck slipped the harness off Emil. The trooper looked even younger than the Boy and would have no seniority over anybody. The Highway Patrol had a separate budget for salaries and they hardly ever fired anybody. Heck’d had the chance to put in for Highway Patrol when he first joined. But, no, he wanted to fight real crime.

  “What was he wearing?”

  “Overalls. Boots. Work shirt. Tweed cap.”

  “No jacket?”

  “Didn’t seem to be.”

  “Was he drinking?”

  “Well, the driver didn’t say. I didn’t exactly ask that. Didn’t see any need to.”

  Heck continued, “Was he carrying anything? Bag or weapon? Walking stick?”

  The trooper looked uneasily at his notes then at Fennel, who nodded for him to answer the questions. “I don’t exactly know.”

  “Was he threatening?”

  “No. Just kind of goofy, the driver said.”

  Heck grunted in frustration. Then he asked, “Oh, one more thing. Just how big is he?”

  “The driver said about six five, six six. Three fifty, if he’s a pound. WWF wrestler, you know. Legs like a side of beef.”

  “Side of beef.” Heck gazed into the blackness in the east.

  Fennel asked him, “Is there enough trail to follow?”

  “It’s not bad. But I wish it’d rain.” Nothing brought out a latent scent better than a gentle mist.

  “To hear the weatherman tell it, you’re going to get that wish in spades.”

  Heck hooked up Emil again and refreshed the scent memories of the dogs with Hrubek’s shorts. “Find, find!”

  Emil took off down the shoulder of the road, Heck paying out the dark-red rope until he felt the twenty-foot knot. Then he followed. Fennel and the retrievers too. But they hadn’t gone fifty feet before Emil turned and nosed slowly toward an unlit, dilapidated house squatting in an overgrown yard. A spooky-looking place, with a sagging roof and shingles like old snake scales. In the window was a sign. Hunting Goods. ETC. Deer dressed and mounted. Pelts bought and sold. Trout too.

  “Think he’s in there?” The Boy uncomfortably eyed the black windows.

  “Hard to say. All that animal work’d confuse even Emil.”

  Heck and Fennel led the dogs to a cockeyed fence post and tied them up. The men drew their sidearms and simultaneously chambered bullets and put the safeties on. Heck thought, Don’t let me get shot again. Oh, please. I got no insurance this time. Though what was behind this prayer wasn’t hospital bills of course but the horror of a scalding bullet.

  “Trent, you don’t have to do this.”

  “From the sound of this guy, you need everybody you’ve got.”

  Conceding, Fennel nodded then motioned the Boy around back. He and Heck walked onto the front porch quietly. Heck looked at Fennel, who shrugged and knocked on the door. There was no answer. Heck leaned forward and looked through a grimy window. He leapt back suddenly. “Jesus! Oh!” His voice clicked into a high register.

  Fennel drew down on the window with his Glock. He squinted. Then laughed. Six inches away, through the muddy glass, was the rearing form of a black bear staring out at them, taxidermied into ferocity.

  “Goddamn,” Heck said reverently. “Son of a bitch, I nearly dampened my pants there.”

  Fennel pointed to a sign propped in another window. Closed First Two Weeks of November. Happy huntin’.

  “He’s telling everybody he’s going away? Don’t this fellow know about burglaries?”

  “He’s got himself a watch-bear.”

  Heck studied the creature with admiration. “That’d be the first thing I’d steal.”

  Then they found the door that Hrubek had kicked in. The men entered cautiously, covering each other. They found the traces of the madman’s shopping spree but it was clear he was no longer here. They reholstered their guns and returned outside. Fennel told the Boy to call Haversham and tell him where they were and that Hrubek did in fact seem to be making for Boston.

  They were about to continue up the highway when the Boy called, “Hold up a minute, Charlie. There’s something here you ought to see.”

  Heck and Fennel ordered the dogs to sit and then walked around to the
back of the building to where the young man was standing, hand on his own pistol. “Look there.” He was pointing inside a work shed. There was blood on the ground just inside the doorway.

  “Jesus.” Out came the Walther again. The safety clicked off.

  Heck eased into the shed. The place was chockablock with a thousand odds and ends: hoses, boxes, animal skulls, bones, broken furniture, rusted tools, auto parts.

  “Check it out. Over there. We got a ’coon bit the big one.”

  Fennel shone his light on the limp corpse of a raccoon.

  “Think he’d do that? Why?”

  “Goddamn,” Heck whispered in dismay. He was looking not at the body of the animal, however, but at a narrow beam in the ceiling from which dangled some spring animal traps, toothless but big—the sort that would easily snap the neck of a fox or badger or raccoon.

  Or the leg of a dog.

  The reason for Heck’s dismay wasn’t the traps themselves but rather the three empty pegs where, presumably, three other traps had hung until not long ago. Several large bloody bootprints were directly below the pegs.

  Heck asked, “Your girls heel?”

  “Not when they’re on track. Emil?”

  “He’s slow to, if the scent’s fresh. We’ll have to tie the lines back and keep ’em next to us. Hell, if he takes to the grass we’ll just about have to crawl on our bellies. Hrubek’ll be in Boston by the time we get to the county line.”

  They walked back to the highway and shortened the lines as Heck instructed. He left his pickup at the truck stop with the third deputy, who remained there in case Hrubek wandered back this way. The Boy accompanied Heck and Fennel in his squad car, the headlights dark, just the amber flashers on. The dogs caught a whiff of the scent and started east once more.

  “Down the middle of the friggin’ road.” Fennel laughed nervously. “This boy is nuts, that’s for damn sure.”

  But Heck didn’t respond. The giddy excitement of earlier in the evening was gone. The night had turned coarse. Their quarry was no longer a big silly fellow, and Trenton Heck felt the same chill he remembered when, four years ago, outside of a neon-lit 7-Eleven, he’d glanced at what he thought was a branch moving in the breeze and saw instead a sphere of muzzle flash and felt a ripping jolt in his leg, as the asphalt leapt up to meet his forehead.

  “You think he’d set traps for dogs?” Fennel muttered. “Nobody’d do that. Nobody’d hurt a dog.”

  Heck reached down and held up his hound’s right ear, in which was a smooth hole the exact size of a .30-’06 slug. Fennel whistled out his disgust at humankind, and Trenton Heck called, “Find, Emil, find!”

  Lis stood in the greenhouse, taping bold X’s over the glass that she could remember being glazed into place twenty-five years ago, her mother standing in the construction site, arms crossed, her austere eye on the contractors. Often she frowned because she believed that people wouldn’t cheat you if it was obvious that you suspected they were capable of it.

  Taping windows as she went, Lis moved slowly around the large room, which was filled with hybrid tea roses in all shades, and grandiflora blushes dotted with the blood-red John Armstrongs, and High Noon yellow climbers twining around an antique trellis. She had large-cluster floribunda Iceberg whites and Fashion corals. A thousand flowers, ten thousand petals.

  She preferred the striking shades, the stark colors, especially in the most fragile of flowers.

  Recalling the thousands of hours she’d spent here—as a girl, helping her mother, then more recently by herself—she pictured the many times she’d cut back shoots, pruned flowered laterals and snipped away unvigorous stems. Her hands, thorn-pricked and red, would scoop a dormant eye from the budding and peel the bark to make a shield then slide it into the t-cut rootstock, binding the incision with raffia.

  Glancing at several recent grafts, she heard a sound behind her and turned to see Portia rummaging through a box on the floor. She was no longer wearing her Manhattan outfit but had finally acknowledged that she was in L. L. Bean country and accepted Lis’s offer of jeans, sweater and Topsiders. Lis was overcome with an urge to thank her again for staying. But the girl wasn’t interested in gratitude. She seized several rolls of masking tape and disappeared, saying, “Too fucking many windows in this house.”

  Her footsteps pounded up the stairs, a teenager sprinting to take a phone call.

  Lis was suddenly aware of the greenhouse’s overhead lights, one bank of which Owen had turned on when he was looking for burlap bags. She now doused them. Lis respected the daily cycle of plants—in the same way that she herself never woke to an alarm if she could avoid it. The rhythm of our bodies, she believed, is linked to our souls’ pulse. Plants are no different and in deference to them Lis had installed, in addition to five-hundred-nanometer artificial-sunlight lamps for overcast days, a series of dim blue and green bulbs for nighttime hours. These lights let her flowers sleep—for she believed plants did sleep—while illuminating the greenhouse.

  This was what horticulturists call a warm greenhouse. Ruth L’Auberget had scattered archaic heaters around the room but they never worked well. It seemed as if the woman was daunted by technology and had been content to let nature and fate decide whether her roses prospered or died. That wasn’t good enough for her daughter. This was after all, Lis reasoned, the computer age, and she had the place outfitted with a microprocessor climate-control system that kept the temperature above sixty-two degrees even on the coldest of nights and operated the automated vents along the roof ’s peak and roller shades on the south-facing panes (sunlight being as potentially dangerous as frost).

  On one side of the thirty-five-by-twenty-foot room were the cuttings, rooted in sand, and the seedlings; on the other were the growing plats for mature bushes, and propagation benches. Soil-warming cables snaked under the cutting area, and hoses, trickle-irrigation pipelines and capillary sand benches provided the water. The connected potting area and lath house were floored in concrete; the greenhouse floor itself was gravel, through which wound a serpentine path of slate—also selected by Lis (to replace the original concrete). The slate was deep green-blue and had been picked by Lis as a reminder of a rose yet to be, the L’Auberget hybrid. This was an ambition of hers—to develop a luminescent teal-colored rose, an All-American Rose Selections designation in her name.

  The crossbreeding of this flower had a particular appeal because she’d been told it was impossible; fellow rosarians assured her that the elusive color couldn’t be bred. What’s more, she was bucking the trend. The current strategy among growers was to cultivate for fragrance and disease resistance. But color and form, now traits in disrepute, were what excited Lis Atcheson. Logically she appreciated the difficulty of the crossbreed. But the irony is that by nature rose lovers have deep romantic streaks and aren’t easily discouraged. So, working with a number of yellow varieties and pinks and the Blue Moon hybrid tea, Lis spent hours here grafting and budding as if it were merely a matter of time until she found the evasive color.

  From literature, Lis had learned the transcendence of the imagination, which she’d come to believe was God’s main prize to us, all things else, even love, being more or less honorable mentions. But from flowers, she learned a better lesson—the persistence of beauty: petals bursting, growing, falling, and curling into dry, colorful flakes.

  Roses were more than animate to her; they were virtually human. “Think about it,” she’d tell students of hers invited to the greenhouse for informal Saturday-afternoon horticultural lectures. “The history of roses? They migrated west to Europe and America, mostly from the Orient. Their culture? They grow in increasingly sophisticated social clusters. And how about religion? Roses’ve had as bad a time on that subject as we have. They were burned by early Christians because of pagan—excuse the expression—roots. And then what happened? The Pope converted them. Now, ask a Catholic what roses represent—Mary, of course. That’s the Mother, by the way, not the prostitute.”

  Lis
’s love of flowers began when she was around nine. Skinny and tall, the girl would herd Portia into the huge backyard, where their mother’s helper presided. The imported au pair would send the girls on missions to find wildflowers of certain colors, after of course delivering the litany of warnings: the lake, snakes, hornets, bees, abandoned wells, strangers, men with candy, on and on. (The caveats were the product of Andrew L’Auberget; no chubby, carefree Dutch girl could possibly find the world so threatening.)

  The speech delivered, paranoia invoked, Jolande would then dole out the assignments. “Leesbonne, a golden flur. Breeng me a gold flur.”

  Off the children would go.

  “Leesbonne, now a red one. A red flur . . . Be careful of that, how you call it, beehive. Poortia, a red one . . .”

  The girls would charge off into the woods and return with the blossoms. The daughters would then ask the big girl to trim and wash the bouquet and the trio would deliver the works of art to Ruth L’Auberget, who would nod with approval and thank the girls. She would then tie the blossoms into bright arrangements for the rectory office where she spent her afternoons.

  This combination of aesthetics and generosity was irresistible to Lis, and she would sit at the dinner table, too timid to speak, but praying that Mother would report to Father about the flowers—or that talkative Portia would blurt the story to him. Impatient with religion, Andrew L’Auberget only managed to tolerate his wife’s involvement in St. John’s (it was, the liquor merchant was fast to joke, her only vice). Still, he usually dispensed some backhanded praise. “Ah, very good. Good for you, Lisbonne. And Portia too. You were careful of thorns and wasps?”