Praying for Sleep

by Deaver, Jeffrey

  “You did it?” she whispers. “You killed her?”

  “I didn’t plan it. It wasn’t supposed to be this way! I made it look as if he’d done it. I dumped her motorcycle in a river. The cops thought he was going to Boyleston but I knew he was headed this way.”

  Of course he did. He knew all along that Michael had a motive for coming to Ridgeton—to find the woman who’d lied about him in court.

  “And you shot Trenton. And the deputy outside!”

  He grows eerily calm now. “It got out of hand. It started simple and it got out of hand.”

  “Owen, please, listen to me. Listen.” She hears in her voice the same desperate but soothing tone with which she’d addressed Michael a half hour before. “If you want the money, for God’s sake, you can have it.”

  But looking at his face, she knows that the money isn’t the point at all. She thinks of her conversation with Richard Kohler. Michael might be mad, yes, but at least his demented world is incorruptibly just.

  It’s her husband who’s the psychopath; he’s the one immune to mercy.

  Lis realizes now that he must have begun planning her death from the very beginning of the evening—when he first heard about Michael’s escape. Making a scene about the sheriff ’s putting men here, insisting she go to the Inn—they were just efforts to make him look innocent. Why, after he murdered Michael, he’d have rung up Lis at the Inn and told her to return. All’s safe, my love. Come home. But he’d be waiting for her. For her and . . .

  “Oh, God,” she whispers.

  Portia too.

  She realizes that he must have intended to kill her as well.

  “No!” Her wail fills the greenhouse. “No!”

  And she does the very thing she’d left her basement hideout for, the very thing she prayed for strength to do but never believed herself capable of until this instant—she turns, picks up the kitchen knife from the table behind her and swings the blade at him with all her strength.

  She’s aimed for his neck but instead hits his cheek. His head bounces back from the impact of the metal. The gun flies from his hand. He blinks in shock.

  Blood appears instantly, sheets of blood covering his head like a crimson veil.

  For an instant they stand motionless, staring at each other, their thoughts as frozen as their bodies. Neither breathes.

  Then with the howl of a combat soldier Owen leaps for her. She falls to the ground, dropping the knife, holding her hands over her face to ward off his maniacal pummeling. She takes a stunning strike on her jaw. Her vision crinkles momentarily to black. She drives her fist into his left shoulder. His cries are like an animal’s as he leans away, clutching the tormented joint.

  But he recovers quickly and renews the assault, his fury overpowering her. She’s no match for his strength or weight, even with the wound on his face and a damaged arm. Soon she’s on her back, her shoulders and neck lacerated by bits of gravel. His hand is on her throat, squeezing hard. The lights of the greenhouse, blue and green, dim lights all, grow dimmer as her lungs beg for oxygen they can’t have. Her hands flail toward his hugely bloody face. They strike only air then fall to the ground. A dust of blackness fills her eyes. She says something to him, words he cannot possibly hear, words she herself does not understand.

  In her last moment of consciousness a small shadow forms at some distant focal point—part of her brain dying, she thinks. This shadow grows from a tiny mass to an encompassing darkness that hangs in the air, a wad of black storm cloud. Then the glass roof directly above the struggling couple disintegrates into a million shards, and bits of wood and glass envelop the hurtling shadow like bubbles of air following a high diver into water.

  The massive body lands sideways, unbalanced, half on Owen, half on a tall Imperial rose tree, whose thorns dig deep parallel scratches like musical-staff lines along Michael’s cheek and arm. He sobs in panic from the twenty-foot leap—a terror that for anyone would be overwhelming and for him must be beyond comprehension.

  A long boomerang of glass slits Lis’s neck. She rolls sideways away from the straggling men and huddles, covering the wound with a shaking hand.

  Through the gaping hole in the glass roof a light mist falls and a few swirling leaves descend. Bulbs shatter under the cold moisture from the sky and the room is suddenly immersed in blue darkness. Then a sound fills the air, a sound that Lis believes at first is the rejuvenated storm. But, no, she realizes that it’s the howling of a human voice inflected with madness—though whether it’s Michael’s or Owen’s or perhaps even her own, Lis Atcheson will never know.

  Here, in this storm-tossed yard, the vigilant and serious sheriff ’s deputies dispersed doggedly, combing the house and grounds.

  Here the medics, directed first to pale Trenton Heck, took his vital signs and determined that he hadn’t lost a critical quantity of blood. Here the same medics stitched and dressed Lis’s own sliced neck, a dramatic but unserious wound, whose scar would be with her, she guessed, for the rest of her days.

  And here Portia was flying into her sister’s arms. Embracing her hard, Lis smelled shampoo and sweat and felt one of the young woman’s silver hoop earrings tap against her lips. They hugged for a full minute and when Lis stepped away it was the younger of the two sisters who was crying.

  A mud-spattered state-police car arrived, its rooftop speaker already turned to the receiving channel and stuttering with broadcasts, all of which were related to the cleanup efforts following the storm. A tall, gray-haired man stepped out of the car. Lis thought he resembled a cowboy.

  “Mrs. Atcheson?” he called.

  She caught his eye and he started for her but then paused halfway through the muddy yard to gaze with undisguised surprise, then concern, at Trenton Heck, lying on a gurney. He was barely conscious. The two men said a few words to each other before the medics carted the lanky tracker off to an ambulance.

  Don Haversham approached her and asked if she felt like answering a few questions.

  “I suppose.”

  As they were talking, a doctor emerged from one of the ambulances and put a butterfly bandage on the cut on Lis’s arm then retreated, saying only, “Hardly a scratch. Wash it.”

  “No stitches?”

  “Nup. That bump on your head, that’ll go away in a day or two. Don’t worry.”

  Unaware that she had a bump on her head she said she wasn’t worried. She turned back to Haversham and spoke with him for the better part of half an hour.

  “Oh, listen,” she asked, after she’d finished her account, “could you get in touch with a Dr. Kohler at Marsden hospital?”

  “Kohler?” Haversham squinted. “He’s disappeared. We were trying to find him.”

  “Hey, would that be a Richard Kohler?” The Ridgeton sheriff had overheard them.

  “That’s him,” Lis said.

  “Well,” the sheriff responded, “fella of that name was found drunk an hour ago. At Klepperman’s Ford.”

  “Drunk?”

  “Sleeping off a bad one on the hood of a Mark IV Lincoln Continental. To top it off, had a raincoat laid over him like a blanket and this skull, looked like a badger or skunk or something, sitting on his chest. No, I’m not fooling. If that ain’t peculiar I don’t know what is.”

  “Drunk?” Lis repeated.

  “He’ll be okay. He was pretty groggy so we got him in a holding cell at the station. Lucky for him he was on the car and not driving it, or he could kiss that license goodbye.”

  This hardly seemed like Kohler. But nothing would have surprised her tonight.

  She led Haversham and another deputy into the house and coaxed Michael outside. Together they walked him to an ambulance.

  “Looks like that’s a broken arm and ankle,” the astonished medic said. “And I’d throw in a couple cracked ribs too. But he don’t seem to feel a thing.”

  The deputies stared at the patient with fear and awe, as if he were the mythical progeny of Jack the Ripper and Lizzie Borden. Michael, u
pon Lis’s solemn promise that it was not poison, consented to a shot of sedative and allowed his own wounds to be cleaned though only after Lis asked the medic to dab antiseptic on her wrist to prove it was not acid. Michael sat in the back of the ambulance, hands together, staring down at the floor, and said not a word of farewell to anyone. He seemed to be humming as the doors closed.

  Then Owen, battered but conscious, was taken away.

  As was the horrible rag-doll body of the poor young deputy, his blood, all of it, lost in his squad car and in a bed of muddy zinnias.

  The ambulances left, then the squad cars, and Lis stood next to Portia in the kitchen, the two sisters finally alone. She looked at the younger woman for a moment, examining the bewilderment on her face. Perhaps it was shock, Lis pondered, though more likely a virulent strain of curiosity, for Portia suddenly began asking questions. Although Lis was looking directly at her, she didn’t hear a single one of them.

  Nor did she ask Portia to repeat herself. Instead, smiling ambiguously, she squeezed her sister’s arm and walked outside, alone, into the blue monotone of dawn, heading away from the house toward the lake. The bloodhound caught up with her and trotted alongside. When she stopped at the far edge of the patio, near the wall of sandbags the sisters had raised, the dog flopped onto the muddy ground. Lis herself sat on the levee and gazed at the gunmetal water of the lake.

  The cold front was now upon Ridgeton and the trees creaked with incipient ice. A million jettisoned leaves covered the ground like the scales of a giant animal. They’d glisten later in the sun, brilliant and rare, if there was a sun. Lis gazed at broken branches and shattered windows and shingles of wood and of asphalt yanked from the house. The heavens had rampaged, true. But apart from a waterlogged car the damage was mostly superficial. This was the case with storms around here; they didn’t cause much harm beyond dousing lights, stripping trees, flooding lawns and making the good citizens feel temporarily humble. The greenhouse, for instance, had seen several howling tempests and had never been damaged until tonight—and even then it’d taken a huge madman to inflict the harm.

  Lis sat for ten minutes, shivering, her breath floating from her lips like faint wraiths. Then she rose to her feet. The hound too stood and looked at her in anticipation, which, she supposed, meant he’d like something to eat. She scratched his head and walked to the house over the damp grass, and he followed.

  Epilogue

  The blossoms of the floribunda are complicated.

  This is a twentieth-century rose plant, and the one that Lis Atcheson now trimmed, a shockingly white Iceberg, was a hearty specimen that spilled in profusion into the entryway of her greenhouse. Visitors often admired the blossoms and if she was to enter it in competition she was confident that it would be a blue-ribbon rose.

  Today, as she cut back the shoots, she wore a dress that was patterned in dark-green paisley, the shade of a lizard at midnight. The dress was appropriately somber but it wasn’t black; she was on her way to a sentencing hearing, not a funeral.

  Although the results would make her a widow of sorts, Lis was not in mourning.

  Against his lawyer’s recommendation Owen rejected a plea bargain—even after Dorothy turned state’s witness in exchange for a manslaughter charge. Owen insisted that he could beat the rap by pleading insanity. An expert witness, a psychiatrist, took the stand and in a long-winded monologue characterized Owen as a pure sociopath. This diagnosis, however, apparently didn’t have the same allure to juries that Michael’s illness did. After a lengthy trial Owen was convicted of first-degree murder on the first ballot.

  Last week Lis signed the contract to purchase Langdell’s Nursery and that same day she gave notice to the high school; at the end of the spring semester her twelve-year bout as an English teacher would officially end.

  Surprising her older sister, Portia had asked for the nursery’s P&L statements and balance sheet, which she’d then shown to her current boyfriend—Eric or Edward, Lis couldn’t recall. An investment banker, he’d seemed impressed with the company and recommended that Portia buy into the deal while she still could. The young woman had spent several days considering the proposition then waffled in a big way and declared that she wanted more time to think about it. She’d promised Lis an answer when she returned from the Caribbean, where she planned to spend February and March.

  Portia had spent the night and would be accompanying Lis to the hearing today. Following Owen’s arrest, the young woman had stayed for three weeks in the Ridgeton house, helping Lis clean and repair. But a week after the indictments were handed up, Lis decided that she wanted to be on her own again and insisted that her sister return to New York. At the train station Portia suddenly turned to her. “Listen, why don’t you move into the co-op with me?” Lis was touched by the offer although it was clear that the majority of Portia’s heart voted against it.

  But the city was hardly for Lis and she declined.

  Cranking closed the upper vanes of the greenhouse today, shutting out the winter air, Lis had this thought: We face death in many ways and most are hardly as dramatic as finding the ghosts of our dead ancestors in greenhouses or learning that it’s your husband who’s traveled miles to slice your thin throat as you lie drowsing in bed. Reflecting on these subtler confrontations with mortality, Lis thought of her sister and she understood that Portia wasn’t being perverse or cruel all those long years of separation. Nothing so premeditated as that. There was a simpler point to her escape from the family: she did what she had to.

  Too many willow switches, too many lectures, too many still-as-death Sunday dinners.

  And who knew? Maybe old man L’Auberget changed his tune after Lis’s fateful swimming lesson, and climbed into the sack with Portia when she was twelve or thirteen. She, after all, was the pretty one.

  There was a time when this thought would have been madness and seething heresy. But madness had since come to roost in Lis’s own backyard and if the night of the storm—the delicate euphemism the sisters had settled upon—taught her anything it was that there are only real two heresies: lies and our willing acceptance of them.

  Trenton Heck would also be at the hearing today. He had an interest in this case beyond justice. Before being removed as director of Marsden hospital by the Department of Mental Health, Dr. Ronald Adler had reneged on the reward Heck felt he was due. Adler’s successor could find no moral, let alone legal, reason to pay over the money, which Adler apparently had no authority to pledge in the first place. And so with a certain reluctant desperation Heck sued Owen for shooting him in the back.

  The insurance company wouldn’t pay off for such malfeasance and Heck was horrified to find that suing Owen ultimately meant suing Lis. He immediately offered to withdraw the case but Lis told him that he more than anyone deserved to profit from this tragedy and over her exasperated lawyer’s objections wrote him a check for far more than he asked.

  There was, Lis understood, no reasonable connection between the two of them, Trenton Heck and herself, yet in some ways she felt they were stations along the same route. Still, when he asked her out to dinner last week, she declined. It was true that he needed something in his life other than a mobile home and a dog. But she doubted that it was for her to provide whatever that might be.

  One person who wouldn’t be at the hearing was Michael Hrubek.

  On Thanksgiving, at the patient’s shy request, Lis had paid him a visit at the Framington State Mental Health Facility, where he was once again under the care of Richard Kohler. Michael at first had been peeved that Lis, as an agent of God, refused to take his life in exchange for that of a nineteenth-century president. But he had apparently come to accept that saving her was part of a complicated spiritual bargain that only he understood and had acquiesced to remaining on this good earth for the time being.

  Michael himself had an upcoming trial—for the murder of a fellow prisoner during his escape from Marsden. The evidence clearly suggested that the man’s death was a suicide
and the case was going forward only because Michael’s escape made fools of the hospital and the police. Michael, his attorney assured Lis, would emerge from the trial not only innocent but with a better public image than that of the prosecutor, who, at least one editorial pointed out, ought to have better things to worry about than the death of Bobby Ray Callaghan, an institutionalized killer.

  There were other charges too. Auto theft, breaking and entering, assault and the intentional confinement of two extremely unhappy Gunderson police officers in their squad-car trunk, one of them with an extremely painful broken wrist. Michael was admittedly the perpetrator. But he probably would serve no time in prison, the lawyer reported. All he need do was tell the judge the truth—that he was simply evading Pinkerton agents pursuing him for Abraham Lincoln’s assassination—and, bang, he’d be out of the lockup and back into his hospital room in no time.

  Michael Hrubek was a good example of using history to your own advantage.

  Lis now pulled on her coat and called to her sister that it was time to leave. They were taking two cars; after the hearing she was planning to spend an hour or two at Framington.

  She’d been back to the hospital several times since Thanksgiving. She was still somewhat wary about seeing him. But she’d found that when sitting across from Michael, sometimes in the company of Richard Kohler, sometimes not, she got an indefinable pleasure from his company. When she entered the room, he took her hand with a delicacy and awe that sometimes moved her nearly to tears. She would like to understand the immensely complex matrix of his emotions. She’d like to understand why he undertook his quest to save her, of all people, and why—even though it was rooted in madness—that journey touched her so.

  But those were questions beyond Lis Atcheson, and she was content simply to sit with him in a lounge overlooking the snowy fields and drink coffee and soda from plastic cups while they talked about dairy cows or the state of American politics or insomnia—a problem, it seemed, they both suffered from.