by Dean Koontz
The hour was not so late that a phone call would be ill advised. Daring to identify himself as “with the Daily News,” Mr. Tamazaki asked to speak to the provost and was told that he should call back during school hours. He took the further risk of saying that he had an important question to ask, that it involved a capital crime, and that he needed only two minutes of Mr. Atherton’s time, whereupon he was transferred to the line at the provost’s on-campus house.
“I assure you, Mr. Tamazaki, I wasn’t traveling alone in the Caribbean in October of 1961, or at any other time, for that matter,” the provost said. “Ever since my marriage, nineteen years ago, I have never vacationed without my wife.” He couldn’t quite keep the note of regret out of his voice. “Furthermore, I would never take a two-week cruise during the school year. I’d consider it a dereliction of duty, considering what some of these hellions might likely get up to in my absence.” Evidently, the provost didn’t know that the mother of a former student had gone missing from a cruise ship two and a half years after that student’s graduation. “You must be seeking another Douglas Atherton.”
Mr. Tamazaki believed the provost. It seemed entirely within Lucas Drackman’s character to have fun with the alias that he used to commit murder, a puerile joke that would amuse no one but him and those of his co-conspirators who were equally immature.
Using the provost’s name—which had been supported with false ID—wouldn’t convict Lucas Drackman. It didn’t qualify as evidence admissible in court, because as yet no link existed to prove who had booked the cruise in that name. If anything could be learned about who rented the post-office box in Charleston to which the cruise line sent the ticket, the case against Drackman might be advanced.
When Mr. Yoshioka was informed, both he and Mr. Tamazaki thought that this discovery seemed promising and that with luck justice might find its way to young Mr. Drackman, the Cassidy twins, Aaron Kolshak, and anyone else associated with them—which might include my father. If that were to happen, they would cease to pose any threat to me or my mother or Mr. Yoshioka.
In retrospect, the argument could be made that Mr. Tamazaki’s discovery marked the moment when the storm began to form that, not long thereafter, would change all our lives, and not for the better.
50
Tuesday, July 4, we had a picnic dinner in the park. Fireworks at first dark, the sky painted with cascading colors.
Mother and Grandpa Teddy set off together Wednesday morning. Woolworth’s had offered her a longer shift than she had been getting, and although she was frustrated not to be able to find a singing gig, she needed those extra hours. Grandpa still performed five nights a week at the hotel, but he had taken on two more afternoons at the department store. Until school started in the autumn, I would be on my own every weekday.
That morning, I sat on the porch steps, hoping Malcolm would see me and take it as an invitation to come over and rock the living room again. I had neglected to find out which of the houses across the street was the Pomerantz residence. If he came over, I couldn’t pour out to him everything that I’d been hiding from my mother. In fact, I didn’t dare tell him any of it. But neither The Star Beast nor any other book would fade my worry back to mere concern. Neither would practicing the piano alone. At least with Malcolm, as well as he played and as smart as he talked, I’d be too distracted to continue imagining one death scenario after another.
When the woman strode along the public sidewalk from my left, through a dappling of sunlight and tree shadows, I didn’t initially pay much attention to her, preoccupied as I was with all the dreadful events that I could imagine forthcoming. I was vaguely aware that she dressed pretty much like Grandma Anita had dressed for work in the monsignor’s office: sensible black shoes with a low heel, dark-gray suit with a mid-calf skirt and hip-length jacket, white blouse. When she turned onto our front walk, I saw she also wore a black straw hat with soft crown, straight brim, and three blue feathers. I knew her.
I started to get to my feet. “Miss Pearl.”
“Stay where you are, Ducks. I don’t expect you to dance with me. I’ll just share that step with you.”
I hadn’t seen her since June of the previous year, the day after my mother packed my father’s belongings and locked him out of the apartment. Miss Pearl had been among the crowd in the Abigail Louise Thomas Room, listening to Mom sing while I played the piano. I’d only ever seen her twice before; I couldn’t count the two times she’d been there in the dark after a dream, because once she’d been just a voice and the other time a voice and a silhouette.
Scented faintly with rose perfume, she sat down and put her large black handbag between us. She was still tall and pretty and mahogany, but not as glamorous as she had been when dressed all in flamingo-pink.
“How have you been, Ducks?”
“Not so good.”
“Yes, I see you’re just as glum as that day I first saw you on the stoop at your old apartment building. You looked like the king of grump that day, like you must’ve been sitting on nails and chewing thumbtacks. You remember what you were so down about?”
“I guess because … Tilton was never going to let me take lessons and be a piano man.”
“And how did that work out for you?”
“Pretty good, I guess.”
“You guess? Don’t give me no guess. You’re already a piano man before you’re even a man.”
“Thank you for the piano, Miss Pearl.”
“You see? If you get in a mood and scowl at the world, the world will just scowl back at you. Vicious circle. No point to it. Is this the sunniest of sunny days or isn’t it?”
“What?”
“You’ve got eyes, child. Look around, look around!”
“Sure, it’s sunny.”
“Then you be sunny, too, and things will turn out better than if you aren’t.”
“I’ve got bigger trouble now than I did back then. Way bigger. Just thinking sunny isn’t going to help.”
She arched one eyebrow. “You mean your father with Miss Delvane, Mr. Smaller screaming like a lunatic at police, Fiona Cassidy going to Woolworth’s, plus Lucas Drackman plotting with your father and the rest of them?”
I met her eyes, and as before, I saw nothing scary in them. Kindness is what people do for one another; it isn’t something that you can peer into their eyes and see. Yet in her warm brown eyes, I saw unmistakable, inexhaustible kindness. They sparkled, too, not with morning sunlight but as if she were gazing at some glittering display of diamonds, instead of just at me. My breath caught in my throat—I don’t know why—and I was filled with such wonder and such a sense of mystery that I thought I might swoon and pass out.
She put a hand on my shoulder, and that brief touch seemed to release me from a trance, so that I could breathe again. I looked away from her, at the trees along the street, which struck me as far more beautiful than they had been only a moment earlier.
When I could speak, I said, “How do you know about them and their … plotting?”
“Well, who was it first showed you Fiona and Lucas in dreams?”
“Yeah, and how could you do that? You’re not a witch.”
“That’s a bull’s-eye, Ducks. I don’t live in a gingerbread house in a spooky old woods, and I don’t have a cauldron somewhere full of boiling eye-of-newt stew.”
“Then who are you, what are you?”
As calmly and sanely as I’ve ever heard anyone speak, she said, “Think of me this way, Jonah.… I am the city, the soul of the city, spun up from threads raveled off the better souls of all those who have lived here and died here, also those who live here now. One thread of my soul is borrowed from yours, another is a thread from your mother’s soul, another from your grandpa’s soul. Millions and millions of threads. Another is from your Grandma Anita. When you memorized the Our Father, your grandmother gave you a silver dollar and told you to spend it on the day of your confirmation. In your sweet way, you asked her quite solemnly what you should bu
y with it, and she whispered in your ear, ‘Spending doesn’t mean always buying something, Jonah. Buy nothing. Give it to the poor.’ ”
“You can’t know that,” I protested.
“Is that what your grandma said or isn’t it?”
“Yes. But how—”
“I’ve taken a special interest in you, Jonah.”
She told me what I recounted to you at the beginning of this oral history. As the city, she worried that in spite of all she had to offer her citizens, she might be failing too many. The city knew its every avenue and back street, its every height and all its depths in intimate detail, but it didn’t know what it felt like to be human and live in those thousands of miles of street. And so she, the soul of the city, had taken human form to walk among her people.
As I’ve admitted before, I had a spacious imagination as a boy; and that morning, I found plenty of room in it to accommodate Miss Pearl’s claim to be the soul of the city made flesh. Lately I had spun so many lies, like one of those jugglers on the old Ed Sullivan Show who sets plates spinning atop bamboo sticks of various heights, racing back and forth to keep them in motion, spinning more and more plates until it appeared impossible that he could take them down one at a time before they all crashed to pieces on the stage. They say that you can’t lie to a liar and deceive him. Maybe because I had become such an accomplished young liar, I recognized the pure truth of Miss Pearl’s story, regardless of how fantastic it might seem.
Instead of contesting a word she’d said, I asked, “Why would you—why would the city—take a special interest in me?”
“Because of what you are, Ducks.”
“I’m just a messed-up kid.”
“That’s not all you are.”
“That’s the bigger part of it.”
“That’s the tiniest part.”
“Is it because of the piano?”
“You’ve got great talent, Ducks, but it’s not because of that, either. It’s because of what you are—and you won’t understand what that is for a long time yet.”
A covey of noisy vehicles passed in the street, and when quiet returned, I said, “You know everything that’s ever happened in the city and everything that’s happening now.”
“I do, yes. Sometimes it amazes me how I can keep track of it all. There are a lot of unpleasant things I’d rather not know, I’d rather just sweep out of my head forever, but I’m aware of them all, anyway.”
“And you know what’s going to happen next?”
She shook her head. “That’s a step too far, Ducks. What happens next is up to all the people who live along my streets. Your part of it is up to you.”
Although I tried to be sunny, I couldn’t fully cast off glum. “I’m afraid of what might happen next, and I don’t know what to do.”
When she saw that I was shaking, she put an arm around me, but she offered no advice.
“Tell me what to do,” I pleaded.
51
Birds sang in the trees, crickets chirruped in the grass, bouncy doo-wop music came from a phonograph at the house next door, three laughing children played some game on a porch across the street, and it all sounded like doomsday music to me.
“Tell me what to do,” I said again.
“That’s one thing I can’t do, Jonah. I’ve already given you all the help I can. You’ll have to decide yourself what to do as things happen. But you know what?”
“What?”
“You already know what to do.”
“But I don’t.”
“You already know,” Miss Pearl insisted, “and whatever happens, good or better, bad or worse, you’ll know what to do step by step.”
I buried my face in my hands.
She sat silently beside me for a while. Then: “If you trust me, believe what I’m about to say, it’ll help you in the darkest times.”
Speaking into my hands, I said, “What is it?”
“No matter what happens, disaster piled on calamity, no matter what, everything will be okay in the long run.”
I spread my fingers to filter my words. “You said you can’t see the future.”
“I’m not talking about the future, Ducks. Not the way you mean. Not tomorrow and next week and next month.”
Frustrated, I said, “Then what are you talking about?”
She repeated, “No matter what happens, everything will be okay in the long run. If you believe that, if you trust me, nothing that might happen in the days to come can break you. On the other hand, if you won’t take to heart what I’ve just told you, I don’t expect things will turn out as well as they could.”
I didn’t mean to cry, not out there in public, not on the front porch steps for just anyone to see who might pass by, tears flooding from me as if I were a baby. I was past ten, going on eleven, more than halfway to being a man, or so I thought, and if I had to carry a weight, I should be able just to shut up and carry it already, but I felt small and weak and confused.
In the most tender voice, Miss Pearl said, “Ducks, I’m going to do something I’ve rarely done before. But you are special to me, and I’ll give you this.”
Despairing at my weakness, I wiped tears from my eyes with both hands. “Give me what?”
“A peek inside my purse.” She patted the black handbag between us. She picked it up and smiled at me and set it in my lap.
“Your purse? What could be in your stupid purse that’ll make any difference?”
“You won’t know until you look. Mind me, you can’t have the purse, only a peek inside it.”
“I’m a boy. I don’t want a purse.”
“Then take a look right now. Much as I love you, Ducks, I can’t sit here all day. I’m a city, and a city is always busy, busy, busy.”
In spite of my having heard pure truth when she had told me what she was, you might think that I would at some point, given sufficient provocation, reverse myself and decide that she was a crazy lady. But I never did.
The handbag was large enough to carry a bowling ball and bowling shoes and maybe a tenpin. I folded the braided handles down, pressed the black clasp, opened it, and stared in bafflement, at first unable to understand what lay within.
“Put your face right down close to it, Ducks, right down close. Then you’ll see.”
I did as she said, and I saw. I don’t know how long the whole experience took. At the time it seemed to go zoom, all unfolding in a few seconds, but in retrospect, I thought it might have been an hour or more.
When I raised my head and looked around at the tree-lined street splashed with sun and shadow, I couldn’t for a moment remember any words in the English language, and I said something like, “Unnn-gah-unng.”
52
Miss Pearl retrieved her purse and closed it.
When I heard the clasp snap shut, I came to my feet, swayed, and steadied myself with the porch-steps handrail.
At the time, the peek into the purse stunned me, thrilled me, but also confused me.
As Miss Pearl got to her feet, I said, “What? What was that?”
“You know, Ducks.”
“No. I don’t. I’m confused. Amazed and confused and wow.”
“You only think you’re confused.”
“I know that I think I’m confused. And I am.”
“Your confusion is only on the surface, Ducks. Deep down, you understand, and that’s what counts. In time, your confusion will go away, and your deep-down understanding will rise to the surface.”
She descended the porch steps to the front walk. She had no need of the handrail.
I didn’t move, still half dizzy. “I wish you wouldn’t go.”
When she turned and smiled, standing there in her severe dark-gray suit and prim black hat, I thought of Mary Poppins. If she’d been carrying an umbrella instead of that huge handbag, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had opened it and caught a breeze and continued along the street at altitude.
“I can give you no more help. I’ve already given you more
than I ever should. You have to make your own future, day by day, with no rescues by me. As I said before, what happens next is up to all the people who live along my streets. Your part of it is up to you.”
“What if I make mistakes and people die?”
“People die every day. Wrong decisions are made, and they have consequences. Death is part of life. If you think about it, you were born into a world populated by the dead, because every one of them will die one day.”
She followed our front walk to the public sidewalk, turned right, waved at me, and walked away.
I watched her until the street trees and the shadows and sun glare and sheer distance allowed me no further glimpse of her.
Because I knew what I’d seen in her purse but not what it meant, because that understanding came much later, I won’t tell you at this point what the handbag contained. This is my life I’m talking, and I’ll talk it in the way that makes most sense to me. Everything in good time.
After Miss Pearl was lost to sight, I went unsteadily into the house to lie down on the living-room sofa until my dizziness fully passed.
I assured myself that no matter what happened, if disaster piled on calamity, everything would be okay in the long run. Meanwhile, on that fifth day of July 1967, nothing serious yet.
53
That same morning, by telephone, Mr. Tamazaki of the Daily News reached out to the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple in Los Angeles. In part of this ornate house of worship had been stored the belongings of some of those Californians sent to relocation camps during the war. A limited number of items were never reclaimed, and a curator looked after them even these years later. In addition, the curator maintained a lengthy list of the people who had been sent to the relocation camps, as well as a smaller list of those who wished for their whereabouts to be known to others who had endured the camps and who regularly updated their addresses with the temple.
Mr. Tamazaki wished to know if the temple might be aware of a former internee of any of the ten War Relocation Authority camps now living in or around Charleston, Illinois. Within an hour, he received a confirmation call. A woman named Setsuko Nozawa had been interned at the camp in Moab, Utah, and currently resided in Charleston. She had already agreed that her address and phone number could be shared with Mr. Tamazaki.