Nocturnes (2004)

by John Connolly

  “I remember what he said before he died: ‘This is not a house. This is a home.’ Still don’t know what he meant by that. The place looked less like a home than anywhere I’ve ever been. Sticks of furniture, half-painted walls, cheap wallpaper already starting to peel. There was dust and filth and damn mirrors on every wall. Those mirrors, they completely threw me. It seemed like there was movement everywhere: our reflections, the reflections of our reflections. I’ve never been so jumpy in all my life.

  “I was pretty close to Grady when he pulled the trigger. I recall his face, and his eyes. You know, what he did was beyond belief, as terrible a thing as I’ve seen in all my life, but he was a tormented man. I could see it on him. His skin was covered with some kind of rash. There were sores all over his mouth, and his eyelids were swollen and puffy. He was just this haunted, sick creature. I was the closest man to him. I saw myself reflected in his eyes and, I swear, I knew what he was about to do and I wanted to stop him: not because I cared if he lived or died, but because I had this feeling that if he died at that moment, then somehow he’d take a part of me with him, because I was trapped in his gaze. Makes no sense, does it? I was so wired at the time, so freaked out by all those mirrors, that the fear just kind of hit me. I didn’t think it through. Suddenly, it was just there.

  “Anyway, he kind of looked to his right and saw his reflection in the mirror, and his face changed. He looked almost relieved. Then he pulled the trigger, and the mirror just disappeared in a shower of blood and glass. That was it for him. We found the bodies with him in the basement, and the little Maguire kid, who was drifting in and out of consciousness. The best thing that can be said about what happened to those kids is that the M.E. figured they died quickly, but this is children we’re talking about. Jesus, what are we reduced to when we have to console ourselves with the idea of a fast end to their sufferings?”

  He raised his bottle for another beer. I was on coffee. I don’t drink much anymore. I don’t have the taste for it.

  “I can’t believe all that stuff just came out,” said Clem. “Strange what you keep inside, almost without knowing.”

  I thought of Denny Maguire, carried from the house in the arms of a policeman, wrapped in a stranger’s coat. I got the feeling that he probably hadn’t slept well after he closed up the bar on the night that we spoke. Then again, I guessed Denny Maguire had rarely slept peacefully since the day John Grady stole him from his family and brought him to that house. He had kept it all inside too, and it had turned him into an old man before his time.

  Clem’s beer arrived, but he didn’t touch it.

  “I just told you all that, and I don’t even know why you’re asking about him.”

  I briefed him on Matheson, and the photograph of the little girl.

  “Children,” he said, quietly. “It’s always children with you.”

  I didn’t respond. I didn’t want to.

  “Some cops, they have a thing,” he continued. “Cases of one kind just seem to come their way more than others. They don’t go looking for them. They just kind of happen upon them. With some, it’s domestics; others, it’s rapes. They develop a way of looking at them that’s different from the rest, and then it’s like they attract them. With you, I guess, it’s children. Must be hard for you, after what happened.”

  “Sometimes,” I said.

  “You believe in God?”

  “I don’t know. If He exists, then I don’t understand what He’s doing.”

  “If He doesn’t exist, then we’re lost. I look around, I think about men like Grady and what he did, and I wonder sometimes if there’s anybody beyond this who really cares. And then, it’s like the fog clears for a couple of seconds, and I see a pattern. No, not even a pattern, just the possibility of one.”

  “You see the hand of God?”

  He laughed, and tapped his cheekbone with his finger.

  “Cop’s eyes: I see his fingerprints. I see patterns on the glass. You get older, you start thinking about these things. If there is a God, then you and He are going to be having a serious talk in the near future, so you start thinking about what you might say. Mostly, you figure you’re going to be saying ‘Sorry.’ A lot.”

  Clem seemed to remember what he was doing here.

  “I’m rambling. You say Grass is looking into this thing?”

  “He’s skeptical. He says he wants to be discreet, in case he freaks out some family for no good reason, or starts a panic among parents.”

  “Grass is a straight arrow. He was a young man when the Grady thing happened but, like me, he was there at the end. I don’t think it will ever leave him. From what I hear, he takes his stewardship of the place pretty personally. He doesn’t want to remind people of what happened there, and I suppose he’s right to take that view. Next thing you know, it’s on a death trip tourist trail, or somebody takes it into his head to torch the place. No bad thing, if you ask me. I don’t understood why Matheson wanted to keep the house to begin with. But, like I said, the Grady house is now Grass’s patch. He’s taken on the burden of it.”

  I wondered if Clem was right. Grass, Denny Maguire, even Clem himself—all seemed to carry with them some remnant of what had taken place in the Grady house, like a splinter in the soul. Perhaps wiping it from the earth would help to bring some relief to them and to all those whose lives had been touched by John Grady. Even Matheson must have begun to reconsider his urge to preserve it as a monument, now that it had found a way to extend its reach into an unknown girl’s life.

  “Anything else you can tell me?” I asked.

  “There’s not much more to tell,” he said. “Grady was a blank slate. I don’t even know if that was his real name. His fingerprints weren’t on record, and nobody came forward after his death to claim his body. He cost the state a funeral and a cheap cross.”

  He pushed the bottle of beer away from him.

  “Don’t know why I ordered this. I drink more than one bottle in the afternoon and I’m napping for the rest of the day. I’m already finding it hard to think of details that might be helpful to you. I suppose the only thing I can add is that we took some material from the house—books, mostly—that was kind of odd.”

  “Odd how?”

  “It was woo-woo stuff. You know: witchcraft, daemons, pictures of those star things.”

  “Pentagrams.”

  “Yeah, trust you to know the name for them. It wasn’t low-end stuff, either. Some of those books were pretty old. I hear they made some money for the widows and orphans when they were sold.”

  “They were sold off?”

  “Well, there was no reason to hold on to them in the first place, since Grady was dead, and it wasn’t like there was going to be a trial or anything. Someone put them to one side and forgot about them, and they lay around in a basement for twenty years. Then there was that big clearout last fall. I went over to take a look, just in case there was anything worth holding on to as a souvenir. Those books turned up, and someone decided to get a valuation on them. The word went out to some of the dealers in the state, and literally the next day a guy showed up to take a look at them. He offered a thousand dollars for the lot, and walked out with them five minutes later.”

  “Do you know who bought them?”

  “I can find out for you right now, if you want.”

  He took out his cell and tapped in a phone number.

  “See, I did have a use for this after all,” he said, as his call was answered. “Hi, can you put me through to Detective Brian Harrison, please?”

  I didn’t know Harrison. He came on the line and he and Clem exchanged greetings for a while and caught up on news of mutual friends. Eventually, Clem asked him about the sale of the Grady books. After a lot of “uh-huhs” he thanked Harrison, promised to meet him for a drink, then hung up.

  “Wouldn’t you know it?” he said. “There had to be a woo-woo angle. The guy who bought the books claimed to be working for Bowe & Heinrich. He said he was Milton Bowe’s n
ephew.”

  Bowe & Heinrich was a well-known firm of rare-book dealers based in Bangor.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Bowe & Heinrich never heard of him.”

  “Milton Bowe arrived at state police headquarters a day later to take a look at the books himself, but they were already gone by then. He was pretty pissed at what happened. He didn’t like the idea of some weirdo impersonating his nephew, or stealing books from under his nose.”

  “Weirdo?”

  “He looked like a tramp. Some of these collector types do, I hear. They spend more money on books and antiques than they do on clothes. This guy had an old coat and a shoe that was speaking to him. He paid in cash, though: ten hundred-dollar bills, which was probably more than Bowe would have paid, the cheap bastard. If this guy committed a crime, it was a victimless one.”

  I didn’t need to ask Clem any more about the buyer. I knew who he was.

  “You decided how you’re going to handle this thing?” Clem asked.

  I gave a noncommittal reply. I wasn’t sure yet what I could do, other than dig up old memories and watch as the dust they raised settled itself on the Grady house.

  “Well, you need help, you let me know,” said Clem.

  We stood to leave. I picked up the check, despite ribbing Clem earlier about his wealth.

  “It’s taken care of,” he said. “I left my credit card behind the bar.”

  “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “Hey, it was good to see you. I don’t get to talk to someone thirty years younger than me so often now. Makes me feel like less of an old fart.”

  The weather had turned chill. My breath hung like an unfulfilled promise in the afternoon air.

  “Have you ever been back to the Grady house?” I asked Clem, as we walked to our cars.

  “Nope. No cause to go there. Even if I had to go back, I wouldn’t stay too long. There’s something unhealthy in the atmosphere of the place. You’ve been there; you know what I’m talking about. I didn’t know better, I’d say that there were chemicals in the walls and the floors. In the days after Grady killed himself, most of the men who spent time in the house complained of nausea and vomiting. I had headaches for weeks afterward. That was more than twenty years ago. It could be that it’s not as strong now, but I don’t doubt that it’s still there.”

  His words brought back my own disorientation after spending a little time in the Grady house. Clem was right. Whatever had infected the house was still present, engaged in a process of slow decay like the half-life of radioactive waste.

  We parted on Commercial. Clem gripped my hand tightly in both of his.

  “No ‘if onlys,’ ” he said. “Remember that. Don’t let anything happen to that little girl. There are too many lost children. You know that better than anyone else. There are just too many lost children….”

  VI

  I drove up to Bangor that afternoon. Voodoo Ray Czabo and his wife had moved back up to Maine so that she could be closer to her mother, which proved that not only was Ray kind of unpleasant, he was also dumb as well. When a woman like Edna Czabo says she wants to be closer to her mother, then you might as well start packing your bags and looking for a bachelor apartment, because no good can come of it. The talk was that Ray Czabo’s marriage was on the rocks.

  Ray was a skinny guy who dressed neatly, smelled nice, and could be superficially charming when the necessity arose, but his fascination with suffering and the vicarious pleasure—and actual profit—he derived from it left him a couple of rungs below blowflies on the moral ladder. I’d never had the joy of making Mrs. Czabo’s acquaintance, but from what I heard she made Ray seem like good company.

  There were two vehicles in the driveway, a sensible Nissan and a souped-up Firebird, when I pulled up outside the Czabos’ nondescript single-story house, surrounded by similarly anonymous houses with marginally newer paintwork. The grass in the yard was patchy and unkempt, and the trees and bushes that bordered their property hadn’t been pruned that year. Light was already fading as I walked up to the door and pressed the buzzer. After a couple of minutes, the door was opened by a woman in a pale blue bathrobe. Her feet were bare, her hair was tousled, and she had the smoking butt of a cigarette in her hand. I picked out the remains of lipstick at the corners of her mouth, and her chin and cheeks were red and irritated.

  “Mrs. Czabo?” I said.

  “That’s me.”

  She finished the cigarette, seemed to look for somewhere to put it out, then contented herself with tossing it onto the step by my feet. I stamped it out for her.

  “I was looking for your husband.”

  “Who are you?”

  I showed her my license.

  “My name’s Charlie Parker. I’m a private—”

  “Yeah, I know all about you. You broke Ray’s nose.”

  “I didn’t break his nose. He ran into a wall.”

  “He ran into a wall because he was running away from you.”

  I conceded the point.

  “I still need to talk to him.”

  “What’s he done now? Dug up a corpse?”

  “I just have some questions for him. He’s not in any trouble.”

  “Yeah, well, Ray don’t live here no more. He moved out a couple of months ago.”

  “You know where he is?”

  She picked at something between her teeth. Her fingers emerged clutching a short hair. I tried not to think of its possible origins.

  “He does his thing, I do mine. I don’t pay no heed to his business.”

  I heard a toilet flush in the house and a man appeared in the hallway with a towel wrapped around his waist. He was younger than Mrs. Czabo by a decade, which made him about my age, but he looked bulkier and stronger than I was. He glanced at me, then asked her if everything was okay.

  “I’ll holler if I need you,” she said. Her tone made it clear that it would be a sorry day when she needed his help.

  “I just want an address,” I said.

  She shook her head.

  “Cocksucker,” she said. “You hear me?” Her voice was low, and I could smell the staleness on her breath.

  “Ray said you were a cocksucker, and he was right. That’s all you are. So why don’t you just get the fuck out of here and leave us all in peace?”

  “Gee,” I said, “you’re a nice lady.”

  She made a gesture using her tongue and her right hand, just in case I wasn’t clear on what being a cocksucker entailed, then closed the door in my face.

  My cell phone rang as I walked down Edna Czabo’s garden path. I didn’t recognize the number on the caller display. It turned out to be Denny Maguire.

  “Can you talk?” he asked.

  I leaned against my car and looked at the Czabo house. A drape twitched in one of the front windows.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Look, this could be nothing. You asked me if I remembered anything that Grady said while I was in that basement. Like I told you, I was pretty out of it before they rescued me, so most of it’s a blur, but I do recall him telling me that he was afraid.”

  “Afraid of what?”

  “He said that he was going to be punished for what he’d done to those kids, and for what he was going to do to me eventually, I guess. He said that he was damned, but that he wouldn’t go without a fight. He told me that he’d taken precautions. I didn’t know what he meant. I thought later that he was talking about the way he’d reinforced the basement door, but now I’m not so sure.”

  The drape twitched again in the front window, this time with a little more force.

  “There was always black paint on his hands,” Denny continued, “and he was hanging paper and working on the house all of the time. I remember that most of the walls had been covered while I was kept in the basement, because he’d nearly finished the job when the police came for him. There were other things, odd things. During the first days, there was a pile of bones in the corner of the basement. He told me that they
came from dogs. Later, he took them away and buried them.”

  “He told you this?”

  “Yeah. His hands were dirty, and he must have seen me looking at them. He said that he’d been working in his yard, burying the bones. That was when he first began talking about the precautions he was taking, and about how he wasn’t going to be pulled from his home without a fight.”

  The front door of the Czabo house opened, and the bulky young man appeared on the step. He was now dressed in baggy jeans and a hooded sweat top. There were scuffed sneakers on his feet.

  “I don’t know if any of that is helpful,” said Denny.

  “It may be,” I said. “Listen, Denny, I have to go, but thanks for that. I’ll let you know how things work out.”

  I killed the connection just as the man I took to be Edna Czabo’s lover reached the end of the path.

  “Who were you talking to?” he asked. His voice was a little high, and softer than I’d expected.

  “Your mother,” I replied. “She says you’re to come home and stop screwing around with other men’s wives. Oh, and she wants you to pick up some milk along the way.”

  He didn’t look too pleased at the reply, but he didn’t make a move either, although I could see his hands almost involuntarily tense into fists. He was probably smarter than he looked, which made me wonder what he was doing with Edna Czabo.

  “Why are you looking for Ray?” he asked.

  “I have some questions for him.”

  “Ray doesn’t come around here much.”

  “Did you scare him away?”

  “It’s all over between him and Edna. He moved out.”

  “So she told me. Do you know where he is?”

  “Edna says he’s in Bangor someplace. I don’t know where.”

  “That’s not very helpful,” I said. “So if you didn’t come out here to help, why did you come out?”

  His head jerked back slightly in the direction of the house, and the woman within.