“Our file shows that any such step would be contraindicated,” the doctor said. “Not in the patient’s best interests.”
A white flash of light, something like heat lightning, burst over Wilson’s mental horizon, obscuring his view of the bookcases. He found he was clenching the receiver in a strangle grip and talking much louder than before. “Sir, you are describing a piece of paper to me, and I am talking to you about a man who has threatened to kill his wife, not once but many times—”
Dr. Meagrum harrumphed. “Yes, someone with this type of pathology might make such a threat, but I wouldn’t suggest that you take it too seriously …”
“He came to her house with a thirty-ought-six rifle,” Wilson said. “A loaded rifle—I’m now referring to the police report. They found him and the gun and they found her barricaded in an upstairs bedroom. With her two children, I should say. The boy is six now, Dr. Meagrum, and the little girl is seven. Your outpatient has threatened to kill them too.”
Dr. Meagrum resorted to the imperial “we”: “We have no record that this patient is violent. We see no reason to alter the treatment program at this time.”
With a mighty effort, Wilson established a greater degree of control over his voice. “Very well,” he said frostily. “I do sincerely hope you’ll see no reason to regret the course you’ve taken.”
By dumb luck his next call caught Judge Oldfield in his chambers, between cases, on the fly.
“I’m asking the impossible now,” Wilson said. “Let’s have him picked up. An APB. Lock him up and have a look at him. Just for a day or so.”
“You’re right,” Oldfield said. “That’s impossible. I couldn’t do it if I wanted to. This is Williamson County. We haven’t got a police state here.”
“It’s a free country, isn’t it,” Wilson said. “Well, I had to ask.”
“I wonder if you did, at that,” Oldfield said. “You’re acting mighty worked up about this, old son. Don’t you think you might be making a little much of it all? He’s been out two days already, so you say, and what happened? Nothing. The lady didn’t even know until you called her. Simmer down some, think it over. Go home early. It’s Friday, after all.”
“All right,” Wilson said. “Might give it a try.”
“You get me that injunction and I’ll pass it on to the sheriff direct,” Oldfield said. “I can’t do any more than that.”
“I know,” Wilson said. “Not until something happens. Well, I appreciate it.”
He hung up and dialed Sharon Morgan at the office but she was gone, gone for the weekend, had left half an hour before to pick up the children from school. He plopped down the phone and tried, forcibly, to relax. Try it. Judge Oldfield was no fool, after all. Wilson picked up the pencil with a fleeting idea of listing off what he was thinking, feeling, but that was a ridiculous notion; probably that was how they spent their time at Central State. Possibly nothing would happen anyway. Possibly. He looked up Sharon’s home number and dialed it, but there was no answer, though it rang twenty times.
In ten minutes he had scratched out the requisite injunction and handed it to Mrs. Veech with instructions to type it and walk it over to the courthouse when she was done. After she had gone out, he sat doing nothing but covering the phone, which didn’t ring. The jingle of Mrs. Veech’s return moved him to at least pretend to work. But he’d had it with the will for the day, though it still wasn’t quite finished. He scraped his agenda toward him across the desk and ran his pencil point down item by item. There were two boundary disputes and a zoning complaint. A piece of frivolous litigation to do with somebody’s unleashed dog. There was a murder case where the defendant would plead, draw two-to-ten and count himself lucky. A foregone conclusion, Wilson thought in his present skeptical mood, though matters had not yet reached that stage. At the foot of the list was a patent case that would make him and his client rich if he could win it. This one was the most remote, no court date even set for it yet, but at the same time the most intriguing, as much for its intricacy as its promise. He swiveled and dug in the cabinet for the file.
At four he called Sharon Morgan at the lake and got no answer. For another half hour he studied the patent case, though he was losing interest at an exponential rate. When he next called there was still no answer, and he was out of the chair and snatching his coat down from its peg before he even knew he meant to leave. On the highway bound for Keyhole Lake he began to feel a little foolish. He’d been presuming, counting the time from three o’clock, when school let out. It was not more than an hour from Nashville to the lake house, but he hadn’t considered that she might have stopped to shop on the way, or taken the children to a movie or simply for a drive. Now it appeared to him that his every move that day had been an error. It was unlike him to have lost his temper with that doctor. Patience had always been his strength; he left it to his opponents to make mistakes in anger. Then too, that last call to Judge Oldfield was something he’d have to live down, and on top of all that he had wasted the day, and would need to come back in Saturday morning to recover the lost time.
All foolishness, and yet the thought did not comfort him. He drove carefully, a hair under the speed limit, sighting through the windshield across the burn mark on his knuckle. For no reason he could think of, he let the car roll past the Morgan mailbox and coast to a stop on the shoulder, where he got softly out. There was a little lip to climb before he could see down the driveway to the steeply pitched roof of the A-frame house and the blue lake distantly visible out past it. It was cooler here; the weather was turning, or else it was a chill coming off the water.
Below him, the drive was matted with fallen leaves. A staining fall of sunset light came slanting through the tree trunks on either side as the wind rose and combed the red leaves back, bringing a few more falling from the branches. Except for the wind it was utterly still; only across the lake the dogs in Jackson’s kennel were barking, their voices echoing off the flat expanse of the water. But probably they were barking all the time. That was not the problem. What was wrong was that the passenger door of Sharon’s orange Volkswagen had been left hanging open, sticking out stiffly like a broken arm. The car was pulled around parallel to the back porch, and over its roof he saw that the sliding glass door to the house had been left open too.
He walked to the dangling car door and stopped. Just past the edge of the drive, not more than three yards from him, there lay a child’s blue tennis shoe, a Ked, with maple leaves spread around it like the prints of a large hand. Some twenty paces farther on he found the second shoe and then the little boy, barefoot, lying face down in a pile of sloppily raked leaves. Wilson thought that his name had been Billy, but he couldn’t be quite certain of it, which bothered him unreasonably. The child had been shot in the base of the neck; the entry wound was rather small. Beyond the leaf pile a wide swath of dun lawn swept down to the lake shore where a canoe, tethered to a little dock, rocked softly on the water.
A strip of almost total darkness fit into the gap of the glass door. The porch floor moaned as Wilson crossed it, and glancing down he saw a brass shell casing caught in a crack between two boards. He bent to pick it up, then stopped himself and put both hands in his pockets. Through the door was a large living room with no ceiling, only the peaked roof and the rafters. At this time of day it was very dim within and it took Wilson’s eyes a moment to adjust. The daughter (he was almost sure her name was Jill) was sprawled on a high-backed wicker chair as if flung there by some strong force. There was a single wound in her chest. Her mouth was open slightly and her eyes showed a little white. Wilson thought it more than likely that Pax had shot her from a standing position on the porch.
It took him only a quarter turn of his head to locate Sharon’s body at the far end of the long room, lying across a wide flight of steps that rose to the kitchen and dining area. Pax might well have shot her from the doorway; he was a marksman, the proof was plain, and efficient with his shells. Wilson crossed the room to the steps
and paused. He couldn’t tell just where she’d been hit, though she’d bled very heavily. She lay crooked, twisted over at the waist, the fingers of one hand folded over the overhang of a step. Her hair had fallen full over her face, and Wilson was grateful for that, but her position looked so uncomfortable that he was tempted to turn and straighten her. His hands were still jammed in his pockets, however, and he left them there.
He went up the steps almost on tiptoe, careful to avoid bloodying his shoes, and made a turn to the left that brought him up against the metal kitchen cabinets. His breath was coming very short, each intake arrested as though by a punch in the midsection. He was aware of the tick of his wristwatch, and that was all. There was a telephone on the kitchen counter, and presently he detached a paper towel from a roll neatly suspended beneath the line of cabinets, wrapped it around the receiver and called the sheriff’s office.
At the opposite end of the kitchen, a smaller set of sliding doors opened onto a deck overlooking the lawn and the lake. With the help of another paper towel, he slid back the door and went out and sat on a bench to wait. The lake’s surface had a painful metallic glitter, with the sunset colors spreading across it like corrosion. He had left his sunglasses in the car, and being in no mood to retrieve them, he simply shut his eyes. In Korea, where the Army had sent him, he had seen some action, as they say, but afterward he had thought very little about what he had seen. In some quietly ticking corner of his mind a speculation was going forward as to how the bodies had come to be positioned as they were, and now it came to him that after they were all inside the house the boy must have missed his shoes and gone back to the car—He opened his eyes with a jerk and looked up. A solitary, premature firefly detached itself from the treetops on one side of the yard and floated dreamily across and into the treetops on the other.
It was twilight by the time he had parked his car behind the square, and for some reason he bypassed his office and walked on down Main Street as far as Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church. More leaves had carpeted the white stone steps, and Wilson stood looking at them, one hand curved around a spear of the iron fence, and then turned back. The sidewalk was empty but for him, and he could hear the dry leaves crisping under his every footfall.
The street lights were coming on by the time he had returned to the square. The windows of his office were dark, but he could hear the telephone ringing as he came up the steps. Mrs. Veech had, of course, locked up before she left, and while he was searching out his key the phone stopped ringing. He went inside and pressed the light switch. Again the phone began to jangle, and he reached across Mrs. Veech’s typewriter to pick it up.
“Mr. Wilson? It’s Sam Trimble here. I had your paper to serve on Paxton Morgan?”
“Yes,” Wilson said.
The deputy cleared his throat. “I thought you might like to know we picked him up. He’d gone straight back to his own house, you know, like they do.”
“Yes,” Wilson said again.
“We got him cold, if it’s any comfort,” Trimble said. “The gun still warm and blood on his shoes.”
“That’s all right,” Wilson said. “He’ll plead insanity.”
He was not often here at night, and the overhead fixture was harsh and bright, bouncing blurred reflections from the flat black of the window panes, making his inner office look too much like a cell. But if he used only the desk lamp, the shadows reached toward him so. And yet he was still afraid to go home! He shouldn’t have said what he had to Trimble, though at the moment he could hardly bring himself to feel regret for it. And he was late by now; he’d better call.
“Daddy, you’re late,” Lisa said.
“That’s right, kiddo,” Wilson said. “Where’s your mother?”
“She’s outside,” Lisa said. “We were, both of us. I’ll go call her.”
“No, you don’t need to,” Wilson said. “Just tell her I’ll be home shortly. Say I still have to stop by the store, though.” Hanging up, he glanced at his watch. A fine evening like this, his wife would certainly spend outdoors, not bothering to watch the evening news.
Flushed with relief, he pictured their long curving yard, thick with fireflies, as it would be now, green pinpoints flashing and hovering in the dark. The lights of the house glowed warm behind the calm silhouettes of his wife and his daughter, and inside, the kitchen steamed with the scent of supper waiting. Upstairs, beside his bedside lamp, lay the copy of War and Peace he’d been rereading this fall; at a half hour or so a night, it would last him to Christmas or longer. He thought now of Prince Andrey lying wounded on the battlefield, looking up into the reaches of the sky, that radical change in his perspective.
Still, he was not quite ready to leave. He picked up his pencil and tapped the butt of the dried eraser on the pad. At home, tonight or tomorrow or whenever he finally had to tell the story there, then the murders would be absolutely realized and the alternative of their somehow not having happened would be permanently shut off. Above, the fluorescent fixture made a sort of whining sound; Wilson thought that he could feel it in his teeth.
He turned the pencil over in his hand and set the point on the pad, but there was nothing much to write. The yellow paper was down at the bottom of a long pale shaft, stroked with faint parallel lines which signified nothing. If he could note down all the ingredients of the episode, then they could be comprehended, wrapped in a parcel of law and so managed. Wilson was a believer in due process. Without meaning to, he had become a bystander in this case.
It was only dizziness because he had skipped lunch, undoubtedly, and when he remembered that, the pad came floating back up toward him and the desk flattened and held still. There were some scratch marks on the paper, as if during his vertigo he had been trying unsuccessfully to draw a picture. Now he wondered if he had known what would happen, and if he had known, what then? He had left no legitimate measure untried but still he could picture himself crossing the lip above the lake house with a gun in his own hand, seeing the Volkswagen door still closed, the glass door of the house pulled to and Pax Morgan outlined against the glimmer of the lake like a paper silhouette.
The pencil slipped from his fingers and hit the desk with a clacking report that broke the fantasy. Pax was alive and the others were dead. His freedom was better protected than their safety—that would be one way of putting it. Simple. It was time to go home. Wilson turned off the desk lamp, stood up and pulled his coat down from the hat rack. Safer and better to have no freedom maybe, but no, you wouldn’t say that. The humming stopped when he nicked the light switch by the door. No, you wouldn’t say that, would you? In the dark of the hall he could not see his way; he went toward the vague light of the front window with one hand on the wall. No, you wouldn’t, but what would you say?
MOVE ON UP
HAL STOOD IN THE dawn haze, one hand resting lightly on the pebbled concrete balustrade, watching the iron-gray light filter out across Columbus Park. He shifted slightly from foot to foot, and every few minutes he twisted his torso to the rear, to stretch his lower back, which hurt a little. Down the double staircase from the long open concrete barn in which he’d spent the night, the park was empty, more or less. The ragged shrubbery rattled in a slicing March wind; an empty beer can gave out a hollow clacking sound, turning with the wind over the uneven cobbles. A couple of men had fit themselves through the hoops of a couple of benches to sleep, or maybe they were women. From where he stood they were nothing but bundles of rags and hair; he couldn’t have recognized the difference. This notion reminded him exactly of what he had been trying not to think about.
Behind him, the growl of early Canal Street traffic was just audible, gnawing back and forth between the Holland Tunnel and the Manhattan Bridge. He turned and set the small of his back against the concrete and looked over at the slick gray rise of the Tombs wall. The wind picked up, swirling trash around his ankles, and automatically he thumbed his denim collar up. Under the short jacket he wore three different kinds of shirts and a piece of th
ermal underwear he’d found. His pants were thin and holey, though, and his fingers were waxy and stiff from the cold. But keep your chest warm and you won’t get sick—someone had once told him that back when he was little. He sniffed and wiped his nose with a denim cuff.
The whole long rectangle under the roof was full of litter, paper and plastic and anything else that people might drag up there in the hope that it would keep them warm. Hal studied the currents and eddies the wind made in it all. At the far corner a big sheet of cardboard lifted, hovered, then blew back against the wall, and Loman sat up from underneath it, tightening his greasy overcoat around him. The wind dropped and the cardboard settled back onto him. He knocked it away with an elbow and peered uneasily around. When his eyes lit on Hal he smiled through his yellowish beard.
“Morning already?” he said. “You never woke me, did you?” They had a loose arrangement for each to watch while the other slept. It had been discovered that to fall below the status of victim was impossible for anyone nowadays.
“It’s all right,” Hal said. “I was thinking.”
“Who, you?” Loman’s joints popped like a string of firecrackers as he stood up. “What about?”
“Nothing.” Hal turned back to overlook the park. He could hear Loman coughing behind him.
Then Loman came over and spat something wet and brown across the rail and straightened up. “Mighty cold,” he said. “Thought you told me spring was coming.”
“It’ll get here.” Hal cut one eye Loman’s way. There was a queer dry patch spreading from Loman’s eye socket down over his cheekbone, purplish under the black skin. Hal had never asked if it was a birthmark or a scar.
“I tell you what,” Loman said. He pulled out a cigarette stub and lit it shakily, tightening his lips inward so as not to burn them. “It keep up this way, Brother Henry, you might find me climbing on that van.”
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