Murder Scene

by Richard Montanari

  Detta began to cry.

  ‘You have to go,’ Anthony said. ‘You weren’t supposed to be here. Neither of you.’

  ‘Don’t do this,’ Will said. ‘Please.’

  ‘Me? I didn’t do this. You did this. Just like your mother.’

  ‘What’s he talking about, Dad?’

  ‘She is Hope,’ Anthony said.

  And then Will heard it. It was a tiny sound, the sort of noise that passes in the background of daily tedium, unnoticed, unremarkable. A small click. It was the demarcation point between what Will’s life had been up to this moment, and whatever it would become in its aftershock.

  As both lighters sparked to life, igniting the world, Amanda leaped to her feet and pushed Bernadette toward Will. The power of the monstrous blast propelled Amanda backward, through the glass doors, onto the balcony, over the edge, and out into the night sky.

  Will and Detta were slammed into the hallway. Will felt the drywall shatter at his back, felt the searing heat on his face, saw the interior of the apartment explode in a barrage of scorched, shimmering air.

  The last thing Will Hardy thought, in the moment before his world went black, was that his father had been right.

  Fire has a voice.

  Winter – Ravens

  Being the True Diary and Journal of Eva Claire Larssen

  December 11, 1868

  There is so much to do! Christmas is coming in two weeks and we are busy making everything ready. Godwin Hall is full of visitors, and they are from all points on the compass. One man is an actor from England! He left a silver dollar for Deirdre under his pillow, as she attends his room. He is very handsome, and when Deirdre talks of him she does not stammer.

  December 15, 1868

  The people who own Godwin Hall – the Schuyler family – are warm and decent people. Mr Schuyler is tall and strong, always easy with a smile. He often smells of woodsmoke and resin. Mrs Schuyler is rotund, like Mama was. She snorts when she laughs sometimes.

  The clientele here is often quite elegant, much like you would imagine. It is another world to me, though, a world in which I feel like a stranger.

  December 16, 1868

  In the ballroom there have been many entertainments, such as chorales and dances and raffles. This morning we made cakes and trimmed the tree. But the gaiety of Godwin Hall is not what makes my heart beat faster. There is something else about the Hall that makes me swoon. The son of the owners is a tall, shy boy of seventeen years. His eyes are an ocean blue, and he walks with great poise, even when doing the most menial chores. For the longest time I thought he might have been mute, as I never heard him say a word.

  Today he talked to me. He asked me if I was looking forward to Christmas. I said I was, very much.

  His name is Willem.

  December 18, 1868

  Zeven Farms, where Veldhoeve is located, is decorated like a fairy tale kingdom. People come from miles around to look at the displays. I think it might actually be enchanted. I am told that, during the war, many orphaned children came to stay here. My room is in the attic, by the back. I am an orphan of the war, too.

  December 19, 1868

  We spent the morning straining pumpkins for the pies. The owner of Zeven Farms, Dr Rinus van Laar, brought them over to the Hall for us himself. He is a kindly old man. He lost his wife many years ago. I think he is quite lonesome. It seems he has taken a shine to me as his granddaughter.

  December 20, 1868

  I’ve had the most unusual day. It began ordinary enough with the morning chores of baking the breads, grinding the coffee, collecting the eggs for the guests of Godwin Hall. Then, after service, I returned to my room. On the way up the back stairs, Dr van Laar met me, and said he had something to show me. He led me back to the main house, and down a long corridor. At the end was a small room called camera lucida, and it is wondrous. If you sit in a chair, in the center, you can see for miles and miles, as if you were flying through the treetops. You can even see people who are no longer here. Dr van Laar says it is all done with daguerreotypes and special glass lenses, but he has a twinkle in his eyes, so I am not sure. I think there is magic here. Dr van Laar told me I could come up here anytime, and I think I will.

  He says it will be our secret.

  December 21, 1868

  The Winter Solstice Dance was at Godwin Hall tonight. Folks from as far away as Cleveland came in their finery. It was a lot of work for us preparing the food, but it was all so festive. It lifted my spirits. As Willem danced with a rich girl named Darcy he kept looking at me.

  December 22, 1868

  Someone told Willem that today is my birthday. I found the most beautiful locket on the pillow of my bed. It looks to be yellow gold with a seed pearl embellishment in the shape of a white bird. I will cherish it always.

  December 24, 1868

  It is Christmas Eve. Most of the girls who work at Godwin Hall are with their families today. I am by myself in the back attic room at Veldhoeve, crying myself to sleep over Mama and Papa, and my home so far away.

  Willem came to me at midnight and we loved.

  11

  In camera lucida the past was ever present. In this secret and silent place, this many-roomed mansion where light collects the soul, the four walls held centuries of memory.

  The man standing in the center of the room was tall and elegantly slender, soft spoken and direct in his eye contact, precise in his chosen words.

  His name was Jakob van Laar.

  Jakob’s hands were large but, unlike his fathers before him, they were not a crofter’s hands, those of a man who tilled the earth for his food and wage. Instead they were nimble, the hands of an artist or a master tailor. As often as he took a charcoal pencil in hand he played the Steinway in the parlor of Veldhoeve, favoring the études of Chopin and the fugues of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck.

  He’d done the day’s work of a nurseryman in his youth, of course, had saddle grafted hundreds of trees, tilled and irrigated and spaded, had spent many a cold fall night covering young saplings to shield them from frost.

  But as Zeven Farms, founded by Dr Rinus van Laar, prospered in his care, Jakob stepped into the shadows, preparing for this time.

  In camera lucida Jakob walked among the dead, the long buried, and it was through them, and the bounty of his orchards, that he lived.

  On this day, as snow gently fell on Holland County, Ohio, he thought:

  I am the last of my kind.

  It all ends with me.

  As he prepared to leave camera lucida Jakob felt a presence in the room.

  He turned slowly, and saw Sébastien van Laar standing behind him. His father, dead at fifty, wore a brown hunting vest and a pair of Irish Setter Rutmasters. Behind him, on the large table draped with oilcloth, sat his beloved Remington 870, and the defleshed skull and antlers of an eight-point buck.

  The sight of the man filled Jakob with a primitive longing, the hunger of a boy for the sound and strength of his father, the safety of his nearness.

  What do you see?

  Jakob spun slowly in place. The images on the walls had somehow returned, and now showed the four fields that awaited him in the coming weeks and months.

  Each meadow held objects he had collected over many years, meticulously placed and replaced, some having grown over with grass and clover, each a layer of a final composite.

  It was in Maryland he’d found the brass wine goblet. In eastern Maine he located the silver and ebony gavel. Two days earlier, at an estate sale outside Toledo, he bought the pewter tea urn.

  ‘I see the seasons,’ Jakob said.

  It will soon be the first day of winter.

  ‘Yes. The solstice.’

  Do you remember?

  Jakob recalled with clarity the Latin textbook, its corners creased and bent with use, the very smell of it important. He remembered how he stayed up late into the night to learn the language. Decline the noun; conjugate the verb.

  ‘Iucundissima est spei p
ersuadio et vite imprimis.’

  Very good, son.

  Son.

  How Jakob missed hearing the word.

  Jakob drew on his overcoat, buttoned it, pulled onto his hands supple Italian leather gloves.

  He would now return to his living quarters, change his clothing, gather the boy from the barn, and together they would head south, to a small town called Chambersburg.

  They watched her enter the store. It was a fueling station with six pumps, three of them diesel. Attached was a small grocery, a convenience store that sold country staples – beer, cigarettes, sugary baked goods, jerky.

  Jakob pulled to the side of the road, checked his mirrors. Traffic was very light. He and the boy were in one of the older unmarked service vans, shorn of any reference to the farm or store. The inside was spotless, as new.

  Jakob handed the boy a disposable cell phone.

  ‘Call the moment she leaves.’

  ‘Okay.’

  The boy got out of the van, hiked the collar of his jacket to the chill, and crossed the road. Jakob watched him, thought of all the children over the years. There was never a shortage of them; wounded birds who had alighted in Holland County from far-flung nests.

  As Jakob headed to the secluded spot a half-mile away, he recalled the first time he had seen the girl. She had been about twelve years old and, when he’d first set his eyes on her, he knew so much.

  She was a cautious little one, given to blushing when complimented, choosing silence instead of bluster. In her heart, Jakob was certain, there was virtue.

  He’d once observed the girl, about a year earlier, as she talked with two of her friends at the fast food court in the Belden Village Mall. The least outgoing of her small group, she had mostly listened, jumping into the conversation only as necessary to keep these acquaintances engaged.

  Near them sat a man at a table. He wore tattered clothing, damp-rinsed and wrung dry in some filthy gas station men’s room, the soles of his worn boots beginning to waffle.

  The girl noticed the man watching her, perhaps saw the desperation in his eyes. While her friends deposited their trash into the nearby trash cans, the girl quite deliberately left her half-eaten sandwich on the table. When she reached the exit door, Jakob saw her turn around to see the man wrapping the sandwich in its paper, and putting it in his pocket.

  Each day, after school, she would stop along the two-mile route to her home, a gaunt frame house at the end of a dirt lane off Poinciana Road. Her stop was a welfare check of an unofficial sort with an older woman whom Jakob had observed coming to her door in a wheelchair, an oxygen canister strapped to the side.

  Today, as forecast, the snow had begun to fall at noon. Jakob parked the van in a turnoff on a heavily wooded bend in the road. He pulled his wool cap low on his forehead, selected a pair of tinted glasses from the box on the seat next to him.

  At just after two o’clock the boy called and told him the girl had left the store. She was coming toward him. It was now a matter of minutes.

  When Jakob saw her come around the bend, her shoulders raised to the cold, his heart began to race.

  Are you certain of her heart?

  ‘I am,’ Jakob said.

  He turned to look at the shadow standing next to the driver’s door of the van.

  Zoals het klokje thuis tikt, tikt het nergens.

  Rinus van Laar, who had been scholarly in the works of Erasmus and Rabelais, often spoke to Jakob in proverbs.

  The clock ticks at home, as it ticks nowhere else.

  Jakob glanced at the side mirror on the passenger door. The girl, whose name was Paulette Graham, was less than one hundred feet away. Jakob stepped out of the van.

  The girl looked at him, at the scattered mess on the side of the road. ‘What happened?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m afraid I took that curve a little too quickly.’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘I’d forgotten that the latch on this back door was broken. I’ve been meaning to get it fixed but, alas, money is tight.’

  Paulette smiled. Jakob felt something untoward fuss within him. He pushed it back.

  ‘I can help you with that if you like,’ she said. ‘Help you put everything back in your truck.’

  ‘Not to bother,’ Jakob said. ‘It’s cold and wet. I couldn’t ask you to do that.’

  The girl looked down, at her already soaked jacket and jeans. When she looked up, she didn’t respond.

  ‘You are most kind,’ Jakob said.

  They worked in silence for a few minutes. Every so often Jakob would steal a glance at the girl. She could have easily been Charity. The virtues entwine like roots, he thought.

  Before long, the van was reloaded, the back door secured with string. As they’d worked not a single car passed. This would not be the case for long.

  ‘I must pay you for your time,’ Jakob said.

  ‘Pay me? I didn’t do all that much.’

  Jakob glanced both ways up and down the lane. ‘Where are you headed?’

  A slight pause, then she pointed over her shoulder, toward Aquila Road. Jakob knew exactly where she was headed. He’d known for a long time.

  ‘Up to Aquila Road.’

  ‘I can drop you off. It’s the least I can do for your kindness.’

  In that moment she looked away, toward the village square, now laced with gently falling snow. She glanced back at Jakob. Perhaps she was weighing the transaction, balancing the work she had done, the wage offered, considering the wisdom and folly of getting into a vehicle with a complete stranger.

  To Jakob she was not a stranger at all. He knew as much about the girl as he had ever known about anyone. He knew that she would now curl her hair behind her right ear, look at the ground for a moment, then look into his eyes. He knew that she would either say no thank you or okay, thanks.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’

  She slipped into the van, closed the door, and buckled her seatbelt. Jakob stole another glance at the mirrors. They were alone.

  And thus, in the way of his fathers before him, he made the first girl his own.

  There would be three more.

  12

  It was somewhere around seven hundred that Bernadette Hardy lost track.

  She’d fallen asleep in the chair, her mind still racing out of control, still scrambling up and down the slopes of reason and understanding. That’s how exhausted she was. She rarely fell asleep right away, even in her own bed; her comfortable, soft, expensive bed. Even as a child, sleep had been elusive to her, like trying to net a butterfly in the dark.

  For more than two weeks, even the Ambien (with which she’d begun overmedicating, but not by that much) had not worked. Today the fatigue finally pulled rank, and she’d lost count of how many times the machines had beeped, something she’d vowed she would never do.

  In the closing of an eye her mother was Here.

  In the opening of an eye she was Gone.

  In one moment her mother had been Amanda Kyle Hardy: swimmer, painter, rooftop gardener, social worker. Amanda Kyle Hardy, wife to William, mother to Bernadette, daughter of the late James and Sylvia Kyle. Amanda who never cursed anyone, but swore like a longshoreman. Amanda who was always an easy mark for whoever would show up on her doorstep, hands out for some cause or another.

  On the afternoon of the day it all ended they’d sat at the small table in the kitchen. Detta made her mom’s favorite herbal tea. It was the last conversation they would ever have.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Detta asked.

  Her mother took a few seconds before answering. ‘I don’t know, honey. I thought I had it all figured out this morning, but I don’t.’

  ‘Is Dad moving back in?’

  Her mother didn’t answer. Instead she reached out and touched Detta’s hand.

  Detta knew a lot of kids from her school whose parents were divorced. Most of them, in fact. Divorce always sounded like a foreign country to her and, because of it, she often felt lik
e a member of a select society, an elite tribe whose parents had a perfect marriage. Her father was a professor and a bestselling author; her mother was a social worker who helped disadvantaged and troubled people.

  Seconds after the machines flat-lined a pair of nurses rushed into the room, followed by a doctor, an older man with muddy brown eyes and a calm, measured delivery when it came to bad news. Detta had noticed that this doctor didn’t really look at you, but rather looked near you. Perhaps he had delivered so much bad news while looking directly at people that their eyes had begun to reduce him, to take away parts of his soul.

  The nurses and doctor touched and scanned and listened and pumped, scurried and scratched things on their charts, checked the machines. They mumbled to each other as the doctor put a stethoscope to Amanda Hardy’s chest.

  Suddenly their actions took on less urgency. The nurses shut down the machines, one by one; the doctor took the ends of the stethoscope from his ears, and grimly consulted his watch.

  Of course, Detta thought. He’s noting Mom’s time of death. It’s the lottery everybody wins. You only have to buy the one ticket.

  They would soon explain that it was an aneurysm, this final assault, an anomaly of a burst blood vessel in her mother’s brain. Caused, of course, by severe head trauma. Caused, of course, by the fall from the balcony.

  Caused, of course, by her father.

  Detta glanced over at the chair where her father was supposed to be. He had gone for coffee, or whatever it was he did when he found he could no longer sit in this room. Maybe it was the rigid plastic chair that hurt him, or the reheated and recycled air, or the smell of sickness and repair.

  Maybe it was the guilt. No one knew more about guilt than Dr William Hardy.

  As the death dance began around her, Detta put on her headphones. She scanned her playlists, wondering what music might be appropriate for these moments. Over the past two-and-a half months she had amassed a few dozen songs for this very purpose.

  Now, when the pain was red and fresh and scorching, she needed loud, an IRT train coming straight at her in a tunnel. In a few seconds, she had it.