He lifted himself from the back seat and stood, catching the paper with his foot before it slid past.
It was a flyer. The same kind of flyer he’d seen on Haight Street, and up near Fisherman’s Wharf, and along half a dozen other avenues in the last few months. Since September, they’d been taped to the lampposts and stapled to the trees. He’d seen them pasted to shop windows, block upon block. Walls of paper covering entire storefronts, wrapping full-grown trees to their highest and most insubstantial branches. He’d seen crowds of people walk past them without slowing, without turning their gaze for even the half-second it would have taken to read the names of the missing.
He bent and took the flyer in his hand. Its bold print ran above three black-and-white photographs.
HAVE YOU SEEN INSPECTOR GARCIA OR OFFICER GEDARRO? WHAT ABOUT DAVID HANEY?
The first two photographs could not have been taken. Garcia’s face was smashed and lacerated, one eye punctured by a shard of glass that still protruded from the socket. Officer Gedarro stood with his back to the camera but was nonetheless looking straight into the lens, because his neck was broken and his head had turned all the way around. The skin around his throat was twisted into a spiral, like the strands of a rope. The last photograph showed the man who’d been on the mattress in the Trident, his face still enclosed in the metal apparatus. Caleb let go of the paper and watched it skid away, watched it follow the tunnel’s gentle curve until it evaporated into the fog that waited outside.
Twenty-five years ago, his father might have seen the flyers too. There’d been missing men on his conscience, fifteen of them, going back to the day of Caleb’s birth. Their faces might have covered the walls of his basement cutting room during his last three days of work. Flyers and handbills and leaflets everywhere, like the guilty debris after a flood. His father, bloody up to his elbows and singing as he shaped his final sculpture with a wooden mallet and an improvised chisel, might have been staggering through a sea of flyers, might have been fighting off a whirling storm of them whenever he paused and waved his arms at the ceiling, whenever he spun in circles and punched the air while shouting in languages no one spoke.
Perhaps the collectors who bought his paintings wanted to search them for hints. Wanted to stand before them in quiet rooms and study them for signs and forewarnings. Hidden images full of dark potential, like buried seeds. The same way Henry and the rest of them would pick through his house and his lab, would reread his articles in a hunt for the genesis of this darkness named Caleb they’d found like a weed in their ranks. They would catalog their discoveries and write about them in journals, and perhaps someday a different class of collectors would begin trading in his charcoal sketches, buying them at private auctions and taking them home to study the chiaroscuro shading in his series of Bridget Laurent nudes, hoping to divine the point at which the spectrum went to full black.
He looked down the empty tunnel.
“Emmeline?” he whispered.
She didn’t answer. She couldn’t answer, because she was gone.
He closed his eyes again and held on to the roof of the car so he wouldn’t tip over. He had to breathe, had to focus. That was the way back. To focus on her. To focus on anything at all, but especially on her.
“Emmeline.”
Whispered slowly, her name lapped like three low waves against a welcome shore. He set the word loose in his mind, let it wash through him.
Even though she was gone, he could still smell her.
I’m yours, she’d said, and so far, she’d never lied to him. Everything had been true, every promise had been kept. Her perfume, lingering above the smell of twisted metal and burning rubber, was a new promise. A promise that if everything else was gone, if no hope or plausible future remained, there was Emmeline.
He opened his eyes, then turned and shut the squad car’s passenger door. He stepped up to the driver’s door and looked at Officer Gedarro through the cracked window. Then he looked at the car’s front end. Shattered windshield glass was spread in a fan on the hood and in Garcia’s hair. The glass shard in Garcia’s right eye glittered in the amber light. But the engine was still running. If he reversed away from the wall and put the car back into forward gear, he’d be able to drive it. Perhaps not far, but he didn’t need to go far. The first thing was to get out of the tunnel.
He opened the driver’s door and shoved Officer Gedarro into the passenger seat, behind Garcia’s dangling legs. Emmeline was his. That was the truest thing of all. And she’d be waiting for him, up north, or wherever he went. He dropped into the seat and slammed the door. The rest of the glass fell out of the window frame. After he backed away from the wall and straightened the wheel, he checked the side-view mirror. There were no headlights yet, but there would be, and when they came, they’d come fast.
He’d have to hurry now. Emmeline hadn’t been lying about that, either.
He put the car into gear and pressed on the accelerator, then reached past the steering wheel to clear away the opaquely shattered glass hanging in the windshield’s frame. Then there was the wind, fresh against his bleeding face.
Out on the hood, Garcia was watching him with his good eye. He blinked and stared, blinked again. His feet kicked a rhythm against the dashboard.
“North,” Caleb said, looking at the detective. “She’ll be there. You’ll see.”
The cruiser was riding on two flat tires. Any faster than ten miles an hour and he couldn’t stop the fishtailing. They came limping out of the tunnel, the wounded car and its cargo of men, and when he hit the wall of fog outside, he saw how it would be when he got to the north, how it would go when he found her again. A week or a month from now, he might be sleeping in a storm culvert beneath some empty stretch of highway, but when he woke at night and raised his head to look around, he wouldn’t see a cement drain. He wouldn’t see the sticks and old animal bones he’d shoved aside to make his bed.
None of that.
He’d see a candle guttering in an iron birdcage, would see the crystal cake stand with its dried rose, the stuffed eagle frozen in its scream. Persian carpets would blanket a wood-planked floor. Somewhere in the wavering shadows, he’d hear the Comtoise clock as it marked the backwards time of nowhere.
He might have stolen an old blanket from a laundromat, but when he woke in the light of Emmeline’s caged candle, when he heard the swing of a pendulum and the click of well-oiled clockworks, he would be ensconced in white down rather than pilled wool. If he explored beneath that duvet, he’d find Emmeline’s hip, would trace with his fingertips that fine, cool curve until she stirred and woke and turned to him.
They’d travel by night.
North and beyond, until they found woods deep enough to hold them. He might be sitting in the passenger seat of a pickup truck after daring to hitchhike, the old man behind the wheel smelling of sweat and chewing tobacco, smelling of thoughts kept to himself. But if Caleb closed his eyes, the truck’s rattle would die away until it carried them as if it ran on smooth rails. The engine would tighten up until its knocks blurred into the roar of a finely tuned straight-eight. If he opened his eyes, Emmeline would turn to him and smile, one hand on the Black Prince’s leather-wrapped wheel.
Don’t look in the back seat, Caleb, okay? she might say. I don’t want you to be angry with me. The old man—
Garcia was still watching him from the hood.
“She’ll take care of me,” Caleb said to him. “That’s all it is.”
Ahead, he saw a pullout, a wide place in the gravel shoulder where the car could easily slip through a gap in the guardrail and go down the embankment. There was only one thing left to do. He reached across to Gedarro and unsnapped the holster on his hip. He pulled out the gun and held it in his right hand. Then he slowed the car to an idle, pointed its hood at the shoulder where the hill sloped away to a brushy ravine, and tumbled out, rolling clear of the car as it passed. He watched it pitch down the slope until it disappeared. The last sound was a weak scream,
and he wished he hadn’t heard it.
It would be okay, though.
He could give it to Emmeline and she would carry it for him, beyond his reach. She could carry a lot of screams for him. But there was another way too. His father had been wrong in everything he did, but surely his last decision was the correct one. No one had ever doubted that choice. He looked at his feet. On his way out of the car, he’d dropped Gedarro’s gun. Now he searched the road’s shoulder until he found it.
He stooped and picked it up.
Either way, he’d need the gun. He brushed it off and put it in his waistband, then began to consider his route toward the nearest neighborhood. If he hurried, he might find a motorcycle before dawn, might be far into the north by first light. She was waiting for him, up there, where the deeper woods turned back even the afternoon sunlight, and the morning fog caught in the tree crowns and fell to the ground smelling of wet bark and the sea. It would be a good place for them, for what they had to do. Maybe she’d bring absinthe, and they could drink one last glass with each other, under the trees, before the dark came.
Acknowledgments
A great many people helped me to make this story into what you’re holding. My wife, Maria Wang, read the manuscript countless times, always with a red pen. I could not have written this story without her. My sister, Lisa Moore, provided on-the-ground reconnaissance when I couldn’t visit San Francisco myself. Dawn Barbour, at the Sausalito Police Department, answered strange questions, and Nathaniel Boyer, M.D., who was then at the UCSF Medical Center, answered disturbing questions. Bruce Nakamura, Jon Wilson, J Moore, Elizabeth Moore, and Jocelyn Wood are beta readers without equal. Most of all, there was Alice Martell, my agent. She saw what this story could be and wouldn’t let me stop until I got it there. When the book was finished, she became its tireless advocate. Working with the editors—Andrea Schulz, Naomi Gibbs, and Alison Kerr Miller at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Bill Massey at Orion—has been a privilege. Thank you all.
The Trident Restaurant, in Sausalito, is open for business as of this writing. It has never been hit by a barge, and is a wonderful place to spend an afternoon.
About the Author
JONATHAN MOORE is an attorney and the author of two previous novels, Close Reach and Redheads, which was short-listed for the Bram Stoker Award. He lives in Honolulu, Hawaii.
The Poison Artist Page 29