What was before his eyes now most would consider shabby. Crumbling bricks on the back wall of the buildings over on Columbia Street, the porch on the house across Fourth Street fallen half off, dirty insulation leaking from its tar-shingled walls.
For Ray, this scene ranked towards the upper part of the spectrum. The natural process of decay was central to his art. And painted in the last golden rays of the dying sun, what was before his eyes shone with a poignant beauty.
Except for the little flagstone path that led from the theater door to the street. He’d never liked it. He cast a baleful eye on it. Why did it displease him? The stones glistened with snowmelt. Maybe he didn’t like that kind of stone. He was particular about rocks, too. He hated volcanic ones.
Bodine came up beside him. “I got played. Mingus just wanted to come out because it’s spring.”
“Doesn’t feel like it….” But he was distracted, watching the sun inch down, the stones one by one catching fire. His jaw clenched.
Though Ray was stock still, Bodine must have sensed the current pulsing through him. “What?”
“Nothing.” But Ray wasn’t listening, his entire consciousness distilled into the light on the stones before him. He hadn’t liked them before, but he’d never counted. One. Two. As the last rays of the sun hit magic number three, a door, long closed, sprung open.
Three stones gleaming in the sun. But not here. And not at sunset. A finger pointing at them, and that inimitable voice clear as if it spooled from some old reel-to-reel tape machine, murmuring, One stone is just a rock. Two are just two. But three is a…a path.
Bodine said, “Ray?”
Ray jerked a hand up. Bye! And he rushed home, sentences already forming in his head. He ran up Warren, weaving through strolling tourists by instinct. He was blind to the street as the visual memory came to life. He crossed Warren, and a car swerved and honked, almost hitting him.
Key fumbled at the lock, bells jangled, then he plucked the laptop from under the desk where he’d hidden it. He bounded upstairs to the third floor with the clamor of troops on a battleship. Rushed into his sanctuary and onto the couch.
It was chilly that morning, working in the shadow of The House. The sun crept across the lawn—it seemed to take a month—but finally reached my face. I squinted. In minutes I was sweating. I’d been raking since dawn without a break. My tongue was leathery with thirst. I kept snagging the metal tines of the rake on tangles of weeds in the overgrown garden. As I overheated, my hands squeezed the rake until they hurt. But I forced my facial muscles to go slack. You must never betray frustration, let alone anger in this place.
The tines clattered on something hard. The shock of the impact shot up my arms. It had to be a stone. I raked on. A moment later I struck another.
Fuck. I was going to have to dig them out. It wouldn’t be the first time, and it was a pain. I got a shovel from the neat row of tools around the side of The House and went to work.
The top of the stone was…flat. And the edge was straight. Another edge at ninety degrees. I reached down and brushed the dirt off. A flat, blue stone. I uncovered a second, then the beginnings of a third. All flat and square.
An old flagstone path, buried under decades of autumn leaves. These stones led to a door to the basement of The House.
In the opposite direction, if the path continued the two hundred feet or so across the gardens, it should run into the pile of junk at the bottom of the hundred-foot cliff.
I studied the first stone I’d uncovered. My face flushed, and I gave a fearful glance at The House looming tall above me. Shit on shit. I’d dinged it with my rake, made a silver mark. Wounded it. I knelt, spit on the stone and frantically rubbed dirt into the scratch, but it was no use. The scar was permanent.
My eyes darted around. No one was watching. I casually raked soil over the stones. Bury them and who will know?
“Ray.” The voice was behind me. I started, then stood rigid as a statue. Sun, breeze, the smell of earth all vanished as I became my ears. Became the listening. The voice was soft, just at audible volume, but it penetrated to my core. “What have you found?”
Ray’s hands stopped on the keyboard. He returned to his body, which, aside from shallow breaths, was frozen. The velvet arm of the couch touching his forearm, and the soft cushion against a stiff back. Where had he just been? It was like the words had written themselves, springing from some deep vault, pure, unsullied by recollection in the intervening decades.
He was coughing again. He tried to clear his throat. He stopped breathing, felt his face heat up. The coughing subsided. But now there was something in there. A lump. A fast-growing tumor… He shouldn’t go there. He massaged his Adam’s apple, but it only made the lump seem to grow. Like a small animal burrowing inside.
Even as he focused on his throat, his hands idle, the story continued in his head.
Karl.
One stone is just a rock….
He heard the exact words, as from a tape recording, and the exact voice, with its lustrous overtones and British accent.
Karl must have been looking at Ray as he spoke. He always did. But his face was missing from the memory. All he saw was a dark form, taller than Ray, wider, looming over him, casting a shadow. Like The House.
He always just appeared, sneaking up without a sound, as from thin air.
Ray was suddenly a kid again who’d done a very bad thing and was about to be punished. No question, this writing was magic. Black magic. It had got him running over here from Bodine’s, telling tales out of school.
No more. Ray closed the file and dragged it into the trash. He trashed the Susan piece too. He picked up the placemats from where he’d dropped them on the floor, balled them up and clanked downstairs and out to the cans in the alley. Pickup was tomorrow morning.
He came back upstairs and hit the absinthe hard. He’d passed that crucial midpoint of the glass—definitely on the half-empty side tonight—when he remembered. He’d thrown away the physical writing but forgotten to empty the trash on the computer. He leaned down and fished the laptop out from under the couch. When he sat up again he was little dizzy.
“Are you sure you want to permanently delete the two items in the trash?”
A click of the mouse pad and they were gone.
The rest of the glass, and he was too.
The sun woke Ray the next morning. Something was hanging over his head.
Absinthe? No, that happened every morning. He battled Liz’s coffee machine, had almost conceded defeat and headed to Jo’s when it spit out a cup of something. He carried it downstairs and sat. The coffee fixed his head.
The thing was still hanging over it.
He looked out the window at the sidewalk. Three stones, that blank face. Had he actually written about Karl? That must be what was hanging. But then he remembered: he’d deleted it.
So what…
The mortgage. Fuck.
What time was it? A little after nine. When did book agents get to work? If it was like the music business, ten at the earliest. He puttered around the gallery until quarter after ten, then sat in his chair and called Lou.
As the phone rang, he flashed on Lou at one of their gigs, standing awkwardly behind those monster glasses, looking right at Ray, no, at his guitar, like it was a magical scepter. He smiled. Maybe this would work.
The receptionist, who sounded about twelve—though a well-educated twelve—said, “Will he know what you’re calling in regards to?”
“Just tell him it’s Ray Watts.”
And here was Lou. “Raaaay! The Nightcrawlers. Fastest Telecaster in the East. Tell me you’re still playing.”
Twice maybe in the last year. “Absolutely.”
They reminisced about the early days of the band. Lou sounded like they were recounting the rise of the Beatles in Liverpool. Good.
Ray said, “I caught your website. Very impressive.”
“Ahhhh. Yeah, I’m a big shit these days. It still ain’t rock and roll. I’ve written a few song lyrics myself.”
“I saw. Great. Actually…I’ve been barking up your tree lately. Doing a little writing.”
“Hey, those songs of yours were far out!”
“These aren’t song lyrics.”
“It doesn’t matter. Send me whatever you’ve got. I promise, no jive-ass bullshit. I’ll tell you if I can sell it.”
“Thanks, man. This address here on the website?”
“Oh, don’t bother with snail mail. Attach them to an email. I look forward to it.”
Ray did a little dance around the gallery. He caught himself. It wouldn’t do for prospective customers to see that. But it sure had been easy. He’d have to thank Bodine, lay a case of Magic Hat on him, maybe three.
Ray’s exuberance lasted about thirty seconds. Attach what? He’d trashed the writing. That piece about Karl was definitely out, but the thing about Susan? Some of that was on the placemats, though it hadn’t been as good as the stuff in the computer. But he could reconstruct it. Had they taken his garbage yet?
He raced into the alley behind the house. The cans were empty. Back inside the gallery he called Bodine. “Fiddlefarts!”
“What now?”
Ray told him about Lou and trashing the writing.
“Upside, Ray. He wants to look at your stuff.”
“I know. Thanks for thinking of him.”
“You brought up the guitar and that sold him.”
“Didn’t have to. He brought it up.”
“Why’d you trash what you wrote?”
“I guess I’m a temperamental artist.”
Bodine paused. He wasn’t buying the lie. But he let it pass. “What have you done on the computer since?”
“Nothing.”
“Then you’re in luck. Bring that sucker over here, and I’ll show you a little trick.”
Ray hit the street with the laptop.
They sat in the office. Bodine said, “Fiddlefarts your latest word of the month? I’d expect with you becoming a writer and all, you’d be going a little more upmarket. Using a thesaurus.”
“No. It’s the mot juste.”
“French—that’s more like it.”
Ray handed him the laptop. Ray leaned over the organ and noodled silently as Bodine worked on his computer. He didn’t know any jazz like Bodine, but he could play three chords. In C, anyway.
A couple of minutes later Bodine said, “Here’s your stuff.”
“You’re fast.”
“That’s what they say.”
Ray came over and looked over his shoulder as Bodine clicked on the folder of retrieved items. “Hey, don’t…”
“’Susan.’ Why’d you trash that? And ‘Stones?’ You getting into a little music criticism while you’re at it? Geology?”
Ray shuddered and frowned.
Bodine shook his head, misunderstanding Ray’s look. “What a shame. Not my style, but Susan was a fine woman.”
Back home he was in the gallery, about to send the Susan file to Lou when he stopped. She was dead, but he really ought to change her name at least. He called Bodine.
Bodine said, “Use ‘Bulk Replace.’ But be careful. It’s a powerful tool.”
“Thanks again.”
Sally? Sue? It didn’t make any difference. Ann. He used bulk replace to swap out the Susans for Anns. He was about to send it to Lou when he thought to proofread it.
The replace seemed to have worked. But as he read he felt himself falling back into the past, back into the good times. He winced and dragged himself back to the present. She was still dead.
As he hit Send, he felt a little shiver. It wasn’t just Bulk Replace that was powerful. All this tech stuff was, especially the internet. Just like the President could push a button and blow up the world, you could poke a little plastic key and make big things happen in your life.
Though this would probably be just a little, painful thing. I don’t know how to break it to you, buddy, but you ought to stick with music. Okay, so maybe not so little.
The poke of a key had started this. He’d clicked on Susan’s obituary, and the next thing he knew he was diving headlong into the past, writing.
It was too late for Susan’s funeral, to send flowers. Not too late to know how she’d lived, to find out what she’d become. He could call the husband.
Her widower. The prospect made him a little queasy, but he Googled Phillip Roberts and found his profile on LinkedIn.
He poked more keys, and there he was.
Ray was stunned. Not that Roberts was a middle manager at a pest control company, or that he coached Pop Warner football. But by the fact that this bullet-headed, crew-cut guy with the dead eyes and blank face could have gotten the time of day out of Susan, let alone married her and fathered her children.
Ray found a number and tapped it into his phone with a sick feeling.
“Ray Watts. I’m not sure if Susan ever mentioned me…”
“I know who you are.”
Do you?
Barely into the conversation and Ray had to restrain the urge to end it. He forced the next words. “I’m very sorry for your loss, for your children’s loss…is this a good time?” He sounded like an idiot. A callous idiot.
Ray gripped the phone through a long silence. He flipped the sign in the door to Closed. This wasn’t the kind of conversation he wanted to share with the public. Or anyone. He walked to the back of the gallery by the bathroom.
Finally the guy said, “What do you want?”
“I want to know…was she happy?”
“Happy? Of course she was happy. We were happy.”
A happy family? Happy couple? Ray would have understood if the guy sounded uptight, hearing from the old ex-husband of his dead wife. But he seemed shut down, like his tongue was made of wood, like he was reading his lines from a manual at the pest control company. It must be grief.
“I know this has got to be hard, but when she had the…accident, she was close to my house.”
“Sheer coincidence, I’m sure.”
“Do you have any idea where she was going?”
“No. She had nothing scheduled with the company, nothing in her appointment book.” For the first time Ray heard some feeling.
“So what do you think happened?”
A pause, and when he spoke his voice was raised. “I have no idea. She was completely sober, going the speed limit. And then she just slammed into a bridge abutment.”
“So you don’t think…”
Roberts lost his cool, raising his voice. “Susan would never harm herself. She believed in life.” So he understood one thing about Susan. And whatever she’d felt for her husband, she would have loved her kids. She couldn’t do that to them. The guy said, “I have to go.”
Ray said, “Well, thank you, and again, I’m sorry.” But Roberts had hung up.
Ray paced, weaving his way between the sculptures. A whole lot of sorry going around.
He was sorry he Googled Susan, sorry she was dead. And sorry Susan ended up with that putz. It just didn’t make sense. Ray had heard no evidence of imagination in the guy’s voice. He was boring, with no spark. Ray liked to think she’d had better taste in men.
And what was with I have no idea? Maybe he was one of those guys who goes for angry because he can’t do sad. But it sounded like maybe he did have an idea. Whatever it was, Ray wasn’t going to find out from him. He couldn’t imagine any circumstance in which they’d speak again.
The conversation left him with weird energy in his body. It was concentrated in his hands. But he wasn’t writing until he heard back from Lou.
Ray’s guitar playing had been the thing that
got Lou interested in seeing his writing. Bodine had been hassling him for some time to come play a gig with him at some local dive. Ray wasn’t ready for that, but it did rouse an old guilt. He’d devoted a good part of his young life to learning guitar. He’d never let a day go by without at least practicing scales. Now whole months went by with his guitars sleeping in their cases in the closet.
He left the sign in the window closed and brought his Martin acoustic up to the couch.
Playing guitar was like riding a bike. He fell right into a blues in E, with all those nice open strings, and his hands felt good. For ten minutes, at which point his un-calloused fingers started complaining. More tomorrow, maybe.
How long did it take to read some pages? Ray gave it three days before he called Lou back. He tried in the morning. “In a meeting.” Left a message, but Lou didn’t return the call. He tried again at two-thirty. The twelve-year-old receptionist said, “He has your number. He’s still at lunch.”
Weren’t three martini lunches confined to the Mad Men set? So what did they do all that time, now—guzzle fizzy water?
He was up on his couch, five bells approaching when he gave it a last shot. The receptionist didn’t seem the least bit annoyed to hear from him again. Maybe that’s what writers did all day long—called their agents.
“Are you sure Lou got my message?”
“Hold on, that’s him in the hall.”
Lou said, “Sorry, buddy. Business must be attended to.”
“It’s alright. I’m just curious…”
“I read your stuff.” Ray’s pulse started beating in his temples.
“The good news? The writing’s decent. No surprise there. I knew you had it in you.”
Ray waited for the blow to fall.
“But an ex-wife? No offense, but if I were looking for a kiss-and-tell I’d be talking to Bodine.”
Ouch.
Never Speak: A Mystery Thriller (The Murderous Arts Series) Page 4