On this day, two sturdily built middle-aged women in crisp gray business suits came to the front door of the house and knocked firmly. Each of the women had a bible tucked under her arm and a sheaf of Watchtowers in hand. When they got no answer to their knock, they knocked again. They wore pleasant, forgiving smiles which did not alter even as the women went back to their car and drove away.
~ * ~
The doctor attending to David introduced a man who was tall, very thin, and almost comically intense looking. "This," said David’s doctor, "is Dr. Flexner. He’s a psychiatrist and he would like to speak with you for a few minutes, if you’re up to it."
David gave both men a noncommittal smile, but said nothing.
"Are you up to it, Mr. Case?"
David said, "If he is."
Dr. Flexner nodded a little, as if to himself. He said, in a voice that had the jarring quality of being sepulchral and nasal at the same time, "I have looked at your file, Mr. Case. I find it, and you, quite interesting."
"Thank you," David said.
"Thank you? For what?"
"For finding me interesting."
"Well, of course, all people are interesting—"
"Yes, they are," David agreed.
Dr. Flexner smiled tightly, as if realizing he was being toyed with. He said, speaking slowly and succinctly, the nasal quality in his voice now very obvious, "I would like to talk with you specifically about your visits to what you refer to as ‘the other side.‘ I have worked with other people, I can tell you, who have claimed similar . . . odysseys." He smiled again, coyly. "I myself have had such an experience, and I must say that it was quite horrifically convincing."
David said, "I think horrific is the wrong word, Doctor."
"Yes," Flexner said, " ‘horrific’ is entirely the wrong word. And of course there is the fact that you have recently lost a loved one to a tragic event."
David looked at Flexner for a long moment. Then he said curtly, "I’m sorry, but I’m really not up to this, now. I hope you understand."
"And you can well imagine," Flexner went on, his tone crisp, authoritarian and nasal, "that such an event could trigger impulses that might lead to self-destruction. It is a given in cases of severe depression. It is the set of your emotions which drives you; and so we must alter that set of emotions, Mr. Case."
David wasn’t looking at him. He was looking at his feet sticking out from beneath the blanket. He had his arms folded. His face was expressionless. Under other circumstances, he would have been thinking that Dr. Flexner was an ass. But he was thinking, instead, about his sister, about Brian Fisher, and about answers he did not have. Flexner went on, clearly annoyed, "Sir, if this is the wrong time—"
"It is," David said. "As I’ve said already."
"Then there will be another time," Flexner said and, with David’s attending physician following him, he left the room.
~ * ~
David had visited his sister often, and had sometimes spent the night in one of the many unused bedrooms on the second floor. On the nights when he stayed, he occasionally woke early in the morning because he could hear her moving about in the dark house. It had been a nearly lifelong habit with her—getting up in the wee hours to walk by herself in the darkness. "It’s good for thinking, and for dreaming," she explained, "to walk in the dark, in a house that I know."
Often, she sang in a small, barely audible voice. The songs she sang would have been unrecognizable to a casual listener because she sang so softly. The songs that David heard were, he guessed, songs that their mother sang to them both when they were very young, songs that had usually accompanied them into sleep. Ironic, he thought, that Anne, as an adult, should sing them as she walked through her house late at night.
On an overnight visit six months before her murder, David woke, saw her padding past his door, and called, "Anne? Is everything all right?" He had never called to her before upon waking in the small hours to find that she was up and about, and he wondered what had made him call out to her now.
She did not answer him at once. He heard her stop walking—that is, he heard nothing. Then, moments later, she reappeared in the open doorway. A diffused yellow light shone from somewhere beyond her, and he could see little more than her soft profile. She said. "Did I wake you, David? I’m sorry." Her voice was low, concerned.
"Is everything all right?" he said again.
"Why do you ask?" It was an evasion, and he knew it. She went on, "You’ve seen me walking in the house late at night before."
After a moment’s hesitation, he said, "What’s wrong, Anne?"
And, after only a moment—because obfuscation and evasion between them were uncommon things—she answered, "I’ve made a mistake." She sighed. It had the odd quality of being both fearful and resigned. "I’ve made a very bad mistake, David."
He got out of bed—he was wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt—crossed the room, put his hands on her shoulders. Behind her, the hallway stretched for twenty feet in both directions. David noticed again the diffused yellow light he had seen from the bed, but it was brighter here, at the door. He stuck his head out the doorway, looked right and left. He saw that all the lights were on in the large, open room to the right, and over the stairs to the left. This was odd. Usually, when Anne walked the house at night, she walked it in almost total darkness.
"You’ve got all the lights on," he said.
She nodded. "Yes. Downstairs, too. I didn’t want to turn the light on here"—in the hallway—"because I thought it would disturb you." A brief pause. "I never knew before what was in the darkness. Do you know?" She paused, then continued, her voice low, as if she were sharing some awful secret, "It hides monsters, David. The darkness hides monsters."
"Anne—"
She put her fingers on his lips. "No. It’s all right. I want to talk about it. Believe me I do. But not now. I have a lot of thinking to do now. Perhaps in the morning. Okay?"
"I don’t understand—"
"Please, David, go back to bed. We’ll talk. In the morning."
And because he was her brother, and knew her as well as anyone, he realized that any resistance would be futile. "Yes, in the morning," he said, turned, and went back to bed. When he looked toward the doorway again, she was gone. He fancied he could hear her padding about in the large open room at the end of the hallway, fancied he could hear her singing. But he knew that he couldn’t. This night, he realized, was very different from other nights. This night, there were monsters in the house.
~ * ~
But he and Anne did not talk the following morning. She was making breakfast when he arrived in the kitchen, her mood cheerful and talkative, so he thought he had better wait until she brought up the subject of the night before. But she never did.
SEVEN
In the dark room, the dust collected itself, and stood. It looked about, and was frightened. The dust felt no tug of gravity. It felt a tug from above. This was, at once, strange and comforting.
Eventually, the dust collected itself sufficiently that it scratched at an itch that had always bothered it. Then it stood and, without real purpose, moved about in the room. At last, it went back to where it had arisen.
It lay down.
It wept.
It laughed.
As strange as this place was, it was oddly familiar, too, and the dust desperately needed the familiar.
~ * ~
Detective Fred Collins was off work and he was thinking about Anne Case. Collins lived alone in a three-room apartment on a pleasant street on Batavia’s east side, and when he did not have to work, he stayed in his apartment, listened to soft rock music—The Carpenters, Carly Simon, early Beatles and Beach Boys—and thought about his work, and about the people he dealt with, both the living and the dead. What he was thinking about Anne Case was that she had been doomed from the beginning of her life. He had no hard and fast reason for thinking this. He had not known her in life. He had first lain eyes on her a week earlier, when she’d been dead for
half a day and her body had had sixty-three stab wounds in it, most of them concentrated in her stomach and in her upper back. When he saw her then, he thought that she had looked strangely serene, as if she had died in her sleep. It was true that many murder victims looked passive, as if they were sleeping, and that was simply because, in death, the muscles relaxed. But few of the dead actually looked serene, as Anne Case had. And that was why Fred Collins was thinking that she had been doomed from the beginning of her life, because she had clearly been living it in preparation for that moment—the moment of her death.
Fred Collins whispered to himself, "You don’t know what you’re talking about." He supposed that these thoughts were no more than mental games he played because he was trying to humanize the people he dealt with. It may or may not have been correct that Anne Case was doomed from the start of her life, but it didn’t matter because he always kept such ideas to himself.
He had begun to believe that Brian Fisher was not her murderer. It was a doubt he had expressed once to his partner, Leo Kenner, who had guffawed and said, "Sure he was, Fred. Of course he was. He murdered her because he loved her. That’s obvious."
Collins shook his head. "People don’t murder the people they love, Leo."
"People murder whoever’s available—especially the people they love."
"I know what you’re saying, and I think you’re wrong. He didn’t . . . this Brian Fisher didn’t possess her, he really did love her. I’m convinced of it. And I don’t think he murdered her. I think he may have blamed himself for her murder, but he didn’t actually do it." He paused "And there’s this ‘frenzy’ thing you were talking about, too, which doesn’t hold up."
"Frenzy thing?"
"Yes. She was stabbed sixty-three times. We know that. We counted the wounds."
"So?"
"So it doesn’t add up to frenzy, Leo. It adds up to . . ." He paused. "Here I am, I’m the murderer, and I’ve stabbed her—what?—twenty or thirty times in the stomach, and now, just to make it look symmetrical . . . I don’t know, just so it won’t look half-assed, hell, I’ll turn her over and stab her another twenty or thirty times in the back. That’s not frenzy, Leo. That’s premeditation."
But in the end, Collins had felt certain that he’d convinced Kenner of nothing; Kenner had, in fact, made him feel as if he were impossibly naive and a little addlepated besides, so Collins had said nothing more about it.
Today, in his apartment, Anne Case would not leave him. He wondered about her life, about her growing up, about her passions, her last morning, her last moments alone.
He thought that she had been softly attractive. People used to use the word "frail" to describe people like her. He had heard about her agoraphobia and had thought, yes, she looked the type, the type to prefer wandering about in her big house all alone.
He did not think that her death was a sad thing. If this had been his first case, his second, his third, he would have been torn up by the fact of a life so quickly and cruelly taken, by the pain she had clearly suffered, and by her aloneness. But after so many years dealing with the dead, he had grown beyond that. Her murder had not been sad. Her death had not been sad. Her life had been sad because she had been doomed from its start to constant agony, and to a terrible death.
~ * ~
The afternoon following Christian and Karen’s visit to his room at Syracuse General, David was visited by Detective Leo Kenner, who showed David his badge, introduced himself, and asked, "Do you remember me?"
"Yes," David said.
"May we talk?" Kenner put his shield back in his coat pocket.
"How did you know I was here?"
"From your place of work. Your doctor called them to find out what he could about this drug you took."
"Oh," David said. "Of course."
"May we talk?" Kenner repeated.
"I doubt that there’s much to say," David said.
"Perhaps I could be the judge of that."
David was still in his pajamas; he gestured toward the closet. "Will you excuse me a moment while I get some clothes on?"
"I won’t take much of your time," Kenner answered. He was tall and stocky, and his body presented an almost impenetrable wall between David and the closet. "I’d simply like to ask you one or two questions."
"What questions? About Anne?"
"About Brian Fisher."
"I didn’t know him. I met him once. Twice. We shared a Christmas dinner at Anne’s house last year; he was quiet, I would say he was shy. Painfully shy. I respected that; I let him be. We’ve said maybe three or four sentences to each other."
"Did your sister talk about him?"
"Anne wasn’t much of a talker."
"She said nothing about him?"
"Of course she did. She said that he treated her well and that she was happy when they were together. She didn’t elaborate."
"Would you say, Mr. Case, that they had a passionate relationship?"
"I have no idea what they did in bed, Detective—"
"I’m not talking about that, Mr. Case. I’m talking about their . . . commitment to each other. Was it strong? Would you say that they loved each other very deeply?"
David said nothing.
"Mr. Case?"
"Yes," David whispered.
Kenner said, "Yes, they were deeply in love with each other?"
David said aloud, "They loved each other as much as two people can. It was obvious to anyone. If they had walked together outside that house then people would have pointed at them and smiled and said how nice they looked, what a beautiful couple they made." He paused, looked away, again as if in reflection. He looked back, nodded. "Yes, Mr. Kenner. They loved each other." He shook his head a little. "It went beyond love, I think." He looked away again. Kenner could see that David was being swept by emotion, so he decided it was a good time to push on.
"And do you believe that Mr. Fisher murdered your sister?"
David didn’t answer for a moment, then he said sharply, "Yes. Of course." He stopped. His breathing had suddenly become heavy and ragged with emotion. He looked away and continued, "I don’t know." He shook his head. His eyes watered. "I don’t know," he whispered. Another pause. "Yes." He was still looking away. "He could have murdered Anne. Of course he could have murdered Anne."
"Thank you, sir," Kenner said.
~ * ~
In the room it was daylight and the dust had gathered itself together and had become a man.
EIGHT
Karen Duffy felt ill at ease, alone in Christian Grieg’s house. She had no concrete reason for it. It was not an uncomfortable house; it was small, tastefully furnished, and it had that welcoming, lived-in air that so many houses lacked. She had, in fact, spent more than a few happy hours in it with Christian. But lately, when he left her alone there, it was as if he left some part of himself behind to watch her. And she had no concrete reason for feeling that way, either, because she had always thought of Christian as an open and generous man who cared little for possessions, per se, and who was clearly happy to share whatever he had with his friends. Still, she felt ill at ease. And today, while he was gone, she stayed in the living room and read a book while she waited for him to return.
After a while, she decided that she did not know Christian as well as she thought she had, and that was the reason for her discomfort. She imagined that there was some facet of himself that he kept hidden, that possibly it was something dark. But, soon, she decided that she was merely trying to find a reason for her discomfort, and that giving Christian a "dark side" was as good a reason as any.
She wondered suddenly if his personality had altered in the last couple of months? It was hard to say; she didn’t know. He did not seem to have a tight rein on his temper anymore. Ever since she’d known him, he had seemed to be a man who kept his anger in check. There was the time, for instance, when a man who had been tailgating Christian had run into him at a stop sign. Christian had merely shaken his head resignedly, gotten out, and
politely exchanged all the necessary information with the man. Karen wasn’t sure what the Christian she knew now would do under the same circumstances.
His treatment of David was odd, too. So judgmental, so lacking in understanding and good will. He and David had been friends for many years, and the old Christian—the Christian she had met four years earlier and had grown to love; though, she thought, perhaps only in a platonic way—had shown himself in many ways to be David’s closest friend and confidant. But now—
She put her book down and looked appraisingly about the room. There was little of Christian in it, she thought. The books—there were several hundred of them in two large bookcases—were an eclectic assortment that, Christian had once told her, reflected his changing tastes, inclinations, and concerns over the years. If there was anything to tie them together it was a tendency toward the darkly philosophical—Camus, Kierkegaard, Sartre. But there was Mickey Spillane, too, and Sherlock Holmes.
Christian had no hobbies. He claimed that his work—his writing—was his hobby as well his profession. So there was nothing in the room to suggest a side of him other than his writing, although even that—he had authored nine books—was not much in evidence. There were several copies of his first novel—Greed—stuck in a lower corner of one of the bookcases, but all his other books were scattered about the house as if he didn’t much care if anyone saw them. He didn’t seem to take a lot of pride in what he did. He didn’t talk about it, he shunned interviews with local news reporters, he was constantly invited to literary receptions and conventions, but rarely went. "Writing is simply a job," he said once.
He wrote about people falling in love, people falling out of love, about people who were in some long and ghastly process of dying. Greed had, in fact, encompassed all three areas, and had done it so successfully that the book had launched his career. But none of the books that followed had been as successful. Each had sold only marginally well. They had enabled him to make a living at writing, but he had not yet garnered any sort of real fame.
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