‘And there,’ she pointed to the other light in the north. ‘See? Just like the other one.’
‘Yeah, you’re right, honey.’
‘What do you think they could be?’
‘Neon signs, obviously,’ he replied as if that were the only possible explanation.
‘Stuart, they aren’t neon signs.’
‘Sure they are, Marge.’ He patted her backside playfully.
‘Well I saw that one the other day, in broad daylight, and so did Sylvia Berkovitz.’
‘So?’
‘Who turns on lights during the day?’
‘Lots of people. Besides, they’re probably new and maybe they were trying them out the other day.’
‘I don’t think so. Up there,’ she pointed north, ‘there’s nothing but woods and back roads anyhow. Who’d put a sign out there?’
‘I don’t know, maybe it can be seen from the highway. Come on inside, honey.’
‘Oh, Stuart, the highway’s miles away.’
‘You can’t tell from here, Marge, things look out of whack at night.’
‘Well, those just don’t look like neon signs to me.’
‘Okay, what do you think they are?’
Marge frowned to herself. She knew Stu would just chuckle if she started talking about flying saucers, especially if they didn’t fly.
‘Come on inside. There’s a good game on and I’m missing it.’ He started to walk back to the house.
Marge continued looking at the lights for a few seconds, and then followed her husband. Maybe they were signs, but she didn’t think so. She would just have to find out.
*
‘Misadventure.’ Chief Sturdevent said the word flatly, without enthusiasm. He pushed a paper-clip about his desk with one finger.
‘Misadventure?’ Martin Lasker raised his eyebrows in surprise. ‘That sounds like something from a British detective story.’
‘Maybe,’ Sturdevent said neutrally.
‘But misadventure means, as I understand the term, an accident. It doesn’t apply to what happened to Donner.’
‘It’s the only thing we can call it, at this time.’ Sturdevent carefully stressed the last three words. ‘We simply have nothing else to go on.’
‘But a man was brutally, savagely killed.’
‘That’s right.’
‘You can’t just call that misadventure, Chief.’
‘What else can we call it? It sure wasn’t suicide. It wasn’t natural causes.’
‘Why not call it murder, pure and simple?’
‘Because.’ Sturdevent sighed wearily. ‘It doesn’t necessarily add up as murder. Donner had no enemies we can find a trace of, there was no motive and the whole way he died is all wrong for murder. There would have had to be a gang of them in that room to do all that damage. Well, there just isn’t a bunch of escaped psychotics on the loose in the state; in fact there haven’t been any escapes lately.’
‘They don’t have to be escaped. You haven’t got all the nuts locked up around the country by any means.’
‘I know that, but you’re missing my point. Let me put it this way, Martin. Even a band of murderers probably couldn’t have done the things that happened in that apartment — wood slivers drilled into the baseboard and so on; the guy’s scalp ripped up.’
Lasker shifted in his seat across the desk from Chief Sturdevent. ‘Do you think it ties in with what happened to Bondarevsky’s cow?’
‘Off the record, yes, I think it does.’ Sturdevent pushed the paper-clip to one side and folded his large hands on his belly, unconsciously covering his growing roll of fat. ‘In fact, I’m almost certain the two incidents are related, but at the moment that doesn’t help us at all. You saw Bondarevsky’s cow and you’ve seen these photos of Donner.’ The Chief nudged a small pile of repulsive black-and-white police photographs on his desk. ‘What would you make of it all?’ Sturdevent paused briefly before continuing. ‘So you don’t like Doc Schmidt’s verdict. If you or anybody else has any ideas or suggestions or even a genuine clue, I’d be happy to hear about it.’ He even managed a thin smile.
Lasker glanced at the photos again and then turned away quickly. They were not a pleasant sight and he was glad he had not actually been in the Hoadley Street apartment. ‘Yeah, well. When we were out at Bondarevsky’s I thought what had happened to his cow was just some odd thing. I couldn’t accept his remarks about some fiendish butcher doing it.’
‘But,’ Sturdevent prompted.
‘But now, with Donner, there’s a repetition, a pattern. It still seems outrageous and impossible but it no longer seems like an accident.’
‘I agree completely,’ Sturdevent said. ‘But that still doesn’t give me anything to go on. It could still be some kind of freak happening.’
‘Lightning striking twice?’
Sturdevent merely shrugged.
Lasker found himself growing annoyed with the Chiefs stolid, complacent attitude. It stumped him but there was little he could do about it. Tough. Maybe it’ll go away.
‘Now I think it has to be the work of some person or persons unknown,’ Lasker asserted. ‘I can see there are problems, some of the things you mention in the apartment, but I can’t see Donner just dying in that way. It’s crazy, impossible.’
‘You ought to be on the police force, son — no, I’m sorry if that sounded patronising. It’s good that you have questions and won’t accept the first answer that comes along. I have questions, we all have questions. Questions are healthy, a teacher of mine once said. But the trouble is, it’s nice to have the occasional answer, the occasional right answer. It’s my job to find the right answers, and in this situation we have a whole lot of questions and not one single goddamn halfway-to-solid answer for anything. Nothing fits.
‘Look at Bondarevsky’s cow. Who would go out there and do that to some cow? Not even a crazy would do it that way. Hell, we’ve even thought about witchcraft — some folks still mess around with it — but there’d be signs, and there weren’t any. They’d do it some place special. Out at Dayton’s Den, maybe. But the way it actually did happen, it doesn’t fit anything at all.
‘Look at Donner. A nobody, a meek, mild slob who kept to himself, didn’t drink, held a steady job in the post office, living in a tiny dump over a pizza parlour, for Christ’s sake. Why him? Far as we can tell, all he ever did outside work was play chess and jerk off. All those Russian things, they were all just chess writings, nothing more, so bang goes the dumb theory that he was involved in some kind of espionage work — yeah, you laugh. I told you we’ve considered everything under the sun.’ Sturdevent sighed heavily, perhaps surprised by the length of his own speech.
‘So now…’ Lasker raised his eyebrows.
‘So now we’ve had a heap of destruction and a violent death, and we can’t buy a clue. That’s so now.’
‘Have you had a lab report?’
‘We had two quote guest unquote detectives in from Waterbury, yeah, and a lab crew. You know we just don’t have the facilities and staff here in Millville to do that kind of work.’
‘I know. What did they find.’
‘Nothing at all. No prints, except those of Donner and a couple of his pals. Nothing unusual, nothing that wasn’t already in the room. No sign of an explosion. They took away a few bags full of wreckage from the apartment for more detailed examination and testing.’
‘Maybe something will come from that.’
‘Maybe, but I doubt it. This case has a lousy feel to it. Nothing is going our way.’
‘And you’re satisfied that everything that can be done is being done?’
The Chief stiffened. ‘What the hell do you think?’
*
Pomar had not exaggerated: the children were unshakeable. But Father Lombardy, in his half-hour talk with them, had detected soft spots. He was mildly surprised to find that Maria was by far the more talkative of the two on the subject. She was quite sure she had seen Mary, the Mother of God. She
heard voices, but she didn’t know what they said. Once, the first time, they had felt the touch of Mary; on subsequent occasions they stayed back several yards. She had appeared to them a few times now, but not every day. What especially interested Father Lombardy about Maria’s testimony was that she could not say what Mary looked like, nor even whether She appeared simply as a face or with a complete body. Maria would only say that She was there, in the centre of a wondrous blue cloud.
Joey, on the other hand, was even less precise, although he was equally insistent that the experiences they described were genuine. He agreed that it had been Mary who appeared to them, but he said this with slightly less fervour than his sister. The priest tried to probe more deeply, but the boy refused to be drawn. He seemed to be easily irritated and more than once he asked why, if Father Lombardy was a Catholic priest, he was so suspicious of the visitations. Didn’t he believe? The priest explained patiently that Christ or Mary appeared to man on Earth only very rarely, and then only for some very important reason. The children greeted this comment with silence.
Joey was also vague on the subject of the voices. Whereas his sister described them as beautiful, musical and heavenly, Joey would only say that yes, he had heard something that could be a voice or voices, but he didn’t know what it meant. Didn’t he think that if Mary was speaking to them She would speak in a way they could understand? Joey again said nothing but Maria exclaimed ‘Yes’ enthusiastically, as if the Virgin’s failure to do so annoyed her, too.
Joey admitted he too had felt the touch of Mary on him that first day. They had fallen to the ground and he had begun praying. He didn’t know how many prayers he had said but at some point he noticed the silence and the calm around them. They looked up and were alone again.
As far as Father Lombardy was concerned, the meeting was inconclusive and just a little unnerving. He hadn’t expected the children to be as unyielding as they were. Also, he had expected them to trot out fairly familiar descriptions, incidents, features like a halo — the kind of things they might easily pick up from potted biographies of the saints or booklets about Lourdes and Fatima. But they hadn’t done so. The blurred and fuzzy edges to their collective account added credence to their story rather than detracted from it.
And the way they innocently threw their faith back at him, the priest, also lodged in his mind at an awkward angle. Didn’t he believe? In his religion, yes, of course. And in his priesthood, yes. But miracles? Heavenly visitations? Had he ever even thought about it much? Church history was rich with such astounding events so why should it seem such a strange notion now?
Father Lombardy left the Pomar house that evening feeling as if he had stepped off a neat suburban patio into a swampy field, and muddy water was leaking into his shiny cordovan shoes.
Later that night he briefly discussed the matter with Father Connors, the eldest of the four priests at St Jude’s, and the pastor of the parish. Father Lombardy gave only the barest details and asked if he was handling the situation in the best way. The old priest listened with a flicker of a sly smile hovering at the corners of his eyes. But some of Father Lombardy’s unease was communicated in spite of the fact that he tried to mask it behind a sober, straight-forward attitude, and Father Connors poured two glasses of port before speaking.
‘The Church finds this kind of thing terribly embarrassing,’ he said.
After that it was all downhill. He rambled on for several minutes in his weak, throaty voice. He was no help to Father Lombardy, saying virtually the same things and in almost the same order as the younger priest had first said to Art Pomar. Father Lombardy listened politely, nodding his head frequently, realising that he was going to hear nothing new. The pastor was sincere and well-intentioned, but that was about it.
His last comment had been ‘Lay it to rest quickly, William, or they’ll be seriously disturbed.’ Those words echoed in his mind now as Father Lombardy walked across the football field at the back of Emerson School with Joey Pomar. He felt like a religious CIA operative on assignment to a trouble-spot.
‘Where’s your sister today, Joey?’
‘Mom kept her home today,’ the youth replied sullenly. He didn’t look very happy to be seen by his classmates walking off into the woods with a priest, and Father Lombardy thought it must look strange. He certainly felt strange.
‘This looks like a good place to play,’ the priest said as they followed the path. The boy said nothing. ‘Are there many animals in these woods, Joey?’
‘Woodchucks, squirrels, grass snakes… less and less.’
‘Less and less? Why?’
‘They’re starting to clear the land to build houses or something. Not many animals left.’
When they came to the rocky outcrop Joey moved faster and the priest kept pace. Joey came to the cliff edge and stood fearlessly looking down.
‘Nope, not there,’ the boy said clearly.
‘That’s a fair drop. Down there, is that where you and Maria saw it?’
‘Her,’ Joey corrected. ‘Yep, right there. The blue cloud reached almost up to the top here.’
‘Nothing there now, is there?’ Father Lombardy tried to ask the question in a totally neutral tone, so as not to annoy the child.
‘Nope,’ Joey replied simply.
‘Can we go down and take a closer look?’
‘Sure. This way.’
Joey led the priest to the far edge and then down the narrow path that wound around the stone face. They reached the clearing in a few moments. Father Lombardy strode into the centre of the clearing and turned around.
‘Right here, Joey?’
‘Yes, Father.’ The boy had held back at the edge of the clearing at first, but now walked slowly up to the priest.
‘Must be a twenty, twenty-five foot drop,’ Father Lombardy said gazing up the cliff wall. ‘Where were you and Maria,’ he said, turning to the boy, ‘when you — ?’
The wind caught them both and flung them through the air into the brush at the perimeter of the clearing; The speed and violence of the action stunned the priest, but he recovered quickly, scrambling on all fours.
‘See!’ Joey cried from a few feet away.
Father Lombardy grabbed the boy, pressing him to the ground beneath him. ‘Is that it?’ he whispered hoarsely, knowing that it was.
Blue, fiery light blossomed in front of the cliff.
In it, filling it, were faces.
PART TWO
THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING
‘The ghost of electricity
Howls in the bones of her face.’ – Bob Dylan
CHAPTER FIVE
Martin Lasker drove past the broad green fairways of the Millville golf course and turned into a quiet, attractive street canopied with tall elms and maples. The houses on Field Street were large and expensive, a strange mixture of restored colonial homes and modem split-level palaces, with a second and sometimes a third car in almost every driveway, expansive lawns and more swimming pools on this golden mile than in the rest of the entire town. Natural timber fences added a rustic touch.
Lasker thought it odd that Doc Schmidt should live in this neighbourhood. By all accounts, the physician’s practice was not the liveliest in Millville, nor the wealthiest. Obviously he wouldn’t continue acting as the town coroner and medical examiner, which was a poorly paid job, if he didn’t need the money. How did he manage to buy a house out here in the first place? Perhaps, years ago, Schmidt had inherited some money.
The doctor’s house-and-office was one of the most handsome on the street, a rambling white colonial edifice that bore the date 1792. But, as Lasker walked up the drive, he noticed that the paint was beginning to peel in one or two spots and the front lawn needed mowing. The only other car in sight was Schmidt’s own Chrysler, which Lasker guessed to be about twelve years old.
Lasker rang the bell and after some minutes was greeted by a woman about his own age. She looked vaguely surprised to see him. She wore a candy-stripe nurse’s uniform t
hat seemed somehow inappropriate and her white cap was perched on an enormous sweep of teased, dirty-blonde hair. To Lasker she looked like a seven-foot amazon. After that flicker of hesitation, she unleashed a broad, toothy smile.
‘Come on in.’ She stood back and waved her arm.
‘Thank you.’
The young woman led Lasker into a small reception room that contained three chairs and a settee in what is loosely described as the Scandinavian style, and her desk, behind which she moved. Lasker remained standing.
When she had composed herself, the receptionist said, ‘Can I help you?’
‘I’ve come to see Doctor Schmidt,’ the reporter said, thinking it should be fairly obvious.
‘Do you have an appointment?’
‘I phoned him, yes, he knows I’m coming.’
‘Your name, sir?’
‘Martin Lasker, but,’ as she scanned a lean appointments book, ‘I’m not a patient’
‘Oh,’ she said looking up, her face now troubled. ‘Are you a salesman?’
‘No, I work for the Millville News. I’m here to see the doctor on personal business.’
‘Oh, I see.’ The toothy smile returned. ‘Do sit down, won’t you?’ She waved her arm again, theatrically.
Lasker sat on the edge of one of the chairs and noticed for the first time the triangular nameplate on the receptionist’s desk. It read: Miss K. Peters. He looked up at Miss K. Peters and found she was still smiling blankly at him.
‘Is the doctor in?’ he asked after a pause.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said quickly, shaking her head as if coming out of a trance. ‘He’s in the toilet, but he should be out soon.’
Good God, Lasker thought, where did Schmidt find this creature? If she acted like this all the time it was no wonder the appointments book had so few entries. He smiled thinly back at her.
‘You’re — Miss Peters?’ He nodded towards the nameplate.
‘Yes, that’s me. Are you writing a story about Doctor Schmidt?’ Her eyebrows arched in a serious attempt to strike a reflective pose.
The Fates Page 7