Laura Hill looked to be in her twenties. The first time Ted laid eyes on her, he felt pity for this girl just starting out on her career, with her rectangular glasses and her hair drawn back, her affable manners and calm smile. Just playing at therapist, Ted thought. Later on he was amazed to discover that Laura Hill was already fortyish. He didn’t know her exact age; she had never told him.
She managed to disarm him with her youthful good looks, her air of innocence, and her frankness with him during that first conversation. Ted was seduced by the challenge of getting past the traps she set for him in each session, for of course it never occurred to her—any more than it did to Carmichael—to speak with him of the suicidal thoughts that were starting to crowd in on his mind.
“Hello, Ted,” Laura said. “So the fishing trip with your business partner was canceled, I see.”
“That’s right. Thanks for finding the time to see me.”
“Sorry about the trip.” Today Laura wore her auburn hair tied in a bun. “How are you feeling?”
Yesterday I killed a man. I went to his house, hid inside a closet waiting for him to get home, and murdered him. The world won’t miss him.
He could almost taste the words. He imagined the transformation in Laura Hill’s expression if he were to tell her any such thing. The truth was, he himself hadn’t even gotten used to the idea that he’d killed another human being. Much less the fact that he’d enjoyed it.
“I had another nightmare last night,” Ted said. He often talked about his nightmares, basically because he thought they were nonsense and because he could leave out anything he thought might be revealing. “There was something new.”
Flanking the lone window in her office was a desk that Laura rarely used during these sessions. Today she sat in the armchair, facing Ted. A small coffee table stood between them, nothing on it but a plastic cup filled with water. Ted never drank from it.
“Tell me about your dream.”
“I was in the living room, looking out at the porch. A possum was perched on the table, eating one of Holly’s legs. Holly wasn’t there, just her leg, but I knew it was hers. I ran outside and looked for something to throw at it and scare it off, and that was when I noticed a box lying on the ground. I recognized it right away. It was my old chess box.”
If she had been one of those therapists who write down every important detail in a notebook, Laura couldn’t have helped noting this point, given the serious tone of Ted’s voice. But she never took notes. She had a prodigious memory.
“I threw the pieces at the animal, but I could never hit it,” Ted went on. “They’d veer off inexplicably. And there seemed to be no end of chessmen. Then I noticed Holly in the yard, and I think she had the ocean behind her. Isn’t it funny, what the human mind comes up with?”
Ted left out the detail of blowing away the possum with the Browning. It seemed too close to what he would have done to his own head if it hadn’t been for Lynch. That was the sort of detail he preferred to keep to himself.
“You didn’t kill the possum?” Laura asked. It wasn’t the first time she’d displayed an alarming sixth sense.
“No.”
She nodded.
“When was the last time you dreamed about anything related to chess?”
“Never.”
She paused thoughtfully, searching for the proper words.
“Ted, we have to talk about what happened during that period in your life. You have to tell me why a boy with such a talent for chess would give it up so abruptly. You never played again?”
“Not seriously. I taught my daughters, and I’ve played a few games with them, but now they play each other.”
“Tell me why you gave it up.”
It wasn’t the first time she’d tried to get him talking about this. Ted had put up a little resistance before, and she hadn’t insisted, but talking about that period didn’t really bother him much. He settled back in the chair and started in.
“My father taught me to play. By the time I was seven, I could beat him easily. He took me to meet an old man who had retired to his hometown, Windsor Locks, who’d been a pretty well-known chess player in his time.” Ted paused. Thinking about his mentor, possibly the only adult he had ever respected and admired in his life, made him feel a mixture of nostalgia and grief. “His name was Miller; I think I’ve mentioned him before. The first time I saw him I thought he was the oldest man I had ever met: his hair was white, long in back, and his face was all wrinkled. We didn’t talk much that time. We sat down at a chessboard he kept in his garage, where he taught the neighborhood kids, and we played a game. My father watched. We made a few moves, not more than twenty, and then Miller led my father off and they talked by themselves. I sat there, waiting. I thought Miller was telling him I was no good, and then I’d go home with my dad and that would be it. Instead it was eight years, until I turned fifteen, that I saw him two or three times a week.”
“You two had the horseshoe ritual, didn’t you?”
Ted couldn’t remember mentioning the horseshoe. More disturbing evidence of his therapist’s astonishing mental archive.
“Right. Miller became my coach. We spent hours practicing variations on simultaneous boards.”
Laura wrinkled her mouth.
“I’m afraid my knowledge of chess doesn’t extend that far.”
“There are a certain number of openings in chess, many of them named after the players who popularized them, and then there are what they call variations, which are different ways of continuing the game from those openings. Let’s say there’s a main road and several branching side roads. They’ve all been studied, and they’re part of what you study in chess. Chess isn’t just a game of logic; it’s also a game of memory. Miller and I re-created famous games, analyzing each move. Remember, I was a little kid, and though I liked chess, I was also very restless. Miller had to find ways of keeping me involved. He told me stories about chess players, about famous games. So one day he told me the story of the nineteen twenty-seven world championship match in Buenos Aires between a Cuban, José Raúl Capablanca, and a Russian, Alexander Alekhine. Miller was fascinated by the games in that match, and he passed his enthusiasm on to me. Capablanca was the world champion, and everybody thought he was unbeatable, a revolutionary genius. Alekhine, the challenger, was a studious type, a meticulous player that few thought capable of winning. Am I boring you?”
“Not at all. I love seeing how that youthful enthusiasm still moves you today. Go on, please. I want to know how the story of the exceptional genius versus the methodical challenger turns out. Am I very ignorant not to know?”
Ted laughed.
“No, of course not. We’re talking about a chess match from nineteen twenty-seven! The thing is, back then there weren’t any clear rules for running a world chess championship. They agreed that whoever won six games would be the next champion. But it’s very common for chess games to end in a draw, so they had to play lots of games to get to six wins. In the end, they played thirty-four. Over the course of seventy-three days!”
“Who won?”
“To everyone’s surprise, it was Alekhine, the challenger. Relations between the two players had always been terrible; afterwards, they became even worse. Alekhine and Capablanca never agreed to terms for a rematch of the world championship, and fifteen years later Capablanca died. But the outcome had surprised everyone, and this is where the horseshoe comes in. It seems that when Alekhine got to Buenos Aires, he found a horseshoe lying in the street. He was a very superstitious man, and he knew that horseshoes are considered good luck. So he told his wife, who had accompanied him to the match, about it, and he decided to keep the object as a good luck charm. He bought a newspaper and wrapped it carefully. He told his wife, ‘It was waiting for me.’”
Ted had a faraway stare. He’d let himself get carried away. Miller had told him that story a thousand times, dressing it up with a million realistic details. The old man even kept an album with newspaper clipp
ings from that time, some of them from Argentine newspapers that he had gotten ahold of and had translated in his tiny, beautiful handwriting.
“Miller had a horseshoe hanging on his wall,” Ted said, staring off into space, as if he were really seeing it there. “He said it was the very same horseshoe Alekhine had found in Buenos Aires. Said he’d bought it at an auction. When I first started playing in state championship tournaments, we’d take down the horseshoe, wrap it in newspaper, and bring it with us. My father usually drove us, but even he didn’t know about the horseshoe. It was our secret, Miller’s and mine, and nobody else’s. I did pretty well in those tournaments. When we got back, we’d hang it up on the wall of Miller’s garage again, like a ritual.”
“You speak of Miller with a great deal of pride. He must have been a very important person for you.”
“You bet. During those years my father would drive me to his house, a little more than an hour from ours. I’d spend three hours with Miller, and the time would fly. My father was a salesman, so he’d take advantage of these trips and work the area. Things weren’t easy at home; my mother’s dementia was getting worse, and I couldn’t stand their arguments. Windsor Locks was a form of escape, in more ways than one.”
“What became of Miller?”
“Miller must have been maybe seventy when I met him, maybe a couple years younger. So eight years later, he was closing in on eighty. I was fifteen, and chess was the only thing that calmed my rebellious spirit. When I wasn’t at Miller’s garage, I’d become an impulsive young troublemaker. I don’t know how much longer I could have kept going like that, because I had really turned into two different people. I was an intolerant teenager who hated his parents and hardly spoke to his father, a problem kid at school, a back talker. But I was also the boy who still loved spending an afternoon with Miller, listening to his stories and analyzing games.”
Ted paused. He hadn’t even told Holly this much about Miller, much less revealed the story he was about to tell. He cleared his throat.
“The day Miller died, I was there with him. Once or twice a month we played each other, and by the end we were pretty closely matched. It was his turn. He always sat the same way when he was thinking, with his elbows on the table and his chin propped on his fists. I usually sat with my hands under the table, leaning forward. That’s how we were sitting when Miller suddenly slumped across the board. His arms splayed out and his head fell like a lead weight, scattering chess pieces everywhere. I jumped up, startled and scared. Miller was a widower; he had a son who visited now and then, but at the time it was just the two of us at home. I was so agitated, I couldn’t even get myself to go over and shake him to see if he’d react, find out what had happened. I know it wouldn’t have changed anything, because Miller had died of a massive stroke. I stood paralyzed for the longest time by the table, breathing rapidly…At last I ran from the garage to find help. I could have gone to any of the neighbors’ houses, but for some ridiculous reason I thought I should go find my father. His Mustang wasn’t in the driveway, which didn’t surprise me, so I ran off in whatever direction. I got to the corner, turned right arbitrarily, never stopped running…And as luck would have it, I caught sight of his car in the distance, two hundred yards away, parked in front of some house. My father had to be there, selling his encyclopedias or correspondence courses or whatever it was he was selling at the time. You can guess the rest of it, can’t you, Laura?”
“I think so.”
“I ran into the house and figured out right away that my father hadn’t been driving me to visit Miller all those years so I could perfect my chess game or to get away from my mother. Not only that, anyway. The woman who lived there had been his first girlfriend; my father tried to explain it to me later.”
“What did you see in that house, Ted?”
They were in the bedroom. I didn’t see them. But I could hear them. I sat in the living room in silence, in a chair facing the TV, which was off. I listened to them laughing. I was thinking about Miller, collapsed in his garage, and I had a horrible thought—I remember it perfectly. I was hoping he was dead, because otherwise I still would never be able to go back to that town. Also because it would be my father’s fault. And at that moment all I wanted to do was hate him.”
The jangle of the telephone startled them both. Nobody ever interrupted Laura in the middle of a session.
“Excuse me, Ted. I have to take this.” She stood up and walked to the desk.
Ted nodded.
Laura picked up the receiver and listened. For a brief moment Ted noticed the tension in her face, until she suddenly relaxed and smiled.
“Yes, of course. No problem. You have my okay.”
She hung up.
“My son’s in the Boy Scouts,” she explained to Ted. “He forgot to give me a form to sign, authorizing him to go on one of their camping trips, and they were nice enough to call.”
Laura sat down again.
“I’m sorry about the interruption, Ted,” she apologized again.
“Don’t worry about it. There’s not much more to tell. I never talked about it with my father again. He kept on getting away from the house as often as he could, and I stayed at home, hating him intensely and struggling with my mother. They got divorced, and I gave up chess forever.”
7
Ted knelt behind the bushes. He’d just tramped through nearly a mile of mosquito-infested woodland. He shook his head and concentrated on what stood across the way.
A whistled melody mingled with the trilling of songbirds. He saw a lake and a boat with a single occupant: Wendell was calmly awaiting his fate, a fishing rod in hand, at peace with himself.
Ted squashed a mosquito with a silent clap of his hands and sat down with his back to the lake to study his surroundings. Then he saw it, glittering in the sunbeams that filtered through the pines: the unmistakable shape of a horseshoe. He was a few yards away and didn’t even stand up to get it; he crawled over and picked it up with both hands, amazed at how exactly it looked like the one Miller had kept on the wall of his garage. (Deep down, he knew that it was Miller’s horseshoe.)
What was it doing here? He gazed at it for a long time and then stuffed it in his pocket.
The path led to Wendell’s weekend home, a modernist pile of concrete blocks with huge windows. A wooden deck on one side stretched past the lakeshore, turning into a narrow jetty that projected a few yards into the lake itself. Ted weighed his options. Once Wendell decided he was done fishing, he would undoubtedly dock at the jetty and cross the deck to his house. Ted’s most reasonable course of action seemed to be to wait inside for him. At least the wait would be more comfortable there, without all these mosquitoes. He snatched at another and looked at his closed fist with some satisfaction. When he opened his hand, it was empty.
He walked along the private path unimpeded. The closer he came to the modernist home, the larger it loomed. The sporty black car parked in front turned out to be a Lamborghini convertible. Ted couldn’t resist the temptation to go over and take a look. It was his dream car; he was beginning to sympathize with Wendell. When he leaned over to check out the interior, his jacket opened under the weight of the Browning, reminding him of the gravity of what he intended to do. He closed the jacket but didn’t button up—the heat was unbearable, yet it felt safer to have the gun where he could easily reach it. He stood up just as a red light flashed in the car window. At first he thought it was one of the dashboard lights, but after shifting his head slightly he realized it was a reflection in the car window. He turned around and studied a lamp high on a pole partially hidden in the trees. A security camera atop the pole pointed directly at the spot where he was standing. A tiny red light blinked on and off. Ted felt a chill. The detailed report on the house in Lynch’s folder mentioned nothing about a security system, and Lynch hadn’t warned him of it. It seemed unlikely that they could have missed a detail like this.
As the red LED continued to blink, Ted wondered if anyone was
watching the camera feed. Maybe it was a closed-circuit system, in which case Lynch wouldn’t have thought it worth mentioning. Lynch and his people would be sure to get rid of the recordings, of course. Ted turned from the security camera with a sense of relief.
He went to the front door. Unlocked, naturally. A handmade rug, perhaps Indian, drew him inside. The place was just as he had imagined it: spacious, with balconies and overhead walkways, all stainless steel, glass, and gleaming white. Like the reception area of a corporate headquarters, not a weekend getaway home. Two staircases with polished wooden steps seemed to float in midair. There were a number of thin, round columns. Ted slowly made his way to the right, toward a large, dark glass table that seemed never to have been used. He immediately saw that the best place for him to wait for Wendell was just past the hallway that presumably led to the kitchen.
He was heading there when he was struck by a distinctive sense of being watched. He stopped and looked around. He saw no cameras inside, but he figured there must have been some. Far across the great room was an enormous flat-screen TV, some leather easy chairs, and a fireplace with photos on the mantel. Ted continued to scrutinize the area, distrustful. When the feeling of being watched passed, he moved on to his hiding place, though he couldn’t quite rid himself of his unease. Something wasn’t right. What was it?
Kill the Next One Page 4