by Dean Koontz
“It’s not the only Oreo in the world, you know. Is this the most fog ever?”
“It’s about the most I’ve ever seen.”
As Wally got behind the wheel and closed his door, Angel said, “Mommy, where’s fog come from? And don’t say Hawaii.”
“New Jersey.”
“Before she rats on me,” Wally said, “I gave her an Oreo.”
“Too late.”
“Mommy thought I put it in my shoe.”
“Getting her into her shoes and coat sooner than Monday required a bribe,” Wally said.
“What’s fog?” Angel asked.
“Clouds,” Celestina replied.
“What’re clouds doing down here?”
“They’ve gone to bed. They’re tired,” Wally told her as he put the car in gear and released the hand brake. “Aren’t you?”
“Can I have another Oreo?”
“They don’t grow on trees, you know,” said Wally.
“Do I have a cloud inside me now?”
Celestina asked, “Why would you think that, sugarpie?”
“’Cause I breathed the fog.”
“Better hold on tight to her,” Wally warned Celestina, braking to a halt at the intersection. “She’ll float up and away, then we’ll have to call the fire department to get her down.”
“What do they grow on?” Angel asked.
“Flowers,” Wally answered.
And Celestina said, “The Oreos are the petals.”
“Where do they have Oreo flowers?” Angel asked suspiciously.
“Hawaii,” Wally said.
“I thought so,” Angel said, dubiosity squinching her face. “Mrs. Ornwall made me cheese.”
“She’s a great cheese maker, Mrs. Ornwall,” Wally said.
“In a sandwich,” Angel clarified. “Why’s she live with you, Uncle Wally?”
“She’s my housekeeper.”
“Could Mommy be your housekeeper?”
“Your mother’s an artist. Besides, you wouldn’t want to put poor Mrs. Ornwall out of a job, would you?”
“Everybody needs cheese,” Angel said, which apparently meant that Mrs. Ornwall would never lack work. “Mommy, you’re wrong.”
“Wrong about what, sugarpie?” Celestina asked as Wally pulled to the curb again and parked.
“The Oreo isn’t gone forever.”
“Is it in your shoe, after all?”
Turning in Celestina’s lap, Angel said, “Smell,” and held the index finger of her right hand under her mother’s nose.
“This isn’t polite, but I must admit it smells nice.”
“That’s the Oreo. After I ate it up, the cookie went smoosh-smoosh into my finger.”
“If they always go there, smoosh-smoosh, then you’re going to wind up with one really fat finger.”
Wally switched off the engine and killed the headlights. “Home, where the heart is.”
“What heart?” Angel asked.
Wally opened his mouth, couldn’t think of a reply.
Laughing, Celestina said to him, “You can never win, you know.”
“Maybe it’s not where the heart is,” Wally corrected himself. “Maybe it’s where the buffalo roam.”
On the counter beside the bathroom sink stood an open box of Band-Aids in a variety of sizes, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and a bottle of iodine.
Tom Vanadium checked the small wastebasket next to the sink and discovered a wad of bloody Kleenex. The crumpled wrappers from two Band-Aids.
Evidently, the blood was Cain’s.
If the wife killer had cut himself accidentally, his writing on the wall indicated a hair-trigger temper and a deep reservoir of long-nurtured anger.
If he had cut himself intentionally for the express purpose of writing the name in blood, then the reservoir of anger was deeper still and pent up behind a formidable dam of obsession.
In either case, printing the name in blood was a ritualistic act, and ritualism of this nature was an unmistakable symptom of a seriously unbalanced mind. Evidently, the wife killer would be easier to crack than expected, because his shell was already badly fractured.
This wasn’t the same Enoch Cain whom Vanadium had known three years ago in Spruce Hills. That man had been utterly ruthless but not a wild, raging animal, coldly determined but never obsessive. That Cain had been too calculating and too self-controlled to have been swept into the emotional frenzy required to produce this blood graffiti and to act out the symbolic mutilation of Bartholomew with a knife.
As Tom Vanadium studied the stained and ravaged wall again, a cold and quivery uneasiness settled insectivally onto his scalp and down the back of his neck, quickly bored into his blood, and nested in his bones. He had the terrible feeling that he was not dealing with a known quantity anymore, not with the twisted man he’d thought he understood, but with a new and even more monstrous Enoch Cain.
Carrying the tote bag full of Angel’s dolls and coloring books, Wally crossed the sidewalk ahead of Celestina and climbed the front steps.
She followed with Angel in her arms.
The girl sucked in deep lungsful of the weary clouds. “Better hold tight, Mommy, I’m gonna float.”
“Not weighed down by cheese and Oreos, you won’t.”
“Why’s that car following us?”
“What car?” Celestina asked, stopping at the bottom of the steps and turning to look.
Angel pointed to a Mercedes parked about forty feet behind the Buick, just as its headlights went off.
“It’s not following us, sugarpie. It’s probably a neighbor.”
“Can I have an Oreo?”
Climbing the stairs, Celestina said, “You already had one.”
“Can I have a Snickers?”
“No Snickers.”
“Can I have a Mr. Goodbar?”
“It’s not a specific brand you can’t have, it’s the whole idea of a candy bar.”
Wally opened the front door and stepped aside.
“Can I have some ’nilla wafers?”
Celestina breezed through the open door with Angel. “No vanilla wafers. You’ll be up all night with a sugar rush.”
As Wally followed them into the front hall, Angel said, “Can I have a car?”
“Car?”
“Can I?”
“You don’t drive,” Celestina reminded her.
“I’ll teach her,” Wally said, moving past them to the apartment door, fishing a ring of keys out of his coat pocket.
“He’ll teach me,” Angel triumphantly told her mother.
“Then I guess we’ll get you a car.”
“I want one that flies.”
“They don’t make flying cars.”
“Sure they do,” said Wally as he unlocked the two deadbolts. “But you gotta be twenty-one years old to get a license for one.”
“I’m three.”
“Then you only have to wait eighteen years,” he said, opening the apartment door and stepping aside once more, allowing Celestina to precede him.
As Wally followed them inside, Celestina grinned at him. “From the car to the living room, all as neat as a well-practiced ballet. We’ve got a big headstart on this married thing.”
“I gotta pee,” Angel said.
“That’s not something that we announce to everyone,” Celestina chastised.
“We do when we gotta pee bad.”
“Not even then.”
“Give me a kiss first,” Wally said.
The girl smooched him on the cheek.
“Me, me,” Celestina said. “In fact, fiancées should come first.”
Though Celestina was still holding Angel, Wally kissed her, and again it was lovely, though shorter than before, and Angel said, “That’s a messy kiss.”
“I’ll come by at eight o’clock for breakfast,” Wally suggested. “We have to set a date.”
“Is two weeks too soon?”
“I gotta pee before then,” Angel declared.
“Love you,” Wally said, and Celestina repeated it, and he said, “I’m gonna stand in the hall till I hear you set both locks.”
Celestina put Angel down, and the girl raced to the bathroom as Wally stepped into the public hall and pulled the apartment door shut behind him.
One lock. Two.
Celestina stood listening until she heard Wally open the outer door and then close it.
She leaned against the apartment door for a long moment, holding on to the doorknob and to the thumb-turn of the second deadbolt, as though she were convinced that if she let go, she would float off the floor like a cloud-stuffed child.
In a red coat with a red hood, Bartholomew appeared first in the arms of the tall lanky man, the Ichabod Crane lookalike, who also had a large tote bag hanging from his shoulder.
The guy appeared vulnerable, his arms occupied with the kid and the bag, and Junior considered bursting out of the Mercedes, striding straight to the Celestina-humping son of a bitch, and shooting him point-blank in the face. Brain-shot, he would drop quicker than if the headless horseman had gotten him with an ax, and the kid would go down with him, and Junior would shoot the bastard boy next, shoot him in the head three times, four times just to be sure.
The problem was Celestina in the Buick, because when she saw what was happening, she might slide behind the steering wheel and speed away. The engine was running, white plumage rising from the tailpipe and feathering away in the fog, so she might escape if she was a quick thinker.
Chase after her on foot. Shoot her in the car. Maybe. He’d have five rounds left if he used one on the man, four on Bartholomew.
But with the silencer attached, the pistol was useful only for close-up work. After passing through a sound-suppressor, the bullet would exit the muzzle at a lower than usual velocity, perhaps with an added wobble, and accuracy would drop drastically at a distance.
He had been warned about this accuracy issue by the thumbless young thug who delivered the weapon in a bag of Chinese takeout, in Old St. Mary’s Church. Junior tended to believe the warning, because he figured the eight-fingered felon might have been deprived of his thumbs as punishment for having forgotten to relay the same or an equally important message to a customer in the past, thus assuring his current conscientious attention to detail.
Of course, he also might have shot off his own thumbs as double insurance against being drafted and sent to Vietnam.
Anyway, if Celestina escaped, there would be a witness, and it wouldn’t matter to a jury that she was a talentless bitch who painted kitsch. She would have seen Junior get out of the Mercedes and would be able to provide at least a half-accurate description of the car in spite of the fog. He still hoped to pull this off without having to give up his good life on Russian Hill.
He wasn’t a marksman, anyway. He couldn’t handle anything more than close-up work.
Ichabod passed Bartholomew through the open door to Celestina in the passenger’s seat, went around the Buick, put the tote bag in the back, and climbed behind the wheel once more.
If Junior had realized that they were driving only a block and a half, he wouldn’t have followed them in the Mercedes. He would have gone the rest of the way on foot. When he pulled to the curb again, a few car lengths behind the Buick, he wondered if he had been spotted.
Now, here, all three on the street and vulnerable at once—the man, Celestina, the bastard boy.
There would be lots of aftermath with three at once, especially if he took them out with point-blank head shots, but Junior was pumped full of reliable antiemetics, antidiarrhetics, and antihistamines, so he felt adequately protected from his traitorous sensitive side. In fact, he wanted to see a significant quantity of aftermath this time, because it would be proof positive that the boy was dead and that all this torment had come at last to an end.
Junior worried, however, that they had noticed him after he pulled to the curb twice behind them, that they were keeping an eye on him, ready to bolt if he got out of the car, in which case they might all make it inside before he could cut them down.
Indeed, as Celestina and the kid reached the foot of the steps to this second house, Bartholomew pointed, and the woman turned to look back. She appeared to stare straight at the Mercedes, though the fog made it impossible for Junior to be sure.
If they were suspicious of him, they showed no obvious alarm. The three went inside in no particular rush, and judging by their demeanor, Junior decided that they hadn’t spotted him, after all.
Lights came on in the ground-floor windows, to the right of the front door.
Wait here in the car. Give them time to settle down. At this hour, they would put the kid to bed first. Then Ichabod and Celestina would go to their room, undress for the night.
If Junior was patient, he could slip in there, find Bartholomew, kill the boy in bed, whack Ichabod second, and still have a chance to make love to Celestina.
He was no longer hopeful that they could have a future together. After sampling the Junior Cain thrill machine, Celestina would want more, as women always did, but the time for a meaningful romance had now passed. For all the anguish he’d been put through, however, he deserved the consolation of her sweet body at least once. A little compensation. Payback.
If not for Celestina’s slutty little sister, Bartholomew would not exist. No threat. Junior’s life would be different, better.
Celestina had chosen to shelter the bastard boy, and in so doing, she had declared herself to be Junior’s enemy, though he’d never done anything to her, not anything. She didn’t deserve him, really, not even one quick bang before the bang of the gun, and maybe after he shot Ichabod, he’d let her beg for a taste of the Cain cane, but deny her.
A speeding truck passed, stirring the fog, and the white broth churned past the car windows, a disorienting swirl.
Junior felt a little lightheaded. He felt strange. He hoped he wasn’t coming down with the flu.
The middle finger on his right hand throbbed under the pair of Band-Aids. He’d sliced it earlier, while using the electric sharpener to prepare his knives, and the wound had been aggravated when he’d had to strangle Neddy Gnathic. He would never have cut himself in the first place if there had been no need to be well-armed and ready for Bartholomew and his guardians.
During the past three years, he’d suffered much because of these sisters, including most recently the humiliation in the Dumpster with the dead musician, Celestina’s pencil-necked friend with a propensity for postmortem licking. The memory of that horror flared so vividly—every grotesque detail condensed into one intense and devastating flash of recollection—that Junior’s bladder suddenly felt swollen and full, although he had taken a long satisfying leak in an alleyway across the street from the restaurant at which the postcard-painting poseur had enjoyed a leisurely dinner with Ichabod.
That was another thing. Junior hadn’t gotten his noon meal, because the spirit of Vanadium had nearly caught up with him when he’d been browsing for tie chains and silk pocket squares before lunch. Then he missed dinner, as well, because he had to maintain surveillance on Celestina when she didn’t go straight home from the gallery. He was hungry. He was starving. This, too, she had done to him. The bitch.
More speeding traffic passed, and again the thick fog swirled, swirled.
Your deeds…will return to you, magnified beyond imagining…the spirit of Bartholomew…will find you…and mete out the terrible judgment that you deserve.
Those words, in a vertiginous spiral, spooled through the memory tapes in Junior’s mind, as clear and powerfully affecting—and every bit as alarming—as the memory flash of the ordeal in the Dumpster. He couldn’t recall where he’d heard them, who had spoken them, but revelation trembled tantalizingly along the rim of his mind.
Before he could replay the memory for further contemplation, Junior saw Ichabod exiting the house. The man returned to the Buick, seeming to float through the mist, like a phantom on a moor. He started the engine, quickly hun
g a U-turn in the street, and drove uphill to the house from which he had earlier collected Bartholomew.
In Cain’s bedroom, Tom Vanadium’s hooded flashlight revealed a six-foot-high bookcase that held approximately a hundred volumes. The top shelf was empty, as was most of the second.
He remembered the collection of Caesar Zedd self-help drivel that had occupied a place of honor in the wife killer’s former home in Spruce Hills. Cain owned a hardcover and a paperback of each of Zedd’s works. The more expensive editions had been pristine, as though they were handled only with gloves; but the text in the paperbacks had been heavily underlined, and the corners of numerous pages had been bent to mark favorite passages.
A quick review of these book spines revealed that the treasured Zedd collection wasn’t here.
The walk-in closet, which Vanadium next explored, contained fewer clothes than he expected. Only half the rod space was being used. A lot of empty hangers rang softly, eerily against one another as he conducted a casual examination of Cain’s wardrobe.
On a shelf above one of the clothes rods stood a single piece of Mark Cross luggage, an elegant and expensive twosuiter. The rest of the high shelf was empty—enough space for as many as three more bags.
After she flushed, Angel stood on a stepstool and washed her hands at the sink.
“Brush your teeth, too,” Celestina said, leaning against the jamb in the open doorway.
“Already did.”
“That was before the Oreo.”
“I didn’t get my teeth dirty,” Angel protested.
“How is that possible?”
“Didn’t chew.”
“So you inhaled it through your nose?”
“Swallowed it whole.”
“What happens to people who fib?”