for clearheaded believers in the primacy of self to express their healthy instincts, which might be mistakenly perceived as racial prejudice. He could be fired.
Fortunately, just as he was about to declare his gut feelings to his superior and risk dismissal, he saw his potential patient. At fifteen, Seraphim was breathtakingly beautiful, in her own way as striking as Naomi, and instinct told Junior that the chance of being physically or morally polluted by her was negligible.
Like all women past puberty and this side of the grave, she was attracted to him. She never told him as much, not in words, but he detected this attraction in the way she looked at him, in the tone that she used when she spoke his name. Throughout three weeks of therapy, Seraphim revealed countless small but significant proofs of her desire.
During the girl’s final appointment, Junior discovered she would be home alone that same night, her parents at a function she wasn’t required to attend. She appeared to reveal this inadvertently, quite innocently; however, Junior was a bloodhound when it came to smelling seduction, regardless of how subtle the scent.
Later, when he showed up at her door, she pretended surprise and uneasiness.
He realized that like so many women, Seraphim wanted it, asked for it—yet had no place in her self-image to accommodate the truth that she was sexually aggressive. She wanted to think of herself as shy, demure, virginal, as innocent as a minister’s daughter ought to be—which meant that to get what she wanted, she required Junior to be a brute. He was happy to oblige.
As it turned out, Seraphim was a virgin. This thrilled Junior. He was inflamed also by the thought of ravishing her in her parents’ house…and by the kinky fact that their house was a parsonage.
Better still, he was able to have the girl to the accompaniment of her father’s voice, which was even kinkier than doing her in the parsonage. When Junior rang the bell, Seraphim had been in her room, listening to a tape of a sermon her father was composing. The good reverend usually dictated a first draft, which his daughter then transcribed. For three hours, Junior went at her mercilessly, to the rhythms of her father’s voice. The reverend’s “presence” was deliciously perverse and stimulating to his sense of erotic invention. When Junior was finished, there was nothing sexual that Seraphim could ever do with a man that she had not learned from him.
She struggled, wept, pretended disgust, faked shame, swore to bring the police down on him. Another man, not as highly skilled at reading women as Junior, might have thought the girl’s resistance was genuine, that her charges of rape were sincere. Any other man might have backed off, but Junior was neither fooled nor confused.
Once satiated, what she desired was a reason to deceive herself into believing that she was not a slut, that she was a victim. She didn’t really want to tell anyone what he had done to her. Instead, she was asking him, indirectly but indisputably, to provide her with an excuse to keep their passionate encounter secret, an excuse that would also allow her to continue to pretend that she had not begged for everything he’d done to her.
Because he genuinely liked women and hoped always to please them, always to be discreet and chivalrous and giving, Junior did as she wished, spinning a vivid account of the grisly vengeance he would take if ever Seraphim told anyone what he’d done to her. Vlad the Impaler, the historical inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula—thank you, Book-of-the-Month Club—could not have imagined bloodier or more horrific tortures and mutilations than those that Junior promised to visit upon the reverend, his wife, and Seraphim herself. Pretending to terrorize the girl excited him, and he was perceptive enough to see that she was equally excited by pretending to be terrorized.
He added verisimilitude to his threats by concluding with a few hard punches where they wouldn’t show, in her breasts and belly, and then he went home to Naomi, to whom he’d been married, at that time, less than five months.
To his surprise, when Naomi expressed an interest in romance, Junior was a bull again. He would have thought he had left his best stuff at Reverend Harrison White’s parsonage.
He loved Naomi, of course, and never could deny her. Although he had been especially sweet to her that night, if he had known that they would have less than a year together before fate tore her from him, he might have been even sweeter.
As Junior stood at Seraphim’s grave, his breath smoked from him in the still night air, as though he were a dragon.
He wondered if the girl had talked.
Perhaps, reluctant to admit to herself that she had yearned for him to do everything that he’d done, she had slowly been inflamed by guilt, until she convinced herself that she had, indeed, been raped. Psychotic little bitch.
Did this explain why Thomas Vanadium suspected Junior when no one else did?
If the detective believed that Seraphim had been raped, his natural desire to exact vengeance for his friend’s daughter might motivate him to commit the relentless harassment that Junior had endured now for four days.
On second thought—no. If Seraphim had told anyone she’d been raped, the police would have been at Junior’s doorstep in minutes, with a warrant for his arrest. No matter that they would have no proof. In this age of high sympathy for the previously oppressed, the word of a teenage Negro girl would have greater weight than Junior’s clean record, fine reputation, and heartfelt denials.
Vanadium was surely unaware of any connection between Junior and Seraphim White. And now the girl could never talk.
Junior remembered the very words the detective had used: They say she died in a traffic accident.
They say…
As usual, Vanadium had spoken in a monotone, putting no special emphasis on those two words. Yet Junior sensed that the detective harbored doubts about the explanation of the girl’s death.
Maybe every accidental death was suspicious to Vanadium. His obsessive hounding of Junior might be his standard operating procedure. After too many years investigating homicides, after too much experience of human evil, perhaps he had grown both misanthropic and paranoid.
Junior could almost feel sorry for this sad, stocky, haunted detective, deranged by years of difficult public service.
The bright side was easy to see. If Vanadium’s reputation among other cops and among prosecutors was that of a paranoid, a pathetic chaser after phantom perpetrators, his unsupported belief that Naomi was murdered would be discounted. And if every death was suspicious to him, then he would quickly lose interest in Junior and move on to a new enthusiasm, harassing some other poor devil.
Supposing that this new enthusiasm was an attempt to uncover skullduggery in Seraphim’s accident, then the girl would be doing Junior a service even after her demise. Whether or not the traffic accident was an accident, Junior hadn’t had anything to do with it.
Gradually he grew calm. His great frosty exhalations diminished to a diaphanous dribble that evaporated two inches from his lips.
Reading the dates on the headstone, he saw that the minister’s daughter had died on the seventh of January, the day after Naomi had fallen from the fire tower. If ever asked, Junior would have no trouble accounting for his whereabouts on that day.
He switched off the flashlight and stood solemnly for a moment, paying his respects to Seraphim. She had been so sweet, so innocent, so supple, so exquisitely proportioned.
Ropes of sadness bound his heart, but he didn’t cry.
If their relationship had not been limited to a single evening of passion, if they had not been of two worlds, if she had not been underage and therefore jailbait, they might have had an open romance, and then her death would have touched him more deeply.
A ghostly crescent of pale light shimmered on the black granite.
Junior looked up from the tombstone to the moon. It seemed like a wickedly sharp silver scimitar suspended by a filament more fragile than a human hair.
Although it was just the moon, it unnerved him.
Suddenly the night seemed…watchful.
Without
using his flashlight, depending only on the moon, he ascended through the cemetery to the service road.
When he reached the Suburban and closed his right hand around the handle on the driver’s door, he felt something peculiar against his palm. A small, cold object balanced there.
Startled, he snatched his hand back. The object fell, ringing faintly against the pavement.
He switched on his flashlight. In the beam, on the blacktop, a silver disc. Like a full moon in a night sky.
A quarter.
The quarter, surely. The one that had not been in his robe pocket where it should have been, the previous Friday.
He swept the immediate area with the flashlight, and shadows spun with shadows, waltzing spirits in the ballroom of the night.
No sign of Vanadium. Some of the taller monuments offered hiding places on both sides of the cemetery road, as did the thicker trunks of the larger trees.
The detective could be anywhere out there. Or already gone.
After a brief hesitation, Junior picked up the coin.
He wanted to fling it into the graveyard, send it spinning far into the darkness.
If Vanadium was watching, however, he would interpret the pitch of the coin to mean that his unconventional strategy was working, that Junior’s nerves were frayed to the breaking point. With an adversary as indefatigable as this cuckoo cop, you dared never show weakness.
Junior dropped the coin into a pants pocket.
Switched off the light. Listened.
He half expected to hear Thomas Vanadium in the distance, softly singing “Someone to Watch over Me.”
After a minute, he slipped his hand into his pocket. The quarter was still there.
He got in the Suburban, pulled the door shut, but didn’t at once start the engine.
In retrospect, coming here wasn’t a wise move. Evidently, the detective had been following him. Now, Vanadium would puzzle out a motive for this late-night graveyard tour.
Junior, putting himself in the detective’s place, could think of a few reasons for this visit to Seraphim’s grave. Unfortunately, not one of them supported his contention that he was an innocent man.
At worst, Vanadium might begin to wonder if Junior had a link to Seraphim, might uncover the physical-therapy connection, and in his paranoia, might erroneously conclude that Junior had something to do with her traffic accident. That was nuts, of course, but the detective was evidently not a rational man.
At best, Vanadium might decide Junior had come here to learn what other funeral his nemesis had attended—which was, in fact, the true motivation. But this made it clear that Junior feared him and was striving to stay one step ahead of him. Innocent men didn’t go to such lengths. As far as the fruitcake cop was concerned, Junior might as well have painted I killed Naomi on his forehead.
He nervously fingered the fabric of his slacks, outlining the quarter in his pocket. Still there.
Calcimine moonlight cast an arctic illusion over the boneyard. The grass was as eerily silver as snow at night, and gravestones tilted like pressure ridges of ice in a fractured wasteland.
The black service road seemed to come out of nowhere, then to vanish into a void, and Junior suddenly felt dangerously isolated, alone as he had never been, and vulnerable.
Vanadium was no ordinary cop, as he himself had said. In his obsession, convinced that Junior had murdered Naomi and impatient with the need to find evidence to prove it, what was to stop the detective if he decided to deal out justice himself? What was to prevent him from walking up to the Suburban right now and shooting his suspect point-blank?
Junior locked the door. He started the engine and drove out of the cemetery faster than was prudent on the winding service road.
On the way home, he repeatedly checked the rearview mirror. No vehicle followed him.
He lived in a rental house: a two-bedroom bungalow. Enormous deodar cedars with layers of drooping branches surrounded the place, and usually they seemed sheltering, but now they loomed, ominous.
Entering the kitchen from the garage, snapping on the overhead light, he was prepared to find Vanadium sitting at the pine table, enjoying a cup of coffee. The kitchen was deserted.
Room by room, closet by closet, Junior conducted a search for the detective. The cop was not here.
Relieved but still wary, he toured the small house again to be sure that all the doors and windows were locked.
After undressing for the night, he sat on the edge of the bed for a while, rubbing the coin between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, brooding about Thomas Vanadium. He tried rolling it across his knuckles; he dropped it repeatedly.
Eventually he put the quarter on the nightstand, switched off the lamp, and slipped into bed.
He could not sleep.
This morning he had changed the sheets. Naomi’s scent was no longer with him in the bedclothes.
He had not yet disposed of her personal effects. In the dark, he went to the dresser, opened a drawer, and found a cotton sweater that she had worn recently.
At the bed, he spread the garment across his pillow. Lying down, he pressed his face into the sweater. The sweet subtle scent of Naomi was as effective as a lullaby, and soon he dozed off.
When he woke in the morning, he raised his head from the pillow to look at the alarm clock—and saw the twenty-five cents on his nightstand. Two dimes and a nickel.
Junior flung back the covers and came to his feet, but his knees proved weak, and he sat at once on the edge of the bed.
The room was bright enough for him to confirm that he was alone. The interior of the box in which Naomi now resided could be no more silent than this house.
The coins were arranged atop a playing card, which lay facedown.
He slipped the card out from under the change, turned it over. A joker. Printed in red block letters across the card was a name: BARTHOLOMEW.
Chapter 31
FOR THE BETTER PART of a week, on doctor’s orders, Agnes avoided stairs. She took sponge baths in the ground-floor powder room and slept in the parlor, on a sofa bed, with Barty nearby in a bassinet.
Maria Gonzalez brought rice casseroles, homemade tamales, and chile rellenos. Daily, Jacob made cookies and brownies, always a new variety, and in such volume that Maria’s plates were heaped with baked goods each time they were returned to her.
Edom and Jacob came to dinner with Agnes every evening. And though the past weighed heavily on them when they were under this roof, without fail they stayed long enough to wash the dishes before fleeing back to their apartments over the garage.
On Joey’s side, there was no family to provide help. His mother had died of leukemia when he was four. His dad, fond of beer and brawling—like father not like son—was killed in a bar fight five years later. Without close relatives willing to take him in, Joey went to an orphanage. At nine, he wasn’t prime adoption material—babies were what was wanted—and he’d been raised in the institution.
Although relatives were in short supply, friends and neighbors aplenty stopped by to help Agnes, and some offered to stay with her at night. She gratefully accepted assistance with the housecleaning, laundry, and shopping, but she declined the all-night company because of her dreams.
Routinely she dreamed of Joey. Not nightmares. No blood, no reliving of the horror. In her dreams, she was on a picnic with Joey or at a carnival with him. Walking a beach. Watching a movie. A warmth pervaded these scenes, an aura of companionship, love. Except eventually she always glanced away from Joey, and when she looked again, he was gone, and she knew that he was gone forever.
She woke weeping from the dreams, and she wanted no witnesses. She wasn’t embarrassed by her tears. She just didn’t want to share them with anyone but Barty.
In a rocking chair, holding her tiny son in her arms, Agnes cried quietly. Often, Barty slept through her weeping. Awakened, he smiled or squinched his face into a puzzled frown.
The infant’s smile was so captivating and his puz
zlement so comically earnest that both expressions worked on Agnes’s misery as surely as yeast leavens dough. Her bitter tears turned sweet.
Barty never cried. In the hospital neonatal unit, he’d been a marvel to the nurses, because when the other newborns were squalling in chorus, Barty had been unfailingly serene.
Friday, January 14, eight days after Joey’s death, Agnes closed the sofa bed, intending to sleep upstairs from now on. And for the first time since coming home, she cooked dinner without resort to friends’ casseroles or to the treasures in her freezer.
Maria’s mother, visiting from Mexico, was babysitting, so Maria came without her children, as a guest, joining Agnes and the laugh-a-minute Isaacson twins, chroniclers of destruction. They ate in the dining room, rather than at the kitchen dinette, with a lace-trimmed tablecloth, the good china, crystal wineglasses, and fresh flowers.
Serving a formal dinner was Agnes’s way of declaring—to herself more than to anyone else in attendance—that the time had come for her to get on with life for Bartholomew’s sake, but also for her own.
Maria arrived early, expecting to assist with final details in the kitchen. Though honored to be a guest, she wasn’t able to stand by with a glass of wine while preparations remained to be made.
Agnes at last relented. “Someday, you’re going to have to learn to relax, Maria.”
“I am always enjoy to being useful like a hammer.”
“Hammer?”
“Hammer, saw, screwdriver. I am always to be happy when useful in such way like tool is useful.”
“Well, please don’t use a hammer to finish setting the table.”
“Is joke.” Maria was proud of correctly interpreting Agnes.
“No, I’m serious. No hammer.”
“Is good you are joke.”
“It’s good I can joke,” Agnes corrected.
“Is what I say.”
The dining table could accommodate six, and Agnes instructed Maria to set two places on each of the long sides, leaving the ends unused. “It’ll be cozier if we all sit across from one another.”
Maria arranged five place settings instead of four. The fifth—complete with silverware, waterglass, and wineglass—was at the head of the table, in memoriam of Joey.
As she struggled to cope with her loss, the last thing Agnes needed was the reminder posed by that empty chair. Maria’s intentions were good, however, and Agnes didn’t want to hurt her feelings.
Over potato soup and an asparagus salad, the dinner conversation got off to a promising start: a discussion of favorite potato dishes, observations on the weather, talk of Mexico at Christmas.
Eventually, of course, dear Edom held forth about tornadoes—in particular the infamous Tri-State Tornado of 1925, which ravaged portions of Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana.
“Most tornadoes stay on the ground twenty miles or less,” Edom explained, “but this one kept its funnel to the earth for two hundred nineteen miles! And it was one mile wide. Everything in its path—torn, smashed to bits. Houses, factories, churches, schools—all pulverized. Murphysboro, Illinois, was wiped off the map, erased, hundreds killed in that one town.”
Maria, wide-eyed, put down her silverware and crossed herself.
“It totally destroyed four towns, as if they were hit by atom bombs, tore up parts of six more towns, destroyed fifteen thousand homes. That’s just the homes. This thing was black, huge and black and hideous, with continuous lightning snapping through it, and a roar, they said, like a hundred thunderstorms booming all at once.”
Again, Maria crossed herself.
“Six hundred ninety-five people were killed in three states. Winds so powerful that some of the bodies were thrown a mile and a half from where they were snatched off the ground.”
Apparently Maria wished that she’d brought a rosary to dinner. With the fingers of her right hand, she pinched the knuckles of her left, one after the other, as if they were beads.
“Well,” Agnes said, “thank the Lord, we don’t have tornadoes here in California.”
“We have dams, though,” said Jacob, gesturing with his fork. “The Johnstown Flood, 1889. Pennsylvania, sure, but it could happen here. And that was a one, let me tell you. The South Fork Dam broke. Wall of water seventy feet high totally destroyed the city. Your tornado killed almost seven hundred, but my dam killed two thousand two hundred and nine. Ninety-nine entire families were swept from the earth. Ninety-eight children lost both parents.”