From the Corner of His Eye

  Chapter 17

  AS GREASY WITH FEAR sweat as a pig on a slaughterhouse ramp, Junior woke from a nightmare that he could not remember. Something was reaching for him—that’s all he could recall, hands clutching at him out of the dark—and then he was awake, wheezing.

  Night still pressed at the glass beyond the venetian blind.

  The pharmacy lamp in the corner was aglow, but the chair that had been beside it was no longer there. It had been moved closer to Junior’s bed.

  Vanadium sat in the chair, watching. With the perfect control of a sleight-of-hand artist, he turned a quarter end-over-end across the knuckles of his right hand, palmed it with his thumb, caused it to reappear at his little finger, and rolled it across his knuckles again, ceaselessly.

  The bedside clock read 4:37 A.M.

  The detective seemed never to sleep.

  “There’s a fine George and Ira Gershwin song called ‘Someone to Watch over Me.’ You ever hear it, Enoch? I’m that someone for you, although not, of course, in a romantic sense.”

  “Who…who’re you?” Junior rasped, still badly rattled by the nightmare and by Vanadium’s presence, but quick-witted enough to stay within the clueless character that he had been playing.

  Instead of answering the question, meaning to imply that he believed Junior already knew the facts, Thomas Vanadium said, “I was able to get a warrant to search your house.”

  Junior thought this must be a trick. No hard evidence existed to indicate that Naomi had died at the hands of another rather than by accident. Vanadium’s hunch—more accurately, his sick obsession—was not sufficient reason for any court to issue a search warrant.

  Unfortunately, some judges were pushovers in such matters, if not to say corrupt. And Vanadium, fancying himself an avenging angel, was surely capable of lying to the court to finesse a warrant where none was justified.

  “I don’t…don’t understand.” Blinking sleepily, pretending to be still thickheaded from tranquilizers and whatever other drugs they were dripping into his veins, Junior was pleased by the note of perplexity in his hoarse voice, although he knew that even an Oscar-caliber performance would not win over this critic.

  Knuckle over knuckle, snared in the web of thumb and forefinger, vanishing into the purse of the palm, secretly traversing the hand, reappearing, knuckle over knuckle, the coin glimmered as it turned.

  “Do you have insurance?” asked Vanadium.

  “Sure. Blue Shield,” Junior answered at once.

  A dry laugh escaped the detective, but it had none of the warmth of most people’s laughter. “You’re not bad, Enoch. You’re just not as good as you think you are.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I meant life insurance, as you well know.”

  “Well…I have a small policy. It’s a benefit that comes with my job at the rehab hospital. Why? What on earth is this about?”

  “One of the things I was searching for in your house was a life-insurance policy on your wife. I didn’t find one. Didn’t find any canceled checks for the premium, either.”

  Hoping to play at befuddlement awhile longer, Junior wiped his face with one hand, as if pulling off cobwebs. “Did you say you were in my house?”

  “Did you know your wife kept a diary?”

  “Yeah, sure. A new one every year. Since she was just ten years old.”

  “Did you ever read it?”

  “Of course not.” This was absolutely true, which allowed Junior to meet Vanadium’s eyes forthrightly and to swell with righteousness as he answered the question.

  “Why not?”

  “That would be wrong. A diary’s private.” He supposed that to a detective nothing was sacred, but he was nonetheless a little shocked that Vanadium needed to ask that question.

  Rising from the chair and approaching the bed, the detective kept turning the quarter without hesitation. “She was a very sweet girl. Very romantic. Her diary’s full of rhapsodies about married life, about you. She thought you were the finest man she’d ever known and the perfect husband.”

  Junior Cain felt as if his heart had been lanced by a needle so thin that the muscle still contracted rhythmically but painfully around it. “She did? She…she wrote that?”

  “Sometimes she wrote little paragraphs to God, very touching and humble notes of gratitude, thanking Him for bringing you into her life.”

  Although Junior was free of the superstitions that Naomi, in her innocence and sentimentality, had embraced, he wept without pretense.

  He was filled with bitter remorse for having suspected Naomi of poisoning his cheese sandwich or his apricots. She had in fact adored him, as he had always believed. She would never have lifted a hand against him, never. Dear Naomi would have died for him. In fact, she had.

  The coin stopped turning, pinched flat between the knuckles of the cop’s middle and ring fingers. He retrieved a box of Kleenex from the nightstand and offered it to his suspect. “Here.”

  Because Junior’s right arm was encumbered by the bracing board and the intravenous needle, he tugged a mass of tissues from the box with his left hand.

  After the detective returned the box to the nightstand, the coin began to turn again.

  As Junior blew his nose and blotted his eyes, Vanadium said, “I believe you actually loved her in some strange way.”

  “Loved her? Of course I loved her. Naomi was beautiful and so kind…and funny. She was the best…the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  Vanadium flipped the quarter into the air, caught it in his left hand, and proceeded to turn it across his knuckles as swiftly and smoothly as he had with his right hand.

  This ambidextrous display sent a chill through Junior for reasons that he could not entirely analyze. Any amateur magician—indeed, anyone willing to practice enough hours, magician or not—could master this trick. It was mere skill, not sorcery.

  “What was your motive, Enoch?”

  “My what?”

  “You appear not to have had one. But there’s always a motive, some self-interest being served. If there’s an insurance policy, we’ll track it down, and you’ll fry like bacon on a hot skillet.” As usual, the cop’s voice was flat, a drone; he had delivered not an emotional threat, but a quiet promise.

  Widening his eyes in calculated surprise, Junior said, “Are you a police officer?”

  The detective smiled. This was an anaconda smile, inspired by the contemplation of merciless strangulation. “Before you woke, you were dreaming. Weren’t you? A nightmare, apparently.”

  This sudden turn in the interrogation unnerved Junior. Vanadium had a talent for keeping a suspect off balance. A conversation with him was like a scene out of a movie about Robin Hood: a battle with cudgels on a slippery log bridge over a river. “Yes. I…I’m still soaked with sweat.”

  “What were you dreaming about, Enoch?”

  No one could put him in prison because of his dreams. “I can’t remember. Those are the worst, when you’re not able to remember them—don’t you think? They’re always so silly when you can recall the details. When you draw a blank…they seem more threatening.”

  “You spoke a name in your sleep.”

  More likely than not, this was a lie, and the detective was setting him up. Suddenly Junior wished that he had denied dreaming.

  Vanadium said, “Bartholomew.”

  Junior blinked and dared not speak, because he didn’t know any Bartholomew, and now he was certain the cop was weaving an elaborate web of deceit, setting a trap. Why would he have spoken a name that meant nothing to him?

  “Who is Bartholomew?” Vanadium asked.

  Junior shook his head.

  “You spoke that name twice.”

  “I don’t know anyone named Bartholomew.” He decided that the truth, in this instance, could not harm him.

  “You sounded as though you were in a lot of distress. You were frightened of this Bartholomew.”

  The ball of sodden Kleenex was gripped so tightly i
n Junior’s left hand that had its carbon content been higher, it would have been compacted into a diamond. He saw Vanadium staring at his clenched fist and sharp white knuckles. He tried to ease up on the wad of Kleenex, but he wasn’t able to relent.

  Inexplicably, each repetition of Bartholomew heightened Junior’s anxiety. The name resonated not just in his ear, but in his blood and bones, in body and mind, as if he were a great bronze bell and Bartholomew the clapper.

  “Maybe he’s a character I saw in a movie or read in a novel. I’m a member of the Book-of-the-Month Club. I’m always reading one thing or another. I don’t remember a character named B-Bartholomew, but maybe I read the book years ago.”

  Junior realized he was on the verge of babbling, and with an effort, he silenced himself.

  Rising slowly like the blade in the hands of an ax murderer as deliberate as an accountant, Thomas Vanadium’s gaze arced from Junior’s clenched fist to his face.

  The port-wine birthmark appeared to be darker than before and differently mottled than he remembered it.

  If the policeman’s gray eyes had earlier been as hard as nailheads, they were now points, and behind them was willpower strong enough to drive spikes through stone.

  “My God,” Junior said, pretending that his befuddlement had faded and that his mind had just now clarified, “you think Naomi was murdered, don’t you?”

  Instead of engaging in the confrontation for which he had been pressing ever since his first visit, Vanadium surprised Junior by breaking eye contact, turning from the bed, and crossing the room to the door.

  “It’s even worse,” Junior rasped, convinced that he was losing some indefinable advantage if the cop left without playing out this moment as it would usually unfold in an intellectual television crime drama like Perry Mason or Peter Gunn.

  Stopping at the door without opening it, Vanadium turned to stare at Junior, but said nothing.

  Leavening his tortured voice as best he could with shock and with hurt, as though deeply wounded by the need to speak these words, Junior Cain said, “You…you think I killed her, don’t you? That’s crazy.”

  The detective raised both hands, palms toward Junior, fingers spread. After a pause, he showed the backs of his hands—and then the palms once more.

  For a moment, Junior was mystified. Vanadium’s movements had the quality of ritual, vaguely reminiscent of a priest raising high the Eucharist.

  Mystification slowly gave way to understanding. The quarter was gone.

  Junior hadn’t noticed when the detective stopped turning the coin across his knuckles.

  “Perhaps you could pull it from your ear,” Thomas Vanadium suggested.

  Junior actually raised his trembling left hand to his ear, expecting to find the quarter tucked in the auditory canal, held between the tragus and the antitragus, waiting to be plucked with a flourish.

  His ear was empty.

  “Wrong hand,” Vanadium advised.

  Strapped to the bracing board, semi-immobilized to prevent the accidental dislodgement of the intravenous feed, Junior’s right arm felt half numb, stiff from disuse.

  The supplicant hand seemed not to be a part of him. As pale and exotic as a sea anemone, the long fingers curled as tentacles curl artfully around an anemone’s mouth, poised to snare, lazily but relentlessly, any passing prize.

  Like a disc fish with silvery scales, the coin lay in the cup of Junior’s palm. Directly over his life line.

  Disbelieving his eyes, Junior reached across his body with his left hand and picked up the quarter. Although it had been lying in his right palm, it was cold. Icy.

  Miracles being nonexistent, the materialization of the quarter in his hand was nevertheless impossible. Vanadium had stood only at the left side of the bed. He had never leaned over Junior or reached across him.

  Yet the coin was as real as dead Naomi broken on the stony ridge at the foot of the fire tower.

  In a state of wonderment that was laced with dread rather than delight, he looked up from the quarter, seeking an explanation from Vanadium, expecting to see that anaconda smile.

  The door was falling shut. With no more sound than the day makes when it turns to night, the detective had gone.

  Chapter 18

  SERAPHIM AETHIONEMA WHITE was nothing whatsoever like her name, except that she had as kind a heart and as good a soul as any among the hosts in Heaven. She did not have wings, as did the angels after which she had been named, and she couldn’t sing as sweetly as the seraphim, either, for she had been blessed with a throaty voice and far too much humility to be a performer. Aethionema were delicate flowers, either pale-or rose-pink; and while this girl, just sixteen, was beautiful by any standard, she was not a delicate soul but a strong one, not likely to be shaken apart in even the highest wind.

  Those who had just met her and those who were overly charmed by eccentricity called her Seraphim, her name complete. Her teachers, neighbors, and casual acquaintances called her Sera. Those who knew her best and loved her the most deeply—like her sister, Celestina—called her Phimie.

  From the moment the girl was admitted on the evening of January 5, the nurses at St. Mary’s Hospital in San Francisco called her Phimie, too, not because they knew her well enough to love her, but because that was the name they heard Celestina use.

  Phimie shared Room 724 with an eighty-six-year-old woman—Nella Lombardi—who had been deep in a stroke-induced coma for eight days and who had been recently moved out of the ICU when her condition stabilized. Her white hair was radiant, but the face that it framed was as gray as pumice, her skin utterly without luster.

  Mrs. Lombardi had no visitors. She was alone in the world, her two children and her husband having passed away long ago.

  During the following day, January 6, as Phimie was wheeled around the hospital for tests in various departments, Celestina remained in 724, working on her portfolio for a class in advanced portraiture. She was a junior at the Academy of Art College.

  She had put aside a half-finished pencil portrait of Phimie to develop several of Nella Lombardi.

  In spite of the ravages of illness and age, beauty remained in the old woman’s face. Her bone structure was superb. In youth, she must have been stunning.

  Celestina intended to capture Nella as she was now, head at rest upon the pillow of, perhaps, her deathbed, eyes closed and mouth slack, face ashen but serene. Then she would draw four more portraits, using bone structure and other physiological evidence to imagine how the woman had looked at sixty, forty, twenty, and ten.

  Ordinarily, when Celestina was troubled, her art was a perfect sanctuary from all woes. When she was planning, composing, and rendering, time had no meaning for her, and life had no sting.

  On this momentous day, however, drawing provided no solace. Frequently, her hands shook, and she could not control the pencil.

  During those spells when she was too shaky to draw, she stood at the window, gazing at the storied city.

  The singular beauty of San Francisco and the exquisite patina of its colorful history spoke to her heart and kindled in her such an unreasonable passion that she sometimes wondered, at least half seriously, if she had spent other lives here. Often, streets were wondrously familiar to her the first time that she set foot on them. Certain great houses, dating from the late 1800s and early 1900s, inspired her to imagine elegant parties thrown there in more genteel and gilded ages, and her flights of imagination sometimes acquired such vivid detail that they were eerily like memories.

  This time, even San Francisco, under a Chinese-blue sky stippled with a cloisonné of silver-and-gold clouds, couldn’t provide solace or calm Celestina’s nerves. Her sister’s dilemma wasn’t as easily put out of mind as any problem of her own might have been—and she herself had never been in such an awful situation as Phimie was now.

  Nine months ago, Phimie had been raped.

  Ashamed and scared, she told no one. Although a victim, she blamed herself, and the prospect of being e
xposed to ridicule so horrified her that despair got the better of good judgment.

  When she discovered she was pregnant, Phimie dealt with this new trauma as other naive fifteen-year-olds had done before her: She sought to avoid the scorn and the reproach that she imagined would be heaped upon her for having failed to reveal the rape at the time it occurred. With no serious thought to long-term consequences, focused solely on the looming moment, in a state of denial, she made plans to conceal her condition as long as possible.

  In her campaign to keep her weight gain to a minimum, anorexia was her ally. She learned to find pleasure in hunger pangs.

  When she did eat, she touched only nutritious food, a more well-balanced diet than at any time in her life. Even as she desperately avoided contemplation of the childbirth that inevitably approached, she was trying her best to ensure the health of the baby while still remaining slim enough to avoid suspicion.

  Through nine months of quiet panic, however, Phimie grew less rational week by week, resorting to reckless measures that endangered her own health and the baby’s even as she avoided junk food and took a daily multivitamin. To conceal the changes in her physique, she wore loose clothes and wrapped her abdomen with Ace bandages. Later she used girdles to achieve more dramatic compression.

  Because she had suffered a leg injury six weeks before being raped, and had undergone subsequent tendon surgery, Phimie was able to claim lingering symptoms, avoiding gym class—and the discovery of her condition—since the start of school in September.

  By the last week of pregnancy, the average woman has gained twenty-eight pounds. Typically, seven to eight pounds of this is the fetus. The placenta and the amniotic fluid weigh three pounds. The remaining eighteen are due to water retention and fat stores.

  Phimie gained less than twelve pounds. Her pregnancy might have gone undetected even without the girdle.

  The day previous to her admission to St. Mary’s, she awakened with an unremitting headache, nausea, and dizziness. Fierce abdominal pain afflicted her, too, like nothing she had known before, though not the telltale contractions of labor.

  Worse, she was plagued with frightening eye problems. At first, mere blurring. Followed by phantom fireflies flickering at the periphery of her vision. Then a sudden, half-minute blindness that left her in a state of terror even though it passed quickly.

  In spite of this crisis, and though she was aware that she was within a week or ten days of delivery, Phimie still could not find the courage to tell her father and mother.

  Reverend Harrison White, their dad, was a good Baptist and a good man, neither judgmental nor hard of heart. Their mother, Grace, was in every way suited to her name.

  Phimie was loath to reveal her pregnancy not because she feared her parents’ wrath, but because she dreaded seeing disappointment in their eyes, and because she would rather have died than bring shame upon them.

  When a second and longer spell of blindness struck her that same day, she was home alone. She crawled from her bedroom, along the hall, and felt her way to the phone in her parents’ bedroom.

  Celestina was in her tiny studio apartment, working happily on a cubistic self-portrait, when her sister called. Judging by Phimie’s hysteria and initial incoherence, Celestina thought that Mom or Dad—or both—had died.

  Her heart was broken almost as completely by the actual facts as it would have been if she had, indeed, lost a parent. The thought of her precious sister being violated made her half sick with sorrow and rage.

  Horrified by the girl’s nine months of self-imposed emotional isolation and by her physical suffering, Celestina was eager to reach her mother and father. When the Whites stood together as a family, their shine could hold back the darkest night.

  Although Phimie regained her sight while talking to her big sister, she didn’t recover her reason. She begged Celestina not to track down Mom or Dad long-distance, not to call the doctor, but to come home and be with her when she divulged her terrible secret.

  Against her better judgment, Celestina made the promise Phimie wanted. She