A little breathless from the climb, he scanned the scene. His whole self was attentive now, his flesh, his soul. It was that hyper-focus Goulart sometimes talked about, but more than that too. It was as if that shock of darkness he’d felt inside him had connected him to his surroundings somehow, as if it and he had blended with the storm, had become one with the rain and the gloom. Every other thought he had, every worry and consideration, fell away. There was just the forest. Just the green-black sky. Just the white noise of the downpour. And they—and he himself—were all part of the darkness.
Something here.
He went on moving his gaze across the vista in a slow arc. How strangely colorless this place was! How drained of even the dying life of autumn! The rain washed over everything like a kind of acid, eating away its clarity. The lightning too—it struck again now: it burned the vista to an x-ray, all white bones and black backgrounds. What was he sensing? What was he looking for? Where was it?
There! Something! A movement . . . ! What the hell?
Zach stared into the streaming curtain of rain—and the rain began to shift and change. It was as if the water were bending around some presence otherwise unseen. A shape appeared within the downpour, huge and hulking and metamorphic, humanlike one moment, bestial the next, the next a mere shifting presence inhabiting the core of the atmosphere as if it were the very spirit of the storm.
Zach saw it and, at the same time, he felt it inside him: a cancer of oncoming darkness linking him to the cancer spreading through all the world.
Astonished, he thought: Who are you?
The thing in the rain shifted and grew and moved. It answered inside his head, but not like a thought, like a voice, as real, as present as the spoken word, more real, more present, a bizarrely overwhelming whisper, filling him with a meaningless susurrus of words that seemed to have neither beginning nor end.
I AM NOT I AM THAT I AM NOT I AM NOT I
The heart went out of Zach on the instant—all his courage: it just dropped out of him like water from a broken sack. He suddenly understood—not in language, but viscerally and completely—the full meaning of the curse that had fallen on him. He suddenly understood that Gretchen Dankl and the executioner had not told him the whole truth, had not been able to face the whole truth themselves. He understood why they, why every wolf who had come before him, had failed, why none had reclaimed the dagger and ended the evil business, why each had merely passed the nightmare along to the next, mollifying himself with the idea that the hunt for the baselard would continue without him. . . .
It was the fear . . . the paralyzing fear . . . of this . . . of this. . . .
He stood mesmerized, staring. And all the while, the thing in the rain came toward him, burgeoning and blooming into an atmospheric immensity and shrinking back into a beast and then a human form but always coming closer, closer so that Zach lost all sense of anything else around him, the forest, the thunder, the lightning, the fact of the world itself—all gone as the murmuring thing came closer and closer until, without warning, he was seized by the arm. . . .
He shouted in terror and turned.
It was Goulart—standing beside him, eyes like lanterns, good and scared.
“You all right, Cowboy?”
“What? What?”
“What’re you doing? I saw you come up here. What’re you doing? You see something? You all right?”
Zach blinked. His own eyes, he knew, were as wide and terrified as Goulart’s. He turned them, this way, that. There was nothing—nothing unusual. No shape inside the rain. It had just been a remnant, a memory, a scent—a trace not of Abend, but of the dagger itself. Now it was gone and there was only the forest everywhere, the stolid trees bowing and rattling in the wind. Only the downpour, setting up a steady hiss on the fallen leaves.
Breathing hard, he looked down the hill. The sizzling red light of the flares on the pavement—the aggressively prosaic patrol cars, the smashed Bentley—brought him back and anchored him to what had to be reality. The thunder rolled.
“He killed her here,” Zach said. His voice sounded distant even to himself.
“What?” said Goulart. “What do you mean?”
“He’s gone, but this is where he killed her.” Zach kept turning, kept looking through the rain, through the trees. “Somewhere,” he said.
Now Goulart was looking around him too. But Zach spotted it first. He called down to the staties.
“Up here!”
Only part of her hand was sticking out from the leaf cover. The top joints of three fingers, that’s all, as if she were trying to dig free. They never would have spotted it in this storm. It might have gone unnoticed for days.
Captain Mansfield and one of his troopers came stomping and crunching and squelching up the hill. Mansfield knelt in the muddy duff and brushed enough of the leaves away to expose Angela Bose’s gaping eyes, her slashed throat.
“God!” said Goulart. “Look at her!”
“I thought she was in her twenties,” Mansfield said, kneeling there, turning his head away to look at them, to look away from the horror.
The blue eyes gaped out of a face like a skull, the dry, leathery skin shriveled almost to the bone. The mouth was wide, black, toothless, an old, an ancient woman’s mouth. A beetle crawled out of it to scramble down the desiccated chin.
“God!” said Goulart again.
Zach stared through the rain at what had been Angela Bose. He remembered the smell of blood that had come off her, and he thought: that was all she had been in the end, a withered sack made lifelike by the blood. Nothing left of her for Abend to use for himself. . . .
A thought began to form in his mind.
But then the phone in his pocket buzzed. He blinked again at Goulart. Goulart gazed at him. They seemed to understand each other entirely, but neither could have said just then what it was he understood.
The phone in Zach’s pocket buzzed again. Goulart nodded toward the low hum of it. Zach fished it out of his pocket, cupping one hand over it to shield it from the rain. It was his wife calling.
“Grace?”
“Zach?” she said. “You have to come home. You have to come home right now.”
She was weeping.
29
HOME
It was late by the time he reached her, nearly four o’clock—after three-plus hours of travel through the storm-hampered traffic. Even so, the signs of ransack were still visible here and there: shards in the living-room carpet from a broken china urn Grace had loved, stuffing from a torn sofa cushion, disarray on the bookshelves, a slanted photograph on the wall. Even the champion housewife Grace had not been able to fix all of it in mere hours.
She had not been able to stop crying either. She was still in tears. Sitting at the dining-room table. Contemplating a scratch the bastards had made in the glass on one of her mama’s picture frames, turning it this way and that in the light, measuring it with her fingernail to see if she might be able to buff it away. There was a Bible on the table by her elbow—and a woman’s devotional—both of them—so Zach knew she’d been hungry for comfort. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was that she didn’t run to him when he came in, didn’t bury her face in his chest, sob into his lapels the way she had when the plumber was so rude to her that one time.
Instead, she only turned to him after he’d been standing there a while. It was poignant to him—it was heartbreaking—that her face was still pretty, still sweet-looking, even as haggard as it was, even so ravaged by tears.
“I sent the kids to Molly’s,” she told him. “So I could . . .” she gestured to the living room “. . . clean up.”
He echoed her gesture with a helpless gesture of his own. “I’m so sorry, baby. I told them. . . .”
He had told them a lot of things as he’d driven back this way, growling tensely over the phone first at Washington, then at Roth, then at Washington again. The Westchester inspectors had answered the rising heat of his tone with th
e immovable drollery of cops armed with a legal search warrant, which is what they were. Zach, who almost never raised his voice in anger, did not raise his voice now either but finally said to Washington, “So help me, there is going to come a time when you and I will discuss this personally, Inspector.”
“Is that a threat, Agent?” Washington said, amused.
And Zach thought, It’s a full moon tonight and I can’t find Abend, but I can find you, you son of a bitch!
But he hung up without answering aloud.
Goulart, who was behind the wheel for the first part of the journey before Zach dropped him off in Manhattan, listened in, shaking his head. Now and then, he murmured a curt single-syllable profanity, his description of the Westchester cop twins. It was meant to be a show of support for his partner, but Zach couldn’t help but feel there was a hidden message too: You could’ve stood with me. We could’ve stood together. I would’ve covered for you and this would never have happened.
Zach called Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell.
“Well, what did you expect?” she said. She, at least, paid him the courtesy of sounding regretful. “After you walked out on them like that. Like some big-shot screw-you federale? What did you think they’d do?”
“I thought they said it was a wild animal killed her,” said Zach for about the fifth time.
“Well, they can’t find a wild animal and the county’s in a panic about it and you pissed them off. What did you expect?”
Zach hung up and uttered a single-syllable profanity of his own.
His anger had not abated all through the long drive home, not one bit. His fantasies of taking wolf form and ripping Roth and Washington to pieces became disturbingly repetitive, not to mention satisfying. Even now, as he stood in his living room watching his forlorn wife, the fury seethed within him, tamped down only by his overwhelming sorrow and remorse for the hurt he’d caused the woman he loved more than his own breath. The satin tenderness of Margo Heatherton’s skin was gone forever—he could not recall it to his mind in any realistic way—and so he could not imagine for the life of him how on earth he ever could have betrayed this Grace who was the better substance of his soul.
“I guess you better tell me now,” she said. She couldn’t even ask the question without fighting fresh tears. “Did you love her?”
“Who—Margo?” said Zach. “No, of course not. I didn’t even like her.”
“Well, did you go to bed with her?”
He hadn’t made up his mind whether to tell her the truth or not, couldn’t decide whether it would purge the poison of the lie or hurt her needlessly, which course was the selfish one and which correct. In the event, he found that the lie just came out of him, which gave it a spontaneous, almost plausible sound. “No! Is that what they told you?”
“They said she said you did.”
“Oh, she was crazy. No, no, no. That’s not how it was.”
He went to her. Put his hand on her hair. He could tell she wanted to respond, wanted to bury her face in the comfort of him, but she resisted, still uncertain of the truth. She frowned down at the scratched picture frame: a slash across the photo of her mama and sister waving at the camera.
The glass could be replaced, Zach found himself thinking. The glass could be replaced.
“Why didn’t you tell me about her?” Grace asked. She had to force herself to this, he could tell; interrogating her husband was the last thing on earth she wanted to do. There was nothing in Proverbs 31 about that! “When she was at the church, you just said you knew her.”
“I know, I know. I screwed up. She was threatening to tell you we’d, you know, been together. And we hadn’t, but. . . .”
His wife raised her tearstained face to him. “I would have believed you.”
He closed his eyes and sighed. “I know. I should have trusted you.” He despised himself for saying this—all of it—but the lies just came and kept coming. And what the hell—he despised himself so much already, it didn’t make much difference.
She shifted toward him in her chair. She took his hand off her hair, held it in her two hands. Gazed up at him. “I’ve been praying about it,” she said softly.
This, for some reason, only pissed Zach off more. He wanted to throttle God for interfering in his affairs, same as he wanted to throttle Roth and Washington. He wanted to take Grace’s Bible and her devotional, throw them both in the fireplace, light the gas. Why couldn’t God and everyone else just leave them the hell alone?
“Those men, the policemen, they asked me where you were the night this woman Margo died,” Grace said.
Zach tried not to stiffen, but he stiffened all the same. She must have felt it, holding his hand like that.
“I lied to them,” she went on. “I told them you were home all night.”
She must have felt him relax too.
“I know you didn’t hurt her. I know you couldn’t do that. And they said it was some animal anyway, a bear or something. They know it wasn’t you. So I lied and I’m not sorry. To heck with them, anyway.”
He looked away from her. He couldn’t meet her eyes. Because he knew she was sorry—that is, he knew it had cost her in leaden grief to break her Sunday-school precepts, to sin against her God (that damned interfering God!).
“I didn’t tell them she came to the church either,” she said.
He pulled his hand from her. “You didn’t have to . . .” he started to say. But he covered his eyes with his hand and said, instead, “Oh, Grace, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Outside, the rain was still falling—falling hard. It set up a steady hiss and patter on the roof.
“Zach—baby—” Grace said, looking up at him through her tears. “You listen to me now, okay? No matter what—no matter what—you’re the husband of my life. You understand? You know for a fact I’ve never been with anyone else. We are one flesh, one flesh and blood to me, no matter what. And I know I don’t see the things y’all see . . . all the horror and reality. But I’m not stupid. I know what people are and what they do. And I know these things are different for men than for women sometimes. And if maybe this woman . . . came on to you or . . . drew you in somehow . . . I’m not gonna pretend that wouldn’t hurt me, but we’ll get through it, we’ll get by. We’ll go before God and he will heal us. I know he will. You’re a good man, baby. No one knows that better than I do. You’re a good man, just not . . . just not perfect is all. And I will live with that and so will you and we will get by, but . . . I think I’ve got to know the truth, when all is said and done. That’s what God sent me to know when I prayed. I think it’d help me to know there’s not just lying between us. You understand? Because that would mean you were just treating me like a fool. So that’s why I think it’s better you tell me the truth now and get it on over with. So why don’t you do that—right now, baby. Right now.”
Zach prepared himself with a deep breath before he lowered his hand from his face and looked at her. Ah, but that breath—that wasn’t enough preparation, not by half. Because looking at her was different this time than it had ever been before, and the sight of her pierced him to the heart.
He had never really known her; Grace. He had never understood her inner world or workings. He had never even thought that he had. He had taken her as she appeared to him, a Proverbs 31 woman like his mama—his sweet, his simple, his innocent angel, his home girl, his Bible girl—but he had always known that that didn’t describe the full depths of her. How could it? No one was like that all the way down—probably not even his mama, though if she wasn’t, he didn’t want to know. But that was the way she behaved—Grace—that was how she appeared to him, so that was how he took her.
And it wasn’t that he suddenly understood her now either. It was just that—in the brutal clarity of his remorse, in the urgency of this crossroad moment—he saw her more fully than perhaps he had before. He sensed her, for that moment, as a woman of considerations. A complete woman who had chosen, out of the complex muddle of her doubt
s and terrors, despite her temptations and the anxieties that gnawed at her in the lightless hours—had chosen her simplicity, that simplicity that he loved. What to him was her sweetness was, to her, the work of her life, as he was the work of her life, and the children were. She had chosen them, and all the regrets that came with them, all the regrets that come with choosing anything.
That was what he saw. And he didn’t know why this made it easier to tell her the truth. Maybe it was just easier to confess to a human being than to an angel. Or maybe it just made more sense to him that way. After all, as she said, she was not stupid, not a fool. And the fact was that she was his woman—his only woman—forever. The fact was he had wronged her. The fact was she had the right to choose whether to forgive him or not. He was a man; he could face the facts. She was a woman; so could she. Maybe it was just that.
“She saw my picture in the paper and made a project out of me. You know, targeted me,” he told her.
“Of course she did. Because you were a hero,” said Grace. “Some folks have to remake everything into themselves.”
It was the kindest thing she could have said, and he realized with a pang that she had chosen this too, chosen to say it, in the midst of what must have been her terrible hurt and sorrow.
“I went up there that night because she threatened to tell you about . . . the one time we were together. Ah, God, Grace, I am so sorry.”
“I know.”
“I got a thousand reasons, a thousand excuses for it, a thousand lame stories I could tell you. I won’t, though. It would be a disrespect to you.”
“It would.”
“I did wrong, Grace. I was standing there and I could’ve done right and I did wrong, and if I could take it back . . . I am just so sorry.”
“God will heal us,” she tried to say, though she was crying hard now, shaking her head, forlorn. “I know he will.”
“I went up there that night. I told her I wouldn’t be blackmailed. I wouldn’t live lying to you. I did tell her that, I swear I did.”