“Where are you going?”
“Up to Nideck Point. Now listen to me, Father Jim. Come up there anytime that you can. And you can talk to me about this, in private, if you feel the need. I give you permission. But never to anyone else, or in front of anyone else.”
“Thank you.” Jim was obviously relieved. “Reuben, I want permission to read on this, to do research.”
Reuben understood. A priest couldn’t really act on a confession any more than he could talk about it or bring it up to the man who had confessed. Reuben said yes.
“I went by the house earlier today, got some books I’d ordered,” Reuben explained. “Just legend, fiction, poetry, that kind of thing. But there have been incidents in America, you know, sightings—.”
“Mom’s been talking about those things,” said Jim. “So has this Dr. Jaska. Something about the Beast of Bray Road.”
“That’s nothing,” said Reuben. “Just a sighting in Wisconsin of a strange creature, a Bigfoot, maybe, something like that. Not much to go on. But I am searching myself for anything and everything that can shed light on this, and there is a bizarre coincidence having to do with the name Nideck, and I’m trying to figure it out. I just don’t have anything yet. And yes, yes, you can do research, of course.”
“Thank you,” said Jim. “Now I want you to stay in touch with me, Reuben.”
“Yes, Jim, I will.”
Reuben reached for the curtain.
“Wait,” Jim said. “Wait. Please, say whatever Act of Contrition you can. Say it from your heart.” Jim’s voice was breaking. “And let me give you Absolution.”
It hurt Reuben’s heart, the sound of Jim’s voice.
Reuben bowed his head and whispered: “God forgive me. God forgive me for my murderous heart, my heart that glories in this, my heart that doesn’t want to give it up, that will not give it up, that wants somehow to possess it yet to be good.” He sighed. He quoted St. Augustine: “ ‘God make me chaste; just not today.’ ”
Jim was deep into the recitation of the Absolution and perhaps some other prayer, Reuben didn’t know.
“May God protect you.”
“And why would He do that?” Reuben asked.
Jim’s voice came back with childlike sincerity:
“Because He made you. Whatever you are, He made you. And He knows why and for what purpose.”
14
REUBEN WENT over the roofs back to the motel, and locked himself in. All night long he tried to bring about an end to the transformation. He couldn’t use his computer, not with these enormous claws. He couldn’t read the new books he’d ordered. They irritated him. What had legendary werewolves to do with him?
He didn’t dare attempt to drive. He’d had a good taste of how difficult that was when he’d followed the kidnappers. He couldn’t risk being seen or apprehended in his own car, even if he could endure the difficulties.
He didn’t dare go out either.
No matter how he wished for it, he couldn’t work the change. At least not right away.
All around him in the night he could hear the voices. He’d been hearing them all the time he was with Jim.
He didn’t dare to focus on any one thread of sound now. If one voice snared him, he’d be going out to answer it.
It made him miserable to think that he could have been saving someone from suffering, even death. He crouched down in the corner, and tried to sleep, but that too was impossible.
At last around 3:00 a.m., much earlier than ever before, he did change.
It came on as always with a riot of orgasmic sensation, weakening him into a delirium as he went from beast to man. He watched it in the mirror. He snapped pictures on his iPhone. At last he stood staring at the old Reuben Golding he thought he knew so well, and neither had a word for the other that mattered. His hands looked delicate to him, and he wondered that he didn’t feel a vulnerability as a human, but he didn’t feel that vulnerability. He felt uncommonly strong, uncommonly able to resist whatever might threaten him in this form or the other form.
He was not very tired. He took a shower, and decided he’d sleep for a while before hitting the road.
It had now been two days since he’d spoken with anyone at home, and Jim could not, according to the old sacrosanct rules, so much as tell anyone he had even seen Reuben.
He had phone and e-mail messages from virtually everybody, including Galton, who’d installed the televisions for him the way that he’d asked. Galton had another piece of news for him. Orchid trees. Two very large orchid trees had arrived at the house, express shipped from Florida, apparently ordered by Marchent Nideck the night she died. Did Reuben want those trees?
Reuben felt a lump in his throat. For the first time he knew what that cliché meant. Yes, he wanted the orchid trees. That was terrific. Would Galton order any other plants that he could?
He sent a number of e-mails, confident nobody would be up yet to answer. He told Grace he was okay, and doing errands and handling loose ends at Nideck Point. He told Phil pretty much the same thing. He told Billie he was writing a long piece on the modus operandi of the Man Wolf. He told Celeste he needed to be alone right now, and he hoped she’d understand.
He had to let Celeste go. He desperately needed her friendship right now, but the rest had taken on a nightmarish hue, and it wasn’t her fault. No, not at all her fault. He was racking his brain for a way to disconnect romantically, a way that was gentlemanly and kind.
He added: “I hope you and Mort had a good time. I know how fond you are of Mort.”
Was that a nudge towards Mort, or did it sound like a passive-aggressive snipe at her for being with Mort? He was in no condition to decide. He wrote: “You and Mort were always good together. As for me, I’m changed. We both know it. It’s time for me to stop denying it. I’m just not the person I used to be.”
It was about four-thirty, still dark outside, and he was not sleepy and he was restless. It wasn’t painful, this restlessness, as it had been in Mendocino, but it wasn’t all that pleasant.
Suddenly, he heard a gunshot. But where had it come from? He got up from the little motel desk and went towards the windows. Nothing out there but Lombard Street and a few late-night cars crawling the asphalt under the bright streetlamps.
His muscles were on alert. He was hearing something, something distinct and sharp. A man whimpering, crying, telling himself that he had to go through with it. And a woman, a woman pleading with the man. Don’t hurt the children. Please, please, don’t hurt the children. Then came another shot from the gun.
The spasms came from deep within, nearly crippling Reuben. He bent over, feeling his pores breathing, the hair breaking out all over his chest and arms. The change was happening, and happening more rapidly than ever. An ecstatic feeling gripped him, then a paralytic wave of pleasure and strength.
Within seconds, he’d left the room and was moving over the roofs.
The man was bawling, whining, pitying himself and those he “had” to kill, and the wife who was already dead. Reuben moved towards the man’s voice.
The stench hit his nostrils, almost rancid, scent of cowardice and hate.
Reuben cleared the street with a long leap, and moved as fast as he could towards the white stucco house at the end of the block, coming down behind it on a second-floor iron balcony.
He broke the glass and stepped into the room. The only light was from outside. It was a neat, lovingly furnished room.
The woman lay dead on the four-poster bed, blood flowing from her head. The man stood over her, shirtless and barefoot, in pajama bottoms, holding the gun, blubbering and slobbering. The smell of liquor was overpowering and so was the scent of seething, convicting anger. They deserved it, they were making him do it, they’d driven him out of his mind, and they would never leave him alone.
“Have to do it, have to finish it!” the man protested to some unseen questioner. His bleary eyes looked at Reuben, but it wasn’t clear that he saw anything in front
of him. He was wobbling, whimpering. He cocked the gun again.
Reuben stepped up to him quietly, took the gun from his hand, and squeezed the man’s thick slippery neck until his windpipe broke. He squeezed tighter, snapping the man’s spinal cord.
The man dropped in an awkward heap to the floor.
Reuben set the gun down on the dressing table.
On the gilt-framed mirror above it was scrawled in lipstick an incoherent suicide note. He could scarcely make out the words.
He moved quickly down the small narrow hallway of the house, tracking the scent of children, the sweetest loveliest scent—his feet silent on the hardwood floor. Behind a door, he heard a child whispering.
Slowly he opened the door. The little girl was crouched in the bed, knees drawn up under her nightgown, and a toddler crouched beside her, a little boy, maybe three at most, with fair hair.
The little girl’s eyes grew large as she looked at Reuben.
“The Man Wolf,” she said, with the most radiant expression.
Reuben nodded. “After I’m gone, I want you to stay in this room,” he said softly. “I want you to wait until the police come, do you hear me? Don’t go down the hall. Wait here.”
“Daddy’s going to kill us,” said the little girl in a small but very firm voice. “I heard him tell Mommy. He’s going to kill me and Tracy.”
“Not now, he’s not,” said Reuben. He reached out and touched each child on the head.
“You’re a gentle wolf,” said the little girl.
Reuben nodded. He said, “Do as I say.”
He went back the way he came, punched in 911 on the bedroom phone, and said to the operator, “Two people are dead. There are little children here.”
He was back at the motel just before the sun rose. Someone might have seen him come down from the roof onto the third-floor balcony. Not likely, no, but possible. The situation was untenable. He had to change now.
And indeed the change happened immediately, almost as if some merciful wolf god had heard him and forced it. Or maybe he’d forced it himself.
Fighting exhaustion, he packed up and was gone within minutes.
He made it as far as the Redwood Highway just north of Sausalito. Spying a small old one-story adobe style motel, he pulled off and managed to score the room at the very back which opened on a broken asphalt alley at the foot of a hill.
In the early afternoon, he woke.
He was in near despair. Where should he go? What should he do? He knew the answer—that Mendocino provided safety, solitude, and rooms in which to hide, and that it was only up there that he might find the “other one” who might be able to help him. He wanted to be with the distinguished gentlemen on the library wall.
Damn you, I wish I knew who the hell you were.
But he couldn’t stop thinking about Laura. He didn’t want to go up there, because Laura was here.
Over and over in his mind, he played the details of their few hours together. Of course, Laura may have already called the authorities about what happened. But there had been something utterly strange and steely about Laura that caused him to hope that that had not happened.
He got some coffee and sandwiches from a nearby café, brought them back to the room, and started work on the computer.
It didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that Laura was in some way professionally connected to the forest, to the outdoors, to the wilderness surrounding her house. Yesterday, he’d found one tour guide website featuring tours for women—by an L. J. Dennys. He scanned that website now again looking for clues. But the only pictures of L. J. Dennys made it quite impossible to tell who she was beneath her hat and behind her sunglasses. Her hair was scarcely visible.
He found random references to L. J. Dennys, naturalist and environmentalist, all over the place. But no really good pictures.
He keyed in Laura J. Dennys, and let fly. There were several false leads, and then something entirely unexpected: a four-year-old news story from the Boston Globe concerning a Laura Dennys Hoffman, widow of a Caulfield Hoffman who’d died, with his two children, in a boating accident off Martha’s Vineyard.
Well, probably another false lead but he punched it, and up came the picture he’d been looking for. This was the wearer of the pearls, the mother of the two boys in the photo on Laura’s night table—staring out from a society picture of Laura with her late husband, a formidably handsome man with secretive eyes and very white teeth.
She was poised, quietly beautiful—the woman he’d held in his arms.
Within seconds, he was scanning any number of hits on the drowning at sea of Caulfield Hoffman and his sons. Laura had been in New York when the “accident” had happened, and the accident, it turned out, was no accident. After a lengthy investigation, the coroner had ruled it a murder-suicide.
Hoffman had been facing serious criminal charges in connection with insider trading and mismanagement of funds. He’d been arguing with his wife about a possible separation and custody of the boys.
That wasn’t all there was to Laura’s story. The Hoffmans had lost their first child, a baby girl, to a hospital infection when she was less than one year old.
It didn’t take much ingenuity now to close in on the life story of Laura J. Dennys.
She was the daughter of the California naturalist Jacob Dennys, who had written five books about the redwood forests of the northern coast. He’d died two years ago. His wife, Collette, a Sausalito painter, had died of a brain tumor twenty years before. That meant Laura had lost her mother very young. Jacob Dennys’s oldest daughter, Sandra, had been murdered in a liquor store holdup in Los Angeles when she was twenty-two, one of several innocent bystanders “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
It was a breathtaking litany of tragedies. It surpassed anything Reuben might have imagined. And part and parcel of it was that Jacob Dennys had suffered from Alzheimer’s in his last years.
Reuben sat back and drank a little of the coffee. The sandwich looked to him like paper and sawdust.
He was stunned by all this. And felt vaguely guilty reading it, even ashamed. Yes, he was spying on Laura, and, yes, to uncover a mystery in her, and maybe he’d hoped that she was something so exceptional that she could accept him for what he was.
But this was too much.
He thought of those two little kids in the house in San Francisco, nestled together in that bed. He felt a secret exultation that he’d saved them, and a deep resentment that he hadn’t been there in time to save the mother. He wondered where those little kids were now.
No wonder Laura had come home to disappear into the California forest. The L. J. Dennys website was three years old. She’d probably taken care of her elderly father. And then he’d left her, inevitably, like all the rest.
A terrible sadness for Laura settled over Reuben. I’m ashamed, ashamed that I want you and that it sustains me to think, just to think, that because of all you’ve lost, you might love me.
He could not conceive of being that alone, no matter what he was going through even now. In fact, the new isolation he was experiencing was driving him crazy.
But even in this, he was surrounded by love—intimately connected to Grace and Phil and, of course, his beloved brother, Jim. He had Celeste still, who would do anything for him, and Mort, his true friend. He had the warm hub of the Russian Hill house and the great gang of friends drawn perpetually into the family circle by all its vibrant members. And Rosy, beloved Rosy. Even Phil’s tiresome professor friends were a staple of Reuben’s life, like so many gracious old uncles and aunts.
He thought of Laura and that small house on the edge of the wood. He tried to assess what it would mean to marry, and then lose your entire family. Unspeakable pain.
Now a life like that, he figured, could make one tentative and fearful perhaps. Or it could make you remarkably strong, and what people called philosophical—and fiercely independent. Maybe it could make you careless of your own life, indifferent to danger,
and determined to live exactly as you pleased.
Reuben knew a dozen other ways to find out information about Laura—credit score, car registration, personal net worth—but that simply wasn’t fair. In fact, it was obscene. However, there was one more tiny item that he did want, and that was her address, and he found that quickly enough. The house in which she lived had been the subject of a couple of articles. It had belonged to her grandfather, Harper Dennys, and was quite literally grandfathered; no one could have built such a house so deep into the protected forest area today.
He wandered outside and walked around the small motel. The rain was a drizzle. It would be easy after dark to slip out of his room and go up the wooded slope and over the summit and into the thickly forested hills of Mill Valley. From there it would be simple to get to Muir Woods.
Very likely no one was looking for him here now. After all, he had only hours ago killed a man in San Francisco.
That is, nobody was looking for him here unless Laura J. Dennys had told the authorities what happened.
Could she have done that? And would they have believed a word of it?
He didn’t know. He couldn’t imagine her telling anyone.
If there was a television in that small house, if there were newspapers delivered to the door, or brought home from the grocery store in town, then she had to know what had been happening.
Maybe she understood that the Wild Man of the Wood would rather die than bring harm to her—unless harm was his love for her, and his near-mad desire to see her again.
Just before dark, Reuben hit a store for some cheap clothes that actually fit him, clean underwear and socks and such, and stowed all this in a bag that would stay permanently in the Porsche. He was sick of roaming around in the oversized hoodie and trench coat. But he didn’t bother to change now.