“Did you hear anything going on?” I asked Marianne.
This time, it was she who only shook her head.
I gazed out at the church, and realized the cops would have a hell of a job getting in there without destroying evidence. There were no windows in the dirt-covered building; they’d have to go in through the front or back doors. From where I stood, I could see my own footprints in the snow. They were only one of several sets, but they were the smallest prints, and I don’t have a particularly dainty shoe size.
“Oh, here they come!” Marianne breathed.
The police, she meant.
“I’d better get out there,” I said, regretting the need to leave this warm, cozy home. “Thank you for helping me.”
“Anytime,” she said politely. Then she clapped her hand over her mouth, having embarrassed herself again. “I mean, I don’t mean …”
“I know,” I assured her.
Once outside again, I waited at the edge of her sidewalk until the police needed me. Their sirens had brought several neighbors outside, too, including the sluttishly beautiful pregnant girl from across the street. She stepped out and watched from her porch. The “For Sale” sign in her front yard was nearly unreadable because of the ice and snow on it. She wore a hooded red cape that bulged over her belly and black tights that disappeared into black high-heeled boots. The red hood was pushed back, framing her mass of blond hair, which looked disheveled, as if she’d just gotten out of bed. She looked like a ruined Red Riding Hood. The girl stood with her hand on the railing, staring across the street. There was, in more ways than one, an expectant air about her.
“Bitch.”
I wheeled around, startled, to find Marianne Miller standing at my back. She’d put on an extra sweater and slipped up silently in the snow behind me. In an intensely bitter voice, she said, “Somebody like that shouldn’t have kids. That baby would be lucky if she’d abort it.”
When she realized I was staring at her, she grimaced, a little shamefaced, at me.
Old Grace Montgomery, the pig lady, was also watching from her front stoop, leaning on her walker. She wore the same thin housedress I’d seen her in the previous day, without even a shawl to protect her thin, humped shoulders from the cold.
We were all watching, then, like a circle of women around a blood rite, when the police carried out a body, covered in plastic, on a litter. Behind me, Marianne Miller gasped, and said, “Oh God! Who is it?”
“I said so!” old Grace Montgomery shrieked from her porch. She lifted her aluminum walker and began to pound it onto the floor of the porch. My own shoulders ached, just imagining the pain that movement must cause in her arthritic joints. “I said so!” she shrieked. “Nobody listens to an old woman! I told you so!”
One or two of the cops stopped to stare at her, and then a female cop began to trudge across the snow toward the old lady’s house. The other officers returned to their duties, seemingly impervious to the racket, though I suspected it was shredding their nerves as well as mine. I watched an officer I knew, a detective, flip open a billfold he was holding in his hand, pull a card out of it, and study it for a moment.
He looked back at the church, as if scanning it for the address, and then he looked across the street. His gaze came to rest on the porch where the pregnant girl stood, and he started to walk toward her.
The girl saw and stood bolt upright.
“No!” she screamed. She waved her hands frantically in front of her big belly, as if to ward off an evil spirit approaching her. “No! No!”
Now the old lady’s shrieks turned wordless and hysterical.
“It’s Rodney,” Marianne breathed at my back.
The girl turned and fled to her front door, opened it, and ran inside. She slammed the door shut; I imagined her bracing herself against it, trying to hold off what was coming toward her, like a woman holding a cross against a vampire.
The detective ignored it all and just kept walking inexorably through the snow to her house. He knocked steadily, insistently, until she opened the door.
When I turned to say something to Marianne Miller, I discovered she had slipped silently back into her house.
“Jenny?”
It was a detective I knew, standing in front of me.
“I called it in, Frank,” I told him.
“Tell me about it,” he said, taking out a notebook.
I shrugged. “I just walked up and almost stepped in the footprints and blood, that’s all. The doors were ajar. I saw blood, like a handprint, on one of the doors. And then I ran over here and called you guys.”
“Why were you here this morning, Jenny?”
Since the real answer—“I was impersonating a crazy lady, Frank”—was embarrassing, I just said, “Oh, the foundation was going to put some money into this place to turn it into a recreation hall for former mental patients. I was just taking another look at it.”
He nodded, bless him.
“What did you find in there?” I asked him.
“You sure you want to know?”
“I’m a cop’s wife, Frank,” I said with a mock bravado that made him smile a little. “I can take it. I’m tough.”
“Well, let me tell you, it was enough to make a tough man puke. The deceased was a young guy. Somebody really sliced him up good. It looks like somebody just went crazy in there, Jenny.”
“Oh, Frank.” I sighed. “You could have talked all day without using the word crazy.”
He looked at me quizzically, but I only shrugged, and he slipped off to more important tasks.
I looked back at the strange, snow-humped basement, seeing it again with the eyes of the former mental patient in whose shoes I had tried to walk for a little while. “She” gazed sadly at it, feeling as if her dreams were melting before her eyes like icicles in the sun. I agreed with her—the heat this murder produced would surely evaporate the plans for the recreation hall.
Two plainclothes detectives and one uniformed officer emerged from around the back of the building, half rolling and half lifting through the snow the blackboard that I had seen the previous day in the central meeting room in the basement.
When they got it to the curb, they stopped, seeming stymied. It was clearly too large a piece of evidence to fit into any of their cars, and the evidence van hadn’t arrived yet. They didn’t seem to know what to do with it. They stood it in the snow at the curb.
Why did they want to take it to the station at all? I wondered. Couldn’t they just check it for prints and photograph it as part of the crime scene?
Curious, I edged around the perimeter barrier to get a better look at it. The side nearest to me was completely covered in a scrawl of white chalk, writing so cramped and tiny it was unreadable until I got up close and squinted at it.
I stood in the snow that was over my ankles and read what seemed to be a long, rambling letter.
“Dear God,” the strange, cramped scrawl began …
I am called Mob because I was inhabited by a legion of demons. You know the biblical allusion? No matter. The demons have fled at the insistence of a plethora of psychiatrists. I no longer hear the voices of the demons—how they argued!—no more do I obey their commands. (The same might be said of the psychiatrists.) They fled one night while I slept—picked up their skirts, though do not be misled into thinking they are all female, and tiptoed out from behind my eyelids; it was the only time I can remember their doing anything at all quietly or tactfully—and when I awoke the space in my head was still. Still, it is still. It is still still! Still, there remains one voice, and it is Mob’s. Aye, there is vision, in my eyes there is vision, but there are no visions but the vision of Mob, the man who was legion, but whose legions have fled to the hills. It is alone in its head, Mob is, and lonely in this lone place where once legions clambered—to battle, to battle! Aye, I am wounded! Peace. All is not peace, but apace there may come a piece of peace
There was no closing punctuation. No signature.
 
; I suspected I was looking at an actual confession of murder. So why did I feel moved by it?
Frank saw me reading it and walked over to me again.
“You think the killer wrote this, Frank?”
“Might have,” he agreed.
“Well,” I said, after a moment’s reflection, “he must have written it before the murder, because there’s no blood on this, and there was definitely blood on his hands when he left the basement! I saw the handprints.”
Frank slowly and carefully flipped the board over, revealing the other side to me. It was splattered—very nearly every inch of it covered—with blood.
“Oh, my God,” I said, or something to that effect, before I turned away from it. Frank said he was going back to the station and, rather apologetically, offered to drop me off at the foundation on his way.
I took him up on the offer, although I didn’t care where he dropped me off. At that moment, I would have gone just about anywhere to get away from that terrible blackboard.
11
Frank let me out in the parking lot, then drove on.
As I crunched across frozen ridges of snow, the breeze crept under my skirt and stroked my thighs with cold fingers. I stepped gratefully into the shelter of our building’s lobby. As always, it was dimly lighted and barely heated—in summer it was dimly lighted and barely cooled—our frugal landlord’s attempt to cut fuel bills. He, of course, keeps his offices elsewhere; I always imagined them as bright and overheated. Still, on this day, the lobby seemed warm, well, warmer, if not cozy.
When the building was constructed, the architect had foolishly lined the entry way with fake marble, so that on snowy or rainy days you had to tiptoe to the elevators, hugging the wall like a novice skater trying to get off the ice without breaking her neck. There ought to be a law that architects have to live in the buildings they erect for at least a year after they’re completed. Not to mention landlords having to live in their properties for a couple of months a year, preferably February and July.
Murder makes some people weep and others throw up. It makes me digress.
As I rode to the sixth floor, I decided my first responsibility was to call MaryDell Paine and tell her that a homicide at the church had probably slain her hall as well. But first I wanted to talk it over with my secretary and my assistant director.
The elevator stopped with its customary jolt. I waited the usual five seconds for the doors to slide open. Conditions weren’t always so bad in the building, I mused, but it was nearly eight years old. The last time I complained, the landlord said, “Well, what do you expect from these old places?” This, in a town in which the floors in some houses barely creak after three hundred years.
I was doing it again, digressing.
The twenty paces to my office were carpeted, so at least I didn’t have to worry about sliding into home base.
I opened the door. The place was deserted.
“Derek?” I called out as I removed my sodden outer clothing and hung them up to drip in the office closet. My toes felt numb. That was progress, since moments before I hadn’t been able to feel them at all. I glanced over at his desk, which he wasn’t occupying. It looked atypically neat.
The foundation headquarters may be on the top floor, but it’s no penthouse. It’s a simple suite of three rooms—a central reception and work area with desks for Derek and for our secretary, Faye Basil; a small conference room to the left as you’re facing Faye; and my own small office, which is behind her left shoulder, as she faces visitors.
At that moment, she walked out of my office with a fistful of file folders. She was wearing a three-piece gray suit.
“Faye!” I was all prepared to launch into a melodramatic account of my morning, but it seemed she had her own news to impart, and she beat me to it.
“Jenny, Derek’s not here.”
It should have been a simple statement of fact, but she said it in the frantic tone she’d use if one of her teenage sons was late with the car at night, drunk, during an ice storm. In other words, her concern seemed excessive. Faye laid the file folders on a corner of her desk without looking at what she was doing. They tumbled to the floor, spilling papers. She didn’t even notice, but gestured instead toward Derek’s desk.
“He was here. I mean, I guess he was here, but he cleared everything out. And he hasn’t been back, and he hasn’t even called, and I tried calling his condo, but he wasn’t there…. Why has he done this? I just can’t imagine Derek doing something like this!”
“Wait a minute.” The parts of my brain that weren’t frozen were full of images of plastic body bags and the echoes of shrieking women, and I had to clear the screen to comprehend her meaning. As I stepped out of my boots and slipped on the black-leather heels I keep in the closet, I said to her, “I missed that. Tell me again, Faye.”
She turned toward me, and now I saw there was also accusation on her face. I couldn’t remember Faye ever having been angry at me before, not really angry, at least not any more than exasperated, as any employee feels occasionally toward any boss. The day before, when I had told her about firing Derek, she had received the news with the sorrow a mother might feel. But now it was anger that showed clearly in the unnaturally controlled and precise way she spoke to me.
“I came into work this morning.” Her shoulders were rigid. She clasped her hands tightly in front of her, just below the waistband of her skirt. Faye had the rounded stomach that middle age and childbirth bring to women; now her folded hands pressed into it. “Derek wasn’t here. Well, that’s not odd, I’m usually here before he is. So are you, for that matter. But his desk was all cleaned out, Jenny. Everything’s gone!” One hand came loose from her tight grasp and gestured wildly toward Derek’s empty desk. She quickly contained it again. “Everything that belonged to him, I mean. His pens and that extra tie he kept in the bottom drawer, and his razor, and that aftershave he used to use when he had a date after work, and that picture of his nieces and nephews, and that kazoo he used to play when he got paid…. He’s taken everything that’s his and left everything that’s … yours.”
She flushed, looked away, then back at me again.
“I mean the foundation’s. I’m sorry, I’m just so …” But, of course, she wouldn’t say “mad at you, Jenny,” or “angry” or “frosted” or “pissed off,” which was obviously how she felt but she was too much of an old-fashioned lady and a respectful employee to say. And so she finished lamely and told only a partial truth. “… upset that he left like this, without even saying good-bye to Marvin and me.” Marvin Lastelic was the foundation’s part-time accountant. She flushed again. “And to you, too.”
I didn’t understand it any more than she did.
“But he called me last night, Faye.”
I was having a hard time taking it in, particularly on top of everything else. For a moment, I was tempted to inform my secretary—in a restrained and slightly hurt way—that I’d just come from the scene of a murder. But that smacked a little too much of saying, “You think you’ve had a bad cold? Hell, I’ve got cancer.”
“He called me at home,” I repeated. “I’ll swear he didn’t give me a single hint that he planned to walk out like this.”
She firmed her chin, looked me in the eyes, and said, as if to a particularly insensitive child, “Nighttime can be pretty rough when you’re all alone, and you’re out of a job, and you’re not such a young man anymore, and …” Tears sprang to her eyes. She turned away from me to stumble over to her desk and sit down. Faye pulled a piece of paper out of a drawer and stuck it in her typewriter. She started typing on it, apparently without seeing that it was a printed contract, already covered with words.
I was astonished by her reaction.
We’d have to work this out, she and I, but later; I wanted to give her a chance to calm down first, so that she wouldn’t say things to me in anger that might embarrass us later.
“I’ll see if I can locate him, Faye.”
The villain
of the piece stepped over the spilled folders, and tiptoed into her office. I was tempted to close the door, but I left it open, not wanting to erect any other barriers between us.
12
I crossed the green carpet remnant in my office, walked behind my desk, and sank down in my used brown leather-and-wood swivel chair. The leather made a rat-a-tat-tat sound when I sat down, and the springs complained to me when I leaned forward. I crossed my arms on my desktop and laid my forehead on them.
“Oh, shit,” I said wearily to myself.
Like nearly everything else at the foundation, my desk is secondhand, a bulky, chipped old number with a lot of drawers and even more history and character. This morning, the glass that was glued around the edges to the top of my desk smelled faintly of the bleach the building janitorial staff used in their cleaning rags. I turned my face to the side, closed my eyes, and tried to imagine that the light coming in through my windows was summer heat laying a warm, heavy finger on my cheekbone. I tried to imagine that if I suddenly opened my eyes, walked over to the windows, and looked out, I would see green leaves filling the tops of the downtown trees. I imagined breezes, salty air, a flap of wings of a seagull rising from a pier.
I sat up and called Derek’s home phone number.
“Hello.” It was his answering machine, being flip. “I’m Derek, and you’re not. At the tone, tell me who you are, and maybe I’ll call you back. Or maybe I won’t. Hi, Mom.”
It was the same stupid message he had originally put on the machine. Lazy, even in this, he’d never troubled to change it.
I said, trying to keep it light, matching cute for cute: “Hi. This is Jenny. I’m at the office, and you’re not. Where are you? Call home, Son. Mom and I miss you.”