77 Shadow Street (5 page)

In the study, Witness turned in a circle, wanting first to get the feel of the space. He might be there only seconds, a minute or two at most. This was a man’s room but warm, with one wall given to a gallery of photographs showing Silas Kinsley with some of the clients he had so ably represented; Silas and his late wife, Nora, in different exotic locales; and the two of them with various friends on celebratory occasions.

In the hallway, Kinsley walked past the open door, toward the kitchen. He didn’t glance this way. Witness waited for the attorney to reappear, belatedly alerted by peripheral vision, but domestic noises in the kitchen suggested that no confrontation was imminent.

How would he react to finding a stranger—a strong young man in boots, jeans, and sweater—in his apartment as if by magic? With the fear of an old man weakened by time or with the calm authority of a lawyer still confident after decades of courtroom triumphs? Witness suspected that this was a man whose composure wasn’t easily shaken.

Two walls of the room featured floor-to-ceiling shelves packed full of books. Most of them were books of laws, of cases that were significant for the interpretations of laws that set precedents, and thick biographies of important figures in the history of American jurisprudence.

With reverence, Witness slid one hand lightly across the spines of those books. Where he came from, there were no laws, no attorneys, no judges, no juries, no trials. The innocent had been swept away by a brutal tide of belief in the primacy of the primitive, by faith in the wrong things, by rebellion against reality and the elevation of idiot conviction to the status of the single Truth. He had killed many people in his time, certain that he would never be held to account for the blood he spilled. Nevertheless, he held the law in high regard, just as a man who lived in godless despair might esteem the
idea
of God that he was unable to embrace.

7

Apartment 2-A

T
he storm was a gift. The lyrics of “One Rainy Night in Memphis” needed a melody with bounce but also with a melancholy edge, which was not an easy combination to achieve, especially for Twyla Trahern. The bounce part gave her no difficulty, but melancholy was for her a secondhand experience, something that happened to other people, and though she had written a few melancholy songs before, she needed a moody environment to inspire her. With her guitar, she sat on a stool by a window in the study of her apartment on the second floor of the Pendleton, gazing at the timely rain, at the city lights twinkling in the premature twilight that the thunderheads impressed upon the day, picking out notes and trying various chords, seeking the sound of sorrow.

Although she didn’t always compose this way, she got the chorus first, because that was where the bounce needed to be most emphatic. She worked on it—the final refinements would be made at the piano—leaving the eight-bar bridge for later, which she would write after she had extrapolated the clean lines of the melody from the refrain.

As usual, she had earlier laid down the lyrics line by line, verse by verse, polishing each until it had a shine but not so much that it was slick. Shine without slickness was a hard standard to meet. Many lyricists could spring all the way through a song, knowing that a few lines weren’t good enough, that they would have to go back later to rewrite, but Twyla could not work that way. Sometimes, to get the syncopations correct, to make the syllables fall gracefully with the music, she would have to tweak the words once she completed the melody, but tweaking always proved to be the extent of it.

She wrote country and she was country, the daughter of a farmer who lost his farm in the recession of 1980, when she was two years old. He worked thereafter as a maintenance mechanic in a coal-fired power plant, mostly in windowless chambers where the heat could reach 130 degrees. Ten hours a day, five and sometimes six days a week. Sweating continuously. Often doing dangerous work in air smoky with the fine ash of pulverized coal that was flash-burned in a continuous controlled explosion. Winston Trahern endured his job for twenty-two years, to keep his family clothed and fed and comfortable. Twyla never heard her dad complain, and he always showered at the plant, after his shift, and came home looking fresh and clean. When Twyla was twenty-four, a coal cracker at the plant exploded, killing her father and two other men.

She had gotten from him the sunny disposition that made it hard work to write a melancholy song, which was a better inheritance than a pot of money would have been.

As flags of rain unfurled across the city and rippled down the window glass, the melody coalesced around the lyrics. Twyla began to realize she was writing a song that nobody could sing better than Farrel Barnett, her former husband. His first big hit as a performer and her first top-ten tune as a songwriter was “Leaving Late and Low,” and they were married as she finished writing four songs for his second CD.

At the time, she thought she loved Farrel. Maybe she did. Eventually, she realized that in part she had been drawn to him because his eyes were the same shade of blue as her daddy’s and because he had about him an air of trustworthiness and unshakable good cheer reminiscent of Win Trahern.

In Farrel’s case, the cheerfulness was real, though sometimes manic and sometimes inappropriate to the moment. But the trustworthy air was a projection as ephemeral as the beam of light that paints pictures on a movie screen. He went through women like a tornado through a Kansas town, tearing apart other marriages and stripping his more vulnerable lovers of their sense of self-worth as if he took pleasure not in the sex but instead in the destruction that he left behind. Although he always treated Twyla tenderly, he was not as respectful of other women. On a few occasions, one of these wretched specimens, rinsed through with bitterness, washed up on Twyla’s doorstep, as though having endured Farrel Barnett made them sisters in suffering who could console each other and plan a mutual vengeance.

After four years, she had no longer loved him. She had needed two more years before she realized that if she didn’t divorce him, he would blow apart her life and scatter the wreckage so widely that she wouldn’t be able to put herself together as she’d once been. By then, Farrel had made the country-music charts with fifteen songs, twelve written by Twyla, eight of which reached number one.

More important, they created a child together—Winston, named for Twyla’s father—and Twyla was at first determined that Winny would not be raised in a home without a dad. Eventually she came to understand that in some rare cases, a broken home might be better for a boy than one in which his narcissistic old man showed up only occasionally and then merely to recuperate from touring and from
marathon adultery, less engaged with his young son than with his little entourage of sycophantic buddies.

Although she didn’t love Farrel anymore, didn’t even like him much, she didn’t hate him, either. When she finished “One Rainy Night in Memphis,” she would offer it to Farrel first because he would do the best job with it. Her songs supported her aging mother. They were Winny’s future. What was best for a song trumped settling old scores.

When the rumble rose not from the storm-torn heavens but from the ground under the building, Twyla’s fingers froze on the frets and raised the plectrum from the strings. As the last chord faded, she felt tremors pass through the Pendleton. Her Grammy and Country Music Association awards rattled on the glass shelves in the display case behind her piano.

In expectation of some impending disaster, she was still gazing through the tall window when barbed lashes of lightning flailed the sky, several great flashes that made the rain appear to descend haltingly, that flared as if with apocalyptic power and seemed to obliterate the other buildings flanking Shadow Street. As the tremors rising from the ground passed and as hard thunderclaps shook the afternoon, the lightning and rain conspired for a moment to make the four lanes of pavement seem to disappear. The city streets below vanished, the buildings and their lights. In the flickering celestial display there appeared to be nothing but a vast, empty landscape, the long hill and a terrible plain below it, something like a sea of tall grass stippled with clusters of black trees, their craggy limbs clawing at the gloom.

This vision must have been a trick of storm light on rain-washed glass, nothing more, because when the pyrotechnics stopped, the city was there as before, the buildings and the parks. The busy traffic ascended and descended the long boulevard, the blacktop streaming
with rain and with glimmering reflections of headlights, with slithering red rivulets of taillights.

Twyla discovered that she’d gotten off the stool and had lowered her guitar to the carpet without being aware of either action. She stood at the window. What she had seen could have been nothing but an optical illusion. Yet her mouth went dry as she waited for another volley of lightning. In the next barrage, the city did not disappear, but held its ground. The unpopulated vastness, glimpsed before, did not reappear. A mirage. An illusion.

She turned to look past the piano at the display case. None of the awards had fallen over, but the shuddering of the building had been real, not a trick of light and rain-blurred window.

8

Apartment 2-C

B
ailey turned on all the lamps and ceiling fixtures in the living room, dining room, kitchen, master bedroom, guest bedroom, and both baths. He left them blazing even when he found no one lurking anywhere in the apartment. He wasn’t frightened by what he had seen. More curious than anything. The brighter the light in the place, the likelier he was to get a better look at whatever—if anything—came next.

He wasted no time considering the possibility that he might have hallucinated the entity in the swimming pool and the phantom that passed through a wall. He didn’t do drugs. He didn’t drink to excess. If he suffered from a brain tumor or another mortal condition, there had been no previous indication. In his experience, post-traumatic stress disorder, caused by the horrors of the battlefield, was chiefly the invention of psychiatrists bent upon stigmatizing the military.

In the bedroom, he retrieved a pistol from the bottom drawer in his nightstand. The Beretta 9 mm featured a twenty-round magazine, a six-inch Mag-na-ported Jarvis barrel, and Trijicon night sights. He
had purchased the weapon after returning to civilian life, and he never had occasion to use it except on the shooting range.

Once armed, he didn’t know what to do next. If the things that he had seen were not full-blown supernatural apparitions, they were at least paranormal. In either case, a pistol might not be of any use. He intended to keep the gun handy, anyway.

He stood by the bed, holding the weapon, feeling frustrated and somewhat foolish. In war, he never had a problem identifying his enemies. They were the guys who wanted him dead, who were shooting at him and his men. They might run away when their surprise attack failed to gain them a quick triumph, but they didn’t simply vanish. To survive a firefight, to
win
it, marines had to do more than persevere; they had to be strategists and tacticians, which required a solid grasp of reality, a capacity for clear reasoning. Now here he stood with the Beretta, waiting for an enemy to materialize out of the wall, for an apparition, a boogeyman, a manifestation of unreason, as if he were not a marine and never had been, as if he were instead a character from the movie
Ghostbusters
.

As in the pool room eleven hours earlier, a rumble rose from the ground under the Pendleton. This time it escalated rapidly, became louder than before, and the building shuddered for perhaps five or six seconds before both the sound and the tremors faded. He had no doubt that this apparently seismic event was somehow related to the mysterious swimmer and to the inky specter that passed cat-quick through his study. Techniques of financial analysis, no less than battlefield experience, had taught him that coincidences were rare and that unseen connections were everywhere waiting to be uncovered.