A Single Eye (45 page)
But the figure wasn't moving deliberately, and it wasn't Rob. It was Justin. I sank back into the shadows and watched Justin move furtively, almost soundlessly from the door to the stove, pause long enough that I wondered if he had sneaked in for tea. Getting an extra cup of tea wasn't a hanging offense. Why didn't he turn on the light and grab a cup?
I stood for a moment in the shadows. Justin moved on toward the stairs, placing each foot soundlessly. I was barely breathing. How far could I let him go? I couldn't let him creep up the stairs and take Roshi by surprise. And yet I had to give him time to expose his intentions. Amber all but said Aeneas had stolen his college application essays. He'd have spent days, maybe weeks on each one. The opening was in March; the deadline for the essays must have been almost immediate. No way Justin could have reconstructed them in time. And he could hardly send in applications with notes saying: The dog ate my essay. Of course he'd chase after Aeneas. Of course he'd be enraged enough to shove him off the bridge.
He was almost to the stairs. At least, I thought, he didn't grab a knife. He's not planning on attacking. He was moving so slowly he paused on each foot, like he was walking in kinhin. No, wait! He was testing the floor, listening with each step. The envelope? Did he figure it was hidden in here? Did the kitchen have a trapdoor or some facsimile of loose floorboard? It doesn't take much to hide an item none of the residents care about. But why would he bother about his college entrance essays all these years later? Nothing could be of less value to him now.
Unless there was something else in the envelope, something he was sufficiently loath to discuss, admit, focus attention on, that he had lied about to Amber.
I was speculating, but he was working on some thesis, and I wanted to let him follow it as far as he could. He moved around the far side of the melangeur and its great round red tub blocked him from view. I inched forward, faster than he had, but every bit as careful not to reveal myself. The boards under his feet may not have been squeaking enough, but to me those under my feet were screaming. I stopped, waited, but Justin didn't turn.
Bent over, I moved forward.
I was beside the morgue-like metal table the beans had been on. Under its flat metal surface was two feet of empty space and then a bottom shelf. No protection from view. I peered through the opening just as Justin reached the bottom stair to the loft. He reached up, unhooked a foot-long rod from the wall. I couldn't make out what it was.
No more time.
I sent the morgue table shooting across the room at him. He jumped onto the stairs. For a moment I thought he was going to do exactly what I was heading offârun upstairsâbut the noise must have startled them up there and something banged overhead. Justin leapt off the stairs, sprinted across the kitchen, and out the door.
I raced after him out the chocolate kitchen door. In the few minutes I'd been inside, the fog had wrapped the kitchen. Now I couldn't see anyone. Couldn't even spot movement. The path forked below the sesshin kitchen door. Surely Justin had taken the left tine toward the zendo, not stayed straight to the parking lot. There was no reason for him to go there. I turned and hurried down alongside the kitchen, my feet slapping into the silence.
A hand grabbed my arm.
B
efore I realized what happened I was back in the kitchen, the sesshin-half this time, and staring at Roshi. The strength of his pull on my arm shocked me. His illness had lightened him physically but not emotionally, and this “save” came straight out of emotion.
“What was all that, Darcy?”
“Justin, creeping across the room. When he got to the stairs I shot that cart at him. I couldn't have him wandering on up the stairs to find you and Amber and Maureen.”
I glanced toward the stairs expecting to find Amber headed down, but despite the racket she hadn't come looking for the cause.
“Justin,” he mused. But he looked not as if he was thinking but something deeper was going on, as if he was sensing something within himself that had been there all along but he had avoided seeing.
I washed out the cups. The splat of the water resounded through the emptiness of the room. “Roshi, just who is Justin? Amber didn't need him to drive her here this time. He didn't come to study with you. So what's he doing here now? He still thinks it was Aeneas who was the enlightened being; still acts like Aeneas went to Japan even when the truth is smacking him in the face.”
Roshi leaned against the counter.
“So he said.”
“But why would he say such bizarre things if they weren't true?”
He shrugged.
“People do, Darcy. I know that's not the answer you're looking for right now. You want something beyond a reasonable doubt. There's a lot I don't know about the students here. We are a small monastery, not like Zen centers with renowned teachers and waiting lists. We schedule our sesshins and we take who comes.”
“But how do you know what you're getting?”
“We don't,” he reiterated. “This is a monastery in the woods in a cold, rainy climate. We have no electricity; we are nine miles from the road. It's not Puerta Vallarta here. If someone wants to come to spend two weeks in silence, facing the wall, with knee pain, back pain, shoulder pain, not to mention mental pain, I assume he is serious about his practice. I figure if he's not; he's in trouble. So far that's been true.”
“But someone killed Aeneas.”
My words hung between us. I was thinking of Justin's college entrance essays sitting invitingly in the car, despite Amber's warnings. Was Justin the one she meant when she said it was only guests who became Aeneas's victims because they didn't protect their belongings? Next to original research documents, college entrance essays top the “can't do without” category. If Justin spotted Aeneas with them, of course he'd chase after; of course he'd be furious enough to shove him.
“Did Justin say anythingâ”
“Darcy, no one said anything definite. Do you think I would have let this go on for years if they had?” His face went slack. He nodded, slow, minuscule movements. “It's time to go.”
“Go where?”
“You, to bed.”
“And you?”
“That's not . . . I don't know.”
There had been a change in his voice during that pause; the last sentence seemed to surprise him as much as it did me. It scared me more than Justin had. He didn't know where he was going because he didn't know if he'd be coming back. He didn't know if he would be killed.
My whole body quivered and I knew if I didn't hold tight I would sob. I breathed in, staring at the counter next to him, feeling the cold of the air, forcing myself to concentrate on this moment and not the future without him.
I leaned on the counter next to him and said, “This is my first job as jisha. I've let you get poisoned. I've let you go all day without food. I'll be damned if I'm going to let you get yourself killed.”
A grin twitched on his face; he looked like he was about to wink, maybe to make some joke about his fork collection. Then, as quickly as it had come, Leo was replaced by Roshi, and it was Roshi who said coldly, “You are not jisha. You have ten minutes to get to bed before lights out.”
“Roshiâ” I was desperate to ask him . . . something, anything. I didn't know if it was to keep him or, failing that, to keep a part of him. He looked so fragile. I grabbed him by the arms. “You are my
teacher
.”
“Each moment is your teacher. Be alert.” He removed my hands. He may have given them a little squeeze; I can't be sure if he did or if I so wanted it that I imagined I'd felt it. He opened the door, paused and said, “Check on Maureen before you go,” and stepped outside into the dark, leaving me more alone than I could ever remember feeling.
I stepped outside and watched him go. The fog fuzzed the light in the bathhouse and meshed the dark figures moving on the paths with the trees and buildings behind them. Almost immediately, I lost track of which one was him. I walked across the path toward the bathhouse, passing a tall man in a thick Peruvian sweater. The bathhouse looked like a temple on a foggy Japanese lake, ridiculously romantic with its rectangles of dim yellow throwing just enough light to outline the curlicued corners of the roof. I was ten feet from the building, on the path from the kitchen, when the door from the men's side opened, backlighting a robed figure as it emerged into the night.
I recognized Roshi from his deliberate gait. But that wouldn't have been necessary. He was carrying a lantern; it lit his face, throwing a grotesquely large shadow of his head onto the side of the building. Slowly he walked to the zendo, up the steps, and without removing his shoes opened the door and peered around inside. Then, satisfied in whatever his purpose, he closed the door, hoisted his lantern, and moved down the stairs, back along the path to the bathhouse, and turned right toward the parking area. He hadn't looked around as he passed my path or at any other time in that walk. He hadn't looked because he was not being alert to danger. He was a well-lit invitation to danger! The killer wouldn't have to worry about finding him to attack. And in case the chances of his being saved were too great here, Roshi was moving down the path to the parking area and the road. And the woods. He was all but daring the killer to get him. In this fog anyone could come up behind him and he'd have no warning. If he wanted warning.
I flashed on that moment his face had gone slack and he had said,
I
don't
know. He hadn't meant merely that he didn't know what would happen in the next hour, he'd meant, I was sure, that he didn't know anything, not the logic of his original plan, nor the safety of his student he had assumed he was protecting, nor whether his new, more dangerous plan would work. Was he on a suicide mission? Was he spurred by guilt about Aeneas? Or was this a last, desperate effort to protect the rest of us?
His slight figure grew smaller in the fog till I couldn't distinguish him from the shadows beyond and could barely see his light.
Then I dug my hands into my pockets and hurried after him.
R
oshi's walk had the quality of meditation, a slow, steady, deliberate moving of the weight onto one foot and then the other so that the progress was steady, unbroken, ineffable.
Coastal fog in California is different than the gray, downy comforters that smother the Atlantic coastline. It blows in from the Pacific at night and is cranked back in morning like an old awning. There are small tears in its canvas through which the moon blinks and is gone. The moon blinked on Roshi as he crossed the bridge. He slowed and for the first time his gait was shaky, the uncertain steps of a sick man. At the middle of the bridge he stopped.
I moved closer, trying not to crackle twigs underfoot. His face was drawn and the moonlight bleached out any color, leaving it garishly white. He made a small bow toward the stone wall railing, lifted the hem of his robe, stepped up on it and gazed down over the edge to the water and the rocks.
I broke into a run.
I don't know if he heard me or if he had intended all along to climb back down, but he stepped back onto the bridge, walked on across to the Japanese maple, and paused before it as he had on the bridge wall. I could see him bowing as the fog sealed up the tear and he faded under it.