Night Relics (32 page)

The door to Beth’s bedroom was nearly shut. With the toe of his shoe, he pushed it open hard so that it rotated all the way
around and into the door stop. The bed was remade and empty of lingerie, and the room appeared to be deserted. The closet
door was standing halfway open, probably the way Beth had left it.

Relief surged through him. Pomeroy had backed down! The bastard was scared, and he damned well
should
be. Maybe this would satisfy him—the simple knowledge that he’d pushed Klein too far. If Larry Collier had tried paying Pomeroy
off, then he’d made a mistake; he’d lost the game. Once you showed them the inside of your wallet, they had you. The stakes
got higher and higher. It was better to show them a closed fist, right from the get-go. Klein reached for the top dresser
drawer, but then stopped himself. Pomeroy wouldn’t have left any clues. He was criminally psychotic, but he wasn’t stupid.
And there was no reason for Klein’s prints to be all over the drawer pulls.

He took a last, quick walk-through, then let himself out and headed home. He would have his talk with Lorna, and this time
he’d hold on to his temper. Somehow they’d hash through things, just like they always did, and then he’d come back over and
at least get the dead bolts out of the way before the sun went down. In the garage, he set the hammer on the bench and immediately
went into the house, phrasing in his mind what it was he would tell her.

Stopping at the sink to get a glass of water, he hollered Lorna’s name. There was no answer. The house was silent.
Abruptly worried, he walked down the hall and into the empty bedroom, then back out into the living room, where he could see
through the french doors into the deserted backyard. A big tumbleweed had blown down out of the hills against the fence, and
the deck was a mess of broken twigs and leaves. A lawn chair had blown over, and the wind had nearly scooted it into the pool.
The backyard was empty.

For a moment he stood there looking at it, thoughts of Lorna dwindling away as he searched the moving shadows on the hillsides,
anticipating the approach of the woman in the black dress. Clearly Pomeroy had seen her that afternoon. She was no figment….

He shook his head, driving the thought of her out of his mind.

“Lorna!” he shouted again. But he knew it was futile. There was nothing but silence in the house and the swish and scrape
of the wind outside, the sound of dry leaves blowing across concrete. She’d left. She hadn’t waited for him. He felt betrayed.
What did she want from him? What could he have told her, that he was going next door to beat Pomeroy to death with a hammer?
That Pomeroy had been inside Beth’s house, going through her things, but that there was damn-all he could do about it because
he was up to his earlobes in fraud and all the rest?

Slowly he walked out through the front door to verify what he already knew. Her Jaguar was gone. She’d run off without even
leaving a damned note.

P
ETER DROVE
B
ETH’S BUS BACK INTO
T
RABUCO
O
AKS
, then hiked home along the ridge trail. In a couple of hours he would walk on back up to Ackroyd’s place and find out how
things went at the vet’s in El Toro. The wind drifted out of the east, skimming through the dry leaves and grass with now
and then a gust driving down off the ridges, blowing hard for a minute or two before falling slack again. He listened for
human voices on the wind, but the late-afternoon shadows were deep and empty, and the woods were quiet.

It was nearly dark when he got home, and, looking at the dimly lit parlor, he thought of Mr. Ackroyd’s warning about “unearthing
things better left buried.” The idea was full of suggestion.

It took him two hours to sweep the parlor and clear away the tools and debris. He cleaned the rubble out of the old fireplace
and then started a new fire with eucalyptus logs and the antique newspapers that had been stuffed into the wooden crates as
packing material decades ago. He unrolled the carpet, swept it clean, and retrieved the tarnished candelabras, filling them
with candles from the kitchen drawer. It was important that the candelabras be full—a matter of effect. He didn’t want the
hiss of propane light or the white glow of burning gas mantles. He wanted to hear the wind, the variety of its tone and expression,
and he wanted a flickering yellow light, dim and full of shadow—the light that had illuminated the room years past,
when the room was newly built. That’s how he pictured the room in his mind. And as he worked, arranging and rearranging, reassembling
the parlor bit by bit, that picture grew more clearly detailed until it became as whole and vivid as a memory.

He set the two chairs before the hearth with a small table between them and filled the bookcases with old books from the crates.
The books were water-warped and terminally dusty, but empty bookcases wouldn’t have worked; they would have stood out like
holes torn in a stage curtain. Slowly he was filled with an artist’s instinct for where each piece of furniture had to stand
and each print had to hang—what the entire room must look like. As he worked he found the subtle depressions of table and
chair legs in the old carpet, like marks on the boards of a stage, and once he saw them they seemed to become even more pronounced,
like slowly developing images on photographic paper. The room was a theater that had waited long years for the reenactment
of a drama in which he was an understudy—an understudy with a lifetime of anticipation.

He fed the fire, watching the smoke whirl away up the chimney, listening to the crackle of the wood as the flames rose. Handfuls
of dry leaves altered the yellow color of the flame, tinting it an autumn red at the edges. The air had turned chilly, and
despite wearing a sweater he couldn’t seem to get warm. Finally he was drawn to the chair before the fire. He sat down wearily,
looking around the room. The decayed furniture was shabby, the glass in the bookcase doors cracked, the wood stained and warped.
But the old bookcases hid the crumbled plaster, and the flickering candles and fire threw a veneer of shadow and light over
the room that muted the ravages of time and weather.

The chair opposite him was empty. Somehow it was a lonesome sight, a symbol of all the things he’d had and lost. He pictured
her in his mind, sitting with a book in the firelit room, the wind moving through the trees outside. He recalled the shape
of her cheekbones, the color of her hair,
how much like Amanda she had looked in the melancholy photograph on Ackroyd’s wall. Somewhere, back in the recesses of his
mind, he heard the scratchy, weirdly toned music of an old Victrola, and he tried to identify the melody. It was familiar
to him, but at the same time alien, and it mingled confusedly with a dozen other random sounds—the clinking of glasses, footfalls
on the carpeted floor, the rustle of papers, the wind, the mewling of a cat….

Until this evening he had never really
lived
in the house. He had been an outsider, an interloper, an audience. That had been his mistake. Amanda and David had become
players in a strange masque to which he thought he had been denied a role. But he knew now that he had merely to submit to
it to gain access. He understood why grieving parents maintained a dead child’s bedroom just as it had been when the child
died—the clock stopped, the door closed, the dusty pages of the calendar stirred only by the passage of ghosts. The precise
arrangement of things was as full of suggested magic as were the things themselves.

He watched the space in front of the empty chair, seeming now to see a shadow there, and he forced himself not to think, but
to allow himself to see. Perhaps the pieces of the puzzle had been available to him all along; he had only to quit looking
so hard….

“It’s late for that, isn’t it?”

The question seemed to irritate her, though there was no reason it should. A wife’s place, after all, was with her family.
Running out after dark, leaving her husband and son alone, that was something so independent as to be almost immoral. What
about your wedding vows, he wanted to ask her.

“I promised Aunt Lydia that I’d read her a chapter. Remember? I told you a couple of days ago. She’s expecting me.

“Well, she’ll have to find a way to bear your absence just this once.”

“That’s a little ungenerous, don’t you think?”

“Tell me, why is it that the woman continually calls on other people to be
generous
? We need a clearer definition of the word.” He sat there seething. Over the past eight years she must have read through half
the English novelists to the old woman. It was an act of philanthropy—that was the implication—and he was a humbug if he denied
it to either of them. Well, he’d see who was the humbug. If she was determined to leave, he’d at least make it sting a little.

He watched her face as she stared at the fire, his mind falling under the same shadow that had darkened it for weeks now—the
knowledge that things had changed between them, that
she
had changed. He had remained constant, but he was losing her. And after what he had sacrificed—his practice, his time, his
very life. That was the irony of it; he had mortgaged his life for her, hadn’t he? And now he would lose her. She was still
young, only twenty-five, and yet in most ways hadn’t managed to grow up, but had retained the flighty, silly mannerisms and
enthusiasms of her girlhood, a lily of the field.

And that was something that had attracted him—how long ago? Nearly seven years now. He would freely admit that his building
the house in the canyon, inconveniently far from town, had been designed to remove her from the things in the world that would
inevitably change her. But that which had been cheerfully frivolous in the girl he had married had transmuted into a baser
metal over the years, losing its luster. The look in her face just now had been insolence, pure and simple. What else could
he call it when she made her every trivial dissatisfaction apparent to him with a look or a toss of her head or a heavy sigh?

“There’s a gale blowing. It’ll get worse.” He opened his book, as if the issue were settled. He knew it wasn’t, and didn’t
bother to focus on the words.

“I’m not afraid of the wind or the darkness, and it’s not really very late, is it?”

For a moment he stared at the book in silence. It was
clear that she had made up her mind. “Why on earth can’t that woman have books read to her during the day?” he said, and already
he knew he was defeated.

“She sleeps during the day. She’s an insomniac, remember?”

“My memory isn’t the issue here. Surely the woman has fits of wakefulness during daylight hours.”

“You might at least have the courtesy not to refer to her as ‘the woman.’ ”

“And you might do me the courtesy not to be insolent. I’m your husband, and you should treat me as such.”

There it was again—the change in her features that made it clear what she was thinking, her indifference to him, to his needs
and his rights.

“It’s barely seven-thirty,” she said. “I’ll be there and back before ten.” She busied herself unnecessarily now, slipping
her book back into the case, straightening the pillow on her chair, making it clear that she was preparing to leave.

“I suppose I’ll start up the sedan.”

“I don’t
want
you to start up the sedan.” For a moment she looked irritated, out of patience, but then her features softened and she said,
“Really, I’d rather walk. I love the canyon at night. This isn’t the first time I’ve been out after dark, is it? It’s very
nearly routine.”

He said nothing. That was the point, wasn’t it? Short of tying her up, what could he do? Aunt Lydia! Of course the old lady
was
her aunt, but what did that signify? Simply that Esther was at her beck and call, apparently twenty-four hours a day. “What
about Lewis?” he asked. “Is the boy an illiterate? He can’t read to his own mother? Did the war deprive him of his faculties?”

She closed her eyes, as if she were counting to ten. “I know nothing about the extent of his literacy. I suppose that in your
eyes it was an act of betrayal that he didn’t die at Flanders. Perhaps you’re wrong in that. But as for Aunt Lydia, she read
to my brother and me when we were children
and now I read to her. You should come along, too. We’re reading
Middlemarch
.”

He waved his hand at her and shook his head. “I don’t need a soporific.
I’m
not the insomniac.”

She moved toward the door, the conversation having ended. He wondered what she would say, what she would do if he simply refused
to let her go. He had that right, as her husband. But he watched in silence as she left, his eyes on the back of her head,
trying to make her feel the full weight of his stare. Moments later he heard the door to Jamie’s bedroom close. The boy was
already asleep, thank God. The back door slammed shut, and he was struck with the knowledge that he smelled the scent of jasmine
on the still air of the house. She’d put on perfume before going out.

“Amanda!” Peter said, standing up out of his chair. He reached for the glass on the table, but there was nothing there. Momentarily
confused, he looked down, expecting to see the faceted crystal glass, the decanter beside it. The empty table was scarred
and discolored, part of its veneer peeled away.

The sound of the door slamming echoed in his head, which throbbed with pain at his temples, as if he were hung over. Impossibly,
he could taste the whiskey on his tongue, and he felt disoriented, not quite clear how long he’d been sitting there or why
he was angry. But even as he thought about it, the anger dwindled away, leaving him chilled and empty. The moon was up now,
the fire was burned down to a few glowing coals, and the candles were within an inch of burning out.

He rejected the idea of going out into the kitchen to check the door. Why had he thought it was Amanda going out? It was so
obviously just the wind. And just as this thought concluded, the fire sprang up in the fireplace again. The embers flared,
licking at the bottom of the flue. He watched the leaf shadows dance on the wall, and his hand
strayed across the tabletop and settled on the top of his restored glass. For a flickering moment he knew that the glass was
wrong, and that the lingering scent of jasmine on the air simply couldn’t exist. But he picked up the glass and tasted the
whiskey. The headache diminished as he thought about Lewis, home at last from the war, long awaited. Esther putting on perfume,
going out on this wind-haunted night…