The Confessor (30 page)

Dalton gave the back room a final looking-over. It was like staring through a magic window back into the past. He closed the door, and with thumb and forefinger put the key in the old lock and turned it. Mid-action, he had to alter his grip before he could turn it far enough to get the click of the chambers. Some hand movements were still difficult to perform successfully without adjustments.

He took out the key and moved down the hall toward the kitchen. The old planks muttered beneath his shoes. Sometimes he heard the words they were saying . . . but not tonight.

There was a glass of red wine he had poured earlier waiting on the counter – a rich Margaux from Bordeaux that Victor had brought as a gift the first time they had met. He picked it up and continued through a darkened doorway to the study, flicked on the light and sat down at his computer. The monitor’s screensaver was a single silver word in a large, ornate, three-dimensional font – floating, turning, tilting randomly.
GEIGER
.

He tapped the space bar and the screensaver flew away, revealing a page of his memoirs. He took a sip of wine as he read his latest entry.

Dalton looked to a window. The deep silence had made a pact with the blackness, weaving itself into it, allies now, creating a fibrous, impenetrable wall of night. It shut out the pinpricks of starlight and the cries of hunter and prey. He began typing.

He closed the document, leaned back in his chair, and the screensaver –
GEIGER –
returned to the dark monitor. Dalton reached for his glass – as the floating, silver word came to rest in the center of the screen and morphed into Geiger’s placid, unblinking face. It was as if they were looking at each other through a tinted window.

‘Ah . . . Bonsoir, mon ami.’ Dalton took up his glass. ‘Tchin-tchin,’ he toasted, tilted the wine to his parted lips and drank slowly. ‘Getting close, aren’t you?’ He put the glass down softly. ‘But not as close as you think.’

Dalton’s forefinger rose and began to tap his lip.

‘What I realized, back on that day, when you were in the chair and I was cutting you up . . . is that you
don’t know who you are
. You’re like a blind man with incredibly attuned senses – but the fact still remains . . . You can’t
see
.’

Geiger stared back at him, unmoved by the diagnosis.

‘You
think
you can see – but you can’t.’ Dalton leaned to the monitor. ‘And that is why I am here. To help you. You think this is about saving lives – Matheson, Harry – all for Ezra, in a sense. But you
can’t see
. This isn’t about anyone else’s life but
yours
– and
mine
. I’m in your head, Geiger. In that beautiful brain of yours. And I am going to give you sight.’ He raised the wine again. ‘And then all shall be revealed.’

Dalton drained the glass, then held it out before him, turning the bowl in his fingertips, left and right, so the light wrapped round its equator like a thin, gleaming ribbon. His fingers tensed slightly, slowly, the pressure increasing in minute degrees – and the glass shattered in his hand.

‘Voilà,’ he said.

Christine rinsed a plump Belle de Pontoise apple under the kitchen faucet, then sliced it into quarters and put it on a plate beside spears of raw asparagus and stalks of broccoli. Geiger had told her he only ate raw food.

She didn’t have to look around to know the long-lost troll was near. She could hear the sniffles and sobbing, the taunting dare to come join in the remorse. The size and power of all she’d been dragged into was beginning to hit home, and she needed to keep doing things. Geiger was in the bathroom washing the dirt and dust off. She’d put his dirty clothes in the washer. The events of the past few days, and the last twelve hours – they’d been picking the locks of her vault, and she felt her sad, precious treasures and horrors were about to come tumbling out.

She turned. Geiger was coming down the hall, cleaned up, wearing a pair of gym shorts. The swelling in his shoulder had diminished, but her eyes immediately went to the three horizontal marks on his left quad. She felt the urge to ask – but stopped herself.

Geiger sat down at the table. Christine brought the plate and a fork and put it down before him.

‘Are you sure you don’t want me to cook any of this?’

‘Yes.’

She sat down across from him. ‘Do you want salt?’

‘I don’t use it.’ He picked up an asparagus spear with his long fingers and took a bite. It made a loud crunch. ‘Thank you, Christine – for your help.’

‘You’re welcome.’

They stared at each other. Christine felt a trace of a tug – the aftermath of a shared calamity between victims . . . witnesses . . . accomplices. She tried to imagine him smiling – but the image wouldn’t come to her.

‘If you know where they are now, why not bring the police in?’

‘Because I would lose whatever control I might have. Police don’t necessarily make good choices in these situations. If they tried to negotiate . . . or stormed the house, Dalton might decide to kill them both . . . if he had time. It’s impossible to know. But the deal was to make a trade – them for me – and if I show up as planned, he might let them go. Or if I arrive secretly and get the upper hand, I might be able to save them . . . if they aren’t dead already.’

‘But you don’t know what you’re going to do . . .’

‘No. The only way to know is to get there.’

The simplicity of it all made it scarier for her to contemplate. The only concrete element was death – that people would die. It was a very strange thing to be certain about. She reached out and took a piece of apple from the plate, and nibbled off a small chunk. The tartness gave her a tiny rush.

‘What did Harry tell you about us?’ she said.

‘Nothing.’

The word was an unexpected crisp jab – and Christine wondered why it hit her as sharply as it did.

‘Nothing?’

‘No. He never mentioned you until the day he was leaving to come here.’ Geiger took a bite of broccoli.
Snap
. ‘And he said you had a daughter. He used the past tense – so I made the assumption she is dead . . .’

Somehow, his unadorned tone cast the statement in italics.
I made the assumption she is dead
.

‘. . . and that her death destroyed the marriage.’

Christine felt a flinch deep down. It was another lock being picked, another chamber clicking into the open position.

‘Tell me something, Geiger. Do you ever stop to think about
how
you might say something before you say it?’

He swallowed. ‘Was I mistaken about anything?’

She slowly put the apple down on the table. ‘No,’ she said. The way his eyes took her in – she felt like a book in his hands. More and more, she was understanding why he was so good at what he did.

‘You were the one who left,’ he stated.

She kept her gaze with his. ‘Yes.’ She didn’t want to look away.

‘Why?’

‘Because I couldn’t look at him without seeing her . . . and I couldn’t be with him without feeling her
not
being there. So I left.’

‘Have you missed him?’

‘Very much – but I became adept at putting that feeling away.’ Her smile had a small, bitter crimp to it. ‘Like fixing up a guest room for it all. Someplace I can open the door and have a quick look at sometimes if I’m blue enough.’ She let out a long breath, as if she’d been holding it for some time.

Geiger pushed his chair back and stood up. ‘I need some water.’

He started toward the kitchen – and that was when Christine saw the back of his legs, and the perfect latticework of slender scars from his thighs all the way down to his ankles. Their degree of precision, and what that signified, made them all the more horrific to discover. She watched him find a glass in a cupboard above the sink, fill it up and drink it all, then refill the glass and come back to his seat.

‘Who did that to you?’

‘My legs?’ The fingers of his right hand began to rise and fall on the tabletop in a rhythmic ritual. The images were never far from the moment . . .

Lying face down, naked, on the bench before the hearth, staring at the cabin’s floor – an astonishing work of art, a recreation of Bosch’s
Garden of Earthly Delights
, the thousands of inlays a testament to his father’s virtuosity and obsession.

‘My father did it.’

‘For how long?’

‘Years. Since I was five or six, I think. I’m not certain.’

His father stood over him in faded denim overalls, holding the pearl-handled straight razor.

‘What do we know, son?’ he said.

‘Life makes us ache for things we think we need.’

‘And . . . ?’

‘And the pain makes us weak.’

‘Why did he do it, Geiger? Do you know why?’

‘To teach me about pain. To make me strong.’

‘So what must we do, son?’

‘Embrace the pain, a little each day, and grow strong.’

‘But
why?
Did something happen . . . to make him start?’

‘I don’t know.’

His father laid the blade down on the quadriceps. ‘Say it with me, son,’ and they chanted together softly. ‘Your blood, my blood, our blood . . .’

Geiger put the visions away. He could feel his body’s messages. He needed to sleep. Christine leaned to him.

‘What about your mother? Where was she when – when this was happening?’

‘I don’t remember my mother. I don’t have many memories of things as a boy.’

Christine’s new knowledge changed the way his face appeared to her. He looked . . . younger.

‘I’m sorry, Geiger,’ she said.

‘We all carry things with us, Christine.’ He picked up his glass and slowly drank. ‘I’m going to stop talking now. I need to sleep for a few hours.’

‘The bed in the guest room is made up. Clean sheets. Last door on the right.’

Geiger rose from his chair and headed down the hall. She turned and watched him – the slight tilt to his walk odd but not inelegant, the marks of madness shifting slightly with each step. She tried to picture it, the terrible ritual – perhaps it would help her grasp the unspeakable – but when the images came she couldn’t bear to look at them.

She took hold of the breakfront’s center brass knob and pulled. The drawer stuck. It hadn’t been opened in a long time. She gave a tug and it slid open. She pushed some of the contents aside – half a dozen candles, a pack of napkins with floral designs still wrapped in cellophane – and found what she was looking for. She lifted the thin leather album out, took it to the coffee table and sat down on the sofa.

She opened the album and leaned over it. The first page had three photographs attached to it, beneath a protective plastic sheet: she was in her hospital bed, her brand-new baby in her arms, its tiny white skullcap perched at an angle; Harry sat on a beige couch, smiling, cradling the infant in one arm, feeding her a bottle, Christine beside him, her hand on his thigh; Harry sat in a wide, overstuffed chair, two-year-old Sophie on his lap, the two of them staring at a
New York Times
he held open in his hands.

A tear fell onto the plastic sheet. It looked like the first drop of a rainstorm landing on a window. Then the heavens opened up and it began to pour . . .

He had left the light on, and was lying on his back instead of his usual fetal position because of the pain in his shoulder. He heard her come into the room and stop at the bedside.

‘Geiger . . . ?’

He opened his eyes. She stared down at him, a shining line of tears on each cheek. Geiger watched their slow descent. He had always been intrigued by the act of crying. Tears were unique, triggered by every kindred and opposite emotional state. He’d made a list once, put it in one of his binders and studied it for hours, watching the connections grow between the words like routes on a road map to destinations he’d never known – fear and joy, apprehension and anticipation, loss and fulfillment, despair and pleasure, grief and rapture . . .

‘Can I lie down next to you . . . just for a little while?’ A faint quiver threaded through her voice, and her arms were wrapped across her chest – as if she were cold, or afraid she might come apart.

‘Why?’

‘I feel very sad.’

Geiger moved a foot to his left – and Christine lowered herself onto the bed and slowly lay back, leaving six inches of the blue comforter between them. Crying always made her chest tighten and breaths feel unfinished – so she clasped her hands on her stomach and tried to breathe deeply, slowly.

‘I was looking at some pictures.’