The Darkest Evening of the Year (23 page)

Chapter
54

T
he previous evening, when he had shot Gunny Schloss, Billy had killed his third person since dawn, having also assisted in two other homicides. When he should have been full of merriment, all the fun had gone out of the day and all the frolic out of him.

As he drove away from the restaurant in Monterey, feeling the dog’s stare on the back of his head even after he turned the corner, he decided the problem might be that he had killed those people solely for business reasons. He hadn’t wasted any of them just for a lark, simply as an expression of his conviction that life was a parade of fools marching to no purpose.

Shumpeter had not been a business associate, but he had not been killed as an act of meaningless violence, either. Billy blew him away for his Cadillac and to use his house as a furnace in which to obliterate multiple life-sentences worth of incriminating evidence.

To his chagrin, Billy realized that he had lost his way. He had gotten so consumed by business that he’d strayed from the philosophy that had given him such a happy and successful life. He had become so
serious
about the illegal drug dealing, arms dealing, organ dealing, and other enterprises that he had succumbed to the idea that what he did
mattered
. Other than the fact that everything he did to earn money was illegal, he could not see one lick of difference between himself and Bill Gates: He had committed himself to
building
something, to a
legacy
!

He was embarrassed for himself. He had become a counter-culture bourgeois, seduced by the illusion of purpose and accomplishment.

The previous night, driving away from Brian McCarthy’s place after the inexplicable crying jag, he had told himself that the tonic most certain to improve his mood would be the ruthless murder of a total stranger selected on a whim, thus confirming the meaningless and dark-comic nature of life.

He had been correct. Amoment of clear seeing. But he had not yet acted on his own good advice more than half a day later.

With the Learjet, he could leapfrog over McCarthy and Redwing, and be waiting at the interception point long before they arrived. He had time to put his life back on track.

In a Best Buy parking lot, Billy opened the weapons case. He snapped the thirty-three-round magazine into the 9-mm Glock 18 and screwed on the sound suppressor.

Then he cruised.

During the next half hour, he encountered numerous excellent targets. A sweet-looking elderly woman walking a Maltese. A girl in a wheelchair. A beautiful young woman, demurely dressed, getting into a Honda bearing bumper stickers that urged
JUST SAY NO TO DRUGS
and
ABSTINENCE ALWAYS WORKS
.

When he failed to work up the energy to pull the trigger on a young mother pushing two infants in a tandem stroller, Billy knew he was having a midlife crisis.

In a Target parking lot, he unscrewed the silencer from the Glock, ejected the extended magazine, and returned everything to the molded-foam niches in the suitcase.

He had never been so scared in his life.

When he completed the current job, he would take off longer than a few days, perhaps a month. He would live the entire time as Tyrone Slothrop, and would reread all the classics that had liberated him in his youth.

The problem might be that the current generation of alienated, bitter, ironic, angry, nihilistic writers with a comic bent were not as talented as the giants who had come before them. If he had been sustaining himself on weak tea, mistaking it for white lightning, he could have unwittingly been starving his mind.

He returned to the airport, where the Lear waited.

At Billy’s request, the steward with the British accent prepared Chivas Regal over cracked ice.

Lunch, served high above the earth, was a chopped salad with breast of capon and quail’s eggs.

Billy sipped Scotch, ate, and brooded. He did not pick up any magazines. He went to the bathroom once, but he didn’t glance at the mirror. He did not worry about the dog getting his scent through the open SUV window. He did not weep. Not a single tear. His malaise was just a bump in the road. Nothing to worry about. A bump. In the road. Hi-ho.

Chapter
55

D
riving toward the city where so many people had claimed to have left their hearts, Amy unburdened hers.

In her senior year at Misericordiæ, she won a scholarship from a major university. Because it was partial, she had to support herself.

For two years in high school, she had worked part-time as a waitress. She had liked the job and had earned good tips.

When she went away to university, she landed a job in an upscale steakhouse. There she met Michael Cogland, a regular customer, when he was twenty-six, eight years her senior.

He was charming and intense, but when he asked her out, she did not initially accept the invitation. He proved to be indefatigable.

Amy thought she knew what she wanted: a first-rate education, including a doctorate, a career as a professor, a quiet academic life with many friends, and an opportunity to enrich the lives of students as the sisters of Misericordiæ had enriched hers.

Michael Cogland not only persisted until he swept her out of her waitressing shoes, but he also swept her into a world of wealth that she found irresistibly seductive.

Later she would realize that being abandoned at the age of two with only the clothes she wore, having lost the Harkinsons and the solid middle-class life they would have given her, and having been raised in an orphanage, she had grown up with a thirst for security that had not been quenched by all the love that the sisters had rained on her. She had gotten along for eighteen years without more than a few dollars in her wallet, and she had thought that poverty—and the comfort with which she lived in it—inoculated her against an unhealthy desire for money.

Cogland had recognized her subconscious yearning for security and, with subtlety and cunning, had presented her with a vision of a cozy future that she could not resist.

Because she was a modest Catholic-school girl, he treated her with respect, too, and delayed a physical relationship until they were married. He knew precisely how to play her.

They were engaged two months after they met, and were married in four. She dropped out of university and into a life of leisure.

He wanted a family. Soon she was pregnant. But there would be a nanny, maids.

Only much later did she learn that although Michael was a rich man by most standards, his greatest wealth was held in trust. By the terms of his grandfather’s will, those funds would pass to him only on two conditions: Before his thirtieth birthday, he must marry a girl acceptable to his parents, and he must father a child by her.

Apparently his grandfather, if not also his parents, had seen in him, even when he’d been a boy, a tendency toward bad attitudes and ill-considered actions. As the Coglands had been a scandal-free family of faith, whose wealth had been built with a strong sense of community service, they believed in the power of a good wife and children to settle a man who might otherwise indulge his weaknesses.

Amy gave birth to a daughter when she was nineteen, and for a while all seemed well, a long life of privilege and joy propitiously begun. Michael came into his inheritance—and still she didn’t know that she had been the vehicle by which he obtained it.

Gradually, she began to see in him a different man from the one whom she had thought she married. The better she knew him, the less that his charm seemed genuine, the more it appeared to be a tool for manipulation. His warm manner wore thin, and a colder mind at times revealed itself.

He had a goatish streak, and he jumped the fence to more than a few other women. Twice she found evidence, but in most cases she knew the truth not from facts but from inference. He had a temper, well concealed until the beginning of their third year.

By the time they were married two years, Amy had begun to stay more often and longer in their vacation home, a stunning oceanfront property on which a handsome residence had been expanded from the lightkeeper’s house. The lighthouse itself, while owned by the Coglands, had long been automated; it was serviced once a month by Coast Guard engineers who flew to the site in a helicopter.

Michael was content to remain in the city. He visited as seldom as he could while maintaining the appearance of a marriage, but his desire for her faded so that even during his visits, he often slept in his own room. He seemed to view her with a contempt that she had not earned and could not understand.

She remained married to him solely for the sake of their one child, whom Amy loved desperately and whom she wanted to raise in the stable family environment that characterized the Coglands, generation after generation. In truth, she told herself that she remained for no other reason, but she engaged in self-delusion.

Although she yearned for a genuine husband-wife relationship, and though she suffered loneliness, she liked the lifestyle, liked it perhaps too much: the magisterial aura of old money, the peaceful rhythms of daily life without struggle, the beauty of her property.

Now, years later, having become a far different Amy from that young woman, she braked behind traffic crawling along the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Without glancing at Brian, she said, “He wanted to name our daughter Nicole, and I was pleased with that, it’s a lovely name, but by the time she was three, I called her Nickie.”

Chapter
56

W
hen the dark goes away outside the windows, when Piggy is pretty sure Mother and the man are sleeping, she sleeps, too.

If she sleeps when they don’t sleep, she might wake and see her mother watching. She is scared to have Mother watching her sleep.

Sometimes, she wakes and Mother has fire. A lighter. Her thumb turns the fire on. Then off. Then on. Over and over. Mother watching Piggy sleep and making fire.

Piggy dreams of Bear. He has a sock puppet on each hand. The sock puppets are so funny, like they were when Bear wasn’t dead.

Then Mother is in the dream. She touches fire to the sock puppets. Bear’s hands are all fire.

In the dream, Piggy says
No, no, this isn’t how, not fire, it was a knife.

Now Bear’s hair is all fire. He tells Piggy
Run. Run. Run, Piggy, run!
Bear’s mouth spits fire, his eyes melting.

Piggy sits up in bed. Throws off covers. Gets out of bed. She stands hugging herself, shaking.

She feels so alone. She’s afraid. She’s afraid alone is forever, all the days there are ever going to be, and then that many more.

She hurries to the big chair, lifts off the cushion. Cushion has a cover. Cover has a zipper.

With the Forever Shiny Thing in her hand, Piggy does the Worst Thing She Can Do.

It is really a good thing. It makes her feel not so alone. Makes her remember Bear not all fire, no knife in him, just Bear smiling.

Bear calls it the Worst Thing She Can Do because Mother will get the Big Uglies, maybe bigger than big, if she catches Piggy doing it.

When the Worst Thing She Can Do is done, the Forever Shiny Thing put away, Piggy washes, dresses. She is Ready for Anything.

Bear says when you have
HOPE
, you are Ready for Anything.

She eats broken cookies from yesterday. She saves food when she can. Food won’t always come when you want it.

She thinks what Bear said in her dream.
Run, Piggy, run!

He means not just in her dream but now. Bear is warning her.

She remembers what she read in Mother’s eyes last night, Mother with the like-Bear knife, her eyes so ugly.

Run, Piggy, run!

If Piggy looks at the bottoms of her feet, she will see what you get when you try to run. That was long ago. But the marks are there, you can see them.

What you get when you try to run is hurt, you get hurt. You hear a click, then you hurt.

Mother’s thumb turns fire on. Then off. Then on. If you try to run.

Piggy sits at her desk and takes a box out of a drawer.

In the box are pictures. Lots and lots. They are all the same but different.

She has been cutting them from magazines a long time, not for all the days there are ever going to be and then that many more, but a long time.

She will paste them together in a way that makes her feel good. She has saved them and saved them from so many magazines. Now she has enough. She is ready to start.

The pictures make her smile. They are so nice. Lots and lots. Standing and sitting. Running and jumping. Dogs. All dogs.

Chapter
57

A
n infinite army all in white marshaled in the west and rolled eastward on silent caissons, seizing the great bridge without shout or shot.

Golden Gate
was the name not of the bridge but of the throat of the bay, and the bridge was orange.

The stiffening trusses, the girders, the suspender cables, the main cables, and the towers began to disappear into the fog.

As Amy drove north toward Marin County, there were moments when she could see nothing of the surrounding structure except vertical cables, so it seemed that the bridge was suspended from nothing more than clouds and that it conveyed travelers from the white void of the life they had lived to the white mystery beyond death.

“In those days,” Amy said, speaking of her years of marriage to Michael Cogland, “although I had been raised to believe, I wasn’t able yet to
see
. Life was vivid and strange and at times tumultuous, but in the rush of days, I was oblivious of patterns. A wonderful dog named Nickie had come to me when I was a girl…and now into my life had come this girl whose nickname became Nickie, and I thought it amusing and sweet, but nothing more.”

As her husband grew more remote and as Amy became increasingly estranged from him, Michael began to travel more frequently and to remain away for longer periods, sometimes in Europe or Asia, or South America, supposedly on business, but perhaps in the company of other women.

Her daughter, Nicole, her second Nickie, at five years of age, had recently begun having bad dreams. They were all the same. In sleep, she found herself wandering in a snowy night, lost in dark woods, alone and afraid.

The woods were those behind their house, thickets of various evergreens, where the great beam of the lighthouse did not sweep.

Amy suspected that Nickie’s dreams were a consequence of having been all but abandoned by her father, who had at first charmed her and won her heart as he had charmed and won her mother.

One night, in her pajamas and sitting on the edge of the bed, Nickie had asked for slippers.

Mommy, last night I was barefoot in the dream. I have to wear slippers to bed so I won’t be walking barefoot through the woods in my dream.

If it’s just a dream woods,
Amy replied,
why wouldn’t the ground be soft?

It’s soft but it’s cold.

It’s a winter woods, is it?

Uh-huh. Lots of snow.

So dream yourself a summer woods.

This night was in the winter. The first snow of the season had fallen the previous week, and just that afternoon, the sky had salted two fresh cold inches across the coast.

I like the snow,
said Nickie.

Then maybe you should wear boots to bed.

Maybe I should.

And thick woolen socks and long johns.

Mommy, you’re silly.

And a mink coat and a big mink Russian hat.

The girl giggled but then sobered.
I don’t like the dream, but I don’t like the barefoot part the most.

Amy had gotten a pair of slippers from the closet and had put them under Nickie’s pillow.

There. Now if you dream about the woods, and if you’re barefoot again, just reach under your pillow and put them on in your sleep.

She had tucked her daughter in for the night. She had smoothed Nickie’s hair back from her face, kissed her brow, kissed her left cheek and then her right, so her head wouldn’t be unbalanced by the weight of a kiss.

Then Amy had spent the evening reading and had gone to bed in her own room at half past ten.

Now, in the passenger seat of the Expedition, Brian said with awful tenderness, “Maybe I should drive.”

Having crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, they were heading north on Highway 101.

The clotted mass of fog that smothered the bridge had boiled off into a thin milk as they had come somewhat inland.

“No,” she said. “It’s better if I drive, something for my hands to grip.”

That winter night, wind had awakened her, not with its own moan and whistle, but with the disharmony that it rang from the collection of wind chimes on the balcony off the master bedroom.

Amy looked toward a west-facing window, expecting to see the fairy dance of falling snow against the glass, but there was only the darkness and no snow.

Although the chimes usually appealed, something in their jangle disturbed her. In her years here, this was the first wind that was not a good musician.

As she came fully awake, instinct told her that not the chimes but some other sound had awakened her and stropped her nerves. She sat up in bed, threw aside the covers.

A separate house was occupied by the couple—James and Ellen Avery—who managed the property and made sure that their employers’ every need was met. In addition to being a good manager, James was a strapping man, and responsible.

In their own wing of the main house were private rooms for Lisbeth, the maid, and Caroline, the nanny.

Each night a perimeter alarm was engaged. The breaking of a window or the forcing of a door would trigger a siren, and James Avery would come running.

Nevertheless, Amy was impelled by animal suspicion to remain standing beside her bed.

Head lifted, she listened intently, wishing that the wind would declare an intermission and let the chimes fall silent.

Her bedside lamp featured a dimmer switch. She fumbled for it and eased the palest light into the room.

Only weeks before, she’d done something that, at the time, had seemed impulsive, excessive, even foolish. Because several stories of grisly murder had recently filled the news, she had bought a pistol and had taken three lessons in its use.

No. Not because of murder in the news.

That was a self-deception that allowed her to go on believing her life had merely encountered a length of bad track, that it had not derailed.

If her fear had been of homicidal strangers, she would have told someone, at least James Avery, that she had purchased the pistol and had taken lessons. She would have left the weapon in her night-stand, where it would be easy to reach—and where the maid would have seen it. She would not have hidden it in an unused purse, in the back of a bureau drawer that held a collection of purses.

Feeling as though she moved not through the waking world but in a dream, with just enough light to avoid the furniture, she went to the bureau and withdrew the purse that served as holster.

As Amy turned from the bureau, she heard the faint creak of the doorknob, and gasping she turned in time to see him enter, his eyes shining in the gloom, like ice on stone in moonlight. Michael.

Supposedly in Argentina on business, he was not due back for another six days.

He did not speak a word, nor did she, for the circumstances and his eyes and his lurid sneer were phrases in an infinite sentence on the subject of motive and violence.

Fast he was, and brutal. He hit her, and she rocked backward, the knobs of bureau drawers gouging her back. But she held on to the purse.

He clubbed her with one fist, striking at her face but hitting the side of her head, and she fell to her knees. But she held on to the purse.

Grabbing a fistful of her hair, Michael hauled her to her feet, and she was conscious of no pain, so totally was she in the thrall of terror.

She saw the knife then, how big it was.

He was not ready to use the blade, but twisted her hair to turn her, and she turned like a helpless doll.

When Michael shoved her hard, she stumbled away from him and fell, and almost struck her head against a dresser. But she held on to the purse.

She tore at the zipper of the purse, reached within, rolled onto her back, and worked the double action as she had been instructed.

The shot shattered something, missing Michael, but in shock he shrank from her.

She fired again, he fled, and as he passed through the doorway between the bedroom and hall, he cried out in pain when the third shot nailed him. He staggered, but he did not go down, and then he vanished.

In self-defense and in defense of the innocent, killing is not murder, hesitation is not moral, and cowardice is the only sin.

She went after him, certain that he was not mortally wounded, determined that he would be.

Into the hallway, light spilled from Nickie’s room.

In the clockworks of Amy’s heart, the key of terror wound the mainspring past the snapping point, and the scream that came from her was silent, silent, her lungs suddenly as airless as the world around her seemed to be, a vacuum in a vacuum.

With the pistol in both hands and held stiff-armed before her, she went into Nickie’s room, and Michael was not there.

He had been there earlier, and what Amy saw was aftermath, a sight from which she reeled in horror and in instant crippling grief, a sight that almost compelled her to put the pistol in her mouth and swallow her fourth shot.

But if in that moment she did not care whether she sent herself to Hell, she was
determined
to send him there.

Into the hall, down the stairs, she seemed not to run but fly, and in the entry hall found the front door standing open.

Impossible that she was still alive, that she was not dead from her own ardent wish to be dead, and yet she moved out of the house, across the porch, down the steps, into the night.

To the east, beyond the house, the concentrated light beamed out from the high lantern room, as powerful and silent as her still-silent scream, warning sailors in transit on the deep Atlantic.

Because its arc was constrained to 180 degrees in respect of inland dwellers, the lighthouse failed to brighten the night here in the west. Only a faint ghost pulse of its sweeping beam played upon the snow, so weak that it could quiver up no shadows.

Scanning the night, seeking Michael, she could not see him—and then did. He was running for the woods.

She squeezed off her fourth shot, and sea gulls thrashed into flight from the eaves of the high catwalk of the lighthouse, flew west in confusion, but then over her head wheeled east and high into the sky.

Michael was beyond the reach of the pistol, and she ran after him, holding her fire until she had gained ground.

She closed on him as she knew she would, because he was wounded and she was not, because he ran in fear and she ran in fury.

As Michael reached the woods, Amy fired again, but he did not fall, and the trees crowded around him and welcomed him into their dark.

Now it seemed to her that this was a fulfillment of her sweet girl’s dream, Nickie’s dream that she would be lost in the woods. Her father had not only taken her life but her soul, and he would cast it away in the forest, where she would wander forever, barefoot and afraid.

Crazy as that thought was, it compelled Amy ten steps into the woods, twenty, until she halted. Before her were a thousand pathways through the night, a maze of trees.

She listened but heard nothing. Either he was laying for her in this labyrinth or he had fled far enough along a trail he knew that she could not hear him running.

Were he lying in wait, she would risk being taken by surprise, because she might kill him anyway, in the struggle.

If on the other hand he had gone deep into the woods, if he had left a car on the farther side, along the county road, her pursuit of him would only ensure his escape.

Reluctantly, desperately, she retreated from the trees and ran back toward the house, to call the police.

She was almost to the front-porch steps when she realized that her gunfire had brought no one out of either house. Neither James nor Ellen Avery, nor Lisbeth, the maid, nor Caroline, the nanny.

They were all dead, and she the sole survivor.