24

As the sun set and the sky didn’t darken further, full of flame like some pyre built to the mad gods, Monty phoned back.  His voice was wet and alcohol-spattered, his breath intense with whiskey.  “Tommy–listen–”

“Relax, Monty, you’re not fired.”

“Gray’s dead.”

I barely registered what he’d said.  It was like the whine of an insect had driven into my ear.  I winced.  “What?”

“Gray’s dead.  They just found him.”

And then there was nothing but the numbness, and the purity and loving compassion of the numbness moved through me in a precise measure, from my back to my front, as if another stroke was hitting, as if I’d laid down in ice water and slowly been submerged.  I felt it inching forward through my body, killing nerve endings as it went, shutting down pain, horror, curiosity.  It touched the back of my eyes and kept moving forward.  The other me was gone.

“No one’s sure what happened,” Monty said.  “His wife, what’s her name, Becky–”

“Virginia.”

“–they were supposed to go on vacation, she took time off from work, told the friends they were going to the Grand Canyon–”

Gray at the Grand Canyon, riding up the ridges on a pack mule.  I almost started to laugh.

“–an extended trip, right, two, three weeks–told his editor he was going to do some research on a new novel, needed some down-time, but–but they never left the house.  He...Tommy...he killed her.”  Monty had never even met Virginia, but the emotion grew unwieldly in his voice as he trembled, the phone shaking and rubbing against his ear, metal on flesh, shhh shhh, and he swallowed and took a deep breath to steady himself.  I listened to him drink down more whiskey and then he uttered a sigh of sorrow and relief.  “He killed her.  With a hammer.  Wrapped her body up in a tarp, left it in a crawlspace in the–”

“In the basement,” I said.  It’s where he put the Christmas tree and decorations.  Where he left boxes of books and magazines in air-tight plastic containers, all of them neatly stacked to one side, alphabetized so he could find anything he needed at a moment’s notice.

“They found him beside her, curled up in another tarp.  A different tarp.  You see?  He was putting himself away right next to her.”

Neatly stacked.

“He OD’ed, Tommy.  They don’t know what kind of pills yet.  Looks like it was fourteen, maybe fifteen days ago.  This time of year, I don’t know, what, with the flies–”

That was about the last time I’d talked to him.

“Cops said he didn’t want anyone finding them for as long as possible.  He did it on the first day of their trip, their supposed trip, right?  Even had a neighbor take in the mail.  So nobody would know.  So he could lay with her, in that crawlspace, like–like he didn’t want to be bothered.”

I hung up.

Gray had killed himself right after our last phone call.

Or had he already been dead when we spoke?