By the time I had driven up to the northern end of Candlewood Lake it was dark, and all that I could see was whirling snow. But I managed to find Sherman, with its little snow-covered bandstand, and an elderly woman in a bright yellow parka pointed me in the direction of Brinsmade Lane, while her dog yapped impatiently around her rubbers.
I drove up and down for almost twenty minutes, trying to find Kate’s parents’ house. Most of the property along Brinsmade Lane was hidden behind the trees, and almost every driveway had a gate, so that it was impossible to drive in close enough to see what the houses looked like.
I was close to giving up when God answered my prayer. A white Cadillac CTS came along the highway in the opposite direction, and turned into an entrance about twenty yards ahead of me. As it turned, my headlights caught the driver’s face, and it was unmistakably Victor.
My heart started beating inside my chest like a drum pedal. I drove about a half-mile further on, and then I turned around. I switched off my lights and drove very slowly back toward the entrance, and parked deep underneath the branches of an overhanging laurel bush. I just hoped that Henry’s paintwork wasn’t too badly scratched.
I climbed out of the car and walked down the driveway. The shingle was frozen so my feet crunched loudly as I walked. As soon as the house came into view I recognized it from the photograph that Pearl had shown me, even though it was hooded with snow. It reminded me of the house in those Amityville movies: a rambling colonial with tall chimney stacks, and dormer windows like clown’s eyes. I recognized the cherry trees, too, although their branches were clogged with snow, instead of blossom. Two vehicles were parked by the garage block – Victor’s Cadillac and a black Ford Explorer.
What Victor was doing here, I couldn’t even begin to guess. Kate had told me that her parents were dead, but she had never told me that she had inherited their house. Was she here, too? She hadn’t been in touch with me for two days, after all. Maybe she lived here in Sherman most of the time, and only visited Victor occasionally, which is why she didn’t keep any of her clothes at St Luke’s Place. But no clothes at all? Not even a spare sweater or a change of underwear?
I could see lights shining in the hallway, and the living room. I crossed the lawn where Kate had been photographed with her parents, all those years ago, and I stood in the snow-covered flowerbed so that I could look inside the living room window.
The room was furnished and decorated in colonial style, with dark oak chairs and tables, and chintzy drapes. A large stone fireplace dominated the left-hand wall, but it was blackened and dark and heaped with dead ashes. Above the fireplace hung a nineteenth-century portrait of a Puritan woman in a bonnet, her lips pursed as if she disapproved of everything, especially being painted.
I listened. I was sure that I could hear very faint music coming from someplace inside the house. Tony Bennett, singing The Boulevard of Broken Dreams. I dodged around the side of the house, keeping my head down and staying close to the wall, until I reached the kitchen window at the back. There were no lights in the kitchen, but the door was half open, so that I could see into the hallway. A mirror was hanging on the wall, just beside the front door, and for a second I glimpsed Victor in it, as he crossed from one room into another. I had the chilling feeling that he had caught sight of me, but that was only an optical illusion.
I climbed the steps to the kitchen door, and tried the handle. Unsurprisingly, it was locked. Maybe there was a cellar door, or a window I could pry open. I circled around the house as quietly as I could, although I managed to kick over a stack of flowerpots, filled up with snow. I stayed perfectly still, listening, in case Victor had heard me, but Tony Bennett continued crooning, and nobody came out of the house to take a look.
At the side of the house, I found a small high window which probably illuminated the cloakroom, or the stairs. Not far away, underneath a fir tree, there was an old wooden chair with a broken arm. I dragged the chair close to the house, right underneath the window. Then I picked up a rusty old trowel that somebody had left embedded in the soil, and climbed up on to the seat.
I was trying to force the point of the trowel into the side of the window when I heard a crackling noise close behind me. I turned around and almost lost my balance. It was Jack Friendly, in his long black coat, his breath smoking like Satan himself.
‘Well, well. If it ain’t my nosy friend from Venice. What brings you here, slick, as if I didn’t know?’
I climbed awkwardly down from the chair, and held up the trowel in front of me.
‘Where’s Margot?’ I challenged him.
Jack took a step closer. ‘Margot’s safe and sound for now, always providing that you play along. So what are you going to do with that? Plant me to death?’
‘Just take me to her. I want to make sure that you haven’t hurt her.’
‘Hurt her? Now why should we hurt her?’
‘For the same reason you hurt the Westerlunds, and the Philips and the Cesarettis, and God alone knows how many more families.’
‘Life is just a horse race, Gideon. You have your winners, and you have your Can’t be helped, no matter how hard you try.’
‘You’re a total bastard,. Jack.’
He grinned at me, and his eyes glittered. ‘I certainly like to think so.’
He led me around the side of the house, toward the front door. Halfway there, I tossed the trowel into the snow.
He opened the door for me and we stepped into the brightly lit hallway. It was freezing cold, but I could hear a furnace rumbling in the basement, and smell the dusty tang of radiators heating up.
Jack closed the door and called out, ‘Victor! Hey, Victor! Found your friend outside!’
I looked around. The pink floral wallpaper was scuffed, and most of the pictures were all hanging crooked, as if somebody had been fighting in here. On the right-hand side there was a curving staircase, with a galleried landing, but upstairs was in darkness. I had the impression of an elegant family home which had been visited by tragedy, and hadn’t been lived in ever since.
Victor suddenly appeared from the living room, still wearing his overcoat and black leather gloves. Under his bright orange tan, he looked tired and pale, and he had bags under his eyes. He didn’t seem at all surprised to see me.
‘Gideon,’ he said. He sniffed, and wiped his nose with his finger. ‘Crappy night for driving out to the sticks. You thought about my proposition?’
‘I’m more worried about Margot. Is she here? You haven’t hurt her, have you?’
‘She’s here, yes. And, no, my friend, we haven’t hurt her. In fact we don’t have any intention of hurting her, nor you neither, if you’re cooperative.’
‘I want to see her.’
‘Sure. No problemo. Follow me.’
Victor beckoned me along the hallway. We entered the kitchen, which was huge, and chilly, with a brown-and-white tiled floor, and a massive butcher-block table. A motley collection of antique copper saucepans was suspended from the ceiling, although they were tarnished almost black. Two red-and-green sacks of IGA groceries were standing on the hutch, waiting to be unpacked.
‘Takes a hell of a time for this dump to warm up,’ said Victor. ‘By the time it’s livable-in, it’s usually time to drive back to the city.’
‘Does this house belong to you, too?’ I asked him. ‘Or should I say Penumbra?’
‘I told you, Gideon. I’m a man of substance.’
‘So what happened to Kate’s parents? They sell you the place, for a nominal price?’
‘I got it very reasonable, let’s put it that way.’
‘In other words you put the squeeze on them, just like you put the squeeze on the Westerlunds, and the Philips, and the Cesarettis, and just like you’re putting the squeeze on me?’
Victor crossed the kitchen to a large green-painted door, took a key out of his coat pocket, and unlocked it. ‘I don’t like the word “squeeze”, Gideon. “Negotiation”, that’s what I prefer.’
‘Oh, really?’ I challenged him, although I can’t say that I wasn’t frightened of what he was going to do next. ‘How about “extortion”?’
Victor grinned, and for the first time I saw a gold tooth shining. ‘I like you, Gideon. You got class. You got character. And I have to say it took some nerve for you to drive out here. I like nerve.’
‘I want to see Margot,’ I insisted. I was still shaking with cold.
He lifted one finger and said, ‘Follow me. But mind the steps, OK? There’s one or two of them loose.’
He opened the green door and went down the steps into the cellar. I hesitated, but Jack said, ‘Go ahead, go on,’ and I followed him.
Victor was right: two steps wobbled when I trod on them, and one of them was missing.
When I reached the bottom of the steps, I could see how vast the cellar was. It had a very low ceiling, but it stretched the whole length of the house, so that its further recesses were hidden in darkness. On the left-hand side there were rows and rows of wine racks, more than half filled with dusty bottles of wine, but the rest of the cellar was crowded with tea chests filled with books, and ornaments, and lampshades. I saw an old Zenith television, and a hula-hoop, and a wooden ironing board, and a child’s bicycle with its front wheel missing.
In a recess on the right-hand side stood a large old-fashioned gas-fired furnace, which was roaring stentoriously as it tried to heat up the house. In front of it, Margot was lying on a lumpy red couch, blindfolded with a red woolen scarf and her wrists and her ankles fastened with silver duct tape.
As we approached, Margot swung her legs around and sat up. ‘Let me go, you skunks!’ she screamed. ‘You can’t keep me here! Let me go!’
‘Hey, easy,’ said Victor. ‘I brung your friend to see you’re OK.’
‘What? Let me go! You’re going to go to prison for this! Let me go!’
I went over and knelt down beside her, and took hold of her hands. ‘Margot, it’s OK, it’s me.’
‘Gideon? Oh, thank God! Get me out of here! I’m going crazy!’
‘It’s OK, sweetheart. They want me to promise that I’ll keep my mouth shut about Penumbra, and I’ve said that I will.’
‘Please get me out of here, Gideon! Please!’
I turned to Jack. He was smiling, and popping his knuckles. ‘Just untie her,’ I said. ‘I’ve given you my word. I won’t say anything to anybody, ever, about what you did, even if that means I deserve to rot in hell the same as you do.’
‘No need to be hostile, Gideon,’ said Victor.
‘Hostile? You should both get the death penalty for what you’ve done.’
Victor shrugged. ‘They don’t have the death penalty in Sweden. Nor in Britain. Nor in Italy, neither. Sorry to disappoint you.’
‘I should kill you myself.’
‘Well, there’s no need to go to extremes. All I’m asking is that you keep quiet about something which you don’t have any proof of anyhow. And that you make over the title to your apartment.’
Margot said, ‘What? What does he want you to do?’
‘He wants me to hand over my apartment, the same way he made the Westerlunds and the Philips and the Cesarettis give him their apartments.’
‘But you can’t, Lalo! That’s your apartment! That’s your home!’
‘I don’t think I have a whole lot of choice. It’s either that, or you and I disappear and nobody ever sees us again.’
Margot took a deep breath and screamed out, ‘Help! Somebody help us! Help! Somebody let us out of here! Call the police! Help!’
Victor waited until she had finished, and then he said, ‘Nobody can hear you, doll-face. You’re down in a cellar, more than a half-mile from the nearest highway, and the same distance from the nearest neighbor, so you might as well save your breath.’
I stood up. ‘Come on, Victor. I’ve agreed to keep my mouth shut, and you can have my apartment just as soon as you’ve drawn up all the paperwork. Let her go, why don’t you?’
Victor shook his head. ‘I’m not stupid, Gideon. But I promise you this. As soon as your signature dries on that deed, she’ll go free.’
‘Do you really think I trust you?’ I retorted. I was trying very hard not to rile him, but I was so angry and frightened that my voice was shaking. ‘You’re a cold-blooded murderer, Victor. Maybe Jack did all of your torturings and killings for you, but there’s just as much blood on your hands as there is on Jack’s.’
‘Hey,’ said Victor, in a conciliatory tone. ‘There’s no need to get all gnarly about it.’
But at that instant, there was a loud slamming sound, and all of the lights in the cellar went out. We were plunged into darkness …
Victor said, ‘Goddamned circuit-breaker! Jack – you got a lighter?’
I thought of grabbing Margot and trying to head for the stairs, but it was so dark that I was completely disoriented, and I doubt if we would have made it even halfway there before Jack or Victor caught up with us.
‘Don’t you move, Gideon!’ Victor warned me. He must have read my mind. ‘You try anything cute, and so help me you’ll regret it!’
Jack flicked his lighter, and it scratched, and it scratched, but it wouldn’t light.
‘For Christ’s sake, Jack!’ Victor barked at him. ‘Find the goddamned circuit-breaker!’
The flames inside the gas furnace were throwing a dim, wavering light across the floor, and as my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, it was enough for me to make out Margot, and Victor, and then Jack.
But then I realized that the four of us had company. There was a fifth person standing in back of the couch, a woman, pale-faced, and very still.
‘Margot,’ I said.
‘What is it, Lalo?’ She must have been able to hear the warning in my voice.
Jack was stumbling around, close to the bottom of the steps, trying to find the fuse box. He collided with a tea chest that must have been filled with old china, because I heard a muffled crashing noise, and then Jack shouting, ‘Fuck! Fuck, my knee!’
But I couldn’t take my eyes off the woman behind the couch. Her head was covered in a black scarf, and she was holding a black-wrapped bundle close to her face. Protectively, but also defiantly. And I knew who she was, even though her appearance here was impossible, and unbelievable, and scared me so much that I could barely speak.
‘Who is that?’ Victor demanded. ‘Who’s there? Jack will you fix those fricking lights for Christ’s sake!’
He didn’t need to. Gradually, the lights came back on by themselves. The filaments burned brighter and brighter, although they still shone unsteadily, as if the wires were shorting out.
‘No,’ said Victor. Then he raised one hand, as if to shield his eyes. ‘No, no. This is not happening. No.’
‘Victor?’ called Jack, treading on broken china.
‘This is not happening!’ Victor shouted. ‘Jack! What the hell are you doing? Tell me this is not happening!’
But the woman behind the couch came forward, and stood staring at him. It was Kate, all dressed in black; and in her arms, in a black wool blanket, she was carrying her baby.
‘What’s going on?’ Margot asked me. ‘Tell me, Lalo – what’s going on?’
Victor sank to his knees on the concrete floor. He kept covering his face with his hands and then opening them up again, like a hymn book, as if the next time he looked, Kate would have disappeared. Jack stayed where he was, looking tetchy and confused and off balance. Jack only knew how to solve problems by hitting people, or hurting them, or killing them, but it was obvious even to him that this wasn’t one of those problems.
‘Kate,’ I said, and cautiously approached her, holding out my hand.
But she didn’t look at me. She continued to stare down at Victor.
‘Victor,’ she said. Her voice sounded very distant and breathy, as if it were the wind talking.
Victor kept his hands closed over his face.
‘You’re not here,’ he told her, in a muffled voice.
‘I’m here, Victor. You can hear me, can’t you?’
‘You’re not here! You’re not here! You can’t be here!’
Kate waited for a moment. Then she said, ‘Aren’t you ashamed, Victor, of what you’ve done?’
‘I’ve just told you! You’re not here!’
But Kate persisted. ‘Aren’t you ashamed of all the pain you’ve inflicted, all the people you’ve murdered, all the property you’ve stolen?’
Victor lowered his hands and looked up at her. To my surprise, his face was glistening with tears. ‘They took our son, Kate.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But he would have died anyhow.’
‘I gave them everything. I gave them nearly three million dollars! Three million dollars, Kate! They bankrupted me! And for what? How did you expect me to feel, when Michael died? They promised me that he would live but he died!’
‘That’s no excuse, for what you did.’
Victor climbed to his feet. He almost lost his balance, but Jack stepped forward to steady him. ‘What was their excuse, for what they did? What was their excuse, for killing all of those innocent children, so that they could sell their hearts for millions of dollars?’
‘None,’ said Kate. ‘There was no excuse. It was wholesale murder. Why do you think I tried to stop you from doing it?’
Victor was so angry now that he had almost forgotten his fear. He stalked up to Kate and shouted, ‘Michael deserved a chance! He was our son, Kate! He was going to carry on the Solway name, for ever! Not just substance, Kate! Reverence! One generation of Solways, after another!’
Kate pulled back the black scarf that was covering her head. ‘What was the price of that chance, Victor? You paid for the killing of another child, so that our child could have a new heart. But he died, regardless, as God had probably meant him to.’
Victor said, ‘They promised me. “The best chance he’ll ever have, Mr Solway” – that’s what they told me. They were quick enough to take my money, weren’t they? But what am I left with? Nothing. No son. No heir. Not even a fricking refund.’
‘We could have tried again.’
Victor shook his head. ‘With you? After you told me that you wouldn’t take some other kid’s heart, to save Michael’s life? That other kid probably came from some slum someplace, Rio, or Darfur, or Christ knows where. He probably had a life expectancy of seven years old, and for all of those seven years he would have been miserable, and hungry, and sick. Tell me – go on, tell me – what was the best possible use of that other kid’s heart?’
‘We could have tried again, Victor.’
‘And the odds were, the same thing would have happened all over again, you know that. What was the point of trying again? My family carries Ebstein’s Anomaly, once every other generation, and that’s all there is to it. There never can be a Solway dynasty.’
Jack laid his hand on Victor’s shoulder. ‘Come on, boss. This isn’t real. This is some kind of scam. I’ll deal with this broad.’
‘Oh!’ Kate retorted. ‘You don’t think this is real? What do you think happened to the baby, who was murdered for Michael’s new heart?’
‘They said it was going to be painless!’ Victor shouted at her. ‘They said it was an orphan, with no quality of life whatsoever!’
But Kate unraveled the black woolen blanket she had been carrying in her arms. Inside was a dark-skinned baby of about six months old.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘This is what happened to it, because of you, and all the people like you.’
She turned the baby around, so that it was facing them. He looked like a grotesque caricature of a ventriloquist’s dummy. His eye sockets were empty, and he had been split open from its chest downwards.
‘They harvested his corneas. They harvested his kidneys, his liver, his lungs and his gall bladder. And of course, they took his heart.’
‘I don’t believe this,’ said Victor. ‘I’m having some kind of nightmare.’
‘You’re not the one who’s having a nightmare. This baby was healthy when they took him into the operating theater. Healthy, and alive. He came from Benin, in Nigeria. Under normal circumstances, he would have expected to live to the age of forty-seven, at least.’
‘They promised me that Michael would survive!’ Victor screamed at her. ‘They promised me, those bastards!’
With infinite gentleness, Kate rewrapped the gutted baby in its blanket. ‘Kate—’ I began, but she touched her finger to her lips, to indicate that she wasn’t finished yet. And I trusted her now, because I knew from what Pearl had told me that she couldn’t do this – not unless I was here to give her substance. There was only one person who could help her to bring Victor and Jack to justice, and that was me.
‘Come on, Victor,’ said Jack. ‘Let me sort this out for you, OK?’
I don’t know what Jack had in mind, and I never found out, because at that moment there was a sharp shuffling noise from the darkest corners of the cellar. It sounded like people shuffling into church for a funeral service.
‘Holy shit,’ said Victor, and he was so frightened that his face had turned a dirty orange color.
Toward us, through the cellar, came the Westerlund family – Axel and Tilda and Elsa and Felicia – as well as the Philips – David and Helena and their son Giles – and the Cesarettis – Enrico and Salvina, as well as Amalea and Raffaella and little Massimo.
But there wasn’t just one Axel, or one Tilda, or one Elsa and Felicia – or only one appearance of any one of them.
Jostling close to each other, I saw four different Axels: one bearded, one with his face badly bruised, one with dark-brown runnels of blood congealing on his forehead, like a crown, and yet another who was so green and swollen and puffy that he was barely recognizable. Next to him, there was a pretty rosy-cheeked Elsa, with her hair beautifully braided, but there was also a pale straggly-haired Elsa like the girl who had been lifted out of the harbor at the Wasa Museum.
It was the same with the Cesarettis and the Philips. They advanced slowly toward us out of the darkness, and there were so many different manifestations of each of them. When they were alive, when they were being tortured and beaten, and after they were dead. There must have been nearly fifty of them, maybe more.
I turned to Kate again, although she still wouldn’t look at me. I wanted to tell her that I realized what was happening. Here were dozens of pages from these families’ lives, just the way that Kate had described them, like pages from a flicker book.
Young Giles Philips stood near the front, in his British school uniform; but next to him stood the same apparition that I had seen in his parents’ back garden, with his eyelids glued together. There was little Massimo, too, unmarked but serious; but close behind him stood another Massimo, his face beaten like a smashed melon.
The most horrifying of all was Helena Philips. She stood next to Kate’s right shoulder, with a sad but gentle expression, in a flowery summer frock. But she had a terrible twin who was almost hidden from sight, right behind her. A terrible twin whose scalp was raw and whose face was burned black, and whose nightgown was still smouldering.
‘What’s this, Gideon?’ said Victor, his voice shrill with panic. ‘Did you do this? These are holograms, right? They’re holograms!’
He took two nervous steps toward little Massimo, who was standing closest to him, and he reached out and quickly touched his shoulder.
‘Shit!’ he said. ‘They’re real! They’re fricking real! Jesus, Gideon, what the hell have you done here?’
Jack looked even more confused. He kept looking behind him, as if he expected more apparitions to come down the steps. He was rapidly whispering something under his breath, although I couldn’t hear what it was. Knowing him, it was probably some kind of blasphemy.
Victor turned to me. ‘Make them go away!’ he demanded. ‘You hear me, Gideon? Make them go away!’
‘He can’t,’ said Kate.
‘I’m dreaming this,’ said Victor. ‘This isn’t true, none of it. I’m having a nightmare. Make them go away, Gideon! Make them go away!’
Kate said, ‘Didn’t you hear me, Victor? He can’t.’
Victor whirled around, off balance. His eyes were staring and he looked as if he were just about to have an epileptic fit. Jack meanwhile was slowly backing toward the steps, sinking to his knees, still praying. I caught the mumbled words, ‘… forgive me my fucking trespasses, forgive me my fucking trespasses … give me a goddamned sign, God … forgive me my fucking trespasses!’
‘Kate!’ I called her.
Now she looked across at me and smiled, although her smile looked weary.
‘Hallo, Gideon. You did it. And here we are. The moment of truth.’
I reached out and took hold of her free hand, and she felt real, and warm, and that was all I needed.
‘How did you get here?’ I asked her.
‘This was my parents’ house. Well, you know that. I never really left.’
Victor stalked across to me and screamed at me, so close that I could feel his spit flying in my face. ‘Make her go away! Make her go away! Make all of them go away!’
Kate shook her head. ‘The people you murdered couldn’t accuse you, Victor. After they had died, they had to stay silent. But Gideon can accuse you. He knows what you and Jack did. He’s seen it for himself.’
‘This is a nightmare! This is nothing but a nightmare!’
‘Yes, Victor, this is a nightmare. For you, anyhow.’
Kate paused. She was breathing very hard, but she seemed to be elated, as if she had been running, and knew that she was going to win.
‘These families couldn’t speak out against you. Neither could I. But Gideon can. You’re finished, Victor. You and Jack. You’re both finished.’
‘Gideon doesn’t have any proof!’ Victor shouted at her. ‘What did he see? When? It’s his word against ours!’
‘Oh, you think so?’ Kate asked him. ‘Where are my parents?’
‘You think I’m going to tell you that? You’re crazy!’
‘What did you do with them, Victor? Where are my parents?’
‘Wouldn’t you like to know? They signed it over to me, and then they left for parts unknown!’
‘You had them murdered, Victor! Where are they?’
Victor staggered around again, and then he stabbed his finger at her. ‘Screw you, Kate! Screw all of you!’
Kate didn’t answer, but looked down at the baby that she was carrying in her arms, and drew down the blanket that was covering his head. Then she turned him around and held him up in both hands, so that Victor could see him clearly.
I felt a crawling sensation all down my back that was partly dread and partly elation. The baby was white, with blond hair, and he was staring at Victor with dark-blue eyes.
‘You bitch,’ said Victor. ‘You just wanted him to die. He was my son, and you just wanted him to die! And I was totally cleaned out! And he still died! And you have the nerve to bring him here, whatever you are, and taunt me!
He lunged toward her, with both hands raised, trying to grab the baby. But Kate flung the blanket over the baby’s head, and turned away.
‘Michael!’ shouted Victor. And in spite of all the terrible things that he had done, or maybe because of them, his voice was filled with pain and desperation.
But Kate lifted the blanket, and shook it, and like a parlor trick, it was empty.
‘You bitch,’ said Victor. The tears were streaming down his face. Jack came up to him and laid his hand on his shoulder.
‘Let’s get the fuck out of here.’
‘She killed my son! She killed my Michael!’
But the murdered families were beginning to crowd forward now, and Jack’s eyes were darting apprehensively from one apparition to another.
‘Victor, I’m telling you. Whatever the fuck’s going on, we need to get out of here.’
At that moment, however, the scream started.
*
It wasn’t a scream of anger, or of fear. It was an intensely high-pitched sound, right on the furthest horizon of my hearing. It grew louder and louder, and as it did so, I realized that it was coming from Kate, and all of the other dead people in the cellar. Their mouths were slightly open, and they were letting out the same ear-splitting scream that Kate had screamed, whenever she made love, and that Tilda Westerlund had screamed, in her panic and frustration, when she shattered the lantern.
I looked from one to the other – to Axel and Tilda, to Elsa and Felicia – to David and Helena and Giles – and to Enrico and Salvina, and Amalea, and Raffaella, and Massimo. They were standing here, in the cellar, but there was no living expression in their eyes. They were dead, and they had come here to get their revenge, that was all. The sound rose higher and higher, like fingernails scraping on a chalkboard, until I couldn’t hear it any more. But Victor and Jack both clamped their hands over their ears, and Victor started to roar with pain.
‘Stop it.!’ he begged. ‘Stop it! You’re killing me!’
Kate stopped screaming, and approached him, although everybody else carried on.
‘Victor? Where are my parents? Tell me where they are! Where are my parents?’
Victor dropped to his knees, next to Jack. ‘Make it stop!’ he wailed, thrashing his head from side to side. ‘You’re killing me, you witch!’
‘Where are my parents?’ Kate demanded.
Victor jabbed his finger at the cellar floor. ‘They’re here, goddammit! They’re right here! They’re under the goddam floor!’
Kate stepped back a little. ‘There!’ she said. ‘Now Gideon has his proof! You’re finished!’
She raised her hands again and closed her eyes. She had the same beatific expression on her face as she did when we made love. She uttered a note that began with piercing clarity, and then grew louder and louder until it sounded like a thousand church choirs. She wasn’t directing it at me, but even so my head rang and my vision blurred and my insides felt as if I was being shaken apart, as if I were riding a bicycle down an endless flight of steps.
A whole boxful of china vases suddenly shattered, and two light bulbs popped. Victor screamed even louder and bent over double, hitting his forehead against the floor. ‘I can’t see! I can’t see! I’ve gone blind!’ But Jack had kept his hands clamped tightly over his ears, and he managed to raise himself up on one knee, and then, very unsteadily, to stand.
He turned toward me and I had never seen anybody stare at me with such hatred. He took one lurching step toward me, like a zombie, and then another.
‘You fuck,’ he hissed at me. ‘I’m going to tear your fucking head off.’
He swung at me, but I stepped back and he missed me by a clear six inches. He almost lost his balance, but then he lurched forward again, and took another swing. I backed off again, but now I was right up against the cellar wall.
‘You thought you could mess with me?’ he said. ‘You thought you could mess with Jack Friendly?’
He jabbed at me, but I parried him away with my elbow, and he stumbled so close to me that we were almost embracing each other. I could smell him, smell his aftershave and the garlic on his breath. And all the time Kate and all of the others continued to scream that intense, piercing note, so that my eardrums started to ache, too, and my vision started to blur.
I punched Jack in the stomach, just below the sternum, as hard as I could. If anybody had punched me like that, I would have gone down like a knackered horse. But Jack’s abdomen felt like a sack of cement, and he didn’t even flinch.
Jack hit me back, on my collarbone. I bent forward, winded, and he hit me again, right on the cheek. I thought I heard Kate cry out, ‘Gideon!’ but then Jack hit me in the mouth, and I toppled backward and struck my head against the wall. For a count of five, everything went black-and-white, like a photographic negative.
When I managed to pull myself up again, I saw Jack heaving Victor up the cellar steps, with one of Victor’s arms around his shoulders. They climbed upward as if they were drunk, missing every second or third step and clinging to the handrail to stop themselves falling back down.
Nobody from any of the families tried to stop them, but all of them slowly walked after them, toward the bottom of the steps, where they gathered in a semicircle, still singing. Victor dropped on to his knees, sobbing, but Jack managed to pull him up again.
Kate came up to me and gently touched my cheek with her finger-tips. ‘Gideon – are you all right?’
‘Don’t know. My head’s ringing like a goddamned bell.’
‘Hey – you’re my hero. But you didn’t have to fight him. He’s not going to get away, my darling, I promise you. And neither will Victor.’
I shook my head, trying to clear it, but with all that singing going on, I couldn’t think straight. Victor and Jack had pushed open the door at the top of the steps and crashed their way through it.
‘It sure looks like they’re getting away.’
‘No, they won’t,’ said Kate, and firmly took hold of my hand. ‘This is where Victor and Jack get what they deserve. You’ll have your evidence against them. They’ll both get life sentences, if they’re lucky.’
Together, we climbed up the cellar steps. When we reached the hallway, I saw that Jack and Victor had left the front door wide open. An icy wind was blowing, and snow was whirling into the living room.
‘There – they’ve escaped, Goddamn it.’
‘Have a little faith,’ said Kate. She hurried toward the open door and I followed her, cupping my hand over my swollen mouth to shield it from the wind.
Red tail lights flared, and I heard the whoomph of the Explorer’s engine starting up. Jack was driving. Victor was lolling in the passenger seat, his face against the window. I thought at first that he was staring at me but then I realized that he was blindly staring at nothing at all.
The Explorer backed up, and then turned, heading for the highway.
‘All right, I have faith,’ I said. ‘But how are we going to stop them now?’
But Kate laid one hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Look.’
I blinked through the thickly billowing snow. As the Explorer sped toward the entrance gates, a host of figures appeared in its headlights, blocking its way. More than fifty of them now, maybe seventy or eighty, and more of them approaching out of the gloom. Above the bellowing of the Explorer’s engine, that high, eerie screaming was even more penetrating than ever.
The Explorer skidded to a halt, with its exhaust fuming red. The figures started slowly to encircle it. The Westerlunds, and the Philips, and the Cesarettis, in different moments from their lives – when they were happy, when they were suffering, when they were close to death. I thought: why doesn’t Jack simply run them down? But then I saw him twisting around in the driver’s seat, trying to back up, and I realized that he was terrified of them. If he tried to run them down, he would have to admit to himself that they were here, that they were real, and that they wanted revenge for what he and Victor had done to them. Either that, or he knew that they were dead already, and he couldn’t kill them a second time.
The Explorer’s tires slithered and whinnied but the driveway was too icy, and he succeeded only in sliding diagonally toward the ditch.
He slammed the Explorer into drive, and then reverse, and then drive, and then reverse, and at last the SUV began to creep backward. He had only traveled a few yards, however, when I heard a sharp, crackling noise, and saw a shower of yellow sparks. A power line crossed over the driveway, and its glass insulators had shattered, so that the cable had dropped down on to the snow. It was spitting and writhing like an angry anaconda.
The Explorer’s rear wheels ran right over the power line, but as it passed under the front wheels, it became entangled with the driveshaft. There was a loud thump, and the Explorer was brought to a halt, with sparks gushing out from under its wheel arches.
The ghostly figures remained where they were, but now I realized that they had stopped screaming. All I could hear now was the venomous fizzing of the power line, and the revving of the Explorer’s engine, as Jack tried desperately to drag it free.
Kate gripped my hand. Her own fingers were very cold. ‘They can’t escape, Gideon, whatever they do.’
I glanced at her. For some reason, the movement of her lips didn’t quite match what she was saying, as if her words had been dubbed. I felt as if she were two or three seconds ahead of me; or maybe two or three seconds behind.
The Explorer’s engine screamed again, but the power line was far too securely wound around the driveshaft, and Jack was only pulling it tighter.
Nearly a minute passed, with the Explorer just ticking over. By the light that was coming from the open door of the house behind me, I could see Victor and Jack, sitting side by side behind the snow-blurred windshield like two accused men sitting in the dock. In a way, this garden was now a courtroom, where they were being judged for the crimes that they had committed.
Off to my right, about fifty yards away, I saw two figures struggling. I shielded my eyes with my hand, and realized that they were Jack and Felicia, and that Jack was dragging Felicia away, just as I had seen him dragging her away at the Wasa Museum in Stockholm. Both figures moved in a jerky, fitful fashion, as if they were characters in a home movie, or a flicker book. But I clearly recognized both of them. Jack was wearing his black coat and Felicia was wearing her yellow windbreaker.
I looked back at the Explorer. The real Jack was still sitting behind the wheel, but I could see that he was staring at the image of himself that was pulling Felicia through the snow. He looked ghastly. His face was enamel-white, like a Venetian plague doctor’s mask.
Felicia let out a blurry scream, and the image of Jack twisted her around and threw her face first on to the ground. He knelt on her back, pinning her down, and then he grasped her neck with both hands and started to throttle her.
I shouted, ‘Hey!’ and made a move toward them, but Kate quickly snatched at my sleeve.
‘Just watch,’ she said. Now that you’re here, they can show you their stories. But they’re only stories. There’s nothing you can do to change them.’
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a light dancing, and when I turned around, there was Helena Philips, blazing from the waist upward. She was howling rather than screaming, while a tall flame flapped from the top of her head, and her ears shriveled up. Another image of Jack was standing close beside her, with his hand raised to protect his face from the heat.
All around us, the ghosts of the Westerlunds and the Cesarettis and the Philips were playing out their different scenarios of pain and desperation. The snow-filled garden had become a theater of agonizing memories. There was Jack, again and again, strangling and mutilating and burning. There was Victor, too, pacing impatiently and vengefully around every act of torture, almost as if he were angry that he couldn’t make his victims suffer more.
Off to my left, I saw David Philips with his hands clasped over his eyes, and Amalea, sewn to her mattress, circling through the snow as if she were actually floating on the Grand Canal. I saw Elsa, drowned; and eerily, high in the air, hanging from nothing at all, I saw Enrico and Salvina, slowly rotating from a chandelier that wasn’t there. Below them, though, stood Jack, with a coiled rope over his shoulder, his head raised, and a smile on his face that was almost beatific; and not far away, Victor, although Victor wasn’t looking up at them. Victor was looking at something else that wasn’t there: one of the Cesarettis’ antique vases, perhaps, or the view out on to the Campo San Polo. He had the creepiest look of satisfaction on his face.
The ghosts weren’t screaming any longer, but the garden was filled with intermittent cries and shouts and sobbing, and the awful shuffling of people fighting for their lives.
I put my arm around Kate and watched all these scenes with a growing feeling of helplessness and rage. There was nothing I could do to save these families now. Their fathers had damned them all, and Victor Solway had made sure they had all gone to hell. But I was sure of one thing: I was going to see Victor and Jack convicted for what they had done, and pay the price for it.
After a few minutes, one after another, the jerky images faded. The last thing I saw was the yellow of Felicia’s windbreaker, like a sunflower seen through a misted-up window. Eventually, only the figures remained, wordless and watchful.
There was a long, long pause, while the Explorer’s engine continued to tick over. Then I saw the driver’s door open. I thought: Jesus – he’s not going to try to climb out? If he does, he’d better jump way clear. Those feeder lines carry more than four thousand volts.
It was then that I saw his arm waving, as if he were groping to find his way. The singing must have blinded him, too. That’s why the families had stopped. Now, patient and unmoving, they were waiting for him to bring himself his own retribution.
‘You scum!’ he screamed. ‘Couldn’t even beat me face to face, could you? Didn’t have the balls! Didn’t have the fucking cojones!’
Maybe he did it on purpose. You can never tell what a man like that might be thinking. Pain. Death. I’ve given them to plenty of other people, maybe it’s time I found out for myself what an agonizing death really feels like.
He stepped down on to the driveway while he was still holding the door handle, and he exploded, blown into tattered black shreds. Electricity jumped and spat like firecrackers all around the outline of the Explorer, and for a split second the interior was all lit up. I saw Victor Solway, his blind eyes bulging, his lips stretched back as if he were laughing at some monstrous joke.
Then, with a deafening bang, the Explorer’s fuel tank blew up. The vehicle was thrown into the air and crashed on to its side, where it lay furiously blazing.
‘Jesus,’ I said. I felt utter shock. But the crowd of figures stood quite still and watched the inferno in silence, as if they were doing nothing more than burning last year’s leaves. One of the apparitions of Tilda Westerlund turned toward us – the one whose cheeks were bruised, and whose lips had been split apart.
‘What are they going to do now?’ I asked Kate.
‘They’re leaving now. They came here to get justice, no more than that.’
One by one, the assembled company turned away from us, into the falling snow, and as they turned away, they vanished, as if they had been images in mirrors, turned sideways. Within a few seconds, they were all gone.
I turned to Kate and said, ‘Will they be at peace now? I know they don’t have proper resting-places.’
‘At peace? I don’t think anybody who ever lived is ever at peace.’
‘First things first, though,’ I told her. ‘Let’s go rescue Margot.’
*
It was dark in the house, because the power was out, but we went through to the kitchen and found half a dozen large white candles in a drawer. We lit one each and went back down to the cellar. ‘Margot,’ I said, as I came down the steps, ‘your knight in shining armor has arrived.’
‘What was that terrible noise?’
‘Victor and Jack had a little car trouble. A power line came down, got itself wrapped around their wheels.’
I tugged off her blindfold and loosened the cords around her wrists.
‘Oh God, Lalo,’ she said. ‘I thought they were going to kill me.’
‘You don’t have to worry about them now. They were both electrocuted. They’re dead. Both of them.’
‘You’re not serious. Dead?’
I knelt down to untie Margot’s ankles. Kate said, ‘It was no more than they deserved, believe me.’
‘Are you OK, Margot?’ I asked her.
‘Stiff. Sore. Dying to go to the bathroom. But thank you for saving me. Thank you so, so much! You’re a superhero.’
I stood up, and turned to Kate. ‘I guess I’d better call the police. And the fire department. And the power company, too.’
Kate said, ‘Not yet. There’s something else I want you to do first. I want you to find the proof that Victor and Jack were murderers. I want to show them up for what they were. Think of all the relatives and friends who never found out what happened to the families they killed. There should be a pick in the garden shed.’
‘You want me to do it? We’re talking about your parents here.’
She nodded. ‘They disappeared, and everybody presumed they were dead, but nobody ever knew where they went. Now we know.’
I hunkered down again. Now that I knew what I was looking for, I could see that there was a rough rectangle of different colored cement in the center of the floor.
I didn’t have to ask Kate if she was sure that she really wanted me to do this. If the remains of my parents had been lying under this floor, I would have wanted to dig them up, too, and give them the kind of funeral they deserved.
*
I found a rusty pick in the garden shed, and carried it back into the house, and after tying my handkerchief around my nose and mouth, attacked the cellar floor with it.
Lucky for me, the cement had been mixed very dry, and most of it broke up into crumbly lumps. All the same, it took me over four hours of hacking at it before I eventually struck the top of a large wooden box, and I was sweaty and gritty and exhausted.
I wearily trudged up the cellar steps and found Kate and Margot in the living room. Margot was asleep on one of the couches, covered in an overcoat, while Kate was standing by the window, watching the sky gradually grow lighter. The gardens were still covered in snow, but it was going to be a sharp, sunny day.
I came up to her and put my arms around her. ‘I think I’ve found them,’ I said. ‘There’s a big wooden box under the floor, but I haven’t opened it up yet.’
She nodded. ‘At least they can have a decent burial. Not like all of those other poor people.’
The sun was shining through one of the beech hedges along the driveway, so that it looked as if it were on fire.
‘We made it, anyhow,’ said Kate. She looked at her watch. ‘Look —eight o’clock. Less than an hour to spare.’
‘Less than an hour to spare before what?’
She turned around and kissed me. ‘You won’t be sad, will you?’
‘Sad? Why should I be sad?’
‘The air tickets … Pearl bought them for me. And the keys … she took them out of Victor’s desk. She used to invite herself in to his apartment for a drink, and borrowed them when he wasn’t looking.’
‘Wily old bird, that Pearl, isn’t she?’
Kate smiled. ‘There were certain things I couldn’t do. I didn’t have a credit card anymore. And I couldn’t take anything from Victor’s apartment.’
‘Well, I thought you lived there, but when I took a look around, it was pretty obvious that you didn’t.’
‘I haven’t lived there in three years, Gideon. Three years exactly, to the day.’
‘But you told me you couldn’t leave.’
‘It wasn’t the apartment I couldn’t leave. It was Victor. You can be tied to somebody by hatred, just as much as you can be tied to them by love. I was determined that he wasn’t going to get away with what he’d done to Michael, or the child who was murdered for Michael’s new heart. Or what he’d done to my parents. Or to me.’
Kate looked at me with those rainy gray eyes, and suddenly they were shining with tears. ‘We all have three years to make amends. Three turnings of the seasons to make things right. Don’t ask me why.’
‘Amends? Amends for what?’
‘Anything you like. Some people don’t bother to make amends at all. Some people only do very small things, like help their loved ones to find a lost piece of jewelry, or a photograph, or a diary. Some people simply make their presence felt, so that they can bring comfort to those they’ve left behind.
‘But I wanted to make sure that Victor was punished. That was the hold he had over me. I couldn’t accuse him myself, as you know. I couldn’t find any evidence, and I couldn’t find anybody to help me. Not until I saw you looking out of your window, and realized that you could see me.’
‘Of course I could see you,’ I told her. ‘I can still see you. I can feel you, too, goddammit. You’re real. Other people can see you, too.’
‘When I’m with you, yes – because you have the gift. But otherwise, no. And you know it, don’t you? You’ve known it for a long time.’
‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘I didn’t want to believe it. But, yes. But if I can see you, and feel you, and talk to you, what difference does it make?’
‘Gideon, I’m the same as them. I’m the same as the Westerlunds and the Philips and the Cesarettis.’
‘But we’re lovers, Kate. How can we be lovers, if you don’t exist? How can we possibly be lovers if you’re—?’ I couldn’t bring myself to say the word ‘dead’ without tipping myself right over the edge of human reason.
Kate led me over to the window seat. I sat down and grasped both of her hands so that I could feel how real her fingers were, and so that she couldn’t pull away from me. If I let her walk out of that door, who knows if I would ever see her again?
‘Gideon – I can’t stay here any longer. No matter how much I want to.’
‘Who says? God?’
Outside, the whole garden sparkled. ‘You still have your gift, Gideon. You can help scores of other people, too. So many murders go unpunished. You can help the victims to get justice – just like you did for the Westerlunds and the Cesarettis and the Philips – and the Kilners, too.’
‘The Kilners?’
‘My parents. Henry and Joyce Kilner. Victor killed them because they refused to pay for a second heart transplant for poor little Michael. And he killed me, too, because I persuaded them not to. I couldn’t get any answer from them, on the phone, so I came up here looking for them. Jack Friendly was waiting for me, with a hammer.’
‘All right,’ I said. I was trembling with stress, and with exhaustion. ‘Supposing I accept that you’re some kind of spirit? Is that what you are, some kind of spirit? You say that you were given three years to put things right, which is what you’ve managed to do. But what happens after that? Who’s to say you can’t stay around?’
‘Gideon, I died!’
‘I don’t care! So long as I can see you and feel you, so long as we can go on being lovers, what difference does it make? I have a gift, and I can use it to help other people. But who says I can’t use it to get what I want, too? And what I want, Kate, is you!’
She looked at me for a very long time without saying anything. Then she turned and looked out at the snow. The Explorer had burned out now, until it was nothing more than a blackened skeleton, although brown smoke was still drifting across the driveway.
‘I don’t know, darling,’ she said. ‘I just don’t know what happens now. I’m no more of an expert on the world beyond than you are.’
‘Then stay,’ I told her.
The sunshine in the garden was dazzling now. I kissed Kate’s hair and I kept my arms tightly around her waist, so that I could feel her breathing. As long as I kept her close like this, there was no way that she could leave me.
*
I don’t know how long it took me to fall asleep. They say that the average when you’re really tired is seven minutes. But I slept, and I dreamed that Kate and I were walking through the gardens of Drottningholm, in Sweden, and that the air was filled with shining snow, like thistledown.
Somebody was shaking my arm. At first I thought it was one of the palace guides, trying to tell me that we were walking the wrong way, but then I opened my eyes and it was Margot.
‘Margot? What’s wrong?’
‘You were talking in your sleep. I just wanted to make sure that you were OK.’
I blinked, and looked around the living room. ‘I’m fine. Jesus, it’s cold in here. Where’s Kate?’
‘Kate? I haven’t seen Kate.’
I sat up. ‘What do you mean? She was here only a couple of minutes ago. She was sitting right here.’
Margot said, ‘If she was, she’s not here now. I didn’t see her.’
I stood up, and went to the front door, and opened it. The garden was deserted, and there were no footprints in the freshly fallen snow.
‘She’s gone,’ I said.
‘Maybe she went to get some supplies,’ Margot suggested.
‘Maybe.’
I went back into the house and closed the door.
*
It took me another forty minutes to clear the cement from the lid of the wooden box. When I managed to lever it open, there was a soft exhalation of gasses, like somebody with very bad morning breath. Inside, closely packed together, there were human thigh bones and arm bones and ribs and pelvises, as well as mummified flesh the color of smoked bacon rind.
So this is what Victor and Jack had done with Kate’s parents. Terrorized them, tortured them, and forced them to sign over their house. Then he had killed them, and cemented them under their own cellar floor.
There were two skulls, one at each end of the box, and both of them still had skin and hair on them, although their eyes had been reduced to the size and color of pickled walnuts. They were both grinning at me, as if they were pleased to see me.
I didn’t want to disturb the remains, because the state police would want to see them exactly as I had found them. But as I lifted away the lid, one of the skulls rolled sideways, and I realized that there was a third skull underneath it. A skull with straight, ash-blonde hair, still clogged at the back with black dried blood.
‘Kate,’ I said. My voice sounded like somebody else altogether.
*
We got back to the city around 5:00 p.m., in the middle of the rush hour. I dropped Margot home, and then I took Henry’s Malibu back. He was deeply relieved to see that it was undented, although he had been forced to take the commuter train back to New Rochelle.
‘You look like shit,’ he told me. ‘Also, I hate to tell you this, but you smell like shit, too. Don’t you musicians use a deodorant?’
‘I just exhumed three bodies,’ I told him.
‘Sure you did. You owe me a steak dinner at Angelo & Maxie’s.’
*
I paid a visit to Pearl, upstairs. She was sitting in her pink bathrobe playing solitaire.
‘How did it go?’ she asked me. Cigarette smoke trailed across the room, and shuddered when it reached the open window, like a ghost.
‘Good. I guess things worked out the way they were supposed to.’
Pearl nodded toward the painting on the easel. ‘I thought they had.’
I walked around and took a look. The painting was finished, but the only person in it was Pearl. Everybody else had gone, as they had in the snow. Turned around, like mirrors turned sideways, and vanished.
‘Where do you think people go, when they die?’ I asked her. ‘I mean, what do you think it’s like?’
Pearl took a long drag at her cigarette, with one eye closed against the smoke. ‘It’s just like being in the movies, that’s what they tell me, except that you’re in the movie instead of the audience. Don’t you worry, you’ll find out for yourself one day. We all do.’
She paused, and then she said, ‘You miss her, don’t you?’
I nodded. I suddenly found myself very close to tears.
Pearl said, ‘Very strange thing, love. When you don’t have it, it hurts. And when you do, it hurts like hell.’
I went back downstairs. Sitting outside my door, waiting patiently, was Malkin. She mewed when she saw me, and she followed me inside.
‘You hungry?’ I asked her, as she wound herself persuasively around my ankles. ‘Of course you’re hungry. Stupid question.’
But it’s so goddamned difficult to open a can of anchovies when you’re crying.