Black House (28 page)

“I guess my head’s as clear as I can expect today,” he says, and goes around the front of Mrs. Morton’s old brown Toyota. There’s a brown bag on the passenger seat with leafy stuff poking out of it. Jack moves it to the middle, then sits down.

“I don’t know if the early bird gets the worm,” she says, driving on, “but the early shopper gets the best greens at Roy’s, I can tell you that. Also, I like to get there before the layabouts.”

“Layabouts, Mrs. Morton?”

She gives him her best suspicious look, eyes cutting to the side, right corner of her mouth quirked down as if at the taste of something sour.

“Take up space at the lunch counter and talk about the Fisherman this and the Fisherman that. Who he might be,
what
he might be—a Swede or a Pole or an Irish—and of course what they’ll do to him when he’s caught, which he would have been long ago if anyone but that nummie-squarehead Dale Gilbertson was in charge of things. So says they. Easy to take charge when you got your ass cozied down on one of Roy Soderholm’s stools, cuppa coffee in one hand and a sinker in the other. So thinks I. Course, half of ’em’s also got the unemployment check in their back pockets, but they won’t talk about that. My father used to say, ‘Show me a man who’s too good to hay in July and I’ll show you a man that won’t turn a hand the rest of the year, neither.’ ”

Jack settles in the passenger bucket, knees against the dash, and watches the road unroll. They’ll be back in no time. His pants are starting to dry and he feels oddly at peace. The nice thing about Elvena Morton is that you don’t have to hold up your end of the conversation, because she is glad to take care of everything. Another Lily-ism occurs to him. Of a very talkative person (Uncle Morgan, for instance), she was apt to say that So-and-so’s tongue was “hung in the middle and running on both ends.”

He grins a little, and raises a casual hand to hide his mouth from Mrs. M. She’d ask him what was so funny, and what would he tell her? That he had just been thinking her tongue was hung in the middle? But it’s also funny how the thoughts and memories are flooding back. Did he just yesterday try to call his mother, forgetting she was dead? That now seems like something he might have done in a different life. Maybe it
was
a different life. God knows he doesn’t seem like the same man who swung his legs out of bed this morning, wearily, and with a feeling best described as doomish. He feels fully alive for the first time since . . . well, since Dale first brought him out this very same road, he supposes, and showed him the nice little place that had once belonged to Dale’s father.

Elvena Morton, meanwhile, rolls on.

“Although I also admit that I take any excuse to get out of the house when he starts with the Mad Mongoloid,” she says. The Mad Mongoloid is Mrs. Morton’s term for Henry’s Wisconsin Rat persona. Jack nods understanding, not knowing that before many hours are passed, he will be meeting a fellow nicknamed the Mad Hungarian. Life’s little coincidences.

“It’s always early in the morning that he takes it into his head to do the Mad Mongoloid, and I’ve told him, ‘Henry, if you have to scream like that and say awful things and then play that awful music by kids who never should have been let near a
tuba,
let alone an
electrical guitar,
why do you do it in the morning when you know it spoils you for the whole day?’ And it does, he gets a headache four times out of every five he pretends to be the Mad Mongoloid and by afternoon he’s lying in his bedroom with an icebag on his poor forehead and not a bite of lunch will he take on those days, neither. Sometimes his supper will be gone when I check the next day—I always leave it in the same place in the refrigerator, unless he tells me he wants to cook himself—but half the time it’s still there and even when it’s gone I think that sometimes he just tips it down the garbage disposer.”

Jack grunts. It’s all he has to do. Her words wash over him and he thinks of how he will put the sneaker in a Baggie, handling it with the fire tongs, and when he turns it over at the police station, the chain of evidence will begin. He’s thinking about how he needs to make sure there’s nothing else in the sneaker box, and check the wrapping paper. He also wants to check those sugar packets. Maybe there’s a restaurant name printed under the bird pictures. It’s a longshot, but—

“And
he
says, ‘Mrs. M., I can’t help it. Some days I just wake up as the Rat. And although I pay for it later, there’s such joy in it while the fit is on me. Such total
joy.
’ And I asked him, I said, ‘How can there be joy in music about children wanting to kill their parents and eat fetuses and have sex with animals’—as one of those songs really
was
about, Jack, I heard it clear as day—‘and all of that?’ I asked him, and he said— Uhhp, here we are.”

They have indeed reached the driveway leading to Henry’s house. A quarter of a mile further along is the roof of Jack’s own place. His Ram pickup twinkles serenely in the driveway. He can’t see his porch, most certainly can’t see the horror that lies upon its boards, waiting for someone to clean it up. To clean it up in the name of decency.

“I
could
run you all the way up,” she says. “Why don’t I just do that?”

Jack, thinking of the sneaker and the rotten baloney smell hanging around it, smiles, shakes his head, and quickly opens the passenger door. “Guess I need to do a little more thinking after all,” he says.

She looks at him with that expression of discontented suspicion which is, Jack suspects, love. She knows that Jack has brightened Henry Leyden’s life, and for that alone he believes she loves him. He likes to hope so, anyway. It occurs to him that she never mentioned the baseball cap he’s holding, but why would she? In this part of the world, every man’s got at least four.

He starts up the road, hair flopping (his days of styled cuts at Chez-Chez on Rodeo Drive are long behind him now—this is the Coulee Country, and when he thinks of it at all, he gets his hair cut by old Herb Roeper down on Chase Street next to the Amvets), his gait as loose and lanky as a boy’s. Mrs. Morton leans out her window and calls after him. “Change out of those jeans, Jack! The minute you get back! Don’t let them dry on you! That’s how arthritis starts!”

He raises a hand without turning and calls back, “Right!”

Five minutes later, he’s walking up his own driveway again. At least temporarily, the fear and depression have been burned out of him. The ecstasy as well, which is a relief. The last thing a coppiceman needs is to go charging through an investigation in a state of ecstasy.

As he sights the box on the porch—and the wrapping paper, and the feathers, and the ever-popular child’s sneaker, can’t forget that—Jack’s mind turns back to Mrs. Morton quoting that great sage Henry Leyden.

I can’t help it. Some days I just wake up as the Rat. And although I pay for it later, there’s such joy in it while the fit is on me. Such total
joy.

Total joy. Jack has felt this from time to time as a detective, sometimes while investigating a crime scene, more often while questioning a witness who knows more than he or she is telling . . . and this is something Jack Sawyer almost always knows, something he smells. He supposes carpenters feel that joy when they are carpentering particularly well, sculptors when they’re having a good nose or chin day, architects when the lines are landing on their blueprints just right. The only problem is, someone in French Landing (maybe one of the surrounding towns, but Jack is guessing French Landing) gets that feeling of joy by killing children and eating parts of their little bodies.

Someone in French Landing is, more and more frequently, waking up as the Fisherman.

Jack goes into his house by the back door. He stops in the kitchen for the box of large-size Baggies, a couple of wastebasket liners, a dustpan, and the whisk broom. He opens the refrigerator’s icemaker compartment and loads about half the cubes into one of the plastic liners—as far as Jack Sawyer is concerned, Irma Freneau’s poor foot has reached its maximum state of decay.

He ducks into his study, where he grabs a yellow legal pad, a black marker, and a ballpoint pen. In the living room he gets the shorter set of fire tongs. And by the time he steps back onto the porch, he has pretty much put his secret identity as Jack Sawyer aside.

I am COPPICEMAN,
he thinks, smiling.
Defender of the American Way, friend of the lame, the halt, and the dead.

Then, as he looks down at the sneaker, surrounded by its pitiful little cloud of stink, the smile fades. He feels some of the tremendous mystery we felt when we first came upon Irma in the wreckage of the abandoned restaurant. He will do his absolute best to honor this remnant, just as we did our best to honor the child. He thinks of autopsies he has attended, of the true solemnity that lurks behind the jokes and butcher-shop crudities.

“Irma, is it you?” he asks quietly. “If it is, you help me, now. Talk to me. This is the time for the dead to help the living.” Without thinking about it, Jack kisses his fingers and blows the kiss down toward the sneaker. He thinks,
I’d like to kill the man—or the thing—that did this. String him up alive and screaming while he filled his pants. Send him out in the stink of his own dirt.

But such thoughts are not honorable, and he banishes them.

The first Baggie is for the sneaker with the remains of the foot inside it. Use the tongs. Zip it closed. Mark the date on the Baggie with the marker. Note the nature of the evidence on the pad with the ballpoint. Put it in the wastebasket liner with the ice in it.

The second is for the cap. No need for the tongs here; he’s already handled the item. He puts it in the Baggie. Zips it closed. Marks the date, notes the nature of the evidence on the pad.

The third bag is for the brown wrapping paper. He holds it up for a moment in the tongs, examining the bogus bird stamps.
MANUFACTURED BY DOMINO
is printed below each picture, but that’s all. No restaurant name, nothing of that sort. Into the Baggie. Zip it closed. Mark the date. Note the nature of the evidence.

He sweeps up the feathers and puts them in a fourth Baggie. There are more feathers in the box. He picks the box up with the tongs, dumps the feathers inside onto the dustpan, and then his heart takes a sudden hard leap in his chest, seeming to knock against the left side of his rib cage like a fist. Something is written on the box’s bottom. The same Sharpie marker has been used to make the same straggling letters. And whoever wrote this knew who he was writing
to.
Not the outer Jack Sawyer, or else he—the Fisherman—would have no doubt called him Hollywood.

This message is addressed to the inner man, and to the child who was here before Jack “Hollywood” Sawyer was ever thought of.

Try Ed’s Eats and Dogs, coppiceman. Your fiend,

THE FISHERMAN.

“Your fiend,” Jack murmurs. “Yes.” He picks up the box with the tongs and puts it into the second wastebasket liner; he doesn’t have any Baggies quite big enough for it. Then he gathers all the evidence beside him in a neat little pile. This stuff always looks the same, at once grisly and prosaic, like the kind of photographs you used to see in those true-crime magazines.

He goes inside and dials Henry’s number. He’s afraid he’ll get Mrs. Morton, but it turns out to be Henry instead, thank God. His current fit of Rat-ism has apparently passed, although there’s a residue; even over the phone Jack can hear the faint thump and bray of “electrical guitars.”

He knows Ed’s Eats well, Henry says, but why in the world would
Jack
want to know about a place like that? “It’s nothing but a wreck now; Ed Gilbertson died quite a time ago and there are people in French Landing who’d call that a blessing, Jack. The place was a ptomaine palace if ever there was one. A gut-ache waiting to happen. You’d have expected the board of health to shut him down, but Ed knew people. Dale Gilbertson, for one.”

“The two of them related?” Jack asks, and when Henry replies “Fuck, yeah,” something his friend would never say in the ordinary course of things, Jack understands that while Henry may have avoided a migraine this time, that Rat is still running in his head. Jack has heard similar bits of George Rathbun pop out from time to time, unexpected fat exultations from Henry’s slim throat, and there is the way Henry often says good-bye, throwing a
Ding-dong
or
Ivey-divey
over his shoulder: that’s just the Sheik, the Shake, the Shook coming up for air.

“Where exactly is it?” Jack asks.

“That’s hard to say,” Henry replies. He now sounds a bit testy. “Out by the farm equipment place . . . Goltz’s? As I recall, the driveway’s so long you might as well call it an access road. And if there was ever a sign, it’s long gone. When Ed Gilbertson sold his last microbe-infested chili dog, Jack, you were probably in the first grade. What’s all this about?”

Jack knows that what he’s thinking of doing is ridiculous by normal investigatory standards—you don’t invite a John Q. to a crime scene, especially not a murder scene—but this is no normal investigation. He has one piece of bagged evidence that he recovered in another world, how’s that for abnormal? Of course he can find the long-defunct Ed’s Eats; someone at Goltz’s will no doubt point him right at it. But—

“The Fisherman just sent me one of Irma Freneau’s sneakers,” Jack says. “With Irma’s foot still inside it.”

Henry’s initial response is a deep, sharp intake of breath.

“Henry? Are you all right?”

“Yes.” Henry’s voice is shocked but steady. “How terrible for the girl and her mother.” He pauses. “And for you. For Dale.” Another pause. “For this town.”

“Yes.”

“Jack, do you want me to take you to Ed’s?”

Henry can do that, Jack knows. Easy as pie. Ivey-divey. And let’s get real—why did he call Henry in the first place?

“Yes,” he says.

“Have you called the police?”

“No.”

He’ll ask me why not, and what will I say? That I don’t want Bobby Dulac, Tom Lund, and the rest of them tromping around out there, mixing their scents with the doer’s scent, until I get a chance to smell for myself? That I don’t trust a mother’s son of them not to fuck things up, and that includes Dale himself?