Black House (36 page)

Green manages to wheeze in something like a cubic inch of air.

“When your wind starts to come back, get out of here. Crawl, if you have to. Go back to your car and drive away. And for God’s sake, make it snappy, or our friend here is likely to put you in a wheelchair for the rest of your life.”

Slowly, Wendell Green gets to his knees, takes another noisy sip of oxygen, and levers himself semi-upright. He waggles one open hand at them, but his meaning is unclear. He could be telling Beezer and Jack to stay away from him, or that he will trouble them no further, or both. His trunk tilted over his belt, his hands pressed to his stomach, Green stumbles around the side of the building.

“I guess I oughta thank you,” Beezer says. “You let me keep my promise to my old lady. But I have to say, Wendell Green is one guy I’d really like to deconstruct.”

“Man,” Jack says, “I wasn’t sure if I could get in before you did.”

“It’s true, my restraint was crumbling.”

Both men smile. “Beezer St. Pierre,” Beezer says, and sticks out a hand.

“Jack Sawyer.” Jack takes his hand and experiences no more than a second of pain.

“Are you gonna let the state guys do all the work, or will you keep going on your own?”

“What do you think?” Jack says.

“If you ever need any help, or you want reinforcements, all you have to do is ask. Because I do want to get this son of a bitch, and I figure you have a better chance of finding him than anyone else.”

On the drive back to Norway Valley, Henry says, “Oh, Wendell took a picture of the body, all right. When you came out of the building and went to your truck, I heard someone take a couple of pictures, but I thought it might have been Dale. Then I heard it again when you and Dale were inside with Bobby Dulac, and I realized someone was taking a picture of
me
!
Well, now,
I say to myself,
this must be Mr. Wendell Green,
and I told him to come out from behind the wall. That’s when those people charged out, yelling and screaming. As soon as that happened, I heard Mr. Green trot around from the side, go into the building, and shoot a few pictures. Then he sneaked out and stood by the side of the building, which is where your friend Beezer caught up with him and took care of things. Beezer is a remarkable fellow, isn’t he?”

“Henry, were you going to
tell
me about this?”

“Of course, but you were running around all over the place, and I knew Wendell Green wasn’t going to leave until he was thrown out. I’ll never read another word he writes. Never.”

“Same here,” Jack says.

“But you’re not giving up on the Fisherman, are you? In spite of what that pompous state cop said.”

“I can’t give up now. To tell you the truth, I think those waking dreams I mentioned yesterday were connected to this case.”

“
I
vey
-di
vey. Now, let’s get back to Beezer. Didn’t I hear him say he wanted to ‘deconstruct’ Wendell?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“He must be a fascinating man. I gather from my nephew that the Thunder Five spends Saturday afternoons and evenings in the Sand Bar. Next week, maybe I’ll start up Rhoda’s old car and drive to Centralia, have a few beers and a nice gab with Mr. St. Pierre. I’m sure he has interesting taste in music.”

“You want to drive to Centralia?” Jack stares at Henry, whose only concession to the absurdity of this suggestion is a little smile.

“Blind people can drive perfectly well,” Henry says. “Probably, they can drive better than most sighted people. Ray Charles can, anyhow.”

“Come on, Henry. Why would you think Ray Charles can drive a car?”

“Why, you ask? Because one night in Seattle, this was, oh, forty years ago, back when I had a gig at KIRO, Ray took me out for a spin. Smooth as Lady Godiva’s backside. No trouble at all. We stuck to the side roads, of course, but Ray got up to fifty-five, I’m pretty sure.”

“Assuming this really happened, weren’t you scared?”

“Scared? Of course not. I was his navigator. I certainly don’t think I’d have a problem navigating to Centralia along this sleepy stretch of backcountry highway. The only reason blind people don’t drive is that other people won’t let them. It’s a power issue. They want us to stay marginalized. Beezer St. Pierre would understand perfectly.”

“And here I was, thinking I was going to visit the madhouse this afternoon,” Jack says.

14

A
T THE TOP
of the steep hill between Norway Valley and Arden, the zigzag, hairpin turns of Highway 93, now narrowed to two lanes, straighten out for the long, ski-slope descent into the town, and on the eastern side of the highway, the hilltop widens into a grassy plateau. Two weatherbeaten red picnic tables wait for those who choose to stop for a few minutes and appreciate the spectacular view. A patchwork of quilted farms stretches out over fifteen miles of gentle landscape, not quite flat, threaded with streams and country roads. A solid row of bumpy, blue-green hills form the horizon. In the immense sky, sun-washed white clouds hang like fresh laundry.

Fred Marshall steers his Ford Explorer onto the gravel shoulder, comes to a halt, and says, “Let me show you something.”

When he climbed into the Explorer at his farmhouse, Jack was carrying a slightly worn black leather briefcase, and the case is now lying flat across his knees. Jack’s father’s initials, P.S.S., for Philip Stevenson Sawyer, are stamped in gold beside the handle at the top of the case. Fred has glanced curiously at the briefcase a couple of times, but has not asked about it, and Jack has volunteered nothing. There will be time for show-and-tell, Jack thinks, after he talks to Judy Marshall. Fred gets out of the car, and Jack slides his father’s old briefcase behind his legs and props it against the seat before he follows the other man across the pliant grass. When they reach the first of the picnic tables, Fred gestures toward the landscape. “We don’t have a lot of what you could call tourist attractions around here, but this is pretty good, isn’t it?”

“It’s very beautiful,” Jack says. “But I think everything here is beautiful.”

“Judy really likes this view. Whenever we go over to Arden on a decent day, she has to stop here and get out of the car, relax and look around for a while. You know, sort of store up on the important things before getting back into the grind. Me, sometimes I get impatient and think, Come on, you’ve seen that view a thousand times, I have to get back to work, but I’m a guy, right? So every time we turn in here and sit down for a few minutes, I realize my wife knows more than I do and I should just listen to what she says.”

Jack smiles and sits down at the bench, waiting for the rest of it. Since picking him up, Fred Marshall has spoken only two or three sentences of gratitude, but it is clear that he has chosen this place to get something off his chest.

“I went over to the hospital this morning, and she—well, she’s
different.
To look at her, to talk to her, you’d have to say she’s in much better shape than yesterday. Even though she’s still worried sick about Tyler, it’s
different.
Do you think that could be due to the medication? I don’t even know what they’re giving her.”

“Can you have a normal conversation with her?”

“From time to time, yeah. For instance, this morning she was telling me about a story in yesterday’s paper on a little girl from La Riviere who nearly took third place in the statewide spelling bee, except she couldn’t spell this crazy word nobody ever heard of.
Popoplax,
or something like that.”

“Opopanax,” Jack says. He sounds like he has a fishbone caught in his throat.

“You saw that story, too? That’s interesting, you both picking up on that word. Kind of gave her a kick. She asked the nurses to find out what it meant, and one of them looked it up in a couple of dictionaries. Couldn’t find it.”

Jack had found the word in his
Concise Oxford Dictionary;
its literal meaning was unimportant. “That’s probably the definition of
opopanax,
” Jack says. “ ‘1. A word not to be found in the dictionary. 2. A fearful mystery.’ ”

“Hah!” Fred Marshall has been moving nervously around the lookout area, and now he stations himself beside Jack, whose upward glance finds the other man surveying the long panorama. “Maybe that is what it means.” Fred’s eyes remain fixed on the landscape. He is still not quite ready, but he is making progress. “It was great to see her interested in something like that, a tiny little item in the
Herald
.
.
.
”

He wipes tears from his eyes and takes a step toward the horizon. When he turns around, he looks directly at Jack. “Uh, before you meet Judy, I want to tell you a few things about her. Trouble is, I don’t know how this is going to sound to you. Even to me, it sounds . . . I don’t know.”

“Give it a try,” Jack says.

Fred says, “Okay,” knits his fingers together, and bows his head. Then he looks up again, and his eyes are as vulnerable as a baby’s. “Ahhh . . . I don’t know how to put this. Okay, I’ll just say it. With part of my brain, I think Judy
knows
something. Anyhow, I want to think that. On the other hand, I don’t want to fool myself into believing that just because she seems to be better, she can’t be crazy anymore. But I do want to believe that. Boy oh boy, do I ever.”

“Believe that she knows something.” The eerie feeling aroused by
opopanax
diminishes before this validation of his theory.

“Something that isn’t even real clear to her,” Fred says. “But do you remember? She knew Ty was gone even before I told her.”

He gives Jack an anguished look and steps away. He knocks his fists together and stares at the ground. Another internal barrier topples before his need to explain his dilemma.

“Okay, look. This is what you have to understand about Judy. She’s a special person. All right, a lot of guys would say their wives are special, but Judy’s special in a special way. First of all, she’s sort of amazingly beautiful, but that’s not even what I’m talking about. And she’s tremendously brave, but that’s not it, either. It’s like she’s connected to something the rest of us can’t even begin to understand. But can that be real? How crazy is that? Maybe when you’re going crazy, at first you put up a big fight and get hysterical, and then you’re too crazy to fight anymore and you get all calm and accepting. I have to talk to her doctor, because this is tearing me apart.”

“What kinds of things does she say? Does she explain why she’s so much calmer?”

Fred Marshall’s eyes burn into Jack’s. “Well, for one thing, Judy seems to think that Ty is still alive, and that you’re the only person who can find him.”

“All right,” Jack says, unwilling to say more until after he can speak to Judy. “Tell me, does Judy ever mention someone she used to know—or a cousin of hers, or an old boyfriend—she thinks might have taken him?” His theory seems less convincing than it had in Henry Leyden’s ultrarational, thoroughly bizarre kitchen; Fred Marshall’s response weakens it further.

“Not unless he’s named the Crimson King, or Gorg, or Abbalah. All I can tell you is, Judy thinks she
sees
something, and even though it makes no sense, I sure as hell hope it’s there.”

A sudden vision of the world where he found a boy’s Brewers cap pierces Jack Sawyer like a steel-tipped lance. “And that’s where Tyler is.”

“If part of me didn’t think that might just
possibly
be true, I’d go out of my mind right here and now,” Fred says. “Unless I’m already out of my gourd.”

“Let’s go talk to your wife,” Jack says.

From the outside, French County Lutheran Hospital resembles a nineteenth-century madhouse in the north of England: dirty red-brick walls with blackened buttresses and lancet arches, a peaked roof with finial-capped pinnacles, swollen turrets, miserly windows, and all of the long facade stippled black with ancient filth. Set within a walled parkland dense with oaks on Arden’s western boundary, the enormous building, Gothic without the grandeur, looks punitive, devoid of mercy. Jack half-expects to hear the shrieking organ music from a Vincent Price movie.

They pass through a narrow, peaked wooden door and enter a reassuringly familiar lobby. A bored, uniformed man at a central desk directs visitors to the elevators; stuffed animals and sprays of flowers fill the gift shop’s window; bathrobed patients tethered to I.V. poles occupy randomly placed tables with their families, and other patients perch on the chairs lined against the side walls; two white-coated doctors confer in a corner. Far overhead, two dusty, ornate chandeliers distribute a soft ocher light that momentarily seems to gild the luxurious heads of the lilies arrayed in tall vases beside the entrance of the gift shop.

“Wow, it sure looks better on the inside,” Jack says.

“Most of it does,” Fred says.

They approach the man behind the desk, and Fred says, “Ward D.” With a mild flicker of interest, the man gives them two rectangular cards stamped
VISITOR
and waves them through. The elevator clanks down and admits them to a wood-paneled enclosure the size of a broom closet. Fred Marshall pushes the button marked 5, and the elevator shudders upward. The same soft, golden light pervades the comically tiny interior. Ten years ago, an elevator remarkably similar to this, though situated in a grand Paris hotel, had held Jack and a UCLA art-history graduate student named Iliana Tedesco captive for two and a half hours, in the course of which Ms. Tedesco announced that their relationship had reached its final destination, thank you, despite her gratitude for what had been at least until that moment a rewarding journey together. After thinking it over, Jack decides not to trouble Fred Marshall with this information.

Better behaved than its French cousin, the elevator trembles to a stop and with only a slight display of resistance slides open its door and releases Jack Sawyer and Fred Marshall to the fifth floor, where the beautiful light seems a touch darker than in both the elevator and the lobby. “Unfortunately, it’s way over on the other side,” Fred tells Jack. An apparently endless corridor yawns like an exercise in perspective off to their left, and Fred points the way with his finger.

They go through two big sets of double doors, past the corridor to Ward B, past two vast rooms lined with curtained cubicles, turn left again at the closed entrance to Gerontology, down a long, long hallway lined with bulletin boards, past the opening to Ward C, then take an abrupt right at the men’s and women’s bathrooms, pass Ambulatory Ophthalmology and Records Annex, and at last come to a corridor marked
WARD D.
As they proceed, the light seems progressively to darken, the walls to contract, the windows to shrink. Shadows lurk in the corridor to Ward D, and a small pool of water glimmers on the floor.

“We’re in the oldest part of the building now,” Fred says.

“You must want to get Judy out of here as soon as possible.”

“Well, sure, soon as Pat Skarda thinks she’s ready. But you’ll be surprised; Judy kind of likes it in here. I think it’s helping. What she told me was, she feels completely safe, and the ones that can talk, some of them are extremely interesting. It’s like being on a cruise, she says.”

Jack laughs in surprise and disbelief, and Fred Marshall touches his shoulder and says, “Does that mean she’s a lot better or a lot worse?”

At the end of the corridor, they emerge directly into a good-sized room that seems to have been preserved unaltered for a hundred years. Dark brown wainscoting rises four feet from the dark brown wooden floor. Far up in the gray wall to their right, two tall, narrow windows framed like paintings admit filtered gray light. A man seated behind a polished wooden counter pushes a button that unlocks a double-sized metal door with a
WARD D
sign and a small window of reinforced glass. “You can go in, Mr. Marshall, but who is he?”

“His name is Jack Sawyer. He’s here with me.”

“Is he either a relative or a medical professional?”

“No, but my wife wants to see him.”

“Wait here a moment.” The attendant disappears through the metal door and locks it behind him with a prisonlike clang. A minute later, the attendant reappears with a nurse whose heavy, lined face, big arms and hands, and thick legs make her look like a man in drag. She introduces herself as Jane Bond, the head nurse of Ward D, a combination of words and circumstances that irresistibly suggest at least a couple of nicknames. The nurse subjects Fred and Jack, then only Jack, to a barrage of questions before she vanishes back behind the great door.

“Ward Bond,” Jack says, unable not to.

“We call her Warden Bond,” says the attendant. “She’s tough, but on the other hand, she’s unfair.” He coughs and stares up at the high windows. “We got this orderly, calls her Double-oh Zero.”

A few minutes later, Head Nurse Warden Bond, Agent OO Zero, swings open the metal door and says, “You may enter now, but pay attention to what I say.”

At first, the ward resembles a huge airport hangar divided into a section with a row of padded benches, a section with round tables and plastic chairs, and a third section where two long tables are stacked with drawing paper, boxes of crayons, and watercolor sets. In the vast space, these furnishings look like dollhouse furniture. Here and there on the cement floor, painted a smooth, anonymous shade of gray, lie padded rectangular mats; twenty feet above the floor, small, barred windows punctuate the far wall, of red brick long ago given a couple of coats of white paint. In a glass enclosure to the left of the door, a nurse behind a desk looks up from a book. Far down to the right, well past the tables with art supplies, three locked metal doors open into worlds of their own. The sense of being in a hangar gradually yields to a sense of a benign but inflexible imprisonment.

A low hum of voices comes from the twenty to thirty men and women scattered throughout the enormous room. Only a very few of these men and women are talking to visible companions. They pace in circles, stand frozen in place, lie curled like infants on the mats; they count on their fingers and scribble in notebooks; they twitch, yawn, weep, stare into space and into themselves. Some of them wear green hospital robes, others civilian clothes of all kinds: T-shirts and shorts, sweat suits, running outfits, ordinary shirts and slacks, jerseys and pants. No one wears a belt, and none of the shoes have laces. Two muscular men with close-cropped hair and in brilliant white T-shirts sit at one of the round tables with the air of patient watchdogs. Jack tries to locate Judy Marshall, but he cannot pick her out.