In the Night Season (16 page)

He had left everything in such a ruin.

She rifled the drawers of the desk. In one drawer there was a key on a little circular chain. She held it in the palm of her hand, trying to recall ever having seen it before. Then she put it in her coat pocket. There was a rustle behind one of the smaller drawers, something caught. She pulled it all the way out and looked into the hole. Something had creased there, attached with tape. She reached in and pulled it out, and part of it tore. She worked to get that, too, and stood piecing the thing together—a sheet of paper with writing on it.

Nora stood crying in the basement, alone. The letter was written on the business stationery letterhead of a real estate agency Jack had done some work for a year and a half ago. Eighteen months. A woman she hadn’t known about and now perhaps would never know about. Ruth. Ruth. He had never mentioned anyone named Ruth.

She crushed the pieces of paper and put them in the woodstove, lifting the iron lid carefully, slowly, and setting it back.

But she was abruptly assailed by the sense that the woman, Ruth, might hold the answer, the information these men wanted. When she tried to lift the lid again, she heard him on the stairs. She hurried to the desk and began looking through the other letters and papers, and he came partway down.

“Anything?”

“No.”

“Keep looking.”

When he had gone, she moved to the woodstove and retrieved the crumpled pieces. She put them in the pocket of her coat and went back to searching. She looked in the metal cabinet where Jack kept most of his tools and found a tin full of assorted nails and screws, the blades of a hacksaw. She put one blade in her coat pocket with the key and the crumpled pieces of paper and another in the bottom of her tennis shoe, hurrying, frantic, while Travis’s footsteps grew louder, nearer.

He came back down the stairs, still holding the pane of glass. “It’s too big for the door. I can’t fix it.” He put the glass pane back in its place, exercising care not to break it or chip it. There was a strange fastidiousness about him, she decided. Now he appeared momentarily troubled. “Shoot,” he said. “I thought it was working out so nice.”

C
HIEF
I
NVESTIGATOR
S
HAW STOOD
in the strips of shadow from the blinds at his office window, hands in his pockets, surveying the street below. A sunny winter day, men and women hurrying past, bundled up against the wind. Their shadows on the walk looked darker, more sharply defined by the clear cold air. Across the way was the county jail, the new building with its heavy, dark glass windows. He would have to go over there soon to report to the county attorney what he had been able to ascertain from the evidence concerning the slaughter, by gunfire, of some cattle near Darkness Falls Courthouse. A canvas of the area had turned up a few boot prints and several empty shell casings from a .38-caliber revolver. People in the vicinity were spread wide apart by the open pasture and woods, and apparently nobody had heard anything. Nobody could think of why someone would do a thing like this, either.

He had been working on the report, sitting there in the sunlight from the window, and the warm light had done to him what it had been doing to him for weeks now, except that his brief dip into unconsciousness had been colored by the appalling scene of apparently recreational slaughter that he had been trying to describe in his report. He saw it again in his sleep and came awake with a start.

The fact of it was unnerving in some elemental way. It weakened him. He wished fervently that he was elsewhere on this particular morning.

The night had been terrible. He had lain awake, restless, a pervasive, clammy sense of horror in his bones, unable to keep his mind on what he was reading. This was the day, the eleventh anniversary of the boy’s death, and Carol’s plans to leave Steel Run with Mary made it all that much worse; it brought everything back, a desolation. The scene at Lombard’s pasture, the inert shapes bulging in the grass, kept dissolving into the image of what he had struggled toward out of the tossing surf with such deepening horror, all those years ago.

He would lose his daughter, too, now. She would grow away from him, in her mother’s house.

Near dawn he dozed off and had a vivid dream that he had drunk three glasses of whiskey, swallowing it greedily, thinking of forgetfulness and waiting for it to begin. He woke in the quiet dark. Pure fright. No chance of sleep. He was vaguely dizzy and light-headed; but nothing happened. The numbers changed on the digital clock by his bedside. At first light, he arose, made his way into the kitchen, prepared some dry toast and poured himself a glass of milk, then sat at the table.

“Lord,” he said, low. “Please help me today.”

Now, he turned from the window and sat down again to his report. How does one describe the creepy nature of such a crime, its weirdness?

He couldn’t think. He put his head in his hands and felt the whole thing drift off again.

His partner, Frank Bell, talked about depression. There were the relentless facts: the lost years of alcoholism, of a kind of functioning pathology, a marriage soaked in grief and recrimination, the recent divorce, his wife’s decision to leave and take Mary with her. Frank said it was plain as daylight.

Shaw didn’t think so. People spoke of depression as an
interruption
of normal patterns of life, whereas Shaw’s pattern had been
unchanging for years now. It wasn’t any interruption, no shift in the status quo. It was just harder on the anniversaries, and this particular anniversary was especially difficult because of the coming change, Mary’s departure for Richmond. He felt no great longing to keep Carol near.

She was making a statement with her life.

Shaw considered that her grief had brought out of her something of an almost freakish turbulence and agitation, a need to
involve
herself, a willingness to embrace causes that were far from her old life. The latest was an oddly rote rejection of what she called the male-dominated idea of herself as a wife and mother. She could be a mother without a patriarch in the house.

It felt, to Shaw, like blame. It
was
blame.

He understood, and he could even forgive it. It was all part of the waste their relationship had mostly been since Willy’s death. The truth was, he had spent a lot of time away, over the years, a lot of time under the influence of one substance or another. It had almost cost him his job. Carol would say it had ruined his marriage. Lately, she had taken to putting it in terms of her newfound political awareness: he had demonstrated the essential bankruptcy of the male-centered culture. This was her particular battiness now, another of her ways of pocketing her grief, and the fact was that he felt quite willing to have her practice her newfound political beliefs away from him. He was a little sick of her—even as he felt pangs of sorrow for her—with her insistence on putting a political spin on everything, including the ways he had wrecked her life, with alcohol and overindulgence and dread. The alcohol was a form of seduction, a way of depriving her of her freedom. She had even put the political hex on their lovemaking—particularly their lovemaking. It was all power to her. And the phrase was
gender issues
. She used it in every context, even about the boy’s death, and without the slightest hint of self-examination or the least discernment as to the sense of the language as it was perverted by such jargon:
gender issues
was the overall rubric. It was gender that had killed their son—the boy following his macho father into the waves, never suspecting for a moment that his father’s willingness to plow into such a dangerous
surf had been produced by the alcohol coursing through his veins. There were a few phrases borrowed from Marx and the Soviets, too: every single human action or inaction was one kind of political gesture or another to her, and it was as though this belief
spared
her, in some incalculable way, from the terrible, remorseless fact of the child’s death; at least, it explained that death for her.

And Shaw was further culpable for continuing to drink after the tragedy. Yes. He had failed miserably in the years of Mary’s infancy.

This was true.

Sometimes, listening to her, though, he had thought he might go out of his mind. Carol could take her dull, humorless, frozen, narrow attitudes, her bromides, and her pain, and go.

Yet he hurt so, as the reality of it approached.

The fact was that because he was the chief investigating officer for Fauquier County, and spent more time away from home than most men, the court had deemed it in the interest of the child that Carol keep custody. But Shaw hadn’t been quite ready for her to pick up and move back to Richmond. He hadn’t thought of this as part of the deal, no matter how forcefully his lawyer went over it, showing him where it said that she could relocate with Mary, up to three hundred miles from Steel Run Creek and Fauquier County without having to seek the permission of the court, or of Philip Shaw.

So they were leaving. All that remained of his family. And Shaw suffered from bad insomnia and increasing thirst.

“It’s depression,” Frank Bell told him. “Classic case. I’ve seen it. My sister once got this way, after the birth of her second child.” He shook his head and snapped his fingers. “Like that. Went down into herself—got into bed and stayed there for six weeks. Six weeks.”

“Did she sleep during that time?”

“Almost the whole time.”

“Well, I
can’t
sleep. So I guess I don’t have what she had.”

“It manifests itself in different ways, Phil.”

“You just said I was a classic case.”

“All right. I’m just saying…” Bell was a rangy, stoop-shouldered man with a deeply lined, dark face and large, deep-socketed
eyes. He had come to Shaw from the traffic division two years ago, and Shaw sometimes thought of him as being a man with tidal patience and calm. Having never taken a drink in his life, having in fact kept such charge of his own affairs that it was hard to imagine him in any kind of extremity, he sometimes took a faintly parental attitude toward Shaw. He was inclined to offer advice. Shaw liked him, even when he found the advice annoying, because Bell obviously meant to help, and because you got the feeling, talking to him, that he was thinking about you at odd hours of the day.

“How’re things going with Eloise?” Frank said.

“What’s Eloise got to do with anything?”

“Just asking. I think she’s a nice lady. I think she’d be good for you.”

“I don’t think I’m depressed,” Shaw said. “This is grief, not depression.”

“I have some sleeping pills my doctor gave me when I tore my knee up last year.”

“I’m fine, really,” Shaw said. “Everybody’s fine. Really.”

But there were these petit mal episodes in his office, when the warm air and the quiet made him feel as though his head were stuffed with buzzing cotton, his eyelids made of melting sand. He would feel the whole of himself begin to pause, to sink, and he would have to struggle back to the surface, worried that anyone might find him like this, sitting in a city office, drowsing.

What he had on the books for today, beside the slaughter of Lombard’s cattle, were two cases of check fraud, two break-ins, a car theft, vandalism—someone had sawed the head off a parking meter—and Shaw had already put in a call to the local video store asking for a list naming everyone who in the last week or so had rented
Cool Hand Luke
.

Concerning the cattle kills, Mr. Lombard had stated unequivocally that there were no ongoing conflicts or feuds of any kind between him and anyone else. He ran an honest business, he said. He had no enemies he could think of. This was a case of random destruction. Shaw believed that whoever was responsible had probably left the area. Lombard wanted to call the FBI. Shaw had
assured him that the problem did not warrant involving the federal government.

Now he stretched and yawned and wondered how he would make it through the rest of the day. He had to make a court appearance at noon, a grand jury appearance in the hour after noon, and he knew all this would involve sitting and waiting to testify. Otherwise he would be out on the county roads, looking for cattle killers.

On his desk was a large paper cup with cold tea in it. He took a long drink of it. When the phone rang he almost doubted it. It rang twice. He picked up the handset. “What?”

“Daddy?” Mary’s voice.

He leaned back in the chair and experienced a rushing sensation in the exact middle of his chest. “Hi, sweetness.”

“Mommy said I should call you about this. I won the spelling bee.”

“Aw, honey,” he said. “That’s great.”

“I get to go to Wordsworth High School next month and compete for the whole school district.” She was almost twelve years old, in sixth grade.

“I’m so proud of you,” he said into the phone.

Frank Bell walked in, carrying a notepad. He sat on the edge of the desk, looking rushed and aggravated. “Phil,” he began.

Shaw held up his hand. “Tell me all about it. Will I get to see you compete?”

“If you want to.”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“Are you picking me up today?”

“You know I am.”

“Okay—I’ve got to go now. Bye.”

“Bye, darling.” Shaw started to hang up, then had a thought. “Honey, does your mother want to talk to me—”

She had broken the connection.

“Lombard is waiting out in the hall,” Frank Bell said. “About his beef cattle.”

“I can’t see him now. I don’t have anything for him.”

“He says he’s not leaving until you talk to him.”

“You know what I think?” Shaw said. “I think we’re not gonna find whoever did this.”

“I dare you to say that to him.”

Shaw smiled. “Maybe I’ll just get you to tell him.”

“Not me.”

The two men moved to the door of the office and out into the hallway, at the end of which Lombard sat reading a pamphlet. He wore a red baseball cap. A wooden rack of pamphlets hung on the wall: instructions for witnesses, household security hints, advice for setting up a neighborhood watch program. When Shaw approached, Lombard stood and put the pamphlet back in among the others. “It’s about time you came out here and earned some of what my taxes pay you,” he said.

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” Shaw said. “Truth is, I have to be in court in a couple minutes. An arrest I made for breaking and entering a few weeks back. If you’ll just write out what you want me to know, I’ll be glad to go over it and get back in touch with you, sir. And I do have people working on it.”

Lombard backed down a little. “You know it’s just one guy?”

“We’re not sure yet it
is
a guy, are we?”

“I just get worried that nothing’s being done.”

“I promise if it’s at all possible to do we’ll get to the bottom of it, sir. It’s only been one day, after all.”

“I just can’t imagine,” Lombard said, starting out the door. “Shooting cattle. At the end of the goddam twentieth century. A damn mean thing like that.”

“It’s one for the books, sir.”

As Lombard opened the door to leave, he nearly walked into David Ross, the deputy state’s attorney. Shaw was surprised to see him. Ross, looking grim, stepped aside for Lombard to pass. Lombard went on, shaking his head. The door closed on him.

“David,” Shaw said.

Ross walked into the first office, a small room with two cluttered
desks facing each other. Shaw and Bell followed him. “Boys,” he said, turning at the first desk. “There’s been a homicide out on Rural Route Six.”

“The housing development?” Shaw said. A tremor of alarm ran through him. He had just spoken with Mary.

“Back in the meadows,” Ross said. “The Bishop Farm. Bishop’s the victim.”

“Bishop?” Frank Bell said. “Isn’t that the guy—”

“He was in here a while back,” said Shaw. “That Virginia Front outfit threatened him.” He walked back down the corridor to his own office, and from the top of his desk he took the folder with Bishop’s name on it. Inside was one of the sheets of folded paper, the printed threat, the crude graphics. The others had followed him, and he held it out to them.