In the Night Season (3 page)

Out on the porch, in the chill, he threw some scraps on the lawn, for the cats. He could hear the music out here. The sky was dotted with little tufts of cloud. He experienced a wave of loneliness, or depression.

The one was the other.

He went back into the house. Thinking had become so troublesome, these days:
This is how I’ve lived most of my life
He went to the living room and sat down.

His only remaining family connection, his sister, believed that her life and his had both been blighted by their parents, by the stern, quiet people who’d inhabited this Virginia property and then sold it to their eldest son as their interest in life and their health waned. Eugenia had washed her hands, she said, of every vestige of those two. She’d married a chiropractor named Crane and moved to Syracuse, New York. For years she led a rather adventurous life. The chiropractor made a lot of money, and she used it to travel; she had been in most of the world’s capitals before she reached the age of forty. She gathered possessions from far-flung cultures and learned to speak several languages. And her manner toward her brother had become somewhat magisterial.

“Edward, do you know what your trouble is? You have no gumption. You don’t like to make waves. You’re just like Daddy in that respect. An old colored man with worries. I don’t mean this in a
bad way, particularly. It’s just the truth. For instance, when is the last time you left the state of Virginia for anything? Even a vacation.”

“I’ve gone places,” he said. “Just because I haven’t been around the world.”

“Well, if you had been anywhere at all other than that—farm—you wouldn’t be so painfully uncomfortable in social situations.”

Bishop hadn’t seen her in years and hadn’t wanted to, for she had become a carbon copy of her mother—critical, painfully blunt, not to say cruel. A boxy-shaped, frowning, humorless woman with highly polished manners and a slight accent, an affectation of substantial wealth and influence, a heavy lady putting on airs. A snob, really, and Edward Bishop was evidently an embarrassment to her. She had been widowed more than ten years ago and was childless. Now she lived in a retirement village somewhere near Erie, Pennsylvania. Fifty-two and living there. Occasionally he would send flowers to her, for her birthday, or for one of the holidays. He rarely heard anything back.
Dear Edward. Thank you for the lovely arrangement. Please send no more, as I have very little room where I am presently living
.

Well, and now after years of a kind of growing acceptance about himself and his solitary existence, this young woman’s trouble had drawn him into her life, and he could not get her out of his mind. Her need of him, even in the face of these veiled threats from thugs, had made him want all that much more to be helpful, to keep her from harm.

He had been sitting there daydreaming, watching the mailbox, and he heard something on the porch. He went to the side window and looked out again, but couldn’t see enough. Entering the kitchen, he heard it again—and froze. The cats.

The wind kicked at the house. He ran the tap, washed his hands, as if to wash away the sense of his own ability to imagine things. Upstairs, the record player paused, and the music began again. There was the sound out on the porch. Quickly, not quite believing himself, he went to the cabinet and fetched one of the rifles. But then, with a small curse, he put it back in its place. This was broad daylight, and the cats were running under the porch. He would not
make a fool of himself by walking out of the house with the rifle, a scared man in the middle of the afternoon. He strode to the front door, opened it, and stepped out. The sun had gone behind a wall of gray clouds. He walked around the house and on to the end of the side porch, where he could see into the back field. Upstairs the music was sounding, so quick and bright. He waited a moment, standing with his hands on the white-painted railing.

No, it was his damned imagination.

He walked around to the front door and heard the cats running before him, and how many alarms had they given him over the months? He headed toward the hallway, raised his eyes to the stairs leading up, and saw a man standing in the upper hallway, holding a pistol. The man was lean but powerful-looking.

“Who are you?” Bishop asked him out of pure startlement. He realized almost immediately the absurdity of the question, and he put his hands up, though he hadn’t been told to.

“Come on up,” the man said, almost friendly.

Bishop started out the door, but another man was waiting there. He saw the jowly, pale round face, the bulk and wideness of him, and emitted a cry. He had seen that face before. The back window of the car speeding past him in the night. The heavy man pushed the door open, and Bishop backed away from him.

“Up here,” the other said. He held the pistol, barrel down. In his other hand was a bundle of cord. His demeanor was relaxed, nearly casual. “Come on.”

C
HIEF
I
NVESTIGATOR
S
HAW HAD
spoken to the computer lab teacher at the high school and had been given a list of names and addresses of youths who were known to be particularly adept at the use of the school’s computers. That afternoon, he drove to Steel Run Creek to interview the family of one such youth—a starved-looking, pale boy with a strangely protruding breastbone and long, spidery fingers. The boy identified the type of program that could produce the graphics: it was common to every computer produced in the last five years, part of the software that came with them from the factory. Oh, yes, he said, they each came with it; IBMs, and all the clones, and Macs, too. Every one had a graphics program of one kind or another. And there were dozens of color printers that could have produced these pages.

No help.

Shaw went out to his car and sat there, looking over his notes. He felt sleepy, sitting in the warmth of the front seat. His own radio startled him. There was a call for him out at the Lombard farm, out near Darkness Falls. He picked up the handset and spoke into it.

“I’m in Steel Run now. Give me the address.”

He had spent the morning sitting at his desk, papers open before him, bright sun washing into the window to his right, and, as had happened more often than he liked to admit to himself, he’d rested his chin in his hands and drifted off to sleep. He went through a fleeting dream about sitting in his office sleeping, and when he became aware that he
was
sleeping, he tried to move. The phone was ringing. But this sleep was so deeply, soul-nourishingly good, the only sleep that was ever any good at this time of the year. It was especially bad this year.

The phone kept on. He broke free of the stillness, opened his eyes. “What?” Had it indeed been ringing?

He picked it up. A female voice told him Edward Bishop was on the line. He spoke to the distraught Mr. Bishop, then got up and walked down the hall to the cafeteria, where he ordered a cup of coffee and sat drinking it, reflecting that if this was what he needed now, he would pay heavily for it later in the day, at the end of his day.

In the nights, he spent the hours reading, or sitting on a hassock in front of the television, channel-surfing. The avalanche of crap on television didn’t even serve as an anodyne now; in fact, it sometimes kept him awake in recollection. Television was a depository of time past; you saw people doing and saying things they were doing and saying when you were elsewhere in your life. “Elsewhere” for Philip Shaw involved the loss of a son, through what he believed was his own neglect, a kind of neglect, anyway. And the memory of it had never come with any less force, or changed one element of the hard pure pressure under his breastbone, that the boy was gone—eleven years now, almost to the day. The anniversary coming around again, with its familiar force. Eleven years in which his marriage had deteriorated and gone to pieces, and his ability to do much of anything beyond the rote work of his daily grind had narrowed and narrowed. He had a daughter, the lost boy’s younger sister, and his wife was taking her away, too, now.

The lost boy’s name was Willy. Eleven years ago, while vacationing in Fort Lauderdale, Shaw, in the glow of too much alcohol, had taken the boy, nine years old, into the surf with him. The waves
seemed moderate enough, deep swells, lifting and setting them both down, near shore. But the boy had disappeared at the base of one and not come up. It crashed and surged all the way to the beach line, and the foam of it washed back to reveal the shape of the boy on the sand, lying facedown, his head turned at a terrible angle.

A freak accident, the doctors said. It was just the way the water hit him, or moved him against the ground under the weight of it coming down. This type of thing was rare, but not impossible in such conditions. There were other people in the water, other boys Willy’s age. No one was at fault, the doctors said. But Shaw thought of the beer he had had to drink—the careless, impervious sense of well-being with which he had plowed into the rough waves with his son.

There had followed a long spiral, an incremental sinking that both he and his wife, Carol, had not quite understood for what it was; they had both spent an awful amount of time drunk. Carol had come to see it first. “We have a daughter who isn’t old enough to remember what got us started on this,” she told him. “I’m so ashamed of myself.”

When she stopped the drinking, she buried her longing for oblivion under a busy parade of fierce involvement in community service—the PTA at school, volunteer teaching, volunteer work in the nursing homes, day-care centers, hospitals, hospices, and shelters. For a month she had housed a pair of battered women and a homeless adolescent girl with a heroin addiction. Shaw came home late in the nights to the sprawl of human shapes on the living room floor and in the room that had been his son’s. If he was not already drunk, he would get himself that way as quickly as possible. Mornings, he drove his daughter to school and ached for how little she was getting of what she had every practical right to expect. He would kiss her cheek and watch her walk into the low red-brick building that was her other life, the life with girls and boys who came from less confusing households, happy families.

It was after he managed to stop drinking that the sore places in his marriage began to be insupportable. The truth of the matter was that there had been trouble neither of them quite acknowledged
before Willy’s death, and perhaps it was so that without the duress of unendurable loss, such troubles exist in the silences of any marriage, without ever bringing the edifice to the point of collapse.

He had ended up feeling almost happy, at any rate, being out and away from Carol, and it had seemed, with the schedules the lawyers had set up through the court, that he spent more consecutive time with his daughter than he had ever been quite able to spend during the time he lived in the house. She came to him on weekends, and there were unexpected pleasures arising out of the fact that he had to think of things to do with her, to please her—to
interest
her.

But now Carol was moving to Richmond and taking Mary with her. It was all decided; she had invested in her cousin Betsy’s beauty parlor, had drifted away from her various social work commitments. Her latest and most passionate involvement, other than making money, was the redress of political inequities. Carol had embraced a kind of ersatz radicalism that Shaw feared might poison his daughter against him, especially if she possessed the advantage of distance, and it seemed evident enough that, consciously or unconsciously, she was holding him accountable for Willy’s death.

He did not blame her. But he wanted nothing to do with her anymore, either.

On some weekday evenings he spent time with a young woman, Eloise Lefler, thirteen years his junior, to whom he had been introduced at a gathering of people working on the Fall Festival in Point Royal. She liked television, and so he watched it with her, sitting in her small living room, with her father moving around in the next room. The old man, a former sheriff, had a hobby of carving wooden ducks, for decoys, and he liked to tell about the old days, chasing whiskey-runners on the narrow county roads of the valley. Shaw liked him and, in fact, felt slightly more comfortable with Eloise when her father was around. He was not quite ready to start things up with somebody else.

So he spent a lot of nights alone, in the light, reading. His nightstand was stacked high with books: history, biography, novels. He had been poring through
Anna Karenina
and a biography of
Churchill. At some point it had become part of his nightly routine to spend seven hours this way, not even expecting to grow heavy-eyed or sleepy. The nights wore on and became dawns, and at last he would drift off, the book lying on his chest, or, at times, the television playing, people talking and laughing as if they were trapped doing that, no matter who listened or slept. He would come out of these small dips into nonwaking, and he would have the day to get through. The slow hours of court, if there was court; the hours in his office, sitting in the sun from the windows, fighting sleep. He had been sober for almost a year now. But the sober life was presenting its own problems.

In one bad night, he dreamed that Willy came into the room where he slept; it was not any other room, none of the other rooms he had ever been in with the boy, but this room, with its clutter of books and its evidence of a desiccated spirit—the clothes strewn on the surfaces and the unwashed dishes on the counter, the general neglect of everything—the apparition walked in and stood there, in a glow. “Son?” Shaw said to him. “Can you stay a while?” He heard the casual note of pleasant conversation in his voice, even as the desperation raked through him to make the boy stay, to reach out and touch his hair, the thin carved-looking white neck and shoulders. “Stay?” Shaw said. And the boy responded almost jauntily, “No, gotta go.” And he was gone.

There had been nights, in the past week, when he had come close to taking a drink.

The Lombard farm was the last farm that was completely intact in the county, having navigated the changes in population and development through the boom years of the sixties and seventies, when most of the larger farms had been parceled out for ready cash, the big money that came from selling to shopping malls and the builders of houses and apartment complexes. It was a ten-thousand-acre farm, ranged over foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, with at its southern edge the little town of Darkness Falls Courthouse: one green road sign, a few antiques stores, a white clapboard church, and a post office. There was no courthouse anymore, and
for legal matters one had to travel five miles to Steel Run. The word
courthouse
in the town’s title stemmed from an antebellum rule concerning county seats and the judicial map.

No one knew or could remember who had decided upon Darkness Falls as the name of the place. There was a lake called Darkness (Eloise lived at its southern edge), but no falls that anybody knew about. Lombard owned the land that skirted most of the circumference of the lake, and he had dumped several tons of sand along the north side of it. In the summer, families came to swim in the dark green water and sun themselves on the little artificial beach. Lombard was a community-minded man.

His farm had its own abattoir, its own processing and packaging plant, but much of the rolling countryside surrounding the Lombard house looked like uncultivated wild land. The house itself was a surprisingly small rambler, with shuttered windows and a gold eagle on the front door. It might have been brought forward untouched and unchanged from 1955. The only visible sign of the prosperity Lombard enjoyed was the Olympic-sized swimming pool in back. Lombard himself was a scrawny little man with fierce blue eyes and a sun-damaged face pocked with what appeared to be brown scales, over furrows and lines. He was standing at the gate as Shaw drove up.

“Wait till you see this,” he said, already leading the detective along the fence toward what was apparently the property line. A creek wound along the curve of the road at that end—a runoff of Darkness Lake—it was thick with undergrowth, and it eventually coursed under the road in a cement culvert. A barbed wire fence ran across the culvert and up into the growth on the other bank. Lombard strode through the tall dry grass, which clicked and rattled with his tread; he skirted the bank and angled away from the road. His demeanor was furious. He said nothing, pushing through, leading the way. About fifty yards on, the tangle of undergrowth opened out, to the grass field on that side of the creek. Lombard stepped down the bank, over some stones and past the freezing little pools of collected water, up the other side, into the tall grass there. Shaw trailed along after him. They climbed into the field and along the
undulating ground to a slight well of earth, a dip, like a crater that had filled after thousands of years, a circle of sunken ground, littered with stones and patches of dry red clay. In this space lay the carcasses of several beef cattle. Shaw saw calves, cows, and at least two bulls. Some of them were down in areas of wild grass, others lay on bare ground.

“Fourteen cows,” Lombard said. “Three bulls and five calves.” He was almost crying with it. He shook his head. He stood there with his hands in the back pockets of his jeans. “Who the hell would do such a thing?”

Shaw looked around them. The ground was hard; the grass showed no signs of movement through it. He looked down toward the road, the place where it crossed over the creek.

“Shot,” Lombard said. “Like some kind of damn game—or something. Some son of a bitch taking potshots. Target practice on poor dumb animals.”

The detective was visited with the unfriendly notion that a hundred years ago a man like Lombard, with his chewing tobacco and his jeans and cowboy boots, his hat emblazoned with the emblem of the National Rifle Association, might have well been one of those wild men who slaughtered whole herds of buffalo. Lombard spit. “Damned senseless destruction,” he said. Shaw stepped close to the first dead animal, a cow. One eye was blown in—a bullet wound. There was a circular area of powder burn around it, indicating close range. Inches, probably.

“This was no target practice,” he said.

The next animal, another cow, had multiple wounds in its side. Still another had been shot in the middle of the brow. There seemed no pattern, no discernible method: just someone shooting at random, walking among the startled animals, then running among them, firing. Several of them had been killed at distances from the first few. From the looks of it, the killings were recent—not more than a few hours.

“Jesus Christ,” Lombard kept saying. “Look at this. Look at this.”

Shaw said, “I’ve got to get some people out here, look all this over. You haven’t touched anything, have you?”

“No.” Lombard was crying now.

Shaw felt a stab of guilt for his earlier thoughts about him. On an impulse, he said, “Have you received any hate mail lately?”