Night Relics (33 page)

H
E DIDN’T LIKE
L
EWIS.
I
T DIDN’T MATTER THAT HE WAS
Esther’s cousin; the man was a parasite. The war-hero talk was nonsense. The man had avoided death—hardly something that
could be construed as heroic. The least such a hero could do with his idle time was read to his invalid mother, but instead
he wrote poetry, or rather a bad imitation of poetry, a grown man looking out at the world through big moony eyes with too
much white showing under the irises as if he were drowsy with opium. He had a slight tubercular build and was no good at conversation.
And he meddled, giving Jamie the damned cat. The damned thing had scratched the furniture to pieces. There was only one thing
more intelligent than simply shooting it, and that would be shooting Lewis instead.

Esther had prevailed upon him to let the boy keep it, but he could see now that it had been a mistake. He wanted no part of
Lewis in the house. He was a slow poison, the single ruinous thing in their lives, and there was no doubt at all that he was
the chief engineer of the change in Esther. He
stared into his glass now, the heavy crystal making the half inch of whiskey seem far deeper than it was. The night blustered
beyond the windows, and the floor was stippled with moonlight.

There were things that a man could overlook, things he could outright deny in order to have peace, to maintain the sanctity
of his home. But when a man’s wife threw these things into his face, then he had to admit that his home had come undone. That
was the dark truth. There came a point when he could deny it no longer, and either he acted decisively or else he admitted
defeat and crawled off beaten.

He sat scowling at the fire, full of self-loathing now as well as the rest. Damn the cat, and damn Aunt Lydia, too. The question
had become as plain as a red flag: was she going to Aunt Lydia’s to read
Middlemarch
, or was she going to pay a visit to Lewis? That was what it had come down to. And now that it had, the question must be answered,
the truth revealed.

There had been an incident years ago that had planted the germ of the idea in his mind. He could trace his dwindling unhappiness
to that day—the two of them, Esther and Lewis, embracing as if … He couldn’t put words to it, although these several years
later the scene was etched in his mind in the clearest sort of detail. Esther had laughed it off, waving her hand at him.
Of all the silly notions—she and Lewis were
cousins
. They had grown up together. He was going off to war. A kiss was a natural thing between cousins. Never mind that it had occurred
in an otherwise empty room and that the look of shocked surprise on her face had been as expressive as the novels she read
to her aunt.

And her laughter. What had once appealed to him chilled him now, roiling up dark billows of regret and loathing within him.
He forced himself now to picture the face of his son—the dark eyes, the narrow build. People remarked on his resemblance to
Lewis. Aunt Lydia herself had cackled over it more than once, no doubt with a good deal of
nasty calculation: “Why, look at the two of you,” she’d say, seeing them together. “Who wouldn’t think you were father and
son?”

And for Esther he had given up the world! She might as well have slapped him in the face when she left a half hour ago. That’s
what the slammed door meant; that much couldn’t be argued. He swirled the faceted glass in front of the candlelight, the smoky
amber whiskey catching the light. Then he tossed it off and poured another, his hand shaking as he set the decanter down.

He abandoned his thoughts abruptly and tried to read again, but he couldn’t. The words meant nothing. He could concentrate
on nothing but the picture of the two of them together, Esther and Lewis, childhood companions, their names falling inexorably
together. He stood up unsteadily and put the book down next to the glass, staggering just a little as he picked up the candelabra
and stepped to the door.

Right then he caught sight of his face in the mirror over the mantel, and for a moment he scarcely knew himself. He drew back
in confusion, his mind a jumble of contradiction, his features so twisted by evil passion that his own face was alien and
loathsome. The glass in the mirror was cracked and hazed with dust and reflected only a vague outline of the candlelit room
behind him.

Then a door slammed, or a shutter, and the noise revived him like cold water. He swept the glass and decanter onto the floor,
his confusion gone, his mind suddenly clear and purposeful. He walked through the front room, pushing open the door to Jamie’s
bedroom, holding the candelabra over his face and trying to read something in his features that would deny what was becoming
more apparent by the month—that their marriage was a travesty, that he was a cuckold, and that the boy sleeping before him
was a bastard.

There was a movement at the foot of the bed—the cat, Lewis’s cat, shifting on the mattress. It stood up and
stretched, clawing at the bedclothes, catching at the loops of thread and yanking them to pieces. Without thinking, he swung
the candelabra at it, but the cat scampered toward the top of the bed, and the candelabra cracked into the edge of the doorframe,
half the candles pitching out onto the floor, sdll alight. One landed on the bed cover, burning a hole in it, and he pinched
the flame out with his fingers, cursing, and stomped out the flaming candles on the floor, turning in a rage to find the boy
awake, staring at him, holding the cat to his chest. The wind shrieked under the eaves outside, and dark leaves flew in the
moonlight beyond the window.

The eyes, the damned eyes. You couldn’t get around them. He turned away, his chest heaving, then leaned down and clutched
the cat by the fur at the back of its neck, yanking it out of the boy’s hands. The boy cried out, scrabbling across the top
of the bed. “No!” he yelled. “Daddy, no! Don’t hurt it!”

“Get dressed,” he said, his voice husky. He held the cat at arm’s length, letting it kick. Hurt it? He’d kill it and return
it to its owner. Right now. Sometimes what a person needed to change a bad habit was a shock to the system.

The boy dressed hurriedly, trying to smile, as if it would make a difference. Just like his mother—the smile that would turn
the world right. Well, not this time. “Come along,” he said, his voice cold, and he pinched out the couple of remaining candles
so that the house fell into darkness.

L
ORNA HAD COME HOME LATER THAT EVENING, IN NO
mood to talk. He knew better than to ask where she’d been, but he could see that she was stone-cold sober, so she hadn’t
been off drinking with a girlfriend. Her smile was forced, and the couple of pleasant things she had said to Klein set his
teeth on edge. She’d pretty much gone straight to bed. He wrote the whole day off as a bad investment and decided to wait
until morning to confront her. Now that he’d gotten the upper hand with Pomeroy things had steadied out a little; tomorrow
would be a little brighter for all of them.

Meanwhile he would bunk down on the couch. He poured out a glass of scotch and iced it up, lying down in his bathrobe and
watching the wind blow across the top of the pool, herding the leaves into the shallow end and making a kaleidoscope picture
out of the moon’s reflection. If anything, the wind was blowing harder than it had all week.

From where he lay he could see through the wrought-iron fence, out to where the dry grass waved on the moonlit hillside, the
wind flattening it out in sheets and runnels. He sipped his scotch and waited, not sleepy, but full of sharp anticipation.
It occurred to him that it was a perfect night for Lorna to be sore at him—him on the couch and her holed up in her bedroom—but
then he thrust the idea aside, getting up to refill his glass.

He stood at the window, watching the shadows, listening
to the night. He could almost hear her voice, the woman’s voice, on the wind. “Come on,” he said softly, picturing her in
his mind, the two of them together in the dimly lit room of his dreams, the smell of jasmine and tallow and pine…

And then he saw her.

He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again she was gone. He searched the shadows with his eyes, his breath
stopped. He set his glass down quietly on the coffee table and opened one of the doors, the wind blowing into his face. She
had been descending along the ridge trail, and perhaps had slipped out of sight beyond the poolhouse, even then crossing through
the orchard toward the gate. He flipped on the outdoor lamp, and in that moment she appeared beyond the fence, stopping in
the darkness of the poolhouse shadow, just at the edge of the circle of light. He flipped the light off and went out through
the door.

For a second he couldn’t see her, but he knew she was there as he hurried to the fence, grasping the cold wrought iron. She
stepped out of the shadow then, the moon shining on her face and hands. “Esther,” he said, her name materializing in his mind.
She smiled at him, and he reached up to unlatch the gate.

T
HE NIGHT WAS A TORRENT OF NOISE AND MOVEMENT
. The cacophony of wind and of blowing leaves and creaking limbs shattered the cold deliberation that had settled on his mind
minutes ago, reducing it to a broken glass jumble of rage and jealousy and suspicion. He turned his face away from the wind
and strode out into a circle of moonlight that played across the top of the low stone retaining wall behind the house. The
cat, as if panicked by the wind, snarled and kicked, and he tried in vain to grapple the writhing thing around the neck with
both hands, forgetting utterly about Jamie until, with a wild cry, the boy grabbed his arms and hoisted himself off the ground,
trying to force his hands apart and save the cat.

He flung the boy aside, staggering sideways with the force of it, and in that moment the cat twisted loose, dropping to the
ground on all four feet and disappearing in an instant into the windblown darkness beyond the rock wall. Cursing out loud,
he lunged after it, climbing onto the wall, pushing into the tangle of vines that crept out of the edge of the forest. Picking
up a broken limb with both hands, he flailed at the bushes, beating them to pieces in his rage to punish the cat. He felt
Jamie’s hands on his arm again, dragging at him, and heard him sobbing, pleading with him to stop. The crying filled him with
an inexpressible anger, and he swung the limb sideways as the boy jerked away, ducking beneath it. He saw the cat reappear
in the moonlight along the top of the wall, nearly at the end of the
house, then dart away into the darkness of the open cellar. In his rage he slammed the limb against the stones, snapping it
off short. He flung the leftover piece into the darkness.

Jamie cowered against the wall of the house now, shrinking away, afraid to look at his face. The boy broke and ran along the
wall, dodging out of the way, calling for the cat. Dr. Landry let him go. Neither the boy nor the cat was of any interest
to him any longer. He was wasting his time here. He had to hurry if he wanted to catch them together. In his mind he pictured
Lewis, and then Lewis and Esther together, embracing in a dimly lit room. His breath whistled in and out of his lungs, and
the wind stung his eyes as he staggered back into the house, searching for the door key, yanking out cupboard drawers and
spilling their contents onto the kitchen floor.

He found a can of lamp oil, and for one wild moment he considered setting the house on fire, pouring the oil over the wooden
floor and setting it aflame. That would put an end to it forever—the ruins of their marriage, the irony of his building her
this house in its idyllic setting, a place where they would make each other happy forever. He laughed out loud, the laughter
nearly doubling him over.

Then he saw the key, hanging on a nail inside a cupboard door. He plucked his watch out of his pocket—just past nine o’clock.
She’d still be there. He forgot about the lamp oil and methodically checked to see that the windows were not only shut but
locked. The thought of bringing his rifle occurred to him, but instantly he knew he wouldn’t need it. That wasn’t the way
it would happen….

An image sprang into his mind: a door blowing open, swirling leaves, the man rising before him on the white sheets, his face
welling blood. He looked about him at the dark furniture, at the dancing shadows on the windows. The wind howled, rattling
the front door, moaning through the eaves. Lurching forward, he threw the bolt to lock the front door, then turned to go out
the back again, into the night,
locking that door, too, and pocketing the key. The boy was gone, the little bastard, for good and all. The house was ridded
of his presence, of Lewis’s presence. That was the beginning of putting things right.

Lewis’s face appeared before him again like a ghostly projection against the trees, drawing him along the trail, into the
darkness of the woods.

P
OMEROY SWUNG THE CAR INTO THE LOOP FOR THE THIRD
time—out Portola to Alicia Parkway, hooking up onto the San Diego Freeway south, then off at El Toro and all the way up to
Cook’s Corner, where he turned up into Live Oak Canyon, drifting past the mouth of Trabuco Oaks and up the hill again. Sometimes
he did his best thinking when he drove. He wanted to be doing something, but he didn’t know what, besides drive, waiting for
instructions. Something would suggest itself if he was open to it—the stars, the wind, the pattern of headlights coming toward
him on the highway.

Something in the wind was lonesome and empty tonight, and the quiet interior of the car was a barrier against it—that loneliness,
and although it wasn’t something you wanted to think about, aimless movement was better than no movement at all. Tomorrow
morning Klein would get the letter and cassette in the mail, but Pomeroy had no patience with tomorrow. Today had been too
curious, too full of suggestion for him to let it end early. The night still held promise.