Son of Destruction (11 page)

Here in the room.

His voice. Whoever he is. ‘God damn you, old woman.’ The room shakes.

I’ll see you dead
. Words boil out of her, leaving Dan riven and shaking.
I’ll see you in hell
. And in a plume of flames, she imagines it. She sees me writhing and howling in the heat.
But who am I. Who am I?
Rigid and furious, she envisions the murders – Hal, once she starts there will be no end to it, Eden Rowse.
You
. The ball of heat inside her grows; in the unlikeliest of cavities it flickers, getting brighter as she seethes in the depths of her recliner, unaware and unprotected, roaring,
Who’s sorry now?
Furious, she is too angry to comprehend the fire inside her, any more than she will know the exact moment that her soul explodes and flies out in a shower of sparks. By the time her body splits and flames shoot up there is nothing left of Lorna Archambault but the chair she sits in and the shell of her body in its melted shreds of lavender that she put on especially for him; everything else is consumed from within, everything but the husk. For a few seconds she flames brilliantly – gorgeous,
Too bad Hal can’t see
, and then collapses inward. What little is left of her curls back on itself and fuses with the melting fabric of the ruined chair. Only rage remains, a nugget of distilled evil so powerful that Dan yelps in pain.

The guilt.

Whose? ‘God.’ He lunges for the door.

‘God!’

The guilt is terrible.

How did this door close? Did I shut myself in? Did she? Drenched and shaking, he grapples with the knob and finally breaks out. He’s free, but the knowledge follows him out of the room. Changed by forces he doesn’t recognize and can’t name, he hurtles downstairs and out into beginning night.

It’s a nice enough day out here on the water, but it’s getting late. Not that Stitch Von Harten and Buck Coleman want their afternoon on the water to end. Every Friday they find ways to back out of the office – Stitch from Von Harten Printing, which his dad founded, and Buck from Coleman Chrysler, where he shows up only reluctantly because his father hung the business around his neck like a stone.

Every Friday they come out here with a couple of six-packs, whether the grouper are running or not. Stitch knows it sounds cheesy, but it’s their special time. They’re dragging their feet because of the party. They did their part – they’re paying for it, stood back and admired the dresses their wives bought for the event – should be enough. The hell of it is, they’re under orders to show up early, to help Cathy and Buck’s pretty wife Kara cope. They’re supposed to be home in time to shower and shave, break out the clippers for nose-hairs and put on the clothes the wife laid out for them and stand there until she approves.

They will do their job and walk in smiling, but, shit. All that social agro and nicey-niceness when there are egrets and blue heron in these waters, astonishing birds that take Stitch’s heart with them when they take flight. If he had his druthers, he and Buck would be out in the boat watching the sun go down, but time is thumbing its nose at them and they have to go.

‘Fuck,’ Stitch says. ‘How did we get to be so old?’

‘We’re not old, we’re just domesticated,’ Buck says. For a guy who’s spent his adult life grieving, Buck is more or less content. ‘We were hot shit, weren’t we? Back in the day?’

Stitch laughs. ‘Still are. But I see what you’re saying. At reunions, they’re sizing us up, looking for things to cut off.’

‘Because we ruled that school.’ Buck hasn’t exactly pulled up the anchor. He is staring out at the bridge. ‘We were good, weren’t we?’

‘We were.’

Moodily, Buck cracks another beer. ‘We didn’t know how sweet it was.’

Stitch has problems of his own, but he prefers not to dwell. He says sympathetically, ‘Nut cancer. What a bitch.’

‘Oh, that. That’s nothing.’ Buck looks up. ‘We had everything, and we fucked it up.’

‘Only at the end.’ Stitch knows where this is going. ‘Darcy. We all felt bad.’

The summer before senior year Buck’s dad told the twins their future was Coleman Chrysler, no ifs, ands or buts. Darcy Coleman was drunk by noon. By four, he was crazy-ruined – they couldn’t cut him off, couldn’t bring him down. At midnight Buck’s twin drove a demo model off the lot and crashed into the biggest tree on Beach Drive. It took hours to pry him out. Buck threw himself in on top of Darcy, like he wanted to be buried too. He’s been going around like half a person ever since.

Then Buck surprises him. ‘No. I mean the end of senior week. You know when.’

Stitch knows exactly when and he groans out loud. ‘Right.’

‘If Darcy’d been there, she’d have stayed back. No room in the Jeep.’ Buck is getting weird and agonized. ‘It wouldn’t of come down the way it did.’

‘Don’t beat yourself up over things you can’t help.’ Stitch starts the motor so he won’t have to hear what Buck says in reply. He takes off in high and doesn’t slow down until they turn into the estuary off Pierce Point.

They are in low, putt-putting along the shoreline to the Marina when Buck says, ‘Look!’ He can’t point; it’s too obvious. He jerks his head at the shore. Weird business: they are being watched.

‘Holy crap,’ Stitch says, and he means it in a good way. ‘That’s Walker Pike.’ Even from here, although he is half-blind without his glasses, Stitch knows. Pike is so unlike them that there’s no mistaking it: that cigar-store Indian profile, the proud lift of the head. Even back in high school he was a little scary, strung tight as a string on a crossbow. Not Like Us. Stitch Von Harten personally has changed shape in the years intervening and so has Buck. It happens, but not to Walker Pike.

If anything, he stands taller, so lean and easy in his body that Buck sucks in his belly at the sight. ‘Fuck, in high school he was nothing. Now look.’

‘Yeah. Pierce Point trash,’ Stitch says. ‘What goes around comes around someplace else, I guess.’ Walker Pike that they used to walk past without speaking is
somebody
now, sitting there on the deck of his neat redwood house with its glittering solar panels. ‘I heard he invented Google or Ebay or some damn thing. Now he’s rich as God. Look at that house!’

‘Yeah. Kara says it’s in
Architectural Forum
, just what you can see from here. They never got inside.’

‘All that, and he wouldn’t let them in?’

‘He always was one weird bastard.’ Stitch waves. ‘Hey, Walker.’

‘Look, he sees us! Walker, hey.’

‘Remember us?’ Not that Walker would recognize him, heavy as he is. ‘It’s Stitch and Buck, Buck Coleman? From Fort Jude High?’

Fluid, fearsomely easy within his body, Pike stands. Like a priest, he lifts one hand, showing them the blade but stopping short of the blessing. Then he turns and goes inside.

Stitch says, ‘Well, it’s nice to see you too. Son of a bitch couldn’t afford a clean T-shirt when we knew him. Now look.’

Buck is slapping at his pockets. He motions to Stitch to shut the motor. ‘Phone. Crap. Too late.’

‘Probably the girls, getting on our case.’ In Stitch’s pocket, his phone is vibrating off the hook. He pulls it out and checks caller I.D. ‘Wait. No. It’s Chape. Buck, it’s Chape. Yo, Chape!’ He listens carefully. ‘There’s trouble with Brad. He wants us at the shack. We’re on our way,’ he says into the phone and slaps it shut. ‘Damndest thing. He says Chaplin’s coming.’

‘Well, shit.’ Buck looks happier than he has all day, probably because unlike them, all-American high school hero Bob Chaplin is slipping, so much for the leader of the pack. Every man needs somebody to look down on, and now it’s Chaplin’s turn. ‘It’ll be nice to see him. He’s been home, how long? It’s damn well time he showed himself.’

It was funny and sad, watching the two old fuds out in their motor boat, idling a little bit too close to his house. Walker didn’t mind; they looked harmless enough until they hailed him, which drove him inside. He can’t be with people he knows. Walker knows them, all right, but he doesn’t know them well enough to predict what they’d say or do if he let them in, or what might come down if it went wrong.

In high school he had their faces by heart, but he wouldn’t have recognized either one if Stitch hadn’t broadcast their names. Von Harten. Coleman. The least of the fabulous five – football captain and four rich kids from the Fort Jude Club. In high school he hated them. Face it, in high school he envied them. Well, look at them now, bobbing in that crap boat in their floppy crew hats and nose guards and zinc oxide, probably because the wives said it was that or metastatic melanoma from exposure to the sun. Poor bastards, they never had a chance.

Walker’s mind usually travels on another plane but in a way it was gratifying, thinking at ground level, where he left these good old boys the night he left Fort Jude – forever, he thought. He never belonged, for which he’s always been grateful. He didn’t run with them in high school. He observed. An outsider then and an outsider now, Walker is a behaviorist. To him they’ve always been specimens from another culture because they acted so big and thought so small.

In a way, he’s sorry he didn’t wave back when Von Harten hailed him – they’re nice enough and sad, really, with one already dead. It would be fun to see. Too bad he couldn’t invite them to tie up on his dock and come up to the house for a beer.

He’d like these two old guys to see what the kid from Pierce Point made of himself with what little he was given, but it isn’t safe. Now, Walker Pike is safe enough in New York or London or any of the big cities where he does business, but he can’t let himself get close to anybody he knew growing up in Fort Jude. There’s too much backstory between them. Interface and there’s a chance that in spite of his best intentions, it will end badly.

Given the givens, Walker knows it was weird to build down here, when he fought so hard to escape. It’s the terrain. He was driving along the coast outside Cape Town with the crashing surf on one side and mountains rising at his back when he was leveled by homesickness, not for Fort Jude, for sandspurs and summertime heat mirages on blistering white sand. He came back to Florida for the sawgrass and mangroves in certain inlets and the creatures that fed among the roots, these horizons with thunderclouds at one end, and at the other, orange sunset and pink afterglow.

He’s rich enough to telecommute, so he built this place. He bought the plot and surrounding property on the water not all that far from Pierce Point, where he was so miserable as a kid. It’s risky, but heartbreak brought him back. It’s as good a place as any to be alone.

Too bad, Walker thinks, but I had to let them go. They were good old boys, Coleman and Von Harten; Chaplin was OK, although his feelings for Chaplin are ambiguous at best. The problem lies with the other two, whom he
will not name
. It’s too much like summoning demons. Name them and they show up. And everything goes to hell. Trouble is, he can’t say whether those two are the demon or he is, so. Sorry, Buck. Sorry, Stitch. Not today.

Even people you like may bring up things it’s dangerous for you to remember. First proof of the existence of . . . No. Don’t go there.

So Walker locked his door and dropped the louvered shutters, not because he’s scared of those two good old boys, same as they ever were, but because he’s scared of what he might do.

If.

That’s the problem. It was his problem back then, it’s his problem now and always will be.

The if.

Crazy, but when the doorbell chimed I thought,
What if it’s Bobby?
A nice man to hang out with when Davis goes. Not that I’m sure he is. Going, I mean. We haven’t sat down over the details, but when I walked back from work last week, my mind ran along ahead and by the time I collapsed at home, I knew.

I can do this!

Five whole miles, and I only stopped once.
I’m stronger than you think.

I know it’s Bobby out front. A woman would phone ahead. It wouldn’t be half bad, walking into Patty’s engagement party on Bobby’s arm. One look and they’d all know without me having to explain. I can ask him in and make a fuss over him, and Davis McCall, who’s out in the car somewhere sulking, well, Davis can go to hell.

But my face! All dressed up, with my face all naked and smeared with grief. After days of not speaking, Davis picked today to have the fight. Frankly, life was a lot more tolerable when we weren’t speaking, but these things have to be done.

I’ve been putting it off for months. What with parties and Steffy and my job and a hundred dozen household things, I don’t have the time. I thought we might hash it out this summer when everything slows down, so I have to wonder. Did Davis plant that phone bill to smoke me out? Tomorrow, I kept telling myself, tomorrow we’ll start, but we didn’t. Then God cursed me with an empty afternoon – two clients canceled, no new houses to list. With Davis home early on Fridays and Steffy safely off at Busch Gardens, I walked right into it.

He let me have it before I got in the door. ‘OK, Nenna. I’m done.’

All the blood rushed to my head. ‘That’s all you have to say?’

‘I’m not spending the rest of my life on that sofa.’

Push leads to shove; I shouted, ‘Then you’re not spending it here!’

Crafty Davis, leading me on. ‘You want me to move out?’

‘I don’t know what I want!’

God damn Davis, he lit up like it was Christmas morning. ‘Great, I’ll need the weekend to pack. Do you want to me to pick up cartons or can I borrow the roller bags?’

I’m glad Steffy crashed into the kitchen just then, before I screamed at him. She thumped through the Florida room in a panic, calling, ‘Mom?’ like the world was ending. ‘Dad?’ She tumbled into the living room with her hair gone wild and when she saw us facing off, all hostile and stony, she stopped cold, and I can’t tell if she was disappointed, or just surprised. ‘Oh! You’re all right.’

‘Steffy!’
And we tried so hard to keep her out of this.
‘Honey, of course we are.’