The Darkest Evening of the Year (18 page)

Chapter
42

M
illie and Barry Packard, who had agreed to keep Fred and Ethel for a night or two, lived in a shingle-sided New England-style house on a low rise above the beach.

The front door was unlocked, as Amy had been told it would be. She and Brian followed Fred, Ethel, and Nickie through the house to the back patio, where Millie sat at a teak table, sipping a martini, in the magical light of gas-flame hurricane lanterns with prismatic panes.

Five feet two, slender, with short shaggy blond hair and large eyes, Millie had an air of elfin glamour and looked as if she had just gotten home from playing the lead in a production of
Peter Pan
. She was fiftyish, perhaps too old for the role, though Mary Martin had probably still played the part in Broadway revivals at that age.

“Freddie darling, my adorable Ethel,” she exclaimed as the two kids went straight to her, tails lashing, confident of receiving ear rubs and chin scratches. “You’re as fabulous as ever, but why didn’t you fix your folks a drink before you brought them out here?”

“Don’t get up,” Amy said, bending to kiss Millie on the cheek.

“Cupcake, I never get up for family, only for people I don’t like, so I can mix them weak drinks that make them desperate to go elsewhere.”

They were family because they were both board members of Golden Heart and both besotted with goldens.

“Brian, dear, you know where to find the liquor cabinet. We’re out of cocktail olives, it’s a tragedy of historic proportions, but we’re coping because we’re Americans.”

After bending for a kiss of his own, Brian said, “We can’t stay more than a minute, Millie. We have to hit the road.”

“My God, you’re a handsome young man. It can’t be natural. You shouldn’t start cosmetic surgery so young. By the time you’re sixty, your mouth will be stretched ear to ear.”

Amy said, “Where’s Barry?”

“On the beach with the dogs. Just for a walk. No romping in the surf. It’s too late to be combing sand out of fur, and the dogs would need grooming, too.”

Fred and Ethel spotted the trio on the sand below. They hurried to the edge of the patio. As much as they wanted to plunge down the slope to the sea, they wouldn’t dash off without permission.

When Millie glimpsed Nickie, her eyes widened with delight. “Oh, Amy, you’re right. She’s a beauty. Come here, you fabulous creature. I’m your Aunt Millie. Nothing they’ve told you about me is true.”

While Nickie and Millie charmed each other, Amy watched Barry on the beach with Daisy and Mortimer.

Past play, the dogs weaved lazily along the strand, smelling one by one the shells, the driftwood, the knots of weed, the sea urchins, the ocean-smoothed medallions of bottle glass left by the last high tide and to be carried away on the next.

A million fragments of the shattered moon knocked together in the troughs and crests of a low surf, while in the lulls between sets of waves, the jigsaw self-assembled, repairing the silvery sphere, which shimmered in the currents, twisted, and came apart once more.

The rhythms of the sea, the quarter-million-mile light of the moon, and the companionship of dogs inspired a sense of timelessness, of peace, of the profound grace always waiting to be discovered when the noise of daily life subsides.

Amy had the uneasy feeling that this tranquil moment might be the last that she would know for a long time, if not forever.

Perhaps having seen them on the patio, Barry Packard came up from the sea, his dogs preceding him.

Of the Packards’ many fine qualities, Amy admired none more than the compassion they revealed in their choice of dogs. They adopted only goldens with special needs, which were the hardest to place in forever homes.

As a puppy only a few weeks old, Mortimer had been found in a Dumpster, thrown away because he had spina bifida and was paralyzed from the waist down. Although treated like garbage, he had been fortunate—considering that he might have been drowned in a bucket before being tossed in the trash.

After examinations by three different vets, Mortimer was judged too severely disabled to be saved. Euthanasia was recommended.

In his expressive face, in his sweet and cheerful demeanor, Amy had seen not an inconvenience but instead a soul as bright as any.

At the start, Mortimer could walk on his front legs but only drag his rear. Surgery to remove his hopelessly deformed left hind leg, followed by weeks of therapy, resulted in an accomplished tripod pup who could not only walk without dragging his butt but also
run
with a gait that was as peculiar as it was swift.

Five years old now, Mortimer was a certified therapy dog. Millie took him to children’s hospitals to visit ill and disabled kids who, every one, were inspired by his courage and good cheer.

Daisy was blind. She navigated by sound and smell and instinct, but also by staying close to Mortimer, who was her trusted guide and boon companion.

Steps led up the ice-plant-covered slope, and three-legged Morty and blind Daisy ascended with the enthusiasm of any goldens at the realization that visitors had come calling.

Usually, their rapidly rotating tails would wind them up and wiggle them directly to Amy and Brian. But when they came off the stairs onto the patio, and encountered Nickie, a remarkable thing happened.

Morty froze, Daisy froze, tails suddenly still but not lowered, heads high, ears lifted. Like Fred and Ethel, these two did not rush to Nickie for the usual doggy meet-and-greet.

First Mortimer came forward tentatively, then Daisy. Approaching Nickie, Morty bowed his head, and Daisy did the same a moment later.

Mortimer settled onto his belly and awkwardly crawled forward the last few feet. Daisy, sensing what he had done, followed his example.

When they had reached her, Nickie lowered her head to Mortimer and, as if grooming her pup, began lovingly to lick his face.

Eyes closed, he submitted with a look of ecstasy, tail sweeping the brick patio. His failure to return the kisses was odd behavior.

When after half a minute Nickie had finished with Morty, she turned her attention to Daisy and licked her face, too, as though she were a mother tending to a newborn. Daisy closed her sightless eyes and sighed contentedly.

Fred and Ethel had refrained from greeting their old friends, the disabled Packard dogs, as if in Nickie’s presence new protocols applied. They stood nearby, watching intently.

Having come up the steps immediately behind his goldens, Barry Packard witnessed this strange ceremony. A burly, barrel-chested man of reliable good humor, he usually entered with a laugh line followed by handshakes and hugs. Here he stood in silence, intrigued by the dogs’ behavior.

Martini forgotten, Millie had risen from her chair to get a better view of these events.

Amy realized that the actions and the attitudes of the dogs were not alone responsible for the extraordinary quality of the moment.

A hush had fallen upon the night, as though a great bell jar had been lowered over the house and patio. The background sounds of which she had been only half aware—faint music from one neighbor’s house, soft laughter from another, the spirited singing of shore toads—were silenced. Even the low surf, although no lower or in less frequent sets than before, seemed to dissolve upon the sand with less exuberance, almost in a whisper.

The prismatic lenses of the six gas-fed hurricane lamps had all along sprayed quivering rainbows across the white painted ceiling of the patio and had scattered shimmering coins of light across chairs and tables and faces, but surely the colors had not been as intense as they were now.

Imagination might have accounted for Amy’s impression that the air carried a subtle new energy, similar to the freighted atmosphere under storm clouds before the first flash of lightning. But she was not imagining when she felt the fine hairs on her arms and on the nape of her neck quiver as though responding to the silent flute of static electricity.

Mortimer rose to his three feet, blind Daisy to her four. The five dogs regarded one another, grinning, tails wagging, but still in some transported state.

In a voice subdued for him, Barry Packard said, “I knew this kid in college, Jack Dundy. Total party animal. Lived for beer and card games and girls and laughs. Skated through his studies with the minimum of work. Came from money, spoiled, irresponsible, but damn likable in his way.”

Whatever story Barry might be telling, it seemed to have no connection to what had just happened among the dogs. Nevertheless, Amy still felt a prickling along her arms, the back of her neck, her scalp.

“One Sunday night, Jack’s coming back to college from a weekend home. Just two blocks from the campus, he sees fire in the ground-floor windows of a three-story apartment building. He goes into the place, shouting
fire,
pounding on doors, the place filling fast with smoke.”

To Amy, it seemed that even the dogs were alert to the story.

“They say Jack led people out three times before the fire department arrived, saved at least five children whose parents had been trapped by flames and died. He heard other kids screaming, went in a fourth time, even though he heard sirens coming, went back in and up, broke out a third-story window, dropped two little girls to people on the lawn catching them in blankets, went back into that room for a third child but never made it to the window again, died in there, burned beyond recognition.”

The night sounds were returning. Faint music from another house. The songs of shore toads.

“I couldn’t understand how the Jack Dundy I knew, slacker and party animal, spoiled rich kid, quick to play the fool…could have done something so damn heroic and so selfless. For the longest time it seemed to me not only that I hadn’t understood Jack Dundy but also that I didn’t understand the world at all, that nothing was as simple as it seemed, as if I were an actor just realizing I was in a play, nothing but painted sets around me, and something else altogether behind the stage scenery.”

Barry fell silent, blinked, and looked around as though for a moment he had forgotten where he was.

“I haven’t thought about Jack Dundy in years. Why did he come to me now?”

Amy had no answer for him, but for reasons she couldn’t quite articulate, the story nevertheless seemed appropriate to the moment.

Suddenly dogs were dogs again, each of them seeking the touch of human hands, the sweet-talk that told them they were beautiful and were loved.

The ocean receded into blackness. More blackness lay behind the moon, and still more beyond the stars.

Amy knelt to give Daisy a tummy rub, but because the blind dog could not meet her eyes, her gaze traveled instead to Nickie, who was watching her.

Through her memory, the flock of sea gulls startled into flight with a thunderous drumming of wings, feathers blazing white in the sweeping beam of the lighthouse, sharply shrieking as they ascended, shrieking as if testifying to the terror below, as if crying
Murder, murder!
and Amy with the gun in both hands, standing in the blood-spotted snow, screaming with the gulls.

Chapter
43

B
illy Pilgrim walked twice past the building that housed Brian McCarthy’s company offices and apartment. The windows were dark on both floors.

The boss had confirmed by phone that the deal was made. McCarthy and Redwing were evidently on the road to Santa Barbara by now.

Billy returned to the Cadillac in which Pauline Shumpeter had died of a massive stroke but had not soiled herself. He boldly reparked it in the lot beside McCarthy’s building.

After sheathing his hands in latex gloves, he got out of the car and climbed the exterior stairs to the apartment door.

He needed gloves because he didn’t intend to reduce this place to molten metal and soot with exotic Russian incendiary weapons. He would have
preferred
to leave fingerprints and then burn the building because his hands sweated in the gloves, and they made him feel like a proctologist.

With a LockAid lock-release gun, he picked the deadbolt pins in twenty seconds, went inside, closed the door behind him, and stood listening for the sound of somebody he might need to kill.

Billy did not usually kill two people per day and assist in the murder and disposal of two others. If this had been a take-your-son-to-work day, and if he had had a son, the boy would have come to the conclusion that his dad’s job was a lot more glamorous than it really was.

Sometimes months would pass between killings. And Billy could go a year, even two years, without having to waste a friend like Georgie Jobbs or a complete stranger like Shumpeter.

Sure, in his line of work, every day required the commission of felonies, but mostly they were not capital crimes that could earn you a lethal injection and burial at public expense.

Episodes of life seldom had the body count of good novels in the everything-is-pointless-and-silly genre, which is why Billy still read so many books even after all these years.

Unnervingly, episodes of real life also were not reliably as meaningless as life was portrayed by his favorite writers. Once in a while, something would happen to suggest meaningful patterns in events, or he would encounter someone whose life seemed to be filled with purpose.

On those occasions, Billy would retreat to his books until his doubts were put to rest.

If his favorite books failed to encourage a full renewal of his comfortable cynicism, he would kill the person whose life had seemed to be meaningful, which at once proved that the meaning had been an illusion.

The apartment remained silent, and finally Billy moved room to room, switching on lights.

He disliked the minimalist decor. Too Zen. Too calm. Nothing here was real. Life was chaos. This decor was not authentic.

Authentic decor was a deranged old lady living with fifty years of daily newspapers and thousands of bags of trash stacked throughout the residence, her husband dead twelve years on the parlor sofa, and twenty-six cats with various seizure disorders. Authentic decor was bombed-out shells of buildings, tenements full of crack whores, and anything Vegas.

Billy loved Vegas. His ideal vacation, which he didn’t get to enjoy often enough, was to go to Vegas with two hundred thousand in cash, lose half of it at the tables, win the losses back, then lose the entire bankroll, and kill a perfect stranger chosen at random on the way out of town.

In McCarthy’s annoyingly clean neon-free study, Billy unplugged the brain of the computer, carried it from the room, and stood beside the front door. When he headed for Santa Barbara, this logic unit would be in the trunk of his car. Later, he would flood it with corrosive materials and burn it in a crematorium.

The architect had been instructed to take his laptop with him. Billy would have to destroy that machine after McCarthy was dead.

In the study again, he searched the file cabinets and found the printouts of all the e-mails that Vanessa had sent to the architect over the past ten years. Although the waste can was tall, those files filled it to the brim, and he put them by the front door.

Because McCarthy might have saved old e-mail files on diskettes when he updated computers, Billy searched boxes of those but found nothing that, judging by the labels, needed to be trashed.

His purpose here was to eliminate anything that might, in the event of McCarthy’s disappearance, lead the police to Vanessa.

In the study and bedroom, he also searched for a diary. He did not expect to find one.

As with literature, authentic decor, ideal vacations, and so many things, Billy Pilgrim had a theory about diaries.

Women were more likely than men to think that their lives had sufficient meaning to require recording on a daily basis. It was not for the most part a God-is-leading-me-on-a-wondrous-journey kind of meaning, but more an I’ve-gotta-be-me-but-nobody-cares sentimentalism that passed for meaning, and they usually stopped keeping a diary by the time they hit thirty, because by then they didn’t want to ponder the meaning of life anymore because it scared the crap out of them.

He did not find a diary in McCarthy’s apartment, but he did find scores of art-paper tablets full of sketches and detailed drawings, mostly portraits. This suggested that the architect secretly yearned to be not a designer of buildings but instead a fine artist.

Pencil drawings littered the kitchen table. One of them was a striking portrait of a golden retriever. Some were studies of the dog’s eyes in different light conditions. Others were abstract patterns of light and shadow.

Billy became at once fascinated by the drawings because he inferred that during their creation, the artist had been in emotional chaos. Billy was a connoisseur of chaos.

He stood at the table, sorting through the pictures, and after a while he found himself in a chair without remembering having sat down. The wall clock revealed that he had been with the drawings for more than fifteen minutes, when he would have sworn it had been two or three.

Later, still enthralled by the art, he was startled to feel blood trickle down his face.

In no pain, puzzled, Billy raised one hand and felt his cheeks, his brow, seeking the wound, which he could not find. When he looked at his fingertips, they glistened with a clear fluid.

He recognized this substance. These were tears. In his line of work, he sometimes reduced people to tears.

Billy had not wept in thirty-one years, since he had read a huge novel of such stunning brilliance that it had drained him of his last measures of sadness and sympathy for his fellow human beings. People were nothing but machines of meat. You couldn’t feel sorry for either machines or meat.

That same novel had made him guffaw so strenuously, for so long, at the folly and bottomless stupidity of humankind that he had also used up his lifetime allotment of tears of laughter.

These new tears perplexed Billy.

They amazed and astonished him.

They also alarmed him.

Dread made his palms clammy.

The nanopowder-coated latex gloves were slimy with sweat, which backed up to the cuffs and leaked out at his wrists, dampening his shirt sleeves.

If his tears were tears of laughter, a preparatory lubricant for gales of giggles, he might have been able to accept them. But he did not feel any laughter building inside him.

His contempt for humanity remained so pure that he knew these could not be tears inspired by the richly comic horror of the human condition.

Only one other possibility occurred to him—that these were tears shed for himself, for the life that he had made for himself.

His alarm escalated into fear.

Self-pity implied that you felt wronged, that life had not been fair to you. You could only have an expectation of fairness if the universe operated according to some set of principles, some tao, and was at its heart benign.

Such an idea was an intellectual whirlpool, a black hole that would suck him in and destroy him if he allowed its fearsome gravity to capture him for another moment.

Billy knew well the power of ideas. “You are what you eat,” the nutritionists endlessly hector fast-food addicts, and you are also what ideas you have consumed.

With the thirst of an insatiable swillpot, he had poured down the fiction of two generations of deep thinkers, and he was pickled in their ideas,
comfortably
pickled. At fifty-one, he was too old to be transformed from a dill into a gherkin; he would have been too old at twenty-five.

He did not know why the drawings had brought him to tears.

Heart racing, breathing like a man in panic, he resisted the desire to study them further to ascertain the reason for their extraordinary effect on him.

With his happiness and his future at stake, Billy at once gathered up the drawings, hurried with them into Brian McCarthy’s study, and fed them through a paper shredder that stood beside the desk.

Half convinced that they wriggled with life in his hands, he packed the tangled mass of quarter-inch ribbons of paper into a dark-green plastic garbage bag that he found in the kitchen. Later, in Santa Barbara, he would burn the shredded drawings.

By the time he carried the computer brain, the wastebasket full of e-mail files, and the bag of shredded drawings to the Cadillac, where he stowed them in the trunk, his heart rate had subsided almost to normal, and he had regained control of his breathing.

Behind the wheel of the car, he stripped off the disgustingly slimy latex gloves and tossed them into the backseat.

He blotted his hands on his slacks, on his sport coat, on his shirt, and then drove away from McCarthy’s den of perils.

By the time he found the freeway entrance, the flow of tears had stopped, and his cheeks had begun to dry.

He suspected that to blot from his mind the entire disturbing incident, the best thing that he could do would be to kill a total stranger selected on a whim.

Sometimes, however, even a random act of murder had to wait for a more propitious moment. Billy was already late setting out for Santa Barbara, and he had to make up for lost time.