The Darkest Evening of the Year (8 page)

Chapter
18

T
he living room yielded nothing of interest to Vernon Lesley, but in the back of the bedroom closet, he found two shoe boxes full of photographs.

His client had provided a list of items related to Amy Redwing’s other life that she might not have destroyed when she shed her past, changed her name, and relocated to southern California. Photographs were at the top of that list.

The box contained primarily snapshots and the digital-camera memory cards from which some of them had been printed. The most recent were almost nine years old.

Vern sat on the edge of Redwing’s bed and patiently pored through numerous envelopes of photos to see if they contained any pornographic material. His client hadn’t asked him to conduct such a meticulous inspection; but Amy Redwing happened to be an attractive woman, and Vern happened to be curious.

Unfortunately, not one picture proved to be erotic or even exotic. He had never seen a more mundane collection of snapshots.

Although he didn’t know Redwing’s story, to Vern it seemed that her current life and her former one had been equally boring.

In Vern’s other life, as Von Longwood, he tooled around on a radically customized motorcycle, a real
hog,
and he was a master of tae kwon do with the costumes to prove it, and in general he lived large. He didn’t understand why anyone would want another life that was as drab as the first.

In this life, Redwing even looked similar to how she had looked in her prior life. Her hair was long now, short then; she had done some things with makeup then that she didn’t do now; she had dressed more stylishly in those days. That was the extent of her makeover.

She had remained a brunette even though she might have looked hotter as a blonde. And judging by what evidence Vern possessed, she hadn’t undergone breast enlargement, which maybe she should have.

Whereas Vernon Lesley stood five eight, Von Longwood towered an awesome six feet six. Vern slouched through life with round shoulders and a potbelly, but Von had biceps to rival those of Schwarzenegger when he had been a great action-movie star instead of a governor.

Von had tattoos, an earring with a tiny skull dangling from it, a muscular chest instead of man boobs, and
wings
. They were huge, soft, feathery wings, but so strong, and when Von wanted to fly,
no one
could keep him grounded.

Vernon Lesley’s other life unfolded in Second Life, the Internet site that offered a vivid virtual world populated by avatars like Von Longwood.

Some people mocked this kind of role-playing, but they were ignorant. Virtual worlds were more
imaginative
than the real world, more exotic, more colorful, yet they were becoming more convincingly detailed by the week. They were the future.

Vern had more fun in his other life than in this one, more and better friends, and more memorable experiences. He was freer as Von Longwood than he could ever be as Vernon Lesley. He had never been creative in his first life, but in his second, he had designed and built a nightclub, and he had even bought an island that he intended to populate with fantastic creatures of his own invention.

Any
of that, any moment of it, beat sitting in a stranger’s bedroom, poring through boxes of boring photographs, hoping to find a nude shot.

From an inner pocket of his sport coat, he withdrew a white plastic trash bag and unfolded it. He put all the photos in the bag, and then he returned the empty shoe boxes to the back of the closet, leaving them exactly where he had discovered them.

As far as he could tell, the only significant difference between Redwing’s two lives was the addition of dogs to this one. He saw no mutts in the photographs.

In one of her nightstands, he found a SIG P245 pistol loaded with +P .45 ACPs. This struck him as a perfectly manageable weapon for a woman who did not have the balance benefit of surgically enlarged breasts. He returned the gun to the drawer.

He was not surprised to find a loaded pistol. These days, if Vern had been a woman living alone, he would have slept with a shotgun.

From the bedroom, he proceeded to her study. Eventually he discovered a manila envelope taped to the underside of a desk drawer.

Carefully, he peeled off the Scotch tape with which the envelope had been sealed, pried up the clasp. His expired hope of discovering some homemade pornography had been resuscitated.

Instead, he found documents related to the woman’s name change. Well, this was the real world, so you shouldn’t expect many thrills.

She had also been
Amy
in her previous life, but she had swapped the surname
Cogland
for
Redwing
. Of this, Vern approved.
Redwing
was a cool name, even good enough for a Second Life avatar.

She had received a new Social Security card under this name, a passport, and a Connecticut driver’s license, which she had no doubt used to obtain a California license after moving across country.

Accompanying the documents was a copy of a judge’s order sealing the court’s actions and removing them from public record.

Intrigued, Vern read the legal documents more closely than he had the first time. He suspected that the name
Cogland
ought to ring a whole tabernacle’s worth of bells, but it didn’t.

If Redwing had been in the news during her Cogland life, Vern might not have read or heard about her. He had never been interested in the news.

Before Second Life, he’d spent most of his leisure time playing in on-line game groups of the Dungeons and Dragons variety. He had slain a vast menagerie of monsters, and no dungeon had held him long.

Vern put all of these papers in the white trash bag with the photographs and the digital-camera memory cards.

Occasionally, Redwing might reach under the desk drawer and feel the envelope to confirm that the hidden material remained where she had put it.

Vern took several sheets of paper from her computer printer. He folded them and inserted them in the envelope to approximate the feel of the original documents.

With the brass clasp, he secured the flap. From the dispenser on her desk, he pulled a length of tape and sealed the flap just as it had been, and then he taped the envelope under the drawer, where he had found it.

He was left with only the lengths of old tape. He wadded them in a ball and dropped them in the white trash bag.

Although Vernon had searched the half bath off the kitchen, he had not yet explored the full bath that adjoined her bedroom. He had been concerned that, in a moment of reckless bravado, he would be tempted to leave his traditional signature.

He was a professional, he had a job to finish, and he needed the money for his island of fantastic creatures.

In her bathroom, the lid of the toilet stood open, exposing the seat and the bowl. At once he put it down.

He took the lid off the tank. Sometimes people sealed things in a plastic bag and submerged it in the toilet tank. Not Redwing.

If he squinted when he looked in the mirror above the sink, he could see Von Longwood. Vern smiled and said, “Lookin’ good, dude.”

Chapter
19

S
hortly before nine o’clock, Thursday morning, Brian heard his three employees coming to work in the offices below his apartment.

Earlier he had left a voice mail for Gretchen, his assistant, asking her to reschedule his Thursday appointments to the following week. He told her that inspiration had seized him, that he would be drawing in his apartment, and that he should not be interrupted.

Inspiration had more than seized him. A singularly persistent muse—insistent, incandescent—had overwhelmed him, filled him with a quiet excitement, and he labored in a state of enchantment.

Supposedly true tales of the supernatural had never struck him as credible; yet Brian now sensed that he was channeling a talent greater than his own. If what he felt was true, then the presence working through him must be benign, for he had seldom in his life felt this happy.

Although he had put a slantboard under the art-paper tablet, his fingers should have ached, and his hand should have cramped. He had been at this for at least five hours, with intense focus.

As if the laws of physics and physiology had been suspended, he suffered no stiffness in his hand, no slightest pain. The longer he drew, the more fluidly the images appeared upon the paper.

The eyes of the dog…Brian stopped drawing the surrounding facial structures, yielding to a fascination with just the glistening curves from lid to lid, from inner to outer canthus, the mysterious play of light upon and within the cornea, iris, lens, and pupil.

In each new drawing, the quality of the incoming light was different from that in previous renditions, was received by the eyes at different angles, obliquely and directly.

Out of his pencil flowed larger and still larger eyes, in pairs, filling the entire page.

Then he began rendering one eye per page, enlarging the scale for a more detailed study of the patterns of intraocular radiance.

When next he glanced at the clock, he was unnerved to discover that an hour and a half had passed since he had heard his small staff coming to work downstairs. Yet he did not put down the pencil.

Although the elliptical perimeter of an eye still framed the subject, though the iris and the pupil could still be discerned, enigmas of light and shadow began to dominate each composition to such an extent that the drawings became almost abstract.

Soon Brian began to see hieroglyphics in these soft yet complex patterns, strange symbols that blazed with meaning when glimpsed from the corner of an eye. They faded into gray haze or diffused into luminous mists when he attempted to look at them directly.

Even as meaning eluded him, he grew convinced that whatever the source of these images, whether they came from his intuition or were the work of a phantom presence that guided his hand, they contained a hidden truth and were leading him toward a shattering revelation.

He tore off another page, put it aside. He had used at least a third of the tablet. Drawings layered the table.

Only after his hand had worked for a while on the clean page did he realize that he was being led into a still deeper exploration of the dog’s mesmerizing gaze. Instead of merely portraying the beauty of the dusky yet luminous canine eyes as they appeared from without, Brian’s busy pencil took him
within
that architecture of shade and sheen, not into the substance of the eyeball itself, but inside the warp and woof of shadow and light within cornea, iris, pupil, lens.

This was a vision of which he, as an artist, could never have conceived. The eye as a recognizable subject disappeared from the page, leaving only the incoming luminous rays and the companion shadows as they traveled through the processing layers of the eye. The drawing became entirely abstract, yet achingly more beautiful, numinous. Here was genius at work, and Brian knew he was no genius.

He had passed into an altered state of consciousness, into a trance of delight.

At times he swore that he saw the point of the working pencil pass through the paper without puncturing it, laying down its graphite
beyond
the page, as if constructing an image down, down, down through an infinite number of surfaces.

Any good artist can create the illusion of three dimensions; but as these many-petaled patterns were refined, they blossomed toward him and simultaneously invited him to fall away within them. His pencil seemed to be a key to dimensions beyond a third.

The meaningful hieroglyphics that earlier he’d glimpsed embedded in the drawing began to glow again in his imagination if not in fact, brighter than they had been previously. Then, as the drawing appeared to flower toward him, he became aware of some secret at its center, a shimmering amazement that might ultimately be beyond understanding, that could never be adequately drawn, yet his pencil worked, worked—

Through the room swept a sound so terrible that Brian flung down the pencil and thrust to his feet, knocking over the chair.

Not a simple sound but many noises simultaneously: hiss, whizz, soft clicking, rustle and flump, deep throb and ruffle,
crumpcrump-crumpcrump
. Loud, but not a blast. Not heavy like the hard crash of thunder, but heavy like the subsequent roll.

He felt as if he had been folded into the sound—as if it were a great blanket—folded into it and shaken out, folded in, shaken out.

Concussion waves thrummed in his ear drums, quivered through his teeth, traveled the hollows of his bones.

Sudden silence surprised him. The alarming resonance had seemed as if it would escalate and endure until everything in sight had been shaken apart, like the voice of an earthquake speaking deep within the breaking earth, but it lasted only three or four seconds.

For a moment he was paralyzed, throat tight, waiting for the phenomenon to repeat.

After a hush had held the kitchen for half a minute, Brian went to the window and peered out, half expecting to see a column of smoke rising in the distance, evidence of an explosion. The sky was clear.

The attraction of the unfinished image on the art paper remained powerful. His perception of a pending revelation returned.

He set the fallen chair upright and settled at the table once more. He picked up the pencil.

As his hand moved and the pencil point whispered against paper, further detailing the abstract image, the sound came again, but not loud this time. With rustle and flutter, something approached in the kitchen behind him.

Chapter
20

A
fter play, the dogs happily lapped at the large water bowls lined up just outside the kennel, in the shade of the enormous oak.

A
come
command brought Fred, Ethel, Nickie, and Hugo back to the blanket on which Amy sat with Renata.

The six breeder dogs settled on the lawn at a distance, as they had been before the games. They trusted other dogs implicitly, but they were still wary of people, even of those who had rescued them.

After a while, Renata opened a bag of wheat-free cookies. She gave treats to Ethel and Hugo, while Amy rewarded Nickie and Fred.

The prospect of cookies brought the six ghost dogs to their feet. They approached hesitantly, tails swishing.

Amy’s kids made her proud as they eased away—albeit somewhat reluctantly—to allow the newcomers to receive treats.

Gently, with lips and tongue, the breeder dogs finessed the cookies from Amy’s fingers. She felt not the slightest contact with a tooth, and none of the six tried to snatch away the bag of goodies.

“Ever been bitten by a puppy-mill breeder?” Amy asked Renata.

“Nope. They come here covered in sores, some half-blind from untreated eye infections, spent their lives in cages hardly bigger than them, never knew a human being wasn’t a greedy hateful bastard, never knew a gentle touch or any kindness. They ought to savage us. But they have the softest mouths, don’t they? The gentlest hearts.”

Some nights, Amy lay sleepless, unable to stop thinking about the hell of some dogs’ lives, feeling angry and helpless.

Most puppy farms had ten or twenty breeder dogs, but some big operators kept a thousand or more in cruel conditions. These animals did not truly live, merely existed, and in perpetual black despair.

Their litters had a hope of a real life, but not the breeders. And because mill owners had no interest in maintaining the quality and improving the genetics of the breed, many of the puppies would suffer diseases and joint conditions that would shorten their lives.

Responsible pet stores like Petco and PetSmart had adoption programs for homeless dogs, but didn’t sell puppies.

Other stores, Internet merchants, and newspaper advertisers who claimed to have puppies from small breeders and loving farm families were usually selling animals produced by brutalized breeder dogs.

An American Kennel Club registration specified that the dog was a purebred, not that it had been bred humanely. Every year, hundreds of thousands of puppy-mill products, sired and whelped by dogs living in desperate conditions, came with the “proper papers.”

Amy gave talks at schools, at senior centers, to any audience that would listen:
Accept a rescue dog. Or buy from a reputable breeder recommended by the parent club for each breed, such as the Golden Retriever Club of America. Go to animal shelters. Each year, four million shelter dogs die for lack of a home.
Four million.
Give love to a homeless dog, and you’ll be repaid tenfold. Give money to the puppy-mill barons, and you’ll be perpetuating a great horror.

Her audiences were always attentive. They applauded. Maybe she reached some of them.

She never imagined that she was changing the world. It couldn’t be changed. So many people’s indifference to the suffering of dogs was proof, to her, that the world was fallen and that one day there would be—must be—judgment. All she could do was try to rescue a few hundred dogs a year from misery and premature death.

When she and Renata finished dispensing treats, three breeder dogs shied away after a few minutes of cuddling. Two lingered longer before retreating, but one—Cinnamon—settled beside Renata as if to say
Okay, I’m going to take a chance, I’m going to trust this.

Renata said, “Cinnamon’s gonna be one of your soul-savers.”

Amy believed that dogs had a spiritual purpose. The opportunity to love a dog and to treat it with kindness was an opportunity for a lost and selfish human heart to be redeemed. They are powerless and innocent, and it is how we treat the humblest among us that surely determines the fate of our souls.

Cinnamon turned to look at Amy. She had the eyes of a redeemer.

The geometry of judgment is a circle. Hate is a snake that turns to consume itself from the tail, a circle that diminishes to a point, then to nothing. Pride is such a snake, and envy, and greed. Love, however, is a hoop, a wheel, that rolls on forever. We are rescued by those whom we have rescued. The saved become the saviors of their saviors.

When Amy left the Last Chance Ranch with her three kids, she turned slowly onto the county road, hesitating long enough to read the license plate on the Land Rover.

As she headed west, the other vehicle shed the shade of the jacarandas and followed. Maybe the driver thought she was too naive to recognize the existence of a tail. Or maybe he didn’t care that she knew she was being followed.