The Illusionist (26 page)

It was twelve-thirty. The sky above was a pearly color, there was no sun out, just a dull, quiet light as if it were going to storm again.

Terry lived up on Schermerhorn Road. A steep incline that led up the hillside through the trees to where her house was. Someone had plowed the road that morning, and I was able to get up it. When I reached the house, I saw Dean's truck parked next to Terry's little black Honda.

I climbed out of the car, and I stood a moment. There was a silence all around me, except for the faint, intermittent brushing of the wind through the trees.

It looked like no one had come outside yet this morning. Maybe they were sleeping late. As I plowed across the yard to the house, I noticed old footprints on the ground softened at the edge by new snow. The prints led from the house, across the yard, up into the fields.

As I approached the front steps, I looked down. On the snow at the foot of the steps, there was a red stain. It was dark at the center, then dissolving into pink at the edges.

The porch was covered by an inch of new snow, I noticed, the firewood stacked there was powdered with it.

I paused. All around me, the only living sound was a bird cawing somewhere in the distance, its cry echoing through the fields.

I rapped on the front door. No answer. I turned the knob. The door was unlocked.

As I entered the house, the air was still and cold. There was no welcoming warmth, not even the heat that human bodies massed together inside give off. The temperature inside the main room was the same as outside.

I stood in the center of the room. Everything was orderly, the dishes stacked in the drainer by the sink, a child's toy trucks parked in a row along the wall. Only one thing seemed out of place—on the floor there was a small blue book facedown, splayed open as if it had been flung there. I bent down and picked it up, and saw the familiar handwriting. It was a diary, Terry's diary. I recognized her writing from all the orders she had written out at work, all the notes I had seen from her, her round, neat script, as if she always wrote everything slowly and carefully. I had watched her write many times. Someone's handwriting, the way they write, is a clue to their soul. How many times had I stood by Terry at the Home and watch her do her orders, noticed how slowly and carefully she wrote. I glanced at the words,
“Who is to say how we will be happy? I don't care what you are.”

In the window, a fly buzzed. There were two doors leading off from the main room. They were open. Through one door, I glimpsed the edge of a wrought iron bed frame.

I stepped across the threshold. It takes a moment for the brain to sort out the outline, the meaning, of the shapes in front of one's eyes, of something like what I saw there in that room. At first I saw only a room, very still. And then, on the floor by the bed, I saw the figure of a child, facedown, in blue sleeper pajamas. The back of the head dark red, hair matted with blood. On the bed, two figures facedown, in blue jeans, their hair also dark with blood.

I stepped forward into the room. They lay like dolls that had just been thrown there. I recognized Terry and Dean. For some reason I noticed the blood on the hair looked dried. On the floor, the child looked he had just been thrown there, like he weighed nothing. If you hadn't seen the dried blood on the hair, a glimpse of the dead white skin of his face, you would have mistaken him for a doll. I saw a fly crawling on Terry's arm, and as I moved, it flew off and I knew the bodies had been there for many hours.

The bedsheets were stiff with blood. Behind the bed there was a spray of red on the wall as if someone had flung a can of paint on it.

The stillness told me all. I was too frightened to go further into the room and I cried out, “Terry!” and then I rammed my fist into my mouth, and I ran back through the main room into the smaller bedroom.

My memory of what happened next is blurred. I ran to the telephone and I dialed 911, screaming that there had been a murder, weeping and sobbing as the operator kept asking me over and over again the exact location of the house.

Then, I threw down the phone, and I cowered in the corner of the room, afraid whoever had done this was still there, although I knew that there could be no other living being with me in the house. But what if he came back? I had never been so close to death before. The silence of it terrified me. But within seconds, I heard the distant sound of sirens in the still, midday air, growing louder and louder across the countryside. And soon the yard was crowded with ambulances and police cars converging all at once. Men were running up the front steps, and I could hear the urgent squawking of police radios.

I sat huddled at the kitchen table. The police stood over me, asking me questions. “Did you know the victims, ma'am?” “Do you know if there are next of kin?” But it didn't take them long to realize I knew nothing.

And by now I was crying so hard that I could hardly get the
words out. And it was so cold in the house because the fire in the woodstove had died out, and I was shivering and my teeth were chattering like china rattling, and this little orange-haired woman cop brought a blanket for me and wrapped it around my shoulders and I was grateful.

I heard grunts as stretchers were lifted across the room and I saw the bodies covered up, the tiny little one in the body bag like a dog or something.

There was a blast of freezing air as they opened the door of the house and carried the bodies out into the snow. And all the time it was so cold in the house, as if the inside were outside because the cold had seeped into the very walls and beams and settled there.

And after a while the woman cop with orange hair drove me to my dad's. We didn't talk the whole way because it was as if she were scared too, scared of the whole huge thing. When I got to my dad's, Liz was kind to me and made a hot bath for me, and put me to bed in the boys' room and made them sleep in the living room. And all through the night, I kept waking up, and I would sense Liz there, coming in to check on me and see if I was okay.

The next day at dawn, the cops found Brian Perez's Camaro abandoned on the edge of the Parkway. There were footprints leading from the car into the fields. The police followed the prints over the ridge and across the fields again to Terry's house. They figured he must have taken Terry and Dean by surprise. Probably killed the child because it had been woken up by the noise and run into the bedroom to see what was happening. Brian must have killed them all in a some crazy, blind rage, spraying bullets all over the place.

He must have wanted them very badly to hike in across the snow like that. And I pictured Brian plowing knee-deep through it with a deadly determination, the wind cutting his face, looking like some wild creature, his body shagged with white, not caring anymore if he lived or died, not capable of feeling cold or heat, not capable even of dying in the cold on his journey, couldn't die because he was completely animated by hate.

They instigated a statewide search for him, calling in reinforcements from other counties. But that night, they discovered him in the old ice house down by the river, cowering and hypothermic. He hadn't gone far. It was almost like he wanted to get caught. He didn't resist, they said, just put up his hands and went along with them. There were signs he had tried to build a fire, but he couldn't get it going. Arsonist that he was, Brian couldn't even start a fire in snow. He had no weapon with him. But they found his gun thrown out onto the ice on the river. It was a 9mm and the bullets matched those in the bodies.

He gave himself up without a struggle, he was nearly dead with cold. And besides, he had destroyed the object of his hatred, Dean, and he had nothing left to fight for—indeed, to live for, anymore. It didn't matter now whether he lived or died because he was never ever going to have Melanie—never, never, once and for all.

Later, as I lay in my own bed in my apartment, huddled under the blankets, still shivering though it was warm, I watched the whole thing over and over again on television, the woman reporter from the Albany station standing in the yard outside Terry's house, dressed in a sheepskin coat and hat, the snowflakes melting on the lens of the camera and making blotches of white on her face, talking into her mike. “This is the first multiple homicide in memory in this quiet, rural county fifty miles northwest of Albany,” the woman said. “This place, of quiet farming communities, where neighbors help one another in time of need . . .”

There was a week of funerals. The whole county turned up at the little white church in Bergen Falls for the joint funeral of Bobby and Terry. The church was filled, and they had to have speakers hooked up in the trees outside so all who had come could hear the service and people stood in the freezing cold, or sat in their cars with the motors running for the heat, listening. Even the cops who were involved in the case came.

Up by the altar, with its plain brass cross and threadbare vestments, the two coffins stood side by side, the little coffin in the shadow of the bigger one, as if seeking its shelter.

I sat in a pew with B.J. on one side of me, and Carl on the other. B.J. was crying, though he was a man, the tears streaming down his dark face. And whenever a prayer was uttered, Carl crossed himself. Though this was a Lutheran church, he was Roman Catholic. Terry's father was unable to attend, they said, because he had had to be hospitalized with heart fibrillation.

There was a woman minister, fresh-faced, short hair, young. She was itinerant, and made her way across the area from one Lutheran church to another to perform services. She did not know Terry and her boy personally, she said, but she knew from talking to the people of Sparta that Terry was a kind person, and conscientious, a hardworking supervisor at the Nightingale
Home, beloved by all the patients, and above all, a good mother to her child.

*  *  *

A couple of days later they had Dean's funeral all the way up in St. Pierre. Melanie insisted on going, and her mother too, and they asked me if I would drive with them, because they didn't want to make the journey all that way alone in winter and I told them we could take my car.

At 6
A.M.
on the morning of the funeral I picked them both up at their house. It was still dark out and our breath steamed in the black air as we got into the car.

Mrs. Saluggio sat in the front next to me, beautiful, with her golden skin, her perfect bowed lips. Didn't look much older than Melanie, they could have been sisters. Despite the hour, Mrs. Saluggio was all dressed up, her dark hair perfectly combed, she was wearing a neat camel's hair coat, her slender legs gleaming in their shiny stockings. She had on little boots with a fur trim and her perfume filled my car with a rich, sweet scent.

As we drove out of Sparta, Melanie sat in back, peering out the window at the roadway with glittering eyes. She was hunched over in the folds of her black leather coat, puffing on a cigarette with frantic, jerky gestures, as if this was the only language she knew to express all her anger. She looked thinner, her neck was scrawny, her cheekbones were hollow, there were dark circles under her eyes. Her hair hung limp and dull around her face, and she wore dirty jeans and a soiled aqua-colored sweatshirt under the coat. A gold cross hung on a chain around her neck.

We took the Sparta bridge across the river, then the Thruway north. They kept the Thruway cleared in all weather, and the driving wasn't bad. Mrs. Saluggio did most of the talking, her voice blending with the throb of the motor. “I blame myself,” she said. “I should've let him stay with us.”

“Then maybe Brian would've gotten
you
too,” I told her.

“True . . . but I loved her—or him.” That was easy to say now, I
thought, now that he was dead and no threat to anyone. “She was like another child to me. But I couldn't have her back after all that stuff in the newspaper, saying she was a girl. . . .”

She glanced behind her at Melanie. “With all this AIDS, I had to protect Mellie.”

Melanie, hunched over in the back, said nothing, just puffed away angrily at her cigarette, glaring out the window.

“Mel, honey,” Mrs. Saluggio said, “open that window, will you? The smoke is too much.”

With a spiteful, violent gesture, Melanie jerked the window down, and cold air swept through the car.

We drove awhile, then Mrs. Saluggio said, “Now it's freezing, honey. Can you throw that thing out and roll the window up?”

Melanie threw her cigarette out and turned in her seat, watching it disappear behind her, and then sullenly rolled up the window again.

Mrs. Saluggio was watching her. “You didn't take a shower this morning. You should've, for the funeral.”

In the rearview mirror, I could see Melanie's lips tighten.

“You should've,” Mrs. Saluggio said, “out of respect, honey.”

And I realized suddenly that the pungent, salty smell of sweat and old hair that was permeating the car was Melanie's smell. Playing the role of the widow, I thought, establishing herself as the widow. That would be her whole identity from now on. Dean's widow.

Mrs. Saluggio leaned back in her seat. “I guess sometimes the only thing to do is trust in the Lord. He's the only one who can make sense of this.”

“I hate God!” Melanie said suddenly from the back.

“Don't say that, honey. You don't mean that.”

“Yes I do.”

“Well, I know you don't,” Mrs. Saluggio said, softly. “You're just upset. Sometimes we don't understand. . . .”

“Could you check the map?” I asked. “It's Route Twenty-five, isn't it?”

Mrs. Saluggio peered down at the map spread across her lap. “I'm looking for the exit,” she said. I could feel her guilt.