The Wrath of Angels (16 page)

‘You hear any word yet on what’s coming to you?’

Teddy knew that Harlan Vetters had split his worldly wealth evenly between his children. There wasn’t much money in the bank, but the house would be worth something, even in these hard times. It was a big old rambling place with a lot of land adjoining it, land that bled into the forest on three sides so that there was little chance of anyone building nearby. Harlan had kept it nice too, right until the end.

‘Marielle talked to the bank about taking a loan to buy me out, with the house as security.’

‘And?’

‘They’re still talking,’ said Grady, and his tone made it clear that it wasn’t a subject he wished to pursue.

Teddy took a long drag on his cigarette, right down to the filter. He’d heard whispers about this because his old buddy Craig Messer was engaged to a woman who worked as a teller at the bank, and this woman had said that Rob Montclair Jr, whose father managed the bank, didn’t care none for Grady Vetters, and was doing his damnedest to ensure that the bank didn’t go lending money to his sister. The reasons for his hatred were lost in the mists of high school, but that was the way of small towns: little hatreds had a way of lying dormant in their soil, and it didn’t take much to make them germinate. Marielle could go someplace else for a loan, but Teddy felt sure that the first thing she’d be asked was why she wasn’t talking to her own bank about this, and then someone from the second bank would call Rob Montclair Jr. or his poppa, and the whole sorry business would start over again.

‘You know, Teddy, I hate this place,’ said Grady.

‘I figured,’ said Teddy. He wasn’t resentful. Grady just saw Falls End differently. He always had.

‘I don’t know how you can stand to stay here.’

‘I ain’t got nowhere else to go.’

‘There’s a whole world out there, Teddy.’

‘Not for people like me,’ said Teddy, and the truth of it made him want to die.

‘I want to go back to the city,’ said Grady, and Teddy understood that this wasn’t a conversation between equals. Grady Vetters wasn’t just the center of his own universe, but a planet around which men like Teddy orbited adoringly. As far as changes in the direction of Grady Vetters’ conversation went, the best that his friend could hope for would be, ‘Enough about me, what do you think of me?’

‘Which city?’ said Teddy. Only a little of his resentment showed, not that Grady noticed.

‘Any city. Any place but here.’

‘Why don’t you, then? Go back to what you were doing and wait for the money to come.’

‘Because I need the money
now
. I got nothing. I been sleeping on couches and floors these past six months.’

This was news to Teddy. Last he heard, the whole art business had been paying well enough for Grady. He’d sold some paintings, and there were more commissions in the pipeline.

‘I thought you was doing okay. You told me that you’d sold some stuff.’

‘They didn’t pay much, Teddy, and I was spending it as soon as it came in. Sometimes
before
it came in. I had it bad for a while.’

This Teddy did know about. Heroin scared the shit out of him. Blow you could take or leave, but with heroin you were a full-blown, living-out-of-Dumpsters-and-selling-your-sister-for-quarters addict, although Teddy would have paid more than quarters for Marielle Vetters.

‘Yeah, but you’re all good now, right?’

‘Better,’ said Grady.

There was a frailty to how he said it that made Teddy fear for him.

‘Better than I was.’

‘That’s something,’ said Teddy, not sure what else to say. ‘Look, I know Falls End ain’t for you, but at least here you have a roof over your head, and a bed to sleep in, and people who’ll look out for you. If you got to wait a while for the money to come through, better here than on someone’s floor. It’s all relative, man.’

‘Yeah, all relative. Maybe you’re right, Teddy.’

He gripped the back of Teddy’s neck and smiled at him, and there was such sadness in his eyes that Teddy would have given a limb to make it go away, any residual anger at Grady’s selfishness now forgotten, but he just said ‘So you want to go over to Darryl’s? There’s no percentage in staying here.’

Grady tossed his cigarette butt. ‘Sure, why not? You got any weed? I couldn’t listen to Darryl’s shit with my head straight.’

‘Yeah, I got some. I don’t want to bring it to Darryl’s, though. Shit’ll be gone before I got time to find my rolling papers. Let’s go back to mine, pick up some beers, have a smoke. When your head’s in the right place, we can join the party.’

‘Sounds good,’ said Grady.

They finished their beers and left them on the bench, then scooted round the side of the bar so they didn’t have to see Kathleen Cover and her shitbird husband again. They got bitten some more on the way to Teddy’s truck, so back at the house Teddy hunted down a bottle of calamine while Grady put on some music – CSNY,
Four Way Street
, couldn’t have been more mellow if Buddha himself was on backing vocals – and then Teddy produced the Baggie of weed, and it was very good weed, and they never did make it to Darryl Shiff’s party but instead talked long into the night, and Grady told Teddy things that he had never told anyone before, including the story of the airplane that his father and Paul Scollay had found in the Great North Woods.

‘That’s it,’ said Teddy, through a fug of smoke. ‘That’s how you do it.’

He stumbled to his bedroom, and Grady heard closets being searched, and drawers being emptied on the floor, and when Teddy returned he was holding a business card in his hand, grinning like it was a winning Powerball ticket.

‘The plane, man. You tell them about the plane . . .’

That night, a message was left on the answering service for Darina Flores, the first time any such message had been received in many years.

It had begun.

I
n her dark bedroom, Darina Flores drifted in and out of consciousness. The painkillers disagreed with her, causing tremors in her legs that tore her from sleep. They also provoked peculiar dreams. She couldn’t have called them night terrors, for she was herself virtually without fear, but she experienced sensations of descent, of falling into a great emptiness, and she felt the absence of grace with a pain that was unfamiliar to her. The god she served was a pitiless one, and there was no consolation from him in times of distress. He was the god of mirrors, the god of form without substance, the god of blood and tears. Trapped in her misery, she understood why so many chose to believe in the Other God, to follow Him even though she saw in Him only a being as heedless of suffering as her own. Perhaps the only true difference was that her god took pleasure in agony and grief; at least, one might argue, he had a sense of involvement.

She had always considered herself to have a high tolerance for pain, but she had a fear of burns, and a reaction to them that was disproportionate to the severity of the injury. Even a minor burn – the careless brushing of a candle flame, a match held for too long – caused blistering to her skin, and a fierce throbbing that found an echo deep inside her. A psychiatrist might have speculated on childhood trauma, an accident of youth, but she had never talked with a psychiatrist, and any mental health specialist would have been forced to travel further back than distant memories of her childhood to find the source of her terror of burning.

Because her dreams were real: she had fallen, and she had burned, and somewhere inside she was still burning. The Other God had made it so, and she hated Him for it. Now her inner pain had its most ferocious external manifestation yet, the extent of it hidden from her by dressings and the refusal to allow her a mirror.

Barbara Kelly had surprised her in the end. Who could have guessed that she would prove to be so weak and yet so strong, that she would seek to save herself at the last by turning to the Other God, and in doing so would inflict such damage on the woman sent to punish her? My beauty, she thought, now gone; temporarily blind in one eye, with the possibility of lasting damage to her vision caused by the old grounds in the coffee pot sticking to her pupil. She wanted to shed her body like a snake slews off its skin, or a spider leaves its old carapace to wither. She did not want to be trapped in a disfigured shell. In the darkness of her agonies, she feared that it was because she did not wish to see the corruption of her spirit reflected in her outer form.

Each time she woke the boy was there waiting, his ancient eyes like polluted pools against the pallor of his skin. He still had not uttered a word. As an infant he had rarely cried, and as a boy he had never spoken. The doctors who examined him, chosen for their trustworthiness, their commitment to the cause, could find no physical defect to explain the boy’s silence, and his mental functions were adjudged to be well above average for his age. As for the goiter upon his neck, that troubled them, and there had been discussions about removing it. She had demurred. It was part of him. After all, that was how she had known it was him. She had thought that it was possible when she felt him kicking in her womb. A sense of his presence had suffused her as though she were enveloped in his embrace, as though he were inside her more as a lover than a developing child, and it had grown in intensity throughout her second and third trimesters so that it became almost oppressive to her, like a cancerous growth in her belly. Expelling him from herself had come as a relief. Then she had looked upon him as he was placed in her arms, and her fingers had traced his lips, and his ears, and the delicacy of his hands, and had paused at the swelling upon his throat. She had gazed into his eyes, and from the blackness of them he had looked back at her, an old being resurrected in a new body.

And now he was beside her, stroking her hand as she moaned upon the sweat-dampened sheets. While they were finishing with Barbara Kelly, Darina had summoned help, but their nearest tame physician was in New York and it took time for him to reach her. Strangely, there was not as much pain as she might have anticipated, not at first. She attributed it to her rage at the bitch who had turned upon her, but as Kelly’s life slowly seeped from her beneath blades and fingers, so too the torment in Darina’s face seemed to increase, and when Kelly at last died it screamed into red life with her passing.

Deep second-degree burns: that was how they described them. Any more severe and there would have been serious nerve damage, which would at least have numbed the pain, she thought. There was still the possibility that grafts might be necessary, but the doctor had decided to hold off on that decision until a degree of healing had occurred. Some scarring was inevitable, he said, particularly around her injured eye, and there would be significant contracture of the eyelid as the scarring proceeded. The eye hurt more than anything else: it felt like needles were being pushed through it and into her brain.

The eye was patched, and would remain so even after the other dressings were removed. Already her skin was blistering badly. She had been given lubricant for the eye, as well as antibiotic drops. The boy took care of them all and salved her blistered face, and the physician visited each day and commended him on his efforts, even as he kept his distance from him, his nose wrinkling at the faint odor that seemed to rise from the boy regardless of how many showers he took or how clean his clothes were. His breath was the worst: it stank of decay. Darina had grown used to it from long exposure, but it was still unpleasant, even to her.

But then he was an unusual boy, mostly because he wasn’t really a boy at all.

‘Hurts,’ she said. She still had trouble speaking. If she moved her mouth more than a fraction, her lips bled.

The boy who was more than a boy put some gel on his fingers and gently applied it to her lips. He took a plastic bottle with a fixed straw in its cover, slipped the straw into the undamaged side of her mouth, and squeezed some water through. She nodded when she was done.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

He stroked her hair. A tear rolled from her uninjured eye. Her face felt as though it were aflame.

‘The bitch,’ she said. ‘Look what the bitch did to me.’

And: ‘I’m burned, but she is burning too, and her pain will be greater and longer than mine. The bitch, the burning bitch.’

She was not due another painkiller for a couple of hours, so he turned on the TV as a distraction. Together they watched some cartoons, and a comedy show, and a dumb action movie upon which she wouldn’t ordinarily have wasted her time but that now acted as a soporific. The night drew on, and the sun rose. She watched the light change through the crack in the drapes. The boy gave her another pill, then changed into his pajamas and curled up on the floor next to her bed as he saw her falling asleep, his head on a pillow and a comforter covering his body only from the waist down. She felt her eyes begin to close, and prepared to exchange real pain for the memory of pain.

From the floor the boy watched her, unfathomable in his strangeness.

Messages accumulated. Most were inconsequential. Still, the boy made a careful note of each one, and handed it to her when she was sufficiently alert to understand what she was being shown. Minor tasks were postponed for a time, major ones diverted elsewhere. She willed herself to recover. There was too much that needed to be done.

But for all of the boy’s solicitude, and all of the care he took with her phone, some contacts went unexamined for a time. The boy did not have access to the old Darina Flores answering service: it had come into existence before he was born, and there had been no reason to acquaint him with it. Anyway, it had been many years since contact had been made through that number.

And so it was that a message inquiring if she was still interested in news of an airplane that might have crashed in the Great North Woods remained unlistened to for days, and a little time was bought.

But only a little.

I
called Gordon Walsh, a detective who now worked out of the Maine State Police’s Southern Major Crimes Unit in Gray. Walsh was about the closest thing I had to a friend in the MSP, although it would have been stretching the point to call him an actual friend. If Walsh was my friend, then I was lonelier than I thought. Actually, if Walsh was
anybody’s
friend they were lonelier than they thought.