From the Corner of His Eye (34 page)

By the time he arrived at his apartment, Junior could think of no better action to take, so he phoned Simon Magusson, his attorney in Spruce Hills.

He used the kitchen phone, at the corner secretary. The blood had been cleaned up long ago, of course, and the minor damage from the ricocheting bullet had been repaired.

Strangely, as sometimes happened in this room, his missing toe itched. There was no point in removing his shoe and sock to scratch the stump, because that would provide no relief. Curiously, the itch was in the phantom toe itself, where it could never be scratched.

When the attorney finally came on the line, he sounded put-upon, as though Junior were the equivalent of a troublesome toe that he would like to shoot off.

The big-headed, bulging-eyed, slit-mouthed runt had collected $850,000 from Naomi’s death, so the least he could do was provide a little information. He’d probably bill for the time, anyway.

Considering Junior’s actions on his last night in Spruce Hills, eleven months ago, he must be cautious now. Without incriminating himself, pretending ignorance, he hoped to learn if his carefully planned scenario, regarding Victoria’s death and Vanadium’s sudden disappearance, had convinced the authorities—or whether something had gone wrong that might explain the quarter at the diner.

“Mr. Magusson, you once told me that if Detective Vanadium ever bothered me again, you’d have his choke chain yanked. Well, I think you need to talk to someone about that.”

Magusson was startled. “You don’t mean he’s contacted you?”

“Well, someone’s harassing me—”

“Vanadium?”

“I suspect he’s been—”

“You’ve seen him?” Magusson pressed.

“No, but I—”

“Spoken to him?”

“No, no. But lately—”

“You do know what happened up here, regarding Vanadium?”

“Huh? I guess not,” Junior lied.

“When you called earlier in the year, to ask for a referral to a private investigator down there, the woman had recently turned up dead and Vanadium was gone, but no one put the two together at first.”

“Woman?”

“Or at least, if the police knew the truth at that time, they hadn’t yet gone public with it. I had no reason to mention it to you back then. I didn’t even know Vanadium was missing.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Evidence suggests Vanadium killed a woman here, a nurse at the hospital. Lover’s quarrel, perhaps. He set her house on fire with her body in it, to cover his tracks, but he must have realized they would still finger him, so he lit out.”

“Lit out where?”

“Nobody knows. Hasn’t been a sighting. Until you.”

“No, I didn’t see him,” Junior reminded the attorney. “I just assumed, when this harassment started here—”

“You should call San Francisco police, have them put your place under surveillance and nail him if he turns up.”

Since the cops believed that Junior accidentally shot himself while searching for a nonexistent burglar, he was already in their book as an idiot. If he tried to explain how Vanadium had tormented him with the quarter, and how a quarter turned up, of all places, in his cheeseburger, they would figure him for a hopeless hysteric.

Besides, he didn’t want the police in San Francisco to know that he’d been suspected, by at least one of their kind, of having killed his wife in Oregon. What if one of the locals was curious enough to request a copy of the case file on Naomi’s death, and what if in that file, Vanadium had made reference to Junior waking from a nightmare, fearfully repeating
Bartholomew
? And then what if Junior eventually located the right Bartholomew and eliminated the little bastard, and then what if the local cop who’d read the case file connected one Bartholomew to the other and started asking questions? Admittedly, that was a stretch. Nevertheless, he hoped to fade from the SFPD’s awareness as soon as possible and live henceforth beyond their ken.

“Do you want me to call and confirm how Vanadium was harassing you up here?” asked Magusson.

“Call who?”

“The watch officer, San Francisco PD. To confirm your story.”

“No, that’s not necessary,” Junior said, trying to sound casual. “Considering what you told me, I’m sure whoever’s bothering me here can’t be Vanadium. I mean, him being on the run, with plenty of his own troubles, the last thing he’d do is follow me here just to screw with my head a little.”

“You never know with these obsessives,” Magusson cautioned.

“No, the more I think about it, the more it feels like this is just kids. Some kids goofing around, that’s all. I guess Vanadium got deeper under my skin than I realized, so when this came up, I couldn’t think straight about it.”

“Well, if you change your mind, just give me a call.”

“Thank you. But I’m sure now it’s just kids.”

“You didn’t seem too surprised?” said Magusson.

“Huh? Surprised about what?”

“About Vanadium killing that nurse and vamoosing. Everyone here was stunned.”

“Frankly, I always thought he was mentally unbalanced. I told you as much, sitting there in your office.”

“Indeed, you did,” said Magusson. “And I dismissed him as a well-intentioned crusader, a holy fool. Looks like you had a better take on him than I did, Mr. Cain.”

The attorney’s admission surprised Junior. This was probably as close as Magusson would ever get to saying,
Maybe you didn’t kill your wife, after all,
but he was by nature a nasty prick, so even an implied apology was more than Junior had ever expected to receive.

“How’s life in the Bay City?” the attorney asked.

Junior didn’t make the mistake of thinking that Magusson’s new conciliatory attitude meant they were friends, that confidences could be shared or truths exchanged. The money-grubbing toad’s only real friend would always be the one he saw in a mirror. If he discovered that Junior was having a great time post-Naomi, Magusson would store the information until he found a way to use it to his advantage.

“Lonely,” Junior said. “I miss…so much.”

“They say the first year’s the hardest. Then you find it easier to go on.”

“It’s almost a year, but if anything, I feel worse,” he lied.

After he hung up, Junior stared at the telephone, deeply uneasy.

He hadn’t learned much from the call other than that they hadn’t found Vanadium in his Studebaker at the bottom of Quarry Lake.

Since discovering the quarter in his cheeseburger, Junior had been half convinced that the maniac cop survived the bludgeoning. In spite of his grievous wounds, perhaps Vanadium had swum up through a hundred feet of murky water, barely avoiding being drowned.

After his conversation with Magusson, however, Junior realized this fear was irrational. If the detective had miraculously escaped the cold waters of the lake, he would have been in need of emergency medical treatment. He would have staggered or crawled to the county highway in search of help, unaware that Junior had framed him for Victoria’s murder, too badly wounded to care about anything but getting medical attention.

If Vanadium was still missing, he was still dead in his eight-cylinder casket.

Which left the quarter.

In the cheeseburger.

Someone had put it there.

If not Vanadium, who?

Chapter 56

BARTY TODDLED,
Barty walked, and ultimately Barty carried a pie for his mother on one of her delivery days, wary of his balance and solemn with responsibility.

He moved from a crib to a bed of his own, with guardrails, months ahead of the average toddler. Within a week, he requested that the rails be left down.

For eight nights thereafter, Agnes padded the floor with folded blankets on both sides of the boy’s bed, insurance against a middle-of-the-night fall. On the eighth morning, she discovered that Barty had returned the blankets to the closet from which she’d gotten them. They were not jammed haphazardly on the shelves—the sure evidence of a child’s work—but were folded and stacked as neatly as Agnes herself would have stored them.

The boy never mentioned what he’d done, and his mother ceased worrying about him falling out of bed.

From his first birthday to his third, Barty made worthless all the child-care and child-development books that a first-time mother relied on to know what to expect of her offspring, and when. Barty grew and coped and learned according to his own clock.

The boy’s difference was defined as much by what he didn’t do as by what he did. For one thing, he didn’t observe the Terrible Twos, the period of toddler rebellion that usually frayed the nerves of the most patient parents. No tantrums for the Pie Lady’s son, no bossiness, no crankiness.

Uncommonly healthy, he didn’t suffer croup, flu, sinusitis, or most of the ailments to which other children were vulnerable.

Frequently, people told Agnes that she should find an agent for Barty, as he was wonderfully photogenic; modeling and acting careers, they assured her, were his for the asking. Though her son was indeed a fine-looking lad, Agnes knew he wasn’t as exceptionally handsome as many perceived him to be. Rather than his looks, what made Barty so appealing, what made him
seem
extraordinarily good-looking, were other qualities: an unusual gracefulness for a child, such a physical easiness in every movement and posture that it seemed as though some curious personal relationship with time had allowed him twenty years to become a three-year-old; an unfailingly affable temperament and quick smile that possessed his entire face, including his mesmerizing green-blue eyes. Perhaps most affecting of all, his remarkable good health was expressed in the lustrous sheen of his thick hair, in the golden-pink glow of his summer-touched skin, in every physical aspect of him, until there were times when he seemed
radiant.

In July 1967, at two and a half, he finally contracted his first cold, an off-season virus with a mean bite. His throat was sore, but he didn’t fuss or even complain. He swallowed his medicine without resistance, and though he rested occasionally, he played with toys and paged through picture books with as much pleasure as ever.

On the second morning of Barty’s illness, Agnes came downstairs and found him at the kitchen table, in his pajamas, happily applying unconventional hues to a scene in a coloring book.

When she complimented him on being such a good little soldier, abiding his cold with no complaint, he shrugged. Without looking up from the coloring book, he said, “It’s just here.”

“What do you mean?”

“My cold.”

“Your cold is just here?”

“It’s not everywhere.”

Agnes delighted in their conversations. Barty was far ahead of the language learning curve for his age, but he was still a child, and his observations were filled with innocence and charm. “You mean your cold is like in your nose but not in your feet?”

“No, Mommy. Colds don’t go in anybody’s feets.”

“Feet.”

“Yeah,” he confirmed, applying a blue crayon to a grinning bunny that was dancing with a squirrel.

“You mean it’s like with you in the kitchen, but not if you go into the living room? Your cold has a mind of its own?”

“That’s really silly.”

“You’re the one who said your cold’s just here. Maybe it stays in the kitchen, hoping it’ll get a piece of pie.”

“My cold’s just here,” he expanded, “not every place I am.”

“So…you’re not just here in the kitchen with your cold?”

“Nope.”

“Where else are you, Master Lampion? In the backyard playing?”

“Somewhere, yeah.”

“In the living room reading?”

“Somewhere, yeah.”

“All at the same time, huh?”

Tongue clamped between his teeth as he concentrated on keeping the blue crayon within the lines of the bunny, Barty nodded. “Yeah.”

The telephone rang, putting an end to their chat, but Agnes would remember the substance of it later that year, on the day before Christmas, when Barty took a walk in the rain and changed forever his mother’s understanding of the world and of her own existence.

Unlike most other toddlers, Barty was entirely comfortable with change. From bottle to drinking glass, from crib to open bed, from favorite foods to untried flavors, he delighted in the new. Although Agnes usually remained near at hand, Barty was as pleased to be put temporarily in the care of Maria Gonzalez as in the care of Edom, and he smiled as brightly for his dour uncle Jacob as for anyone.

He never passed through a phase during which he grew resistant to hugging or kissing. He was a hand-holding, cuddling boy to whom displays of affection came easily.

The currents of irrational fear, which bring periodic turbulence to virtually every childhood, didn’t disturb the smoothly flowing river of Barty’s first three years. He showed no fear of the doctor or the dentist, or the barber. Never was he afraid to fall asleep, and having fallen asleep, he appeared to have only pleasant dreams.

Darkness, the one source of childhood fear that most adults never quite outgrow, held no terror for Barty. Although for a while his bedroom featured a Mickey Mouse night-light, the miniature lamp was there not to soothe the boy, but to quiet his mother’s nerves, because she worried about him waking alone, in blackness.

Perhaps this particular worry was not ordinary maternal concern. If a sixth sense is at work in all of us, then perhaps subconsciously Agnes was aware of the tragedy to come: the tumors, the surgery, the blindness.

Agnes’s suspicion that Barty would be a child prodigy had grown from seed to full fruit on the morning of the boy’s first birthday, when he’d sat in his highchair, counting green-grape-and-apple pies. Through the following two years, ample proof of high intelligence and wondrous talents ripened Agnes’s suspicion into conviction.

Precisely what type of prodigy Barty might be was initially not easy to deduce. He revealed many talents rather than just one.

Given a child-size harmonica, he extemporized simplified versions of songs he heard on the radio. The Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love.” The Box Tops’ “The Letter.” Stevie Wonder’s “I Was Made to Love Her.” After hearing a tune once, Barty could play a recognizable rendition.

Although the small tin-and-plastic harmonica was more toy than genuine instrument, the boy blew and siphoned surprisingly complex music from it. As far as Agnes could tell, he never hit a sour tone.

One of his favorite gifts for Christmas 1967 was a twelve-hole chromatic harmonica with forty-eight reeds providing a full three-octave range. Even in his little hands, and with the limitations of his small mouth, this more sophisticated instrument enabled him to produce full-bodied versions of any song that appealed to him.

He had a talent, as well, for language.

From an early age, Barty sat contentedly as long as his mother would read to him, exhibiting none of the short attention span common to children. He expressed a preference for sitting side by side, and he asked her to slide one finger along each line of type, so that he could see precisely the right word as she spoke it. In this manner, he taught himself to read early in his third year.

Soon he dispensed with picture books and progressed to short novels for more accomplished readers, and then rapidly to books meant for young adults. Tom Swift adventures and Nancy Drew mysteries captivated him through the summer and early autumn.

Writing came with reading, and in a notebook, he began to make entries about points of interest in the stories that he enjoyed. His
Diary of a Book Reader,
as he titled it, fascinated Agnes, who read it with his permission; these notes to himself were enthusiastic, earnest, and charming—but literally month by month, Agnes noticed that they grew less naive, more complex, more contemplative.

Having been a volunteer instructor of English to twenty adult students over the years, having taught Maria Elena Gonzalez to speak impeccable English without a significant accent, Agnes was little needed as a teacher by her son. Even more than other children, he asked
why
with numbing regularity, why this and why that, but never the same question twice; and as often as not, he already knew the answer that he sought from her and was only confirming the accuracy of his deduction. He was such an effective autodidact, he schooled himself better than any college of professors that could have been assigned to him.

Agnes found this turn of events amazing, amusing, ironic—and a little sad. She would have dearly loved to teach the boy to read and write, to see his knowledge and competence slowly flower under her care. Although she fully supported Barty’s exploration of his gifts, and although she was proud of his astounding achievements, she felt that his swift advancement was robbing her of some of the shared joy of his childhood, even though he remained in so many ways a child.

Judging by his great pleasure in learning, Barty didn’t feel robbed of anything. To him, the world was an orange of infinite layers, which he peeled and savored with increasing delight.

By November 1967, the Father Brown detective stories, written for mystery-loving adults by G. K. Chesterton, thrilled Barty. This series of books would retain a special place in his heart for the rest of his life—as would Robert Heinlein’s
The Star Beast,
which was among his Christmas gifts that year.

Yet for all his love of reading and of music, events suggested that for mathematics he had a still greater aptitude.

Before he taught himself to read books, he also taught himself numbers, and then how to read a clock. The significance of time had a more profound impact on him than Agnes could understand, perhaps because acquiring an awareness of the infinite nature of the universe and the finite nature of each human life—and fully understanding the implications of this knowledge—takes most of us till early adulthood if not later, whereas for Barty, the vast glories of the universe and the comparatively humble nature of human existence were recognized, contemplated, and absorbed in a matter of weeks.

For a while he enjoyed being challenged to figure the number of seconds elapsed since a particular historical event. Given the date, he did the calculations in his head, providing a correct answer in as little as twenty seconds, rarely taking more than a minute.

Only twice, Agnes vetted his answer.

The first time, she required a pencil, paper, and nine minutes to calculate the number of elapsed seconds since an event that had occurred 125 years, six months, and eight days in the past. Her answer differed from his, but while proofing her numbers, she realized that she had forgotten to factor in leap years.

The second time, armed with the previously calculated fact that each regular year contains 3,153,600 seconds, and that a leap year contains an additional 86,400, she vetted Barty’s answer in only four minutes. Thereafter, she accepted his numbers without verification.

In his head, without apparent effort, Barty kept a running total of the number of seconds that he had been alive, and of the number of words in every book that he read. Agnes never checked his word totals for an entire volume; however, when she cited any page in a book that he’d just finished, he knew the number of words it contained.

His musical abilities were most likely an offshoot of his more extraordinary talent for math. He said that music was numbers, and what he seemed to mean was that he could all but instantly translate the notes of any song into a personal numerical code, retain it, and repeat the song by repeating the memorized sequence of code. When he read sheet music, he saw arrangements of numbers.