From the Corner of His Eye (58 page)

Wally parked the Buick at the curb in front of the house in which he lived, and when Celestina slid across the car seat to the passenger’s door, he said, “No, wait here. I’ll fetch Angel and drive the two of you home.”

“Good grief, we can walk from here, Wally.”

“It’s chilly and foggy and late, and there might be villains afoot at this hour,” he intoned with mock gravity. “The two of you are Lipscomb women now, or soon will be, and Lipscomb women never go unescorted through the dangerous urban night.”

“Mmmmm. I feel positively pampered.”

The kiss was lovely, long and easy, full of restrained passion that boded well for nights to come in the marriage bed.

“I love you, Celie.”

“I love you, Wally. I’ve never been happier.”

Leaving the engine running and the heater on, he got out of the car, leaned back inside, said, “Better lock up while I’m gone,” and then closed his door.

Although Celestina felt a little paranoid, being so security-minded in this safe neighborhood, nevertheless she searched out the master-control button and engaged the power locks.

Lipscomb women gladly obey the wishes of Lipscomb men—unless they disagree, of course, or don’t disagree but are just feeling mulish.

The floor of the spacious bathroom featured beige marble tiles with diamond-shaped inlays of black granite. The countertop and the shower stall were fabricated from matching marble, and the same marble was employed in the wainscoting.

Above the wainscoting, the walls were Sheetrock, unlike the plaster elsewhere in the apartment. On one of them, Enoch Cain had scrawled
Bartholomew
three times.

Great anger was apparent in the way that the uneven, red block letters had been drawn on the wall in hard slashes. But the lettering looked like the work of a calm and rational mind compared to what had been done after the three Bartholomews were printed.

With some sharp instrument, probably a knife, Cain had stabbed and gouged the red letters, working on the wall with such fury that two of the Bartholomews were barely readable anymore. The Sheetrock was marked by hundreds of scores and punctures.

Judging by the smeariness of the letters and by the fact that some had run before they dried, the writing instrument hadn’t been a felt-tip marker, as Vanadium first thought. A spattering of red droplets on the closed lid of the toilet and across the beige marble floor, all dry now, gave rise to a suspicion.

He spat on his right thumb, scrubbed the thumb against one of the dried drips on the floor, rubbed thumb and forefinger together, and brought the freshened spoor to his nose. He smelled blood.

But whose blood?

Other three-year-olds, stirred from sleep after eleven o’clock at night, might be grumpy and would certainly be torpid, bleary-eyed, and uncommunicative. Angel awake was always
fully
awake, soaking up color-texture-mood, marveling in the baroque detail of Creation, and generally lending support to the apperception-test prediction that she might be an art prodigy.

As she clambered through the open door into Celestina’s lap, the girl said, “Uncle Wally gave me an Oreo.”

“Did you put it in your shoe?”

“Why in my shoe?”

“Is it under your hood?”

“It’s in my tummy!”

“Then you can’t eat it.”

“I
already
ate it.”

“Then it’s gone forever. How sad.”

“It’s not the
only
Oreo in the world, you know. Is this the most fog ever?”

“It’s about the most I’ve ever seen.”

As Wally got behind the wheel and closed his door, Angel said, “Mommy, where’s fog come from? And don’t say Hawaii.”

“New Jersey.”

“Before she rats on me,” Wally said, “I gave her an Oreo.”

“Too late.”

“Mommy thought I put it in my shoe.”

“Getting her into her shoes and coat sooner than Monday required a bribe,” Wally said.

“What’s fog?” Angel asked.

“Clouds,” Celestina replied.

“What’re clouds doing down here?”

“They’ve gone to bed. They’re tired,” Wally told her as he put the car in gear and released the hand brake. “Aren’t you?”

“Can I have another Oreo?”

“They don’t grow on trees, you know,” said Wally.

“Do I have a cloud inside me now?”

Celestina asked, “Why would you think that, sugarpie?”

“’Cause I breathed the fog.”

“Better hold on tight to her,” Wally warned Celestina, braking to a halt at the intersection. “She’ll float up and away, then we’ll have to call the fire department to get her down.”

“What
do
they grow on?” Angel asked.

“Flowers,” Wally answered.

And Celestina said, “The Oreos are the petals.”

“Where do they have Oreo flowers?” Angel asked suspiciously.

“Hawaii,” Wally said.

“I thought so,” Angel said, dubiosity squinching her face. “Mrs. Ornwall made me cheese.”

“She’s a great cheese maker, Mrs. Ornwall,” Wally said.

“In a sandwich,” Angel clarified. “Why’s she live with you, Uncle Wally?”

“She’s my housekeeper.”

“Could Mommy be your housekeeper?”

“Your mother’s an artist. Besides, you wouldn’t want to put poor Mrs. Ornwall out of a job, would you?”

“Everybody needs cheese,” Angel said, which apparently meant that Mrs. Ornwall would never lack work. “Mommy, you’re wrong.”

“Wrong about what, sugarpie?” Celestina asked as Wally pulled to the curb again and parked.

“The Oreo isn’t gone forever.”

“Is it in your shoe, after all?”

Turning in Celestina’s lap, Angel said, “Smell,” and held the index finger of her right hand under her mother’s nose.

“This isn’t polite, but I must admit it smells nice.”

“That’s the Oreo. After I ate it up, the cookie went
smoosh-smoosh
into my finger.”

“If they always go there,
smoosh-smoosh,
then you’re going to wind up with one really fat finger.”

Wally switched off the engine and killed the headlights. “Home, where the heart is.”

“What heart?” Angel asked.

Wally opened his mouth, couldn’t think of a reply.

Laughing, Celestina said to him, “You can never win, you know.”

“Maybe it’s not where the heart is,” Wally corrected himself. “Maybe it’s where the buffalo roam.”

On the counter beside the bathroom sink stood an open box of Band-Aids in a variety of sizes, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and a bottle of iodine.

Tom Vanadium checked the small wastebasket next to the sink and discovered a wad of bloody Kleenex. The crumpled wrappers from two Band-Aids.

Evidently, the blood was Cain’s.

If the wife killer had cut himself accidentally, his writing on the wall indicated a hair-trigger temper and a deep reservoir of long-nurtured anger.

If he had cut himself intentionally for the express purpose of writing the name in blood, then the reservoir of anger was deeper still and pent up behind a formidable dam of obsession.

In either case, printing the name in blood was a ritualistic act, and ritualism of this nature was an unmistakable symptom of a seriously unbalanced mind. Evidently, the wife killer would be easier to crack than expected, because his shell was already badly fractured.

This wasn’t the same Enoch Cain whom Vanadium had known three years ago in Spruce Hills. That man had been utterly ruthless but not a wild, raging animal, coldly determined but never obsessive.
That
Cain had been too calculating and too self-controlled to have been swept into the emotional frenzy required to produce this blood graffiti and to act out the symbolic mutilation of Bartholomew with a knife.

As Tom Vanadium studied the stained and ravaged wall again, a cold and quivery uneasiness settled insectivally onto his scalp and down the back of his neck, quickly bored into his blood, and nested in his bones. He had the terrible feeling that he was not dealing with a known quantity anymore, not with the twisted man he’d thought he understood, but with a new and even more monstrous Enoch Cain.

Carrying the tote bag full of Angel’s dolls and coloring books, Wally crossed the sidewalk ahead of Celestina and climbed the front steps.

She followed with Angel in her arms.

The girl sucked in deep lungsful of the weary clouds. “Better hold tight, Mommy, I’m gonna float.”

“Not weighed down by cheese and Oreos, you won’t.”

“Why’s that car following us?”

“What car?” Celestina asked, stopping at the bottom of the steps and turning to look.

Angel pointed to a Mercedes parked about forty feet behind the Buick, just as its headlights went off.

“It’s not following us, sugarpie. It’s probably a neighbor.”

“Can I have an Oreo?”

Climbing the stairs, Celestina said, “You already had one.”

“Can I have a Snickers?”

“No Snickers.”

“Can I have a Mr. Goodbar?”

“It’s not a specific brand you can’t have, it’s the whole idea of a candy bar.”

Wally opened the front door and stepped aside.

“Can I have some ’nilla wafers?”

Celestina breezed through the open door with Angel. “No vanilla wafers. You’ll be up all night with a sugar rush.”

As Wally followed them into the front hall, Angel said, “Can I have a car?”

“Car?”

“Can I?”

“You don’t drive,” Celestina reminded her.

“I’ll teach her,” Wally said, moving past them to the apartment door, fishing a ring of keys out of his coat pocket.

“He’ll teach me,” Angel triumphantly told her mother.

“Then I guess we’ll get you a car.”

“I want one that flies.”

“They don’t make flying cars.”

“Sure they do,” said Wally as he unlocked the two deadbolts. “But you gotta be twenty-one years old to get a license for one.”

“I’m three.”

“Then you only have to wait eighteen years,” he said, opening the apartment door and stepping aside once more, allowing Celestina to precede him.

As Wally followed them inside, Celestina grinned at him. “From the car to the living room, all as neat as a well-practiced ballet. We’ve got a big headstart on this married thing.”

“I gotta pee,” Angel said.

“That’s not something that we announce to everyone,” Celestina chastised.