As it was of old, in the beginning and in the Bible.
The next second I picked myself up and ran. I didn’t know where, I just knew I had to get away from that terrible spot.
And now I had the certain knowledge that whatever I had seen was running after me. The chaser had become the chased. I ran as if the shadows themselves were in pursuit of me; and perhaps they were. Panic took hold of my whole self as I crashed into a tree before going around it and running on. Once again I tripped and sprawled on the ground and, glancing around, heard something following close behind me. I picked myself up and this time I was more fortunate because the clouds parted and the moon appeared again, illuminating my position and the direction I needed to go. I sprinted toward the back of the house and, reaching it, went through the French windows and slammed them shut behind me.
For a moment, I stood there with my foot jammed against the bottom of the frame, panting loudly and shaking with terror and staring through the dusty windowpanes at the moonlit garden where something in human shape hovered on the edge of the tree line. My heart felt as if it were going to leap out of my chest and take off on its own. Never had I felt fear like this, not once since joining the FBI had I felt myself actually physically sick with dread. It was as though my whole personality had changed from man to boy. My heart was such an afflicted thing and my breathing so labored that at any moment I thought the very life would flee from my terrified body.
“Jesus Christ, what the fuck was that?” I muttered. “What the fuck was that? What the fuck was that?”
I stayed there, staring out of the window for several minutes before the movement in the trees ceased altogether and my heartbeat and breathing returned to something like normal.
“Get a grip,” I whispered, almost angry with myself for being so afraid of something I couldn’t explain. “And that’s all it is. Just something you can’t explain. For all you know, that could have been someone in trouble, lying on the ground. Maybe it was Mr. Hindemith. Maybe he also fell and hurt himself. Perhaps he’s still lying there, hurt, waiting for you to come and help him. Perhaps he’s in need of an ambulance. Instead, you’re cowering in here like a fucking pussy. So much for all your FBI training. Jesus, you’re such a fucking pussy.”
I started to laugh.
“You’re such a fucking pussy, Gil Martins.”
I paused, still running in my head the film my brain had shot in the split second when I’d lit the match and seen the weird-looking man lying on the ground. Was it really a man I’d seen? There was no getting away from the fact that something about that man I’d seen was not right. Yes, the expression on the man’s face had been extraordinarily hostile. And there was also the way the thing had groped at my feet. But it wasn’t so much that as the fact that the long, bony fingers had been more like claws.
“So, he needs a fucking manicure,” I said. “Come on, Martins, anyone looks like shit when they’re hurt. If he looked pissed off, it was because you chased him through his own back garden, you dumb asshole. And I bet you’d look pretty damned evil if someone came wandering into your house in the dark.”
I swallowed hard and finally caught all of my breath.
“Just don’t go believing that shit Nelson Van Der Velden told you. This has got nothing to do with that. You hear? Come on, man. Let’s see what you’re made of. Get back out there and do your fucking job, okay? You’re an FBI agent, not a lingerie designer.”
I opened the French windows once more and stepped out onto the overgrown lawn. The wind dropped again and the night seemed to hold its breath as if keen to see the outcome of this act of lunacy on my part.
This time I walked slowly down the lawn.
At the bottom of the lawn I turned and looked back at the house, just to get my bearings and then, with my heart in my mouth, I stepped cautiously into the woods and struck several matches, one after the other, but I didn’t see anything.
I stood still for a moment and listened carefully. “Mr. Hindemith? Or whoever you are, please identify yourself. I’m an FBI agent and I’m armed.” That part was a lie, of course; my gun was still lying on the ground somewhere in the garden.
But I heard nothing by way of a reply. Just the wind in the trees. And an owl hooting somewhere in the darkness.
A minute passed and then another until I figured I was wasting my time and moved again, only this time I disturbed something else that was lying on the ground—probably the ibis or the spoonbill I thought I’d seen earlier; it flew up into the air with a great beating of wings and then was gone, leaving me with a stupid grin on my face and the beginnings of a terminal cardiac condition.
I walked back to the house and out the front door, and jogged my way back down the street—all the time looking around to see if I was being followed by something—toward the lights of the diocesan house and home.
The wind had picked up again and this time there was some rain in the air; it cooled my face and dampened my shirt and felt good against the skin on my forehead as if the water had been taken straight from the font. But my hand on the doorknob of the diocesan house was such a trembling thing that it looked as if I had Parkinson’s disease, and I wondered if it would ever be still again. Inside the house I tried to close the door quietly, but at the last second the wind seemed to catch it and the door banged shut with a loud and reverberating noise.
I let out a breath and then fetched myself a drink from the cabinet, downing it quickly.
“That’s better.”
The scotch collected what human spirit I had left, fortified me a little so that I was able to resist the true implications of what I had experienced for just a while longer. Surely I had mistaken what I had seen.
“Of course you did. You imagined it.”
Yes. My own imagination had carried me away for a moment. Nothing could have been what I had thought. Such things were impossible. For me, especially. I had made a choice, after all. And I should stick with that choice. There was no self-respect to be had in abandoning that earlier, rational decision, especially on such flimsy evidence. Fuck that. If I changed my mind now, it would just be from fear, and all that would be left would be that same fear and self-loathing. Nobody could live like that, could they?
“Jesus Christ,” said a woman’s voice.
I spun around to see Sara in the doorway. She was wearing a T-shirt and not much else other than a severe look of alarm. The look on her face was all due to me.
“What the hell happened?”
I shook my head. “Nothing much,” I said, fixing a sort of smile onto my face. “The wind is picking up. I think there’s a storm coming. It caught me by surprise. I went into the backyard to close the gate and it blew back into me and knocked me flat on my back, that’s all. Stunned me for a moment.” I touched my face and found some blood on my fingers. “Shit. Must have cut myself, too.”
She swallowed noticeably. “That’s not what it looks like.”
“Really, I’m fine,” I said.
“Come here.” Sara took me by the hand and led me back into the hall, then placed me in front of a full-length mirror that hung on a wall, and switched on the overhead light.
She didn’t accuse me of lying, not right away; she didn’t have to; all she did was let my appearance speak for itself.
I was quite a sight. My hair was standing on end as if I’d been electrocuted; the irises in my staring eyes were so dilated I looked as if I’d been taking drugs; and my face and chest were covered in blood. There were five parallel scratches on my face and my chest—deep enough to have torn through my shirt—as if a large and fierce animal had lashed out at me with razor-sharp claws. I looked as if I had been mauled.
“Holy Christ,” I whispered.
“You’d better let me put something on those claw marks,” she said quietly.
“They’re not claw marks,” I insisted. “Where do you get an idea like that? The gate left me stunned, that’s all. In the dark I walked into a tree and scratched myself on the branch. Let’s not get carried away here, Sara.”
“They look much more like claw marks than anything a tree might have done.”
I shrugged. “What, you think there’s a mountain lion out there? This is East Texas, not Arizona, Sara. It was a tree. I walked into a fucking tree. It was my own stupid fault.”
She pointed at my holster.
“Your gun is gone.”
“It must have fallen out when I fell over. No harm done, I’ll find it in the morning.”
“Which begs the question why you took it in the first place.”
“Oh, I see. There’s a flashlight on the muzzle.”
“Do you have any iodine?” she asked. “Or antiseptic?”
“Under the kitchen sink, I think.”
I fetched myself another drink and knocked it back quickly. Glancing down at my chest, I tried to recall the moment I had received the lacerations; surely it had just been the branch of a tree, after all—a branch with five smaller branches that only resembled the fingers and claws of an outstretched hand. That’s all it could have been. In my panic to be away from that man lying on the ground I had simply run into the clawlike branch of a tree. And yet, somewhere inside my soul—for I think such things do exist—I knew differently. After all, how could I account for that man lying on the ground?
“Yes, a tree,” I said. “That’s all. I’m not really injured, you know. I think it looks worse than it is.”
I could see that Sara didn’t believe me. She didn’t say so. Perhaps she, too, knew but didn’t want to know. I understood what that felt like.
“After I brushed my teeth,” she said from the kitchen, “I went outside to ask you something and you weren’t there.”
“Like I said, there’s a storm coming. That’s why I probably didn’t hear you.”
She came back into the room with a bowl and a roll of paper towels.
“I appreciate that you’re trying not to scare me,” she said. “Really, I do. But from now on, I think it’s best if you don’t lie to me. Even for the best of reasons.”
“All right,” I said.
“You’d better take that shirt off so I can dress those wounds. And then you can tell me what really happened.”
I took off my shirt; then I sat beside her on the sofa and let her wipe the wounds with antiseptic-soaked paper towels. For some reason, I started to tremble.
“I think you’re suffering from shock,” she said.
For a moment, I almost laughed.
Shock,
I wanted to say,
that’s not shock, lady, that’s fucking terror.
But I restrained myself just in time. I could see no point in adding to Sara’s considerable store of terror with a large spoonful of my own.
“I don’t suppose this will help very much,” she said, and then she kissed one of my scratches. “In fact,” she added, “there’s probably”—she kissed another—“a very good chance”—and another—“that what I’m doing now could even infect them, the average human mouth being as dirty as it is.”
I took hold of her dimpled chin, looked at her generous lips, and then kissed them with lingering appreciation.
“There’s nothing dirty about your mouth,” I said, licking her sharp little teeth and under her upper lip. “In fact, it’s just about the nicest mouth I’ve ever seen.”
Rain pattered against the window as if reminding us that there was still a real world outside.
“I should go put the top up on your car like I meant to do earlier. Be a crime for the rugs in that thing to get wet.” I kissed her some more. “Did you have your bath like I told you?”
“Not yet.”
I nodded at the ceiling. “You go up and have one, and I’ll be along in a moment.”
“All right,” she said, but she insisted I kiss her before letting me go.
I went outside. I still had the Bentley’s key in my pocket, and it was only a matter of a few seconds to operate the top. I had just turned back to the house when I heard Sara scream.
My chest immediately tightened again and I ran with limbs made clumsy by fear, and then I fell, half crawled, and then scrambled up the steps into the house.
S
he was huddled up into a ball in a corner of the bathroom, hugging her knees to her chest, with her eyes closed and her beautiful face pressed against the wall. I knelt down and, for a moment, I looked closely at Sara’s head and body for some injury or sign of what had scared her, but found nothing that gave a clue as to what had happened. The bathroom looked the same except that the bath was running. I turned the tap off and came back to her side.
“Hey, there,” I said gently. “Take it easy. What happened? What’s the matter?”
Sara didn’t answer, but as soon as I put my hand on her head, she threw her arms around me like a little child and held me tight and started to cry. I let her hold me like this for several minutes before she became calm enough to tell me what had frightened her.
“You said we’re alone here,” she said. “Didn’t you?”
“That’s right. We are alone. I promise. It’s just the two of us.”
“Yes, I saw you make up the bed,” she said haltingly. “I saw you. I helped you. We did that, didn’t we?”
“Yes,” I said. “We did. Now, take it easy.”
She nodded and wiped her face with a towel I gave her.
“Yes,” she sniffed. “When you went out the first time to put the top up on my car, I came in here, to the bathroom, to brush my teeth and stuff. But I didn’t go to bed. Just now I came in here again to run a bath. But before I did, I glanced in the bedroom. Which is when I saw the bed.”
She was calm now, but her face was a sickly color of gray.
I nodded and then stood up and put my head around the bedroom door. Her pants, jacket, and shoes lay on the floor by the bed where she had dropped them and a big Hermès handbag was open beside her watch and jewelry on the dressing table. The TV was on, but the volume was turned down and the remote control lay on the floor next to her shoes. The blind was drawn, and even though the rain sounded heavy against the window, everything looked normal to me.
“What about it?” I asked.
I came back into the bathroom and knelt down at her side.
She shook her head. “Tell me that this is not some kind of sick joke,” she said.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “There’s no joke. I’m not in the mood for jokes, nor are you, I think. But forgive me, I really don’t see what the problem is here, Sara.”
She swallowed a brick and then let out a big, teary sigh. “The problem is, my darling man, that the bed has been slept in, but I didn’t sleep in it.”
“What?”
“Yes. Which means, if you didn’t sleep in it and I didn’t sleep in it, then who did?”
I got up and put my head around the door of the bedroom again. There was no doubt about it: the sheets and quilt that I had carefully arranged on the bed were now disordered as if someone had slept there for a good eight hours, which made no sense at all.
I was thoroughly disturbed by what she was suggesting. On top of everything I’d just been through in Mr. Hindemith’s back garden, this was a lot more than I had bargained for. Was she part of some mad conspiracy to fuck with my head? And if so, why? And why her? Someone with her background could never have been one of Nelson Van Der Velden’s followers; and besides, if she was to be believed, someone had been doing a very good job of fucking with her head, too.
I went back into the bathroom and sat on the toilet.
“Tell me everything that happened after I left the house the first time,” I said patiently.
She nodded and, resting her head against the wall, stared up at the ceiling light. “The first time you went out I was in the bedroom about to get undressed. I wanted to ask if you had a hair dryer so I could wash my hair so I went downstairs again and opened the front door to ask you about that, only you weren’t there. Which scared me. It’s very quiet around here. So I came back upstairs and sat around for a moment or two wondering what to do and if I might have made a mistake coming here. After a while, I got undressed, like you see. I took off my clothes and my shoes and socks, and came in here, and then when I heard you return, I went downstairs again. And you looked like you’d been attacked by a wild animal and were hitting the whiskey bottle.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“So, when I went downstairs, the bed—the one we’d made up—it hadn’t been slept in, and now it has.” She shrugged. “It’s as simple as that.”
I nodded.
“You don’t think that you could have sat on the bed and sort of messed it up while you were waiting for me to come back in earlier?” I suggested. “Sort of absently? The way you do when you’re preoccupied with something?”
“No,” she said. “I remember. I sat on the chair in front of the bedroom TV. I watched it for about fifteen minutes. Not once did I sit on the bed.”
I went back into the bedroom and pressed my hand onto the bottom sheet of the bed; it wasn’t warm but a chill passed over me all the same. The bed was damp to the touch, as if someone had jumped out of the bath and got straight into the bed.
“You’ll be relieved to know it doesn’t actually feel like it’s been slept in,” I said as coolly as I was able.
“I don’t know if that helps or not,” she said.
Instinctively, I glanced at the window, which was shut, and then I looked up at the ceiling to check for a leak; I even stood on the bed and pressed my hand against the plaster, but it was dry.
“That is, I mean, the bed’s not warm. All the same, I think I’ll change it again. To make you feel more comfortable.”
When I was through, I came back into the bathroom. “It’s okay now. I’ve made it up again.”
“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” she said.
“No, not at all, Sara.”
“In view of what’s happened these past few days, it’s a wonder I’m not; but if someone is trying to drive me out of my mind, then I’m not going to let them, do you hear? I’ve got a first-class mind and nothing and no one is going to be allowed to fuck with that.”
Some of that sounded as if it was directed my way, so once again I knelt down beside her and took her hand. “Sara, please believe me,” I said. “I had absolutely nothing to do with this.”
“I do believe you,” she said. “Actually, that’s half the problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“After I came downstairs, you were never out of my sight. I really don’t see how you could have come up here without my noticing it. Either there’s someone else in this house or—I can’t think of any other explanation; at least there’s not one I want to think of.” She swallowed uncomfortably. “As a matter of fact, I think I’m going to be sick.”
She crawled over to the toilet, lifted the lid, and then retched into the bowl. If she was acting, then she was worth a Golden Globe.
When she’d finished, she flushed the toilet and I helped her to wash her face and drink some water.
“Feel better?”
“A little.”
I led her into my bedroom and tried to make her comfortable under the sheet. Next I switched on all the lamps to eliminate any shadows. It was just a pity I couldn’t do anything about the overgrown tree outside my window that was tapping at the pane more insistently than usual because of the wind.
“I’ve never slept in a cop’s bed before,” she said. “Or, for that matter, a priest’s.” She smiled a thin halfhearted smile as if she was trying to recover her sense of humor.
“With three husbands, you surprise me,” I said, rising to the challenge.
“Not that I think I am going to sleep,” she admitted. “I’m very tired, but I’m not at all sure yet that I’m going to stay here.”
“No? It’s hardly a night to go anywhere on your own.”
“I was thinking you could come with me,” she said.
“Yes, but where? A hotel?”
“Maybe.”
“In Galveston?” I made a face.
“Good point. Well, maybe we could drive to Houston. Or find a motel on the way.”
“All right. If you want. I’ll drive you wherever you want to go. Houston. Austin. You name it. Just say when and where. Your car or mine. Although your car does look a lot nicer.”
She shook her head. “No, that’s all right. Let’s stay here for now. I just wanted to hear you say it. I guess if you were planning to murder me here you wouldn’t do that.”
“Until you called me this evening, I thought I wouldn’t ever see you again,” I admitted. “So I don’t know how I could have been planning anything that involved you.”
“Really?”
“What I mean to say is, you called me, remember?”
“Yes.” She smiled again. This time it looked more convincing than before. “And I’m very glad I did. You’re very sweet. Where the hell were you all day, anyway?”
“I had lunch with a guy from our computer forensics lab,” I said. “And then I went to see a movie at the Cinemark in Webster just off the Gulf Freeway.”
She nodded.
“Look,” I said. “I need to fetch another gun from the car. Just in case. And to lock up around here.”
“I’d rather you didn’t leave me alone.”
“I’ll be no more than a minute.”
“There’s a gun in my purse,” she said. “You can borrow that if you like.”
“All right.” I handed the bag to her and watched as she brought out a little Walther P22 compact pistol from its capacious interior.
“Here,” she said.
“Nice little gun,” I said.
“You can only say something like that in Texas.”
“Yes, I suppose so. But it feels good in your hand.”
“Ditto.”
I checked the magazine. Then I tucked the gun into the waistband of my trousers. I might have let her keep it if I hadn’t been worried she was scared enough to shoot me by accident.
“Are you expecting trouble?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, there’s what happened with the bed to consider, isn’t there?”
“I’d rather not, if you don’t mind. But I’m not sure how you’re going to shoot someone that neither of us can see.”
“Fair point.” I smiled, but only to conceal the fact that suddenly I was convinced she really did believe that someone other than us had been occupying my bed; and it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
“On the other hand, I still don’t really know what happened to you earlier.” She nodded at the scratches on my torso. “I mean, those don’t look like they were done by anything invisible.”
“I already told you about that. It was the branch of a tree that did this.”
“If you say so. But look.” She held up her hand.
“What am I looking at?”
“My nails.”
“They’re very nice.”
“I got them done today in Galveston. While I was waiting for you to come back.”
“For Galveston that counts as the return of civilization. I’m impressed. “
“Yes, they do look nice. But they’re also sharp. I’ve scratched enough men in my time—in anger or while having sex—to know what the effect of a human scratch looks like.”
“I can count myself lucky, I guess.”
I turned the volume up on the TV so that she’d have company while I was out of the room, and then walked to the door. Leno was still on.
“Where are you going now?”
“To lock the front door. Like I said.”
“You won’t be long, will you?”
“I’ll be just a minute.”
“And you won’t be going outside or anything?”
I shook my head. “I’m coming straight back up to make love to you again.”