The Dead Path (32 page)

Through the window over the bed where Laine slept, he’d watched the rain grow softer as hours passed, until it finally ceased an hour ago. The clouds were lit faintly from below by the orange tungsten glow of the sprawling city. Gradually, those clouds parted and dissipated like smoke. Stars winked faintly. Just ten minutes ago, the fingernail crescent of the moon had begun falling with aching slowness beyond the silhouetted leaves of the camphor laurel tree outside the window to light the figure on the bed ghostly silver.

Laine shifted again. Around midnight, her finger had twitched. By one, she was moving her feet in her sleep. Now she was rolling over, pulling the blanket up around her chin. She opened her eyes. Nicholas was again struck by their color: a slate gray that was almost black in this half-light. He’d never seen eyes that color—smoky and somber as storm clouds.

“We’re at my mother’s house,” he said. “You’re safe.”

She nodded, closed her eyes, and fell instantly back to sleep.

He watched her for a long while, then reluctantly turned his eyes back to the moon.

He couldn’t remember the color of Cate’s eyes. He was sure they were blue. Or were they hazel? Now he imagined them gray.

Chapter
30
   

  T
he room was so bright that Swizzle’s eyes were matchstick slits. Hannah squinted.

She sat at the breakfast table, chair pushed out, with Swizzle on her lap. Her mother made coffee. Her father poured juice into glasses. The room was as silent as a classroom after a student has been sent to the principal. Eerily still.

The police had come late last night, and for hours afterward Hannah had lain awake listening to her mother sob and her father speak quietly, his voice a bowling ball rumble of words she couldn’t make out.

She had slept on and off, with a can of Raid hidden under her pillow. She’d been awake to see the night turn from black to purple-blue to green and yellow. She’d heard her parents rise, voices low, reaching agreement that they “had to tell Hannah.”

Like she didn’t know. How stupid did they think she was?

They’d come in around seven and sat quietly on her bed, neither seeming to know what to say. So Hannah had said it for them.

“Miriam’s dead.”

Her mother had jerked back as if slapped.

Her parents had looked at each other and nodded. A man, they explained, had stolen Miriam from her room. He’d killed her. But he was gone now. There was no need to be scared. They dragged the words reluctantly from deep within themselves, like heavy hauls from a dismal sea.

Hannah watched while her father spoke. It was obvious he loved Miriam as much as Mum did, much more than Hannah had herself. She wondered if they’d be this upset if the spiders had got in here instead of Miriam’s room? It seemed doubtful. Her father finished by explaining that the next few days and weeks would be very, very hard. They both hugged Hannah tight and told her they loved her and made her promise that if she needed to talk about how she felt to come straight to them.

That’s a joke,
thought Hannah; she remembered all too well how much that slap on her buttocks had hurt. Maybe a man
had
killed Miriam; Hannah didn’t think her parents were lying. But they sure didn’t know everything.

They didn’t believe her about the spiders? Fine. She’d watch the news stories about the guy who said he’d killed Miriam. She’d see if
he
said anything about spiders.

If he didn’t, Hannah knew where she had to start looking.

The woods weren’t far away.

  P
ritam watched ephemeral diamonds crawl across the ceiling of his ward: scintillating colander holes of morning sunlight reflecting off the river and darting like fireflies above his head. The light winked between the wires and rods that held him in his web, peeking here and there between the chromium and the tubing, delighting him, making him smile. He felt sure the reluctant sparks were about to divulge the definitive answer to Thomas Aquinas’s dilemma about how many angels could dance on a pin head … but whenever the answer was on the tip of his tongue, a dazzling flicker would steal it from his mind.

When he’d woken just before dawn, the pain had been extraordinary. His pelvis and the bones of his right leg felt filled with molten metal, and their white heat was pulsing from within, cooking his flesh. He was shaking so badly that he could hardly press the call button with his left hand—his right remained immobile, strapped across his chest. The nurse had arrived and shown him how to use the morphine demand button next to the call remote. Since that lesson, the morning had passed in a delightful fog, punctuated by occasional moments of brilliant clarity and modulated by a chorus of skittering ceiling fireworks.

Best of all, Pritam now knew what to do with Rowena Quill.

She was, most surely, a sinner, a murderer, a dancer with demons. But Pritam had felt the pain of martyrs now. He had tasted, at last, the physical agony of the saints who had died in the service of the Lord; perhaps even a sense of the pain that the Son Himself felt as His body was broken. And he had passed through. He was closer to the divine. And he was humbled. And what could be a greater display of his gratitude than to guide the most egregious of sinners to seek forgiveness?

He would find Rowena Quill and, filled with the power of the Holy Ghost, convince her to admit her sins, to accept Christ and receive His mercy.

Pritam smiled and pressed the morphine button again. Yes. This was so right.

A pretty nurse entered the room, carrying something. She was young and lovely: a delightful work by the Father in this morning brightness.

“Mr. Anand?”

“Will you marry me?” He peered to read her name tag. “Joanna?”

The nurse smiled. “No, Mr. Anand. But I will hold the phone up to your ear. You have a call.”

She held the mobile handset against Pritam’s left ear.

“God be with you this Heaven-sent morning!” said Pritam brightly, pleased that his words slurred hardly at all.

“Cheers,” replied Nicholas.

“Nicholas!”

Nicholas was sitting on the back steps of his mother’s house, looking out over her vegetable garden. It was ludicrously green after the rains: an impossibly emerald world of vigorous growth. To counteract the salubrious sight, he lit the last of Gavin Boye’s cigarettes and inhaled deeply.

“Hole in one. How are you?”

“Blessed. How am I, Joanna?”

“You’re doing well, Mr. Anand.”

“Joanna’s going to marry me,” explained Pritam.

“Are you … Are you high, Pritam?”

“No! Well, I have a morphine button.”

“Okay.” Nicholas got to his feet. “I’ll call you back—”

“No! I have been thinking about Rowena Quill.”

“So have we. Laine’s here with me.”

“Good. Now, listen. Have you read Luke?” asked Pritam excitedly. “Read Luke!”

Nicholas screwed the cigarette butt into the doorframe. “Pritam, you’re fucking high. I’m going to call back.”

“Shh, listen! Luke fifteen something. Woman loses a coin. She has ten but loses one. And she finds it and she’s so happy!”

“Goodbye, Pritam—”

“Wait! That’s how the angels feel when a sinner repents!”

Nicholas squinted against the sunlight. The cigarette had made him feel nauseated.

“Like they just found twenty cents?”

“No! You’re not listening!” Pritam rolled his eyes in mock exasperation. The nurse smiled and took the telephone with her other hand so she could check his catheter bag.

“I don’t feel like repenting right now,” said Nicholas.

“Not you; her! Quill! I’m going to help Quill!”

Nicholas watched a butcher bird land on the Hills Hoist. It had a grasshopper in its beak, and the insect kicked, kicked, kicked. It occurred to him that he’d never seen the ghost of a bird or a dog or a grasshopper. Did they not have souls? Or did they never die before their time? Or did only haunted birds and dogs and insects see the ghosts of their own kind? Despite the nausea, he wished for another smoke.

“Pritam? Hannah Gerlic’s sister was murdered. The guy who killed her—supposedly killed her—killed himself at the cop shop.”

Pritam’s bright mood faded slightly. “Oh.”

“And remember I told you a developer put a sign up at the Carmichael Road woods? Barisi Developments. Last night, a Tony Barisi murdered his lover, then jumped out the window of his penthouse apartment.”

“Oh,” repeated Pritam. He pressed the morphine button, but nothing happened; he’d reached his limit for the moment. A last facet of sunlight on the ceiling flickered and vanished. Another nurse, older with short brown hair, appeared in the doorway. Joanna waved at her, can you do this? The brown-haired nurse shrugged and took hold of the phone. Joanna whispered in her ear, smiled at Pritam, and hurried from the room. Pritam glanced down at the new nurse’s badge: Helen Muir.

“I think Quill killed my father,” said Nicholas simply. The words left his mouth without fanfare or footprints.

Pritam felt the pain start twisting again in his broken hip, his shattered leg: some sharp-mawed worm stirring in its uneasy sleep.

“Nothing’s changed, has it?”

“No,” replied Nicholas. “But at least we know. We’re going to go into the woods.”

“You and Laine?”

“Yeah. Listen, just be careful, okay?”

“I can’t run too fast right now.”

“You know what I mean,” said Nicholas.

“Watch out for white dogs?”

“That kind of thing, yeah.”

“Okay.” Pritam was feeling tired. Maybe a nap now. “Nicholas?”

“Yeah?”

“I did mean that, even though I didn’t know it was you. God be with you, this Heaven-sent morning.”

Nicholas watched the butcher bird swallow the still-kicking grasshopper. “And also with you.”

They said their goodbyes, and Pritam nodded at the brown-haired nurse. She pressed the end call button on the handset and reached behind him to adjust his pillow.

“Thank you, Helen,” Pritam said.

“You’re welcome, Mr. Anand. But it’s not Helen,” she added, smiling at his mistake. She tapped her name badge.

Pritam blinked, and a wave of ice water rolled up through him. The badge read “Rowena Quill.”

He grabbed for the call button, but his fingers were as slow as old creek water. She easily pulled the button away, and smiled again. Pritam could see that she had Eleanor Bretherton’s eyes: hard and shining.

“Are you going to call out?” she asked pleasantly.

A lilt,
he thought.
Her accent. After all these years
 …

“No,” he replied. His throat was tight. Fear.

She nodded, as if pleased with an obedient child.

“You know who I am?”

“Show me,” he said.

She raised her eyebrows and smiled, and looked to the door. No one was there. She looked back at Pritam and winked. And suddenly, right in front of him was John Hird.

“Will this make it easier, you useless black fucker?” the older reverend asked brightly.

Pritam reeled. Here she was. Just a few minutes ago he’d been ablaze with the idea of bringing her to her knees with the Glory of the Host, penitent and humbled. But now he was cold inside, doused ash.

John’s friendly, wrinkled face vanished in a blink, replaced by the young nurse, Joanna. “Or her?”

Joanna’s face was gone, seamlessly replaced with Pritam’s mother’s. “Or her, my little
chinnanna?
”

“Stop,” he whispered. His mouth was as dry as cardboard.

“Or me?” His mother’s loving face vanished, replaced by a woman who looked older than time. Withered and wrinkled and hard as wood, with eyes that were bright blue sparks in folds of nut-brown flesh. “I heard you at the door,” she whispered. Her breath was foul and smelled of decayed flesh and the moldy misshapen things that grew in damp shadows. “You want to save my soul, boy?”

Pritam felt the last of his strength drain from him. The room was still light, but there was no longer warmth in it.
This is the room I die in,
he realized. He looked at the crone. She smiled, showing two rotten gray stumps that looked like snapped-off sparrow bones.

“Christ can forgive you,” he whispered, though he didn’t believe it. There wasn’t a hint of compassion in those ice-blue eyes.

“That’s grand,” she said.

Her features became again those of the pleasant, brown-haired nurse. She smiled, pulled out the pillow behind his head, and covered his face.

  A
fter Nicholas hung up the phone, he watched his mother carry buckets and garden tools across the couch grass toward a bed that would, come spring, be as brightly ablaze as tropical coral with colorful arctotis, impatiens, and petunias. Katharine dug with hard, chopping strokes, pulling out wandering jew and oxalis, tossing the uprooted weeds into a black pot beside her.
The garden will be beautiful,
he thought.
But how do the weeds feel about it? Sacrifices must be made.

Blood is the only sacrifice that pleases the Lord.

He needed to ask Laine something. He went inside.

The bed in Suzette’s room was empty. Laine was awake and up somewhere. He stepped back into the hall. Through the dimpled glass of the front door, he could make out the hunch of someone sitting on the front steps. He took a breath and went outside.

Laine wore his tracksuit pants and a woollen sweater that swallowed her. She didn’t look up as he shut the door behind him. A westerly wind troubled the trees in the street. The sky was cloudless. The sun gave no warmth. He looked around, and spotted what he was looking for. Gavin was walking up the footpath toward them.

“Will you sit?” she asked.

Nicholas watched Gavin reach the front gate.

“I don’t think so.”

But he needed to talk to Laine, and so reluctantly sat beside her.

“What happened?” she asked.

“You passed out in the car. I took you to hospital. Then I took you out of hospital.”

She stared out at a blue, wind-streaked sky that seemed impossibly vast above the ruby and emerald tile and tin rooftops.

“I dreamed,” she said. He waited.

“I was in a ship, a wooden ship. It was crammed full. A woman beside me had a baby. So much blood. It was stillborn. She cried and cried and held the dead baby and the crying seemed to last all night. The only way for it to stop was for me to bring her another baby. And I would have. I would have, only I was held down. Pinned down. By this weight, this warm weight on my chest. But I would have done anything to get her another child and stop that awful, awful crying.”