The Horses of the Night (8 page)

“The house doesn't matter,” she said. “Money doesn't matter. You matter. We matter.”

The cup in my hand was empty, although still warmed by the just-finished tea. Nona took the cup from my hands, and she put it down beside her own empty cup on a dust-glazed side table.

Nona had a way of curing one of my headaches by applying her fingertips very gently to what she called “acupoints.” These were points of her own discovery, I realized once while paging through a volume on acupressure. Her hands now found the pulse in my temple, the tension in my neck. Her fingers found the anxiety in me, and released it.

We were upstairs again, and as we made love I felt the city around us expand and dissolve, Nona beneath me whispering my name until it was no longer a whisper, but a cry of discovery.

I woke, remembering the sound of wings. This had happened to my mother, and now it was happening to me.

Her voice had been so beautiful. My mother's soprano was with me, as though, through the sound of Nona's steady sleep, I could hear my mother. Just like years before. When I had heard her talk. I had worked so hard to forget.

Surely everything would be fine. That was my strongest talent: faith.

I stared upward, into the dark.

10

She woke well before dawn, and she was into her clothes before I could fully stir.

It was that special, freshest part of the day, morning before it has begun to be light. It was night, but a time of night that promises. I could not help myself—I lay there for a long moment enjoying her loveliness, her tousled dark hair even now catching, or creating, auras out of the virtually nonexistent light in the room. She dressed with very little sound, and the dark light made it look as though I imagined her entirely. She was a figure in a dream.

“Do you have to leave so soon?” I asked.

“I hate to. But I have to get to the hospital early,” she said. “I've been thinking about them every hour since I stepped onto the plane.”

“I'm sure they missed you,” I said, and I meant: So did I.

It was that simple: I wanted to be with her every day.

“I have time to do everything I want to do,” she said, “if I stop eating and sleeping, and clone myself into about six different people.”

“I can drop by the hospital for lunch.”

She met my eyes. Her voice became serious, gentle. “The children would enjoy a visit. They like you.”

“Would you like it?”

“You try eating lunch with a bunch of surgeons every day. All they talk about is golf and mutual funds. Today is really horrible. I have to meet with the budgeting committee over chicken salad. I need to explain why hypnotherapy is as important as chemotherapy. Doctors forget that their patients have psyches. Sometimes I think half the surgeons on the staff would be just as happy if they treated horses and dogs instead of people.”

“They forget,” I said, “that people have souls.”

Perhaps Nona hesitated with her hairbrush for an instant. “Exactly.” Then she turned to look at me. “You are all right, aren't you?” she asked hopefully.

Leaping from bed, I hurried into my clothes. “I'll make some coffee—”

She saw me tucking in my shirttail and gestured that she had no time, a flutter of her hand much like a wave of farewell. “I have a coffee machine in my office that I never use. Morning is so important. The children need special reassurance in the morning, when they first wake up.”

“Dinner tonight?”

“Someday we'll be able to do everything we want to do,” she said.

“They teach you how to say no in medical school. Just go ahead and say it. It's a word of one syllable.”

She kissed me, her lips lingering on mine, and on the special place in my forehead, that point where wisdom and peace were supposed to originate. “I know how you feel,” she breathed. “There will be time for us, Strater. Someday.”

“This is only the fifth time that we have even spent the night together. The fifth time in over a year.”

She made a soft groan that I knew was a sincere expression of her feelings. She put her forehead against mine, and we stood as though in a small, confined space, a place of our own making. “I want to change the way we live. There's just so much to do—”

My feelings made it hard to speak. “I admire your work, Nona. It's part of why I love you.”

The word
love
definitely made her pause. “Someday we'll have day after day together. Someday when I get real support, instead of the piecemeal dollar here and there. Someday, when my projects are funded—”

I kept the disappointment out of my voice. “Someday when there are no more sick children.”

“They don't even take me seriously, some of them. Some of the men, some of the dinosaurs with fat wallets. They can't even hear what I'm saying. They look at me and think: Just another hyperactive female. Just another pushy, plaintive woman. Just another lightweight. Besides,” she laughed. “You'd get tired of me. Take my word for it—if you saw me every night you would become bored.”

Day was coming. We could see without difficulty. We walked down the stairs together, Nona holding my hand, my arm trying to slow her down, hold her back.

I found myself wishing, whimsically, that I could visit a seer, a prophet who could tell me succinctly whether or not I would win Nona.

“You have to believe in the future,” Nona was saying, as she reached the front door. She was bantering, refusing to take me seriously, and at the same time she realized how serious I was. “You're good at believing, aren't you?”

And I believe in you, I wanted to say. “Call me,” I said, and then she was gone.

With her absence, the frustrations of my life all returned to me. There was simply the raw truth: My family had been wealthy, and now it was not. Nona knew a little, now, but no one beside my brother and I really understood the nature of our finances. Our cash reserves had suffered years of my father's benevolent mismanagement, money given away to promote everything from better acoustics in opera houses to computers in schools. What my father did not sow, Zeus-like, grand and loving, my mother finished off, but that was a story I did not like to even consider.

I kept up the illusion of brisk wealth, but it was only a pretense.

Collie had made a haven of the kitchen, and even in her absence it awaited her return, spruce and cheerful, like Monet's kitchen in Giverny, sun-yellow and spacious. Maui onions waited in a tumble on a side table, beside a rope of garlic.

I ground some Jamaica Blue Mountain and called Blake and let the phone ring. Bad thoughts pricked me.

Someone was keeping Blake away from the phone. Someone who was using Blake as bait. This was not a rational theory, and yet it simmered within me as I waited out the dark, the sun crawling across the old, warped glass of the leaded windows.

I turned on the portable Sony beside the teapot. I watched idly, and then cursed myself for turning on the television so thoughtlessly. There was “AM San Francisco,” and our host, an amiable man I knew slightly, a man as mild and agreeably shallow as he looked, was introducing “one of Northern California's biggest talents, a man you're going to hear a lot more about, Frederick Peterson.”

Frederick, I thought dully. Everyone I knew called him either “Peterson” or “Fred.” It must be one of DeVere's suggestions. New clothes, new name, bright new future.

There was Peterson, lean and made up so that he looked more deeply tanned than ever. He wore one of DeVere's Scottsdale line of sports jackets, one of the so-called Western tweeds. It was not a bad-looking piece of clothing.

Behind the figures on the screen was the usual set, a beige wall, and a circle with a stylized seven—the station's logo. I had designed a few logos in my career—one or two had been accepted by local companies, a now defunct restaurant supply firm and a stationery store. I found myself wondering why beige was so popular, and if someone from the age of, say, Chaucer would have even recognized the color.

I busied myself with wiping invisible spots on the counter, unable to watch for a few moments. But there was something peculiar. The host's voice chattered idly, and I had the sense that the show was not moving smoothly. When I looked back Peterson was seated. “You've got some big plans for the way our city is going to look,” said the host.

What had seemed self-consciousness now seemed a speech impediment. Peterson opened his mouth and could say nothing.

I felt myself sink into a very ugly realization. I said the words aloud. “Don't.”

The television made a faint buzz, a tiny electronic reverberation behind the spoken words.

My voice again: “Don't do it.”

It was a shock. Not long ago, Peterson had been thoughtful, articulate. Now he was a man numbed, lost. There was no doubt in my mind. I knew, but I was helpless, looking on, unable to reach forth my hand and shut off the sight of what was about to happen.

The cohost was a woman, a journalist of considerable intelligence who had retreated to the safety of morning talk shows recently after her helicopter crashed in the Middle East. Her voice accompanied the sight of Peterson's glazed eyes, his working lips.

“Frederick has some really impressive improvements in mind for the Polo Field at Golden Gate Park, and he has some good ideas for the Shakespeare Garden—”

Peterson spoke. His voice was hard to make out. “I wanted it all so badly.”

The male host beamed and frowned simultaneously, so that he would be sure to have the correct expression in any event.

Peterson continued, his voice a gasp. “I wanted to
have
something.”

“It certainly looks like you have some very fine plans for San Francisco, Frederick,” said the brisk, female voice, “and in just a moment we'll be back to—”

“The competition was rigged. DeVere rigged it. Stratton Fields deserves to win.” His words were spoken with the mechanical care of a man confessing after torture. Peterson stood straight in his chair. He fumbled at his sage-brown tweed jacket.

It looked almost comical as the camera panned back, the television crew in a hurry to move away from Peterson, to get him off and move on to someone else. Peterson seemed to take a large piece of chocolate cake from his jacket, put it to his mouth and work his mouth for an instant around the mass of dark color.

It was not cake.

The hand fumbled at the pistol. There was a crack that vibrated the speaker of the portable television, and what looked like cherry juice and chocolate was spattered all over the circle with its stylized seven.

An ad for something, a cavalcade of smiling people, flashed into view before I could stop myself. I seized the television, lunging at it instinctively, forgetting for the moment that what I had before me was an image. I wanted to grab Peterson, but in my embrace merely unplugged the Sony and sent it into blank silence.

11

It was a bright, perfect morning, as though there had never been a day before, never had been weariness, or doubt. It was sunny and cool, brisk yet warm, moss in the seams of the sidewalk.

Fern had been right. Thinking gets us into trouble. I tried to keep my mind empty.

There was no traffic. It was a quick drive. I stepped before Blake's house on Filbert Street, clapping my hands softly against the chill of the shadows.

I knew.

I knew as soon as I hesitated on the sidewalk, as soon as I wouldn't take the first step toward the front door. There was good reason Blake hadn't answered the phone.

I argued with myself—I'm good at that. Of course there was nothing wrong. But I couldn't shake the feeling: Call the police.

There was one of those large, twisting junipers beside the steps, and I found himself admiring the contorted plant. I sniffed the air for that metallic juniper spice in the air, and then I nearly had to laugh at myself. I was being childish.

You're stalling, I told myself, self-respect stirring.

The doorbell made a delayed toll, a bronze, rich tone far within the big house. The entire house was wrong. The curtains were drawn. Blake was a man who liked morning light, and he was an early riser. All the way back to the days at Tahoe, Blake and my father got up in virtual darkness for slowly illuminated, mountain-air tennis. All the curtains, all the way up into the third story, were drawn, and this was not right at all.

Maybe he's so sick he can't get out of bed. And here I am, I thought, standing here, totally useless. Blake is suffering from something pernicious and purely medical, and I am wasting time.

He flew to London last night. He decided to pop down to Newport Beach. He's with a girlfriend. He drove down to see his horses, or north to gaze upon his vineyard.

Peterson was dead.

The doorbell rang unanswered once again, a solemn one-two far off in the depths of the house. The brass lion's-head knocker was bright and cold when I gripped it. I let the knocker clap. Many times. Too many times.

Stop thinking, Nona would say. Act.

There was always a housekeeper, at the very least. This was Russian Hill: staid, even pretentious. Surely one would answer now. But there was, if anything, even more silence from the interior of the house, a well of cold that sucked in all possible whispers.

I tested the door. It was a thumb-latch, the sort of graceful handle that the fingers wrap, leaving the thumb to depress the bright tongue and feel the satisfying slip of the bolt. Well-made, I thought, trying to ignore the cold that swept over me.

This door should have been locked. It was a quick thought, one I repressed at once. The door was opening, swinging inward.

Someone wants you to step inside. Someone wants you to be the first. Call the police. And an equally quick: You are definitely overreacting.

I paused in the foyer of Blake's elaborate Victorian. It was an ornate version of my own building, which was itself a proud three-story. This house had been done over by a designer featured in articles in several magazines, and walking into the sitting room was like entering the pages of an ad for Turkish carpets.