“Chloroform?” he asks.
“No. Gag him. Tape him.”
She doesn’t look at Booth again but walks out of the kitchen, his spittle still wet upon her face.
Her words replay in Booth’s memory. Not even your mind is dark enough to imagine what I’ll do to you.
26
In her office, Tanuja Shukla sat at the computer, moving her lonely character, Subhadra, through a night of wind and rain, on a journey ominous and mysterious but ultimately magical. The sentences failed to form with the usual felicity, but there was satisfaction in the struggle.
Her smartphone ringtone was a few bars of “What a Wonderful World.” She smiled and let the music repeat, as she usually did, while she sang, “I see skies of blue and clouds of white.” Then she answered it.
A vaguely familiar man’s voice said, “Uncle Ira is not Uncle Ira.”
“Yes, all right,” Tanuja said.
She listened to what must happen that evening, and she said she understood, that she would act according to instructions.
After he was finished, the caller said, “Auf Wiedersehen, sweet lips.”
“Good-bye,” she said and put aside her phone and returned to the novelette in progress.
After a moment, she sang, “I see trees of green and red roses, too,” as she reached for the phone. But the music did not repeat. No call was incoming. Either the caller had let it ring once before hanging up or Tanuja had imagined the ringtone.
She stared at the phone in puzzlement for a moment. Then she shrugged and returned to her story about Subhadra in the storm.
Now and then, she absentmindedly touched the wounded corner of her mouth, but the bleeding had stopped hours ago, and her fingers always came away dry.
27
In the half bath, at the sink, Jane washed her face with soap and water and rinsed it and dried with a guest towel.
She leaned against the vanity, staring into the mirror, into her eyes, which lately seemed alien to her, and she wondered if she could really do what she intended to do.
Even as a young girl, she had never spent a lot of time gazing into mirrors. She could see too much of her mother in her face, so that her reflection was a reminder of grievous loss. Not least of all, the image in the looking glass reminded her of the confusion and self-doubt and fear and cowardice that had paralyzed her when, as a nine-year-old child, she hadn’t been able to accuse her father of murdering her mother, though she’d had good reason to believe—no, she had known—that he’d killed her and staged it as a suicide. We grow, we change, we labor to maturity, to what little wisdom we might ever acquire, but always in the mirror is who we were as well as who we are, a harking back and, yet again, a quiet reckoning.
The problem this time was not cowardice. No courage was needed to do to Booth Hendrickson what she intended. Instead, ruthlessness was required. She needed a hardened heart, if not hardened to all the world, at least to those who lacked the ability to see their own humanity in others, who preyed on others, who recognized no right to life except their own, for whom power was no less essential than air and water. The world had always been acrawl with their squamous kind in nuisance numbers, but these days they flourished as never before, after centuries of compounding technological advances had put into their hands more power than kings of old had dreamed, power that should be entrusted only to benign gods.
She could not interrogate Hendrickson using the techniques she had found successful with other subjects. His arrogance was both a suit of armor and a fortress. The deepest roots of his psychology, like those of his brother, were snarled in a Gordian knot first tied in his earliest childhood and elaborated on since then; the man now in his forties might appear to be a mighty oak, but he was rotten at the core, all his limbs and branches deformed—and leafless, if it could be said that leaves were a sign of health. He was maze of deception, a primal forest of deceit, and she could trust the answers he gave her only at considerable peril.
With such a man, she had no choice but to be extraordinarily cruel. Of course, uncountable psychopaths resorted to that same rationalization.
She closed her eyes and tried to call to mind her son as she had last seen him: in the ranch-fenced exercise yard adjacent to the stable at Gavin and Jessica Washington’s place, where he was hidden away and safe; dappled by sunlight and oak-leaf shadows; standing on a low stool, grooming the mane of the Exmoor pony named Hannah that Gavin and Jessie had recently bought for him; his hair dark and tousled, like his father’s, and stirring in the light breeze; his eyes the blue of hers, although clear with an innocence that she had lost long ago.
In the past, at the end of each of her infrequent visits, he had walked with her to her car and watched as she had driven away. But he could no longer bear parting in that manner. On this most recent occasion, soon after Jane’s arrival, he’d made it known, through Jessica, that when the time came for his mother to leave, she should just pretend that she was going out to sit on the porch or into the next room to read, something like that, without saying the word good-bye.
And so she had stood for a while, watching him groom Hannah, talking about how quickly he was becoming a confident rider under Gavin’s tutelage, about how smart Hannah was and about how much the pony enjoyed the company of the German shepherds, Duke and Queenie. As always, a moment came when the deep-heart sorrow of leaving him seemed to double in weight each minute she delayed, so that if she didn’t go right then, she would never go. But she had learned too many secrets, done too much harm to too many people whose wealth and power were exceeded by their arrogance and by their cherished and implacable malignity. If she walked away from this grim fight, her enemies would never stop hunting for her, and they would eventually find her. Finding her, they would also find him. No foreign country was far enough away, no lifestyle too humble, no false identities too cleverly woven to thwart them in their search, not when they had numerous eyes in the heavens, maybe a hundred million cameras here below, and the growing Internet of Things that would one day give them undetected access to every room on earth. And so…and so she kissed Travis’s cheek as he stood grooming Hannah, and she said that she was going for a walk, and she went into the house by the back door and out the front door and to her car and away, the road before her blurred and darkling as if storm-swept, though the day was blue and bright.
Now, in the Mendez family’s half bath, she regarded her mirror image and knew that, without doubt, she would be able to commit the horror she had been contemplating. In the defense of the innocent—not just her son, but also the uncounted others whose souls had been or would be harvested by the Arcadians—she would incur no mortal stain requiring that she stand before the judgment of eternity.
However, she would be a fool if she believed that the act she was about to commit would not haunt her for the rest of her life. And she was no fool.
28
In this season, the cooler mornings were for horses, and like other mornings with horses, this last Saturday in March provided idyllic hours of peaceful rhythms, simple nature scenes, and graces abundant, with no jarring note or alarming turn until they stopped for a creekside lunch in the shade of cottonwoods.