THE SCENE DIDN’T APPEAR to have been staged. It was a true suicide. No scream before the gunshot, no footsteps or other sound afterward. Only the motion and the act, and terror or relief or regret in the instant between them. A nightstand drawer hung open, where the home-defense weapon might have been kept.
Although Jane hadn’t known Gwyneth long enough to be wrenched with grief, dull but awful sadness and sharp anger afflicted her, the latter because this was no ordinary suicide, no consequence of anguish or depression. For a woman only two weeks from the loss of her husband, Gwyn had been coping as well as anyone might. Baking muffins, soon to take them to family and friends who had supported her in the current darkness, looking to the future. Besides, of the little she had learned about this military wife, one thing she knew beyond doubt was that Gwyn would not have tormented another grieving widow by putting her in the position of having to be the first to discover yet another suicide.
A sudden beeping caused her to pivot from the dead woman and bring her pistol up. No one. The sound issued from an adjacent room. She approached the open doorway with caution until she recognized the tone as the AT&T signal alerting its customer that a phone had been left off the hook.
She crossed the threshold into Gordon Lambert’s study. On the walls were photographs of him as a younger man in combat gear with brother Marines in exotic places. Gordon in dress blues, tall and handsome, pictured posing with a president. A framed flag that had flown in battle.
Trailing on its coiled cord, the handset of the desk phone lay on the carpet. From a jacket pocket, she fished a cotton handkerchief that she carried for no purpose other than fingerprint avoidance, and she cradled the handset, wondering with whom Gwyn might have spoken before making her mortal decision. She lifted the phone and entered the automatic call-back code but got nothing.
Gwyn had ostensibly come upstairs to find a brochure or program from the What If Conference. Jane went to the desk, opened a drawer.
The phone rang. She was not surprised. There was no caller ID.
She picked up the receiver but said nothing. Her discretion was matched by the person on the farther end of the line. It was neither a phantom call initiated by a system glitch nor a wrong number. She heard music in the background, an old song by America, recorded before she’d been born: “A Horse with No Name.”
She hung up first. Considering the large properties in this neighborhood, it was unlikely the single shot had been heard. But she had urgent work to do.
10
* * *
MAYBE SOMEONE WAS COMING. Or maybe they had no agent in this vicinity, but prudence required that she expect hostile visitors. She had no time to search the general’s office.
On the ground floor, she wiped everything that she remembered touching. She quickly washed and put away the coffee mugs and spoons. Although no one could hear, she performed each task quietly. Week by week she had grown quieter in all things, as though she was preparing soon to be a ghost and silent forever.
In the half bath, the mirror captured her attention briefly. Such was the fantastic nature of the mission she had set out upon, so strange were the discoveries she was making, sometimes it seemed reasonable to think that the impossible might be possible—in this instance that, when she left the room, her image would remain in the mirror to incriminate her.
When she departed the house by the front door, she felt not unlike the angel of Death. She came, a woman died, she left. Some said that one day there would be no death. If they were right, Death, too, could die.
As she walked past the neighbors’ houses, she saw no one at a window, no one on a porch, no child at play in risk of the pending storm. The only sounds were those that the inconstant wind stirred from the materials of the day, as though humanity had been expunged, its constructions intact but now to be erased by eons of weather.
She drove to the end of the block, where she could either turn left or continue straight. She motored ahead half a mile, made a right turn and soon a left, with no immediate destination in mind, glancing repeatedly at her rearview mirror. Confident that she had no tail hanging at a distance, she found the interstate and drove west toward San Diego.
The day might come when the earth fell under such precise and continuous observation that vehicles without transponders were no less trackable than those lawfully equipped. In such a world, she would never have made it to the Lambert house in the first place.
11
* * *
ONE NIGHT the previous November, six days before Nick’s death, while she’d been waiting in bed for him as he brushed his teeth, she had seen a story on the TV news that intrigued her and that lately had circled back again and again in her memory, as though it must be pertinent to what she was currently enduring.
The piece had been about scientists who were developing brain implants using light-sensitive proteins and fiber-optics. They said that we had a ceaseless conversation with our brains: our senses “writing in” information, our brains interpreting it and “reading out” instructions. Experiments were being done in which cerebral implants could take the brain’s instructions and transmit them past points of communication breakdown, such as stroke and spinal-nerve damage, making it possible for a paraplegic to operate prosthetic limbs just by thinking about moving them. People with certain motor neuron diseases that locked them in their bodies, even denying them the ability to speak, might be able, with such implants, to think their side of a conversation and hear it spoken. Their thoughts, translated into luminous pulses by light-sensitive proteins, would be processed by software and rendered into speech by a computer.
At the time, Jane had marveled that everything was changing so rapidly, that ahead seemed to be fast coming a world of miracles and wonders.
Now she was trapped in a world of violence and horror to which that old news story seemed to have no relevance. And yet she kept recalling it, as if it mattered profoundly.
Maybe she remembered the story not because of anything in it, but because of what Nick had said to her shortly thereafter. He came to bed exhausted from a hard day, as she also was exhausted. Neither had the energy to make love, but they enjoyed lying side by side, holding hands and talking. Just before she fell asleep, he raised her hand to his lips, kissed it, and said, “You rock me.” His words followed her into the most lovely dreams, where they were spoken in a variety of whimsical situations, always with great tenderness.
12
* * *
IN BENNY’S AT THE BEACH, the attack on Philadelphia commuters was as commanding of the clientele as would have been the Stanley Cup. Twenty-four/seven, there was enough TV sports coverage, live and replay, to satiate any fan, but on this lunch hour, the two bar screens were tuned to cable news, the bottom crawl devoted to death counts and statements of outrage from politicians rather than to past victories and player stats.
Benny’s was not in fact at the beach, but two blocks from the sound of lapping surf, and if it had been a San Diego favorite for fifty years, as its sign claimed, it most likely was no longer owned by someone named Benny, if it had ever been. The customers appeared to be middle-class, a shrinking demographic during the past decade. At this hour, none had drunk enough to bluster in the face of horror, though Jane found almost tangible the anger, fear, and need for community that had brought them to their barstools and chairs.