She sighed. “Come upstairs and let’s get funky. Then maybe we’ll both sleep.”
Ralph went willingly enough, but even while they were making love (except at the moment of climax, when all thought was obliterated), he found himself remembering Doyle’s dictum. It was smart. Logical. But could you amend it to Once you eliminate the natural, whatever remains must be supernatural? No. He could not believe in any explanation that transgressed the rules of the natural world, not just as a police detective but as a man. A real person had killed Frank Peterson, not a spook from a comic book. So what remained, no matter how improbable? Only one thing. Frank Peterson’s killer had been Terry Maitland, now deceased.
5
On that Wednesday night, the July moon had risen as bloated and orange as a gigantic tropical fruit. By early Thursday morning, as Fred Peterson stood in his backyard, on the footstool where he had rested his feet during many a Sunday afternoon football game, it had shrunk to a cold silver coin riding high overhead.
He slipped the noose around his neck and yanked it until the knot rested against the angle of his jaw, as the Wikipedia entry had specified (complete with helpful illustration). The other end was attached to the branch of a hackberry tree like the one beyond Ralph Anderson’s fence, although this one was a rather more elderly representative of Flint City’s flora, having sprouted around the time an American bomber was dropping its payload on Hiroshima (surely a supernatural event to the Japanese who witnessed it at a distance great enough to save them from being vaporized).
The footstool rocked back and forth unsteadily beneath his feet. He listened to the crickets and felt the night breeze—cool and soothing after one hot day and before another he did not expect to see—on his sweaty cheeks. Part of his decision to draw a line under the Flint City Petersons and call the equation complete was a hope that Frank, Arlene, and Ollie had not gone far, at least not yet. It might still be possible to catch up. More of it was the unbearable prospect of attending a double funeral in the morning at the same mortuary—Donelli Brothers—that would bury the man responsible for their deaths in the afternoon. He couldn’t do it.
He looked around one final time, asking himself if he really wanted to do this. The answer was yes, and so he kicked the footstool away, expecting to hear the crack of his neck breaking deep in his head before the tunnel of light opened before him—the tunnel with his family standing at the far end, beckoning him to a second and better life where harmless boys were not raped and murdered.
There was no crack. He had missed or ignored the part in the Wikipedia entry about how a certain drop was necessary to break the neck of a man weighing two hundred and five pounds. Instead of dying, he began to strangle. As his windpipe closed and his eyes bulged in their sockets, his previously drowsing survival instinct awakened in a clangor of alarm bells and a glare of interior security lights. In a space of three seconds his body overrode his brain and the desire to die became the brute will to live.
Fred raised his hands, groped, and found the rope. He pulled with all his strength. The rope slackened, and he was able to draw a breath—necessarily shallow, because the noose was still tight, the knot digging into the side of his throat like a swollen gland. Holding on with one hand, he groped for the branch to which he had tied the rope. His fingers brushed its underside, and loosed a few flakes of bark that fluttered down onto his hair, but that was all.
He was not a fit man in his middle age, most of his exercise consisting of trips to the fridge for another beer during one of his beloved Dallas Cowboys football games, but even as a high school kid in phys ed, five pull-ups had been the best he could do. He could feel his one-handed grip slipping, and grabbed the rope with his other hand again, holding it slack long enough to pull in another half-breath, but unable to yank himself any higher. His feet swung back and forth eight inches above the lawn. One of his slippers came off, then the other. He tried to call for help, but all he could manage was a rusty wheeze . . . and who would possibly be awake to hear him at this hour of the morning? Nosy old Mrs. Gibson next door? She would be asleep in her bed with her rosary in her hand, dreaming of Father Brixton.
His hands slipped. The branch creaked. His breath stopped. He could feel the blood trapped in his head pulsing, getting ready to burst his brains. He heard a rasping sound and thought, It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
He flailed for the rope, a drowning man reaching for the surface of the lake into which he has fallen. Large black spores appeared in front of his eyes. They burst into extravagant black toadstools. But before they overwhelmed his sight, he saw a man standing on the patio in the moonlight, one hand resting possessively on the barbecue where Fred would never grill another steak. Or maybe it wasn’t a man at all. The features were crude, as if punched into being by a blind sculptor. And the eyes were straws.
6
June Gibson happened to be the woman who had made the lasagna Arlene Peterson dumped over her head before suffering her heart attack, and she wasn’t asleep. Nor was she thinking about Father Brixton. She was suffering herself, and plenty. It had been three years since her last attack of sciatica, and she had dared to hope it was gone for good, but here it was again, a nasty uninvited visitor who just barged in and took up residence. Only a telltale stiffness behind her left knee after the post-funeral gathering at the Petersons’ next door, but she knew the signs and begged Dr. Richland for an oxycodone prescription, which he had reluctantly written. The pills only helped a little. The pain ran down her left side from the small of her back to her ankle, where it cinched her with a thorny manacle. One of the cruelest attributes of sciatica—hers, anyway—was that lying down intensified the pain instead of easing it. So she sat here in her living room, dressed in her robe and pajamas, alternately watching an infomercial for sexy abs on TV and playing solitaire on the iPhone her son had given her for Mother’s Day.
Her back was bad and her eyes were failing, but she had muted the sound on the infomercial and there was nothing wrong with her ears. She heard a gunshot next door clearly, and leaped to her feet with no thought for the bolt of pain that pistoned down the entire left side of her body.
Dear God, Fred Peterson has just shot himself.
She grabbed her cane and hobbled, bent over and crone-like, to her back door. On the porch, and by the light of that heartless silver moon, she saw Peterson crumpled on his lawn. Not a gunshot after all. There was a rope around his neck, and it snaked a short distance to the broken branch around which it had been tied.
Dropping her cane—it would only slow her down—Mrs. Gibson sidesaddled down her back porch steps and negotiated the ninety feet between the two backyards at a lurching jog, unaware of her own cries of pain as her sciatic nerve went nuclear, ripping her from her skinny buttocks to the ball of her left foot.
She knelt beside Mr. Peterson, observing his swollen and empurpled face, the protruding tongue, and the rope half-buried in the ample flesh of his neck. She wriggled her fingers under the rope and pulled with all her strength, unleashing another blast of agony. The cry this occasioned she was aware of: a high, long, ululating scream. Lights went on across the street, but Mrs. Gibson didn’t see them. The rope was finally loosening, thank God and Jesus and Mary and all the saints. She waited for Mr. Peterson to gasp in air.