Possible others with motivation? A crazed fan? A crazed associate of the junkie who’d killed Huston’s mother? Maybe Annabel has a boyfriend who found out she was doing Huston. Or maybe the motive was professional jealousy. Denton? Conescu? Somebody else?
He stared at those questions for a while, tried to think each one through. But why would Huston kill Annabel? When? No missing strippers reported. No extra bodies. He drew a line through the first question, looked at the others. An accomplice would explain the two methods of killing—stabbing for the baby, slit throats for everybody else. Then he told himself, Hold on, wait. You’re confusing the writer with the character. This is fiction, it’s just a story. This isn’t Huston at all.
He was about to cross out the questions when he stopped, lifted his pen off the paper, looked at the questions once more, then let them stand.
Had the writer become the character? Had the murder and suicide of Huston’s parents loosed something in him, spawned a rage he struggled with but, eventually, failed to contain? DeMarco understood repressed rage. He understood how a single event could shred a privileged life, leave it tattered and flapping in the black gales of night.
But DeMarco was having a hard time keeping things straight now. Was the Annabel of these passages real? What about the strip club Annabel? Or were both a fabrication? Where did Huston end and the author of those dark passages begin? Huston’s writing had never before been so sanguinary, so grim. Where was the hopeful story Nathan had said Huston was writing? Or was it far too early for the end?
This was a whole different writer at work than the one DeMarco thought he knew. How much of the voice was artifice and how much a reflection of the man?
DeMarco leaned back in his chair. He looked at his white-gloved hands. How much of you is artifice? he asked himself.
“We are all made up,” he answered aloud. “We are only real at night.”
Thirty-One
Huston retraced his steps through the woods, back toward Bradley, deep enough behind the trees that his chances of being spotted were small, but close enough to the cluster of buildings that he could scan for a good place to emerge. A place where, if spotted from a distance, he would provoke no suspicion, a day hiker out for a stroll, just another yuppie pantheist who didn’t have sense enough to wear sturdy shoes.
You have to anticipate the reader’s questions, then address those questions, he always told his students. Questions about motivation. Intent. Nothing in fiction can be aimless. Anticipate and address.
From the woods, he could see the backs of a vinyl-sided two-story and a small clapboard cottage, and between them a garage with a gravel driveway that ran out to the highway. Huston angled toward the garage, and then, maybe twenty feet inside the woods on the far side of the garage, he came upon a ring of stones, charred logs inside the ring. An old kitchen chair, half-rotted seat on a rusty metal frame. Cigarette butts that had been tossed toward the fire ring but fell short.
Somebody’s quiet place, he told himself. He studied the two houses. The cottage looked dark, the windows curtained. The backyard was empty but for a bare wooden picnic table and two benches. The grass was thick and heavy with dead leaves blown in from the woods. Summer home. Maybe a hunting camp.
An elaborate swing set sat behind the two-story. The aluminum crossbar was bowed, the red paint dull. He guessed that the child or children who had played on those swings, who had slid down that now-canted slide, were too big for it now. Teenagers maybe. In any case, that house too was still and dark. Parents at work, he told himself, kids at school. And that glint of sunlight on glass, the garage’s side entrance, wooden door with a window chest high.
The door might be locked or it might not.
You’re not going to find a better place than this.
He knew how to do it. A couple of his characters had done it; he had written them, had watched them. He had already thought it through. Stride purposefully to the garage’s side door, quick test of the knob, if it’s unlocked you’re inside. If it’s locked, no hesitation, crisp elbow jab to the corner of the glass, reach inside even as the glass is still skidding over the concrete floor, find the lock, turn it, open the door, and step inside. The sound of breaking glass might catch somebody’s attention a house or two away, and they would stop what they were doing, listen, wonder where the sound had come from. But by then, he would be inside, searching for a tool. Getting away unseen would be more problematic than getting in.
You know all this, he told himself. Just do it.
He pulled the sunglasses from his pocket, fitted them on. Pulled the bill of the cap low over his eyes. Gathered his energy and made himself ready.
But the swing set undid him. It sucked his energy dry.