“Go home and take a nap,” he told himself. He turned to the window behind his desk. It was still a beautiful day outside, blue skied and sunny. Warm enough that he could sit on his back patio with a jacket and gloves and a ski cap on, stretch out on the chaise lounge, lose consciousness for a while. Maybe he would try Huston’s prescription of meditation and progressive relaxation. Except that he didn’t know how to meditate. Did it involve prayer of some kind? Prayer had never worked for him. Television sometimes worked, but only at two or three in the morning with the volume low and the flickering images muted behind a glass of Jack and melting ice. Not a good prescription for an afternoon nap.
His eye was drawn then to the rose of Sharon bush outside his window. That bush had put him to sleep once. He still remembered how restful the nap had been, one dusky afternoon last spring. He had spotted a movement of some kind in the center of the bush, had pulled his chair close to the window for a better look. At first, he had had difficulty making sense of the object in the shadows; it fit no preconception. Gradually, the object separated into two objects, and he saw that the lower one was a bird lying on its back. The other object, a second bird, was standing over it and lightly pecking at the first bird’s neck. His first thought was cannibalism, one bird eating another. But as he watched he realized that he was witnessing a courtship, two cardinals engaged in foreplay. The female, on her back, would turn her head this way or that, allowing the male to nuzzle his bright beak against her.
DeMarco remembered the sense of lightness he had felt while watching the birds, a quiet kind of happiness. He had leaned back in his chair and watched them just over the windowsill, and at some point, he had closed his eyes and fallen asleep. When he’d awakened a half hour was gone, but he’d felt as if he had slept for ten hours. Afterward the day had been clean and new again. On his way home that afternoon, he had stopped at a local travel agency and picked up brochures about Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the Bahamas. He had made up his mind to take a vacation in the summer, leave everything behind in drab Pennsylvania, all the crimes and bloodstains and adumbrations. He had held onto that plan well into July. Now it was November and he could not remember where he had put the brochures.
Forty-One
The night was cool and smelled of woodsmoke, the kind of late autumnal night that, in other circumstances, might have found Thomas and Claire Huston lying on their backs on a blanket in the backyard, holding hands and watching the stars with Alyssa snuggled against her father, Tommy with his head on his mother’s shoulder. The adults would take turns pointing out constellations, maybe telling the story of Orion and Artemis, recounting how the Seven Sisters had committed suicide and were then turned into stars by Zeus. Tommy would probably turn the talk to aliens, while Alyssa remained contemplative and silent, alert for a shooting star. A foot or so behind Thomas’s head, a speaker from the baby monitor would be humming softly, a barely audible murmur of comforting white noise.
But tonight, there were no comforting sounds for Thomas Huston. Music from inside Whispers came to him disjointed and jarring, bass thumps and screeching guitars. The temperature was in the midfifties, but he could not stop shivering. Before leaving the equipment shed in Bradley that afternoon, he had anticipated the night’s chill and had searched the shed for something extra to wear, something less filthy than the torn quilted jacked. He had found a navy-blue hooded sweatshirt that had been rolled into a ball and stuffed onto the top shelf behind some batting helmets. The sweatshirt was a good fit, had probably belonged to one of the coaches, who had pulled it off on a warm day, threw it aside, and forgot about it. It was stiff with dust but loosened up after a vigorous shaking. He wore it now with the hood pulled low over his ball cap, the drawstring snug beneath his chin, his hands drawn up into the sleeves. It had kept him warm enough while hiking, but now, every minute or so, as he huddled in the trees behind the gravel lot, a spasm of shivers would seize him, spreading out from his solar plexus and down his spine.
At other moments he felt feverish. His eyes burned and his stomach fluttered with nausea from time to time. He had been too nervous all day to eat anything, had drunk only a can of Diet Pepsi purchased from a vending machine outside of a gas station just thirty minutes earlier.
Now he lowered himself onto his knees in the darkness of the tree line. The low trees and bushes grew to the very edge of the gravel lot, which left him a mere twenty yards from the building, from Annabel. The only illumination at the rear of the building came from the bare yellow bulb above a door with neon-yellow lettering that said Employees Only. All Others Use Front Entrance.