Читать книгу Blackbird - Tom Wright - Страница 13

FIVE

I finally got around to Jonas an hour or so after I got back to what used to be home, the three-bedroom on Lanshire where I slept at night and where the emptiness was like an icicle through the heart. On the way, thinking maybe I needed a sugar and caffeine hit, I had stopped for a cappuccino at Starbucks, but ended up grinding my teeth and throwing it savagely at the ArkLaTex Realty sign in the front yard as I crossed the drive toward the door. Just the thing to show the neighbours what a stable guy I was. Then for my self-imposed act of contrition I walked humbly over and retrieved the cup, thinking, for no reason I recognised at the moment, of Father Joe – José Carbajal, senior pastor at Sacred Heart downtown – gone now but bright in memory.

Father Joe walking into the fellowship hall, finished with confessions for now and carrying another six-gallon bucket of pancake flour to the kitchen, setting it on the end of the counter and lighting a small cigar. It was a freezing Saturday morning toward the end of my first year in Traverton, and I was standing elbow to elbow with Jonas McCashion, flipping all-you-can-eat pancakes for the Kids’ Roundup Ranch in Bowie County.

‘I thought this place was smoke-free,’ said Jonas.

‘Que es peor que la que,’ the priest said, rolling up his sleeves, the cigar cocked at an obstinate angle in his teeth. ‘Es de la reserva privada de Fidel.’ He grabbed a spatula. ‘Let’s feed these paganos hambre.’

Jonas and I went back to our conversation about women, snow geese and incoherent Texas governors, already on our way to becoming good friends. I was what he called dis-mated, a circumstance he was unwilling to let stand. He introduced me to a former neighbour of his, a ceramic artist named Jana Stiles, and his instincts turned out to be dead-on.

Because without Jana I’d have had no story that could be whole. I still saw and smelled and felt the exact moment when it began for me: the CCR concert in Baton Rouge – our third date – midnight, cigarette lighters held high all around us in the dark, Fogerty and his latest line-up doing a long, sweet reprise of ‘Who’ll Stop the Rain?’ and Jana, deep inside the music, swaying against me, leaning over and taking the lobe of my ear lightly in her teeth, growling softly.

When I lost her it was for reasons I should have understood then but didn’t even now, a fact that joined forces with many others to make me wonder how the hell there could be enough room in the known universe to accommodate all the things I didn’t understand.

One thing I did get was that most of the women I’d loved had been John Fogerty fans, and I remembered him from about as far back as he went. When it came to dancing Rachel had been more country-western than anything else, but couldn’t get enough of Fogerty’s early stuff, like the Blue Velvets version of ‘Have You Ever Been Lonely?’.

In fact, that was what had been playing on the kitchen radio the first night I’d been the designated cook on one of Kat’s visits. That had given me full control of the operation, which meant steaks all around. It was the first time I’d been trusted with that many rib-eyes, but I brought it off without a hitch if you judged by all the compliments and the almost complete absence of leftovers.

When the table was clear, Dusty had said, ‘’Fraid y’all are going to have to hold the fort without Ray and me tonight. We’re goin’ boot-scootin’ at the Palomino with Liz and Doc.’

‘How nice,’ Gran Esther said. ‘You two have a good time – you’ve earned it.’

With Dusty and Rachel on their way, Kat and I were doing the dishes. ‘Where’s the Palomino?’ she asked, her hip warm against mine.

‘Greenville,’ I said, lowering my voice a little to keep Gran Esther from hearing. ‘It’s a couple of hours each way. They usually stay the night in town.’

Kat smiled, passed me another handful of knives, forks and spoons.

‘Here, let me help with that,’ said Gran, carrying a couple of stray saucers she’d found in the living room over to the sink.

‘No, ma’am,’ I said. ‘We’ll have this done in no time. How about some hot chocolate or something?’

‘Come to think of it, hot chocolate would be very nice, dear.’

Kat quickly dried her hands, saying, ‘Let me make that for you, Mrs Rhodes. Biscuit can show me where everything is.’

Gran said she was tired and decided to take the chocolate to her room. ‘Goodnight to both of you,’ she said, ‘and God bless.’

What Gran called her room was actually a good-sized apartment at the far end of the house, and once she was in for the evening she never came back out. Kat watched as Gran closed the door behind her.

‘You’ve got a great family, Biscuit,’ Kat said.

‘Yeah, I know,’ I said. ‘Want a beer?’

‘You can do that?’

‘One or two on weekends as long as it’s just around here. Dusty thinks beer is good for your constitution.’

‘How does Rachel feel about it?’

‘She doesn’t drink. And she doesn’t say anything about anybody else’s drinking either. Calls that taking other people’s inventory.’

‘My Uncle Marty says things like that. He’s in AA.’

I just nodded.

‘Well, she seems like a pretty terrific lady to me.’

‘She is now.’

I opened two Lone Stars from the fridge and handed Kat one of them as we wandered over to the stereo.

Flipping through the tapes, Kat picked one up and said, ‘Judy Collins, great.’ She took a drink of Lone Star and looked around the room’s wide hardwood floors scattered with area rugs. ‘This room was made for dancing, Biscuit. Think Gran would mind?’

‘She takes out her hearing aid when she goes in at night,’ I said. ‘She’ll never know.’ I pushed the tape into the player, and we rolled back a couple of the rugs and lowered the lights. Kat slipped her penny loafers off, took my Lone Star and set both bottles on the counter, then came back and held her hand out to me as the music filled the room. I buried my face in her hair, smelling her skin and her summery perfume, her soft breasts lightly pressing my chest and her hips moving smoothly against mine.

After a few more numbers she lifted her mouth to mine, kissing me deeply as we danced, her hands on my waist.

When we finally broke the kiss she said what I’d been trying to think of a way to bring up: ‘Show me your room?’

When I opened the door to my room and switched on the light Kat glanced around. ‘Hey, you’re not too messy for a guy, Biscuit – and your own bathroom! Wow!’ She walked over for a closer look at the framed picture on my dresser next to the cracked red coffee mug bristling with pencil stubs and dried-up ballpoint pens. ‘This must be Lee Ann in the middle,’ she said. ‘Who are the other two?’

‘My grandmother and Dr Kepler.’

‘Dr Kepler?’

‘She was a professor, a friend of ours,’ I said. ‘She didn’t have any family or anything, and she kind of adopted us.’

‘What happened to her family?’

‘Her parents and sisters died in a concentration camp in Poland,’ I said. ‘Now she’s dead too.’ I stood gazing at her image, feeling its familiar dark energy, like a permanent, warm, almost undetectable push against my skin, and wondering why I couldn’t stop saying things that made me sound even stupider than I actually was.

For a while Kat just stared at the picture in silence, something changing in her eyes. She swallowed hard, touched her fingers to the glass. ‘Aleha ha-shalom,’ she said softly. ‘Baruch dayan emet.’

I was about to ask what this meant when she pulled my mouth down to hers and kissed me again, her breath coming faster. She stepped back, looked at me for a while without saying anything, then walked over to the door, closed it and thumbed the lock.

Taking a deep breath, I unlocked and opened the front door of my house and stepped inside, bracing myself against what I knew I was going to see, which was nothing. Or maybe I should say everything, but all of it exactly as I’d left it this morning. Until Jana took the girls and moved to the big cedar A-frame behind her gallery off Border I hadn’t understood that inanimate things could die, that all those atoms could stop their quantum dance at once and something as full of energy and purpose as a house one day could become only a shell the next, a replica of life like the detailed husk a cicada leaves behind when it moults.

It wasn’t that I denied being mostly responsible for what had gone wrong between Jana and me, or that I didn’t understand what she was saying about the job. And for her it went beyond the fact that her brother had been killed in the desert, or that her cop uncle had been murdered by a couple of skinheads on the street in Houston. It really came down to her being through with the locker-room police culture that still hung around me like cigar smoke when I got home from work at night, the gun I put on my belt every morning – to her nothing but an ugly black killing tool – the constant anxiety, the midnight calls. She wanted no more bagpipes playing ‘Amazing Grace’ or white-gloved honour guards firing blanks at the sky as somebody with colourful medals and high rank handed young widows or widowers in sunglasses their tightly folded American flags. And outweighing all the rest of it put together, the half-ounce of copper-jacketed lead in the form of two nine-millimetre bullets that wouldn’t have had to be cut out of my body if I’d had some other job.

Her solution was direct and uncomplicated: take the fifty-one-per-cent deal Rachel and Dusty had offered us on the Flying S in Rains County, move out there and run the place, and let them take off to find out what the rest of the world looks like – something they’d been dreaming of for the last fifteen years. But the terms didn’t really matter, because for Jana the question of where we’d be going was a non-essential detail; what she cared about was what we’d be leaving behind – a folded flag of her own.

But nothing about Jana was simple. She’d been an accounting major but cared more about natural fibres than bottom lines. She had killer instincts at poker, but kids lost in stores ran to her on sight. She called herself a ‘pretty good potter’, the real-world meaning of which was that she was an at least moderately famous artist, a ceramicist exhibiting in galleries from one end of the country to the other.

Maybe it was being an artist that made her so contradictory. But whatever gifts she had, she wanted to share. One of the most vivid memories I had of her went back to a Saturday morning years ago, our daughter Casey still in her yellow footie pyjamas, an icy rain falling steadily beyond the windows of the breakfast nook where she sat at the table with her colouring book, Jana standing beside her, watching in silence, her face soft and radiant with undisguised pride.

My eyes stinging as the already-dead house somehow found a way to die a little more, I was suddenly filled with a pure, brilliant hatred of the echoing emptiness banging against my eardrums and sucking the oxygen from the air.

Mutt, my personal cat, came pacing silently in from the hallway. He was mostly black, with two barely visible tan markings above his eyes that gave him a permanently surprised expression, and he stopped and stared at me now as if I were the last thing he’d expected to find in here. Jana had taken him along when she and the girls moved out, thinking he was more attached to them than to me, but he’d run away the first day. Then three days after that I’d found him sitting on the front doormat, licking a curled paw and ignoring me. He’d somehow made it almost six miles across town to come home, probably using up several of his spare lives on the way.

As cats go, he wasn’t a bad roommate – no clawing the furniture, keeping me awake at night or spraying in the house – but he reminded me so much of Jana and the girls that I sometimes had to work at not resenting him for it. On the other hand, right now I was glad to have the company of another conscious being.

‘Ahoy,’ I said.

He gave no sign that he heard me.

The thought of other conscious beings brought to mind the only Dallas phone number I didn’t need to look up. I grabbed the phone and punched it in.

‘Dr Lee Ann Rowe’s office,’ said LaKeisha.

‘This still group night?’

‘That you, Lieutenant Bonham?’

I said what I always did: ‘Call me Jim.’

‘Yes, sir,’ she said. ‘It is, and she should be out any second. I’ll put you on hold. Enjoy the music.’

The next thing I heard was a slow instrumental version of ‘Satisfaction’, strings and light brass, which I enjoyed as much as I could.

Thinking about LA as I waited – as always trying to edit out the memories that underlined my own failures and selfishness, my inability to prevent what had happened to her – I argued myself around to the position that this call was justifiable, that I wasn’t going to kick up any dust from the past that she couldn’t deal with, that she was probably tougher than me anyway, and certainly no longer had any need for my protection. If she ever really had.

Then, thinking some more about families, I looked up at the pictures on the wall: Jana in front of the fieldstone fireplace at the Flying S; Gram, my grandmother Miriam Hunnicutt Vickers, who’d raised LA and me after everyone else ahead of her on the depth chart had defaulted – a wise and beautiful woman, battered but never broken by a world that didn’t deserve her, looking sadly into the lens from among the tomato plants in her garden; and my own daughters, Casey and Jordan, on horseback, the November sun backlighting their hair against a background of red and gold leaves.

But images of Deborah Gold’s dead flesh began shouldering their way back in, her half-shut eyes gazing emptily down at me through the icy rain, her viciously violated body already gone cold on its way to rejoining the soil.

Then the soundtrack transitioned to ‘Circle of Life’, taking me smoothly back through time to an evening with the girls not long after the separation, the three of us sharing a tub of popcorn and watching a movie about cartoon animals having conversations and singing songs, Jordan saying, ‘That’s pretty dumb,’ not carping, just thinking out loud. ‘They’d be eating each other.’

A huge sigh from her sister Casey. ‘It’s a metaphor, you dink.’

‘I think you mean fable, Miss Hairball.’

All her life Casey had been what Jana called an ‘easy upchuck’, like a cat, throwing up for any reason, or no reason. When there was a purpose it was usually evil – to duck chores, an exam, or some adverse social situation – and it had earned her the nickname Hairball. She was a little sensitive about it. ‘Well, just up yours, Little Susie Einstein,’ she said, giving her hair a sulky toss.

The soundtrack clicked off. ‘Speak, troop,’ LA’s telephone voice said. ‘Start by telling me you’re not relapsing.’ I imagined her leaning back in her desk chair, sporting one of her two main looks – denim and boots that would look spot-on in a boardroom, or a serious suit in toned-down colours that she could wear to a dogfight without raising an eyebrow. Not much jewellery or makeup, probably no high heels – you don’t paint extra stripes on a tiger. Of course with her the concept of a hairstyle had never had any actual meaning because no matter what she or anybody else tried to do with it, she still ended up with the same dark, unconquerable mop that our grandmother had said always looked freshly dynamited.

‘Hi, girl,’ I said. ‘I’m fine, but I need your wisdom.’

‘Some things never change,’ she said. ‘How’s your appetite?’

‘Not too bad,’ I said. ‘But junk food has kinda lost its taste.’

A brief pause. ‘How long since you’ve been fishing?’

‘I don’t know – quite a while.’

‘But you’ve still got the boat?’

I said, ‘Yeah. And tackle. And a fishing licence. I just don’t go.’

‘What’s your weight?’

‘One-seventy-five.’

‘Still a light heavyweight. How well are you sleeping?’

‘No way to know,’ I said. ‘I’m always asleep at the time.’

‘Give.’

‘Okay, I’ve waked up too early a few times since the last time we talked.’

‘What are you calling a few?’

‘Four.’

‘Talked to Max about it?’

‘Yeah, some. He gave me a couple things to think about.’

‘But you haven’t talked to Jana and the girls about the farm.’ Not a question.

‘Would you believe it if I said I was working on it?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘But I’d believe you think you are.’

‘Maybe the problem’s not really knowing where I belong.’

‘I saw how you were when you were working the place that last year, troop. Nobody could belong there more than you. Except maybe Casey and Jordie.’

I looked again at the pictures of the two of them on the wall. She was right; both were natural riders, as much at home on horseback and in the open country as birds in the air. If anybody belonged out there it was them.

‘Yeah, they’d be great with it,’ I said. ‘What worries me is how they’re handling the separation. I’m taking them out for lunch tomorrow, probably to the marina. I know it won’t fix anything, but I really need to spend some time with them.’

‘The main thing they need is for you to keep being who you are – the guy they can count on, who loves ’em like a rock. So who’re you sleeping with and how long has it been?’

With therapists there are certain constants, one of them being that you’ve got to account for your sex life.

‘It’s still Jana when it’s anybody,’ I said. ‘It’s been three weeks. Why?’

‘Because I hear skin hunger in your voice,’ she said, awakening new images of Gold’s violated skin in my mind. ‘You need more human contact.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘But first, question number one: what’s the difference between a hallucination and a vision?’

‘Sometimes nothing, but generally you call it a hallucination – meaning it’s a symptom – when you’re nuts,’ she said. ‘A vision is just an experience. Why?’

I described what I’d seen on my computer monitor, and the memories that went with it.

‘Sounds like flashbacks,’ she said. ‘Anything happen lately that took you back to the farm or football or anything like that?’

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘I mean, I see Johnny now and then, but that’s about it. Losing Jana and the girls might have triggered something, but I can’t really think of anything else.’

‘You haven’t lost Jana yet,’ LA said. ‘And you’ll never lose the girls. But your brain’s working on something. Give it a little time – things like that come when they’re ready.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Thing number two is a murdered psychologist I want to talk to you about.’

‘Wow,’ she said. ‘That’s hittin’ a little close to home, troop. But I don’t know how much I can help with something like that. I’m no criminalist.’

‘But you’re kind of smart,’ I said. ‘And you know a bunch of psychology words.’

‘Okay, Bis, let’s hear it.’

I said, ‘This woman used to do our employment screenings. She was hung up in a tree.’ Hearing myself, I realised how weak and obtuse this sounded. If I wanted to keep my communication skills anywhere above rock bottom I needed more interaction with people who had the kind of mind LA did, though I wasn’t exactly sure where to find anybody like that.

‘Hung up how?’

‘She was crucified.’

There was a short silence as LA processed this. She said, ‘Any religious connection?’

‘Like what?’

‘Like she was about to blow the whistle on some monsignor for embezzlement, a child-abusing cult, anything like that?’

‘Not that I know of,’ I said. I outlined what we had so far, including the anatomical switch the killers had performed. I’d been worried about this part, but the non-negotiable standing price of a conversation with LA had always been the naked truth or nothing.

‘Jesus, Bis, that’s some pretty incredible rage – but at least I’d say it eliminates most of your likely suspects.’

Seeing no way around having to admit I didn’t get it, I said, ‘What do you mean?’

‘Not trying to play junior detective here, but this sounds too complicated for plain sexual sadism. And I’d bet your killer wasn’t her husband, or her lover. The killing was some kind of punishment, no doubt about that, but this isn’t the kind of anger you get when a guy’s wife or girlfriend cheats on him at the Christmas party or runs off with the tennis pro. When a man is mad enough to murder his woman, if he doesn’t shoot her it’s usually either spur of the moment, where he goes for the face or neck, or else it’s a premeditated thing like an insurance killing and he’ll try to make it look accidental. Or hire a guy to fake a burglary.’

‘Doc Stiff,’ I said.

‘Explain that.’

‘A homicide detective I knew. Used to be a biology teacher. His thinking was, the hotter the blood, the sooner and simpler the killing. He called it the Index of Passion. Not saying these doers kept a cool head exactly, but this took thinking and planning and patience.’

‘Doc sounds like a pretty smart guy,’ she said. ‘Anyway, your bad guys went to all that trouble for some reason. Any messages around the body, or on it?’

‘No note, no anonymous calls, no hieroglyphics carved on her chest,’ I said, watching Mutt groom himself. ‘Wayne found a Roman coin, but there’s no telling how it got there or if it had anything to do with the killing.’

‘A Roman coin?’

Suddenly Mutt came to attention. He looked first toward the back door, then the garage entrance, the fur along his back standing up, his eyes huge. Hearing nothing myself. but catching his mood like an instantaneous virus, I said, ‘Hold on a minute, LA. I’ll be right back.’ I grabbed the Glock and a flashlight, checked to be sure there was a round in the pistol’s chamber, and slipped out the front door. As I waited for my eyes to adjust I listened carefully to the night. I hadn’t expected to hear crickets or cicadas at this time of year, but even taking that into account it seemed unnaturally quiet out here. I started working my way slowly around the house, staying as deep in the shadows as possible. Nothing in front, nothing in the driveway, nothing anywhere around the house that I could see. I stood motionless again, listening, hearing only the menacing rumble of a Harley somewhere in the middle distance, and behind that the faint hum of the interstate that could only be heard from here on a quiet night. I switched the flashlight on and made a non-stealth circuit of the house. Still nothing.

Back inside, I picked up the phone, saying, ‘I’m here.’

‘What happened?’

‘The cat spooked,’ I said.

‘Only you would have a watchcat. What spooked him?’

‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe some colleague of his dropping by. Coyotes come through sometimes, but usually not before three, four in the morning.’

After a short silence LA said, ‘I don’t like the sound of that, Bis.’

‘Yeah, well,’ I said. ‘Where were we?’

‘The coin.’

‘Right – the mystery coin. Wayne says it hadn’t been in the ground.’

‘So it got dropped there recently,’ LA said. ‘Meaning you can’t rule out that it was your bad guys who dropped it. And if they did – ’

‘If they did, it was probably on purpose – ’

‘ – so why? What’s the message? And who’s it for?’

‘If I could figure out that last one it’d probably tell me who did it.’ I told her we’d found out Gold got a call from a pre-paid phone around eight the night she was taken. The conversation had ended at 8.19 p.m. after eight minutes and a couple of seconds. Gold had then left the house and gone to her office, checking with the call centre from there at 8.44, no messages. Her purse, snapped shut and apparently unrobbed, had been left on a corner of the receptionist’s desk, the front office lights still on and Gold’s green BMW parked unlocked in front of the office door.

‘All they wanted was her,’ LA said. ‘Better bet they showed up in something like a utility van.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Nothing unusual in or close to her car. No fingerprint results yet, but I doubt they even touched it – no reason to unless they were going to steal it. All the back rooms, Dr Gold’s office included, were locked and dark when the secretary came in the next morning.’

‘What about the husband?’

‘He’s younger than her, runs a computer and data-service company that’s doing okay financially. Can you profile something like this?’

‘Not like you see on TV,’ she said. ‘Even when you can, all you usually end up with is “white male, twenty-five to thirty-five, not good with relationships”, yakkity-yak. Try getting a warrant with that.’

‘Well, with you on the case we’re takin’ our game up a notch, right?’

She was silent for a few seconds, which I spent looking at the pictures above the mantel. Then she said, ‘I’m coming to see you.’

‘Hey, great,’ I said. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’

‘Nothing. I’m signed up for a conference in Miami, and I’m taking a week off before that.’

‘To do what?’

‘Pay you a visit, what else?’ she said. ‘Horn-in on your cases – car chases, explosions, trading quips while you cuff the perps.’

‘Where’s all that coming from?’

‘Prime time,’ she said. ‘Think you’re the only one who’s got a TV?’

‘What if I signed you on as a consultant?’ I said.

‘Well . . . ’ she said, like somebody looking a used car over, which told me two things: one, she was not going to need any more persuading, and two, she would now name her real price. ‘Okay, here’s the deal,’ she said. ‘I’ll make it a week if you’ll weld some bookends for my office – that credenza behind my desk.’

‘Weld?’

‘Yeah, with your blowtorch. Like that stuff you used to make with the ragged edges.’

‘Acetylene torch,’ I said.

‘Okay, acetylene,’ she said. ‘If that’s what flips your fritters.’

On a farm or ranch the number-two rule – number one being: never trust the weather – is that everything breaks, meaning that to be useful around the Flying S as a kid I had to learn basic cutting and welding. I still kept an oxyacetylene rig and an old Lincoln buzz-box in my backyard workshop where I sometimes roughed out odds and ends like makeshift trivets, doorstops, paperweights – even a pair of candleholders that from a certain angle looked a little like the Grand Tetons – out of scrap metal as a way of clearing my head. Jana liked them and used them for bookends, garden sculpture or just general decoration.

‘Your soul and your hands understand line and mass better than you do,’ she’d said with that quirky little smile of hers.

I visualised LA’s office and the oak credenza, directly under a skylight, where she kept the leather-bound TS Eliots Gram had left her, held up by a few other volumes stacked as bookends. Rough-cut steel wouldn’t look bad there.

‘Done,’ I said. ‘But how about saying a few psychological words, just to convince me I’m not making a mistake here.’

She snorted. ‘I’ll see what I can do with your dead psychologist, Sherlock,’ she said. ‘But meantime, how about emailing me the stuff you’ve got so far – give me a chance to look it all over before I come calling.’

When we’d said our goodbyes I thumbed the phone off and dropped it in my shirt pocket, feeling like the guy who’d just closed on Manhattan for a sack of beads.

I grabbed a can of Dos Equis from the fridge, still gloating but a little bothered by a sense that I was forgetting something. But nothing came to me, so I sat back down to think some more about Deborah Gold. I wondered if she’d felt safe in the world. My theory was that only people who were definitely good-hearted or completely evil really did – you either expected the universe to abide by the Golden Rule in its dealings with you because that’s what you’d do in its place, or, if you were bad enough, you didn’t worry about it because you just didn’t believe in consequences and expected fate to be as untrustworthy as you anyway. On the other hand, people of the middle ground, the best I could give myself credit for, were apparently doomed to a life of apprehension and doubt.

But it seemed to me Dr Gold’s exit from the mortal stage had another dimension. It was like a scenario fast-forwarded through the bloody centuries from the ironically named Holy Land, the long arm of Caesar reaching across time to punish some unknown treason –

This stopped me.

Reaching across time –

The words repeated themselves in my mind, something in them buzzing with danger, somehow bringing back the stark image of Bragg Field at the centre of an infinitely cold darkness spreading away in every direction and to the ends of the earth.

If you believe the books, a criminal always leaves something at the scene of the crime and always takes something away. In this case the trade was a Roman coin for a tongue, but I couldn’t put together any plausible explanation for either the coin’s presence or the tongue’s absence, much less figure out what the two had to do with each other.

Across time – why that? I had no idea, but all of it carried an irresistible feeling of meaning and connectedness. Vaguely remembering something I’d come across somewhere about Carl Jung and synchronicity, and putting that together with bits and pieces I’d heard about quantum indeterminacy, I wondered if it was actually possible, maybe down at the level of quarks and bosons, for causality to work differently in different situations or at different times.

Watching Mutt continue his grooming at the kitchen entry, I suddenly remembered what I’d been forgetting. Jonas. Checking the time, I decided it wasn’t too late. Mutt strolled over to make a couple of figure-eight passes against my leg as I reached for the phone and punched in numbers. He was a cruiserweight of the housecat world but he jumped to my lap as weightlessly as Tinker Bell and gave me his chronically amazed expression. I stroked his thick black fur absent-mindedly, hearing and feeling the resultant rumbling purr as I waited for Jonas to pick up.

‘McCashion,’ said Jonas’ voice.

We traded greetings, with no questions from him about Jana and the girls, then he said, ‘Got a new one for you: student of mine’s named Giles Selig.’ Jonas spelled it for me. ‘Middle name’s got three letters – what is it?’

I thought about it for a minute, listening to the busy clicking of his keyboard as he worked on something, probably lecture notes.

‘Asa,’ I said.

‘You son of a bitch!’ he yelped. ‘How the hell do you do that?’

‘Nothing else came to mind but Bob and Gig. They didn’t seem to fit.’

‘Damn,’ he sighed. ‘So what’s up, JB?’

‘I want a consult. Can I buy you a drink?’

‘Just me, or do I bring Abby?’

‘Just you,’ I said. ‘This is business.’

‘When?’

‘Now.’

‘Okay, let’s make it John Boy’s, but you’ve got to sell it to her. We were gonna watch To Kill a Mockingbird tonight.’

I heard him call his wife to the phone.

‘Hey, crime fighter,’ she said. I pictured dark intelligent eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, her glossy chestnut hair and crooked smile. At this time of day I was sure she’d be wearing her old sweats and carrying a cup of apple tea around with her.

‘Atticus gets the guy off,’ I said.

‘Yeah, yeah, I know, they all ended happy in those days, that’s what I like about old movies. What’s happening?’

‘I want your husband.’

‘You want him? Jim, this man is my only stuff. I need him. Where would I find a replacement at my age?’

‘I’ll cook the Special for you this weekend,’ I said, meaning charcoal-grilled salmon fillets with caper and raisin sauce, one of the three real-meal recipes Rachel had taught me years ago based on her belief that a man had to be able to put at least that many different credible meals on the table if necessary. ‘On the grill outside if the weather’s good, otherwise I’ll broil it in the kitchen.’

There was a silent pause, which told me I had her.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘But I want him returned in good condition.’

‘No worries,’ I said. ‘It’s only his mind I’m interested in.’

‘His what?’

Beginning to feel that a little momentum might be building, I looked at the mantel again, the other end this time, where the watercolour caricature Jana had had done for me by a friend of hers a few birthdays ago leaned against the bricks: two charging tigers wearing jerseys numbered 39 and 22, the numbers Johnny Trammel and I had worn the year Bragg won State.

‘Growl a little growl for me, baby,’ she’d said as she handed it to me. ‘And I’ll show you what real tigers do in the dark.’

I’d brought it in here from the workshop last week in hopes of reawakening some sense of life in the place, but it hadn’t done that, managing only to bring back the smell of the Bragg Field locker rooms vividly enough to send me on a reconnaissance tour of the house in search of missed laundry or forgotten cat food.

I decided on one more call before I left to meet Jonas, this one to Johnny over in Burnsville at the western end of the county, to see if I could get him and Li signed on for the cookout too. Not that you had to come up with anything special for him – he’d never been famous for turning down anything that came on a plate. He was still easy because in recent years he’d always seemed too preoccupied even to notice what he was eating, which I took to be a hazard of the legal profession. Some of the guys he represented would be hard on anybody’s appetite.

The spring we graduated he’d tossed a half-dozen scholarship offers in the trash and started visiting recruiters, eventually ending up in Delta Force and being awarded two Purple Hearts and a Silver Star for his actions in places where hatreds a thousand years old ran like underground rivers, places whose names he would, along with what he’d done there, take with him to the grave. I shouldn’t have known, but did, that his last mission was a so-called black op, a HALO – high altitude, low opening – jump from a C-130 in friendly airspace, he and his squad free-falling thirty thousand feet on a moonless night, five dark silences slanting like raptors down through the stars, nothing to be seen but the soft blue dots of the altimeters on their wrists as they vectored cross-country over a mountain range and a hostile border to pop their chutes a thousand feet above the last ground four of them would ever touch. Johnny made it out alone nine weeks later with a permanent limp and a never-explained tendency to gag at the sight of beets.

I took the best scholarship offer I got, the one from TCU, where I blew out both knees against Kansas State my second year and had no choice but to become an actual student, while Johnny eventually earned his law degree at Baylor and hung out his shingle in Burnsville, the county seat. He married a blonde former cheerleader named Alicia Meador and settled down to practise country law and watch his cows get fat on the little farm he and Li signed the mortgage on after he brought in his first big settlement. His medals were still gathering dust on his office wall along with his Chamber of Commerce and Rotary certificates and the team picture from our championship season, all of us standing forever shoulder to shoulder in sunlight that somehow seemed historical and heatless in the old print. Johnny himself looked like a dangerous but dapper Prohibition rum-runner or a tragic Irish poet, brick-coloured hair brushed casually to the side and face turned toward me with a small smile, as if I’d just cracked some dumb joke.

‘Hi, Jim,’ said Li’s telephone voice.

I told her what I had in mind.

She said, ‘Whatcha cooking?’

‘The Special.’

‘With that weird sauce?’

‘It’s the only one I know how to make.’

‘Count us in. I know Johnny’ll want to hear all about your hot case.’

I heard Johnny’s voice in the background: ‘Ask him what’s going on with that. He got any suspects yet?’

‘Tell him when I catch somebody I’ll give them his number,’ I said. ‘If they’re rich enough to afford a big-time lawyer.’

Hanging up the phone, I sipped beer, thinking about what Li had said. It resonated weirdly in my mind because, although the coin had felt warm to me, the case itself didn’t at all. It felt cool, like old mausoleum air or the dank and unfresh stirring of the breeze off a swamp at night.

I put Mutt on the arm of the chair and stood up, thinking about what I wanted to ask Jonas and about the way things ought to be. ‘Your watch, boy,’ I said to the cat. ‘Don’t let any rats get by you.’

He just stared at me, looking mystified.