Grady rose, stepped around the table, and put his face to the window. He expected to see lights in the workshop, which earlier he locked tight. Instead, the glow came from the garage, to which the workshop was attached.
Nevertheless, he knew this intruder must be the same that had toured the workshop and later had taken the baked chicken breasts.
Upon finding the bloody handprint on the wall near the head of the cellar stairs, Henry Rouvroy considered firing the shotgun down into the darkness. Restraint was not a quality of character natural to him, yet he managed to resist the urge to squeeze the trigger.
When he flicked the switch and light bloomed, he found no one waiting at the bottom of the stairs. He let out his pent-up breath.
Listening to the room below, he became convinced that someone down there likewise listened to him.
He almost whispered a name. But he kept his silence for fear of receiving an answer in a familiar voice.
Anyone in the cellar could leave by the outer door, which opened onto exterior stairs that led up to the lawn. Henry couldn’t imprison the intruder, but he could prevent him from returning to the ground floor by this route.
After switching off the cellar light, he closed the door and slid the bolt into the latch plate. He doubted it would hold against a determined assault. He fetched a chair from the nearby dinette, tipped it on its back legs, and wedged the headrail under the doorknob.
He continued his sweep of the house, making sure no one was concealed anywhere, checking that windows were securely latched. He felt exposed at every pane of glass while he closed the draperies.
In the bedroom, on the bed, he had left the pistol with which he had killed Jim and Nora. During his absence, someone had taken it. The shoulder holster and the spare magazine were also gone.
A small smear of blood brightened the beige chenille bedspread.
Two spaces remained to be searched: the closet and the bathroom. Both doors were in the same wall, and they were closed.
Taking a wide stance to brace himself against the recoil, Henry leveled the pistol-grip shotgun at the closet, fired, fired again. In this closed space, the sound slammed off the walls with a blowback that he could almost feel. He fired two rounds at the bathroom.
The buckshot punched holes through both of the cheap hollow-core doors, with enough velocity remaining to tear up whoever might be waiting beyond. The absence of a scream suggested that he’d wasted ammunition.
He pumped the last round into the breech, dug spare shells out of his pockets, and reloaded the magazine.
His hands trembled, stomach acid scalded the back of his throat, and his bowels felt loose. But he neither vomited nor soiled his pants.
In such a pressurized situation, with everything at risk, not losing control of bodily functions seemed to be a triumph. Henry gained confidence from the fact that his underwear remained dry.
Killing unsuspecting people was far easier than defending your life against an armed enemy.
That was a truth they didn’t teach you at Harvard. At least not in any of the classes that Henry had taken.
The anticipation of violence before a murder was pleasurable, but the expectation of being shot in the head wasn’t in the least exhilarating, no matter what psychology professors said about death having a subconscious appeal similar to that of sex. A good-looking woman chained in a potato cellar had infinitely more appeal than stalking – and being stalked by – someone who perhaps wanted to blow your brains out.
He opened the riddled door to the closet and found no one alive or dead. In the bathroom, buckshot had shattered the mirror.
Having secured the residence, he felt safer but far from safe. The house was not a fortress. Anyway, sooner or later, he would have to go outside.
Standing in the dark, face to the kitchen window, looking south beyond the house, Grady saw lights in the garage windows. And the big roll-up door was raised.
Getting into the garage would not have been difficult for an intruder. Neither of the two windows had a working latch. In a rural county with a crime rate almost as low as that in the Vatican, he’d never seen a need for garage security.
For a minute, he watched for a silhouette of someone against the big rectangle of light. But then he returned to his chair and poured his first mug of coffee from the thermos.
Sitting at the French door, Merlin issued a thin, inquisitive sound.
“I don’t know,” Grady said, “but I think maybe the idea is to determine if we’re watching. If we’re watching, we’d be expected to go out to the garage to see what’s up.”
The dog said nothing.
“My feeling is,” Grady said, “it’s better if it looks like we’ve gone to bed. If no one thinks we’re watching, then there might be something to see.”
Having been seasoned with cinnamon, the black coffee gave off a mellow aroma. The brew tasted as good as it smelled.
Watchfulness and patient waiting were tasks for which Grady possessed the temperament and the skills, and with which he had years of deep experience.
His friend Marcus Pipp had called him Iguana. Like that lizard, he could sit motionless for so long that his stillness became a kind of camouflage. You could see him, yet you forgot he was there.
Marcus had been dead for ten years. Grady still thought of him more days than not.
A United States senator killed Mrs. Pipp’s boy. Grady should have seen it coming and should have acted to prevent Marcus’s death; therefore, he was in part at fault.
Some would not agree with that assessment. Present when Marcus died, Grady knew the truth. He would neither endorse the official lie nor make excuses for himself.
His mother said the lies you told yourself were the worst lies of all. If you could not face every truth about yourself, you would not know who you really were. You could not redeem yourself if you failed to recognize the need for redemption.
Grady recognized the need for redemption, all right, and he realized that to finish the task, he would have to live a long life.
Having gotten to his feet again, Merlin padded through the gloom to his water bowl, which was wide and deep. In the stillness of the kitchen, he sounded like a Clydesdale drinking from a trough.
Out in the yard, only the moon now relieved the darkness. The garage lights had gone off.
Seeking affection, the wolfhound came to Grady. Merlin’s head was above the table, and Grady gently worked the dog’s ears between his thumb and forefinger.
When your task was patient watchfulness, the anchored body frustrated the mind into cutting loose, setting sail. Your thoughts tended to tack through an archipelago of disconnected subjects. The journey could seem to have no destination – yet could bring you to a port worth exploring.
He found himself in a vivid memory of the afternoon woods, at the instant when Merlin passed through the last trees into the golden meadow. Beyond the woods, the sunshine seemed witchy, as lurid as a coppery twilight, glimmering as if a cloud of sequined atmosphere had plumed through an open door from a realm more magical than this one.
He had hesitated to follow the wolfhound, but when he stepped from the forest, he had found the meadow descending in sunshine as ordinary as ever it was. He had dismissed the perception of coppery scintillation as a short-lived phenomenon resulting