Biblical (10 page)

“The society beauty’s murder on your stairs? Yeah, I remember …”

Corbin leaned further forward, holding Macbeth in a steady gaze. “I know this sounds crazy, but I’ve heard her singing, at night. And laughing.”

“What?”

“And there’s more. I’ve seen her, John. Marjorie Glaiston.”

“You’re kidding me …’ Macbeth laughed disbelievingly. “You’re seriously telling me your new house is haunted? That you’ve seen a ghost?”

“No. Not a ghost. Ghosts don’t exist. We both know that. What I experienced was a hallucination. I saw Marjorie Glaiston walk down the stairs. No dramatic scene, just her moving from the bedroom, down the stairs and into the living room, as she must have done countless times while she lived there. One of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. Except I could not possibly have seen her.”

“God, Pete … it could be something and nothing, you know that. A combination of stress, lack of sleep and stuff you’ve read about the case and forgotten you read.”

“Except for one thing: Joanna was standing beside me when I saw Marjorie Glaiston on our stairs. She saw her too, John. If this was a delusion, it was one I shared with my wife.” Corbin held Macbeth with a gaze that was as earnest as his exhaustion would allow. “Whatever it is that’s caused this epidemic of delusional episodes that I’ve been treating patients for over the last few months, Gabriel was right … I’ve got it too.”

The introduction was more than superfluous; it was ridiculous.

Of course Hoberman recognized the woman the instant she walked into the lounge room of the lodge. He had never met her before, never seen her in the flesh, but hers was one of the most famous faces in the world. Nevertheless, Jack Ward introduced her to Hoberman as Elizabeth Yates. President of the United States of America.

President Yates was taller than Hoberman had expected. And as she crossed the room to shake hands with him, she projected that amplified presence that the truly powerful seemed naturally to possess. She was fifty-six with hair dyed a shade that was obviously an attempt to match the strawberry blonde of her youth. She had clearly been a striking-looking woman, but her beauty had matured into an almost masculine handsomeness. The most impressive thing about her was her eyes: bright, crystalline blue; eyes that made even the most casual glance deeply penetrating and added yet more power to her presence.

She was dressed in a dark blue suit, as she habitually was. On one jacket lapel was a presidential pin, on the other an enameled stars and stripes. Suspended from the chain at her neck was the symbol that had caused most controversy. The cross that Hoberman knew the President now only wore in private.

For the third time, Hoberman was thanked for coming at such short notice at such an hour.

“I’m afraid I’m working to an even more challenging schedule than usual,” she said, her voice deep and, despite the precampaign coaching, still tinged with her native Louisiana, as she lowered herself gracefully, purposefully, onto the sofa. “You can imagine that developments in Europe and the Middle East are making exceptional demands on my time.”

“I’m sure they are, Madame President.”

“You’ve read the information?”

“Yes, Ma’am, I have.” Hoberman wondered if ‘Ma’am’ was the right form of address. He hadn’t used it since eighth grade.

“So what is your professional opinion, Professor Hoberman? Do you think I’m a fruit-loop?”

“Fruit-loop? No, Madame President,” said Hoberman. “Delusional, yes, to be frank, I think that is a possibility.”

Hoberman looked to Ward for the expected retort. There was none. Nor from the President.

“If I am delusional,” asked Yates, “does that mean I am, in your opinion, unstable? I mean, is this the precursor to something worse?”

“I can’t answer that, at the moment,” said Hoberman. “But we have to get this into perspective. Everyone has delusional episodes or hallucinations to some degree or another and of one type or another at some point in their life. You said yourself that you have a punishing schedule at the moment … Stress is the number-one trigger for episodes like this. Or you may simply have some kind of bug.”

“As I told you in our briefing,” said Ward, “the President has been in excellent health and certainly hasn’t registered a high temperature. I think we need to look beyond the obvious, Professor Hoberman. We would not have gone to the trouble of bringing you here if we had not eliminated the usual suspects.”

“I know you’ve ruled out a viral cause. I’m just making the point that very vivid and convincing hallucinations can be
brought on by something as simple as the flu.” Hoberman flicked through the dossier. “The first episode, two months ago … could you run through that again for me? I know it’s all documented here, but I’d like to hear it in your own words.”

“I was working late in the Oval Office – I actually spend less time in there than you would think, but that’s where I hold all major meetings. I’d been discussing the European Union situation with the Secretary of State. When he left, I took a few minutes for prayer.”

“This is part of your routine?”

“I pray four times a day, Professor Hoberman. I’ve been charged with the greatest responsibility, the most important office in the world. It’s a charge for which I need a great deal of guidance.”

“And you experienced this delusion shortly after completing your time of prayer?”

“I left the Oval Office and let my staff know I was going upstairs to the executive quarters. I was in the main hallway when I saw him.”

“President Hoover.”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve seen other Presidents?”

“No … I mean, I’m not sure.” Yates frowned. “Maybe. I was looking out through a window one day, down onto the lawn. I saw a portly man with a bushy mustache. He was in shirt-sleeves and with a small dog. When I asked security how he had been allowed access to the lawn they could find no trace of anyone. But the man I saw was dressed in an old-fashioned way. Collarless shirt, Paisley-pattern suspenders, that kind of thing. You know that already …” She nodded towards the dossier in Hoberman’s hands.

“And you believe this man was Taft?”

“That’s who he looked like. Yes, that’s who I thought he was.” Elizabeth Yates sighed. “It sounds bad, I know. But it’s not like
this happens every day. The thing is, I think I’ve seen other people as well … less important people who could not possibly have been there.”

“How do you know they couldn’t have been there?”

“I don’t know … Their dress. Their demeanor. I can’t explain it, but I can tell they’re not from this time.”

“President Taft famously kept a cow on the White House lawn. You didn’t see that?”

“Are you trying to be funny, Professor Hoberman?”

“Not at all, Madame President. It helps determine the nature of the delusion … if you were seeing the expected – the stereotypical image, as it were – that would suggest it’s generated entirely in your mind, rather than a misinterpretation of something that is actually there.”

“No, Professor Hoberman,” said Yates wearily. “No cows. And I haven’t seen Ben Franklin flying a kite in a storm either.”

Hoberman paused for a moment, fingers drumming on the dossier on his lap. “Do you see anyone other than Republicans, President Yates?”

“Now hold on …” Ward leaned forward in his seat. “This really is no joking matter.”

“Again, Colonel Ward, it was not, in any way, meant as a joke,” said Hoberman, nonplussed. “President Yates has expressed the desire for guidance in this weighty office. If the figures she has seen are of the same political persuasion, then it could simply be a transference of that desire for guidance. I take it you would never consider taking advice from a Democrat, Madame President?”

“You’d be right.” She leaned back in the sofa, resting her elbows on the back and holding Hoberman in a steady, ice-blue stare. There was something practiced about the pose, about the confidence. “Am I mad, Professor Hoberman?”

“There’s no such thing as mad. No psychiatric professional deals in absolutes like that. The human mind is an enormously
varied and variable entity. I need to study the information Colonel Ward has given me on the incidents reported elsewhere. The question is whether you’re suffering from a disorder or whether these episodes have been induced by some kind of hallucinogenic agent. But if you are suffering from a disorder, we need to establish what that disorder is, whether it’s temporary or sustained, and how we can treat it.” Hoberman squeezed out his most reassuring smile. “We’ll get to the bottom of this, Ma’am.”

“I shall pray that the Lord gives you the strength and the wisdom to do just that.” Again she locked Hoberman in her ice-blue gaze. “I shall pray for you, Professor Hoberman.”

The silver frame with the gilt edging.

Mary knew that the silver frame with the gilt edging always went to the far right of the dresser. It gleamed in the sunlight that cut a bright angle across the dining room, warming the polished wood of the floor, intensifying the reds and yellows of the spring flowers held by a sparkle of crystal on the windowsill. Like the corner piece of a jigsaw – the one that oriented the others and began the process of reassembling a fragmented picture – the silver frame with the gilt edging anchored the assembly of other pictures, allowing each to slot back into place once she had dusted it.

It wasn’t just the silver frame with its gilt edging that fitted that particular picture for prominence: it was Mary and Joe’s main wedding photograph, taken only two and a half years ago – Mary smiling with joy at having become Mrs Dechaud, still-uniformed Joe beaming with pride that he had come home from the Army to find Mary, the most beautiful girl in New England, dutifully and faithfully waiting to become his bride.

The far right of the dresser was where the photograph in the silver frame with the gilt edging always went. The place it belonged. Just so. Mary liked everything just so.

Most of the pictures were of Mary and Joe: the wedding, the honeymoon, one of Joe in uniform, trying but failing to look militarily stern. There were others of relatives: aunts, uncles, Mary’s brother and his young family, a couple from Joe’s side.
There was one picture, a color one of a smartly dressed but sad-faced old woman whom Mary could not place. It was no surprise that she’d lost track of who everyone was, as Joe’s family was of biblical proportions: four sisters, two brothers, countless aunts, uncles, cousins … At the wedding, they had spilled over onto her side of the church, bolstering what now seemed to be her underrepresented lineage. Of course, growing up in the same small New England town, Joe and Mary had known each other’s families, but the sheer scale of the Dechaud clan meant that there was kin, scattered across Rutland County and beyond, whom Mary had never encountered. Like the sad old lady in the photograph. Something about her resolved Mary to ask Joe exactly which of his relations she was.

Mary finished dusting the photographs and was about to go through to the kitchen to make some coffee when she noticed a speck on the silver candlestick that sat on the dining-room table. Joe’s Aunt May had given them it as a wedding present and everyone had been amazed at her unaccustomed display of generosity. Joe’s Aunt May was certainly not the sad old lady in the photograph on the dresser; she was a notoriously difficult woman, tall and lean with cold, pale green eyes that glittered argumentatively beneath what seemed a perpetual frown. Aunt May, with her sharp tongue and embittered views, was the focus of discord that every family seemed to have – seemed to need, almost. The navigation of uncharted familial waters was the one thing that Mary found difficult about being a new bride: finding herself adrift on the turbulent sea of generations-long established relationships, rifts, allegiances and history for which she had no compass. No, that wasn’t true: Joe was her compass. Her lighthouse.

Joe, with his thick, auburn hair, large soft-brown eyes that were more boy than man, his deep, quiet voice and calming, gentle smile. When Joe smiled that way, Mary forgot all about the stresses of newly wedded life. Now, as she absent-mindedly
rubbed at the candlestick to remove the tarnish, she was aware of the bright sparkle of their lives together, of the thousand promises their future held.

Theirs had been a truly traditional, even old-fashioned love story. Joe and Mary, whose birthdays fell within a week of each other, had known each other since elementary school, had been sweethearts since fifteen, had married at twenty, as soon as Joe had come back from overseas. It had been one of those things that everyone had expected to happen, the most natural thing in the world. As far as everyone in town was concerned, there was no Joe, no Mary … it was always Joe-and-Mary and it always would be. Together they were singular, not plural.

After the formality of a honeymoon in a Burlington hotel looking out over Lake Champlain, they had returned to what they really both wanted: to start their married lives together in the home they’d bought from Joe’s uncle. Out of the Army, Joe had started work as a shift super at the marble quarry and Mary had set about making their new house their lasting home.

Mary frowned at the candlestick: she would have to use a silver cloth on it. Maybe it wasn’t new as Aunt May had claimed, but second-hand. New or old, Mary didn’t much care for the piece, but it was odd that the tarnished spot looked established and was so difficult to shift.

Shrugging, she replaced the candlestick, turning it so the tarnish faced away from the window’s daylight. Before heading into the kitchen, she called through to Joe – it being a weekend morning, he would be in his study, hunched over the newspaper – and told him she was going to make coffee. As Mary filled the pot from the faucet, she looked out through the window above the sink. The house was elevated on a hill and from this window she could see out over the gentle humps of forest and field with nothing to shade the house from the spring sun. It was her favorite place to stand and contemplate her contentment. As she was happy to admit, Mary was a young woman of modest
ambition and had here everything she could ever want. She knew that Joe felt the same.