Black House (10 page)

Dale goes back to the table, sips his coffee, then puts his hand to his forehead and closes his eyes. In this moment we can see precisely how frightened and miserable he is. Dale is just forty-two and a man of abstemious habits, but in the cruel morning light coming through the window by which we entered, he looks, for the moment, anyway, a sickly sixty.

He
is
concerned about his job, knows that if the fellow who killed Amy and Johnny keeps it up, he will almost certainly be turned out of office the following year. He is also concerned about Davey . . . although Davey isn’t his chief concern, for, like Fred Marshall, he cannot actually conceive that the Fisherman could take his and Sarah’s own child. No, it is the
other
children of French Landing he is more worried about, possibly the children of Centralia and Arden as well.

His worst fear is that he is simply not good enough to catch the son of a bitch. That he will kill a third, a fourth, perhaps an eleventh and twelfth.

God knows he has requested help. And gotten it . . . sort of. There are two State Police detectives assigned to the case, and the FBI guy from Madison keeps checking in (on an informal basis, though; the FBI is not officially part of the investigation). Even his outside help has a surreal quality for Dale, one that has been partially caused by an odd coincidence of their names. The FBI guy is Agent John P. Redding. The state detectives are Perry Brown and Jeffrey Black. So he has Brown, Black, and Redding on his team. The Color Posse, Sarah calls them. All three making it clear that they are strictly working support, at least for the time being. Making it clear that Dale Gilbertson is the man standing on ground zero.

Christ, but I wish Jack would sign on to help me with this,
Dale thinks.
I’d deputize him in a second, just like in one of those corny old Western movies.

Yes indeed. In a second.

When Jack had first come to French Landing, almost four years ago, Dale hadn’t known what to make of the man his officers immediately dubbed Hollywood. By the time the two of them had nailed Thornberg Kinderling—yes, inoffensive little Thornberg Kinderling, hard to believe but absolutely true—he knew
exactly
what to make of him. The guy was the finest natural detective Dale had ever met in his life.

The
only
natural detective, that’s what you mean.

Yes, all right. The
only
one. And although they had shared the collar (at the L.A. newcomer’s absolute insistence), it had been Jack’s detective work that had turned the trick. He was almost like one of those storybook detectives . . . Hercule Poirot, Ellery Queen, one of those. Except that Jack didn’t exactly deduct, nor did he go around tapping his temple and talking about his “little gray cells.” He . . .

“He listens,” Dale mutters, and gets up. He heads for the back door, then returns for his briefcase. He’ll put it in the back seat of his cruiser before he waters the flower beds. He doesn’t want those awful pictures in his house any longer than strictly necessary.

He listens.

Like the way he’d listened to Janna Massengale, the bartender at the Taproom. Dale had had no idea why Jack was spending so much time with the little chippy; it had even crossed his mind that Mr. Los Angeles Linen Slacks was trying to hustle her into bed so he could go back home and tell all his friends on Rodeo Drive that he’d gotten himself a little piece of the cheese up there in Wisconsin, where the air was rare and the legs were long and strong. But that hadn’t been it at all. He had been
listening,
and finally she had told him what he needed to hear.

Yeah, shurr, people get funny ticks when they’re drinking,
Janna had said.
There’s this one guy who starts doing this after a couple of belts.
She had pinched her nostrils together with the tips of her fingers . . . only with her hand turned around so the palm pointed out.

Jack, still smiling easily, still sipping a club soda:
Always with the palm out? Like this?
And mimicked the gesture.

Janna, smiling, half in love:
That’s it, doll—you’re a quick study.

Jack:
Sometimes, I guess. What’s this fella’s name, darlin’?

Janna:
Kinderling. Thornberg Kinderling.
She giggled.
Only, after a drink or two—once he’s started up with that pinchy thing—he wants everyone to call him Thorny.

Jack, still with his own smile:
And does he drink Bombay gin, darlin’? One ice cube, little trace of bitters?

Janna’s smile starting to fade, now looking at him as if he might be some kind of wizard:
How’d you know that?

But how he knew it didn’t matter, because that was really the whole package, done up in a neat bow. Case closed, game over, zip up your fly.

Eventually, Jack had flown back to Los Angeles with Thornberg Kinderling in custody—Thornberg Kinderling, just an inoffensive, bespectacled farm-insurance salesman from Centralia, wouldn’t say boo to a goose, wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful, wouldn’t dare ask your mamma for a drink of water on a hot day, but he had killed two prostitutes in the City of Angels. No strangulation for Thorny; he had done his work with a Buck knife, which Dale himself had eventually traced to Lapham Sporting Goods, the nasty little trading post a door down from the Sand Bar, Centralia’s grungiest drinking establishment.

By then DNA testing had nailed Kinderling’s ass to the barn door, but Jack had been glad to have the provenance of the murder weapon anyway. He had called Dale personally to thank him, and Dale, who’d never been west of Denver in his life, had been almost absurdly touched by the courtesy. Jack had said several times during the course of the investigation that you could never have enough evidence when the doer was a genuine bad guy, and Thorny Kinderling had turned out to be about as bad as you could want. He’d gone the insanity route, of course, and Dale—who had privately hoped he might be called upon to testify—was delighted when the jury rejected the plea and sentenced him to consecutive life terms.

And what made all that happen? What had been the first cause? Why, a man listening. That was all. Listening to a lady bartender who was used to having her breasts stared at while her words most commonly went in one ear of the man doing the staring and out the other. And who had Hollywood Jack listened to before he had listened to Janna Massengale? Some Sunset Strip hooker, it seemed . . . or more likely a whole bunch of them. (
What would you call that, anyway?
Dale wonders absently as he goes out to the garage to get his trusty hose.
A shimmy of streetwalkers? A strut of hookers?
) None of them could have picked Thornberg Kinderling out of a lineup, because the Thornberg who visited L.A. surely hadn’t looked much like the Thornberg who traveled around to the farm-supply companies in the Coulee and over in Minnesota. L.A. Thorny had worn a wig, contacts instead of specs, and a little false mustache.

“The most brilliant thing was the skin darkener,” Jack had said. “Just a little, just enough to make him look like a native.”

“Dramatics all four years at French Landing High School,” Dale had replied grimly. “I looked it up. The little bastard played Don Juan his junior year, do you believe it?”

A lot of sly little changes (too many for a jury to swallow an insanity plea, it seemed), but Thorny had forgotten that one revelatory little signature, that trick of pinching his nostrils together with the palm of his hand turned outward. Some prostitute had remembered it, though, and when she mentioned it—only in passing, Dale has no doubt, just as Janna Massengale did—Jack heard it.

Because he listened.

Called to thank me for tracing the knife, and again to tell me how the jury came back,
Dale thinks,
but that second time he wanted something, too. And I knew what it was. Even before he opened his mouth I knew.

Because, while he is no genius detective like his friend from the Golden State, Dale had not missed the younger man’s unexpected, immediate response to the landscape of western Wisconsin. Jack had fallen in love with the Coulee Country, and Dale would have wagered a good sum that it had been love at first look. It had been impossible to mistake the expression on his face as they drove from French Landing to Centralia, from Centralia to Arden, from Arden to Miller: wonder, pleasure, almost a kind of rapture. To Dale, Jack had looked like a man who has come to a place he has never been before only to discover he is back home.

“Man, I can’t get over this,” he’d said once to Dale. The two of them had been riding in Dale’s old Caprice cruiser, the one that just wouldn’t stay aligned (and sometimes the horn stuck, which could be embarrassing). “Do you realize how lucky you are to live here, Dale? It must be one of the most beautiful places in the world.”

Dale, who had lived in the Coulee his entire life, had not disagreed.

Toward the end of their final conversation concerning Thornberg Kinderling, Jack had reminded Dale of how he’d once asked (not quite kidding, not quite serious, either) for Dale to let him know if a nice little place ever came on the market in Dale’s part of the world, something out of town. And Dale had known at once from Jack’s tone—the almost anxious drop in his voice—that the kidding was over.

“So you owe me,” Dale murmurs, shouldering the hose. “You
owe
me, you bastard.”

Of course he has asked Jack to lend an unofficial hand with the Fisherman investigation, but Jack has refused . . . almost with a kind of fear.
I’m retired,
he’d said brusquely.
If you don’t know what that word means, Dale, we can look it up in the dictionary together.

But it’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Of course it is. How can a man not yet thirty-five be retired? Especially one who is so infernally good at the job?

“You
owe
me, baby,” he says again, now walking along the side of the house toward the bib faucet. The sky above is cloudless; the well-watered lawn is green; there is nary a sign of
slippage,
not out here on Herman Street. Yet perhaps there is, and perhaps we feel it. A kind of discordant hum, like the sound of all those lethal volts coursing through the steel struts of the KDCU tower.

But we have stayed here too long. We must take wing again and proceed to our final destination of this early morning. We don’t know everything yet, but we know three important things: first, that French Landing is a town in terrible distress; second, that a few people (Judy Marshall, for one; Charles Burnside, for another) understand on some deep level that the town’s ills go far beyond the depredations of a single sick pedophile-murderer; third, that we have met no one capable of consciously recognizing the force—the slippage—that has now come to bear on this quiet town hard by Tom and Huck’s river. Each person we’ve met is, in his own way, as blind as Henry Leyden. This is as true of the folks we haven’t so far encountered—Beezer St. Pierre, Wendell Green, the Color Posse—as it is of those we have.

Our hearts groan for a hero. And while we may not find one (this is the twenty-first century, after all, the days not of d’Artagnan and Jack Aubrey but of George W. Bush and Dirtysperm), we can perhaps find a man who
was
a hero once upon a time. Let us therefore search out an old friend, one we last glimpsed a thousand and more miles east of here, on the shore of the steady Atlantic. Years have passed and they have in some ways lessened the boy who was; he has forgotten much and has spent a good part of his adult life maintaining that state of amnesia. But he is French Landing’s only hope, so let us take wing and fly almost due east, back over the woods and fields and gentle hills.

Mostly, we see miles of unbroken farmland: regimental cornfields, luxuriant hay fields, fat yellow swaths of alfalfa. Dusty, narrow drives lead to white farmhouses and their arrays of tall barns, granaries, cylindrical cement-block silos, and long metal equipment sheds. Men in denim jackets are moving along the well-worn paths between the houses and the barns. We can already smell the sunlight. Its odor, richly compacted of butter, yeast, earth, growth, and decay, will intensify as the sun ascends and the light grows stronger.

Below us, Highway 93 intersects Highway 35 at the center of tiny Centralia. The empty parking lot behind the Sand Bar awaits the noisy arrival of the Thunder Five, who customarily spend their Saturday afternoons, evenings, and nights in the enjoyment of the Sand Bar’s pool tables, hamburgers, and pitchers of that ambrosia to the creation of which they have devoted their eccentric lives, Kingsland Brewing Company’s finest product and a beer that can hold up its creamy head among anything made in a specialty microbrewery or a Belgian monastery, Kingsland Ale. If Beezer St. Pierre, Mouse, and company say it is the greatest beer in the world, why should we doubt them? Not only do they know much more about beer than we do, they called upon every bit of the knowledge, skill, expertise, and seat-of-the-pants inspiration at their disposal to make Kingsland Ale a benchmark of the brewer’s art. In fact, they moved to French Landing because the brewery, which they had selected after careful deliberation, was willing to work with them.

To invoke Kingsland Ale is to wish for a good-sized mouthful of the stuff, but we put temptation behind us; 7:30
A
.
M
. is far too early for drinking anything but fruit juice, coffee, and milk (except for the likes of Wanda Kinderling, and Wanda thinks of beer, even Kingsland Ale, as a dietary supplement to Aristocrat vodka); and we are in search of our old friend and the closest we can come to a hero, whom we last saw as a boy on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean. We are not about to waste time; we are on the move, right here and now. The miles fly past beneath us, and along Highway 93 the fields narrow as the hills rise up on both sides.

For all our haste, we must
take this in,
we must
see where we are.

4

T
HREE YEARS AGO,
our old friend traveled down this stretch of 93 in the passenger seat of Dale Gilbertson’s old Caprice, his heart going crazy in his chest, his throat constricting, and his mouth dry, as friendly Dale, in those days little more than a small-town cop whom he had impressed beyond rational measure simply by doing his job more or less as well as he could, piloted him toward a farmhouse and five acres left Dale by his deceased father. “The nice little place” could be purchased for next to nothing, since Dale’s cousins did not particularly want it and it had no value to anyone else. Dale had been holding on to the property for sentimental reasons, but he had no particular interest in it, either. Dale had scarcely known what to do with a second house, apart from spending a great deal of time keeping it up, a task he had found oddly enjoyable but did not at all mind turning over to someone else. And at this point in their relationship, Dale was so in awe of our friend that, far from resenting the prospect of this man occupying his father’s old house, he considered it an honor.

As for the man in the passenger seat, he was too caught up in his response to the landscape—too caught up
by
the landscape—to be embarrassed by Dale’s awe. Under ordinary circumstances, our friend would have urged his admirer into a quiet bar, bought him a beer and said, “Look, I know you were impressed by what I did, but after all, Dale, I’m just another cop, like you. That’s all. And in all honesty, I’m a lot luckier than I deserve to be.” (It would be the truth, too: ever since we last saw him, our friend has been blessed, if it is a blessing, with such extravagantly good luck that he no longer dares to play cards or bet on sporting events. When you win almost all the time, winning tastes like spoiled grape juice.) But these were not ordinary circumstances, and in the swarm of emotion that had been threatening to undo him since they left Centralia on the flat straightaway of Highway 93, Dale’s adulation barely registered. This short drive to a place he had never seen before felt like a long-delayed journey home: everything he saw seemed charged with remembered meaning, a part of him, essential. Everything seemed sacred. He knew he was going to buy the nice little place, no matter what it looked like or how much it cost, not that price could in any way have been an obstacle. He was going to buy it, that was all. Dale’s hero-worship affected him only to the extent that he realized he would be forced to keep his admirer from undercharging him. In the meantime, he struggled against the tears that wanted to fill his eyes.

From above, we see the glacial valleys dividing the landscape to the right of 93 like the imprint of a giant’s fingers. He saw only the sudden narrow roads that split off the highway and slipped into mingled sunshine and darkness. Each road said,
Nearly there.
The highway said,
This is the way.
Gazing down, we can observe a roadside parking area, two gasoline pumps, and a long gray roof bearing the fading legend
ROY’S STORE;
when he looked to his right and saw, past the gas pumps, the wooden stairs rising to a wide, inviting porch and the store’s entrance, he felt as though he had already mounted those stairs a hundred times before and gone inside to pick up bread, milk, beer, cold cuts, work gloves, a screwdriver, a bag of tenpenny nails, whatever he needed from the practical cornucopia crowded onto the shelves, as after that day he would do, a hundred times and more.

Fifty yards down the highway the blue-gray sliver of Tamarack Creek comes winding into Norway Valley. When Dale’s car rolled across the rusting little metal bridge, the bridge said,
This is it!,
and the casually but expensively dressed man in the passenger seat, who looked as though all he knew of farmland had been learned through the windows next to first-class seats on transcontinental flights and in fact was incapable of telling wheat from hay, felt his heart shiver. On the other side of the bridge, a road sign read
NORWAY VALLEY ROAD.

“This is it,” said Dale, and made the right turn into the valley. Our friend covered his mouth with his hand, stifling whatever sounds his shivering heart might cause him to utter.

Here and there, wildflowers bloomed and nodded on the roadside, some of them audacious and bright, others half-hidden in a blanket of vibrant green. “Driving up this road always makes me feel good,” Dale said.

“No wonder,” our friend managed to say.

Most of what Dale said failed to penetrate the whirlwind of emotion roaring through his passenger’s mind and body. That’s the old Lund farm—cousins of my mother. The one-room schoolhouse where my great-grandmother taught used to be right over there, only they tore it down way back. This here is Duane Updahl’s place, he’s no relation, thank goodness. Buzz blur mumble. Blur mumble buzz. They once again drove over Tamarack Creek, its glittering blue-gray water laughing and calling out,
Here we are!
Around a bend in the road they went, and a wealth of luxuriant wildflowers leaned carousing toward the car. In their midst, the blind, attentive faces of tiger lilies tilted to meet our friend’s face. A ripple of feeling distinct from the whirlwind, quieter but no less potent, brought dazzled tears to the surface of his eyes.

Tiger lilies, why? Tiger lilies meant nothing to him. He used the pretense of a yawn to wipe his eyes and hoped that Dale had not noticed.

“Here we are,” Dale said, having noticed or not, and swerved into a long, overgrown drive, hedged with wildflowers and tall grasses, which appeared to lead nowhere except into a great expanse of meadow and banks of waist-high flowers. Beyond the meadow, striped fields sloped upward to the wooded hillside. “You’ll see my dad’s old place in a second. The meadow goes with the house, and my cousins Randy and Kent own the field.”

Our friend could not see the white two-story farmhouse that stands at the end of the last curve of the drive until the moment Dale Gilbertson swung halfway into the curve, and he did not speak until Dale had pulled up in front of the house, switched off the engine, and both men had left the car. Here was “the nice little place,” sturdy, newly painted, lovingly maintained, modest yet beautiful in its proportions, removed from the road, removed from the world, at the edge of a green and yellow meadow profuse with flowers.

“My God, Dale,” he said, “it’s perfection.”

Here we will find our former traveling companion, who in his own boyhood knew a boy named Richard Sloat and, once, too briefly, knew yet another whose name was, simply, Wolf. In this sturdy, comely, removed white farmhouse we will find our old friend, who once in his boyhood journeyed cross-country from ocean to ocean in pursuit of a certain crucial thing, a necessary object, a great talisman, and who, despite horrendous obstacles and fearful perils, succeeded in finding the object of his search and used it wisely and well. Who, we could say, accomplished a number of miracles, heroically. And who remembers none of this. Here, making breakfast for himself in his kitchen while listening to George Rathbun on KDCU, we at last find the former Los Angeles County lieutenant of police, Homicide Division, Jack Sawyer.

Our Jack. Jacky-boy, as his mother, the late Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer, used to say.

He had followed Dale through the empty house, upstairs and down, into the basement, dutifully admiring the new furnace and water heater Gilbertson had installed the year before his father’s death, the quality of the repairs he had made since then, the shining grain of the wooden floors, the thickness of the insulation in the attic, the solidity of the windows, the many craftsmanlike touches that met his eye.

“Yeah, I did a lot of work on the place,” Dale told him. “It was pretty shipshape to begin with, but I like working with my hands. After a while it turned into sort of a hobby. Whenever I had a couple of hours free, weekends and such, I got in the habit of driving over here and puttering around. I don’t know, maybe it helped me feel like I was staying in touch with my dad. He was a really good guy, my dad. He wanted me to be a farmer, but when I said I was thinking of getting into law enforcement, he supported me straight down the line. Know what he said? ‘Go into farming halfhearted, it’ll kick you in the tail sunrise to sundown. You’d wind up feeling no better than a mule. Your mom and I didn’t bring you into this world to turn you into a mule.’ ”

“What did she think?” Jack had asked.

“My mom came from a long line of farmers,” Dale had said. “She thought I might find out that being a mule wasn’t so bad after all. By the time she passed away, which was four years before my dad, she’d gotten used to my being a cop. Let’s go out the kitchen door and take a gander at the meadow, okay?”

While they were standing outside and taking their gander, Jack had asked Dale how much he wanted for the house. Dale, who had been waiting for this question, had knocked five thousand off the most he and Sarah had ever thought he could get. Who was he kidding? Dale had wanted Jack Sawyer to buy the house where he had grown up—he’d wanted Jack to live near him for at least a couple of weeks during the year. And if Jack did not buy the place, no one else would.

“Are you serious?” Jack had asked.

More dismayed than he wished to admit, Dale had said, “Sounds like a fair deal to me.”

“It isn’t fair to
you,
” Jack had said. “I’m not going to let you give this place away just because you like me. Raise the asking price, or I walk.”

“You big-city hotshots sure know how to negotiate. All right, make it three thousand more.”

“Five,” Jack said. “Or I’m outta here.”

“Done. But you’re breaking my heart.”

“I hope this is the last time I buy property off one of you low-down Norwegians,” Jack said.

He had purchased the house long-distance, sending a down payment from L.A., exchanging signatures by fax, no mortgage, cash up front. Whatever Jack Sawyer’s background might have been, Dale had thought, it was a lot wealthier than the usual police officer’s. Some weeks later, Jack had reappeared at the center of a self-created tornado, arranging for the telephone to be connected and the electricity billed in his name, scooping up what looked like half the contents of Roy’s Store, zipping off to Arden and La Riviere to buy a new bed, linens, tableware, cast-iron pots and pans and a set of French knives, a compact microwave and a giant television, and a stack of sound equipment so sleek, black, and resplendent that Dale, who had been invited over for a companionable drink, figured it must have cost more than his own annual salary. Much else, besides, had Jack reeled in, some of the much else consisting of items Dale had been surprised to learn could be obtained in French County, Wisconsin. Why would anyone need a sixty-five-dollar corkscrew called a WineMaster? Who was this guy, what kind of family had produced him?

He’d noticed a bag bearing an unfamiliar logo filled with compact discs—at fifteen, sixteen dollars a pop, he was looking at a couple hundred dollars’ worth of CDs. Whatever else might have been true of Jack Sawyer, he was into music in a big way. Curious, Dale bent down, pulled out a handful of jewel boxes, and regarded images of people, generally black, generally with instruments pressed to or in their mouths. Clifford Brown, Lester Young, Tommy Flanagan, Paul Desmond. “I never heard of these guys,” he said. “What is this, jazz, I guess?”

“You guess right,” Jack said. “Could I ask you to help me move furniture around and hang pictures, stuff like that, in a month or two? I’m going to have a lot of stuff shipped here.”

“Anytime.” A splendid idea bloomed in Dale’s mind. “Hey, you have to meet my uncle Henry! He’s even a neighbor of yours, lives about a quarter mile down the road. He was married to my aunt Rhoda, my father’s sister, who died three years ago. Henry’s like an encyclopedia of weird music.”

Jack did not take up the assumption that jazz was weird. Maybe it was. Anyhow, it probably sounded weird to Dale. “I wouldn’t have thought farmers had much time to listen to music.”

Dale opened his mouth and uttered a bray of laughter. “Henry isn’t a farmer. Henry . . .” Grinning, Dale raised his hands, palms up and fingers spread, and looked into the middle distance, searching for the right phrase. “He’s like the
reverse
of a farmer. When you get back, I’ll introduce you to him. You’re going to be crazy about the guy.”

Six weeks later, Jack returned to greet the moving van and tell the men where to put the furniture and other things he had shipped; a few days afterward, when he had unpacked most of the boxes, he telephoned Dale and asked if he was still willing to give him a hand. It was 5:00 on a day so slow that Tom Lund had fallen asleep at his desk, and Dale drove over without even bothering to change out of his uniform.

His first response, after Jack had shaken his hand and ushered him in, was undiluted shock. Having taken a single step past the doorway, Dale froze in his tracks, unable to move any farther. Two or three seconds passed before he realized that it was a
good
shock, a shock of pleasure. His old house had been transformed: it was as if Jack Sawyer had tricked him and opened the familiar front door upon the interior of another house altogether. The sweep from the living room into the kitchen looked nothing like either the space he remembered from childhood or the clean, bare progression of the recent past. Jack had decorated the house with the wave of a wand, it seemed to Dale, in the process somehow turning it into he hardly knew what—a villa on the Riviera, a Park Avenue apartment. (Dale had never been to New York or the south of France.) Then it struck him that, instead of transforming the old place into something it was not, Jack had simply seen more in it than Dale ever had. The leather sofas and chairs, the glowing rugs, the wide tables and discreet lamps, had come from another world but fit in perfectly, as if they had been made specifically for this house. Everything he saw beckoned him in, and he found that he could move again.

“Wow,” he said. “Did I ever sell this place to the right guy.”

“I’m glad you like it,” Jack said. “I have to admit, I do, too. It looks even better than I expected.”