From the Corner of His Eye (20 page)

A ghostly crescent of pale light shimmered on the black granite.

Junior looked up from the tombstone to the moon. It seemed like a wickedly sharp silver scimitar suspended by a filament more fragile than a human hair.

Although it was just the moon, it unnerved him.

Suddenly the night seemed…watchful.

Without using his flashlight, depending only on the moon, he ascended through the cemetery to the service road.

When he reached the Suburban and closed his right hand around the handle on the driver’s door, he felt something peculiar against his palm. A small, cold object balanced there.

Startled, he snatched his hand back. The object fell, ringing faintly against the pavement.

He switched on his flashlight. In the beam, on the blacktop, a silver disc. Like a full moon in a night sky.

A quarter.

The
quarter, surely. The one that had not been in his robe pocket where it should have been, the previous Friday.

He swept the immediate area with the flashlight, and shadows spun with shadows, waltzing spirits in the ballroom of the night.

No sign of Vanadium. Some of the taller monuments offered hiding places on both sides of the cemetery road, as did the thicker trunks of the larger trees.

The detective could be anywhere out there. Or already gone.

After a brief hesitation, Junior picked up the coin.

He wanted to fling it into the graveyard, send it spinning far into the darkness.

If Vanadium was watching, however, he would interpret the pitch of the coin to mean that his unconventional strategy was working, that Junior’s nerves were frayed to the breaking point. With an adversary as indefatigable as this cuckoo cop, you dared never show weakness.

Junior dropped the coin into a pants pocket.

Switched off the light. Listened.

He half expected to hear Thomas Vanadium in the distance, softly singing “Someone to Watch over Me.”

After a minute, he slipped his hand into his pocket. The quarter was still there.

He got in the Suburban, pulled the door shut, but didn’t at once start the engine.

In retrospect, coming here wasn’t a wise move. Evidently, the detective had been following him. Now, Vanadium would puzzle out a motive for this late-night graveyard tour.

Junior, putting himself in the detective’s place, could think of a few reasons for this visit to Seraphim’s grave. Unfortunately, not one of them supported his contention that he was an innocent man.

At worst, Vanadium might begin to wonder if Junior had a link to Seraphim, might uncover the physical-therapy connection, and in his paranoia, might erroneously conclude that Junior had something to do with her traffic accident. That was nuts, of course, but the detective was evidently not a rational man.

At best, Vanadium might decide Junior had come here to learn what other funeral his nemesis had attended—which was, in fact, the true motivation. But this made it clear that Junior feared him and was striving to stay one step ahead of him. Innocent men didn’t go to such lengths. As far as the fruitcake cop was concerned, Junior might as well have painted
I killed Naomi
on his forehead.

He nervously fingered the fabric of his slacks, outlining the quarter in his pocket. Still there.

Calcimine moonlight cast an arctic illusion over the boneyard. The grass was as eerily silver as snow at night, and gravestones tilted like pressure ridges of ice in a fractured wasteland.

The black service road seemed to come out of nowhere, then to vanish into a void, and Junior suddenly felt dangerously isolated, alone as he had never been, and vulnerable.

Vanadium was no ordinary cop, as he himself had said. In his obsession, convinced that Junior had murdered Naomi and impatient with the need to find evidence to prove it, what was to stop the detective if he decided to deal out justice himself? What was to prevent him from walking up to the Suburban right now and shooting his suspect point-blank?

Junior locked the door. He started the engine and drove out of the cemetery faster than was prudent on the winding service road.

On the way home, he repeatedly checked the rearview mirror. No vehicle followed him.

He lived in a rental house: a two-bedroom bungalow. Enormous deodar cedars with layers of drooping branches surrounded the place, and usually they seemed sheltering, but now they loomed, ominous.

Entering the kitchen from the garage, snapping on the overhead light, he was prepared to find Vanadium sitting at the pine table, enjoying a cup of coffee. The kitchen was deserted.

Room by room, closet by closet, Junior conducted a search for the detective. The cop was not here.

Relieved but still wary, he toured the small house again to be sure that all the doors and windows were locked.

After undressing for the night, he sat on the edge of the bed for a while, rubbing the coin between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, brooding about Thomas Vanadium. He tried rolling it across his knuckles; he dropped it repeatedly.

Eventually he put the quarter on the nightstand, switched off the lamp, and slipped into bed.

He could not sleep.

This morning he had changed the sheets. Naomi’s scent was no longer with him in the bedclothes.

He had not yet disposed of her personal effects. In the dark, he went to the dresser, opened a drawer, and found a cotton sweater that she had worn recently.

At the bed, he spread the garment across his pillow. Lying down, he pressed his face into the sweater. The sweet subtle scent of Naomi was as effective as a lullaby, and soon he dozed off.

When he woke in the morning, he raised his head from the pillow to look at the alarm clock—and saw the twenty-five cents on his nightstand. Two dimes and a nickel.

Junior flung back the covers and came to his feet, but his knees proved weak, and he sat at once on the edge of the bed.

The room was bright enough for him to confirm that he was alone. The interior of the box in which Naomi now resided could be no more silent than this house.

The coins were arranged atop a playing card, which lay facedown.

He slipped the card out from under the change, turned it over. A joker. Printed in red block letters across the card was a name: BARTHOLOMEW.

Chapter 31

FOR THE BETTER PART
of a week, on doctor’s orders, Agnes avoided stairs. She took sponge baths in the ground-floor powder room and slept in the parlor, on a sofa bed, with Barty nearby in a bassinet.

Maria Gonzalez brought rice casseroles, homemade tamales, and chile
rellenos
. Daily, Jacob made cookies and brownies, always a new variety, and in such volume that Maria’s plates were heaped with baked goods each time they were returned to her.

Edom and Jacob came to dinner with Agnes every evening. And though the past weighed heavily on them when they were under this roof, without fail they stayed long enough to wash the dishes before fleeing back to their apartments over the garage.

On Joey’s side, there was no family to provide help. His mother had died of leukemia when he was four. His dad, fond of beer and brawling—like father
not
like son—was killed in a bar fight five years later. Without close relatives willing to take him in, Joey went to an orphanage. At nine, he wasn’t prime adoption material—babies were what was wanted—and he’d been raised in the institution.

Although relatives were in short supply, friends and neighbors aplenty stopped by to help Agnes, and some offered to stay with her at night. She gratefully accepted assistance with the housecleaning, laundry, and shopping, but she declined the all-night company because of her dreams.

Routinely she dreamed of Joey. Not nightmares. No blood, no reliving of the horror. In her dreams, she was on a picnic with Joey or at a carnival with him. Walking a beach. Watching a movie. A warmth pervaded these scenes, an aura of companionship, love. Except eventually she always glanced away from Joey, and when she looked again, he was gone, and she knew that he was gone forever.

She woke weeping from the dreams, and she wanted no witnesses. She wasn’t embarrassed by her tears. She just didn’t want to share them with anyone but Barty.

In a rocking chair, holding her tiny son in her arms, Agnes cried quietly. Often, Barty slept through her weeping. Awakened, he smiled or squinched his face into a puzzled frown.

The infant’s smile was so captivating and his puzzlement so comically earnest that both expressions worked on Agnes’s misery as surely as yeast leavens dough. Her bitter tears turned sweet.

Barty never cried. In the hospital neonatal unit, he’d been a marvel to the nurses, because when the other newborns were squalling in chorus, Barty had been unfailingly serene.

Friday, January 14, eight days after Joey’s death, Agnes closed the sofa bed, intending to sleep upstairs from now on. And for the first time since coming home, she cooked dinner without resort to friends’ casseroles or to the treasures in her freezer.

Maria’s mother, visiting from Mexico, was babysitting, so Maria came without her children, as a guest, joining Agnes and the laugh-a-minute Isaacson twins, chroniclers of destruction. They ate in the dining room, rather than at the kitchen dinette, with a lace-trimmed tablecloth, the good china, crystal wineglasses, and fresh flowers.

Serving a formal dinner was Agnes’s way of declaring—to herself more than to anyone else in attendance—that the time had come for her to get on with life for Bartholomew’s sake, but also for her own.

Maria arrived early, expecting to assist with final details in the kitchen. Though honored to be a guest, she wasn’t able to stand by with a glass of wine while preparations remained to be made.

Agnes at last relented. “Someday, you’re going to have to learn to relax, Maria.”

“I am always enjoy to being useful like a hammer.”

“Hammer?”

“Hammer, saw, screwdriver. I am always to be happy when useful in such way like tool is useful.”

“Well, please don’t use a hammer to finish setting the table.”

“Is joke.” Maria was proud of correctly interpreting Agnes.

“No, I’m serious. No hammer.”

“Is good you are joke.”

“It’s good I
can
joke,” Agnes corrected.

“Is what I say.”

The dining table could accommodate six, and Agnes instructed Maria to set two places on each of the long sides, leaving the ends unused. “It’ll be cozier if we all sit across from one another.”

Maria arranged five place settings instead of four. The fifth—complete with silverware, waterglass, and wineglass—was at the head of the table, in memoriam of Joey.

As she struggled to cope with her loss, the last thing Agnes needed was the reminder posed by that empty chair. Maria’s intentions were good, however, and Agnes didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

Over potato soup and an asparagus salad, the dinner conversation got off to a promising start: a discussion of favorite potato dishes, observations on the weather, talk of Mexico at Christmas.

Eventually, of course, dear Edom held forth about tornadoes—in particular the infamous Tri-State Tornado of 1925, which ravaged portions of Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana.

“Most tornadoes stay on the ground twenty miles or less,” Edom explained, “but this one kept its funnel to the earth for two hundred nineteen miles! And it was one mile wide. Everything in its path—torn, smashed to bits. Houses, factories, churches, schools—all
pulverized.
Murphysboro, Illinois, was wiped off the map,
erased,
hundreds killed in that one town.”

Maria, wide-eyed, put down her silverware and crossed herself.

“It totally destroyed four towns, as if they were hit by atom bombs, tore up parts of six more towns, destroyed fifteen
thousand
homes. That’s just the
homes.
This thing was black, huge and black and hideous, with continuous lightning snapping through it, and a roar, they said, like a hundred thunderstorms booming all at once.”

Again, Maria crossed herself.

“Six hundred ninety-five people were killed in three states. Winds so powerful that some of the bodies were thrown a mile and a half from where they were snatched off the ground.”

Apparently Maria wished that she’d brought a rosary to dinner. With the fingers of her right hand, she pinched the knuckles of her left, one after the other, as if they were beads.

“Well,” Agnes said, “thank the Lord, we don’t have tornadoes here in California.”

“We have dams, though,” said Jacob, gesturing with his fork. “The Johnstown Flood, 1889. Pennsylvania, sure, but it could happen here. And that was a one, let me tell you. The South Fork Dam broke. Wall of water seventy feet high totally destroyed the city. Your tornado killed almost seven hundred, but my dam killed two thousand two hundred and nine. Ninety-nine entire families were swept from the earth. Ninety-eight children lost both parents.”

Maria stopped praying with her knuckle rosary and resorted to a long swallow of wine.

“Three hundred and ninety-six of the dead were children under the age of ten,” Jacob continued. “A passenger train was tumbled off the tracks, killing twenty. Another train with tank cars got smashed around, and oil spilled across the flood waters, ignited, and all these people clinging to floating debris were surrounded by flames, no way to escape. Their choice was being burned alive or drowning.”

“Dessert?” Agnes asked.

Over generous slices of Black Forest cake and coffee, Jacob at first held forth on the explosion of a French freighter, carrying a cargo of ammonium nitrate, at a pier in Texas City, Texas, back in 1947. Five hundred and seventy-six had perished.

Mustering all her hostess skills, Agnes gradually turned the conversation from disastrous explosions to Fourth of July fireworks, and then to reminiscences of summer evenings when she, Joey, Edom, and Jacob had played cards—pinochle, canasta, bridge—at a table in the backyard. Jacob and Edom, paired, were formidable competitors in any card game, because their memory for numbers had been sharpened by years of data gathering as the statisticians of catastrophe.

When the subject shifted to card tricks and fortune-telling, Maria admitted to practicing divination with standard playing cards.

Edom, eager to learn precisely when a tidal wave or falling asteroid would bring his doom, fetched a pack of cards from a cabinet in the parlor. When Maria explained that only every third card was read and that a full look at the future required four decks, Edom returned to the parlor to scare up three more.

“Bring four,” Jacob called after him, “all new decks!”

They wore out a lot of cards and kept a generous supply of all types of decks on hand.

To Agnes, Jacob said, “Likely to be a sunnier fortune if the cards are bright and fresh, don’t you think?”

Perhaps hoping to discover which runaway freight train or exploding factory would smear him across the landscape, Jacob pushed aside his dessert plate and shuffled each deck separately, then shuffled them together until they were well mixed. He stacked them in front of Maria.

No one seemed to realize that predicting the future might not be a suitable entertainment in this house, at this time, considering that Agnes had so recently and horribly been blindsided by fate.

Hope was the handmaid to Agnes’s faith. She always held fast to the belief that the future would be bright, but right now she was hesitant to test that optimism even with a harmless card reading. Yet, as with the fifth place setting, she was reluctant to object.

While Jacob had shuffled, Agnes had taken little Barty from his bassinet into her arms. She was surprised and discomfited to discover that the baby was to have his fortune told first.

Maria turned sideways in her chair and dealt from the top of the four-deck stack, onto the table in front of Barty.

The first was an ace of hearts. This, Maria said, was a very good card, indeed. It meant that Barty would be lucky in love.

Maria set aside two cards before turning another faceup. This was also an ace of hearts.

“Hey, he’s going to be a regular Romeo,” said Edom.

Barty cooed and blew a spit bubble.

“This card to mean also is family love, and is love from many friends, not just to be kissy-kissy love,” Maria elucidated.

The third card that she placed in front of Barty was also an ace of hearts.

“What are the odds of that?” Jacob wondered.

Although the ace of hearts had only positive meanings, and although, according to Maria, multiple appearances, especially in sequence, meant increasingly positive things, a series of chills nevertheless riffled through Agnes’s spine, as if her vertebrae were fingers shuffling.

The next draw produced four of a kind.

Whereas the lone heart at the center of the rectangular white field inspired amazement and delight in her brothers and in Maria, Agnes reacted to it with dread. She strove to mask her true feelings with a smile as thin as the edge of a playing card.

In her fractured English, Maria explained that this miraculous fourth ace of hearts meant that Barty would not only meet the right woman and have a lifelong romance worthy of epic poetry, would not only be showered all his life by the love of family, would not only be cherished by a large number of friends, but would also be loved by uncountable people who would never meet him.

“How could he be loved by people who never meet him?” asked Jacob, scowling.

Beaming, Maria said, “This is to mean Barty will to be some day
muy
famous.”

Agnes wanted her boy to be happy. She didn’t care about fame. Instinct told her the two, fame and happiness, seldom coexisted.

She had been gently dandling Barty. Now she held him still and kept him close to her breast.

The fifth card was another ace, and Agnes gasped, because for an instant she thought it was also another heart, an impossible fifth in a stack of four decks. Instead: an ace of diamonds.

Maria explained that this, too, was a most desirable card, that it meant Barty would never be poor. To have it follow four aces of hearts was especially significant.

The sixth card was another ace of diamonds.

They all stared at it in silence.

Six aces in a row, thus far consecutive as to suit. Agnes had no way of calculating the odds against this draw, but she knew that they were spectacularly high.

“Is to mean he is to be better than not poor, but even rich.”

The seventh card was a third ace of diamonds.

Without comment, Maria set aside two cards and dealt the eighth. This, too, was an ace of diamonds.

Maria crossed herself again, but in a different spirit from when she’d crossed herself during Edom’s rant about the Tri-State Tornado of 1925. Then, she’d been warding off bad fortune; now, with a smile and a look of wonder, she was acknowledging the grace of God, which, according to the cards, had been settled generously on Bartholomew.

Barty, she explained, would be rich in many ways. Financially rich, but also rich in talent, in spirit, intellect. Rich in courage, honor. With a wealth of common sense, good judgment, and luck.

Any mother ought to have been pleased to hear such a glowing future foretold for her child. Yet each glorious prediction dropped the temperature in Agnes’s heart by another few degrees.

The ninth card was a jack of spades. Maria called it a
knave
of spades, and at the sight of it, her bright smile dimmed.

Knaves symbolized enemies, she explained, both those who were merely duplicitous and those who were downright evil. The knave of hearts represented either a rival in love or a lover who would betray you: an enemy who would deeply wound the heart. The knave of diamonds was someone who would cause financial grief. The knave of clubs was someone who would wound with words: one who libeled or slandered, or who assaulted you with mean-spirited and unjust criticism.

The knave of spades, now revealed, was the most sinister jack in the deck. This was an enemy who would resort to violence.

With his ringleted yellow hair, coiled mustache, and haughty right profile, this was a jack that looked as if he might be a knave in the worst sense of the word.

And now to the tenth card, already in Maria’s small brown hand.

Never had the familiar red Bicycle design of the U.S. Playing Card Company looked ominous before, but it was fearsome now, as strange as any voodoo vèvè or satanic conjuration pattern.