Shadowfires (3 page)

She heard sirens in the distance.

Gradually she regained control of her breathing.

Her shivering grew less violent, though it did not stop entirely.

The sirens grew nearer, louder.

She opened her eyes. The bright June sunshine no longer seemed clean and fresh. The darkness of death had passed through the day, and in its wake, the morning light had acquired a sour yellow cast that reminded her more of sulfur than of honey.

Red lights flashing, sirens dying, a paramedic van and a police sedan approached along the northbound lanes.

“Rachael?”

She turned and saw Herbert Tuleman, Eric’s personal attorney, with whom she had met only minutes ago. She had always liked Herb, and he had liked her as well. He was a grandfatherly man with bushy gray eyebrows that were now drawn together in a single bar.

“One of my associates . . . returning to the office . . . saw it happen,” Herbert said, “hurried up to tell me. My God.”

“Yes,” she said numbly.

“My God, Rachael.”

“Yes.”

“It’s too . . . crazy.”

“Yes.”

“But . . .”

“Yes,” she said.

And she knew what Herbert was thinking. Within the past hour, she had told them she would not fight for a large share of Eric’s fortune but would settle for, proportionately, a pittance. Now, by virtue of the fact that Eric had no family and no children from his first marriage, the entire thirty million plus his currently unvalued stock in the company would almost certainly, by default, come into her sole possession.

The hot, dry air was filled with the crackle of police radios, a metallic chorus of dispatchers’ voices, and the smell of sun-softened asphalt.

The paramedics could do nothing for Eric Leben except convey his corpse to the city morgue, where it would lie in a refrigerated room until the medical examiner had time to attend to it. Because Eric had been killed in an accident, the law required an autopsy.

“The body should be available for release in twenty-four hours,” one of the policemen had told Rachael.

While they had filled out a brief report, she had sat in the back of one of the patrol cars. Now she was standing in the sun again.

She no longer felt sick. Just numb.

They loaded the draped cadaver into the van. In spots, the shroud was dark with blood.

Herbert Tuleman felt obliged to comfort Rachael and repeatedly suggested that she return with him to his law office. “You need to sit down, get a grip on yourself,” he said, one hand on her shoulder, his kindly face wrinkled with concern.

“I’m all right, Herb. Really, I am. Just a little shaken.”

“Some cognac. That’s what you need. I’ve got a bottle of Rémy Martin in the office bar.”

“No, thank you. I guess it’ll be up to me to handle the funeral, so I’ve got things to attend to.”

The two paramedics closed the rear doors on the van and walked unhurriedly to the front of the vehicle. No need for sirens and flashing red emergency beacons. Speed would not help Eric now.

Herb said, “If you don’t want brandy, then perhaps coffee. Or just come and sit with me for a while. I don’t think you should get behind a wheel right away.”

Rachael touched his leathery cheek affectionately. He was a weekend sailor, and his skin had been toughened and creased less by age than by his time upon the sea. “I appreciate your concern. I really do. But I’m fine. I’m almost ashamed of how well I’m taking it. I mean . . . I feel no grief at all.”

He held her hand. “Don’t be ashamed. He was my client, Rachael, so I’m aware that he was . . . a difficult man.”

“Yes.”

“He gave you no reason to grieve.”

“It still seems wrong to feel . . . so little. Nothing.”

“He wasn’t just a difficult man, Rachael. He was also a fool for not recognizing what a jewel he had in you and for not doing whatever was necessary to make you want to stay with him.”

“You’re a dear.”

“It’s true. If it weren’t
very
true, I wouldn’t speak of a client like this, not even when he was . . . deceased.”

The van, bearing the corpse, pulled away from the accident scene. Paradoxically, there was a cold, wintry quality to the way the summer sun glimmered in the white paint and in the polished chrome bumpers, making it appear as if Eric were being borne away in a vehicle carved from ice.

Herb walked with her, through the gathered onlookers, past his office building, to her red 560 SL. He said, “I could have someone drive Eric’s car back to his house, put it in the garage, and leave the keys at your place.”

“That would be helpful,” she said.

When Rachael was behind the wheel, belted in, Herb leaned down to the window and said, “We’ll have to talk soon about the estate.”

“In a few days,” she said.

“And the company.”

“Things will run themselves for a few days, won’t they?”

“Certainly. It’s Monday, so shall we say you’ll come see me Friday morning? That gives you four days to . . . adjust.”

“All right.”

“Ten o’clock?”

“Fine.”

“You sure you’re okay?”

“Yes,” she said, and she drove home without incident, though she felt as though she were dreaming.

She lived in a quaint three-bedroom bungalow in Placentia. The neighborhood was solidly middle-class and friendly, and the house had loads of charm: French windows, window seats, coffered ceilings, a used-brick fireplace, and more. She’d made the down payment and moved a year ago, when she left Eric. Her house was far different from the place in Villa Park, which was set on an acre of manicured grounds and which boasted every luxury; however, she liked her cozy bungalow better than his Spanish-modern mansion, not merely because the scale seemed more human here but also because the Placentia house was not tainted by countless bad memories as was the house in Villa Park.

She took off her bloodstained blue sundress. She washed her hands and face, brushed her hair, and reapplied what little makeup she wore. Gradually the mundane task of grooming herself had a calming effect. Her hands stopped trembling. Although a hollow coldness remained at the core of her, she stopped shivering.

After dressing in one of the few somber outfits she owned—a charcoal-gray suit with a pale gray blouse, slightly too heavy for a hot summer day—she called Attison Brothers, a firm of prestigious morticians. Having ascertained that they could see her immediately, she drove directly to their imposing colonial-style funeral home in Yorba Linda.

She had never made funeral arrangements before, and she had never imagined that there would be anything amusing about the experience. But when she sat down with Paul Attison in his softly lighted, darkly paneled, plushly carpeted, uncannily quiet office and listened to him call himself a “grief counselor,” she saw dark humor in the situation. The atmosphere was so meticulously somber and so self-consciously reverent that it was stagy. His proffered sympathy was oily yet ponderous, relentless and calculated, but surprisingly she found herself playing along with him, responding to his condolences and platitudes with clichés of her own. She felt as if she were an actor trapped in a bad play by an incompetent playwright, forced to deliver her wooden lines of dialogue because it was less embarrassing to persevere to the end of the third act than to stalk off the stage in the middle of the performance. In addition to identifying himself as a grief counselor, Attison referred to a casket as an “eternal bower.” A suit of burial clothes, in which the corpse would be dressed, was called “the final raiments.” Attison said “preparations for preservation” instead of “embalming,” and “resting place” instead of “grave.”

Although the experience was riddled with macabre humor, Rachael was not able to laugh even when she left the funeral home after two and a half hours and was alone in her car again. Ordinarily she had a special fondness for black humor, for laughter that mocked the grim, dark aspects of life. Not today. It was neither grief nor any kind of sadness that kept her in a gray and humorless mood. Nor worry about widowhood. Nor shock. Nor the morbid recognition of Death’s lurking presence in even the sunniest day. For a while, as she tended to other details of the funeral, and later, at home once more, as she called Eric’s friends and business associates to convey the news, she could not quite understand the cause of her unremitting solemnity.

Then, late in the afternoon, she could no longer fool herself. She knew that her mental state resulted from fear. She tried to deny what was coming, tried not to think about it, and she had some success at not thinking, but in her heart she knew. She knew.

She went through the house, making sure that all the doors and windows were locked. She closed the blinds and drapes.

 

At five-thirty, Rachael put the telephone on the answering machine. Reporters had begun to call, wanting a few words with the widow of the Great Man, and she had no patience whatsoever for media types.

The house was a bit too cool, so she reset the air conditioner. But for the susurrant sound of cold air coming through the wall vents and the occasional single ring the telephone made before the machine answered it, the house was as silent as Paul Attison’s gloom-shrouded office.

Today, deep silence was intolerable; it gave her the creeps. She switched on the stereo, tuned to an FM station playing easy-listening music. For a moment, she stood before the big speakers, eyes closed, swaying as she listened to Johnny Mathis singing “Chances Are.” Then she turned up the volume so the music could be heard throughout the house.

In the kitchen, she cut a small piece of semisweet dark chocolate from a bar and put it on a white saucer. She opened a split of fine, dry champagne. She took the chocolate, the champagne, and a glass into the master bathroom.

On the radio, Sinatra was singing “Days of Wine and Roses.”

Rachael drew a tub of water as hot as she could tolerate, added a drizzle of jasmine-scented oil, and undressed. Just as she was about to settle in to soak, the pulse of fear which had been beating quietly within her suddenly began to throb hard and fast. She tried to calm herself by closing her eyes and breathing deeply, tried telling herself that she was being childish, but nothing worked.

Naked, she went into the bedroom and got the .32-caliber pistol from the top drawer of the nightstand. She checked the magazine to be sure it was fully loaded. Switching off both safeties, she took the thirty-two into the bathroom and put it on the deep blue tile at the edge of the sunken tub, beside the champagne and chocolate.

Andy Williams was singing “Moon River.”

Wincing, she stepped into the hot bath and settled down until the water had slipped most of the way up the slopes of her breasts. It stung at first. Then she became accustomed to the temperature, and the heat was good, penetrating to her bones and finally dispelling the chill that had plagued her ever since Eric had dashed in front of the truck almost seven and a half hours ago.

She nibbled at the candy, taking only a few shavings from the edge of the piece. She let them melt slowly on her tongue.

She tried not to think. She tried to concentrate on just the mindless pleasure of a good hot steep. Just drift. Just
be
.

She leaned back in the tub, savoring the taste of chocolate, relishing the scent of jasmine in the rising steam.

After a couple of minutes, she opened her eyes and poured a glass of champagne from the ice-cold bottle. The crisp taste was a perfect complement to the lingering trace of chocolate and to the voice of Sinatra crooning the nostalgic and sweetly melancholy lines of “It Was a Very Good Year.”

For Rachael, this relaxing ritual was an important part of the day, perhaps the
most
important. Sometimes she nibbled at a small wedge of sharp cheese instead of chocolate and sipped a single glass of chardonnay instead of champagne. Sometimes it was an extremely cold bottle of dark beer—Heineken or Beck’s—and a handful of the special plump peanuts that were sold by an expensive nut shop in Costa Mesa. Whatever her choice of the day, she consumed it with care and slow delight, in tiny bites and small sips, relishing every nuance of taste and scent and texture.

She was a “present-focused” person.

Benny Shadway, the man Eric had thought was Rachael’s lover, said there were basically four types of people: past-, present-, future-, and omni-focused. Those focused primarily on the future had little interest in the past or present. They were often worriers, peering toward tomorrow to see what crisis or insoluble problem might be hurtling toward them—although some were shiftless dreamers rather than worriers, always looking ahead because they were unreasonably certain they were due for great good fortune of one kind or another. Some were also workaholics, dedicated achievers who believed that the future and opportunity were the same thing.

Eric had been such a one, forever brooding about and eagerly anticipating new challenges and conquests. He had been utterly bored with the past and impatient with the snail’s pace at which the present sometimes crept by.

A present-focused person, on the other hand, expended most of his energy and interest in the joys and tribulations of the moment. Some present-focused types were merely sluggards, too lazy to prepare for tomorrow or even to contemplate it. Strokes of bad luck often caught them unaware, for they had difficulty accepting the possibility that the pleasantness of the moment might not go on forever. And when they found themselves mired in misfortune, they usually fell into ruinous despair, for they were incapable of embarking upon a course of action that would, at some point in the future, free them from their troubles. However, another type of present-focused person was the hard worker who could involve himself in the task at hand with a single-mindedness that made for splendid efficiency and craftsmanship. A first-rate cabinetmaker, for example, had to be a present-focused person, one who did not look forward impatiently to the final assembly and completion of a piece of furniture but who directed his attention entirely and lovingly to the meticulous shaping and finishing of each rung and arm of a chair, to each drawer face and knob and doorframe of a china hutch, taking his greatest satisfaction in the
process
of creation rather than in the culmination of the process.