The Dark Door (2 page)

Chapter 2

“Mr. Loesser,” dr. Mcchesney
said, “go back home. Don’t hang around here. I can recommend a doctor to oversee your convalescence now. You need to be with friends, relatives, people who know you and care for you. All this brooding about what you might have done is pointless, Mr. Loesser. I’ve talked to the detectives, and they all agree that there was nothing more. In fact, it was very brave, perhaps even foolhardy, for you to try to help at all.”

Carson Danvers sat on the side of his bed. His face was swathed in bandages. A bullet had grazed his cheekbone, had torn away most of the flesh on one side. He would need plastic surgery. His right arm was in a cast. A bullet had gone through his shoulder. His torso was bandaged. They had gone in and removed part of a rib shattered by the third bullet. The rib had deflected it, sent it back outward through a second hole. Except for the plastic surgery, he was repaired, healing, ready to be discharged from the hospital.

Dr. McChesney stood up. “If you decide to stay around here, I can recommend a rooming house where they’ll take care of you, and I’ll have my nurse set up an appointment in my office next week.”

“That’s what I’ll do,” Carson said. Talking hurt; he kept it at a minimum.

“Okay, I’ll make the arrangements. Your company will pick up the bill, they said. You’re on sick leave for the next three months and we’ll evaluate your situation then. Nothing to worry about on that score.” He regarded his patient for a moment, then put his hand on Carson’s shoulder. “I don’t know how the hell you dragged yourself up those stairs, either. God knows, John, you did more than was human as it was. Don’t torture yourself. I’ll send in the nurse for you.”

Carson knew he had to tell them the truth about who he was, but not yet, he thought. Not yet. Elly’s parents, her sister, his parents… . How could he tell them Gary had gone crazy and killed his mother? Even trying to form the words it would take to tell them brought a long shudder and made his eyes sting with tears. Not yet.

The strange thing was the ease with which he
was getting away with being John Loesser. They
had found a wallet—Loesser’s wallet—in his pocket; Carson’s things were in his coat left in the Buick that day. Even the man the company sent out had accepted him. Of course, he had not known Loesser personally, but he had seen him a time or two. Carson had not been expected to talk then, and the bandages had concealed his identity further, but even so, he mused, even so. The few times he had started to explain, he had gone dumb, started to shake, lost control. Twice they had given him an injection to put him to sleep again, and the last time they had sent in a new doctor whose name had already escaped him. A shrink, he had realized after a short time. Guilt, the shrink had stated ponderously, was the most debilitating emotion of all. He had talked on, but Carson had stopped listening. Guilt of the survivor, he realized, was what the shrink assumed he was suffering from. And he was, he was. Guilt over doing something so horrible to Gary that he had turned on his own parents with a gun. Guilt over not being able to help his dead wife. Guilt over not being able to help his child. Guilt, guilt, guilt. But as John Loesser the guilt was abstract, distant. He would tell them later, he had decided that day. Much later.

Two weeks after leaving the hospital he flew to Richmond and let himself into Loesser’s apartment. He still had bandages on his face, would have them until plastic surgery did its magic. People he met averted their gaze, and that was fine with him. The apartment was scrupulously neat—almost obsessively so—with good paintings, good books, good furniture, good stereo and television. Money, he thought bleakly. Loesser had had money. He had not given it any consideration until then. He went through the apartment carefully, getting to know his host, not liking him, but reassured because it became more and more apparent that Loesser had had no friends or relatives. Had he become a recluse after his wife’s death, or had the trait always been there? There were names in an address book; he recognized a few from cards he had received—impersonal, duty cards—while he was still hospitalized. He found the financial statements. There was real money. Mrs. Loesser’s insurance had been half a million dollars, a traveler’s policy that anticipated the worst scenarios, and now and then paid handsomely. He found her picture, a pretty woman with a small mouth, upturned nose, blue eyes. A forgettable face. The picture had been put away in a closet in a box of mementos, along with her college diploma, and medical records dating from childhood up to the time over five years ago when they had ceased to matter.

He spent the weekend there, learning about Loesser, learning about money, about stock holdings, bonds, certificates of deposit. No one challenged him. The building superintendent knocked on the door, and when Carson opened it on the chain, the man hardly glanced at him. He had heard, he said; what a hell of a thing. If there was anything he could do… . He went away.

Carson sat in the darkening room on Sunday and suddenly was overwhelmed with grief that shook his frame, made his cheek hurt with a stabbing pain, made his chest tighten until he feared—and would have welcomed—a heart attack. He had to call her parents, he knew, but not yet. Not until they found her, found Gary. No bodies had been recovered. Not yet.

He drove Loesser’s Malibu back to Washington, and collapsed into bed as soon as he arrived at his rooming house. He could get an apartment, he thought, staring at the ceiling, a good apartment with a view, and there he would wait until they found her, found Gary, and then he would call her parents. The next day he drove out to the inn.

Someone had come and boarded it all up again, exactly the same as it had been the first time he had seen it. He walked around the building and stopped at the back porch where he had found her. Although it had been scrubbed clean, in his mind the blood was there, her body was there, one sandal missing. Where had it gone? He almost went down the stairs to the tangle of briars to search for it. He clutched the rail with his good hand and rubbed his eyes with the other. He remembered rising, seeing his son with the rifle. Suddenly, cutting through the memories, there was the other thing again, just as it had been the last time. Something present but out of sight. Carson did not move, held his breath listening. No sound. But something was there, he knew without doubt. Something. Slowly he turned, and now he closed his eyes, concentrating on that something. He felt as if he had moved into an electrical field vibrating on a level that did not affect muscles and skin, but was active deep inside his head, making it ache. For a moment he swayed, but the dizziness passed quickly and all he felt now was a headache that was growing in intensity. Like a hangover, he thought from a distance, spacing himself away from it, the way he had learned twenty years ago in college. Pretend it isn’t there, think yourself away from it, and let the damn thing ache all it wants. Cholly’s advice. Cholly, his college roommate whom he had not thought of in years. The headache became manageable and he opened his eyes with caution, as if afraid of startling away that something that was there with him. He could still feel it; he felt surrounded by it, pressed from all sides. Moving very slowly he started to back away, backed down the steps to the overgrown path, walked deliberately around the building to get inside his car, Loesser’s car. It was still there with him. He turned on the ignition, and then it was gone.

That night he stood naked before his mirror and regarded the long ugly scar that started somewhere on his back out of sight, curved under his arm and went up to just under his nipple. The scars on his shoulder were uglier, bigger. The skin and bone grafts would blend in, the doctors had said, but it would take time. His face was the worst of all. Hideously mutilated, inflamed, monstrous. Plastic surgery would hide it all, they assured him. He was an excellent candidate for the kind of reconstruction they were capable of now. His gaze traveled down his body and he was mildly surprised to see how thin he had become. He had lost nearly forty pounds. The doctors had been amazed that he had lived through his attack, that his recovery was going along so uneventfully, so quickly. He had been amazed at the same things, but now he knew why he had been spared, knew what he had to do. He had been spared because he had to kill the thing in the inn.

He moved the next day to a bright, airy apartment with a view of the Potomac that looked lovely, inviting. He thought of the river below the inn; was that where the bodies had been hidden? He knew even as he wondered that that was wrong; they had been taken behind that darkness of the doorway. This time no tears came. He began to think of what he would need. Crowbar. Flashlight. Gasoline. He already had decided he had to burn it out, let fire consume and purify the house. Matches. How terrible it would be to have everything ready and no matches. After a thunderstorm, he decided, when the woods would be wet. He did not want a conflagration in the woods, did not want to hurt anyone, or chance having the fire put out before its work was done. An interior fire that would be out of control before it could be spotted from outside, at a time when no one would be on the road to call a fire department. He made his plans and the next day began to provision himself. There were thunderstorms almost every afternoon; he was able to pick his night.

He felt
it
as soon as he stopped the car at the inn. It was three thirty in the morning, an inky black night, the air heavy with leaf mold and forest humus, earthy smells of the cycle of life and death repeated endlessly. He could smell the river, and the grass. He circled the inn to the back, where he forced open the boards on several windows. He climbed in and opened the door, then went back to the porch. Carefully, he poured gasoline where her body had been, followed her invisible tracks through the house, one foot shod, one bare, both bloody; no traces remained, but he knew. He covered the trail with gasoline. Up the curving stairs, through the hallway, to the door where the bloody prints had stopped, where the abyss still yawned. That was where Elinor and Gary were, he knew. They had been taken into the abyss. He sprayed the walls with gas, soaked the floor with it, then finished emptying the can as he retraced his own trail from that day, down the back stairs, to the porch. It was done. A distant rumble of thunder shook the air. The things all around him, pressing against him, vanished momentarily, then returned as the thunder subsided. Now and then he found himself brushing his hand before his face, as if to clear away cobwebs; his hand passed through emptiness, and they were still there, pressing against him. The dizziness did not come this time, but his head was aching mildly He struck a match and tossed it to the gleaming wet gasoline where she had lain. The porch erupted into flames that raced through the building, following the trail he had made, through rooms and halls, up the stairs. There was a whoosh of flame from the upper floor. He had not closed the back door; belatedly he wondered if he should have knocked boards off in the front to admit a cross draft. He stood watching the flames blaze up the kitchen wall, and he knew he had done enough. Slowly he turned and walked to the car, taking the
something
with him, oblivious of the death he had planned for it. He got in and turned on the ignition; as before, it fled. He drove away without looking back.

Over the six months he had more surgery on his shoulder, plastic surgery on his face. A scar gleamed along his cheekbone. They could fix that, they told him. Give it a few months first. He did not go back. He learned to use his right arm all over again; the bank, lawyers, no one questioned the changed signature. They all knew the trauma he had suffered, the difficult recovery he was making. He took from Carson Danvers very little. Carson had been a master chef, and the new person emerging equipped his kitchen with the best cookware available and bought good spices and herbs, but he used them very little. John Loesser had been obsessively neat; the new man liked neatness more than he had realized, but not to such an extreme. Carson had been outgoing, friendly, talkative. He had liked people, liked to entertain people, kid around with them. The new man knew no one; there was no one he wanted to talk to, no jokes, no stories worth repeating any more.

He spent many hours in his darkened apartment in Washington watching the lights on the river, watching the patterns of light in the city, thinking nothing. He spent many hours reliving his past, going over scenes again and again until he knew he had recaptured every detail, then going on to other scenes. At first the pain was nearly intolerable, but over time it lessened and he could even smile at the memories. Their first date, how awkward he had been, how afraid he would offend her, bore her, even frighten her. He had loved her from the very first, and had declared his love much too soon, long before she was ready to consider him seriously. He had been so dumb, tongue-tied with her, and adoring. The pain diminished, but the emptiness grew.

The company sent someone out to see him again, and for the first time he suggested that he might never return to work. He talked to the man—Tony Martinelli—in a shadowed living room, making certain he was hidden by shadows, Martinelli did not press him, was probably relieved. They would wait, he had said; there was no rush, no quick decision to be made. But no one had urged him to mend quickly and return, Loesser had had no real friends in the company; no one would miss him. In time they sent papers; he hired a law firm to represent his interests, and paid no more attention to any of that until one day when he received a letter asking politely if he would mind sending back certain records, certain computer information. He went to the study where he had John Loessers computer, records, files, books—all boxed. He had not looked at any of it. That afternoon he unloaded one box after another and examined the contents. He got out the computer manual and connected parts to other parts as directed, but he did not know what to do with it. There were books on the insurance industry, on computers, on statistics and rates and liability schedules; there were actuarial tables. At last he had something to do, something he could not ask for help with; Loesser was supposed to know all this. It had been weeks since he had called the police to enquire about the missing bodies, weeks since he had thought about revealing his own identity. That night he realized that Carson Danvers was as dead as Elinor and Gary Danvers.