The Sign of the Book (31 page)

Erin lay on a cot a few feet away. Between us was a small table with two candles lighting the room. I scrambled across to her, blew out the candles, and threw my arm across her body.

She was strapped down and covered with heavy blankets.

I felt her face. It was hot, sweaty. I felt the pulse beating in her neck. I put my face against hers and softly said her name. I fumbled with the ropes and got them loose.

Then I felt another, and another…

Half a dozen knots on top, more underneath. I picked at them and slowly worked them free.

Erin moaned softly as if she'd been drugged. I thought of the coffee, dripping in the pot.
We were sitting in the kitchen having coffee,
she said in my mind.
That's the last thing I remember.
This wasn't rocket science. Now I had to get her out of there.

“Laura.” At last she had said her old friend's name. I felt her take a deep breath and I heard her say it again. “Laura…”

“Don't talk.”

“Cliff…”

“Shhh.”

I had to get her off the cot. She was a sitting duck.

“Come on,” I whispered. “Try to sit up.”

The cot squeaked. I squeezed her arm. “No noise now. Quiet…quiet…”

Slowly I got to my feet. I stood in a crouch. At some point I thought I could see beyond the porch. On three sides the swirling snow; on the other the interior of the house, a black place made only slightly less black by the indirect light trickling through from the kitchen. I could make out where the doorway was, I could almost see the room and the hall beyond it wrapped in pitch-blackness; I could see the black hall, which must mean I was seeing the light, as faint as it was. I could see across the porch and somewhat into the house. I knew I could see a little better, I was sure I could, as my eyes adjusted more to the dark.

I could see the hall, definitely a lighter shade of black, I thought. But what was definite; what was real?

The corners of the room seemed to emerge murkily. I crouched absolutely still till my muscles began to ache. Then I moved, slightly; I stood up straighter and convinced myself that, wherever Laura was, she wasn't in this room.

I waited. Watched.

Nothing.

She wasn't in this room. So I believed, after an eternity of crouching.

I got my arm around Erin and pulled her off the cot…an inch at a time.

 

Now we were against the wall, deep in a pocket of darkness, and we huddled together in the black corner. The wind howled around the house and there was an occasional bump from somewhere. Might be a limb blowing down on the roof…maybe a load of snow falling and hitting something…or was
that
noise just now something closer, inside the house, a room away? The building creaked in the wind. The glass above my head seemed to be rattling in its sash, and beyond it the snow whirled past like a giant white cyclone.

I knew one thing: the house was getting colder. No heat had been turned on; whatever we had was coming from that one distant fireplace. By morning, if we were still here, the fire would be out and the house would be like an icebox. I had worn my heavy winter overcoat and I drew Erin inside it. She squeezed my hand and we moved along the wall.

One…step…at a…time.

I heard another bump. Erin hitting the wall, probably with a heel or an elbow.

Hush,
I thought.
Oh, please, hush.

I heard her sigh and I said it was okay. But it wasn't okay, it would never be okay till we were out of there.

“Can you run?”

“I don't know…I don't…”

“When we get outside, we'll have to make a run for the car.”

“I feel sick.”

“Hold tight to my arm.”

“I'm sorry, I just…”

“Don't worry, I'll wait for you. As long as you need me.”

“Where're we going now?”

“Out of here. Down the slope to the car. Is there a door out of this porch?”

“I don't know. It would probably be locked.”

“Did you come in this way?”

“No…no. Oh, God, I feel sick.”

“I'll wait for you. However long it takes I'll be here.”

I felt her sag against me. An ice age passed. At some point she said, “It's not going to get any better. Let's go.”

The shortest way was out the front door. We moved slowly into the hall and turned right. Backs against the wall we went to the end. “Hold still,” I whispered, and I tried the door. It was locked.

“We'll have to go back through the house.”

I gripped her arm and eased down the wall toward the kitchen.
No noise now, no noise.
“Stay behind me,” I whispered.

I peered into the house.

O black night. Blacker than black.

Now I saw why. The light had been turned off down in the kitchen, plunging the whole interior into this blacker-than-hell midnight.

I couldn't see anything, not even the blowing snow beyond the windows. This was how it would be from now on, groping along an inch at a time, going by feel and memory. I inched down the wall, holding Erin with my right hand and my gun with my left, easing along it toward the kitchen. A sudden slight change in the air told me I had reached the crossing hall. I felt for the opening with my hand and there it was, yawning into eternity. She's there, I thought: that's where she'll be, and we stood for another eon trying to wait her out. But nothing moved, nothing changed, nothing happened.

“Come on,” I whispered, and we hurried across, again sinking against the wall on the other side.

I stopped for a breather. “Almost there,” I said, but in plain fact I didn't know what we almost were. I took a step and that goddamned poker fell again, clattering like ten ghosts screwing on a tin roof.

So. She repropped it.

Clever, diabolical, while all I had been was blind, stupid, unthinking, stupid.

I stood somewhere south of the kitchen, feeling stupid and alone.

Gotta go.

I squeezed Erin's hand and took a step. Another. Another…

In this way we reached the threshold of the kitchen.

One more room to cross. But then I heard a noise: not behind me…ahead…

Something bumped.

“That wasn't me,” Erin said in my ear.

“Mmm-hmm.”

A footstep.

She's getting impatient.

This time the noise was softer, closer.

She's coming.

She's coming.

She's here.

She's in the next room over from the kitchen.

She's here, just across the room.

She's here in the kitchen with us…

“Hi,” she said.

“I know you're in here,” she said.

She crossed the room and disappeared into the far side of it, but for those few seconds I could see her shape and track her movements. I could have shot her then, but of course I couldn't and of course she would know that. The advantage of the moment was hers. She had taken off her shoes; she made no sound as she walked, but then she disappeared again into the murk and the house settled back into that eerie quiet, broken only by the pounding of the wind. She'll go crazy after just a little of this, I thought, I can outlast her. But time passed and nothing happened.

Had she gone farther back into the house or was she still nearby in some black hole of her own? I squeezed Erin's hand.
No noise now…not even a soft sigh to give her a hint that we are together or where we might be…

I pictured vast sheets of ice moving across the land, thousands of years apart. I saw asteroids pounding the earth, sending tidal waves rolling toward us.

I thought about what I knew and tried to imagine why.

She's insane. That's the easy answer.

Too easy. Far too simple, much too pat.

If she's a monster, she's not like Steinbeck's monster. No, and she's not like those real-life monsters, Bundy and Gacy and Dahmer, either; there are so few women like that, it's not worth the time it takes to think about them. Serial savagery is like poaching, it's almost exclusively a male sport. Unless she's some kind of freak with bodies buried all over this mountaintop, she is far more typical
of women who kill than any of those monsters. There's a strong personal motive for what she does, I'd bet four of my best books on it: the two sweetheart Raymond Chandlers, my cherry
Grapes of Wrath,
and the signed Richard Burton. If she kills once, others may follow, but they too are personal, not random. She has no inherent bloodlust; if no one offends her, we may never hear of her again. Bobby had been personal, an accumulation of long resentment; maybe it hadn't even been premeditated. Lennie too was personal, though we don't yet know how. Something he said, perhaps, in that angry moment captured on Jerry's sketchpad as he looked through the doorway. Erin would also be personal, maybe a grudge of such long standing that even she can't understand it anymore. I don't want to kill her but I have a bad feeling about any probable outcome.

Erin's voice, close now: “Let's talk to her.”

“No way.”

“What can it hurt?”

Are you kidding? You must still be under the influence of that dope she gave you if you can even ask such a thing.
“Not a word,” I whispered. “Not a sound.”

Let her stew.

Suddenly, somewhere out in the void, she sneezed and laughed irrationally. “This is ridiculous,” she said, just above a whisper. “What's wrong with you two?”

She sneezed again. Sneezes come in twos, but this time there was no laugh and her voice was louder. “What's the matter? You're treating me like some kind of leper.”

A long, quiet moment passed.

“What's wrong? What's going on here? Can't we even talk?”

She's beginning to crack.

“Talk to me.

“Talk to me,” she said again, some time later. But she was the one who talked.

“None of this would've happened if it hadn't been for that stupid deputy. Trust me, Erin, you'd have killed Bobby long ago if you'd had to live with him, you'd have shot him dead, fed him rat poison, cut his throat in his sleep. I thought about it a hundred times over the years. At first it was a shock that I could even think such a thing. But I saw the whole thing one morning in a vision over my cornflakes and bananas. I remember thinking,
What if Jerry killed him?
What if Jerry did it? They wouldn't do anything to him, we'd both be home scot-free.

“When it finally happened, it was over so quickly I couldn't believe it. I shot him in an argument that flared up before either of us saw it coming, it was just, oh,
Christ,
it was an accumulation of stuff that had been building up for years until finally I had had it. There was his gun on the chair; I picked it up and,
wow!
Bobby Marshall was the most surprised fellow in the state.”

She laughed, a crazy schoolgirl giggle. “So what the hell, I did it, there he was. But that deputy was such an idiot, then McNamara came, and after a while everything was unreal, and it almost seemed like I hadn't done anything at all.

“Jerry did it.”

I heard her breathe, a deep shivery sound just across the room. Her voice in the void was like velvet.

“Jerry did it.”

She sniffed. “I am the victim here, not Bobby.”

She sighed. “You were always my idol, Erin. Still are. I'll bet you didn't know that. You need to know how I've been quietly admiring your life and career for years. Anytime you won a big case, I kept the press accounts, I cut them out and put them in a scrapbook. Would you like to see it? I can get it out for you and turn on the lights. Just say the word. I know you'd be as impressed with yourself as I've been; how could you not be? I know you would never collect your own press accounts, you'd never stoop to such vanity. You've always been better than that, but not me, hey, I'm not above it. I loved seeing you excel and accomplish things. I know her, I would say to myself; she's a very good friend of mine. I'll bet I know things about you that you yourself don't know, or have forgotten. I'll bet you don't know how I've watched you at work. I can make myself up to look like an old woman and I've done that; maybe a million times I've driven to Denver and sat in the back row of some courtroom, watching you work. I drove all the way to Rock Springs for that water case you were on. And I always think,
Damn, she is
so
good, she's so smooth and quick,
and I'm so proud to have you for my friend. I've always been proud of you, Erin. I've been waiting for years just to tell you that.”

She coughed. “One day in Rock Springs you looked straight at me. Our eyes met and I thought,
She sees me, she knows, in a minute she'll come over here and say, ‘Don't we know each other?' and I'll say, ‘Of course we do, dear,' and everything'll be all right again.
But it never was, was it?

“Does it matter to you, what I've just said? Do you care? You must not or you'd say something. I know you're awake, I heard your voice back here. I didn't give you that much sugar in your coffee, just enough when you started to realize what had really happened here, when I could see it in your face.

“I was only trying to
explain
something to you, but I could see that you…

“I could see it…I saw it in your face.”

She moved and something bumped. “I wouldn't hurt you, Erin. You can't believe I'd do you any harm. All I wanted was to find something I thought I had lost forever.”

I heard her move. Again I saw her shadow against the windows; again she dropped low and disappeared into the dark places.

“Jesus, I wish you'd talk to me. Don't shut me out like this. You've been doing that for so long, how long do I have to pay for that silly thing I did all those years ago? I wish you'd talk to me about it. I know I could get you to understand if you'd just…

“Talk to me…

“
Talk
to me.

“Please.”

I heard her tremble in the dark. Her breath came out in a shivery gush.

Now a touch of anger rippled through her voice. “It wasn't all me, you know. It wasn't like I set a trap for Bobby just to hurt you. You know I would never do that. He's got to have some responsibility in what happened. Takes two to tango, but you, you could never forgive either of us. Just a word from you would've made all the difference in my life. Just something easy like ‘Hey, I understand' or ‘It's okay.' Is that asking so much? You could do that now. It would be easy just to say you understand. Then we'd be okay again. Just like old times. Just like old times, Erin. Just…”

I squeezed Erin's arm.
Not a word…not a sound.

“I love you, Erin. I always have.”

She sniffed.

“You were so good to me when we were kids. Remember that day we met, when those brats were jeering at me at recess? How you stood up to them all and told them off? You didn't care if they ostracized you, you didn't need those creeps. I always admired that. Still do. And I've been waiting years to tell you.

“Years…

“A lifetime.

“You were so much better off without Bobby. Actually I did you a favor if you only knew it. You have no idea how maddening he was, like some pissy old woman, he picked and fussed over everything. I couldn't cook, couldn't make love, there was always you; you were always there between us; there were always those subtle little reminders, and some not so subtle. Someone like me finds that pret-ty hard to take. It would've been so easy to resent you…”

She sighed. “If I just hadn't loved you so much.”

Her voice broke. “Oh, Erin, I've always loved you. Why won't you believe me?”

A long silence.

“Men,” she said contemptuously. “They mess up everything. You think that one you've got now is such great shakes, but don't bet your farm on it. He kissed me, you know. Right there in McNamara's dining room he kissed me hard on the mouth. I'll tell you something, Erin, you cut to the heart of it and your precious Janeway is no better than Bobby was. They all think with their cocks.”

I squeezed Erin's arm. I heard Laura sniff and saw her move opaquely across the room. Suddenly she screamed. “God
damn
you,
SAY
something!
Say something!
Don't just sit there in the dark and judge me with that superior silence! Who in the
hell
do you think you are?”

I felt Erin tremble against me. I squeezed her tight.

“I'm sorry. God, I'm sorry, I didn't mean that. Of course I didn't mean it. I can never stay mad at you. But now you've got to talk to me, that's why I brought you up here. Just a few words to say you understand and it's all okay. I'll tell you how it was with Bobby and me and you'll thank your lucky stars I took him away from you.

“That's what I'll do, I'll tell you about Bobby. And you'll be surprised. You may've thought he was God's gift to women…”

She laughed without humor, a dry chuckle. “He was a nightmare to live with. All he cared about was those
God…DAMN
…books!

“From the moment he found out what Jerry could do, he had a one-track mind. We laughed at first when this little boy could sign all this stuff and it looked so real.”

Again she laughed. “It was fascinating to watch him. All he had to do was see a signature and it rolled out of him. You should see what he does with Beethoven and Mozart. But Bobby wasn't stupid enough to fool with that. Bobby said,
We'll stick to the new stuff, the stuff nobody questions.
You don't have to know about papers and inks to put some movie star's name in a book. Jerry could do it with a modern pen, and we laughed, God, how we laughed. But then Bobby began selling this stuff and it wasn't funny anymore. He knew this bookseller from Arkansas and they made this alliance. The guy would bring up some books, give us a lot of money, and take away the signed ones, no questions asked. We could live forever out here on the money they brought us.

“But we fought. We fought all the time. I'm telling you, he'd have driven you nuts. He was so
damned
controlling. It was his way or the highway.

“He asked me for a divorce. Fine by me. But then he said, ‘I'm taking Jerry,' and everything unraveled.

“
I'm taking Jerry.
Of all the nerve. Where was he when that kid was nothing but trouble and hard work? Where was he then?

“Jerry meant nothing to him except as a money machine. So we fought. And it got worse and worse…kept getting worse until that day in a fit of anger I had to kill him.

“Tell
me
he's gonna take Jerry!”

Softly, a moment later: “He got what he asked for.”

Her voice settled into a quiet drone. “So I killed him. I killed Bobby.”

I heard her move. The floor creaked.

“I killed him and here was Jerry, waiting to help me like some gift from heaven. Jerry's always been so anxious to help me. He always wants me to be pleased with what he does.

“This is what you've got to understand. Jerry
wanted
to help me.

“He seemed to be speaking to me.
Say I did it,
he said to me. Nobody will know.