What the Night Knows (59 page)

His mother’s weeping was a wrenching sound, the wretched sobbing of a woman beyond all consolation, and it so pained him to hear her that he couldn’t retreat into darkness again but felt compelled to comfort her. As his thoughts clarified, he heard her say, with such terrible anguish, “Howie saved my life, he saved me from despair by the way he coped with his burns.” The man’s voice seemed to belong to a doctor. Howie didn’t care about the man, what he said. He wanted to hear more from his mother, and in a while he did: “I bought a gun. To kill my husband. For what he’d done, the fire. But by the time they set bail and he found a way to post it, I saw Howie wasn’t just going to live, he was going to thrive. I had to control my rage for Howie’s sake. Day after day, year after year, he’s been my hero, such courage for a little guy like him. He has such strength, and he’s always been the source of mine.”

Howie had never thought of himself as his mother’s hero, not anyone’s hero. He was just a bad-luck boy, someone a father couldn’t love, Scarface, Eight-Fingered Freak, Butt-Ugly Dugley, determined to live only because he was afraid to die. In a voice as dry as burnt toast, he said, “Mom,” and had to say it twice again before she heard him and came to his bedside. Her eyes were bloodshot, her nose rubbed red by Kleenex, her pale cheeks glistening with tears, but she was as pretty as ever. Howie had always been proud of how pretty his mom was. He sometimes wondered if any pretty girl would ever like him, but he didn’t waste much time wondering about it because his mother and his sister were pretty enough to last him a lifetime, just knowing they liked him. Now, as his mother leaned close, he said, “I’m all right now,” and he was.

The following summer, a week short of his thirteenth birthday, on the second anniversary of the episode with Blackwood, Howie woke in the morning to the sound of wind whistling in the eaves. When he looked at his bedroom window, a single black feather, about four inches in length, with a gray quill, danced against the glass. He watched it for more than ten minutes before at last the warm June wind carried it away.

Year after year, on that day, although Blackwood was dead and gone, a night-black raven’s feather came to Howie by one means or another: spiraling out of a tree to brush across his face, sliding out of a newspaper when he opened it to read, stuck to the bottom of his shoe along with a bit of tramped-on chewing gum, under the driver’s-side windshield wiper when he returned to the car from a trip to the mall, once inexplicably in his jacket pocket when he reached for coins to feed a vending machine.… Each time, although he came to expect this curious apparition, the sight of the feather sent a frisson of terror through him, a shiver that was almost convulsive, though it never lasted more than a few minutes.

Howie grew up, shaved off what hair he had because shaved heads were now stylish, became a Realtor, and eventually opened his own successful brokerage even though he was scrupulous about revealing every property’s flaws to every potential buyer. Medicine advanced, but not in any way that would allow a minimization of his scars; but he had settled into his looks and did not brood about them. He sold a starter house to a pretty woman named Felicity Callaway, and when she got her license as a Realtor, she marketed properties through his brokerage. They had worked together almost a year when, much to his surprise, she said, “What the hell does a girl have to do to get asked on a date by you? Or isn’t there any interest?” Months later, when she accepted his proposal of marriage, she said, “You’re the most honest man I’ve ever known. I’ve never heard you tell a lie, not one, I feel so safe with you.”

Still the raven’s feather came each year, and Howie wondered somewhat more about it when he and Felicity had children. But he figured that if he worried excessively about the feather and what it implied, he might be inviting something into his life that he would regret. Someone once said that if you painted the devil on the walls often enough, you got the devil on the stairs, his footsteps approaching.

7

ON AN AUTUMN EVENING, WHEN HOWIE WAS thirty-two and the father of three beautiful children, as he sat in his favorite armchair, reading a novel, he felt a sudden relief, as if a burden had been lifted from him that he hadn’t known he was carrying. The curious sensation, not related to any apparent cause, was so extraordinary that he had to put his book aside and get at once to his feet. For a moment, because his life had been going so well for so long and because he knew how abruptly good fortune could pivot to bad, he imagined that this new buoyancy of spirit was instead light-headedness, the first—and only benign—symptom in a series that would grow rapidly worse until something catastrophic, like a stroke or a heart attack, felled him. But he was not pessimistic by nature, and as the sense of relief persisted, he went looking for Felicity. He found her in the kitchen, and he kissed her more than once. He discovered the kids—Mia, Leo, and Josh—watching TV instead of doing their homework, but he did not scold them.

In his study, he sat at his desk, staring at the phone, certain there was someone with whom he must speak, though he could not think who that might be. One of the desk drawers contained hanging files that held copies of various insurance policies, among other things. Howie didn’t at first realize why he opened the drawer—and then he knew. The final file contained a sealed envelope. He slit it open and removed a five-dollar bill and a pair of ones, the seven bucks that he had kept from Blackwood’s thirty, for the sandwiches. All these years, he had felt that this money could buy him only bad luck, and he had even been reluctant to give it away for fear that it came with a curse that he would be passing to someone else. He didn’t know why the money should suddenly be clean, but he felt that it was, and he decided to drop it in the poor box at church.

The following day, one of the lead stories on the television news concerned several bizarre murders in a distant city, culminating in an attack on the home of a homicide detective named John Calvino, the same person who, twenty years earlier, at the age of fourteen, killed Alton Turner Blackwood. These new murders were of families and seemed eerily reminiscent of Blackwood’s killing spree two decades earlier. Howie realized that the inexplicable feeling of relief that overcame him while he was reading in the armchair had occurred at the very hour that Calvino’s wife and children were targeted in their own home. He followed the story for a couple of days, both on TV and in the papers, with a growing conviction that the most important aspect of the case was not being reported, perhaps because no reporter was aware of the full truth.

Six days later, Howie placed a call to the homicide division of the police department in which Calvino worked, and in a few hours the detective returned his call. Assuming Calvino must have read the journal of Alton Turner Blackwood that was available on the Internet, Howie said, “I am the boy who made good sandwiches for him. Because there’s no photo of Blackwood, you’ll know it’s true if I describe him.”

After listening to the description, John Calvino said, “All he says in his journal is that yours was the first family he intended to kill, but you saved them.”

“It’s more accurate to say they almost died because of me.”

“My family
did
die because of me, Mr. Dugley. Thank God you were spared that.”

“Thank you. I’m sorry for your losses. All your losses. But … may I ask, Detective Calvino, if in any way, any way whatsoever, the case just in the news—all those deaths—is it related to Blackwood?”

John Calvino’s silence was long enough to mean yes, but when at last he spoke, he said only, “I killed Alton Turner Blackwood more than twenty years ago.”

“Yes. I know. I heard about it at the time. Yet … all these years, I’ve been waiting for … something.” Howie realized he had put his hand protectively on his throat, and he thought of Bleeker pinned to the wall. “Even though I knew Blackwood was dead, if ever someone could come back … I think it would be him. I guess that sounds irrational at best.”

After another silence, Calvino said, “All I’ll tell you is that for twenty years, I’ve been waiting for something, too.”

A phantom finger, spatulate and cold, traced a line down the back of Howell Dugley’s neck.

After a silence of his own, he said, “Is it over at last?”

“In my work, Mr. Dugley, I’ve seen that good usually triumphs. But I’ve also seen that evil never dies. It’s always wise to remain vigilant.”

Later that afternoon, Howie decided against dropping the seven dollars in the poor box at his church. He took the three bills into the backyard and put a match to them.

By the following June, the pall of Blackwood had so lifted from Howie’s life that, at play in the park with his kids, he did not even realize this day marked the twenty-second anniversary of his rooftop lunch with the murderer. They were playing Frisbee with Barney, their dog, who jumped and caught the disc again and again with exuberance. The sky was cloudless, the velvet-green park dappled with the cool shadows of the trees. In the pleasure of the moment, Howie had almost forgotten that life had ever wounded him, and if someone had held up a mirror to him, he might have been surprised, just for a moment, that he was scarred.

Mia took a break from the game, but Howie and the boys were indefatigable. Minutes passed before he glanced at his daughter—and froze. Seven years old, petite and as pretty as her mother, Mia perched on the edge of a wooden bench, unaware that behind her and to her left, a raven sat on the head-rail of the bench back. Its inky eyes were as hard as buckshot and seemed to draw a bead on Howie. As if in response to his attention and apprehension, the bird spread its wings, craned its head forward, cracked its beak, but made no sound, as silent as Death himself is silent when he glides in for the kill.

Howie was holding the Frisbee, and he flung it with a snap of the wrist. The disc whizzed past Mia, grazed the bird, and sent it squawking into frightened flight, to the surprise of the girl and to the delight of her brothers. Barney barked, and Howie took a bow.

When they returned to play, he didn’t once search the sky for that bird or any other. Howell Dugley, survivor, hero to some and butt-ugly freak to others, did not fear either the darkness of the night or the darkness under the sun that can sometimes crowd in upon us when we least expect it.

He knew the bird circled above. Twice it came so low that he saw its shadow swoop across the grass. He never looked up.

That night he woke and lay listening to the distinctive calls of a raven: the hollow
brronk
, the deep resonant
prruck
, interspersed with bell-clear notes. Judging by the proximity and the direction of the voice, the bird must have been perched on a telephone wire in the nearby street. Howie did not get out of bed to look.

The next morning, he was the first downstairs to make coffee and to let the dog out to toilet. On the breakfast table in the kitchen lay a single black feather. He buried it at the bottom of the trash can and mentioned it to no one.

When the coffee was brewing, he stepped outside to get the newspaper from the front lawn. Something swooped low overhead, not so low that its talons stroked his scalp, but low enough that he felt the wind of its passage, and it entered the beech tree, causing the leaves to stir noisily.

On the way back into the house, Howie never raised his eyes from the weather report in the paper. Clear and sunny.

In this world of ours, there is always a chance that a day of fire will come, but there is nothing to be gained by extending an invitation to the arsonist, no matter how persistently he hints that he would like to have one.

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