“I’ll walk, Dad.” The Birches lived only about two hundred yards away along Sheridan road, where the shoulders, though unpaved, were smooth and plenty wide enough to walk on without having to dodge traffic.
“All right, then. Tell them we’ll call them later.”
Shortly after Johnny left, darkness fell.
The phone rang, rang. Neighbors and business associates who had just heard the news kept calling in to offer sympathy. There were reporters, who could be brushed off for now. But it was in the papers now anyway, and on TV. In the intervals between incoming calls, Lenore began phoning out, talking to relatives and old friends scattered around the country. As if it helped her, just to have the phone in her hand and talk. Andrew didn’t know where to look for something that would help him. There was Judy, of course. Thank God for Judy. She came and sat beside her father, saying little, just being there.
Somewhere along the line Joe Keogh had departed. A time came when all the police were gone. Lenore was on the phone, saying for what sounded like the hundredth time: we don’t know yet about the funeral. After tomorrow, sometime.
Then the family made an attempt at gathering for dinner. Andrew took over the phone, and rang the Birches. “This is Andy. I think a son of mine is over there?”
“Andy, good lord. Johnny was telling . . . it’s so terrible. What can we say?”
“I guess there’s nothing.” Andrew hardly knew any longer what he was saying himself. “Is John there?”
“Why, no, he left some time ago. I think about six. I thought he was going directly home, but he might have stopped in at the Karlsens’.”
“That’s probably it.” Andrew said goodbye, hung up, and punched for the Karlsens’ home.
But Johnny wasn’t there either.
Phone cradled again, Andrew tried to think. The Montoyas? They were in Mexico. Where else might Johnny be? Somewhere in walking distance.
Andrew slipped on a coat and without saying anything left the house and walked down the long, curving drive. He felt there was no rational reason for what he was doing, but he was not going to let that stop him tonight. He noticed that some stars were out. Could Johnny be standing somewhere, gazing at them? The boy would do that, sometimes. The telescope was put away, back in the small guest house near the lake.
As he walked down the drive he could hear distant surf behind him, smashing against the icefield, a different sound from that of its impact on rock and beach in summer. From in front came a murmur of light traffic, and passing headlights dazzled at him through the fir trees flanking his drive.
In the light of the next set of headlights Andrew saw that the flag on his mailbox had been raised. He himself had brought the Saturday mail in earlier in the day, and he had told the family often enough not to put anything out there over the weekend, not after that time when the checks were pilfered . . .
As he brought it back near the lighted house, Andrew’s mind registered that the little brown-paper-covered package bore no stamps, and that it was addressed, ballpoint in an unfamiliar, clumsy block printing, to himself.
He carried it inside with him, and as Lenore approached, wondering out loud where he had been, he opened it. Paper fell away, revealing a box that had probably once held a gift pen. It opened easily.
Looking at the object inside, a freshly amputated finger with a ragged, bloody stump-end that had left blood-smears on the inner lining of the box, Andrew felt something like the beginning of comfort. In a moment he recognized the comfort as of the sort experienced when the nightmare goes too far, and one knows at last that one is dreaming.
Except that even in his dreams he had never before heard Lenore, he had never heard anyone, make noises like the ones that she was making now . . .
* * *
An hour before midnight, with the drive again full of police cars, Clarissa found herself rising like a sleepwalker from her sleepless chair, moving away from the other members of her distraught family and letting herself be drawn back to the library.
Inside, she closed the door behind her, at the same time switching on one light. The shelves at the far east end were still in dimness.
In a pocket of her sweater her hand encountered a handkerchief, which, come to think of it, was part of her last year’s Christmas gift from Johnny. Dear God, let him still be alive! But it was too long since she had genuinely tried to pray.
At the touch of her foot, the library stool glided along the base of the shelves, then settled beneath her modest weight to grip the carpet and hold itself in place. Handkerchief in hand, she ascended to the second step. The seldom-disturbed books on the top shelf must be dusty, given the succession of part-time maids who had lately been in charge of cleaning.
Clarissa whisked with the handkerchief, and pocketed it again. Then her hand went out to the book she wanted, one she had not opened in more than thirty years.
* * *
November, 1946. Clarissa, widowed early in the war, had been two years remarried to a Yank, John Southerland, lately a brigadier in the US Eighth Air Force. She was preparing to leave her native England for her husband’s home in far-off Illinois; one step in that preparation was to bid farewell, for what had seemed would quite possibly be the last time, to her grandmother Wilhelmina Harker.
The old lady had been in her seventies then, though she looked no more than a well-preserved sixty, and another two decades were to pass before she breathed her last. Eight years widowed herself in 1946, Grandmother Harker was still living then in her turn-of-the-century home in Exeter. The house, like the rest of England, had been left almost servantless by World War II, and was in a gloomy, neglected state, with some of last year’s blackout curtains still in place.
Grandmother Harker had begun the interview by looking keenly at little Andrew, who had accompanied his mother. “Will he be changing his name to Southerland?” she demanded of Clarissa.
“I think he will.” Clarissa’s chin lifted, and her tone balanced between defiance and toleration. She had never spent much time with her grandmother and did not know her very well.
“Just as well,” the old lady answered shortly, to Clarissa’s surprise. Then Grandmother Harker had given the child his farewell present, a book of adventure stories, had wished him well among all the Red Indians of America, and then had sent him off to play with some neighbor’s offspring. It turned out that the old woman had, or thought she had, some very private business with Clarissa.
“When you come right down to it,” Grandmother Harker said, waving at the younger woman a fat, dark-bound book that Clarissa had not noticed until that moment, “jewels and money and such things are trivialities. At least they are once one has enough of them to get along in comfort. I understand your new husband is quite well off?”
“Quite.”
“Then I hope you won’t be disappointed that I’m not giving you anything of that sort.”
Clarissa murmured a truthful denial, and at the same time wondered: A book? What in the world? She herself was not much of a reader, and certainly no collector; nor would she have guessed her grandmother, who in her youth had been rather adventuresome in a physical way, to have any particular leaning in that direction.
The book was being extended steadily toward Clarissa, in a slender hand that evidently still retained surprising strength. The old lady said to her: “But this is something valuable, my dear, as such a parting gift ought to be. You know, you were always my favorite among your generation of the family. And now, why shouldn’t I say so, and do something to show I mean it? Truthfulness is one of the few luxuries whose enjoyment becomes more practical as we grow older.”