“And what debt is that?”
“It’s a private matter.”
“Are you working for somebody?”
“We all work for somebody, Mr. Parker. Suffice it to say that John Grady attempted to secure a certain asset before he died. He partially succeeded. A token gesture will be enough to undo the damage. Your client is unwilling to make that gesture.”
“The debt is not his to pay. He has no obligation to you, and even if he had, I don’t see how paying it diminishes the ‘risk’ to the girl in the photograph.”
The Collector lit another cigarette. In the flare of the match, his eyes filled with flames.
“This is an old and wicked world. John Grady was a foul man, and the Grady house is a foul place. Such places retain a residue that can pollute others. If you help me, then some of that pollution may be removed.”
“What do you want?”
“A mirror, from the Grady house. It has many mirrors. One will not be missed.”
“Why don’t you just take one yourself?”
“The house is secured.”
“Not so secure that a man couldn’t get into it if he wanted something badly enough.”
“I am not a thief,” said The Collector.
It was more than that. For the first time, his eyes shifted from mine. He was scared of the house. No, not scared, but wary. For whatever reason, he was unable to enter the house himself.
“I think you need to talk to the lawyers, or the bank,” I said. “Talk to somebody, anybody, but just don’t talk to me again. I can’t help you.”
As I spoke, I opened the car door. He remained standing, isolated in the middle of the lot, watching me.
I closed the door and put the key in the ignition. When I looked up, The Collector was gone, or so I thought until the tapping came at my side window. He was close to the glass, so close that I could see the lines in his face and the veins running beneath his pale skin. It looked too thin, as though only the slimmest of membranes concealed the bloody redness beneath.
“I will collect,” he said. “Remember that.”
I gunned the engine and pulled out so quickly that he was forced to throw himself back against the big Toyota in the next space. He hung in the rearview mirror like an infected wound in the flesh of the night, and then I turned the corner and he disappeared from my sight.
There was no moon over Scarborough as I drove home. Great swaths of cloud hid the light. Soon the marshes would flood, and a fresh round of feeding and dying would begin. I wondered what effect that cycle might have on me, and if the water in my own body might somehow be prey to the revolutions of a chunk of dead rock in space. Perhaps it affected my behavior, making me act in odd and unpredictable ways. Then I thought of Rachel, and what she might say if I shared those thoughts with her: she would tell me that my behavior was odd and unpredictable anyway, and that nobody would notice a difference if they tried to make a lunar connection.
Our first child was due, and every time my cell phone buzzed I expected to hear Rachel’s voice telling me that it was time. I had long given up cosseting her, for not only was she fiercely independent, but she saw in my actions an attempt to guard against the loss of another child. My daughter and my wife had been stolen from me only a few years before. I was not sure that I could live if another was taken from me. Sometimes that made me overprotective of those I now held dear.
I stopped my car before entering the driveway to our home. I thought of Matheson and his wife: how did they see themselves now, I wondered? Was one still a father, a mother when one’s child was dead? A wife who has lost her husband becomes a widow, and a husband bereaved of his wife a widower, but there was no name for what one became when one’s only child was wrenched from this world. But perhaps it didn’t matter: in my own mind I was still her father, and she was still my child, and regardless of the world in which she now dwelt, that would always be. I could not forget her, and I knew that she had not forgotten me.
For she came to me still. In the lost time, in the pale hours, in those moments between waking and sleeping when the world was still forming around me, she was there. Sometimes her mother was with her, cloaked in shadows, a reminder of my duty to them, and to those like them. I used to dream of being at peace, of no longer experiencing these visions. Now I know that it is not meant for me, not now, and that my peace will only come when I close my eyes and at last take my place beside them in the darkness.
Rachel was lying on the couch, reading, her hand resting on her belly and her long red hair descending in a braid across her left shoulder. I kissed her forehead, then her lips. She placed my hand alongside hers, so that I could feel the child within.
“You think the kid is planning to leave anytime soon?” I asked. “If the baby stays there any longer we can start charging rent.”
“Get used to saying that,” she said. “You’ll be asking the same question until our child goes to college. Anyway, I’m the one who has to carry another person around inside me. It’s about time you started shouldering some of the burden.”
I went to the kitchen and took a soda from the fridge. “Yeah, what about all the ice cream I have to keep bringing home? It doesn’t float here on its own.”
“I heard that.”
I stood at the kitchen door and waved a carton of Len Libby’s orange sherbet at her.
“Tempted? Huh? Do we want a little spoonful for the road?”
She threw a cushion at me.
“How I ever allowed you to get close enough to impregnate me I really don’t know. I guess it was a moment of weakness. Literally a moment, in your case.”
“Harsh,” I said. “You’re not including cuddling time.”
I sat down beside her and she folded herself into me as best she could. I shared my soda with her, despite her hurtful comments about my alleged lack of stamina.
“So how did it go?” she asked.
I told her about my day: the cops, the Grady house, my conversation with Maguire. None of it added up to very much. Rachel had spent some time going through the files Matheson had left with me. Now that the birth was imminent, she was not taking on any new academic or professional work, and consequently the Grady case offered her an opportunity to stretch some underused psychologist’s muscles.
“Mirrors,” said Rachel. “Conversations with an unseen other. A display of victims yet without any real interaction. No actual sexual or physical abuse of the children, beyond the final act of taking their lives. Even then, he seemed determined to put them through as little pain as possible: a single blow to the head to render them unconscious, then suffocation.”
“Then there’s the house,” I said. “He had great plans for it, yet never did much to improve it from what I can see. All he did was start wallpapering and put too many mirrors on the walls.”
“And what do you think he saw in them?” asked Rachel.
“He saw himself. What does anyone see in a mirror?”
She pursed her lips and shrugged. “Do you see yourself when you look in a mirror?”
I had the feeling that I often got with Rachel, that she had somehow moved three steps ahead of me while I was being distracted by a passing cloud.
“I-”
I stopped as I tried to consider the question properly.
“Well,” I said at last. “I see a version of myself.”
“Your reflection is informed by your own self-image. In effect, you create part of what you see. We are not as we are. We are as we imagine ourselves to be. So what did John Grady see when he looked in the mirror?”
I saw again the house. I saw its unfinished walls, its filthy sinks, its decaying carpets. I saw the cheap sticks of furniture, the empty bedrooms, the warped boards.
And I saw the mirrors.
“He saw his house,” I said. “He saw his house as he wished it to be.”
“Or as he believed it to be, in another place.”