The AC had been on, but there was a bad smell already: human waste and the odor of spoiling meat. In the darkness he made out Grollier’s naked body, slumped against the wall like a heap of pillows with dark stains. As he stepped forward, moonlight coming in from the skylight caught the slits of white in the half-open eyes and he flinched back. All right, he thought, steadying himself. Alright. This was why he’d come, wasn’t it? To see what he’d done; confirm that he hadn’t in fact been dreaming or imagining his long evening at the A-frame. Well, here was his proof: the bearded head slumped on the enormous torso, one arm on the floor, the other bent at the elbow with the hand turned back awkwardly as if caught in the act of batting off a fly, legs kicked out across the passage; the whole body, blood-splotched from the neck down, emanating a sort of confused reproach, like some felled colossus who believed he’d been promised immortality.
He stared on. You! the man had shouted, incredulous as he recognized Matthew in the flickering darkness. You!-glancing back into the living room and up toward the loft as if suddenly understanding everything, and then lunging forward with his empty hands outspread in front of him. That much Matthew remembered vividly. What happened next was less clear in his mind, and in fact never acquired a stable outline. The fireworks lights strafing the kitchen in bright flashes that made the intermittent darkness all the more impenetrable no doubt added to the uncertain nature of the episode. Sometimes he saw himself blindly grabbing the kitchen knife only as Wade came charging toward him. Sometimes he’d taken it deliberately out of the knife block the moment he’d reached the back door, and had been highly conscious of having it in his possession all along. Sometimes it really did seem to have materialized in his grip by magic. As for the stabbing itself, it appeared to have occurred in some purely interstitial realm, outside consciousness and intractable to memory. One moment Wade was charging at him like an enraged ape; the next he was thrashing on the floor with a five-inch Sabatier blade in his throat, blood fountaining out from the severed artery in a copious gush while Matthew staggered back to the wall and stood flattened against it, aware only of a roaring in his ears and the fact that his body was vibrating uncontrollably, as if he were in the process of being sucked into a tornado.
eleven
At around five the following afternoon, he went out from the kitchen, where he’d been making focaccia dough, and walked over to the pool. Chloe was lying on a sunbed, wearing earbuds and laughing at something on her phone. She liked listening to comedy podcasts and on those occasions there would be the minor delight of seeing her break into helpless laughter without visible cause.
It was a beautiful afternoon, the light so clear he could see small insects at the far end of the pool, glinting in the air above the water.
“Coming for a swim?” Chloe asked, tapping her phone. She was wearing one of her thin cotton shirts over her swimsuit. Her hair was loosely gathered in a leather clasp, falling in dark strands.
“Thinking of it,” Matthew said. “I was actually wondering if it was warm enough.”
“I know. It’s getting cooler. I think the monarchs may have started leaving.” She gestured over to the butterfly garden, where a few desultory specimens were still wandering through the air.
“Where do they go?”
“Mexico.”
“Lucky them!”
She smiled.
“Want to hear something hilarious?”
She held out one of her earbuds, leaving the other in her ear.
“Sure.”
He went over and perched on the end of her sunbed.
“Come closer,” she said. “It won’t reach.”
He slid closer to her and put in the earbud. Chloe said a name that didn’t mean anything to him.
“He’s an actor but he also does stand-up. This… this person I know who goes to a lot of comedy clubs put me on to him.”
She tapped the phone and the comedian’s voice came into Matthew’s ear. He laughed along with Chloe, but he wasn’t listening. To be sitting there, joined to her through the looping white scribble of the earbuds, close enough to feel the warmth of her body, was a novel experience, strangely intimate, and he found himself wanting to take note of every detail of it: her arm in its weightless shirt brushing against him as she laughed; the sunlight on her fine small teeth; her perfume, which was like the scent of something grown in paradise; above all the private atmosphere of happiness she dwelled in, that at this proximity was something you could almost touch and taste and see. The intense love he felt for her seemed to dilate and sparkle inside him. He sat motionless, drinking in the unexpected blissfulness of the moment.
It was Charlie who brought it to an end, appearing at the gate in his swimming trunks. He was looking at his iPad.
“Hey, Chlo, didn’t we meet Wade Grollier? The director?”
Chloe took out her earbud.
“What?”
Charlie walked in through the gate, still looking at his screen.
“Didn’t we meet Wade Grollier?”
Very coolly Chloe said:
“Who?”
“Wade D. Grollier. Movie guy.”
“I don’t know.”
“I think we met him at some fund-raiser. Big guy with a beard.”
She shrugged.
“Maybe. Why?”
“He was renting a house up here this summer.”
Matthew braced himself.
“Oh,” Chloe said with perfect nonchalance.
“Yeah. He was just killed.”
No sound came from Chloe for a second or two.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“He was found dead in his rental house.”
“What?”
“Stabbed. They found him today.”
“What… where?”
Charlie looked down at his screen. “Veery Road-that’s the one that goes by the creek, isn’t it?”
Chloe didn’t answer. She had stood up, putting on her sunglasses, and was walking over to Charlie.
“I’m pretty sure we did meet him,” Charlie said as she looked at the screen over his shoulder. “At that thing in Aspen, where they had the hot-air balloons…”
Chloe had turned pale and Matthew could see that her hands were clenched tight.
“Don’t you remember? Must have been two, three years ago.”
“Maybe. What else does it say?”
Charlie flicked the screen.
“That’s all. It’s just a statement from the sheriff’s department. Found stabbed earlier today… Treating it as murder… That’s his picture.”
“Oh, god.”
“Unbelievable, right?”
Chloe moistened her lips, but said nothing.
She detached herself from Charlie and walked to the gate, cradling her elbows. Matthew could feel, almost on his own nerves, the horror surging through her.
“Where are you off to?” Charlie called after her.
“Lily.”
She moved quickly toward the house. After she’d gone, Charlie gave a quiet laugh:
“Psycho on the loose, she’s thinking.”
Matthew gave a vague nod. He’d known his reactions were going to have to be very carefully calibrated once the discovery was made, but he could tell already that this was going to be more complicated than he’d imagined. Aside from the need to hide any awareness of how Chloe would surely be feeling under her own, equally necessary, masquerade, it was also going to be crucial not to seem out of step with the casual attitude that Charlie, who had no reason to feel personally affected, would naturally assume.
Charlie continued:
“I doubt that’s what it is, though. Probably just some meth-head burglar who wasn’t expecting to find anyone home.”
“You think?”
“Yeah, or one of those Rainbow people.”
He plunged into the pool and began swimming laps. Matthew went inside. The TV was on in the upstairs bedroom. He could hear its muffled noise through the kitchen ceiling, under the squeak of Lily’s clarinet from along the corridor. There was a radio in the kitchen, but he couldn’t find any news on it. He fetched his netbook from the living room and found a couple of breaking news stories that had the same information Charlie had read from his iPad.