"At the far end of this place, there's part of a mud wall and a lot of blood on the ground. I saw a busted-up M-16 lying next to a big iron cookpot hung up over a burned-out fire. Somebody had did a job on that M-16. They busted the stock right off, and the barrel was all bent out of true. I looked into the cookpot and wished I hadn't even thought of it. Through the froth on top, I could see bones floating down in this kind of jelly, this soupy jelly. Long bones, like leg bones. And a rib cage."
"And then I saw what I really didn't want to see. Next to the pot was a baby. Cut in half—just sliced in half, right across the belly. There was maybe a foot of ground between the top half and the bottom half, where his guts were. It was a boy. Maybe a year old. And he wasn't any ordinary Yard baby, because he had blue eyes. And his nose was different—straight, like ours."
Bo knotted his hands together and stared at them. "It was like we were killing our own, you know? Like we were killing our own. I couldn't take it anymore. I said to myself, This is too weird, all I'm doing from now on is concentrating on getting out of this place. I said, I'm through with seeing things. This right here is it. I said, From now on, all I'm doing is following orders—man, I'm already done."
Father Joe waited a second, nodding like a sage. "Do you feel better about this incident, now that you've told the group about it?"
"I don't know." Bo retreated into himself. "Maybe."
Jack hesitantly raised his hand a couple of inches off his lap. "I don't want to keep going up on my roof. Could we talk about that some more?"
"You never heard of willpower?" Lester asked.
The meeting broke up a little while later, and Bo disappeared almost instantly. I helped Harry and Frank stack the chairs while Father Joe told me how much I'd gotten out of the meeting. "These feelings are hard to let go of. Lots of times I've seen men experience things they couldn't even grasp until a couple of days went by." He put a hand on my shoulder. "You might not believe this, Tim, but something happened to you while Bo was sharing with us. He reached you. Come back soon, will you, and let the others help you get through it?"
I said I'd think about it.
6
When I opened the door to my loft, the red light on the answering machine flashed like a beacon in the darkness, but I ignored it and went into the kitchen, turning on lights along the way. I couldn't even imagine wanting to talk to anyone. I wondered if I would ever know the truth about anything at all, if the actual shape of my life, of other lives too, would ever remain constant. What had really happened in Bachelor's encampment? What had John met there and what had he done? I made myself a cup of herbal tea, carried it back into the main part of the loft, and sat down in front of the paintings that had been shipped from Millhaven. I had looked at them during the long nights of work, been pleased and delighted by them, but until this moment I had never really seen them—seen them together.
The Vuillard was a much greater painting than Byron Dorian's, but by whose standards? John Ransom's? April's? By mine, at least at this moment, they had so much in common that they spoke in the same voice. For all their differences, each seemed crammed with possibility, with utterance, like Glenroy Breakstone's saxophone or like the human throat—overflowing with expression. It occurred to me that for me, both paintings concerned the same man. The isolated boy who stared out of Vuillard's deceptively comfortable world would grow into the man turned toward Byron Dorian's despairing little bar. Bill Damrosch in childhood, Bill Damrosch near the end of his life—the painted figures seemed to have leapt onto the wall from the pages of my manuscript, as if where Fee Bandolier went, Damrosch trailed after. Heinz Stenmitz meant that I was part of that procession, too.
The red light blinked at my elbow, and I finished the tea, set down the cup, and pushed the playback button.
"It's Tom," said his voice. "Are you home? Are you going to answer? Well, why aren't you home? I wanted to talk to you about something kind of interesting that turned up yesterday. Maybe I'm crazy. But do you remember talking about Lenny Valentine? Turns out he's not fictional, he's real after all. Do we care? Does it matter? Call me back. If you don't, I'll try you again. This is a threat."
I rewound the tape, looking across the room at the paintings, trying to remember where I had heard or read the name Lenny Valentine—it had the oddly unreal "period" atmosphere of an old paperback with a tawdry cover. Then I remembered that Tom had used Lenny Valentine as one of the possible sources for the name Elvee Holdings. How could this hypothetical character be "real after all"? I didn't think I wanted to know, but I picked up the receiver and dialed.
7
I waited through his message, and said, "Hi, it's Tim. What are you trying to say? There is no Lenny—"
Tom picked up and started talking. "Oh, good. You got my message. You can deal with it or not, that's up to you, but I think this time I'm going to have to do something, for once in my life."
"Slow down," I said, slightly alarmed and even more puzzled than before. Tom's words had flown past so, quickly that I could now barely retain them. "We have to decide about what?"
"Let me tell you what I've been doing lately," Tom said. For a week or so, he had busied himself with the two or three other cases he had mentioned to me in the hospital, but without shedding the depression I had seen there. "I was just going through the motions. Two of them turned out all right, but I can't take much credit for that. Anyhow, I decided to take another look through all those Allentowns, and any other town with a name that seemed possible, to see if I could find anything I missed the first time."
"And you found Lenny Valentine?"
"Well, first I found Jane Wright," he said. "Remember Jane? Twenty-six, divorced, murdered in May 1977?"
"Oh, no," I said.
"Exactly. Jane Wright lived in Allerton, Ohio, a town of about fifteen thousand people on the Ohio River. Nice little place, I'm sure. From 1973 to 1979, they had a few random murders— well, twelve actually, two a year, bodies in fields, that kind of thing—and about half of them went unsolved, but I gather from the local paper that most people assumed that the killer, if there was one single killer, was some kind of businessman whose work took him through town every now and then. And then they stopped."
"Jane Wright," I said. "In Allerton, Ohio. I don't get it."
"Try this. The name of the homicide detective in charge of the case was Leonard Valentine."
"It can't be," I said. "This is impossible. We had this all worked out. Paul Fontaine was in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in May of 'seventy-seven."
"Precisely. He was in Pennsylvania."
"That old man I talked to, Hubbel, pointed right at Fontaine's picture."
"Maybe his eyesight isn't too good."
"His eyesight is terrible," I said, remembering him pushing his beak into the photograph.
Tom said nothing for a moment, and I groaned. "You know what this means? Paul Fontaine is the only detective in Millhaven, as far as we know, who could not have killed Jane Wright. So what was he doing at that house?"
"I suppose he was beginning a private little investigation of his own," Tom said. "Could it be a coincidence that a woman named Jane Wright is killed in a town with the right sort of name in the right month of the right year? And that the detective in charge of the case has the initials LV, as in Elvee? Is there any way you can see that as coincidental?"