He stepped outside, leaving Tal alone in the house.
As he walked through the entry foyer and into the spacious first floor a feeling of disquiet came over him. It wasn’t the queasy sense that somebody’d just died here; it was that the house was such an unlikely setting for death. He looked over the yellow-and-pink floral upholstery, the boldly colorful abstracts on the walls, the gold-edged china and prismatic glasses awaiting parties, the collection of crystal animals, the Moroccan pottery, shelves of well-thumbed books, framed snapshots on the walls and mantel. Two pairs of well-worn slippers — a man’s size and a woman’s — sat poignantly together by the back door. Tal imagined the couple taking turns to be the first to rise, make coffee and brave the dewy cold to collect the New York Times or the Westbrook Ledger.
The word that came to him was “home.” The idea of the owners here shooting themselves was not only disconcerting, it was downright eerie.
Tal noticed a sheet of paper weighted down by a crystal vase and he blinked in surprise as he read it.
To our friends:
We’re making this decison with great contentment in hearts, joyous in the knowldge that we’ll be together forever.
Both Patsy and Don Benson had signed it. He stared at the words for a moment then wandered to the den, which was cordoned off with crime scene tape. He stopped cold, gasping faintly.
Blood.
On the couch, on the carpet, on the wall.
He could clearly see where the couple had been when they’d died; the blood explained the whole scenario to him. Brown, opaque, dull. He found himself breathing shallowly, as if the stain were giving off toxic fumes.
Tal stepped back into the living room and decided to fill out as much of the questionnaire as he could. Sitting on a couch he clicked a pen point out and picked up a book from the coffee table to use as a writing surface. He read the title: Making the Final Journey: The Complete Guide to Suicide and Euthanasia.
Okay…I don’t think so. He replaced the book and made a less troubling lap desk from a pile of magazines. He filled out some of the details, then he paused, aware of the front door opening. Footsteps sounded on the foyer tile and a moment later a stocky man in an expensive suit walked into the den. He frowned.
“Sheriff’s Department,” Tal said and showed his ID, which the man looked at carefully.
“I’m their lawyer. George Metzer,” he said slowly, visibly shaken. “Oh, this is terrible. Just terrible. I got a call from somebody in your department. My secretary did, I mean…You want to see some ID?”
Tal realized that a Real Cop would have asked for it right up front. “Please.”
He looked over the driver’s license and nodded, then gazed past the man’s pudgy hand and looked again into the den. The bloodstains were like brown laminate on cheap furniture.
“Was there a note?” the lawyer asked, putting his wallet away.
Tal walked into the dining room. He nodded toward the note.
The lawyer looked it over, shook his head again. He glanced into the den and blinked, seeing the blood. Turned away.
Tal showed Metzer the questionnaire. “Can I ask you a few questions? For our statistics department? It’s anonymous. We don’t use names.”
“Sure, I guess.”
Tal began querying the man about the couple. He was surprised to learn they were only in their mid-sixties.
“Any children?”
“No. No close relatives at all. A few cousins they never see…Never saw, I mean. They had a lot of friends, though. They’ll be devastated.”
He got some more information, troubled he had to leave blank the questions that could only be answered by the responding officers. Tal felt he had nearly enough to process the data but one more question needed an answer.
9. Apparent motive for the incident:
“You have any idea why they’d do this?” Tal asked.
“I know exactly,” Metzer said. “Don was ill.”
Tal glanced down at the note again and noticed that the writing was unsteady and a few of the words were misspelled. LaTour’d said something about them drinking but Tal remembered seeing a wicker basket full of medicine bottles sitting on the island in the kitchen. He mentioned this then asked, “Did one of them have some kind of palsy? Nerve disease?”
The lawyer said, “No, it was heart problems. Bad ones.”
In space number 9 Tal wrote: Illness. Then he asked, “And his wife?”
“No, Patsy was in good health. But they were very devoted to each other. Totally in love. She must’ve decided she didn’t want to go on without him.”
“Was it terminal?”
“Not the way he described it to me,” the lawyer said. “But he could’ve been bedridden for the rest of his life. I doubt Don could’ve handled that. He was so active, you know.”
Tal signed the questionnaire, folded and slipped it into his pocket.
The round man gave a sigh. “I should’ve guessed something was up. They came to my office a couple of weeks ago and made a few changes to the will and they gave me instructions for their memorial service. I thought it was just because Don was going to have the surgery, you know, thinking about what would happen if…But I should’ve read between the lines. They were planning it then, I’ll bet.”
He gave a sad laugh. “You know what they wanted for their memorial service? See, they weren’t religious so they wanted to be cremated then have their friends throw a big party at the club and scatter their ashes on the green at the eighteenth hole.” He grew somber again. “It never occurred to me they had something like this in mind. They seemed so happy, you know? Crazy fucked-up life sometimes, huh? Anyway, I’ve got to meet with this guy outside. Here’s my card. Call me, you got any other questions, Detective.”
Tal walked around the house one more time. He glanced at the calendar stuck to the refrigerator with two magnets in the shape of lobsters. Newport Rhode Island was written in white across the bright red tails. In the calendar box for yesterday there was a note to take the car in to have the oil changed. Two days before that Patsy’d had a hair appointment.
Today’s box was empty. And there was nothing in any of the future dates for the rest of April. Tal looked through the remaining months. No notations. He made a circuit of the first floor, finding nothing out of the ordinary.
Except, someone might suggest, maybe the troubled spirits left behind by two people alive that morning and now no longer so.
Tal Simms, mathematician, empirical scientist, statistician, couldn’t accept any such presence. But he hardly needed to in order to feel a churning disquiet. The stains of opaque blood that had spoiled the reassuring comfort of this homey place were as chilling as any ghost could be.
When he was studying math at Cornell ten years earlier Talbot Simms dreamed of being a John Nash, a Pierre de Fermat, a Euler, a Bernoulli. By the time he hit grad school and looked around him, at the other students who wanted to be the same, he realized two things: one, that his love of the beauty of mathematics was no less than it had ever been but, two, he was utterly sick of academics.
What was the point? he wondered. Writing articles that no one read? Becoming a professor? He could have done so easily thanks to his virtually perfect test scores and grades but that life to him was like a Mobius strip — the twisted ribbon with a single surface that never ends. Teaching more teachers to teach…