The Crooked Staircase, Page 26

At precisely 4:45 P.M., she suddenly knew intuitively that she was nearing a breakthrough with the story. But she needed to step away from it and do something else for a while, something fun, and let her subconscious wrestle with the novelette. She saved the document and switched off the computer.

  She always worked by intuition. Whether it was a novel or a shorter piece, she didn’t outline a plot, and she didn’t produce character sketches before beginning the story itself. She just started to write, guided by the still, small voice of intuition, which was like an open phone line to a higher power, one infinitely more creative than she could ever hope to be.

  Like an open phone line, yes, except it didn’t speak to her in full sentences, but instead in isolate images and dreamflow scenes of action and hieroglyphics of emotion and enigmatic lines of blank verse that she then had to translate into comprehensible English, into meaningful fiction. But this time, the still, small voice of intuition was in fact a voice that spoke coherently: Saturday night is for fun, go have fun, forget about Subhadra and her storm, dress up, go out, there is fun to be had, do whatever you feel you must do to be happy, and tomorrow you will write your best work ever.

  Initially, the clarity and specificity of that inner voice was strange, disturbing, but then not so much, and then not at all.

  She pushed her chair away from the desk and got up. She left her home office without bothering to turn off the lights.

  The time had come. There were actions to be taken. What those actions were did not matter. She did not need to think about them. They would come naturally to her. Intuitively.

  She went upstairs to her bedroom. On a shelf in her walk-in closet rested a small black-lacquered box with silver hinges. She had never seen it before, yet she had known it would be there.

  This did not strike her as peculiar. There were actions to be taken. What they were would become clear to her as she took them.

  She carried the box to her vanity and opened it.

  The first item that she extracted was a necklace of miniature human skulls carved from bone. Gleaming black onyx filled the eye sockets. The craftsmanship was exquisite, the skulls more beautiful than frightening. The box also contained four lovely gold bracelets fashioned as cobras.

  Durga, the Goddess Mother of the Hindu pantheon, was maternal and kind and the source of much life, but she also had dark aspects. The most fierce of those was her incarnation as Kali, often depicted as wanton, naked but for the darkness in which she wrapped herself, wearing only gold bracelets and a necklace of human skulls.

  In this religion, no separation existed between the sacred and profane. All things on the earth were aspects of the divinity. Kali, an aspect of Durga, had several aspects herself, one being Chandi, the Terrible One. The Chandi aspect of Kali was often depicted with her four arms raised—instead of Kali’s usual eight—hands gripping a sword, a noose, a skull-capped staff, and a severed human head. Of all the divinities, only Kali had conquered time, and she was, among other things, a slayer of demons.

  Tanuja Shukla did not share her deceased parents’ Hindu faith; but she hadn’t forgotten it, either. She sometimes employed Hindu mythology in her stories, as metaphor, for color, to evoke a sense of mystery, but never to endorse it. If she could have believed in a goddess, it would have been in the most benign Durga, not any of her less compassionate aspects, not Kali.

  But the necklace was quite beautiful. She draped it across her breast and reached behind her neck to click the clasp.

  6

  Hendrickson—hobbled ankle to ankle, zip-tied to his chair, hands palms-up on the table—at first sat silently as Jane paced the kitchen. She massaged her trapezius muscles and rolled her head side to side to work a stubborn soreness out of her neck.

  The light at the windows would last an hour and a half; but the overcast would steal the golden radiance and scarlet dusk that could make a California day’s end so enchanting. Following the events of the morning and afternoon, and considering those to come, nature’s loveliest pyrotechnics couldn’t have bewitched Jane, anyway. Her mood matched the gray skies.

  At the table, Hendrickson muttered. When she asked what he’d said, he only smiled at his upturned palms. His expression had no dangerous edge; it was wistful, pensive. She suspected that he hadn’t heard her, so lost was he in thought.

  She continued pacing and, not for the first time, regarded her reflection in the brushed stainless-steel door of the refrigerator. Her form was warped and blurred, her face a mask of shadows from which all features had been shorn, as though she had died and become a revenant.

  At the table, Hendrickson said, “Now is it true, or is it not, that what is which and which is what?”

  She went to the table and stared down at him.

  His gentle smile was a storybook thing, the smile of a cat who learned to be friends with a mouse, the smile of a mouse who won his prize of cheese, the smile of a boy who survived a fearful adventure and sat now hearthside and home again. Jane was creeped out by it.

  Tethered to the chair as he was, he could make no move against her. Even if he had not been shackled, she could have handled him, taken him down.

  Nevertheless, she wished that Gilberto would return soon with dinner.

  7

  At 5:15 P.M. precisely, Sanjay typed THE END in small caps, although he had not reached the end of the novel that he had been writing for the past three months. Neither had he arrived at the conclusion of a chapter or even the bottom of the current page. He wondered at the words, almost deleted them, but then left them dark upon the white screen and saved the document.

  The time had come. There were actions to be taken. What those actions were didn’t matter. He didn’t need to think about them. They would occur naturally to him. Like his sister, Sanjay was an intuitive artist whose finest fiction was not first designed and then constructed according to blueprints. Writing was always work, always, but when he surrendered himself to the currents of creative energy that flowed from the mysterious headwaters of intuition, the source unknown and unknowable, he was at his best. Therefore, the time had come. The time not just to write intuitively, but to live intuitively. The time to do whatever occurred to him, without first considering where his actions would lead.

  He left the room without switching off the lights.

  In his bedroom, he changed into black jeans and a black shirt. Black socks and black rubber-soled shoes. He took a black sport coat from his closet but did not put it on.

  Leaving the lights on behind him, he went down the hall and into Tanuja’s bedroom.

  She was standing beside her vanity bench, waiting for him, as he had known she would be. She was quite beautiful, dressed all in black, wearing a necklace of skulls and gold bracelets fashioned as cobras. She wore black eye shadow and black lipstick and black polish on her fingernails.

  They did not speak. There was no reason to speak. The time had come. There were actions to be taken.

  Sanjay sat on the vanity bench. Tanuja knelt on the floor before him and began to paint his fingernails black.

  Never before had his fingernails been painted. This seemed an odd thing for her to be doing and a peculiar thing for him to allow. His uncertainty—for it was not a strong enough feeling to be called doubt—lasted only until she had painted the thumbnail on his right hand and the nail of the adjacent forefinger, whereupon nothing had ever seemed more natural than this.

  After his nails were black and gleaming, as he waited for them to dry, his sister applied black eye shadow to his upper and lower eyelids. She painted his lips black, and this, too, was as it should be, so that he said nothing, nor did she.

  8

  Numerous one-pint white boxes of Chinese takeout stood on the kitchen table. Foo yung loong har, which was lobster omelet with chopped onion. Subgum chow goong yue chu—fried scallops with mixed vegetables. Fried prawns. Shrimp balls. Chicken w
ith almonds. Sweet and sour pork.

  There were noodles and rice. Jane ate a little of the latter, none of the former, but indulged in every variety of protein.

  At first Gilberto seemed to have over-ordered, but his appetite was as hearty as Jane’s. Halfway through the meal, she wondered if they might come to blows when they got to the last white box.

  Hendrickson disliked everything he tasted, except the noodles, and he wasn’t enthusiastic about those. He dropped the chopsticks, with which he was having considerable trouble, and said, “All I want are some cookies.”

  “There are no cookies,” Jane said.

  “Why aren’t there cookies?”

  “Eat what you have.”

  “It’s all weird stuff.”

  “You’ve never eaten Chinese food?”

  “I’ve eaten it, but I don’t like it.”

  Chewing chicken and almonds in a delicious soy-and-sherry sauce, Jane studied him, wondered about him, wondered what else he was becoming on his way to being an adjusted person.

  He shied from the intensity of her stare and lowered his eyes to the chopsticks that he had discarded.

  Gilberto said, “We have some cookies. Lemon drop cookies, also chocolate chip. Carmella made them.”

  “That’s what I want,” said Hendrickson.

  “All right with you?” Gilberto asked Jane.

  Hendrickson was a condemned man, perhaps only three hours from the moment when Brownian motion jiggled into place the last piece of the nanomechanism. Then spider-web filaments would light up across the surface of his brain as well as deep into the tissue of it, and he would at that moment forget what had been done to him and would be himself in every way except the one that mattered. But which self would that be? The arrogant, vicious Arcadian or an earlier version of Mama Hendrickson’s boy, his psyche having collapsed so completely into a past condition that no command mechanism could restore him to full wicked maturity and his job at the Department of Justice? If so, would that be dying twice, long before the death of flesh and bone, whenever that might come?

  In any event, a condemned man always received what he ordered for his last meal.

  “Give him the cookies,” she said.

  “And a Coke, please,” Hendrickson said, glancing apprehensively at her, then smiling timidly at Gilberto. “Cookies and a Coke would be nice.”

  Suddenly Jane could eat no more. She set aside the container of chicken and almonds. A few low waves of nausea washed through her, then quieted away.

  While Gilberto got the cookies, Jane fetched two cans of Coca-Cola from the refrigerator, one for Hendrickson and one for herself. She got two glasses and scooped a little ice into each one and put them on the table.

  “Gilberto, please tell me you’ve got some vodka I can add to mine.”

  Thank God, he said yes.

  9

  Leaving the lights on in the upstairs and downstairs hallways, Sanjay and Tanuja went to the kitchen. He carried his sport coat, and she carried her black purse.

  To his eye, the key to the Hyundai Santa Fe Sport glowed as if with supernatural power, as might have the sword of destiny locked in stone, which only good King Arthur had been able to draw from its granite scabbard. It dangled from a peg in the perfboard beside the door to the garage, like a lynchpin holding the kitchen together—the kitchen, the house, the lives they’d known—as though everything would, upon his taking possession of the key, blow away like so many dead leaves in a wind, revealing the truth of the world behind all of humanity’s illusions.

  Together, he and Tanuja went into the garage.

  The vehicle was spotless, gleaming as it had on the showroom floor when they purchased it. For some reason, he expected it to be spattered with mud and the spokes of its high-end custom wheels to be entangled with torn weeds.

  For a moment, in his mind’s eye, he clearly saw the Hyundai in exactly that filthy condition, but also with a broken headlight and a damaged front fender on the passenger side.

  He stared at the SUV in bewilderment. A still, small voice deep within him said this meant nothing. Nothing at all. His confusion quickly passed.

  Tanuja accompanied him to the back of the Hyundai. He put up the tailgate, and they looked into the cargo space.

  Sanjay hadn’t expected to see two 9 mm Smith & Wesson pistols, but when he saw them, he didn’t find them in the least remarkable. In fact, he knew that each gun weighed a mere twenty-six ounces, had a barrel length of three and one-half inches, and featured a white-dot front sight and a Novak Lo-Mount Carry two-dot rear. Stainless-steel slide. Alloy frame. The recoil would be quite manageable.

  There was one shoulder rig, into which Sanjay shrugged. He adjusted the straps. He slipped into his sport coat.

  Tanuja put her pistol in her purse.

  Beside each firearm were two spare ten-round magazines. She dropped one in each front pocket of her sport coat, and her brother did the same.

  Also in the cargo space lay a long orange extension cord neatly coiled and beside it an electric reciprocating saw with a twenty-four-inch blade. They would leave those items untouched until they reached their destination.

  Sanjay closed the tailgate. He drove. Departing, they left all the garage lights on and didn’t close the big door.

  10

  Part Cherokee, part Irish, part Hawaiian—the last of those including genetic slivers of various South Pacific and Asian ancestors—Jessica Washington, with her Cherokee complexion and sable hair and almond eyes of shamrock green, was a woman of many parts, including two sets of legs.

  When she ran for exercise or competed in a 10K run, she wore the legs with flexible blades for feet. Now, as she prepared dinner and put it on the table with the help of man and boy, she wore more traditional prosthetics.

  At the age of twenty-three, nine years earlier, she had lost her legs from the knees down while serving in Afghanistan. She’d been Army, like Gavin, but a noncombatant. Roadside IEDs were equal-opportunity destroyers, however, indifferent to issues of gender, race, religion, and nationality. Gavin had met her following the loss of her legs, and they had been married for eight years. They rarely spoke of her disability or her difference except when one of her prosthetic limbs needed to be repaired or replaced.

  Gavin had established a solid post-Army career writing military nonfiction and, more recently, a series of novels featuring a cast of Special Forces operatives. He’d not landed on the bestseller list yet—and maybe he never would—but he was doing all right. Jessie had proved to have considerable organizational skills working as a volunteer advocate for wounded veterans. Their lives were happy and full, especially full since Travis had come to live with them.

  This evening, it was the boy’s turn to say grace. For a five-year-old, he made of the duty a detailed expression of gratitude that always brought a smile to Jessie. He thanked God not just for brisket of beef and au gratin potatoes and sugar snap peas and baked corn and dinner rolls and iced tea and carrot cake, but also for Exmoor ponies and Sara Orangetip butterflies, for Bella and Samson and Hannah, for red-tailed hawks and canyon wrens and baleen whale fossils, for Gavin and Jessica, and last of all for Jane, which was when, as always, he ceased thanking God and required of the Big Guy a term upon which any future statements of gratitude would be conditioned: “And thank you for my mom, the best mom ever, so you have to keep her really safe and bring her back to us really soon, like not a year from now but like really, really soon.”

  They had music while preparing dinner—classic Sam Cooke—and soft piano during the meal. As the men cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher, Jessie stepped onto the back porch for fresh air, which smelled of jasmine and oak mast. The German shepherds, Duke and Queenie, followed her. Only then, with no screening music, did she hear an airplane cruising the night at altitude.

  At various times during the day,
with Gavin and Travis off on their ride, as Jessie had been about one chore or another, here and there on the property, she had heard a plane, surely not always the same one. The valley was as rural as anywhere in this sprawling county of three million souls. It wasn’t near a major airport. No takeoff or landing paths bisected it. Jets of all sizes crossed the valley, but at such high altitude they could hardly be heard. There were private craft at times, prop planes bound for days of pleasure in farther places, businessmen headed for distant conferences or scouting possible real-estate ventures from the air. But she could not recall a day in which, as today, there seemed to be a constant coarse drone of aircraft.

  In fact, it might not just have seemed so, but might have been so. She had played music at times other than dinner and had been performing tasks that took her full attention or that were noisy enough to mask the sound of a plane.

  The dogs had scampered away not merely to have a last pee of the day, but also to patrol the yard, the stables, and the freestanding garage. By their nature, especially between sunset and sunrise, shepherds were diligent guardians of their family.

  The breeze had gone to bed with the sun. In the stillness, there were occasional early season tree toads making themselves sound as big as frogs, an owl on an oak-branch perch, calling hooo-hooo-hooodoo-hooodoo, as if warning of some dark magic at work in the night—and the plane just clear enough to be tracked as it droned east to west and then turned south. Her military experience allowed Jessie to reach certain conclusions with confidence: that the current aircraft was a twin-engine model, larger than the light planes sold by companies like Cessna and Piper, and that it was being flown above three thousand feet, perhaps to avoid unduly disturbing the residents of the valley—or to avoid, as much as possible, raising suspicion in those with reason to be wary. The engine noise dwindled toward the south, and when it seemed within a minute of fading beyond hearing, it changed in character. Jessica listened until she was sure that the craft had turned east. If in a few minutes it changed course northward, there could be little doubt that it was circling the valley.