helping his mother by setting the table for dinner, when the story came on the small TV that stood on a counter. In a far city, Blackwood had over a few months murdered four entire families, raped the girls and the women, tortured and mutilated some, before he was killed by the last surviving member of the fourth family, a boy of fourteen named John Calvino, who shot the monster in the face. The news provided no photo of Blackwood because none existed, but there were pictures of the victims. All the young girls reminded Howie of Corrine, and all the mothers reminded him of his own. Flatware rattled in his hands as he laid down the forks, the spoons, the gleaming knives at three place settings on the dinette table.
Blackwood had kept a journal in which he wrote of others he had killed throughout the years, all across America. Over the next day, Howie waited to hear Ron Bleeker’s name and then to be identified as an unwitting accomplice. But the killer’s journal didn’t include the names of the victims or the locations where they were murdered — not until Blackwood began to slaughter entire families. He had felt that his numerous one-off homicides were in some way beneath him, and he believed that he had achieved greatness as a killer only when he began annihilating whole families. Howie was folding napkins to put on the table when, on the second evening that the story topped the news, he heard that Alton Turner Blackwood had been inspired to murder families by someone whom he described only as “a young boy who made good sandwiches.”
Here were the consequences that Howie dreaded, and they were so terrible that during the next few weeks they gradually laid him as low as any disease might have done. He began to sleep most of the day and to lie in listless distraction when not sleeping. He had no appetite, and sometimes when his mother insisted that he eat, Howie vomited soon after. By mid-November, he had lost five pounds, and although he had no fever, the doctors began to suspect an exotic virus of some kind. Depression was the only virus afflicting him, depression like murky waters into which he sank and sank and seemed sure to drown. Days passed without him being much aware of them, so numbed by sadness that he half heard voices as if through muffling fathoms. He saw little more than shadow and light, as a dying boy might see the world with his back pressed in the mud of a pond and his lungs full of water. His sadness was so deep that even in his all but constant sleep, he experienced neither good dreams nor bad ones, and thus escaped Blackwood, who would have raged through his nightmares if catatonic sorrow had not spared him from them.
The next time he knew what day it was, he had lost more than two weeks, and it was the second of December, a Sunday, though he didn’t at first know the date when his mother’s weeping began to call him back from the darkness. Through slitted and crusted eyes, he found himself in a hospital, his right arm connected to an intravenous drip. He could tell that he had lost more weight. He felt like a creature of straw and paper. He heard some man say “dehydration from the vomiting and the night sweats. But also
His mother’s weeping was a wrenching sound, the wretched sobbing of a woman beyond all consolation, and it so pained him to hear her that he couldn’t retreat into darkness again but felt compelled to comfort her. As his thoughts clarified, he heard her say, with such terrible anguish, “Howie saved my life, he saved me from despair by the way he coped with his burns.” The man’s voice seemed to belong to a doctor. Howie didn’t care about the man, what he said. He wanted to hear more from his mother, and in a while he did: “I bought a gun. To kill my husband. For what he’d done, the fire. But by the time they set bail and he found a way to post it, I saw Howie wasn’t just going to live, he was going to thrive. I had to control my rage for Howie’s sake. Day after day, year after year, he’s been my hero, such courage for a little guy like him. He has such strength, and he’s always been the source of mine.”
Howie had never thought of himself as his mother’s hero, not anyone’s hero. He was just a bad-luck boy, someone a father couldn’t love, Scarface, Eight-Fingered Freak, Butt-Ugly Dugley, determined to live only because he was afraid to die. In a voice as dry as burnt toast, he said, “Mom,” and had to say it twice again before she heard him and came to his bedside. Her eyes were bloodshot, her nose rubbed red by Kleenex, her pale cheeks glistening with tears, but she was as pretty as ever. Howie had always been proud of how pretty his mom was. He sometimes wondered if any pretty girl would ever like him, but he didn’t waste much time wondering about it because his mother and his sister were pretty enough to last him a lifetime, just knowing they liked him. Now, as his mother leaned close, he said, “I’m all right now,” and he was.
The following summer, a week short of his thirteenth birthday, on the second anniversary of the episode with Blackwood, Howie woke in the morning to the sound of wind whistling in the eaves. When he looked at his bedroom window, a single black feather, about four inches in length, with a gray quill, danced against the glass. He watched it for more than ten minutes before at last the warm June wind carried it away.
Year after year, on that day, although Blackwood was dead and gone, a night-black raven’s feather came to Howie by one means or another: spiraling out of a tree to brush across his face, sliding out of a newspaper when he opened it to read, stuck to the bottom of his shoe along with a bit of tramped-on chewing gum, under the driver’s- side windshield wiper when he returned to the car from a trip to the mall, once inexplicably in his jacket pocket when he reached for coins to feed a vending machine.… Each time, although he came to expect this curious apparition, the sight of the feather sent a frisson of terror through him, a shiver that was almost convulsive, though it never lasted more than a few minutes.
Howie grew up, shaved off what hair he had because shaved heads were now stylish, became a Realtor, and eventually opened his own successful brokerage even though he was scrupulous about revealing every property’s flaws to every potential buyer. Medicine advanced, but not in any way that would allow a minimization of his scars; but he had settled into his looks and did not brood about them. He sold a starter house to a pretty woman named Felicity Callaway, and when she got her license as a Realtor, she marketed properties through his brokerage. They had worked together almost a year when, much to his surprise, she said, “What the hell does a girl have to do to get asked on a date by you? Or isn’t there any interest?” Months later, when she accepted his proposal of marriage, she said, “You’re the most honest man I’ve ever known. I’ve never heard you tell a lie, not one, I feel so safe with you.”
Still the raven’s feather came each year, and Howie wondered somewhat more about it when he and Felicity had children. But he figured that if he worried excessively about the feather and what it implied, he might be inviting something into his life that he would regret. Someone once said that if you painted the devil on the walls often enough, you got the devil on the stairs, his footsteps approaching.
7
On an autumn evening, when Howie was thirty-two and the father of three beautiful children, as he sat in his favorite armchair, reading a novel, he felt a sudden relief, as if a burden had been lifted from him that he hadn’t known he was carrying. The curious sensation, not related to any apparent cause, was so extraordinary that he had to put his book aside and get at once to his feet. For a moment, because his life had been going so well for so long and because he knew how abruptly good fortune could pivot to bad, he imagined that this new buoyancy of spirit was instead light-headedness, the first — and only benign — symptom in a series that would grow rapidly worse until something catastrophic, like a stroke or a heart attack, felled him. But he was not pessimistic by nature, and as the sense of relief persisted, he went looking for Felicity. He found her in the kitchen, and he kissed her more than once. He discovered the kids — Mia, Leo, and Josh — watching TV instead of doing their homework, but he did not scold them.
In his study, he sat at his desk, staring at the phone, certain there was someone with whom he must speak, though he could not think who that might be. One of the desk drawers contained hanging files that held copies of various insurance policies, among other things. Howie didn’t at first realize why he opened the drawer — and then he knew. The final file contained a sealed envelope. He slit it open and removed a five-dollar bill and a pair of ones, the seven bucks that he had kept from Blackwood’s thirty, for the sandwiches. All these years, he had felt that this money could buy him only bad luck, and he had even been reluctant to give it away for fear that it came with a curse that he would be passing to someone else. He didn’t know why the money should suddenly be clean, but he felt that it was, and he decided to drop it in the poor box at church.
The following day, one of the lead stories on the television news concerned several bizarre murders in a distant city, culminating in an attack on the home of a homicide detective named John Calvino, the same person who, twenty years earlier, at the age of fourteen, killed Alton Turner Blackwood. These new murders were of families and seemed eerily reminiscent of Blackwood’s killing spree two decades earlier. Howie realized that the inexplicable feeling of relief that overcame him while he was reading in the armchair had occurred at the very hour that Calvino’s wife and children were targeted in their own home. He followed the story for a couple of days, both
