When Junior opened the trunk, he discovered that fishing gear and two wooden carriers full of carpenter's tools left no room for a dead detective. He would be able to make the body fit only if he dismembered it first.
He was too sensitive a soul to be able to take either a handsaw or a power saw to a corpse.
Only madmen were capable of such butchery. Hopeless lunatics like Ed Gein, out there in Wisconsin, arrested just seven years ago, when Junior had been sixteen. Ed, the inspiration for Psycho, had constructed mobiles out of human noses and lips. He used human skin to make lampshades and to upholster furniture. His soup bowls had once been human skulls. He ate the hearts and selected other organs of his victims, wore a belt fashioned from nipples, and occasionally danced under the moon while masked by the scalp and face of a woman he had murdered.
Shivering, Junior slammed the trunk lid and warily surveyed the lonely landscape. Black pines spread bristled arms through the charry night, and the moon cast down a jaundiced light that seemed to obscure more than it illuminated.
Junior was free of superstition. He believed in neither gods nor demons, nor in anything between.
Nevertheless, with Gein in mind, how easy it was to imagine that a monstrous evil lurked nearby. Watching. Scheming. Driven by an unspeakable hunger. In a century torn by two world wars, marked by the boot heels of men like Hider and Stalin, the monsters were no longer supernatural, but human, and their humanity made them scarier than vampires and hell born fiends.
Junior was motivated not by twisted needs, but by rational self interest. Consequently, he opted to load the detective's body into the cramped backseat of the Studebaker with all limbs intact and head attached.
He returned to the house and extinguished the three blown-glass oil lamps on the living-room coffee table. Out, as well, the silk-shade lamp.
In the kitchen, he fussily avoided the blood and stepped around Victoria to switch off both ovens. He killed the gas flame under the large pot of boiling water on the cook top.
After clicking off the kitchen lights, the hall light, and the light in the foyer, he pulled shut the front door, leaving the house dark and silent behind him.
He still had work to do here. Properly disposing of Thomas Vanadium, however, was the most urgent piece of business.
A sudden cold breeze blew down out of the moon, bearing a faint alien scent, and the black boughs of the trees billowed and rustled like witches' skirts.
He got behind the wheel of the Studebaker, started the engine, did a hard 180-degree turn, using more lawn than driveway, and cried out in terror when Vanadium moved noisily in the backseat.
Junior jammed on the brakes, slammed the gearshift into park, threw open the door, and plunged from the car. He spun around to face the menace, loose gravel shifting treacherously underfoot.
Chapter 38
Baseball cap in hand, he stood on Agnes's front porch this Sunday evening, a big man with the demeanor of a shy boy.
'Mrs. Lampion?'
'That's me.'
His leonine head and bold features, framed by golden hair, should have conveyed strength, but the impression he might have made was compromised by a fringe of bangs that curled across his forehead, a style unfortunately reminiscent of effete emperors of ancient Rome.
'I've come here to? ' His voice trailed away.
Considering his formidable size, his clothes ought to have served an image of virile masculinity: boots, jeans, red flannel shirt. His ducked head, slumped posture, and shuffling feet were reminders, however, that many young boys, too, dressed this way.
'Is something wrong?' Agnes encouraged.
He met her eyes, but at once shifted his gaze to the porch floor again. 'I've come to say? how sorry I am, how miserably sorry.'
During the ten days since Joey's passing, a great many people had conveyed their condolences to Agnes, but until this man, she'd known all of them.
'I'd give anything if it hadn't happened,' he said earnestly. And now a tortured note wrung wet emotion from his voice' I only wish it had been me who died.'
His sentiment was so excessive that Agnes was speechless.
'I wasn't drinking,' he said. 'That's proven. But I admit being reckless, driving too fast in the rain. They cited me for that, for running the light.'
Suddenly she understood. 'You're him.'
He nodded, and his face flushed with guilt.
'Nicholas Deed.' On her tongue, the name was as bitter as a dissolving aspirin.
'Nick,' he suggested, as though any reason existed for her to be on a first-name basis with the man who killed her husband. 'I wasn't drinking. '
'You've been drinking now,' she softly accused.
'Had just a few, yeah. For courage. To come here. To ask your forgiveness.'
His request felt like an assault. Agnes almost rocked backward as though struck.
'Can you, will you, forgive me, Mrs. Lampion?'
By nature, she was unable to hold fast to resentment, couldn't nurture a grudge, and was incapable of vengeance. She had forgiven even her father, who had put her through hell for so long, who had blighted the lives of her brothers, and who had killed her mother. Forgiving was not the same as condoning. Forgiving did not mean that you had to exonerate or forget.
'I can't sleep half the time,' Deed said, twisting the baseball cap in his hands. 'I've lost weight, and I'm so nervous, jumpy.'
In spite of her nature, Agnes could not find forgiveness in her heart this time. Words of absolution clotted in her throat. Her bitterness dismayed her, but she could not deny it.
'Your forgiveness won't make any of it right,' he said, 'nothing could, but it might start to give me a little peace.'
'Why should I care whether you have any peace?' she asked, and she seemed to be listening to a woman other than herself.
Deed flinched. 'No reason. But I sure never did mean you or your husband any harm, Mrs. Lampion. And not your baby, either, not little Bartholomew.'
At the mention of her son's name, Agnes stiffened. There were numerous ways for Deed to have learned the baby's name, yet it seemed wrong for him to know it, wrong to use it, the name of this child he had nearly orphaned, had almost killed.
His alcohol-soured breath washed over Agnes as he asked, 'How's Bartholomew doing, is he okay, is the little guy in good health?'
Jacks of spades, in quartet, rose in her mind.
Remembering the ringleted yellow hair of the fateful figure on the playing cards, Agnes fixated on Deed's blond bangs, which curled across his broad brow.
'There's nothing here for you,' she said, stepping back from the door in order to close it.
'Please. Mrs. Lampion?'
Strong emotion carved Deed's face. Anguish, perhaps. Or anger.
Agnes wasn't able to interpret his expression, not because he was in the least difficult to read, but because her perceptions were skewed by sudden fear and a flood of adrenaline. Her heart seemed to spin like a flywheel in her breast.
'Wait,' said Deed, holding out one hand either beseechingly or to block the door.
She slammed it shut before he could stop her, whether he had intended to stop her or not, and she engaged the deadbolt lock.
