The Rule of Four

I flip a wall switch, but the room stays dark. My eyes are beginning to adjust. Taft's dining room is in front of me, baroque furniture and dark walls and claw-legged chairs. At the far end is the foot of a staircase.

Gil's phone rings again. He is behind me, calling out Paul's name. The odor intensifies. Three objects sit in a tangle on the credenza by the staircase. A tattered billfold, a set of keys, a pair of eyeglasses. Suddenly everything comes into focus.

I turn back. Answer the phone.

By the time he reaches into his pocket, I'm already climbing the stairs.

Katie…? I can hear him say.

Everything is overlapping shadows. The staircase seems fractured, like darkness through a prism. Gil's voice rises.

What? Jesus…

Then he's racing up the stairs, pushing at my back, barking at me to hurry, telling me what I already know.

Taft's not at the police station. They released him more than an hour ago.

We reach the landing just in time to hear Paul screaming. Gil is pressing me forward, forcing me up toward the sound. Like the shadow of a wave at the moment before impact, it settles over me that we are too late, that it has already happened. Gil pushes past me, moving down a corridor to the right, and I'm aware of myself in flashes, in the gaps between instincts. My legs are in motion. Time is slowing; the world is cycling in a lower gear.

Oh God, Paul moans. Help me.

The walls of the bedroom are shot with moonlight. Paul's voice comes from the bathroom. The smell is here, of fireworks and cap guns, of everything out of place. There is blood on the walls. In the tub is a body. Paul is on his knees, bent over the porcelain rim. Taft is dead.

Gil stumbles out of the room, but my eyes trip over the sight. Taft lies on his back in the basin, his gut flattened on top of him. There is a gunshot in his chest, and another between his eyes, with a well of blood still seeping across his forehead. When Paul extends a trembling arm, I feel the sudden urge to laugh. The sensation comes, then fades. I feel sleepy, almost drunk.

Gil is calling the police. An emergency, he says. On Olden Street. At the Institute.

His voice is loud against the silence. Paul mumbles the house number, and Gil echoes it into the phone.

Hurry.

Suddenly Paul raises himself from the floor. We need to get out of here.

What?

My senses are returning. I put a hand on Paul's shoulder, but he darts into the bedroom, looking everywhere-the space beneath the bed, the crack between the doors of Taft's closet, odd slats in tall bookshelves.

It's not here… he says. Then he turns, struck by something else. The map, he blurts. Where's my map?

Gil looks at me as if this is it, the sign that Paul has lost touch.

In the lockbox at Ivy, he says, taking Paul by the arm. Where we put it.

But Paul shakes him off and begins toward the stairs on his own. In the far distance there comes the sound of sirens.

We can't leave, I call out.

Gil glances at me, but follows him. The sirens are closer now-blocks away, but rising. Outside, through the window, the hills are the color of metal. In a church somewhere, it is Easter.

I lied to the police about Vincent, Paul cries back. I can't be here when they find him.

I follow them out the front door, pushing toward the Saab, Gil fires the engine, flooding it with gas, and the car roars in neutral, loud enough to bring on the lights in the house next door. Throwing the gearshift into first, he guns the engine again. When the tires catch asphalt, the car rockets into motion. Just as Gil turns onto an adjoining road, the first patrol car arrives at the opposite end of the street. We watch as it comes to a stop in front of Taft's house.

Where are we going? Gil says, glancing at Paul in the rearview mirror.

Ivy, he says.

Chapter 28

The club is silent when we arrive. Someone has piled rags on the floor of the main hall to sop up the alcohol Parker spilled, but puddles of booze still glisten. Curtains and tablecloths are stained. Nowhere is the staff to be found. Kelly Danner seems to have emptied the club of every last soul.

The carpet on the stairway to the second floor is damp underfoot, where partygoers have trudged alcohol up on the bottoms of their shoes. At the entrance to the Officers' Room, Gil closes the door and flicks on the overhead lamp. The remains of the broken wet bar are pushed up into a corner. A fire has been left to die in the fireplace, but the embers are still raw, spitting up stray flames and red heat.

Seeing the phone on the table, I think of the number I couldn't remember when Gil's cell phone went dead, and it comes to me suddenly, what all of this is. A failure of memory; a miscommunication. The line connecting Richard Curry to Paul has filled with static, and somehow Curry's message was lost. Yet Curry had made his demands clear.

Tell me where the blueprint is, Vincent, he said at the Good Friday lecture, and you won't see me again. That's the only business we have anymore. But Taft refused.

Gil produces a key and opens the mahogany lockbox. Here, he says to Paul, pulling out the map.

I can see Curry again, advancing toward Paul in the courtyard, then backing away toward the chapel, toward Dickinson Hall and Bill Stein's office.

Jesus, Gil says, how are we going to deal with this?

Call the police, I tell him. Curry could come for Paul.

No, Paul says. He won't hurt me.

But Gil meant something else: dealing with what we've done, fleeing Taft's house. Curry killed Taft? he says.

I lock the door. And he killed Stein.

The room suddenly feels airtight. The wreckage of the wet bar, brought up from downstairs, gives the place a sweet, rotten odor.

Gil stands at the head of the table, speechless.

He won't hurt me, Paul repeats.

But I remember the letter we found in Stein's desk. I have a proposition for you. There's more than enough here to suit both of us. Followed by Curry's reply, which I'd misunderstood until now: What about Paul?

He will, I say.

You're wrong, Tom, Paul snaps.

But I'm seeing more and more clearly where this all leads.

You showed Curry the diary when we went to the exhibit, I tell him. He knew Taft had stolen it.

Yes, but—

Stein even told him they were going to steal your thesis. Curry wanted to get it before they did.

Tom—