Black House

present; the rest of you is somewhere else. Sweetie, don’t you think I can tell when you’re worried and preoccupied? I might be blind, but I can see.”

“Okay. Let’s suppose that something has been on my mind lately. What could that have to do with going to the station house?”

“There are two possibilities. Either you were going off to confront it, or you were fleeing from it.”

Jack does not speak.

“All of which suggests that this problem has to do with your life as a policeman. It could be some old case coming back to haunt you. Maybe a psychotic thug you put in jail was released and is threatening to kill you. Or, hell, I’m completely full of shit and you found out you have liver cancer and a life expectancy of three months.”

“I don’t have cancer, at least as far as I know, and no ex-con wants to kill me. All of my old cases, most of them, anyway, are safely asleep in the records warehouse of the LAPD. Of course, something has been bothering me lately, and I should have expected you to see that. But I didn’t want to, I don’t know, burden you with it until I managed to figure it out for myself.”

“Tell me one thing, will you? Were you going toward it, or running away?”

“There’s no answer to that question.”

“We shall see. Isn’t the food ready by now? I’m starving, literally starving. You cook too slow. I would have been done ten minutes ago.”

“Hold your horses,” Jack says. “Coming right up. The problem is this crazy kitchen of yours.”

“Most rational kitchen in America. Maybe in the world.”

After ducking out of the police station quickly enough to avoid a useless conversation with Dale, Jack had yielded to impulse and called Henry with the offer of making dinner for both of them. A couple of good steaks, a nice bottle of wine, grilled mushrooms, a big salad. He could pick up everything they needed in French Landing. Jack had cooked for Henry on three or four previous occasions, and Henry had prepared one stupendously bizarre dinner for Jack. (The housekeeper had taken all the herbs and spices off their rack to wash it, and she had put everything back in the wrong place.) What was he doing in French Landing? He’d explain that when he got there. At eight-thirty he had pulled up before Henry’s roomy white farmhouse, greeted Henry, and carried the groceries and his copy of Bleak House into the kitchen. He had tossed the book to the far end of the table, opened the wine, poured a glass for his host and one for himself, and started cooking. He’d had to spend several minutes reacquainting himself with the eccentricities of Henry’s kitchen, in which objects were not located by kind—pans with pans, knives with knives, pots with pots—but according to what sort of meal required their usage. If Henry wanted to whip up a grilled trout and some new potatoes, he had only to open the proper cabinet to find all the necessary utensils. These were arranged in four basic groups (meat, fish, poultry, and vegetables), with many subgroups and subsubgroups within each category. The filing system confounded Jack, who often had to peer into several widely separated realms before coming upon the frying pan or spatula he was looking for. As Jack chopped, wandered the shelves, and cooked, Henry had laid the table in the kitchen with plates and silverware and sat down to quiz his troubled friend.

Now the steaks, rare, are transported to the plates, the mushrooms arrayed around them, and the enormous wooden salad bowl installed on the center of the table. Henry pronounces the meal delicious, takes a sip of his wine, and says, “If you still won’t talk about your trouble, whatever it is, you’d better at least tell me what happened at the station. I suppose there’s very little doubt that another child was snatched.”

“Next to none, I’m sorry to say. It’s a boy named Tyler Marshall. His father’s name is Fred Marshall, and he works out at Goltz’s. Do you know him?”

“Been a long time since I bought a combine,” Henry says.

“The first thing that struck me was that Fred Marshall was a very nice guy,” Jack says, and goes on to recount, in great detail and leaving nothing out, the evening’s events and revelations, except for one matter, that of his third, his unspoken, thought.

“You actually asked to visit Marshall’s wife? In the mental wing at French County Lutheran?”

“Yes, I did,” Jack says. “I’m going there tomorrow.”

“I don’t get it.” Henry eats by hunting the food with his knife, spearing it with his fork, and measuring off a narrow strip of steak. “Why would you want to see the mother?”

“Because one way or another I think she’s involved,” Jack says.

“Oh, come off it. The boy’s own mother?”

“I’m not saying she’s the Fisherman, because of course she isn’t. But according to her husband, Judy Marshall’s behavior started to change before Amy St. Pierre disappeared. She got worse and worse as the murders went on, and on the day her son vanished, she flipped out completely. Her husband had to have her committed.”

“Wouldn’t you say she had an excellent reason to break down?”

“She flipped out before anyone told her about her son. Her husband thinks she has ESP! He said she saw the murders in advance, she knew the Fisherman was on the way. And she knew her son was gone before they found the bike—when Fred Marshall came home, he found her tearing at the walls and talking nonsense. Completely out of control.”

“You hear about lots of cases where a mother is suddenly aware of some threat or injury to her child. A pyschic bond. Sounds like mumbo jumbo, but I guess it happens.”

“I don’t believe in ESP, and I don’t believe in coincidence.”

“So what are you saying?”

“Judy Marshall knows something, and whatever she knows is a real showstopper. Fred can’t see it—he’s much too close—and Dale can’t see it, either. You should have heard him talk about her.”

“So what is she supposed to know?”

“I think she may know the doer. I think it has to be someone close to her. Whoever he is, she knows his name, and it’s driving her crazy.”