glanced quickly at the other side of the street, spun around and raced over the tilting lawn. When he had run past the side of the house and veered toward the backyard, he stopped short, startled by what he was looking at.
For the first time, Mark realized that the other residents of Michigan Street had been mowing the areas of the lawn visible from the street. Behind the house, the lawn had disappeared beneath a riot of tall weeds and field grass. Queen Anne’s lace and tiger lilies shone within the waist-high growth. Circles of dead leaves and gray mulch surrounded the bases of the giant oak trees. Mark felt as if suddenly he had been transported to another country. Insects buzzed. As soon as he waded into the tangle, a small animal exploded into motion near his right foot and scurried deeper into the tall grass. Startled by what had been done to the rear of the house, he scarcely noticed the ruckus. It had been modified out of all recognition. He realized that he was looking at what the eight-foot concrete wall had been built to conceal.
Alongside the kitchen on the uphill side of the house, someone had added a strikingly eccentric structure. To Mark, the addition only barely suggested the existence of anything that could be considered a room, but a room he supposed it had to be: a room like a space in a steeply pitched attic. The roofline dropped to within three feet of the ground and met a short exterior wall. It looked like the side of a big, big pup tent made of roofing tiles. He could not imagine why anyone would build such a thing—a long, windowless room pinched down into itself by a steeply slanting roof.
In the few moments since he had come around the side of the house, the air had truly darkened. Hasten hasten, night comes on. Mark pushed through the tall field grass, and the tiger lilies bobbed their heads. Another little life shot panicked away from his foot. A dry, jungly odor of rot arose from a clump of bindweed.
Close up, the added room proved to be ill-constructed and in need of repair. Nothing quite lined up or lay flat. Long chips of paint had flaked off the boards alongside the kitchen door. Mark went up three broken steps and peered through a narrow glass panel. A layer of gray dust kept him from seeing any more than the vague shapes of the counters and the arched entrance, identical to that in his house, to the dining room. The arch carved in the wall looked like a trick of perspective. He rattled the doorknob.
The air around him had advanced another stage toward nightfall, though the sky was still almost bright. Mark peeled the topmost shirt off his body and wrapped it around his right fist. He had been seeing himself do this since leaving Jimbo; now it felt as though he were acting mechanically, without volition. Hurry hurry, little boy, do your worst, dark dark night approacheth. He punched the narrow window with his padded hand. Shards of dusty glass flew inward, clattered tinkling to the floor, and burst into fragments. So softly he barely noticed, something odd and as physical as a smell streamed through the broken window and fastened on him. Jagged sections of broken glass clung to the sides of the frame, and these he snapped off with sharp, efficient raps of his hand. He unrolled the T- shirt from his hand, brushed off shards of glass, draped it around his neck, and reached in. His fingers found the doorknob, which felt simultaneously gritty and sticky, almost greasy. He revolved the knob, unlocking the door, and withdrew his arm. Then he opened the door the width of a boy’s slender body and, in accord with the plans he had decided upon hours earlier, slipped into the dark kitchen.
For a second or two, he was able to register a sense of emptiness and neglect that suggested absolute abandonment. On the wall to his left, he took in a closed door that must have opened into the pup-tent room. Then whatever had settled on him after he broke the window clamped down like a vise. His eyes failed, and he found that he could not draw breath. Hopelessness and misery thickened around him like a reeking cloud. His stomach and his bowels churned. What had invaded him? Frantic with disgust, Mark cried out. He could barely hear his own voice. When one of his hands struck the back door, he whirled toward it. As if the door had come violently to life, it rapped his chest and his elbow. Layer upon layer of stinking gauze seemed to drift like spider webs down upon him. His right hand blessedly found the doorknob. He thrust himself through the frame and slammed the door behind him. Invisible webs and filaments seemed to float out in pursuit. When he wiped his eyes, the sight of his hands— trembling, so pale!—informed him that his vision had returned.
11
“Oh, you heard me talking to Jackie Monaghan about that ‘heroism’ business?” Philip asked. “Believe me, there’s no point in talking about that subject.”
“Humor me,” Tim said. “Tom Pasmore mentioned it the other day, but he didn’t know the whole story.”
The brothers were driving east on Burleigh in Tim’s swan boat, to which Philip had agreed both for the sake of comfort and on the grounds that riding in the passenger seat allowed him to scan the sidewalks more effectively. Three hours earlier, the radio announcement about Dewey Dell had given him leave to swap the agony of hope suspended for the comfort of despair, but believing that his son was dead did not release him from the obligation to act as though Mark might still be at large. After Tim had driven twice around Sherman Park, expanding his circle outward, Philip overruled his plan of making a third, wider circuit by telling him to drive toward the lake.
He pretended to scrutinize a group of teenagers hanging out in front of a drugstore. At last he looked back at Tim. “Heroism! That’s a laugh. Really. Nancy’s family was a lot of things, but heroic was never part of the deal.” He took his eyes from Tim and seemed to look at the windshield instead of through it. “You ought to do background checks on everybody related to the person you think you want to marry, that’s all I can say.”
“You have to admit,” Tim said, “it’s an odd twist in the Joseph Kalendar story.”
“Everything about Joseph Kalendar’s story is twisted. I can’t believe you didn’t know about this. I guess it all came up while you were still frisking around in the Far East. The guy was a good carpenter, but everything else about him was crazy. Kalendar raped and murdered a bunch of women, and he killed his own son. He probably killed his wife, too, so he could have a nice, empty house to play in.”
“What year are we talking about?”
“Kalendar was arrested in 1979, 1980, I can’t remember which. Turn south on Humboldt and get on Locust. We’ll drive past that little park over there.”
“You want me to drive to the East Side?”
“You never know,” Philip said, meaning that it was impossible to predict where a teenage boy might go when he ran away from home.
“Did you and Nancy ever get together with the Kalendars? He was her first cousin, after all.”
Philip shook his head. “I hardly knew the guy existed until one day Nancy told me that his wife had come over to see her. This was when we were living in Carrollton Gardens. Way west. What a mistake. I hated it out there. Bunch of snobs talking about golf and money.”
“Kalendar’s wife went to see Nancy? When was that?”
“Around ’72, something like that. It was winter—a miserable winter. We’d only been married about two years. When I got home from work, Nancy was very upset. She refused to talk about it. Then she finally ’fessed up, said her cousin’s wife had been out to see her. I don’t remember the woman’s name, something like Dora, Flora, who knows? She probably wanted money. Of course Nancy knew better than to give her any. We were thinking about starting a family, and I would have hit the ceiling if Nancy had given my hard-earned money away to her fruitcake cousin.”
“And Nancy was upset.”
“Very. Very disturbed about the whole thing.”
“Did she seem guilty to you?”
“That’s one way to put it. Guilty and upset. Stay away from those people, I said. Don’t ever let them come out here again.”
“Did you ever meet Kalendar?”
Philip shuddered.
“Nancy must have known him, though, at least during her childhood.”
“Yeah, sure, she knew him. I guess he was sort of okay as a kid, but he started to get weird pretty soon. The trouble was, nobody knew how weird. Nancy said this thing about him once—after he got arrested. She said it was scary just being with him.”
“How?”
“Nancy said he made you feel like all the air was sucked out of the room. Nobody ever knew what happened to his wife. I bet he killed her, too, and got rid of the body. For sure, she disappeared.”
“How long was that after she came out to see Nancy?”
