Luther’s grandparents, or at least someone known to them.”
“Oh, my God,” said Jennie Dell.
“That happened in 1999, and you didn’t know about it until today?” Flip Auslander seemed torn between rage and incredulity.
“You’d be amazed by how little communication goes on between departments in different jurisdictions. Anyhow, Luther Hardcastle’s story put a lot of things in a different light. Joseph Lilly, for example. He was a seventeen-year-old Laurel Heights boy who disappeared in June of 2000. Then there is Barry Amato, fourteen, disappeared from South Millhaven in July 2001. So we have this pattern of one a year, always in the summer months, when the boys are on vacation and more likely to be outside at night. In 2002, the ante is upped a little. Last year, we had two teenage boys disappear from the Lake Park region, Scott Lebow and Justin Brothers, seventeen years old. Their parents thought that they ran away together, since the Lebow boy had just come out to his mother, and Justin’s parents had known he was gay since he went through puberty. Both sets of parents tried to break up the friendship. We thought the boys ran off together, too, but now I believe we must reconsider.”
“The creep got ’em,” said Bill Wilk.
“Here’s the situation as I see it,” Pohlhaus said. “Ronnie has been living in or around this city for years. He has a decent job, and he owns his own house. He is single. He likes to consider himself heterosexual. This man is neat, orderly, and a considerate neighbor. Mainly, he keeps to himself. His neighbors have never been inside his house. Five years ago, something in him snapped, and he could no longer resist the very, very powerful temptation to act on his fantasies. James Thorn fell for his CDs story and wound up buried in a secret location, probably somewhere on Ronnie’s property.
“Killing Thorn kept him satisfied for a year, after which time Luther Hardcastle fell into his lap. Luther’s probably buried next to or on top of the Thorn boy. I want you to observe that Ronnie went to different parts of the Millhaven area to select his victims, and that he continued to do so until this summer. He keeps to the pattern of one murder a year. In the summer of 2000, he goes hunting again and captures Joseph Lilly. Another body in the backyard, or under his basement floor. In 2001, another body. In 2002, he strikes it rich and gets two victims. His appetite is getting stronger. This year, he bides his time until school gets out, but then loses control completely. He kills four boys in the space of about ten days. My point is, he’s getting more and more reckless. Three weeks ago, he approached a boy in broad daylight, and the only thing that stopped him was that our professor scared him off. He laid low for a little while. Then he went into this frenzy.”
Sergeant Pohlhaus’s words would have been unbearable but for the almost violently impassive authority with which he delivered them. No one at the table moved.
“This city needs a curfew,” Philip said. His voice sounded as if it were leaking through from the other side of a heavy internal door.
“A curfew is going to be set in place within the next couple of days. Persons sixteen years of age and younger will be required by law to be off the streets by ten P.M. We’ll see how effective it is.”
“But what are you going to do?” asked Marty Auslander. “Wait around hoping you’ll catch him before he murders another boy?”
The remainder of the meeting degenerated into a contest of name-calling against stonewalling. As the Underhills left the building, Philip looked so drained and weary that Tim asked if he could drive him home.
“You got it,” Philip said, and tossed him the keys.
Bill Wilk, Jennie Dell, and the Auslanders separated from the brothers and from one another before they reached the sidewalk. All parties went toward their cars without a parting word or a gesture of farewell.
Six o’clock. Without anything to do (maybe without the energy to think of something to do), I sit here on the ugly green sofa of my childhood, scribbling in this journal while pretending not to hear the sounds coming from upstairs. Philip is weeping. Ten minutes ago, he was sobbing, but now he has settled into a soft, steady weep, and I hear sighs instead of groans. I should probably be glad he can cry. Haven’t I been waiting for him to show some genuine emotion?
Now the two of us, along with everyone else in that room, have a name and a face to go with our fears and our grief. Ronnie, what an innocuous-looking fiend. I wonder what Joseph Kalendar looked like. I could Google him on my nephew’s computer, but for some reason I feel reluctant to break into Mark’s privacy like that. Of course the police felt no such compunction, and they searched his hard disk and his e-mail for clues to what might have happened to him. Since Philip says they returned it without comment, I assume they found nothing relevant.
Which means they ignored the e-mails Mark sent me. If this adventure of his made him feel as though he were inside one of my books, it couldn’t be a conventional mystery about a murderer and an empty house. It had to be something about the house itself, and something that was happening to him there. Something he was undergoing. This “something” both frightened and excited him in a way mere sleuthing could never do. What Jimbo tells me confirms this. Mark’s paper bag traveled from the second floor of Kalendar’s house to the ground floor through a series of secret corridors between the walls. Earlier, the photo album had traveled from the kitchen to a space hidden behind a panel in an upstairs closet. I don’t see how you can avoid the conclusion that someone else was in the house with him.
Gardens at
Impossible
Distances
PART FIVE
20
In the heat beneath the stairs, sweat drizzled from his hairline to his eyebrows. For a moment his vision blurred. Through a blanket of humidity, an indistinct hand groped forward in shadows toward a fuzzy shape that two seconds before had been a paper bag. Mark wiped his eyes. The fuzzy shape once again became that of a bag. Even before his fingers closed around its top, he knew it was the bag he had left in the closet upstairs.
He lifted it, and the hammer and the crowbar clunked together. Mark thumped the bag onto the floor. His stomach felt taut, and his eyes hurt. “Come on,” he said. “You can’t be here.” He unrolled the top and thrust his hand deep inside. The crowbar fell against his wrist, and the hammer tilted into the side of the bag. Here was the album’s quilted plastic binding, taking up most of the interior. Behind the album, his sandwich wilted in its smooth container.
Mark’s mouth was dry. The little space behind the closet had shrunk around him, crushing him down. Awkwardly, he slid open the panel leading into the closet, trained the light on the inner side of the door, worked the latch, and pushed his way outside. He was sweating furiously.
At the bottom of the staircase, Mark took everything out of the bag and arranged its contents in front of him. The air was a mild gray, brightened by ambient window light to a dusty glow that illuminated the grime on his hands and the dark, embedded layer of grit on the cover of the album.
“How did you . . .”
Mark glanced to both sides, then up the length of the staircase.
Smoky, insubstantial walls: he felt all at once that altogether another world lay on the other side of these vaguenesses, and if he but pushed through the veils of gauze, he could reach that new and infinitely more desirable realm.
“Hello!”
Only silence answered.
“Is anyone here?”
