The Throat

I turned the book over in my hands and opened it to the title page. WHERE WE WENT WRONG, or The Memoirs of a Plain Soldier, by Col. Beaufort Runnel (Ret.). I turned pages until I got to the first sentence.

I have always loathed and detested deceit, prevarication, and dishonesty in all their many forms.

'I'm surprised he ever made it to colonel,' I said, and then a coincidence I trusted was meaningless occurred to me. 'Lang Vei starts with the initials LV,' I blurted.

'Maybe you didn't flunk out of Famous Detective School after all.' He grinned at me. 'But I still hope we come across Lenny Valentine one of these days.'

He took me downstairs and let me out into the warm night. What looked like millions of stars hung in the enormous reaches of the sky. As soon as I got to the sidewalk, I realized that for something like four hours, Tom had nursed a single glass of malt whiskey.

<2h>7

The lights were turned off in all the big houses along Eastern Shore Road. Two blocks down from An Die Blumen, the taillights of a single car headed toward Riverwood. I turned the corner into An Die Blumen with a mind full of William Writzmann and an empty shell called the Green Woman Taproom.

The long empty street stretched out in front of me, lined with the vague shapes of houses that seemed to melt together in the night. Street lamps at wide intervals cast fuzzy circles of light on the cracked cement. Everything before me seemed deceptively peaceful, not so much at rest as in concealment. The scale of the black sky littered with stars made me feel tiny. I shoved my hands into my pockets and began to walk faster.

I had gone half a block down An Die Blumen before I fully realized what was happening to me—not a sudden descent of panic, but a gradual approach of fear that felt different from the way the past usually invaded me. No men in black flitted unseen across the landscape, no groans leaked out of the earth. I could not tell myself that this was just another bad one and sit down on someone else's grass until it went away. It wasn't just another bad one. It was something new.

I hurried along with my hands in my pockets, unconsciously huddled into myself. I stepped down off a curb and walked across an empty street, and the dread that had come over me slowly focused itself into the conviction that someone or something was watching me. Somewhere in the blanket of shadows on the other side of An Die Blumen, a creature that seemed barely human followed me with its eyes.

Then, with an absolute certainty, I knew: this was not just panic, but real.

I moved down the next block, feeling the eyes claiming me from their hiding place. The touch of those eyes made me feel appallingly dirty, soiled in some way I could not bear to define —the being that looked through those eyes knew that it could destroy me secretly, could give me a secret wound visible to no one but itself and me.

I moved, and it moved with me, sliding through the darkness across the street. At times it lagged behind, leaning against an invisible stone porch and smiling at my back. Then it melted through the shadows and passed among the trees and effortlessly moved ahead of me, and I felt its gaze linger oh my face.

I walked down three more blocks. My palms and my forehead were wet. It was concealed in the darkness in front of a building like a tall blank tomb, breathing through nostrils the size of my fists, taking in enormous gulps of air and releasing fumes.

I can't stand this, I thought, and without knowing I was going to do it, I walked across the street and went up the edge of the sidewalk in front of the frame house. My knees shook. A tall shadow moved sideways in the dark and then froze before a screen of black that might have been a hedge Of rhododendrons and became invisible again. My heart thudded, and I nearly collapsed. 'Who are you?' I said. The front of the house was a featureless slab. I took a step forward onto the lawn.

A dog snarled, and I jumped. A section of the darkness before me moved swiftly toward the side of the house. My terror flashed into anger, and I charged up onto the lawn.

A light blazed behind one of the second-floor windows. A black silhouette loomed against the glass. The man at the window cupped his hands over his eyes. Light, pattering footsteps disappeared down the side of the house. The man in the window yelled at me.

I turned and ran back across the street. The dog pushed itself toward a psychotic breakdown. I ran as hard as I could down to the next corner, turned, and pounded up the street.

When I got to John's house, I waited outside the front door for my breathing to level out. I was covered in sweat, and my chest was heaving. I leaned panting against the door. I didn't think the man in the Lexus could have moved that quietly or quickly, so who could it have been?

An image moved into the front of my mind, so powerfully that I knew it had been hidden there all along. I saw a naked creature with thick legs and huge hands, ropes of muscle bulking in his arms and shoulders. A mat of dark hair covered his wide chest. On the massive neck sat the enormous horned head of a bull.

8

When I got into John's office, I turned on some lights, made up my bed, and got Colonel Runnel's book out of the satchel. Then I slid the satchel under the couch. After I undressed I switched off all the lights except the reading lamp beside the couch, lay down, and opened the book. Colonel Runnel stood in front of me, yelling about something he loathed and despised. He was wearing a starchy dress uniform, and rows of medals marched across his chest. After about an hour I woke up again and switched off the lamp. A car went past on Ely Place. Finally I went back to sleep.

9

Around ten-thirty Tuesday morning I rang Alan Brookner's bell. I'd been up for an hour, during which I had called the nursing registry to ensure that they had spoken to Eliza Morgan and that she had agreed to work with Alan, made a quick inspection of April Ransom's tidy office, and read a few chapters of Where We Went Wrong. As a stylist, Colonel Runnel was very fond of dangling participles and sentences divided into thunderous fragments. All three Ransoms had been eating breakfast in the kitchen when I came down, John and Marjorie in their running suits, John in blue jeans and a green polo shirt, as if the presence of his parents had changed him back into a teenager. I got John alone for a second and explained about the nursing registry. He seemed grateful that I had taken care of matters without bothering him with the details and agreed to let me borrow his car. I told him that I'd be back in the middle of the afternoon.

'You must have found some little diversion,' John said. 'What time did you get home last night, two o'clock? That was some walk.' He allowed himself the suggestion of a smirk.

When I told him about the man who had been following me, John looked alarmed and then immediately tried to hide it. 'You probably surprised some peeping Tom,' he said.

The usual reporters were slurping coffee on the front lawn. Only Geoffrey Bough intercepted me on the way to the car. I had no comments, and Geoffrey slouched away.

Eliza Morgan opened Alan's door, looking relieved to see me. 'Alan's been asking for you. He won't let me help him get his clothes on—he won't even let me get near his closet.'

'His suit pockets are full of money,' I said. I explained about the money. The house still smelled like wax and furniture polish. I could hear Alan bellowing, 'Who the hell was that? Is that Tim? Why the hell won't anybody talk to me?'

I opened his bedroom door and saw him sitting straight up in bed bare-chested, glaring at me. His white hair stuck up in fuzzy clumps. Silvery whiskers shone on his cheeks. 'All right, you finally got here, but who is this woman? A white dress doesn't automatically mean she's a nurse, you know!'

Alan gradually settled down as I explained. 'She helped my daughter?'

Eliza looked stricken, and I hurried to say that she had done everything she could for April.

'Humpf. I guess she'll do. What about us? You got a plan?'