Besides, calling in the police to rescue him rubbed against his natural grain, no small matter. His own identity was his first and single most forceful creation, the machine that had manufactured all his other successes, which had produced everything in his life that was worth having and that he cared about. He would protect that to the end.
Jude could believe in a ghost but not a boogeyman, a pure incarnation of evil. There had to be more to the dead man than black marks over his eyes and a curved razor on a golden chain. He wondered, abruptly, what Anna had cut her wrists with, became conscious all over again of how cold it was in the kitchen, that he was leaning toward the kettle to absorb some of its ambient heat. Jude was suddenly certain she had slashed her wrists with the razor on the end of her father’s pendulum, the one he’d used to mesmerize desperate suckers and to search for well water. He wondered what else there was to know about how Anna had died and about the man who’d been a father to her and who had discovered her body in a cold bath, the water darkened with her blood.
Maybe Danny had turned up Anna’s letters. Jude dreaded reading them again and at the same time knew that he had to. He remembered them well enough to know now that she’d been trying to tell him what she was going to do to herself and he’d missed it. No—it was more terrible than that. He had not wanted to see, had willfully ignored what was right in front of him.
Her first letters from home had conveyed a breezy optimism, and their subtext was that she was getting her life together, making sound, grown-up decisions about her future. They arrived on rich white card stock and were composed in delicate cursive. As with her conversation, these letters were filled with questions, although, in her correspondence at least, she didn’t seem to expect any answers. She would write that she had spent the month sending out job applications, then rhetorically ask if it was a mistake to wear black lipstick and motorcycle boots to an interview at a day-care center. She would describe two colleges and wonder at length about which would be better for her. But it was all a con, and Jude knew it. She never got the job at the day care, never mentioned it again after that one letter. And when the spring semester rolled around, she had moved on to applying for a spot at a beauticians’ academy, college forgotten.
Her last few letters were a truer picture of the place she’d been in mentally. They came on plain, ruled paper, torn out of a notebook, and her cursive was cramped, hard to read. Anna wrote that she couldn’t get any rest. Her sister lived in a new development, and there was a house going up right next door. She wrote she heard them hammering nails all day long and that it was like living next to a coffin maker after a plague. When she tried to sleep at night, the hammers would start up again, just as she was drifting off, and never mind that there was no one over there. She was desperate to sleep. Her sister was trying to get her on a treatment plan for her insomnia. There were things Anna wanted to talk about, but she didn’t have anyone to talk to, and she was tired of talking to herself. She wrote that she couldn’t stand to be so tired all the time.
Anna had begged him to call, but he had not called. Her unhappiness wore on him. It was too much work to help her through her depressions. He’d tried, when they were together, and his best hadn’t been good enough. He’d given it his best, it hadn’t panned out, and still she wouldn’t leave him alone. He didn’t know why he even read her letters, let alone sometimes responded to them. He’d wished they would just stop coming. Finally they had.
Danny could dig them out and then make a doctor’s appointment for Georgia. As plans went, it wasn’t much, but it was better than what he had ten minutes before, which was nothing. Jude poured the tea, and time started up again.
He drifted with his mug into the office. Danny wasn’t at his desk. Jude stood in the doorway, staring at the empty room, listening intently to the stillness for some sign of him. Nothing. He was in the bathroom, maybe—but no. The door was slightly ajar, as it had been the day before, and the crack revealed only darkness. Maybe he had taken off for lunch.
Jude started over toward the window, to see if Danny’s car was in the driveway, then held up before he got there, took a detour to Danny’s desk. He flipped through some stacks of paper, looking for Anna’s letters. If Danny had found them, however, he’d tucked them somewhere out of sight. When Jude didn’t turn them up, he settled into Danny’s chair and launched the Web browser on his computer, intending to do a search on Anna’s stepdaddy. It seemed like there was something about everyone online. Maybe the dead man had his own MySpace account. Jude laughed—choked, ugly laughter—down in his throat.
He couldn’t remember the dead man’s first name, so he ran a search for “McDermott hypnosis dead.” At the top of Jude’s search results was a link to an obituary, which had appeared in last summer’s
Jude clicked on it—and there he was.
The man in the black-and-white photograph was a younger version of the man Jude had seen twice now in the upstairs hallway. In the picture he looked a vigorous sixty, his hair cut in that same close-to-the-scalp military bristle. With his long, almost horsey face, and wide thin lips, he bore more than a passing resemblance to Charlton Heston. The most startling thing about the photograph was discovering that Craddock, in life, had eyes like any man’s eyes. They were clear and direct and stared into Forever with the challenging self-assurance of motivational speakers and evangelical preachers everywhere.
Jude read. It said that a life of learning and teaching, exploring and adventuring, had ended when Craddock James McDermott had died of a cerebral embolism at his stepdaughter’s home in Testament, Florida, on Tuesday, August 10. A true son of the South, he had grown up the only child of a Pentecostal minister and had lived in Savannah and Atlanta, Georgia, and later Galveston, Texas.
He was a wide receiver for the Longhorns in 1965 and enlisted in the service upon graduation, where he served as a member of the army’s psychological operations division. It was there that he discovered his calling, when he was introduced to the essentials of hypnosis. In Vietnam he earned a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. He was discharged with honors and settled in Florida. In 1980 he was wed to Paula Joy Williams, a librarian, and became stepfather to her two children, Jessica and Anna, whom he later adopted. Paula and Craddock shared a love built upon quiet faith, deep trust, and a mutual fascination with the unexplored possibilities of the human spirit.
At this, Jude frowned. It was a curious sentence—“a mutual fascination with the unexplored possibilities of the human spirit.” He didn’t even know what it meant.
Their relationship endured until Paula passed away in 1986. In his life Craddock had attended to almost ten thousand “patients”—Jude snorted at the word—using deep hypnotic technique to alleviate the suffering of the ill and to help those in need to overcome their weaknesses, work that his oldest stepdaughter, Jessica McDermott Price, carried on still, as a private consultant. Jude snorted again. She had probably written the obituary herself. He was surprised she hadn’t included the phone number for her service.
Craddock’s interest in spiritualism and the untapped potential of the mind led him to experiment with “dowsing,” the old country technique of discovering underground water sources with the use of a rod or pendulum. But it was the way in which he led so many of his fellow life travelers to discover their own hidden reservoirs of strength and self-worth for which he will be best remembered by his surviving adopted daughter and his loved ones. “His voice may have fallen silent, but it will never be forgotten.”
Nothing about Anna’s suicide.
Jude passed his gaze over the obit again, pausing on certain combinations of words that he didn’t much care for: “psychological operations,” “unexplored possibilities,” “the untapped potential of the mind.” He looked again at Craddock’s face, taking in the chilly confidence of his pale black-and-white eyes and the almost angry smile set on his thin, colorless lips. He was a cruel-looking son of a bitch.
Danny’s computer pinged to let Jude know that an e-mail had come through. Where the hell was Danny anyway? Jude glanced at the computer’s clock, saw he’d been sitting there for twenty minutes already. He clicked over to Danny’s e-mail program, which picked up messages for both of them. The new e-mail was addressed to Jude.
He flicked a glance at the address of the sender, then shifted in the chair, sitting up straight, muscles tightening across his chest and abdomen, as if he were readying himself for a blow. In a way he was. The e-mail was from [email protected].
Jude opened the e-mail and began to read.
dear judewe will ride at nightfall we will ride to the hole i am dead you will die anyone who gets too close will be infected with the death on you us we are infected together we will be in the death hole together and the grave
