needed to conduct surveillance.
When John looked up from a display of silver jewelry featuring animals, he saw the young man watching him from another aisle, that abiding half-smile reminiscent of a porpoise.
He supposed Piper’s Gallery might be one of those stores that fostered a sense of community among its regular customers. Certain specialty merchants had a knack for making their patrons feel like members of an extended family. In which case, these three sensed that he was unfamiliar with the store, and like any group of insiders in a world of outsiders, they were entertained by his reactions.
After circling the premises, he came to a cashier’s station at the back, opposite the front door, where a clerk sat on a stool. She was reading a slim volume of poetry, and she finished a quatrain before closing the book and smiling at him. “May I help you?”
An attractive, freckle-faced brunette of about fifty, she wore no makeup. Her lustrous hair was drawn into a ponytail that looked as if it might reach to her waist. Hanging on a short chain, a silver ring encircling a silver sphere nestled in the hollow of her throat.
Police ID usually elicited a subtle reaction that John could read as easily as a newspaper headline. In this case, he could tell nothing from the woman’s response; she seemed as indifferent to the sight of a badge as she might have been to a library card.
“Is Mr. or Mrs. Piper available? Or is Piper a first name?”
Her smile was as fresh and wholesome as her appearance. But John thought he detected smugness in it, a faint trace of haughtiness, a discreet disdain closer to pity than to dislike.
Or perhaps his paranoid mood shaded her smile with a quality it did not contain. To have any success as a detective, he must remember that what was perceived was not always what had been seen, that an observer was part of the scene he observed. Only a perfect lens did not distort, and no human being could achieve perfection.
“Piper,” said the clerk, “isn’t anyone’s name in this case. It’s a title. I’m Annalena Waters. I own the place.”
From a coat pocket, John produced the box containing the calla-lily bells. He had cleaned the blood from the silver stem, though the tarnish remained.
“I see by the display, it’s a regular item in your inventory. Do you sell many of it?”
“Quite a few of the entire line, but not that many of any one flower. There are seventeen different kinds. And the calla lily is the most expensive.”
“If you sold a set of bells like these to someone recently, might you be able to describe him?”
“This is about the Lucases, isn’t it?” asked Annalena Waters.
“Then you recognize this particular set? The bells were found in the girl’s room. I believe the boy carried them with him from murder to murder.”
Her face seemed unaccustomed to a frown and aged with the strain of it. “How strange. Why do you believe he did such a thing?”
“I’m not free to discuss evidence in the case. But you do recall selling these bells to him?”
“Not to him. To Sandy. His mother.”
John had assumed the boy bought the bells under the influence of Blackwood’s invading spirit. They had been circumstantial evidence of a supernatural aspect to the case. Now they were just bells.
Annalena said, “Sandy was my customer ever since the accident that put her in the wheelchair. She was such a lovely person. What happened to the family—it’s too awful to think about.”
“Were you surprised that Billy could do such a thing?”
“I’m still not sure he did.”
“He confessed.”
“But he was such a kind and thoughtful boy. There wasn’t any violence in him, not any anger. He usually came with his mother. He was so attentive to her, so caring. He adored her.”
“When did she buy the bells? Recently?”
“Oh, no. Maybe two, three months ago.”
Returning the bells to the box, John said, “Why would Sandra Lucas buy a set of bells?”
“For one thing, they’re beautiful. The artist does fine work. And they produce such a sweet sound. Some people call them fairy bells. We call them reminder bells. They remind us that Nature is beautiful and sweet, that life will be more beautiful and that we will be healthier when we live in harmony with her.”
“The dried herbs, weeds,” John said, “are they for homeopathic remedies?”
“Not primarily homeopathic,” Annalena said. “They’re useful in all forms of alternative medicine.”
“That’s what the store is about, huh? Alternative medicine.”
“Natural therapies,” she explained. “Fill your home—your life—with the beauty, the aromas, the sights and sounds of nature, and you will prosper in all ways. Or is that too New Age for you, Detective?”
“I keep an open mind, Ms. Waters. I keep a wide-open mind.”
In spite of the sincerity of his answer, he thought he saw again that most gentle arrogance in her smile, that disdain akin to pity.
Outside, as John opened the driver’s door of his car, he looked at the shop and, through the large windows, saw the women customers and the young man with the dreamy smile gathered at the cashier’s station, not as if lined up to make purchases, but as if consulting with Annalena Waters.
The rain clouds had mostly unraveled. The sun ruled the sky, but shadows gathered under the shagbark hickories, and the afternoon seemed darker than it was.
25
NICOLETTE WOKE FROM A DEEP DARKNESS IN WHICH LESSER darknesses moved, and she found herself alone at the bottom of a well, light high overhead but shadows here, and cold stone for a bed.
As her disorientation passed, she realized the light came from the clerestory windows that faced away from the westering sun of the afternoon. She remembered the exploding bathroom mirror.
Wary of the danger of shattered glass, she moved circumspectly, anticipating the brittle notes of shards falling from her onto the limestone floor. There was no such glassy music, and when she touched her face, she found no embedded splinters, no wounds, no blood.
No debris crackled underfoot as Nicky rose. She discovered the mirror intact.
The undiminished memory of the looming figure, the strange and shadowed face where her reflection should have been, chilled her now just as the blast of arctic air, out of the disintegrating mirror, chilled her then.
On the black-granite counter lay the loop of waxed floss with which she had cleaned her teeth, and beside it stood the tumbler of water with which she had rinsed her mouth. The scarecrow figure had seemed as real as these everyday objects.
She switched on the lights. In the clear depths of the mirror, she was the sole presence.
When she consulted her wristwatch, she realized that she had been lying on the floor for longer than an hour.
Such a period of unconsciousness suggested a serious knock on the head, the danger of concussion. She did not feel concussed—no dizziness, no blurred vision, no nausea—and when she explored her skull with her fingertips, she found no tender spot.
Brooding about what had happened, she rinsed the drinking glass and dried it with paper towels. She returned it to the drawer from which she had gotten it earlier.
As she threw the paper towels and the length of floss in the small trash can, her tongue found the hole from which the first molar on the lower left side had been extracted a month earlier. She knew at once a possible explanation for the man in the mirror and the exploding glass.
The oral surgery had taken a few hours because every speck of the fused roots of the broken-off tooth had to be drilled out of the jawbone. Her periodontist, Dr. Westlake, prescribed Vicodin for the post-operative pain, which was sharp and persistent. Nicky took the drug only twice before experiencing a serious adverse effect, a rare idiosyncratic reaction: frightening hallucinations.
Those visions were different in substance but akin in feeling to the apparition in the mirror. She had not taken Vicodin in twenty-six days, but it must somehow be the culprit in this case.
