Two Days Gone (Ryan DeMarco Mystery #1)(64)

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered. He turned in his seat, reached for his briefcase, laid it open on the passenger seat. He turned on the dome light, then found Huston’s journal among the papers and paged through it until he located the passage he wanted.

There is some quality of furtiveness about her, some pale aura of shame. She looks like a dancer trying to hide a limp, but there is nothing wrong with her legs; her legs are fine. Better than fine. No, her limp is elsewhere, somewhere in her mind or in her heart, in the shuffle and drag of her soul.

And there was another passage too, something about the mouth. It didn’t take him long to find it.

She is a dark-haired woman, green eyed and dusky with secrets. Her mouth is sensuous but sad, limbs long and elegant, every movement languid. Even her smile is slow with sorrow.

The passages, he realized, applied more to Bonnie than to Danni. In fact, they fit Bonnie perfectly. He looked up at Whispers, the closed door, the dim, naked bulb. “She’s Annabel,” he said. He did not yet know what it meant, but he was nonetheless certain. “They’re both Annabel.”





Forty-Three


On the drive home, DeMarco thought three times about calling Nathan Briessen. After the third time, he placed the call.

“I hope you don’t mind my calling again. But I guess you’ve become my go-to guy for all things literary.”

“I don’t mind at all,” Nathan said, although to DeMarco’s ears his voice sounded sleepy. “Not that I’m any kind of authority.”

“Well, you’re in training to be a writer. So you know how writers work. How Thomas works. I’ve read lots of novels, sure, but that doesn’t give me any insight into what goes on in a writer’s mind.”

“I think you’re giving me too much credit, but I’ll help if I can. What do you want to know?”

“Is it reasonable that Thomas could have based his Annabel character on two women? One young and the other one older?”

Nathan took a long time before answering. DeMarco did not hurry him.

“A composite character,” the young man finally said. “I mean…I don’t see why not. Maybe he used one as the younger version of Annabel and one as the older. Or maybe he took qualities from each of them to build the character. The one thing he always preached to us was the need for complex characters. It’s the contradictions in a personality that make for conflict, he said. And that’s what a story is all about. Do you know the Faulkner quote from his Nobel speech? He said that the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.”

“The heart in conflict with itself,” DeMarco said.

“Right. So…” Then Nathan went silent.

“Is there something else?” DeMarco asked.

“Sorry, I was thinking about something he said about building characters. That we—as writers, I mean—have to really take our time getting to know them. To not just jump into a novel until we have a full sense of who our main characters are as people. That we have to let them build bit by bit.”

“I’m not sure what that means, Nathan.”

“In terms of his Annabel. He was still building her. Figuring out exactly who she was as a character. And probably using various people, not just one or two. The way this one looks, the way that one talks, bits of history from somebody else.”

“You’re saying that his Annabel wasn’t based wholly on one real person.”

“It’s unlikely that she was. After all, he was starting with Nabokov’s and Poe’s Annabels. And building his own from there.”

DeMarco suppressed a sigh that would have emerged as a groan. “Okay,” he said. “Thanks. I appreciate this. I apologize for disturbing you.”

“Not a problem,” Nathan said.

Afterward, in the reclining chair that, most nights, served as his bed, DeMarco tried to ignore the recognition that something had fallen in him, some inarticulable thing that left him feeling heavier than he was before, as if his center of gravity had dropped to his knees. Not only had Huston’s Annabel become more amorphous than ever, but the notion that Huston had cheated on his wife was even more troubling. DeMarco had wanted Huston to be better than that, someone he could admire. But now the equation was changed. It was a kind of Occam’s razor for law enforcement that adultery explained nearly everything. Infidelity. Lust. Stupidity and weakness.

It did and it did not. To be attracted to the kind of life Bonnie represented, to be drawn to that hedonism and self-indulgence when one’s own life is otherwise so structured and controlled, this much DeMarco could understand. But to lay a knife across the throat of a woman you apparently adored, to take the life of your own son and daughter and baby boy, this was incomprehensible. Mere lust, sexual attraction, the desires of the flesh—how could any of it account for such madness?

In the darkness and silence of his living room, with a cool glass of melting ice and whiskey in his hand, DeMarco wondered if he was trying to apply reason to a situation where reason did not exist. To a casual observer, Huston’s life would have appeared blessed. But this was the illusion Huston had created and maintained. A man patient and generous with his students, a picture-perfect wife and family, shirts and chinos always neatly pressed, fame and financial success; a man respected, envied; a man with a life each of his students longed for. Was it all a construction meant to conceal in himself the same dark urges that drove Huston’s characters? His life had seemed a sunlit lagoon, but what currents made the blue water shimmer? A lifetime of struggle and ambition. Parents taken away by violence. Professional jealousies. The stresses of fame, the loss of anonymity. The pressure to live up to the hype, to always be better, brighter, more successful, more worthy of praise.