Nine Lives(28)

What was beautiful about the beads was that they were significant for anyone, for a person of faith or for an agnostic, which was what Arthur now considered himself to be. We all know that our time on earth is brief, the beads seemed to say. We know it, even if we don’t always feel it. Our faces and bodies are only beautiful for a short time. Our bones outlast us. But instead of making him feel worse, the memento mori beads made him feel better. How lucky he was to have had Richard in his life for the years that he did. How lucky that he was still alive with the sun on his face, and the well-tended campus lawn under his feet. In the middle distance two college students threw a Frisbee back and forth, and it seemed indescribably beautiful. Life might be the blink of an eye, but he was somehow in it.

Back at his house he was surprised to find two strange cars in his driveway, one a police cruiser and one a black sedan that reminded him briefly of a hearse, but that was probably an aftereffect of the exhibit he’d gone to see.

He was told that he was under temporary police protection and was questioned by a federal agent at his kitchen table while a police officer briefly searched the house. It had to do with the letter he’d received, the one with nine names on it. The agent wouldn’t tell him much, but it was clear that something bad must have happened to at least one of the other people who’d received the list. He was asked about all their names, and, as before, he said that none of them was familiar to him.

“How about any of the surnames?” the agent named Tom Urbino said. He was young, Arthur thought, maybe just thirty years old, with olive skin and deep-set eyes.

Arthur took another look at the photocopy of the list that was in front of him on the enamel-topped kitchen table. “No,” he said, remembering his conversation on the phone with another FBI agent, Jessica Winslow. She had thought that his father and her father might be friends. Did his father have a friend named Winslow? If he had, Arthur had no memory of it.

He agreed to having a police officer parked outside his house for the duration of the night, and the agent left, while the officer, another young man, this one very blond and with a pimply chin, told Arthur he’d be doing the first shift from his police cruiser. “Lock your doors. Don’t let anyone in. If you need anything you can call me.”

“Can you tell me more about what’s going on?” Arthur said, partly because he badly wanted to know, and partly because it eased his anxiety just to have someone to talk with.

“Honestly, I don’t know much about it myself. I’m a low rung on a tall ladder, I guess.”

“But does this sort of thing happen often? In your experience …?”

“Well, no, I guess. But I’m new here.”

Arthur, realizing he wasn’t going to learn anything more, told the officer—he’d already forgotten his first name but his surname was Clift, like the actor—that if he wanted to stay in the house, it would be fine with him. But the officer said he was supposed to be outside in his vehicle.

Lying in bed that night, Arthur thought back over the surreal day: those carved faces reduced by death and time to grinning skulls; the two young men playing Frisbee in the quad; Arthur’s thoughts on his walk, the way he’d suddenly felt at peace with the losses of his life. He’d always wondered what was worse: to feel emptiness and not know what would make it go away, or to feel emptiness and know exactly what was missing. Tonight, for whatever reason, he seemed to have the answer. He understood with evangelical clarity how fleeting our lives are, and how foolish it is to mourn those who’ve left too soon.

It was colder that night than it had been the night before and Arthur got up to close the window. After getting back into bed, he tucked the duvet tightly around him, placed his hands on his chest, and began the process of falling asleep. It wasn’t such a problem these days, but Arthur had suffered on and off from insomnia for most of his adult life. He’d even been to a sleep specialist, and when he’d told her that he slept on his back with his hands folded across his chest, she’d told him he slept in the coffin position. And, now, every time he was falling asleep, he thought of that odd phrase.

Two hours later a stainless-steel canister that had been hidden in one of Arthur’s empty suitcases on the floor of his closet began to silently release carbon monoxide into the room. It had been equipped with a specially modified valve that opened according to a timing system. Within an hour the carbon monoxide concentration in the bedroom was 3,200 parts per million and Arthur, still tucked under his covers, still in the coffin position, was gone from this world.





SIX





1





SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2:01 P.M.


Is there anywhere you can go? Anywhere you wanna go?”

“I’ve been thinking a little bit about that,” Jessica said. She was in her most comfortable chair, the leather recliner, and Aaron Berlin was pacing back and forth across her living room, making her nervous. “Have a seat, why don’t you? You want a beer?”

“I don’t know why you’re being casual about this. Three people on that list are dead, and one of them had police protection at the time.”

“I’m not being casual about it, trust me. But wearing out my rug is not going to help.”

“You have beer in the fridge?”

“Yep.”