The Big Dark Sky (31)
If anything about her life to date had been markedly different from what in fact it had been, she might have pulled the plug on the TV and lied to herself about what had happened, might have mummified her memory in wrappings of denial. Or she might have called for an appointment with a physician to be tested for a brain tumor, might even have sought the services of a psychiatrist.
However, being who she was, she did not—could not—pull the plug, but moved closer to the television to touch that rectangular electronic eye. Although her heart still labored and tremors shook her, she demanded, “Who are you? What are you?”
The quality of the light failed to change, and the perfect silence of the set endured.
She waited, but not for long.
In the bathroom once more, Joanna picked up the two dropped bottles of skin-care products and tucked them into the makeup case. She closed the lid and snapped the latches shut.
After putting the case beside the wheeled bags that stood next to the armchair, she took a quick shower and dressed. She booked an early flight to Denver and a connecting flight to Billings, Montana.
Waiting for dawn, which was still hours away, eating breakfast at the kitchen table, she thought about Jimmy Alvarez, Jimmy Two Eyes. Katherine’s description of the boy hadn’t pierced Joanna’s armored memory; but when he appeared in the dream, in the orchard, she remembered him at once. When he’d spoken, she recognized his rough voice and knew he had talked to her often during their years together on the ranch, only to her when they were alone, so that no one but she knew he was capable of speech. Her recollections didn’t return in a flood; she remembered nothing more than Jimmy’s face, his voice—and that he was in some strange way her secret friend.
The why of a life could never be solved in this world, although vast libraries of solemn books speculated on the meaning and purpose of existence. Nothing could be known other than the what of any single life: what happened, what actions were taken, what events occurred beyond the person’s control, what obvious consequences ensued, what impact for better or worse that one life was seen to have on others.
Because self-reflection was one of the tools with which she developed fictional characters and earned her living, Joanna had thought she knew the what of her life in intimate and vivid detail. Now she understood that, for three or four years of her childhood, her recollections were sketchy at best, not merely because time was a thief of memories, but also because someone had cast upon her a spell of forgetting.
She didn’t write mystery novels per se, but mysteries of one kind or another coiled in the heart of every engaging novel. Because she was enchanted by the mysteries of existence and was as well a writer of stories concerned with things often unfathomable, hidden, recondite, she couldn’t abide not knowing the full truth of her past.
In countless novels, however, revelation led not just to light in the darkness, but also as often to danger, loss, and death. Of course, events in life didn’t unfold as they did in fiction. The real world didn’t provide as many happy endings as were found in novels.
22
One bright beam speared low across the floor, with darkness all around. Perhaps two birds on a roost unseen watched the fat spider as it explored the path of light.
In the church that stood now as a shrine to murder, Ophelia Poole had found one loose nail in a plank. With her fingernails, she had worked it a quarter of an inch out of the wood, but then it had seized up.
The Tac Light that Optime left with her featured a wrist strap of tough fabric. She managed to detach the strap and knot it around the head of the nail, which gave her leverage. Sitting on the floor, legs splayed to each side of the job, she worked the nail back and forth, extracting it a millimeter at a time.
Freed from the underlying joist, it proved to be two inches long and dark with time, but not rusty. A stiff little length of steel. Although it was not much of a weapon, it was something. Given a chance, she might be able to stab Optime in the eye.
She got to her feet and swept the sanctuary with the Tac Light. The two crows were perched on the chancel railing. Their eyes were like drops of oil, as black as their feathers. They worked their beaks as if speaking to her on a frequency that human beings could not hear.
In the second pew on the right, she stretched out on her left side and clicked off the light. The pew was a hard bed, though no harder than the planks on which it stood. The odor of decomposition, seeping upward from the basement, was noticeably less offensive even just two feet off the floor.
She listened to the beams and rafters contract minutely as the heat of the day was leeched from them by the night, to the tics and creaks of the floorboards as gravity tested them as it had for many decades, to the occasional rustle of the birds shifting on their roost.
Clutching the nail tightly in her right hand, she whispered, “So this is why I’m still alive, Octavia. This is why I didn’t die with you.”
She didn’t think she would sleep, but of course she slept. She woke a few times and listened for shuffling footsteps, though there were none.
Once, she realized the crows had left the chancel railing and were perched on the back of the pew on which she was lying, directly above her. She didn’t switch on the light or chase them away. She decided to think of them as angels watching over her, though nothing about them seemed holy.
23
Someone spoke his name. If sleep had brought dreams, Wyatt Rider didn’t remember them when he woke, lying on his left side, fully clothed except for his shoes. At first he couldn’t identify the room revealed by the low light of the bedside lamp. Then he remembered Rustling Willows, and with memory came the realization that whoever addressed him had not been in a dream.