It was some distance downtown, so he took to the street he used to get to work—the one the Busy Bee was on—and bounded down the center of it in giant leaps that took his heels to the height of telephone poles. During one jump, he looked to his left and saw, five or six blocks away, visible even through the downpour, the yellow smudge of a miasma settling upon a rooftop, and reminded himself of all the cautions Melody had schooled him on. He stopped at the Busy Bee and stood outside its lighted window, which had been repaired. It appeared to be operating as it had before the tragedy—open all night—a young man with a ponytail behind the counter. Amazing, he thought, how life and commerce go on even after such a loss. When he left the scene, it was more like he was fleeing, escaping memories that wanted to drag him into depression. With all this on his mind, he was relieved when he finally made it to the center of town and found Margrave Street.
He no longer bounded but walked slowly, peering through the rain and the dark, trying to make out the house with the path to the front door. He recalled it was a larger piece of property than most of the others. In the night world, though, things looked different. There were two houses that could have been the place. He walked up the drive of one, passed through the front door into a darkened house. The first thing that struck him was noise coming from a back room. It sounded as if someone was being strangled. He crept down the hall, cautious, even though no one could hear him. He found the room the commotion was coming from. Passing through the door, he saw, by the glow of a night light, a young woman, naked, straddling a young man, naked, and moving frantically like a kid hyped up on sugar, riding a rocking horse. Owen put his hand in front of his face, a modesty lost to the fact that he could see through his palm.
He noticed there was a sleeper in the corner, crouched down, assiduously watching the young couple as if performing a scientific study. When Owen noticed his pale blue glow, the old man turned to him, winked, smiled, and gave a stiff mechanical thumbs-up. It wasn’t that the couple having sex was devoid of any allure, but with the other sleeper there, it was too much of a reminder of the creepy nature of his home invasions. Had the old man not been there, who knows what the librarian might have done. Instead of returning the greeting, he jumped up through the ceiling and roof and landed in the front yard. He was upset with himself for becoming what he’d promised he wouldn’t. Also, he realized that hadn’t checked to see if the young man was the one from the gas station. He should have looked for a beard, but it wasn’t what his sight had been trained on.
He moved down the street to the other place he thought might be the house of the attendant. As soon as he passed through the door, he saw the long-haired, bearded fellow sitting at a small table in the living room, the television on. In front of him was a notebook, a cup of coffee, and a silver nine-millimeter pistol. Owen walked behind the chair and looked to see what was written in the notebook. There was a list of four names, a line through three of them. The last, without a line through it and the only female name on the list, was Kiara. Owen’s first thought was it could have been the woman he and Melody had visited the night before. The man wrote something next to the woman’s name in a tiny, loopy script too small to make out.
Owen moved away and looked around to see what else he could find. There were local newspapers scattered on the kitchen counter. He saw the one in which the reporter called his admission that he hadn’t played the hero at the Busy Bee a confession. Then he could see from the headlines that all of them had front-page stories about the robbery. Stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet was a photo of what looked like, as far as Owen could remember, Helen’s killer. He had his arm around the shoulders of a woman holding a baby. She was definitely the young mother he and Melody had stumbled upon in the apartment building next to the school. Looking at the photo, he tried to figure out how he was going to let the police know about it. If he told them the truth, they’d send him away for psychiatric evaluation.
On the dresser in the bedroom, Owen found the stub of a paycheck from the gas station with the attendant’s name on it—Aaron Feit. He mouthed the name, and just then the man entered the room, sat on the bed, and put his boots on. In the living room, he stuffed the pistol into the waist of his jeans and threw on a waterproof poncho with a hood. Then he left the house. Owen passed through the door behind him and followed him down the road, away from town.
9
A RIGHT AND A LEFT down long streets in the rain, and Feit finally stopped walking. He stepped off the sidewalk into the darker darkness beneath a stand of tall oak. With the leaves blocking some of the downpour, he pulled back his hood and took out a pack of cigarettes. The instant Owen saw them, he had an urge to smoke again.
It was obvious from where his quarry stood that Feit were there to watch the house across the street. It was a sizeable place, nearly a mansion, but so well set back amid the border of the barrens that its corner turrets and second floor with gabled roof and two dormers were lost to the passerby. The whole structure was covered in some kind of dark brown wood shake. There was light in every other window.
Feit took out his phone and made a call. The name he spoke was “Kiara.” Owen moved as close as possible so as not to miss a word, and Feit partially passed through him. “I’m outside Crenshaw’s now. All the lights are on. Just checking to see if there isn’t another one in there with him. I can take care of him, but . . .” He listened for a time to Kiara. There was a pause. “How’s William?” he asked. He nodded and hung up. Feit and Owen stood on the corner in the wind and rain, watching. Owen noticed faint classical music coming from an open window in the left-hand turret and saw shadows move throughout the rooms.
An hour later, when Feit gave up and headed away, Owen lingered on the corner. He was fairly confident either this fellow was going to rob the big old house, or he and Kiara were going to. It was obvious whoever lived there was well off. Owen stepped into the street and was crossing it before he realized he was going to pay a visit to Crenshaw. By then it had stopped raining and the wind had died down. He guessed it to be somewhere around three AM in the waking world. He swept up the long flight of front steps leading from the sidewalk and, without hesitating, passed through the door into a hallway of polished wood and a flowered runner leading him toward the inner rooms of the house.
The place was stately, with antique furniture and a lot of polished wood. The walls were covered with oil paintings and in some of the rooms, especially a darkened one, there were painted canvases in frames stacked again the walls. The pictures he passed were beautiful night scenes, stars with a gauzy glow, and pale maidens half asleep or sleepwalking yet carrying out tasks by the seashore. In one, a large canvas on the main wall of a well-lit room that appeared to be used for entertaining, there was an eerie scene of a piece of marble statuary in moonlight—a woman with flowing hair and a writhing snake around her naked waist. Then, like a cutaway, beneath the marble form, under the ground, there was a room with a satin divan. Draped across it, in an almost-awkward position, was an image of an old man, asleep. The attitude of the figure caught his eye.
Four rooms later, alternating dark and bright, he found the house’s resident sitting near a blazing fireplace, its flames the only light in the room. With a long paintbrush, he was persistently dabbing a particular area with light green pigment. This painting, like the others, had a softness to the forms, as if they were beginning to disintegrate at the edges. Owen sat on the raised hearth of the fireplace, watching the old man work. At some point during his surveillance, it struck him that with all these paintings of night, this fellow might have already achieved the 100 Nights of Nothing. He watched the artist get up and, moving slowly, go off to a kitchen somewhere and bring back a cup of tea. While sipping it, he sat quietly and stared at his progress. The classical music that had been playing in another room suddenly quit. Owen left the house, heavy with the idea he had to warn the painter that he was in the sights of the Solar Cross Gang.