“You bitch!” Daniel plunged into the fire headfirst, trying to grab the book before it ignited, and his sweater seemed to explode with flames. Indifferent, he yanked the book out and rolled back and forth on the floor. It wasn’t clear to Tess if he had the presence of mind to remember the old rule for how to put out a fire or if he was in some childish tantrum.
“She’s under us, okay?” he said, sobbing. “She’s been here all along, under the floorboards. I wish I had killed her. I wish I had killed you.”
“Beneath the floorboards? Where, Daniel? How?”
He didn’t reply, just continued rolling frenziedly It was impossible to know if the low, keening sound he made was for his own pain or for the singed book he held to his chest. Tess looked around wildly, and her glance fell on the Winans pike in the corner. With great deliberation, she drove the pointed end into one of the gaps between the planks and used it as a pry. The pine boards came up easily. After all, they had already come up once that day. She found Cecilia beneath the table where she had pretended to eat. Her eyes were wide, her features stretched with a strange combination of terror and relief. If she had been drugged, the effects had worn off long ago. She must have heard everything. She had probably feared that Tess was going to leave her here or allow the house to burn with her in it.
Tess ripped the handkerchief from Cecilia’s mouth and began to untie her limbs, rubbing her wrists and ankles to stimulate circulation. After a few choked breaths, Cecilia looked over at Daniel, still rolled in a ball, and shook her head.
“Why?”
Tess echoed the answer Daniel had given earlier, when asked about Yeager’s death.
“Because he could.”
“So you were right?”
“And you too, in your way.”
Everyone had been right, Tess realized. Cecilia had been right that Hayes had been attacked by someone who was intensely homophobic. But Yeager had been right when he guessed Hayes’s attacker was driven by envy as much as anything else-he had just named the wrong man. Together, they had all the pieces. Even Mi-ata had known something all along.
Gretchen let herself into the house. “It’s been thirty minutes, so I called Rainer as you told me to and they’re en route. Jesus, he had a lot of fucking books,” she added, looking around the room, doing a double take on Daniel, rolling and babbling, and at the wide-eyed Cecilia, as ethereal as any of Poe’s necrophiliac objects of love. “Why would anyone want to have this many books? They’re dust catchers. So, what’d you do, torture him with a hot poker? Did he give it up?”
“In his own fashion,” Tess said. “He gave it up because he couldn’t give it up, if that makes any sense.”
Now all three women stared at the man, whose skin seemed to blister before their eyes. The room was heavy with horrible smells-burnt hair, burnt wool, burnt paper, burnt flesh. The only sound was Daniel Clary’s rough sobs, and those were horrible, too.
He wept like a wounded animal, like a mother crying for a child. He wept, but not for himself and not for his pain. He cried for the damaged book in his arms.
Chapter 33
The last note-and Tess never doubted it would be the last-arrived a month to the day after that night. It was direct and simple, incapable of misinterpretation.
Please meet me at 1 p.m. today in Green Mount Cemetery, behind the obelisk. You’ll know it when you see it.
She wondered if the March date had any significance. Was it yet another Poe allusion destined to fly over her head, or under her radar, or wherever it was that such things flew? She was only beginning to grasp the geometry lessons that had perplexed her in junior high, the revelation that the world was full of infinite planes that never intersect.
The day was fair, almost warm. The year’s stepchildren-March, November-had shown signs of surprisingly sweet temperaments lately, while the once-reliable months of May and September had become unruly and bratty. She found a groundskeeper sitting on a bench, eating a sub, and he rolled his eyes at her interruption but pointed the way.
“No dogs allowed,” he called after her.
“She’s a Seeing Eye dog,” Tess said, of the Doberman by her side.
“You don’t look blind.”
“Visually impaired,” she corrected.
“That either,” he said. But he let her go, rather than disturb his lunch.
The grave behind the obelisk turned out to be where John Wilkes Booth was buried. This gave Tess a moment of trepidation-it was an assassin’s grave, after all-and she felt for the comforting shape of the gun in her coat pocket. She had been doing that a lot lately. Her gun was turning into a grown-up version of a child’s “blankie,” one of those tiny scraps of cloth carried far too long. She wondered if her gun would become similarly worn in spots, from all this talismanic touching.
The note had specified 1 p.m., but it did not surprise her when ten, fifteen, twenty minutes passed. If he were clever-and whoever he was, he was clearly clever-he would make sure she had come alone, check the cemetery for exits and entrances. Green Mount, one of the city’s oldest graveyards, was an expansive ramble of a place, and it would be easy to elude someone here. The trick was staying alive in the depressed neighborhood that surrounded it.
Finally, a tall figure approached. Not in a cape this time, but in the most ordinary trench coat, a belted London Fog. His head was bare in the sun, his hair that shiny, stiff old-man white that made Tess think of dental floss. The silken scarf at his neck was whiter still. He must not have realized how warm it was.
Up close, his face was familiar, but perhaps that was a trick of its very ordinariness. Still-
“We’ve met, haven’t we?” she asked.
He inclined his head in a formal bow. “Several times.”
She studied him, took in the hollows in his cheeks, the bristling eyebrows, the thin lips. But hair could be dyed, especially when it was that snowy white. Voices could change.
“The Norwegian radio reporter.”
“Ja,” he said with a nod. “Would you tell me your hourly rate? May I see your gun?”
“And… the gentleman who came to the jewelry store that day, the self-important one with the monocle and the same silk scarf you’re wearing now.”
He harrumphed, as the man in Gummere Brothers had, all gruff and pompous, and adjusted the scarf at his neck.
“Anywhere else?”
“I sure do like a turkey sammich,” he said, his voice a credible alto, as opposed to the silly falsetto most men affect when trying to imitate a woman. Tess was in Cross Street Market, buying a sub for a homeless woman. A beat, and his voice was now that of a streetwise young man, hanging outside KFC on a winter’s evening, the one who had answered her desperate call. “I just gotta know, you know?”
Then, in what appeared to be his own voice: “I also was in the Paper Moon one morning, when you came in with your boyfriend and ended up quarreling with that other girl. But that was a coincidence, the kind peculiar to Baltimore. I eat there all the time. I like the sweet-potato cottage fries, and I-” He stopped, flustered.
“Yes,” Tess said, letting him off the hook, knowing he had been about to say that he lived near there, which was more than he intended to tell. “Tiny Town.”
An awkward silence fell, an awkwardness peculiar to the voyeur and the viewed. Tess could not help wondering what else he had seen and observed while tracking her. She also felt vaguely foolish. She had not only bought him a sandwich, she had bought the idea that he was a woman. She had given him an interview, watching him struggle comically with his tape recorder, and asking him to repeat his questions because his accent was almost indecipherable. In Gum-mere Brothers, they had looked past each other, intent on their own missions. If he had been self-important- well, so had she, and it hadn’t been an act with her.