My legs began to quiver, as if they would fail me, and I sat on the spillway. I said my good-byes and prayers in a voice that trembled not because of the cold.
Even near its engineered banks, the river offered almost a fathom, and the bed rapidly fell off to accommodate deep-drawing vessels. The tied ends of the tarp were not watertight, and I hoped that it floated out far enough to go unnoticed after it sank.
The shroud washed somewhat farther from shore than I anticipated before it disappeared beneath the waves. The added metal was meant less to sink the package than to keep it down when the body began to decompose and, producing gases, sought the surface, as Father had sought it and dreamed of possessing it all of his sequestered life.
In days to come, in the most fierce of storms, the water would swell and race, and his remains would be shifted by the stronger-than-usual currents, moved farther downstream. At some point, too, the ever-shifting silt of the bottom might deposit layer upon layer atop him, until it buried him under the river, as in life he lived under the city that enchanted him.
Through the stillness, snow fell not in skeins but in infinitely layered arabesques, filigree in motion, ornamenting the icy air, of an especially intense white in the dove-gray light of the morning, laying boas on the limbs of leafless trees, ermine collars on the tops of walls, a grace of softness in a hard world. You might have thought it would fall forever, endlessly beautifying all it touched, except for the reminder of the river. When the snowflakes met the undulant water, they ceased to exist.
Everything and everyone we treasured in this world comes to an end. I loved the world not for itself but for the marvelous gift that it was, and my only hope against eventual despair was to love something larger than the world, larger even than a near-infinite sparkling universe full of worlds.
I remained on the spillway, recalling many special moments with Father, until the cold finally bit through my ski mask and my layered clothing. When I got to my feet, a cape of snow fell away from me, as if I were a statue that suddenly came to life.
From there I returned to my windowless rooms, now mine and mine alone. For the subsequent six years, I secretly moved through the city, diminished by solitude, until one night in the central library, I saw a running girl dressed all in black but no less graceful than snow in motion.
45
The table cleared, Gwyneth and I sat with what remained of our second glasses of wine, and although the rapping in the attic arose briefly twice again, she made no further reference to it as she told me about the night that her father died. She knew how the murder had played out, because Ryan Telford had relished telling her in vivid detail.
Her father’s long-standing policy regarding Christmas was to give the household staff paid leave from December 22 through the New Year celebration. Almost a decade earlier, he had cashed out of his real-estate investments and had built an unlikely but successful second career working from home. Although his friends, none of whom Gwyneth could endure meeting, thought his new line of work must give him ample time for leisure, he was busier than ever. Come the holiday season, he preferred to be alone, to treat it as a time of peace, just he and Gwyneth, so that she might have not just the fourth floor, but the entire fine residence to roam without fear of encountering a house manager or maid or cook.
The only visitor anticipated throughout the holiday was J. Ryan Telford, who even then oversaw the renowned collections of the city library and the associated art museum across the street from it. For years, the curator had contracted with Gwyneth’s father to catalogue and appraise his amassment of rare first-edition books and works of fine art, a small fraction of which were kept in the residence, the majority in a climate-controlled warehouse. Late on the afternoon of December 22, Telford was expected to deliver a year-end report to the house. When he arrived, he also brought with him a bag of fresh scones from the best bakery in the city and a jar of honey.
From time to time, Gwyneth’s father had spoken of donating substantial portions of his acquisitions to institutions that he favored, and recently he had decided that the time for doing so had nearly come. Telford had long feared that his theft of key items in the collections might eventually be discovered; and it seemed that fateful moment would soon arrive.
During the previous two years, to ingratiate himself, Telford pretended to embrace the older man’s enthusiasm for exotic honeys, and he learned the lingo of beekeepers and honeymakers. In a conversation some days before he arrived on the doorstep with lethal intent, he extravagantly praised an exotic creamed honey that he claimed to have purchased during a trip to Italy, although he would not reveal the plants from which the bees collected nectar. Arriving that December afternoon, he presented Gwyneth’s father with a bottle of the acclaimed ambrosia, from which he’d stripped the label. In a spirit of fun, he challenged his host to identify the unique flavor.
They went at once to the kitchen, where Gwyneth’s dad uncapped the honey, breathed deeply of it, put out plates and knives and cups, and set about brewing a pot of tea. While his host was distracted, Telford tore open the bag of scones and placed it in the center of the table, the biscuits spilling from it as if from a cornucopia. Earlier, one scone had been cut in half, spread with another, benign creamed honey, and pressed together again. Telford put that one on his own plate, as if he’d just then split it. He stirred the knife in the honey but didn’t use any, and by the time that his host returned with the teapot, the curator sat at the table, ready to eat.
All parts of the oleander plant are supertoxic, including the nectar, and symptoms of poisoning appear as soon as a minute or two after even a minimal dose of the toxin has been swallowed.
Gwyneth’s father lavished the creamed honey on his scone, ate half of it with enthusiasm, trying to determine the exotic flavor, and started on the second half when suddenly he broke into a heavy sweat. His face paled, his lips went gray, and he dropped the scone to put one hand to his chest. With a sound that Telford likened to a baby gagging on pureed vegetables, the victim thrust up from his chair. Because oleander is a cardiac stimulator, his heart would have been hammering perhaps as much as two hundred beats per minute. Already finding it difficult to breathe, he collapsed to his knees, and then onto the floor, on his side, where he spasmed helplessly.
Telford finished his own scone and then took his plate to the sink, washed it, dried it, and put it away. He poured his tea down the drain, rinsed and dried the cup, and put that away as well.
On the floor, the victim vomited and died. If he had vomited sooner and emptied himself more completely, he might have survived. But honey’s fabled palliative powers and its sweetness helped keep the mass of poisonous quickbread in his gut.
Telford wiped his prints from the handle of the honey knife and, holding it with a paper towel, put it on his dead host’s plate. Two scones remained. He wrapped them in the torn bag to take them with him, for they were delicious and would make an excellent late-night snack, but with lemon marmalade instead of honey, which he detested.
From Gwyneth’s father, and from a few of the servants, Telford had learned of the daughter with social phobia who lived in seclusion on the fourth floor. And then one day he had seen her when he had been leaving her father’s second-floor study after a meeting. She was eleven then, and Goth was not yet her personal style. Head down, holding something to her breast that he couldn’t identify, she raced along a hallway and disappeared up a staircase, evidently heading for her high rooms.