Keith closed the door of the cabinet and said, "It's finished." He opened the other wardrobe and unpacked the two handmade Italian suits he'd decided to hold on to. He hung up his tuxedo and smiled at the incongruity of the thing in this setting, then hung a few items of casual clothing, making a mental note to stop at Kmart for jeans and plaid shirts.
To continue the Roman theme, he reflected, like Caesar, he'd burned his bridges behind him, but he wasn't certain that the future included this farm. It depended on who Keith Landry had become.
In his mind, he still thought of himself as a farm boy, despite college, travel, custom-made suits, proficiency in foreign languages, and proficiency with exotic weapons and exotic women. Whether he was in Paris, London, Moscow, or Baghdad, he still imagined there was a residue of hayseed in his hair. Probably, however, this was not true; perhaps what he had become was who he was. And if that was true, he was in the wrong place. But he'd give Spencerville some time, and if he started enjoying trout fishing and church socials, the VFW Hall and small talk at the hardware store, then he'd stick around. If not... well, he could never go back to Washington. He'd spent over half his professional life on the road, and maybe that's where he belonged: everywhere and nowhere.
Keith noticed that the bed was made with fresh linen and a quilt blanket, compliments of Aunt Betty, and he realized that she remembered this was his room, and she hadn't upgraded him to the master bedroom. This had been his father's room as a boy, and his father's before him, so Aunt Betty probably figured he should sleep there until he grew up. He smiled.
Keith walked downstairs into the big country kitchen. The round table could seat ten: family, farmhands, and any kid who stopped by for a meal. Keith opened the refrigerator and saw it had been stocked with basic necessities, except beer. Many of the rural people around here were teetotalers, and the county, while not dry, wasn't awash in alcohol either. Keith, on his rare visits, had found this quaint, but as a resident, it might be a problem. Then again, this might be the least of his problems.
He went into the living room, removed a bottle of Scotch from one of his boxes, returned to the kitchen, and made himself a Scotch and water in a blue plastic glass that made the drink look green.
He sat at the big round table, in his chair, and looked around at the empty places. Aside from his mother and father and Paul and Barbara, there had been Uncle Ned, his father's younger brother, who used to sit opposite Keith, and Keith could still see his uncle at breakfast, at lunch, at dinner, eating quietly, tired after a long day of farm work. Ned was a farmer through and through, a serious but not humorless man, a son of the soil who wanted only to marry, raise children, raise crops, fix broken things, and do a little fishing on Sunday, usually with his nephews, and someday with his yet-to-be-born sons.
Keith was about ten when Uncle Ned was drafted into the Army, and he remembered his uncle coming home one day in his uniform. A few weeks later, Ned left for the Korean War and never returned. They'd sent his things home, and they were stored in the attic. Keith had gone through the trunk when he was a boy and had even put on the green dress uniform once.
A forgotten war, a forgotten man, a forgotten sacrifice. Keith recalled that his father had cried when they got the news, but oddly, Ned's name was never mentioned again.
Perhaps, Keith thought, the last man to die in World War II had made the last meaningful sacrifice; since then, it was all politics and power freaks playing with people's lives and families. Perhaps now, he thought, we're starting to figure it out. He looked at Uncle Ned's place, empty now for over forty years, and belatedly, but with sincerity, he said, "I miss you."
Keith finished his Scotch and made another. He looked out the screen door into the dark garden. The wind blew harder now, and in the west he saw lightning, followed by a clap of thunder.
He smelled the rain before he heard it, and heard it before he saw it. A lot of memory circuitry — sights, sounds, smells — were deeply imprinted before a person turned eighteen, Keith thought. A lot of who you were in middle age was determined before you had a chance to manipulate, control, or even understand the things around you. It was no mystery, he thought, why some old people's minds returned to their youth; the wonder of those years, the discoveries, the first experience with the dirty secret of death, and the first stirrings of lust and love were indelible, drawn in luminous colors on clean canvas. Indeed, the first sex act was so mind-boggling that most people could still remember it clearly twenty, thirty, sixty years later.
Annie.
So, he thought, his journey of discovery had led home. On the way he had seen castles and kings, golden cities and soaring cathedrals, wars and death, starvation and disease. Keith wondered if old Pastor Wilkes was still alive, because he wanted to tell him that he'd actually met the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and knew more about them than their names; he knew who they were, and obviously they were us.
But Keith had also seen love and compassion, decency and bravery.
And here, alone with himself, sitting in his place at the table, he felt the journey was not ended, but was about to get interesting again.
So here it was, twenty-five years since he'd stepped off his front porch into the world, and he'd put a million miles on his trip meter since then, and he'd had so many women he couldn't remember half their names if his life depended on it. Yet, in the dark times, in the mornings and in the evenings, on long plane rides to scary places, in the jungles of Asia, in the back streets of Eastern Europe, and in those moments when he thought he was going to die, he remembered Annie.
Chapter Four
Annie Baxter lay sleepless on her bed. Brief, incandescent flashes of lightning lit the dark room, and thunder shook the house to its foundations. A burglar alarm, triggered by the storm, wailed somewhere, and dogs barked in the night.
The dream she'd had crept into her consciousness. It was a sexual dream, and it disturbed her because it was about Cliff, and it should have been about Keith. In the dream, she was standing naked in front of Cliff, who was fully dressed in his uniform. He was smiling — no, leering at her, and she was trying to cover her nakedness with her hands and arms.
The Cliff Baxter in her dream was younger and better built than the Cliff Baxter she was married to now. More disturbing still was that, in the dream, she was sexually aroused by Cliff's presence, and she'd awakened with the same feeling.
Keith Landry and the other men she'd been with before Cliff were more sensitive and better lovers in the sense that they were willing to experiment and to give her pleasure. Cliff, on the other hand, had been, and still was, into sexual dominance. She had been turned on by this initially, she admitted, like in the dream; but Cliff's rough sex and selfishness now left her feeling unsatisfied, used, and sometimes uneasy. Still, she remembered a time when she was a willing and aroused partner.
Annie felt guilty that she'd once enjoyed that sado-sexual relationship with Cliff and guilty that she still thought and dreamed about it with no revulsion or loathing. In fact, it was quite the opposite, like now, awakening from that dream, moist between her legs. She realized she had to kill that dream and those thoughts once and for all.
She looked at the clock beside the bed: 5:16 A.M. She rose, put on her robe, went down to the kitchen, and poured herself an iced tea. After some hesitation, she picked up the wall phone and called police headquarters.
"Sergeant Blake speaking, Mrs. Baxter."
She knew that her phone number, name, and address appeared on some sort of screen when she dialed, and that annoyed her. Cliff wasn't comfortable with a lot of new technology, but he intuitively recognized the possibilities of the most sinister, Orwellian gadgets available to the otherwise Stone Age police force of Spencerville.
"Everything okay, Mrs. Baxter?"