A more reassuring idea: He’d obviously come in through the back door and probably left the same way. I didn’t think he’d have risked going out through the front. Maybe he’d started his search at the far end of the house and worked his way backward, his fury mounting with every fruitless room until, with only the kitchen and the breakfast room left, he’d felt secure that he would be out of the house and blocks away before the sheriffs responded to a neighbor’s call. He’d been gone before I arrived.
Maybe.
Whatever he’d wanted had been small enough to hide in a book. What I wanted was Max’s computer, so I could move fast. It was a great relief to move fast.
I barely glanced into the living room and the library. I’d seen them the day before-it seemed like a week ago-and I couldn’t have missed a computer. Both rooms had been tossed violently. Max’s books had been torn from their shelves, flung into piles that spilled into the hallway. Paintings had been slashed, their frames snapped. Stuffing bled out of the incisions in the deep chair.
The hallway was completely interior, so no moonlight reached it. My penlight picked out details of destruction: a rug sliced into parallel strips three inches wide, the bright shards of a broken mirror scattering light on the walls as I passed.
A small bedroom that opened to the left, toward the front of the house, was in total confusion, the mattress standing against the wall, the frame upended, and the box spring slit open from head to foot. The glass shower door in the adjoining bathroom had been shattered. It was not so much a search as an evisceration.
The door at the far end of the bathroom was ajar, and I pushed it open with an extended hand, harder than I’d intended, and waited as it banged against the wall of a larger bedroom, Max’s bedroom, I guessed. The human bomb had gone off in here, too, but on a small desk across the room I saw a compact computer, intact.
I’m not familiar with Macintoshes, but I expected at least to be able to turn one on. I found a switch that seemed to be in the right place and flipped it up. Nothing. Running my hands around the frame, I located no other switches, and I got down on my hands and knees, feeling the room yawning wide behind my unprotected back, and pointed my penlight along the power cord until I came to the socket into which it was plugged. Scratch the first hypothesis, always presented so helpfully in the manuals as a panacea when trouble is encountered: Make sure the system is plugged in.
That left the unwelcome possibility that the outlet was controlled by a switch, probably just inside the door. Craftsmen’s bungalows, for all their strong points, are generally underwired, with few outlets. I guess people in the twenties just didn’t have so much stuff to plug in.
There were only two lights in the room, one a lamp next to the bed and the other a ceiling fixture in the center of the room. I hauled the chair on which I’d been sitting across the floor until it was beneath the fixture and climbed up. The milk-glass covering pulled away with a shower of dust and a couple of dead moths, revealing a small bulb, touchingly pink. It unscrewed easily, and I tossed it into the center of the bed. Then I clambered down, yanked the plug on the bedside lamp, crossed to the door, and threw the switch.
The Macintosh came to life with a startlingly loud whir. The screen glowed and then snapped alight to reveal the fabled user-friendly interface, full of little bugs, pictures that presumably launched programs. There we were: a tiny telephone icon and the legend modem. I highlighted it with the mouse and pushed the enter key, and the screen flickered again and came up with a dialogue box, full of buttons. One of them said Timed Send. It sounded right, so I pushed down on the mouse and the button on-screen turned into a box containing the words Timed Send: 10/26 14:00.
At two o’clock I’d been sitting in Jack’s computer room, watching the text fly by: Max’s ghost message, dispatched by the clock in a machine.
As long as I had the computer on, I figured, I might as well search Max’s hard drive. I kicked out of the communications program, located Mac Word, and booted it. It only took a few seconds to figure out how to access the list of document directories, and when I did I found that Max had obligingly named one of them Correspondence.
There was quite a lot of correspondence, and absolutely none of it was personal. I found dozens of drafts of his “Therapist” replies and some stuff to his lawyers in Boulder, as well as a few hopeful notes to a publisher to whom Max had apparently submitted a book called The Map Within. Nothing else.
“Damn,” I said aloud. Max was being secretive.
I was trying another directory when someone said behind me, in a pleasant voice, “I couldn’t find anything, either,” and then the computer went dark and took the room with it.
9 ~ Carpet Cutter
The chair I’d thrown clattered harmlessly against the opposite wall, and the noise reverberated in the room as I stood stock-still and waited, willing my breath to slow. The moon was on the far side of the house now, leaving the bedroom harmfully dark. A small part of my mind, the only part not clinging to the immediate issue of survival, asked a question: How long had he been standing there?
A quick scuffling sound, and the chair struck me in the chest and knocked me back against the desk. The keyboard of the computer pitched forward, striking the back of my legs, and I jumped forward and picked up the chair, holding it with the legs pointed away from me, lion-tamer style. “Gotcha,” the voice said, and chuckled.
“You made quite a mess,” I said, willing him to reply.
I heard the door to the hall close, heard the lock snap shut.
“I got a little irritated,” he said, and I held the chair at arm’s length and launched myself toward the voice, hearing him bump up against the wall as he shifted left, and I compensated and felt the chair strike something yielding, flesh, and he grunted, and something either very cold or very hot punched against the bare skin of my left forearm, backing me away. My hand was immediately wet and warm.
“Carpet cutter,” he said. “Very sharp.” He wasn’t even winded.
I hoisted the chair and advanced, swinging it down hard in front of me, and one leg caught him, on the shoulder, maybe, and I heard him go down. A vision of the carpet cutter slicing from below, its hook pointed up to tear, pushed me away like a cold current, and I backed up again, lowering the chair as I went so its legs pointed at where I thought he might be.
I still couldn’t see much of anything; the afterimage of the computer screen floated in front of my eyes, pale and blue and opaque. I took another step away from him, rifling my memory of the room for something that might serve as a weapon, and the chair came to life in my hands, bucking once, and he pulled it free by the legs, bringing its back up under my chin.
The phantom computer screen shivered into a million tiny lights: an exploding Christmas tree. I felt myself fall backward, onto something soft, and let myself go the rest of the way down, twisting and rolling away, toward the far side of the bed. The mattress heaved and jumped, and something tore through layers of cloth in a long, rending arc. I went for the arm above the carpet cutter with both hands, missed, and landed on my stomach on the bed again with a hard lump beneath me.
The tearing sound had traveled toward the foot of the bed. I scrambled toward its head, grabbing at the lump as I went, and came up on my knees, holding the light bulb I’d taken from the ceiling fixture. It was slippery in my gloved hand, and I realized the front of my shirt was soaked. I’d been bleeding the whole while.