Only thing is, now I’m up here, and the landline’s not working.
No dial tone, no nothing. Dead plastic. I lift the cord, trace it back to the jack and then back to the desk, click the switch hook a few times. I look around the room, bite my lip. Everything is the same: the desks are in place, the piles of papers, filing cabinets, sandwich wrappers, soda cans, the wan winter light tilting in through the window. I travel around the room to Culverson’s desk, lift up his receiver. It’s the same: no dial tone, no life. I place the receiver back gently in the cradle.
“Something’s fucked,” says Detective McGully, appearing in the doorway with his arms crossed, sleeves of his sweatshirt pushed up, cigar jabbing out of the side of his face. “Right?”
“Well,” I say. “I can’t get a line.”
“Tip of the fucking iceberg,” he growls, digging in the pockets of his sweatpants for a matchbox. “Something’s up, New Guy.”
“Huh,” I say, but he is serious, dead serious—in all the time I’ve known him I’ve never seen an expression like this one on McGully’s face. I go over and take Andreas’s chair down off his desk, give his phone a try. Nothing. I can hear the Brush Cuts in the little coffee room two doors down, loud voices, someone guffawing, someone going, “So I say—I say—listen, wait.” Somewhere a door slams; footsteps are rushing this way and that way outside.
“I ran into the chief when I came in this morning,” McGully says, wandering into the room, leaning against the wall by the radiator, “and I said, ‘hey, asshole,’ like I always do, and he just walked right past me. Like I was a ghost.”
“Huh.”
“Now there’s some kind of meeting going on in there. Ordler’s office. The chief, the DCO, the DCA. Plus a bunch of jerks I don’t recognize.” He puffs on the cigar. “In wraparound sunglasses.”
“Sunglasses?”
“Yeah,” he says, “sunglasses,” like it signifies something, but whatever the drift is I’m not catching it, and I’m only half listening, anyway. There’s a small tender swelling on the back of my head, where it slammed against the brick wall in Eagle Square this morning.
“You mark my words, kid.” He points at me with his unlit cigar, gestures with it all around the room, like the Ghost of Christmas Future. “Something is going the fuck on.”
In the lobby of the main branch of the Concord Public Library is a neat display of classics, the greatest hits of the Western canon arranged in a tidy pyramid: The Odyssey, The Iliad, Aeschylus and Virgil providing the foundation, Shakespeare and Chaucer the second row, upward and forward in time all the way through The Sun also Rises at the capstone. No one has felt it necessary to provide a title for the display, although the theme is clearly things to read before you die. Somebody, maybe the same joker who put the R.E.M. song on heavy rotation on the Penuche’s jukebox, has slipped a paperback copy of On the Beach into this display, shoehorned between Middlemarch and Oliver Twist. I take it out and carry it over to Fiction and refile it before going down to the basement to find the reference section.
This is what it must have meant to be a policeman in a predigital age, I’m thinking, enjoying the experience in a visceral way, digging out the fat phonebook for suburban Maryland, thumping it open along the spine, running my forefinger along the tiny columns of type, flipping through the tissue-thin pages for a name. Will there be policemen afterward, I do not know. No—there won’t—eventually, maybe—but not for a while.
There are three listings for Eddes in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and I carefully copy the numbers into my blue book and go back up to the lobby, past the Shakespeare and John Milton, to where they have an old-fashioned phone booth by the front entrance. There’s a line, and I wait for about ten minutes, gazing out the tall deco windows, my eyes resting on the skinny branches of a little gray musclewood tree outside the library entrance. I get in there, take a breath, and start dialing.
Ron and Emily Eddes, on Maryland Avenue. No answer, no machine.
Maria Eddes, Autumn Hill Place. She answers, but first of all she sounds very young and second she speaks only Spanish. I manage to ask her if she knows a Naomi Eddes, and she manages to reply no, she does not. I apologize and hang up.
It’s drizzling out there again. I dial the last number and while it rings I watch a single lonesome ovular leaf, alone on the farthest reach of a twisting branch, get pelted by the raindrops.
“Hello?”
“William Eddes?”
“Bill. Who’s this?”
My teeth clench. I clutch my forehead with my palm. My stomach is a tight black knot.
“Sir, are you related to a woman named Naomi Eddes?”
The pause that follows is long and painful. This is her father.
“Sir?” I say at last.
“Who is this?” he says, his voice tight and cold and formal.
“My name is Detective Henry Palace,” I say. “I’m a policeman, in Concord, New Hampshire.”
He hangs up.
The musclewood leaf, the one I was watching, is gone. I look and I think I can see where it landed, a black smear in the slush of the lawn. I call Bill Eddes back and I do not get an answer.
There’s someone outside the phone booth, an agitated-looking old lady, bent over a small wire-frame shopping cart, the kind you get from the hardware store. I hold up one finger, smile apologetically, and I call Bill Eddes a third time, and I’m not surprised at all when there’s no answer, and that the phone abruptly stops ringing entirely. Naomi’s father, in his living room or kitchen, has yanked the phone from the wall. He’s slowly winding the slim gray cord around the phone, placing the phone on the shelf of a closet, like you put away something not to be thought of again.
“Sorry, ma’am,” I say, holding open the door for the old lady with the cart, and she asks, “What happened to your face?” but I don’t answer. I’m leaving the library, I’m chewing on an end of my mustache, holding one hand over my heart, palming it, feeling it beat—holy moly—this is it—holy moly—hurrying, running now, through the sodden lawn and back to the car.
It’s such a small town, Concord, sixty square miles taking in all the outskirts, and to drive just from downtown to the hospital with no other cars on the road? Ten minutes, which is not time enough to figure it all out, but is time enough to be sure that I will figure it out, that I’ve got it, that I will solve this murder—these murders—two murders, one murderer.
Here I am already, at the intersection of Langley Parkway and Route 9, looking up at Concord Hospital, where it sits like a child’s model of a castle on a hill, surrounded by its outbuildings and sprawling parking lots and office suites and clinics. The new wing, unfinished and never-to-be finished, piles of timber, panes of glass, frames of scaffolding hidden under tarps.
I pull in, sit in the parking lot, drum my fingers on the wheel.
Bill Eddes reacted how he did for a reason, and I know what the reason is.
That fact implies a second fact, which leads me on to a third.
It’s like you walk into a dark room, and there’s a sliver of pale light under a doorway on the opposite side. You open that door and it leads on to a second room, slightly brighter than the last, and there’s another door on the other side, with light under that one. And you keep going forward, one room after the other, more and more rooms, more and more light.
There’s a bank of spherical lights over the main doors, and all were lit the last time I was here, and now two are out, and that’s just it. The world is decaying bit by bit, every piece degrading at its own erratic rate, everything trembling and crumbling in advance, the terror of the coming devastation a devastation of its own, and each minor degradation has its consequences.