Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

As a result, the estate had come to Rick, and through him to the rest of them. The money had been deposited in a bank in Bellingham and was accessible via the Accel and Interlink systems at any one of millions of cash machines all over the country. He could afford to wait weeks, even months, until it was perfectly clear that the police suspected nothing.

The thought made him reach into the bag again. He took out a pair of pants and jacket in a dark, heavy material. They needed to be cleaned and pressed, but it might well be a nice touch to wear them when the time came. But first he had to find out where the house was and figure out the bus schedules. It might take days to get there, but that didn’t matter. He didn’t care how long or uncomfortable the journey was, just as long as he arrived safely.

And he would! He knew it, suddenly, with a surge of confidence and courage that made him want to leap in the air and holler exultantly. He would arrive and the others would depart, revealed for the shams they were. And the survival of the Secret would be ensured forever, sealed in their blood.

It was a Sunday morning, ten days after I was released. I had gone to run some errands at the local stores and now I was walking home, relishing the warm sunshine and the cool breeze and the stunning views of snow-capped mountains above the wooded ridges and valleys of the North Seattle skyline.

We had been in the house a week, and were still settling in. It had been made a condition of my release that I should remain in the state, available to the San Juan County investigators. At the same time, both Andrea and I wanted to get away-and to get David away-from the islands themselves which, beautiful as they were, held such horrific memories for us. When my lawyer mentioned a house in Seattle that was available for a few months at a reasonable rent, we jumped at the idea.

When I was finally given my conditional freedom, I had no expectations about anything or anyone from my former life. All that had been wiped clean. After being charged with crimes I had experienced only as a victim, nothing seemed impossible, or even unlikely. Normality had become a meaningless concept. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find that David had vanished again, and that everyone was conspiring to convince me that he had died back in Minnesota months before. As for Andrea, I no longer had any firm belief that she had ever existed in the first place. She was just one among many phantom figures I seemed to have encountered in the course of my hallucinatory experiences on the island.

So I was even more amazed than pleased to find her waiting for me when I emerged from my cell. Thanks to a benign sexism on the part of Sheriff Griffiths, Andrea had never been regarded as a suspect, and once he had taken a full statement from her she had been free to go. But she had stayed. That made all the difference. We both had to make plans, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to make them together. After what we had just lived through, any arrangement was bound to seem provisional. Why not take the path of least resistance, rent this house that my lawyer had found and see how things turned out?

It had been Andrea’s testimony which had finally convinced the sheriff of my innocence. We had each been questioned separately and in great detail about the events of that fatal day, and our answers matched to a degree which ultimately made it impossible to believe that we were making it all up. One of the two survivors from the hall was Ellie, and she had been able to corroborate my story about the events leading up to the final horror. Finally, the police had talked to David. His story, told with the idiosyncratic clarity of a child’s vision, corresponded fully to Andrea’s and mine. That clinched it.

The investigators were now working on the theory that one of the dead gunmen had still been alive when the sheriff and his men approached the compound. Thinking they were enemies, he had opened fire, and had then died in the long interval before the helicopter arrived to illuminate the scene. All in all, I got the impression that the cops were asking me to stick around not because they had any further intention of charging me, but to try to lend an air of credibility to the fact that they’d arrested me in the first place.

That was fine with me. I had no wish to go home, and for that matter no home to go to. The events I had lived through had cut me off forever from my past, and called into question everything I had ever imagined in the way of a future. I was left with the present, and for the present I was content to settle into this pleasant house, knowing that whatever happened we would have to move out in a couple of months, but not oppressed by that knowledge. I no longer had any interest in long-term plans. I was content to live one day at a time, as long as I could live it with Andrea and David.

Through all this, David had of course been my major preoccupation. My feeling that his previous acceptance of the situation had been too good to be true had been confirmed. It seemed somehow to be linked with his being on the island. The moment we left, everything changed. He became withdrawn and intensely clinging. I couldn’t even go to the bathroom without finding him outside the door in tears when I came out. There was also the question of Rachael’s death, which I had ducked before. Now I told him the truth, although without mentioning that she had died by her own hand. He at first refused to believe that he would never see her again, then became preoccupied with the physical details of her present whereabouts. In fact Rachael had been cremated, but I spared David that knowledge too, particularly after what he had seen on the island. I said she was buried underground, and he wanted to know how deep and where and whether she had enough food and a phone. I explained that that was just her body, and that his mom was not really there. I added, with a twinge of hypocrisy, that some people believed that she was in heaven. David immediately decided this was right, and that she could see him and hear everything he said. I decided to go along with this and let him work out the truth for himself at a later date.

One very important factor in David’s stability was completely fortuitous. The woman who owned the house in back of ours happened to have a boy about the same age, and the two made friends one day over the fence. This was the more surprising because David had never been very outgoing, even in the old days back in St. Paul. But although it would be absurd to suggest that the ordeal he had been through was what we would once have called “a growth experience,” there was no question in my mind that he had changed, becoming more independent and less tentative with other children. The only thing he absolutely insisted on was my continual physical presence. I’d only been able to sneak out to the store because he was plugged into some TV show he’d become hooked on.

The main problem with David’s understandable dependency on me was that I wanted to be with Andrea-alone with Andrea. Her problems of readjustment were not as serious as David’s, but they were just as real. After living in seclusion for so many years on the island, she had lost many of the skills that we all take for granted. Going almost anywhere was a torment to her. Traveling in a bus or car made her sick, the sight of strange faces made her panic. She couldn’t deal with answering the telephone or going shopping. Like a prisoner released after many years, she found herself unable to cope with the demands of organizing a life in which she was constantly called upon to make decisions.

All of this would simply have been irritating if I hadn’t been in love with her, but I was. Whenever we were apart, even for an hour or two, I felt unreal, drained of substance, like one of those specters whose meaning Sam had so totally perverted. What Blake meant, as far as I can recall, is that every one of us has a male and a female component, and that we can only achieve full humanity when the two are commingled. Split from that whole, the male component becomes a “specter,” a reasoning machine spinning abstract theories and arbitrary rules and then enforcing them ruthlessly. The female component similarly degenerates into an “emanation,” jealous, moody, nagging, envious.

Something like that had happened to me. Without Andrea, I felt reduced to a pale parody of myself. I wanted to be with her all the time, to care for her in this difficult transitional phase she was going through, to help her find her feet in the outside world. I never discussed these feelings with her, or asked her what she felt for me. It would have been forced and intrusive. Once we had both settled down there would be time enough to talk, and to decide what we were going to do next. For now, it was enough that we had these few months together, without conditions or promises.

I walked home unhurriedly, enjoying the mild summer day. Our house was in a pleasant neighborhood called Wallingford, with just enough yuppie input to have excellent bread and coffee and micro-brews and similar amenities readily available, while retaining a solid core of long-time residents from the days when it had been an unpretentious blue-collar community, blighted by fumes from the gas works down by Lake Union. The paper bag I was carrying contained a crusty French loaf, a bottle of good olive oil, tomatoes, basil, pasta and a selection of local goat’s and sheep’s cheese, together with a couple of bottles of Hogue Cellars’ fume blanc. Life seemed good.

As I turned the corner into our street, I saw something that brought me crashing down. At the other end of the block, coming toward me, was a policeman. He passed the house next door where the students lived, then turned up our steps and disappeared inside the fence.

For a moment I was tempted to go hole up at the trendy cafe where the local house-husbands went to sip herb tea and write in their diaries. It wasn’t that I was seriously concerned about being arrested again, although there was always the possibility of some unexpected development in the investigation. But even the prospect of having to answer another set of questions designed to trap me into some inconsistency seemed too grim to contemplate. I just wanted to be left alone.

But I knew this was dumb. If the police wanted to question me, there was nothing I could do. Better to get it over with now. I carried on down the hill, clutching my sad sack of goodies. Our gate was open. I walked up the steps to the porch. The lace curtains of the living room window were drawn. I opened the front door and called, “Hi, I’m home.” There was no answer.

Setting the groceries down on the table in the hall, I walked through into the living room. It seemed to be empty, but I could hear a strange noise, like someone humming tunelessly. Although it was such a lovely day, the blind over the window looking on to the garden was lowered. A black bag I’d never seen before lay on the pine table. I rounded the section of wall forming a kind of proscenium arch into the dining area, and stopped. Andrea was on her knees in the corner of the room, looking up at me imploringly. Her wrists and ankles were handcuffed together and a patch of tape covered her mouth. She was trying desperately to speak, but all that emerged was the inarticulate humming I had heard. Then something cold and hard touched the nape of my neck.

“Hi, Phil. I’m home too.”

I felt my skin prickle. I couldn’t see who was standing behind me, but I knew the voice. I also knew that the person it belonged to was dead.

“Put your hands behind your back.”

I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t think. What was happening was impossible.