After Death(87)
Past midnight, the first hour of December twenty-sixth, back in the day. Having been emboldened by his Halloween adventure, young Calaphas waits until his family is asleep, and then he goes to the basement. There he will complete the transition from a mere boy to a boy with a great destiny that began two months earlier, though completing the transition isn’t his conscious intention. He visits the cold-holding room for two purposes: first, to see what Britta Holdstrom looks like naked; second, to determine what damage, if any, the limited autopsy did to her.
When he pulls out the morgue drawer and turns back the shroud from her head, he is looking into eyes as white as snow. Whether they crystalized as she lay dying in the frigid garage or some other cause explains them, Calaphas doesn’t know. Meeting that icy-white gaze, he remembers an animated film about a beautiful princess who is bewitched into eternal sleep—until she is awakened by the kiss of a prince. If he, a seven-year-old boy, can take the life from an old man and get away with it, perhaps he can restore life to this woman, which will mean that he must be a prince or will become one. He has no fear. His experience with the old man has cured him of fear. He presses his mouth to Britta’s cold lips, but she fails to wake. Although somewhat disappointed, he doesn’t close the drawer and leave. He remains curious about the size and shape of Britta’s breasts. When Durand draws the shroud farther down, revealing the objects of his curiosity, between those mounds lies a Hershey’s Kiss.
His humiliation is immediate and intense, his face burning with shame. Gifford has foreseen this moment, and by this bit of mockery has tarnished the triumph of his little brother’s Halloween visit to this chamber, when the hiding of a Hershey’s Kiss in a cabinet was proof of courage. Mortification shakes him as if it’s a wind risen out of his bones, storming through him. Leaving the chocolate drop where Gifford placed it, he draws the shroud over Britta—but then realizes the genius of the trap that has been laid. In the morning, when his father tends to the embalming, he will find the morsel of candy. Gifford has surely schemed a way to be sure that his brother will be blamed, though Durand can’t figure out how. If he takes the Kiss, there will be no outraged father in the morning, and Gifford will know what has happened. Then the endless jokes and torments will begin. Bitter resentment washes through Durand as he pulls back the shroud, retrieves the candy, covers Britta again, and closes the drawer. Making his way to his room by the thin beam of his penlight, he is blinded more by anger than by darkness, stumbling twice on the stairs, narrowly avoiding a collision with a console in the upper hallway.
When he reaches his bed, on his pillow is another piece of Hershey’s finest and a note: HOW DID HER NIPPLES TASTE, PERV? Anger has always been Durand’s weakness, anger and pride. Not covetousness or lust. Neither envy nor gluttony. Not sloth. Now his pride bleeds and his anger swells into rage, into fury, such a blazing wrath that he feels as if he might melt. And here the transition becomes complete. The incident on Halloween cured him of fear; ferocious anger burned it out of him forever. Now even hotter anger purges from him any capacity for guilt or shame. No fear, shame, or guilt ever again. He warns himself not to acknowledge finding either of the two Hershey’s Kisses or this note, never to respond to Gifford’s taunts, which will be coming by the hundreds. He must never give his brother the satisfaction of seeing him angered. If Durand keeps his fury unrevealed, the day will come, perhaps many years from now, when Gifford no longer expects revenge for this mockery. Then revenge can be taken.
All these years later, Gifford is long dead, having gotten what was coming to him, that rich moment on his fancy boat when Durand’s score in the game soared. Now, here in Rancho Santa Fe, the game clock counts down to a glorious end.
The memory of Britta in the morgue drawer and the vicious note on his pillow has amped Calaphas’s anger no less than have the two bennies. No beast on Earth is as strong and dangerous and determined as he is now.
In addition to its three double-wide roll-up doors, the garage features a man-size door at the back. Calaphas lifts the night-vision goggles from around his neck and fits the unit to his eyes. The world goes from death-black and moon-silver to green. He employs his lock-release device, used earlier at the home of Vincent and Colleen, to defeat the deadbolt. He puts the device away and eases the door open. He enters.
As he hoped, he quickly finds two electric-service panels. He opens the metal door of the first, rapidly flips off the breakers one by one, then repeats the process with those in the second panel. Michael Mace and his two nameless companions have been plunged into darkness. Triumph awaits in several eerie shades of green.
OLD FRIENDS
Ascending the second run of stairs, Nina nervously turns the Tac Light in her hand, and vertiginous patterns of shadow and light wheel up the wall. As John follows her and as Michael steps onto the landing, darkness cascades through the rooms below. The mechanical systems of the house shut down; the faint humming-ticking-buzzing-sighing of motors and pumps and fans and air in circulation, all the muffled sounds of a living home that are monotonous enough to seem like silence, suddenly become true silence so deep that it summons dread.
Calaphas is here. He has cut the power to the residence, which means he’s in the garage where earlier Michael had noticed electric-service panels. He’ll be inside the house proper in a minute or two. Thereafter, any sound they make will approximately locate them, diminishing the need for the agent to stalk them cautiously room by room.