When the sedan remained quiet and dark, she returned to the kitchen, where she opened a bottle of good cabernet. She didn’t indulge in wine every night, but the prospect of having bought another lemon on four wheels made a glass or two necessary. Maybe three.
As she ate, she listened to Rubinstein playing Mozart, and she read from Kolyma Stories by Varlam Shalamov. He had spent seventeen years slowly starving in a Soviet death camp deep in Siberia and, though released in 1951, had lived another thirty years under the jackboot of Communism. The music lifted her heart, and the stories made her grateful for the food before her.
Most nights, she slept well, and on this occasion, the wine drew her into a deeper slumber than usual. She hadn’t dozed off with the TV on, but the gray light of a dead and silent channel filled the screen when she opened her eyes at 2:00 a.m. She fumbled with the remote and switched off the set. Sleep-sodden, hardly awake, she couldn’t be sure if the distant sound of a racing engine was real or part of a lingering dream. She drifted off again before curiosity could motivate her to throw aside the covers and get out of bed.
3
Sunrise in Santa Fe, New Mexico, sometimes offered a peacock sky that opened the heart to wonder, even if the day included an appointment for a root canal procedure or, in Joanna’s case, the prospect of a car mechanic issuing a diagnosis almost as unsettling as bad news from an oncologist. At dawn Tuesday, she stood in the small walled courtyard of her house, drinking coffee as she watched the new day spread its colorful plumage across the eastern sky.
At eight o’clock, she left the Continental at the Lincoln dealership and was provided with a loaner. Her morning was filled with errands, but she returned home at eleven thirty.
She took lunch—a turkey sandwich—at her desk in the study, while she worked on her current novel. The story centered on a heinous crime, and she was determined, as always, not to glamorize or to any extent romanticize criminals, which was in her estimation a problem with many contemporary novels and films. The stories by Varlam Shalamov, which she’d been reading, often featured gangsters who ran the Soviet gulags, portraying them with anger and bitterness that had the sting of truth, and his work helped to keep her honest.
Wednesday morning, the repair-shop manager at the dealership called to report that they were unable to find anything wrong with her Continental. She returned the loaner to them and collected her sedan. During the short drive home, the navigation system didn’t offer any unsolicited directions.
That night, if the car started spontaneously in her garage, Joanna was unaware of it, for even without wine, she was lost in deep sleep. Sometime, as Wednesday melted into Thursday, the strange dreams began. Maybe she opened her eyes and saw the pale-gray light on the TV screen, or maybe that was part of the dream. Just part of the dream. Yes, relax, Jojo, it’s just part of the dream.
4
Harley Spondollar would have died violently if he hadn’t gone outside at 1:10 Thursday morning to climb over the picket fence and urinate on his neighbor’s prize roses. He had been favoring the roses with his bladder water every night for five weeks. All that uric acid had at last begun to have a satisfying effect: the leaves grew spotted, the number of roses declined, and the flowers dropped their petals even as they struggled to open from buds to blooms.
Spondollar had nothing against roses. His hatred was reserved for Viola Redfern, who lived next door. She was seventy years old, maybe ninety—who the hell knew?—and Spondollar was convinced the old bitch would never die. She was indefatigable, giving her neighbors homemade cookies and cakes, roses from her garden, and sweaters she knitted. When Spondollar was sick, she provided him with pots of homemade soups. She never complained when he played music at high volume or sat on his front porch and loudly cursed everything from squirrels to passing children. She had legions of grandkids and great-grandkids who were always visiting her; they were so polite and quiet and well behaved that they made Spondollar want to puke.
Wednesday evening and early Thursday morning, Spondollar had made a special effort to consume such quantities of beer that he would be able to pay a deathblow to his neighbor’s precious roses. Burdened by all her wrinkles and wattles, Viola reliably went to bed promptly at nine o’clock every night and fell asleep reading books, as boring a biddy as any ever born. On this occasion, however, she was staying overnight with a granddaughter to celebrate a great-granddaughter’s tenth birthday.
One of Harley Spondollar’s greatest joys in life was annoying the hell out of people and then playing psychological games with them until they regretted their impatience and indignation to such an extent that they found themselves apologizing for objecting to his boorishness. Viola refused to be annoyed, seemed impervious to insults, and had an inexhaustible supply of patience. Living next door to the likes of her was no fun.