The why of a life could never be solved in this world, although vast libraries of solemn books speculated on the meaning and purpose of existence. Nothing could be known other than the what of any single life: what happened, what actions were taken, what events occurred beyond the person’s control, what obvious consequences ensued, what impact for better or worse that one life was seen to have on others.
Because self-reflection was one of the tools with which she developed fictional characters and earned her living, Joanna had thought she knew the what of her life in intimate and vivid detail. Now she understood that, for three or four years of her childhood, her recollections were sketchy at best, not merely because time was a thief of memories, but also because someone had cast upon her a spell of forgetting.
She didn’t write mystery novels per se, but mysteries of one kind or another coiled in the heart of every engaging novel. Because she was enchanted by the mysteries of existence and was as well a writer of stories concerned with things often unfathomable, hidden, recondite, she couldn’t abide not knowing the full truth of her past.
In countless novels, however, revelation led not just to light in the darkness, but also as often to danger, loss, and death. Of course, events in life didn’t unfold as they did in fiction. The real world didn’t provide as many happy endings as were found in novels.
22
One bright beam speared low across the floor, with darkness all around. Perhaps two birds on a roost unseen watched the fat spider as it explored the path of light.
In the church that stood now as a shrine to murder, Ophelia Poole had found one loose nail in a plank. With her fingernails, she had worked it a quarter of an inch out of the wood, but then it had seized up.
The Tac Light that Optime left with her featured a wrist strap of tough fabric. She managed to detach the strap and knot it around the head of the nail, which gave her leverage. Sitting on the floor, legs splayed to each side of the job, she worked the nail back and forth, extracting it a millimeter at a time.
Freed from the underlying joist, it proved to be two inches long and dark with time, but not rusty. A stiff little length of steel. Although it was not much of a weapon, it was something. Given a chance, she might be able to stab Optime in the eye.
She got to her feet and swept the sanctuary with the Tac Light. The two crows were perched on the chancel railing. Their eyes were like drops of oil, as black as their feathers. They worked their beaks as if speaking to her on a frequency that human beings could not hear.
In the second pew on the right, she stretched out on her left side and clicked off the light. The pew was a hard bed, though no harder than the planks on which it stood. The odor of decomposition, seeping upward from the basement, was noticeably less offensive even just two feet off the floor.
She listened to the beams and rafters contract minutely as the heat of the day was leeched from them by the night, to the tics and creaks of the floorboards as gravity tested them as it had for many decades, to the occasional rustle of the birds shifting on their roost.
Clutching the nail tightly in her right hand, she whispered, “So this is why I’m still alive, Octavia. This is why I didn’t die with you.”
She didn’t think she would sleep, but of course she slept. She woke a few times and listened for shuffling footsteps, though there were none.
Once, she realized the crows had left the chancel railing and were perched on the back of the pew on which she was lying, directly above her. She didn’t switch on the light or chase them away. She decided to think of them as angels watching over her, though nothing about them seemed holy.
23
Someone spoke his name. If sleep had brought dreams, Wyatt Rider didn’t remember them when he woke, lying on his left side, fully clothed except for his shoes. At first he couldn’t identify the room revealed by the low light of the bedside lamp. Then he remembered Rustling Willows, and with memory came the realization that whoever addressed him had not been in a dream.
A man spoke with contempt: “Pestilence and vermin.”
Wyatt rolled out of bed, onto his feet, snatching the pistol on the nightstand, with the weapon in a two-handed grip. The door to the hallway remained closed; no intruder had entered the room.
He searched the adjacent bathroom, where nothing moved in response to him except his image in the mirror.
“Diseased rats without tails,” the voice declared with thick abhorrence, “filthy cockroaches on two legs.”
In the bedroom once more, Wyatt realized that the TV glowed softly, tuned to a dead channel, though he’d never switched it on.