Nocturnes

I went to the kitchen and took a soda from the fridge. “Yeah, what about all the ice cream I have to keep bringing home? It doesn’t float here on its own.”

“I heard that.”

I stood at the kitchen door and waved a carton of Len Libby’s orange sherbet at her.

“Tempted? Huh? Do we want a little spoonful for the road?”

She threw a cushion at me.

“How I ever allowed you to get close enough to impregnate me I really don’t know. I guess it was a moment of weakness. Literally a moment, in your case.”

“Harsh,” I said. “You’re not including cuddling time.”

I sat down beside her and she folded herself into me as best she could. I shared my soda with her, despite her hurtful comments about my alleged lack of stamina.

“So how did it go?” she asked.

I told her about my day: the cops, the Grady house, my conversation with Maguire. None of it added up to very much. Rachel had spent some time going through the files Matheson had left with me. Now that the birth was imminent, she was not taking on any new academic or professional work, and consequently the Grady case offered her an opportunity to stretch some underused psychologist’s muscles.

“Mirrors,” said Rachel. “Conversations with an unseen other. A display of victims yet without any real interaction. No actual sexual or physical abuse of the children, beyond the final act of taking their lives. Even then, he seemed determined to put them through as little pain as possible: a single blow to the head to render them unconscious, then suffocation.”

“Then there’s the house,” I said. “He had great plans for it, yet never did much to improve it from what I can see. All he did was start wallpapering and put too many mirrors on the walls.”

“And what do you think he saw in them?” asked Rachel.

“He saw himself. What does anyone see in a mirror?”

She pursed her lips and shrugged. “Do you see yourself when you look in a mirror?”

I had the feeling that I often got with Rachel, that she had somehow moved three steps ahead of me while I was being distracted by a passing cloud.

“I-”

I stopped as I tried to consider the question properly.

“Well,” I said at last. “I see a version of myself.”

“Your reflection is informed by your own self-image. In effect, you create part of what you see. We are not as we are. We are as we imagine ourselves to be. So what did John Grady see when he looked in the mirror?”

I saw again the house. I saw its unfinished walls, its filthy sinks, its decaying carpets. I saw the cheap sticks of furniture, the empty bedrooms, the warped boards.

And I saw the mirrors.

“He saw his house,” I said. “He saw his house as he wished it to be.”

“Or as he believed it to be, in another place.”

“In the world beyond the glass.”

“And maybe that world was more real to him than this one.”

“So if the house was more real in that world, then…”

“Then so was he. Perhaps that’s who he was talking to while he was waiting to kill De

“And the children?”

“What did De

“He said that Grady spoke to their reflections in the glass.”

Rachel shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard anything quite like that before.”

She moved in closer to me.

“You will be careful, won’t you?” she asked.

“He’s dead,” I said. “There’s a limit to the harm dead men can do.”

In the Grady house, something stirred. Dust was raised in ascending spirals. Papers rustled in empty grates. It was the north wind, whistling through rotting frames and broken boards, that created the sense of movement in the silent rooms. It was the north wind that made doorknobs rattle, and doors creak. It was the north wind that caused coat hangers to jangle against one another in locked closets, and dirty glasses to clink in closed kitchen cupboards.

And it was the north wind that made the trees move, creating faint shadows that fell through cracks in the boarded windows, their shapes drifting across the old mirror above the fireplace in the dining room, the world reflected in its depths subtly different from our own, the shape moving within it finding no companion in the old house. There should have been photographs on the mantel, for there were photographs in its reflection in the glass. Instead, the mantel within the house itself was empty.

It was the wind, then, that had carried these black-and-white images of unknown children through the glass and into another world.

It was the wind, just the wind.

V

Surveillance is difficult work. Even the worst doughnut head, the kind of guy who wore a hockey helmet to school in case he fell over, is going to catch someone who’s watching him regularly for any length of time. The cops are lucky. It’s harder for a suspect to spot a handful of people on his tail than just one, and cops can split the job up between them, give one another a break, and generally help the other guy to remain on alert throughout, because surveillance, as well as being difficult, is also tedious, and the mind tends to wander. A good surveillance detail therefore requires a lot of manpower, which is why even the cops tend to sit on their hands some when the subject comes up. Taking two or more cops off regular duties to watch some jerk who may or may not be worthy of the attention has a knock-on effect on morale, overtime, and probably crime in general.

Private investigators generally don’t have the luxury of surveillance teams, and their clients aren’t always so wealthy that they can afford to hire a whole bunch of operatives to cover a job, so checking up on someone can be difficult work. The Grady house detail was different. The house wasn’t about to go anywhere, or attempt to make a break for freedom through the woods. Nevertheless, watching it continuously was going to be a problem, which meant that someone would have to be found to share the burden. To be done well, even a simple task like monitoring an empty old house required someone with patience, self-discipline, a steady nerve, and an eye for detail, someone who didn’t spook easily and who would know how to handle himself if anything went down.

In the absence of such an individual, I needed someone with a lot of time on his hands.

I knew just the person.

“Surveillance, huh?” said Angel.

Angel and his partner, Louis, were the closest thing to real friends that I had. Admittedly, they were morally suspect, and Angel had the kind of temperament that might have been helped by a little pharmaceutical intervention, but then I couldn’t claim to be perfect either. Most men end up with the friends that they deserve, but I figured that I could probably get away with a lot during the rest of my life and still have some cause for complaint about the ones that I’d been handed. Most of the time, they lived together in an apartment on the Upper West Side, where Louis’s natural tendency toward order and minimalism fought a valiant but losing battle against his partner’s fascination with clutter and bargain clothing. It was all very yin and yang, but when I offered that theory to Angel he pretended that I was talking about Siamese twins and regaled me with anecdotes of a sexually fascinating, if politically incorrect, nature. When I shared a similar view with Louis, he threatened to send Angel to stay with me, just to see how long Rachel and I would tolerate a little of Angel’s yang. Given that Rachel sometimes made Louis look like a slob, I imagined that wouldn’t be very long.

I could hear music playing in the background as Angel and I spoke. It sounded terrible.

“What the hell are you listening to?”