Praying for Sleep

The massive body lands sideways, unbalanced, half on Owen, half on a tall Imperial rose tree, whose thorns dig deep parallel scratches like musical-staff lines along Michael’s cheek and arm. He sobs in panic from the twenty-foot leap-a terror that for anyone would be overwhelming and for him must be beyond comprehension.

A long boomerang of glass slits Lis’s neck. She rolls sideways away from the straggling men and huddles, covering the wound with a shaking hand.

Through the gaping hole in the glass roof a light mist falls and a few swirling leaves descend. Bulbs shatter under the cold moisture from the sky and the room is suddenly immersed in blue darkness. Then a sound fills the air, a sound that Lis believes at first is the rejuvenated storm. But, no, she realizes that it’s the howling of a human voice inflected with madness-though whether it’s Michael’s or Owen’s or perhaps even her own, Lis Atcheson will never know.

Here, in this storm-tossed yard, the vigilant and serious sheriff ’s deputies dispersed doggedly, combing the house and grounds.

Here the medics, directed first to pale Trenton Heck, took his vital signs and determined that he hadn’t lost a critical quantity of blood. Here the same medics stitched and dressed Lis’s own sliced neck, a dramatic but unserious wound, whose scar would be with her, she guessed, for the rest of her days.

And here Portia was flying into her sister’s arms. Embracing her hard, Lis smelled shampoo and sweat and felt one of the young woman’s silver hoop earrings tap against her lips. They hugged for a full minute and when Lis stepped away it was the younger of the two sisters who was crying.

A mud-spattered state-police car arrived, its rooftop speaker already turned to the receiving cha

“Mrs. Atcheson?” he called.

She caught his eye and he started for her but then paused halfway through the muddy yard to gaze with undisguised surprise, then concern, at Trenton Heck, lying on a gurney. He was barely conscious. The two men said a few words to each other before the medics carted the lanky tracker off to an ambulance.

Don Haversham approached her and asked if she felt like answering a few questions.

“I suppose.”

As they were talking, a doctor emerged from one of the ambulances and put a butterfly bandage on the cut on Lis’s arm then retreated, saying only, “Hardly a scratch. Wash it.”

“No stitches?”

“Nup. That bump on your head, that’ll go away in a day or two. Don’t worry.”

Unaware that she had a bump on her head she said she wasn’t worried. She turned back to Haversham and spoke with him for the better part of half an hour.

“Oh, listen,” she asked, after she’d finished her account, “could you get in touch with a Dr. Kohler at Marsden hospital?”

“Kohler?” Haversham squinted. “He’s disappeared. We were trying to find him.”

“Hey, would that be a Richard Kohler?” The Ridgeton sheriff had overheard them.

“That’s him,” Lis said.

“Well,” the sheriff responded, “fella of that name was found drunk an hour ago. At Klepperman’s Ford.”

“Drunk?”

“Sleeping off a bad one on the hood of a Mark IV Lincoln Continental. To top it off, had a raincoat laid over him like a blanket and this skull, looked like a badger or skunk or something, sitting on his chest. No, I’m not fooling. If that ain’t peculiar I don’t know what is.”

“Drunk?” Lis repeated.

“He’ll be okay. He was pretty groggy so we got him in a holding cell at the station. Lucky for him he was on the car and not driving it, or he could kiss that license goodbye.”

This hardly seemed like Kohler. But nothing would have surprised her tonight.

She led Haversham and another deputy into the house and coaxed Michael outside. Together they walked him to an ambulance.

“Looks like that’s a broken arm and ankle,” the astonished medic said. “And I’d throw in a couple cracked ribs too. But he don’t seem to feel a thing.”

The deputies stared at the patient with fear and awe, as if he were the mythical progeny of Jack the Ripper and Lizzie Borden. Michael, upon Lis’s solemn promise that it was not poison, consented to a shot of sedative and allowed his own wounds to be cleaned though only after Lis asked the medic to dab antiseptic on her wrist to prove it was not acid. Michael sat in the back of the ambulance, hands together, staring down at the floor, and said not a word of farewell to anyone. He seemed to be humming as the doors closed.

Then Owen, battered but conscious, was taken away.

As was the horrible rag-doll body of the poor young deputy, his blood, all of it, lost in his squad car and in a bed of muddy zi

The ambulances left, then the squad cars, and Lis stood next to Portia in the kitchen, the two sisters finally alone. She looked at the younger woman for a moment, examining the bewilderment on her face. Perhaps it was shock, Lis pondered, though more likely a virulent strain of curiosity, for Portia suddenly began asking questions. Although Lis was looking directly at her, she didn’t hear a single one of them.

Nor did she ask Portia to repeat herself. Instead, smiling ambiguously, she squeezed her sister’s arm and walked outside, alone, into the blue monotone of dawn, heading away from the house toward the lake. The bloodhound caught up with her and trotted alongside. When she stopped at the far edge of the patio, near the wall of sandbags the sisters had raised, the dog flopped onto the muddy ground. Lis herself sat on the levee and gazed at the gunmetal water of the lake.

The cold front was now upon Ridgeton and the trees creaked with incipient ice. A million jettisoned leaves covered the ground like the scales of a giant animal. They’d glisten later in the sun, brilliant and rare, if there was a sun. Lis gazed at broken branches and shattered windows and shingles of wood and of asphalt yanked from the house. The heavens had rampaged, true. But apart from a waterlogged car the damage was mostly superficial. This was the case with storms around here; they didn’t cause much harm beyond dousing lights, stripping trees, flooding lawns and making the good citizens feel temporarily humble. The greenhouse, for instance, had seen several howling tempests and had never been damaged until tonight-and even then it’d taken a huge madman to inflict the harm.

Lis sat for ten minutes, shivering, her breath floating from her lips like faint wraiths. Then she rose to her feet. The hound too stood and looked at her in anticipation, which, she supposed, meant he’d like something to eat. She scratched his head and walked to the house over the damp grass, and he followed.