The Forbidden Door Read online

  For a day after her beautiful Nick removed himself from this world, she had been in a state of shock. Before her muddled thinking cleared, before she grew certain he hadn’t been capable of suicide under any circumstances, those first twenty-four hours were like a century in Purgatory. In confusion and grief, she searched her heart for what guilt might be hers. What might she have done to turn him away from self-destruction? What could she have been for him that she had not been? Why hadn’t she recognized his precarious state of mind?

  She had known him too well, however, to accept for long that he had taken his own life. They were not just lovers, not just husband and wife, not just creators of their lovely boy; their souls were so precisely configured to fit together that she and Nick were a two-piece puzzle, a puzzle solved when they took their marriage vows, the meaning of life made pellucid to them when they became as one.

  Now the angle of Ivan Petro’s head and his gruesome throat wound put her back in Virginia on that terrible evening just days before Thanksgiving. For a moment, the world seemed so strange that she couldn’t hope ever to make her way through it to a place of peace—but only for a moment.

  Part of Nick remained alive, their boy, and she could not fail Travis. To fail him would also be to fail Nick for real this time.

  “Screw that,” she said.

  She turned her back on Ivan Petro and sprinted across the glen, up the north slope, where thin strata of pale smoke moved west to east, layered ghosts swimming toward a different haunt. Shadow-robed trees loomed in solemn threat, like the unforgiving judges in some final court.

  As she ascended, her eyes stung and her nostrils burned and her chest ached. When she drew near the crest, concussion waves trembled through her from the explosion of the Range Rover’s fuel tank, but she did not look back.

  She broke from the trees into the field of weeds and ribbon grass, greedily inhaling clean air, blowing out the smell of smoke.

  Passing the hammer that she had thrown at Petro, she plucked it off the ground. At the Explorer, she snatched up the screwdriver and the pieces of the shattered burner phone, threw everything onto the passenger seat.

  When she went around to the driver’s door, she saw a dark and churning column just now emerging through the tree tops in the glen, a few tendrils of lighter smoke rising elsewhere.

  She drove around the perimeter of the parking lot, toward the exit lane. It seemed that people at the truck stop had become aware of the fire in the woodlet only after the explosion and the sudden greater rush of smoke that followed it. As far as she could tell, no one associated her with those events.

  Out of the truck stop, quick onto Interstate 5, southbound. Sirens in the distance. The wailing rose, rose higher, but then faded, and she never saw the sources or was able to deduce from where they came.

  Fewer than ten minutes had passed in the glen. She was an hour north of Los Angeles, early enough to beat the rush-hour traffic that would clog every artery in and out of the city.

  She thought of the dead man in the woods. The shakes took her.

  Others might have hoped for good luck tomorrow in Indio and later in Borrego Valley, but in times as troubled as these, she placed no hope in the cruel gods of fortune. She trusted only in her own preparations and actions, in the power of love to inspire her to do the wisest thing to the best of her ability.

  She pulled into a rest stop before the Tejon Pass, waited until she had the place to herself, located the transponder in the wheel well of her Explorer, and used her hammer to render it inoperative. The backplate of the device couldn’t be loosened from the epoxy that fixed it to the car. But when she examined the fragments that fell to the pavement, she was confident that the SUV was not trackable.

  Once more racing south on I-5, she wanted music, a song written out of profound love. She chose pianist David Benoit playing “Kei’s Song,” which he’d written for his wife. She turned up the volume.

  Piano chords and notes are known not only to her ears, but also are felt in her fingertips, weave through her heart, nourish her soul as milk makes strong the bones.

  36

  THE GRIEVING BOY, WHO’D TAKEN most of the night to fall asleep, still slept and slept. The dogs needed to be toileted and fed, but leaving the boy alone seemed wrong. Cornell ought to do something—what?—to be prepared for when the mother came to collect her child.

  Like Mr. Paul Simon had sung, The mother and child reunion is only a motion away.

  This was more responsibility than Cornell usually shouldered. When he tried to sit near the boy and read, he couldn’t concentrate on the prose. He worried that he was going to do something—or fail to do something—that would endanger Travis.

  Now he stood over the La-Z-Boy recliner again, watching the child. Travis breathed so softly, maybe he wasn’t breathing at all. Cornell wanted to touch him, see if he was alive, but dared not.

  All night the German shepherds had patrolled the library, taking turns sleeping, sniffing Cornell, trying to induce him to pet them, which he couldn’t do, because it might be like touching a person.

  Any place where another person touched him was a wound that didn’t bleed blood, that bled the very essence of him, his mind and soul. By a touch, another person could drain Cornell out of himself and leave his body a mindless husk.

  This was a false fear related to his personality disorder. But knowing it was a false fear didn’t make him less fearful. Strange. Otherwise, he respected reason. But this streak of unreason was baked into him like a vein of cinnamon in a morning roll, though cinnamon was a good thing and unreason was not good.

  The dogs were agitated. They needed to potty.

  Cornell didn’t want the dogs to potty on his Persian carpets.

  If he tried to put the dogs’ leashes on their collars, they might touch him. No good, no good, no good.

  The dogs might be trained not to run away. But what if they did? The boy loved them. He’d be devastated if the dogs ran away.

  Here was what responsibility meant. It meant making decisions that affected someone other than Cornell himself.

  When the dogs started whining, he said, “All right, I’ll take you out. But don’t run away from me, please and thank you.”

  Outside, the day was warm and bright, with none of the soft colors of the library lamplight that he loved so much.

  The dogs ran a few yards from the door before they peed. Then they sniffed around for a minute, and finally both squatted to poop.

  Cornell was embarrassed, watching the dogs toilet, but he was also fascinated because they seemed self-conscious, glancing at him sheepishly, maybe because he hadn’t watched them do this before.

  When they had pooped, they stood staring at him expectantly, ears pricked forward. After a minute of confusion, he realized they expected him to pick up the poop in plastic bags, like people did.

  He didn’t have plastic bags. Besides, except for the graveled area around the blue house, in which cacti and succulents were the only landscaping, the rest of this acreage, including that in the vicinity of the barn, was a mess of dead grass, sage, long-stemmed buckwheat, assorted weeds, and bare earth. Leaving poop wasn’t as offensive as it would have been on a golf course or a church lawn.

  As Cornell moved toward the house, his hulking freak-show shadow preceding him, the dogs watched. When he called them, they glanced at the poop and regarded him with puzzlement, maybe wondering why he was so poorly trained. But at last they came to the house with him.

  The large bag of kibble stood in the kitchen where the boy had said it would be. His suitcase of spare clothes and other items was in the smaller of the two bedrooms.

  After locking the door, Cornell returned to the barn, carrying the kibble in one hand and the suitcase in the other.

  “Come along, please and thank you,” he said to the dogs, and it delighted him that they
trotted at his side, one to his left, one to his right, as if they cared for him the way they cared for the boy.

  The electronic key in his pants pocket automatically unlocked what appeared to be a flimsy man-size barn door that was in fact steel behind its rotten-plank façade. He and the dogs stepped into a white vestibule. He closed the door behind him. After a few seconds, its lock engaged with a hard clack. The electronic lock on the door before him responded to his hand on the knob and unlocked itself, so he could push through into the library.

  To the left of the door through which Cornell entered, another door led to the bathroom. To the right lay the part of the fourth wall that wasn’t lined with books, but instead featured a kitchen counter, cabinets, a double sink, two large Sub-Zero refrigerators, two microwaves, and an oven.

  The boy stood peering in one of the Sub-Zeros.

  The dogs whined with pleasure and hurried to the boy.

  Travis turned to Cornell. “Mr. Jasperson, can I ask something?”

  “Can you? Yes. Of course. And call me Cornell.”

  “What runs the ’frigerators?”

  Cornell blinked at him. He put down the kibble and suitcase. “Umm. Runs? Well, the power company.”

  “What happens after the world ends?”

  “The world won’t end. Just civilization.” When the boy frowned, Cornell explained, “Just cities and stuff, not the planet. Not the planet. Not the planet.”

  “So what runs the ’frigerators then?”

  “A generator. A big tank of propane buried out there. It’ll run library and bunker fourteen months, or just the bunker for thirty.”

  “What then?” the boy asked.

  “Maybe a new civilization will start up.”

  “What if nothing starts?”

  “Umm. Umm. Then I’ll probably be dead.”

  “Probably,” Travis agreed. “I thought you never go into town.”

  “I don’t ever go to town anymore. Hardly ever did, even when I lived in the little blue house. I don’t want to scare people.”

  “So where do you get chocolate milk and stuff if you never go into town?”

  “Gavin comes down here once every month like clockwork. He stocks the refrigerators.”

  “Maybe he will. If he’s not…”

  “Umm. If he’s not dead. If he’s not dead. If he’s not dead.”

  The boy closed the refrigerator and regarded Cornell solemnly, as did the dogs. “Mr. Jasperson, why do you say things three times?”

  “You can call me Cornell. I don’t say everything three times.”

  “But you say some things three times.”

  “Umm. Things I don’t want to happen or wish weren’t true. Or sometimes things I think aren’t true but wish they were.”

  “Does that work?”

  “No. But I feel a little better. Do you want something to eat?”

  “I’m kind of hungry.”

  “I can make eggs scrambled or fried, cheese or not, or eggs all other ways. With toast. I can make baloney sandwiches. Mustard or mayonnaise or both. I can make many kinds of meals.”

  “Are you hungry?” the boy asked.

  “I am. I’m hungry.”

  “Then I’ll have what you’re having,” the boy said.

  The dogs padded to the bag of kibble, sniffing with excitement.

  “I should feed the dogs.” Cornell bent to the bag. “They’re nice dogs so far. They don’t bite so far. Not so far.”

  “They like you a lot,” Travis said.

  Cornell froze. Hunched over the bag, he turned his head to stare at the boy. “How do you know?”

  “Can’t you see? They like you.”

  “I don’t see. I don’t know how to see that.”

  “Well, they do. They like you.”

  Cornell looked at one dog, at the other. They wagged their tails. “Umm. Maybe it’s just because I have the food.”

  “No, they really like you.”

  Around other people, Cornell always felt too big and awkward and strange, even around his cousin Gavin, and he felt no less so around animals. Before this, dogs barked at him. Cats hissed, bared their teeth, and fled. “Umm. Maybe, maybe not. But that would be something. That would be something. That sure would be something.”

  37

  IF HE BELIEVED THEY WERE real, Egon Gottfrey would hate Texans, and if he believed Texas was a real place rather than a concept, he would never go there again.

  Chase and Alexis Longrin, with their three daughters—Laurie, Daphne, and Artemis—are being temporarily detained in the living room.

  When Chris Roberts and Janis Dern attempt to interrogate the family, all five detainees act as though they are gathered here by their own choice. They pretend to be unaware of any intruders, and speak only to one another, mostly about television shows they have seen recently. They are certain that Gottfrey and his crew aren’t legitimate authorities—or at least that they aren’t loyal to either the Bureau or the country. Clearly, through her in-laws, Jane Hawk has poisoned the minds of these people.

  Egon Gottfrey observes this impudence until it bores him. Then he goes to the fenced exercise yard at Stable 5, where Pedro and Alejandro have corralled all the employees, eight men and two women. Nine of those ten are day workers and can claim not to have been on the property at 2:00 A.M., when Ancel and Clare Hawk arrived on horseback—and perhaps soon thereafter left by a more comfortable form of transportation.

  Only one of them, Bodie Houston, a lean-muscled sun-seared thirtysomething guy with jet-black hair, has been here all night, in a small ranch-manager’s house. He claims to so admire the FBI, its history and its high standards and its incorruptible agents, that he bitterly regrets having slept too soundly to have seen anything. Bitterly regrets it. “As a kid, see, all I ever did want to be was FBI. What an honor if I could help you fellas. Damn, but don’t I feel as useless as a fifth leg on a horse.”

  Gottfrey regards him in silence after that speech, trying to decide whether the Unknown Playwright wants him to handcuff Bodie Houston, drive him to a remote location, and throw him off a cliff—or walk away.

  He chooses to walk away.

  38

  CORNELL’S LIBRARY FOR THE END of the world. Windowless. Quiet. A fortress of books. In one of the reading areas, four mismatched—but beautiful—armchairs faced one another in a circle. Between the chairs were antique tables, each of a different period. Stained-glass lamps on the tables. The colored light so soft and pretty. Chairs and everything standing on a late-nineteenth-century Tabriz carpet in shades of red and gold.

  Cornell had tried to make the library match his idea of what Heaven would be like, except he hoped that he wouldn’t be alone in Heaven and that he wouldn’t look scary to people there and that he would know what to say to the other people he met.

  Now he had company, and it seemed like this was a test to see if he might be ready for an afterlife in which he wouldn’t be alone.

  The two big dogs were lying on the carpet, each with its tail tucked between its legs, one of them snoring. Cornell had quickly grown more comfortable with the dogs than he’d thought possible on first encountering them. For one thing, there was no need to carry on a conversation with the dogs.

  Cornell sat in a wingback chair. The boy was lost in a big club chair. By contrast with the child, Cornell felt like a pterodactyl folded onto a perch meant for a sparrow. Feet on footstools, they faced each other from the north and south points of the reading circle. The dining trays were hooked over their chair arms.

  “Sandwiches are real good,” the boy said.

  Cornell wasn’t sure what to say, though it seemed safe just to describe the sandwich. “Buttered bread, two slices of baloney, two slices of cheese, one Velveeta and one provolone, sliced tomatoes, a little mayonnaise, put in a sandwich press and toa
sted.” That seemed to go over well, so he added, “Two sweet pickles on the side and a little bag of potato chips for each of us.”

  “The cola is good with the sandwiches,” the boy said.

  Having read everything on the soda can, having an eidetic memory, Cornell decided not to list the contents of the beverage, but he did quote a fact he found interesting: “ ‘Canned under the authority of the Coca-Cola Company, Atlanta, Georgia, 30313, by a member of the Coca-Cola Bottlers’ Association, Atlanta, Georgia, 30327.’ ”

  The boy said, “I’ve never been to Atlanta.”

  “Neither have I,” said Cornell.

  “We should go someday.”

  “No, that’s a scary idea.”

  “Scary why?”

  “Too far. Too big,” Cornell said.

  “I guess it is if you say so.”

  This conversation thing with a new person was easier for Cornell than it had often been before.

  After a silence, the boy said, “You’re Uncle Gavin’s cousin.”

  “My mother, Shamira, was his mother’s sister. But the family disowned her and she disowned them when she was sixteen, before I was born. The family never knew about me.”

  “How do you…disown somebody?”

  “You push them out, close the door, and never see them again.”

  “Wow. That’s mean. Why’d they do that?”

  “My mother was a terrible angry drug addict and a prostitute.”

  “What’s a prositoot?”

  “She sold sex. Oh. You didn’t hear that. You didn’t hear it. You didn’t hear. She…she…she made love for money.”

  This conversation thing had broken Cornell into a sweat.

  The boy said, “Making love is making babies. She made babies?”

  “Just me. I was a baby once.”

  “So who’s your dad?”

  “Nobody knows. It’s a big mystery.”