The Crooked Staircase Read online

  Jane listed some symptoms of hypothermia. “Uncontrollable shivering, confusion, weakness, dizziness, slurred speech.”

  “Cold is its own kind of pain,” Sara said. She closed her eyes and bent her head and might have been mistaken for a woman in prayer if her hands had not cramped into fists once more.

  Jane waited in patient quiet, Sara in the chilly silence of mortification, until Jane said, “It wasn’t primarily about the pain. Sure, they wanted you to be miserable. And afraid. But mainly it was about humiliation. Making you feel helpless, submissive, using shame to break your resolve.”

  When at last Sara spoke, her voice trembled as if the needled cold of that long-ago ordeal pricked her bones again. “The men…when they had to…”

  Jane spared her from the need to say it. “When they had to urinate, they did it in the tub.”

  Finally Sara raised her head and met Jane’s eyes. “I never could’ve imagined such a thing, treating anyone with such contempt.”

  “Because you’d never dealt with their type before. I have.”

  The character of the tremor in Sara’s voice changed, no longer occasioned by a memory of cold or humiliation, but by a virulent and righteous anger. “Will you do to Simon what those three did to me?”

  “I don’t work that way, Sara.”

  “He deserves it.”

  “He deserves worse.”

  “Will you ruin him?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Take his money?”

  “Some of it, anyway.”

  “Will you kill him?”

  “If I force him to tell me what I need to know, other people will probably kill him for ratting on them.”

  Sara considered that prospect. “What’s this all about?”

  “You don’t want to know. But if you hope to get your self-respect back, entirely back, you need to help me.”

  Outside, rain and wind. In the mind of Sara Holdsteck, a different but equal turbulence.

  Then she said, “What do you want to know?”

  5

  Tanuja Shukla, thrashed by fear but driven by duty, owing her brother no less than everything, hurrying through the dark stable where no horses had been kept for years, hooding the flashlight with her left hand even though distance and foul weather made it unlikely that one of the men in the house, glancing out a window, would glimpse the pale beam…Rain beating on the roof like the booted feet of marching legions, the earthen scent of the hard-packed hoof-imprinted floor, the musty but sweet smell of old straw moldering in the corners of the empty stalls…

  What had once been the tack room, where saddles and bridles and other horse gear had been stored, now contained a riding lawnmower, rakes and spades and gardening tools. A long-handled axe could serve as a weapon, but it wouldn’t be enough to help one slender girl drive off or chop down three men, even if she had the stomach for such violence, which she didn’t.

  Because the tack room was without windows, she no longer hooded the flashlight beam. She swept it quickly across bags of fertilizer, terra-cotta pots of all sizes, redwood stakes for tomato plants, cans of Spectracide Wasp & Hornet Killer….

  From the shelf she took a container of hornet spray. Removed the safety cap. The can was about ten inches tall. Weighed maybe a pound and a half. It contained a lot of poison.

  A cadenced wind now brought complex rhythms to the rain as Tanuja returned to the open door of the stable, where she switched off the flashlight and put it on the floor.

  Hindu by birth but not by practice, she had not believed in the faith of her mother and father since she’d been ten, which was the year they perished in the crash of a 747 while on a flight from New Delhi to London. Yet now she sent up a prayer to Bhavani, the goddess who was the benign aspect of the fierce Shakti, Bhavani the giver of life and the great font of mercy. Provide me with strength and allow me to triumph.

  She plunged into the cold rain, vigorously shaking the can of Spectracide as she ran toward the house where Sanjay was perhaps in mortal danger. Sanjay had slid into existence and taken his first breath close behind her, following her from womb to wicked world; therefore, she must always be his rakshak, his protector.

  6

  A crystal bowl, like a Gypsy’s instrument of foretelling that had failed to predict the current threat, seemed to float on the translucent milky quartz tabletop, bright with a fullness of ripe roses that shed petals as portentous as blood drops.

  Sitting at the kitchen table, held there at gunpoint, Sanjay Shukla was both fearful and exhilarated. He was sufficiently self-aware to marvel that, in such dire circumstances, a thread of delight was woven through his dread.

  His sister wrote a kind of magic realism, and her new novel, only in stores three weeks, had earned all but universal critical acclaim. Sanjay, too, had been declared an author of promise for importing into the literary novel certain qualities of hard-boiled detective stories. Sometimes he worried that he’d not experienced enough of the dangers and roughness of the world to be able to write neo-noir fiction as effectively as he wished. Yes, his parents had died when terrorists blew up an airplane. Yes, his and Tanuja’s mausi—their mother’s sister—Aunt Ashima Chatterjee and her husband, Burt, during their guardianship of the Shukla twins, had embezzled two-thirds of the inheritance before their niece and nephew could induce a court to declare them adults at the age of seventeen. But none of that was the kind of noir ordeal that would have made a good movie with Robert Mitchum; therefore, Sanjay often wished that he had more gritty experience of threat and violence.

  Now here he was, staring down the barrel of a pistol held by a neighbor who previously seemed as straight-arrow as Captain America. A second gunman, a stranger, stood near the door to the mudroom. A third man, whose caterpillar eyebrows nearly met over the bridge of his nose, placed on the table a small cooler from which he produced a packaged hypodermic needle with cannula and a stainless-steel box about nine inches square, seven or eight inches deep; he handled the box with cotton gloves, evidently because it was cold enough to take the skin off bare fingers.

  Sanjay was less alarmed by the pistol than by the syringe. A gun was an easily understood threat, but the needle injected an element of the unknown. It made him think of illness, disease. He wasn’t sick, and even if he had been, these men were not here to heal him, which meant they might be here to infect him.

  That made no sense, but people did a lot of things that made no sense.

  Sanjay also thought of truth serum, movie scenes involving interrogation, but that didn’t compute, either, because he didn’t have any valuable information to withhold from anyone.

  He had asked them what they wanted, what they were doing, what this was all about, but they had ignored his questions even though he answered theirs. Maybe they intuited that his answers were not truthful, which was why they responded to his inquiries only with silence. He’d told them that Tanuja was on a date with her boyfriend and that he didn’t know when they would return. He hoped that his sister, who didn’t currently have a boyfriend, who had been outside somewhere, standing in the rain, engaged in one of her eccentric quests for authentic details to enhance her writing, had seen these men coming, realized their malicious intent, and gone for help.

  Because conducting an agitated one-sided conversation would only make him seem desperate and likely to make a break for freedom, Sanjay matched their silence with silence and slumped in the chair, as if sliding into hopelessness, just a skinny Indian boy with a pair of golis no bigger than chickpeas, if he had any golis at all between his legs. The more certain they were that he’d submitted to them, the more likely he might surprise them and escape.

  The man wearing gloves opened the metal box, from which wafted a pale odorless mist, as if perhaps the contents rested on a bed of dry ice that began to evaporate when exposed to the air.

  The guns and syringe
were frightening, but the shared attitude of the three intruders was even more intimidating: the sense of authority with which they invaded the house and forcibly escorted Sanjay to the kitchen and pressed him into this chair and pushed aside the bowl of roses, slopping water on the quartz; the arrogant silence with which they responded to his protests and questions; their faces without expression; their stares direct and pitiless, as though they regarded him as belonging to a different—and inferior—species from them. Linc Crossley was not himself, lacking his usual humor, and there was something machinelike about all of them.

  The metal box appeared to contain numerous sleeves of silvery insulation, each perhaps an inch in diameter and seven inches long. As the gloved man removed three of these and put them on the table, his frown brought his caterpillar eyebrows together as if in an act of bristling conjugation.

  Crossley put his pistol on the counter by the refrigerator and from a jacket pocket produced a length of rubber tubing of the kind that phlebotomists used as a tourniquet to make it easier to find the vein of a patient from whom blood was to be drawn.

  The unhurried movements of the mute and solemn men, like mimes engaged not in entertainment but in the conveyance of some truth with a terrible consequence…Razor-keen light gleaming off the edges of the stainless-steel box as it was pressed shut…A few last feathery emissions from the smoking ice, as ephemeral as the secrets of the deceased issuing from the death-throttled throats of spirits…Moment by moment, the scene became more dreamlike yet hyperreal in its detail.

  The gun on the counter seemed to be an opportunity. If Sanjay chose the right moment when the men were distracted, twisted his chair to the left, reared back from the table, bolted up, moved fast, he surely could reach the pistol before the deputy seized it, though it was important to remember that Linc had police training.

  Crossley also produced a foil packet that might have contained an alcohol-saturated pad to sterilize the skin before pricking it with a needle.

  Sanjay’s attention was drawn again to the three silvery tubes. Caterpillar Man peeled open the Velcro closure on one, and into his hand slid a glass ampule containing a cloudy amber fluid.

  The fragile thread of delight woven through Sanjay’s dread had withered away. In the past few minutes, he had experienced enough threat and violence to inspire his writing for the rest of his career, assuming that he lived long enough to have one.

  As Caterpillar Man pierced the membrane of the ampule with the needle and drew the amber fluid into the barrel of the syringe, the man standing near the mudroom holstered his gun and approached, perhaps to restrain Sanjay should that be necessary. He yawned as though he must be so experienced in this work that it bored him.

  For an instant, it seemed as if a thick jet of glistering gastric acid erupted from his mouth. But recognizing the smell, Sanjay turned his head to follow the stream of hornet-killing insecticide to its origin.

  Only five feet four, a hundred pounds, wet, and no doubt cold, Tanuja seemed to be a towering menace when she entered from the downstairs hall, her pretty face contorted by wrath, as if she were a terrible manifestation of Kali, goddess of death and destruction, minus two of Kali’s four limbs, a can of Spectracide held at arm’s length. The highly pressurized container did not provide a spray, but instead produced a thick stream that projected up to twenty feet from the nozzle.

  Ironically, it was Linc Crossley who had once mentioned that wasp spray and bear repellent were effective home-defense weapons.

  The first man, gagging on the insecticide and unable to get his breath because of the volatile fumes, stumbled toward the kitchen sink perhaps to rinse out his mouth, which would make things worse.

  Lithe as a dancer, Tanuja pivoted toward Lincoln Crossley, who reached for the pistol on the counter, and she triggered the can again. At a distance of only eight feet, the stream splattered forcefully into his eyes and nose, rendering him temporarily blind and in even greater respiratory distress than her first target.

  As the man in white gloves cursed and dropped the ampule with the hypodermic, Sanjay slid out of his chair and under the table and onto his hands and knees, to get out of the line of fire.

  Now all three of the men were wheezing, coughing, issuing wordless cries of misery, colliding with furniture and one another.

  Pushing between steel-legged chairs, crawling out from under the table, Sanjay heard his sister call his name. He saw her at the door between the kitchen and garage, which was when gunfire erupted. The glass window in the microwave shattered. A round ricocheted off the refrigerator. An upper cabinet door pocked and cracked, and the dishes within exploded in a rattle-jangle of shrapnel.

  If not blinded, with tears and insecticide flooding down his face, Linc Crossley must have seen a world blurred beyond all recognition. He drew breath in raw gasps, exhaling explosively as each inhalation contained more suffocating flatus than air, swaying in place as if his legs were rubberizing. Yet he held fast to the pistol, firing at phantoms evoked by his stinging, bloodshot eyes.

  Crawling frantically, Sanjay stayed wide of the gloved intruder, who was lying on his right side, bearded with vomit. Hands clutching his stomach, the man now foamed at the mouth as though rabid.

  The guy who had been by the mudroom door, having taken a few ounces of the hornet-killing concoction straight in the mouth and having reflexively swallowed it, sprawled on his back, clawing his throat with such urgency that his fingernails scratched bloody furrows in his flesh, perhaps desperate for air, perhaps poisoned and dying. Beside him lay a smartphone, which must have slipped out of a jacket pocket when he fell.

  Although frantic to escape the kitchen and the blind man’s Hail Mary gunfire, Sanjay had the presence of mind to confiscate the phone on his way to the open door through which Tanuja had vanished.

  After dogging it into the laundry room, where his sister had put down the Spectracide and waited at the entrance to the garage, Sanjay clambered to his feet. In his terror, he heard himself praise her with a Hindi expression of their dad’s—“Shabash!”—which meant “Well done!” Switching on the phone as he followed Tanuja into the garage, he said, “I’ll call nine-one-one.”

  “Screw that,” she said. “We’re outta here.”

  7

  Now confident that it wouldn’t be thrown at her, Jane poured a second mug of coffee, brought it to the table, and put it in front of Sara Holdsteck, the fragrant steam rising in serpentine ribbons.

  As she refreshed her own mug, she said, “Though you’ve agreed to help me, first there’s more you need to hear.”

  “Which must mean…my situation is even worse than I think.”

  “Simon never told you he’d been married three times before?”

  Sara was surprised for a moment—and then not. “He said he’d sworn to stay a bachelor. But with me, he wanted it to be forever.”

  “His third wife said he has a silver tongue.”

  “Yeah. And a heart of iron.”

  Jane returned the Pyrex pot to the coffeemaker. “He seems to choose his wives for two reasons. First, they resemble one another. Slim brunettes with blue eyes, five feet six, give or take an inch.”

  “The other qualification?”

  “Money. They inherited it. Or earned it, as in your case and another. Not enormous fortunes, but serious money. Three other wives with four different divorce attorneys. Yet in every case they wanted zip from Simon, while giving him fifty to seventy percent of their assets.”

  “After going through one hell or another.”

  In her chair again, Jane said, “Pretty much the same hell. People sued them, all kinds of federal agencies suddenly came after them, and at the height of the chaos…ice-cold baths or the equivalent, and a dose of intense humiliation.”

  “They all broke like me,” Sara intuited, not as if she thought the weakness of the three previous wives somehow exoner
ated her, but as if depressed by the news of Simon’s repeated triumphs.

  “Count yourself lucky or wise that you gave him what he wanted after a weekend of abuse. Anyway, your only other choice would have been to kill him.”

  “I wish I had. But I was a different person then. So timid.”

  “Not timid,” Jane said. “Naïve. His third wife endured eight days. Ice-water baths, brutal sessions in a superheated sauna, sleep deprivation—and then came the vicious gang rapes you escaped, three men at a time and never the same three. She broke. She lives simply now on what he allowed her to keep. She’s become agoraphobic, so afraid of the outside world she never leaves her little bungalow.”

  When Sara drank some coffee, the mug rattled against her teeth.

  “I don’t know what outrages the other two wives were subjected to,” Jane said. “But even with his first, Simon didn’t need her money. He was already an entrepreneur with a few highly profitable businesses, largely because of his connections with people in positions of power.”

  Sara folded her hands around the warm mug and closed her eyes and seemed to be listening to the torrents of rain pummeling the house, but perhaps instead she heard only moments of the past, her ex-husband’s sneering voice. In time she said, “I always knew my money was the least of it. What mattered most to him was my total mortification, my shame, my submission. That’s why I think he let me live. So he can know I’m out here, changed forever and suffering.”

  Because Sara was smart enough to understand the implications of two final revelations, Jane gave her facts without interpretation. “Two and a half years after the divorce, his first wife treated herself to a vacation in France, accompanied by her cousin. On their third day in Paris, both women disappeared. Their remains were found two days later, in an abandoned building in an arrondissement where they would never have dared to go, where even police are reluctant to patrol because of the Iranian and Syrian gangs that operate there. They’d been robbed and beaten to death with lengths of iron pipe left at the scene. In the case of his second wife, three years after the divorce, she’d recovered enough confidence to have a boyfriend. They went hiking in Yosemite. At a point where the trail narrowed with a steep drop to one side, maybe one of them slipped over the edge. Maybe the other reached out to halt the companion’s fall and was pulled off balance. However it happened, both ended up dead on the rocks three hundred feet below.”