Relentless Page 7

  “Why would he want that?”

  “Either he wants us to call them or he doesn’t care if we do. This is so screwy. I haven’t done anything to him. There’s something about this we don’t understand.”

  “I don’t understand any of it,” she declared.

  “Exactly. Trust me on this. No cops just yet.”

  Leaving her with Milo and the dog, I searched the house, found no one. Nothing had been damaged. Everything seemed to be in order.

  All the doors were locked, and the security chains were engaged. The window latches were secure. No panes had been broken.

  Christmas was little more than six weeks away; but Waxx had not come down a chimney and had not departed through one. All the dampers were closed tight.

  In the master bathroom, I stripped off my pajamas and quickly dressed. I retrieved my wristwatch from the vanity, where I had left it before retiring for the night. The time was 4:54 A.M.

  Catching sight of myself in a mirror, I didn’t like what I saw. Face pale and damp with sweat, skin gray and grainy around the eyes, lips bloodless, mouth tight and grim.

  My eyes were especially disturbing. I didn’t see myself in them. I saw someone I had once been.

  When I returned to Milo’s room, he still slept.

  Lassie had gotten over her shame. From the bed, she stared at us imperiously and issued a long-suffering sigh, as though we were keeping her awake.

  Penny said, “I’m gonna scream if I don’t have a cookie.”

  This time: oatmeal-raisin with macadamia nuts. Penny was too agitated to sit at the table. She paced the kitchen as she nibbled the cookie. “You want milk?” I asked. “No. I want to blow up something.”

  “I’m having Scotch. Blow up what?”

  “Not just a tree stump, that’s for sure.”

  “We don’t have any stumps. Just trees.”

  “Like a hotel. Something at least twenty stories.”

  “Is that satisfying—blowing up a hotel?”

  “You’re so relaxed afterward,” she said. “Then let’s do it.”

  “We blew up a church once. That was just sad.”

  “I’m angry and scared. I don’t need sad on top of that.” I sat on a stool, my back to the breakfast bar, and watched her pace as I sipped the Scotch. The whiskey was just a prop; what calmed and fortified me was watching Penny.

  “Blowing things up,” she said, “relieves stress better than cookies.”

  “Plus it’s less fattening,” I noted, “and doesn’t lead to diabetes.”

  “I’m thinking maybe we’ve made a mistake not involving Milo in all that.”

  “I’m sure he’d enjoy blowing up buildings. What kid wouldn’t? But what about the effect on his personality development?”

  “I turned out okay, didn’t I?” she asked.

  “So far, you’re the nicest abnormal person I know. But if the cookies stop working for you …”

  Grimbald, her father, was a demolitions expert. In Las Vegas alone, he had brought down four old hotels to clear the land for bigger and glitzier enterprises. From the time Penny—then Brunhild—was five years old until she married me, he had taken her with him to watch his controlled blasts implode enormous structures.

  On a DVD that her folks produced for us, we have TV-news footage of young Penny at numerous events, clapping her hands in delight, giggling, and mugging for the camera as, behind her, huge hotels and office buildings and apartment towers and sports stadiums collapsed into ruins. She looked adorable.

  Grimbald and Clotilda titled the DVD Memories, and for the soundtrack they used Streisand singing “The Way We Were” as well as an old Perry Como tune, “Magic Moments.” They got teary-eyed when they played it every Christmas.

  “I’ve learned something about myself tonight,” Penny said.

  “Oh, good. Then it’s all been worthwhile.”

  “I didn’t know I could get this pissed off.”

  Penny dropped her half-eaten cookie in the kitchen sink.

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  With a spatula, she shoved the cookie into the drain. She turned on the cold water, and then she thumbed the garbage-disposal button.

  In an instant, whirling steel obliterated the cookie, but she did not at once push the button again. She stared at the drain as the water spilled down through the churning blades.

  I began to suspect that in the theater of her mind, she was feeding pieces of Shearman Waxx to the disposal.

  After a minute, I raised my voice to be heard above the motor, the whistling blades, and the running water: “You’re beginning to freak me out.”

  Shutting off the disposal and the water, she said, “I’m freaking myself out.” She turned away from the sink. “How could he see in the dark?”

  “Maybe night-vision goggles, the infrared spectrum.”

  “Sure, everybody has a pair of those lying around. So how could he take control of our alarm system?”

  “Babe, remember when we got a car with a satellite-navigation system? The first day, I kept responding to the woman who was giving me directions because I thought she was talking to me live from orbit?”

  “Okay, I’m asking the wrong guy. But you’re the only guy I’ve got to ask.”

  As I started to reply, Penny put a finger to her lips, warning me to be silent.

  Cocking my head, listening to the house, I wondered what she had heard.

  She came to me, took my glass of Scotch, and put it on the counter.

  Raising my eyebrows, I silently mouthed the question What?

  She grabbed my hand, led me into the food pantry, closed the door behind us, and said sotto voce, “What if he can hear us?”

  “How could he hear us?”

  “Maybe he bugged the house.”

  “How could he have done that?”

  “I don’t know. How did he take control of our alarm system?”

  “Let’s not get totally paranoid,” I said.

  “Too late. Cubby, who is this guy?”

  The standard online encyclopedia answer that had been adequate only a day earlier—award-winning critic, author of three college textbooks, enema—no longer seemed complete.

  “After his weird walk-through yesterday,” Penny said, “I told you it was over, he’d made his point. But it wasn’t over. It still isn’t.”

  “Maybe it is,” I said with less conviction than a guy cowering in the rubble of a city only half destroyed by Godzilla.

  “What does he want from us? What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t figure how his head works.”

  Her eyes were no less lovely for being haunted. “He wants to destroy us, Cubby.”

  “He can’t destroy us.”

  “Why can’t he?” she asked.

  “Our careers depend on talent and hard work—not just on a critic’s opinions.”

  “Careers? I’m not talking about careers. You’re in denial.”

  For some reason—maybe to avoid her gaze—I plucked a can of beets off a pantry shelf. Then I didn’t know what to do with it.

  “In the mood for beets?” she asked. When I returned the can to the shelf without comment, she said, “Cubby, he’s going to kill us.”

  “I didn’t do anything to him. Neither did Milo. You haven’t even seen him yet.”

  “He has some reason. I don’t much care what it is. I just know what he’s going to do.”

  I found myself looking at a can of corn, but I didn’t pick it up. “Let’s be real. If he wanted to kill us, he could have done it tonight.”

  “He’s sadistic. He wants to torment us, terrify us, totally dominate us—and then kill us.”

  I was surprised by the words that came from me: “I’m not a magnet for monsters.”

  “Cubby? What does that mean?”

  I know Penny so well that her tone of voice told me precisely what expression now shaped her face: furrowed brow, eyes squinted in calculation, nose lifted as if to catch a scent, lips
still parted in expectation after she had spoken—the quizzical look of an acutely perceptive woman who recognizes a moment of revelation hidden in the folds of a conversation.

  “What does that mean?” she repeated.

  Rather than lie to her, I said, “I think I should apologize.”

  “Are you talking to me or the corn?”

  I dared to look at her, which was not easy considering what I said as I met her eyes: “I mean—apologize to Waxx.”

  “Like hell. You don’t have anything to apologize for.”

  “For going to lunch just to get a look at him.” I couldn’t explain myself to her. For ten years, I deceived her by omission, and now was not the time to confess. “For violating his privacy.”

  Incredulous, she said, “It’s a public restaurant. This is a private residence. You looked at him, he Tasered us.”

  “An apology can’t do any harm.”

  “Yes, it can. An apology won’t placate him. It’ll encourage him. He’ll feed on any concession. Apologizing to such a man—it’s like baring your throat to a vampire.”

  Hard experience supported what she said, but it was experience that I had long repressed and on which I was loath to act.

  “All right,” I said. “So what do you think we should do?”

  “Locks and alarms didn’t stop him tonight. They won’t stop him tomorrow night. This place isn’t safe.”

  “I’ll have the alarm company upgrade the system.”

  She shook her head. “That’ll take days. And it won’t matter. He’s too clever for upgrades. We have to get to a safe place, where he can’t find us.”

  “We can’t run forever. I’ve got a book deadline.”

  “And, good golly,” she said, “we haven’t even begun to do our Christmas shopping.”

  “Well, I do have a deadline,” I said defensively.

  “I didn’t say run forever. Just buy time to do some research.”

  “What research?”

  “Shearman Waxx. Where does he come from? What’s his story, his past, his associations?”

  “He’s an enigma.”

  She picked up the can of beets in which I had previously shown an interest. “Take the label off this can, the contents are a mystery—but only until you open it.”

  “I can open a can,” I said, because we had an electric opener that required of me no mechanical skill.

  “And if Waxx is this freaking weird with us,” Penny said, “he has to have been totally bizarro with someone else, maybe with a lot of people, so at the very least we should be able to find someone to support our claim that he’s harassing us.”

  I acquiesced. “All right. We’ll get someplace safe, then we’ll go on the hunt.”

  “Still no cops?”

  “Not till we know more about Waxx. I don’t want a media circus.”

  “Cops can be discreet.”

  “They’d have to talk to Waxx. He won’t be discreet. Come on. I’ll help you pack.”

  “I’d rather you took Lassie out to poop. Fix breakfast for Milo. Deal with your morning e-mails. I’ll pack after I shower.”

  “I don’t know why that can of shaving cream detonated in the suitcase. It didn’t have anything to do with me.”

  “Nobody said that it did, sweetie. Not either time. I just pack faster than you do.”

  “Because I like to make the maximum use of space. You can take fewer suitcases if you don’t waste a cubic inch.”

  She kissed me on the nose and quoted Chesterton: “‘A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke. Each has discovered that the other is not only a fool, but a great fool.’”

  We drew on each other’s strengths, but perhaps more important, we found our strength increased and our love enriched by being able to laugh at our own and at each other’s weaknesses.

  As Penny opened the pantry door, I suddenly knew that the critic would be there, armed with something wickedly sharp. I was wrong. We were alone.

  The specifics of the premonition proved false, but the essence was fulfilled a short while later. Before we left the house, Shearman Waxx would escalate the terror and deal us a devastating blow.

  At 5:30 that Thursday morning, a full half hour before dawn, when I went upstairs to wake Milo, he was sitting at his desk, working with his computer.

  On the back of his plain white pajamas, the word SEEK blazed in red block letters.

  Lassie stood on top of the highboy, peering down at me.

  “How did she get up there?” I asked.

  His attention fixed on the computer, Milo said, “The usual way.”

  “Which is how?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Milo?”

  He did not respond.

  Although the boy wasn’t touching the keyboard, groups of numbers and symbols flickered across the screen. On closer inspection, I saw multiple lines of complex mathematical equations chasing one another so fast from left to right that I could make no sense of them.

  In truth, I would not have been able to understand them at any speed. I’m grateful that Penny is willing to balance the checkbook and review bank statements every month.

  The screen went blank, and Milo at once typed in a series of approximately thirty numbers and symbols that, as far as I was concerned, might as well have been ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. When he finished typing, his entry remained on the monitor for a moment, but then blinked off. Once more, tiers of equations streamed across the computer without any further input from him.

  “What’s happening?” I asked.

  Milo said, “Something.”

  “Something what?”

  “Yeah.”

  When my son was at his most mystifying, when he turned so far inward that he seemed almost autistic in his detachment, I had always before been intrigued, enchanted by the single-minded concentration with which he chased an idea through the labyrinth of his mind, his eyes bright with the excitement of discovery.

  Not until now had I found his contemplative disjunction from his surroundings to be disturbing. The atmosphere in the bedroom was ominous, and the hairs on the nape of my neck were raised by a power less ordinary than static electricity.

  “Something’s happening,” I pressed. “Something what?”

  He said, “Interesting.”

  On top of the highboy, Lassie wagged her tail. Her reliable canine instinct for menace seemed to detect nothing troubling in the moment.

  I was probably reacting to Shearman Waxx’s assault on us and to the fear of his return, not to Milo.

  “Listen,” I said, “we’re going on a little trip.”

  “Trip,” Milo said.

  “We want to get out of here by seven-thirty.”

  Milo said, “Thirty.”

  “We’ll have something quick for breakfast, cereal and toast, then you’ll shower in the master bath because your mom will be in our bedroom packing, and she wants you to stay close to her.”

  Milo intently studied the screen.

  “Hey, Spooky, did you hear what I said?”

  “Cereal, toast, stay close to Mom.”

  “I’m going to feed Lassie and toilet her. You come to the kitchen.”

  “Cereal, toast, gimme a minute.”

  On top of the highboy, Lassie looked eager but trepidatious.

  “It’s too far for her to jump,” I said.

  “Too far,” Milo agreed, still enraptured by the computer.

  “How do I get her down?”

  “However.”

  From the linen closet across the hall, I fetched a step stool. I stood on it and lifted the dog off the highboy.

  She licked my chin gratefully, and then she jumped from my arms to the floor.

  Downstairs, I needed about a minute to find the measuring cup, open her feed can, scoop up the kibble, and put it in her bowl—and she needed even less time to eat.

  In the backyard, while she attended to both parts of her toilet, I swep
t the darkness with a flashlight beam, half expecting to find Shearman Waxx lurking behind a tree.

  When the dog was finished, I used the flashlight to locate the poop, double-bag it, and drop it in one of the trash cans beside the garage.

  As always, she watched me complete this task as if I were the most mystifying creature she had ever seen—and quite possibly mad.

  “If you were the real Lassie,” I said, “you’d be smart enough to bag your own poop.”

  I washed my hands at the kitchen sink, and as I dried them, Milo arrived. While I made and buttered the toast, he poured two bowls of cereal.

  Although I would have preferred shredded wheat instead of Franken Berry in chocolate milk, I decided to think of this as a bonding experience.

  Until Milo sat to eat, I had not noticed that he had brought his Game Boy.

  “No games at the table,” I reminded him.

  “I’m not playing games, Dad.”

  “What else can you do with a Game Boy?”

  “Something.”

  “Let me see.”

  He turned the device toward me. Equations, like those on his computer, streamed across the small screen.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Stuff,” he said, holding the Game Boy in one hand and eating with the other.

  “What is it? What’s it mean?”

  He said, “We’ll see.”

  I suppose if Mozart’s father was an ignoramus about music, the little genius would have found it frustrating to try to discuss his compositions with the old man—but still would have loved him.

  When Milo and Lassie were safely upstairs in the master suite with Penny, I went to my study.

  I almost dropped the pleated shades at all three windows. But dawn had come, and I doubted that Waxx would still be lingering.

  I switched on my computer and checked my e-mail without freezing up the keyboard, without damaging the mouse, and without destroying the Internet. Because I spend so much of my life writing, a computer is one machine with which I’ve grown comfortable.

  As I was responding to an e-mail from my British editor, the phone rang. Line 3. Caller ID told me only UNKNOWN, but I took the call anyway: “This is Cubby.”

  A man whose voice I did not recognize said, “Cullen Greenwich?”