Relentless Read online

  Loading the last of the suitcases, I said to Milo, “Get in the backseat with Lassie.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I told you. A little trip.”

  “Why the hurry?”

  Closing the tailgate, I said, “Maybe we have a plane to catch.”

  “Do we have a plane to catch?”

  Giving him a dose of his own inscrutability, I said, “Could be.”

  “Is it the Northern Hemisphere?” he asked.

  “Is what?”

  “Where we’re going.”

  “What does it matter?” I asked.

  “It matters.”

  “Get in the backseat, scout.”

  “I should ride shotgun.”

  “That’s your mother’s job.”

  “She doesn’t have a shotgun.”

  “Neither do you.”

  “So let’s draw straws.”

  “Can you kick someone’s butt?” I asked.

  “Whose butt?”

  “Whoever’s. I need a butt-kicker riding shotgun.”

  “Mom could kick anyone’s butt.”

  “So get in the backseat.”

  “Guess I will.”

  “That’s my boy.”

  “Northern Hemisphere is important.”

  Climbing into the car, he looked so small that I couldn’t help thinking about Emily and Sarah Clitherow. The possibility of losing Milo pulled my nerves as taut as violin strings.

  Penny seemed to be taking a long time. I began to feel that I had not properly conveyed to her the grim nature and importance of the new development or the greater urgency that it imposed on us.

  The big garage door had not been raised. The side door remained locked. Milo would be as safe here as anywhere. Yet I was reluctant to leave him.

  Penny had gone upstairs alone. At least Milo had Lassie.

  “Stay put,” I shouted to the boy, and I sprinted into the house.

  As I strode through the laundry room, a telephone rang.

  This shrill call tone was different from that of our house phone and that of the cell in my shirt pocket.

  In the kitchen, I heard the unfamiliar ring again. It seemed to come from the utility closet that backed up to the laundry room.

  The closet contained no phone—unless it belonged to someone hiding there.

  In the nearest corner stood a broom, and I seized it, judging that stiff bristles jammed in the eyes would be as effective as any thrust I might make with a knife, which in any case was not as near at hand as this more domestic weapon and would require a closer engagement with Waxx than I relished.

  As the call tone shrilled a third time, I opened the utility-closet door, revealing a twelve-foot-deep, five-foot-wide space with a gas furnace against the back wall. Fluorescent light from the kitchen intruded far enough to confirm that no one crouched in wait for me.

  Using the broom, I brushed up the light switch and stepped into the closet as the phone rang a fourth time.

  A common gas furnace is to me a mystery of engineering no less complex than a 747 and no less intimidating than a nuclear reactor. My incompetence with mechanisms and machines, and my deep wariness of them, are exacerbated, in the case of a furnace, by the presence of pressurized gas lines.

  Yet even I knew that the furnace had not come from the factory with a cell phone epoxied to the face of it, and that in fact no phone had been there previously.

  Wires trailed from the phone to a curious construction on the floor, beside the furnace. This ominous assemblage included a digital clock displaying the correct time, several items that I might not have been able to identify even if I’d had time to study them, and what appeared to be a block of clay of the kind with which children played, gray and oily.

  On the fifth ring, the display screen lit, and the phone somehow accepted the call. Then it produced—or received—a rapid series of varied tones that might have been a coded message.

  On the digital clock, the time changed from the correct 7:03:20 A.M. to the incorrect 11:57:00 P.M.

  Even I, ignorant of most things mechanical, knew that our best interests would not be served if we were still in the house when the clock displayed midnight three minutes hence.

  Suffering no heroic delusion that I could safely dismantle this device, I backed out of the utility closet and threw down the broom. I raced up the back stairs, shouting for Penny.

  As I reached the top of the stairs and stepped into the short arm of the L-shaped upstairs hall, Penny turned the corner from the longer hall that served her studio and the master suite. She carried an artist’s portfolio large enough to hold several paintings of the size that she had lately been creating for The Other Side of the Woods, the book she would publish next autumn.

  She said, “Cubby, a phone’s ringing, but it’s not ours.”

  Our house had two furnaces, one for each floor. When I pulled open the door of the nearby utility closet and switched on the light, a phone like the one downstairs answered itself; wired to another clay-brick package, it produced a series of varied tones that surely were coded instructions. A digital clock identical to the one in the first closet switched from the correct time to 11:57:30 P.M.

  Two and a half minutes and counting.

  In spite of her childhood and adolescent experience of colossal destruction, Penny made no attempt to disarm the device but hissed “Waxx” as if it were a curse word, and plunged down the back stairs, two at a time, and across the kitchen, with me so close behind that the toes of my shoes might have scuffed the heels of hers.

  Bursting from the laundry room into the garage, she slapped a wall switch, and the roll-up door began to rise.

  As I clambered in behind the steering wheel, Penny swung up into the passenger seat, tossed the Explorer keys to me, glanced in the back, and said, “Where’s Milo?”

  The dog sat in the backseat, ears pricked and alert, but the boy was gone.

  Shouting for Milo, Penny and I flew from the Explorer as if we had been ejected by a device installed by James Bond’s favorite car customizer.

  If the boy was in the garage, he apparently was in no condition to answer our calls. Penny hurried to search in, under, and around the sedan in the second parking stall, while I returned to the house.

  I thought of John Clitherow. He had been Waxx’s primary target, but the critic had first taken John’s family.

  The greatest punishment is not your own death but instead the loss of those you love. How much worse that loss must be if you have to live with the bitter knowledge that those who trusted and relied on you had been dealt early deaths as surrogates for you, punished for your offenses.

  Waxx was not merely a homicidal sociopath but also, in the fullest sense, a terrorist.

  In the doomed house, in the sparkling laundry room that would soon be filthy rubble, in the kitchen that momentarily would itself be cooked, in response to my ever more frantic shouts, Milo finally called out—“Yo, Dad!”—and entered at a run from the downstairs hall.

  He carried Lassie’s favorite toy, which we had inadvertently left behind: a plush purple bunny with huge startled eyes and floppy ears and a white puffball tail. It was cute, and it had a squeaker in its tummy, and the dog adored it, but it wasn’t a toy worth dying for.

  With more athletic grace than I had ever before exhibited, I scooped Milo off the kitchen floor and into my arms, swiveled toward the laundry room, and ran.

  Giggling and exuberantly squeaking the bunny, Milo said, “What’s happening?”

  “The place is gonna blow,” I said.

  The squeaking alerted Penny. By the time we reached the garage, she stood by the open driver’s door of the Explorer.

  Her eyes were even wider than those of the startled rabbit. “No time to belt him in, Cubby, hold him in your lap!”

  Even though the door had rolled all the way up and offered no obstacle, I felt relieved that she would be driving. Two facts—that the SUV had a reverse gear, that the back wall of the g
arage remained intact—seemed to tempt Fate too much for me to drive.

  Milo had wanted to ride shotgun, and now he shared that position with me. He sat in my lap, and I wrapped both arms around him.

  Folding his arms around the bunny and holding it against his chest, the boy said to the toy, “Don’t worry. Dad won’t let anything happen to us.”

  Geniuses, even six-year-old prodigies, don’t believe that toys live any kind of life. Milo talked not to the rabbit, but reassured himself.

  I had left the key in the ignition. When Penny tried to start the engine, she got from it a cough, a cough, a groan.

  She glanced at me as I glanced at her, and we didn’t need to be telepathic to know we shared the same thought: Waxx had sabotaged the vehicle.

  The stumpy, bow-tied, elbow-patched, Hush-Puppied, horn-rimmed-glasses-wearing, white-wine-sipping, pretentious, thick-necked, wide-assed intellectual fraud must have been in our house from at least midnight, planting explosives and tampering with the cars before at last venturing to our bedroom after four o’clock in the morning to torture us with a Taser.

  For once, however, we had overestimated his capacity for villainy. On Penny’s third try, the engine of the Explorer turned over, roared.

  Pressing back hard in my seat, bracing my feet against the floorboard, I cradled Milo as best I could, expecting to be blown out of the garage as if from a circus cannon, in a plume of fire and debris.

  But Penny sped the length of the driveway and braked only slightly to make a left turn into the street. Morning traffic had not yet appeared. She drove half a block before letting up on the accelerator and coasting toward the curb.

  Since exiting the garage, I searched the day, expecting to see Waxx either in a parked car or standing at some vantage point along the street. He seemed to have decided against a ringside seat.

  Penny looked at me. I nodded. She used the remaining momentum of the vehicle to turn crosswise in the street, where she came to a stop, angled back the way we had come.

  A kind of masochistic need to know enraptured us.

  Through the windshield, we had a view of the first house we ever owned. Slate roof. Stacked-stone and stucco walls. Imposing but not pretentious lines. Welcoming.

  With us in residence, that house had known much laughter and love. Milo had been conceived there, and within those walls we had transformed ourselves from a couple into a family, which more than anything had been what Penny and I wanted; still wanted; would always want.

  The first blast shook the street, rocked the Explorer, and fissured one corner of our house, casting off slate shingles, slabs of plaster, and a bright rain of shattered upstairs windowpanes.

  Even as the shingles, the shed stucco, and the shards of glass became airborne, the second blast shuddered the entire structure, blew out first-floor windows, toppled a stone chimney toward the backyard, and distorted the shape of the garage.

  Within me, distortions occurred as well: to my perception of my place in the world, to my expectations of social order and simple justice, to my vision of the future.

  A third explosion followed in maybe three seconds, not as loud and sharp as the first two but even more profoundly destructive: a heavy whump, as if Satan had fired up a burner on the biggest gas stove in Hell. The house seemed to swell, then twist, then shrink, and in an instant was engulfed in flames from end to end, flames more blue than yellow, not orange at all, seething and insatiable, leaping eagerly to the forty-foot-wide crowns of the matched phoenix palms.

  Before neighbors rushed into the street, Penny wheeled from the burning house and drove away.

  I saw tears standing unshed in her eyes, and I could have cried or cursed, but I kept my silence as she kept hers.

  We had gone perhaps a block when in my arms Milo said shakily, “We didn’t blow up our house, did we?”

  “No, we didn’t,” I said.

  “Who blew it up?” he asked.

  Penny said, “A man I want to have a talk with someday.”

  “A very bad man,” I added.

  “I think I know him,” said Milo.

  “I think you do.”

  “I really liked our house,” Milo said. “Now all our stuff is burned up.”

  “Not all of it,” I said. “We seem to have like three tons of it here in the Explorer.”

  “A house is just a house,” Penny said. “Stuff is just stuff. All that matters is the three of us are together.”

  In the backseat, Lassie growled.

  “The four of us,” Penny corrected. “The four of us are nicer, smarter, and tougher than Shearman Waxx. We’ll settle this, we’ll set things right again.”

  That we were nicer than Waxx, not even Waxx himself would have denied. He did not seem to value niceness.

  With Milo on our side, we were more intelligent than the critic, although not more cunning. Like Mozart, Einstein, and other brainiacs, Milo had every kind of smarts in abundance, except for the one most important in this instance: street smarts.

  I did not have a clue why Penny thought we were tougher than Waxx. Because she did not say such things lightly, I credited the possibility that, in us, Waxx had met his match, as absurd as that concept might appear to be.

  Of course, she didn’t have all the information that I possessed. Events had unfolded so quickly that I’d had no opportunity to tell her about John Clitherow.

  As I watched her repress her tears and find a reassuring smile for Milo, I dreaded having to tell her about John’s murdered family. But I had only twice ever deceived her by omission, and the second time— withholding the fact that Waxx would be at lunch at Roxie’s when I took Milo there—had been a mistake of epic proportions.

  In 1933, G. K. Chesterton wrote, “The disintegration of rational society started in the drift from hearth and family; the solution must be a drift back.”

  I had a disturbing feeling that getting back to where we had been would require more than drifting. We would need to swim with all the strength and perseverance we possessed, and the journey was likely to be upstream all the way.

  I Am My Brothers’ Reaper

  Even miles from our burning house, Penny repeatedly frowned at the rearview mirror.

  “Someone following us?” I asked.

  “No.”

  The lead-gray sky of the previous afternoon, which had looked as flat and uniform as a freshly painted surface, was deteriorating. Curls of clouds peeled back, revealing darker masses, and beards of mist hung like tattered cobwebs from a crumbling ceiling.

  She glanced at the mirror again.

  “Someone?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “It makes me nervous, the way you keep checking the mirror.”

  In my lap, Milo said, “It makes me nervous the way you keep asking Mom is someone behind us.”

  When she frowned at the mirror again, I could not help asking: “Anything?”

  “If I see something,” she said, “I’ll tell you.”

  “Even if you think it’s nothing, it might be something,” I said, “so if it’s nothing or something, tell me either way.”

  “Good grief,” said Milo.

  “Okay,” I admitted, “that didn’t make any sense.”

  Barely escaping our house before it blew up had left us in a state of shock. But as writers and readers, Penny and I were drunk on words, and we needed conversation as much as we needed air and water. Not much short of death could shut us up. Even Milo, when he wasn’t lost in an electromagnetic-field-theory reverie, could be garrulous. The shock of our loss did not reduce us to a brooding silence; in fact, the opposite was true.

  In the Greenwich-Boom family, conversation was not just talk but also a way we helped one another heal from the abrasions and contusions of the day. We started with practicalities and progressed swiftly to absurdities, which was not surprising, considering our conversations expressed our philosophies and experiences.

  Penny thought we would be staying at a hotel, but I nixed that.
“They’ll want a credit card, at least for ID. We don’t want to be using our credit cards right now.”

  As she braked to a stop at a red traffic light, she said, “We don’t? Why wouldn’t we?”

  “John Clitherow called while you were packing. He gave me some advice. Credit cards were part of it.”

  “Clitherow—the writer?”

  “Yeah. He read the review. He has some experience of this … of Waxx.”

  “What experience?”

  Because I didn’t want to talk about the murder of Clitherow’s family in front of Milo, I said, “John wants me to tell you his three favorite children’s stories are Dumbo, Kate DiCamillo’s The Tale of Despereaux, and your first Purple Bunny book.”

  “That’s nice. But you said ‘experience.’ What’s he know about Waxx?”

  “John especially likes the funny physiology in those books.”

  In my usually savvy wife’s defense: Having been Tasered, having seen her house blown up minutes earlier, she urgently wanted to hear anything that I might have learned about the critic, and she was not in a state of mind that allowed her to pick up on kid-evading code.

  Holding Milo with one arm, I grimaced at Penny, tugged on my left ear, and pointed at the boy.

  She looked at me as if I were suffering delayed spasms from the Tasering.

  I said, “Dumbo, Despereaux, Pistachio,” because the last was the name of her bunny character.

  The driver behind us tapped his horn to encourage us to notice that the traffic light had turned green.

  As she drove through the intersection, Penny said, “I guess I misunderstood. I thought he called about Waxx.”

  In my lap, Milo said, “The little elephant, the little mouse, and the little bunny all had really big ears.”

  “Did they?” I asked. “Hey, yes, they did. How about that?”

  “Mom,” the boy said, “Dad’s trying to tell you that I’m little but I’ve got big ears, and there’s something Mr. Clitherow told him that I guess I’m too young to hear.”

  “So what did he tell you?” Penny asked me.