Jeffery Deaver: Praying for Sleep

After a few minutes the panic became a stinging memory then a dark thought and then was nearly forgotten. Hrubek rose to his full six-foot, four-inch height and stood bald and blue as a Druid. He snatched up a handful of grass and wiped his mouth and chin. He studied the geography around him. The road was in the middle of a deep valley; bony ridges of rock rose up on either side of the wide asphalt. Behind him in the west-where the hearse had come from-the hospital was lost in darkness many miles away. Ahead lay the distant lights of houses.

Like an animal released from his captors, he circled in an awkward, cautious lope, uncertain of which direction to take.

Then, like an animal finding a scent, he turned toward the lights in the east and began to run, with an ominous grace and at a great speed.

Above them the sky had gone from resonant gunmetal to black.

“What’s that? There?” The woman pointed to a cluster of stars above the distant line of alder and oak and occasional white birch that marked the end of their property.

The man sitting beside her stirred, setting his glass on the table. “I’m not sure.”

“Cassiopeia, I’ll bet.” Her eyes lowered from the constellation to gaze into the large state park that was separated from their yard by the inky void of a dim New England lake.

“Could be.”

They’d sat on this flagstone patio for an hour, warmed by a bottle of wine and by unusually congenial November air. A single candle in a blue fishnet holder lit their faces, and the scent of leaf decay, ripe and too sweet, floated about them. No neighbors lived within a half mile but they spoke in near whispers.

“Don’t you sometimes,” she asked slowly, “feel something of Mother around here still?”

He laughed. “You know what I always thought about ghosts? They’d have to be naked, wouldn’t they? Clothes don’t have souls.”

She glanced toward him. His gray hair and tan slacks were the only aspects of him visible in the deepening night (and made him, she reflected, if anything, ghostlike). “I know there’re no ghosts. That’s not what I mean.” She lifted the bottle of California ’s finest Chardonnay and poured herself more. She misjudged and the neck of the bottle rang loudly on her glass, startling them both.

Her husband’s eyes remained on the stars as he asked, “Is something wrong?”

“No, nothing at all.”

With long, ruddy and wrinkled hands Lisbonne Atcheson absently combed her short blond hair, shaping the strands but leaving them as unruly as before. She stretched her limber, forty-year-old body luxuriously and looked momentarily at the three-story colonial house rising behind them. After a moment she continued, “What I mean about Mother… It’s tough to explain.” But as a teacher of the Queen’s language Lis was bound by the rule that difficulty of expression is no excuse for not expressing, and so she tried once more. “A ‘presence.’ That’s what I mean.”

On cue, the candle flickered in its cerulean holder.

“I rest my case.” She nodded at the flame and they laughed. “What time is it?”

“Almost nine.”

Lis slouched down into the lawn chair and pulled her knees up, tucking her long denim skirt around her legs. The tips of brown cowboy boots, tooled with gold vines, protruded from the hem. She gazed again at the stars and reflected that her mother would in fact have been a good candidate for ghosthood. She’d died just eight months ago, sitting in an antique rocking chair as she looked out over the patio where Lis and Owen now sat. The elderly woman had leaned forward suddenly as if recognizing a landmark and said, “Oh, of course,” then died in a very peaceful second.

This house too would have been a good site for a haunting. The dark boxy structure contained more square footage than even a fertile eighteenth-century family might comfortably fill. It was sided with weather-stained cedar shakes, brown, scalish, rough. The trim was dark green. Once a Revolutionary War tavern, the house was divided into many small rooms connected by narrow hallways. Beams dotted with powder-post-beetle holes crisscrossed the ceilings, and Lis’s father had claimed that several finger-size perforations in the walls and posts were from musket balls fired by rebel militia as they fought the British from room to room.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars had been sunk into the interior design of the house over the past fifty years but for some reason her parents had never properly wired the place; lamps with low-wattage bulbs were all that the circuits could bear. From the patio tonight these lights shone through the small squares of rippled panes like jaundiced eyes.

Lis, still thinking of her mother, said, “It was like the time near the end when she said, ‘I just talked to your father and he said he was coming home soon.’ ” That conversation would have been a tricky one; the old man had been dead for two years at that point. “She imagined it, of course. But the feeling was real to her.”

And their father? Lis wondered momentarily. No, L’Auberget père was probably not present in spirit. He’d dropped dead in a men’s room in Heathrow Airport as he tugged angrily at a reluctant paper-towel dispenser.

“Superstition,” Owen said.

“Well, in a way he did come home to her. She died a couple days later.”

“Still.”

“I guess I’m talking about what you feel when people are together again, people who knew someone who’s gone.”

Owen was tired of speaking about the spirits of the dead. He sipped his wine and told his wife he’d scheduled a business trip for Wednesday. He wondered if he could get a suit cleaned in time for his departure. “I’ll be staying through Sunday, so if-”

“Wait. Did you hear something?” Lis turned quickly and looked at the dense mesh of lilacs that cut off their view of the back door of the house.

“No, I don’t think I…” His voice faded and he held up a finger. He nodded. She couldn’t see his expression but his posture seemed suddenly tense.

“There,” she said. “There it was again.”

It seemed like the snap of footsteps approaching the house from the driveway.

“That dog again?” Lis looked at Owen.

“The Busches’? No, he’s penned in. I saw him when I went for my run. Deer probably.”

Lis sighed. The local herd had feasted on over two hundred dollars in flower bulbs over the course of the summer, and just last week had stripped bare and killed a beautiful Japanese-maple sapling. She rose. “I’ll give it a good scare.”

“You want me to?”

“No. I want to call again anyway. Maybe I’ll make some tea. Anything for you?”

“No.”

She picked up the empty wine bottle and walked to the house, a fifty-foot trip along a path that wound through topiary, pungent boxwood and the bare, black lilac bushes. She passed a small reflecting pond in which floated several lily pads. Glancing down, she saw herself reflected, her face illuminated by the yellow lights from the first floor of the house. Lis had occasionally heard herself described as “plain” but had never taken this in a bad way. The word suggested a simplicity and resilience that were, to her, aspects of beauty. Looking into the water tonight she once again prodded her hair into place. Then a sharp gust of wind distorted her image in the water and she continued toward the house.

She heard nothing more of the mysterious noise and she relaxed. Ridgeton was among the safest towns in the state, a beautiful hamlet surrounded by wooded hills and fields that were filled with kelly-green grass, huge boulders, horses bred for running, picturesque sheep and cows. The town had been incorporated even before the thirteen states considered unionizing, and Ridgeton’s evolution in the past three hundred years had been more in the ways of earthly convenience than economics or attitude. You could buy pizza by the slice and frozen yogurt, and you could rent Rototillers and videos but when all was said and done this was a walled village where the men were tied to the earth-they built on it, sold it and loaned against it-and the women marshaled children and food.