Dead Sleep

27

“I was born during the war,” Wheaton says, painting with absolute assurance. “Nineteen forty-three. My father was in the Marine Corps. He came home on leave after basic training, and that’s when he fathered me. That’s what he thought, anyway. He was a hard man, merciless and cold. Mother couldn’t explain to me why she married him. She only said, ‘Things look different when you’re young.’”

“My mother said the same thing more than once,” I tell him.

“When my father was drafted, she was left alone for the first time since she’d been married. She had two sons, but they were only four and five. It was a liberation. She was free of the cutting voice, the brutal hand, the ruthless insistence of the nights when she protested in vain to the ceiling and the walls, begging God for some reprieve. God had finally answered her prayers. He had sent her the war.”

Wheaton smiles with irony. “A month after my father shipped out for the Pacific, a stranger came to the door asking for water. He had a limp. Some injury or disease had crippled him, and the army wouldn’t take him. He worked for the government, one of the WPA artists’ projects. He was a painter. Mother fell in love with him the first day. She worshiped art. Her prize possession was a book a dead aunt had given her. A big color-plate thing called Masterpieces of Western Art. Anyway, the painter camped nearby for two weeks, and when he left, Mother was pregnant. She never knew where he went, but he said was from New Orleans. He told her that much.”

My God, I say silently.

“I was born two weeks premature.” Wheaton twirls the tip of his brush on his palette. “That made the timing almost work out. It meant Mother could lie about my paternity and get away with it. At least for a while.

“When my father came back from the war, he was different. He’d been captured by the Japanese, and they had done something to him. He rarely talked. He became a sort of religious fanatic. But he was just as brutal – with her and with us.

“He saw immediately that Mother treated me differently from my brothers. She told him it was because I was premature, that I was fragile. He tried to force me to be like the others, but she resisted him. After a time, they came to an arrangement. She bought me a sheltered childhood with subservience. Anything he wanted, he got. His word was law. In daily life. In his bed. Only where I was concerned did her word count.

“My brothers worked the farm and helped him trap when they weren’t in school. My life was different. Mother taught me things. Read to me. Pinched pennies to buy me paint and canvas. She encouraged me to imitate the paintings in her book. My brothers made fun of me, but secretly they were jealous. They beat me when they could get away with it, but that was a small thing. In the summers, Mother and I spent our days in an old barn in the woods. We escaped.”

A look of transcendence comes over Wheaton’s face.

“It stood in a small clearing, surrounded by ancient trees, with a stream flowing beside. Part of the roof had fallen in, but we didn’t mind. The sun fell through the hole in great yellow shafts, the way it does in Gothic cathedrals.”

“What did you paint there?” I ask, even as the answer comes to me. “Did you paint your mother?”

“Who else could I paint? After I outgrew copying from the book, she would bring different clothes from the house, or things she’d bought on a rare trip into town. Things she never showed my father. Gauzy gowns, robes like those the women wore in the classical paintings. Hour after hour I would paint, and we would talk, and laugh, until the shafts of light began to fade, and we began to whisper, putting off until the last second our walk back to the dark little house of rage.”

“What happened? What ended all that?”

Wheaton’s body freezes like a tape being stopped. His jaw moves, but no sound emerges. Then, slowly, his right hand extends the paintbrush to the canvas. “When I was thirteen, I became… curious about certain things. Many of the pictures in Mother’s book were nudes, and I wanted to paint like that. She understood the necessity, but we had to be careful. Sometimes my father took work at the mill in the town. My brothers would do his trapping then. That’s when she posed nude for me.”

Though the bathwater is cold, my face feels hot. I sense that we’re heading into the unmapped territory of incest.

“Did you become… intimate?”

“Intimate?” His voice is an echo from a cave. “We were like the same person.”

“I meant-”

“You meant sex.” He lifts his brush, his face showing disgust. “It wasn’t like that. I touched her sometimes, of course. To pose her. And she told me things. About the way love was supposed to be, how somewhere in the world she hoped it really was. But mostly we made plans. She said I had a gift that would make me famous one day. I swore a thousand times that if I ever got away, I would succeed and come back for her.”

A frightening vision comes to me. “Did someone catch you with her like that?”

Wheaton closes his eyes. “One spring afternoon, instead of trapping, my brothers spied on us. They watched until Mother disrobed. Then they ran all the way to town and got my father. When he burst into the barn and saw her naked, he went crazy. Screaming gibberish about harlots and God-knows-what-else from the Bible. My mother shrieked at him to get out, but he had murder in his eyes. He told my brothers to hold me down, and he – he started to beat her. But instead of taking it, as she usually did, she fought back. She clawed his face, drew blood. When he saw that, he picked up an old scythe handle…”

Wheaton squints as though staring at a distant object. “I can still hear the whistle it made. And the impact, like the sound of an eggshell. The way she fell. She was dead before she hit the floor.”

His voice sounds the way mine does when I speak of my father’s “death” – higher in pitch, tremulous. “Why isn’t there any record of this?”

“There was no one around for miles. She had no family left.”

“Did your father bury her?”

“No.”

No? “What happened?”

Wheaton looks at the floor, and his voice drops to a barely audible whisper. “He came over to where my brothers were holding me down and leaned over my face. He told me to bury her and go home. His breath stank. He said if I told anyone what had happened, he and my brothers would swear they’d caught me raping her in the barn, after she was dead. I’d never even heard of such a thing. It paralyzed me with fear. No one would believe me, he said. I’d be sent to a reform school in the city, where boys would beat me every day and sodomize me in the night. Then they left me with her.”

“I’m so sorry,” I murmur, but Wheaton doesn’t hear me.

“I couldn’t bury her.” His voice is almost a whine. “I couldn’t even look at her. The side of her head was broken. Her skin was like blue marble. I cried until my eyes were like sandpaper. Then I dragged her down to the stream. I fetched her gown and washed her from head to toe, cleaning away the blood and straightening her hair as best I could. The way I knew she’d want it. I knew they might come back at any moment, but I didn’t care. I’d realized something. Her agony was finally over. All her life was pain, and now it had ended. She was better off dead.” Wheaton lays down his brush and drives his fingers through his tangled hair. “I wasn’t better off. I couldn’t even imagine life without her. But she was. You see?”

I do. I see how a shattered child made the mental journey to a state that allows him to kill women and believe he is doing a good thing.

“I went back to the barn and painted over what I’d been doing. Then, in the dying light of the clearing, I painted Mother in her peace. It was the first time I’d seen her face completely relaxed. It was an epiphany for me. My birth as an artist. When I was finished, I took a shovel from the barn and buried her beside the stream. I didn’t mark the spot. I didn’t want them to know where she was. Only I knew.”

“What happened when you went home?”

My question seems to suck the humanity out of Wheaton’s face. “For four years, I lived like an animal. My father told the few people who asked that my mother had run away to New York. Then he began poking into her past. He became convinced that I was illegitimate. He talked to her doctor, studied the records at the courthouse. He was right, but he couldn’t prove it. He just knew. There was nothing in me of him – nothing – and I thank God for it. But after that, they did things to Roger that you simply can’t imagine. They starved him. Beat him. Worked him like a slave. The father gave the older brothers permission to do as they liked with him. They burned him. Cut him. Shoved things inside him. The father used him sexually, to punish him.” Wheaton shakes his head dismissively. “If it weren’t for me, he’d never have survived.”

Severe sexual or physical abuse during childhood, Dr. Lenz told us. The kind of radical psychological break I’m talking about… “How did you protect Roger?”

“I listened. I watched. My hearing grew frighteningly acute. I could hear them breathing in their sleep. If their breathing changed, I knew it. If they got out of bed, I knew Roger was in danger. I told him when to hide, when to run. When to hoard food. When to give in, and when to resist. After a while, it got where I could hear them thinking. I saw the morbid desire in their minds, pictures forming into intent, intent traveling from their brains down their sluggish nerves, moving their heavy limbs to action. That’s how Roger survived.”

“Did you tell him to run away to New York?”

Wheaton resumes painting, the brush moving quickly again. “Yes. But the city wasn’t how I thought it would be. Roger tried to paint, but he couldn’t make a go of it. People offered help, but they didn’t want to help him. They were helping themselves. They gave him food, a place to sleep, space to paint. But in exchange they wanted their pound of flesh. They wanted him. And he gave himself to them. What did it matter? They were so much gentler than his father and brothers. For four years he moved among them – soft, greedy, gray old men – painting derivative work, doing anything they asked of him. Things had to change.”

An almost cruel smile touches Wheaton’s lips. “One day, walking down the street, I saw my opening. I darted into a recruiting office and joined the marine corps. One quick irrevocable act. There was nothing he could do. The war in Vietnam was heating up, and almost before Roger knew what had happened, he was on his way there.”

Pride flashes like diamonds in the artist’s eyes. “That’s where I came into my own. Vietnam. He couldn’t make it without me. During the days he would poke along, joking and cursing and slapping backs, trying to fit in. But at night he made room for me. On patrol. On point. I could smell things he couldn’t even see. I could hear bare feet bending grass at fifty meters. I kept him alive. The others, too. They gave me medals for it.”

“What about after?” I ask, a fraction of my mind still wondering how far John and Baxter and Lenz have come down the investigative trail to this house.

“I went back to New York, didn’t I? I was a different man. I took my GI Bill money, went to NYU, and painted for four years. When I got out, I did portraits to keep myself in groceries. I was searching for my destiny. And it found me. My surviving brother died in the merchant marine, and the farm went up for sale. I decided to buy it. I thought of burning the place down, but I didn’t. Every day was a sweet revenge. Those rooms had witnessed all Mother’s pain, and Roger filled them with color and light. It was then that he began to paint the Clearing.”

“When did you start painting? The Sleeping Women?”

Wheaton purses his lips, like a man trying to recall the year he got married or joined the service. “Seventy-eight, I think. I was driving out of New York, and I saw a girl beside a bridge, hitchhiking north. She was young and pretty, and looked like a student. A waif, you know? A leftover hippie. I asked where she was going, and she said, ‘Anyplace warm, man.’” Wheaton smiles at the memory. “I knew exactly how she felt. I’d been there too.

“I drove her back to the farm. On the way, she got high. She had pills with her, and they made her talkative. Her story was like others I’d heard from women. A father like mine. A mother who couldn’t protect her. Men who used her. At the farm, I fed her. She got sleepy. I asked if I could paint her, and she said yes. When I asked if I could paint her nude, she hesitated, but only a moment. ‘You wouldn’t do anything freaky,’ she said. ‘You’re too nice.’ And then she took off her clothes. I posed her in the tub.”

Lulled into a trance by his story, I feel a sudden nausea as his last words sink in.

“I painted as Roger never had. I was in control, you see? I had the brush. It worked under my will.”

“But something happened,” I say hesitantly.

Wheaton puts down his brush and vigorously massages his left hand. “Yes. Before I finished the painting, she woke up. I was naked. I’m not sure how I got that way, and what does it matter? I only know I was naked and painting, and I was aroused. The girl panicked.”

“What did you do?”

“I panicked too. She knew where she was. If she told people the way things had happened, it could cause trouble for Roger. I tried to calm her down, but she took it wrong. She fought. She gave me no choice. I pushed her under the water and held her there until she stopped fighting.”

Jesus… “What did you do then?”

“I finished the painting.” Wheaton picks up his brush, dips it, and goes back to his work. “She looked so peaceful. Much happier than she had when I picked her up. She was the first Sleeping Woman.”

Nineteen seventy-eight. The year I left high school, Roger Wheaton drowned a waif junkie in New England and started down a road that led ultimately to my sister.

“What did you do with her body?”

“I buried her in the clearing.”

Of course he did.

“I waited a year before I picked up another one. She was a runaway. She made it so easy. And I knew what I wanted by then.”

“What about Conrad Hoffman?”

“That was 1980. Roger had a one-man show in New York, and Conrad showed up for that. He saw something in The Clearing paintings that no one else did. He saw me. The germ of me. He was charismatic, young, dangerous. He hung around after the show, and we went for coffee. He didn’t fawn over Roger, as some did. He sensed the power hidden in the paintings. The darkness. And I did something I never thought I would do.”

“You showed him your Sleeping Women.”

Wheaton nods cagily. “There were only two then. You should have seen his face when he saw them. He knew immediately that the women were dead. He knew because he’d seen women that way. And when he looked back at me from the paintings, I let him see my true face. I dropped the mask.”

As you did with me, after tasing the FBI agent in the gallery. “What did Hoffman do?”

“He reveled in it. When I saw that he understood, I felt some irresistible power well up within me. And I ravished him.”

“What?”

“I wasn’t like Roger – facedown and taking it in pain. I was the one in control. Conrad saw my genius, and he wanted to experience its totality. He was a vessel for my power.” Seeing shock in my face, Wheaton says, “Conrad was bisexual. He’d told me in the car. He picked it up in jail.”

“And after that, he started helping you?”

Wheaton is painting with almost mechanical speed now. “Conrad procured my subjects, mixed the drug cocktails, worked out what was best to keep them sedated while I worked. The insulin. He carried many burdens for me.”

“And he raped the women as a reward.”

Wheaton’s brush hardly stutters. “I suppose he did. I doubt they were conscious while it happened.”

I pray they weren’t. “What made you stop? In New York, I mean?”

“Conrad killed someone in an argument. He was sentenced to fifteen years. He told me not to take any more, but I… I couldn’t stop. I tried to pick up a girl in New York. She sensed something wrong, and she fought. Screamed. I barely escaped the police. That’s what made me stop. Conrad had told me about prison. I couldn’t go there. It would have been like being back in my father’s house.”

“So you channeled your desires into the Clearing paintings. Didn’t you? That’s why they became more abstract.”

“Yes. And the more I put into them, the more famous Roger got. I wanted the world to see my work – purely - not through the distorted mirror of Roger’s abstracts.”

“Is that why you started killing again, fifteen years later?”

“No.” He gives me a simple, clear gaze. “I was dying. I had to do what good I could, while I could.”

“Hoffman was out of prison by then? He helped you?”

“Six months after my diagnosis, he was released to make room for new inmates. I’d already moved to New Orleans. I had a juvenile fantasy of finding my biological father. Or his grave. Something tangible. But I never did. But yes, Conrad helped me begin my work again.”

“Why did you sell the paintings? Why take the risk? You already had money. Fame. Respect.”

“Roger had those things.” Wheaton’s brush pecks the palette, then flies to the canvas. “In his bourgeois way. But when collectors saw my Sleeping Women, they recognized an entirely different level of truth.”

“Like Marcel de Becque?”

“He was one.”

“Do you know him well?”

“I know he buys my work. Nothing more.”

Strangely, I believe him. So what explains the connections between de Becque, Wingate, and Hoffman? Were they all exploiting this tortured artist and his twisted vision?

“What do you intend to do now?”

“I’m going away. To live as myself. Openly. Money’s not a problem, and Conrad established new identities for us long ago. Just in case.”

“Will you paint?”

“If I feel the need. After this one, I don’t suspect I will.”

“What do you plan to do with me?”

“I’m going to give you what you most want. I’m going to reunite you with your sister.”

My eyes close. “Where is my sister?”

“Very close.”

“Driving distance? Walking distance?”

Wheaton sniffs. “Closer than that.”

John’s voice sounds in my head, an echo of the first day I met him. Lakeshore Drive. The water table has fallen considerably in recent years. He could be burying them under a house, and they would stay buried. And dry. Toss in a little lime every now and then, they wouldn’t even stink.

“Is she buried here? Under this house?”

There’s not even a hitch in Wheaton’s brush stroke as he nods. It’s almost more than I can bear.

“The other women too?”

“Yes. Your sister was a bit different from the rest. She tried to escape. I’m not sure how she managed it, but she made it out to the garden. Conrad caught her, but she fought, and he had to end it there. He buried her immediately. I finished painting her using only a photograph.”

For the first time in many hours, anger boils to the surface. Reaching out to the tap, I turn it as I have twice before – only this time I open the cold valve. Wheaton doesn’t seem to notice.

As I fight the tortured images called into being by his words, he puts down his brush, massages his hands again, then lifts a watch from the table behind him and looks at it. With a soft grunt, he turns and walks into the main house. There’s a soft clatter followed by the low murmur of a voice. He’s making a phone call.

I roll over, get to my knees, lean out, and drag the Igloo cooler up to the tub. Praying the running water will cover the noise, I take several panting breaths, then lift the cooler to the edge of the tub and dump the contents inside.

The icy shock sucks the breath right out of my lungs. Even my thoughts seem to stutter, so cold is the water, but I haven’t time to waste. Three bottles of Michelob have fallen into the tub. I put them back into the empty cooler, then slide it back to its place. A droning voice floats through the doorway to my left. I hear the word “ticket” several times. Possibly the word “departure.”

God, it’s cold. I won’t be able to stand much of this. My sluggish brain has already forgotten something critical. My insulin defense. Reaching down between the tub and mirror, I bring up a pack of Pop-Tarts and tear open the foil with stiff fingers. I break the hard pastries into pieces, shove them into my mouth, and chew them just enough to get them down my throat.

Wheaton is still talking. I rip open another foil pack and gobble two more Pop-Tarts.

Footsteps.

“Come to me,” I say softly, trying to keep my teeth from chattering. “Said the spider to the fly.”

When Wheaton reappears, I suddenly realize how strange he looks in his white linen cloth. After two days of painting, I’ve gotten used to it. But after hearing him talk on the phone like a normal person, it’s a shock. He looks like a man who believes he’s Jesus. A sixty-year-old Jesus. He stands before the easel, examining the canvas with a critical eye.

The ice water feels like it’s draining the life out of me, and the pain is greater than I anticipated. The line between ice and fire quickly vanishes.

“Is the painting done?” I ask.

“What?” Wheaton says in a distant voice. “Oh. Almost. I-”

The ringing telephone cuts him off. He looks confused. It rings again, faint but insistent. With a quick glance at me, he goes back into the house.

I have an almost irresistible compulsion to leap out of the tub. Turn on the hot water, says a voice in my head. A little won’t hurt -

This time the footsteps return at a run. Wheaton rushes into the room, his face blotched red again, only this time there’s a gun in his hand. A Smith amp; Wesson featherweight.38. The gun John gave me.

“What’s the matter? What happened?”

“They hung up.” His voice is a ragged whisper.

“That happens all the time.”

“Not here. And it wasn’t dead when I got there. They listened for a few seconds before they hung up.”

I try to keep my eyes flat as hope blossoms in my chest, “It was probably a kid. Or some pervert.”

Wheaton shakes his head. The animal awareness shining in his eyes is a fearsome thing to see: survival instinct honed to a gleaming edge.

“Why are you making explanations?” he asks. “Why do you care?”

“I don’t. I just-”

“Shut up!” He turns and looks at his unfinished painting, then back at me. “I have to go.”

“Go where? Why?”

“Sometimes I know things. And I never second-guess that feeling. This place isn’t safe anymore.”

I feel a sudden urge to leap out of the freezing tub, but before I can act, Wheaton says, “I know you can move.”

My heart stutters.

“Don’t pretend you can’t. I ran out of muscle relaxant. I have to get ready to leave. I’m going to walk over there and put some more Valium into your IV. Enough to knock you out for a while, but not enough to kill you.”

His face looks sincere, but I know who I’m talking to. “You’re lying. You already said you’re going to kill me.”

“Jordan. I could shoot you right now if I wanted to kill you.”

“Maybe we’re too close to other houses. Or maybe you can’t stand to kill that way. Using insulin gives you the illusion of euthanasia.”

A strange smile touches his lips and eyes. “I shot a lot of people in Vietnam. That’s not a problem.”

He crouches four feet from the tub and looks me in the eye. “Why doesn’t Valium work on you, Jordan? Do you have a little habit? Is that it?”

“Maybe a little one.”

He laughs appreciatively. “You’re a sly one, aren’t you? A survivor, like me.”

“So far.”

He stands and goes into the other room, then returns with a syringe. “Stay right where you are. If you try anything, I’ll have no choice but to shoot you. Same thing if you pull out the IV.”

Wheaton walks out of my field of vision, and though I can’t see him, I know what he’s doing: leaning in from as far away as possible and injecting the contents of the syringe into my IV bag. Could he be telling the truth about the Valium? Would he really let me live? He hasn’t let anyone else. They’re all buried somewhere under this house.

My wrist should start burning, but it doesn’t. Wheaton reappears on my left side and crouches again, three feet away. He doesn’t say anything. He just watches.

“You’re shivering,” he says at length. “How do you feel?”

“Scared.”

“There’s nothing to fear. Don’t fight it.”

“Fight what?”

“The Valium.”

“It’s not Valium.” A wave of nausea rolls through me. “Is it?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because my wrist isn’t burning.”

He sighs, then smiles with something like compassion. “You’re right. Trust a junkie to know her drugs. It’s insulin. Soon you won’t have a care in the world. No pain at all.”

Four feet opposite me, Thalia Laveau looks like exactly what she is: a living corpse. I cannot end my life like that. I only pray that Conrad Hoffman didn’t rape her before she went into a coma.

“Sleepy yet?” asks Wheaton, cradling the gun in his left hand.

The sugar that the Pop-Tarts flushed into my blood will give only limited immunity to the insulin, depending on the dose he gave me. If he comes no closer than he is now, I’ll pass out before I can do anything to save myself. Unless I pull out the IV. And then he’ll shoot me.

“I… I am,” I say in a slurred voice. “Am. Sleepy.”

“That’s right,” he half-whispers, glancing past me, through the glass wall of the conservatory. He looks as if he expects to see armed men crossing his garden at any moment.

The bathwater doesn’t feel as cold as it did before, and for a second I’m thankful. Then I understand: the insulin is affecting my perception. Near panic, I shake myself, then kick my legs up out of the tub, which sends me sliding down into the water. My behind skids between Thalia’s thighs, and my head slips beneath the surface.

It takes a supreme act of will to hold my head under the water, but this is the only path to survival. I make a show of fighting to get my head above the water.

A shadow appears above the tub, then coalesces into a definable shape. A head. Shoulders. Wheaton is looking down into the tub. What does he see? A replay of the first woman he ever killed? The waif? With a macabre sense of dislocation, I watch my last moments on earth through his eyes. He wants to pull my head clear of the water; I can feel it. To give me a more humane death.

Starved for oxygen and stunned by the cold, my lungs burn to reach the surface. I can’t wait for Wheaton to reach in. With a scream of desperation I explode out of the water, hands extended like claws. His eyes bulge in terror, and he tries to wheel backward, but I have him by the wrists. He roars and tries to fight, but his feet haven’t enough purchase on the wet floor to allow him to use his weight against me. With all my weight, I jerk both his hands down into the icy tub.

His eyes go wide with the incomprehension of a child being tortured for reasons it cannot guess, and his feet go out from under him.

Still I hold on.

New faces come alive in his eyes: the abused boy who could read his father’s lustful thoughts; the soldier who heard the enemy’s bare feet from fifty meters. As I struggle to keep his hands pinned, one of his wrists jerks in my hand, and a muted explosion hammers my ears. Blood swirls through the bathtub. His wrist jerks again, and my ears ring like cymbals.

He’s firing the gun under the water.

I don’t feel hurt, but sometimes you don’t know. Amplified by the tub, the blast alone stuns me, but I don’t let go. Bright red blood sprays through the icewater as though from a hose.

Thalia. A hole in her thigh is spurting blood with every beat of her heart. She’s still alive enough to die badly. Screaming in rage, I cling to Wheaton’s wrists as the gun kicks my freezing hand across the bottom of the tub.

When silence returns, it shocks us both. Wheaton’s face is bone white, and his arms have stopped struggling. The icy water has done its work. Before I know what I’m doing, I’ve let go of his wrists and scrambled out of the tub. The IV stand crashes to the floor beside me, and the catheter pops out of my wrist, sending a warm rush of blood down my hand.

Wheaton straightens slowly, and for a moment I think he’s been shot. But he’s not holding himself anywhere; he’s struggling to remove the soaked gloves from his shaking hands. He looks like a burn victim trying to remove melted clothing. One glove drops to the wet floor, then the other, and then he’s holding his hands up before him, fingers splayed and quivering. The fingers are blue. Not a pleasant blue, but the morbid blue-black that signals tissue death. As I stare, Wheaton’s mouth forms an O and he roars in agony.

The scream snaps my trance. Backpedaling away from the tub, I turn toward the door of the main house. It seems a short distance away, but when I try to run, my legs go watery. I have to stop, bend, and grip my knees to stay on my feet. Panic balloons in my chest, cutting off my air. Is that the insulin too?

I need sugar. Rather than try to reach my stash by the mirror, I fall backward onto my rump and throw my hand toward the grocery bag. Wheaton plods toward me, his eyes blazing, but he doesn’t look like much of a threat. It’s like being attacked by a man without hands. Scrabbling in the grocery bag, I rip open a Twinkie and stuff it into my mouth, swallowing the spongy cake almost without chewing.

Wheaton suddenly veers away, back toward the tub. He’s looking down into it like a monk ordered to retrieve some relic from a kettle of fire. The gun. He’s trying to summon the courage to plunge his dying hands back into the ice.

I rake my fingernails down my left forearm, drawing blood. The pain momentarily sharpens my senses, and in that window of clarity I force myself to my feet.

Wheaton bends over the tub and plunges one arm in up to the elbow. Then he pops erect like a jack-in-the-box, his gun arm trembling, and whirls to face me.

The pistol is rising when I charge him, arms outstretched. The gun bellows as my hands strike center mass, driving him backward over the tub and into the mirror propped against the wall. The mirror snaps five feet from the floor, and the top half crashes over us, bursting into lethal shards as big as china plates.

Wheaton falls across the tub, stunned but still conscious, straining to hold himself above the icy water. As I struggle to get off him, his eyes flash with life and he jams the gun barrel into my throat.

“Don’t,” I plead, hating myself for begging. “Please.”

He smiles with odd regret, then pulls the trigger.

There’s a hollow click.

Wild-eyed, he jerks back the gun to bludgeon me, but his flexing shoulder slips off the rim of the tub and sends him down into the water. He doesn’t even scream. He sucks in a massive gulp of air, and one dark hand flies to his chest as though to massage his heart. Before pity can gain a foothold in mine, I put both hands on his head and shove it beneath the icy surface.

He struggles, but his strength has left him. I want to hold him down, if only to end his torture, but I can’t afford to. The sugar in my blood could be metabolized by insulin before I get ten paces from the tub. If it is, I’ll leave this place feet first with a tag around my toe.

I raise myself from the tub and stagger to the door behind the easel. The door leads to an oblong room containing a television, a sofa, and a telephone table. Stumbling through it, I find myself in a wide hall that runs forty feet to a great wooden door, much like the one in Jane’s house on St. Charles Avenue. I start toward the door, focusing on my balance, but two-thirds of the way there my legs give way and I fall headlong into a white baseboard.

There’s a strange fog loose in my head. I want to lie on the soft wood and let it enfold me. But from the midst of the fog rises an image so indelible that my heart begins pounding under the force of it: shallow graves, eleven in a line, low mounds of dirt moldering in the dark beneath a house. This house. Beneath my feet wait the remains of eleven women whose husbands and parents and children pray each night to know their fates. My sister waits with them. And there is no question whom she’s waiting for. My duty is not yet done.

Struggling to my knees, I crawl the last few yards to the door, then reach up with my right hand and turn the knob.

It doesn’t move.

A few still-active brain cells paint the image of a window behind my closed eyes, but I’ve no hope of reaching one. I can go no farther.

“Please,” I hear myself sob, and again the indignity of begging embarrasses me. “Open.”

The door remains closed. A pathetic end for a decently lived life. Naked. Alone. Lost in a white fog that blows with insidious silence, deadening the sound of my sobs, then the rasp of my breathing. Soon all will be whiteness.

As my ears chase the last hissing echo of my respiration, an inhuman screech splits my fading consciousness like an ax. There’s a pounding of drums, then a shattering cacophony like the mirror breaking in the conservatory. Black insectile figures swarm over me, their metallic voices ringing against my eardrums. One is trying to ask me something, his goggle eyes wide and earnest, but I can’t understand him.

A scream of utter desolation cleaves the air, stretching toward infinity. It punches through my heart like a bullet of pure misery, fusing with the grief that has festered there so long. My hands fly up to cover my ears, but the scream smashes into a black wall, leaving only a ringing vibration in the air. The goggle eyes above me go wide, then vanish, and a human face appears in their place.

John Kaiser’s face.

He thinks I’m dead. I see it in his eyes. The fog has almost swallowed me. I have to tell him I’m alive. If I don’t, he might bury me. Deep in my mind, a spark winks to life. A lone pinpoint of white in a black sky. And from that star comes a voice. Not my father’s voice. A woman’s voice.

My sister’s voice.

Speak, Jordan! Say something, damn you!

Two syllables fall from my lips with eerie clarity, and they trigger a burst of frantic activity. The word I say is “Sugar.” Then I slap my wrist. “Sugar!” I say again, slapping the bloody IV hole like a monkey on amphetamines. “Sugar, sugar, sugar…”

A white-clad angel bends over me. “I think she wants us to check her glucose level.”

Then the star winks out, and John’s face vanishes.