The Devil's bed

chapter
seven

When he saw the two agents head toward the barn, Nightmare switched to the camera he’d concealed in a hay bale in the loft two days earlier.

In the weeks before, access to Wildwood had been easy. The grounds were large, and unsecured. Tom Jorgenson liked to think of himself as a man of the people, and unless a dignitary was visiting, he didn’t believe in extensive security measures. Nightmare had scaled the stone wall dozens of times, coming and going in the night as he studied the layout of the buildings and the equipment the Secret Service would eventually use to create the illusion of safety. While the Jorgensons slept, or while they were absent, Nightmare had walked their rooms undetected. He felt like a ghost, and he liked the feeling. He would show them what the dead could do.

The two agents stood in the open doorway of the barn. On Nightmare’s monitor and seen through the sunglasses that he wore even in the dark, they were black shapes against the glare of the yard light. He turned up the microphone and listened as they discussed the concern of the one called Thorsen.

The tractor. It was a small detail. Why hadn’t he let it run off the cliff? The answer was simple. Too much noise. Too great an announcement of the event. Nightmare had always been an operative who appreciated the quiet and the dark. Execute and evaporate. Gone before anyone knew he’d ever been there.

But this Thorsen was observant and smart. Nightmare knew he would have to watch the man, and eliminate him if necessary. Not difficult. Nightmare had dealt with dozens like him, men who thought they were too smart to get killed.

When the two agents split up, Nightmare switched cameras again, this time to a view of the house from a unit he’d secreted in the sycamore tree. The three women had quit the porch. Nightmare checked the kitchen camera hidden in a false fire extinguisher with which he’d replaced the real one, then he flipped to the camera hidden in a book on a shelf in the living room where the agent on duty was playing a game of solitaire on a coffee table. Finally he checked the camera he’d placed in the bedroom that had once been Kate’s. He found, as he’d hoped, that the room was still hers. She sat on her bed, staring at a bare wall.

What do you see there, Kate? The future? The past? You don’t see me, I’ll bet. But you will.

He remembered the first night twenty years ago that he’d watched her like this, unseen. He’d climbed the sycamore, climbed as easily as a snake up a vine. In those days, there’d been curtains over the windows, gauzy things not dense enough in their weave to block his vision of her undressing. He remembered her breasts especially, tumbling from the bra that had held them captive. For weeks in that summer of his seventeenth year, he’d made a ritual of the sycamore tree. On those nights when she was gone, when they were all gone and the house was deserted, he climbed the porch supports, swung himself easily over the eaves to the roof, and crept to her window. He was already a genius at picking locks, at easing through the smallest breach in someone’s privacy. Her screen presented him no challenge at all. He wandered her room, fingering everything she’d touched. He lay on her bed, breathing the scent off her pillow.

He loved her, of course. How could he not love that which had possessed him?

In the present, he watched the First Lady drift left, just beyond camera range. She reappeared a minute later. Her yellow dress was gone, and she’d removed her bra. Her breasts were fuller now, heavier-looking, and there was a roundness to her belly and hips that was the signature of time, of the two decades that separated this intimate view from the last. She stood a moment, as if lost. Then she turned her back to the camera and bent her head. Nightmare could tell from the way her shoulders quivered that she wept.

Until that moment, he’d been hard in his thinking, brutal, in the way that time and circumstance had shaped him to be. But when he saw her cry, a different feeling nudged him, one that he had not expected. He remembered how his own mother used to cry, from confusion and loneliness.

He fingered the festering wound above his heart, full of ash and old blood. He put his sunglasses back on and closed himself like a fist around an understanding: It didn’t matter if what he did was done out of anger or out of pity. The end was the same.

Kate put on a nightgown, lay down, reached for a book on the nightstand, and began to read.

The sun will rise for you tomorrow, Nightmare thought as he watched her. But soon there will be nothing for you except the night, the unending night. And I will be the one who takes you there.