What the Night Knows

20

FOR NICOLETTE, THE MORNING WAS FINE, FULL OF FAMILY, but the waking nightmare came at half past noon.

Mornings in this house were sacrosanct, beginning with breakfast prepared by Nicky and attended by all five Calvinos before John went off to work. During these early hours, no phone calls were made or accepted. Interruptions of routine were seldom sanctioned.

At seven forty-five, Nicky took the kids to the second-floor library, where she oversaw their lessons until lunch. They were a lively bunch, as eager to learn as to joke and tease and sass. Usually they engaged in too much of the latter three activities, yet always—frequently to Nicky’s surprise—a satisfying amount of learning occurred.

This morning, the conversation around the breakfast table was different from the usual chinfest, more subdued, and the children were less lively during lessons, as well. Nicky attributed their uncharacteristic reticence to their late dinner the previous night and to the fact that they must have subsequently settled down to sleep hours later than usual.

At noon, Walter and Imogene offered options for lunch, and as this was the one meal of the day that wasn’t a family event, Nicky took her Caesar salad with sliced chicken breast and a cold bottle of tea to her studio on the third floor. She didn’t want to suffocate her ducklings. They needed time with one another, no adults around. They certainly needed time alone, too, if only to discover if they were going to be healthy saplings who found solitude nutritious or bratlings who, when left alone, blew things up for sport. She didn’t mind if they suffocated her. They could hang out in her studio while she painted and they could quack at her nonstop, and she would relish every minute of it, though this proved to be a day when Zach took his lunch to his room and the girls retreated to theirs.

No out-of-house music or art lessons were scheduled for the afternoon, but Leonid Sinyavski, their math tutor, would be in-house from two o’clock until four. With his wild head of Einsteinian hair, bushy eyebrows, bulbous nose, and expansive belly, dressed always in a black suit and white shirt and black tie, he looked like a former circus clown who had decided to get serious. He was a dear man who seasoned his mathematics with magic tricks, and the urchins adored him, which was a good thing, because although Nicolette had a solid background in history and literature and art, she was no less undone by math than Samson by a barber.

In her studio, Nicky put the bottle of tea on the table that held her humility roses and sat on a stool to eat her salad while she studied the triptych that she suspected-hoped-believed was more than half finished. It looked like crap, which was okay because every painting in process seemed like crap when she returned to it on a new day. The longer she assessed a seemingly crappy canvas, the better it appeared, until sooner or later it didn’t seem to be crappy anymore. Or if it continued to seem crappy, often it was the kind of crappy that had the potential to be transformed into something quite wonderful if only she could shift her sluggish talent into a higher gear, find that sweet spot between bitter self-doubt and dangerous overconfidence, and get it done.

John was one of the figures in the painting. He often appeared in her work. He wouldn’t recognize himself at first—if at all—because the face on the figure differed from his. This face was one that Nicolette imagined he might have had if his adolescence hadn’t been shattered by horror and violence, if his family had lived. She had painted him with many faces over the years because she had never known a man who held within him so many potentialities for goodness, even greatness.

At breakfast, before John left for the day, he had been a bit reticent, too, like the kids. Sometimes an investigation challenged him or emotionally involved him to such an extent that he lived half a step apart from everyone else, sometimes even from her, distracted by the scattered pieces of the puzzle that the murderer left behind.

Currently his primary case concerned a high-school teacher, Edward Hartman, who had been beaten to death in his cottage by the lake. Clues pointed toward the instructor’s students, though not to one in particular. John’s parents had been teachers—and murdered—so Nicky supposed he might be less himself for a while, until reason and intuition led him to a suspect and to case-clinching evidence.

Curiously, however, he had not mentioned the murdered teacher to her in perhaps a week, though he usually bounced ideas off her throughout the course of an investigation. If she didn’t know how committed he was to his work, she might have thought he had reached a dead end in the Hartman case.

After she finished the salad, Nicky stepped out of her studio, crossed the third-floor landing at the head of the stairs, and went into the master suite, to the bathroom.

A month earlier, she’d undergone surgery to remove an abscessed tooth with roots fused to the jawbone. Although she had always been a twice-a-day flosser, the oral-surgery experience encouraged her to be obsessive about dental hygiene, and now she flossed after every meal.

With her tongue, Nicky could feel the gap where the tooth had been extracted. Eventually, when the bone repaired itself, she would receive an implant to fill the hole.

Because the storm clouds had begun to tatter, the clerestory windows high in the walls admitted enough sunshine that she didn’t switch on the bathroom lights.

She drew a glass of cold water and put it aside.

Flossing, she bent over the sink, closed her eyes. Two minutes later, finished, she opened her eyes, saw scraps of lettuce and tiny shreds of chicken in the porcelain basin, and felt virtuous. She took a mouthful of water from the glass, rinsed, and spat.

When she put down the glass, raised her head, and grinned at the mirror to look for any obvious remaining bits of lettuce, she saw a man standing close behind her in the bathroom.

Crying out, Nicky swiveled to confront him. No one was there.

Shadowy and half-glimpsed in the clerestory light, he had seemed real nonetheless, tall and stoop-shouldered and scarecrow-strange. He could not have fled the bathroom, however, in the split second during which she turned toward him.

She took a deep breath, blew it out, and with it a small nervous laugh, amused that she had spooked herself.

When she turned once more to the mirror, the man was not behind her, as before, but now appeared—a dark shape, a shadowed face—in the looking glass where Nicky’s reflection should have been.

A rough voice said something that sounded like Kiss me, a blast of arctic air slammed into Nicky, the mirror exploded in a thousand shards, and darkness took her.