What the Night Knows

26

THE INTERIOR OF THE LUCAS RESIDENCE SEEMED LESS BRIGHT than it should have been, as though the sin of murder so thickened the air that sunshine could pierce only inches past the windowpanes.

Room by room, John turned on every light for which he could find a wall switch. He could not bear to tour the house in shadows again.

The living room, converted to a bedroom for wheelchair-bound Sandra, had not interested him before because no one had been killed there. Now he circled through it in search of items that might have been purchased at Piper’s Gallery, and he found them everywhere.

On her nightstand stood a crystal cat. In a semicircle around the animal were three green candles of a kind sold by Annalena.

The nightstand drawer contained a dozen bottles of various herbs in capsule form. There were sticks of incense, a porcelain holder in which to fix them, and a box of wooden matches.

John saw the corner of something dark protruding from between Sandra’s two bed pillows. A red sachet plump with a perfumed cloth.

He assumed the sachet would smell sweet, but the scent proved to be faint and vaguely unpleasant. He could not identify the fragrance, and the more often that he held it to his nose to inhale, the more his stomach turned with incipient nausea.

Bookshelves surrounded a fireplace above which a flat-screen TV was mounted. Instead of books, the shelves held crystal cats of different kinds, crystal spheres and obelisks.

The Lucases owned two real cats that had fled the murder house on the night: British spotted shorthairs named Posh and Fluff.

On an end table stood a geode, its hard black crust filled with red crystal spears. In the shop, it would have dazzled, but here it looked like a snarling maw bristling with hundreds of bloody teeth.

What had sparkled in the Fourth Avenue store instead darkled in this house. What had been cheerful there had here become cheerless.

Across the width of the mantel were clear-glass cups holding fat candles, most of them green, a few blue, and one black.

Elsewhere on the ground floor, he found Piper’s Gallery items in the kitchen. A pantry shelf crammed full of double-stacked jars of exotic dried herbs. A crystal sphere on a redwood stand at the center of the dinette table, three half-melted candles encircling it.

In the study, where Robert Lucas was murdered with a hammer, there were no candles or crystal pieces, nothing from the gallery.

Upstairs, the grandmother’s room was also free of Annalena’s merchandise.

John dreaded returning to Celine’s room, where to his mind’s ear the bed was as saturated with screams as with blood. But he needed to know if she possessed items from Piper’s Gallery. He would have overlooked them on his previous visit, unaware that they might be significant.

He found nothing, and he was further convinced that the calla lilies had been left there by Billy after he rang them over his sister’s corpse. Celine was his fourth and final victim.

In Billy’s room, among the shelves of paperbacks nestled a pair of crystal lizards—one green, one clear—and a blue obelisk. On his nightstand a volcanic-rock geode featured deposited purple crystals of amethyst. A pair of three-inch-diameter scented blue candles in glass holders stood on his desk.

None of those things had seemed significant before. Now they intrigued John.

Apparently only the disabled mother, Sandra, and her son—who supposedly adored her—had bought in to Annalena’s theory of natural therapies that would help them to “prosper in all ways.”

This mattered, but John could see no reason that it should. He sensed that these objects had not brought the Lucases into greater harmony with nature but, to the contrary, had in some mysterious way endangered them. If he could discover why that was true, he would better understand the threat to Nicky and the kids, and he would have more hope of protecting them. His intuition told him as much, and intuition never failed him.

Throughout this second search of the house, he half expected to hear the silvery ringing of the calla-lily bells. The sound did not arise, perhaps because the entity that came with him from the state hospital the previous day was no longer his fellow traveler, but waited for him at home.

As John pored through the boy’s desk drawers again, a voice that was not otherworldly said, “Breaking and entering, Calvino?”