The Wolf Gift Read online

  Eating right after a “death” had always revolted him. He remembered when Celeste’s brother had died in Berkeley. Reuben had not been able to eat or drink anything for days, without vomiting.

  He was doing a very good job of concealing his distress. Galton was watching him, waiting.

  “Look, you go ahead,” said Reuben. “I give you carte blanche on the repairs.” He opened his wallet and drew out a wad of bills. “This ought to start things off. And stock the freezer and the pantry, you know, with all the usual stuff. I know how to defrost and cook a leg of lamb. Get me a sack or two of potatoes, carrots, and onions. I can fend for myself. You just tend to everything. The main thing with me is privacy. I ask that nobody, I mean nobody, be admitted to the place except your workmen and only then when you’re with them yourself.”

  The man was pleased. He put the wad of bills in his pocket. He nodded to everything. He explained “those reporters” had been all around, snooping on the outside, but none had dared to come in, and then when the kidnapping happened, the reporters had vanished. “That’s the way it is today, with the Internet and all,” said Galton. “Everything’s a flash in the pan, though now of course they’re talking about this Man Wolf in San Francisco, and people have been calling up here, you know. The police drove by here twice earlier.”

  Besides, the alarm had been connected since the police left the place. He had personally set the alarm as soon as the investigators were out. The family lawyer had seen to all that. Once that alarm was set, the entire ground floor was covered by motion detectors, glass breaker alarms, and contacts on all doors and windows.

  “When that alarm goes off, it rings my house, and the local police station simultaneously. I call. They call. But no matter what they barrel on up here.”

  He gave Reuben the alarm code, showed him how to punch it in, and told him there was a keypad on the second floor that he could use to take off the motion detectors before he came downstairs in the morning. “Now, if you want it on while you’re still moving around, then you punch in the code and press HOME, and your windows and doors are covered without the motion detectors.

  “Oh, and you have to have my e-mail. I check my e-mail all day. You e-mail me about anything you find wrong up here. I’m on it.” He held up his iPhone proudly. “Oh you just call me. This phone’s right by my bed all night.”

  Not to worry about the furnaces either. The old gas furnaces were relatively new, considering the age of the place, and there was absolutely no asbestos in the place. They were keeping the house at about sixty-nine degrees, which was how Marchent had liked it. Of course a lot of the vents were closed off. But wasn’t it warm enough in here now?

  And by the way, there’s a cellar under this house, a small cellar, with a stairs under the main stairs. Forgot about that. Nothing down there, however, because all the furnaces were moved out back into the service wing years ago.

  “Yes, fine,” said Reuben.

  The Internet service was connected too, just as Miss Marchent had had it before. The service covered the whole house. There was a router in her office and in the second-floor electrical room at the end of the hall up there.

  Reuben was happy about all that.

  Reuben walked Galton to the back door.

  For the first time under the high floodlights in the trees he saw a broad parking area and the back two-story servants’ wing to the far left where, apparently, Felice had been murdered. It was obviously a later addition to the house.

  He could see almost nothing of the forest beyond the lights, just here and there a bit of green and the streak of light on the bark of a tree.

  Are you out there? Are you watching? Do you remember the man you spared when you killed the others?

  Galton had a brand-new Ford truck and discoursed on its virtues for several minutes. Few things made a man feel better than a brand-new truck. Reuben might want to keep a truck on the property, would come in handy. But then Galton’s truck was at Reuben’s disposal. Then he was off with the promise that he could be here in ten minutes if Reuben rang his cell or house phone.

  “One last question,” Reuben said. “I have the surveyor’s maps and all, but is there any kind of fencing around this property?”

  “No,” said the man. “The redwoods run on for miles, with some of the oldest trees on the coast out there. But you don’t get many hikers. This is too off the beaten path. They’re all headed for the state parks. The Hamiltons live north and the Drexel family used to live east but I don’t think there’s anybody out there anymore. That place has been for sale for years. I did see a light out there a couple of weeks ago. Probably just a real estate agent. They’ve got trees on that property as old as your trees.”

  “I can’t wait to walk the woods,” Reuben murmured but what he was registering was that he was really alone here. Alone.

  Come to think of it, what could be better when the change came—than to walk these woods as the Man Wolf, seeing and hearing—and perhaps tasting things—as never before?

  And what about the mountain lion and her brood? Were they really close? Something in him stirred at the thought of it—a beast as powerful as a mountain lion. Could he outrun such an animal? Could he kill it?

  He stood for a moment in the kitchen door listening as the sound of Galton’s truck died away, and then he turned around and faced the empty house and everything that had happened there.

  9

  HE HADN’T BEEN the least bit afraid of anything when he’d come here the first time. And now he was far more removed from fear than he’d been then. He felt quietly powerful, resilient, and self-confident in a way he’d never felt before the transformation.

  Nevertheless he did not entirely like being this alone, this utterly alone, and he really never had much liked it.

  He’d grown up in the crowds of San Francisco, squeezed into the high narrow house on Russian Hill with its small elegant rooms, and the constant vitality of Grace and Phil and Grace’s friends coming and going. He’d spent his life in groups and gatherings, just steps from the foot traffic of North Beach and Fisherman’s Wharf, minutes from his favorite restaurants on busy Union Street, or Union Square—loving cruise-ship family vacations and wandering with bands of intrepid students through Middle Eastern ruins.

  Now he had the solitude and quiet he’d been craving, dreaming of, the solitude and quiet that had seduced him so powerfully that first afternoon here with Marchent, and it settled over him and he felt more alone than ever in his life, and more alienated from everything, even the memory of Marchent, than he’d ever been.

  If there was something out there in the night, something that knew more about him perhaps than anyone did, he couldn’t feel it. He couldn’t hear it. He heard small sounds, sounds without menace. That was all.

  And he couldn’t really hope for that creature to come either.

  He felt too alone.

  Well, time to get to work—to learn the place, and learn whatever else he could.

  The kitchen was cavernous and spotlessly clean. Even the braided throw rugs were new, and dreadfully unsuited for the white marble floor. Copper-bottomed pans hung from iron hooks above the central island with its butcher-block surface and small fancy sinks. Black granite countertops gleamed along the walls. Behind the glass doors of the white enameled cabinets he saw row upon row of china in different patterns, and the more utilitarian pitchers and bowls of a large kitchen. A long narrow butler’s pantry ran between kitchen and dining room, and there was more china and a lot of linen in the glass-doored cabinets there.

  Slowly, he glanced in the direction of Marchent’s office. Then he made his way into the small darkened room, and stared at the blank desk. This place had been carved out of the western end of the kitchen, and the marble floor ran on underneath. All the clutter he’d glimpsed that fatal night had apparently been gathered into white storage boxes, each labeled in black felt-tip writing with numbers and abbreviations that must have meant something to the police who’
d come to investigate Marchent’s murder. The floor had been swept and mopped, obviously. Yet a faint perfume lingered in the room—Marchent.

  He felt a surge of love for her and unspeakable pain. He held tight waiting for it to pass.

  Everything was dusted and still. The computer was there, though what was left on its hard drive, he could not guess. The printer and fax machine stood ready for action. There was a copy machine with a glass window, for copying from books. And there was a photograph on the wall, a single portrait, under framed glass, which Reuben had not seen before, of Felix Nideck.

  It was one of those formal front-facing portraits that appear to be staring right at you. Sheet film again, he reasoned, because you could see the tiniest details so clearly.

  The man’s hair was dark and wavy. His smile was immediate, his dark eyes warm and expressive. He wore what appeared to be a tailored jacket of faded denim, and a white shirt open at the neck. He seemed about to speak.

  In black ink in the left-hand corner was written: “Beloved Marchent. Don’t forget me. Love, Uncle Felix, ’85.”

  Reuben turned his back and closed the door.

  He hadn’t expected all this to hurt so very much.

  “Nideck Point,” he whispered. “I accept all you have to give me.” But he didn’t so much as glance towards the hallway outside the kitchen door where he’d almost been killed.

  Let’s take it one thing at a time.

  He stood quiet. He could not hear a sound in the night. Then far away he heard the sea banging on the coast, banging, the waves sounding like big guns as they thundered on the beach. But he’d had to reach for that sound, reach beyond these placid well-lighted rooms.

  He took some stew on a plate, found a fork in a drawer of silver, and went into the eastern breakfast room, sitting down at the table in front of the windows.

  Even this room had its wood fire—though it wasn’t lighted—in a black iron Franklin stove in the corner, and there was a big oak hutch of painted plates along the back wall.

  A finely carved Black Forest cuckoo clock hung just to the right of the hutch. Phil would love that, Reuben thought. Phil had once collected cuckoo clocks, and their constant chiming and tweeting and cooing had driven everybody at home a little nuts.

  Black Forest. He thought of that story, “The Man-Wolf,” and of the character of Sperver. And the Nideck connection. Black Forest. He had to go look at that picture in the library, but there were so many pictures upstairs to check as well.

  One thing at a time.

  The windows here covered most of the eastern wall.

  He’d never liked sitting before naked windows at night, especially when one could see nothing in the dark world beyond, but he did it consciously and deliberately now. To anyone out there in the forest he must be strikingly visible here, as if he were on a lighted stage.

  So if you are out there, degenerate cousin of the great Nidecks, well, for the love of heaven, make yourself known.

  There was no doubt in his mind that he would change later, of course, as he had the night before and the night before, even if he did not know why or when. But he was going to try to bring it on sooner. And he wondered if that creature, that creature who just might be out there watching, would wait for that transformation before he or it appeared.

  He ate the beef, the carrots, the potatoes, whatever he could spear with the fork. It was pretty good, actually. So much for being disgusted by food. He lifted the plate and drank the broth. Nice of Galton’s wife to arrange this.

  Suddenly he set the fork down and he rested his forehead in his hands, elbows on the table. “Marchent, forgive me,” he whispered. “Forgive me for forgetting for one moment you died here.”

  He was still sitting there quietly when Celeste called him.

  “You’re not afraid up there?”

  “Afraid of what?” he asked. “The people who attacked me are dead. They’ve been dead since it happened.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t like to think of you up there. You know what’s happened. They found this little girl.”

  “I heard on the way up here.”

  “There’re reporters camped outside the sheriff’s office.”

  “I’m sure of it. I’m not going there just now.”

  “Reuben, you’re missing the biggest story of your career.”

  “My career’s six months old, Celeste, I have a long way to go.”

  “Reuben, you have never had your priorities straight,” she said gently, emboldened obviously by the miles between them. “You know, nobody who knows you expected you to write such interesting articles for the Observer and you should be writing right now. I mean when you took that job, I thought, Yeah, sure, and How long will this last? and now you’re the one who’s given the Man Wolf his name. Everybody’s referencing your description—.”

  “The witness’s description, Celeste—.” But why was he bothering to argue, or to talk at all?

  “Look, I’m here with Mort. Mort wants to say hello.”

  Now that was cozy, wasn’t it?

  “How’re you doing, old buddy?”

  “Fine, just fine,” said Reuben.

  Mort went on for a little while about Reuben’s article on the Man Wolf. “Good stuff,” he said. “Are you writing something on the house up there?”

  “I don’t want to draw any more attention to this house,” he said. “I don’t want to remind anybody about it anymore.”

  “That figures. Besides, this is one of those stories that will be over before it ever grows legs.”

  You think so?

  Mort mentioned he might take Celeste to a movie in Berkeley, and he wished Reuben was there to come with them.

  Hmmmm.

  Reuben said fine, he’d catch up with them both in a few days. End of phone call.

  So that was it. She was with Mort and she was having too good a time and she felt guilty and so she rang me. And what is she doing going to a movie with Mort when the whole city’s looking for the kidnappers or the Man Wolf?

  Since when did Celeste want to be in a Berkeley art house with those kinds of things going on? Well, maybe she was falling for Mort. He couldn’t blame her. The fact was, he did not care.

  After he’d put the plate and fork in one of the three dishwashers he discovered under the counter, he started his real tour of things.

  He went all through the ground floor, peering into the closets and pantries that were everywhere, finding all as it had been, except that old abandoned conservatory had been thoroughly cleaned, and all the dead plants taken away, and the black granite floor tidily swept. Even the old Grecian fountain had been scoured apparently, and someone had fixed a neat note, “Needs pump,” to the side of it with Scotch tape.

  Beneath the main stairs, he found the steps to the cellar, and it was small, a cement room about twenty feet square, lined with darkly stained wooden storage cabinets, floor to ceiling, filled with stained and torn linen that had seen its day. One dusty obsolete furnace still stood against the wall. He could see where other furnaces had once been. The ductwork was gone, the ceiling patched. A broken dining room chair stood in one corner, and an old electric hair dryer, and an empty steamer trunk.

  Now came a key moment, one he’d anticipated as he deliberately put it off: the library and the distinguished gentlemen of the jungle in their gilt frame. He headed back upstairs.

  He entered the library as if it were a sanctum.

  Turning on the overhead chandelier, he read the names written in ink on the framing mat.

  Margon Sperver, Baron Thibault, Reynolds Wagner, Felix Nideck, Sergei Gorlagon, and Frank Vandover.

  Quickly he typed them into an iPhone e-mail and sent it to himself.

  What remarkable and cheerful faces these men had. Sergei was a giant as Marchent had mentioned, with very blond hair and bushy blond eyebrows and a long rectangular face. Quite Nordic looking, indeed. The others were all slightly smaller, but varied in physiognomy quite a bit. Only Felix an
d Margon were dark skinned, as if they had some Asian or Latin blood.

  Were they sharing some kind of personal joke in this photo? Or was this just a marvelous moment during a great adventure shared by close friends?

  Sperver; Nideck. Maybe it was just coincidence and nothing else. The other names didn’t mean anything much to Reuben at all.

  Well, they’d be here forever now; and he could spend hours with them later this evening or tomorrow or tomorrow after that.

  He went upstairs.

  Now came more very special moments. He opened the doors that had been locked that first night. All were unlocked now.

  “Storerooms,” Galton had said dismissively.

  He saw the crowded shelves he’d anticipated with such relish, the countless statues in jade or diorite or alabaster, the scattered books, fragments.…

  He went from room to room, hoping to capture the scope of it.

  And then he pounded up the bare steps at the front of the house to the third floor, and groping for a light switch, quickly found himself in a vast room beneath the sloping roofs of the southwest gable, gazing at wooden tables scattered with books, papers, more statues, and curios, boxes of cards covered in scribbled writing, blank books, what seemed to be ledgers, even bundles of letters.

  This was the room above the master bedroom, the one that Felix had sealed off. Indeed he saw the square of replaced flooring where the iron stairs had once been.

  There were big old sagging comfortable chairs in the center of this room beneath an old black iron chandelier.

  On the arm of one chair, he found a small dusty paperback book.

  He picked it up.

  PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN

  How I Believe

  Now this was most curious. Had Felix been a reader of Teilhard de Chardin, one of Catholicism’s most elegant and mysterious theologians? Reuben didn’t really have a mind for abstract philosophy or theology, any more than he did for science. But he loved the poetic dimension of Teilhard and always had. So did his brother, Jim. Reuben found a kind of promise in Teilhard, who’d been not only an ardent believer in God but a believer in the world, as he had often put it.