The Wolf Gift Page 5

  He felt rejuvenated now, and a little elated and guilty, and a little sad. It never occurred to him for a minute that Marchent would invite him into her bed again. In fact, he was certain she wouldn’t. And he winced when he thought of her patronizing him, maybe calling him a beautiful boy. Seems she had whispered something like that to him when they were in the thick of it, and it hadn’t mattered then. But it mattered now.

  Ah, well, he was surprised by this turn of events, and it seemed mixed up with this house and with Felix Nideck and with the mystique of the whole family.

  He got up and went into the bathroom. There was his shaving kit unzipped on the edge of the marble washbasin, and on a glass shelf beneath the mirror stood all the toiletries he might need, just as he might find them in a fine hotel. A curtained window faced west, and by day one could likely see the ocean or the cliffs, he wasn’t sure.

  He showered, brushed his teeth, and then got into his pajamas. Slipping on the robe and his shoes, he quickly turned down the coverlet, and plumped the pillows.

  For the first time this evening, he checked his phone and saw he had two messages from his mother, one from his father, two from his brother, Jim, and five messages from Celeste. Well, this wasn’t the time to answer them.

  He slipped the phone into the pocket of his robe, and then took stock of the room.

  Unbelievable treasures, helter-skelter, it seemed, and dusted as best they could be. Tablets. Yes, there were tablets there, tiny fragile baked-clay tablets that might crumble at his touch. He could see the tiny cuneiform writing. And there were figures in jade, and diorite, and alabaster, gods and goddesses he knew, and some he had never known, and inlaid boxes crammed with random bits of paper or fabric, and heaps of coins and what might have been jewelry, and then books. Lots of books, in all the mysterious Asian languages again, and in the languages of Europe too.

  All Hawthorne’s novels were here, and some very recent novels that surprised him and thrilled him—James Joyce’s Ulysses, very thumbed and filled with little note tags, and copies of Hemingway and Eudora Welty and Zane Grey. There were books of old ghost stories, too, elegant British writers, M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, and Sheridan LeFanu.

  He didn’t dare to touch these books. Some were bulging with torn bits of paper, and the oldest paperbacks were falling apart. But it gave him the oddest feeling again of knowing and loving Felix, a twinge that was like the fan sickness he’d felt as a kid when he’d fallen in love with Catherine Zeta Jones or Madonna and thought them the most gorgeous and desirable people in the world. It was that kind of simple yearning, to know Felix, to have Felix, to be in Felix’s world. But Felix was dead.

  A wild fantasy bloomed in his mind. He’d marry Marchent. He’d live here with her. He’d bring the house to life again for her. They’d go through all of Felix’s papers together. Maybe Reuben would write a history of the house, and a history of Felix, one of those specialty books, which always include big expensive photographs, books that didn’t become best sellers but which were always respectable and valuable. God knows he had such books himself.

  Now he was the one telling himself he was dreaming. And in truth, much as he loved Marchent, he didn’t want to be married yet to anybody. But the book, maybe he could do the book, and Marchent might cooperate in such a venture, even if she herself went off again to her house in South America. Maybe it would bind them together, deeply, as good friends and fine friends, and that would be something of great value to them both.

  He went out of the room and walked about for a while, on the second floor.

  He went down the north hallway on the back of the house.

  Many doors stood open, and he found himself peering into several little libraries and galleries much like the one he’d just left. More ancient clay tablets. Ah, this took his breath away. More figurines, and even some parchment scrolls. He was fighting himself not to touch.

  There were more of the beautifully appointed bedrooms off the east hallway, one with dazzling black-and-gold Oriental wallpaper, and another papered in stripes of red and gold.

  Circling back eventually, he was again on the west side of the house. He stood for a moment on the threshold of what was obviously Marchent’s bedroom, one door above Felix’s bedroom, a haven of white lace curtains and bed trimming, noting her clothes in a heap at the foot of the bed. But Marchent was nowhere around.

  He wanted to go up to the attic. There was a staircase at either end of the western hall. But he had no leave to go exploring up there, and so he didn’t. And he didn’t open closed doors, though he wanted to do that very much too.

  He loved the house. He loved the twin candlelike sconces, the thick wooden crown moldings everywhere, and the dark wooden baseboards and heavy brass-handled doors.

  Where was the lady of the house?

  He went downstairs.

  He heard her voice before he saw her. From the kitchen, he saw her in an adjacent office, amid fax machines or copy machines, computer monitors and mountains of clutter, talking on a landline phone in a low voice.

  He didn’t want to eavesdrop, and in truth, he couldn’t really make out what she was saying. She wore a white negligee now, something very soft, with layers of lace and pearls, it seemed, and her smooth straight hair shimmered like satin in the light.

  He felt a stab of desire that was painful, just looking at her hand as it held the receiver of the phone, and seeing the light on her forehead.

  She turned, saw him, and smiled, gesturing for him to wait.

  He turned and went away.

  The old woman Felice was going through the big house and turning off the lights.

  The dining room was already dark when he came back through it, and he saw that the fire had been scattered and was no more than embers. The rooms up front appeared to be in total darkness now. And he could see the old woman moving down the hall, reaching for the switches of the sconces one by one.

  At last she passed him on her way back to the kitchen, and this room she plunged into total darkness as well. She went on out then, without a word to Marchent, who was still talking, and Reuben went on back up the stairs.

  A small lamp burned on a table in the upstairs hallway. And there was light coming from Marchent’s open bedroom door.

  He sat down at the top of the stairs, with his back to the wall. He figured he would wait for her and surely she would come up soon.

  He knew suddenly he’d do everything in his power to get her to sleep the night with him, and he grew impatient wanting to hold her, kiss her, feel her in his arms. It had been powerfully exciting to sleep with her simply because she was new to him and so very different, yet soft and yielding and utterly self-confident and frankly much more passionate than he’d ever known Celeste to be. She didn’t seem like an older woman in any particular way. He knew she was, of course, but her flesh had been firm and sweet, and she’d been a little less muscular than Celeste.

  These struck him as crude thoughts; he didn’t like these thoughts. He thought of her voice and her eyes and he loved her. He figured Celeste would probably understand. Celeste after all had been unfaithful to him with her old boyfriend twice. She’d been very candid about both of these “disasters,” and they’d gotten past it. In fact, Celeste had suffered over them much more than Reuben had.

  But he had it in his mind that she owed him one, and that a woman of Marchent’s age wouldn’t arouse her jealousy at all. Celeste was uncommonly pretty, effortlessly attractive. She’d let this go.

  He went to sleep. It was a thin sleep in which he thought he was awake, but it was sleep. His body felt sublimely relaxed and he knew he was happier than he’d been in a very long time.

  3

  A LOUD CRASH. Glass breaking. He woke up. The lights were out. He couldn’t see anything. Then he heard Marchent scream.

  He raced down the steps, hand sliding along the broad oak railing, finding his way.

  One horrific scream after another drew him straight forward in the bla
ckness, and gradually, by what light he didn’t know, he made out the kitchen door.

  The beam of a flashlight blinded him, and before he could shield his eyes, someone had caught him by the throat and was pushing him backwards. His head cracked into wall. The guy was strangling him. The flashlight was rolling on the floor. In sheer rage, he rammed his knee into the attacker, while reaching with both hands for the man’s face. He caught a hank of hair in his left hand and rammed his fist into the man’s eye. The man yelled and gave up the grip on Reuben’s throat. But another figure was bearing down on him with another light. Reuben saw the flash of metal, and felt the sharp stab of the blade going into his stomach. He had never felt rage like he was feeling it now, but as the two men beat him and kicked at him, he felt the blood pumping out of his stomach. Again, he saw the flash of the knife raised. He struck out with all the force he could muster, thrusting his shoulder behind the blow, and threw one of his attackers backwards and away.

  Again he felt the blade, this time slicing into his left arm.

  A sudden torrent of sounds exploded in the shadowy hallway. It had to be the deep roaring growls of a fierce dog. His attackers were screaming, the animal was snapping, roaring, and Reuben himself had slid down in what was surely his own blood.

  Once a long time ago, Reuben had seen a dogfight, and what he remembered was not the sight—because it happened too fast and too furiously for anyone to see anything—but the noise.

  That’s how it was now. He couldn’t see the dog. He couldn’t see his attackers. He felt the weight of the beast on top of him, pinning him to the floor, and then the bellowing of the two men stopped.

  With a savage snarl, the animal grabbed Reuben by his head, the teeth sinking into the side of his face. He felt himself being lifted as his arms flailed. The pain was worse than the wound in his stomach.

  Then suddenly the powerful jaws let him go.

  He fell back down on top of one of the attackers, and the only sound in the whole world suddenly was the animal’s panting breath.

  He tried to move but he couldn’t feel his legs. Something heavy, the paw of the beast, was resting on his back. “Dear God, help me!” he said. “Dear God, please.”

  His eyes closed and he went down and down into rolling darkness; but he forced himself back to the surface. “Marchent!” he shouted. Then the darkness rolled over him again.

  Utter quiet surrounded him. He knew the two men were dead. He knew that Marchent was dead.

  He rolled over on his back, and struggled to reach into the right pocket of his robe. His fingers closed on the cell phone, but he waited, waited in the silence until he was certain that he was truly alone. Then he drew the phone out and up to his face, and punched the button to turn on the small screen.

  The darkness rose again, like waves coming up to wash him off the safe white beach. He forced himself to open his eyes. But the phone had slipped from his hand. His hand had been wet and he’d lost it, and as he turned his head, the darkness came again.

  With all his strength he fought it. “I’m dying,” he whispered. “They’re dead, all of them. Marchent’s dead. And I’m dying here, and I have to get help.”

  He reached out, groping for the cell phone, and felt only the wet boards. With his left hand he covered the pain burning in his gut and felt the blood coming through his fingers. A person cannot live with bleeding like this.

  Turning on his side he struggled to right himself and climb up on his knees. But when the swoon came this time it took him down at once.

  There was a sound somewhere.

  A thin winding sound.

  It was like a ribbon of light in the darkness, this sound.

  Imagining this? Dreaming? Dying.

  He had never expected death to be this quiet, this secretive, this easy. “Marchent,” he whispered. “I’m sorry, so sorry!”

  But there was a second siren, yes, he could hear it, a second shining ribbon in the dark. The two luminous ribbons of sound were weaving in and out, weaving and coming closer and closer. And there was a third siren, yes.

  Imagine that.

  The sirens were very close now, winding down, someone spooling up that shimmering luminous ribbon and, once again, the sound of breaking glass.

  He drifted, feeling the tug of the darkness again. Ah, well, my friends, you are too late. It didn’t seem so horribly tragic, really. It was all too immediate and exciting, You are dying, Reuben, and he didn’t struggle, or hope.

  Someone was standing over him. Beams of light were crisscrossing above him, sliding down the walls. It was actually beautiful.

  “Marchent,” he said. “Marchent! They got her.” He couldn’t say it clearly enough. His mouth was full of fluid.

  “Don’t talk, son,” said the man kneeling beside him. “We’re taking care of her. We’re doing all we can.”

  But he knew. He knew by the quiet and the stillness that had surrounded him, and by the sad tone of the man’s voice, that for Marchent it was too late. The lovely and elegant woman he had known for less than a day was dead. She’d died right away.

  “Stay with me, son,” the man said. People were lifting him. Down came the plastic oxygen mask. Someone was ripping open his shirt.

  He heard the snap and crackle of the walkie-talkie. He was on the stretcher. They were running.

  “Marchent,” he said. The glaring light inside the ambulance blinded him. He didn’t want to be taken away from her. He panicked but they held him down and then he went out.

  4

  REUBEN WAS IN AND OUT of consciousness for two hours in the Mendocino emergency room; then an air ambulance took him south to San Francisco General where Dr. Grace Golding was waiting with her husband, Phil, at her side.

  Reuben was struggling desperately against the restraints that bound him to the gurney. The pain and the drugs were driving him out of his mind.

  “They will not tell me what happened!” he roared at his mother, who at once demanded that the police come and give him the answers he was entitled to have.

  The only problem with that, said the police, was that he was too drugged to answer their questions and they had more questions than he did at this point. But yes, Marchent Nideck was dead.

  It was Celeste who got on the phone with the authorities in Mendocino and came back with the details.

  Marchent had been stabbed over sixteen times and any one of ten different wounds might have been fatal. She’d died within minutes, maybe seconds. If she suffered, it was very brief.

  Reuben willfully closed his eyes for the first time and went to sleep.

  When he woke there was a plainclothes police officer there, and in drug-slurred words, Reuben volunteered that yes, he had had intimate relations “with the deceased,” and no, he did not mind if they took a DNA test. He had known the autopsy would reveal all this.

  He gave the best account he could of what he remembered. No, he had not made the 911 call; he had dropped his phone, and been unable to recover it. But if the call had come from his phone, well, then, he must have done it.

  (“Murder, murder.” That’s what he’d said over and over again? Didn’t sound like something he would have said at all.)

  Celeste wanted him to stop talking. He needed an attorney. He’d never seen her so anxious, so near to tears.

  “No, I don’t,” Reuben insisted. “I don’t need an attorney.”

  “It’s the concussion,” Grace said. “You’re not going to remember everything. It’s a miracle you remember as much as you do.”

  “ ‘Murder, murder’?” he whispered. “I said that?”

  He so vividly recalled struggling to find the phone and not being able to do it.

  Even through the haze of painkillers, Reuben could see how shaken his mother was. She was in her usual green scrubs, her red hair pinned down and flat, her blue eyes red rimmed and tired. He felt a throbbing in her hand as if she were trembling inside where people couldn’t see it.

  Twenty-four hours later, whe
n he was moved to a private room, Celeste brought the news that the killers had been Marchent’s younger brothers. She was powerfully energized by the perfectly outrageous story.

  The two had driven a stolen car to the property and, wearing wigs, ski masks, and gloves, had cut off the power to the house, but not before bludgeoning an old housekeeper to death in her bed in the rear servants’ quarters. Obviously wanting the attack to look like the work of random junkies, they’d bashed in the dining room window though the back doors of the house were unlocked.

  They’d caught Marchent in the kitchen, just outside her office. There was a small gun found near her, with only her fingerprints on the handle. Not a single shot had been fired.

  The animal that had killed the brothers was a mystery. No real tracks were found at the scene. The bites had been savage and immediately fatal to the brothers. But what the animal was, the authorities could not at this point say.

  As for the locals, some were insisting it was a female mountain lion, long infamous in those parts.

  Reuben said nothing. He heard those sounds again, he felt that paw against his back. A violent shock passed through him, a flash of helplessness and acceptance. I am going to die.

  “These people are driving me insane on this,” Grace declared. “One minute it’s the saliva of a dog, the next it’s the saliva of a wolf, and now they’re telling me maybe the bites were made by a human. Something’s happened to their lab results. They don’t want to admit it. The fact is, they didn’t test those wounds properly. Now it was no human being that made these bites on Reuben’s head and neck. And it was no mountain lion either. The idea is patently absurd!”

  “But why did it stop?” Reuben asked. “Why didn’t it kill me the way it killed them?”

  “If it was rabid, it was behaving erratically,” Grace explained. “And even a bear can be rabid. Mountain lions, no. Maybe something distracted it. We don’t know. We only know you’re alive.”