The Wolf Gift Read online

  He’d talked on and on about the family, how they’d sprung up “out of nowhere” in the nineteenth century, and how the Nideck lawyers had searched exhaustively for family connections during those years when Felix Nideck had been missing. They’d never found anyone in Europe or America. Now the Goldings, and the Spanglers (Grace’s people), well, they were old San Francisco families, going way back.

  Reuben was going to sleep. All he cared about was that land, that house, and what was in that house.

  “All of it’s yours,” Simon said.

  Before noon, Reuben decided to cook lunch like in the old days just so everybody would think he was all right. He and Jim had grown up preparing meals with Phil, and he found it soothing, the rinsing, chopping, frying. Grace joined in whenever she had the time.

  They sat down to lamb chops and salad as soon as Grace got in.

  “Listen, Baby Boy,” she said. “I think you should put the house up there on the market as soon as you can.”

  Reuben burst out laughing. “Sell the place! Mom, that’s insane. This woman left it to me because I loved it. I loved it at first sight. I’m ready to move up there.”

  She was horrified. “Well, that’s a bit premature,” she said. She glared at Celeste.

  Celeste put down her fork. “You’re seriously thinking of living up there? I mean, like, how can you even think of going into that house after what happened? I never thought—.”

  There was something so sad and vulnerable in her expression that it cut Reuben to the quick. But what was the use of saying anything?

  Phil was staring at Reuben.

  “What on earth is the matter with you, Phil?” Grace asked.

  “Well, I don’t know, really,” said Phil. “But look at our boy. He’s gained weight, hasn’t he? And you’re right about his skin.”

  “What about my skin?” Reuben asked.

  “Don’t tell him all that,” said Grace.

  “Well, your mother said there was a bloom to it, you know, almost like a woman gets when she’s pregnant. Now I know you’re not a woman and you’re not pregnant, but she’s right. There’s a bloom to your skin.”

  Reuben started laughing again.

  They were all looking at him.

  “Dad, I want to ask you something,” said Reuben. “About evil. Do you believe evil is a palpable force? I mean do you think there is such a thing as evil apart from what men do, a force maybe that can get into you and turn you to evil?”

  Phil answered without missing a beat. “No, no, no, son,” he said, scooping a forkful of salad into his mouth, “the explanation of evil is a hell of a lot more disappointing than that. It’s blunders, people making blunders, whether it’s raiding a village and killing all the inhabitants, or killing a child in a fit of rage. Mistakes. Everything is simply a matter of mistakes.”

  No one else said a word.

  “I mean look at Genesis, son,” said Phil. “The story of Adam and Eve, it’s a mistake. They make a mistake.”

  Reuben was pondering. He didn’t want to answer, but he thought he should.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said. “Dad, do you have a pair of shoes I can borrow? You’re a size twelve, right?”

  “Oh, sure, son. I’ve got a closetful of shoes I never wear.”

  Reuben drifted off into his thoughts.

  He was thankful for the silence.

  He was thinking about the house, thinking about all those little clay tablets covered with cuneiform, and about that room where he’d slept with Marchent. Six weeks. It seemed like forever.

  He got up and walked slowly out of the dining room and up the steps.

  A little later he was sitting by his window looking out at the distant towers of the Golden Gate, when Celeste came in to say she was headed back to the office.

  He nodded.

  She put her arm around his shoulders. Slowly he turned and looked up at her. How very pretty she was, he thought. Not regal or elegant like Marchent, no. But so fresh and pretty. Her hair was such a very glossy brown and her eyes were so deeply brown, and she had such an intense expression. He’d never thought of her as fragile before, but she seemed fragile now—fresh, innocent, and definitely fragile.

  Why had he ever been so afraid of her, afraid of pleasing her, afraid of measuring up to what she expected, afraid of her energy and her smarts?

  Suddenly she drew back. It was as if she’d been startled. She moved several steps away. She stared at him.

  “What on earth is the matter?” he asked. He actually didn’t want to say much of anything, but it was clear something had made her very uncomfortable and it seemed the decent thing to ask.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She forced a smile. Then gave up on it. “I could have sworn, it was like, well, you seemed like a different person—a different person looking out of Reuben’s eyes at me.”

  “Hmmmm. It’s just me,” he responded. Now he was the one smiling at her.

  But her face was puckered, fearful. “Good-bye, sweetie,” she said quickly. “I’ll see you at dinner.” He figured he’d cook a roast for dinner. He looked forward to having the kitchen to himself.

  The nurse was in the door. She’d come to give him an injection. This was her last day.

  5

  IT WAS FRIDAY.

  The call came while he was going over the first sheaf of papers from the title company regarding the Mendocino property.

  Kidnapping: an entire busload of students from the Goldenwood Academy in Marin County.

  He threw on one of Phil’s old corduroy jackets, the one with the leather patches on the elbows, and rushed down the stairs and into the Porsche and headed over the Golden Gate.

  He had the news blaring from the radio all the way. All that was known was that the entire student body of forty-two students, aged five years old through eleven, and three teachers had vanished without a trace. A sack containing the teacher’s cell phones and a couple of phones that had belonged to the students had been found at a call box on Highway One, with a printed note:

  “Wait For Our Call.”

  By three o’clock, Reuben was in front of the huge old brown shingle Craftsman style building that housed the private school, along with a mob of local cameramen and reporters, as more and more people arrived from the local news.

  Celeste confirmed by phone. No one knew where the students had been taken or how, and no ransom demand had been received.

  Reuben managed to get in a few words with a volunteer at the school who described conditions there as idyllic, and the teachers as “earth mothers” and the gentlest “flower children” in the world. The kids had been en route for a field trip in nearby Muir Woods, which included some of the most beautiful redwoods in the world.

  Goldenwood Academy was private, unconventional, and expensive. But the school bus, specially made for Goldenwood, had been old and without a GPS tracker or its own phone.

  Billie Kale had two researchers on it at the city room.

  Reuben’s thumbs were going as he typed on his iPhone, describing the picturesque three-story building, surrounded by venerable oaks, and masses of wildflowers, including poppies, and marguerites and azaleas blooming on the shady grounds.

  Parents were still arriving, and the authorities were shielding them from the press as they rushed them inside. Women were crying. Reporters were pressing too close, trampling the flowers, even shoving. The police were getting testy. Reuben chose a spot well to the rear.

  These were mostly doctors, lawyers, and politicians, these parents. Goldenwood Academy was experimental but prestigious. No doubt the ransom demand would be outrageous. And why bother to keep asking if the FBI had been called in?

  Sammy Flynn, the young photographer from the Observer, found him finally, and asked what Reuben thought he should do. “Get the whole scene,” said Reuben a little impatiently. “Get the sheriff up there on the porch; get the feel of the school itself.”

  But how is this going to help, Reuben wo
ndered. He’d covered five criminal cases before this, and in each he’d thought the press played some laudatory role. He wasn’t so sure here. But then maybe somewhere somebody had seen something, and in watching this spectacle flashing on every home television in the area, somebody would see this, remember, make a connection and then make a call.

  He stood back, on the roots of a low gray live oak, and rested against the rough bark. The woods here smelled of pine needles and green things, and reminded him very much of that walk with Marchent over the Mendocino property, and a little fear came to him suddenly. Was he unhappy to be here, instead of there? Was that unlikely and remarkable inheritance going to lure him away from his job?

  Why hadn’t that crossed his mind before?

  He closed his eyes for a moment. Nothing much was happening. The sheriff was now repeating himself endlessly, as the same questions kept flying at him from different voices in the crowd.

  Other voices intruded. For a second, he thought they were coming from the people around him, but then he realized they were coming from the distant rooms in the house. Parents sobbing. Teachers babbling platitudes. People reassuring one another when they had no real basis for reassurance.

  He felt uneasy. No way in the world was he going to report these voices. He shut them out. But then it came to him. Why the hell am I hearing this? If I can’t report it, well, what’s the point? The fact was, there was nothing much to report.

  He typed in what was obvious. Parents were breaking down under the strain. No ransom call. He felt confident enough to verify that. All those voices told him there had been none, even the low drone of the crisis manager, assuring them that such a call would likely come.

  People around him talked about the famous Chowchilla school bus kidnapping of the seventies. No one had been hurt in that one. The teachers and the kids had been taken off their bus and moved by van to an underground quarry, from which they’d later managed to escape.

  What can I do, really do, to help this situation? Reuben was thinking. He was exhausted suddenly and agitated. Maybe he wasn’t ready to go back to work. Maybe he didn’t want ever again to go back to work.

  By six o’clock, when nothing had changed in the situation, he headed back across the Golden Gate and home.

  He was still suffering waves of unusual exhaustion, no matter how robust he looked, and Grace said this was a simple aftereffect of the anesthesia used in the abdominal surgery he’d endured. And then those antibiotics. He was still on them and they were still making him sick.

  As soon as he hit the house, he hammered out a visceral “on the scene” piece for the morning’s paper and e-mailed it in. Billie called a minute and a half later to say she loved it, especially the stuff about the crisis counselors, and the flowers getting totally trampled by the press.

  He went downstairs for supper with Grace, who was not her usual self for a number of reasons, among them that two patients had died on the table that afternoon. Of course, no one had expected either one to survive. But even a trauma center surgeon takes two losses painfully, and he sat just a little longer at the table with her than he might have done otherwise. The family talked about “The School Bus Kidnapping,” with the television on mute in the corner of the room so Reuben could watch for developments.

  Then Reuben was back at work, writing up a review of the old Chowchilla kidnap case, including updates on the kidnappers who were still to this day behind bars. They’d been young men his age at the time of the kidnapping. He wondered what had really become of them during their long years of incarceration. But that wasn’t the focus of his piece. He was optimistic. All of the kids and teachers had survived.

  This was the busiest he’d been in one day since the massacre in Mendocino. He took a long shower, and went to bed.

  An extraordinary restlessness came over him. He got up, paced, went back to bed. He was lonely, hideously lonely. He hadn’t really been with Celeste since before the massacre. He didn’t want to be with Celeste now. He kept thinking that if he was with Celeste, he’d hurt her, bruise her somehow, run roughshod over her feelings. Wasn’t he doing that these days without their putting it to the bedroom test?

  He turned over, clutched his pillow and imagined he was alone at Nideck Point, in Felix’s old bed, and that Marchent was with him. Just a useful incoherent fantasy to get to sleep. When sleep did come he went down deep into the dreamless darkness.

  When next he opened his eyes, the clock said midnight. The television was the only light in the room. Beyond the open windows, the city burned bright in spectral towers on the crowded hills. The bay was the absence of light: pools of blackness.

  Could he really see all the way to the hills of Marin? It seemed so. It seemed he saw their outline way beyond the Golden Gate. But how was that possible?

  He looked around. He could see all the details of the room with remarkable clarity, the old plaster crown moldings, even the fine cracks in the ceiling. He could see the grain in the wood of his dresser. He had the oddest feeling of being at home in the artificial twilight.

  There were voices in the night. They sizzled just below the level of meaning. He knew he could pick out any one and amplify it, but why could he do that?

  He got up and went out on the deck, and put his hands on the wooden railing. The salty wind iced him all over, quickening him and refreshing him. How invulnerable he felt to the cold, how energized by it.

  There was a limitless reservoir of heat inside of him, and now it broke out on the surface of his skin as if every hair follicle on his body was expanding. He’d never felt such exquisite throbbing pleasure, such raw, divine pleasure.

  “Yes!” he whispered. He understood! But what, what did he understand? The realization escaped him suddenly, yet it didn’t matter. What mattered was the wave after wave of ecstasy passing through him.

  Every particle of his body was defined in these waves, the skin covering his face, his head, his hands, the muscles of his arms and legs. With every particle of himself he was breathing, breathing as he’d never breathed in his life, his whole being expanding, hardening, growing stronger and stronger by the second.

  His fingernails and toenails tingled. He felt the skin of his face, and realized that it was covered in soft silky hair, indeed soft thick hair was growing out of every pore, covering his nose, his cheeks, his upper lip! His fingers, or were they claws, touched his teeth and they were fangs! He could feel them descending, feel his mouth lengthening!

  “Oh, but you knew, didn’t you? Didn’t you know this was inside of you, bursting to come out? You knew!”

  His voice was guttural, roughened. He began to laugh with delight, low and confidential and utterly yielding to the laughter.

  His hands were thickly covered with hair! And the claws, look at the claws.

  He tore off his shirt and shorts, shredding them effortlessly and letting them drop to the boards of the deck.

  The hair was pouring out of his scalp, it was rolling down to his shoulders. His chest was now completely covered and the muscles in his thighs and calves sang with ever-increasing strength.

  Surely this had to peak, this orgasmic frenzy, but it didn’t peak. It went on and on. He felt his throat open with a cry, a howl, but he didn’t give in to it. Staring up at the night sky, he saw the layers and layers of white clouds beyond the mist; he saw the stars beyond the reach of human eyes, drifting into eternity.

  “Oh, God, good God!” he whispered.

  On all sides the buildings were alive with pulsing lights, tiny busy windows, voices throbbing inside, as the city breathed and sang around him.

  You should ask, shouldn’t you, why this is happening? You should stop, shouldn’t you? You should question. “Nooo!” he whispered. It was like reaching for Marchent in the dark; it was peeling back her soft brown wool dress and finding her naked breasts beneath him.

  But what is happening to me! What is this that I am?

  An imperative as strong as hunger told him he knew, he knew a
nd he welcomed it. He’d known it was coming; he’d known it in his dreams and in his waking ruminations. This strength had to find its way out of him, or it would have torn him limb from limb.

  Every muscle in his body wanted to leap, to run, to spring loose of this confining spot.

  He turned around and, flexing his powerful thighs, sprang up to the ledge beneath his parents’ window, easily springing from that to the roof of the house.

  He laughed it was so easy, so natural. His bare feet hugged the asphalt. And bounding across the roof he went, leaping forward as an animal might leap and then walking a few steps and leaping again.

  Before he’d even meant to do it, he had cleared the entire width of the street and landed on the roof of the house opposite. There hadn’t been a chance of his falling.

  He stopped thinking. He gave in to it and raced across the rooftops. Never had he known such power, such freedom.

  The voices were louder now, the chorus rising and falling, and rolling as he turned around and round, and he was searching those voices for one dominant note, what was it? What did he want to hear, to know? Who was calling him?

  From one house to another he sped, going lower and lower as he made his way down towards the traffic and noise of North Beach, flying so fast now that he scarce touched down on the smaller slopes, his clawed hands flying out to grasp whatever he needed to hoist his easy weight and send him flying over the next street or alleyway.

  Alleyway! He stopped. He heard the sound. A woman screaming, a woman terrified, a woman who had become her scream in fear of her life.

  He was down on the ground before he even willed it, landing soft and soundless on the greasy pavement, the walls rising up on either side, the light from the sidewalk showing in horrifying relief the figure of a man tearing off the woman’s clothes, his right hand clutching her by the throat, strangling her as she kicked at him helplessly.