Desert Places (Andrew Z. Thomas/Luther Kite Series 1)

“Will you come with me?” I asked again.

“Take a wild guess.”

“I understand.”

“No. No, you don’t. You don’t understand anything.” He started to cry again, but he managed to hold himself together for another moment. “Let’s get something straight, all right? Don’t call me. Don’t come to my house. Don’t e-mail me. Don’t think about me. Don’t do one goddamn thing that would make this monster think we’re friends. We clear?”

“Yes, Walter. I want you to—”

“Don’t you say another word to me. Give me the rope.”

I untied our rowboats and cast the end of the rope to him. He cranked the outboard motor and chugged away, making a wide circle back toward his pier.

It was nearly dark, and the rain fell steadily and hard into the lake. I started the motor and pressed on toward my pier. Were the safety of Walter and his family not in question, I would have been heading home to kill myself.

20

THE walls of my office consist almost entirely of windows, and because the room juts out from the rest of my house into the trees, I feel as though I spend my hours writing in a piedmont forest. My desk is pushed against the largest wall of glass, facing the forest, so that nothing but an occasional doe or gray fox distracts me from my work. I can’t even see the lake from my desk, and this is by design, because the water mesmerizes me and would only steal my time.

Books abound, stacked on disorganized shelves and lying in piles on the floor. In one corner, there’s an intimidating stack of manuscripts from fans and blurb-seekers. A mammoth dictionary lounges across a lectern, perennially open. There’s even a display case, which holds first editions and translations of my novels, standing on one side of the door; a small gold frame enclosing a mounted photocopy of my first, meager royalty check hangs on the other.

Staring into the black forest as streams of rain meandered down the glass, I sat at my desk, waiting for the Web page to load. This would be the fifth college Web site I’d checked. I was focusing my search on the history departments of schools in New Hampshire and Vermont, but as the doors closed one after another, I’d begun to wonder if that cowboy’s memory wasn’t askew. Franklin Pierce, Keene State, the University of New Hampshire, and Plymouth had given me nothing. Maybe Dave Parker was Orson bullshit.

When the home page for Woodside College had loaded, I clicked on “Departments,” then “History,” and finally “Faculty of the History Department (alphabetical listing).”

Waiting on the server, I glanced at the clock on my desk: 7:55 p.m. She’s been dead twenty-four hours. Did you just leave her in that filthy basement? With his gig in Washington, I couldn’t imagine that Orson had gone to the trouble to take our mother with him. Depositing her body outside of the house would have been time-consuming and risky. Besides, my mother was a loner, and she’d sometimes go days without contacting a soul. My God, she could lie in that basement a week before someone finds her.

The police would have to notify me. I hadn’t even given consideration to reporting her murder, because for all I knew, Orson had framed me again. Matricide. It seems unnatural even among the animals. I couldn’t begin to wonder why. I was operating on numbness again.

At the top of the Web page listing faculty was a short paragraph that bragged about the sheer brilliance and abundant qualifications of the fourteen professors who constituted the history department. I scanned that, then scrolled down the list.

Son of a bitch.

“Dr. David L. Parker,” the entry read.

Though his name was hyperlinked, his page wouldn’t load when I clicked on it. Is that you? Did I just find you because of one short exchange with a stoned Wyoming cowboy?

The doorbell startled me. I was not expecting company. Picking up my pistol from the desk (I carried it with me everywhere now), I walked through the long hallway that separated my office from the kitchen and the rest of the house. Passing through the living room, I turned right into the foyer, chambered the first round, and stopped at an opaque oval window beside the door.

The doorbell rang again.

“Who is it?” I said.

“Trick-or-treat!” Children’s voices. Lowering the gun, I shoved it into the waistband at the back of my damp jeans. Because my house stood alone on ten acres of forest, at the end of a long driveway, trick-or-treaters rarely ventured to my door. I hadn’t even bought candy for them this year.

I opened the door. A little masked boy dressed up as Zorro pointed a gun at me. His sister was an angel—a small white bathrobe, cardboard wings, and a halo of silver tinsel. A calamitous-faced man in a brown raincoat stood behind them, holding an umbrella—Walter. Why are you—

“Give me candy or I’ll shootcha,” John David said. The four-year-old’s blond hair poked out from under the black bandanna. His mask was crooked, so that he could see through only one of the eyeholes, but he maintained the disguise. “I’ll shootcha,” he warned again, and before I could speak, he pulled the trigger. As the plastic hammer clicked again and again, I cringed with the impact of each bullet. Stumbling back into the foyer, I dropped to my knees.

“Why, John David, why?” I gasped, holding my belly as I crumpled down onto the floor, careful that my Glock didn’t fall out. John David giggled.

“Look, Dad, I got him. I’m a go see if he’s dead.”

“No, J.D.,” Walter said as I resurrected. “Don’t go in the house.”

I walked back to the door, caught Walter’s eyes, and looked down at the seven-year-old angel.

“You look beautiful, Jenna,” I said. “Did you make your costume?”

“At school today I did,” she said. “You like my wand?” She held up a long pixie stick with a glittery cardboard star glued to the end.

“Take a walk with us,” Walter said. “I left the car by the mailbox.”

“Let me see if I can find some candy for—”

He rustled the trash bag in his right hand. “They’ve got plenty of candy. Come on.” I put on a pair of boots, grabbed a jacket and an umbrella from the coat closet, and locked the door behind me as I stepped outside.

The four of us walked down the sidewalk, and when we reached the driveway, Walter handed his umbrella to Jenna. “Sweetie, I want you and J.D. to walk a little ahead of us, okay?”

“Why, Daddy?”

“I have to talk to Uncle Andy.”