DEAN KOONTZ
Life Expectancy

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2005

Copyright © Dean Koontz 2005

Dean Koontz asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780007196951

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780007318223

Version: 2018-12-03

To Laura Albano,

who has such a good heart.

Strange brain, but good heart.

But he that dares not grasp the thorn

Should never crave the rose.

—ANNE BRONTё, “The Narrow Way”

Here’s a sigh to those who love me,

And a smile to those who hate;

And, whatever sky’s above me, Here’s a heart for every fate.

—LORD BYRON, “To Thomas Moore”

Contents

Title Page Copyright Epigraph Part One: Welcome To The World, Jimmy Tock Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Part Two: Might As Well Die If I Can’t Fly Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty One Chapter Twenty Two Chapter Twenty Three Part Three: Welcome To The World, Annie Tock Chapter Twenty Four Chapter Twenty Five Chapter Twenty Six Chapter Twenty Seven Chapter Twenty Eight Chapter Twenty Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty One Chapter Thirty Two Chapter Thirty Three Chapter Thirty Four Chapter Thirty Five Chapter Thirty Six Chapter Thirty Seven Chapter Thirty Eight Chapter Thirty Nine Chapter Forty Part Four: All I Ever Wanted Was Immortality Chapter Forty One Chapter Forty Two Chapter Forty Three Chapter Forty Four Chapter Forty Five Chapter Forty Six Chapter Forty Seven Chapter Forty Eight Chapter Forty Nine Chapter Fifty Chapter Fifty One Chapter Fifty Two Part Five: Just Like Pontius Pilate,You Washed Your Hands Of Me Chapter Fifty Three Chapter Fifty Four Chapter Fifty Five Chapter Fifty Six Chapter Fifty Seven Chapter Fifty Eight Chapter Fifty Nine Chapter Sixty Chapter Sixty One Chapter Sixty Two Part Six: I Am Moonlight Walking, The Love Of Every Woman, The Envy Of Every Man Chapter Sixty Three Chapter Sixty Four Chapter Sixty Five Chapter Sixty Six Chapter Sixty Seven Chapter Sixty Eight Chapter Sixty Nine Chapter Seventy Preview Keep Reading About the Author Also By Dean Koontz About the Publisher

PART ONE

Welcome to the World, Jimmy Tock

1

On the night that I was born, my paternal grandfather, Josef Tock, made ten predictions that shaped my life. Then he died in the very minute that my mother gave birth to me.

Josef had never previously engaged in fortunetelling. He was a pastry chef. He made éclairs and lemon tarts, not predictions.

Some lives, conducted with grace, are beautiful arcs bridging this world to eternity. I am thirty years old and can’t for certain see the course of my life, but rather than a graceful arc, my passage seems to be a herky-jerky line from one crisis to another.

I am a lummox, by which I do not mean stupid, only that I am biggish for my size and not always aware of where my feet are going.

This truth is not offered in a spirit of self-deprecation or even humility. Apparently, being a lummox is part of my charm, an almost winsome trait, as you will see.

No doubt I have now raised in your mind the question of what I intend to imply by “biggish for my size.” Autobiography is proving to be a trickier task than I first imagined.

I am not as tall as people seem to think I am, in fact not tall at all by the standards of professional—or even of high school—basketball. I am neither plump nor as buff as an iron-pumping fitness fanatic. At most I am somewhat husky.

Yet men taller and heavier than I am often call me “big guy.” My nickname in school was Moose. From childhood, I have heard people joke about how astronomical our grocery bills must be.

The disconnect between my true size and many people’s perception of my dimensions has always mystified me.

My wife, who is the linchpin of my life, claims that I have a presence much bigger than my physique. She says that people measure me by the impression I make on them.

I find this notion ludicrous. It is bullshit born of love.

If sometimes I make an outsized impression on people, it’s as likely as not because I fell on them. Or stepped on their feet.

In Arizona, there is a place where a dropped ball appears to roll uphill in defiance of gravity. In truth, this effect is a trick of perspective in which elements of a highly unusual landscape conspire to deceive the eye.

I suspect I am a similar freak of nature. Perhaps light reflects oddly from me or bends around me in a singular fashion, so I appear to be more of a hulk than I am.

On the night I was born in Snow County Hospital, in the community of Snow Village, Colorado, my grandfather told a nurse that I would be twenty inches long and weigh eight pounds ten ounces.

The nurse was startled by this prediction not because eight pounds ten is a huge newborn—many are larger—and not because my grandfather was a pastry chef who suddenly began acting as though he were a crystal-ball gazer. Four days previously he had suffered a massive stroke that left him paralyzed on his right side and unable to speak; yet from his bed in the intensive care unit, he began making prognostications in a clear voice, without slur or hesitation.

He also told her that I would be born at 10:46 P.M. and that I would suffer from syndactyly. That is a word difficult to pronounce before a stroke, let alone after one.

Syndactyly—as the observing nurse explained to my father—is a congenital defect in which two or more fingers or toes are joined. In serious cases, the bones of adjacent digits are fused to such an extent that two fingers share a single nail.

Multiple surgeries are required to correct such a condition and to ensure that the afflicted child will grow into an adult capable of giving the F-you finger to anyone who sufficiently annoys him.

In my case, the trouble was toes. Two were fused on the left foot, three on the right.

My mother, Madelaine—whom my father affectionately calls Maddy or sometimes the Mad One—insists that they considered forgoing the surgery and, instead, christening me Flipper.

Flipper was the name of a dolphin that once starred in a hit TV show—not surprisingly titled Flipper—in the late 1960s. My mother describes the program as “delightfully, wonderfully, hilariously stupid.” It went off the air a few years before I was born.

Flipper, a male, was played by a trained dolphin named Suzi. This was most likely the first instance of transvestism on television.

Actually, that’s not the right word because transvestism is a male dressing as a female for sexual gratification. Besides, Suzi—alias Flipper—didn’t wear clothes.

So it was a program in which the female star always appeared nude and was sufficiently butch to pass for a male.

Just two nights ago at dinner, over one of my mother’s infamous cheese-and-broccoli pies, she asked rhetorically if it was any wonder that such a dire collapse in broadcast standards, begun with Flipper, should lead to the boring freak-show shock that is contemporary television.

Playing her game, my father said, “It actually began with Lassie. In every show, she was nude, too.”

“Lassie was always played by male dogs,” my mother replied.

“There you go,” Dad said, his point made.

I escaped being named Flipper when successful surgeries restored my toes to the normal condition. In my case, the fusion involved only skin, not bones. The separation was a relatively simple procedure.

Nevertheless, on that uncommonly stormy night, my grandfather’s prediction of syndactyly proved true.

If I had been born on a night of unremarkable weather, family legend would have transformed it into an eerie calm, every leaf motionless in breathless air, night birds silent with expectation. The Tock family has a proud history of self-dramatization.

Even allowing for exaggeration, the storm must have been violent enough to shake the Colorado mountains to their rocky foundations. The heavens cracked and flashed as if celestial armies were at war.

Still in the womb, I remained unaware of all the thunderclaps. And once born, I was probably distracted by my strange feet.

This was August 9, 1974, the day Richard Nixon resigned as President of the United States.

Nixon’s fall has no more to do with me than the fact that John Denver’s “Annie’s Song” was the number-one record in the country at the time. I mention it only to provide historical perspective.

Nixon or no Nixon, what I find most important about August 9, 1974, is my birth—and my grandfather’s predictions. My sense of perspective has an egocentric taint.

Perhaps more clearly than if I had been there, because of vivid pictures painted by numerous family stories of that night, I can see my father, Rudy Tock, walking back and forth from one end of County Hospital to the other, between the maternity ward and the ICU, between joy at the prospect of his son’s pending arrival and grief over his beloved father’s quickening slide into death.

With blue vinyl-tile floor, pale-green wainscoting, pink walls, a yellow ceiling, and orange-and-white stork-patterned drapes, the expectant-fathers’ lounge churned with the negative energy of color overload. It would have served well as the nervous-making set for a nightmare about a children’s-show host who led a secret life as an ax murderer.

The chain-smoking clown didn’t improve the ambience.

Rudy stood birth watch with only one other man, not a local but a performer with the circus that was playing a one-week engagement in a meadow at the Halloway Farm. He called himself Beezo. Curiously, this proved not to be his clown name but one that he’d been born with: Konrad Beezo.

Some say there is no such thing as destiny, that what happens just happens, without purpose or meaning. Konrad’s surname would argue otherwise.

Beezo was married to Natalie, a trapeze artist and a member of a renowned aerialist family that qualified as circus royalty.

Neither of Natalie’s parents, none of her brothers and sisters, and none of her high-flying cousins had accompanied Beezo to the hospital. This was a performance night, and as always the show must go on.

Evidently the aerialists kept their distance also because they had not approved of one of their kind taking a clown for a husband. Every subculture and ethnicity has its objects of bigotry.

As Beezo waited nervously for his wife to deliver, he muttered unkind judgments of his in-laws. “Self-satisfied,” he called them, and “devious.”

The clown’s perpetual glower, rough voice, and bitterness made Rudy uncomfortable.

Angry words plumed from him in exhalations of sour smoke: “duplicitous” and “scheming” and, poetically for a clown, “blithe spirits of the air, but treacherous when the ground is under them.”

Beezo was not in full costume. Furthermore, his stage clothes were in the Emmett Kelly sad-faced tradition rather than the bright polka-dot plumage of the average Ringling Brothers clown. He cut a strange figure nonetheless.

A bright plaid patch blazed across the seat of his baggy brown suit. The sleeves of his jacket were comically short. In one lapel bloomed a fake flower the diameter of a bread plate.

Before racing to the hospital with his wife, he had traded clown shoes for sneakers and had taken off his big round red rubber nose. White greasepaint still encircled his eyes, however, and his cheeks remained heavily rouged, and he wore a rumpled porkpie hat.

Beezo’s bloodshot eyes shone as scarlet as his painted cheeks, perhaps because of the acrid smoke wreathing his head, although Rudy suspected that strong drink might be involved as well.

In those days, smoking was permitted everywhere, even in many hospital waiting rooms. Expectant fathers traditionally gave out cigars by way of celebration.

When not at his dying father’s bedside, poor Rudy should have been able to take refuge in that lounge. His grief should have been mitigated by the joy of his pending parenthood.

Instead, both Maddy and Natalie were long in labor. Each time that Rudy returned from the ICU, waiting for him was the glowering, muttering, bloody-eyed clown, burning through pack after pack of unfiltered Lucky Strikes.

As drumrolls of thunder shook the heavens, as reflections of lightning shuddered through the windows, Beezo made a stage of the maternity ward lounge. Restlessly circling the blue vinyl floor, from pink wall to pink wall, he smoked and fumed.

“Do you believe that snakes can fly, Rudy Tock? Of course you don’t. But snakes can fly. I’ve seen them high above the center ring. They’re well paid and applauded, these cobras, these diamondbacks, these copperheads, these hateful vipers.”

Poor Rudy responded to this vituperative rant with murmured consolation, clucks of the tongue, and sympathetic nods. He didn’t want to encourage Beezo, but he sensed that a failure to commiserate would make him a target for the clown’s anger.

Pausing at a storm-washed window, his painted face further patinated by the lightning-cast patterns of the streaming raindrops on the glass, Beezo said, “Which are you having, Rudy Tock—a son or daughter?”

Beezo consistently addressed Rudy by his first and last names, as if the two were one: Rudytock.

“They have a new ultrasound scanner here,” Rudy replied, “so they could tell us whether it’s a boy or girl, but we don’t want to know. We just care is the baby healthy, and it is.”

Beezo’s posture straightened, and he raised his head, thrusting his face toward the window as if to bask in the pulsing storm light. “I don’t need ultrasound to tell me what I know. Natalie is giving me a son. Now the Beezo name won’t die when I do. I’ll call him Punchinello, after one of the first and greatest of clowns.”

Punchinello Beezo, Rudy thought. Oh, the poor child.

“He will be the very greatest of our kind,” said Beezo, “the ultimate jester, harlequin, jackpudding. He will be acclaimed from coast to coast, on every continent.”

Although Rudy had just returned to the maternity ward from the ICU, he felt imprisoned by this clown whose dark energy seemed to swell each time the storm flashed in his feverish eyes.

“He will be not merely acclaimed but immortal.”

Rudy was hungry for news of Maddy’s condition and the progress of her labor. In those days, fathers were seldom admitted to delivery rooms to witness the birth of their children.

“He will be the circus star of his time, Rudy Tock, and everyone who sees him perform will know Konrad Beezo is his father, patriarch of clowns.”

The ward nurses who should have regularly visited the lounge to speak with the waiting husbands were making themselves less visible than usual. No doubt they were uncomfortable in the presence of this angry bozo.

“On my father’s grave, I swear my Punchinello will never be an aerialist,” Beezo declared.

The blast of thunder punctuating his vow was the first of two so powerful that the windowpanes vibrated like drumheads, and the lights—almost extinguished—throbbed dimly.

“What do acrobatics have to do with the truth of the human condition?” Beezo demanded.

“Nothing,” Rudy said at once, for he was not an aggressive man. Indeed, he was gentle and humble, not yet a pastry chef like his father, merely a baker who, on the verge of fatherhood, wished to avoid being severely beaten by a large clown.

“Comedy and tragedy, the very tools of the clown’s art—that is the essence of life,” Beezo declared.

“Comedy, tragedy, and the need for good bread,” Rudy said, making a little joke, including his own trade in the essence-of-life professions.

This small frivolity earned him a fierce glare, a look that seemed capable not merely of stopping clocks but of freezing time.

“‘Comedy, tragedy, and the need for good bread,’” Beezo repeated, perhaps expecting Dad to admit his quip had been inane.

“Hey,” Dad said, “that sounds just like me,” for the clown had spoken in a voice that might have passed for my father’s.

“‘Hey, that sounds just like me,’” Beezo mocked in Dad’s voice. Then he continued in his own rough growl: “I told you I’m talented, Rudy Tock. In more ways than you can imagine.”

Rudy thought he could feel his chilled heart beating slower, winding down under the influence of that wintry gaze.

“My boy will never be an aerialist. The hateful snakes will hiss. Oh, how they’ll hiss and thrash, but Punchinello will never be an aerialist!”

Another tsunami of thunder broke against the walls of the hospital, and again the lights were more than half drowned.

In that gloom, Rudy swore that the tip of Beezo’s cigarette in his right hand glowed brighter, brighter, although he held it at his side, as if some phantom presence were drawing on it with eager lips.

Rudy thought, but could not swear, that Beezo’s eyes briefly glowed as bright and red as the cigarette. This could not have been an inner light, of course, but a reflection of … something.

When the echoes of the thunder rolled away, the brownout passed. As the lights rose, so did Rudy rise from his chair.

He had only recently returned here, and although he had received no news about his wife, he was ready to flee back to the grim scene in the intensive care unit rather than experience a third doomsday peal and another dimming of lights in the company of Konrad Beezo.

When he arrived at the ICU and found two nurses at his father’s bedside, Rudy feared the worst. He knew that Josef was dying, yet his throat tightened and tears welled when he thought the end loomed.

To his surprise, he discovered Josef half sitting up in bed, hands clutching the side rails, excitedly repeating the predictions that he had already made to one of the nurses. “Twenty inches … eight pounds ten ounces … ten-forty-six tonight … syndactyly …”

When he saw his son, Josef pulled himself all the way into a sitting position, and one of the nurses raised the upper half of the bed to support him better.

He had not only regained his speech but also appeared to have overcome the partial paralysis that had followed his stroke. When he seized Rudy’s right hand, his grip proved firm, even painful.

Astonished by this development, Rudy at first assumed that his father had experienced a miraculous recovery. Then, however, he recognized the desperation of a dying man with an important message to impart.

Josef’s face was drawn, seemed almost shrunken, as if Death, in a sneak-thief mood, had begun days ago to steal the substance of him, ounce by ounce. By contrast his eyes appeared to be enormous. Fear sharpened his gaze when his eyes fixed on his son.

“Five days,” said Josef, his hoarse voice raw with suffering, parched because he had been taking fluids only intravenously. “Five terrible days.”

“Easy, Dad. Don’t excite yourself,” Rudy cautioned, but he saw that on the cardiac monitor, the illuminated graph of his father’s heart activity revealed a fast yet regular pattern.

One of the nurses left to summon a doctor. The other stepped back from the bed, waiting to assist if the patient experienced a seizure.

First licking his cracked lips to wet the way for his whisper, he made his fifth prediction: “James. His name will be James, but no one will call him James … or Jim. Everyone will call him Jimmy.”

This startled Rudy. He and Maddy had chosen James if the baby was a boy, Jennifer if it was a girl, but they had not discussed their choices with anyone.

Josef could not have known. Yet he knew.

With increasing urgency, Josef declared, “Five days. You’ve got to warn him. Five terrible days.”

“Easy, Dad,” Rudy repeated. “You’ll be okay.”

His father, as pale as the cut face of a loaf of bread, grew paler, whiter than flour in a measuring cup. “Not okay. I’m dying.”

“You aren’t dying. Look at you. You’re speaking. There’s no paralysis. You’re—”

“Dying,” Josef insisted, his rough voice rising in volume. His pulse throbbed at his temples, and on the monitor it grew more rapid as he strained to break through his son’s reassurances and to seize his attention. “Five dates. Write them down. Write them now. NOW!”

Confused, afraid that Josef’s adamancy might trigger another stroke, Rudy mollified his father.

He borrowed a pen from the nurse. She didn’t have any paper, and she wouldn’t let him use the patient’s chart that hung on the foot of the bed.

From his wallet, Rudy withdrew the first thing he found that offered a clean writing surface: a free pass to the very circus in which Beezo performed.

Rudy had received the pass a week ago from Huey Foster, a Snow Village police officer. They had been friends since childhood.

Huey, like Rudy, had wanted to be a pastry chef. He didn’t have the talent for a career in baking. His muffins broke teeth. His lemon tarts offended the tongue.

When, by virtue of his law-enforcement job, Huey received freebies—passes to the circus, booklets of tickets for carnival rides at the county fair, sample boxes of bullets from various ammo manufacturers—he shared them with Rudy. In return, Rudy gave Huey cookies that didn’t sour the appetite, cakes that didn’t displease the nose, pies and strudels that didn’t induce regurgitation.

Red and black lettering, illustrated with elephants and lions, crowded the face of the circus pass. The reverse was blank. Unfolded, it measured three by five inches, the size of an index card.

As hard rain beat on a nearby window, drumming up a sound like many running feet, Josef clutched again at the railings, anchoring himself, as if he feared that he might float up and away. “Nineteen ninety-four. September fifteenth. A Thursday. Write it down.”

Standing beside the bed, Rudy took dictation, using the precise printing with which he composed recipe cards: SEPT 15, 1994, THURS.

Eyes wide and wild, like those of a rabbit in the thrall of a stalking coyote, Josef stared toward a point high on the wall opposite his bed. He seemed to see more than the wall, something beyond it. Perhaps the future.

“Warn him,” the dying man said. “For God’s sake, warn him.”

Bewildered, Rudy said, “Warn who?”

“Jimmy. Your son, Jimmy, my grandson.”

“He’s not born yet.”

“Almost. Two minutes. Warn him. Nineteen ninety-eight. January nineteenth. A Monday.”

Transfixed by the ghastly expression on his father’s face, Rudy stood with pen poised over paper.

“WRITE IT DOWN!” Josef roared. His mouth contorted so severely in the shout that his dry and peeling lower lip split. A crimson thread slowly unraveled down his chin.

“Nineteen ninety-eight,” Rudy muttered as he wrote.

“January nineteenth,” Josef repeated in a croak, his parched throat having been racked by the shout. “A Monday. Terrible day.”

“Why?”

“Terrible, terrible.”

“Why will it be terrible?” Rudy persisted.

“Two thousand two. December twenty-third. Another Monday.”

Jotting down this third date, Rudy said, “Dad, this is weird. I don’t understand.”

Josef still held tight to both steel bedrails. Suddenly he shook them violently, with such uncanny strength that the railings seemed to be coming apart at their joints, raising a clatter that would have been loud in an ordinary hospital room but that was explosive in the usually hushed intensive care unit.

At first the observing nurse rushed forward, perhaps intending to calm the patient, but the electrifying combination of fury and terror that wrenched his pallid face caused her to hesitate. When waves of thunder broke against the hospital hard enough to shake dust off the acoustic ceiling tiles, the nurse retreated, almost as if she thought Josef himself had summoned that detonation.

“WRITE IT DOWN!” he demanded.

“I wrote, I wrote,” Rudy assured him. “December 23, 2002, another Monday.”

“Two thousand three,” Josef said urgently. “The twenty-sixth of November. A Wednesday. The day before Thanksgiving.”

After recording this fourth date on the back of the circus pass, just as his father stopped shaking the bedrails, Rudy looked up and saw a fresh emotion in Josef’s face, in his eyes. The fury was gone, and the terror.

As tears welled, Josef said, “Poor Jimmy, poor Rudy.”

“Dad?”

“Poor, poor Rudy. Poor Jimmy. Where is Rudy?”

“I’m Rudy, Dad. I’m right here.”

Josef blinked, blinked, and flicked away the tears as yet another emotion gripped him, this one not easy to define. Some would have called it astonishment. Others would have said it was wonder of the pure variety that a baby might express at the first sight of any bright marvel.

After a moment, Rudy recognized it as a state more profound than wonder. This was awe, the complete yielding of the mind to something grand and formidable.

His father’s eyes shone with amazement. Across his face, expressions of delight and apprehension contested with each other.

Josef’s increasingly raspy voice fell to a whisper: “Two thousand five.”

His gaze remained fixed on another reality that apparently he found more convincing than he did this world in which he had lived for fifty-seven years.

Hand trembling now, but still printing legibly, Rudy recorded this fifth date—and waited.

“Ah,” said Joseph, as if a startling secret had been revealed.

“Dad?”

“Not this, not this,” Josef lamented.

“Dad, what’s wrong?”

As curiosity outweighed her anxiety, the rattled nurse ventured closer to the bed.

A doctor entered the cubicle. “What’s going on here?”

Josef said, “Don’t trust the clown.”

The physician looked mildly offended, assuming that the patient had just questioned his medical credentials.

Leaning over the bed, trying to redirect his father’s attention from his otherworldly vision, Rudy said, “Dad, how do you know about the clown?”

“The sixteenth of April,” said Josef.

“How do you know about the clown?”

“WRITE IT DOWN,” Josef thundered even as the heavens crashed against the earth once more.

As the doctor went around to the other side of the bed, Rudy added APRIL 16 after 2005 to the fifth line on the back of the circus pass. He also printed SATURDAY when his father spoke it.

The doctor put a hand under Josef’s chin and turned his head to have a better look at his eyes.

“He isn’t who you think he is,” said Josef, not to the doctor but to his son.

“Who isn’t?” Rudy asked.

“He isn’t.”

“Who’s he?”

“Now, Josef,” the physician chided, “you know me very well. I’m Dr. Pickett.”

“Oh, the tragedy,” Josef said, voice ripe with pity, as if he were not a pastry chef but a thespian upon the Shakespearean stage.

“What tragedy?” Rudy worried.

Producing an ophthalmoscope from a pocket of his white smock, Dr. Pickett disagreed: “No tragedy here. What I see is a remarkable recovery.”

Breaking loose of the physician’s chin grip, increasingly agitated, Josef said, “Kidneys!”

Bewildered, Rudy said, “Kidneys?”

“Why should kidneys be so damned important?” Josef demanded. “It’s absurd, it’s all absurd!”

Rudy felt his heart sink at this, for it seemed that his dad’s brief clarity of mind had begun to give way to babble.

Asserting control of his patient again by once more gripping his chin, Dr. Pickett switched on the ophthalmoscope and directed the light in Josef’s right eye.

As though that narrow beam were a piercing needle and his life were a balloon, Josef Tock let out an explosive breath and slumped back upon his pillow, dead.

With all the techniques and instruments available to a well-equipped hospital, attempts at resuscitation were made, but to no avail. Josef had moved on and wasn’t coming back.

And I, James Henry Tock, arrived. The time on my grandfather’s death certificate matches that on my birth certificate—10:46 P.M.

Bereaved, Rudy understandably lingered at Josef’s bedside. He had not forgotten his wife, but grief immobilized him.

Five minutes later, he received word from a nurse that Maddy had experienced a crisis in her labor and that he must go at once to her side.

Alarmed by the prospect of losing his father and his wife in the same hour, Dad fled the intensive care unit.

As he tells it, the halls of our modest county hospital had become a white labyrinth, and at least twice he made wrong turns. Too impatient to wait for the elevator, he raced down the stairs from the third floor to the ground level before realizing that he’d passed the second floor, on which the maternity ward was located.

Dad arrived in the expectant-fathers’ waiting lounge to the crack of a pistol as Konrad Beezo shot his wife’s doctor.

For an instant, Dad thought Beezo had used a clown gun, some trick firearm that squirted red ink. The doctor dropped to the floor, however, not with comic flair but with hideous finality, and the smell of blood plumed thick, too real.

Beezo turned to Dad and raised the pistol.

In spite of the rumpled porkpie hat and the short-sleeved coat and the bright patch on the seat of his pants, in spite of the white greasepaint and the rouged cheeks, nothing about Konrad Beezo was clownish at that moment. His eyes were those of a jungle cat, and it was easy to imagine that the teeth bared in his snarl were tiger fangs. He loomed, the embodiment of murderous dementia, demonic.

Dad thought that he, too, would be shot, but Beezo said, “Stay out of my way, Rudy Tock. I have no quarrel with you. You’re not an aerialist.”

Beezo shouldered through the door between the lounge and the maternity ward, slammed it shut behind him.

Dad knelt beside the doctor—and discovered that a breath of life remained in him. The wounded man tried to speak, could not. Blood had pooled in his throat, and he gagged.

Gently elevating the physician’s head, shoving old magazines under it to brace the man at an angle that allowed him to breathe, Dad shouted for help as the swelling storm rocked the night with doomsday peals of thunder.

Dr. Ferris MacDonald had been Maddy’s physician. He had also been called upon to treat Natalie Beezo when, unexpectedly, she had been brought to the hospital in labor.

Mortally wounded, he seemed more bewildered than frightened. Able to clear his throat and breathe now, he told my father, “She died during delivery, but it wasn’t my fault.”

For a terrifying moment, my dad thought Maddy had died.

Dr. MacDonald realized this, for his last words were “Not Maddy. The clown’s wife. Maddy … is alive. I’m so sorry, Rudy.”

Ferris MacDonald died with my father’s hand upon his heart.

As the thunder rolled toward a far horizon, Dad heard another gunshot from beyond the door through which Konrad Beezo had vanished.

Maddy lay somewhere behind that door—a woman left helpless by a difficult labor. I was back there, too—an infant who was not yet enough of a lummox to defend himself.

My father, then a baker, had never been a man of action; nor did he become one when, a few years later, he graduated to the status of pastry chef. He is of average height and weight, not physically weak but not born for the boxing ring, either. He had to that point led a charmed life, without serious want, without any strife.

Nevertheless, fear for his wife and his child cast him into a strange, cold panic marked more by calculation than by hysteria. Without a weapon or a plan, but suddenly with the heart of a lion, he opened that door and went after Beezo.

Although his imagination spun a thousand bloody scenarios in mere seconds, he says that he did not anticipate what was about to happen, and of course he could not foresee how the events of that night would reverberate through the next thirty years with such terrible and astonishing consequences in his life and mine.

2

At Snow County Hospital, in the expectant-fathers’ waiting room, the inner door opens to a short corridor with a supply room to the left and a bathroom to the right. Fluorescent ceiling panels, white walls, and a white ceramic-tile floor imply impeccable antibacterial procedures.

I have seen that space because my child entered the world in the same maternity ward on another unforgettable night of incomparable chaos.

On that stormy evening in 1974, with Richard Nixon gone home to California, and Beezo on a rampage, my father found a nurse sprawled in the hallway, shot point-blank.

He remembers almost being driven to his knees by pity, by despair.

The loss of Dr. MacDonald, although terrible, had not fully penetrated Dad, for it had been so sudden, so dreamlike. Mere moments later, the sight of this dead nurse—young, fair, like a fallen angel in white raiments, golden hair fanning in a halo around her eerily serene face—pierced him, and he absorbed the truth and the meaning of both deaths at once.

He tore open the storage-closet door, searching for something he might use as a weapon. He found only spare linens, bottles of antiseptic cleaner, a locked cabinet of medications …

Although in retrospect this moment struck him as darkly comic, at the time he thought, with grave seriousness and with the logic of desperation, that having kneaded so much dough over the past few years, his hands were dangerously strong. If only he could get past Beezo’s gun, he surely would have the strength to strangle him.

No makeshift weapon could hope to be as deadly as the well-flexed hands of an angry baker. Sheer terror spawned this lunatic notion; curiously, however, terror also gave him courage.

The short hallway intersected a longer one, which led left and right. Off this new corridor, three doors served a pair of delivery rooms as well as the neonatal care unit where swaddled newborns, each in his or her bassinet, pondered their new reality of light, shadow, hunger, discontent, and taxes.

Dad sought my mother and me, but found only her. She lay in one of the delivery rooms, alone and unconscious on the birthing bed.

At first he thought that she must be dead. Darkness swooned at the edges of his vision, but before he passed out, he saw that his beloved Maddy was breathing. He clutched the edge of her bed until his vision brightened.

Gray-faced, drenched with sweat, she looked not like the vibrant woman he knew, but instead appeared to be frail and vulnerable.

Blood on the sheets suggested that she’d delivered their child, but no squalling infant was present.

Elsewhere, Beezo shouted, “Where are you bastards?”

Reluctant to leave my mother, Dad nonetheless went in search of the conflict to see what help he could provide—as (he has always insisted) any baker would have done.

In the second delivery room, he found Natalie Beezo upon another birthing bed. The slender aerialist had so recently died from the complications of childbirth that her tears of suffering had not yet dried upon her cheeks.

According to Dad, even after her agony and even in death, she was ethereally beautiful. A flawless olive complexion. Raven hair. Her eyes were open, luminous green, like windows to a field in Heaven.

For Konrad Beezo, who didn’t appear to be handsome under the greasepaint and who was not a man of substantial property and whose personality would surely be at least somewhat off-putting even under ordinary circumstances, this woman was a prize beyond all reasonable expectation. You could understand—though not excuse—his violent reaction to the loss of her.

Stepping out of the delivery room, Dad came face to face with the homicidal clown. Simultaneously Beezo flung open the door from the crèche and charged into the hall, a blanketed infant cradled in the crook of his left arm.

At this close range, the pistol in his right hand appeared to be twice the size that it had been in the waiting room, as if they were in Alice’s Wonderland, where objects grew or shrank with no regard for reason or for the laws of physics.

Dad might have seized Beezo’s wrist and, with his strong baker’s hands, fought for possession of the gun, but he dared not act in any way that would have put the baby at risk.

With its pinched red face and furrowed brow, the infant appeared indignant, offended. Its mouth stretched open wide, as though it were trying to scream but had been shocked silent by the realization that its father was a mad clown.

Thank God for the baby, Dad has often said. Otherwise I would have gotten myself killed. You’d have grown up fatherless, and you’d never have learned how to make a first-rate crème brûlée.

So cradling the baby and brandishing the pistol, Beezo demanded of my father, “Where are they, Rudy Tock?”

“Where are who?” Dad asked.

The red-eyed clown appeared to be both wrung by grief and ripped by anger. Tears streaked his makeup. His lips trembled as if he might sob uncontrollably, then skinned back from his teeth in an expression of such ferocity that a chill wound through Dad’s bowels.

“Don’t play dumb,” Beezo warned. “There had to be other nurses, maybe another doctor. I want the bastards dead, all of them who failed her.”

“They ran,” my father said, certain that it would be safer to lie about having seen the medical staff escape than to insist that he had encountered no one. “They slipped out behind your back, the way you came, through the waiting room. They’re long gone.”

Feeding on his rage, Konrad Beezo appeared to swell larger, as if anger were the food of giants. No Barnum & Bailey buffoonery brightened his face, and the poisonous hatred in his eyes was as potent as cobra venom.

Lest he become a stand-in for the medical staff no longer within Beezo’s reach, Dad quickly added, with no trace of threat, as if only being helpful, “Police are on the way. They’ll want to take the baby from you.”

“My son is mine,” Beezo declared with such passion that the stink of stale cigarette smoke rising from his clothes might almost have been mistaken for the consequence of his fiery emotion. “I will do anything to keep him from being raised by the aerialists.”

Walking a thin line between clever manipulation and obvious fawning in the interest of self-preservation, my father said, “Your boy will be the greatest of his kind—clown, jester, harlequin, jackmuffin.”

“Jackpudding,” the killer corrected, but without animosity. “Yes, he’ll be the greatest. He will. I won’t let anyone deny my son his destiny.”

With baby and pistol, Beezo pushed past my dad and hurried along the shorter hall, where he stepped over the dead nurse with no more concern for her than he’d have shown for a janitor’s mop and bucket.

Feverishly trying to think of something that he could do to bring down this brute without harming the infant, Dad could only watch in frustration. When Beezo reached the door to the expectant-fathers’ lounge, he hesitated, glanced back. “I’ll never forget you, Rudy Tock. Never.”

My father could not decide whether that declaration might be an expression of misguided sentimental affection—or a threat.

Beezo pushed through the door and disappeared.

At once, Dad hurried back to the first delivery room because his primary concern understandably remained with my mother and me.

Still unattended, my mother lay on the birthing bed where Dad had moments ago discovered her. Though still gray-faced and soaked with sweat, she had regained consciousness.

She groaned with pain, blinked in confusion.

Whether she was merely disoriented or delirious is a matter of contention between my parents, but my father insists that he feared for her when she said, “If you want Reuben sandwiches for dinner, we’ll have to go to the market for cheese.”

Mom insists that she actually said, “After this, don’t think you’re ever going to touch me again, you son of a bitch.”

Their love is deeper than desire, than affection, than respect, so deep that its wellspring is humor. Humor is a petal on the flower of hope, and hope blossoms on the vine of faith. They have faith in each other and faith that life has meaning, and from this faith comes their indefatigable good humor, which is their greatest gift to each other—and to me.

I grew up in a home filled with laughter. Regardless of what happens to me in the days ahead, I will have had the laughter. And wonderful pastries.

In this account of my life, I will resort at every turn to amusement, for laughter is the perfect medicine for the tortured heart, the balm for misery, but I will not beguile you. I will not use laughter as a curtain to spare you the sight of horror and despair. We will laugh together, but sometimes the laughter will hurt.

So …

Whether my mother was delirious or sound of mind, whether she blamed my father for the pain of labor or discussed the need for cheese, they are in relative agreement about what happened next. My father found a wall-mounted phone near the door and called for help.

Because this device was more an intercom than a phone, it did not have a standard keypad, just four keys, each clearly labeled: STAFFING, PHARMACY, MAINTENANCE, SECURITY.

Dad pressed SECURITY and informed the answering officer that people had been shot, that the assailant, costumed as a clown, was even then fleeing the building, and that Maddy needed immediate medical assistance.

From the bed, clearheaded now if she had not been previously, my mother cried out, “Where’s my baby?”

Phone still to his ear, my father turned to her, astounded, alarmed. “You don’t know where it is?”

Striving unsuccessfully to sit up, grimacing with pain, Mom said, “How would I know? I passed out or something. What do you mean someone was shot? For God’s sake, who was shot? What’s happening? Where’s my baby?”

Although the delivery room had no windows, although it was surrounded by hallways and by other rooms that further insulated it from the outside world, my folks heard faint sirens rising in the distance.

Dad’s memory regurgitated the suddenly nauseating image of Beezo in the hallway, the pistol in his right hand, the baby cradled in his left arm. Bitter acid burned in my father’s throat, and his already harried heart raced faster.

Perhaps Beezo’s wife and child had died at birth. Perhaps the infant in his arms hadn’t been his own but had been instead little James—or Jennifer—Tock.

I thought “kidnapped,” Dad says when he recalls the moment. I thought about the Lindbergh baby and Frank Sinatra Junior being held for ransom and Rumpelstiltskin and Tarzan being raised by apes, and though none of that makes sense, I thought it all in an instant. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t, and I felt just like that red-faced baby with its mouth open but silent, and when I thought of the baby, oh, then I just knew it had been you, not his at all, but you, my Jimmy.

Desperate now to find Beezo and stop him, Dad dropped the phone, bolted toward the open door to the hallway—and nearly collided with Charlene Coleman, a nurse who came bearing a baby in her arms.

This infant had a broader face than the one Beezo had spirited into the stormy night. Its complexion was a healthy pink instead of mottled red. According to Dad, its eyes shone clear and blue, and its face glowed with wonder.

“I hid with your baby,” Charlene Coleman said. “I hid from that awful man. I knew he would be trouble when he first showed up with his wife, him wearing that ugly hat indoors and making no apology for it.”

I wish I could verify from personal experience that, indeed, what alarmed Charlene from the get-go was not Beezo’s clown makeup, not his poisonous ranting about his aerialist in-laws, not his eyes so crazy that they almost spun like pinwheels, but simply his hat. Unfortunately, less than one hour old, I had not yet learned English and had not even sorted out who all these people were.

3

Trembling with relief, Dad took me from Charlene Coleman and carried me to my mother.

After the nurse raised the head of the birthing bed and provided more pillows, Mom was able to take me in her arms.

Dad swears that her first words to me were these: “You better have been worth all the pain, Little Blue Eyes,’ cause if you turn out to be an ungrateful child, I’ll make your life a living hell.”

Tearful, shaken by all that had occurred, Charlene recounted recent events and explained how she’d been able to spirit me to safety when the shooting started.

Unexpectedly required to attend two women simultaneously in urgent and difficult labor, Dr. MacDonald had been unable at that hour to locate a qualified physician to assist on a timely basis. He divided his attention between the two patients, hurrying from one delivery room to the other, relying on his nurses for backup, his work complicated by the periodically dimming lights and worry about whether the hospital generator would kick in reliably if the storm knocked out electric service.

Natalie Beezo had received no prenatal care. She unknowingly suffered from preeclampsia. During labor she developed full-blown eclampsia and experienced violent convulsions that would not respond to treatment and that threatened not only her own life but the life of her unborn child.

Meanwhile, my mother endured an excruciating labor resulting largely from the failure of her cervix to dilate. Intravenous injections of synthetic oxytocin initially did not induce sufficient contractions of the uterine muscles to allow her to squeeze me into the world.

Natalie delivered first. Dr. MacDonald tried everything to save her—an endotracheal tube to assist her breathing, injections of anticonvulsants—but soaring blood pressure and convulsions led to a massive cerebral hemorrhage that killed her.

Even as the umbilical cord was tied off and cut between the Beezo baby and his dead mother, my mother, exhausted but still struggling to expel me, suddenly and at last experienced cervical dilation.

The Jimmy Tock show had begun.

Before undertaking the depressing task of telling Konrad Beezo that he had gained a son and lost a wife, Dr. MacDonald delivered me and, according to Charlene Coleman, announced that this solid little package would surely grow up to be a football hero.

Having successfully conveyed me from womb to wider world, my mother promptly passed out. She didn’t hear the doctor’s prediction and didn’t see my broad, pink, wonder-filled face until my protector, Charlene, returned and presented me to my father.

After Dr. MacDonald had given me to Nurse Coleman to be swabbed and then wrapped in a white cotton receiving cloth, and when he had satisfied himself that my mother had merely fainted and that she would come to herself in moments, with or without smelling salts, he peeled off his latex gloves, pulled down his surgical mask, and went to the expectant-fathers’ lounge to console Konrad Beezo as best he could.

Almost at once, the shouting started: bitter, accusatory words, paranoid accusations, the vilest language delivered in the most furious voice imaginable.

Even in the usually serene, well-soundproofed delivery room, Nurse Coleman heard the uproar. She understood the tenor if not the specifics of Konrad Beezo’s reaction to the loss of his wife.

When she left the delivery room and stepped into the hallway to hear Beezo more clearly, intuition told her to carry me with her, bundled in the thin blanket.

In the hall, she encountered Lois Hanson, another nurse, who had in her arms the Beezo baby. Lois, too, had ventured forth to hear the clown’s intemperate outburst.

Lois made a fatal mistake. Against Charlene’s advice, she moved toward the closed door to the waiting room, believing that the sight of his infant son would quench Beezo’s hot anger and ameliorate the intense grief from which his rage had flared.

Herself a refugee from an abusive husband, Charlene had little faith that the grace of fatherhood would temper the fury of any man who, even in a moment of profound loss, responded first and at once with rage and with threats of violence rather than with tears or shock, or denial. Besides, she remembered his hat, worn indoors with no regard for manners. Charlene sensed trouble coming, big trouble.

She retreated with me along the maternity ward’s internal hall to the neonatal care unit. As that door was swinging shut behind us, she heard the gunshot that killed Dr. MacDonald.

This room contained rows of bassinets in which newborns were nestled, most dreaming, a few cooing, none yet crying. An enormous view window occupied the better part of one long wall, but no proud fathers or grandparents were currently standing on the other side of it.

With the infants were two crèche nurses. They had heard the shouting, then the shot, and they were more receptive to Charlene’s advice than Lois had been.

Presciently, Nurse Coleman assured them the gunman wouldn’t hurt the babies but warned he would surely kill every member of the hospital staff that he could find.

Nevertheless, before fleeing, each nurse scooped up an infant—and fretted about those they were forced to leave behind. Frightened by a second shot, they followed Charlene through a door beside the view window, out of the maternity ward into the main corridor.

The three, with their charges, took refuge in a room where an elderly man slept on unaware.

A low-wattage night-light did little to press back the gloom, and the flickering storm at the window only made the shadows jitter with insectile energy.

Quiet, hardly daring to breathe, the three nurses huddled together until Charlene heard sirens in the distance. This welcome wail drew her to the window, which provided a view of the parking lot in front of the hospital; she hoped to see police cars.

Instead, from that second-story room, she saw Beezo with his baby, crossing the rain-washed blacktop. He looked, she said, like a figure in a foul dream, scuttling and strange, like something you might see on the night that the world ended and cracks opened in the foundations of the earth to let loose the angry legions of the damned.

Charlene is a transplanted Mississippian and a Baptist whose soul is filled with the poetry of the South.

Beezo had parked at such a distance that through the screen of rain and under the yellow pall of the sodium-vapor lamps, the make, model, and true color of his car could not be discerned. Charlene watched him drive away, hoping the police would intercept him before he reached the nearby county road, but his taillights dwindled into the drizzling darkness.

With the threat removed, she returned to the delivery room just as Dad’s thoughts were flashing from the Lindbergh baby tragedy to Rumpelstiltskin to Tarzan raised by apes, in time to assure him that I had not been kidnapped by a homicidal clown.

Later my father would confirm that the minute of my birth, my length, and my weight precisely fulfilled the predictions made by my grandfather on his deathbed. His first proof, however, that the events in the intensive care unit were not just extraordinary but supernatural came when, as my mother held me, he folded back the receiving blanket, exposing my feet, and found that my toes were fused as Josef had predicted.

“Syndactyly,” Dad said.

“It can be fixed,” Charlene assured him. Then her eyes widened with surprise. “How do you know such a doctorish word?”

My father only repeated, “Syndactyly,” as he gently, lovingly, and with amazement fingered my fused toes.

4

Syndactyly is not merely the name of the affliction with which I was born but also the theme of my life for thirty years now. Things often prove to be fused in unanticipated ways. Moments separated by many years are unexpectedly joined, as if the space-time continuum has been folded by some power with either a peculiar sense of humor or an agenda arguably worthwhile but so complex as to be mystifying. People unknown to one another discover that they are bonded by fate as completely as two toes sharing a single sheath of skin.

Surgeons repaired my feet so long ago that I have no slightest memory of the procedures. I walk, I run when I must, I dance but not well.

With all due respect for the memory of Dr. Ferris MacDonald, I never became a football hero and never wished to be one. My family has never had an interest in sports.

We are fans, instead, of puffs, éclairs, tarts, tortes, cakes, trifles, and fans as well of the infamous cheese-and-broccoli pies and the Reuben sandwiches and all the fabulous dishes of table-cracking weight that my mother produces. We will trade the thrills and glory of all the games and tournaments mankind has ever invented for a dinner together and for the conversation and the laughter that runs like a fast tide from the unfolding of our napkins to the final sip of coffee.

Over the years, I have grown from twenty inches to six feet. My weight has increased from eight pounds ten ounces to one hundred eighty-eight pounds, which should prove my contention that I am at most husky, not as large as I appear to be to most people.

The fifth of my grandfather’s ten predictions—that everyone would call me Jimmy—has also proved true.

Even on first meeting me, people seem to think that James is too formal to fit and that Jim is too earnest or otherwise inappropriate. Even if I introduce myself as James, and with emphasis, they at once begin addressing me as Jimmy, with complete comfort and familiarity, as though they have known me since my face was postpartum pink and my toes were fused.

As I make these tape recordings with the hope that I may survive to transcribe and edit them, I have lived through four of the five terrible days about which Grandpa Josef warned my father. They were terrible both in the same and in different ways, each day filled with the unexpected and with terror, some marked by tragedy, but they were days filled with much else, as well. Much else.

And now … one more to go.

My dad, my mom, and I spent twenty years pretending that the accuracy of Josef’s first five predictions did not necessarily mean that the next five would be fulfilled. My childhood and teenage years passed uneventfully, presenting no evidence whatsoever that my life was a yo-yo on the string of fate.

Nevertheless, as the first of those five days relentlessly approached—Thursday, September 15, 1994—we worried.

Mom’s coffee consumption went from ten cups a day to twenty.

She has a curious relationship with caffeine. Instead of fraying her nerves, the brew soothes them.

If she fails to drink her usual three cups during the morning, by noon she will be as fidgety as a frustrated fly buzzing against a windowpane. If she doesn’t pour down eight by bedtime, she lies awake, so mentally active that she not only counts sheep by the thousand but also names them and develops an elaborate life story for each.

Dad believes that Maddy’s topsy-turvy metabolism is a direct result of the fact that her father was a long-haul trucker who ate Nō-Dōz caffeine tablets as if they were candy.

Maybe so, Mom sometimes answers my father, but what are you complaining about? When we were dating all you had to do was get five or six cheap coffees into me, and I was as pliable as a rubber band.

As September 15, 1994, drew near, my father’s worry expressed itself in fallen cakes, curdled custard, rubbery pie crusts, and crème brûlée that had a sandy texture. He could not concentrate on his recipes or his ovens.

I believe that I handled the anticipation reasonably well. In the last two days leading up to the first of those five ominous dates, I might have walked into more closed doors than usual, might have tripped more often than is customary for me when climbing the stairs. And I do admit to dropping a hammer on Grandma Rowena’s foot while trying to hang a picture for her. But it was her foot, not her head, and the one instance when a trip led to a fall, I only tumbled down a single flight of steps and didn’t break anything.

Our worry was kept somewhat in check by the fact that Grandpa Josef had given Dad five “terrible days” in my life, not just one. Obviously, regardless of how grim September 15 might be, I would not die on that day.

“Yes, but there’s always the possibility of severed limbs and mutilation,” Grandma Rowena cautioned. “And paralysis and brain damage.”

She is a sweet woman, my maternal grandmother, but one with too sharp a sense of the fragility of life.

As a child, I had dreaded those occasions when she insisted on reading me to sleep. Even when she didn’t revise the classic stories, which she often did, even when the Big Bad Wolf was defeated, as he should have been, Grandma paused at key points in the narrative to muse aloud on the many gruesome things that might have happened to the three little pigs if their defenses had not held or if their strategies had proved faulty. Being ground up for sausages was the least of it.

And so, less than six weeks after my twentieth birthday, came the first of my five ordeals….

PART TWO

Might as Well Die If I Can’t Fly

5

At nine o’clock on the evening of Wednesday, September 14, my parents and I met in their dining room to have as heavy a dinner as we might be able to stand up from without our knees buckling.

We were also gathered to discuss once more the wisest strategies for getting through the fateful day that lay just three hours ahead of me. We hoped that in a prepared and cautious state of mind, I might reach September 16 as unscathed as the three little pigs after their encounter with the wolf.

Grandma Rowena joined us to speak from the point of view of the wolf. That is, she would play the devil’s advocate and relate to us what flaws she saw in our precautions.

As always, we took dinner on gold-rimmed Raynaud Limoges china, using sterling-silver flatware by Buccellati.

In spite of what the table setting suggests, my parents are not wealthy, just securely middle class. Although my father makes a fine salary as a pastry chef, stock options and corporate jets don’t come with his position.

My mother earns a modest income working part-time from home, painting pet portraits on commission: mostly cats and dogs, but also rabbits, parakeets, and once a milk snake that came to pose and didn’t want to leave.

Their small Victorian house would be called humble if it weren’t so cozy that it feels sumptuous. The ceilings are not high and the proportions of the rooms are not grand, but they have been furnished with great care and with an eye to comfort.

You can’t blame Earl for taking refuge behind the living-room sofa, under the claw-foot tub in the upstairs bath, in a clothes hamper, in the pantry potato basket, and elsewhere during the three interesting weeks that he adopted us. Earl was the milk snake, and the home from which he’d come was a sterile place with stainless-steel-and-black-leather furniture, abstract art, and cactuses for houseplants.

Of all the charming corners in this small house where you might read a book, listen to music, or gaze out a many-paned window at a bejeweled winter day, none is as welcoming as the dining room. This is because to the Tock family, food—and the conviviality that marks our every meal—is the hub that turns the spokes that spin the wheel of life.

Therefore, the luxury of Limoges and Buccellati.

Considering that we are incapable of pulling up a chair to any dinner with less than five courses and that we regard the first four, in which we fully indulge, as mere preparation for the fifth, it is miraculous that none of us is overweight.

Dad once discovered that his best wool suit had grown tight in the waist. He merely skipped lunch three days, and the pants were then loose on him.

Mom’s caffeine tolerance is not the most significant curiosity regarding our unusual relationship to food. Both sides of the family, the Tock side and the Greenwich side (Greenwich being my mother’s maiden name), have metabolisms as efficient as that of a hummingbird, a creature which can eat three times its body weight each day and remain light enough to fly.

Mom once suggested that she and my father had been instantly attracted to each other in part because of a subliminal perception that they were metabolic royalty.

The dining room features a coffered mahogany ceiling, mahogany wainscoting, and a mahogany floor. Silk moiré walls and a Persian carpet soften all the wood.

There is a blown-glass chandelier with pendant crystals, but dinner is always served by candlelight.

On this special night in September of 1994, the candles were numerous and squat, set in small but not shallow cut-crystal bowls, some clear and others ruby-red, which fractured the light into soft prismatic patterns on the linen tablecloth, on the walls, and on our faces. Candles were placed not only on the table but also on the sideboards.

Had you glanced in through a window, you might have thought not that we were at dinner but that we were conducting a séance, with food provided to keep us entertained until at last the ghosts showed up.

Although my parents had prepared my favorite dishes, I tried not to think of it as the condemned man’s last meal.

Five properly presented courses cannot be eaten on the same schedule as a McDonald’s Happy Meal, especially not with carefully chosen wines. We were prepared for a long evening together.

Dad is the head pastry chef for the world-famous Snow Village Resort, a position he inherited from his father, Josef. Because all breads and pastries must be fresh each day, he goes to work at one o’clock in the morning at least five and often six days a week. By eight, with the baking for the entire day complete, he comes home for breakfast with Mom, then sleeps until three in the afternoon.

That September, I also worked those hours because I had been an apprentice baker for two years at the same resort. The Tock family believes in nepotism.

Dad says it’s not really nepotism if your talent is real. Give me a good oven, and I am a wicked competitor.

Funny, but I am never clumsy in a kitchen. When baking, I am Gene Kelly, I am Fred Astaire, I am grace personified.

Dad would be going from our late dinner to work, but I would not. In preparation for the first of the five days in Grandpa Josef’s prediction, I had taken a week’s vacation.

Our starter course was sou bourek, an Armenian dish. Numerous paper-thin layers of pasta are separated by equally thin layers of butter and cheese, finished with a golden crust.

I still lived with my folks in those days, so Dad said, “You should stay home from midnight to midnight. Hide out. Nap, read, watch a little TV.”

“Then what’ll happen,” Grandma Rowena imagined, “is that he’ll fall down the stairs and break his neck.”

“Don’t use the stairs,” Mom advised. “Stay in your room, honey. I can bring your meals to you.”

“So then the house will burn down,” Rowena said.

“Now, Weena, the house won’t burn down,” Dad assured her. “The electrical wiring is sound, the furnace is brand new, both fireplace chimneys were recently cleaned, there’s a grounded lightning rod on the roof, and Jimmy doesn’t play with matches.”

Rowena was seventy-seven in 1994, twenty-four years a widow and past her grief, a happy woman but opinionated. She’d been asked to play the devil’s advocate, and she was adamant in her role.

“If not a fire, then a gas explosion,” she declared.

“Gee, I don’t want to be responsible for destroying the house,” I said.

“Weena,” Dad reasoned, “there hasn’t been a house-destroying gas explosion in the entire history of Snow Village.”

“So an airliner will crash into the place.”

“Oh, and that happens weekly around here,” my father said.

“There’s a first time for everything,” Rowena asserted.

“If there’s a first time for an airliner to crash into our house, then there’s a first time for vampires to move in next door, but I’m not going to start wearing a garlic necklace.”

“If not an airliner, one of those Federal Express planes full of packages,” Rowena said.

Dad gaped at her, shook his head. “Federal Express.”

Mom interpreted: “What Mother means is that surely if fate has something planned for our Jimmy, he can’t hide from it. Fate is fate. It’ll find him.”

“Maybe a United Parcel Service plane,” said Rowena.

Over steaming bowls of pureed cauliflower soup enlivened with white beans and tarragon, we agreed that the wisest course for me would be to proceed as I would on any ordinary day off work—though always with caution.

“On the other hand,” Grandma Rowena said, “caution could get him killed.”

“Now, Weena, how could caution get a person killed?” my father wondered.

Grandma finished a spoonful of soup and smacked her lips as she had never done until she had turned seventy-five, two years previously. She smacked them with relish, repeatedly.

Halfway between her seventh and eighth decades, she had decided that longevity had earned her the right to indulge in certain small pleasures she had never previously allowed herself. These were pretty much limited to smacking her lips, blowing her nose as noisily as she wished (though never at the table), and leaving her spoon and/or fork turned useful side up on the plate at the end of each course, instead of useful side down as her mother, a true Victorian and a stickler for etiquette, had instructed her always to do in order properly to indicate that she had finished.

She smacked her lips again and explained why caution could be dangerous: “Say Jimmy’s going to cross the street, but he worries that a bus might hit him—”

“Or a garbage truck,” Mom suggested. “Those great lumbering things on these hilly streets—why, if the brakes let go, what’s to stop them? They’d go right through a house.”

“Bus, garbage truck, might even be a speeding hearse,” Grandma allowed.

“What reason would a hearse have to speed?” Dad asked.

“Speeding or not, if it was a hearse,” said Grandma, “wouldn’t that be ironic—run down by a hearse? God knows, life is often ironic in a way it’s never shown on television.”

“The viewing public could never handle it,” Mom said. “Their capacity for genuine irony is exhausted halfway through an episode of Murder, She Wrote.”

“What passes for irony on TV these days,” my dad noted, “is just poor plotting.”

I said, “I’m less spooked by garbage trucks than by those huge concrete mixers they drive to construction sites. I’m always sure the part that revolves is suddenly going to work loose of the truck, roll down the street, and flatten me.”

“All right,” Grandma Rowena said, “so it’s a concrete mixer Jimmy’s afraid of meeting up with.”

“Not afraid exactly,” I said. “Just leery.”

“So he stands on the sidewalk, looks left, then looks right, then looks left again, being cautious, taking his time—and because he delays there on the curb too long, he’s hit by a falling safe.”

In the interest of a healthy debate, my father was willing to entertain some rather exotic speculations, but this stretched his patience too far. “A falling safe? Where would it fall from?”

“From a tall building, of course,” Grandma said.

“There aren’t any tall buildings in Snow Village,” Dad gently protested.

“Rudy, dear,” Mom said, “I think you’re forgetting the Alpine Hotel.”

“That’s only four stories.”

“A safe dropped four stories would obliterate Jimmy,” Grandma insisted. To me, in a concerned tone, she said, “I’m sorry. Is this upsetting you, sweetheart?”

“Not at all, Grandma.”

“It’s the simple truth, I’m afraid.”

“I know, Grandma.”

“It would obliterate you.”

“Totally,” I agreed.

“But it’s such a final word—obliterate.”

“It sure does focus the mind.”

“I should’ve thought before I spoke. I should’ve said crushed.”

In lambent red candlelight, Weena had a Mona Lisa smile.

I reached across the table and patted her hand.

Being a pastry chef, required to mix many ingredients in precise measure, my father has a greater respect for mathematics and reason than do my mother and grandmother, who are more artistic in their temperaments and less slavishly devoted to logic than he is. “Why,” he asked, “would anyone raise a safe to the top of the Alpine Hotel?”

“Well, of course, to keep their valuables in,” said Grandma.

“Whose valuables?”

“The hotel’s valuables.”

Although Dad never triumphs in exchanges of this nature, he always remains hopeful that if only he persists, reason will prevail.

“Why,” he asked, “wouldn’t they put a big heavy safe on the ground floor? Why go to all the trouble of craning it to the roof?”

My mother said, “Because no doubt their valuables were on the top floor.”

In moments like these, I have never been quite sure if Mom shares more than a little of Weena’s cockeyed perspective on the world or if she’s playing with my father.

Her face is guileless. Her eyes are never evasive, and always limpid. She is by nature a straightforward woman. Her emotions are too clear for misinterpretation, and her intentions are never ambiguous.

Yet as Dad says, for a person so admirably open and direct by nature, she can turn inscrutable when it tickles her to, just as easily as throwing a light switch.

That’s one of the things he loves about her.

Our conversation continued through an endive salad with pears, walnuts, and crumbled blue cheese, followed by filet mignon on a bed of potato-and-onion pancakes, with asparagus on the side.

Before Dad got up to roll the dessert cart in from the kitchen, we had agreed that, for the momentous day ahead, I should keep to my usual vacation routine. With caution. But not too much caution.

Midnight arrived.

September 15 began.

Nothing happened right away.

“Maybe nothing will,” Mom said.

“Something will,” Grandma disagreed, and smacked her lips. “Something will.”

If I had not been obliterated or even badly crushed by nine o’clock the next evening, we would meet here for dinner again. Together, we would break bread while remaining alert for the whiff of natural gas and the drone of a descending airliner.

Now, after demidessert, followed by a full dessert, followed by petits fours, all accompanied by oceans of coffee, Dad went off to work, and I helped with the kitchen cleanup.

Then at one-thirty in the morning, I retired to the living room to read a new book for which I had high expectations. I have a great fondness for murder mysteries.

On the first page, a victim was found chopped up and packed in a trunk. His name was Jim.

I put that book aside, selected another from the stack on the coffee table, and returned to my armchair.

A beautiful dead blonde stared from the book jacket, strangled with an antique Japanese obi knotted colorfully around her throat.

The first victim was named Delores. With a sigh of contentment, I settled down in my chair.

Grandma sat on the sofa, busy with a needlepoint pillow. She had been a master of decorative stitching since her teenage years.

Since she had moved in with Mom and Dad almost two decades ago, she had kept baker’s hours, sewing elaborate patterns through the night. My mother and I kept that schedule, too. Mom had home-schooled me because our family lived by night.

Recently, Grandma’s preferred embroidery motifs were insects. Her butterfly wall hanging and even her ladybug chair cushions were charming, but I did not care for the spider-festooned antimacassars on my armchair or for the cockroach pillow.

In an adjacent alcove, which Mom had outfitted as her studio, she worked happily on a pet portrait. The subject was a glittery-eyed Gila monster named Killer.

Because Killer was hostile toward strangers and not housebroken, the proud owners had provided a series of photos from which Mom could work. A hissing, biting, pooping Gila monster can really spoil an otherwise pleasant evening.

The living room is small and the shallow art alcove is separated from it only by silk curtains in a wide archway. The curtains were open, so Mom could keep an eye on me and could be ready to move fast in case she recognized, say, signs of impending spontaneous human combustion.

For perhaps an hour, we were silent, immersed in our various pursuits, and then Mom said, “Sometimes I worry that we’re becoming the Addams family.”

The initial eight hours of my first terrible day passed without a disturbing incident.

At 8:15, his eyebrows white with flour, Dad came home from work. “I couldn’t make a good crème plombières to save my ass. I’ll be glad when we’ve got through this day and I can focus again.”

We had breakfast together at the kitchen table. By 9:00 A.M., after more than the usual day’s-end hugs, we went to our bedrooms and hid beneath the sheets.

Perhaps the rest of my family wasn’t hiding, but I pretty much was. I believed in my grandfather’s predictions more than I cared to admit to the rest of them, and my nerves tightened with every tick of the clock.

Going to bed at an hour when most people are beginning their workday, I required blackout blinds overlaid by heavy drapes that absorbed both light and sound. My room was quiet and dead black.

After a few minutes, I urgently needed to turn on a bedside lamp. Not since early childhood had I been this disturbed by the dark.

From my nightstand drawer I withdrew a plastic sleeve in which was preserved the free pass to the circus that Officer Huey Foster had given to my father more than twenty years ago. The three-by-five card appeared newly printed, marred only by the crease through the middle, where Dad had folded it to fit in his wallet.

On the blank reverse, Dad had taken dictation from Josef on his deathbed. The five dates.

The front of the pass featured lions and elephants. ADMIT TWO it directed in black letters, and in red blazed the promise FREE.

Toward the bottom were four words I had read uncounted times over the years: PREPARE TO BE ENCHANTED.

Depending on my mood, sometimes that sentence seemed to betoken forthcoming adventure and wonder. At other times, I drew from it a more threatening interpretation: PREPARE TO BE SCARED SHITLESS.

After returning the pass to the drawer, I lay awake for a while. I didn’t think I would sleep. Then I slept.

Three hours later, I sat up in bed, instantly awake and alert. Trembling with fear.

To the best of my knowledge, I hadn’t been awakened by a bad dream. No nightmare images lingered in memory.

Nevertheless, I woke with a completely formed and terrifying thought so oppressive that my heart felt as if it were being squeezed in a vise, and I could draw only quick shallow breaths.

If there were to be five terrible days in my life, I would not die on this one. In her inimitable way, however, Weena had pointed out that an exemption from death this September did not rule out severed limbs, mutilation, paralysis, and brain damage.

Neither could I rule out the death of someone else. Someone dear to me. My father, my mother, my grandmother …

If this were to be a terrible day because one of them would suffer a painful and violent death that would haunt me for the rest of my life, then I might wish that I had been the one to die.

I sat on the edge of the bed, glad that I had gone to sleep with the nightstand lamp aglow. My hands were slick with sweat and shaking so badly that I might not have been able either to find the switch or to turn it.

A close and loving family is a blessing. But the more people we love and the more deeply we love them, the more vulnerable we are to loss and grief and loneliness.

I was finished with sleep.

The bedside clock reported 1:30 P.M.

Less than half the day remained, only ten and a half hours until midnight.

In that time, however, a life could be taken, a world could end—and hope.

6

Millions of years before the Travel Channel existed to report the change, storms inside the earth had raised the land into serried waves, like a monsoon seascape, so any voyager in this territory is nearly always moving up or down, seldom on the horizontal.

Evergreen forests—pine and fir and spruce—navigate the waves of soil and rock, docking along every shore of Snow Village, but also finding harbors deep within town limits.

Fourteen thousand full-time residents live here. Most make their living directly or indirectly from nature as surely as do those who dwell in fishing ports in lower, balmier lands.

Snow Village Resort and Spa, and its world-famous network of ski runs, along with other area hotels and winter-sport facilities, draw so many vacationers that the town’s population increases sixty percent from mid-October through March. Camping, hiking, boating, and whitewater rafting pull in almost as many the rest of the year.

Autumn weather arrives early in the Rocky Mountains; but that day in September was not one of our refreshingly crisp afternoons. Pleasantly warm air, as still as the greatly compressed fathoms at the bottom of an ocean, conspired with golden afternoon sunlight to give Snow Village the look of a community petrified in amber.

Because my parents’ house is in a perimeter neighborhood, I drove rather than walked into the heart of town, where I had a few errands to undertake.

In those days I owned a seven-year-old Dodge Daytona Shelby Z. Other than my mother and grandmother, I’d not yet met a woman I could love as much as I loved that sporty little coupe.

I have no mechanical skills, and I lack the talent to acquire any. The workings of an engine are as mysterious to me as is the enduring popularity of the tuna casserole.

I loved that peppy little Dodge sheerly for its form: the sleek lines, the black paint job, the harvest-moon-yellow racing stripes. That car was a piece of the night, driven down from the sky, with evidence of a lunar sideswipe on its flanks.

Generally speaking, I do not romanticize inanimate objects unless they can be eaten. The Dodge was a rare exception.

Arriving downtown, thus far having been spared from a head-on collision with an ironic speeding hearse, I passed several minutes in a search for the perfect parking spot.

Much of Alpine Avenue, our main street, features angle-to-the-curb parking, which I avoided in those days. The doors of flanking vehicles, if opened carelessly, could dent my Shelby Z and chip its paint. I took its every injury as a personal wound.

I much preferred to parallel park, and found a suitable place across the street from Center Square Park, which is in fact square and in the center of town. We Rocky Mountain types sometimes are as plainspoken as our magnificent scenery is ornate.

I curbed the Shelby Z behind a yellow panel van, in front of the Snow Mansion, a landmark open to the public eleven months of the year but closed here in September, which falls between the two main tourist seasons.

Ordinarily, of course, I would have stepped from the car on the driver’s side. As I was about to exit, a pickup truck exploded past, dangerously close and at twice the posted speed. Had I opened the door seconds sooner and started to get out, I would have spent the autumn hospitalized and would have met the winter with fewer limbs.

On any other day, I might have muttered to myself about the driver’s recklessness and then opened the door in his wake. Not this time.

Being cautious—but I hoped not too cautious—I slid over the console into the passenger’s seat and got out on the curb side.

At once I looked up. No falling safe. So far, so good.

Founded in 1872 with gold-mining and railroad money, much of Snow Village is an alfresco museum of Victorian architecture, especially on the town square, where an active preservation society has been most successful. Brick and limestone were the favored building materials in the four blocks surrounding the park, with carved or molded pediments over doors and windows, and ornate iron railings.

Here the street trees are larches: tall, conical, and old. They had not yet traded their green summer wardrobe for autumn gold.

I had business at the dry cleaner’s, at the bank, and at the library. None of those establishments was on the side of the park where I’d found a suitable place for my car.

Of the three, the bank most concerned me. Occasionally people robbed banks. Bystanders were sometimes shot.

Prudence suggested that I wait until the following day to do my banking.

On the other hand, though no dry cleaner has ever been charged with causing a catastrophe in the course of Martinzing a three-piece wool suit, I was pretty sure they used caustic, toxic, perhaps even explosive chemicals.

Likewise, with all the narrow aisles between wooden shelves packed full of highly combustible books, libraries are potential firetraps.

Halted by indecision, I stood on the sidewalk, dappled with larch shadows and sunlight.

Because Grandpa Josef’s predictions of five terrible days lacked specificity, I had not been able to plan defensively for any of them. All my life, however, I had been preparing psychologically.

Yet all that preparation afforded me no comfort. My imagination had hatched a crawling dread that crept down my spine and into every extremity.

As long as I had not ventured out of the house, the comfort of home and the courage of family had insulated me from fear. Now I felt exposed, vulnerable, targeted.

Paranoia may be an occupational hazard of spies, politicians, drug dealers, and big-city cops, but bakers rarely suffer from it. Weevils in the flour and a shortage of bitter chocolate in the pantry do not at once strike us as evidence of cunning adversaries and vast conspiracies.

Having led a fortunate, cozy, and—after the night of my birth—happily uneventful life, I had made no enemies of whom I was aware. Yet I surveyed the second-and third-story windows overlooking the town square, convinced I would spot a sniper drawing a bead on me.

Until that moment, my assumption had always been that whatever misfortune befell me on the five days would be impersonal, an act of nature: lightning strike, snakebite, cerebral thrombosis, incoming meteorite. Or otherwise it might be an accident resulting from the fallibility of my fellow human beings: a runaway concrete truck, a runaway train, a faultily constructed propane tank.

Even stumbling into the middle of a bank robbery and being shot would be a kind of accident, considering that I could have delayed my banking errand by taking a walk in the park, feeding squirrels, getting bitten, and contracting rabies.

Now I was paralyzed by the possibility of intent, by the realization that an unknown person might consciously select me as the object upon which to visit mayhem and misery.

He didn’t have to be anyone I knew. Most likely he would be a crazed loner. Some homicidal stranger with a grudge against life, a rifle, plenty of hollow-point ammunition, and a supply of tasty high-protein power bars to keep him alert during a long standoff with the police.

Many windowpanes blazed with orange reflections of the afternoon sun. Others were dark, at angles that didn’t take the solar image; any of those might have been open, the gunman lurking in the shadows beyond.

In my paralysis I became convinced that I possessed the talent for precognition that Grandpa Josef had displayed on his deathbed. The sniper was not just a possibility; he was here, finger on the trigger. I had not imagined him, but had sensed him clairvoyantly, him and my bullet-riddled future.

I tried to continue forward and then attempted to retreat, but I couldn’t move. I felt that a step in the wrong direction would take me into the path of a bullet.

Of course as long as I stood motionless, I made a perfect target. Rational argument, however, couldn’t dispel the paralysis.

My gaze rose from windows to rooftops, which might provide an even more likely roost for a sniper.

So intense was my concentration that I heard but didn’t respond to the question until he repeated it: “I said—are you all right?”

I lowered my attention from the search for a sniper to the young man standing on the sidewalk in front of me. Dark-haired, green-eyed, he was handsome enough to be a movie star.

For a moment I felt disoriented, as though I had briefly stepped outside the flow of time and now, stepping in again, could not adjust to the pace of life.

He glanced toward the rooftops that had concerned me, then fixed me with those remarkable eyes. “You don’t look well.”

My tongue felt thick. “I … just … I thought I saw something over there.”

This statement was peculiar enough to tweak an uncertain smile from him. “You mean something in the sky?”

I couldn’t explain that my focus had been on rooftops, because it seemed this would lead me inexorably to the revelation that I had been mesmerized by the possibility of a sniper.

Instead, I said, “Yes, uh, in the sky, something … odd,” and at once realized that this statement made me seem no less peculiar than talk of a sniper would have done.

“UFO, you mean?” he asked, revealing a lopsided smile as winning as that of Tom Cruise at his most insouciant.

He might in fact have been a well-known actor, a rising star. Many entertainment figures vacationed in Snow Village.

Even if he had been famous, I wouldn’t have recognized him. I didn’t have that much interest in movies, being too busy with baking and family and life.

The only film I’d seen that year had been Forrest Gump. Now I supposed that I must appear to have the IQ of the title character.

Heat blossomed in my face, and I said with some embarrassment, “Maybe a UFO thing. Probably not. I don’t know. It’s gone now.”

“Are you all right?” he repeated.

“Yeah, sure, I’m fine, just the sky thing, gone now,” I said, embarrassed to hear myself babbling.

His amused scrutiny broke my paralysis. I wished him a good day, walked away, tripped on a fault in the sidewalk, and almost fell.

When I regained my balance, I didn’t look back. I knew he would be watching me, his face alight with that million-dollar smile.

I couldn’t understand how I had so completely given myself to an irrational fear. Being shot by a sniper was no more likely than being abducted by extraterrestrials.

Grimly determined to get a grip on myself, I went directly to the bank.

What would be would be. If a ruthless holdup gang crippled me with a shot to the spine, that might be preferable to being horribly disfigured in a library fire or to spending the rest of my life on an artificial-lung machine after inhaling toxic fumes in a catastrophic dry-cleaning accident.

The bank would be closing in minutes; consequently, there were few customers, but everyone looked suspicious to me. I tried not to turn my back on any of them.

I didn’t even trust the eighty-year-old lady whose head bobbed with palsy. Some professional thieves were masters of disguise; the tremors might prove to be a brilliant bit of acting. But her chin wart sure looked real.

In the nineteenth century, they expected banks to be impressive. The lobby had a granite floor, granite walls, fluted columns, and a lot of bronze work.

When a bank employee, crossing the room, dropped a ledger book, the report, ricocheting off the walls, sounded quite like a gunshot. I twitched but didn’t soil my pants.

After depositing a paycheck and taking back a little cash, I departed without incident. The revolving door felt confining, but it brought me safely into the warm afternoon.

I needed to pick up several garments at the dry cleaner’s, so I left that task for last, and went to the library.

The Cornelius Rutherford Snow Library is much bigger than one would expect for a town as small as ours, a handsome limestone structure. Flanking the main entry are stone lions on plinths in the shape of books.

The lions are not frozen in a roar. Neither are they posed with heads raised and alert. Curiously, both are shown asleep, as if they have been reading a politician’s autobiography and have been thus sedated.

Cornelius, whose money built the library, didn’t have a great deal of interest in books but thought that he should. Funding a handsome library was, to his way of reasoning, as broadening of the spirit and as edifying to the mind as actually having pored through hundreds of tomes. When the building was complete, he thereafter thought of himself as a well-read man.

Our town isn’t named after the form in which most of its annual precipitation falls. It honors instead the railroad-and-mining magnate whose pre-income-tax fortune founded it: Cornelius Rutherford Snow.

Just inside the front doors of the library hangs a portrait of Cornelius. He is all steely eyes, mustache, muttonchops, and pride.

When I entered, no one sat at any of the reading tables. The only patron in sight was at the main desk, leaning casually against the high counter, in a hushed conversation with Lionel Davis, the head librarian.

As I drew near the elevated desk, I recognized the patron. His green eyes brightened at the sight of me, and his big-screen smile was friendly, not mocking, though he said to Lionel, “I think this gentleman will be wanting a book on flying saucers.”

I’d known Lionel Davis forever. He’d made a life of books to the same extent that I had made a life of baking. He was warm-hearted, kind, with enthusiasms ranging from Egyptian history to hard-boiled detective novels.

He had the worn yet perpetually childlike countenance of a kindly blacksmith or a sincere vicar in a Dickens novel. I knew his face well, but I had never seen on it an expression quite like the one that currently occupied it.

His smile was broad but his eyes were narrow. A tic at the left corner of his mouth suggested that the eyes more truly revealed his state of mind than did the smile.

If I had recognized the warning in his face, I could not have done anything to save myself or him. The handsome fellow with the porcelain-white teeth had already decided on a course of action the moment I entered.

First, he shot Lionel Davis in the head.

7

The pistol made a hard flat noise not half as loud as I would have expected.

Crazily, I thought how in the movies they didn’t fire real bullets, but blanks, so this sound would have to be enhanced in post-production.

I almost looked around for the cameras, the crew. The shooter was movie-star handsome, the gunshot didn’t sound right, and no one would have any reason to kill a sweet man like Lionel Davis, which must mean that all this had been scripted and that the finished film would be in theaters nationwide next summer.

“How many flies do you swallow on the average day, standing around with your mouth hanging open?” asked the killer. “Is your mouth ever not hanging open?”

He appeared to be amused by me, to have already forgotten Lionel, as if killing the librarian had been an act of no more consequence than stepping on an ant.

I heard my voice turn hollow with stunned incomprehension, brittle with anger: “What did he ever do to you?”

“Who?”

Though you will think his perplexity must have been an act, tough-guy bravura meant to impress me with his cruelty, I assure you that it was not. I knew at once that he didn’t relate my question to the man whom he had just murdered.

The word insane did not entirely describe him, but it was a good adjective with which to begin.

Surprised that fear remained absent from my voice even as more anger crowded into it, I said, “Lionel. He was a good man, gentle.”

“Oh, him.”

“Lionel Davis. He had a name, you know. He had a life, friends, he was somebody.”

Genuinely puzzled, his smile turning uneasy, he said, “Wasn’t he just a librarian?”

“You sick son of a bitch.”

As the smile stiffened, his features grew pale, grew hard, as though flesh might transform into a plaster death mask. He raised the pistol, pointed it at my chest, and said with utmost seriousness, “Don’t you dare insult my mother.”

The offense he took at my language, so out of proportion to the indifference with which he committed murder, struck me as darkly funny. If a laugh, even one of shocked disbelief, had escaped me then, I’m sure he would have killed me.

Confronted by the muzzle of the handgun, I felt fear enter the halls of my mind, but I didn’t give it the keys to every room.

Earlier in the street, the prospect of a sniper had paralyzed me with dread. I realized now that I’d not been afraid of a rifleman in some high concealment but that I’d been petrified because I did not know if the sniper was real or if instead the mortal threat might be any of a thousand other things. When danger can be sensed but not identified, then everyone and everything becomes a source of concern; the world from horizon to horizon seems hostile.

Fear of the unknown is the most purely distilled and potent terror.

Now I had identified my enemy. Although he might be a sociopath capable of any atrocity, I felt some relief because I knew his face. The uncountable threats in my imagination had evaporated, replaced by this one real danger.

His hard expression softened. He lowered the pistol.

With perhaps fifteen feet between us, I didn’t dare rush him. I could only repeat, “What did he ever do to you?”

He smiled and shrugged. “I wouldn’t have shot him if you hadn’t come in.”

Like a slowly turning auger, the pain of Lionel’s death drilled deeper into me. The tremor in my voice was grief, not fear. “What’re you talking about?”

“By myself, I can’t manage two hostages. He was here alone. The assistant librarian is out sick. There were no patrons at the moment. He was going to lock the doors—then you came in.”

“Don’t tell me I’m responsible.”

“Oh, no, not at all,” he assured me with what sounded like genuine concern for my feelings. “Not your fault. It was just one of those things.”

“Just one of those things,” I repeated with some astonishment, unable to comprehend a mind that could be so casual about murder.

“I might have shot you instead,” he said, “but having met you earlier in the street, I figured you’d be more interesting company than a boring old librarian.”

“What do you need a hostage for?”

“In case things go wrong.”

“What things?”

“You’ll see.”

His sport coat was cut stylishly full. From one of the roomy interior pockets he withdrew a pair of handcuffs. “I’m going to throw these to you.”

“I don’t want them.”

He smiled. “You are going to be fun. Catch them. Lock one cuff around your right wrist. Then lie on the floor with both hands behind your back, so I can finish the job.”

When he threw the cuffs, I sidestepped them. They rattled off a reading table, clattered to the floor.

He’d been holding the pistol at his side. He aimed at me again.

Although I’d stared down that muzzle before, I didn’t find it any less disconcerting the second time.

I’d never held a handgun, let alone fired one. In my line of work, the closest thing to a weapon is a cake knife. Maybe a rolling pin. We bakers, however, tend not to carry rolling pins in shoulder holsters and are therefore defenseless in situations like this.

“Pick them up, big fella.”

Big fella. He was approximately my size.

“Pick them up, or I’ll do a Lionel on you and just wait for another hostage to walk through that door.”

I had been using my grief and my anger over Lionel’s death to suppress my terror. Fear could diminish and defeat me, but now I realized that fearlessness could get me killed.

Wisely giving recognition to the coward in me, I stooped, picked up the cuffs, and clamped one steel circlet around my right wrist.

Snaring a set of keys off the librarian’s desk, he said, “Don’t lie down yet. Stay on your feet where I can see you while I lock the door.”

When he was halfway between the main desk and the portrait of Cornelius Rutherford Snow, the door opened. A young woman, a stranger to me, entered with a stack of books.

She was prettier than a gâteau à l’orange with chocolate-butter icing decorated with candied orange peel and cherries.

I wouldn’t be able to endure seeing her shot, not her.

8

She was prettier than a soufflé au chocolat drizzled with crème anglaise flavored by apricots, served in a Limoges cup on a Limoges plate on a silver charger, by candlelight.

The door had swung shut behind her and she had taken a few steps into the room before she realized that this was not a typical library tableau. She couldn’t see the dead man behind the desk, but she spotted the handcuffs dangling from my right wrist.

When she spoke, she had a wonderfully throaty voice, the effect of which was heightened by the fact that she addressed the killer in a stage whisper: “Is that a gun?”

“Doesn’t it look like a gun?”

“Well, it might be a toy,” she said. “I mean, is it a real gun?”

Gesturing at me with the weapon, he said, “You want to see me shoot him with it?”

I sensed that I’d just become the least desirable of available hostages.

“Gee,” she said, “that seems a little extreme.”

“I only need one hostage.”

“Nevertheless,” she said with an aplomb that dazzled me, “maybe you could just fire a shot into the ceiling.”

The killer smiled at her with all the expansive good humor that he had directed toward me earlier, in the street. In fact it was a warmer and even more adorable smile than the one I’d received.

“Why are you whispering?” he asked.

“It’s a library,” she whispered.

“The usual rules have been suspended.”

“Are you the librarian?” she asked him.

“Me—a librarian? No. In fact—”

“Then you can’t possibly have the authority to suspend the rules,” she said, speaking softly but no longer in a whisper.

“This gives me the authority,” he declared, and fired a round into the ceiling.

She glanced at the front windows, where the street was visible only in a succession of wedges between the half-closed Venetian blinds. When she looked next at me, I saw that she was disappointed, as I had been, by the pathetic volume of the shot. The walls, padded by books, absorbed the sound. Outside, it might have been not much louder than a muffled cough.

Giving no indication that his casual gunfire rattled her, she said, “May I put these books down somewhere? They’re quite an armful.”

With the pistol, he indicated a reading table. “There.”

As the woman put down the books, the killer went to the door and locked it, always keeping an eye on us.

“I don’t mean to criticize,” the woman said, “and I’m sure you know your business better than I do, but you’re wrong about needing only one hostage.”

She was so dangerously appealing to the eye that under other circumstances, she could have reduced any guy to his most deeply stupid state of desire. Already, however, I found myself more interested in what she had to say than I was in her figure, more fascinated by her chutzpah than by her radiant face.

The maniac seemed to share my fascination. By his expression, anyone could see that she had charmed him. His killer smile became more luminous.

When he spoke to her, his voice had no bite to it, no trace of sarcasm: “You have a theory or something about hostages?”

She shook her head. “Not a theory. Just a practical observation. If you wind up in a showdown with the police and you have only one hostage, how are you going to convince them you would actually kill the person, that you’re not bluffing?”

“How?” he and I asked simultaneously.

“You couldn’t make them believe you,” she said. “Not beyond a shadow of a doubt. So they might try to rush you, in which case both you and the hostage wind up dead.”

“I can be pretty convincing,” he assured her in a mellower tone that suggested he might be thinking of asking her for a date.

“If I was a cop, I wouldn’t believe you for a minute. You’re too cute to be a killer.” To me, she said, “Isn’t he too cute?”

I almost said I didn’t think he was that cute, so you can see what I mean by her bringing out the deeply stupid in a guy.

“But if you had two hostages,” she continued, “you could kill one to prove the sincerity of your threat, and after that the second would be a reliable shield. No cop would dare test you twice.”

He stared at her for a moment. “You’re some piece of work,” he said at last, and clearly meant to compliment her.

“Well,” she replied, indicating the stack of books that she had just returned, “I’m a reader and a thinker, that’s all.”

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Lorrie.”

“Lorrie what?”

“Lorrie Lynn Hicks,” she said. “And you are?”

He opened his mouth, almost told her his name, then smiled and said, “I’m a man of mystery.”

“And a man with a mission, by the look of it.”

“I’ve already killed the librarian,” he told her, as if murder were a resumé enhancement.

“I was sort of afraid you had,” she said.

I cleared my throat. “My name is James.”

“Hi, Jimmy,” she said, and though she smiled, I saw in her eyes a terrible sadness and desperate calculation.

“Go stand beside him,” the maniac ordered.

Lorrie came to me. She smelled as good as she looked: fresh, clean, lemony.

“Cuff yourself to him.”

As she locked the empty ring around her left wrist, thereby linking our fates, I felt I should say something to comfort her, in response to the desperation I’d glimpsed in her eyes. Wit failed me, and I could only say, “You smell like lemons.”

“I’ve spent the day making homemade lemon marmalade. I intended to have the first of it tonight, on toasted English muffins.”

“I’ll brew a pot of bittersweet hot chocolate with a dash of cinnamon,” I told her. “That and your marmalade muffins will be the perfect thing to celebrate.”

Clearly she appreciated my confident assertion of our survival, but her eyes were no less troubled.

Checking his wristwatch, the maniac said, “This has taken too much time. I’ve got a lot of research to do before the explosions start.”

9

All our yesterdays neatly shelved, time catalogued in drawers: News grows brittle and yellow under the library, in catacombs of paper.

The killer had learned that the Snow County Gazette had for more than a century stored their dead issues here in the subbasement, two stories under the town square. They called it a “priceless archive of local history.” Preserved for the ages in the Gazette morgue were the details of Girl Scout bake sales, school-board elections, and zoning battles over the intent of Sugar Time Donuts to expand the size of its operation.

Every issue from 1950 forward could be viewed on microfiche. When your research led you to earlier dates, you were supposed to fill out a requisition form for hard copies of the Gazette; a staff member would oversee your perusal of the newspaper.

If you were a person who shot librarians for no reason, standard procedures were of no concern to you. The maniac prowled the archives and took what he wanted to a study table. He handled the yellowing newsprint with no more consideration for its preservation than he would have shown for the most current edition of USA Today.

He had parked Lorrie Lynn Hicks and me in a pair of chairs at the farther end of the enormous room in which he worked. We were not close enough to see what articles in the Gazette interested him.

We sat under a barrel-vaulted ceiling, under a double row of inverted torchieres that cast a dusty light acceptable only to those scholars who had lived in a time when electricity was new and the memory of oil lamps still fresh from childhood.

With another set of handcuffs, our captor had linked our wrist shackles to a backrail of one of the chairs on which we were perched.

Because not all the archives were contained in this one room, he paid repeated visits to an adjacent chamber, leaving us alone at times. His absences afforded us no chance to escape. Chained together and dragging a chair, we could move neither quickly nor quietly.

“I’ve got a nail file in my purse,” Lorrie whispered.

I glanced down at her cuffed hand next to mine. A strong but graceful hand. Elegant fingers. “Your nails look fine,” I assured her.

“Are you serious?”

“Absolutely. I like the shade of your polish. Looks like candied cherries.”

“It’s called Glaçage de Framboise.”

“Then it’s misnamed. It’s not a shade of any raspberries I’ve ever worked with.”

“You work with raspberries?”

“I’m a baker, going to be a pastry chef.”

She sounded slightly disappointed. “You look more dangerous than a pastry chef.”

“Well, I’m biggish for my size.”

“Is that what it is?”

“And bakers tend to have strong hands.”

“No,” she said, “it’s your eyes. There’s something dangerous about your eyes.”

This was adolescent wish fulfillment of the purest kind: being told by a beautiful woman that you have dangerous eyes.

She said, “They’re direct, a nice shade of blue—but then there’s something lunatic about them.”

Lunatic eyes are dangerous eyes, all right, but not romantic dangerous. James Bond has dangerous eyes. Charles Manson has lunatic eyes. Charles Manson, Osama bin Laden, Wile E. Coyote. Women stand in line for James Bond, but Wile E. Coyote can’t get a date.

She said, “The reason I mentioned the nail file in my purse is because it’s a metal file, sharp enough at one end to be a weapon.”

“Oh.” I felt inane, and I couldn’t blame my dunderheadedness entirely on her stupidity-inducing good looks. “He took your purse,” I noted.

“Maybe I can get it back.”

Her handbag stood on the table where he sat reading old issues of the Snow County Gazette.

The next time he left the room, we could stand as erect as a chair on our backs would allow and hobble in tandem and as fast as possible toward her purse. The noise would most likely draw him back before we reached our goal.

Or we could make our way across the room with stealth foremost in mind, which would require us to move as slowly as Siamese twins negotiating a minefield. Judging by the average length of time that he had thus far been absent when extracting additional issues from the files, we would not reach the purse before he returned.

As if my thoughts were as clear to her as the lunacy in my eyes, she said, “That’s not what I had in mind. I’m thinking if I claim a female emergency, he’ll let me have my purse.”

Female emergency.

Maybe it was the shock of living out my grandfather’s prediction or maybe it was the persistent memory of the librarian being shot, but I couldn’t get my mind around the meaning of those two words.

Aware of my befuddlement, as she seemed to be aware of every electrical current leaping across every synapse in my brain, Lorrie said, “If I tell him I’m having my period and I desperately need a tampon, I’m sure he’ll do the gentlemanly thing and give me my purse.”

“He’s a murderer,” I reminded her.

“But he doesn’t seem to be a particularly rude murderer.”

“He shot Lionel Davis in the head.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s incapable of courtesy.”

“I wouldn’t bet the bank on it,” I said.

She squinched her face in annoyance and still looked darned good. “I hope to God you’re not a congenital pessimist. That would be just too much—held hostage by a librarian killer and shackled to a congenital pessimist.”

I didn’t want to be disagreeable. I wanted her to like me. Every guy wants a good-looking woman to like him. Nevertheless, I could not accept her characterization of me.

“I’m not a pessimist. I’m a realist.”

She sighed. “That’s what every pessimist says.”

“You’ll see,” I said lamely. “I’m not a pessimist.”

“I’m an indefatigable optimist,” she informed me. “Do you know what that means—indefatigable?”

“The words baker and illiterate aren’t synonyms,” I assured her. “You’re not the only reader and thinker in Snow Village.”

“So what does it mean—indefatigable?”

“Incapable of being fatigued. Persistent.”

“Tireless,” she stressed. “I’m a tireless optimist.”

“It’s a fine line between an optimist and a Pollyanna.”

Fifty feet away, having left the room earlier, the killer returned to his table with an armload of yellowing newspapers.

Lorrie eyed him with predatory calculation. “When the moment’s right,” she whispered, “I’m going to tell him I’ve got a female emergency and need my purse.”

“Sharp or not, a nail file isn’t much use against a gun,” I protested.

“There you go again. Congenital pessimism. That can’t be a good thing even in a baker. If you expect all your cakes to fall, they will.”

“My cakes never fall.”

She raised one eyebrow. “So you say.”

“You think you can stab him in the heart and just stop him like a clock?” I asked with enough disdain to get my point across but not sarcastically enough to alienate her from the possibility that we could have dinner together if we survived the day.

“Stop his heart? Of course not. Second best would be to go for the neck, sever the carotid artery. First choice would be to put out an eye.”

She looked like a dream and talked like a nightmare.

I was probably guilty of gaping again. I know I sputtered: “Put out an eye?”

“Drive it deep enough, and you might even damage the brain,” she said, nodding as if in somber agreement with herself. “He’d have an instant convulsion, drop the gun, and if he didn’t drop it, he’d be so devastated, we could easily just take the pistol out of his hand.”

“Oh my God, you’re going to get us killed.”

“There you go again,” she said.

“Listen,” I tried to reason with her, “when the crunch came, you wouldn’t have the stomach to do something like that.”

“I certainly would, to save my life.”

Alarmed by her calm conviction, I insisted, “You’d flinch at the last moment.”

“I never flinch from anything.”

“Have you ever stabbed someone in the eye before?”

“No. But I can clearly picture myself doing it.”

I couldn’t suppress the sarcasm any longer: “What are you, a professional assassin or something?”

She frowned. “Keep your voice down. I’m a dance instructor.”

“And teaching ballet prepares you to put out a man’s eye?”

“Of course not, silly. I don’t teach ballet. I give ballroom-dancing lessons. Fox-trot, waltz, rumba, tango, cha-cha, swing, you name it.”

Just my luck: to be cuffed to a beautiful woman who turns out to be a ballroom-dance instructor, and me a lummox.

“You’ll flinch,” I insisted, “and you’ll miss his eye, and he’ll shoot us dead.”

“Even if I flub it,” she said, “which I won’t, but even if I do, he won’t shoot us dead. Haven’t you been paying attention? He needs hostages.”

I disagreed. “He doesn’t need hostages who try to stab him in the eye.”

She raised her eyes as if imploring the heavens beyond the ceiling: “Please tell me I’m not shackled to a pessimist and a coward.”

“I’m not a coward. I’m just responsibly cautious.”

“That’s what every coward says.”

“That’s also what every responsibly cautious person says,” I replied, wishing I didn’t sound so defensive.

At the far end of the room, the maniac began to pound one fist against the newspaper he was reading. Then both fists. Pounding and pounding like a baby in a tantrum.

Face contorted fearsomely, he made inarticulate noises of rage. Some rough Neanderthal consciousness, remnant in his genes, seemed to break free from the chains of time and DNA.

Fury informed his voice, then frustration, then what might have been a wild grief, then fury once more and escalating. This was the performance of an animal howling with loss, its rage rooted in the black soil of misery.

He pushed his chair back from the table, picked up his pistol. He emptied the remaining eight rounds in the magazine, aiming at the newspaper he had been reading.

The hard report of each shot boomed off the vaulted ceiling, rang off the brass shades of the inverted torchieres, and crashed back and forth between the metal filing cabinets. I felt echoes of each concussion humming in my teeth.

Cut loose two floors underground, the barrage would be at most a faint crackle at street level.

Splinters of the old oak refectory table sprayed and scraps of paper spun and a couple bullets ricocheted through the air, some fragments trailing threads of smoke. The fragrance of aging newsprint was seasoned with the more acrid scent of gunfire and with a raw wood smell liberated from the table’s wounds.

For a moment, as he repeatedly squeezed the trigger without effect, I rejoiced that he had depleted his ammunition. But of course he had a spare magazine, perhaps several.

While he reloaded the weapon, he seemed intent on delivering ten more rounds to the hated newspaper. Instead, with the fresh magazine installed, his rage abruptly abated. He began to weep. Wretched sobs racked him.

He collapsed into his chair once more and put down the gun. He leaned over the table and seemed to want to piece together the pages that he had ripped and riddled with gunfire, as if some story therein was precious to him.

Still lemony enough to sweeten the air that had been soured by gunfire, Lorrie Lynn Hicks tilted her head toward me and whispered, “You see? He’s vulnerable.”

I wondered if excessive optimism could ever qualify as a form of madness.

Gazing into her eyes, I saw, as previously, the fear that she adamantly refused to express. She winked.

Her stubborn resistance to terror scared me because it seemed so reckless, so irrational—and yet I loved her for it.

Whidding through me, like the spirit of Death’s black horse, came a premonition that she would be shot. Despair followed this dark precognitive flash, and I was desperate to protect her.

In time, the premonition eventually proved true, and nothing I did was able to alter the trajectory of the bullet.

10

Tears damp on his cheeks, green eyes washed clear of bitter emotions, and clear of doubts as well, the maniac had the look of a pilgrim who has been to the mountaintop and knows his destiny, his purpose.

He freed me and Lorrie from the chairs but left us tethered to each other.

“Are you both locals?” he asked as we rose to our feet.

After his violent display and flamboyant emotional outburst, I found it difficult to believe that he now wished to engage in pleasant chitchat. The question had a purpose more important than the words themselves conveyed, which meant our answers might have consequences we could not foresee.

Wary, I hesitated to reply, and the same logic led Lorrie to remain silent as well.

He persisted. “What about it, Jimmy? This is the county library, so people come here from all around. Do you live in town or outside somewhere?”

Although I didn’t know which answer he would regard favorably, I sensed that silence would earn me a bullet. He had shot Lionel Davis for less, for no reason at all.

“I live in Snow Village,” I said.

“How long have you been here?”

“All my life.”

“Do you like it here?”

“Not handcuffed in the subcellar of the library,” I said, “but I like most other places in town, yeah.”

His smile was uncannily appealing, and I couldn’t figure out how anyone’s eyes could twinkle so constantly as his unless implanted in them were motorized prisms that ceaselessly tracked environmental light sources. Surely no other maniacal killer could make you want to like him just by cocking his head and favoring you with a crooked smile.

He said, “You’re a funny guy, Jimmy.”

“I don’t mean to be,” I said apologetically, shuffling my feet on the honed limestone floor. Then I added, “Unless, of course, you want me to be.”

“In spite of everything I’ve been through, I have a sense of humor,” he said.

“I could tell.”

“What about you?” he asked Lorrie.

“I have a sense of humor, too,” she said.

“For sure. You’re way funnier than Jimmy.”

“Way,” she agreed.

“But what I meant,” he clarified, “is do you live here in town?”

As I had answered the same question positively and had not been immediately shot, she dared to say, “Yeah. Two blocks from here.”

“You lived here all your life?”

“No. Just a year.”

This explained how I could have missed seeing her for twenty years. In a community of fourteen thousand, you can pass a long life and never speak to ninety percent of the population.

If I had just once glimpsed her turning a corner, however, I would never have forgotten her face. I would have spent long anxious nights awake, wondering who she was, where she’d gone, how I could find her.

She said, “I grew up in Los Angeles. Nineteen years in L.A. and I wasn’t totally bug-eyed crazy yet, so I knew I had almost no time left to get out.”

“Do you like it here in Snow Village?” he asked.

“So far, yeah. It’s nice.”

Still smiling, still twinkly-eyed, with his charm in full gear and none of the insane-guy edge to his voice, he nevertheless said, “Snow Village is an evil place.”

“Well,” Lorrie said, “sure, it’s evil, but parts of it are also kind of nice.”

“Like Morelli’s Restaurant,” I said.

Lorrie said, “They have fabulous chicken all’ Alba. And the Bijou is a terrific place.”

Delighted that we shared these favorite places, I said, “Imagine a movie theater actually called the Bijou.”

“All those cute Art Deco details,” she said. “And they use real butter on the popcorn.”

“I like Center Square Park,” I said.

The maniac disagreed: “No, that’s an evil place. I sat there earlier, watching the birds crap on the statue of Cornelius Randolph Snow.”

“What’s evil about that?” Lorrie wondered. “If he was half as pompous as the statue makes him look, the birds have got it right.”

“I don’t mean the birds are evil,” the maniac explained with sunny good humor. “Although they might be. What I mean is the park is evil, the ground, all the ground this town is built on.”

I wanted to talk to Lorrie about more things we liked, attitudes we might have in common, and I was pretty sure she wanted to have that conversation, too, but we felt we had to listen to the smiley guy because he had the gun.

“So … did they build the town on an Indian burial ground or something?” Lorrie wondered.

He shook his head. “No, no. The earth itself was good once long ago, but it was corrupted because of evil things that evil people did here.”

“Fortunately,” Lorrie said, “I don’t own any real estate. I’m a renter.”

“I live with my folks,” I told him, hoping this fact would exempt me from complicity with the evil earth.

“The time has come,” he said, “for payback.”

As if to emphasize his threat, a spider suddenly appeared and slowly descended on a silken thread from within the shade of one of the overhead lamps. Projected by the cone of light, the eight-legged shadow on the floor between us and the maniac was the size of a dinner plate, distorted and squirming.

“Answering evil with evil just means everyone loses,” Lorrie said.

“I’m not answering evil with evil,” he replied not angrily but with exasperation. “I’m answering evil with justice.”

“Well, that’s very different,” Lorrie said.

“If I were you,” I told the maniac, “I’d wonder how to know for sure that something I’m doing is justice and not just more evil. I mean, the thing about evil is it’s slippery. My mom says the devil knows how to mislead us into thinking we’re doing the right thing when what we’re really doing is the devil’s work.”

“Your mother sounds like a caring person,” he said.

Sensing I’d made a connection with him, I said, “She is. When I was growing up, she even ironed my socks.”

This revelation drew from Lorrie a look of troubled speculation.

Concerned that she might think I was an eccentric or, worse, a momma’s boy, I quickly added: “I’ve been doing my own ironing since I was seventeen. And I never iron my socks.”

Lorrie’s expression didn’t change.

“I don’t mean that my mother still irons them,” I hastened to assure her. “Nobody irons my socks anymore. Only an idiot irons socks.”

Lorrie frowned.

“Not that I mean my mother is an idiot,” I clarified. “She’s a wonderful woman. She’s not an idiot, she’s just caring. I mean other people who iron their socks are idiots.”

At once I saw that with the language skills of a lummox, I had talked myself into a corner.

“If either of you irons your socks,” I said, “I don’t mean that you’re idiots. I’m sure you’re just caring people, like my mom.”

With disturbingly similar expressions, Lorrie and the maniac stared at me as though I had just walked down the debarkation ramp from a flying saucer.

I thought that being shackled to me suddenly creeped her out, and I figured the maniac would decide that a single hostage was plenty of insurance, after all.

The descending spider still hung over our heads, but its shadow on the floor was smaller, now the size of a salad plate, and blurry.

To my surprise, the killer’s eyes grew misty. “That was very touching—the socks. Very sweet.”

My sock story didn’t seem to have struck a sentimental chord in Lorrie. She stared at me with squint-eyed intensity.

The maniac said, “You’re a very lucky man, Jimmy.”

“I am,” I agreed, although my only bit of luck—being cuffed to Lorrie Lynn Hicks instead of to a diseased wino—seemed to be turning sour.

“To have a caring mother,” the maniac mused. “What must that be like?”

“Good,” I said, “it’s good,” but I didn’t trust myself to say more.

Spinning gossamer from its innards, the spider unreeled a longer umbilical, finally dangling in front of our faces.

With dreamy-voiced eloquence, the killer said, “To have a caring mother who makes you hot cocoa each evening, tucks you in bed every night, kisses you on the cheek, reads you to sleep….”

Before I myself could read, I was almost always read to sleep because ours is a bookish family. More often than not, however, the reader had been my Grandma Rowena.

Sometimes the story was about a Snow White whose seven dwarf friends suffered fatal accidents and diseases until it was Snow alone against the evil queen. Come to think of it, a two-ton safe fell on Happy once. That was a lot cleaner than what happened to poor Sneezy. Or maybe Weena would read the one about Cinderella—the dangerous glass slippers splintering painfully around Cindy’s feet, the pumpkin coach plunging off the road into the ravine.

I was a grown man before I discovered that in Arnold Lobel’s charming Frog and Toad books, there was not always a scene in which one or the other of the title characters had a foot gnawed off by another meadowland creature.

“I didn’t have a caring mother,” the maniac said, a disturbing note of whiny distress entering his voice. “My childhood was hard, cold, and loveless.”

Now occurred an unexpected turn of events: My fear of being shot to death took second place to the dread that this guy would harangue us with a droning account of his victimization. Beaten with wire coathangers. Forced to wear girly clothes until he was six. Sent to bed without his porridge.

I didn’t need to get kidnapped, cuffed, and held at gunpoint to be subjected to a pityfest. I could have stayed home and watched daytime-TV talk shows.

Fortunately, he bit his lip, stiffened his spine, and said, “It’s a waste of time to dwell on the past. What’s done is done.”

Unfortunately, the glimmer of teary self-pity in his eyes was not replaced by that charming twinkle, but instead by a fanatical gleam.

The spider had not continued its descent. It hung in front of our faces, perhaps freaked out by the sight of us and frozen in fear.

As though he were a vintner plucking a grape from a vine, the maniac pinched the fat spider between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, crushed it, and brought the mangled remains to his nose to savor the scent.

I hoped he wouldn’t offer me a sniff. I have a highly refined sense of smell, which is one reason that I’m a natural-born baker.

Fortunately, he had no intention of sharing the heady fragrance.

Unfortunately, he brought the morsel to his mouth and delicately licked the arachnid paste. He savored this strange fruit, decided it was not sufficiently ripe, and wiped his fingers on the sleeve of his jacket.

Here was a graduate of Hannibal Lecter University, ready for a career in hospitality services as the new manager of the Bates Motel.

This spider-sampling had not been a performance for our benefit. The entire incident had been as unconscious as shooing away a fly, except the opposite.

Now, quite unaware of the effect his culinary curiosity had on us, he said, “Anyway, the time for talking is long past. It’s time for action now, for justice.”

“And how will that justice be achieved?” Lorrie wondered. For the moment, anyway, she was no longer able to maintain a sprightly, let alone flippant, let alone devil-may-care tone of voice.

In spite of his adult baritone, he sounded uncannily like an angry little boy: “I’m going to blow up a lot of stuff and kill a bunch of people and make this town sorry.”

“Sounds pretty ambitious,” she said.

“I’ve been planning this all my life.”

Having changed my mind, I said, “Actually, I’d really like to hear about the coathangers.”

“What coathangers?” he asked.

Before I could talk my way into a bullet between the eyes, Lorrie said, “Do you think I could have my purse?”

He frowned. “Why?”

“It’s a female emergency.”

I couldn’t believe she was going to do this. I knew I hadn’t won the argument, but I assumed that I’d put enough doubt in her mind to give her second thoughts.

“Female emergency?” the maniac asked. “What’s that mean?”

“You know,” she said coyly.

For a guy who looked like a babe magnet able to draw swooning women like iron filings from a hundred-mile radius, he proved surprisingly obtuse in this matter. “How would I know?”

“It’s that time of month,” she said.

He claimed bafflement. “The middle?”

As if it were infectious, Lorrie caught his bewilderment: “The middle?”

“It’s the middle of the month,” he reminded her. “The fifteenth of September. So what?”

“It’s my time of month,” she elucidated.

He just stared at her, befuddled.

“I’m having my period,” she declared impatiently.

The furrows in his brow were smoothed away by understanding. “Ah. A female emergency.”

“Yes. That’s right. Hallelujah. Now may I have my purse?”

“Why?”

If she ever got her hands on that nail file, she would plunge it into him with enthusiasm.

“I need a tampon,” she said.

“You’re saying there’s a tampon in your purse?”

“Yes.”

“And you need it now, you can’t wait?”

“No, I absolutely can’t wait,” she confirmed. Then she played to his compassionate side, which he hadn’t shown to the head-shot librarian, but which she seemed to think must be there, considering that he had not been actually rude: “I’m sorry, gee, this is so embarrassing.”

Regarding matters female, he might be a bit thick, but regarding Machiavellian schemes, he smelled a rat instantly: “What’s really in your purse—a gun?”

Admitting that she had been caught out, Lorrie shrugged. “No gun. Just a pointy metal nail file.”

“You were going to—what?—stab me in the carotid artery?”

“Only if I couldn’t get one of your eyes,” she said.

He raised his pistol, and though he pointed it at her, I figured that once he started blasting away, he’d drill me, too. I’d seen what he’d done to the newspaper.

“I should kill you dead right here,” he said, although without any animosity in his voice.

“You should,” she agreed. “I would if I were you.”

He grinned and shook his head. “What a piece of work.”

“Right back at ya,” she said, and matched his grin.

My teeth were revealed molar to molar, as well, though my grin was so tight with anxiety that it hurt my face.

“All these years, planning for this day,” the maniac said, “I expected it to be gratifying in a savage sort of way, even thrilling, but I never thought it would be as much fun as this.”

Lorrie said, “A party can never be better than the guests you invite.”

The lunatic killer considered this as if Lorrie had quoted one of the most complex philosophical propositions of Schopenhauer. He nodded solemnly, rolled his tongue over his teeth, uppers and lowers, as though he could taste the brilliance of those words, and finally he said, “How true. How very true.”

I realized that I wasn’t holding up my end of the conversation. I didn’t want him to get the idea that a party of two might be more fun than three.

When I opened my mouth—no doubt to say something even more inappropriate than my stupid coathangers line, something that would bring me closer to a bullet in the groin—a great hollow peal tolled through the vaulted subcellar. King Kong pounded his mighty fists one, two, three times against the giant door in the massive wall that separated his half of the island from the half where the nervous natives lived.

The maniac brightened at the sound. “That’ll be Honker and Crinkles. You’ll like them. They have the explosives.”

11

As it turned out, Cornelius Randolph Snow not only had a keen appreciation for fine Victorian architecture but also for Victorian hugger-mugger of the kind that flourished in melodramas of the period and that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had used with singular effect in his immortal Sherlock Holmes yarns: concealed doors, hidden rooms, blind staircases, secret passageways.

Hand in hand but only because of the steel cuffs, quickly but only because of the gun prodding us in the back, Lorrie and I went to the end of the room where the maniac had brutally shot the old newspaper.

Shelves spanned the width of that wall, rose from floor to ceiling. Stored thereon were periodicals in labeled slipcases.

The maniac studied several shelves, up and down, back and forth, maybe looking for the 1952 run of Life magazine, maybe hoping to spot a juicier spider.

Nope, neither. He was searching for a hidden switch. He found it, and a section of bookshelves pivoted open, revealing an alcove behind them.

At the back of the alcove, a stone wall embraced an iron-banded oak door. In an age that demanded harsher punishment for patrons with overdue books, they might have kept a tardy Jane Austen reader here until solitary confinement and a short ration of gruel brought the miscreant to remorse and contrition.

The maniac pounded one fist three times on the door—obviously an answering signal.

From the farther side came two knocks, hollow and loud.

After the maniac responded with two, a single knock came from the space beyond. He answered with one thump.

This seemed to be an unnecessarily complicated passcode, but the maniac was delighted by the ritual. He beamed happily at us.

His toothy smile no longer had quite the endearing quality that had marked it previously. He was an adorable-looking fellow, and against your better judgment, you still wanted to be charmed by him, but you kept scanning for dark hairy bits of spider on his lips and tongue.

A moment after the last knock, the buzz of a small high-speed motor arose from the farther side of the door. Then metal shrieked on metal.

A diamond-point steel drill bit thrust through the keyhole. The spinning shaft chewed up the lock mechanism and spat metal shavings on the floor.

Our host raised his voice and reported with boyish enthusiasm: “We tortured a member of the Snow Village Historical Preservation Society, but we couldn’t get keys out of him. I’m sure he’d have given them to us if he’d known where to get them, but it was our bad luck—and his—that we chose the wrong person to torture. So we’ve had to resort to this.”

Lorrie’s cuffed hand sought my cuffed hand and held it tight.

I wished that we had met under different circumstances. Like at a town picnic or even at a tea dance.

The drill withdrew from the lock plate, fell silent. The broken lock assembly rattled, clinked, twanged, and gave way as the door opened into the alcove.

I had a glimpse of what appeared to be an eerily lit tunnel beyond the door.

A dour man came through, out of the alcove, past the pivoted section of bookcase, into the library’s subcellar. A similar specimen followed him, pulling a handcart.

The first newcomer was about fifty, totally bald, with black eyebrows so shaggy that you could have knitted a child’s sweater from them. He wore khakis, a green Ban Lon shirt, and a shoulder holster with gun.

“Excellent, excellent. You’re right on time, Honker,” said the maniac.

I had no way of knowing whether the new guy’s name was, say, Bob Honker, or whether this was a nickname inspired by the size of his nose. He had an enormous nose. Once it must have been straight and proud, but time had rendered it a spongy lump, ruddy with a fine webbing of burst capillaries—the nose of a serious drinker.

Honker appeared to be sober now, but brooding and suspicious.

He scowled at me, at Lorrie, and said gruffly, “Who’re the bitch and Bigfoot?”

“Hostages,” the maniac explained.

“What the hell we need hostages for?”

“If something goes wrong.”

“You think something’ll go wrong?”

“No,” the maniac said, “but they entertain me.”

The second newcomer stepped away from the handcart to join the discussion. He resembled Art Garfunkel, the singer: a decadent choirboy’s face, electroshocked hair.

He wore a zippered nylon windbreaker over a T-shirt, but I could see the bulk of a holster and weapon beneath it.

“Whether something goes wrong or not,” he said, “we’ll have to waste them.”

“Of course,” the maniac said.

“It’d be a shame to off the bitch without using it,” said the choirboy.

More than their casual talk of murdering us, this reference to Lorrie as “it” chilled me.

Her hand gripped mine so tightly that my knuckles ached.

The maniac said, “Put her out of your mind, Crinkles. That isn’t going to happen.”

Whether this was the guy’s legal name or nickname, you might expect someone called Crinkles either to have a well-creased face or to be wonderfully amusing. His face looked as smooth as a hard-boiled egg, and he was about as amusing as an antibiotic-resistant streptococcus infection.

To the maniac, Crinkles said, “Why’s she off limits? She belong to you?”

“She belongs to nobody,” our host replied with some annoyance. “We didn’t come all this way just to score some quiff. If we don’t stay focused on the main objective, the whole operation will fall apart.”

I felt that I ought to say something to the effect that if they wanted to get at Lorrie, they would have to come through me. But the truth was, armed and crazy, they could come through me as easily as the blades of a kitchen mixer churning through cake batter.

The prospect of dying didn’t distress me nearly as much as the realization that I was helpless to defend her.

I hadn’t made pastry chef yet, but in my mind I had always been a hero—or could be in a crisis. As a kid, I often fantasized about whipping up soufflés au chocolat fit for kings while at the same time battling the evil minions of Darth Vader.

Now reality set in. These violent lunatics would eat Darth Vader in a pita pocket and pick their teeth with his light saber.

“Whether something goes wrong or not,” Crinkles repeated, “we’ll have to burn them.”

“We’ve already gone over this,” the maniac said impatiently.

“Because they’ve seen our faces,” Crinkles persisted, “we’ll have to whack them both.”

“I understand,” the maniac assured him.

Crinkles had eyes the color of brandy. They grew pale when he said, “The time comes, I want to be the one gets to ice the bitch.”

Waste, off, burn, whack, ice. This guy was a walking thesaurus when it came to synonyms for kill.

Maybe this meant he had croaked so many people that he found discussion of murder boring and therefore needed richer language to maintain his interest. Or, conversely, he might be a hit-man wannabe, all boast and jargon, with no guts when it came to doing the dirty deed.

Considering that Crinkles hung out with a madman who shot librarians for no reason and who saw no difference between spiders and bonbons, I decided that the wisest course was not to doubt his sincerity.

“You can whack her when we won’t need hostages anymore,” the maniac promised Crinkles. “I don’t have a problem with that.”

“Hell, you can whack both of them,” Honker said. “Means nothing to me.”

“Thanks,” Crinkles said. “I appreciate that.”

“De nada,” said Honker.

The maniac guided us to another pair of wooden chairs. Although he had backup now, he nevertheless secured our cuffs to one of the back-rails, as he had done previously.

The two newcomers began to unload the cargo on the handcart. There were at least a hundred one-kilo bricks of a gray substance wrapped in what appeared to be greasy, translucent paper.

I’m not a demolitions expert, not even a demolitions dabbler, but I figured these were the explosives of which the maniac had spoken.

Honker and Crinkles were physically the same type: burly and thick-necked but quick on their feet. They reminded me of the Beagle Boys.

In the Scrooge McDuck comic books that I loved as a child, a group of criminal brothers were perpetually scheming to raid Uncle Scrooge’s enormous money bin, where he swam through his fortune as if it were an ocean and occasionally recontoured the acres of gold coins with a bulldozer. These felons were blunt-faced, round-shouldered, barrel-chested, doglike creatures that stood erect in the manner of human beings, had hands instead of paws, and owned a signature wardrobe of prison-stripe shirts.

Although Honker and Crinkles chose not to advertise their villainy by the outfits they wore, they were body doubles for those comic-book villains. The Beagle Boys, however, were more handsome than Honker and a lot less scary-looking than Crinkles.

These two worked quickly, tirelessly. They were obviously happy to be occupied in useful criminal activity.

While his associates distributed bricks of plastic explosives to all points of the subcellar, in this room and others, the maniac sat at the study table. He carefully synchronized the clocks on more than a dozen detonators.

He hunched over his work, concentrating intensely. He pinched his tongue gently between his teeth. His dark hair fell across his forehead, and he kept brushing it back, out of his eyes.

If you squinted, blurring the scene just a little, he looked like a twelve-year-old hobbyist assembling a plastic model of a Navy fighter jet.

Lorrie and I were far enough away from him that we could talk privately if we kept our voices low.

Leaning close, she said conspiratorially, “If we’re in the room alone with Crinkles, I’m going to tell him I’m having a female emergency.”

Being in the hands of three psychotics instead of one, hearing herself referred to as it, listening to them discuss our execution with no more emotion than if they had been deciding who should take out the trash: I had thought all of that would surely give her second thoughts about reckless actions based on wildly exuberant optimism. To Lorrie Lynn, three psychotics just meant two more opportunities to bamboozle someone with the female-emergency story, get her hands on the nail file, and stab her way to freedom.

“You’re going to get us killed,” I warned again.

“That’s lame. They’re going to kill us anyway. Weren’t you listening?”

“But you’ll get us killed sooner,” I said, managing to make a whisper surprisingly shrill, and realized that I sounded as if I had a university degree in wimp.

What had happened to the kid who’d been pumped for intergalactic warfare? Wasn’t he still inside me somewhere?

Lorrie couldn’t get her hand out of the cuffs, but she could slip her hand out of mine. She looked as if she wanted to wash it. In carbolic acid.

When it comes to romance, I’d had some success, but I wasn’t a reincarnation of Rudolph Valentino. In fact, I didn’t need a little black book to record the phone numbers of all my conquests. I didn’t even need a page from a little black book. A Post-it note would do. One of the half-size Post-its you stick to the fridge as a reminder: just room enough to print BUY CARROTS FOR DINNER.

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