The Night Watchman Read online

  I felt the quiet, invisible need for sunlight hiding under all that green. And with it, I sensed my own desire to hold onto the good life I had made for myself.

  Gazing over the back wall, I noticed that one of the neighbouring houses was topped by a stained-glass skylight with two of its panes missing. Most of the tile roof had caved in as well.

  On returning to the library, I studied the pictures of the victim’s wife and kid. There was one of Coutinho with his arms around his daughter – nuzzling into her neck and tickling her; it softened my opinion of him. Sandi must have been eight or nine years old in the picture, and she was squirming with joyful delight.

  In the largest photo, set in a gold frame, the girl’s face was more adult and expressive. She was holding a schoolbook to the camera like a shield, and though she was eyeing the lens as though to appear threatening, she was also about to burst out laughing. Her mom rested her head on the girl’s shoulder and was staring pensively at the lens, and intimately, as well – with the ease of showing one’s true self that comes from great love, it seemed to me. My guess was that Coutinho had blown this one up because of what her devotion meant to him – and maybe, too, because it showed that Sandi was growing up.

  Next door, in the master bedroom, a large painting of a powerful centaur – swiftly executed with Coutinho’s slashing brushstrokes – hung above the bed. The centaur’s sleek, vigorous body was black, and his human eyes – the blue of a medieval fresco – were keenly intelligent and strangely wary. I am watching you, the mythical creature seemed to be saying. Perhaps Coutinho had painted it as a warning to his wife.

  I headed to the top floor of the house, where Sandra had her bedroom. The hallway was stiflingly hot and smelled of overheated dust.

  The parquet floor of her room was a minefield of scattered books and CDs. Yet the bed had been made military-school perfect. I suspected that her parents had struck a bargain with her: if she straightened her bed every day, they’d forbid Senhora Grimault from setting foot inside. My wife and I had made a similar accord with our eldest son, Nati.

  As I raised the blinds, the slanting light caught the parquet and climbed over the girl’s yellow bedspread towards her matching pillows. The walls and ceiling had been painted black, which seemed a strange choice, but also perfectly in keeping with the poster of a teenage vampire prowling the wall above her desk. He was slavering blood and trying his best to appear sinister, but his film-star pose and Hollywood-perfect hair made his effort seem pointless. A well-worn Persian rug patterned with blue and gold arabesques led from the bed to the dresser, which was a simple, utilitarian design. Above the dresser was a Mexican mirror, with masked Carnival figures – in highly worked silver – prancing around the frame.

  Stuffed animals and dolls were propped on the girl’s bed: fourteen stuffed bears, four cats, three Barbies, a Spider-Man action figure and a big-bellied panda with oversized blue eyes. Those gigantic eyes – and her father’s fondness for Japanese culture – made me think the design had originated in a Japanese cartoon. I’d have wagered that her dad had bought it for her.

  Beside the bed, seven pairs of colourful sneakers, from midnight blue through electric pink, hung on nails hammered into the wall. A lime-green pair with golden laces was my favourite. Sandra must have liked standing out. I admired her courage.

  On a wooden shelf leading from her desk towards the back wall were about 200 CDs, most of them American and English rock. A small glass table below her window was reserved for photos of Nero. He was grey and bouncy-looking. His long pink tongue seemed always to be hanging out.

  Sandra had a teenage vampire novel called Queimada – Burnt – on her night table, along with three CDs: Day & Age by The Killers, Lungs by Florence + the Machine and Let England Shake, by P J Harvey. I’d heard of Harvey but not the others. Sandra’s alarm clock doubled as a CD player. It was 11.47 a.m.

  Struck by the notion that something was missing, I turned in a circle. A dark stain on the belly of her stuffed bear’s belly drew my attention. As I touched it, I sensed someone approaching me from behind. Before I could turn, a blow caught me at the back of my head.

  I found myself looking down at my fists, unsure of where I was. My heart was racing and my lips were dry. I was sweating as though I’d made a dash for safety. My mouth tasted of tobacco.

  My writing pad was on the floor near my feet. I was seated on Sandra’s bed. Her alarm clock read 12.19. I’d lost just over half an hour.

  Only a few moments earlier, I seemed to have taken hold of my brother’s wrist to keep him from falling; we’d been standing on the roof of our home in Colorado.

  Closing my eyes, I became certain that the house in my dream wasn’t just in my memory but was a design of my memory. The roof and all the rooms below – my bedroom and closet, most of all – were where everything I’d ever experienced was stored. By going up to the roof and taking my brother with me, I was trying to locate events I’d long forgotten – hoping, it now seemed to me, to find moments from the past that would help me solve this case.

  As I stood up, I caught sight of the ink on my left hand. Running across my palm and along my thumb was a message from Gabriel: H: bad memories under girl’s bed. Painting by Almeida in the wrong place. Sneak a peek at the French–Farsi dictionary. Why doesn’t Sandi display any photos of herself?

  Under the last line, Gabriel had drawn crossed arrows, an indication that he wanted me again – and soon.

  Chapter 5

  I first received a message on the palm of my left hand when I was eight years old. It was written in blue ink, in crooked, ant-sized letters. I read it while seated on the floral-patterned couch on our wooden porch. The handwriting didn’t look like my mom’s or mine. The message said: H – Your dad will want to test you and Ernie on Friday. So after school, take Ernie away from the house and don’t return until after dark.

  Who could have written it? And how had it been scribbled on my hand without my being aware of it?

  Figuring that the writing could get me into trouble with my father, I ran to the rusty faucet at the back of our house and scrubbed it off.

  Bigger kids had told me stories of haunted houses by then, and while I was examining the residue of ink on my palm that night – shining my flashlight on it while sitting up under my bed sheet – I came to the conclusion that a ghost had gotten in touch with me. That notion didn’t scare me; the message had been meant to keep me safe, I concluded, and the idea that someone from beyond the grave was watching me made me tingle in that way kids do when they’re embarking on a big – and potentially dangerous – adventure. I started to call him the Spectre because Dad had given me his old comic book collection, and there were several featuring that ghostly superhero.

  I don’t know how I formed my ideas about the Spectre, but I came to believe that he was an adult who’d lost his battle with a fatal illness a few years earlier. I decided that he’d been forty-seven years old at the time of his death and had grown up a few miles from our house, at an old abandoned shack I’d passed a hundred times, out on State Road 92.

  When he was alive, the Spectre had had an understanding, world-weary face, long hair, and a jangly, tired kind of walk. He had never married or had children.

  I decided that he had come back from the dead to help me.

  Just before I got his first message, I’d been watching my father yell at Ernie for peeing on his favourite armchair while napping. My brother was four years old then, and Dad’s shouting started him bawling. My heart was drumming because I knew that our father would grab him and shake him until he shut up, and my brother’s body would go all limp, and his eyes would become dull, almost dead. Then the writing appeared on my hand, and I was no longer in the living room. I was seated outside. I felt split in half – as if I were in two places at once.

  After I washed off the message, I found Ernie in the room we shared, under his covers, snoozing away on his belly.

  The Spectre’s suggestion made good sense t
o me, so, on Friday, right after I got home from school, I went to my parents’ bedroom and told Mom I was taking Ernie to a friend’s birthday party. She lowered the wings of her paperback novel and told me, ‘Do whatever you think best, honey.’

  Now, thirty-four years later, it struck me as odd that Mom would trust me to take Ernie out with me all afternoon and evening, since I was just eight years old. But at the time it seemed normal; my mother hardly ever got dressed by then. During the day, when Dad was at the sawmill, she took lots of naps, nesting tight in her blankets, or read a book, though once in a while, when I’d go into her room and sing for her, or dance around to make her laugh, she’d find the energy to slip on some jeans and a blouse, go down to the kitchen and bake me and Ernie a pie or go with us for a walk outside.

  Occasionally, the three of us would pick flowers together. Mom told me once that wildflowers were the sun’s way of getting to know the earth. I loved to hear her say amazing things like that in her Portuguese accent.

  After she died, I discovered Mom’s stash of medications in a box behind her old coats in her walk-in closet, and I realized that she’d been taking huge doses of Valium, and that Dad had been picking up the pills for her at Morton’s Drugstore in Gunnison, because the name and address of that pharmacy were on the label. And I realized, too, that she must have known that I looked through her night-table drawer sometimes, or else she’d have kept the pills there.

  Mom had stopped driving by then. Dad must’ve liked her better as a stay-at-home zombie.

  The topmost layer of Mom’s night-table drawer was her first-aid station. It contained Bayer children’s aspirin, gauze pads, mercurochrome, Polysporin ointment and lots of other useful things. Under all that were splashy brochures for cruises around Europe and her books of poetry. And also a deck of cards with pictures on the back of Lisbon’s landmarks, like the Belém Tower and Jerónimos Monastery.

  After my brother and I moved to Portugal, I discovered her beat-up old copy of Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems in a box that Ernie had packed, and I discovered that she had underlined these lines:

  I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells, dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.

  I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

  Reading that verse in Mom’s book, I turned to ice, because I remembered my dad telling me, ‘I’m going to do to Ernie what the Colorado winter does to our apple trees,’ and I realized more clearly than ever before that he’d had a gift for recognizing what was most beautiful in the world and destroying it.

  At the very bottom of Mom’s night-table drawer was a brown envelope containing pictures of her parents and older sister, Olivia, who lived back home in Portugal. The one I liked best showed the two sisters at the beach at Caparica when Mom was twelve and Aunt Olivia nineteen. They’re each holding up a ping-pong racket and grinning. I keep that picture in my wallet. I like having the two sisters with me wherever I go.

  After Mom died, Dad used to take me and Ernie on trips all over Colorado and New Mexico. We saw a golden eagle nest in Rocky Mountain National Park and stayed the weekend at a motel in Santa Fe that had deer antlers over the reception desk. He even let us share his bed on most nights, Ernie on one side of him and me on the other, and he’d keep his hand atop my head all night, because I’d decided I couldn’t sleep if he wasn’t exactly where he was supposed to be.

  Maybe everything I’ve done in my life has its origin in my father’s complexity. And maybe every case I’ve investigated has been one more opportunity to solve the mystery forever staring at me with his suspicious brown eyes – which are also my eyes, for better or for worse. Do we all lead the lives we lead because we have to know why things happened the way they did, and if there had been any other way they could have combined together to produce something more gentle and meaningful and permanent?

  I have two photos of my mother from 1980. I know I took them that summer, because Dad bought me a Canon camera at the end of the school year. Mom looks all used up in them, as if she’d been on an uphill climb for so long that she was too exhausted to go on, though she was only thirty-eight years old at the time – still young, though her eyes are bruised-looking and her hair is like old frayed rope.

  I don’t look at those photos of her too often. They’re in my night-table drawer, right at the bottom, where no one else will ever see just how dead inside she’d become.

  I have no idea where the negatives are. I couldn’t find them when it came time to leave for Portugal. I hope the new owners of our Colorado ranch discovered where they were and threw them out; I don’t like to think of my mom’s negatives stuck in a place where she was so unhappy; death should free us, if nothing else.

  On the Friday after receiving the Spectre’s first message, I grabbed Ernie and led him down by the stream, a quarter of a mile from our house, to a meadow where my dad and I used to practise shooting. I grabbed a blanket, too, since even though it was late May, we were at six thousand seven hundred feet and temperatures fell below freezing at night. We lived a half-mile from our nearest neighbours, a couple in their eighties named Johnson. Both Mr and Mrs Johnson were deaf, I figured at the time. Now, I realize that they must not have wanted to get mixed up in what went on at our ranch.

  Ernie had an ornery, little-kid energy that could drive you crazy, since if you didn’t watch him closely he might start tugging the cord of a lamp out of the socket or turn over the garbage in the kitchen. I can see now that he was just naturally curious, but at the time his actions seemed aimed at getting both of us punished by Dad.

  Ernie lived on the surface of his senses as a kid. In particular, he was tuned in to the calls of birds in the morning. And to their colours. Their singing and screeching would wake him up at dawn, and he’d slide out of bed in his pyjamas and stand at our window as if he were watching Santa Claus and his reindeer prepare for their Christmas Eve adventures. Ernie had dark brown hair cut real short and big watery green eyes that were always darting around, with the long lashes that a lot of Portuguese people have. And he had a scent that was all his own, and that I loved – like warm oatmeal.

  ‘They look to me like tiny fern fronds.’

  That’s what Mom used to say about Ernie’s eyelashes.

  When Mom complimented Ernie’s looks, maybe she was also saying that there was still something special and beautiful about herself, too, even though it had become nearly impossible to see. I hope that was part of what she meant. I hope it every day of my life.

  Dad must have also sensed that Ernie wasn’t like everyone else. And he had to have noticed that Ernie – even as a little kid – looked a lot like Mom and almost nothing like him.

  I know I disappointed my mother. That’s the hardest thing of all for me to admit.

  Anyway, on that Friday afternoon when the Spectre first wrote to me, I led Ernie down to our stream. He started to kick up a fuss because I hadn’t remembered to bring along any food. I diverted his attention by asking him to name the wildflowers all around us. At that time of year, our meadow was like a botanical garden, and all of those yellow, purple and scarlet blossoms seemed as eager as we were to warm up in the sun after our long winter. And to be recognized for who they were.

  Indian Paintbrush was Ernie’s favourite flower because it had tufted scarlet blossoms that seemed to tickle your fingers when you touched them. Mom once showed us how to dry flowers in between the pages of a book, and so we sometimes used to pick Paintbrush blossoms and slip them into the American College Dictionary that she bought me for my eighth birthday. She said that Ernie and I needed to learn English perfectly if we were going to be a success in America.

  She always predicted that Ernie would become a scientist. He had that sort of unstoppable, wide-eyed curiosity about simple things. I thought so too.

  After an hour of leading Ernie around, I wanted to sit down and rest, but he started to bawl every time I left him alone. It was like he was battery-operated, programmed
to erupt into hot tears if I didn’t hold his hand.

  After the sun eased down over the edge of a faraway mountain, we spotted a wild turkey – a hen – nesting beneath a big scrub oak. Her chicks were all around her, and we listened to them making those scratchy, high-pitched fiddle sounds they made when they wanted to let their mother know just where they were.

  When we finally got home, I was so pooped I could hardly stand. It was just after nine p.m. Dad was passed out on the couch in our living room. He reeked of tequila and cigars, and he’d taken off his shirt and trousers, but was still in his underwear and Milwaukee Braves baseball cap. Bessie Smith was singing on our record player in that big scratchy voice of hers. It was an old seventy-eight with a purple label.

  I went to our parents’ room and told Mom that Ernie was starving. She and I tiptoed into the kitchen. She opened up a can of Heinz baked beans and heated the mixture on the range with a little bit of tomato paste and water. I stood Ernie on a chair, and while he and I watched the thick liquid bubble and hiss, I whispered to Mom about the turkey family we’d seen.

  Ernie and I gorged ourselves in our closet. He dug into our bowl with a soupspoon that made it only halfway to his mouth before spilling a good part of its beans on the towel I’d wrapped around his neck.

  Before bed, Mom said it was good we’d gone away in the afternoon because Dad had come home real angry, and so drunk that hardly could he keep his stability to make pee. That was when I became certain that the Spectre had given me good advice.

  Dad went out with his workmates and drank too much on the last Friday of every month; it was payday. I didn’t realize that when I was little. But the Spectre knew it. That’s how he was able to warn me not to be home that afternoon. He was cleverer than I was. Maybe because he was an adult.

  From then on, the Spectre used to write on my hand once a week or so, mostly warnings about when Dad was sure to be so drunk that he’d get a really bad hangover. Almost right away, the Spectre started taking Dad’s tests for me, too. He became much better at finding Ernie than I was. He saved my brother from getting badly hurt on a few occasions when I’d never have located him in time.