The Straw Men 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Straw Men, The Lonely Dead, Blood of Angels. Michael Marshall
will never go away, and often a movement will cause it to nudge a nerve ending and burn like fire for a while. However much it hurts when that happens, the last thing you want to do is take a knife and reopen the wound.
I left the house, locking up carefully, and went next door to Mary’s. She seemed both pleased and surprised to see me, and dealt coffee and cake in dangerous quantities. Feeling underhanded and unworthy of her kindness, I established in roundabout ways that my parents had seemed their normal selves in the days and weeks leading up to the accident, and that – as Officer Spurling later confirmed – Mary had identified the bodies. I knew this already. She’d told me on the phone, as I sat bonelessly in Santa Barbara. I just needed to hear it again. I could have visited the bodies at the undertakers myself, of course, instead of sitting in the hotel for two days. I hadn’t, which now made me feel ashamed. I’d told myself at the time that it was important to remember them as they had been, rather than as two lengths of damaged putty. There was truth in that. But also I had been afraid, bothered by the idea, and simply unwilling.
After I left Mary I went round to the other neighbours. A young woman opened the door almost instantly, startling me. She was confident and healthy-looking, and wearing generously paint-spattered clothes. The hallway behind her was half finished in a shade I considered ill-advised. I introduced myself and explained what had happened to their neighbours. She was already aware of events, as I’d known she would be. She expressed her condolences and we chatted for a moment. At no point did anything in her manner suggest that the accident hadn’t come as a surprise, what with one or both of the Hopkinses being evidently off their heads. That was that.
I called the cops, and then went to the hospital. As I stood in the parking lot after talking to the doctor, I decided that three confirmations were enough. My parents were dead. Only a fool would follow this line of inquiry any further. I could talk to Davids the next day if I wished – I’d missed him at his office, and left a message – but I knew anything he told me would lead to the same conclusion. The note wasn’t what it purported to be. It wasn’t a get-out-of-grief card. It didn’t undo what had happened.
But there had to be a reason for it, even if that reason turned out to be only that one of them had not been completely sane. The note’s existence meant something, and I found that I needed to know what that was.
I searched in the garage, and then my father’s workshop in the cellar of the house. I felt I should be looking for something in particular, but didn’t know what, so I just poked around. Drills, routers, other handyman kit of obscure purpose. Nails and screws in a wide variety of sizes, neatly sorted. Numerous scraps of wood, rendered purposeless and inexplicable by his death. Nothing seemed obviously out of place, all was arranged with the tidiness and rigour I would have expected. If external order can be taken as an index of state of mind, my father had been the same as ever.
I went back up into the house and did the downstairs first. The kitchen and utility room, the sitting room, my father’s den, the dining room, and the section of the porch that at some time in the past had been glassed in and turned into a sunroom. Here I was more thorough. I looked beneath every cushion, under the rugs, and behind every piece of furniture. I looked inside the cabinet, under the television, and found nothing except technology and a couple of DVDs. I took everything out of the cupboards in the kitchen, looked in the oven and the larder. I picked up and shook every book I found, whether on the bookcases in the hallway, or filed, in my mother’s idiosyncratic way, among the dried pasta. There were a lot of books. It took a long time. Especially my father’s study, off the half-landing, which was where I looked first. I dug through the drawers of his desk, on every shelf, and dipped into each hanging file in the oak cabinet. I even turned on his computer and took a cursory trawl through a few files, though this felt unwelcome and invasive. I wouldn’t want anyone who loved me sifting through the contents of my laptop. They’d be likely to dig me up and set fire to me. It soon became obvious that it would take far too long to read everything on the machine, and that it would very likely turn out to be nothing but invoices and workaday correspondence. I left the machine on, with the idea of coming back to it if all else failed, but my father wasn’t a computer buff. I didn’t think he’d leave a further message anywhere he couldn’t touch with his hands.
Before long I was beginning to feel worn out. Not with the physical effort, which was negligible, but the emotional undertow. Thoroughly upending my parents’ lives brought them back even more vehemently, especially the trivial things. A framed photocopy of the contract for the first house UnRealty had sold, capped by a logo that I now realized looked a little hand-drawn. By my mother, probably. A scrapbook of recipes for childhood meals, including a lasagne I could smell just by reading the ingredients.
I took a break and spent fifteen minutes sitting in the kitchen, drinking their mineral water. I tried once again to put myself in their position, to think what might be an obvious second step. Assuming they’d left the note in the chair to attract my attention, it made sense that any further note or clue would also be in a place that had resonance. I couldn’t think where that would be. I’d turned everything over. There was nothing there.
The upstairs of the house proved just as much of a bust. I looked under the bed in their room, searched all the drawers. After a deep breath, I went through the contents of the wardrobes, paying special attention to those I recognized – my father’s old jackets, my mother’s battered ex-handbags. I found a few things – receipts, ticket stubs, a handful of loose change – nothing that seemed to mean anything. I lingered over a collection of old ties, neatly boxed in the back of my father’s side of the closet. I’d never seen most of them.
I even looked under the roof, pulling myself up into it via a small trapdoor in the ceiling of the upstairs hallway. My father had got as far as stringing a light up, but no further. There was nothing in the attic space but dust and two empty suitcases.
In the end I went downstairs, and back to my father’s chair. It was early evening. I had found nothing, and I was beginning to feel stupid. Perhaps I was just trying to flay a nonexistent order out of chaos. I sat in my father’s chair, and read the note once again. It meant neither more nor less, however many times you read it.
As I raised my eyes, they fell once more on the television. The chair was aligned perfectly with it, and a thought occurred to me. If I’d been right in thinking that it looked a little out of place, then perhaps its position wasn’t just to help draw my attention to the cushion – but to redirect my gaze to another area entirely.
I got up and opened the glass doors that hid the storage space underneath the television. I found exactly what I had previously. A VCR, a DVD player, and two DVDs: old movies. Nothing else.
No tapes. That was odd.
In the whole of the house I’d found no videotapes. There were two shelves of DVDs in the study, and a further one in the second bedroom. But not a single videotape.
My father was a semiprofessional tube watcher. For as long as I could remember, there’d been tapes lying around the house. So where were they now?
I quickly strode back to his study. No tapes in there either, even though there was a second VCR stowed on a low shelf. I didn’t bother to search the drawers or the cabinet again. There’d been none there. There had been none anywhere in the house or the shop or garage either. I tried to think back to the Thanksgiving before last, when I’d deigned to stop by for twenty-four hours. I couldn’t specifically remember seeing tapes around. I couldn’t remember not seeing them. I’d been pretty drunk most of the time.
It could be that my father had embraced DVD as the dawn of a long-awaited new age in home entertainment, declared the videotape dead, and held a bonfire in the garden. I didn’t think so. Dyersburg doubtless had a dump somewhere, but I couldn’t see that scenario either. Even if he’d found as the years went on that there was less and less he wanted to watch, he wasn’t going to throw all the old favourites away. I started to wonder whether creating an absence of something unremarkable might be a subtle way of attracting the attention of someone who knew you well, who had an understanding of the things that should be in your environment.
Either that, or I was losing objectivity, running too far and fast with a meaningless ball.