Now the steaks, rare, are transported to the plates, the mushrooms arrayed around them, and the enormous wooden salad bowl installed on the center of the table. Henry pronounces the meal delicious, takes a sip of his wine, and says, “If you still won’t talk about your trouble, whatever it is, you’d better at least tell me what happened at the station. I suppose there’s very little doubt that another child was snatched.”
“Next to none, I’m sorry to say. It’s a boy named Tyler Marshall. His father’s name is Fred Marshall, and he works out at Goltz’s. Do you know him?”
“Been a long time since I bought a combine,” Henry says.
“The first thing that struck me was that Fred Marshall was a very nice guy,” Jack says, and goes on to recount, in great detail and leaving nothing out, the evening’s events and revelations, except for one matter, that of his third, his unspoken, thought.
“You actually asked to visit Marshall’s wife? In the mental wing at French County Lutheran?”
“Yes, I did,” Jack says. “I’m going there tomorrow.”
“I don’t get it.” Henry eats by hunting the food with his knife, spearing it with his fork, and measuring off a narrow strip of steak. “Why would you want to see the mother?”
“Because one way or another I think she’s involved,” Jack says.
“Oh, come off it. The boy’s own mother?”
“I’m not saying she’s the Fisherman, because of course she isn’t. But according to her husband, Judy Marshall’s behavior started to change before Amy St. Pierre disappeared. She got worse and worse as the murders went on, and on the day her son vanished, she flipped out completely. Her husband had to have her committed.”
“Wouldn’t you say she had an excellent reason to break down?”
“She flipped out before anyone told her about her son. Her husband thinks she has ESP! He said she saw the murders in advance, she knew the Fisherman was on the way. And she knew her son was gone before they found the bike—when Fred Marshall came home, he found her tearing at the walls and talking nonsense. Completely out of control.”
“You hear about lots of cases where a mother is suddenly aware of some threat or injury to her child. A pyschic bond. Sounds like mumbo jumbo, but I guess it happens.”
“I don’t believe in ESP, and I don’t believe in coincidence.”
“So what are you saying?”
“Judy Marshall knows something, and whatever she knows is a real showstopper. Fred can’t see it—he’s much too close—and Dale can’t see it, either. You should have heard him talk about her.”
“So what is she supposed to know?”
“I think she may know the doer. I think it has to be someone close to her. Whoever he is, she knows his name, and it’s driving her crazy.”
Henry frowns and uses his inchworm technique to entrap another piece of steak. “So you’re going to the hospital to open her up,” he finally says.
“Yes. Basically.”
A mysterious silence follows this statement. Henry quietly whittles away at the meat, chews what he whittles, and washes it down with Jordan cabernet.
“How did your deejay gig go? Was it okay?”
“It was a thing of beauty. All the adorable old swingers cut loose on the dance floor, even the ones in wheelchairs. One guy sort of rubbed me the wrong way. He was rude to a woman named Alice, and he asked me to play ‘Lady Magowan’s Nightmare,’ which doesn’t exist, as you probably know—”
“It’s ‘Lady Magowan’s Dream.’ Woody Herman.”
“Good boy. The thing was, he had this terrible voice. It sounded like something out of hell! Anyhow, I didn’t have the Woody Herman record, and he asked for the Bunny Berigan ‘I Can’t Get Started.’ Which happened to be Rhoda’s favorite record. What with my goofy ear hallucinations and all, it shook me up. I don’t know why.”
For a few minutes they concentrate on their plates.
Jack says, “What do you think, Henry?”
Henry tilts his head, auditing an inner voice. Scowling, he sets down his fork. The inner voice continues to demand his attention. He adjusts his shades and faces Jack. “In spite of everything you say, you still think like a cop.”
Jack bridles at the suspicion that Henry is not paying him a compliment. “What do you mean by that?”
“Cops see differently than people who aren’t cops. When a cop looks at someone, he wonders what he’s guilty of. The possibility of innocence never enters his mind. To a longtime cop, a guy who’s put in ten years or more, everyone who isn’t a cop is guilty. Only most of them haven’t been caught yet.”
Henry has described the mind-set of dozens of men Jack once worked with. “Henry, how do you know about that?”
“I can see it in their eyes,” Henry says. “That’s the way policemen approach the world. You are a policeman.”
Jack blurts out, “I am a coppiceman.” Appalled, he blushes. “Sorry, that stupid phrase has been running around and around in my head, and it just popped out.”
“Why don’t we clear the dishes and start on Bleak House?”
When their few dishes have been stacked beside the sink, Jack takes the book from the far side of the table and follows Henry toward the living room, pausing on the way to glance, as he always does, at his friend’s studio. A door with a large glass insert opens into a small, soundproofed chamber bristling with electronic equipment: the microphone and turntable back from Maxton’s and reinstalled before Henry’s well-padded, swiveling chair; a disc changer and matching digital-analog converter mount, close at hand, beside a mixing board and a massive tape recorder adjacent to the other, larger window, which looks into the kitchen. When Henry had been planning the studio, Rhoda requested the windows, because, she’d said, she wanted to be able to see him at work. There isn’t a wire in sight. The entire studio has the disciplined neatness of the captain’s quarters on a ship.
“Looks like you’re going to work tonight,” Jack says.
“I want to get two more Henry Shakes ready to send, and I’m working on something for a birthday salute to Lester Young and Charlie Parker.”
“Were they born on the same day?”
“Close enough. August twenty-seventh and twenty-ninth. You know, I can’t quite tell if you’ll want the lights on or not.”
“Let’s turn them on,” Jack says.
And so Henry Leyden switches on the two lamps beside the window, and Jack Sawyer moves to the overstuffed chair near the fireplace and turns on the tall lamp at one of its rounded arms and watches as his friend walks unerringly to the light just inside the front door and the ornate fixture alongside his own, his favorite resting place, the Mission-style sofa, clicking first one, then the other into life, then settles down onto the sofa with one leg stretched out along its length. Even, low light pervades the long room and swells into greater brightness around Jack’s chair.
“Bleak House, by Charles Dickens,” he says. He clears his throat. “Okay, Henry, we’re off to the races.”
“London. Michaelmas Term lately over,” he reads, and marches into a world made of soot and mud. Muddy dogs, muddy horses, muddy people, a day without light. Soon he has reached the second paragraph: “Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats.”
His voice catches, and his mind temporarily drifts off-focus. What he is reading unhappily reminds him of French Landing, of Sumner Street and Chase Street, of the lights in the window of the Oak Tree Inn, the Thunder Five lurking in Nailhouse Row, and the gray ascent from the river, of Queen Street and Maxton’s hedges, the little houses spreading out on grids, all of it choked by unseen fog;—which engulfs a battered NO TRESPASSING sign on the highway and swallows the Sand Bar and glides hungry and searching down the valleys.
“Sorry,” he says. “I was just thinking—”
“I was, too,” Henry says. “Go on, please.”
But for that brief flicker of an old NO TRESPASSING sign completely unaware of the black house he one day will have to enter, Jack concentrates again on the page and continues reading Bleak House. The windows darken as the lamps grow warmer. The case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds through the courts, aided or impeded by attorneys Chizzle, Mizzle, and Drizzle; Lady Dedlock leaves Sir Leicester Dedlock alone at their great estate with its moldy chapel, stagnant river, and “Ghost’s Walk”; Esther Summerson begins to chirp away in the first person. Our friends decide that the appearance of Esther demands a small libation, if they are to get through much more chirping. Henry unfolds from the sofa, sails into the kitchen, and returns with two short, fat glasses one-third filled with Balvenie Doublewood single-malt whiskey, as well as a glass of plain water for the reader. A couple of sips, a few murmurs of appreciation, and Jack resumes. Esther, Esther, Esther, but beneath the water torture of her relentless sunniness the story gathers steam and carries both reader and listener along in its train.