“I don’t take this for headaches, because I like to savor the pain. But I keep aspirin on hand because, once in a while, I like to chew on them for the taste.”
“They’re vile.”
“Just bitter. Bitterness can be as pleasing as sweetness when you learn that every experience, every sensation, is worthwhile.”
He returned to the table with the bottle of aspirin. He put it in front of her—and took away her glass of water.
“No, thanks,” she said.
“Bitterness has its place.”
She ignored the bottle.
“Suit yourself,” Vess said, clearing the plates off the table.
Although Chyna needed relief from her various pains, she refused to touch the aspirin. Perhaps irrationally—but nonetheless strongly— she felt that by chewing a few of the tablets, even strictly for the medicinal effect, she would be stepping into the strange rooms of Edgler Vess’s madness. This was a threshold that she didn’t care to cross for any purpose, even with one foot solidly anchored in the real world.
He hand-washed the breakfast plates, bowls, pans, and utensils. He was efficient and fastidious, using steaming hot water and lots of lemon-scented dishwashing liquid.
Chyna had one more question that could not go unasked, and at last she said, “Why the Templetons? Why choose them of all people? It wasn’t random, was it, not just the place you happened to stop in the night?”
“Not just random,” he agreed, scrubbing the omelet pan with a plastic scouring pad. “A few weeks back, Paul Templeton was up this way on business, and when—”
“You knew him?”
“Not really. He was in town, the county seat, on business like I said, and as he was taking something from his wallet to show me, a set of those little hinged plastic windows fell out, you know, with little wallet-size photographs, and I picked them up for him. One of the pictures was his wife. Another was Laura. She looked so… fresh, unspoiled. I said something like ‘That’s a pretty girl,’ and Paul was off and running about her, every inch the proud papa. Told me she was soon going to have her master’s degree in psychology, three-point eight grade average and everything. He told me how he really missed her away at school, even after six years of getting used to it, and how he couldn’t wait for the end of the month, because Laura was coming home for a three-day weekend. He didn’t mention she was bringing along a friend.”
An accident. Photos dropped. A casual exchange, mere idle conversation.
The arbitrariness of it was breathtaking and almost more than Chyna could bear.
Then, as she watched Vess thoroughly wiping off the counters and rinsing the dishpan and scrubbing the sink, Chyna began to feel that what had happened to the Templeton family was worse than merely arbitrary. All this violent death began to seem fated, an inexorable spiral into lasting darkness, as if they had been born and had lived only for Edgler Vess.
It was as if she too had been born and had struggled this far only for the purpose of bringing one moment of sick satisfaction to this soulless predator.
The worst horror of his rampages was not the pain and fear that he inflicted, not the blood, not the mutilated cadavers. The pain and the fear were comparatively brief, considering all the routine pain and anxiety of life. The blood and bodies were merely aftermath. The worst horror was that he stole meaning from the unfinished lives of those people he killed, made himself the primary purpose of their existence, robbed them not of time but of fulfillment.
His base sins were envy—of beauty, of happiness—and pride, bending the whole world to his view of creation, and these were the greatest sins of all, the same transgressions over which the devil himself, once an archangel, had stumbled and fallen a long way out of Heaven.
Hand-drying the plates, pans, and flatware in the drainage rack, returning each piece to the proper shelf or drawer, Edgler Vess looked as pink-clean as a freshly bathed baby and as innocent as the stillborn. He smelled of soap, a good bracing aftershave, and lemon-scented dishwashing liquid. But in spite of all this, Chyna found herself superstitiously expecting to detect a whiff of brimstone.