“What did you think?”
“Call the station and ask them to get out there.”
“I told you, I didn’t have a search warrant. What did you think?”
“You had reasonable grounds for suspicion. The smell of the corpse.”
“There’s no corpse smell in here.”
“No? He’s been dead five days at least, probably a good while longer.”
“He’s frozen. He’s been refrigerated here in some kind of freezer. Bob, tell me, you thought what? What is it you know?”
“I know it wasn’t Tomás Gomez who killed that person in the chair.”
“How?”
“Because the man in the chairisTomás Gomez. Better known as Lobo. I have to do something here now, Kay, I’ll call you back later.”
“Bob!”
But Bob Oz had already hung up. Kay’s whole body was shivering with cold now, and she knew it would be a while before she could get the heat back in her body. A long while. It wasn’t the flayed, frozen body that had caused her to freak out the wayshe had and drop the iron bar. It was the animal with yellow eyes in his lap. The stuffed cat.
—
Bob slipped the phone back into his jacket pocket and stepped out of the car. It was strangely quiet, no one around. Did he wish right now that he was carrying a gun? The answer to that was straightforward. Yes, he did.
Bob approached the house slowly, keeping his eyes on the windows. The silence was broken by the sound of a mower starting up somewhere. A ceramic nameplate hung by the door, clearly the work of a child, probably made in an art class at school. Here, it said, live Sam, Anna, Monica and Mike Lunde. The same four names Bob had found online in the reports of the McDeath killings in 1986. Only the father survived. One report had printed a photo of the family, formally posing in stylish clothing, obviously professionally taken at a photographer’s studio. Bob thought Mike Lunde looked happy in the picture. Happy, young and naive. One hand rested on the shoulder of his daughter, Anna, sitting in front of him. Her long fair hair reached all the way down to the wheelchair, and her smile was radiant.
The mower stopped.
Bob pressed the doorbell. Heard it ring inside the house. Pressed again. Heard the ringing inside but no sound of approaching footsteps. He thought about the body Kay had described. Things were starting to fall into place now. Bob rang a third time. Then he walked around the house to the back, cupped his hands against the glass of the porch door and peered inside. Just then the mower started up again.
In the semi-darkness he saw a tidy room. The furniture was slightly old-fashioned and conservative, as he had halfway expected. There was an open kitchen with a countertop. A large painting of the family hung above the fireplace. It looked asthough the painter had used the same photograph as the one in the report online. Bob’s eyes gradually grew accustomed to the dark and he now saw that what he had at first taken to be an ordinary chair, standing with its back to him on the far side of the room, was actually a wheelchair. There was someone sitting in it. The sun caught the glossy fair hair hanging down over the back of the wheelchair. Bob called out a “Hello!” but the person in the wheelchair didn’t react. Thinking the shout might have been lost in the noise from the mower Bob knocked on the window. Still no reaction. The person sat there, quite motionless. Maybe she was just sleeping. He tried the porch door. It wasn’t locked.
Bob pushed the door open. The penetrating, insistent engine noise of the mower entered the room with him. Still the figure in the wheelchair didn’t move. Bob walked over to her. Swallowed. Recalled Mike’s words.My job is to freeze memories, preserve them in solid form. But there’s something unhealthy about that.
Hysterical violins sounded through his head as he reached out a hand and placed it on the shoulder of the person in the wheelchair. The figure slowly rotated and then—as in the movie—came the scream. The mouth of the figure, a woman, was open. That was where the scream came from. She pulled out the earbuds she was wearing, jerking so hard that the cord came out of the cell phone in her lap and fell to the floor. Bob heard the low buzzing of classical music.
“Oh my God, you gave me such a fright!” exclaimed the woman. “Who are you?”
45
Portrait, October 2016
“I’m sorry, I did ring the bell,” said Bob to the woman in the wheelchair. “Bob Oz. I’m a friend of Mike’s. Is he in?”
“Oh, I see,” she said, panting for breath, one hand flat against her chest. “Just give me a moment to recover. I’m afraid you’ve missed Mike, he just left.”
“Did he say where he was going?”
“To work. A customer is coming in to pick up a Labrador he’s been working on.”
Bob nodded, studying her. She looked to be in her fifties, and her clothes were conservative and almost old-fashioned, in the same way Mike’s were.
“I believe I’ve seen a picture of you somewhere,” he said. “Aren’t you…?”
“Emily Lunde,” she said, offering her hand. “Mike’s sister.”
