The Eyes of Darkness Page 9

  Bill Jaborski had been a wilderness expert and a scoutmaster. Every winter for sixteen years, he had taken a group of scouts to northern Nevada, beyond Reno, into the High Sierras, on a seven-day wilderness survival excursion.

  “It was supposed to build character,” Tina said. “And the boys competed hard all year for the chance to be one of those selected to go on the trip. It was supposed to be perfectly safe. Bill Jaborski was supposed to be one of the ten top winter-survival experts in the country. That’s what everyone said. And the other adult who went along, Tom Lincoln — he was supposed to be almost as good as Bill. Supposed to be.” Her voice had grown thin and bitter. “I believed them, thought it was safe.”

  “You can’t blame yourself for that. All those years they’d taken kids into the mountains, nobody was even scratched.”

  Tina swallowed some cognac. It was hot in her throat, but it didn’t burn away the chill at the center of her.

  A year ago Jaborski’s excursion had included fourteen boys between the ages of twelve and eighteen. All of them were top-notch scouts — and all of them died along with Jaborski and Tom Lincoln.

  “Have the authorities ever figured out exactly why it happened?” Elliot asked.

  “Not why. They never will. All they know is how. The group went into the mountains in a four-wheel-drive minibus built for use on back roads in the winter. Huge tires. Chains. Even a snowplow on the front. They weren’t supposed to go into the true heart of the wilderness. Just into the fringes. No one in his right mind would take boys as young as twelve into the deepest parts of the Sierras, no matter how well prepared, supplied, and trained they were, no matter how strong, no matter how many big brothers were there to look out for them.”

  Jaborski had intended to drive the minibus off the main highway, onto an old logging trail, if conditions permitted. From there they were going to hike for three days with snowshoes and backpacks, making a wide circle around the bus, coming back to it at the end of the week.

  “They had the best wilderness clothing and the best down-lined sleeping bags, the best winter tents, plenty of charcoal and other heat sources, plenty of food, and two wilderness experts to guide them. Perfectly safe, everyone said. Absolutely, perfectly safe. So what the fuck went wrong?”

  Tina could no longer sit still. She got up and began to pace, taking another swallow of cognac.

  Elliot said nothing. He seemed to know that she had to go through the whole story to get it off her mind.

  “Something sure as hell went wrong,” she said. “Somehow, for some reason, they drove the bus more than four miles off the main highway, four miles off and a hell of a long way up, right up to the damn clouds. They drove up a steep, abandoned logging trail, a deteriorated dirt road so treacherous, so choked with snow, so icy that only a fool would have attempted to negotiate it any way but on foot.”

  The bus had run off the road. There were no guardrails in the wilderness, no wide shoulders at the roadside with gentle slopes beyond. The vehicle skidded, then dropped a hundred feet straight onto rocks. The fuel tank exploded. The bus opened like a tin can and rolled another hundred feet into the trees.

  “The kids… everyone… killed.” The bitterness in her voice dismayed her because it revealed how little she had healed. “Why? Why did a man like Bill Jaborski do something so stupid as that?”

  Still sitting on the couch, Elliot shook his head and stared down at his cognac.

  She didn’t expect him to answer. She wasn’t actually asking the question of him; if she was asking anyone, she was asking God.

  “Why? Jaborski was the best. The very best. He was so good that he could safely take young boys into the Sierras for sixteen years, a challenge a lot of other winter survival experts wouldn’t touch. Bill Jaborski was smart, tough, clever, and filled with respect for the danger in what he did. He wasn’t foolhardy. Why would he do something so dumb, so reckless, as to drive that far along that road in those conditions?”

  Elliot looked up at her. Kindness marked his eyes, a deep sympathy. “You’ll probably never learn the answer. I understand how hard it must be never to know why.”

  “Hard,” she said. “Very hard.”

  She returned to the couch.

  He took her glass out of her hand. It was empty. She didn’t remember finishing her cognac. He went to the bar.

  “No more for me,” she said. “I don’t want to get drunk.”

  “Nonsense,” he said. “In your condition, throwing off all that nervous energy the way you are, two small brandies won’t affect you in the slightest.”

  He returned from the bar with more Rémy Martin. This time she was able to hold the glass in one hand.

  “Thank you, Elliot.”

  “Just don’t ask for a mixed drink,” he said. “I’m the world’s worst bartender. I can pour anything straight or over ice, but I can’t even mix vodka and orange juice properly.”

  “I wasn’t thanking you for the drink. I was thanking you for… being a good listener.”

  “Most attorneys talk too much.”

  For a moment they sat in silence, sipping cognac.

  Tina was still tense, but she no longer felt cold inside.

  Elliot said, “Losing a child like that… devastating. But it wasn’t any recollection of your son that had you so upset when I walked in a little while ago.”

  “In a way it was.”

  “But something more.”

  She told him about the bizarre things that had been happening to her lately: the messages on Danny’s chalkboard; the wreckage she’d found in the boy’s room; the hateful, taunting words that appeared in the computer lists and on the monitor.

  Elliot studied the printouts, and together they examined the computer in Angela’s office. They plugged it in and tried to get it to repeat what it had done earlier, but they had no luck; the machine behaved exactly as it was meant to behave.

  “Someone could have programmed it to spew out this stuff about Danny,” Elliot said. “But I don’t see how he could make the terminal switch itself on.”

  “It happened,” she said.

  “I don’t doubt you. I just don’t understand.”

  “And the air… so cold…”

  “Could the temperature change have been subjective?”

  Tina frowned. “Are you asking me if I imagined it?”

  “You were frightened—”

  “But I’m sure I didn’t imagine it. Angela felt the chill first, when she got the initial printout with those lines about Danny. It isn’t likely Angela and I both just imagined it.”

  “True.” He stared thoughtfully at the computer. “Come on.”

  “Where?”

  “Back in your office. I left my drink there. Need to lubricate my thoughts.”

  She followed him into the wood-paneled inner sanctum.

  He picked up his brandy snifter from the low table in front of the sofa, and he sat on the edge of her desk. “Who? Who could be doing it to you?”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  “You must have somebody in mind.”

  “I wish I did.”

  “Obviously, it’s somebody who at the very least dislikes you, if he doesn’t actually hate you. Someone who wants you to suffer. He blames you for Danny’s death… and it’s apparently a personal loss to him, so it can hardly be a stranger.”

  Tina was disturbed by his analysis because it matched her own, and it led her into the same blind alley that she’d traveled before. She paced between the desk and the drapery-covered windows. “This afternoon I decided it has to be a stranger. I can’t think of anyone I know who’d be capable of this sort of thing even if they did hate me enough to contemplate it. And I don’t know of anyone but Michael who places any of the blame for Danny’s death on me.”

  Elliot raised his eyebrows. “Michael’s your ex-husband?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he blames you for Danny’s death?”

  “He says I never should have let him
go with Jaborski. But this isn’t Michael’s dirty work.”

  “He sounds like an excellent candidate to me.”

  “ No. ”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Absolutely. It’s someone else.”

  Elliot tasted his cognac. “You’ll probably need professional help to catch him in one of his tricks.”

  “You mean the police?”

  “I don’t think the police would be much help. They probably won’t think it’s serious enough to waste their time. After all, you haven’t been threatened.”

  “There’s an implicit threat in all of this.”

  “Oh, yeah, I agree. It’s scary. But the cops are a literal bunch, not much impressed by implied threats. Besides, to properly watch your house… that alone will require a lot more manpower than the police can spare for anything except a murder case, a hot kidnapping, or maybe a narcotics investigation.”

  She stopped pacing. “Then what did you mean when you said I’d probably need professional help to catch this creep?”

  “Private detectives.”

  “Isn’t that melodramatic?”

  He smiled sourly. “Well, the person who’s harassing you has a melodramatic streak a mile wide.”

  She sighed and sipped some cognac and sat on the edge of the couch. “I don’t know… Maybe I’d hire private detectives, and they wouldn’t catch anyone but me.”

  “Send that one by me again.”

  She had to take another small sip of cognac before she was able to say what was on her mind, and she realized that he had been right about the liquor having little effect on her. She felt more relaxed than she’d been ten minutes ago, but she wasn’t even slightly tipsy. “It’s occurred to me… maybe I wrote those words on the chalkboard. Maybe I wrecked Danny’s room.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “Could have done it in my sleep.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Tina.”

  “Is it? I thought I’d begun to get over Danny’s death back in September. I started sleeping well then. I didn’t dwell on it when I was alone, like I’d done for so long. I thought I’d put the worst pain behind me. But a month ago I started dreaming about Danny again. The first week, it happened twice. The second week, four nights. And the past two weeks, I’ve dreamed about him every night without fail. The dreams get worse all the time. They’re full-fledged nightmares now.”

  Elliot returned to the couch and sat beside her. “What are they like?”

  “I dream he’s alive, trapped somewhere, usually in a deep pit or a gorge or a well, someplace underground. He’s calling to me, begging me to save him. But I can’t. I’m never able to reach him. Then the earth starts closing in around him, and I wake up screaming, soaked with sweat. And I… I always have this powerful feeling that Danny isn’t really dead. It never lasts for long, but when I first wake up, I’m sure he’s alive somewhere. You see, I’ve convinced my conscious mind that my boy is dead, but when I’m asleep it’s my subconscious mind that’s in charge; and my subconscious just isn’t convinced that Danny’s gone.”

  “So you think you’re — what, sleepwalking? In your sleep, you’re writing a rejection of Danny’s death on his chalkboard?”

  “Don’t you believe that’s possible?”

  “No. Well… maybe. I guess it is,” Elliot said. “I’m no psychologist. But I don’t buy it. I’ll admit I don’t know you all that well yet, but I think I know you well enough to say you wouldn’t react that way. You’re a person who meets problems head-on. If your inability to accept Danny’s death was a serious problem, you wouldn’t push it down into your subconscious. You’d learn to deal with it.”

  She smiled. “You have a pretty high opinion of me.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I do. Besides, if it was you who wrote on the chalkboard and smashed things in the boy’s room, then it was also you who came in here during the night and programmed the hotel computer to spew out that stuff about Danny. Do you really think you’re so far gone that you could do something like that and not remember it? Do you think you’ve got multiple personalities and one doesn’t know what the others are up to?”

  She sank back on the sofa, slouched down. “No.”

  “Good.”

  “So where does that leave us?”

  “Don’t despair. We’re making progress.”

  “We are?”

  “Sure,” he said. “We’re eliminating possibilities. We’ve just crossed you off the list of suspects. And Michael. And I’m positive it can’t be a stranger, which rules out most of the world.”

  “And I’m just as positive it isn’t a friend or a relative. So you know where that leaves me?”

  “Where?”

  She leaned forward, put her brandy snifter on the table, and for a moment sat with her face in her hands.

  “Tina?”

  She lifted her head. “I’m just trying to think how best to phrase what’s on my mind. It’s a wild idea. Ludicrous. Probably even sick.”

  “I’m not going to think you’re nuts,” Elliot assured her. “What is it? Tell me.”

  She hesitated, trying to hear how it was going to sound before she said it, wondering if she really believed it enough even to give voice to it. The possibility of what she was going to suggest was remote.

  At last she just plunged into it: “What I’m thinking… maybe Danny is alive.”

  Elliot cocked his head, studied her with those probing, dark eyes. “Alive?”

  “I never saw his body.”

  “You didn’t? Why not?”

  “The coroner and undertaker said it was in terrible condition, horribly mutilated. They didn’t think it was a good idea for me or Michael to see it. Neither of us would have been anxious to view the body even if it had been in perfect shape, so we accepted the mortician’s recommendations. It was a closed-coffin funeral.”

  “How did the authorities identify the body?”

  “They asked for pictures of Danny. But mainly I think they used dental records.”

  “Dental records are almost as good as fingerprints.”

  “Almost. But maybe Danny didn’t die in that accident. Maybe he survived. Maybe someone out there knows where he is. Maybe that someone is trying to tell me that Danny is alive. Maybe there isn’t any threat in these strange things happening to me. Maybe someone’s just dropping a series of hints, trying to wake me up to the fact that Danny isn’t dead.”

  “Too many maybes,” he said.

  “Maybe not.”

  Elliot put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed gently. “Tina, you know this theory doesn’t make sense. Danny is dead.”

  “See? You do think I’m crazy.”

  “No. I think you’re distraught, and that’s understandable.”

  “Won’t you even consider the possibility that he’s alive?”

  “How could he be?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How could he have survived the accident you described?” Elliot asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “And where would he have been all this time if not… in the grave?”

  “I don’t know that, either.”

  “If he were alive,” Elliot said patiently, “someone would simply come and tell you. They wouldn’t be this mysterious about it, would they?”

  “Maybe.”

  Aware that her answer had disappointed him, she looked down at her hands, which were laced together so tightly that her knuckles were white.

  Elliot touched her face, turning it gently toward him.

  His beautiful, expressive eyes seemed to be filled with concern for her.

  “Tina, you know there isn’t any maybe about it. You know better than that. If Danny were alive, and if someone were trying to get that news to you, it wouldn’t be done like this, not with all these dramatic hints. Am I right?”

  “Probably.”

  “Danny is gone.”

  She said nothing.

  “If you convince yourself h
e’s alive,” Elliot said, “you’re only setting yourself up for another fall.”

  She stared deeply into his eyes. Eventually she sighed and nodded. “You’re right.”

  “Danny’s gone.”

  “Yes,” she said thinly.

  “You’re really convinced of that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  Tina got up from the couch, went to the window, and pulled open the drapes. She had a sudden urge to see the Strip. After so much talk about death, she needed a glimpse of movement, action, life; and although the Strip sometimes was grubby in the flat glare of the desert sun, the boulevard was always, day or night, bustling and filled with life.

  Now the early winter dusk settled over the city. In waves of dazzling color, millions of lights winked on in the enormous signs. Hundreds of cars progressed sluggishly through the busy street, taxicabs darting in and out, recklessly seeking any small advantage. Crowds streamed along the sidewalks, on their way from this casino to that casino, from one lounge to another, from one show to the next.

  Tina turned to Elliot again. “You know what I want to do?”

  “What?”

  “Reopen the grave.”

  “Have Danny’s body exhumed?”

  “Yes. I never saw him. That’s why I’m having such a hard time accepting that he’s gone. That’s why I’m having nightmares. If I’d seen the body, then I’d have known for sure. I wouldn’t be able to fantasize about Danny still being alive.”

  “But the condition of the corpse…”

  “I don’t care,” she said.

  Elliot frowned, not convinced of the wisdom of exhumation. “The body’s in an airtight casket, but it’ll be even more deteriorated now than it was a year ago when they recommended you not look at it.”

  “I’ve got to see.”

  “You’d be letting yourself in for a horrible—”

  “That’s the idea,” she said quickly. “Shock. A powerful shock treatment that’ll finally blow away all my lingering doubts. If I see Danny’s… remains, I won’t be able to entertain any more doubts. The nightmares will stop.”

  “Perhaps. Or perhaps you’ll wind up with even worse dreams.”

  She shook her head. “Nothing could be worse than the ones I’m having now.”