for my personal history here. I’m trying to discover the secret. I’m listening to the bells chime, and wondering if they toll for me.
*Agnew Spalding is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of seven novels, two collections of essays, and a memoir: THINGS THAT FILL THE VOID: A DRINKING MAN’S STORY (1984); MIMIC: SENTINEL (1987); CHASING THE DRAGON (1988); DARK PLACES (1991); DUST OF WONDERLAND (1994); THE DARIEN GAP OF CONNECTICUT (1994); THE PERRY-WELLINGTON ADVENTURES (2002); THE DIVINE DEVOE (2002); A TWISTED LADDER (2009); PETRUCHA’S HUNCH (2012); and HOW NOT TO BUILD YOUR OWN ATOMIC BOMB (2012). His death two days after the completion of this article was a profound loss to the literary community. He is survived by his wife Melinda, and daughters Danielle and Dominique.
Audrey read the article, then reread it, then searched “Agnew Spalding” and found his obituary. Suicide. In his apartment, after his daughters left for school, but before the maid came, so that it was she who found his body hanging from a ceiling beam in the kitchen and not his wife. The article noted that his apartment had a view of The Breviary, and his corpse had pointed toward it. Stranger still, he’d shredded the manuscript he was working on, Generation Vain, then pulped it into a single upright rectangle with a hole in it. Since he’d deleted all his files, the work was irretrievably lost.
She wanted to stop, but there was no turning back. She clicked the next few links in the queue for Breviary, and found headlines like, “Murder-suicide in Tony Manhattan Apartment” dated just two years ago, “Woman Hurls to Own Death” September 4, 2009. Finally, the most recent article, “Bizarre Construction During Final Days.” The caption next to the photo read:
DeLea apartment, July 4: DeLea made a pile of her worldly belongings in this sitting room. All were chopped into small pieces. The weapon has not yet been found. The apartment also suffered from a serious infestation, which authorities believe may have degraded much of the evidence.
Infestation?
The photo showed 14B’s den. Above where Audrey’s floor was now rotted lay an indistinguishable pile of what looked like trash.
She recalled what she’d done this morning. Her clothes. Poor Jayne’s hula girl. The scissors. The card. The ruined photo, her favorite, of her and Saraub. She picked it up now. “No,” she whispered at their obliterated black faces. “Please make this not real.”
Then, finally, she enlarged the photo. The carpet in the den was red shag, and the walls were red-painted, too. The items in the pile were clearer now. She could make out their size and shape, and in some cases, what they’d once been: Tinker toys, hacked red velvet chairs, book spines, the broken top of a walnut dining-room table. She studied them for a long while, ran the permutations in her mind over and over again, and knew that the pile was not random. Each item was a jigsaw piece. She solved the puzzle of the large object that had buckled 14B’s den.
Spalding’s pulped manuscript suddenly made sense. She squeezed her hands into fists and tapped one, two, three, four times. Her nighttime construction was making sense, too. Before she died, Clara DeLea had built a door.
At last, she searched one more name. Looked at the image sidelong, afraid that it might peer back at her. Sharp nose and cheekbones. Tailored wool suit, three pieces. In his younger years, he’d been groomed, but by the 1880s, his long, shaggy hair hung down to his shoulders. Edgar Schermerhorn and the bone-fingered man in the three-piece suit from her dreams were one and the same.
The image suddenly came closer, and Schermerhorn got bigger inside the frame. His smile widened. “Your red ants are showing, my dear.”
29
Lambs Taste Better Than Pigs
With downtown flooded, the subway got stuck at Christopher Street. There weren’t enough cabs, making Hurricane Erebus the great social equalizer. She and her fellow New Yorkers packed like sardines onto the M60 bus. The heavyset Mexican woman to her left wore an extra small T-shirt that read, BUY AMERICAN! She unscrewed a sludgy jar of pickled pigs’ feet and tore the flesh with her teeth as she chewed. To her left, a businessman sporting sprayed-on black hair and a shiny Italian suit clung ferociously to the strap hanging from the ceiling. He seemed new to public transportation and wouldn’t give anybody else enough room to share the strap.
Everybody was looking everybody else up and down. In her sweat suit and broken shoes, Audrey wanted