Mr. Voss

My back went stiff before my mind did.

It happens like that. The body hears first. It hears the quality of a voice, the small hairs on the neck lifting before the ear has finished its work, and by the time the brain says who the spine has already answered. I knelt in the dead leaves with my gloved hand on the rusted rim of the iron bowl and my face six inches from a patch of freshly turned earth, and felt every muscle from my skull to my heels lock in a single cold wave, like water freezing in a pipe.

It was not Gordon Ashby's voice. I knew Ashby's voice. It was small and papery, a reedy courteous tenor that had once told me, in a hallway, not to push things to the edge. Nor was it the voice that had rattled and coughed through the gas in the bank vault, wet and mean as a rat in a drain.

This was something else.

It was low, and it was level, and it did not hurry. It had no gravel in it and no sneer. It was the unemphatic, resonant, well-kept voice of a man who has no need to raise his voice because he has never once been disobeyed. It sounded like a thing that had been used for a very long time, and sharpened a great deal, and kept in a drawer.

"Don't move," it said again, gently, "and please don't turn around."

I didn't.

…

I couldn't have said how long I knelt there. The wind moved in the pines. A single dry leaf skated across the grass in front of me and lodged against the white petals of my chrysanthemums. I heard the thin high ringing in my ears that comes when the heart is working too hard. And in the little plastic bead behind my left ear, I heard Frank Dunleavy.

"Maren."

It was a whisper. It was a hiss of breath, hoarse and rapid, from a very great distance.

"Maren, that's not on my channel. I've got a second voice. I've got a man behind you. Don't speak. Don't move. Keep your hands where they are." A pause, a ragged inhalation. "All units, we have contact. Brandt, Yoon, move in. I say again, move in. Close the net. Close the net now."

I waited.

I waited the way you wait at the top of a staircase for the sound of a child coming up. I waited for the bark of a dog, the thud of boots on gravel, a woman's voice shouting. I knew they were near. They were a hundred yards off, no more, one in the lodge garden, one on the outer path with a brown dog, and they were the best that he had. I would hear them any second. They would burst through the hedges. They would come running.

The pines whispered.

Nobody came.

"Brandt," said Dunleavy. His voice had altered. It had risen, and thinned. "Brandt, do you read? Yoon? Sound off. Somebody sound off. Anybody."

I heard the click of a transmit key. I heard a long dry crackle. And then, from the bead in my ear, there rose a sound I have never been able to describe without a shudder: a high thin electric shriek, like a nail drawn along a pane, rising steadily, climbing, tearing, until I flinched and clapped my hand to my ear. It cut Dunleavy off in the middle of a word.

Then it too was gone.

There was only the wind.

…

"Frank Dunleavy."

The man behind me spoke with a smile in his voice. I could hear it. He spoke it quite pleasantly, in the tone you might use to a neighbor across a fence. "You still trust your people that much?"

He was not speaking to me. He had his head turned a little aside, and the words had a faint muffled edge, as of speech into a cupped hand. A hand pressed to an ear. I thought of the wires, the beads, the thread of voice that had come out of the air all that long afternoon, and I understood that he had been listening to us, to all of us, for a very long time.

"I do hope you haven't been too harsh with them," he went on. "Brandt's a sound officer. A good mother. And the young woman with the dog. Yoon. I should hate to think you'd failed to look after her." A rustle of cloth. "But then, you have so many other things to worry about tonight."

The silence went on. It was a silence like a held note. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something slip from the iron bowl, a sliver of rust, and drop to the earth.

Nobody is coming, I thought.

I had two women and a dog. I told him it was enough.

…

"You may stand now, Ms. Ostrander."

I rose.

I did it slowly, as one rises in a dream, with my hands out from my sides and my knees creaking. My coat caught on a stem. I felt the cold go through my thin gloves. I stood at the foot of the nameless stone with the dead flowers at my feet, and I turned, a quarter turn at a time, until I could see him.

He stood on the path about eight feet away, with the moon behind him.

He was tall. He was broad through the shoulders, a heavy, comfortable build, in a long dark coat of some thick cloth that fell almost to his shins. The collar was turned up. A cap was pulled low. And across the lower half of his face, from the bridge of the nose to the throat, he wore a mask of plain black cloth, such as a surgeon wears, or a thief. Above it his eyes were in shadow. I could see only the faint gleam of them.

His hands were empty.

I noticed it at once. His hands were bare and open, held loosely at his sides: big square pale hands with blunt nails. The left one was pressed flat to the side of his head, against his ear, the fingers tucked into the collar, in the pose of a man listening to a seashell. He held no knife. He held no gun. It struck me, with an absurd and terrible clarity, that he did not need to.

"Voss," I said.

My voice was a croak. I tried again. "Voss. You're Voss."

"If you like."

"My mother said—"

"I know what your mother said." There was a flicker of something in his tone, a dry glint, almost admiring. "Ida never did know when to stop talking. She had a very good ear for a tape recorder. I think she'd have made a splendid radio personality." The eyes above the mask crinkled. "But I'm afraid, my dear, she was a rather poor judge of company."

"Where's my daughter?"

"In a van. With the engine off, and a policeman at the wheel." A tilt of the head. "She's perfectly all right. She's rather clever, your girl. I did think she might spoil the evening. But she's been very good about it, so far."

"If you touch her—"

"Ms. Ostrander." He said it quietly. "Please. We're two reasonable people. Let's not."

…

I have thought many times about that moment.

I have turned it over, day and night, the way you turn a stone in your pocket. I have tried to find in it the point at which I might have done something else. I might have run. I might have screamed. I might have thrown myself on the ground and shouted my daughter's name until my throat bled. I did none of it. I stood on the grass in a borrowed coat, in front of a masked man, with a silenced radio and a hundred yards of dark between me and the nearest living ally, and I felt a calm descend on me that was like the calm of the very drowned.

This is what it is, I thought. This is the man.

I had been afraid of him since three in the morning of the day before. I had been afraid of his voice and his name and his fire. In the dark, I had made him into something huge, a thing with teeth. And here he was, a large pale tidy person in an overcoat, who spoke like a chess teacher and smelled of drugstore soap.

It was the soap, in the end. I could not stop noticing it. It rode on the cold air, clean and sharp and faintly floral, the smell of a bar in a plastic dish by a sink. It seemed the most obscene detail in the world.

"Why are you here?" I said.

"For my property."

"What property?"

"The same property your mother spent twenty years concealing from me." The black cloth shifted with his breath. "I've been very patient with Ida. I let her keep her little game. I thought, why not? A woman should have an interest. She made maps. She made boxes. She laid a trail of pretty sticks across the whole county." A soft laugh. "I followed every one. I confess I admired the craftsmanship."

"And now you've found it."

"No." He took a step toward me, and the moon slid over his shoulder and showed me the edge of his cheek, the line of the cap, and for an instant, in the narrow gap between mask and brim, a pair of calm pale eyes. "Now I'm about to."

Something in his hand caught the light.

He had drawn it from his sleeve, quick and smooth, the way a magician produces a coin. It was a knife. It was a thin, short, plain one, perhaps four inches of blade, narrow as a letter-opener, with a handle wrapped in black tape. There was nothing cruel about it. It had the careful, domestic look of a thing that lives in a kitchen drawer.

I flinched. I could not help it.

"Don't be silly," said Voss. "It isn't for you."

…

He went down on his heels.

He did it with a grunt of effort, one knee cracking, a heavy man in a heavy coat, and squatted at the foot of the iron bowl, a yard from my feet. He did not look up. He seemed to have forgotten me. He bent his head over the patch of loose earth, so close that his breath stirred the dust, and, with the delicate care of a surgeon at an incision, set the tip of the knife in the soil.

He drew it across.

The earth parted in a soft dry whisper. It was damp and black and crumbling, and it smelled of worms. He scraped it back in little curls, an inch at a time, laying it to one side with the flat of the blade, and the hole deepened beneath the iron bowl. A root. A pale pebble. The cut end of a worm, writhing. He worked in complete silence, with his tongue between his teeth, and the only sound was the scritch of steel on stone and the whisper of the pines.

I stood and watched him dig.

I don't know why I didn't run. I think it was something in the way he knelt, so intent, so absorbed, a man at a puzzle he has waited half his life to solve. I think it was the knowledge that there was nowhere to go. And I think, God help me, that I wanted to see.

The knife struck something.

It was a dull, soft, muffled sound, not stone, not metal. A kind of thud. He stopped. The black cloth sucked in and out against his mouth. He laid the blade aside on the grass, and with both hands, bare, he scooped away the last of the soil, and dust sifted down in a gray rain, and the moon, as if it too had been waiting, came out from behind a cloud.

I looked down into the hole.

At the bottom of it, wrapped round and round with twine, packed tight in a shining wet skin of black oilcloth, lay a bundle about the size of a loaf of bread.