Breathless

bedroom.
    When he switched on the ceiling light, he focused at once on the bed. The covers seemed to drape exactly as he had arranged them, and the shape of the fake sleeper was as he designed it.
    If someone had taken the place of the dummy, Henry would have been murdered while he slept. His fear had been irrational.
    Nevertheless, he rounded the foot of the bed to stand over the blanketed form. Holding the shotgun in both hands, with a finger on the trigger, he used the barrel to hook the bedclothes and flip them back from whatever they concealed.
    Having been hostage to his absurd expectations, his breath blew free of him in a gust of relief.
    He pulled the draperies back from the windows and let the early light into the room. He would no longer cower in closets. With the new day, he would follow a fresh strategy. Instead of reacting, he would act, and take the fight to his tormentor.
    The hallway light was on, as it should have been, and one lamp in the living room, but the kitchen was not dark, as he had left it.
    On the dinette table were the leather work gloves. When he found them on the bedspread the previous night, he had put them in a trash bag and set the bag on the bedroom armchair, intending to dispose of them come morning.
    Now morning found them here. They appeared to be more saturated with blood than they had been before, much of it crusted and dry, but some still wet, gluey.
    Beside the gloves were a pencil and the notepad that earlier had been by the kitchen phone. The yellow paint on the pencil was mottled with dried blood.
    A few smears of blood also stained the top sheet of the notepad, but they did not obscure the message. The three handwritten lines were centered to one another.
    So suddenly did Henry’s dread return and with such force that at first he could make no more sense of the words than he would have if they had been from the lost language of an ancient civilization. Fear rendered him momentarily illiterate.
    When he could read, he saw that before him were three lines of verse. They didn’t rhyme because they comprised a brief poem in that seventeen-syllable Japanese form called haiku.
    Of course, Henry knew about haiku because he had graduated from Harvard, but also because his brother, Jim, had written fifty-two of them that were published in a slender hardcover.
    Swooping harrier—
calligraphy on the sky,
talons, then the beak
.
    Henry remembered the pair of harriers gliding in intersecting gyres as he had walked to the barn with his brother.
    Calligraphy. Beautiful Japanese writing done with a brush.
    Henry was neither a poet nor much of a reader of poetry, but he supposed that to describe a swooping bird, a brush painting graceful strokes might be an acceptable metaphor.
    The last line disturbed him more than the others. The final fourwords made this a poem about death, a poem less about the harrier than about the unmentioned mouse that would be pierced by the talons and torn by the beak.
    If Henry was the harrier, then his twin brother must be the mouse, and this poem was about Jim’s murder in the barn.
    On the other hand, if Jim was the harrier, then
his
brother was the mouse, and the poem must be about the impending murder of Henry.
    He remembered Jim’s words spoken just before they entered the barn:
“Predators and prey. The necessity of death, if life is to have meaning and proportion. Death as a part of life. I’m working on a series of poems with those themes.”
    Infuriated more by the mockery than the threat, by being played for a fool, Henry Rouvroy wanted to rip the top page off the notepad, tear it in pieces and flush it down the toilet, but the thought of touching it repulsed him.
    … talons, then the beak
.
    Those cold words seemed to promise a cruel death by stabbing, slashing.
    … talons, then the beak
.
    Jim had not been stabbed. He had been shot. The poem was not likely to be about Jim’s death.
    Henry remembered the five knives that had been on the table when he first came into the kitchen with Jim and Nora.
    Five knives with four- and five-inch blades, nonreflective finishes. Assisted-opening mechanisms for quick blade release.
    Before the three of them had coffee and sweetrolls, Jim moved the knives to the counter by the refrigerator.
    Henry turned away from the haiku and went to the counter.
    Three knives lay there. Two were missing.

Forty-one

T he fragrance of fir, the wry significance of hemlock, and the irony of dogwood comforted Liddon