Seize the Night

for the camera.
    “Wanted to die surrounded by memories of his family,” Bobby suggested.
    The fourth snapshot seemed to support that interpretation. The blonde, the children, and Delacroix stood on a green lawn, the kids in front of their parents, posed for a portrait. The occasion must have been special. Even more radiant here than in the other photos, the woman wore a summery dress and high heels. The little girl flashed a gaptoothed smile, clearly delighted by her outfit of white shoes, white socks, and a frilly pink dress flaring over petticoats. So freshly scrubbed and combed that you could almost smell the soap, the boy wore a blue suit, white shirt, and red bow tie. In an army uniform and an officer's cap—his rank not easy to determine, perhaps a captain—Delacroix was the definition of pride.
    Precisely because the subjects were so visibly happy in these shots, the effect of the photos was inexpressibly sad.
    “They're standing in front of one of these bungalows,” Bobby noted, indicating the background of the fourth snapshot.
    “Not one of them. This one.”
    “How can you tell?”
    “Gut feeling.”
    “So they lived here once?”
    “And he came back to die.”
    “Why?”
    “Maybe … this was the last place he was ever happy.”
    Bobby said, “Which also means this was where it all started going wrong.”
    “Not just for them. For all of us.”
    “Where do you think the wife and kids are?”
    “Dead.”
    “Gut feeling again?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Me too.”
    Something glittered inside the small red votive-candle glass. I prodded it with the flashlight, tipping it over. A woman's wedding and engagement rings spilled out onto the linoleum.
    These items were all Delacroix had left of his beloved wife, other than a few phtotgraphs. Perhaps I was reaching too far for meaning, but I thought he had chosen the votive-candle holder to contain the rings because this was a way of saying that the woman and the marriage were sacred to him.
    I looked again at the photograph that had been taken in front of the bungalow. The elfin girl's wide smile, with one missing tooth, was a heartbreaker.
    “Jesus,” I said softly.
    “Let's split, bro.”
    I didn't want to touch these objects the deceased had arranged around himself, but the contents of the envelope might be important. As far as I could see, it wasn't contaminated with blood or other tissue. When I picked it up, I could discern by touch that it didn't hold any paper documents.
    “Audiotape cassette,” I told Bobby.
    “A little death music?”
    “Probably his last testament.”
    In ordinary times, before a slow-motion Armageddon was unleashed in Wyvern's labs, I would have called the cops to report finding a dead body. I would not have removed anything from the scene, even though the death had every appearance of being a suicide rather than a homicide.
    These are not ordinary times.
    As I rose to my feet, I slipped the envelope and tape into an inside jacket pocket.
    Bobby's attention snapped to the ceiling, and he took a two-hand grip on the shotgun.
    I followed his gaze with the flashlight.
    The cocoons appeared unchanged, so I said, “What?”
    “Did you hear something?”
    “Like?”
    He listened. Finally he said, “Must've been in my head.”
    “What did you hear?”
    “Me,” he said cryptically, and without further explanation, he moved toward the dining-room door.
    I felt bad about leaving the late Leland Delacroix here, especially as I wasn't sure that I would report his suicide to the authorities even anonymously. On the other hand, this was where he had wanted to be.
    On the way across the dining room, Bobby said, “This baby's eleven feet long.” Overhead, the clustered cocoons remained quiescent.
    “What baby?” I asked.
    “My new surfboard.”
    Even a longboard is rarely more than nine feet.
    An eleven-foot monster with cool airbrush art was usually a wall hanger, produced to lend atmosphere to a theme restaurant.
    “Decor?” I asked.
    “No. It's a tandem board.”
    In the living room, the cocoons were as we had last seen them.
    Bobby cast wary glances upward as he went to the front door.
    “Twenty-five inches wide, five inches thick,” he said.
    Maneuvering a surfboard that size, even with two hundred fifty or three hundred pounds aboard, required talent, coordination, and belief in a benign, ordered universe.
    “Tandem?” I said, switching off the flashlight as we crossed the front porch. “Since when have you