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 four words 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

The fragrance of fir, the wry significance of hemlock, and the irony of dogwood comforted Liddon Wallace as he followed the footpath through the forest after arranging for the murders of his wife and child.

The law was a magnificent thing. His legal career had brought him wealth, a measure of fame, powerful friends in high office, a young and stunningly beautiful wife, the means to resolve problems that would daunt or destroy other men, and the freedom to make even radical changes in his life to increase his happiness and to ensure that he was always as fulfilled as he had every right to be.

His parents and most of his teachers over the years, from preschool through law school, had stressed that nothing was more important than self-esteem, that self-esteem was the ticket to a satisfying life journey. In Liddon’s case, they were wasting their time preaching to a true believer who from a tender age was well aware of his many superior qualities, not the least of which was decisiveness.

When he saw what needed to be done, he did it. Or hired someone like Rudy Neems to do it. Liddon never dithered, and once he acted, he never had remorse.

Sometimes, if he possessed the right information, he neither had to do the job himself nor pay to have it done. A lot of people lived with secrets that could destroy them, and if you knew their secrets, you could manipulate them to do things for you that reduced them to the condition of puppets. Because Liddon had friends in high office with unlimited public funds to investigate any member of the public, he never had difficulty getting the dirt on those he targeted, assuming that they had secrets worth learning.

As much as he loved the law and money and himself, he loved nothing more than pulling people’s strings. He was born to be the master of his universe. Power was better than sex. Power was better than wealth. Power was better than anything.

All of these thoughts and a great many more of a diverse nature were bursting through Liddon Wallace’s ever-busy mind as he walked through the woods toward the service road along which he had parked his rental car. Preoccupied with details of universe management and with thoughts related to the oncoming changes in his life, he was all but oblivious of the beauty of the forest.

He was not enthralled by nature as so many people seemed to be these days. He liked grass that was mown, trees artfully shaped by a talented arborist, flowers in orderly rows in well-designed beds, water contained within pools and fountains. He didn’t appreciate the riotous quality of the natural world, everything thrown together in a wild sprawling mess, the fertility, the variety, the chaos.

Perhaps because he was unimpressed by nature, Nature decided to give him a slap upside the head. One second he was hurrying through the fog in a fog of his own, and the next second, wham!

The thing happened so abruptly, he reeled from it with a cry of terror, but there was nowhere to reel to, because the thing happened all around him, so that he either had to surrender to it or resist and endure. Liddon Wallace had never surrendered to anything in his life, never; and he refused to start capitulating now. If any strings were going to be pulled, he would do the pulling, he would not be pulled, he would never yield, never.

The energy of the event, the absolute power of the thing, took his breath away. Literally, he could not breathe. The air became as thick as water, compressed by an irresistible force of inconceivable might. And it seemed to him that the sunlight was being condensed, as well, concentrated not into greater brightness but into a rich golden densification, into a substance that he could feel and smell, into a shimmering coagulum that swelled, bent, buckled, and brought forth impossibilities.

He sensed also that something had gone wrong with time. Wrong wasn’t the correct word; something about time had changed-the flow, the rules, the purpose of it. The past, the present, and the future were as one, twisted together like spaghetti on a fork, then twisted tighter, tighter, until countless millennia were wound into a single instant. He became aware of every moment of his past and of all the possibilities of his future, saw himself as a fetus, an infant, a growing child, an adolescent, an adult, a feeble octogenarian, all simultaneously.