The Devil's bed

“They finally let you exchange your hospital gown for civilian clothes,” she said. “You look good.”

He almost said, So do you. Instead he indicated an area far to her right where a pile of stone and sacks of dry mortar lay. “What’s going on?”

“They’re putting up a wall. Dad finally gave his okay. It’ll ruin the view.” She stared again at the river. “They told me the body’s been definitely identified. It was David Moses.”

“Yes. It’s over, Kate.”

She gave her head a faint shake. “Once a thing happens, it’s never really over. It’s always there in your memory. In your nightmares.”

Bo thought about his own nightmares and knew that what she said was true.

Another smile brightened her face. “By the way, you’re invited to Sunday dinner. I hope you haven’t already made other plans.”

He decided she must not know about the tabloid story yet. He thought he should tell her, but he liked seeing her happy, and he liked feeling happy himself.

“I’ll be there,” he said.

He pulled into the garage behind the duplex in Tangletown. He climbed the stairs to his apartment and unlocked the door. Inside, he felt a little disoriented, as if he’d been gone on a long trip. He knew that in a way he had.

He put his things away, popped on a Miles Davis CD, and stood at the window in his living room. The street was quiet, full of sunlight and the shade of big trees. Down the block, a teenager ran a gas mower across a lawn. Nearer, a man in jean cutoffs hosed the suds off his car in the driveway. Bo could see kids on a swing set visible in one of the backyards. It all looked so normal, and it all felt so alien.

You’re just tired, he told himself. He went to the bedroom to lie down. With him, he took the book she’d given him. He opened it and read again the inscription she’d written. “…your name upon my lips.”

He closed the book.

“Kate,” he whispered.

It felt very good on his own lips.

chapter thirty

The doctor had sent Bo home with pills. Penicillin to fight infection. Codeine to deal with residual pain. And Xanax to help him sleep. Bo sometimes had nightmares about Wildwood. The faces of the men and the woman who had died there haunted him. Often, in the nightmares, he relived the confrontation on the bluff with Moses. Sometimes in the nightmares, it was Bo who went over the cliff, and as he fell, he realized Kate was going to die, too. That nightmare always wrenched him from his sleep.

Awake in the dark one night, he got up to take some Xanax. He settled in front of the television and caught a late-night news program on cable. It was called “Profile of a Madman” and was subtitled “The David Solomon Moses Story.” In the wake of the attack on Wildwood, most networks had thrown together reports, profiles, documentaries of one kind or another. In most respects, the one Bo watched seemed a rehashing of what he and everyone else already knew by now. Moses, the brilliant, troubled man with a horrendous history. The romantic obsession for Kathleen Jorgenson. The assaulton Kate after she made it clear to him that she didn’t return his affection. The choice between prison and military service. There were a couple of new twists. While in the army, David Moses had served with Special Forces. There were positive comments about him from superior officers who felt he’d distinguished himself during a number of assignments. His history after his discharge was vague but included rumors of psychiatric treatment in several VA facilities across the country prior to his arrest for manslaughter in Minneapolis. Bo thought about the alphabet boys. CIA, NSA, DOD. They had the resources to create a smoke screen past for Moses, a man whose association with them, if indeed there’d been one, they would certainly want to hide. Of course the documentary chronicled yet again all the bloody spectacle at Wildwood, which was explained (this was the popular theory) as an adolescent obsession finally finding an outlet in the adult fury of a deranged man.

The profile ended with footage of a simple burial in a cemetery in River Falls, Wisconsin. The final shot was a lingering image of Moses’s gravestone. The marker was small. Chiseled there were his name, the date of his death, and a brief inscription: Forgive us our trespasses.

The only man Bo knew who’d befriended David Moses while he was alive had presided over his final rest in death. Father Don Cannon.

In the morning, Bo called the priest and arranged to meet with him.

“I made the request for disposition of the remains,” Father Cannon said. “Nobody else wanted him.”

They were having coffee in the priest’s home in River Falls. They sat on a patio in the backyard. There was a feeder on a pole at one corner of the patio, and a hummingbird hovered there with its long beak thrust into the tiny tube from which it sucked colored sugar water.

“I would never have believed that the boy I knew could be capable of such brutality,” the priest said.