An Absence of Light

He turned around and looked toward the house. Jael was lying on her stomach in the hammock, and he could see it swinging, swinging. The cotton webbing of the hammock was white, and he imagined her dark skin against it and the way it protruded softly through the weave of the pattern in cocoa triangles.

Chapter 2

From his car on the nearly deserted expressway, Marcus Graver watched the late June rain pass over the western margins of the city as the fading evening stained to a deeper green the dense canopy of water oaks and loblolly pines and magnolias that stretched to the horizon. A thin gleam of glaucous light, all that remained of the day, appeared briefly between the drifting, bruised clouds and the darkening trees, as if an unconscious eye had opened slightly, one last time.

Graver switched off the wipers and watched the eye close through the last spatters of the departing storm that stippled the windshield. Though he was agitated, impatient, only those who knew him well would have been able to tell. He was driving fast on the glistening, black ribbon that banked gently southward, the tires of his car sucking up rain from the pavement and spewing it out behind in a white hissing plume. The city’s lights had begun to coruscate against the Sunday dusk.

Graver would not have chosen Arthur Tisler if he had been asked to imagine this. Of all the men and women who worked under him, Tisler seemed the least remarkable, the least likely to have “things happen” to him. Arthur Tisler was the quintessential invisible man, and invisible men lived their lives without creating eddies of air around themselves; they died without incident, and in no time at all people found themselves saying, Arthur Tisler, my God, I haven’t thought of him in years.

Uninteresting was not a word inherently descriptive of low-key personalities, but, as Graver thought about it, in Tisler’s case this pale, lighter-than-air adjective was singularly appropriate. In his middle thirties, Tisler was of middle height and middle weight His hair, light brown, straight, baby-fine, was prematurely thinning in a little fuzzy swirl on the back of his head. He wore glasses, squarish metal frames of pewter color with a dark brown plastic trim on the upper half. He hadn’t much of a beard, tiny eyelashes, modest eyebrows that almost apologized for not making more of an impression, and a smallish nose that came rather to a point. He possessed, in fact, a forgettable face. Not too far in the future Graver would have to look at a picture of him to remember what he looked like.

Or, maybe not. Maybe after what had happened tonight, Graver would never be able to forget him.

He drifted to the right-hand lane, slowed, and took the Harwin exit down off the expressway. He lifted his chin, to stretch his neck a little underneath the knotted tie as he made a mental note to move over the collar button. It would be the second one he had done in a week, confirming in a practical way what the bathroom scales had been indicating quantitatively for several months now. Which was fine with him. He always had thought he was too thin anyway. He was the only middle-aged man he knew who never gave a damn about what he ate.

Harwin was a long street It ran east and west from the Southwest Freeway into Sharpstown, through good and not-so-good parts of the city depending on how long you stayed with it. To Graver’s right the streets grew sparse as he crossed over Brays Bayou, and vacant lots gave way to empty fields, black stretches of unlighted land. The tracks of the Southern Pacific Railroad angled in from the north as he approached the overpass of the Sam Houston Tollway, and then they turned parallel to Harwin as the lights of Andrau Airpark appeared in the near distance.

He turned right onto Willcrest, slowed immediately, crossed the railroad tracks, and then rolled down his window and began peering out into the darkness to his left, out across the tracts of urban emptiness toward the isolated end of the airstrip. The odors of wet grass and weeds washed into the car. He was surprised that he couldn’t immediately see the lights of the patrol cars. The field appeared flat. He shifted his attention to the edge of the pavement. Pio Tordella had given him precise directions. The homicide detective told him he should begin looking for a little dirt road just after he crossed the railroad tracks. The road was unmarked, just ruts actually, going into the weeds and high grass.

Since his was the only car on the long stretch of street, he crossed over to the oncoming lane and drove beside the caliche shoulder so the headlights could more easily pick up any break in the smooth margin of grass. Immediately they did.