Killer Move

Hallam didn’t share the tech’s assumption that this meant the matter was an end, however. This space had been laboriously dug out of the sand and bedrock of the island prior to the house being built. You didn’t go to that much trouble and expense just for this, nor did you temperature-control or ensure its cleanliness at some recent time with bleach—a process the tiling could have been designed to make easier.

“We’re not done yet,” he said.

They walked methodically across the floor, a few feet apart, looking down. They did it in five passes. They saw nothing, no sign of suspicious substances, no splash of blood to echo the one discovered in the kitchen two days before. If Warner had been killed or wounded here, someone had cleaned up after himself very well.

At the far end they stopped. The tech had visibly started to relax. Hallam hadn’t. His mind told him it was just the notion that you didn’t go to this much trouble for a big white room. His heart, or stomach, had more to say. It could hear something. It was a sound he remembered from when his mother had taken him on a trip to visit relatives up in Canada. It was one of the few times he and his mother had spent quality time alone, and it was a happy memory but for one thing. They spent a week in a town called Colindale, a couple of hours north of Toronto. It had been cold in a way he’d never experienced before or since—wind chill taking it below minus ten most days. One afternoon, when cabin fever set in and Mrs. Hallam decided she either had to get away from her sister for a few hours or risk intersibling bloodshed, she and her son had spent a frigid afternoon trying to find something of interest on Colindale’s short main drag. Eventually they’d wound up in the church, a hulk of architectural nullity that was distinguished that day by having a lot of oil heaters turned up high.

Hallam’s mother wandered, arms folded, looking at the things on the walls and checking her watch. Her son, mollified by the promise that once they’d warmed up he’d be taken to eat a slice of pie in the diner, stood in the center of the church and waited fairly patiently for time to pass. After a while he realized he felt something. A sensation that felt like a sound. He turned, looked around. The only other person present was his mother, now at the far end by a notice board. There had been a priest around, but he was nowhere to be seen.

“Mom,” he called.

“Yes?” Her voice floated back to him as if from a greater distance than the building could circumscribe.

“Did you just hear something?”

“Only you.”

He stood it for five minutes longer, then gained permission to wait outside. It was cold as hell, especially after the stuffy warmth of the church, but he preferred it. Half an hour later, with feeling beginning to return to his fingertips and a big slab of chocolate fudge cake inside him, he would have been hard-pressed to say why the church had made him feel uncomfortable.

In the twenty years since, however, he’d recalled this feeling from time to time, almost exclusively when work or daily life caused him to be inside some kind of religious structure. He’d developed an explanation, electing to believe that it was merely what remains in buildings when people are quiet in them for long periods: the residual silence of prayer, an accretion of contemplation—and also of intense emotion in the process of being mollified, sidelined, shoved aside: the sound of all the voices that are trapped in people’s minds. The power of grief, escaping like a heat haze from heads lowered in reverence before some putative god.

He’d never mentioned this theory to anyone, of course. But that’s what he was feeling now, and it was much louder than he’d ever heard it before, and it did not feel like an echo of anything like calm.

He walked to the center of the room, glanced from side to side, got his bearings. Far as he could judge, this room went the width of the house. The plots along this stretch of the key were relatively narrow, which is why the houses were deep. So ignore the side walls for now. He returned to the back and headed to the far left corner side. The tech watched him, looking puzzled.

“Go to the other side,” Hallam told him. “Right into that corner. Stand a yard back from the wall.”

“And then what?”

“Shuffle toward me, a tile width at a time. Keep looking at the wall.”

They did it together. After a couple of steps their movements locked in time, and it began to sound as if they were engaged in a slow dance in an empty hall, moving toward each other in a pas de deux. Hallam pushed this out of his mind as long as he could, but then heard the sound of the tech sniggering.

“Shh,” Hallam said, though he was half laughing himself. “This is serious.”

That just made the tech laugh out loud. Then he stopped. “Hang on,” he said. “I think I see something.”

Hallam went over. “Where?”

The tech ran his finger up a vertical line of grout between two columns of tiles. “You see?”

“Nope.”