What the Night Knows Read Online Free PDF

watched the numbers flashing. He watched them and wondered.
    The rancid odor seemed to intensify.
    After backing away from the odor but not all the way out of the past into the present, John went next to the study. Here, Robert Lucas had been bludgeoned with a hammer while paying bills.
    Robert’s desk was along the far wall, facing a window, so that hecould look up from his work to enjoy a view of the three paper birches in the yard. This put his back to the study door.
    Darkness shrank from the flashlight beam, and a collage appeared on top of the desk: an artful scattering of envelopes, invoices, and a sheet of postage stamps against a desk-blotter background, all of it unevenly glazed with a lacquer once bright red, now red-black and rust and purple.
    In his audio imaginarium, John Calvino heard nothing of Robert’s death cries, perhaps because the first blow had rendered the man unconscious before a sound could escape him.
    The flashlight found a spattered pen set on a white marble base, a sprayed windowsill, spotted draperies. The spatter, the spray, and the spotting comprised a kind of scream, a shrill shriek that seemed to arise in John’s bones, but this was not a sound that had been made by the victim; this was his own unvoiced cry of moral revulsion.
    As he retreated from the study into the hallway, he thought he heard a jingling of tiny bells, a cold silvery sound lasting but an instant. He became as still as any living thing could be still.
    The flashlight beam did not quiver on the mahogany floor.
    In the sidelights that flanked the front door, the panes of glass were nearly as dark as the wooden muntins that separated them from one another. The sun had sunk far down the gullet of the storm.
    John could not be sure that the sound had been real. He might have summoned it from memory, from twenty years in the past.
    He went to the living room, from where the ringing might have come. The double doors—added to the archway after Sandra’s accident, to convert this space to a ground-floor bedroom—stood wide open. Bedclothes had been neatly turned down, but Sandra had died before retiring for the night. No one, with or without bells, waited there.
    John had no interest in any remaining ground-floor rooms. No one had been murdered in them. The stairs did not creak. At the landing, he paused to gather his resolve.
    The worst would be on the second floor. The mother and father had died quickly. But upstairs, the grandmother and the sister had struggled and suffered. Their cries would come to him.
    On the landing wall, a print of John Singer Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose was spectacular even in the cold LED beam. Two lovely little girls in white dresses were lighting Chinese lanterns under a bower of lilies, in a twilight English garden.
    Perhaps the most charming painting of the entire nineteenth century, the scene had often elicited a smile from John when he came upon it in books of art. He didn’t smile this time.
    As he turned from the picture, he had the impression that one of the girls was sprayed with blood. When he looked again, the blush on her face proved to be light from the Chinese lantern in her hands.
    Upstairs, John went to the grandmother’s quarters at the front of the house, on the left side of the hall. The door stood open.
    No dishwater daylight leaked through the heavy draperies. A combination night-light and air-freshener emitted a peach-colored glow and the fragrance of carnations.
    Except for the punch that, to her grandson’s amusement, knocked out her false teeth, the assault on Ann Lucas had been bloodless. The aftermath John dreaded waited not here but in the sister’s room.
    He flicked a switch, lighting a lamp. Half the grandmother’s room still lay in shadow. Tangled bedclothes trailed onto the floor.
    On the dresser stood a collection of framed photographs. Six featured Billy alone or with others of his family. His open face seemed untouched by deceit. His eyes revealed