Read Devotion for Free Online Page B

night of July 27, 1986, there was a cricket somewhere in David’s kitchen. He thought it might be behind the toaster, or in the toaster. Or possibly in the bread box. A small embroidered Home Sweet Home pillow at his lower back, he was on page 88 of
The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard.
It was 3:15 A.M. David dozed off, head down on the table, but almost immediately was startled awake by a sound that was at once vaguely familiar and joltingly strange. The guesthouse and pond a hundred feet away were surrounded by woods. What David heard might have been a porcupine or bobcat; they sometimes produced such eerie calls. Possibly a screech owl. He took a flashlight from a drawer, stepped out to the porch. Wild white moonlight. He hardly needed the flashlight, but he aimed it at the pen, located halfway to the pond. The swans were huddled in three groups. He recalled that Maggie once showed him an entry in the diary of an eighteenth-century naturalist named Mark Catesby:
I’m told by natives that swans mate for life. I have observed that swans have other behaviors as well.
However, none of the Tecoskys’ swans
were paired up. They’d arrived at the estate individually wounded.
    David stepped barefoot off the porch; the cold grass felt oddly soothing. Crickets. Then David heard a rasping shriek, then an asthmatic reedy bray, and recognized the source. It was the clarinet Maggie had provided her father, on advice from Dr. Epson, to help strengthen his diaphragm, but which William also used, obnoxiously, as a kind of woodwind alarm system. David mentioned this to Naomi, who said, “Turn that clarinet into kindling. Why can’t he just ring you up?”
    But David was obligated here. It could be a real crisis. He was the male nurse, after all. He was the caretaker of the estate, for now. He heard the swans’ wings fluttering, their jostling about the pen. William’s clarinet had this effect on them. On the porch of the main house, he took the key from under the dirt-filled, flowerless terracotta vase, but remembered that William locked the place only when he was away. He opened the door and called out, “William, it’s me, David!” Entering the guest room, David turned on the small table lamp near the door. He saw that the clarinet lay crosswise on the wheeled cart next to the bed. Vials of pills were lined up neatly on the cart, along with a pitcher of water and a glass. William sat upright against the headboard, watching the TV at the foot of the bed. He was dressed in long-sleeved gray pajamas.
    â€œLooks like there’s no emergency,” David said.
    William wrote something on a three-by-five card and handed it to David. David stepped back toward the lamp and read:
I’ve been thinking. I appreciate your nursemaiding me these months. But it doesn’t change things. I have bad dreams about that taxi. When the right time comes, I’ll knock your lights out.
    â€œStatus quo,” David said. “Well, your attitude toward me hasn’t got worse. That’s something.”
    William wrote another note. David read it:
Why not watch this movie with me. It’s called Background to Danger. It started only ten minutes ago.
    David turned off the light, sat in the wicker rocking chair next to the bed. He had not heard of
Background to Danger.
Right away he saw that Peter Lorre was in it. Lorre was standing in an alley (“That guy’s a weasel,” William muttered) and slipping his hand into his trenchcoat pocket. He was talking to a man standing close by, whose shadow against the wall did not intervene. Close by because otherwise the knife Lorre now revealed would be of little threat. Lorre’s mouth twitched a smile, then suddenly fell into a severe frown—no middle ground with this fellow. He spoke with his famous petulant, whining accent, something of a malignant Esperanto; after all, in his movies you never really knew which country Peter Lorre was from, a