The situation seemed to call for stealth and caution. But Henry was trembling uncontrollably, breathing rapidly and shallowly, unable to calm himself. The telltale heart he heard was not that of either Jim or Nora, not a dead pump drumming out an accusation of his guilt, but his living heart knocking against his breastbone, announcing not his homicides but instead his rapidly escalating fear. At the moment, he was no more capable of stealth and caution than he was capable of juggling the axe with no risk to his fingers.
Desperate rather than brave, reckless rather than bold, axe held in both hands as he’d seen his brother carry it, Henry rushed through the open door, into the night. He plunged along the lane toward his Land Rover, which was parked near the house.
Whoever had taken the bodies could not be an agent of legitimate authority. No cops would move and hide the cadavers, and then torment their prime suspect but never question him. His nameless adversary mocked Henry, and when no more fun could be wrung from mockery, murder would follow.
He stumbled, dropped the axe, tripped over it, and as he flailed to keep his balance and avoid a fall, something passed over his head with a whoosh. He thought it must be a blade, perhaps the terrible scythe that had hung in the barn next to the axe.
When he cried out and turned, anticipating decapitation, no one loomed behind him. He was alone in the lane, in the moonlight, in his thrall of terror.
Rather than retrieve the axe, he hurried to the Land Rover. As he raised the tailgate, he expected to find the vehicle empty, but it was packed wall to wall, nothing missing except the suitcases full of cash that he earlier had transferred to the highest shelf in the potato cellar.
He pawed through the cargo, found the large rigid-wall suitcase that he wanted, and pulled it out. He closed the tailgate and pressed the lock icon on the electronic key. Nervously surveying the night, he carried the bag to the house.
Jim and Nora were childless. They lived alone.
Their farm help was seasonal. With the completion of the final harvest, the two hired hands would be gone until spring. Even in season, no laborers lived on the property.
Henry had inferred that much from Jim’s poetry, in which the hired hands were sometimes featured. He had confirmed his inferences soon after his arrival, as he chatted with Jim and Nora over cinnamon rolls and coffee.
Immediately inside the front door, he put the suitcase flat on the living-room floor and opened it. Inside, in molded-foam niches, were a pair of short-barreled, pump-action, pistol-grip, 20-gauge shotguns and boxes of low-recoil ammo.
He fumbled with the shells, dropped more than one, but managed to insert a round in the breech of one of the shotguns and four more in the magazine. He stuffed spare shells in the pockets of his jeans.
First, the house. Make sure no intruder lurked anywhere within these walls. Room by room, lock the windows and doors. Pull shut the drapes, lower the pleated shades.
His tremors had diminished but had not subsided altogether. Dry mouth. Moist palms. Eyes hot and grainy.
Although he had practiced with the shotgun both on shooting ranges and in lonely landscapes on the long drive west, he had no experience sweeping a house to find an intruder. Fortunately, the place was small and was arranged in such a fashion that his quarry could not circle quietly behind him as he searched.
The living room harbored no one. Neither did the kitchen nor the dining area.
The door to the cellar, which earlier he had closed, stood open. Wooden stairs with rubber treads led down into darkness.
Beside the door, the wall was marred by a bloody handprint, as if a wounded man had leaned here for a moment before descending into the dark. The blood glistened, wet.
Holding the shotgun with one hand, Henry pressed the back of his left hand against the wall, next to the print. The length of his pale fingers and the size of his palm seemed to match the hand of whoever had ventured into the cellar.
Another blackjack table. Another casino. This time, Dr. Lamar Woolsey was calling himself Mitch Feigenbaum.
This seemed to be an unlikely name for a sixty-year-old African-American. But his resemblance to the beloved star of a long-ago TV sitcom gave him such instant credibility that no one ever seemed to suspect he was someone other than whom he pretended to be.
He was winning bigger than previously, because he enjoyed the double advantage of being a card counter and a man with an intuitive ability to recognize patterns in apparently chaotic systems.
His intuition had been refined and enhanced by a life’s work in physics and mathematics, in each of which he held a doctorate. His specialty was chaos theory.
For most of its history, science had been reductionist, seeking to learn how things worked by analyzing their constituent parts. But as successful as the sciences had been, discoveries in the last half of the twentieth century revealed that the sum of human knowledge amounted to a few grains of sand, while what waited to be discovered was an infinite – and very strange – beach.
In every complex system – from solar-system dynamics to Earth’s climate, to crystal formation, to cardiological processes – just under the facade of order, which science had discovered and long thought it fully understood, lurked an eerie and disturbing chaos. But also, deep inside every chaos, an eerier kind of hidden order waited to be found.
Even a simple system, like a card game dealt from a six-deck blackjack shoe, was fundamentally chaotic, likely to produce complex and unpredictable results. As a card counter, Lamar Woolsey hoped to impose a profitable order on the random flow of cards.
After thirty minutes of play, the composition of the six-deck shoe tipped slightly in Lamar’s favor: somewhat rich in aces and face cards, a bit low on fives and sixes, but still ruled by randomness. He couldn’t yet justify aggressive betting.
Then something strange happened. A series of Hail Mary draws gave Lamar a glimpse of the eerie nature of reality, of hidden and mysterious order.
The dealer showed a queen above his hole card. Lamar had a ten and a six, to which he drew a five, beating the dealer by a point.
In the next hand, he drew a three and a seven while the dealer showed a six. He doubled down, but drew only a deuce. The dealer revealed a sixteen count – and drew a six, busting.
Now the dealer had an ace up, and Lamar had a four and a three. He drew another four. Then a deuce. Another deuce. Then a six. His final twenty-one beat the dealer, who had a nine under his ace.
None of those three wins involved card counting, and even the most paranoid pit boss would see them as nothing but luck.
Not a believer in luck, Lamar read them instead as one of those curious patterns that expressed a hidden order under the randomness – under the chaos – of any game of chance. This phase of the pattern, which benefited him, was a wave that offered effortless surfing. Until it lost its benign character, he ought to ride it.
He won nine more hands in a row, lost two, then won another eight with such unlikely combinations of cards that counting tens and aces could have had no effect on his fortunes.
Sometimes the power of hidden order can have, with its patterns, such an obvious presence in a system that its precise mechanisms seem within the theorist’s grasp – until chaos reappears. Even when Lamar played irrationally, splitting a pair of fours when the dealer showed a face card, he won. When the dealer showed an ace, Lamar doubled down on eight – and won.
After losing