“Door…buzzer,” Edward managed to get out. “Downstairs. Somebody…wants in.”
“Who’re you expecting?”
“No-nobody. Mary, listen…you’re choking me. Come on…stop it…okay?”
Brrrring.
She stared into his too-blue eyes and his mottled face. He was small, she decided. A small person who had given up and been seduced by the Mindfuck State. He was to be pitied. She didn’t want to kill him, not yet. Drummer was crying and someone wanted in. She released Edward’s tie, and he gasped in a shuddering breath followed by a coughing fit.
Mary pressed the pacifier into Drummer’s mouth. His eyes were angry, and big wet tears had rolled down his cheeks. He looked the way she felt. She finished changing his diaper, the gun beside him on the bed.
In the front room, Edward gave a last ragged cough and pressed the intercom button. “Yeah?”
There was no answer.
“Anybody down there?”
Nothing.
He released the button. Neighborhood kids screwing around, he figured. About three seconds later: Brrrring.
He hit the button again. “Hey, listen up! You want to play, go play in the middle of the stre—”
“Edward Lambert?”
A woman’s voice. Sounded nervous. “Yeah. Who is it?”
“Come downstairs.”
“I don’t have time for this, lady. What’re you selling?”
“Damaged goods,” she said. “Come downstairs.” She clicked off.
“Who was that?” Mary stood in the bedroom’s doorway, freshly diapered Drummer in her arms and the Magnum automatic in her right hand.
“Nobody.” He shrugged. “Bag lady, probably. They’re all over the place trying to get handouts.”
Mary went to the window and looked out. The air was hazed with falling snow. And then she saw the figure standing down on the sidewalk, staring up at the apartment building. The wind had picked up, whipping at the figure’s gray overcoat. There was a black cap on the person’s head, and a long woolen muffler the same color around the neck.
Mary’s eyes narrowed. She recognized the outfit. She’d seen this person before. Yes, she was sure of it. On the boat coming back from Liberty Island. This person had been standing at the stern, hands in pockets, next to the blond-haired girl in the leather jacket. As Mary watched, the figure began to walk slowly away from the building, bent against the wind. A few more steps, and a crosscurrent of winds snatched the cap and lifted it off the person’s head.
A mane of red hair spilled down. A woman, Mary realized. The woman caught the cap before it could spin away, pushed her tresses up under it, and mashed it down again. Then she kept walking, shoulders slumped as if under a terrible burden.
Red hair, Mary thought. Red as a battle flag.
She had known another woman with hair that color.
“Oh my God,” Mary whispered.
The red-haired woman turned a corner and went out of sight, snowflakes whirling behind her.
“Hold my baby,” Mary told Edward, and she put Drummer in his arms before he could say no. She jammed the pistol down into the waistband of her jeans, under her baggy brown sweater, and she headed for the door.
“Where’re you going? Mary! Where the hell are—”
She was already out the door and racing down the second-floor stairway. She ran out onto the street, into the cutting cold and snow. Then on to the corner where the red-haired woman had turned off Cooper Avenue, and Mary could see her about a block away. She was opening the driver’s door of a brown compact Ford.
“Wait!” Mary shouted, but the wind was in her face and the woman couldn’t hear. The Ford pulled out of its parking place and started coming toward Mary, who stepped into the street and walked forward to meet it. Flurries of snow swirled between them. Mary lifted her right hand and made a peace sign, and she strode toward the car as it came on.
She saw the woman’s face through the windshield. Like Edward’s, it was not a face she knew. And then the woman’s eyes widened, her mouth opened in a cry Mary couldn’t hear, and the Ford skidded to a stop on the gleaming pavement.
The woman got out, and the wind took her black cap, and the red tresses danced around her shoulders. Mary lowered her peace hand. Was this or was this not someone she knew? The hair was the same, yes, but the face was different. Bedelia Morse had been as lovely as a model, her nose small and graceful, her mouth and chin set with firm purpose. This woman had a crooked nose that looked as if it had been brutally broken and never properly set, her jowls were thick, and her chin had receded above a padding of flab. Deep lines flared out from the corners of her eyes and cut across her forehead. Mary could tell that the woman, who stood about five six, was heavy around the stomach and waist, a once-fine figure gone to seed. But the woman had green eyes: green as Irish moss. They were Didi’s eyes, in a face that was almost toadish.
“Mary?” she said in Bedelia’s voice grown husky and older. “Mary?”
“It’s me,” Mary answered, and Bedelia tried to speak again, but only a sob came out and it was tattered by the wind. Bedelia Morse rushed forward into Mary’s arms, and they hugged each other with the pistol between them.
2
The Idiot’s Dream
ON MONDAY MORNING BETWEEN two and three, Laura Clayborne put on her heavy overcoat, got into her car in the Days Inn parking lot, started the engine, and drove west, heading for Didi Morse’s cottage in the woods.
Sleep was impossible, the night full of phantoms. A crescent moon hung in the sky, the road empty before the BMW’s headlights. Laura shivered, waiting for the heater to warm up. She and Mark had driven out to the cottage at ten o’clock, to see if Didi Morse had gotten home and was simply not answering her telephone, but the house had been dark. Laura wanted to drive, to have the sensation of at least going from one point to another. Her calls to Agent Kastle in Atlanta had told her how his investigation was going: Kastle, his secretary said, was out of the city and would get in touch with Laura whenever he returned. In other words: don’t call us, we’ll call you.
That wasn’t good enough. Not good enough by a damned long shot.
Laura drove past the cottage. Still dark, no car in front. Wherever Didi was, her weekend trip had stretched out another day. Laura thought she might start chewing the walls of her motel room if she’d come all this way and couldn’t find the woman. She’d stopped taking her sleeping pills because she didn’t want her brain fogged with drugs. The downside of kicking the sleeping pills, though, was that she had maybe three or four hours of sleep a night and the other hours were haunted by visions of the madwoman on the balcony and the sniper with his rifle. Laura couldn’t take looking at her face in a mirror, her eyes had seemingly sunken deeper, and there was a steely shine in them as if something hard and unknown were beginning to peer out.
About a mile west of the cottage, Laura turned around on a dirt road and headed back. Get something to eat, she thought. Find an all-night pancake house, maybe. Someplace with a lot of hot black coffee.
She slowed, nearing the cottage again. She glanced toward it as the BMW crept by. Dark, of course. Didi had gone birding, the old man had said. Borrowed his binoculars, and went bye-bye. Her hands tightened around the wheel. Didi Morse might be her only hope of finding David alive. David might be dead right now, torn apart like the dolls in the box they’d found in Mary Terrell’s apartment. Dear God, Laura prayed, help me hold on to my sanity.
A light flashed.
A light.
In a window of Didi Morse’s cottage.
Laura was past the house by a hundred yards before she could make her foot hit the brake. She slowed down gradually, not wanting the tires to shriek. Her heart was about to blow out of her chest. A light. Just a brief glimmer, maybe a second and then gone. It hadn’t been a reflection of the moon, or of her headlights.
Someone was inside the house, prowling around in the dark.
Laura’s first thought was to stop and
call the police. No, no; she didn’t want the police in this, not yet. She turned around again and drove past the house once more. This time no light shone. But she’d seen it; she knew she had. The real question was: what was she going to do about it?
She pulled the car off the road, stopped it on the brown-grassed shoulder, cut the headlights and the engine.
Her purse was on the seat beside her, but her pistol remained in her suitcase at the motel. She sat there, shivering as the warm air slipped away and the night came in. Who was inside Bedelia Morse’s house? A burglar? Stealing what? Her pottery? Laura realized she could either sit there and thrash it around in her mind or walk back to the house. Courage was not a question here: it was a matter of desperation.
Laura got out, opened the trunk, and put her hand around the tire iron. Then she buttoned up her coat to the neck and began walking the couple of hundred yards back to the dirt driveway that curved up through the woods. No light shone in any of the cottage’s windows. There was no other car anywhere in sight. Imagination or not? She tightened her grip around the tire iron and started up the driveway, the air’s eighteen-degree temperature burning her nostrils and lungs.
The baby was crying again. The sound roused Mary from a dream of a castle on a cloud, and set her teeth on edge. It had been a good dream, and in it she’d been young and slim and her hair had been the color of the summer sun. It had been a dream that she hated leaving, but the baby was crying again. Babies were killers of dreams, she thought as she sat up in bed. Her dream had been to place the baby in Lord Jack’s hands, and see him smile like a blaze of beauty. Lord Jack would love her again, and everything would be right with the world.
But Lord Jack wasn’t here. He hadn’t been at the weeping lady. Lord Jack wasn’t coming for her. Not now. Not ever.
The baby was crying, a sound that razored her brain. She stood up, a well of despair, and she felt the old familiar rage begin to steam from the pores of her flesh.
“Hush,” she said. “Drummer, hush.” He wouldn’t obey. His crying was going to wake the neighbors, and then the pigs might come calling. Why did the babies always try to betray her like this? Why did they take her love and twist it into hateful knots? What good was Drummer now if Lord Jack didn’t want him? Drummer was a piece of crying flesh that had no purpose, no reason for being. She hated him at that moment because she realized what she’d done to bring him to Lord Jack. Now it was all over, and Lord Jack would never set eyes on the wailing rag.
“Won’t you stop crying?” she asked Drummer as she sat on the narrow bed in the dark. She spoke in a quiet voice. Drummer gurgled and cried louder. “All right,” Mary said, and she stood up. “All right, then. I’ll make you stop.”
She switched on the lights in the kitchenette. Then she turned on one of the stove’s burners and swiveled its dial to high.
Laura walked slowly up the front steps of Bedelia Morse’s house. A clay cat was crouched near the door, and dead leaves scuttled across the porch. Laura reached out and tried the doorknob, gently working it from side to side. Locked. She retreated from the door, went back down the stairs again and around to the rear of the house. Her fingers, clenched so hard on the tire iron, were stiffening up with the cold. There was a one-car garage and a larger stone outbuilding, its door sealed with a padlock and chain, where Laura assumed the pottery work was done. Strange clay sculptures stood amid the barren trees like alien plant life; Laura couldn’t see them now, in the dark, but they’d been apparent when she and Mark had gone back there on their initial visit Saturday. All kinds of clay geegaws—bird feeders, mobiles, and other things not so readily identifiable —dangled on wires from the tree limbs. It was obvious that Bedelia Morse—or Diane Daniells, as she called herself now—had thrown herself heart and soul into the work she’d begun as a member of Mark’s commune. Laura went to the back door, her shoes crunching on dead branches and leaves, and she tried this doorknob as well.
It turned easily. Laura’s heart kicked again. She ran her hand over the door and found that one of its small rectangular panes of glass had been removed. Not broken, because there were no shards. Removed, as with a glass cutter.
She opened the door and stood on the threshold. Off in the woods somewhere, an owl spoke to the moon. The cold wind hissed through the trees and made the clay ornaments clink and clatter on their wires. She shivered involuntarily, and she stood in the doorway trying to see through the dark. Nothing in there but shapes upon shapes. She and Mark had looked through the door’s panes on Saturday and seen a kitchen with a table and a single chair in the middle of the room. On Saturday, the door had had all its panes of glass, and it had been securely locked.
Her heart pounding, Laura lifted the tire iron and walked into the house.
Mary picked up the baby. Her touch was rough. The infant’s crying broke, faltered, and began to climb in volume again, a thin, high whine that Mary could not abide. “STOP IT!” she shouted into his reddened, squawling face. “STOP IT, YOU LITTLE SHIT!”
The baby cried on. Mary almost choked on a scream of rage. How could she have been so stupid to believe that Lord Jack had written the message? To believe that he wanted her and the baby after all these years? To believe that he cared? No one cared. No one. She had stolen this child and blown her disguise, had put herself in mortal danger from the pigs of the Mindfuck State…and all for Edward Fordyce’s traitorous book about the Storm Front.
She would deal with Edward before she left. She would make herself put a bullet between his eyes and dump his body in a garbage can. But right now there was the baby, crying his head off. Drummer, she thought, and she sneered. “You want to cry?” She shook him. “You want to cry?” Shook him harder. His crying became a shriek. “Okay, I’ll make you cry!”
She took him into the kitchenette, where the burner glowed fiercely red and its heat rose up in a shimmer. The baby was trembling, still wailing, legs trying to thrash. She didn’t need the little bastard. Didn’t need Lord Jack. Didn’t need anyone. She would make Drummer stop crying, make him obey her, and then she’d leave what remained of him for the pigs and the woman named Laura Clayborne. Then she would go underground again, deep underground, where nothing and no one could touch her, and she would turn her back for the last time on the idiot’s dream of love and hope.
“Cry!” she shouted. “Cry! Cry!”
And she grasped the back of the baby’s head and pressed his face toward the red burner.
In the dark, Laura listened. The boom of her heart and the roar of her breathing got in the way. Get out, she told herself. You don’t belong here. You’re a long way from home, and you’ve gone too far. If a burglar was ransacking Bedelia Morse’s house, that was his business. But she didn’t leave, and her fingers groped for a light switch. Her hand hit something that jingled merrily and made her jump a foot in the air. Another damned pottery mobile. She was making more noise than a marching band.
In another moment she found a light switch, and she turned it on.
A warm breath washed against her neck.
She spun around, to the right, and looked into the face of the man who was standing there. She opened her mouth to scream. A black-gloved hand rose up, fast as a cobra’s head, and clamped her mouth shut before the scream could get out.
The baby’s face was almost on the burner. He was still wailing, stubbornly, and Mary braced for the scream of agony.
A scream came.
“NO!”
Someone grabbed her from behind, shoving her and the baby away from the hot burner. “No! Jesus, no!” A pair of hands winnowed in, trying to grasp Drummer. Mary slammed an elbow backward and heard a grunt of pain as it connected. A woman with red hair was fighting to take Drummer, and Mary didn’t know her face. The woman was saying, “Mary, don’t! Don’t, please don’t!” Her hands grasped at the baby again, and Mary shoved the red-haired stranger back hard against the wall. This was her baby, to do with as she pleased. She had risked her life to have this child, and no o
ne would take him away from her. The woman was fighting her for Drummer once more, the red-glowing burner behind them and the baby wailing. “Listen to me! Listen!” the woman was pleading as she grabbed hold of Mary’s shoulders and hung on. Mary looked at the woman’s white throat, and she saw where she should punch into it to crush her windpipe. “Don’t hurt the baby! Please don’t!” the woman said, still hanging on. “Mary, look at me! It’s Didi! It’s Didi Morse!”
Didi Morse? Mary lifted her gaze from the vulnerable throat and stared into the woman’s heavy-jowled, deeply lined face.
“No,” Mary said over Drummer’s crying. “No. Didi Morse was beautiful.”
“I had surgery. Remember what I told you? I had the plastic surgeon do it. Don’t hurt the baby, Mary. Don’t hurt Drummer.”
Plastic surgeon. Didi Morse, her face made ugly by a scalpel, silicone implants, and a hammer that had broken her nose. I had it done when I went underground, she’d told Mary and Edward. A surgeon who did work on a lot of people who wanted to disappear. Didi had actually paid to have herself made ugly, and the surgeon—who was part of the militant underground—had done the work in St. Louis. Didi Morse, still with green eyes and red hair but now drastically different. Pleading with her not to hurt Drummer.
“Hurt…Drummer?” Mary whispered. “Hurt my baby?” Tears came to her eyes. She heard Drummer crying, but the sound didn’t razor her brain anymore; it was a cry of innocent need, and Mary pressed Drummer against her and sobbed as she realized what her rage had been guiding her toward. “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” she moaned as the baby trembled in her arms. “I’m sick, Didi. I’m so sick.”
Didi switched off the stove’s burner. Her collarbone was still throbbing from the collision with Mary’s elbow, and Mary had almost broken her back against the wall. She said, “Come on, let’s sit down.” She wanted to get Mary away from the stove. Her sight of the woman about to mash the infant’s face down on that burner had been a horror beyond belief. She grasped Mary’s arm with a careful touch. “Come on, sister.”