It was near the dawning of a brand-new day.
4
Crossroads
“JESUS,” BEDELIA MORSE SAID as she stood looking at her wrecked kitchen.
Afternoon sunlight slanted through the windows. The house was cold, and Didi saw the missing pane of glass in the back door. Dead leaves were scattered about, her antique kitchen table overthrown and two legs splintered. Someone had broken in, obviously, but the only sign of ransacking was in this room. Still, she hadn’t checked the pottery workshop yet. She looked out a window, could see the padlock and chain were secure. She didn’t have much of value; her stereo was still in the front room, and so was her little portable TV. She had no jewelry to speak of, just what she fashioned on the wheel. What, then, had the intruder been after?
Terror gripped her. She walked through a short hallway into her bedroom, where her unopened suitcase lay on the bed, and she opened the bottom drawer of her dresser. It was full of old belts, socks, and a couple of pairs of well-worn bell-bottom bluejeans. Her sigh of relief was explosive. Beneath the jeans was a photo album. Didi opened it. Inside were old, yellowed newspaper stories and grainy photographs, protected by cellophane. Storm Front Shootout in N.J., said one of the headlines. FBI Hunting Escaped Terrorists, another trumpeted. Storm Fronter Killed in Attica Riots, a third headline said. There were pictures of all the Storm Front members: old photographs, snapped when they were young. The picture of herself showed her beautiful and lithe, waving at the camera from astride a horse. It had been taken by her father when she was sixteen. The picture of Mary Terrell, standing tall and blond and lovely in the summer sunlight, hurt her eyes to look at, because she now knew the reality.
Didi turned carefully to the back of the album. The last few stories had to do with Mary’s kidnapping of David Clayborne. But before them was the article and black-and-white picture she’d clipped from the Sierra Club’s newsletter five years earlier. Citizen Group Saves Bird Sanctuary, said the headline. The article was five paragraphs long, and the picture showed a woman standing at a podium before a council meeting. Behind her were seated several other people. One of them was a man whose head was turned to the right, as if talking to the woman beside him. Or avoiding the camera, Didi had thought when she’d first seen it. The lens had captured a portion of his profile—hairline, forehead, and nose. The names of the “Freestone Six,” as they called themselves, were Jonelle Collins, Dean Walker, Karen Ott, Nick Hudley, and Keith and Sandy Cavanaugh. All of Freestone, California, the article said.
Didi had always had an eye for faces: the curve of a nose, the width of an eyebrow, the way hair fell across a forehead. It was detail that made up a face. Attention to detail was one of her strengths.
And she was almost certain that one of those men— Walker, Hudley, or Cavanaugh—used to be known as Jack Gardiner.
She put the album back in its place and closed the drawer. There was no evidence that the drawer had been tampered with or the album discovered. She went into the front room and circled the telephone. Call the police? Report a burglary? But what, if anything, had been taken? She roamed around the house, checking closets and drawers. A metal box that held two hundred dollars in ready cash hadn’t been touched. Her clothes—Sears and Penney’s ready-to-wear—all remained on their hangers. Nothing was missing; even the pane of glass that had been cut from the door was lying on the kitchen’s countertop. She walked from room to room in the cottage, her Rubik’s Cube clicking but no solution in sight.
The telephone rang, and Didi picked it up in the front room. “Hello?”
A pause. Then: “Didi?”
If her heart had been pounding before, now her stomach seemed to rise to her throat. “Who is this?”
“It’s me. Mark Treggs.”
“Mark?” It had been five or six months since they’d last spoken. She always called him, not the other way around. It was part of their understanding. But something was wrong; she could hear the tension thick in his voice, and she said quickly, “What is it?”
“Didi, I’m here. In Ann Arbor.”
“Ann Arbor,” she repeated, dazed. Click, click, click. “What’re you doing here?”
“I’ve brought someone to see you.” In his room at the Days Inn, Mark glanced at Laura, who stood nearby. “We’ve been waiting for you to get back from your trip.”
“Mark, what’s this all about?”
She’s right on the edge, Mark thought. About to jump out of her skin. “Trust me, okay? I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you. Do you believe that?”
“Somebody broke in. Trashed my kitchen. Jesus, I don’t know what’s going on!”
“Listen to me. Okay? Just settle down and listen. I wouldn’t hurt you. We go back too far. I’ve brought someone who needs your help.”
“Who? What are you talking about?”
Laura took a step forward and grasped the telephone before Mark could say anything else. “Bedelia?” she said, and she heard the other woman gasp at the unfamiliar voice speaking her name. “Don’t hang up, please! Just give me a few minutes, that’s all I’m asking.”
Didi was silent, but her shock was palpable.
“My name is Laura Clayborne. Mark brought me here to see you.” Laura sensed Didi was about to slam down the phone, the hairs stirring on the back of her neck. “I’m not working with the police or the FBI,” she said. “I swear to God I’m not. I’m trying to find my baby. Do you know that Mary Terrell stole my child?”
There was no answer. Laura feared she’d already lost Bedelia Morse, that the phone would crash down and she would be long gone by the time they drove to the house.
The silence stretched, and Laura felt her nerves stretch with it.
The kernel of a scream began to form, like a small dark seed, in Laura’s mind. What she didn’t know was that the same seed was growing in the mind of Bedelia Morse.
Finally, it came. Not a scream, but a word born from the seed: “Yes.”
Thank God, Laura thought. She had squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for Didi to hang up. Now she opened them again. “Can I come talk to you?”
Another silence as Didi thought it over. “I can’t help you,” she said.
“Are you sure about that? Do you have any idea where Mary Terrell might have gone?”
“I can’t help you,” Didi repeated, but she didn’t hang up.
“All I want is my baby back,” Laura said. “I don’t care where Mary Terrell goes, or what happens to her. I’ve got to have my child back. I don’t even know if he’s still alive or not, and it’s tearing me to pieces. Please. I’m begging you: can’t you help me at all?”
“Look, I don’t know you,” Didi replied. “You could be undercover FBI for all I know. I just got home from a trip, and somebody broke into my house while I was gone. Was it you?”
“No. But I saw the man who did.” And her body remembered the scuffle, too. Her right shoulder was a mass of blue-green bruises under her white blouse and cable-knit sweater, and another line of bruises ran across her right hip beneath her jeans.
“The man.” Didi’s voice had sharpened. “What man?”
“Let me come see you. I’ll tell you when I get there.”
“I don’t know you!” It was almost a shout of fear and frustration.
“You’re going to,” Laura answered firmly. “I’m giving the phone back to Mark now. He’ll tell you I can be trusted.” She handed the telephone to him, and the first thing he heard from Didi was an enraged “You bastard! You betrayed me, you bastard! I ought to kill you for this!”
“Kill me?” he asked quietly. “You don’t really mean that, do you, Didi?”
She gave an anguished sob. “You bastard,” she whispered. “You screwed me. I thought we were like a brother and sister.”
“We are, and that won’t change. But this woman needs help. She’s clean. Let us come see you,” Mark said. “I’m asking like a brother.”
Laura walked away from him, opened the curtain, and looked
outside at the cold blue sky. She could see her car in the parking lot, its windshield marked with the GO HOME warning. She waited in anguish, until Mark put down the receiver.
“She’ll see us,” he told her.
On the drive to Didi’s house, Mark said, “Be cool. Don’t go all to pieces or start begging. That won’t help.”
“Okay.”
Mark touched the letters carved into the windshield. “Son of a bitch did a job on you, didn’t he? I knew that guy sounded weird. Plug in his throat.” He grunted. “I wonder what the hell he was after.”
“I don’t know, and I hope I never see him again.”
Mark nodded. They were a couple of miles from the cottage. “Listen,” he said, “there’s something I’ve got to lay on you. I told you about Didi having plastic surgery, remember?”
“Yes.”
“Didi used to be pretty. She’s not anymore. She had the plastic surgeon make her ugly.”
“Make her ugly? Why?”
“She wanted to change. Didn’t want to be what she was before, I guess. So when you see her, be cool.”
“I’ll be cool,” Laura said. “I’ll be damned cool.”
She slowed down and turned the BMW onto the house’s dirt driveway. As Laura drove up to the cottage, she saw the front door open. A plump woman wearing a dark green sweater and khaki trousers came out. She had long red hair that fell in waves around her shoulders. Laura’s palms were damp, her nerves raw. Be cool, she told herself. She stopped the car and switched off the engine. The moment had arrived.
Bedelia Morse stood in the doorway, watching, as Laura and Mark got out of the car and approached her. Laura saw the woman’s toadish face and crooked nose, and she wondered what kind of plastic surgeon would have consented to do such work. And what private torment had made Bedelia Morse want to wear a face that had been sculpted into ugliness?
“You shit,” Didi said to Mark, her voice cold, and she went inside without waiting for them.
In the cottage’s tidy front room, Didi sat in a chair where she could look out a window at the road. She didn’t offer seats to Laura or Mark; she kept her gaze on him because she recalled Laura’s pain-stricken face from the newscasts and looking at her was difficult. “Hello, Didi,” Mark said, trying for a smile. “It’s been a long time.”
“How much did she pay you?” Didi asked.
Mark’s fragile smile evaporated.
“She did pay you, right? How many silver coins bought my head on a platter?”
Laura said, “Mark’s been a friend to me. He—”
“He used to be my friend, too.” Didi glanced quickly at Laura and then away. Laura Clayborne’s eyes were deep sockets, and they burned with a terrible intensity. “You screwed me, Mark. You sold me, and she bought me. Right? Well, here I am.” Didi forced her head to turn, and she stared at Laura. “Mrs. Clayborne, I’ve killed people. I walked into a diner with three other Storm Fronters and shot four policemen who were guilty of nothing but wearing blue uniforms and badges. I helped plant a pipe bomb that blinded a fifteen-year-old girl. I cheered when Jack Gardiner cut a policeman’s throat, and I helped lift up the corpse so Akitta Washington and Mary Terrell could nail his hands to a rafter. I’m the woman mothers warn their children not to grow up to be.” Didi offered a chilly smile, the shadows of bare tree branches slicing her face. “Welcome to my house.”
“Mark didn’t want to bring me. I kept at him until he did.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better? Or safer?” She placed her fingertips together. “Mrs. Clayborne, you don’t know anything about the world I live in. I’ve killed people, yes; that’s my crime. But no judge or jury had to give me a prison sentence. Every day of my life since 1972 I’ve been looking over my shoulder, scared to death of what might be coming up behind. I sleep maybe three hours a night, on good nights. Sometimes I open my eyes in the dark and I’ve jammed myself into a closet without knowing it. I walk down the street and think a dozen people see through this face to who I used to be. And with every breath I take I know that I stole the life from fellow human beings. Snuffed them out, and celebrated their murders with hits of acid by candlelight.” She nodded, her green eyes hazy with pain. “I didn’t need a prison cell. I carry one around with me. So if you’re going to turn me over to the police, I’ll tell you this: they can’t do anything to me. I’m not here. I’m dead, and I’ve been dead for a very long time.”
“I’m not going to turn you over to the police,” Laura said. “I just want to ask you some questions about Mary Terrell.”
“Mary Terror,” Didi corrected her. “It was”—she’d almost said crazy—“stupid of her to take your baby. Stupid.”
“The FBI lost her after she visited her mother in Richmond. Her mother told them she was headed for Canada. Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”
Here was the question, Didi thought. She stared at her hands.
Laura glanced at Mark for support, but he shrugged and sat down on the couch. “Anything you can tell me about Mary Terrell might be important,” she told Didi. “Can you think of anybody she might have gotten in touch with? Anybody from the past?”
“The past.” Didi sneered it. “There’s no such place. There’s just a long damned road from there to here, and you die a little more with every mile.”
“Did Mary Terrell have any friends outside the Storm Front?”
“No. The Storm Front was her life. We were her family.” Didi drew a deep breath and looked out the window again, expecting a police car to pull up at any minute. If that happened, she wasn’t going to fight. Her fighting days were over. She directed her attention to Laura again. “You said you saw the man who broke into my house.”
Laura explained about the glint of the flashlight she’d seen that night. “I came in, turned on the lights in the kitchen, and there he was. His face—” She shuddered to remember it. “His face was screwed up. He was grinning; his face was scarred, and the grin was frozen on it. Dark eyes, either dark brown or black. And he had a thing in his throat like an electric socket. Right here.” She showed Didi by placing her fingers against her own throat.
“The dude across the road saw him, too,” Mark added. “Said the guy had to plug a speaker into his throat and talk through it.”
“Wait.” Didi’s inner alarm had reached a shriek. “The man went to see Mr. Brewer?”
“That’s right. He asked where you’d gone. Said he was a friend of yours.”
“He asked for me by name? Diane Daniells?” She hadn’t returned the binoculars to Charles Brewer yet, so she hadn’t heard this. When Mark nodded, Didi felt as if she’d taken a punch to the stomach. “My God,” she said, and stood up. “My God. Somebody else knows. You bastard, somebody must’ve followed you!”
“Hold on a minute! Nobody followed us. Anyway, the dude was asking about you before we even got to Ann Arbor.”
Didi felt her control slipping away. The man who’d broken in hadn’t taken anything. He’d known her new name, and where she lived. Had asked Mr. Brewer where she’d gone. She sensed it like a noose tightening around her neck: someone else knew who she was.
“Please try to think,” Laura plowed on. “Is there anyone Mary Terrell might have gone to for help?”
“No!” Didi’s face contorted, her nerves about to snap. “I said I can’t help you! Get out and leave me alone!”
“I wish I could,” Laura said. “I wish Mary Terrell hadn’t taken my baby. I wish I knew if my son was alive or dead. I can’t leave you alone because you’re my last hope.”
Didi put her hands to her ears. “No! I don’t want to hear it!”
She knows something, Laura thought. She walked to Didi, grasped her wrists, and pulled her hands away from her ears. “You will hear it!” Laura promised, her cheeks aflame with anger. “Listen to me! If there’s anything you know about Mary Terrell—anything—you’ve got to tell me! She’s out of her mind, do you realize that? She could kill my child at any time,
if she hasn’t already!”
Didi shook her head. The image of Mary pressing the baby’s face toward the burner was too close. “Please, just leave me alone. All I want is to be left alone.”
“And all I want is what’s mine,” Laura said, still grasping Didi’s wrists. They stared at each other, inhabitants of different worlds on a collision course. “Won’t you help me save my child’s life?”
“I…can’t…” Didi began, but her voice faltered. She looked at Mark and then back to Laura, and she knew that if she didn’t help this woman, the ghosts that feasted on her soul would grow sharper teeth. But she and Mary were sisters in arms! The Storm Front had been their family! She couldn’t betray Mary!
But the Mary Terrell Didi had known long ago was gone. In her place was a savage animal who knew no cause but murder. Sooner or later Mary Terror would snap, and this woman’s baby would die screaming.
Didi said, “Please let me go.” Laura hesitated a few seconds, and then she released Didi’s wrists. Didi walked to the window, where she stood looking out at the cold world. Click, click: her Rubik’s Cube was turning, but the answer was already in sight. “She…calls the baby Drummer,” Didi said. Her heart hurt. In the electric silence that followed, Didi could hear Laura Clayborne breathing. “I saw Mary and your baby yesterday.”
“Oh Jesus.” It was Mark speaking in a low, stunned voice.
“He was all right,” Didi went on. “She’s taking good care of him. But…” She trailed off, unable to say it.
A hand like an iron pincer grasped her shoulder. Didi looked into Laura’s face, and caught a glimpse of hellfire. “But what?” Laura demanded, barely able to speak.
“But…Mary’s dangerous. Dangerous to herself, dangerous to your baby.”
“What’s that mean? Tell me!”
“Mary said…if the police find them…she’ll kill the baby first”—Didi saw Laura wince as if she’d been struck— “and then she’ll keep shooting until the police kill her. She’s not going to give up. Never.”