“Oh, shit,” Jack said. He knew the rest of it. He’d seen it all before, many times. Dead storekeepers, sprawled in pools of their own blood, beside their emptied cash registers.
“There was something strange about this creep,” Rebecca said. “Even though I was only six years old, I could tell there was something wrong with him the moment he came in, and I went to the kitchen and peeked out at him through the curtain. He was fidgety ... pale ... funny around the eyes ...”
“A junkie?”
“That’s the way it turned out, yeah. If I close my eyes now, I can still see his pale face, the way his mouth twitched. The awful thing is ... I can see it clearer than I can see my own father’s face. Those terrible eyes.”
She shuddered.
Jack said, “You don’t have to go on.”
“Yes. I do. I have to tell you. So you’ll understand why ... why I am like I am about certain things.”
“Okay. If you’re sure—”
“I’m sure.”
“Then ... did your father refuse to hand over the money to this son of a bitch—or what?”
“No. Dad gave him the money. All of it.”
“He offered no resistance at all?”
“None.”
“But cooperation didn’t save him.”
“No. This junkie had a bad itch, a real bad need. The need was like something nasty crawling around in his head, I guess, and it made him irritable, mean, crazy-mad at the world. You know how they get. So I think maybe he wanted to kill somebody even more than he wanted the money. So ... he just ... pulled the trigger.”
Jack put an arm around her, drew her against him.
She said, “Two shots. Then the bastard ran. Only one of the slugs hit my father. But it ... hit him ... in the face.”
“Jesus,” Jack said softly, thinking of six-year-old Rebecca in the sandwich-shop kitchen, peering through the parted curtain, watching as her father’s face exploded.
“It was a .45,” she said.
Jack winced, thinking of the power of the gun.
“Hollow-point bullets,” she said.
“Oh, Christ.”
“Dad didn’t have a chance at point-blank range.”
“Don’t torture yourself with—”
“Blew his head off,” she said.
“Don’t think about it any more now,” Jack said.
“Brain tissue...”
“Put it out of your mind now.”
“... pieces of his skull ... ”
“It was a long time ago.”
“ ... blood all over the wall.”
“Hush now. Hush.”
“There’s more to tell.”
“You don’t have to pour it out all at once.”
“I want you to understand.”
“Take your time. I’ll be here. I’ll wait. Take your time.”
8
In the corrugated metal shed, leaning over the pit, using two pair of ceremonial scissors with malachite handles, Lavelle snipped both ends of the cord simultaneously.
The photographs of Penny and Davey Dawson fell into the hole, vanished in the flickering orange light.
A shrill, unhuman cry came from the depths.
“Kill them,” Lavelle said.
9
Still in Rebecca’s bed.
Still holding each other.
She said, “The police only had my description to go on.”
“A six-year-old child doesn’t make the best witness.”
“They worked hard, trying to get a lead on the creep who’d shot Daddy. They really worked hard.”
“They ever catch him?”
“Yes. But too late. Much too late.”
“What do you mean?”
“See, he got two hundred bucks when he robbed the shop.”
“So?”
“That was over twenty-two years ago.”
“Yeah?”
“Two hundred was a lot more money then. Not a fortune. But a lot more than it is now.”
“I still don’t see what you’re driving at.”
“It looked like an easy score to him.”
“Not too damned easy. He killed a man.”
“But he wouldn’t have had to. He wanted to kill someone that day.”
“Okay. Right. So, twisted as he is, he figures it was easy.”
“Six months went by ...”
“And the cops never got close to him?”
“No. So it looks easier and easier to the creep.”
A sickening dread filled Jack. His stomach turned over.
He said, “You don’t mean ... ?”
“Yes.”
“He came back.”
“With a gun. The same gun.”
“But he’d have to’ve been nuts!”
“All junkies are nuts.”
Jack waited. He didn’t want to hear the rest of it, but he knew she would tell him; had to tell him; was compelled to tell him.
She said, “My mother was at the cash register.”
“No,” he said softly, as if a protest from him could somehow alter the tragic history of her family.
“He blew her away.”
“Rebecca ...”
“Fired five shots into her.”
“You didn’t ... see this one?”
“No. I wasn’t in the shop that day.”
“Thank God.”
“This time they caught him.”
“Too late for you.”
“Much too late. But it was after that when I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to be a cop, so I could stop people like that junkie, stop them from killing the mothers and fathers of other little girls and boys. There weren’t women cops back then, you know, not real cops, just office workers in police stations, radio dispatchers, that sort of thing. I had no role models. But I knew I’d make it someday. I was determined. All the time I was growing up, there was never once when I thought about being anything else but a cop. I never even considered getting married, being a wife, having kids, being a mother, because I knew someone would only come along and shoot my husband or take my kids away from me or take me away from my kids. So what was the point in it? I would be a cop. Nothing else. A cop. And that’s what I became. I think I felt guilty about my father’s murder. I think I believed that there must’ve been something I could have done that day to save him. And I know I felt guilty about my mother’s death. I hated myself for not giving the police a better description of the man who shot my dad, hated myself for being numb and useless, because if I had been of more help to them, maybe they’d have gotten the guy before he killed Mama. Being a cop, stopping other creeps like that junkie, it was a way to atone for my guilt. Maybe that’s amateur psychology. But not far off the mark. I’m sure it’s part of what motivates me.”
“But you haven’t any reason at all to feel guilty,” Jack assured her. “You did all you possibly could’ve done. You were only six!”
“I know. I understand that. But the guilt is there nevertheless. Still sharp, at times. I guess it’ll always be there, fading year by year, but never fading away altogether.”
Jack was, at last, beginning to understand Rebecca Chandler—why she was the way she was. He even saw the reason for the overstocked refrigerator; after a childhood filled with so much bad news and unanticipated shocks and instability, keeping a well-supplied larder was one way to buy at least a small measure of security, a way to feel safe. Understanding increased his respect and already deep affection for her. She was a very special woman.
He had a feeling that this night was one of the most important of his life. The long loneliness after Linda’s passing was finally drawing to an end. Here, with Rebecca, he was making a new beginning. A good beginning. Few men were fortunate enough to find two good women and be given two chances at happiness in their lives. He was very lucky, and he knew it, and that knowledge made him exuberant. In spite of a day filled with blood and mutilated bodies and threats of death, he sensed a golden fut
ure out there ahead of them. Everything was going to work out fine, after all. Nothing could go wrong. Nothing could go wrong now.
10
“Kill them, kill them,” Lavelle said.
His voice echoed down into the pit, echoed and echoed, as if it had been cast into a deep shaft.
The indistinct, pulsing, shifting, amorphous floor of the pit suddenly became more active. It bubbled, surged, churned. Out of that molten, lavalike substance—which might have been within arm’s reach or, instead, miles below—something began to take shape.
Something monstrous.
11
“When your mother was killed, you were only—”
“Seven years old. Turned seven the month before she died.”
“Who raised you after that?”
“I went to live with my grandparents, my mother’s folks.”
“Did that work out?”
“They loved me. So it worked for a while.”
“Only for a while?”
“My grandfather died.”
“Another death?”
“Always another one.”
“How?”
“Cancer. I’d seen sudden death already. It was time for me to learn about slow death.”
“How slow?”
“Two years from the time the cancer was diagnosed until he finally succumbed to it. He wasted away, lost sixty pounds before the end, lost all his hair from the radium treatments. He looked and acted like an entirely different person during those last few weeks. It was a ghastly thing to watch.”
“How old were you when you lost him?”
“Eleven and a half.”
“Then it was just you and your grandmother.”
“For a few years. Then she died when I was fifteen. Her heart. Not real sudden. Not real slow, either. After that, I was made a ward of the court. I spent the next three years, until I was eighteen, in a series of foster homes. Four of them, in all. I never got close to any of my foster parents; I never allowed myself to get close. I kept asking to be transferred, see. Because by then, even as young as I was, I realized that loving people, depending on them, needing them, is just too dangerous. Love is just a way to set you up for a bad fall. It’s the rug they pull out from under you at the very moment you finally decide that everything’s going to be fine. We’re all so ephemeral. So fragile. And life’s so unpredictable.”
“But that’s no reason to insist on going it alone,” Jack said. “In fact, don’t you see—that’s the reason we must find people to love, people to share our lives with, to open our hearts and minds to, people to depend on, cherish, people who’ll depend on us when they need to know they’re not alone. Caring for your friends and family, knowing they care for you—that’s what keeps our minds off the void that waits for all of us. By loving and letting ourselves be loved, we give meaning and importance to our lives; it’s what keeps us from being just another species of the animal kingdom, grubbing for survival. At least for a short while, through love, we can forget about the goddamned darkness at the end of everything.”
He was breathless when he finished—and astonished by what he had said, startled that such an understanding had been in him.
She slipped an arm across his chest. She held him fast.
She said, “You’re right. A part of me knows that what you’ve said is true.”
“Good.”
“But there’s another part of me that’s afraid of letting myself love or be loved, ever again. The part that can’t bear losing it all again. The part that thinks loneliness is preferable to that kind of loss and pain.”
“But see, that’s just it. Love given or love taken is never lost,” he said, holding her. “Once you’ve loved someone, the love is always there, even after they’re gone. Love is the only thing that endures. Mountains are torn down, built up, torn down again over millions and millions of years. Seas dry up. Deserts give way to new seas. Time crumbles every building man erects. Great ideas are proven wrong and collapse as surely as castles and temples. But love is a force, an energy, a power. At the risk of sounding like a Hallmark card, I think love is like a ray of sunlight, traveling for all eternity through space, deeper and deeper into infinity; like that ray of light, it never ceases to exist. Love endures. It’s a binding force in the universe, like the energy within a molecule is a binding force, as surely as gravity is a binding force. Without the cohesive energy in a molecule, without gravity, without love—chaos. We exist to love and be loved, because love seems to me to be the only thing that brings order and meaning and light to existence. It must be true. Because if it isn’t true, what purpose do we serve? Because if it isn’t true—God help us.”
For minutes, they lay in silence, touching.
Jack was exhausted by the flood of words and feelings that had rushed from him, almost without his volition.
He desperately wanted Rebecca to be with him for the rest of his life. He dreaded losing her.
But he said no more. The decision was hers.
After a while she said, “For the first time in ages, I’m not so afraid of loving and losing; I’m more afraid of not loving at all.”
Jack’s heart lifted.
He said, “Don’t ever freeze me out again.”
“It won’t be easy learning to open up.”
“You can do it.”
“I’m sure I’ll backslide occasionally, withdraw from you a little bit, now and then. You’ll have to be patient with me.”
“I can be patient.”
“God, don’t I know it! You’re the most infuriatingly patient man I’ve ever known.”
“Infuriatingly?”
“There’ve been times, at work, when I’ve been so incredibly bitchy, and I knew it, didn’t want to be but couldn’t seem to help myself. I wished, sometimes, you’d snap back at me, blow up at me. But when you finally responded, you were always so reasonable, so calm, so damned patient.”
“You make me sound too saintly.”
“Well, you’re a good man, Jack Dawson. A nice man. A damned nice man.”
“Oh, I know, to you I seem perfect,” he said self-mockingly. “But believe it or not, even I, paragon that I am, even I have a few faults.”
“No!” she said, pretending astonishment.
“It’s true.”
“Name one.”
“I actually like to listen to Barry Manilow.”
“No!”
“Oh, I know his music’s slick, too smooth, a little plastic. But it sounds good, anyway. I like it. And another thing. I don’t like Alan Alda.”
“Everyone likes Alan Alda!”
“I think he’s a phony.”
“You disgusting fiend!”
“And I like peanut butter and onion sandwiches.”
“Ach! Alan Alda wouldn’t eat peanut butter and onion sandwiches.”
“But I have one great virtue that more than makes up for all of those terrible faults,” he said.
She grinned. “What’s that?”
“I love you.”
This time, she didn’t ask him to refrain from saying it.
She kissed him.
Her hands moved over him.
She said, “Make love to me again.”
12
Ordinarily, no matter how late Davey was allowed to stay up, Penny was permitted one more hour than he was. Being the last to bed was her just due, by virtue of her four-year age advantage over him. She always fought valiantly and tenaciously at the first sign of any attempt to deny her this precious and inalienable right. Tonight, however, at nine o’clock, when Aunt Faye suggested that Davey brush his teeth and hit the sack, Penny feigned sleepiness and said that she, too, was ready to call it a night.
She couldn’t leave Davey alone in a dark bedroom where the goblins might creep up on him. She would have to stay awake, watching over him, until their father arrived. Then she would tell Daddy all about the goblins and hope that he would at least hear her out before he sent for the men with the strait
jackets.
She and Davey had come to the Jamisons’ without overnight bags, but they had no difficulty getting ready for bed. Because they occasionally stayed with Faye and Keith when their father had to work late, they kept spare toothbrushes and pajamas here. And in the guest bedroom closet, there were fresh changes of clothes for them, so they wouldn’t have to wear the same thing tomorrow that they’d worn today. In ten minutes, they were comfortably nestled in the twin beds, under the covers.
Aunt Faye wished them sweet dreams, turned out the light, and closed the door.
The darkness was thick, smothering.
Penny fought off an attack of claustrophobia.
Davey was silent awhile. Then: “Penny?”
“Huh?”
“You there?”
“Who do you think just said ‘huh?’”
“Where’s Dad?”
“Working late.”
“I mean ... really.”
“Really working late.”
“What if he’s been hurt?”
“He hasn’t.”
“What if he got shot?”
“He didn’t. They’d have told us if he’d been shot. They’d probably even take us to the hospital to see him.”
“No, they wouldn’t, either. They try to protect kids from bad news like that.”
“Will you stop worrying, for God’s sake? Dad’s all right. If he’d been shot or anything, Aunt Faye and Uncle Keith would know all about it.”