we had candy for breakfast."
"Gasket. Not basket."
She wrinkled her face. "Does it really matter?"
"No, I guess not. Basket, gasket, whatever you say."
Emily squirmed out of his arms and jumped down from the bed.
"I'm going to the potty," she announced.
"That's a start. Then take a shower, brush your teeth, and get
dressed."
Charlotte was, as usual, slower to come fully awake. By the time Emily
was closing the bathroom door, Charlotte had only managed to push back
the blankets and sit on the edge of her bed. She was scowling down at
her bare feet.
Marty sat beside her. "They're called 'toes."
"Mmmm," she said.
"You need them to fill out the ends of your socks."
She yawned.
Marty said, "You'll need them a lot more if you're going to be a ballet
dancer. But for most other professions, however, they're not essential.
So if you aren't going to be a ballet dancer, then you could have them
surgically removed, just the biggest ones or all ten, that's entirely up
to you."
She cocked her head and gave him a Daddy's-being-cute-so-let's humor-him
look. "I think I'll keep them.
"Whatever you want," he said, and kissed her forehead.
"My teeth feel furry," she complained. "So does my tongue."
"Maybe during the night you ate a cat."
She was awake enough to giggle.
In the bathroom the toilet flushed, and a second later the door opened.
Emily said, "Charlotte, you want privacy for the potty, or can I shower
now?"
"Go ahead and shower," Charlotte said. "You smell."
"Yeah? Well, you stink."
"You reek."
"That's because I want to," Emily said, probably because she couldn't
think of a comeback word for "reek."
"My gracious young daughters, such little ladies."
As Emily disappeared back into the bathroom and began to fiddle with the
shower controls, Charlotte said, "Gotta get this fuzz off my teeth." She
got up and went to the open door. At the threshold she turned to Marty.
"Daddy, do we have to go to school today?"
"Not today."
"I didn't think so." She hesitated. "Tomorrow?"
"I don't know, honey. Probably not."
Another hesitation. "Will we be going to school again ever?"
"Well, sure, of course."
She stared at him for too long, then nodded and went into the bathroom.
Her question rattled Marty. He wasn't sure if she was merely
fantasizing about a life without school, as most kids did now and then,
or whether she was expressing a more genuine concern about the depth of
the trouble that had rolled over them.
He had heard the television come on in the other room while he had been
sitting on the edge of the bed with Charlotte, so he knew Paige was
awake. He got up to go say good morning to her.
As he was approaching the connecting door, Paige called to him.
"Marty, quick, look at this."
When he hurried into the other room, he saw her standing in front of the
TV. She was watching an early-morning news program.
"It's about us," she said.
He recognized their own home on the screen. A woman reporter was
standing in the street, her back to the house, facing the camera.
Marty squatted in front of the television and turned up the sound.
". . . so the mystery remains, and the police would very much like to
talk to Martin Stillwater this morning . . ."
"Oh, this morning they want to talk," he said disgustedly.
Paige shushed him.
". . . an irresponsible hoax by a writer too eager to advance his
career, or something far more sinister? Now that the police laboratory
has confirmed the large amount of blood in the Stillwater house is
indeed of human origin, the need for the authorities to answer that
question has overnight become more urgent."
That was the end of the piece. As the reporter gave her name and
location, Marty registered the word
"LIVE" in the upper left-hand corner
of the screen. Although the four letters had been there all along, the
importance of them hadn't registered immediately.
"Live?" Marty said. "They don't send reporters out live unless the
story's ongoing."
"It is ongoing," Paige said. She was standing with her arms folded
across her chest, frowning down at the television. "The lunatic is
still out there somewhere."
"I mean, like a robbery in progress or a hostage situation with a SWAT
team waiting to storm the place. By TV standards, this is boring, no
action, no one on scene to shove a microphone at, just an empty house
for visuals. It's not the kind of story they use for a live spot, too
expensive and no excitement."
The broadcast had gone back to the studio. To his surprise, the
anchorman wasn't one of the second-string newsreaders from a Los Angeles
station, who would ordinarily have pulled duty on an early morning
program, but a well-known network face.
Astonished, Marty said, "This is national. Since when does a
breaking-and-entry report rate national news?"
"You were assaulted too," Paige said.
"So what? These days, there's a worse crime than this every ten seconds
somewhere in the country."
"But you're a celebrity."
"The hell I am."
"You may not like it, but you are."
"I'm not that much of a celebrity, not with only two paperback
bestsellers. You know how hard it is to get on this program for one of
their chat segments, as an invited guest?" He rapped a knuckle against
the face of the anchorman on the screen. "Harder than getting an
invitation to a state dinner at the White House! Even if I hired a
publicist who'd sold his soul to the devil, he couldn't get me on this
program, Paige. I'm just not big enough. I'm a nobody to them."
"So . . . what're you saying?"
He went to the window that provided a view of the parking lot, and
parted the draperies. Pale sunlight. Steady traffic out on Pacific
Coast Highway. The trees stirred lazily in the mildest of on-shore
breezes.
Nothing in the scene was threatening or unusual, yet it seemed ominous
to him. He felt that he was looking out at a world that was no longer
familiar, a world changed for the worse. The differences were
indefinable, subjective rather than objective, perceptible to the spirit
more than to the senses but nonetheless real. And the pace of that dark
change was accelerating. Soon the view from this room or any other
would be, to him, like something seen through the porthole of a
spacecraft on a far alien planet which superficially resembled his own
world but which was, below- its deceptive surface, infinitely strange
and inimical to human life.
"I don't think," he said, "that the police would ordinarily have
completed their tests on those blood samples so quickly, and I know it's
not standard practice to release crime-lab results so casually to the
media." He let the draperies fall into place and turned to Paige, whose
brow was furrowed with worry. "National news? Li
ve, on the scene?
I don't know what the hell is happening, Paige, but it's even stranger
than I thought it was last night."
' While Paige showered, Marty pulled up a chair in front of the
television and channel-hopped, searching for other news programs. He
caught the end of a second story about himself on a local channel and
then a third piece, complete, on a national show.
He was trying to guard against paranoia, but he had the distinct
impression that both stories suggested, without making accusations, that
the falsity of his statement to the Mission Viejo Police was a foregone
conclusion and that his real motive was either to sell more books or
something darker and weirder than mere career-pumping.
Both programs made use of the photograph from the current issue of
People, in which he resembled a movie zombie with glowing eyes, lurching
out of shadows, violent and demented. And both pointedly mentioned the
three guns of which he'd been relieved by the police, as if he might be
a suburban survivalist living atop a bunker packed solid with arms and
ammunition. Toward the end of the third report, he thought an
implication was made to the effect that he might even be dangerous,
although it was so smooth and so subtly inserted that it was more a
matter of the reporter's tone of voice and expressions than any words in
the script.
Rattled, he switched off the television.
For a while he stared at the blank screen. The gray of the dead monitor
matched his mood.
After everyone was showered and dressed, the girls got in the back seat
of the BMW and dutifully put on their seatbelts while their parents
stowed the luggage in the trunk.
When Marty slammed the trunk lid and locked it, Paige spoke to him
quietly, so Charlotte and Emily couldn't hear. "You really think we
have to go this far, do these things, it's really that bad?"
"I don't know. Like I told you, I've been brooding about this ever
since I woke up, since three o'clock this morning, and I still don't
know if I'm over-reacting."
"These are serious steps to take, even risky."
"It's just that . . . as strange as this already is, with The Other and
everything he said to me, whatever underlies it all is stranger still.
More dangerous than one lunatic with a gun. Deadlier and a lot bigger
than that. Something so big it'll crush us if we try to stand up to it.
That's how I felt in the middle of the night, afraid, more scared even
than when he had the kids in his car. And after what I saw on TV this
morning, I'm more--not less--inclined to go with my gut feelings He
realized that his expression of dread was extreme, with an unmistakable
flavor of paranoia. But he was no alarmist, and he was confident that
his instincts could be trusted. Events had dissolved all of his doubts
about his mental well-being.
He wished he could identify an enemy other than the improbable
dead-ringer, for he knew intuitively that there was another enemy, and
it would be comforting to have it defined. The Mafia, Ku Klux Klan,
neo-Nazis, consortiums of evil bankers, the board of directors of some
ferociously greedy international conglomerate, right-wing generals
intent on establishing a military dictatorship, a cabal of in sane
Mideastern zealots, mad scientists intent on blowing the world to
smithereens for the sheer hell of it, or Satan himself in all his horned
splendor--any of the standard villains of television dramas and
countless novels, regardless of how unlikely and cliched, would be
preferable to an adversary without face or form or name.
Chewing her lower lip, lost in thought, Paige let her gaze travel across
the breeze-ruffled trees, other parked cars, and the front of the motel,
before tilting her head back and looking up at three shrieking sea gulls
that wheeled across the mostly blue and uncaring azure sky.
"You sense it too," he said.
"Yes."
"Oppressive. We're not being watched, but the feeling is almost the
same."
' More than that," she said. "Different. The world has changed or the
way I look at it."
"Me too."
"Something's been . . . lost."
And we'll never find it again, he thought.
The Ritz-Carlton was a remarkable hotel, exquisitely tasteful, with
generous applications of marble, limestone, granite, quality art, and
antiques throughout its public areas. The enormous flower arrangements,
on display wherever one turned, were the most artfully fashioned that
Oslett had ever seen. Attired in subdued uniforms, courteous,
omnipresent, the staff seemed to outnumber the guests.
All in all, it reminded Oslett of home, the Connecticut estate on which
he had been raised, although the family mansion was larger than the
Ritz-Carlton, was furnished with antiques only of museum quality, had a
staff-to-family ratio of six to one, and featured a landing pad large
enough to accommodate the military helicopters in which the President of
the United States and his retinue sometimes traveled.
The two-bedroom suite with spacious living room, in which Drew Oslett
and Clocker were quartered, offered every amenity from a fully stocked
bar to marble shower stalls so spacious that it would have been possible
for a visiting ballet dancer to practice entrechats during his morning
ablutions. The towels were not by Pratesi, as were those he had used
all his life, but they were good Egyptian cotton, soft and absorbent.
By 7,50 Tuesday morning, Oslett had dressed in a white cotton shirt with
whalebone buttons by Theophilus Shirtmakers of London, a navy-blue
cashmere blazer crafted with sublime attention to detail by his personal
tailor in Rome, gray wool slacks, black oxfords (an eccentric touch)
handmade by an Italian cobbler living in Paris, and a club tie in
stripes of navy, maroon, and gold. The color of his silk pocket
handkerchief precisely matched the gold in his tie.
Thus attired, his mood elevated by his sartorial perfection, he went
looking for Clocker. He didn't desire the big man's company, of course,
he just preferred, for his own peace of mind, to know what Clocker was
up to at all times. And he nurtured the hope that one blessed day he
would discover Karl Clocker dead, felled by a massive cardiac
infarction, cerebral hemorrhage, or an alien death ray like those about
which the big man was always reading.
Clocker was in a patio chair on the balcony off the living room,
ignoring a breathtaking view of the Pacific, his nose stuck in the last
chapter of Shape-Changing Gynecologists of the Dark Galaxy, or whatever
the hell it was called. He was wearing the same hat with the duck
feather, tweed sportcoat, and Hush Puppies, although he had on new
purple socks, fresh slacks, and a clean white shirt. He'd changed into
a different harlequin-pattern sweater-vest, as well, this one in blue,
pink, yellow, and gray. Though he was not sporting a tie, so much black
hair bristled from the open neck of his shirt that, at a glance, he
appeared to be wearing a cra
vat.
After failing to respond to Oslett's first "good morning," Clocker
replied to the repetition of those words with the improbable split
finger greeting that characters gave each other on Star Trek, his
attention still riveted to the paperback. If Oslett had possessed a
chainsaw or cleaver, he would have severed Clocker's hand at the wrist
and tossed it into the ocean. He wondered if room service would send up
a suitably sharp instrument from the chef's collection of kitchen
cutlery
The day was warmish, already seventy. Blue skies and balmy breezes were
a welcome change from the chill of the previous night.
Promptly at eight o'clock--barely in time to prevent Oslett from being
driven mad by the lulling cries of sea gulls, the tranquilizing rumble
of the incoming combers, and the faint laughter of the early surfers
paddling their boards out to sea--the Network representative arrived to
brief them on developments. He was a far different item from the
hulking advance man who'd driven them from the airport to the
Ritz-Carlton several hours earlier. Savile Row suit. Club tie.
Good Baily wingtips. One look at him was all Oslett needed to be