“I didn’t even know. It must have happened when we were struggling with Claire. I’ll take care of it myself. After you leave. It’ll be something to do to keep my mind off everything.”
“There’ll need to be an autopsy.”
He wasn’t prepared. He had a sudden image in his mind of the doctor slitting open Ethan’s small chest, spreading the flaps, removing the organs. “All right,” he said quickly, “yes,” and studied the two long yellow pills in his hand to cancel the image of the open chest. “You lied to me about these pills.”
“They’re relaxing you, aren’t they?”
“Sure. If you call wanting to fall off my chair being relaxed.”
The doctor picked up his medical bag.
“A minute with you, Doctor,” Webster said.
The doctor looked at him. “Certainly.”
“No. Not here.”
He wondered what was going on. He watched the doctor look quizzical once more as Webster took him from the kitchen, crossed the living room with him, and disappeared into the hallway by the door. Then he heard Webster start talking in the hall, and he found out. Webster was talking very quietly, but his words were carrying back all the same.
“I would have assumed you’d check on this anyhow, Doctor,” Webster was saying out of sight in the hallway. “But you’ve already removed the body before I could look and have pictures taken, so let me be direct. I want to know if there are any bruises on the body. We’ll have our own man help with the autopsy, and we’ll have our own man go over the cat. No reflection on you, but this is all just funny enough that I want to have a double shot at it so nobody misses anything.”
As he listened, he looked steadily at Ford in the kitchen, and the detective did his best to act preoccupied, glancing embarrassed at the floor, shifting his glance toward the milk on the table and then toward the broken glass by the stove, as if there were something important that he had not seen before.
Ford finally got the idea of lighting a cigarette. “You want one?” But he didn’t wait for an answer. “Listen, Webster doesn’t mean any harm. Really. It’s just his way. The last time he was sympathetic was ten years ago. A guy’s eight-year-old daughter was raped and killed, and Webster sat around with him, talking about how bad it was. The guy had a theory that a strange kid from the high school did it. So as soon as Webster left, this guy went after the kid with a shotgun and found him before Webster did and blew the kid’s head off. If that wasn’t bad enough, it turned out that this guy and Webster were wrong. The kid wasn’t the one.”
“But I’m not wrong.”
“No. Listen—”
But the doctor was leaving, closing the door, and Webster was coming back into the kitchen.
“You don’t need to worry about any bruises,” he told Webster. “I don’t go around punching five-month-old babies.”
“You heard?”
“Like you were announcing it.”
“Well, I’m sorry.”
“You should be.”
“I mean I’m sorry you heard. I’m not sorry about the way I’m doing this. I tried to be delicate about it, but since you want to make a point, we might as well have it in the open. Poison in milk, that’s new to me. But I’ve seen cases a little like it where the baby accidentally got his hands on a bottle of bleach or floor wax or furniture polish. Except that when you check the child’s body you find it’s no accident at all. Because the kid is bruised from head to foot and maybe he’s got ruptured organs and dislocated joints and the parents just finished him off, crazy enough to think we won’t notice he’s black and blue. So you say this guy Kess is responsible, and I have no reason to doubt it. But I want to see this thing from a lot of angles, and you wouldn’t think much of me if I didn’t. Shootings, knifings, those I can understand, those I can live with and treat as routine. But I’ve got two kids myself, and when I hear about a baby that’s been poisoned by its milk, well Jesus.”
7
The ambulance was gone. The lab men, the police photographers, the fingerprint crew had been and left. There were women across the street, watching the final police car, watching the three of them come out onto the porch. Webster gave him a card with a phone number on it, and Ford stood there in the bright sunlight, holding the two plastic sacks with the half bottle of milk and the cat bunched stiffly, and he still couldn’t place their names. His toe felt like a knife blade had been rammed under it. Abruptly the names came to him. Of course. Webster and Ford. Elizabethan dramatists.
He must have said it out loud.
“What?” Webster asked.
“Nothing. It’s everything that’s happened. These pills the doctor gave me.”
“I think you’d better lie down.”
“Believe me, I will.”
He smiled and made his confusion look like a joke on him, but he was worried. If he didn’t even have enough control to know when he was talking out loud, how could he handle Sarah, or Claire when she woke up? And he was worried too about his eyes. Before, the kitchen had started to cloud gray on him. Now, as he steadied himself against the railing of the porch and watched the two detectives cross the lawn to the cruiser, his eyes were pierced so sharply by the sun that even shielding them he squinted in pain. He leaned dizzily against the rail and watched Ford pull the cruiser away from the curb, watched it recede up the street, and the moment it rounded the corner up there, the phone rang.
It rang again. The front door was open; the nearest extension was down the hall. He did his best to hurry in and grab it before the extension upstairs in the bedroom could rouse Sarah or maybe even Claire. “Hello,” he said, slumping on the bench beside the phone; the man’s voice began to rasp, and his fear strengthened.
“Yeah, there go the cops, but it don’t matter if they stay or go, we’re gonna get you, don’t you worry none.”
“What?” He straightened. “What? Who this?”
“Just let’s say a friend of a friend of yours, but then you two ain’t exactly friends at that, are you? I see it was only your new kid they carried out to the ambulance. That’s all right too, don’t you worry none about that neither, we’re sure gonna get all the rest of you too before we’re done.”
“No,” he tried desperately to say. “Please, no more. You’ve done enough.”
But he never got the chance. There was an immediate click. Then the phone was buzzing.
8
He sat on the bench, listening to the buzz of the phone in his hand for a long time. Just sat there. He didn’t have the strength to stand or set the phone on its base or anything. He was cold. His hands were trembling, his knees shaking, and he was certain that if he did try to stand he wouldn’t be able to stay up. He couldn’t stop the voice from continuing to rasp inside his head. It had been intentionally illiterate, he guessed; the way it had emphasized the faulty grammar. And for a reason he did not understand, that made him even more afraid. The cold became a warm liquid pressure in his bowels.
Christ, how had the guy known about Ethan in the ambulance and the police driving away? Where could he have been calling from? Close. Very close. But there weren’t any pay phones around here. Where could he be?
In a house on the street or up at the corner.
The front door was still open. He turned and looked out toward the house directly across the street. The women were still on the sidewalk over there, talking, watching. That was enough. The next thing he was over and shutting the door.
But none of the neighbors would have done this. He was sure of it. He knew them all. He was friends with a lot of them. Not even the old man down the street would have done this. Then he remembered what the guy had rasped on the phone about friends—and the other thing that Kess had told him months before.
“We’re not alone in this. There are dozens of other organizations like us. We alone have twenty thousand trained dependables, another twenty thousand waiting to be trained. Put our numbers in with in all the other loyalist groups in this country, and you
come up with a figure that’s just slightly under the present strength of the United States Marine Corps, which was two hundred and four thousand the last time I checked. And they’re everywhere, in industry and government, in law enforcement and the military. The guy you bought your car from, the quiet fellow who lives up the street, any of them might easily be one of us.”
He stood where he had closed the door, and glanced up the stairs, and the sight of Sarah startled him.
She was holding her stomach. “Daddy, I’m sick.”
“How bad?” He hurried up the stairs to her.
“I need to throw up.”
The pills from the doctor, he thought angrily and tried to calm himself. Things aren’t bad enough. These pills made us sick.
And then he suddenly wondered if he’d been right in the first place. Maybe the doctor was from Kess and the pills were poisoned, slow-acting to give the doctor time to get away.
He almost panicked. Seeing Sarah’s helpless face, he struggled not to. Slow-acting poison didn’t make sense, he told himself, convincing himself. When the symptoms showed up, there’d be time to get an antidote.
Sure.
He thought it through again.
Sure.
“It’s all right,” he said as calmly as he could. “If you throw up, you’ll feel better. Come on.”
He put his arm around her and took her upstairs to the bathroom and raised the toilet seat.
“Let your stomach throw up if it wants to,” he told her gently. “Kneel down here and I’ll hold you. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
He waited with her.
“Daddy?” she said, kneeling before the bowl.
“Yes, sweetheart.”
“Will I have one of those that Mommy said?”
“One of what, sweetheart? I’m not sure what you mean.”
“One of those that Mommy thought Samantha had because she was sixteen years old.”
He didn’t understand. He tried to think back to when the cat had been poisoned and what Claire might have said. After Ethan and everything else, that seemed such a very long time ago.
“You mean a stroke?”
“Yes. Will I have one of those when I get to be sixteen?”
“Sarah, you know that Samantha was poisoned. I want you to realize that. I don’t want you to eat anything without asking me first.”
“But when I’m sixteen, will I have one of those?”
“No. Cats age differently than people. With a cat, sixteen is like being eighty.”
“Then you won’t have one of those for a long time yet.”
Suddenly he was holding her tight, hugging her, kissing her neck. “That’s right, sweetheart. God, I hope to be around for a long, long time yet.”
She didn’t react, just knelt there while he hugged and kissed her.
“Daddy?”
“Yes.”
“Is Ethan in heaven with Samantha?”
He was beginning to understand now. Slowly he drew back to look at her.
“Sarah, let me ask you something.”
She didn’t answer.
“Are you really sick, or did you just want somebody to talk to? You’re lonely, isn’t that it? You don’t understand what’s happening, and you’re lonely and worried?”
She lowered her head and nodded.
“You should have told me. Honestly I wouldn’t have minded. This way you had me sorry you were sick.”
She still didn’t say anything.
“Listen, there’s nothing to worry about. Everything is going to be fine. I’ll tell you what. There’s something I need to do, but first I’ll take you back into the bedroom and tuck you in with Mommy and wait with you a while. Does that sound all right?”
She just raised her head and looked at him.
What he had to do was phone Webster and tell him about the man who’d called. Maybe Webster would have the nearby houses searched. Something. Anything. He had put off phoning Webster almost as long as he could stand it, waiting for him to have the time to reach the police station. Maybe Webster wouldn’t even have arrived there yet. But he couldn’t make himself wait much longer.
He stood, and his knees felt sharp and stiff from kneeling. He had to tug Sarah gently by the hand before she would go with him. They went across the hall into the bedroom. Claire lay under a soft blue blanket, on her side, sleeping so deeply that in the pale light from the closed drapes she did not at first seem to be breathing. He waited impatiently while Sarah crawled next to her under the blanket, and then as he was stooping to kiss Sarah’s cheek, deciding not to stay with her but instead go right away and call, the phone rang loudly on the night table.
9
It paralyzed him.
“Daddy, what’s the matter?”
He was suspended from kissing her, turned toward the phone as it rang again.
“Daddy, why don’t you answer it?”
The voice that might be rasping on the other end.
The phone rang again. But maybe it was Webster back at the station by now, phoning to tell him something.
And maybe not.
But maybe. He took the chance and answered it. The voice sent chills.
“Yeah, motherfuck, callin’ the cops again ain’t gonna help none either. We’re gonna get the lot of you no matter what. You think about it. You try and think who we’re gonna drop next. Your other kid? Your wife? You? Pass the time on it.”
“Daddy, what’s the matter?” Sarah asked. “Your face.”
He felt his skin going tight and cold. He couldn’t stop the trembling in his voice. “Wait. Don’t hang up again,” he pleaded. “We’ve got to talk. Please. You can’t go on like this. You’ve got to stop.”
“Stop?” the voice rasped back at him. “Why, that just makes me regular disappointed to hear you say that. You’re supposed to be a smart man, ain’t you? I mean, you’ve written all them books and all, haven’t you? Don’t you see that we can’t stop this now? Don’t you see that we’re just getting started?”
“No. Listen. You’ve got to tell me what it is you want. Please. I’ll do anything. Just tell me. Is it money? Will that make you stop? For God’s sake, tell me.”
“Friend, I’d say you’ve done plenty enough already. There is one thing might help, though.”
“What is it? Anything.”
“Next time answer the phone a little quicker. I got tired of waiting.”
Click and he was listening to the dial tone. His heart pounded.
“Who was it, Daddy?” Sarah asked.
“I don’t know, sweetheart,” he managed to control his voice and say.
“Why were you talking to him like that?” She was sitting up in the bed, looking worried.
He couldn’t let himself upset her anymore. Slowly, hand trembling, he replaced the phone.
“But why were you talking to him like that?” Sarah insisted. He looked from her to Claire asleep with her long dark hair spread over the side of her face; looked back at Sarah sitting up, her own hair short and sandy. He thought of Claire’s brown eyes, her dark face. And Sarah with her blue eyes and light skin and freckles. They were so unlike that a stranger could not have guessed they were actually mother and daughter.
His. When he had almost gone away with the other woman, there had been nights when he thought how simple his life would be if Claire and Sarah were killed in an accident. He had hated himself for thinking that. He had known how overpowered by grief he would be if they died. Still their deaths would have been no fault of his, and he would have been free to pursue his life. Now he thought that if they died he would not know how to go on.
“You stay here in bed,” he told her. “I meant it. I’ve got to make a call downstairs, and I don’t want you out of that bed.”
10
The secretary started to say good morning, that this was Chemelec and all that, and he cut her off. “I want to get a message through to Kess.” It was ten o’clock. Where he lived was on Mountain Time. In Provid
ence it was noon, and he had been afraid the secretary would be gone for lunch.
She didn’t answer right away. Her voice was careful. “I’m terribly sorry. Mr. Kess isn’t with us anymore.”
“He’s in hiding, but you know how to get in touch with him all right.” The phone was warm and sweaty in his hand.
“No, sir, I don’t. I don’t know what you mean at all.”
“But you remember me. Eight, nine months ago we talked a lot. Now you get in touch with him. Tell him I called to say I’ve been punished enough. Tell him I know I made a mistake, but my baby is dead now and that’s enough. I’m angry and scared and this sounds like I’m ordering him, but I’m not. I’m begging him. Please. Tell him please leave the rest of us alone.”
“I really am sorry, sir. I have no idea what it is you’re saying, and there’s nothing I can—”
“No. Please. Don’t hang up.”
“Good morning. Thank you for calling Chemelec.”
“No. Wait.”
The click again, and this time the static of the long-distance line. The whole conversation could not have taken more than a minute. He had been hoping so desperately that this would save them all, and he hadn’t even been able to say everything right, and all of a sudden it was over. He felt there was no bottom to his stomach.
What else did you expect? he told himself. Did you really believe all you needed to do was phone and ask for mercy?
Christ, mercy isn’t Kess’s way.
11
“It’s obvious why I can’t search every house on the street,” Webster said. “The judge would wake up from reading the Constitution, and right off he’d want to know what I was searching for. So what could I tell him? That I was looking for a guy with a rasp in his voice that was plainly a disguise in the first place?”
They were in the living room. He was slumped in a chair while Webster leaned forward on the sofa opposite him and explained.