14
Upon discovering the shattered mirror in the half bath off the kitchen, Dusty first thought that a vandal or a burglar was in the house.
Valet’s demeanor didn’t support that suspicion. His hackles weren’t raised. Indeed, the dog had been in a playful mood when Dusty first came home.
On the other hand, Valet was a love sponge, not a serious watchdog. If he had taken a liking to an intruder—as he did to ninety percent of the people he met—he would have followed the guy around, licking his larcenous hands as the family treasures were loaded into gunnysacks.
With the dog trailing after him this time, Dusty searched the house room by room, closet by closet, first the lower floor and then the upper. He found no one, no further vandalism, and nothing missing.
Dusty instructed the obedient Valet to wait in a far corner of the kitchen, to prevent him from getting slivers of glass in his paws. Then he cleaned up the mess in the half bath.
Maybe Martie would be able to explain the mirror when Dusty saw her later. It must have been an accident of some kind, which had happened just before she’d needed to leave for Susan’s place. Either that, or an angry ghost had moved in with them.
They would have a lot to talk about over dinner: Skeet’s would-be suicide plunge, another expedition with Susan, poltergeists…
Doing deep-breathing exercises in Susan’s bathroom, Martie decided that the problem was stress. Most likely that was the explanation for all this. She had so much on her mind, so many responsibilities.
Designing a new game based on The Lord of the Rings was the most important and difficult job she’d ever undertaken. And it came with a series of looming deadlines that put a lot of pressure on her, perhaps more pressure than she had realized until now.
Her mother, Sabrina, and the endless antagonism toward Dusty: That stress had been with her a long time, too.
And last year, she’d had to watch her beloved father succumb to cancer. The last three months of his life had been a relentless, gruesome decline, which he had endured with his customary good humor, refusing to acknowledge any of the pains or the indignities of his condition. His soft laughter and his charm had, in those final days, failed to buoy her as they usually did; instead, his ready smile had pierced her heart each time she saw it, and though from those wounds she had lost no blood, a little of her lifelong optimism had bled away and had not yet been entirely replenished.
Susan, of course, was a source of more than a little stress. Love was a sacred garment, woven of a fabric so thin that it could not be seen, yet so strong that even mighty death could not tear it, a garment that could not be frayed by use, that brought warmth into what would otherwise be an intolerably cold world—but at times love could also be as heavy as chain mail. Bearing the burden of love, on those occasions when it was a solemn weight, made it more precious when, in better times, it caught the wind in sleeves like wings—and lifted you. In spite of the stress of these twice-weekly outings, she could no more walk away from Susan Jagger than she could have turned her back on her dying father, on her difficult mother, or on Dusty.
She would go out to the dining room, eat Chinese food, drink a bottle of beer, play pinochle, and pretend that she was not full of strange forebodings.
When she got home, she’d call Dr. Closterman, her internist, and make an appointment for a physical examination, just in case her self-diagnosis of stress was incorrect. She felt physically fit, but so had Smilin’ Bob just before the sudden onset of a curious little pain that had signaled terminal illness.
Crazy as it sounded, she was still suspicious of that unusually sour grapefruit juice. She’d been drinking it most mornings lately, instead of orange juice, because of the lower calorie count. Maybe that explained the dream about the Leaf Man, too: the raging figure formed of dead, rotting leaves. Perhaps she would give a sample of the juice to Dr. Closterman to have it tested.
Finally she washed her hands and confronted the mirror again. She thought that she appeared passably sane. Regardless of how she looked, however, she still felt like a hopeless nutcase.
After Dusty finished sweeping up the broken mirror, he gave Valet a special treat for being a good boy and staying out of the way: a few pieces of roasted chicken breast left over from dinner the previous night. The retriever took each bit of meat from his master’s hand with a delicacy almost equal to that of a hummingbird sipping sugar water from a garden feeder, and when it was all gone, he gazed up at Dusty with an adoration that could not have been much less than the love with which the angels regard God.
“And you are an angel, all right,” Dusty said, as he gently scratched under Valet’s chin. “A furry angel. And with ears that big, you don’t need wings.”
He decided to take the dog with him to Skeet’s apartment and then to New Life. Although no intruder was in the house, Dusty didn’t feel comfortable leaving the pooch here alone, until he knew what had happened to the mirror.
“Man, if I’m this overprotective with you,” he said to Valet, “can you imagine how impossible I’m going to be with kids?”
The dog grinned as though he liked the idea of kids. And as if he understood that he was to ride shotgun on this trip, he went to the connecting door between the kitchen and the garage, where he stood patiently fanning the air with his plumed tail.
As Dusty was pulling on a hooded nylon jacket, the telephone rang. He answered it.
When he hung up, he said, “Trying to sell me a subscription to the L.A. Times,” as though the dog needed to know who had called.
Valet was no longer standing at the door to the garage. He was lying in front of it, half settled into a nap, as though Dusty had been on the phone ten minutes rather than thirty seconds.
Frowning, Dusty said, “You had a shot of chicken protein, golden one. Let’s see some vigor.”
With a long-suffering sigh, Valet stood.
In the garage, as he buckled the collar around the dog’s neck and snapped a leash to it, Dusty said, “Last thing I need is a daily newspaper. Do you know what newspapers are full of, golden one?”
Valet looked clueless.
“They are full of the stuff newsmakers do. And do you know who the newsmakers are? Politicians and media types and big-university intellectuals, people who think too much of themselves and think too much in general. People like Dr. Trevor Penn Rhodes, my old man. And people like Dr. Holden Caulfield, Skeet’s old man.”
The dog sneezed.
“Exactly,” Dusty said.
He didn’t expect Valet to ride in the back of the van, among the painting tools and supplies. Instead, the mutt jumped onto the front seat; he enjoyed gazing out the windshield when he traveled. Dusty buckled the safety harness around the retriever, and received a face-lick of thanks before closing the passenger door.
Behind the wheel, as he started the engine and backed out of the garage into the rain, he said, “Newsmakers screw up the world while trying to save it. You know what all their deep thinking amounts to, golden one? It amounts to the same thing we scoop up in those little blue bags when we follow you around.”
The dog grinned at him.
Pressing the remote control to close the garage door, Dusty wondered why he hadn’t said all this to the telephone salesperson who had been pushing the newspaper. Those incessant calls from the Times subscription hawkers were one of the few serious drawbacks to living in southern California, on a par with earthquakes, wildfires, and mudslides. If he’d delivered this same rant to the woman—or had it been a man?—pitching the Times, maybe his name would finally have been removed from their solicitation list.
As he backed out of the driveway into the street, Dusty had the peculiar realization that he couldn’t recall whether the Times representative on the phone had been a man or a woman. No reason why he should remember, really, since he had listened only to enough of the spiel to realize what it was, whereupon he had hung up.
Usually, he ended a Times call by making a proposition, to have f
un with the salesperson. Okay, I’ll subscribe if you’ll take barter. I’ll paint one of your offices, you give me three years of the Times. Or, yeah, I’ll take a lifetime subscription if your paper promises never again to refer to a mere sports star as a hero.
He hadn’t made them a proposition this time. On the other hand, he couldn’t remember what he had said, even if it was as simple as no thanks or stop bothering me.
Odd. His mind was blank.
Evidently, he was even more preoccupied with—and disturbed by—the business with Skeet this morning than he had realized.
15
The Chinese takeout was no doubt as delicious as Susan said it was, but although Martie, too, exclaimed over it, she actually found the food flavorless. The Tsingtao tasted bitter today.
Neither the food nor the beer was at fault. Martie’s free-floating anxiety, although ebbing at the moment, robbed her of the ability to take pleasure in anything.
She ate with chopsticks, and at first she thought that merely watching Susan use a fork would induce another panic attack. But the sight of the wicked tines didn’t alarm her, after all, as it had earlier. She had no fear of the fork, per se; she was afraid, instead, of what damage could be done with the fork if it were in her own hand. In Susan’s possession, the utensil seemed harmless.
The apprehension that she, Martie herself, harbored the dark potential for some unspeakable act of violence was so disturbing that she refused to dwell on it. This was the most irrational of fears, for she was certain in mind and heart and soul that she had no capacity for savagery. And yet she had not trusted herself with the bottle opener….
Considering how edgy she was—and how hard she was trying not to reveal that edginess to Susan—she should have been an even bigger loser at pinochle than usual. Instead, the cards favored her, and she played with masterful skill, taking full advantage of each piece of good luck, perhaps because the game helped to distract her from morbid considerations.
“You’re a champ today,” Susan said.
“I’m wearing my lucky socks.”
“Already your debt is down from six hundred thousand to five hundred and ninety-eight thousand.”
“Great. Now maybe Dusty will be able to sleep at night.”
“How is Dusty?”
“Even sweeter than Valet.”
“You get a man who’s more lovable than a golden retriever.” Susan sighed. “And I marry a selfish pig.”
“Earlier, you were defending Eric.”
“He’s a swine.”
“That’s my line.”
“And I thank you for it.”
Outside, a wolfish wind growled, scratched on the windows, and raised mournful howls to the eaves.
Martie said, “Why the change of heart?”
“The root of my agoraphobia might lie in problems between Eric and me, going back a couple years, things I’ve been in denial about.”
“Is that what Dr. Ahriman says?”
“He doesn’t really direct me toward ideas like that. He just makes it possible for me to…figure it out.”
Martie played a queen of clubs. “You never mentioned problems between you and Eric. Not until he wasn’t able to handle…this.”
“But I guess we had them.”
Martie frowned. “You guess?”
“Well, there’s no guessing. We had a problem.”
“Pinochle,” Martie said, taking the last trick. “What problem?”
“A woman.”
Martie was stunned. Real sisters could be no closer than she and Susan. Although they both had too much self-respect to share intimate details of their sex lives, they never kept big secrets from each other, yet she’d never before heard of this woman.
“The creep was cheating on you?” Martie asked.
“A discovery like that, all of a sudden, it makes you feel so vulnerable,” Susan said, but without the emotion the words implied, as though quoting a psychology textbook. “And that’s what agoraphobia is about—an overwhelming, crippling feeling of vulnerability.”
“You never even hinted at this.”
Susan shrugged. “Maybe I was too ashamed.”
“Ashamed? What would you have to be ashamed about?”
“Oh, I don’t know….” She looked puzzled and finally said, “Why would I feel ashamed?”
To Martie it appeared, amazingly, as though Susan were thinking this through for the first time, right here, right now.
“Well…I guess maybe because…because I wasn’t enough for him, not good enough in bed for him.”
Martie gaped at her. “Who am I talking to? You’re gorgeous, Sooz, you’re erotic, you have a healthy sex drive—”
“Or maybe I wasn’t there for him emotionally, wasn’t supportive enough?”
Pushing the cards aside without totaling the points, Martie said, “I don’t believe what I’m hearing.”
“I’m not perfect, Martie. Far from it.” A sorrow, quiet but as heavy and gray as lead, pressed her voice thin. She lowered her eyes, as though embarrassed. “I failed him somehow.”
Her contrition seemed profoundly inappropriate, and her words angered Martie. “You give him everything—your body, your mind, your heart, your life—and you give it in that totally over-the-top, all-or-nothing, passionate Susan Jagger trademark style. Then he cheats on you, and you blame yourself?”
Frowning, turning an empty beer bottle around and around in her slender hands, gazing at it as though it were a talisman that might, with sufficient handling, magically provide full understanding, Susan said, “Maybe you’ve just put your finger on it, Martie. Maybe the trademark Susan Jagger style just…smothered him.”
“Smothered him? Give me a break.”
“No, maybe it did. Maybe—”
“What’s with all these maybes?” Martie asked. “Why are you inventing a series of excuses for the pig? What was his excuse?”
Hard shatters of rain made tuneless music against the windowpanes, and from a distance came the ominous, rhythmic booming of storm waves hammering the shore.
“What was his excuse?” Martie pressed.
Susan turned the beer bottle more slowly than before, and now slower still, and when at last she stopped turning it altogether, she was frowning in evident confusion.
Martie said, “Susan? What was his excuse?”
Putting the bottle aside, gazing at her hands as she folded them on the table, Susan said, “His excuse? Well…I don’t know.”
“We’re all the way down the rabbit hole and at the tea party,” Martie declared, exasperated. “What do you mean you don’t know? Honey, you catch him having an affair, and you don’t want to know why?”
Susan shifted uneasily in her chair. “We didn’t talk about it much.”
“Are you serious? That isn’t you, girlfriend. You’re no milquetoast.”
Susan spoke more slowly than usual, with a thickness of tone like that in the voice of a freshly roused sleeper who was not yet fully awake: “Well, we talked about it a little, you know, and this could be the cause of my agoraphobia, but we didn’t talk the dirty details.”
This conversation had grown so deeply strange that Martie sensed a hidden and perilous truth in it, an elusive insight that would suddenly explain all of this troubled woman’s problems, if only she could grasp it.
Susan’s statements were simultaneously outrageous and vague. Disturbingly vague.
“What was this woman’s name?” Martie asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Good God. Eric didn’t tell you?”
Finally Susan raised her head. Her eyes were unfocused, as though she were staring at someone other than Martie, in another place and time. “Eric?”
Susan had spoken the name with such puzzlement that Martie turned in her chair to survey the room behind her, expecting to find that Eric had silently entered. He wasn’t there.
“Yeah, Sooz, remember old Eric? Hubby. Adulterer. Swine.”
“I didn’t…??
?
“What?”
Now Susan’s voice faded to a whisper, and her face was eerily devoid of expression, as inanimate as the face of a doll. “I didn’t learn about this from Eric.”
“Then who told you?”
No reply.
The wind dropped, not shrieking anymore. But its cold whispering and sly cooing knotted the nerves more effectively than had its voice at full bleat.
“Sooz? Who told you Eric was screwing around?”
Susan’s flawless skin was no longer the color of peaches and cream, but as pale and translucent as skimmed milk. A single drop of perspiration appeared at her hairline.
Reaching across the table, Martie held one hand in front of her friend’s face.
Susan apparently didn’t see it. She stared through the hand.
“Who?” Martie gently insisted.
Suddenly, numerous beads of sweat were strung across Susan’s brow. Her hands had been folded on the table, but now they were fiercely clenched, the skin stretched tight and white across the knuckles, the fingernails of her right hand digging hard into the flesh of her left.
Ghost spiders crawled along the back of Martie’s neck and crept down the staircase of her spine.
“Who told you Eric was screwing around?”
Still staring at some specter, Susan tried to speak but could not get a word out. Her mouth turned soft, trembled, as though she were about to break into tears.
Susan seemed to have been silenced by a phantom hand. The sense of another presence in the room was so powerful that Martie wanted to turn again and look behind her; but no one would be there.
Her hand was still raised in front of Susan. She snapped her fingers.
Susan twitched, blinked. She looked at the cards that Martie had pushed aside, and incredibly she smiled. “Whipped my ass good. You want another beer?”
Her demeanor had changed in an instant.
Martie said, “You didn’t answer my question.”
“What question?”
“Who told you Eric was screwing around?”
“Oh, Martie, this is too boring.”
“I don’t find it boring. You—”
“I won’t talk about this,” Susan said with airy dismissiveness, rather than with anger or embarrassment, either of which would have seemed more appropriate. She waved one hand as if she were chasing off a bothersome fly. “I’m sorry I brought it up.”
“Good grief, Sooz, you can’t drop a bombshell like that and then just—”
“I’m in a good mood. I don’t want to spoil it. Let’s talk Martha Stewart crap or gossip, or something frivolous.” She sprang up from her chair almost girlishly. On the way into the kitchen, she said, “What was your decision on that beer?”
This was one of those days when being sober didn’t have a lot of appeal, but Martie declined a second Tsingtao anyway.