Mrs. Bullock said, “Well, Oddie, we didn’t figure you’d be back till late.”
“I put a few things together and realized the safe house was going to be attacked. I’m sorry I brought them down on you.”
She looked surprised. “Oh, shush, wasn’t nothin’ you did or even you bein’ here that caused this darn foolishness.”
“This here kind of squabble happens once’t in a while,” her husband assured me.
“Squabble?”
“Tussle, scrap, whatever you feel like callin’ it.”
“Every now and then,” said Maybelle, “their kind gets a bead on one of our safe houses, so they show up all full of mayhem.”
“An operation like this here tonight,” Mr. Bullock said, “takes these bastards some plannin’. For sure they been on to us some weeks now, long before you come around.”
Maybelle said, “Maybe it was ’cause of the astronaut they got on the scent of this lovely place.”
“Or that cute-as-a-button ballerina girl,” said Mr. Bullock.
His wife grimaced and shook her head. “Oh, they wanted that dear girl so bad, a thousand of their kind would’ve slit their own throats if maybe it would gain ’em just a thin chance to slit hers.”
“Do these squabbles always end like this?” I asked.
“Gracious, no,” Maybelle said. She smiled at her husband and then looked at me again. “Was it that easy, then this war would be done before it ever did start.”
“Sometimes, it’s our folks end up dead as dirt.” Deacon winked at his wife. “But not here and now.”
“Not here and now,” she said.
Mentally, I was wobbling a little from thinking about the scope of the secret conflict that all of this implied. “I didn’t realize the cult was so big.”
“Them cultists that want to sink their teeth in you, dear? Why, they aren’t big at all. Them and others like ’em wasn’t the ones would’ve killed our astronaut had they got their hands on him.”
“Or that little ballerina,” her husband said.
“Or that Army lieutenant, he won the big medal.”
“Or that comedian, years ago, we had to fake his death and do him a new face.”
“It’s not one cult,” Maybelle said, “it’s a way of thinkin’.”
Mr. Bullock agreed. “Thinkin’, What is it I want, and how can I take it from someone that has it.”
“Thinkin’, Who is it I hate or envy most, and how can they be got rid of,” Maybelle said.
“Thinkin’, Can’t be me made a mess of my life, must be your fault, so you’re gonna pay.”
“A way of thinking,” I said. “But it’s a way that an awful lot of people think.”
“But not anywheres near the most of ’em,” Maybelle said. “Not the most, and that’s one reason why doin’ what we do is worth doin’.”
“I hope you’re right, ma’am.”
“Call me Maybelle.”
“Yes, ma’am. What happens to you now?”
“Me and Deke? We move on wherever.”
“Wherever?”
“Wherever Edie Fischer thinks best. Most often some far place from where we was last.”
“So the clean-up crew you mentioned deals with the dead bodies?”
“Well, it’s partly what keeps ’em busy.”
“What happens to this house?”
Mr. Bullock said, “Clean-up crew tears all the tricks out, puts things back like they was before us, makes it normal as normal ever can be, so it’ll get sold. No safe house never can be a safe house again once’t the bastards know about it.”
Mrs. Bullock finished her spiked coffee and smiled. “We been here three interestin’ years, made some fine memories. But it does a person good to move on from time to time, keeps you fresh.”
Mr. Bullock reached into his shirt pocket. “I hate how it vibrates like a squirmin’ lizard.” He produced a cell phone, put it to his ear, said “yeah” three times, “dang” once, and “no” twice before he terminated the call.
His wife asked, “Clean-up?”
“Yep. Them boys got a job and a half this time around. They’ll be pullin’ in the driveway in about two minutes.”
I said, “They got here really fast.”
“This team is mostly close, a lot of the time just over in Vegas. Got themselves more cleanin’ up to do there than here.”
Looking at my watch, I said, “Did they teleport or something?”
“We had us three false alarms today,” he said.
“One just before dinner,” I remembered.
“Right after that, I called out to Vegas for clean-up, told ’em there’s likely to be one mess or t’other.”
“How did you know the alarms weren’t false?”
“One false alarm in a day,” Maybelle said, “might be nothin’ but truly false. More than one, well, then you got to figure they’re all as real as my own teeth.”
“You’ve got beautiful teeth, ma’am.”
“Thank you, Oddie. I always say everythin’ worthwhile starts with a nice smile.”
Mr. Bullock got up from his chair. “Boss lady’s right behind the crew.”
I rose to my feet. “You mean Mrs. Fischer?”
“About six o’clock, she come in town from the coast with them three friends of yours.”
That would be Annamaria, Tim, and Blossom Rosedale, the Happy Monster.
“Edie holed up somewhere safe with ’em,” Mr. Bullock said. “We don’t got to know where. Don’t want to know. She’s come here just herself now, with the clean-up crew, so she can chat with you, son.”
The three of us stepped onto the front porch as a forty-foot box truck and a paneled van appeared out of the dark colonnades of velvet ash. Neither vehicle sported a company name. They swept past the house to park in the backyard.
A black superstretch Mercedes limousine with tinted windows followed close behind the paneled van and stopped in the driveway, near the front porch. The driver doused the headlights.
Mr. Bullock said, “Edie wants to see you in the car, son. The biggest dang snoops in the world, with all their evil electronic ears, won’t never hear but even a word of what’s said in that limo. Get in the front, ’cause she’s drivin’ herself.”
Thirty-three
The night before my return to Pico Mundo. The sea. The shore. The cottage. Annamaria and the boy, Tim, asleep in their rooms. And I in mine. The bedsheets damp with sweat.
The nightmare of chaos and cacophony.
In a place without detail, where luminous smears of red and blue and gold and white and green whirled and pulsed, swooped toward me and soared as if they were shapeless birds of light. A place of harsh sound, music too shrill and tortured to be called music, voices that spoke what I knew to be English but could not understand, screams and panicked shouting. There had been faces all around me, swelling and receding and swelling again, but now there were only parts of faces, eyes looming out of the blur of light, a mouth wide and howling, a nose with cavernous nostrils, a rouged cheek, and an ear with a silver loop dangling from the lobe.
At my side, supporting me as if I were drunk, Blossom Rosedale maneuvered me through the bedlam as I clutched an urn to my chest. Chief Wyatt Porter had appeared out of the tumult, calling my name. He had pointed his pistol at me, and the muzzle had grown until it was as large as the mouth of a cannon. He had fired the gun, and with the crack of the shot, he had disappeared into the pandemonium once more. Blossom led me onward.
As scenes in dreams often transition one into the other without logic, I found myself lying on my back on a hard surface, holding fast to the urn, the mysterious urn that held the ashes of countless dead. All the strident noise had faded, the music without harmony and the shrill voices and the screams. The kaleidoscopic play of light in smears of brilliant color had given way to a warm golden glow and a soft surrounding grayness.
Standing around me, three lovely women with white-and-gold feathered faces regarded me with
solemn brown eyes. They had noses and mouths, not beaks. Although I tried desperately to hold on to the urn, strong hands took it from me, and I lacked the strength to resist. I could see that the bird women were speaking, whether to one another or to me, but I couldn’t hear what they said. Another face appeared, the beautiful fire-scarred and broken face of Miss Blossom Rosedale. Beside Blossom materialized Terri Stambaugh, the woman who owned the Pico Mundo Grille, who had given me a job when I was sixteen and helped me to master my natural talent as a hash-slinger, refining me into a griddle master.
I tried to speak to Blossom and to Terri, but I had no voice. I could neither hear nor be heard. The spirits of the lingering dead can’t talk, but they can hear; therefore, my current deafness proved that I was not dead.
For a moment I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, I seemed to be alone. I tried to look around, but I couldn’t lift my head. I couldn’t sit up. I couldn’t move as much as one finger. Panic took me. I thought that I must be paralyzed. But then Annamaria spoke to me, and her voice at once calmed me, though I couldn’t see her.
“Well, young man, you have had quite a day.”
Another of those dream transitions left me sitting in a chair, across a table from Annamaria. Between us stood a wide shallow bowl containing an inch of water, and in the water rested an exquisite white flower larger than a cantaloupe, thick white petals spiraling from a loose perimeter to a tight center.
During our four months of friendship, this flower graced rooms where Annamaria lived. In the cottage by the sea, there were always bowls of these enormous blooms. She claimed that she cut them from a tree in the neighborhood. Although I went on long walks for blocks in every direction, I never saw a tree laden with such flowers.
Back in January, in the town of Magic Beach, using the flower, Annamaria had performed a magic trick of some kind for Blossom Rosedale, but I hadn’t been present to see it. The Happy Monster had been amazed, astonished, exhilarated by the illusion with the flower. Annamaria promised that she would perform it for me, too, when the time was right. In her ever-mysterious way, she had never felt the right time had arrived—until now, here in a dream.
“The flower,” she said, “is the amaranth.”
Around my neck, upon a chain, the thimble-size bell given to me by this woman, on the occasion when she asked if I would die for her, began tinkling sweetly, although I did not move. The tiny silver clapper beat against the silver strike and silver lip, perhaps to call me to some task, perhaps to celebrate some pending triumph—perhaps to warn me of a mortal threat.
Annamaria began to pluck loose the largest of the petals, those around the perimeter of the bloom, and drop them on the table. They were as thick as if they had been peeled from a wax flower. At first they glowed snow-white against the wood, then began to yellow, turn brown. Soon they withered even as they fluttered from her fingers. (The silver bell rang faster, louder.) Fear welled again as the petals began to discolor and shrivel before she could pluck them. The deterioration of the bloom accelerated, racing from one petal to the next, around the spiral pattern, rapidly toward the center. (Louder, the silver bell, louder, faster.) I tried to tell her to stop. She was killing not the flower, she was killing me. I could not speak. The large petals fell out of the flower of their own accord, as if they were puzzle pieces from a picture of a beaten and bruised man, quickly curling, cupping, now as crisp as the skin from a desiccated corpse.
I thrust straight up, out of the dream, sweating and gasping, damp sheets clinging to me as if they were a shroud, as if I had sat up not in bed, but from a granite slab in a morgue, where an autopsy was about to be performed on me.
At the end of the silver chain around my neck, the tiny bell rang three times. Each time it sounded less insistent than in the nightmare. Then it fell silent.
I had awakened late. Annamaria and young Tim had finished their breakfast. They were off somewhere together.
After a shower, I packed what little I needed in my toiletries case and in a soft-sided overnight bag. I loaded them in the Big Dog motorcycle’s saddlebags.
Annamaria and Tim returned on foot at 1:30, having eaten a light lunch at a restaurant in town. The boy had not been much like a boy, emotionally and intellectually, when we rescued him from horrific circumstances in that Montecito estate. He had been old beyond his years. But day by day, he seemed to forget what he had endured. Soon he became an ordinary, energetic boy of nine. This change had been wrought by Annamaria, but she had declined to explain how she could have done what an entire corps of psychiatrists and a pharmacy of the latest antidepressants would surely have failed to achieve.
Now Tim wanted to change into swim trunks and search the shore for seashells, go wading, swim a little. Annamaria preferred to keep him in sight when he was on the beach. She said she’d been pregnant a long time and would be pregnant longer still, but she declined to say if this child she carried was her first. As she was eighteen, it most likely would be her first. Yet, as she had shown with Tim, she had about her the wisdom and the manner of someone well experienced in mothering.
As the boy entertained himself along the breaking surf, plucking up half-buried shells to add to his collection, we stood seaward of the picket fence that separated yard grass from sand.
Between the clear sky and the blue rolling sea, brown pelicans glided northward in formation.
She said, “So, odd one, you had a dream, and the bell rang you to action last night.”
“How could you know?”
“The way things are known,” she said with an enigmatic smile. “A dream but not just a dream.”
“Not just a dream,” I agreed. “Chief Porter was in it, so I must have been in Pico Mundo. But I don’t know exactly where.”
“You’ve known since Nevada, the cult will strike in Pico Mundo.”
“You were in the dream,” I said. “Will you be there for real?”
“I phoned Edie Fischer this morning. Tim and I will go out there with her. I wouldn’t miss it, young man.”
“What is it you wouldn’t miss?”
“Whatever is to be.”
“There you go again.”
“Where do I go?”
“In clouds of mystery. By the way, you frightened me in the dream.”
She put a hand on my shoulder. “I will endeavor not to frighten you for real.”
I watched Tim dancing jubilantly in the foaming surf. “Should I be afraid?”
“Not of anything in Pico Mundo,” she said.
“Of what comes after Pico Mundo?”
“Don’t lay out an entire itinerary, Oddie. Take one destination at a time.”
Thirty-four
When I got into the front passenger seat of the limousine and closed the door behind me, Mrs. Fischer grabbed one of my hands in both of hers, pulled me toward her, and kissed me on the cheek.
“Child,” she said, “even the sweetest baby in a cradle isn’t more kissable than you.”
She was a pixie, an inch short of five feet, perched on a pillow to see over the steering wheel. At eighty-six, she had more energy and considerably more gumption than the average thirty-something corporate hotshot.
“I’ve missed you, Mrs. Fischer.”
“And I’ve missed you, too, my dear chauffeur.”
As I’ve detailed in the next-to-last volume of these memoirs, I had been employed as her chauffeur for an event-packed day or so, during which she had done most of the driving.
“But of course,” she continued in her lilting voice and cheery manner, “I’ve been busy helping our little network of like souls to neuter as many rotten scum as we have time to confront. I’m sorry to say, there are so many rotten scum in these perilous times that some days I fear we’re falling behind. But then …” She looked toward the front porch, where the clean-up crew had joined Mr. and Mrs. Bullock and were following them into the house. “But then sometimes the rotten scum come to us, which saves us the trouble of finding them.” She looked at me
again and frowned. “What is it, dear? You don’t appear to be having as much fun as you should be having after all your success in Nevada.”
“A lot of people died there, ma’am.”
“Yes, many of those kidnappers and would-be child-killers died, but the children all lived, thanks to you. Don’t mourn the death of monsters, dear. Celebrate the saving of the innocents.”
“You’re right. I know you’re right. I guess what disturbs me isn’t so much killing the killers. It’s the necessity of killing them, that they push us to that.”
“We’re not engaged in police work, child. This is war. A secret war at our level of the action, but a war nonetheless. There are fewer shades of gray in a war than in police work.”
She had one of those faces—fine-boned and symmetrical—that not only weathered the years well but also pushed the GRANDMOTHER LOVE button deep in your psyche, so that you took seriously whatever she said and felt it to be wise. Her soft skin hadn’t wrinkled randomly, hadn’t puckered her face in unflattering ways; every line seemed to have been designed to maintain a gentle and genteel countenance and to have been executed by a seamstress to royalty.
“Ma’am, as totally impressive as your network was when we worked together back in March, I’m only now beginning to realize its true scope. You and Heathcliff must have built quite a fortune.”
Heathcliff, her husband, apparently had been many things, including a magician. No. What she had told me, exactly, was that he could “appear to be a magician,” that he could appear to be anything he wished, and convincingly.
“Oh, dear, don’t give me too much credit. Heathcliff already had a Scrooge McDuck fortune when he met me and saved me from a life as a mediocre actress. Over the years, my little ideas added only a couple of hundred million to the pot. Anyway, I’m not the only one who funds the resistance. Now tell me, what should we be afraid might happen to your darling little Pico Mundo?”