She had left the engine running, so that we could have air-conditioning in the warm desert night. Although the instrument panel in the dashboard had been dialed up to its brightest level, the limo was softly illuminated. I felt cocooned and, as I always did in her company, quite safe in a dangerous world.
I told her about the dream of the flood, about Malo Suerte Dam and the stolen thousand kilos of C-4. “But you see, ma’am, I never know about my dreams. Sometimes they’re literal, other times only symbolic. If I have to live with this gift, I don’t understand why things can’t always be clearer to me.”
Patting my cheek affectionately, she said, “Because, dear boy, then you would be just another silly superhero who’s never really at risk.”
“I could live with that.”
“But you might then grow too certain of yourself, cocksure and arrogant. Even you. And then you might become one of the very people that my network of friends must thwart. Isn’t that a lovely word—thwart?”
“Thwart? I’ve never thought about it, ma’am.”
“Well, do think about it, dear. Please do. It’s a lovely word. Thwart. To obstruct is as noble an act as to facilitate, if what you are obstructing is the facilitation of evil. Anyway, to maintain the right perspective, sweetie, we always should be at risk of failure, the possibility of making wrong choices.”
“Free will, you mean.”
Pinching my cheek this time, Mrs. Fischer said, “Now, there’s the lovely fry cook who could save this town. You’re very nearly fully smooth and blue.”
“Fully smooth and blue. I still don’t know what that means, ma’am.”
“Oh, don’t puzzle yourself. You’ll know what it means when you know. Meanwhile, there isn’t going to be a test about it.”
She was dressed in a pink pantsuit with a frilly white blouse. On the lapel of her jacket glimmered the exclamation point crafted of gold, diamonds, and rubies.
“I don’t know what that means, either. A version of it turns up on the phone you sent me.”
“It’s a kind of logo,” Mrs. Fischer said. “It’s like that Pepsi circle with the red-white-and-blue waves in it. Or the smiling cow on a can of Lucerne whipped cream.”
“Cows and cream. Okay, that I understand.”
“Of course you do. A smiling cow makes everyone feel good. A smiling cow is a delightful thing, and whipped cream is delightful.”
“But the exclamation point …”
“Well, it’s also a promise.”
“A promise of what?”
“And a statement of conviction. It’s many things, dear, just as anything you can point at in this world is many things.”
I pointed at her.
She pointed at me.
I couldn’t help but laugh. “I wish Stormy could have known you, ma’am. She’d think you were a hoot.”
“She was a lovely girl. She still used the name Bronwen then, hadn’t quite started calling herself Stormy. We got along famously.”
Mrs. Fischer could draw upon a greater variety of smiles than anyone I’d ever known, perhaps because the life that she’d lived had given her so many different kinds and degrees of happiness. The smile with which she favored me now was one I’d seen several times before: what I might call the Smile of Pleasurable Expectation, with her head cocked to one side and her blue eyes bright with curiosity regarding my response to her revelation, also with an impish pleasure in having astonished me.
“You knew Stormy? How did you? When did you?”
Mrs. Fischer took one of my hands in both of hers again and pressed it firmly. “After she was adopted by that dreadful couple, after that horrible thing happened, our little organization got her out of the situation.”
Stormy was seven years old when her parents died in a plane crash, seven and a half when she was adopted by a wealthy, childless couple in Beverly Hills. During the second week in her magnificent new home, her adoptive father came into her room after midnight, exposed himself to her, and touched her in ways no grown man should ever touch a child.
She had still been intensely grieving for her lost parents. Humiliated, ashamed, frightened, alone, confused, she endured the man’s depraved behavior for three months before desperately seeking help.
“But,” I said, “she reported it to a social worker who was making a house call for the adoption agency.”
“Yes, dear. She did.”
“So she was taken out of that place. And then … then she lived in Saint Bart’s Orphanage till she graduated high school.”
“Yes, but she wasn’t removed for a week. Your lovely girl never realized that the first social worker wasn’t the one who helped her. In fact, never would have helped her.”
Having to discuss this, having to consider again what Stormy had told me about the abuse she suffered, I found that the memory came braided with heartache.
Mrs. Fischer said, “The couple who adopted Stormy—”
“She called them Mr. and Mrs. Hellborn. Not their real names, obviously.”
“But apt,” Mrs. Fischer said. “Mr. and Mrs. Hellborn weren’t just corrupt. They were also corrupting of so many people who came into contact with them. And the first social worker was corruptible. Another caseworker in the same child-welfare agency heard a few things and became suspicious. She was one of us.”
By the gentle tenor of her voice, by the compassion in her eyes, by the hands with which she held my hand, she made it clear that what she had to tell me might leave me shaken, but that she would be my anchor through it all.
“The Hellborns thought of themselves as citizens of the world. Which in their case meant they felt above the laws of any one city or state, or country. They had lived in several exotic places where life is accorded less value than it is here. Tragic places where children of the slums are vulnerable, often regarded as a commodity. The crooked authorities let the Hellborns pursue their desires unobstructed. But they had a reputation among locals.”
Stormy and I had never made love. She wanted to know beyond any doubt that I loved her for herself, not merely for the physical pleasure that she could give me. Considering what happened to her, considering that she had triumphed over what would have destroyed many others, considering that she became such a self-sufficient joyful person, I would have been a world-class jerk if I pressured her. Stormy wanted to wait for marriage; I wanted whatever Stormy wanted.
Mrs. Fischer said, “The Hellborns were making plans to take little Bronwen out of the country aboard their hundred-sixty-foot yacht. The Beverly Hills estate was owned by their corporation in the Cayman Islands. The corporation quietly listed it for sale. Those people would never have brought your girl back. Never. And God knows what might have happened to her.”
At first it seemed to me that there was no good reason for Mrs. Fischer to tell me all of this. Stormy was gone. What might have happened to her didn’t matter. What mattered was only what did happen to her both at the hands of the Hellborns and years later on a day of evil at the Green Moon Mall. Why dwell on horrors that might have occurred?
“She was,” said Mrs. Fischer, “the sweetest child, orphaned and abused and traumatized, but already determined not to be a victim. Not ever again. I spent only two days with her, but they were days I will never forget, Oddie. There she was, this precious little person, forty-some pounds, hardly taller than a lawn gnome, but determined to take on the world and win.”
I said, “Nothing scared her, not really. She was afraid for me sometimes but never for herself.”
Mrs. Fischer squeezed my hand. “The dear girl said her name, Bronwen, sounded like an elf or a fairy, and she wasn’t either one. She decided to find a strong name for herself. The second day we were together, there was a terrible storm. Such bright bolts of lightning. Wind and thunder that shook the building. She stood at the window, watching it all, fazed by none of it, and that’s where she found her new name.”
I realized that I was squeezing one of Mrs. Fischer’s hands so tightly that
I must have been hurting her, though she didn’t so much as wince, let alone try to pull away. I relaxed my grip.
“I never … never knew why she chose Stormy. It fit her so well, you know, ’cause she had such power, such a strong presence. But there was no destruction in her, like there can be in a storm, none at all.”
Cocooned in the limo, with the purr of the engine and the soft light and the coolness issuing from the dashboard vents, I almost felt that we weren’t in a mere car. We might instead have been aboard a more significant conveyance, perhaps outbound in space or traveling in time, seeking a world more peaceful than this one or a future when, by some great grace, humanity had recovered its innocence and its birthright.
The exclamation-point brooch on Mrs. Fischer’s lapel sparkled in the dashboard light when I looked at her again. I said, “At first I couldn’t understand why you told me all this. But now I get it.”
“I knew you would, child.”
“Sometimes, when I’m feeling sorry for myself, it seems that I’m made to carry this impossibly heavy weight, the crushing weight of losing her. I have moments of bitterness and doubt. You know? But the weight is a blessing, really, and I shouldn’t be bitter about it. The weight is on my heart because I knew her and loved her. The weight is the accumulation of all we had together, all the hopes and worries, all the laughs, the picnics in Saint Bart’s bell tower, the adventures we shared because of my gift.… If they had taken her away on their yacht, if I had never met her, there would be no weight to carry—and no memories to sustain me.”
Mrs. Fischer smiled at me and nodded. “Fully blue and so very, very near to being fully smooth.”
Thirty-five
Minutes before the cultists found me, Mrs. Fischer drove off the two-lane blacktop and parked on the shoulder of the road, near the grove of cottonwoods in which I had left the Ford Explorer. She shut off the engine, switched off the lights, got out of the limo, and came around to my side, so that we could have a proper hug.
She was birdlike, tiny. And yet I suspected that anyone who tried to mug her or hijack her would discover that being petite and eighty-six did not guarantee that she would be an easy target.
Walking with me through the dark, toward the trees, she said, “I want you to know that Tim will be fine. Set your mind at rest about him. Some of our people are taking him into their family. They’ll take the dog, too, Raphael. They have a golden retriever of their own and a twelve-year-old boy, so Tim will have two dogs and an older brother.”
“What if his past starts coming back to him, who he was and all he went through?”
“It won’t come back to him, dear. Annamaria tells me that she has spared him those memories. And he has new memories that give him a good foundation for a happy future.”
“I know he remembers a different past from what he actually lived. I just don’t understand how it could be done. Not hypnosis. Not drugs.”
“No, no, no. Good gracious, nothing as crude as that.”
“Then what?”
“Well, it’s all a little mystical, isn’t it? Don’t worry your lovely head about it.”
“Back in March,” I reminded her, “you told me I would eventually understand the true and hidden nature of the world. It’s still hidden to me, ma’am.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s any less true, sweetie.”
I had come to love Mrs. Fischer, to trust her entirely. But at times, our conversations seemed to have come straight from the Mad Hatter’s tea party.
I said, “Am I right to think you’ve known Annamaria a long time? Much longer than I’ve known her?”
“Oh, yes, I’ve known her for ages.”
“She’s only eighteen.”
“Yes, dear, she’s been eighteen for ages.”
“How does that work?”
“It works splendidly for her.”
I was silent for a moment. Then I said, “I could be inscrutable, too, you know.”
“Actually, you couldn’t be, dear.”
“Who is she?”
“It’s not for me to tell you, Oddie.”
“So who will tell me?”
“She will, when the time has come for you to know.”
“When will the time come?”
“You’ll know the time has come when it comes, of course. You’re so full of questions, you should be the host of a game show.”
I sighed and stopped at the trees.
We had neither moon nor stars. Her face was ghostly in the gloom. Her white hair veiled her head, all but her face, as if she were of some holy order. I didn’t resort to my flashlight, because under her talk of game-show hosts, I heard a repressed sadness and sensed that she might be struggling to hold back tears. If this might be my last encounter with, my last memory of, Mrs. Edie Fischer, I didn’t want it to be one in which she wept.
“Will I see you again?” I asked.
“Of course you will, dear. You’ll see everyone again. Let me have a question now. What is your next move?”
“You’ll know my next move when it’s time for you to know it.”
“You simply are not charming when you try inscrutability, dear. It’s most unbecoming on you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Is your little rebellion over now?”
“Yes, ma’am. My next move is … I’ve got to talk with Chief Porter and find out if he’s gotten any new info on this Wolfgang Schmidt, one of the cultists.”
“Yes, one of the three that were shot in the back of the head by others of their ilk.”
“How do you know that?”
She pinched my cheek. “How could I not know, dear?”
“If you don’t mind my asking, ma’am—and I’m sure you do—what’s your next move?”
“As always, I’m an open book. I intend to pick up Annamaria and Blossom Rosedale where we’re staying together, and go over to the fairgrounds for a couple of hours.”
“Hey, whoa. That’s a bad idea, ma’am. I’m heading back there myself, ’cause I think that’s where something pretty serious might happen. Not necessarily the big thing. Not the whole town drowned. But something not good.”
She clapped her hands together with girlish enthusiasm. “Well, isn’t that where it’s always the most fun to be—where things are happening?”
I hugged her again. “Heathcliff must have been some guy, ma’am.” I let her go. “Tell me straight now. Do you know what’s going to happen tonight?”
“No, Oddie. For all you may think differently, I’m only human. Annamaria’s human, too, though she’s more than that, as you no doubt suspect. But human nonetheless. We don’t know. Whatever happens will happen because you—and others—make it happen.”
“Free will,” I said.
“Free will,” she agreed, “our greatest gift, the thing that makes life worth living, in spite of all the anguish it brings.”
“Got to be going. I’m running out of time. I think we all are.”
I could see her nod only because her cap of white hair moved up and down.
“Good-bye, Mrs. Fischer.”
“Until we meet again, dear.”
She made her way back to the limousine as if guided by some lamp that I could not see.
I watched her get in the enormous car and drive away. She drove well. Back in March, her best friend and chauffeur of twenty-two years, Oscar Dunningham, had died of a massive heart attack at the age of ninety-two. They had been at dinner in a superb restaurant in Moonlight Bay. As Oscar finished his last spoon of an excellent crème brûlée, his eyes widened, and he said, “Oh, I think the time has come to say good-bye,” and he slumped dead in his chair. According to Mrs. Fischer, although she usually tipped twenty-five percent, she tipped seventy-five because the waiter was kind enough to wipe a dribble of crème brûlée off dead Oscar’s chin. She was also pleased that the busboy, the waiter, and the maître d’ all continued to refer to the deceased as “the guest” even as they assisted in his quiet removal from the din
ing room, leaving most of the other customers unaware that a death had occurred, and presenting Mrs. Fischer with a small box of chocolate mints accompanied by a sympathy card.
I would have liked to be her chauffeur. I’m sure the pay was good. And the benefits would have been unique.
I switched on my flashlight. Walked among the cottonwoods to the Explorer. Behind the wheel, I inserted the key in the ignition. As the engine turned over, I looked up, through the dusty windshield and between the trunks of the trees, toward the two-lane backroad. Distant headlights flared.
I would have driven from the cover of the trees if the vehicle hadn’t been approaching so fast. On that narrow, curved, and potholed blacktop, such high speed was reckless, almost suicidal. The driver evidently needed to get someplace yesterday. Or maybe he needed to get to someone.
Sometimes intuition tickled like a spider crawling along the back of my neck. At other times, it was a cold robot hand that clamped around my throat for a moment and wouldn’t allow me to breathe. This time: robot hand.
The oncoming vehicle closed on me so fast that I had no hope of getting to the road and away before it blocked access. I could tell now that the headlights were high off the pavement, as if it must be either a jacked-up SUV on big tires or a truck. Probably a truck.
I switched off the engine. Got out of the Explorer. Hurried around to the passenger side, to put the Ford between me and the road. Drew the Glock from my shoulder rig.
I was not—and never had been—a man of action. I only pretended to be one. I remained always aware that I was pretending, desperately trying to be Mr. Daniel Craig or Mr. Vin Diesel in one of their more assured performances. Consequently, I frequently felt foolish while doing all the jumping and running and brandishing guns that a man of action is called upon to do.
Now I felt like a self-delusional fry cook as I crouched beside the Explorer, Glock in hand, when it should have been a spatula, watching the truck rocket along the roadway. I told myself, Don’t be paranoid. It’s just someone in a hurry. His wife’s in labor or his little boy swallowed an entire package of laxatives and he doesn’t want to wait for an ambulance. They’re not looking for me. They’re not worried I’ll upend their plans. They have no way of locating me.