“Y-yes,” Mary Ann stammered. “I’ll be out in a moment.”
There was a brief pause, as if the clerk considered pressing the matter, and then footsteps moved away from the door.
Mary Ann stood in front of the sink and splashed water on her face, then used a handful of brown paper towels to dry her skin. She dropped the soggy towels into the wastebasket, then looked at herself in the mirror, not liking what she saw.
When she left for the lock-in at First Presby at around eight in the evening, she’d looked, she thought, like a perfectly normal thirty-five year old woman. For the past few years she’d been noticing more and more wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, and the first gray hairs had started appearing here and there in the black when she was still in her twenties, but now the woman she found herself staring at was a stranger.
Dark purple smudges of fatigue and shock under both eyes, which were red-rimmed and bloodshot from crying and driving. Her mouth was turned down, and there was a seemingly endless network of lines and wrinkles in the skin around eyes. Her hair was a frizzy mess.
She stared at herself in disbelief. How could so much change in so little time? How? Everything you worked so long and so hard for, the house, the car, the job, the man you thought you’d spend your life with, make babies with. All gone in moments, sucked away from you by some huge cosmic vacuum cleaner, as if God had looked down, seen you happy, and said, Oh, sorry, that wasn’t supposed to be yours…
Mary Ann felt herself shaking her head, tried to exercise control over her body, but was powerless to end the motion. From deep within her, a sound was working its way to her mouth, and though she didn’t know what it would sound like when it came out, she knew she didn’t want to hear it. If she let that sound escape her lips, it would kill her, it would tear her apart from the inside out like a bomb. So she shut her eyes and clamped her mouth shut as hard as she could, and all that came out was a puffy humming, and then that stopped and she opened her eyes and found that she could breathe again.
She wiped her eyes with the inside of her wrist and was about to turn from the mirror when she caught sight of the window in its reflection.
The window was small and at shoulder-height, but if it would open, she could fit through. She tried the crank, found that it wouldn’t budge, saw the lock, disengaged it, and then tried the crank again.
The window swung smoothly out.
* * *
As Mary Ann dropped to the ground, a hand settled on her arm and she screamed, clapping a hand to her mouth to stifle the sound. Rose.
“I don’t blame you,” Rose said, a frown in place. “But this is your one free pass, Mary Ann. Try it again, and I’ll hurt you so you’ll never forget it.” After a moment, she added, “All I need from you is information. If you tell me what I need to know, you’ll be okay. I’ll let you go. But if you try this shit again…”
She led Mary Ann back to the car and they got in, Rose behind the wheel this time. Before she put the car in gear, she cracked the window and then lit a cigarette, blowing out through the narrow gap.
Rose put the car in gear and pulled out of the gas station parking lot. For a while, they rode in silence, then Mary Ann said, “Why are you doing this?” She posed the question in a calm, quiet voice, not wanting to provoke some kind of attack or rebuke. Inside, she boiled; outside, she froze. She didn’t look directly at Rose because she thought that if she did, she wouldn’t be able to hold herself together.
Rose didn’t answer immediately, just drove, eyes on the road ahead. Finally, she said, “You know.” She glanced briefly at Mary Ann, then turned back to the road.
“I knew that you would come for John,” Mary Ann said truthfully, hoping Rose would hear the sincerity in her words.
More silence, then, “Do you know why?” The look Rose gave her was almost shy; hers was the face of a woman not used to asking people for answers.
“Not with any certainty,” Mary Ann answered, choosing her words carefully. As much as she wanted not to tell this monstrous woman anything that would help her track John down, she was also thinking clearly, surprisingly clearly, and knew that her continued health depended on retaining her usefulness. “Do you have any idea?”
“Very little,” Rose said. “I know I’m drawn to him, this John Barron, and I know that my intentions when I do find him are…less than benign. I can feel that. What I don’t know is why I need to find him. If I find him and kill him, will something change? What caused this all to start up so suddenly?” Rose slapped the steering wheel, then flicked her cigarette out onto the road.
After a moment, Mary Ann said, “I can’t tell you the answers to all of those questions.”
“What can you tell me?”
Mary Ann clasped her hands in her lap. “How old are you?”
The question appeared to take Rose by surprise. “Thirty-four, why?”
Putting a check next to item number one on her mental list, Mary Ann said. “Other than the new compulsion to track John down and kill him, has anything else changed for you recently? Have you started…feeling anything you didn’t used to feel?”
Rose glanced at her through slitted eyes. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to give you what you want.”
The Toyota’s steering wheel was covered by a rubberized leopard-print sleeve. Rose stroked it softly with the tips of her fingers, and Mary Ann saw a haunted look play over the other woman’s face.
“You want to have a baby,” Mary Ann said almost under her breath. “Don’t you?”
Rose snatched in a shocked breath. “How did you know that?” The haunted look on her face had changed to one of fear. Pure crystalline fear.
“It’s just something I’ve always suspected.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not unique, you know,” Mary Ann said. “There have been others like you before, and when you’re gone, there will be another to take your place. Like everything else in this world, you’re just part of a cycle.”
Rose shook her head impatiently. “But the baby,” she said. “Why would you say that? Tell me.” After a moment, she added, “Please.”
A pinprick of anger started in Mary Ann’s heart. She tried to snub it out, but suddenly it was in her throat and in the middle of her brain like a poisonous snake. She wanted to throw up. She wanted to beat this murdering monster with her bare fists. She smiled, and it was a cold, deadly smile.
When Mary Ann spoke, she didn’t know her voice. It was as if her body had filled with something, something red and black and somehow radioactive, and if it didn’t come out, she’d die, drown in it. “You go to my home and kill my husband and take me from my job and threaten my life and you think a ‘please’ is going to win me over? Are you stupid?” She snorted a laugh.
Rose said nothing, just kept her eyes on the road.
After a while, Mary Ann tired of looking at the woman and slumped in her seat. She felt empty, deflated, and sleep approached like an inky black wave.
Just before she drifted away, it occurred to her what she’d really meant to say when all those other things came out.
“I wanted babies, too,” she murmured, her eyes still closed, her anchor sunken deep in the realm of sleep.
Chapter 23
“It’s almost like fate, you know,” Navarre said to John, then took a pull off his oxygen tank. The two men sat in an enormous dining room at one end of a table crafted beautifully out of teak planks. A few minutes earlier, Percy, the giant, had knocked on John’s door to inform him breakfast was being served. He had been ushered into this room and found Navarre waiting. “I’ve been looking for you for most of my adult life, and now, when I need you most, you’re here.”
“And happy about it,” John muttered, then looked up at Navarre. “You know, I do have a question for you, though. You’ve gone to all this trouble—sending your thugs to kidnap me, transporting me to, well, wherever the hell this is—but you haven’t made me do anything yet. That s
eems odd.”
Navarre laughed. “I have my reasons.”
“And they are?”
Navarre seemed to consider whether to answer John’s question. “Do you know what tomorrow is?”
John thought about it for a moment—with all that had happened since the incident with Kyra, the passing of time had taken on a liquid, uncertain quality—then said, “Easter.”
Navarre said nothing, just looked at John as if waiting for John to answer his own unasked question. And then John suddenly understood. “The day when Jesus was resurrected. A day of healing.”
“And the day on which more confirmed healings have been recorded than any other. Will it make any difference?” Navarre said to himself, then sipped from a glass of orange juice. “I don’t know. I hope so. Either way, it can’t hurt.”
“Can’t hurt you,” John said, and Navarre nodded, signaling that he understood.
“You’ll be cared for by my private physician here, in the house. I read about that unfortunate incident with the cancer patient while you were in the hospital. I won’t put you in that position again.”
John looked down at his hands. “And what if it doesn’t work? What if I put my hands on you and nothing happens?”
“It will,” Navarre said, cold certainty in his eyes, “as long as you do it willingly.”
“So…you’re going to force me into doing something willingly? Are you familiar with the concept of irony, Mr. Navarre?”
Navarre smiled and spread his hands. “Let me ask you, do you understand where you fit into the big scheme of things, John? Do you know what you are?”
It was the very question Mary Ann Shaw had attempted to answer for him just a day ago in the park, but for all John had learned, he found he really didn’t know much at all.
“I know bits and pieces,” John said.
Navarre nodded and looked down, drew on the oxygen tank. “You are part of a cycle that goes back more than two thousand years. In all that time, there have been maybe fifty healers like you. Fifty. Think about that.”
“I’m honored, really, but it doesn’t seem to have done much for my circumstances.”
“But it has for thousands and thousands of others. People like me, who need you.”
“So I exist for you, not for me.”
“You exist to be what you are, the same as me and everyone else.”
“Wow,” John said, sitting back in his chair, “now that was some poetic shit. I mean, it sounds vaguely like rationalization on your part, don’t get me wrong, but still, poetic shit.”
The old man smiled. “I understand your reluctance to accept all of this. If I were in your place, part of a lineage traceable to Christ himself, I might feel…overwhelmed as well.”
Now John couldn’t stop himself from laughing. “Traceable to Christ? Are you joking? Are you seriously implying that I’m a—a blood relative of Jesus Christ?”
“Not at all,” Navarre said, then added, “I’m saying that the soul inside of you, the soul that has jumped from body to body for over two thousand years, is the soul of Jesus Christ.”
John gaped at the man for a second, then slapped the table with both hands and laughed. “Oh, my god,” he whispered. “You really don’t know how crazy you are, do you? You really believe that.”
Navarre smiled serenely and drew once again from his oxygen mask.
* * *
Back in his bedroom, John thought about Macbeth. Why, Monica had asked John’s sub, had Macbeth hired the murderers to kill his friend Banquo? The answer was not what the sub had said, that great men had to pass off duties to the smaller people. The answer was that Macbeth had, as the result of his own ignorance about the nature of his existence, felt he was protecting himself against a cruel universe bent on taking from him what he felt was his by right. In a world where men made and lost their own fortunes, Macbeth had been duped into believing that fate dictated his actions, and that fate, therefore, exculpated him for the commission of his heinous deeds.
It was a truth that had always caused John to both pity and despise Macbeth’s character, but now he saw that he had been confronted with his own prophecy—not by three bearded sisters on the Scottish moors, perhaps, but a prophecy no less. The question was, what was he going to do about it? Give in and do as Navarre demanded? Or take his life into his own hands, maybe for the first time in the thirty-five years of his existence, and dictate his own actions?
It struck him as ironic that, now that he was confined and unable to truly do anything, he suddenly found himself not just wanting but needing to be elsewhere. He needed to be with Connie, and not only for her daughter, but, if he was being honest, for himself, too. If there was any chance she would have him…he had to try. But now he was stuck here, and there was no end to this ordeal in sight.
Sitting in the comfortable chair in his gilded cage, John thought about all of these things, but what he thought about most was how horrible he’d felt during the days after he woke up in the hospital.
If he went along with Navarre’s wishes and something actually did happen—and despite his prior skepticism about his own abilities, John thought something would—John would undoubtedly suffer a physical trauma similar to the one he’d incurred at Kyra’s healing. That would lay him up for days, and maybe even weeks. John remembered how he’d felt lying in the bed in Presbyterian Hospital, sick and exhausted, helpless. It wasn’t a sensation he was eager to invite into his life again, and certainly not for the likes of Albert Navarre.
On the other hand, if he did what he wanted to do, if he made a run for it… Really, what was the worst Navarre’s people could do? They couldn’t kill him if he tried to escape; Navarre would no doubt deal out swift justice to any man who injured or killed the man who represented his only hope for a normal life. All they could do was lock him up somewhere, and that wasn’t too far from where he was stuck right now.
John stood and walked to the window, rested his forehead against the glass, and closed his eyes. He tried to picture as much of the house as he’d seen; every hallway, room, and door. That wasn’t much, really, not in a house as big as he thought this one was, but he believed that, if he could get a moment to himself outside this room, he might have a chance.
Which left him with his first job: escape this room.
* * *
There were three potential ways out of Albert Navarre’s home. One was in the back of a hearse—or, more likely, the back of Curt’s van. That one was understandably unappealing, and John couldn’t help but remember his initial thought that Curt might be the kind of guy who enjoyed taking liberties with dead people.
The second option was what John had, in his mind, dubbed “the graceless exit,” a smash and run job. There were several variables at work in that option, however, not the least of which was the fact that John had not the slightest idea where Navarre’s goons lay in wait. He could break a window and hop down into the waiting arms of Curt out on a smoke break. There was just no telling. Plus, that option had another major drawback. Once he was out of the house, where would he go? From what John had been able to see, the house was entirely surrounded by grass. Green, flawless grass, in every direction. Anybody leaving or approaching the house would be detected in moments.
He raised his head and looked up at the distant, dark line of trees. How far, he thought again. A mile? More? Even if he did get out of the house unseen, how long would it take for someone to see him scampering across the empty field? Not long, John thought. Before he was halfway to the trees, someone would be out to scoop him back up in a Hummer or on an ATV.
So that was out, at least as his first choice.
What John thought just might work was more subtle. Standing in front of the window, his eyes closed, John began to formulate his plan.
* * *
It was early-afternoon. An hour ago, he’d been served lunch in his room, and John had wondered if Navarre had somehow detected his desire to reconnoiter a little on his way to the dining room.
There were cameras in John’s room, after all—at least one that John could see, and who knew how many more—and maybe one of Navarre’s people had seen him looking around the room a little too interestedly. In the end, John figured, it didn’t really matter; that a prisoner would desire to escape was hardly the kind of conclusion it took a rocket scientist to reach.
John walked into the bathroom and splashed water on his face, making sure to get some on his t-shirt. Hoping there wasn’t a camera behind the vanity mirror, he began to run in place, lifting his knees high toward his chest, pumping his arms. Two minutes later he was sweating, and after five sweat was dripping from his neck and face. His breath came in ragged gulps, and John could only hope he had enough left in the tank to move fast when the time came.
“Okay,” he panted, regarding himself in the mirror. “You can do this.” He grabbed his chest, opened the door, and stumbled into the bedroom.
The response was almost instantaneous.
Whomever Navarre had viewing the monitor in John’s room was focused and efficient. This was a part of the plan John had been unsure about; even if there was a live body looking at a monitor somewhere in the house, there was no way to tell if that person decided to go to the bathroom or take a smoke break.
As it was, though, the door slammed open mere seconds after John hit the floor, still clutching at his chest, his eyes pressed shut. John could hear the sound of pounding feet and squeaking wheels, and then voices.
“Come on, get him up. Call Carol, tell her he’s having what looks like a heart attack. Tell her to prep the AED. We’ll be there in one minute.” Strong hands slipped under John’s knees and armpits and he was lifted onto the stretcher. He could hear the staticky squawk of a radio, then a man’s tight voice telling Carol to get the defibrillator ready.
And then he was moving, the gurney swerving wildly as the two attendants ushered him out of the room where he’d been held prisoner for the last twenty-four hours and then down a long stretch of hallway. John’s head was to the side and he risked cracking his eyes, saw white wall sweeping by. Then they were in the foyer, where John had seen the AED when Curt and Percy had brought him to Navarre’s library the day before. There were others in the house—John assumed the place was so well stocked because of Navarre’s declining state of health—but he’d hoped this was the closest. So far, so good.