“And now you are?”
“The reality,” Edward said, “is that everybody has to work to live. There are no free tickets in this world. Don’t you know that yet?”
“Has my brother turned into Big Brother?”
“No!” he answered, too loudly. “Hell, no! I’m just saying we thought everything was black and white back then! We thought we were right and everybody else was wrong. Well, we were fucked up. We didn’t see the gray in the world.” He grunted. “We didn’t think we’d ever have to grow up. But you can’t fight time, Mary. That’s the one thing you can’t put a bullet into or blow apart with a bomb. Things change, and you have to change with them. If you don’t…well, look what happened to Abbie Hoffman.”
“Abbie Hoffman was always true to a cause,” Mary said. “He just got tired, that’s all.”
“Hoffman got busted selling cocaine!” he reminded her. “He went from being a revolutionary to being a drug salesman! What cause was he true to? Jesus, nobody cares who Abbie Hoffman was! You know what the true power of this world is? Money. Cash. If you’ve got it, you’re somebody, and if you don’t, you get swept away with the garbage!”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Mary said, rocking Drummer in her arms. “Sweet baby, such a sweet sweet baby.”
“I need a beer.” Edward went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. Mary kissed Drummer’s forehead. He had an air about him; his diaper needed changing. She took him into the bedroom, laid him down on the bed next to her shoulder bag, and began the task. There was only one more diaper. She was going to have to go out and buy another box of Pampers. As she changed Drummer, she noticed a typewriter on a little desk in the room. The wastebasket had crumpled-up paper in it, squeezed like white fists. She took a wad of paper out and opened it. There were three lines on the paper: My name is Edward Fordyce, and I am a killer. My killing was done in the name of freedom, a long time ago. I was a member of the Storm Front, and on the night of July first, 1972, I was reborn.
Drummer began to cry, uncomfortable and sleepy.
Behind Mary, Edward said, “The publisher tells me I need a snappy opening paragraph. Something to hook a reader with real quick.”
She looked up at him from the wrinkled paper. Drummer kept crying, the sound hurting her head.
Edward sipped his beer. His eyes seemed darker, his face tight with pressure. “They say they want a lot of blood in it. A lot of action. They say it could be a best seller.”
Mary crumpled the paper again, into a hard little ball. Her fist clenched around it as Drummer cried on.
“Can’t you get him quiet?” Edward asked.
The killer awoke. She felt it stir within her, like a heavy shadow. Edward was writing a book about the Storm Front. Writing a book to tell everything to the Mindfuck State. Going to spread the Front’s blood, sweat, and tears out on the woodpulp pages to be licked by dumb jackals. A reunion, he’d said. I guess I was curious.
No, that wasn’t why Edward Fordyce had put the message in the papers and magazines. “You wanted to find the others,” she said, “so we could help you write your book.”
“Background material. I want the book to be a history of the Storm Front, and there’s a lot I don’t know.”
Mary’s hand went into her bag. It came out with the Magnum, and she trained the gun on him, a stranger in enemy colors.
“Put that down, Mary. You don’t want to shoot me.”
“I’ll blow your fucking head off!” she shouted. “No way are you making us whores! No way!”
“We were always whores. For the militant press and the rabble-rousers. We did what they dreamed of doing, and what did we get for it? You’ve turned into an animal, and I’m a forty-three-year-old failure.” He swigged from the beer again, but his gaze stayed on her gun. “I was a stockbroker a few years ago,” he said with a bitter smile. “Making a hundred K a year, living on the Upper East Side. A fast-tracker. Had a Mercedes, a wife, and a son. Then the bottom fell out of the market, and I watched everything go to pieces. It was like that night in Linden, but even worse because it was a house I’d built getting blown apart. Couldn’t stop it. Couldn’t. I spiraled down to where I am right now. So where do I go from here? Do I figure the books for Sea King the rest of my life and retire to an old folks’ home in Jersey? Or do I take a gamble that a publisher might be interested in the Storm Front’s story? It’s past history, Mary. It’s ancient and dusty…but blood and guts sells books, and you know we waded through the blood and guts together. So what’s so wrong about it, Mary? You tell me.”
She couldn’t think. Drummer’s crying was louder, more needful. Her brain was full of machinery that had lost its purpose. One squeeze of the trigger and he would be dusted. Everything was a lie; Lord Jack was not here, and he couldn’t receive his son. This thing standing before her in Mindfuck State clothing vomited out bile and brimstone, but one fact remained: he had saved her life on a long-ago night of pain and fire.
That alone kept her from killing him.
“I’ve got an agent,” Edward went on. “Big knocker in the business. He got me a contract on an outline. The manuscript’s due at the end of August.”
Mary kept the gun aimed at him as Drummer wailed.
“I don’t want it to be just my story. I want it to be about all of us. Everybody who died and everybody who got away. Do you see?”
“I see a traitor,” Mary said, “who deserves execution.”
“Oh, crap! Forget the drama, Mary! This is the real dollars-and-cents world!” He slammed his bottle down atop a bureau, and beer sloshed out. “If we can make money off the hell we went through, why shouldn’t we? I’d be willing to share the profits with you, no problem.”
“Profits,” she said, as if tasting something vile.
“Jesus! Can’t you shut that kid up?” Edward walked toward Drummer. Mary stopped him by putting the Magnum against the side of his head and grabbing his red power tie at the knot. She wrenched at his tie, and Edward’s face reddened. “…Choke…” he gasped. “Choking…me…”
Brrrring.
Telephone, Mary thought. Again: Brrrring.
“Door…buzzer,” Edward managed to get out. “Downstairs. Somebody…wants in.”
“Who’re you expecting?”
“No-nobody. Mary, listen…you’re choking me. Come on…stop it…okay?”
Brrrring.
She stared into his too-blue eyes and his mottled face. He was small, she decided. A small person who had given up and been seduced by the Mindfuck State. He was to be pitied. She didn’t want to kill him, not yet. Drummer was crying and someone wanted in. She released Edward’s tie, and he gasped in a shuddering breath followed by a coughing fit.
Mary pressed the pacifier into Drummer’s mouth. His eyes were angry, and big wet tears had rolled down his cheeks. He looked the way she felt. She finished changing his diaper, the gun beside him on the bed.
In the front room, Edward gave a last ragged cough and pressed the intercom button. “Yeah?”
There was no answer.
“Anybody down there?”
Nothing.
He released the button. Neighborhood kids screwing around, he figured. About three seconds later: Brrrring.
He hit the button again. “Hey, listen up! You want to play, go play in the middle of the stre—”
“Edward Lambert?”
A woman’s voice. Sounded nervous. “Yeah. Who is it?”
“Come downstairs.”
“I don’t have time for this, lady. What’re you selling?”
“Damaged goods,” she said. “Come downstairs.” She clicked off.
“Who was that?” Mary stood in the bedroom’s doorway, freshly diapered Drummer in her arms and the Magnum automatic in her right hand.
“Nobody.” He shrugged. “Bag lady, probably. They’re all over the place trying to get handouts.”
Mary went to the window and looked out. The air was hazed with falling snow.
And then she saw the figure standing down on the sidewalk, staring up at the apartment building. The wind had picked up, whipping at the figure’s gray overcoat. There was a black cap on the person’s head, and a long woolen muffler the same color around the neck.
Mary’s eyes narrowed. She recognized the outfit. She’d seen this person before. Yes, she was sure of it. On the boat coming back from Liberty Island. This person had been standing at the stern, hands in pockets, next to the blond-haired girl in the leather jacket. As Mary watched, the figure began to walk slowly away from the building, bent against the wind. A few more steps, and a crosscurrent of winds snatched the cap and lifted it off the person’s head.
A mane of red hair spilled down. A woman, Mary realized. The woman caught the cap before it could spin away, pushed her tresses up under it, and mashed it down again. Then she kept walking, shoulders slumped as if under a terrible burden.
Red hair, Mary thought. Red as a battle flag.
She had known another woman with hair that color.
“Oh my God,” Mary whispered.
The red-haired woman turned a corner and went out of sight, snowflakes whirling behind her.
“Hold my baby,” Mary told Edward, and she put Drummer in his arms before he could say no. She jammed the pistol down into the waistband of her jeans, under her baggy brown sweater, and she headed for the door.
“Where’re you going? Mary! Where the hell are—”
She was already out the door and racing down the second-floor stairway. She ran out onto the street, into the cutting cold and snow. Then on to the corner where the red-haired woman had turned off Cooper Avenue, and Mary could see her about a block away. She was opening the driver’s door of a brown compact Ford.
“Wait!” Mary shouted, but the wind was in her face and the woman couldn’t hear. The Ford pulled out of its parking place and started coming toward Mary, who stepped into the street and walked forward to meet it. Flurries of snow swirled between them. Mary lifted her right hand and made a peace sign, and she strode toward the car as it came on.
She saw the woman’s face through the windshield. Like Edward’s, it was not a face she knew. And then the woman’s eyes widened, her mouth opened in a cry Mary couldn’t hear, and the Ford skidded to a stop on the gleaming pavement.
The woman got out, and the wind took her black cap, and the red tresses danced around her shoulders. Mary lowered her peace hand. Was this or was this not someone she knew? The hair was the same, yes, but the face was different. Bedelia Morse had been as lovely as a model, her nose small and graceful, her mouth and chin set with firm purpose. This woman had a crooked nose that looked as if it had been brutally broken and never properly set, her jowls were thick, and her chin had receded above a padding of flab. Deep lines flared out from the corners of her eyes and cut across her forehead. Mary could tell that the woman, who stood about five six, was heavy around the stomach and waist, a once-fine figure gone to seed. But the woman had green eyes: green as Irish moss. They were Didi’s eyes, in a face that was almost toadish.
“Mary?” she said in Bedelia’s voice grown husky and older. “Mary?”
“It’s me,” Mary answered, and Bedelia tried to speak again, but only a sob came out and it was tattered by the wind. Bedelia Morse rushed forward into Mary’s arms, and they hugged each other with the pistol between them.
2
The Idiot’s Dream
ON MONDAY MORNING BETWEEN two and three, Laura Clayborne put on her heavy overcoat, got into her car in the Days Inn parking lot, started the engine, and drove west, heading for Didi Morse’s cottage in the woods.
Sleep was impossible, the night full of phantoms. A crescent moon hung in the sky, the road empty before the BMW’s headlights. Laura shivered, waiting for the heater to warm up. She and Mark had driven out to the cottage at ten o’clock, to see if Didi Morse had gotten home and was simply not answering her telephone, but the house had been dark. Laura wanted to drive, to have the sensation of at least going from one point to another. Her calls to Agent Kastle in Atlanta had told her how his investigation was going: Kastle, his secretary said, was out of the city and would get in touch with Laura whenever he returned. In other words: don’t call us, we’ll call you.
That wasn’t good enough. Not good enough by a damned long shot.
Laura drove past the cottage. Still dark, no car in front. Wherever Didi was, her weekend trip had stretched out another day. Laura thought she might start chewing the walls of her motel room if she’d come all this way and couldn’t find the woman. She’d stopped taking her sleeping pills because she didn’t want her brain fogged with drugs. The downside of kicking the sleeping pills, though, was that she had maybe three or four hours of sleep a night and the other hours were haunted by visions of the madwoman on the balcony and the sniper with his rifle. Laura couldn’t take looking at her face in a mirror, her eyes had seemingly sunken deeper, and there was a steely shine in them as if something hard and unknown were beginning to peer out.
About a mile west of the cottage, Laura turned around on a dirt road and headed back. Get something to eat, she thought. Find an all-night pancake house, maybe. Someplace with a lot of hot black coffee.
She slowed, nearing the cottage again. She glanced toward it as the BMW crept by. Dark, of course. Didi had gone birding, the old man had said. Borrowed his binoculars, and went bye-bye. Her hands tightened around the wheel. Didi Morse might be her only hope of finding David alive. David might be dead right now, torn apart like the dolls in the box they’d found in Mary Terrell’s apartment. Dear God, Laura prayed, help me hold on to my sanity.
A light flashed.
A light.
In a window of Didi Morse’s cottage.
Laura was past the house by a hundred yards before she could make her foot hit the brake. She slowed down gradually, not wanting the tires to shriek. Her heart was about to blow out of her chest. A light. Just a brief glimmer, maybe a second and then gone. It hadn’t been a reflection of the moon, or of her headlights.
Someone was inside the house, prowling around in the dark.
Laura’s first thought was to stop and call the police. No, no; she didn’t want the police in this, not yet. She turned around again and drove past the house once more. This time no light shone. But she’d seen it; she knew she had. The real question was: what was she going to do about it?
She pulled the car off the road, stopped it on the brown-grassed shoulder, cut the headlights and the engine.
Her purse was on the seat beside her, but her pistol remained in her suitcase at the motel. She sat there, shivering as the warm air slipped away and the night came in. Who was inside Bedelia Morse’s house? A burglar? Stealing what? Her pottery? Laura realized she could either sit there and thrash it around in her mind or walk back to the house. Courage was not a question here: it was a matter of desperation.
Laura got out, opened the trunk, and put her hand around the tire iron. Then she buttoned up her coat to the neck and began walking the couple of hundred yards back to the dirt driveway that curved up through the woods. No light shone in any of the cottage’s windows. There was no other car anywhere in sight. Imagination or not? She tightened her grip around the tire iron and started up the driveway, the air’s eighteen-degree temperature burning her nostrils and lungs.
The baby was crying again. The sound roused Mary from a dream of a castle on a cloud, and set her teeth on edge. It had been a good dream, and in it she’d been young and slim and her hair had been the color of the summer sun. It had been a dream that she hated leaving, but the baby was crying again. Babies were killers of dreams, she thought as she sat up in bed. Her dream had been to place the baby in Lord Jack’s hands, and see him smile like a blaze of beauty. Lord Jack would love her again, and everything would be right with the world.
But Lord Jack wasn’t here. He hadn’t been at the weeping lady. Lord Jack wasn’t coming for her. Not now. Not ever.
The baby was crying, a sound tha
t razored her brain. She stood up, a well of despair, and she felt the old familiar rage begin to steam from the pores of her flesh.
“Hush,” she said. “Drummer, hush.” He wouldn’t obey. His crying was going to wake the neighbors, and then the pigs might come calling. Why did the babies always try to betray her like this? Why did they take her love and twist it into hateful knots? What good was Drummer now if Lord Jack didn’t want him? Drummer was a piece of crying flesh that had no purpose, no reason for being. She hated him at that moment because she realized what she’d done to bring him to Lord Jack. Now it was all over, and Lord Jack would never set eyes on the wailing rag.
“Won’t you stop crying?” she asked Drummer as she sat on the narrow bed in the dark. She spoke in a quiet voice. Drummer gurgled and cried louder. “All right,” Mary said, and she stood up. “All right, then. I’ll make you stop.”
She switched on the lights in the kitchenette. Then she turned on one of the stove’s burners and swiveled its dial to high.
Laura walked slowly up the front steps of Bedelia Morse’s house. A clay cat was crouched near the door, and dead leaves scuttled across the porch. Laura reached out and tried the doorknob, gently working it from side to side. Locked. She retreated from the door, went back down the stairs again and around to the rear of the house. Her fingers, clenched so hard on the tire iron, were stiffening up with the cold. There was a one-car garage and a larger stone outbuilding, its door sealed with a padlock and chain, where Laura assumed the pottery work was done. Strange clay sculptures stood amid the barren trees like alien plant life; Laura couldn’t see them now, in the dark, but they’d been apparent when she and Mark had gone back there on their initial visit Saturday. All kinds of clay geegaws—bird feeders, mobiles, and other things not so readily identifiable —dangled on wires from the tree limbs. It was obvious that Bedelia Morse—or Diane Daniells, as she called herself now—had thrown herself heart and soul into the work she’d begun as a member of Mark’s commune. Laura went to the back door, her shoes crunching on dead branches and leaves, and she tried this doorknob as well.