It turned easily. Laura’s heart kicked again. She ran her hand over the door and found that one of its small rectangular panes of glass had been removed. Not broken, because there were no shards. Removed, as with a glass cutter.
She opened the door and stood on the threshold. Off in the woods somewhere, an owl spoke to the moon. The cold wind hissed through the trees and made the clay ornaments clink and clatter on their wires. She shivered involuntarily, and she stood in the doorway trying to see through the dark. Nothing in there but shapes upon shapes. She and Mark had looked through the door’s panes on Saturday and seen a kitchen with a table and a single chair in the middle of the room. On Saturday, the door had had all its panes of glass, and it had been securely locked.
Her heart pounding, Laura lifted the tire iron and walked into the house.
Mary picked up the baby. Her touch was rough. The infant’s crying broke, faltered, and began to climb in volume again, a thin, high whine that Mary could not abide. “STOP IT!” she shouted into his reddened, squawling face. “STOP IT, YOU LITTLE SHIT!”
The baby cried on. Mary almost choked on a scream of rage. How could she have been so stupid to believe that Lord Jack had written the message? To believe that he wanted her and the baby after all these years? To believe that he cared? No one cared. No one. She had stolen this child and blown her disguise, had put herself in mortal danger from the pigs of the Mindfuck State…and all for Edward Fordyce’s traitorous book about the Storm Front.
She would deal with Edward before she left. She would make herself put a bullet between his eyes and dump his body in a garbage can. But right now there was the baby, crying his head off. Drummer, she thought, and she sneered. “You want to cry?” She shook him. “You want to cry?” Shook him harder. His crying became a shriek. “Okay, I’ll make you cry!”
She took him into the kitchenette, where the burner glowed fiercely red and its heat rose up in a shimmer. The baby was trembling, still wailing, legs trying to thrash. She didn’t need the little bastard. Didn’t need Lord Jack. Didn’t need anyone. She would make Drummer stop crying, make him obey her, and then she’d leave what remained of him for the pigs and the woman named Laura Clayborne. Then she would go underground again, deep underground, where nothing and no one could touch her, and she would turn her back for the last time on the idiot’s dream of love and hope.
“Cry!” she shouted. “Cry! Cry!”
And she grasped the back of the baby’s head and pressed his face toward the red burner.
In the dark, Laura listened. The boom of her heart and the roar of her breathing got in the way. Get out, she told herself. You don’t belong here. You’re a long way from home, and you’ve gone too far. If a burglar was ransacking Bedelia Morse’s house, that was his business. But she didn’t leave, and her fingers groped for a light switch. Her hand hit something that jingled merrily and made her jump a foot in the air. Another damned pottery mobile. She was making more noise than a marching band.
In another moment she found a light switch, and she turned it on.
A warm breath washed against her neck.
She spun around, to the right, and looked into the face of the man who was standing there. She opened her mouth to scream. A black-gloved hand rose up, fast as a cobra’s head, and clamped her mouth shut before the scream could get out.
The baby’s face was almost on the burner. He was still wailing, stubbornly, and Mary braced for the scream of agony.
A scream came.
“NO!”
Someone grabbed her from behind, shoving her and the baby away from the hot burner. “No! Jesus, no!” A pair of hands winnowed in, trying to grasp Drummer. Mary slammed an elbow backward and heard a grunt of pain as it connected. A woman with red hair was fighting to take Drummer, and Mary didn’t know her face. The woman was saying, “Mary, don’t! Don’t, please don’t!” Her hands grasped at the baby again, and Mary shoved the red-haired stranger back hard against the wall. This was her baby, to do with as she pleased. She had risked her life to have this child, and no one would take him away from her. The woman was fighting her for Drummer once more, the red-glowing burner behind them and the baby wailing. “Listen to me! Listen!” the woman was pleading as she grabbed hold of Mary’s shoulders and hung on. Mary looked at the woman’s white throat, and she saw where she should punch into it to crush her windpipe. “Don’t hurt the baby! Please don’t!” the woman said, still hanging on. “Mary, look at me! It’s Didi! It’s Didi Morse!”
Didi Morse? Mary lifted her gaze from the vulnerable throat and stared into the woman’s heavy-jowled, deeply lined face.
“No,” Mary said over Drummer’s crying. “No. Didi Morse was beautiful.”
“I had surgery. Remember what I told you? I had the plastic surgeon do it. Don’t hurt the baby, Mary. Don’t hurt Drummer.”
Plastic surgeon. Didi Morse, her face made ugly by a scalpel, silicone implants, and a hammer that had broken her nose. I had it done when I went underground, she’d told Mary and Edward. A surgeon who did work on a lot of people who wanted to disappear. Didi had actually paid to have herself made ugly, and the surgeon—who was part of the militant underground—had done the work in St. Louis. Didi Morse, still with green eyes and red hair but now drastically different. Pleading with her not to hurt Drummer.
“Hurt…Drummer?” Mary whispered. “Hurt my baby?” Tears came to her eyes. She heard Drummer crying, but the sound didn’t razor her brain anymore; it was a cry of innocent need, and Mary pressed Drummer against her and sobbed as she realized what her rage had been guiding her toward. “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” she moaned as the baby trembled in her arms. “I’m sick, Didi. I’m so sick.”
Didi switched off the stove’s burner. Her collarbone was still throbbing from the collision with Mary’s elbow, and Mary had almost broken her back against the wall. She said, “Come on, let’s sit down.” She wanted to get Mary away from the stove. Her sight of the woman about to mash the infant’s face down on that burner had been a horror beyond belief. She grasped Mary’s arm with a careful touch. “Come on, sister.”
Mary allowed herself to be steered out of the kitchenette. Tears were streaming down her face, her lungs ratcheted by sobbing. “I’m sick,” she repeated. “Something’s wrong with me, I get crazy. Oh God, I wouldn’t hurt my sweet Drummer!” She hugged him close. His crying was starting to weaken. They were in Mary’s room at the Cameo Motor Lodge. Didi and Mary had gone there after leaving Edward’s at eight o’clock, and they’d shared a couple of bottles of wine and talked about the old days. Mary had folded down the sofa bed for Didi, and it was there that Didi had been sleeping when she’d heard Mary stalk out of the bedroom and go into the kitchenette. Then Mary had gone back for the crying baby, and the rest of what might have happened had been only narrowly averted.
Mary sat down in a chair and began to rock Drummer, the tears glistening on her face and her eyes red and swollen. Drummer was growing quiet, getting sleepy again. Didi sat on the rumpled sofa bed, her nerves still jangling.
“I love my baby,” Mary said. “Can’t you see I do?”
“Yes,” Didi answered. But what she saw was an insane woman with a stolen infant in her arms.
“Mine,” Mary whispered. She kissed his forehead and nuzzled his soft whorls of dark hair. “He’s mine. All mine.”
Sardonicus.
One side of the man’s mouth was frozen open in a hideous rictus that showed teeth ground down to stubs. Like Sardonicus, Laura thought as the gloved hand clamped to her face. His cheek on the grinning side was caved in, his lower jaw crooked and jutting forward like a barracuda’s underbite. He had black eyes, the one on the damaged hemisphere of his face sunken and glassy. A battlefield of scars streaked back from the corner of his grin across his collapsed cheek. In his throat there was a flesh-colored plug with a three-holed socket.
The sight was terrifying, but Laura had no time to be terrified. She struck out with the tire iron, the strength of d
esperation behind it, and hit him a glancing blow across the left shoulder. It was hard enough: the man staggered back, and he opened his ruined mouth and made a hissing sound of pain like a ruptured steam pipe.
At once he was on her again, reaching for her throat. Laura stepped back, giving herself room, and swung the tire iron once more. The man lifted his arm to ward off the blow; their forearms collided with a jolt that knocked numbness into Laura’s hand, but it was the man who lost what he was holding. A small flashlight fell to the floor and rolled under the kitchen table.
He caught Laura’s wrist, and they fought for the tire iron. The man was tall and sinewy, wearing a black outfit and a black woolen cap. His face was pallid, the color of the moon. He slammed Laura back against a counter, and pottery knickknacks clattered and fell. A knee came up, hitting Laura between the legs; the pain made her cry out, but she clenched her teeth and hung on to the tire iron. They careened across the kitchen, crashing into the table and throwing it over. The man grasped her chin with one hand and shoved her head back, trying to snap her neck. Laura clawed at his throat, digging furrows in his flesh. Her fingers found the plug, and she tore at it.
He retreated, clutching at his throat, the breath shrieking from his predator’s grin. Laura advanced on him, her eyes wild. She lifted the tire iron for another blow, her intent to knock his brains out before he could kill her. He made a guttural growling sound that might have been rage, and he darted in before she could swing the tool. He trapped her arm, twisted his body, and lifted her off her feet, flinging her like a flour sack to the other side of the kitchen. She went down on her right shoulder, the air whooshing from her lungs as she slammed to the floor.
Time hitched and spun, knocked out of rhythm. Laura tasted blood. Pain throbbed through her shoulder, and her hand had lost the tire iron. When she could gather the strength to sit up, she found herself alone in Bedelia Morse’s kitchen. The back door was wide open, dead leaves blowing in. Laura spat a red scrawl on the floor, and her tongue found the wound inside her cheek where her teeth had met. I’m all right, she thought. I’m all right. But she was starting to shake uncontrollably now that the man with the death’s-head grin had gone, and fear and nausea hit her in tandem. She barely made it outside to throw up, next to one of the abstract sculptures. She heaved until nothing would come up, and then she sat on the ground away from her mess and breathed in lungfuls of frigid air. Between her thighs there was a pulse of pain. She felt warm wetness spreading there, and she realized with a flash of anger that the son of a bitch had torn her stitches open again.
She stood up and walked back into the kitchen. The flashlight was gone. Her tire iron remained. The urge to cry fell upon her, and she almost gave in to this brutal friend. But she couldn’t trust herself to stop crying if she began, and so she stood with her hands pressed to her eyes until the urge passed. Shock lurked in the back of her mind, waiting its turn to creep over her. There was nothing to be done now but to go to her car and drive back to the Days Inn. Her right shoulder was going to be one black bruise tomorrow, and her back was aching where the man had driven her against the counter.
But she had not been killed. She had stood up against him, whoever he’d been, and she’d survived. Before all this had started, she would have crumpled into a heap and cried her heart out, but things were different now. Her heart was harder, her vision colder. Violence had suddenly and irrevocably become a part of her life.
She would have to tell Mark about this. The man with the plug in his throat, who’d been asking questions about Diane Daniells from the neighbor across the road. Who was he, and how did he fit into the puzzle?
Laura helped herself to a glass of water from the faucet, spitting blood into the sink. It was time to go. Time to leave the light and strike out into the darkness again. She retrieved the tire iron, and she waited for her trembling to subside. It wouldn’t. She put out of her mind the image of the grinning man waiting for her out there somewhere. Let it be, she told herself. And then she switched off the light, closed the back door, and began walking the distance to her car. Nothing came after her, though she jumped at every sound, imagined or otherwise, and her fingers cramped around the tire iron.
Laura got into the BMW, turned on the ignition and the headlights.
That was when she saw it. Backwards letters, carved into her windshield by a glass cutter. Two words:
She sat there for a moment, stunned, looking at what she took to be a warning. Go home. Where was that? A house in Atlanta, shared by a stranger named Doug? A place where her parents lived, ready and eager to command her life?
Go home.
“Not without my son,” Laura vowed, and she pulled the car off the shoulder and drove toward Ann Arbor.
3
The Secret Thing
“SOMETIMES,” MARY SAID AS Drummer slept in her arms, “I get crazy. I don’t know why. My head hurts, and I can’t think straight. Maybe everybody feels like that sometimes, huh?”
“Maybe,” Didi admitted, but she didn’t believe it.
“Yeah.” She smiled at her sister in arms, the storm of madness passed for now. “I was so glad to see you, Didi. I can’t tell you how much. I mean…you look so different and everything, but I’ve missed you. I’ve missed everybody. I think it was smart of you not to show up at the weeping lady. It could’ve been a trap, right?”
“Right.” That was why Didi had gone to Liberty Island at noon, with the binoculars she’d borrowed from her neighbor Charles Brewer. She’d positioned herself on a vantage point where she could see the passengers getting off the boat, and she’d recognized Mary but not Edward Fordyce until he’d approached Mary. She’d followed them from Liberty Island, had seen them go into the apartment building, and had buzzed the apartment belonging to Edward Lambert. Her brown Ford was rented, and her real car—a gray Honda hatchback—was at the airport parking lot in Detroit. “What are you going to do from here?” Didi asked.
“I don’t know. Make it to Canada, I guess. Go underground again. Except this time I’ll have my baby.”
They hadn’t yet breached the difficult subject. Didi wanted to know: “Why’d you take him, Mary? Why didn’t you just come up by yourself?”
“Because,” Mary answered, “he’s Jack’s gift.”
Didi shook her head, not understanding.
“I was bringing Drummer to Jack. When I saw the message, I thought it was from him. That’s why I brought Drummer. For Jack. See?”
Didi did. She sighed softly, and averted her eyes from Mary Terror. Mary’s insanity was as obvious as a scab; it was true that Mary was still cunning, in the way of a hunted animal, but the trial of the years—and her solitary confinement—had eaten her down to the desperate bones. “You brought the baby for Jack and he didn’t show up.” Now the display of rage made more sense to her, but its explanation was madness enough. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t need him!” Mary snapped. “And don’t you be sorry for me! No way! I’ll be just fine now that I’ve got my baby!”
Didi nodded, thinking of the glowing burner. If she hadn’t been here to stop it, the baby’s face would have been scorched off his skull. One night—maybe not very far in the future—Mary would wake up in the throes of madness, and there would be no one to save the infant. Didi knew she’d done a lot of terrible things in her life. They were things that came back to her at night, bleeding and moaning. They haunted her dreams, and they had grinned and jabbered as she’d laid out the razor and soaked her wrists in hot water. She’d done terrible things, but she’d never hurt a baby. “Maybe you shouldn’t take him with you,” she said.
Her face like a block of stone, Mary stared at Didi.
“You can’t move as fast with a baby,” Didi went on. “He’ll slow you down.”
Mary was silent, rocking the sleeping child in her arms.
“You could leave him at a church. Leave a note saying who he is. They’d get him back to his mother.”
“I am his mother,”
Mary said.
Dangerous ground, Didi thought. She was walking in a minefield. “You don’t want Drummer to be hurt, do you? What’ll happen if the police find you? Drummer might get hurt. Have you thought of that?”
“Sure. If the pigs find me, I shoot the baby first and I take as many of them with me as I can.” She shrugged. “Reasonable.”
Didi blinked, startled, and at that moment she saw the darkness of Mary Terror’s soul.
“I can’t let them take us alive,” Mary said. Her smile returned. “We’re together now. We’ll die together, if that’s how it has to be.”
Didi looked at her hands clenched together in her lap. They were earth-mother hands, the palms broad and the fingers sturdy. She thought of bullets going into bodies, and one of her earth-mother hands on the gun. She thought of the newscasts on TV, the pictures of this child’s mother leaving the hospital in Atlanta, her face tormented by worry, her body bent under a terrible weight. She thought of the secret thing, the thing she’d suspected for five years. Her life had been a twisted, treacherous road. She had destroyed her parents, driving her mother to drink and her father to a heart attack that had killed him in 1973. The farm was gone now, reclaimed by the bank. Her mother was in a sanitarium, babbling and wetting her bed. For Bedelia Morse the saying was viciously true: you can’t go home again.
She had seen the message in January’s issue of Mother Jones. At first she’d had no intention of going to the Statue of Liberty on the eighteenth of February, but the idea had kept gnawing at her. She wasn’t sure exactly why she’d decided to go. Maybe it was pure curiosity, or maybe it was because the Storm Front had been her true family. She had bought a round-trip ticket on American Airlines, and left Detroit on Thursday night.
Her flight back to Detroit was at one-thirty in the afternoon. She hadn’t planned on sleeping at Mary’s motel, but it was cleaner than the hotel she was staying at on West 55th in Manhattan. She was glad now that she’d stayed with Mary, for the baby’s sake. And much less glad that she’d seen the inner nature of Mary Terror, though the newscasts of the FBI agent being shotgunned had been a forewarning. Didi turned the secret thing over and over in her mind, working it like a Rubik’s Cube.