Quentin couldn't see her in the graveyard. He ran among the headstones, looking left and right, but she wasn't kneeling anywhere, wasn't standing behind anything. There were bushes, but all of them were leafless. If she was within the graveyard walls, he would see her.
There was no other gate. He ran to each of the far corners of the enclosure, to see if her footprints led to the wall, if by some chance she had climbed it.
How absurd! She was wearing a dress, she was angry, upset—why would she climb a wall?
But then, where was she?
He must have looked away as he ran toward the graveyard. While he was watching his footing in the snow she must have seen him coming and slipped back out again, wanting to avoid him. And maybe she was right. Let her calm down, let him calm down. They could face this problem rationally. She had warned him that there would be problems when she went home. She had told him that she didn't like the person she became when she was here. Well, she had been right all along. He didn't like the person she became, either. But the person she was outside of this place, the person she really was—he loved her, and they could get away from this place and go back to their life and this would become a half-funny memory, to be told to no one. It would become in-references between them. They would call some longstaying visitor a "friend of the family" and both of them would think of Simon. Someone would be obnoxiously formal and they would wink and whisper, "Uncle Stephen." Someone would say something foolish in the attempt to be wise, and they would say, "Athena," and remember this breakfast and the dear foolish spinster aunt who sat at table with them.
But they would never joke about Grandmother. Or Uncle Paul. Or the treasure box. There was real pain there, and if Quentin ever understood it, fine, but if he never did that was also fine, as long as he had his Madeleine and they never had to come back to this place.
He had run the circuit of the graveyard, looking for her footprints. They weren't there. She hadn't come in here after all.
He stood in the entrance, looking down at the snow. Only one set of prints led into the graveyard. His own.
But he had seen her run in here. From the portico he had watched her before he ran across the lawn to meet her here.
He looked out onto the lawn. There were the footprints the two of them had made that morning, the distant ones leading down to the bluff, the near ones that marked their return journey. He walked over to the near prints. Only one set of shoes had broken the crusty surface of the snow. Again, they were his.
She was with him. He had his arm around her; she held him by the waist. They jostled together as they walked. He remembered it. It was impossible that she left no prints in the snow. But then, he had also seen her enter the graveyard.
As he had seen a woman who looked something like Lizzy unlock the door of a townhouse in Herndon and walk in and switch on the lights.
He returned to the graveyard and leaned his back against one of the legs of the stone arch of the gateway. He was hallucinating again. This was disturbing, but not terrifying. It happened the first time out of loneliness, out of longing. This time it was a different kind of stress. But both times he had seen what he needed desperately to see: the first time, Lizzy grown up and leading a normal life; the second time, Madeleine going into a place where he could find her and talk to her and make things right between them. Where he could make sure of her, that she was the woman he knew and loved and not this stranger, this tantrum-throwing, greedy child who had to have someone open up her treasure box.
Of course, normal people didn't hallucinate, even in times of stress. It meant that he had some sort of mental illness. But it wasn't really impairing his functioning yet. They had drugs now to help schizophrenics control their psychosis. That must be what was going on with him, the early symptoms of advancing schizophrenia. But he could go to a psychiatrist and get the drugs he needed to continue functioning. This could be controlled. There was no reason to be afraid.
No, come to think of it, there was a reason. Because he hadn't been under stress when he walked with Madeleine along the bluffs, and that had to have been a hallucination, too, because she left no footprints.
Unless it was a hallucination now. Unless his mind was erasing footprints that really were there, because he couldn't bear to have her with him if she was the person he saw in the parlor. That would explain it. He was in the middle of a serious psychotic episode but it would pass. Even without treatment, these episodes passed, didn't they? Especially in the early stages of the mental illness. He had read a book about this a few years ago and he thought that was how it worked. Once he had control of himself, he would walk out of the graveyard and see two sets of footprints, and he would go back to the house and find Madeleine in the bedroom. That's where she had to be. He hadn't even looked for her upstairs. His need to find her had been so great that he had looked out the open dining room doors and seen her outside when in fact she was probably up on their bed, crying and waiting for him to come to her.
He turned to head for the house, but there was that trail in the snow, and her footprints had not reappeared. He couldn't go back yet. He would take a few moments to collect himself. The world had to return to normal. He had to get a grip on reality. He thought of those old tire ads where fingers grew out of the treads to snatch at the asphalt of the highway. He was skidding along, skipping over things; had to turn into the spin and control it, like driving a car on ice.
He began walking among the stones in the graveyard, looking at the names so that he could get his mind off what was happening to him. Of course there wouldn't be any Cryer names here. The house had been in Madeleine's mother's mother's family, and he had no idea what their name was. There was such a mixture of names on the stones, none preeminent. But the first names were recognizable enough. Families naming new babies after older family members, and the first names passed down generation after generation. There was a Jude. A Stephen. No Athena, but that wasn't her real name, was it? Ah, here was a Minerva. And off in the corner, even a Simon.
But Simon wasn't in the family, was he? So of course it was just coincidence that his name had a match in the graveyard. He looked closely at the stone:
SIMON WISTER
UNKNOWN — FEB. 2, 1877
"I WAS A STRANGER, AND YE TOOK ME IN."
The heat of blood rushing to his face came even before the thought entered his conscious mind. Simon was a visitor who stayed. And here was a headstone belonging to a Simon whose birthdate was not known, and whose epitaph was to a stranger who was taken in.
Well, Quentin, he thought, as long as you're losing your mind, why not throw in some dead people walking around and eating breakfast with you?
He went back to the Minerva headstone.
MINERVA MUELLER
1 JUNE 1866 — 12 JULY 1918
BELOVED OF ALL
WISDOM IN SIMPLICITY
Summer 1918 would suggest that this Minerva was carried off in the flu epidemic. At age... fifty-two. Wisdom in simplicity. Could this be a kindly way of referring to dimwittedness? If the Aunt Athena he had met this morning were to keel over, could he imagine a more appropriate inscription than this?
But they sat at table and ate with him. They talked with him and with Madeleine. They were real.
"Everyone here who is actually real, please raise your hand."
Uncle Simon's words came back to him with painful clarity. Everyone had ignored him, of course, as if he were a madman. But then, no one had raised a hand, either.
COL. STEPHEN ALAN FORREST
DEC. 22, 191O — DEC. 24, 1951
HE DIED IN DISTANT SNOWS
IN SEARCH OF PEACE
ON HIS GRAVE THE LILY GROWS
PURE WITHOUT CEASE
THE LILY KNOWS, THE SOLDIER KNOWS
HOW SHORT IS LIFE'S LEASE
His military bearing. Someone—Madeleine—said that he had served in the Korean War. But he was not old. Forty-one, the age of the Stephen buried here, that was a good approximation of the apparent age of the Uncle Stephen at breakfast. But even an 18-year-old who fought in Korea, if he was alive today, would be sixty at the youngest. And Uncle Stephen did not look sixty, not with that dark beard, that ungraying hair. Maybe he dyed it. Or maybe he was dead.
Cousin Jude's namesake, Philip St. Jude Laurent, was born in Yorkshire in 1799 and died in America in 1885. Hadn't there been a hint of some kind of accent when he spoke?
No, no, this was madness.
He did not know Grandmother's name, and so he could not look for her headstone, if she had one here.
The only Paul in the graveyard had died as a baby, not a man of forty-five, as Madeleine had said Uncle Paul was, or of thirty, as he seemed to be.
And without admitting to himself that he was looking for one, he found to his great relief that there was no headstone for anyone named Madeleine.
Names ran in families, that's all. Names and family lore. Mad was goading them, introducing them with links to names from the graveyard whose stories they would have known. She was being a brat this morning, that's all, and he was simply the only one who didn't get the joke. The others would all have known about these headstones.
But there were no footprints here in the snow except his own.
He walked out of the graveyard, but instead of returning to the back portico, he walked around to the front of the house. There were the tire tracks from the limo, coming around the driveway. Here's where the car stopped and the driver got out and walked around to the right side and the left side of the car, to open doors for them. On the left side, where Quentin had been sitting, his own footprints dutifully appeared, showing how he walked around to the trunk, where he stood as he took his bags from the driver, where he walked as he headed around the other side of the car to walk on up the front stairs of the house.
But there were no footprints at Madeleine's door except those of the driver as he shuffled to open it for her. There were no footprints where the servant had stood. And only one set of prints, Quentin's, led up the front stairs to the door.
If this is a hallucination it's awfully selective, thought Quentin.
He was rather proud of how calmly he was taking the clear evidence of his own mental breakdown.
Somewhere inside that house was Madeleine. She would help him sort this out. She had married him in sickness and in health, hadn't she? Didn't they say that in the old church wedding vow? She would get him to a shrink and they'd get this under control and life would go on.
He climbed the steps, adding only the second set of footprints to break the snow, opened the front door of the house and stepped inside.
It was not the same house.
Oh, the rooms were arranged the same. Even the furniture was in the right place. But dustcovers were on all the major pieces of furniture, and the floor was half an inch thick in dirt and dust, except where his own peregrinations of last night and this morning had carved paths in it. Every step he took stirred up dust clouds and in only a few moments he was sneezing and coughing. If he had come through here before, why hadn't he sneezed and coughed before? Or had he? He had vague memories of wondering last night if he was coming down with a cold. Or was he merely inventing that memory to try to make these things make sense?
He opened the library doors. The windows had had several panes broken out, and snow had drifted across the cloth-covered table. Hundreds of books had been scattered across the floor. The room was freezing cold. His footsteps alone marked a passage across the floor, to what was obviously the only chair that had been moved and sat upon in many years. The others were tied to the table and floor and each other by cobwebs and spider webs. Even the chair he had used was bewebbed and dusty, and now he looked down at his own clothing for the first time and realized that strands of web and patches of dust were drawn across his jacket, his trousers. He brushed at them, and they came away; how could he not have noticed them before?
I am not going through a psychotic episode right now. The certainty grew even as he framed the words in his mind. This morning I was seeing things that were not real. People at breakfast. This room clean, this furniture lustrous. The footmen bringing perfect food here—not a single footprint led from the butler's pantry to the table. What did I eat, then?
The answering churning in his stomach told him that he had eaten nothing. The dryness in his mouth told him that he had drunk nothing. Not since yesterday in the limo, the Icelandic bottled water he had poured for himself and Mad. Had she drunk it? Was there anyone there to do the drinking? Had there ever been anyone there?
Yes, there had to have been. The limo driver did go to her door to open it—he saw her, too! His parents had seen her. His friends, the people at parties and meetings all over America—they all saw her, talked to her. They couldn't all be insane, or if they were, then insanity had lost all meaning.
Madeleine! He felt a sudden terrified yearning for her. Madeleine, how could I even for a moment have stopped believing in you!
He ran from the library, out into the entry hall, then up the two flights of stairs to the room they had shared. He flung open the door. There were his two bags, the suitcase and the carry-on. His side of the bed had been disturbed and slept in. But there were no sheets, just a single white dustcover thrown over the mattress, and webs fringed the bed on every side. Only his drawers in the bureau had been disturbed. Only his clothing hung in the musty wardrobe.
He ran into the bathroom. There was no water in the toilet, just his own urine at the bottom of the bowl. The floor of the bathroom was grimy. The tub was vile—at some point the sewer must have backed up and left grime all over the bottom of it. Had she known? Had she known what the bathroom was really like, and had enough compassion for him to steer him away from trying to bathe in it? The taps in the sink gave no water. His toothbrush still had toothpaste embedded in it—he hadn't rinsed it, but he had brushed his teeth. And now that he thought about it, he could taste the toothpaste in his mouth, could feel the graininess of it between his cheek and gums.
His heart beating madly, his mind racing yet thinking of nothing, he quickly gathered all his clothing out of the wardrobe and the drawers, his kit out of the bathroom, and crammed them all into his luggage. I slept alone in here last night, he thought. And yet we made love, Madeleine and I. We made love and then finished our sandwiches. But there was not a crumb to be found, and only a disturbance of the dust and grime on the small night table where his fingers must have brushed across the surface as he thought he was setting down the plate with his sandwich on it.
Luggage in hand, he left the room and clattered down the stairs. He did not even bother to look for a telephone. If this house had one, it would be as disconnected as the electricity and the waterlines.
The electricity. Today he could see because of light from the windows. But last night there was no light. And yet he hadn't bumped into anything. Someone had led him. Madeleine had led him. She might leave no footprints, but someone who knew this house had been with him or he never could have made his way inside in the darkness, up the stairs, into the bedroom in the pitch black that must have prevailed. The thick bedroom curtains had been closed.
I was not making it all up. Hallucinations can make you see things that aren't there, but they can't possibly let you see things that are there in pitch darkness. Schizophrenia doesn't give you a flashlight.
He set down his bags beside the door. He had been brought here by someone for some reason. The illusion had continued right up to the time when he didn't open the treasure box. Then Madeleine had fled and everyone disappeared except Uncle Paul and Grandmother. The ones whose headstones he had identified in the graveyard had disappeared.
What was real? The cleanliness of the place had been illusion, the food and servants were false, the people were—what, ghosts?—but the table had been real, the chairs, the doors, the bed, even the toilet and sink and tub in the bathroom. Maybe, in the parlor, on a small table, there really was an engraved wooden box that someone, for some reason, needed his help to open up.
He turned and headed for the door leading to the parlor. But as he approached it, two bright white letters appeared on the door.
NO
"I'm not making this up," he whispered to himself. The letters disappeared. He took another step toward the door.
More letters appeared, taster this time, smaller, each word taking the place of the one before.
DON'T
COME
IN
GET
OUT
GET
OUT
DEATH
DEATH
LIVES
HERE
He backed away from the door, looked around at the gloomy walls. In the cold dark fireplace something flickered. A light. He did not move closer; rather he recoiled from it, fearing what it would be. Yet he couldn't take his eyes away.
A rat emerged and perched atop the pile of ancient lumber stacked there. It looked him piercingly in the eye. As Grandmother had done. It opened its mouth.
"Find me," it said.
This was not madness, Quentin knew that now. It was not his mind creating a false reality. On the contrary, his mind was correctly apprehending that the rules that he had always believed reality to be governed by did not apply in this house. Something had made a rat speak, had made words appear on a door to a room he must not enter. Something had led him through this house in the dark. Something had made him believe that the woman he loved was at his side as he walked alone along the bluffs. Someone had introduced him to a group of dead people at breakfast and convinced him that he was eating the best food he had ever tasted in his life, while leaving his stomach empty.
All this he understood rationally. But his body was not rational. His heart was pounding, his limbs were cold, his fingers trembled. He dared not turn his back on the rat, on the parlor door, and yet dared not stay in this place another moment. So he did turn, and walked briskly to the front door where his luggage waited for him. He opened the door, picked up his bags, and stepped out onto the snowy porch.
At the foot of the stairs, where the car had stopped last night, Madeleine stood waiting for him, her face calm, even sad.
The terror fled, swept away by his relief. Madeleine was real. Madeleine was here. His love for her washed over him again. It would be all right. She would see him through this episode of—of whatever it was.
"Mad," he said. "You won't believe what I've been going through."
She shook her head. "Oh, Tin, I'm not Madeleine. Not anymore. She's gone."
He walked down the stairs toward her. "Call yourself whatever you want, you're here. I thought I had lost you."
"You lost me years ago, Tin. When I died in that hospital. When I told you to mellow out. When I told you not to keep me tied down."
He stopped, not believing the words coming out of Madeleine's mouth.
"You dig, you dig, you dig?" she said.
And then it wasn't Madeleine's mouth. There was no transformation. It had never been Madeleine.
"Lizzy," he whispered.
"Now you see me," she said. "But you're still not seeing me. It's your own mind putting this shape on what I am."
"Was it you all along?" At once he remembered seeing her in the grocery store, and going into that townhouse.
"That wasn't me," she said. "But that was part of why I came. You have the power to call me. When you thought you had seen me, your need for me brought me back here. Most of us are tied to our bodies, our relics, but I'm tied more to you. I don't mind, really I don't. Especially because when I came, I saw the danger you were in."
"But if it's you, Lizzy, I'm not in danger."
"It wasn't me, don't you get it? It was someone else who found my image in your mind and used it. When I came to you she was making you see that hallucination of me going into the townhouse, but I wasn't inside the thing you saw, Tin, I was with you. There in the car beside you, feeling you call to me. You're so strong when you call to me like that. Even if I wanted to, I don't think I could stay away."
"Why didn't you speak to me then, the way you're doing now?"
"Because she was there. The dead don't have any strength compared to the living. If she wants me silent, if she's paying attention to me, then believe me, Tin, I can't speak."
"I'm alive, Lizzy. I wanted you to speak."
"Yes, you had the strength to call me, but, Tin, if you're strong, she's—well, she's beyond strong. When she noticed me, she saw the opportunity. She used me, kept me close by, so she could raid my memory the way she raided yours. Use me as part of that Madeleine thing she made. She's a master at manipulating the dead. I thought it was mortuary reunion week at breakfast here this morning. All last night she was rummaging through the graveyard, calling those poor saps back from wherever they were and forcing them to attend her little banquet."
"Why? Who is she? Is she Madeleine?"
"I told you, she made Madeleine. Out of nothing. Out of your desires. Whatever you thought was beautiful and charming, that's what Madeleine became. The way she found the perfect taste and smell and texture for every food you ate today. She also drew on me, of course, forced me into the illusion. I was like clay to her, I couldn't do anything but what she wanted as long as she watched me."
"So I guess she's not watching now."
"You failed her. She left raging. And for the time being, she forgot me. For the first time since you called me back, we're alone together."
Quentin remembered how it was when he first took Madeleine home to meet Mom and Dad. How Madeleine never left them alone.
"Yes," said Lizzy. "Like that. Because she's mortal, she has power over me. She could paste little bits of me into Madeleine. My memories of you. Little habits of mine that you would respond to without realizing it."
"And I believed it all."
"Of course you did. Everyone did. When you went out in public with Madeleine, she pulled me in and used me as the core of her, so the illusion could fool hundreds of people all at once."
"That must have been hard for you."
"Only because I hated what she was doing to you. As for me, I had no urgent appointments. The dead never do. It's not that we're apathetic, we still care about things as much as ever. We're... patient."
"And yet you're here."
"Because you have a deadline. Because there are worse things than death."
"Losing Madeleine?"
"Opening that box."
"Why? What's in it?"
"I don't know what it is, Tin. I only know that it's very strong and the others are all terrified of it."
"The others?"
"The other dead ones. The dead ones at breakfast. The only one who doesn't fear it is the one who's been using us. She hungers for it. That's why she's so angry now. Why she isn't paying attention to us. We aren't useful to her at the moment."
"So she is human. She can only do one thing at a time."
"She's stronger than you and definitely stronger than me, but she can't do everything. I don't think she was able to keep her true self from leaking into Madeleine. Especially today. Today she was so busy keeping her dead puppets under control that she wasn't as careful about making Madeleine act like Miss Perfect all the time. Especially when she had the servants in the room. There weren't any real people behind those servants, dead or alive. She was just making you see them. That's a lot harder than building an illusion around a real soul. Making those servants about wore her out. And while she was maintaining them, some of the others got to sneak in a few things they wanted to say to you."
"Lizzy, I don't understand this."
"And you think I do? It's not like they give us a manual: How to Be Dead. The answers to everything don't become clear the minute you die. I mean, now I know there's definitely a life after death, but we don't look like humans to each other. You see me like this because when you recognize that I'm Lizzy, your mind adds the rest."
The moment she said it, he realized that she was looking a lot less definite. Wavering.
"Don't lose me now," Lizzy cried. "I have to tell you how this works, so you aren't completely helpless against her!"
He reached for her, but there was nothing there. She faded more. "I don't know how to hold on to you!"
"Don't look at me! Look away, listen to my voice until you have me in your head again. The way it was when I read to you out of my favorite books."
"That was real, then," he whispered.
"Listen to me. I don't think she's done with you. She needed you for some reason, and she didn't get what she wants, so she still needs you, and I don't know how to fight her but at least I can tell you what I've figured out about how things work. That's something. It's all I can do."
He nodded, not looking at her. "I'm listening."
"Most mortals can't see us dead people, but she can. So can you, sometimes. She can also cut loose of her body without dying and go out and do stuff. You can't do that."
"Is she here now? Is she listening to us? Would you even know?"
"I would know, and she isn't, not right now. I can't even feel her rage, that's how far off she is. Maybe she went back to her own body, wherever that is. The point is that when she's loose and wandering, she's like us dead people. Only she's stronger because her body's alive. So let me tell you what I've figured out about souls, so you'll know what she is when she's loose. We don't even have a location, unless somebody mortal calls us the way you called me. When I'm not here with you, I'm nowhere in particular. We're still free to make choices, but without a body there aren't a lot of choices to make. We can't change anything in the physical world, and we're kind of weak in some ways. We can get tired—I'm about wiped out now. And we're still bound to our old lives, for a while at least, until the old ties dissolve away. The people she called to breakfast, they're tied to this house, to the family that holds this place. She's part of it, and she can use it to bring them and tame them. That's the list. All I Know About Death, by Lizzy the Dead Girl."
"Lizzy, who is she?"
"I don't know, Tin, that's what I'm trying to tell you. If I knew, do you think I'd keep it a secret from you? I only know that she's so strong she must be mortal. She's a living person. And she's so powerful that she's able to create illusions that you and everybody else can actually see and touch and—and all the other things you did with her."
Quentin thought of all that he had done with Madeleine. "Lizzy, you said that sometimes you were part of Madeleine...." He blushed.
"She only used me like that in crowds, Tin. And don't worry about what I saw. We don't have bodies here, we don't care about that stuff."
"Lizzy, I loved her."
"You loved a dream that had been made real by a person so cruel that—I hate her, Tin. She's vile. But Madeleine wasn't vile. Madeleine was wonderful."
"If this—person—if she's vile, how could she create something as... someone like Mad?" And he was filled all over again with longing for his wife, who he now knew was gone forever, even though he needed her as much as always.
"She didn't invent Madeleine. You did. She took Madeleine out of your head. You gave her the script and she acted it out for you. What you loved was your dream of love."
"Why was she doing this to us?"
"All I know is it has something to do with what's inside that box. Obviously she can't open it herself, or she wouldn't need you."
"But if she wanted me to open it, why were Grandmother and Uncle Paul stopping me? At least, she seemed to think Grandmother was stopping me, and he blocked me the last time I tried to open it—"
"Well, see, the Grandmother and Paul, she didn't call them. They just came. The old lady is a wanderer, like her. Not dead. Uncle Paul—I'm not sure what he is."
"Lizzy, I'm crazy, aren't I? You've never been real and even there in the hospital I was out of my mind with grief and so I hallucinated your voice and I've been crazy ever since."
"Listen to me, Tin! Don't get weak on me! You are not insane. Everything you saw, you were made to see. And what went on in that parlor today, that was real. She didn't choose you accidentally. Like I said, you're strong. Not like her, but strong enough that she can't just do whatever she wants to you. You see through her sometimes. Like when she was controlling Mom and Dad, you saw it, you saw there was something wrong, and it really scared her, I could feel that. She needed you for some reason but she's also just a little bit afraid of you because she can't control you. So you're not without resources."
"Then teach me how to use them!"
"I don't know how. I never had power like that when I was alive, and I certainly don't know anything about people like this... this user."
"What about this Grandmother person? You said she was alive, too. And she told me to find her. Is that so she can teach me?"
"I don't know anything except that she's in a mortal body somewhere in this world, and she and the User hate each other. Whatever it is that the User wants, Grandmother's trying to stop it. And if she said for you to find her, well, maybe you should."
"But why doesn't she just find me? Madeleine did."
"I don't know, Tin. I've told you everything I know."
"What about Uncle Paul? If she didn't call him, who is he?"
"I don't understand what he is. The User got all upset and excited when he showed up. And Grandmother hates him and fears him even more than she fears the User. He's tied to this house much more tightly than any of the others. And the User and Grandmother were both fighting him the whole time at breakfast, keeping him under control. That's what I know. That's all of it."
"Lizzy, what am I going to do?"
"I don't know. Maybe they'll all leave you alone now. Maybe you can pick up your bags and walk out of here and go back to your life."
"What life? Madeleine was my life. It's like she's died, only she never lived. Lizzy, it's like losing you all over again."
"Only you haven't lost me. And as for her—what you found in her was yourself."
"Oh, that's great, now I don't have to write to Ann Landers or go on Oprah."
"Don't be a snot, little brother. I'm telling you the truth. Everything you found in Madeleine is still in you. Waiting for you to love a real woman and give all that to her."
"Yeah, well, apparently women don't come with signs announcing which ones are flesh and blood and which ones don't leave footprints in the snow."
"I don't leave footprints, either, Tin. But I still love you. That's why you have the power to call me. And maybe this User, whoever she is, maybe while she was busy trying to control you to get you to open that box, maybe she also fell in love with you a little. If she has any spark of humanity in her, I don't see how she could help it. So maybe you have some power over her, too."
"I don't want power." He sank down to the snowy step and buried his head in his hands. "Lizzy, I want my life back."
"Don't we all," she whispered.
He felt something touch him, warm and deep, like a candleburst inside his heart. Like a soft breath of joy that swept through him and brightened him, and he looked up to ask her what it was she did to him, how it was she could give him such a gift of light. But she was gone. He was alone on the front porch of an empty house.
Empty, but not empty. A house where writing appeared on doors and rats talked and a wife more dear to you than your parents, more loved than your beloved dead sister, a wife who was the whole meaning of your life could simply disappear. Could run away without leaving a footprint in the snow.
Quentin had a lot of time for thinking as he trekked through the waning afternoon to the nearest town, which was not particularly near. He had time to think as he waited for a car to come up from New York to pick him up. And on the drive down to La Guardia, and as he flew on the shuttle to Washington, and at last when he walked into the apartment where he had lived when he fell in love with Madeleine, he had plenty of time to think.
He thought of all kinds of things. About Grandmother. Lizzy had said she was a mortal, a living person. And she had said, once with her own mouth, or the image of her mouth, and once with the mouth of a rat in the fireplace, "Find me." Should he? Why couldn't she find him? And if he did find her, what then? Did she expect him to get involved in some kind of struggle between the kind of people who could do what had been done to him? Who could call the spirits of the dead and make them seem alive to some poor sap of an ordinary mortal? Would Grandmother make him face her again, face the User? No, he wasn't going to do it. The old lady could rot, the User could rot, they could all rot, they should all go down into that graveyard and stay there. Deep and cold under the snow. Stay there.
He also thought of Lizzy, of what she had said about life after death. The dead still existed, with all their memories, but the way she was living didn't sound like any theology Quentin had heard of. Why didn't anybody else know about this? He couldn't be the only one who had spoken with someone from beyond the grave. He knew he wasn't. So why wasn't there some book about this? And if the dead just hung around and mortal people could call them and control them and make them do things, what sense did that make? What was it all for? And why did he have to spend so many years without Lizzy?
The one thing he could not permit himself to do was think of Madeleine. The pile of books about sex was still on his nightstand—he hadn't been back to this apartment since they got married. He had never slept with her here. But her face was everywhere in this place. He blotted her out. She wasn't real. But he remembered the feel of her under his hand. How perfect her skin was. How cool and dry, and yet how warm when she should be warm.
Of course she was perfect. So were the berries and the pineapple and the pears. So was the luster of the table and the dishes and the goblets. Everything was perfect because the User took it out of his head. And she knew all the right things to say and do because the User stole it out of Lizzy's memory or trapped Lizzy inside the illusion. Forced Lizzy into this hideous fantasy in which all that Quentin amounted to was a pair of hands to open up the lid of a box.
Well, why go to all this trouble? Why him? With the kind of power the User had, why not just take some poor sap from up the road, walk him on down to the big house on the Hudson, and tell him to open the box?
The box was the big deal. There was some kind of barrier protecting the treasure box, locking the User outside. She apparently had thought that Quentin could get past that barrier and was furious when he didn't.
But what stopped him? He felt no barrier. He was about to open it when she ran out. Why did she give up so soon? Questions that had no answers.
Who was the User? Where was she? And how much power would she have with a .45 bullet boiling through her skull?
He lay there in the bed. Three in the morning. Trembling and cold. Check the thermostat. Already hotter than he normally kept his house. He must have taken a chill this afternoon on the road. Last night at this time he had been sleeping in a bed full of cobwebs after making love to his imagination. Last night he had slept in a stone-cold house that he only thought was warm. Why didn't he freeze to death? Did the User have the power to keep him warm? Four in the morning. He was starving. He had tried to eat the crackers in the cupboard, the only food in the apartment that hadn't passed its expiration date, but they were like dust in his mouth. He got up now and ate them anyway, and drank tap water, it felt like gallons of tap water. He showered. He took all his clothes out of his suitcases, clothes that had been put into dusty drawers and a filthy wardrobe, and laid them out to air. The clothes he had actually worn, the day he arrived at the house and today when he left, he threw them all into the garbage. He threw away the toothbrush from his kit. Five in the morning, he slipped back between the sheets and now he could sleep, still not letting himself think of Madeleine.
But sometime in the night, his mind went where he dared not let it go, and he woke up sobbing in grief for her. Madeleine, Mad, Mad. I don't care if you were a lie, I loved you. I loved you and you left me and I didn't do anything to deserve it, I was good to you. He cried himself back to sleep.
When he woke again it was five in the afternoon. Dark outside already. He got up and called the garage that kept his DC car. In the time it took them to bring it over, he showered again, dressed. He came out to meet the driver, tipped him, then got in the car and drove to Tysons Corner and picked up some shirts and slacks, socks and underwear. A new pair of running shoes. A new razor, new kit, two new suitcases exactly like the ones he already had. A new winter jacket. He drove home and changed into new clothes, then put everything that had been in the house on the Hudson, including the clothes he had stuffed in the garbage in the wee hours of the morning, packed them into the old suitcases, and carried them out to the Dumpster. It was nine o'clock. He drove to Lone Star and ate peanuts and steak soup and it was all ashes in his mouth but he went on and ate the salad and the filet because he was not going to let this thing kill him. He was going to go on with his life.
He got home and the message light on his answering machine was blinking. Someone had called.
But that wasn't possible. When he was away from one of his residences—which was most of the time—he had all the calls automatically routed to a single answering service in Nebraska. When he got to one of his residences and wanted to start receiving local calls on his own phone, he would call in and punch in the code to release calls to that particular phone number.
Only his parents, his lawyer, and Madeleine had the codes that would allow them to override his answering service and reach the answering machine in this residence. And his parents and his lawyer had no idea he was here. They would assume he was still at Madeleine's family house on the Hudson River.
Which meant that the message on his machine had to be from Madeleine. Except that Madeleine didn't exist. Which meant that it had to be from the person behind Madeleine. The person who made her. The User, who could wander free from her body and follow him wherever he went, who would know where he was, who would know he was away when the phone call was made so her intention was to leave a message on the tape, and not talk to him directly.
He could hear Lizzy's voice telling him that the User wasn't done with him yet. She hadn't got what she wanted. If she needed him before, she still needed him. Only now it wouldn't be love that she used to motivate him.
He didn't want to hear the message. But he reached out and touched the PLAY button.
"Quentin Fears? This is Ray Cryer. We're worried that we haven't seen Madeleine since you ran out on her yesterday. We have the local police looking for her, but it occurs to us she might be out looking for you and you may find her first. If you do, we'd appreciate a call. Her mother and sister and I are worried sick. Just worried sick. I know you were very angry yesterday, but I hope you'll still help us find our little girl. The local police here might call you to ask you some questions. I hope you'll cooperate with them. You have our number." There was an emotional catch in his voice at the end.
Ray Cryer? Madeleine's mother and sister? These were people Madeleine had never spoken of. Quentin had certainly never met them. Nor did he have their number. But he had no doubt that they would be completely convincing to the police. That was what the User did best—completely convincing people.
The implications were clear. Quentin had better do what they—no, what the User—wanted, or the police would be looking far and wide for a woman they would never find because she didn't exist. And when they didn't find her, it would start looking very bad for Quentin. Her parents say that Quentin had a fight with her. He snuck away with his suitcases, and ever since then they haven't seen their daughter. Why did he sneak off? Where is Madeleine? Your Honor, you don't have to find a body to know that there was foul play.
No. A murder trial was out of the question. There had to be some evidence. The mere disappearance of a person wasn't enough. But that didn't mean that the police wouldn't be convinced that there was a murder. That they wouldn't be dogging Quentin's heels for months and years looking for Madeleine. And the publicity. No, it wouldn't even take publicity. It would just take visits from police investigators to all of his partners and all of the political people he knew in every city where he did business—Madeleine had met them all, and if the User forgot any of them she could just drop in on Quentin's own mind and take the list out of his memory. He had no secrets from the User. The cloud of suspicion would grow around him. His parents. They would question his parents.
"You have our number." No doubt the police would hear Ray Cryer say that. Even if he erased this tape, there was probably also a recording on the other end, and then they would wonder why he had erased his copy. And since he didn't have the number, what choice did he have? He had to go back to New York, back to the house on the Hudson. Where the police would ask him about that night he spent in the house. If he said he slept in the house with Madeleine and had breakfast with her family, they'd go in and find a cold, dark, waterless house with only his footprints in the dust and only one side of the bed slept in. If he said the house was empty and dark, the police would doubtless find it sparkling clean and well lived-in, with Ray Cryer expressing his bafflement that Quentin would tell such an obvious lie.
He couldn't win. There was no escape from her. He might as well give up and head back there first thing in the morning. Or get in his car right now and drive all night and...
No way. That's what the User wanted. For all he knew, she was putting these thoughts in his head right now to try to bring him back. Well, Lizzy had told him he was strong. He had some power to resist her. And the User wasn't all-powerful, Lizzy had said that, too. It strained her there in the library at breakfast to keep six dead people under control, maintain the illusion of Madeleine, and show various servants bringing in imaginary food, all at once. During the police investigation the User wouldn't have half so much to do. She wouldn't have to produce the deep illusion of Madeleine at all. As for this Ray Cryer, he might be a real person and not a mental construct at all. Making the house look clean and lived-in would be a cinch. But could she create the illusion of detailed chemical evidence? Bloodstains? Anything that would convince a court that a crime had been committed? Maybe—but wouldn't she have to know exactly what the lab technicians would need to look for? Could she make her illusions show up on a photograph? Or would she have to follow the photograph constantly to make sure everyone saw the right things when they looked at it? If she knew enough and had power enough to do all that, then there was no point in his even trying to resist her.
But she wasn't infinitely powerful. Her limits could be reached. And he was not going to roll over and play dead.
It was eleven at night. He called his parents in California.
"She left me," he said. Almost his first words.
"No," said Mom.
"Aw, Quen, I'm so sorry," said Dad. "I never would've thought. She was so—you two were so perfect together."
"I don't know where she is. She didn't tell me where she was going."
"How could she do that?" said Mom. "You just don't do that. Decent people don't..."
"Does her family know where she might have gone?"
Here it came—the beginning of his counter-story. Since he had never met or heard of this Ray Cryer, he wasn't going to go along with the User's story that they knew each other. "I never met her family. She took me to the house on the Hudson, but there was nobody there." That was dangerous, he knew, since they were telling the police that he had met her parents. But if they gave him a lie detector test about meeting Madeleine's parents at the house, he could pass it. "And then today, this afternoon, she left."
"But that's so odd," said Mom. "She was taking you there to meet them."
"Did you fight?" asked Dad.
"I had questions. She had no answers. She knew I wasn't happy but no, we didn't fight."
"Oh, son, it'll work out, I know it will," said Mom. "When she realizes you love her no matter what—"
"I do love her, Mom."
"Well there you are. She'll come back, Quen. How could she not? The way you two looked at each other, it was so sweet, you're so much in love with each other, for pity's sake!"
"Dad, Mom, it's not just that she's gone. I'm worried."
"What about?" asked Dad.
"What if something happened to her? She just walked out. I don't know where she went. I didn't see her on the road as I walked to the next town. I didn't see her footprints in the snow."
Silence on the other end of the line.
"Quen, I know this is out of line, but I have to ask. You didn't hit her or anything, did you?"
Mom was furious. "How dare you even suggest such a thing about Quentin!"
"Calm down, Mom, it's all right. If she doesn't turn up soon, the police are going to ask exactly the same question, and they ought to. Dad, I never raised a hand to her or hurt her in any way. The last time I saw her she was fine."
"Why do the police even have to be involved in this?" said Mom. "Wives leave husbands all the time."
"I never met her parents, but now all of a sudden I have a phone call from a man claiming to be her father and he probably is. But he's lying and saying that I met him, which I didn't, and he has the police looking for her and they're going to question me."
"This is so strange," said Mom. "You should be calling to tell us you're going to have a baby, Quentin, not that the police are going to question you."
"You never met her parents," said Dad, "and now suddenly her father is phoning you and they've got the police looking for her. Quentin, is there a chance that Madeleine was setting you up for blackmail all along? You pay up and suddenly there she is, and what was all this missing persons investigation about?"
"I don't know. So far nobody's asked me for money. It's all really confusing and I'm not sure what's really going on. But in case you're contacted and questioned, I wanted you to hear about this first from me."
"That was very wise of you, son."
"What should we tell them?" asked Mom.
"The absolute, complete truth, Mom. I didn't do anything wrong and there's nothing to hide."
"Quentin, I'm so sorry that this is happening," said Dad. "If it's any consolation, we thought she was as wonderful as you did."
"Yeah, well, we're all suckers for the perfect woman, aren't we, Dad? The difference is, the one you married is real."
"Oh, Quen," said Mom.
"Listen, there's a chance that this will hit the papers and if it does, they'll make it look like I'm guilty of something horrible because that's what sells papers. You know, Software Millionaire's Wife Missing, Husband Can't Explain Disappearance. If it's a con, and I think it is, you can be sure there'll be some evidence that supposedly contradicts things I've told you. No matter what other people are saying, though, you can be sure of this: I did no harm to Madeleine, and if I could have her back right now, as my wife, flesh and blood, right here beside me, I'd be the happiest man alive." And then, because this was true, and because he was tired, and because he had never had a chance to mourn for the wife he lost, he wept, his parents listening to him on the phone, believing him, comforting him.
And why not believe him? Everything he had said was true. And he had told them all that they could possibly believe.
Afterward, physically and emotionally drained, he fell asleep in front of the TV in the living room before Letterman got to the top ten list.
Next day he phoned his Virginia lawyer and asked him how to go about reporting a missing person. He explained that his wife had left him in New York State, but he had come home to Herndon assuming that she would find her own way back to one of their residences, only she wasn't answering the phone anywhere and until he located her he had to assume that something might have happened to her and he wanted the police to be on the lookout just in case—wasn't that the right thing to do? And his lawyer assured him, definitely, that was the right thing to do.
So he did it, but they didn't seem to think there was any urgency. "She'll turn up, Mr. Fears. Just give her time to cool down."
"I'm sure you're right," he answered. "But please just put out the word, won't you? Call the police up there and ask them to be on the lookout?" They assured him they'd see to it. He knew that the New York police would assume he was launching his own search because of the phone message from Ray Cryer, but if he didn't start searching it would look even worse.
That afternoon he boarded a flight to San Francisco and by evening he was in his lawyer's office.
"Only for you do I cancel dinner at my favorite restaurant in San Rafael and drive down into the city."
"You should have told me," said Quentin. "I would have come up and joined you there."
"I didn't want you there," said Wayne Read. "I wanted me and my wife there. Being married to me wouldn't be easy for any woman, and it's particularly hard for my wife. So this is costing me, Quentin."
"Madeleine left me."
"Oh." Wayne looked nonplussed for a moment. Then he put his head down on his desk. "I'm trying really really hard, Quentin."
"Go ahead and say it. You told me so."
"Quentin, I'm not happy to be right. I wanted you to be right."
"Yeah, well, she's gone. And I need your help."
"I assume she's got a lawyer. Do you know who yet? Because I'm not a divorce lawyer and—"
"Wayne, you're not getting it. She's gone. Not just leaving-me gone, I mean gone. I've filed a missing persons report in Virginia. I got a phone message from a man claiming to be her father, and he says they've also got the police looking for her up there."
Wayne's demeanor changed. A little bit more serious. A little bit suspicious, too, though he was trying to conceal it. Well, Quentin didn't blame him.
Quentin gave him the whole story he had told his parents.
"Well, somebody's bound to have seen her leave the house. She'll turn up somewhere."
"I doubt it."
"Why?" Again the suspicion.
"Because I never met this Ray Cryer but he left me a phone message implying that we knew each other. He had the code that let him switch off my answering service and leave a taped message on my machine in Herndon—and only Madeleine had those codes. Well, besides you and my parents."
"So she's not missing."
"Let's just say that this guy who calls himself Ray Cryer knows more about her disappearance than I do."
"Then let's find her," said Wayne. "Between the investigators we can hire and the police, we'll find her."
"No we won't. Nobody will ever find her."
Wayne thought for a while, tapping his pencil. "Quentin, are you telling me the truth?"
"Everything I've told you is true."
"That's not exactly what I asked." Then, as Quentin was about to speak, Wayne raised his hand to stop him. "Wait a minute, Quentin. Don't get mad at me, but I have to tell you. If you have committed some crime, and you wish me to be involved with your defense in any way, don't confess that crime to me. If you confess a crime to me, then my advice to you will be to turn yourself in and make a full confession, and I will not represent you in your defense. Do you understand me?"
"Relax, Wayne," said Quentin. "I didn't kill her. As far as I know she's as alive as she ever was."
Wayne relaxed a little.
"And I do want to begin a search. But not some little penny-ante search. It's going to have to cover every city where I have residences, which is a long list, as you well know. But she might have gone to any of those places and I have to at least go through the motions of a serious search. Don't I?"
"Go through the motions?"
"I told you. We won't find her."
Wayne shook his head. "I really hate paradoxes, Quentin. Do you know where she is or don't you?"
"I know she's nowhere."
"If she's buried in the basement of that house, Quentin, the police are going to find her."
"She's not buried anywhere because she's not dead. She's also not alive. She never existed."
"That must have been an interesting wedding, Quentin."
"The real search is for her true identity, Wayne. I want to be able to prove that the Madeleine Cryer I married has no birth certificate in any of the fifty states. That she never went to school anywhere, that she never had a job. The other investigations are because I have to look like a worried husband searching for his vanished wife. But my attorney has to know that what I'm really searching for is the identity of the person who deceived me. Or someone who might know the truth about her."
Wayne leaned back in his chair. "Now, that's interesting. I wonder where the investigator should start."
"There's almost nowhere he can start, Wayne. Like you said, I was a fool. The whole time we were engaged, back in Virginia, she claimed she was staying with friends, moving from house to house. We talked on her cellular phone. I never had a phone number for any of those friends. Never met one. Never heard a single name. She said she was in a job somewhere in the bureaucracy, but I don't know what it was, and frankly I don't believe she ever had such a job, though of course I'll pay to have the federal personnel files searched to see if she worked for them."
"What about this Ray Cryer?"
"Whoever he is, I doubt he'll be real helpful to us—if he talks to our people at all."
"But we can investigate him and his background," said Wayne. "Either he really is her father or he's faking, and either way, checking up on him will help us."
"And the house, Wayne. The deeds. And I mean going back generations. She knows that house. That wasn't a fake. She knows it in the dark. She's connected to it somehow."
"We'll do it, Quentin. In the meantime, you won't mind if I strike her name off your insurance policies and out of your will?"
"Write it up and I'll sign everything."
"The police are going to be so suspicious of you."
"Of course they are. You are, and I pay you handsomely and listen to your wise and intensely personal advice. Think how much less likely they are to think I'm telling the whole story."
"Though of course you are telling the whole story." The irony in Wayne's voice was palpable.
"I've told you the whole story I'm going to tell the police and the whole story I told my parents and the story I'm going to tell everybody else forever, and every bit of it is true."
"But there are some bits you sort of left out?"
"Maybe."
"Are you going to tell me?"
"I want to. If I dare."
"Attorney-client privilege protects everything you tell me. I've already given you my don't-confess-a-crime-to-me warning. Please remember that I mean it."
"But what if the thing I tell you convinces you I'm out of my mind?"
"I'm already convinced."
"I'm not joking, Wayne. I've been questioning my own sanity, and unless you're crazy, you will too."
"Crazy people have as much right to a lawyer as sane people."
"But what if you thought it would be in my best interests to be committed to a mental hospital? To be declared incompetent?"
"I have no standing for that," said Wayne. "Your parents could try it, or your wife, or your children if you had any. Your heirs, perhaps."
"My in-laws?"
"They're running a different scam right now," said Wayne. "The point is, your attorney couldn't try to commit you on his own account. I'd be disbarred if I tried. My job would be to stop them."
"But if you—when you don't believe me, will you still work as hard for me as before? Or will you start handing my work over to underlings until you finally spin me off to some other lawyer?"
"Quentin, now you're bothering me. What is this, some alien abduction thing?"
"I wish." He took a deep breath. "Get out your recorder."
"I'll remember what you tell me."
"I want it in my own voice."
"Quentin, attorney-client privilege only protects you in court, not from public attacks on your reputation. Of course I'll do all I can to protect any tape you make here, but the best protection is for the tape never to exist."
"Tape it."
"Your call." Shaking his head, Wayne got out his recorder. And Quentin told him what really happened, starting with his sighting of a woman who looked like Lizzy at the Elden Street Giant food store in Herndon. From there he skipped to the events at Madeleine's family mansion. The midnight snack. The reason she gave him not to take a shower. The exquisite food at breakfast. The other people at the table. The walk on the bluff. And then the treasure box, Grandmother saying "Find me," Madeleine fleeing into the graveyard. No footprints but his own. The names on the headstones. The dark, cold, empty house, the dust and filth, the bed that only he slept in, the bureau that held only his own clothing. The words that appeared on the door. The talking rat. And then Lizzy, dead Lizzy come back to talk to him, to explain what she understood. And the long walk back to civilization.
Told all in a stream, Quentin didn't believe the story himself.
But there was Wayne Read, turning off the tape recorder, nodding. "I'll keep this tape, Quentin. In my safe. I'm not going to give it to a secretary to transcribe."
"Right."
"What I don't get, Quentin, is why you told me this... stuff."
"Maybe I just had to tell someone."
"Not you, Quentin. You're not a get-it-off-your-chest kind of guy."
"Maybe I'm afraid that somewhere along the line I'm going to get killed. And if I am, I want somebody to know why."
"Me? Your close, intimate lifelong friend?"
He was right. It wasn't Wayne Read he had told this story for. Quentin thought for a moment. "If I'm dead, Wayne, then I want you to play this for my parents."
"Quentin, come on."
"I want them to know."
"Quentin, it's one thing to tell me this stuff, but telling your folks this thing about Lizzy coming back—how is that going to do anything but hurt them?"
Quentin leaned across the desk. "Give me the tape and I'll find another attorney."
"I didn't say I wouldn't do it, I just gave you my best advice. I'm used to you ignoring me. But you are an ass, Quentin."
"Thanks."
"If you're not crazy you're the stupidest liar I've ever known. Dead people hanging around just in case somebody conjures them back? For breakfast?"
"I'm sure inventive, aren't I, Wayne?"
"The worst thing is that I can't even tell my wife because if she heard this story she'd know I was having an affair and didn't even care enough to come up with good lies."
"Are you having an affair?"
Wayne sighed and looked away for a moment. "I'm not, but she is."
"You're kidding."
Glumly, Wayne explained. "When she started getting suspicious of me, I figured something had changed, and it wasn't me, I was just the same as always. So I had her watched for a few weeks. She was giving—favors, I should say—to guys in the parking lots of bars."
"And she's still accusing you of having affairs?"
"Quentin, people are crazy. That's why I told you that. So you'd understand—I know that people do crazy things. But they do them in the real world. The guys my wife sees—they're cowboy types. She goes to cowboy bars. In Marin County, right in San Rafael, we have three kids, and she's blowing guys in the parking lot in exchange for a joint. How is that crazier than your telling me this horrible story that you actually want me to play for your parents if you suddenly croak. I once thought you were the only island of sanity in a screwed-up world. You had no connections except your parents. You didn't get emotionally involved. Rational decisions kept doubling your fortune every three years or so. No waste. No lies. No illusions. Then you fall in love with a woman and she leaves you and you come to me with this story and I swear, Quentin, I've lost all faith in the human race. I've got only one question. Is there any way you can get my wife to disappear off the face of the earth? No, no, I don't mean that."
"I don't know if this is what you had in mind, Wayne, but at least you made me remember that I'm not the only guy in the world with problems."
"That's not what I had in mind. I don't know what I had in mind. I didn't really have anything in mind. I guess I am a getting-it-off-my-chest kind of guy."
"Why don't you divorce her?"
"Because she's still a good mother when she's home. And I love my kids. And I love my wife. Or at least I love what I thought she was."
"I love what I thought Madeleine was, too."
"Yeah, but at least your wife didn't exist." Wayne laughed but it caught in his throat. "Why aren't we drinkers, Quentin? Guys who drink can go to a bar at a time like this."
"Is Swensen's open? We can eat like a hundred scoops of ice cream and puke in the street."
"Well, that's half the fun of drinking, at least."
Quentin got up. "I'm sorry I spoiled your dinner with your wife."
"Yeah, well, maybe I would've stuck a fork in her eye, so you probably saved me from going up on assault charges."
"I hope nothing ever happens that's weird enough to make you believe me, Wayne."
"I hope the same thing. But I still like you and care about you and I'm the best lawyer you'll ever get, especially now that you're a complete loon."
"Thanks, Wayne."
"Come in tomorrow after two to sign the papers getting her name out of your will and off your policies. You'll have to eat the ice cream alone."
And that was that. Somebody else knew the truth—somebody alive—even if he didn't believe it. Now it was just a matter of waiting. For his investigation to lead him somewhere. For the police to start getting suspicious of him. The trouble was that all he was likely to come up with was negative evidence—nobody knew her, nobody had seen her. But there was a paper trail. The User couldn't alter the paper trail. At least he didn't think she could. She dealt in illusions, in getting people to do what she wanted. She hadn't actually changed physical reality one bit. If she wanted that house to look clean, she could fool people. If she wanted it to be clean, somebody had to come in with a mop. The same applied to documents and records. It wasn't easy to fake a life. This Ray Cryer could be exposed. It could be proved, eventually, if he spent enough money, that Madeleine Cryer had never been born.
Which wasn't to say that the User would stay defeated. If one attempt failed, she'd make another—he knew that about her now. She needed him, for some reason. Needed him. And as long as she needed him, she would keep coming at him, and he'd never know it was her. He could never trust anybody again.
That was the worst. Knowing that the User could come at him however she wanted, in any disguise. He'd never guess it was connected to her. After all, there hadn't seemed to be any connection at all between his sightings of Lizzy and meeting Madeleine at the grande dame's party. Every single person he ever met for the rest of his life, he'd have to wonder if it was really the User, trying again and again.
In the long run, he wasn't going to get out of this until he found the User herself and confronted her. The night before, he had imagined, in his rage, finding the User's mortal body and putting a .45 slug in her head. Now, in the light of day, did he really have the heart for that? Was he a murderer, just waiting for the right provocation? He shuddered at the thought. There had to be a way to defeat her short of killing her. To get her out of his life.
Of course, the simplest way would be to go back to New York and open the damn box.
Only he didn't want to do that. If only because the User wanted it so much. Whatever was in there, it would be a very bad thing if the User got it. Because the User loved power, didn't she? That part of Madeleine, that disturbing part of her—that was the User talking. It had to have been. Certainly she didn't find it in Lizzy, or in Quentin's image of the perfect woman. That had been the User telling the truth about herself. The love of power. Whatever was in that treasure box was about power, and if there was one sure thing in this whole business, it was that the User should not get her hands on more power.
Power. Madeleine had told him that she was in Washington in order to be around power, to get some kind of influence. Was any part of that true? The User must have noticed him somewhere, and it was after he moved to the DC area that he started seeing things—Lizzy, and then Madeleine. The User might have grown up in the Hudson River Valley, but that house had been closed down for years. She had to be living somewhere, and it made sense that it was in the DC area. And if she lived there, somebody knew her.
He made a connection. The grande dame's party, where he met Madeleine. There was someone in DC who had known Madeleine before he did.
But he wouldn't send one of his investigators to talk to the grande dame. He owed her more civility than that. He'd go and talk to her himself.
"I remember you. Or do I?" She was as gracious as before, and the confusion of her words didn't show on her face.
"You were very kind to me at a party one night," said Quentin. "In fact, you introduced me to my wife."
"That would be clumsy of me, to introduce a husband and wife to each other."
"No, no, she wasn't my wife at the time, we—"
"Please, Mr. Fears, I was joking. I'm old, but I still understand the ins and outs of simple communication. I spoke to you for a while, didn't I? I think I ran on and on, but you were very patient."
"Conversing with you made me glad that I had read my sister's collection of Jane Austen novels."
"I was not around in the Georgian period, Mr. Fears."
"You converse as elegantly as if you had been. It makes a California boy like me struggle to keep up."
"Now I remember you. I caught you fingering the books in the library."
"I thought of myself as eyeing them."
"You were climbing the ladder, anyway. Did you come to thank me for introducing you to... what was the young lady's name? Not Duncan, anyway."
Not Duncan? "Madeleine Cryer."
"The niece, yes."
"Niece?"
"Well, of course to you she's your wife, but to me, she's the niece of my good friends the Duncans. They have been so kind to me in the last few years, since my husband passed on."
"And so you invited their niece to your party."
"How could I not? Such a lovely girl. Not at all like the Duncans' rather unfortunate daughter. Oh, but now I'm being a gossip."
"What's the Margaret Truman quote? 'If you can't say something nice, come sit by me'?"
"It wasn't Margaret, my dear boy. But these stories have a way of attaching themselves to the people the newsmen have actually met. Of course no one invites newspapermen to any real parties. So they never know the truly clever people."
"You aren't telling me that it was you who originated that—"
"How old do you think I am, young man!" She feigned horror. "That story was ancient before Margaret Truman was born. My great-grandmother's diary mentions hearing that line attributed to the wife of James Buchanan."
"He was the president before Lincoln, wasn't he?"
"Very good—you are in the top two percent of your generation, for knowing that."
"Do I make the top one percent for knowing that Buchanan was a bachelor?"
She clapped her hands together, hankie and all. "Oh, you are a delight, Mr. Fears! It's no fun teasing people who never understand they're being teased."
"Do the Duncans understand?"
She looked at him sharply. "So we're on a fishing expedition. But I think your purpose is either loftier or lower than mere gossip."
"Loftier, I think. My wife has left me."
"Without a claim check, it appears. So when she returns to reclaim you..."
"Oh, I'll be here waiting, if she returns. Her departure was sudden. I don't know where she is."
"Did you do her violence, young man?"
"I'm not a violent man," said Quentin. "But I appreciate your concern for her safety."
"Men do not come with labels, alas, clearly identifying those who harm women from those who are unfailing gentlemen."
"Then tell me nothing, but merely allow me to write a note to Madeleine, care of the Duncans, care of—"
"Care of me."
"Though many hands touch my message, yet may it still have power to touch her heart."
"In all my reading, I can't recall where I heard that gracious speech before."
"You heard it here."
"You invented your own? A lost art is revived before my eyes."
"That art cannot be lost as long as you are in the world. In you the river of time slipped its banks and took a different route from the rest of the world."
"Now that one you did not invent."
"The January Atlantic."
"The article on Madagascar." She laughed. "Oh, Mr. Fears, you're such a spoof."
"Madeleine and I read that issue on our last plane trip together."
Her face grew solemn. "The pleasure of your company has made me forget your errand. By all means, give me your message."
He patted his pockets for a pen. "I'm here unarmed, I'm afraid."
"Then you must rise to your feet and arm yourself at my writing desk. Perhaps you'll want to choose one of the second sheets, so you don't have my monogram on your note."
Quentin went to the writing desk, chose paper and a pen, and wrote.
Dear M
I love you and miss you. Please assure me that you're well. Tell me the future is still a treasure box which we may open together.
All my love, Q
Since Quentin had no idea what the User wanted, he could not be sure that this note, if it even reached her, would have any effect at all. But if in fact the opening of the treasure box was her goal, this note had to leave her wondering exactly how much Quentin had understood of the things that happened at the house on the Hudson. It had to be good for him if she thought he understood less than he really did. And since he understood very little, it shouldn't be hard to persuade her that he knew nothing.
Except, of course, that the moment he called attention to himself, what would stop her from ransacking his mind and finding all his secrets? Lizzy said that the User had left him some independence. You are not without resources, Lizzy said. So maybe it was worth writing this note.
He folded the note in half, then carried it to the grande dame.
"Oh, Mr. Fears, you are cruel."
"Am I?"
"You could have sealed it. Then I would have steamed it open and read your note. But handing it to me folded shows such trust that I would die before I violated it."
Quentin laughed and read it to her.
"Oh, Mr. Fears, I will not deliver this note. Instead I will find treasure boxes of my own for us to open together. Why couldn't you have white hair and arthritis! Such a romantic!"
They laughed together.
"Young love is so hard, these days, Mr. Fears," she said, offering him her hand. He took it gently, and because of the way she rested her hand on his, he did not shake it but instead bowed over it, thinking that he should surely be wearing a cutaway for this scene. "If I see my friends' naughty niece, I will reprimand her for wasting such a fine young man—and after all the trouble we took to bring you to her!"
"Trouble?"
"I told you at the party how I felt about marriages and money. The Duncans are an old family. You are new money. Such a match is made in heaven."
"But the only person I knew at this party was a lobbyist who—"
"Who was invited to this party because he knew you."
"But I only called him a day before to ask him to take me to something."
"Really? Then the Duncans must have been watching you rather closely, because it was exactly the day before when they asked me to invite both that lobbyist and their dear niece."
"So you didn't just stumble across me in the library."
"Nor was Madeleine only by chance under the cherry tree. Oh, Mr. Fears, I thought I was helping create a good family, not setting you up to have your poor heart broken. Will you forgive me?"
"There's nothing to forgive. If I've had any happiness in my life, it's because Madeleine brought it to me. And even if I only had that happiness for a season, I'll always be grateful to you for sending me to her that night."
"I'm glad you're not in politics, Mr. Fears, for I should have to leave my home and vote for you, and I do hate going out."
"Yours would be the only vote I'd get, but I'd feel as if I had won."
She applauded him again. "If only you would pink some rival in a duel over me, I could die happy."
"I have to ask, even though I know the answer. You couldn't simply tell me the Duncans' first names and where they live, could you?
"If your wife didn't introduce you to them, and they didn't introduce themselves, it's hardly my place without their consent, don't you think?"
Quentin nodded. It was the answer he had expected. "I'll come back when it's all settled, to tell you how things came out."
"My door is always open to you, Mr. Fears. Good day."
Outside on the porch, he was almost surprised to see an ordinary overmoneyed street in Chevy Chase. There should have been carriages passing over cobbled streets, and rows of townhouses, and blossoming cherry trees. Instead it was winter, the trees were bare, and most of the houses showed that money and taste do not arrive on the same schedule.
Duncan. Friends of the grand dame—but for how long? And they arranged for his invitation to the party. She was already watching him, the User was. How had she found him? Rich men were thick on the ground inside the beltway. Why had she chosen him?
It was almost, almost worth it, just to have met the grande dame and won her friendship. If only he were really the courtly gentleman he had just mimicked in her drawing room. But somewhere along the line he suspected there would be a time when he stood toe to toe with an enemy, and there would be no pinking in that duel. Something bright red would flow, and someone would fall, and his thought at that moment was that it would probably be himself. But he would not go down easy.
Quentin got into his car. Once inside, he looked around to see if he could spot the surveillance teams that were supposed to be watching the house to see who entered and left after his visit. He didn't see anyone at all, not even a car parked on the street, which either meant that they had screwed up completely or they were very, very good. He pulled away from the curb and called Wayne Read on his cellular phone.
"You just pulled away from the house," said Wayne, by way of greeting, "and you're heading toward the beltway."
"I didn't want them to follow me."
"Just wanted you to know they were on the job."
"And calling you long distance to report on it."
"Well, hey, you can afford it and we both own stock in AT&T."
"I've got a name for you to look for. Duncan. That's a last name, a married couple and they have a daughter. Supposedly Madeleine is their niece. I'm willing to bet that Mr. Duncan is the guy who called himself Ray Cryer."
"Duncan. I'll bet there's only one Duncan family in all of the DC area."
"That's what the surveillance team is for, right? I wrote a note to Madeleine and left it with the grande dame. Either she'll send somebody to the Duncans or the Duncans will send somebody to pick it up. Either way, there'll be somebody to follow."
"Unless she puts it in an envelope and puts a stamp on it."
"People still do that?" Of course he knew they did, but since he hadn't personally licked a stamp in many years, he simply hadn't thought about that possibility.
"Still a bargain at thirty-two cents. And if we interfere with the U.S. mail, that's a felony for all concerned, so we won't do it, even for a guy we love as much as we love you, Quentin."
"Yeah, well, you still have the name Duncan to go on."
"I can hear the phone call now. 'Is this the Duncan family that has a niece who magically disappears after six months of marriage to a rich insane man because he doesn't open a box in time?' We'll find 'em for sure."
"If you're so smart, I'll bet you know who the only bachelor president was."
"Of the U.S.? James Buchanan, the guy right before Lincoln. A Virginian who did his best to screw things up for the North before the Civil War. You want more?"
"Have you found anything about her cellular phone number?"
"It's a Cellular One number, one of the ones they reserve for company use in that area. Needless to say, it hasn't been assigned to anyone during the past year."
"And here I was thinking the connection was always so clear," said Quentin.
So all his phone calls to her while they were engaged had probably taken place without anyone actually answering a phone anywhere. The User just made him think he was hearing Madeleine's voice come out of the phone.
He got out onto the beltway before rush hour started, so driving home was only mildly hellish. When he got inside the message light was flashing again on his machine. He wondered if it would be 'Ray Cryer' again or some other mischief from the User. Instead it was the police chief in Mixinack, New York. That wasn't the town Quentin had walked to when he beat his retreat from Madeleine's house; Mixinack lay to the north, and farther away. But who could fathom how jurisdictions were laid out? It was still midafternoon. He called.
"Chief Bolt here."
"I'm—you answer the phone yourself?"
"Everybody's at the coffee machine or using the john. Who's this?"
"Quentin Fears, returning your call."
"Well, hi."
"Hi." Quentin didn't want to say anything until he found out what Bolt already knew. So he let the silence hang, till Bolt picked up the conversation and went on.
"I got this fax from Herndon, Virginia, saying your wife was missing. You found her yet?"
"Not yet, no. I have investigators on it, but there's nothing yet."
"Oh, well, I'm sorry to hear that. Haven't seen your wife, Mr. Fears."
"I'm even sorrier to hear that."
"I can bet. Tough break. My wife left me once. Damned shame. Came back, too. Damned shame. That was a joke, son. But I guess you don't feel like joking."
"I appreciate your thoughtfulness."
"I'm a thoughtful kind of guy. I bet you're wondering why I bothered to call when I don't have anything to tell you. Well, what can I say? I'm a curious guy. My secretary just got married and with this stomach flu going around I've got to keep all the men I've got left out on the road running speed traps, or we won't be able to meet the payroll. That's another joke, but I've given up on you laughing."
"You're telling me you're all alone in the office."
"That's my point! You are listening! Well, you see, that's why I'm the one saw your fax. We get a lot of those—hate the damn machine, you know, like to rip it out of the wall, since we have to pay for the paper for every boneheaded stupid meaningless fax that any moron in the country decides every police department ought to have. But your fax caught my eye, because of the address you gave for that house where you say your wife left you."
"You know the place?"
"Well, you see, this is a small town, and yes, I know it well. Drive past it quite a bit. Hasn't been a soul living there for five years since the old lady went to a rest home."
An old lady who had ties to the house, gone to a rest home. That might explain why Grandmother couldn't find him herself.
"I have my boys check it out now and then," said Bolt, "to make sure there's no vandalism. You know, broken windows."
"Are there any?"
"You tell me, son. You're the one says he spent the night."
"I didn't say that."
"No, I guess I'm saying that. Saw that fax from Herndon, and I thought, let's check it out. So next time I'm driving down that way in daylight, I pull up and sure enough, there's tire tracks going in and coming out. And footprints. Don't like footprints—that's vandals. That's bums trying to squat in an abandoned house. Or tracks can be bored teenagers looking for a place to smoke some weed or pass along some sexually transmitted disease, but whatever it was I figured it was my job to know. Drove on in, parked a ways back, and saw as how you must have had a driver when you got out of your car."
"We did."
"Yeah, well, I looked for a lady's footprints, but it seems she never got out of the car."
"Is that what it looks like?"
"Or you carried her in. It's damn sure she never set foot in that snow."
"Interesting observation."
"So far so good," said Chief Bolt. "So I remember how the owner asked me to look in on the place, so I think, Time to look in. Climbed up the steps and it's kind of dirty in there, isn't it?"
"Yes sir, I'd say so."
"And cold. A man could freeze his ass off in there. But somebody walked upstairs and spent the night on a filthy dustcover and peed in a toilet that doesn't flush and spit toothpaste into the dry sink. Walked to the basement kitchen, stepping on roaches all the way, walked to the empty fridge—am I getting this right?"
Bolt's cocky sarcasm was contagious. As always, Quentin picked up the tone of the conversation and played it back. "You're quite the Sherlock Holmes," he said.
Bolt's reaction was a brief "Ha." And then: "Well, I won't go through your whole itinerary. A walk out to the bluff. You did a real dance all over the graveyard. Walked around front. And then I've got your tracks coming back out the front door. You sat down on the second from the bottom step and set your bags down beside you. And then you got up and walked on out to the road and went south. Have I about got it right?"
"Can't argue with the truth, Chief."
"And I ask myself, where was this woman who was supposedly last seen leaving the old Laurent place?"
"Laurent?"
"I guess the Laurents lived there longest so the name stuck. Anyway, the only thing I could figure was the missing woman you're looking for must have drove off in that car. Looked like the driver went around to open the door for her, but she never got out. And now she's missing."
"Definitely missing."
"So I really had only one question for you, Mr. Fears."
"Fearsss. Rhymes with pierce."
"Here's my question. Why did a man who the Herndon police tell me is richer than several third world countries combined, why would such a man go inside a freezing cold abandoned house and spend the night in bugs and filth?"
"Is that a crime, Chief?"
"Oh, if I caught you there, I could lock you up and put a vagrancy charge on you, but since you could show means of support and all, I don't think it would stick. Trespass, of course, but you didn't steal or vandalize. So no, we're not charging you with anything. I'm just curious, that's all."
"So am I. I want to know where my wife is. Doesn't sound like you know."
"I see," said Chief Bolt. "Kind of unfair for you to come up here, act weird, go away, and not answer questions about it."
This wasn't going at all well.
"Chief, let me ask you a question."
"Do you want me to answer it or just weasel around like you did?"
"Didn't you get an inquiry from a Ray Cryer about my wife, Madeleine Cryer Fears?"
"Ah, the father-in-law."
"I've never met him, but he says he is."
"Maybe it's in the paperwork somewhere, but—"
"No, it would have been called in during the last few days. You've been answering the phone, right?"
"Ray Cryer?"
"Right."
"Nothing here. I've got the old messy-desk filing system, so I can't swear to it, but no, nothing."
"Well, you see, this Ray Cryer called me and told me he had called you to tell you his daughter was missing. From that house. And that he already had the local police looking for her."
"We're the local police, and we aren't. Looking for her."
"Curiouser and curiouser."
"But if you were there when she left, Mr. Fears, why would he call to tell you she was gone?"
"That's my question, Chief. It sounded to me like maybe he was trying to set up a different version of events."
"Well, we'll never know, will we? Right now, all I've got is your word that your wife was there. And clear evidence that you've got really weird taste in lodgings."
"Well, thank you, Chief Bolt, you've been really helpful."
"So you're gonna blow me off?"
"No sir. On the contrary, I'm hoping you'll keep your eyes open and help my investigators when they get there."
"This Ray Cryer blackmailing you? Is that it?"
"Pardon?"
"Were you on drugs that night? Was it a drug deal or something, and they dropped you off and threatened you or something?"
"What are you talking about?"
"You won't tell me why you acted so weird, I got to rack my brain coming up with stories that fit the evidence."
"Chief, the house is haunted. I was invited in by ghosts, slept with ghosts, had breakfast with ghosts, went on out to the graveyard to say good-bye to their bodies, and then hiked along the highway to get home."
"You know, I may be a small-town chief of the tiniest police force this side of Maggody Arkansas, but I got as good a doorway into jail as any other cop in America. So why are you showing me such disrespect, son? Though I will say that at least you're paying for the call."
"Chief Bolt, I don't want to be your enemy."
"That's good to hear. I'm not a good enemy to have."
"Can you tell me anything about old lady Laurent?"
"Laurent? She's dead."
Dead? Then what was "Find me" all about? "I'm sorry to hear that."
"Happened about twenty years ago and she was older than God when she croaked, so nobody's broke up about it."
"I thought you said the old lady went into a rest home a few years ago."
"Son, it's plain to me you don't know squat about that house and the people who used to live in it, and yet you said your wife took you there to meet her family. Now you lay it out plain. Is this Ray Cryer blackmailing you about something? Did you do something criminal in that house? Or are you just insane? Because you sure as hell did not marry a woman who has anything to do with that house, since that family is gone. Old lady Laurent is dead. The current owner is her daughter, the old lady I mentioned who went into a rest home. And her only daughter is about thirty-five and married with a little kid, and she's never been back since the old lady moved out."
"I did nothing criminal in that house. If Ray Cryer is blackmailing me, he hasn't asked for money yet and if he does I won't give him any because I haven't done anything I need to hide. As to whether I'm insane, well, at my income level people generally call us eccentric."
"But you're still not answering my questions."
"Chief, I want very much to meet you."
"The feeling is mutual."
"I want to go through that house with you and find out everything you can tell me about it."
"What, am I a realtor now?"
"Believe me or not, Chief, my wife came to that house with me. She grew up in that house, of that I have no doubt. It's her people buried in the graveyard. And if I have any hope of finding her, it'll be through whatever I can learn about that house. So I will be there soon. And in the meantime, I'll fax you the receipt from the limo service that took us there, so you can find out whether I did in fact arrive with my wife."
"I'll be waiting for it, son."
They said their chilly good-byes. Quentin hung up the phone and called the limo company to have them fax Chief Bolt a copy of the bill. All the while, he kept telling himself that this was about the stupidest thing he could do. Since Ray Cryer was lying and he hadn't told the police anything, why should Quentin do anything to arouse more suspicion? Why didn't he just tell Bolt some cockamamy story and hang up and sigh in relief and call off the search for a missing wife that he knew would never turn up? And above all, why would he provoke Bolt into getting proof positive from the limo driver that yes indeed, Mrs. Fears got out of the car and went into the house with Mr. Fears? The fact that there were no woman's footprints coming out of the house could only make the chief suspect foul play.
And yet at the time it seemed like the right thing to do. A gut feeling. A sense that Chief Bolt was a decent guy whose trust was worth having. And there was something important about him.
Oh. Of course. Chief Bolt knew the old lady. And if there was any sense to the universe at all, the old lady in the rest home had to be Grandmother. Didn't she? Only she wasn't old lady Laurent, who was twenty years dead, which would make her Grandmother's late mother, which meant Laurent must have been Grandmother's maiden name and the chief would know her married name and where to find her. So knowing the chief was maybe a route to Grandmother.
It was also quite possibly a route to jail.
Quentin shuddered, and then thought of the thing that had made him shudder: When he felt so certain that he should say what he said to the chief, what made him think it was his own idea? For all he knew, he was acting out somebody's script.
No. The User doesn't do that. She's made me see things, but she hasn't made me do things. She can't make me say or do things because if she could, that box would be open and this whole thing would have ended back there by the Hudson. And if Grandmother could make me do things she wouldn't have made me see a talking rat in order to persuade me.
Quentin thought about it some more and realized why he didn't palm off some easy lie on the chief. It was because Quentin was a pretty good judge of people, Madeleine, of course, being a spectacular exception. After screening hundreds and hundreds of people responding to his ads, after working with many dozens of partners over the years, he could tell pretty quickly which people he'd enjoy working with and which would be nothing but pain.
And Chief Bolt was his kind of guy. It was that simple. If Bolt were asking him for funding to start some business, Quentin would hear him out, make sure the premise was sound, and have the papers drawn up, because he could do business with Bolt.
Except the business Bolt was in was the suspicious cop trade, and the only partnership the chief had in mind was the uneasy partnership of cop and suspect. The only thing the chief lacked was evidence of a crime and Quentin was helping him find some.
Maybe it's an unconscious attempt to thwart the User, thought Quentin. After all, I can't open that treasure box if I'm in jail.
Something touched him in the night. As he lay on his side in bed, something light glided over his bare skin, above his hip. He woke with a start, slapping at it. Someone gave a cry. He lunged for the light and turned it on.
Madeleine sat in the bed, holding her hand as if it had been burnt, an accusing look on her face.
He couldn't think of anything to say.
"Miss me?" she said.
Suddenly it annoyed him, the way she was holding her hand, as if she were really in pain. "Don't bother holding your hand. I know you aren't hurt."
"You think it doesn't hurt when you slap me?"
"I thought a spider was crawling up my—yeah, well, I wasn't far wrong, was I?"
"Don't be mad," she said. "Please don't be mad."
The expression on her face was so genuinely sad, so full of longing, that he felt himself melting with compassion in spite of himself. But no, no, he refused to be taken in.
"Get out," he said.
She was wearing a nightgown. She plucked at the hem. "Tin, please, I..."
"Don't call me that. You sucked that out of my mind. Or Lizzy's—that name doesn't belong to you!"
"No, it's your name."
"It's my name when it's spoken by somebody who loves me. Not somebody who's trying to use me to open some... box." He got up and walked clumsily around the bed, out of the bedroom, into the kitchen. He got orange juice out of the fridge and poured a glass.
She stood in the kitchen doorway. "Enough for me?"
"No," he said. "You don't need it. And that's something I want to know. Since you're not really here, what did you do with everything you ate and drank? Where does it go?"
Her face went cold and she walked back to the living room. "I see," she said. "Your note meant nothing."
He followed her, the glass of juice in his hand. "So your real name is Duncan?"
She whirled on him. "My real name is Madeleine Cryer Fears. Your wife. There's a license."
"And how did you sign it? How did your name get on it? You can't really hold a pen."
"I can hold a pen. I can hold a glass. I can hold you. Remember how it felt?" She reached for him. Her hand, reaching to brush against his cheek, to cup his jaw and draw him close...
He grabbed her wrist and pulled her even closer, then poured orange juice over her head. It dribbled down her hair, over her forehead. She covered her face with her hands and wept. "All I want is to love you, Quentin!"
He stood there, looking at the juice, how real it looked. How it dripped from her hair onto her shoulders, some of it down onto the carpet.
"No," he said. "You're not there, and when I poured out that juice it went straight down to the carpet. It didn't go into your hair because you... aren't... real."
She took the glass and threw it against the wall. It shattered and fell. "Think the neighbors heard that?" she asked.
The shards of glass sparkled in the light from the kitchen.
She was crying. He was crying. "Madeleine," he said. "I'm so sorry, I'm—you wouldn't believe—these past few days without you—"
She held him. Her body fit perfectly against his, as it always had. "You think it was easy for me? I shouldn't have run out of there, but Grandmother—she hates me so much. I should have remembered, my love for you, it's stronger than anything, stronger than her hate, stronger than... Oh, Quentin, don't ever be angry with me again, please, it scares me, it hurts me..."
And as she spoke, he looked at the glittering bits of broken glass and remembered the shimmer of the perfect goblets on the table in the library. And then how bare and dirty the table looked, under its dustcover. The look of the water flowing out of the tap into the clean sink in the bathroom, and then the dirty dry sink with taps that didn't work.
"Tin, please let me call you that, please, let me come back and be your wife the way I should be. The way we promised before God that we would."
"You didn't want any cameras at our wedding, Mad," he said. "Why was that?"
She was toying with his hair. "I wanted to imagine that I was the perfect bride, beautiful as snow in sunlight." Her words were simple, and her voice was like low music. Her hand touched his skin, the same touch that had wakened him a few minutes ago and it was awakening him again. "I didn't want to see pictures that might contradict my dream. Do you believe all those Kodak ads? That nothing is real unless you have a picture of it to prove it to yourself? Maybe I should be giving you a Hallmark card right now, or calling you on AT&T so we can have a really touching moment."
He laughed. It was Madeleine, it was the woman he loved. The sound of her voice, the feel of her hair under his fingers.
Her hair.
And now suddenly her hair was sticky with orange juice. But a moment ago it hadn't been. His hand froze in place.
She looked into his eyes. "What?" she said. "What?"
He turned his face away. He thought of Lizzy. He thought of the false image of her, walking up to the townhouse that was rented to nobody.
He pushed her away and walked to the wall where the glass had fallen. He bent down and picked up a shard of glass and drew it along the wall. A scratch appeared in the wallpaper. Suddenly, without planning it, without knowing he was going to do it until he did, he jabbed the glass into the skin of his abdomen. Jabbed twice, three times. Only then did the pain come. He doubled over, it was so bad. Fell to one knee. But he knew it was a lie. He looked down at his belly. Blood was coming out, but there wasn't enough of it.
And then, suddenly, there was more. Too much. He hadn't hit an artery. There wasn't anything there that could bleed so much. In fact, he knew that there was no wound there to bleed. Nothing. No reason for pain. There wasn't even a piece of glass in his hand.
He still held the shard in his fingers.
Hadn't Lizzy told him he was stronger than most people? Why couldn't he fight off these illusions of hers?
On one knee, he sliced through the skin of the other. Sliced deeper and deeper. The glass cut deep. But all he could think of, all he let himself think of, was dissecting a frog in science class. The musculature of the leg when he peeled back the formaldehyde-soaked skin. And for the moment he thought of that, his leg was also a frog's leg. He peeled the skin off just as he had the frog's leg.
"No!" cried Madeleine.
There was no wound in his leg at all. No shard of glass in his hand. No stab wound in his belly. The orange juice glass lay on the floor where he must have dropped it when Madeleine made him think she had taken it out of his hand.
On all fours, he moved to the spot where she had been standing when he poured the orange juice over her head. There it was, a single puddle, spattered, but only one stream of juice had fallen, uninterrupted by a human body. He had recovered reality.
Which meant that he had lost her again.
"Madeleine," he whispered.
From the couch, her voice sounded cold and angry. "I'm still here."
He recoiled, fell back onto the carpet, looked at her. She was on the couch primping her hair, looking into a small vanity mirror. "So your dead sister told you that you were strong," said Madeleine. "Bully for you."
"Who are you really?" he said. "Just be honest with me, can't you? Who are you and why did you pick me?"
"I'm Madeleine Cryer Fears," she said. "I'm your wife."
"You don't exist and you never did."
"Oh? Then who have you been making love to in beds all over America?"
"A lie," he said. "I've been loving a lie."
"Wrong answer, Quentin," she said. "I am the truth. I am the deepest truth in the most secret places in your heart. I am all your dreams come true."
"What do you want from me?"
"What every wife wants. Someone to love. Someone who'll love me. Trust. Faith. A future. Your babies."
"Shut up!"
"Do I take it this means you've changed your mind about children? Men are like that, so changeable. But I can wait. I won't trick you—no babies till you're ready to be a daddy."
"You never let up, do you?"
She leaned forward until she was spread like a lizard on the couch, leaning over the arm so they were nearly face to face. "Let me tell you a secret, my darling," she whispered. "I'm as real as any wife. What do you think marriage is? It's all pretense. Your mother pretending that your father's temper doesn't scare her. Your father pretending that he doesn't hate it when she gets him all riled up about something and then suddenly can't understand why he's upset. Pretending to be happy with each other when they're both so desperately lonely because along about week three of their marriage they realized that they didn't really know each other and they never would, they'd be strangers together for the rest of their lives. But they couldn't live with that, nobody can, I've seen thousands of marriages and they can't face it that they're paired up with a stranger and so the decent ones, the ones who want to be good, they pretend to be whatever they think their partner wants them to be, and then they pretend that they believe in their partner's pretense. The only difference between them and me is that I'm so good at it. When I pretend to be exactly the wife you really want, I am that wife. I am. It is my whole existence. And when I pretend to love you exactly as you are, I do. I'm totally focused on you, I'm witty when you want witty, sexy when you want sexy, weepy when you want sentimental, beautiful when you want to show me off. I am your true wife."
"You don't know anything," said Quentin.
"I know you."
"You know how to get power over me. And it worked, yeah, you had me dancing. Eating out of your hand. Give the boy exactly what he dreams of and he'll sit up and beg."
"I'm the one who's begging now," she said.
"You're the one who doesn't leave footprints in the snow," he said. "You're the one that orange juice pours right through."
"You think you don't believe in me."
"I don't."
"Then why am I still here?"
"You're not," he said.
He got to his feet. At first, for just a moment, he limped on the leg he had carved with the shard of glass. Except he hadn't cut it, there was no injury; he forced himself to walk without a limp.
"Even when you aren't looking at me, I'm here," she said.
She followed him as he walked through the doorway to his bedroom. He slammed it and it passed right through her. She stood there on the inside of the slammed door.
"I don't like it when you do that," she said.
"Slam doors?"
"I think that on the whole I've been pretty decent about this."
"You!" He climbed back under his sheets. "You're an indecency."
"I didn't have to come to you with love, you know."
He looked away from her, leaned over and switched off the light. Now only the faint light slanting in through the mostly-closed blinds illuminated the room.
"I can find other things in your mind," she said.
Suddenly he threw the bedclothes off him. A half-dozen huge shiny spiders were skittering rapidly along the sheet, over his legs. He flung himself off the bed onto the floor.
"I know those spiders aren't real," he said, panting.
A man's voice answered him, a bleak-sounding whisper. "What is reality?" And then a vast hand clamped him around the throat and picked him up and flung him back onto the bed. As he sprawled on his back, the huge, white, slimy figure with a pus-filled wound for a face raised its other hand and smashed it down into his groin. Quentin screamed in agony until the monster squeezed his throat shut.
This isn't happening, he told himself. The trouble was believing it.
If I believe it, he thought, she can kill me with my own fear. I have to stop fighting it because it isn't there. Like the broken glass wasn't there. Like the wounds in my leg. My throat is shut by my own panic, not by any hand because there is no hand.
Breathe slowly, let the air out a little, then bring in a little. There's nothing in the room with me. I'm alone here on my bed.
He opened his eyes. The monster was gone.
But Madeleine was lying on him, her head on his chest, her waist between his legs, her hair spilling onto the bedsheet. Her body felt warm. He could feel her heartbeat. And despite himself, he was filled with longing. He raised his hand to caress her. But he stopped himself. It would not happen. He brought his hands up and tucked them behind his head, fingers interlocking. Just like the monster, this image, too, would go away.
"Aren't you the strong one," she whispered. "Aren't you brave, to insist on reality. You never could face your own dreams."
She rose from his belly. But not as a normal woman might, raising herself up on her arms. Rather she rose like a marionette, pulled by strings. And yes, she was a marionette, with Madeleine's face, her naked body, but the joints were mechanical and her jaw moved on a string.
"Please. Someday, if I'm really good, can't I be a real girl?"
And then she was gone.
He lay there, panting, exhausted physically and emotionally.
"Oh, Lizzy, I did it," he whispered.
He rolled to one side, then onto his stomach, one leg drawn up, his fist doubled under his chin, the way he always slept, the way he had slept as a boy. But his eyes stayed wide open. Seeing nothing. Seeing everything.
"Sorry, Quentin, but he must have seen our surveillance team," said Wayne. "Doubled back twice and we lost him."
"Him?" That was something, Quentin figured, to know it was a man.
"A guy in a messenger service uniform. So you were right, she didn't just use a stamp."
"Guys from messenger services don't double back to avoid surveillance."
"Yeah, well, they assumed he was a messenger and the real quarry was whoever he brought the message to. And then he pulled his maneuver and he was gone."
"Well, the message arrived," said Quentin.
"You got a call?"
"A visit."
"And?"
"I learned nothing," said Quentin bitterly.
"How can you learn nothing? Who came?"
"Madeleine."
"So she's not dead?"
"Wayne, it wasn't the Madeleine you believe in, the flesh and blood one. It was the Madeleine who doesn't leave footprints."
"Quentin, how can I help you when you won't help me back?"
"Keep on believing I'm crazy if you want, Wayne. But don't let up on the investigation."
"Quentin, really. I'm trying to believe you. And you know me, I'm a lawyer, I can act like I believe my client whether I do or not. I learned that from watching the O. J. trial."
"OK, Wayne. It's cool."
"What is?"
"Madeleine visiting me. You not believing me no matter how hard you try. The investigators losing the messenger. Even if they don't find anything, I need them to keep going after everything."
"By the way, the deed to that house is in the name of a certain Anna Laurent Tyler. Seems she inherited from her mother, Delia Forrest Laurent, who got it from her late husband's will. It was originally built by a Laurent, though, back in the early 1800s."
"Any address for Anna Laurent Tyler?" Quentin was writing down the names. He remembered that in the graveyard there had been a Delia Forrest Laurent, Devoted Wife, sharing a headstone with Theodore Aurelius Laurent, Beloved Husband.
"Sure," said Wayne, "but it's the address of the house in the deed."
"Anna Laurent Tyler. That's something. The police chief in Mixinack said that she had a married daughter. Probably she didn't really marry a Duncan, but maybe we can get the true name out of the local papers. From the wedding announcement. A Tyler being given away by her mother, Anna Laurent Tyler."
"When?"
"I'd start about three years ago and work backward. How would I know? If I find out more from Chief Bolt today, I'll let you know."
"Today?" asked Wayne.
"I'm going back up to New York. To Mixinack."
"Why? Hair of the dog?"
"Yeah, well, this dog follows me around anyway, I might as well head for the doghouse."
"So you aren't missing the little woman as much as you thought."
"Let's say that last night's interview was painful."
"You have my sympathy, Quentin."
Chief Bolt's police department was in a graceful old city building, the kind made of huge stones with classical-looking pillars and lions in front. There were two police cars parked in back, in reserved stalls. Quentin pulled his rented Taurus into one of the Visitor spaces, went inside, and began wandering around in search of the police department. Apparently this was one of those small towns that lived by the principle that if you didn't know where something was, you had no business finding it. He would have asked for directions, but the place was deserted. Somewhere, though, somebody was typing. He finally found the source of the sound in the basement, behind an unmarked door. He knocked.
"Come in," said a woman.
He stuck his head in the room. "Just looking for the police department, ma'am."
"You found it."
"This? Right here?"
"Said so, didn't I?"
"I have an appointment with Chief Bolt."
She pointed toward a closed door behind her, then went back to her typing. Quentin hadn't realized that New York manners extended so far north.
Quentin knocked on the chief's door—which also had no sign. This time a man's voice told him to come in.
Bolt was a burly man with military-short hair, but he didn't have the air of rigidity about him that Quentin had always associated with that look. His uniform was a little tight on him, a little rumpled. And his face looked to have some warmth, as if he might just have a sense of humor. Not usually a cop thing.
"Hi, I'm Quentin Fears."
Bolt nodded, but didn't look up from the form he was filling out. So much for the warmth.
After a moment, Quentin realized that it wasn't a form at all, it was a crossword puzzle.
"Five-letter word for anxiety, has a G in the middle," said Bolt.
"Angst," said Quentin instantly.
"Spelled?"
"A-N-G-S-T."
"Oh, angst," said Bolt, pronouncing the A to rhyme with the vowel in rang.
"Need help with any others?" said Quentin.
"I would've got it eventually." He looked up at Quentin. "Younger than you sounded on the phone."
"No, I sounded like a guy my age," said Quentin. Once again, as he had on the phone, Quentin picked up Bolt's offhand manner, his bantering style.
Bolt grinned. The warmth Quentin had seen wasn't an illusion. "I figured I'd never see you, we got off to such a good start on the phone."
"Yeah, well, once you visit Mixinack, you keep on coming back."
"We ought to have that as a slogan. Put it on a sign out at the city limits."
"I got a million of 'em."
"Sit down, Mr. Fears." His tone was friendly now. Quentin's instinct had been right. Bolt liked a man who gave as good as he got.
Quentin sat down and looked around a little. The office was meticulously clean, despite the tattiness of it. And contrary to what Bolt had said on the phone, his desk had only a few papers on it.
"Looks like you're all caught up with your work," Quentin said.
"We're doing OK for the middle of a crime wave."
"Chief Bolt, I just wanted to ask you a couple of questions."
"Really? Just a couple? Couldn't you phone?"
"I figured fair was fair, and you'd have some questions to ask me."
"Still, there's a phone. Why are you here?"
"Because when I get the answers to my questions, I want to be able to act on them immediately."
Bolt nodded. "I always feel that way, too. Found your wife yet?"
"As a matter of fact, I saw her last night. She's not missing anymore."
Bolt nodded more slowly. "Well, good. Why didn't she come along?"
"I didn't say she was back with me. Just that she wasn't missing."
Bolt sighed and recited:
The ways of love are strange and hard:
The love you want is always barred;
The love you have you want to change.
The ways of love are hard and strange.
"I didn't want to change my love," said Quentin.
"Did you like the poem? I wrote it."
"Did you? I thought I'd heard it before."
"Yeah, well, that's why I'm working in a police department in Mixinack instead of being lionized in the New York literary scene."
"You want to hear my questions?"
"I'm all ears."
"Where is Anna Laurent Tyler?"
"In a rest home."
"And where is that rest home?"
Bolt nodded slowly. "Well, now, what are you going to do when you locate it?
"Go see her."
"Won't do you any good," said Bolt.
"You don't know what I want to say to her."
"I don't care if you want to sing her the 'Anvil Chorus'."
"I hope you know the tenor part," said Quentin.
"She's pretty much a vegetable, son," said Bolt. "So you can talk to her all you want, but I don't see how it'll do you much good."
Quentin felt as if the air had been knocked out of his chest. "Can't be," he said.
"Can so," said the chief. "Well, look at that. The word that crosses angst at the N is anvil. And I just said anvil a minute ago. Can you believe that?"
"Just one of the many marvels of an afternoon in Mixinack."
"You still want to see her?"
"I can find out where she is eventually, but instead of making me have my investigators call every licensed rest home in the state, why not just tell me?"
"Better than that. I'll take you."
"In a police car? Will you flash the lights and run the siren?"
"In your car. You think I'm going to use up part of my monthly mileage on giving a rich man a free ride?"
"When can you go?"
"Now," said Bolt, pushing back from his desk. "I haven't had lunch. You like chili?"
"No." Quentin followed him out into the hall.
"That's cause you haven't had Bella's chili. Is that really the coat you came in?"
"Yes."
"Nobody told you it was winter?"
"I don't plan to hike around outside a lot."
"In the north, in the winter, you should always dress as if you were going to have to walk home ten miles in a blizzard from a car stuck in a drift."
"That's how my driver should dress. I should dress for sitting in the limo drinking champagne while I wait for him to get back with help."
By now they were outside. Quentin led the way to his Taurus.
"Oh, I see," said Bolt. "That was a joke. You don't have a driver."
"You don't have a coat, either."
"Man, I must be stupid," said Bolt.
Since snow was falling steadily now, he had a point.
They came out of the parking lot and Bolt directed him until he was heading south on the two-lane road that led past the Laurent house. Quentin realized at once that they weren't heading for the rest home at all. Sure enough, when they got to the half-hidden driveway Bolt directed him to turn left and go on in.
"I see quite a few new tire tracks since I was here last," said Quentin.
"Yeah, they're all mine," said Bolt. "Had to come here and take pictures of the footprints before they got covered."
"Oh," said Quentin. "Evidence?"
"Definitely. I just don't know what it's evidence of. Now that your wife is back in the land of the living."
"If you can call it living," said Quentin. "A joke."
"I got it. First time I heard that, it was Andy Devine in some cavalry movie. Or maybe it was Rin Tin Tin on TV when I was a kid. Was he in that?"
"Before my time," said Quentin.
They got out of the car and Quentin dutifully tagged along up to the front door.
"Hope you don't mind the detour," said Bolt.
"I kind of expected it," said Quentin.
"Just wanted you to walk me through what you did the night you spent here."
"Do I need an attorney?"
"Don't you have one?"
"I meant with me."
"I'm not going to arrest you for trespass, Mr. Fears. Therefore you have no need for an attorney."
"Am I really that stupid-looking?"
"Humor me, Mr. Fears."
They were standing in the middle of the entry hall. Quentin looked at the fireplace but didn't see any talking rats. The door to the parlor had no writing on it. And the chief was a strong man with a pistol. All of this made Quentin feel much better about being in this room again.
"I never saw this room till I came to see Mrs. Tyler off to the rest home," said Bolt.
"Bet it was cleaner then."
"Much. The glaziers are supposed to have come this morning to fix the window in the library. It was broken, you know."
"I know."
"I used to come to the back door all the time. Downstairs. There's a ramp going down to the kitchen. Toolrooms are down there, too."
"You used to work here?"
"As a kid. Started helping out with weeding when I was little. That was before chemicals, so keeping the dandelions out of the lawns kept about a dozen of us kids in movie money all summer. But I kept hanging around, ended up mowing lawns and then I made gardener's assistant. That's how I put myself through college. Shoveled snow off that front porch out there so many times I hate to remember."
"So this house is more than just a neighbor's place to you."
"Had my first kiss here," said Bolt, sighing. "Come on downstairs, I'm curious about what you did in the kitchen."
Quentin followed him. Bolt flipped on lightswitches as he went.
"Lights are on now?" Quentin asked.
"Guess so," said Bolt. "I had them turned on yesterday. I wanted to see more than a flashlight could show me."
With the lights on, the stairs and hall looked to Quentin just as they had the night Madeleine led him down for a midnight snack. But the kitchen didn't. Quentin had distinctly remembered a table. Instead, there was a spot on the floor where someone had apparently sat down on the filthy linoleum.
"You walked in here—in the dark, or with a flashlight," said Bolt. "You went to the fridge, to those cupboards. But the fridge is locked shut, as you might notice, and nobody's opened it. So why walk there? Twice—see? Twice."
Quentin remembered getting out mustard, mayo, a couple of sliced meats, and a head of lettuce. Then going back for pickles when Mad asked for one.
"They used to keep bread in this cupboard," said Bolt. "And sure enough, here's where you walked. To the bread cupboard, and then to the silverware drawer. See? Only... no bread, no silverware."
He opened the empty drawer, the empty cupboard.
"Bummer," said Quentin.
"Then you sit down on the floor. But... right where the kitchen table used to be. Right where the chair at the head of the table used to be. Butler used to have the undisputed right to sit in that chair. The cook made damn sure nobody else—least of all a sweaty gardener's assistant—sat in it."
"Got to keep that furniture clean."
"Why did you sit on this floor, Mr. Fears? And what did you find in those cupboards?"
Quentin shrugged.
"Now, see, there we are," said Bolt. "You want me to answer your questions, but you won't give me tit for tat."
"Why give you answers you won't believe?"
"Well, answers I don't believe would be a step forward. Because right now what I don't believe is that you saw your wife alive yesterday."
Quentin shook his head. "When you watched all those old Columbo episodes, didn't you notice that he always had a dead body before he started the murder investigation?"
"I didn't say murder," said Bolt.
"You said you didn't think I saw my wife alive yesterday. And I tell you she was as alive as she ever was."
Bolt kept opening cupboards until they were all open. Then he hitched himself up to sit on one of the grimy counters. "This is where I had my first kiss. This room. I was sitting on this counter."
"The cook?" asked Quentin.
"The owner's daughter. Rowena Tyler."
"How old?" asked Quentin.
"Who?" He must have startled the chief out of a reverie.
"Rowena. You."
"I was twenty-two. And don't ask why it was my first kiss at that age."
"My first kiss came later than that, Chief," said Quentin.
"She was fifteen."
"So were you her first kiss too?"
"I didn't ask. Judging from the chasteness of the kiss, I'd say yes. And thanks for not saying some smart remark about robbing the cradle."
"I was just thinking that it's sort of a young-adult version of Lady Chatterley's Lover."
"Never read it. Sounded boring compared to the True Confessions magazines my friends and I snuck over and read in the pharmacy when we were twelve."
"So this room is full of memories for you."
"Rowena's about your age now, wherever she is."
"Never met her, I'm afraid."
"She married and left before she was twenty. I think Mrs. Tyler knew that something had passed between us, because for the first couple of years she didn't ever mention Rowena in front of me. And then one day she did, and I didn't flinch, and then she kept me posted about her. She had a child, a daughter, in 1984. She's going to turn twelve this year."
"The woman I married was older than that."
"But younger than Rowena."
"Definitely."
"Help me with this, Mr. Fears."
"See, here's where we're running into our conflict, Chief. You seem to think I understand what happened here, and that I'm just not telling you."
"Aren't these your footprints?"
"I'm willing to bet they are."
"And your buttprint on the floor?"
"Wouldn't be surprised."
"That stairway is pitch black, day or night, when the power's off."
"If you say so."
"But your prints are surefooted."
"Flashlight?"
"And the driver says that when he dropped you and your wife off out in front, the lights were on and a servant was waiting to take Mrs. Fears's bags."
"Odd what details will stick in a person's mind."
"And the servant knew her. Called her by name."
"No, he got it wrong," said Quentin. "He called her by her maiden name, Cryer."
"Tyler."
"Cryer."
"That's what he said, too. Amazing, don't you think?"
"I hoped maybe he'd remember."
"Lights on all over the house," said Bolt.
"Well, not all over. A few windows."
"Not possible," said Bolt.
"What a liar that driver is."
"Did you get to him first?"
"And bribe him to tell you a story that is so obviously false? Boy am I dumb!"
Bolt shook his head. "This family matters to me, and you're doing something here and I really, really want to know what it is because even though the old lady is about as alert as a lawn these days, I owe her. More than that—I like her. She's a friend. And when she dies, this house will go to Rowena. And her I more than liked. Even if I couldn't give her what she wanted most."
"What was that?"
"A way out of Mixinack."
Quentin nodded. "Small-town blues."
"Yeah, well, I'm a small-town guy. Small-town dreams. I told her I'd go to the city with her but she said, 'And do what?' and I didn't have an answer for her."
"They have cops down there, too."
"Yeah, but the cops down there work for a living. And I wasn't a cop then, remember? I was a gardener's assistant."
"Starcrossed lovers."
"My point, Mr. Fears, is that you look like some kind of computer nerd and I'm a really strong guy and unless I know that you aren't going to hurt these people with your millions of dollars and your private investigators and your lawyers, well, I'm going to beat the shit out of you right here in this kitchen."
"Actually, I was kind of hoping you could protect me from them."
"These are good people, you rich lying asshole."
"Chief, I know you won't believe the truth if I tell you, and you obviously won't accept my silence, so you just tell me the lie that you'll believe and I'll say it. Whatever it takes to keep from getting beaten up."
"You think I won't do it? You think just because I know you'll come down on me afterward with every lawyer in the known world, I won't do it?"
"Oh, sure, maybe you'll do it, maybe you won't. If you decide to do it, I'll just stand here until you knock me down. I won't raise a hand against you because you're an officer of the law and besides, I've never raised my hand in violence against another person in my life."
"What are you, a Quaker?"
"A wimp," said Quentin. "Come on, Chief Bolt, I like you and you like me. I understand why you're threatening me but I'm not going to tell you stuff that I know will just make you madder. I'll accept how mad you are right now. I think if you beat me up when you're only this mad, I'll live through it without needing serious surgery."
The chief slid off the counter and took a step toward Quentin. He didn't flinch, though the chief's threats did scare him. Quentin had never been beaten up. He had, however, seen the Rodney King tape.
But Chief Bolt didn't hit him. Instead he slammed all the cupboard doors shut and kicked the fridge. Then he stood with his forehead pressing against the door of the freezer compartment.
"Chief," said Quentin, "thanks for not hitting me."
"You're welcome," said Chief Bolt. "It's not you I'm angry at."
"I figured that, since I'm such a nice guy."
"This place really screwed up my life. I should be happy. I've got a good job, a good wife, and some good kids. But I come back in here and it all comes pouring back over me. And I want to hurt somebody."
"I know the feeling."
"Do you? No, the real question—did you?"
"Chief Bolt, I don't know for sure who Madeleine is. But I do know that when I came here the other night, a servant met us outside in the drive, and the lights were on. Mad and I came down to this kitchen and sat at the table. I was at the head of the table, and she was beside me on the right."
"Housekeeper's chair."
"And we made sandwiches. My second trip to the fridge was for pickles."
Bolt reached down and snapped the lock open—it hadn't been fully engaged, apparently. He yanked open the refrigerator door. "Show me the pickles, Mr. Fears!"
The refrigerator didn't even have shelves.
"They tasted very good," said Quentin. "But the next day, after my wife disappeared, I was as hungry as if I had come down in the dark, sat on the floor, and eaten nothing but my imagination."
Bolt shook his head.
"Chief, after my wife left me, I saw this house as you see it right now. Not the kitchen, of course. The stairs were too dark to get down without a flashlight, and I didn't have one. But while she was with me, there were lights. There was food. Furniture. Everything clean and elegant. We sat down to breakfast—even though it was lunchtime—we ate in the library. No broken window. And eight of us at table. Grandmother—that's all that Madeleine ever called her—and... let's see if I can remember... me and Mad, of course, and then Uncle Stephen, Aunt Athena—no, her real name was Minerva—and Simon and Cousin Jude and Uncle Paul."
"Paul?" asked Chief Bolt. His voice sounded different. "There was a Paul who lived here."
"You know him?"
"I saw him a couple of times when I was a child. At the town Christmas party. The Easter egg hunt on the lawn out front."
"Really? What was he like?"
"Short," said the chief. "He was a toddler. He died when he was about a year and a half old."
"Must not be the same Paul," said Quentin.
"You went out to the graveyard," said the chief. "Let's go out there again. Let's look around."
"You got the heat turned on out there?" But the chief was already heading up the stairs. Quentin followed.
The snow was big flakes now, a Christmasy kind of snow instead of the nasty drizzly snow that had been falling earlier. All the old footprints were gone. But the chief seemed to have memorized Quentin's route through the graveyard.
"like you're trying to catch someone at first, big strides," said Bolt. "And then you see there's nobody in here and you have to see if there's any other way out, or if they climbed over the fence—am I right?"
"Dead on."
"And then you start looking at the headstones. I checked every single one you stopped at. Simon, Minerva, Jude, Stephen."
"I noticed the coincidence," said Quentin. "But the dates were impossible."
"See this one?" He pointed out the grave of the infant Paul who had died at the age of a year and a half.
"Yeah, I saw it," said Quentin.
"Paul was Rowena's brother. She never knew him, though. He was older, and he died a couple of years before she was born. But she came here a lot, to look at his grave."
"Grim," said Quentin.
"After I kissed her that time, after she was sure I was in love with her, she told me a secret. The reason why she wanted to get away from this house."
Quentin said nothing. This was obviously a very difficult memory for Chief Bolt—he was trembling, and his voice was thick with emotion.
"She told me her brother had been murdered."
Quentin felt a chill run through him.
But the chief wasn't done yet. "She told me her mother killed him."
What a wonderful family, thought Quentin. Grandmother, with blood on her hands.
"I take it you never arrested Mrs. Tyler for the crime," said Quentin.
"I didn't believe her. I told Rowena that she must have overheard something and misunderstood it. What evidence did she have, I asked. How could she possibly know something that happened before she was born? And she just looked at me and said, 'I know what I know, Mike.' "
"And?"
"And when I didn't believe her, she didn't see me anymore. She wasn't in the kitchen when I finished my day's work. I hung around each day, waiting. Came early and stayed late. Worked especially hard, but I never saw her."
"She hid from you?"
"I couldn't even ask, because if I asked that would imply that I had some right to ask, and I was the gardener's assistant, for Pete's sake. But I didn't have to ask, I knew what she was telling me. After a couple of weeks I quit and became a cop in Albany, which was a bigger city than I wanted to live in, and after a couple of years the job I've got now was open and they hired me and I came back and I just couldn't stay away from this house, I'd stop by here and Mrs. Tyler would talk to me and tell me news about Rowena and how she was sorry I just missed her. And then she got married and I told you the rest."
"Do you believe her now?"
"I was five when Paul Tyler died. But I looked it up in the library. The Mixinack paper was a daily in those days and the story filled the front page for a week. A real tragedy. The chauffeur backed over the baby. Didn't see him toddle behind the car after he started it up."
"Doesn't sound like murder."
"Chauffeur left at once for England. Distraught, poor guy. Wasn't even here for the inquest. The family didn't blame him, they even paid his way. Out of the country. He was the only witness."
"But who would doubt what happened?"
"So here you are, with a New York limo driver to back up your story about seeing lights and servants here, and a wife who claimed to have grown up in this house. And you have breakfast with people whose names are all on headstones in the graveyard. Including a boy that Rowena told me was murdered by his own mother. If that was true, how could she know? How?"
Quentin didn't answer.
"Because in this house," said Bolt, "the dead walk."
Quentin looked away. Walked to the entrance of the graveyard and looked out over the falling snow. He heard Bolt come up behind him, looked over his shoulder at him.
"So I'm crazy, is that it?" asked Bolt.
"Have you ever seen anything yourself?" asked Quentin.
"Only one thing," said Bolt.
Quentin waited.
"The door at the back of the entry hall, the back left—it doesn't open."
The parlor door.
"Your footprints led right up to that door, and then back out again, but I didn't see where you turned around," said Bolt. "You've been in that room, haven't you?"
Quentin nodded.
"It opened for you."
"I sure can't go through walls."
"The cook said that nobody ever went in that room," said Bolt.
"I'm not surprised to hear it," said Quentin.
"Can't see in through the windows."
Quentin looked over at the house. "Takes kind of a tall ladder to find that out, doesn't it?"
"The old lady asked me to keep an eye on the house."
"Apparently the parlor is an exception."
"Am I right?" asked Bolt.
Quentin nodded. "As far as I know. Yeah, you're right. I ate breakfast with some dead people."
"Except one," said Bolt.
"Grandmother," said Quentin.
"You see why I had to have your answer before I took you out to see her."
"Well what was that about beating me up in the kitchen?"
"Because I was hoping I was wrong and you were just a rich guy jerking people around."
"Why would that be better?"
"Because if baby Paul was murdered, that would explain why the house is haunted. And that would explain how Rowena knew that somebody murdered him."
"And you didn't believe her."
"And I lost her."
Quentin leaned against the arch. "Well, Chief Bolt, sometimes folks just screw up."
"I can't say I screwed up," said Bolt. "I love my wife and my kids. I have a good life. And if I'd gotten involved with the Tylers, well—look how good it's all worked out for you."
"Which is not to say that Madeleine fits into the haunted house theory," said Quentin.
"Does she have to be buried here to haunt it? Or maybe she was secretly buried."
Quentin shook his head. "There's just one little problem with the ghost theory, Chief. I met Madeleine in Washington, DC at a party. We traveled all over the country together. Must be five hundred people shook her hand at parties and fundraisers and dinners, not to mention our wedding. I don't think she's a ghost."
"Well, then, we're back to my original theory, and I have to wonder if you have any witness besides yourself who saw her alive last night."
"Can't we just agree that some really weird stuff happened here the night I slept over?" said Quentin.
"Mr. Fears, before I take you to see the old lady, I have to point out to you that one of the main reasons I didn't believe Rowena is because I knew Mrs. Tyler. She's one of the best people I know. And there is not a chance, not one skinny chance in hell that she would murder anybody, let alone her own baby."
"And my wife Madeleine loved me so much there's not a chance she'd ever leave me."
"She's a ghost, son," said Chief Bolt. "I mean for Pete's sake, she disappeared in this graveyard, didn't she? That's why you were looking for her here, wasn't it?"
Quentin nodded.
"Just cause her name isn't on a marker doesn't mean she isn't dead."
"Chief, you stick to your theory and I'll stick to mine."
"Well, hell, son, since we're both believing in the impossible, can't we at least get our stories straight?"
"Not till I figure out how your story fits in with my story."
"Well if you'd tell me your story, maybe I could help you make it fit."
Quentin considered this a moment. "All right," he said. "On the drive to Grandmother's house."
"I don't know as we'll have enough time. It isn't far."
"Over the river and through the woods, right?"
"That describes the route to every house in this part of the country, son."
"Quentin," said Quentin. "Please call me Quentin."
"I'm Mike," said the chief.
"Mike, I'm ready to try Bella's chili now."
"Not a good idea if you're going to tell me your story while you eat. Nobody can talk with a mouth full of Bella's chili."
"We'll work it out."
They went back into the house so Bolt could turn off all the lights. The entry hall was the last room, of course, and before Bolt turned off the light at the front door, he strode the length of the hall and stood in front of the parlor door and tried to open it. Tried hard. Nothing happened.
He turned to Quentin and shrugged. "See?" he said.
"Oh, I believed you," said Quentin.
"Well come here and try it yourself," said Bolt.
"I don't think so."
"You went in that room, you said. I'm just asking you to try the door. I'm right here beside you."
"Well, that takes care of the trespassing charge, and breaking and entering. But I keep thinking, what's on the other side of that door, holding the handle so you can't turn it?"
"Look," said Bolt, "we've already established that there's nobody but you and me in this house solid enough to leave a footprint."
Quentin walked slowly toward Bolt, who stood back to give him access to the door. Quentin paused in front of it, then reached out to touch the handle.
A single shining word appeared on the door:
NO
Behind him, Bolt gasped. Quentin turned to face him. "You see it?"
Bolt was backing up, just as Quentin had done a few days before, when he first saw the writing.
Someone else had seen it. Quentin knew it was absurd in the face of whatever danger lay behind the parlor door, but at this moment he was almost giddy with delight at having a witness. "It's just words," Quentin said. "It won't hurt us."
"Just the same," said Bolt. "I think I'm done here for now."
That was fine with Quentin. "Let's go get some lunch."
The chief's fingers trembled as he locked the door of the house from the outside.
"You keep this locked all the time?" asked Quentin.
"Always."
Deadbolt, handset. Two locks.
"Well, it wasn't locked when Madeleine and I came here," said Quentin.
"She had the key?"
"She doesn't leave footprints, Mike," said Quentin. "I don't think she can carry keys."
"Well, this deadbolt needs a key, inside or out," said Bolt. "And it was locked when I got here, after your call."
"And there were no other footprints but mine?"
"None."
They looked at each other for a long moment.
"I think," said Quentin, "that we can safely conclude that there's something or someone in this house that can lock and unlock doors."
Bolt reflected on this for a moment. "You know, trying to open that parlor door was about the stupidest idea I ever had."
"Chili," said Quentin. "Lunch. And then the old lady's rest home."
"Anyplace will do," said Bolt as he shambled down the snow-covered steps. "As long as it isn't here."
The chili was hot, but this was Mixinack, not San Antonio, so it wasn't hot enough to stop Quentin from telling his whole story to the one person on earth who had to believe it. Then they got in Quentin's car and started driving north, despite the thickening storm.
It was a hundred-mile drive up the valley. The snow was deep and the plows were out in force, as the towns of the Hudson Valley locked down for yet another major storm. "We need some relief," said Chief Bolt. "About time we had another winter Olympics in Lake Placid. Only sure way of preventing snow for a whole winter."
"You're just getting old," said Quentin. "I still love the snow."
"You're just from California," said Bolt. "If you grew up shoveling it, you wouldn't think it was so nice. You sure you know how to drive in it?"
In answer, Quentin accelerated and then did a sharp enough lane change on the highway to set the car fishtailing a little on the snow. He handled it immediately, stabilizing the car and drifting back down to a safer speed.
"Next time just answer with your mouth," said Bolt. "I don't need a demonstration of stunt driving."
"I spent a winter in South Bend and another in Duluth and another in Laramie."
"Sounds like you need a new travel agent. Turn off at the next light."
"Left or right?"
"Right puts us in the railroad right-of-way, so I guess left."
"Since we're out of your jurisdiction, can I tell you that nobody likes a smug bastard with a badge?"
"I don't want to be liked, Quentin, I just want to get some of this chili out of my system."
"How far are we from the rest home?"
"They put these things close to the main highways so the families won't have any trouble visiting. Not that many of them do. Left at the next light. Then the next right and it's on the right."
"What's it called?"
"I don't remember. It's the only rest home there. Looks like a big motel, only less parking and no neon."
"It looks more like a prison than a motel," said Quentin, when it came into view.
"Yeah, well, you haven't seen many prisons, then."
"I meant except for no bars on the windows."
"And no twenty-foot fences and guard towers and floodlights and checkpoints."
"So when did I say I was an expert on anything?" said Quentin. He pulled the car to a stop in a parking place. At least he was pretty sure it was a parking place. There were plenty of choices but no visible lines. Now that he was here, he wasn't sure what he hoped to accomplish. Bolt said she was in a coma, or at least not coherent. If that was true, there was no hope of learning anything useful from her. Yet she had called him, asked him to find her. Or had she? How did he know the message was really from her? Up against an illusionist like the User, how could he ever be sure what was real?
The snow was real, he was confident of that. Thick and cold as it worked its way up his pantlegs and down into his running shoes.
The front door of the rest home was unlocked, but there was no one at the reception desk. There was a bell. Chief Bolt rang it, but nobody came.
"Hello?" called Bolt. Quentin walked on into the main hallway and looked left and right. Nobody.
"They can't all be out on a field trip," said Bolt.
"Probably shorthanded, in this storm," said Quentin. "It's four o'clock. Maybe everybody's fixing dinner."
"Dining hall's straight ahead, kitchen's off to the left," said Bolt.
Sure enough, the cook and two attendants were frantically making dinner. "Forget looking for people and pitch in and cut up lettuce for the salad!" cried the cook.
"Yeah, right," said Bolt.
"Why not?" said Quentin. "It's not like we have an appointment."
"I could do this at home!" Bolt protested.
"Yes, but here we'll be doing it out of pure virtue." He was already washing his hands.
"Thank you!" cried the harried cook.
"Does this mean I can go back to bedpan duty now?" said one of the attendants.
"Break's over, back on your heads!" said the other. Nobody laughed.
Quentin took a big knife and started hacking at the lettuce. Soon Bolt was beside him, peeling and slicing cucumbers. "I always feel like I'm emasculating something when I do this," said Bolt.
"Didn't know you cops lived such metaphorical lives."
"Told you I was a poet."
They chopped for a while in silence, except for the songs the cook began but never finished. A line or two of some Elvis song or a Four Seasons tune in full falsetto, and then she'd peter out, humming and getting the melody wronger and wronger until it was some other song which she would drift into singing till she ran out of lyrics.
"I know why we're doing this," said Bolt.
"Oh?"
"Because you're scared of the old lady and you're putting off meeting her."
"That's why I'm doing this," said Quentin.
"Yeah, well, I have no will of my own."
"No wonder you send the other cops out to run your speed traps. 'No, Officer, I was only going twenty-five.' 'Oh, sorry, my mistake, what was I thinking?' "
It took longer than Quentin thought it would. Ten minutes, twenty, thirty, but finally it was done, three huge bowls of green salad, with cucumbers, radishes, cherry tomatoes sliced in half, carrot shavings, and garbanzo beans. It actually looked pretty good.
"If only some of the customers had teeth," said Bolt.
"They all have teeth," said an attendant, "if they remember to bring 'em." By now he was in full sweat, taking trays of chicken out of the oven and putting more in.
"Hate to chop and run," said Bolt.
"You were a great help," said the cook. "I was really joking when I asked you to help, and I probably broke sixty regulations by letting you do it, but I usually do this with a staff of four, some of which know what they're doing."
"Bon appetit," said Quentin.
Out in the dining room, a few residents were scattered around at the tables, though no food was being served. Apparently they brought the ones in wheelchairs early. And some of the slow walkers probably needed a head start. Shorthanded as they were, the attendants were running around like country club towel boys.
"Hard to believe this," said Quentin. "Working so hard, and no tips."
"Yeah, well, that's because the nurse who runs this place is a cast-iron bitch," said Bolt.
In a moment the nurse in question charged into the dining room heading for the kitchen. At first glance she seemed middle-aged, but that turned out to be the uniform and her businesslike air and her complete lack of makeup. Actually she couldn't be much over thirty, maybe younger, and if she hadn't stopped cold and given Quentin and Chief Bolt a hostile look, she might even have been attractive. "My evening shift can't get through the blizzard," she said, "but I still get visitors."
"We made the green salad," said Quentin.
"Oh, get real," said the nurse. "There is no salad fairy." She brushed past them and went on to the kitchen. At the door she stopped and called out to a big Polynesian-looking attendant, "Bill! Escort these two guys to the reception area, would you?" Then she disappeared into the kitchen.
As Bill the Polynesian approached, Bolt pulled out his badge and held it up. Bill took a few more steps as he recognized what it was, then gestured for them to sit down wherever they wanted.
The nurse emerged from the kitchen in a slightly better mood. "I shouldn't let non-employees handle the food, but I can't think of what you could do to poison a green salad," she said. "Mrs. Van Ness says you washed your hands."
"Could have done surgery," said Bolt.
"I know you," she said to him. "You're the cop from Mixinack who used to visit Mrs. Tyler."
"It's nice to be recognized."
"Who's the other salad fairy?"
Quentin rose to his feet. "Quentin Fears," he said.
"Sally Sannazzaro," she said. "I'm the medical officer and acting superintendent of this medium-care facility." They shook hands. "Are you a lawyer?" she said. "You don't look like a lawyer."
"Good," he said. Why had she thought he might be a lawyer? "You don't look like the medical officer and acting superintendent of a medium-care facility, either."
"Yes I do," she said pointedly.
This is going so well, thought Quentin.
Bolt took a step toward the door. "You won't be feeding the bed-care patients till later. Mind if we go visit Mrs. Tyler right now?"
"I mind very much," said Sannazzaro. "I don't allow unsupervised visits of my total-bed-care patients." To Quentin she added, "They're helpless and every visitor is a potential heir in a rush."
Bolt's face reddened. "I'm an officer of the law."
"I remember that and I don't care," said Sannazzaro. "Don't rattle my chain, Chief. You always want to see her alone and we always get mad at each other so let's skip straight to the part where you do what I say without any further argument so I don't have to get another restraining order."
"You have never had a restraining order against me!"
"Wasn't that you?" She didn't seem interested in them anymore. "I have places to go." She headed for the door.
"I always prefer a woman who knows her place," said Bolt loudly.
She didn't even look back at him.
"Why are you goading her, Mike?" asked Quentin.
"She just brings it out in me."
Sannazzaro was brusque, but she was under a lot of pressure tonight and certainly didn't need to deal with visitors.
"It's no surprise when women like that never get married," Bolt added.
This wasn't like Bolt. He had always been barbed, yes, but Quentin had never seen him mean. Till now. "Knowing men the way I do," said Quentin, "I'm surprised women ever marry."
Bolt answered with a sneer. "You didn't tell me you were so politically correct. Is somebody keeping your balls in a freezer in case you need them later?"
Was this even the same man? "It doesn't take balls to call hardworking women bitches and make their lives harder," said Quentin.
Bolt's face got ugly then, but instead of answering he stalked off to the reception area. Quentin only caught up with him when he sat down and picked up yesterday's paper. Quentin didn't try to talk to him, just sat and read the latest Time while Bolt cooled off.
But Bolt didn't want to cool off. Quentin had barely gotten into the story about the new fat substitute that caused anal leakage before Bolt was talking again. "I can't believe she still has it in for me."
"What?" said Quentin. It had seemed to him that it was Bolt who had it in for her.
"That crack about never knowing who was an heir in a hurry."
"I thought that was interesting, that they have to have a rule like that. Do you think there are a lot of murders in rest homes?"
"No," said Bolt. "That was nothing but a jab at me. The first time I visited Mrs. Tyler here, some nurse had moved her pillows around and she looked uncomfortable. So I pulled out one of the pillows to plump it up and for a split second I set it down so a corner of it was across her face while I was reaching under her to lift her up and get the pillow under her, you know, and at that exact moment Nurse Ratched walks in and jumps to the conclusion that I was smothering Mrs. Tyler."
"Life's embarrassing moments," said Quentin.
"I explained it but she treats me like a pariah."
"Was there ever a restraining order?"
"She threatened one, but it never would have stuck. I mean, if I don't visit her, who will?"
"Rowena?"
"She thinks her mother murdered her brother."
"Do you?" asked Quentin.
Bolt glared at him. "So you think I was trying to kill her so Rowena would be grateful to me? Rowena's happily married to somebody else and so am I. And she's not vengeful. She left home to get her freedom. She didn't have to kill her mother. I can't believe I'm defending myself to you. You expect me to believe your version of how you spent your first night in Mixinack, but now you're suspecting me of trying to kill a helpless old lady who gave me every break I ever had in my life."
"I didn't suspect you of anything, Mike," said Quentin. "You're jumping to conclusions way too fast."
"Am I?" The paper went back up in front of his face.
For the next hour, the only thing said by either of them was when Bolt muttered, "We make the salad and they don't even offer us a soda pop." Instead of letting himself be annoyed at Bolt's petulance, Quentin decided to be annoyed at Time for the way every reference to the budget deadlock seemed to blame Congress instead of Clinton. At least they could try to be impartial, he thought.
He knew that he was only trying to fool himself into ignoring his own fears. Things were completely out of his control. He had thought Bolt might become a friend, but the way he acted with Sannazzaro reminded Quentin of the way he had acted earlier that day in the kitchen at the Laurent house, when he threatened to beat Quentin up. I don't have any allies in this, he realized. None of the people I trust really believe in what's happening, and those who believe in it all have their own agendas. Bolt. Grandmother. What did the old lady want? Someone who could make words appear on a door a hundred miles away wasn't helpless even if she did spend her life in a rest home bed.
Nurse Sannazzaro finally approached them at quarter to seven. "I'm sorry you came on such an impossible night," she said. "I would have asked you to come back tomorrow, but I know Chief Bolt drives up all the way from Mixinack and so you'd want to wait."
"Thanks," said Quentin. "Can we see Mrs. Tyler now?"
Sannazzaro studied his face. For what? What kind of judgment was she making? "Forgive me, gentlemen, but I have to ask you—see her for what? She doesn't speak. I'm not sure she even knows what people are saying when they speak to her."
"But she's not in a coma?" asked Quentin.
"No," said Sannazzaro. "Nor is she paralyzed." Again she sized him up, as if to decide whether he was worth the trouble of explaining. Apparently he was. "It's like she simply doesn't care enough to pay attention to her own body or her own life."
"Depression?" asked Quentin.
"Despair. I've seen it before. Doesn't respond to Prozac. The only surprise is that she hasn't died yet. Usually once a resident loses all hope, death comes quickly. But Mrs. Tyler has lingered in this state for years now. You're wasting your time." She did not need to add: And mine.
"Ms. Sannazzaro," said Quentin, "I honestly don't know what this visit will accomplish. But it was my idea to come here, not Chief Bolt's. He just came along to show me the way. I don't mean any harm to Mrs. Tyler or anybody in her family. But I'd like to try to talk with her. That can't do her any harm, can it?"
Sannazzaro considered this. "I guess you're right."
They followed her out into the corridor.
"She couldn't have stopped us anyway," said Bolt, obviously intending Sannazzaro to overhear him. "This isn't a prison and there's such a thing as habeas corpus and privacy rights."
Quentin wasn't a lawyer, but he was pretty sure that neither legal principle applied in the case of two non-family visitors without an appointment on a busy understaffed night at a rest home. But he said nothing to Bolt, not in the testy mood he was in tonight.
Sannazzaro also ignored Bolt. "I hope this won't take too long, Mr. Fears. We have a lot of baths to give tonight."
They followed her to an elevator and went up to the top floor, then down to the end of a corridor. "Our bedridden patients don't need to be particularly convenient to the recreation and dining areas," Sannazzaro explained. "They also have fewer visitors than anyone else, so it makes sense to put them in our remotest locations."
Mrs. Tyler had a room to herself. She lay stretched out on the bed, her hands at her sides. She might have been arranged that way by an undertaker. No human being would voluntarily assume such a symmetrical position.
It took a moment, looking at her, to be sure she was the same woman he had seen at breakfast in the Laurent house.
"I found you," said Quentin.
The old lady's eyes opened for a long moment, then closed.
"Well, I'll be," said Nurse Sannazzaro. "She actually noticed you."
Quentin sat down next to her and took her by the hand. "It's good to meet you in the flesh, Grandmother," he said.
"Grandmother?" asked Sannazzaro.
"Can't you at least pretend not to be eavesdropping?" snapped Bolt.
Sannazzaro stood in the doorway, silent now.
Not moving his lips, Quentin formed words carefully in his mind. Can you understand me? Can you read my thoughts the way Madeleine could?
No answer. Not even the fingers squeezing his hand.
"You wanted me to come," Quentin said quietly. "You wanted me to find you."
"She's a turnip," said Bolt impatiently. "Now you've seen her, let's go."
It bothered Quentin that there was no hint of affection for her in his words. Back in Mixinack, it had been obvious that Bolt really cared for the old lady. But now...
"Sorry if I'm boring you," said Quentin. "What do you do when you visit? Play chess with her? Go on walks?"
"I sit and hold her hand," said Bolt.
"And he plumps up her pillows," said Sannazzaro dryly.
Bolt glared at her. Quentin was surprised that a medical officer would taunt someone like that—especially someone who looked after a helpless old lady without being paid for it. Though come to think of it, he wasn't sure but what Bolt was getting paid out of the estate. All that mattered right now, however, was communicating with Mrs. Tyler, and the hostility between Sannazzaro and Bolt wasn't helping.
"If we can't all be friends," said Quentin, "can you both just shut up? Of course I mean that in the nicest possible way."
"It's stuffy in here," said Bolt, standing up. "Will you call your lawyers if I ask for leftovers in the kitchen?"
"Eat anything that isn't actually on the floor with a footprint on it," said Sannazzaro. "But not until the cook brings it out to you in the dining room. It really is against state health regulations for you to be in the kitchen."
Bolt got up and shambled to the door. "Of course, you both know that I'm really going to the john. That chili keeps coming back to me in waves."
For Quentin, the chili had seemed far too mild to cause any discomfort. But then it was only New York chili, and besides, he hadn't eaten half as much as Bolt.
The door closed behind Bolt.
Quentin turned back to Mrs. Tyler. "We're not going to be alone," he said quietly, "so if you're going to talk to me, now would be a really good time."
But she said nothing. Not even a blink or a squeeze of his hand.
Quentin sighed and leaned back in his chair, letting go of Mrs. Tyler's hand. "What a waste of time," he said. "I'm sorry, Ms. Sannazzaro."
"I do appreciate your help with the salad," said Sannazzaro. "We don't get much volunteer help here, as you might guess. Most of our residents are alone or forgotten. Living on their savings or the sale of their houses. Many of them never had children. Those who did generally seem not to have had very devoted ones. I'm afraid I've become cynical, but the only people who visit our bed-care residents seem to be heirs who need money, hoping to get a better estimate of how long the stubbornly nondeparted are going to keep on depleting the estate."
"I'm not an heir," said Quentin.
"But you called her Grandmother."
"That's how my wife introduced her to me."
"I don't know which lie is more obnoxious, Mr. Fears, that you claim to be married to her granddaughter or that you claim you were ever introduced to Mrs. Tyler."
" 'There are stranger things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy,' " Quentin quoted. "Please open your mind to the possibility that I might be an honest man who was himself deceived."
"Why do you care what I think?" asked Sannazzaro.
That was a good question. There was more to it than trying to get along with the keeper of the gate. He wanted Sannazzaro to think well of him. He delivered his answer in the first words that came to mind. "Because you seem to be an honest person who performs well under pressure and genuinely has the best interests of the residents at heart." And then he thought of a few things he didn't say: That she wasn't trying to get anything from him. That she made snap judgments but then wasn't afraid to change her mind. That she said and did what she thought was right without apology but also without unnecessary harshness.
"It's obvious you don't care what I think," said Quentin, "and normally I could say the same about myself, but the truth is I don't like it when good people think ill of me. Actually, I don't like it when bad people think ill of me, either, but there's not much I can do about that without becoming one of them."
Sannazzaro smiled. It was better than a face-lift. "How good are you at telling the difference?"
"No better than anyone else," said Quentin. "I tend to trust people until they prove me wrong. I get fewer ulcers than the people who trust nobody."
"Not to mention saving yourself from a colostomy," said Sannazzaro. "Different generations seem to express stress through different body parts. Our parents got stomach disorders. Our generation seems to be more rectally oriented."
"Now there's a pretty thought."
"So you really thought you were being introduced to Mrs. Tyler?"
Quentin looked at the old lady and nodded.
"And your wife said she was Mrs. Tyler's granddaughter?"
"She took me to Mrs. Tyler's house and said it was her grandmother's."
"Where is your wife, Mr. Fears?" asked Sannazzaro.
Quentin chose his words carefully. "She left me under conditions that suggest our marriage wasn't quite as honest and openhearted as I thought it was."
"Well, then, you won't be surprised when I tell you that Mrs. Tyler has only one child, her happily married daughter Rowena, and she has only one child, a little girl named Roz. Ten or eleven years old by now."
"You know them?" asked Quentin.
"I have Mrs. Tyler's records. And my memory of our long conversations. She wasn't like this when she first came here. It was very sad to watch her slip away into this dreamy state after only a few months."
"Did you like her?" asked Quentin.
"Oh, yes. Not demanding, not complaining." Then Sannazzaro smiled wryly at her own words. "I suppose those are the virtues of the comatose, as well. No, what I valued about Mrs. Tyler was her grace and strength. I got the impression that she had seen the worst that life has to offer and still managed to find joy somewhere, hidden in the folds of despair."
"But then the despair won."
"I don't know about that. She's still alive. So I like to imagine that wherever she's wandering, she's not so much lost as simply contemplating the daisies she found in the midst of the wasteland."
" 'A host of golden daffodils.' " He quoted impulsively, almost before the thought came to mind. As if, talking with Sannazzaro, he had just opened a doorway into his mind and whatever he free-associated came tumbling out.
"Wordsworth," said Sannazzaro. At least she recognized the source. " 'I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o'er vale and hill, when all at once I spied a crowd, a host of golden daffodils.' What a stupid poem, don't you think? Here I thought I had the only high school English teacher who made students memorize and recite bad Romantic poetry."
"You probably did. I just read things and some of them stick in my memory, kind of randomly."
"You mean you picked up Wordsworth voluntarily?"
"Until I got married I had a lot of time on my hands. For a while I tried to work my way through the entire Penguin library."
"What stopped you?"
"There's an awful lot of really dull stuff masquerading as English literature."
"I always think of books as being like people," said Sannazzaro. "Even the dull ones are worthy of decent respect, but you don't have to seek them out and spend time with them."
"The disadvantage with people," said Quentin, "is you can't put bookmarks in them and set them aside till you want them again."
Sannazzaro gave a hard, sharp bark of a laugh, then raised an eyebrow. "On the contrary," she said, "I've had people do that with me lots of times."
"Feeling a little dog-eared?"
"Aren't you?"
"At the moment," said Quentin, "I'm feeling well-read."
To his amazement, she blushed slightly and looked away. Somehow things had got too personal. He could see her put on her business face again. "Well, Mr. Fears—"
"Please call me Quentin. Like the prison in California."
"Minus the 'San'?"
"You've got my 'San,' " Quentin said. "Doesn't your name mean St. Nazareth?"
"Holy Man of Nazareth, I think. Mostly it means my mother and father. Hardworking people and they loved me but it was my brothers who were meant to go to college."
"You were supposed to marry and have babies?" asked Quentin.
"Or disappear. They welcome me home for holidays but nobody ever, ever asks me what I do or cares when I tell them anyway. My married sisters and my sisters-in-law, though, there's always plenty to ask them about. They're ranked according to the number of babies they've had or are about to have. They've got quite a competition going."
"Babies are good," said Quentin, perversely. He had already convinced Chief Bolt that he was politically correct; now was he trying to make Sannazzaro think he was a neanderthal? Was he simply too tired to care what he said?
No, that was a lie. He liked Sannazzaro and so he didn't want to be polite with her, he wanted to be honest and so he said what he believed.
"I know babies are good," said Sannazzaro, predictably irritated. "I didn't say they weren't."
"I didn't say you said they weren't," said Quentin. "I just thought about babies and how my wife has left me and I'm not going to be watching our babies grow up around me. I'm just feeling sorry for myself. My babbling has kept you here when you have baths to give. Sorry."
He started to get up, but to his surprise Sannazzaro waved him to sit down, and sat herself in the other guest chair, the overstuffed one at the foot of the bed. "We're not going to be able to keep to the regular bath schedule tonight anyway. As soon as I go out there, the attendants will feel I'm putting them under pressure and everything will get tense for them. The truth is they're all working overtime and they want to go home and in a few minutes I'm going to dismiss all but the one who's really supposed to be on shift tonight."
"Your night shift is only one?"
"Supposed to be four after the dinner rush is over and then two after everybody's tucked in. But I'm staying the night so we'll be all right. And I've got to admit I enjoy a couple of minutes of visiting with somebody who isn't afraid of me."
He wasn't sure that was true—she was an intimidating person. But not because she wanted to be, or tried to be. Rather she was so direct, so forthright, so clearly uninterested in making a good impression that it gave her the upper hand. Quentin liked this about her. It made him curious. "I've never heard of a nurse being in charge of a rest home. Usually isn't it a salesman type who can sucker people in?"
"This really is a good rest home, so our residents aren't suckers," said Sannazzaro. Before Quentin could protest his innocence, she went on. "But you're right, it used to be a salesman type. Then they caught him with his hands in the till and his fly open in some of the residents' rooms—I don't know which was worse in the owners' minds. Anyway, they needed a fully trained replacement immediately. I was already here as medical officer. So I've been acting superintendent since October of '94."
"Why don't they just make it official?" asked Quentin.
"Because I don't want the job and I keep turning it down."
"So why don't you quit running the place and go back to your nurse duties?"
"Because if I do they'll bring in another salesman type to run the place, and I'd hate going back to that nightmare."
"So you won't take the job, but you won't give it up," said Quentin.
She laughed. "It sounds just as stupid to me, but what can I do? They're paying me at the nurse level plus a bonus, which saves them money, and in the meantime I don't have some cost-cutting moron glad-handing the public and stealing from the patients. Except that I'm tired all the time and don't have a life, things are going great."
Again Quentin found himself speaking on impulse. "It's a good thing we both know that I'm depressed and recovering from a spectacularly failed marriage, or I'd offer to take you away from all this." Quentin wondered at his own words. Was this flirtatious conversation for its own sake? Or did he unconsciously mean something by it?
Fortunately, she took it as a joke rather than a come-on. "Just don't say anything about the Virgin Islands or I'll take you up on it and you'd be stuck with a cast-iron bitch who doesn't look all that good in a bikini."
"Now you've done it. Now I'm thinking of you in a bikini."
They laughed.
Quentin was relieved that it was just a flirtation between two tired people who knew nothing would come of it. But he hadn't had many ventures into the world of flirtation, and most of what he'd seen had been while waiting to meet partners in upscale bars where all the flirters were so drunk that it didn't take much for them to think each other clever. It kind of gave him a thrill to play at it with a sober person whom he liked. But it also made him feel guilty. Even though he knew Madeleine wasn't real, he still felt married and he was a faithful husband.
"You're thinking of your wife," said Sannazzaro.
"Yeah, well, I was thinking that I still feel married."
"I'm glad to hear it. I've known too many men who never felt quite married no matter how many wives they've been through. Their own and otherwise."
Remembering again where they were, Quentin looked at Mrs. Tyler's closed and silent face. "I wonder how Mrs. Tyler felt about her husband."
"Loved him," said Sannazzaro. "But he died young. She told me that she thought the death of their first child, a boy, was too hard on him. He lost heart. Like I said—when people truly despair, they don't live long."
"She seems awfully old to have her oldest grandchild be only ten."
"I think the little girl is eleven. But yes. Mrs. Tyler married late. Maybe that was part of her husband's despair. She was forty before she started having babies."
"What was the delay?"
"What is it ever? She married Mr. Tyler only six months after she met him. He was more than ten years younger than her. She always assumed that he'd outlive her, which was fine, she didn't want to be a widow."
"Bummer," said Quentin.
"And you meant to be a father," said Sannazzaro. "Nobody's life ever goes according to plan."
"So why do we keep on planning?"
She thought for a moment. "Because that's how we know who we are. By what we intend to be. By what we try to become."
"And fail."
"I don't say 'fail,' Mr. Fears. I say we aim and miss. But we still hit something."
"Ouch."
She smiled. But she had been serious, and he could see that his joke disappointed her.
"Sorry," he said. "I think what you said is right. I'm just kind of caught up in the target that I missed. I haven't even looked to see what I might have hit. Maybe the arrow hasn't even landed yet. And please call me Quentin."
"Minus the 'San.' "
"That's what I'll call you."
"Call me Sally," she said.
"Sally, may I call you?" he said. And there it was. He wasn't content for this conversation to amount to nothing.
She looked at him for a while before saying, "When you know what's happening with your marriage, I wouldn't mind a phone call now and then."
He smiled. He liked a woman who knew how to spell out the rules. He also liked it that she had the same rules he did.
She smiled back.
He got up to leave, and so did she. He was reaching for the door when he saw words appear on it.
DON'T GO
His hand hovered over the doorknob.
"Well?" asked Sannazzaro. Sally.
He looked at her. She didn't see the words. Too bad. It would have been nice if he could tell her what was really going on. But without the evidence of her own eyes, like Bolt had had, she would never believe him. And he didn't want her to think he was crazy. He wanted very much for her to like him because he needed a friend who was good and decent and lived in the real world and didn't charge him three hundred bucks an hour.
"Sally," he said. "I want to talk to Mrs. Tyler. Alone. I know she won't hear me, but it would mean a lot to me. I'm not going to hurt her. If you want affidavits about my character, call my lawyer, his number's on my card." He handed her one. "Or call my parents and they'll tell you I was always a good boy."
"Maybe I should call your neighbors," said Sally.
"They'll just tell you I'm a loner who keeps to himself." He grinned.
She shook her head. "Quentin, I don't know why I should trust you. You're such a smooth operator. You're not telling me the truth. And you came here with slime on your shoes."
Apparently she really didn't like Bolt. "The way Bolt acted here tonight, I've never seen him like that. If I'd known the way things stood between you, I never would have brought him. Everything I've told you is true but you're right, I haven't told you everything because I don't want you to think I'm crazy."
"So. Convince me you're not crazy."
"Sally, I saw Mrs. Tyler in a house in Mixinack a few days ago. She slept through breakfast but in the parlor she looked me in the eye and said, 'Find me.' That's why I'm here."
"This isn't helping."
"You can see why I didn't tell you, but it's the truth. Crazy things are happening but I know I'm not crazy because every now and then somebody else sees the same things I see. Earlier today I saw writing magically appear on a door in that house in Mixinack—and Bolt saw it too."
"Better not use Bolt as a witness of your sanity, Quentin."
"And when a limo driver dropped me and my wife off a few days ago, he saw lights on in the house and a servant waiting to meet the car, just as I did. Only the next day I found out that the power hadn't been on in that house ever since Mrs. Tyler came here. And the only footprints in the snow were the driver's and mine."
She shuddered. "This isn't funny, Mr. Fears," she said.
"You asked for the truth," said Quentin. "But when I tell you the truth, I stop being Quentin and become Mr. Fears again."
"I don't believe in ghost stories."
"That's good," said Quentin, "because my wife's not dead and neither is Mrs. Tyler."
Sally looked at him for a long moment, her expression shifting among conflicting emotions. Then, abruptly, she reached for the knob and drew the door open.
Bolt practically fell into the room. He laughed nervously as he recovered his balance. "I was just coming in."
"You were listening at the door," said Quentin.
"I thought it was funny," said Bolt, "you trying to convince her of some idea that doesn't fit into her narrow little nurseview of the universe."
Quentin wanted to deck him. "Of course she doesn't believe me. It isn't believable."
"So why did you tell her? You had her eating out of your hand."
Quentin felt unutterable contempt for Bolt. Where was the man he thought he knew back in Mixinack? Did he really think that the conversation between him and Sally was nothing but manipulation? "Let's get out of here," said Quentin.
"About damn time," said Bolt. He shot Sannazzaro a triumphant glance. Quentin took his arm and almost dragged him out of the room.
"What's the rush?" said Bolt. "You were sure taking your time before."
"For a while today I thought I liked you," said Quentin. "But I was wrong."
"Ah, the rest home witch has enchanted you, has she?"
Instead of jabbing an elbow into his mouth, Quentin strode on ahead.
"Mr. Fears! Quentin! Wait!"
He stopped and turned. Sally Sannazzaro had rushed into the hall from Mrs. Tyler's room.
"Quentin, she spoke! She told me to bring you back!"
Quentin turned in surprise to look at Bolt. Bolt looked angry, even ashamed. "She's lying," he whispered. "The old lady is brain dead. She's a vegetable."
"Bolt, I know that she's not, and so do you."
"She's dead," muttered Bolt. And he didn't come with Quentin back up the corridor.
Quentin paused in the doorway to meet Sally's gaze. "I wasn't lying, Sally," he said.
"I trust Mrs. Tyler as a judge of character," she answered softly. "Apparently you have the gift of bringing people back from the dead."
"Wouldn't that be nice."
"I'll leave you alone with her, but don't let Bolt in here, Quentin."
"I won't."
Then he went inside and closed the door behind him. Mrs. Tyler turned her head and looked at him. "Thank you for coming," she whispered.