Helen’s, meanwhile, simultaneously pulled in and brightened until it was hard to look at. Helen was afraid to go back. Gretchen knew it, and was infuriated by it.
And her own helplessness, Ralph thought. That infuriates her even more.
“I’m going to stay at High Ridge awhile longer,” Helen was saying.
“Maybe until winter. Nat and I will move back into town eventually, I imagine, but the house is going up for sale. If someone actuilly buys it-and with the real estate market the way it is that looks like a pretty big question mark-the money goes into an escrow account.
That account will be divided according to the decree. You know-the divorce decree.”
Her lower lip was trembling. Her aura had grown still tighter; it now fit her body almost like a second skin, and Ralph could see minute red flashes skimming through it. They looked like sparks dancing over an incinerator. He reached out across the table, took her hand, squeezed it. She smiled at him gratefully.
“You’re telling me two things,” he said. “That you’re going ahead with the divorce and that you’re still scared of him.”
“She’s been regularly battered and abused for the last two years of her marriage,” Gretchen said. “Of course she’s still scared of him.”
She spoke quietly, calmly, reasonably, but looking at her aura now was like looking through the small isinglass window you used to find in the doors of coal- furnaces.
He looked down at the baby and saw her now surrounded in her own gauzy, brilliant cloud of wedding-satin. It was smaller than her mother’s, but otherwise identical… like her blue eyes and auburn hair. Natalie’s balloon-string rose from the top of her head in a pure white ribbon that floated all the way to the ceiling and then actually coiled there in an ethereal heap beside the light-fixture. When a breath of breeze puffed in through the open window by the stove, he saw the wide white band belly and ripple. He glanced up and saw Helen’s and Gretchen’s balloon-strings were also rippling.
And if I could see my own, it would be doing the same thing, he thought. It’s real-whatever that two-and-two-make-four part of my mind may think, the auras are real. They’re real and I’m seeing them.
He waited for the inevitable demurral, but this time none came.
“I feel like I’m spending most of my time in an emotional washingmachine these days,” Helen said. “My mom’s mad at me… she’s done everything but call me a quitter outright. and sometimes I feel like a quitter… ashamed…”
“You have nothing to be ashamed of,” Ralph said. He glanced up at Natalie’s balloon-string again, wavering in the breeze. It was beautiful, but he felt no urge to touch it; some deep instinct told him that might be dangerous for both of them.
“I guess I know that,” Helen said, “but girls go through a lot of indoctrination. It’s like, ’Here’s your Barbie, here’s your Ken, here’s your Hostess Play Kitchen. Learn well, because when the real stuff comes along it’ll be your job to take care of it, and if any of it gets broken, you’ll get the blame.” And I think I could have gone down the line with that-I really do. Except no one told me that in some marriages Ken goes nuts. Does that sound self-indulgent?”
“No. That’s pretty much what happened, so far as I can see.”
Helen laughed-a jagged, bitter, guilty sound. “Don’t try to tell my mother that. She refuses to believe Ed ever did anything more than give me a husbandly swat on the fanny once in awhile… just to get me moving in the right direction again if I happened to slip off-course.
She thinks I imagined the rest. She doesn’t come right out and say it, but I hear it in her voice every time we talk on the phone.”
“I don’t think you imagined it,” Ralph said, “I saw you, remember?
And I was there when you begged me not to call the police.”
He felt his thigh squeezed beneath the table and looked up, startled.
Gretchen Tillbury gave him a very slight nod and another squeeze-this one more emphatic, “Yes,” Helen said. “You were there, weren’t you?” She smiled a little, which was good, but what was happening to her aura was better-those tiny red flickers were fading, and the aura itself was spreading out again.
No, he thought. Not spreading out. Loosening. Relaxing.
Helen got up and came around the table.
“Nat’s bailing out on you-better let me take her.”
Ralph looked down and saw Nat looking across the room with heavy, fascinated eyes. He followed her gaze and saw the little vase standing on the windowsill beside the sink. He had filled it with fall flowers less than two hours ago and now a low green mist was sizzling off the stems and surrounding the blooms with a faint, misty glow.
I’m watching them breathe their last, Ralph thought. Oh my God, I’m never going to pick another flower in my life. I promise.
Helen took the baby gently from his arms. Nat went tractably enough, although her eyes never left the sizzling flowers as her mother went back around the table, sat down, and nestled her in the crook of her arm.
Gretchen tapped the face of her watch lightly. “If we’re going to make that meeting at noon-”
“Yes, of course,” Helen said, a little apologetically. “We’re on the official Susan Day Welcoming Committee,” she told Ralph, “and in this case that’s not quite as junior League as it sounds. Our main job really isn’t to welcome her but to help protect her.”
“Is that going to be a problem, do you think?”
“It’ll be tense, let’s put it that way,” Gretchen said. “She’s got half a dozen of her own security people, and they’ve been sending us turn-around faxes of all the Derry-related threats she’s received.
It’s standard operating procedure with them-she’s been in a lot of people’s faces for a lot of years. They’re keeping us in the picture, but they’re also making sure we understand that, because we’re the inviting group, her safety is WomanCare’s responsibility as well as theirs.” Ralph opened his mouth to ask if there had been many threats, but he supposed he already knew the answer to that question.
He’d lived in Derry for seventy years, off and on, and he knew it was a dangerous machine-there were a lot of sharp points and cutting edges just below the surface. That was true of a lot of cities, of course, but in Derry there had always seemed to be an extra dimension to the ugliness. Helen had called it home, and it was his home, tool butHe found himself remembering something which had happened almost ten years ago, shortly after the annual Canal Days Festival had ended.
Three boys had thrown an unassuming and inoffensive young gay man named Adrian Mellon into the Kenduskeag after repeatedly biting and stabbing him; it was rumored they had stood there on the bridge behind the Falcon Tavern and watched him die.
They’d told the police they hadn’t liked the hat he was wearing.
That was also Derry, and only a fool would ignore the fact.
As if this memory had led him to it (perhaps it had), Ralph looked at the photo on the front page of today’s paper again-Ham Davenport with his upraised fist, Dan Dalton with his bloody nose and dazed eyes, wearing Ham’s sign on his head.
“How many threats?” he asked. “Over a dozen?”
“Ah(out thirty,” Gretchen said. “Of those, her security people take half a dozen seriously. Two are threats to blow up the Civic Center if she doesn’t cancel. Hey-this is a real honey-it’s from someone who says he’s got a Big Squirt water-gun filled with battery acid. ’If I make a direct hit, not even your dyke friends will be able to look at you without throwing up,” that one says.”
“Nice,” Ralph said, ’It brings us to the point, anyway,” Gretchen said. She rummaged in her bag, brought out a small can with a red top, and put it on the table. “A little present from all your grateful friends at WomanCare.”
Ralph picked the can up. On one side was a picture of a woman spraying a cloud of gas at a man wearing a slouch hat and a Beagle Boys-type eye-mask. On the other was a single word in bright red capital letters:
“What is this?” he asked, shocked in spite of himself. “Mace?”
“No,” Gretchen said. “Mace is a risky proposition in Maine, legally speaking. This stuff is much milder… but if you give somebody a faceful, they won’t even think of hassling you for at least a couple of minutes. It numbs the skin, irritates the eyes, and causes nausea.”
Ralph took the cap off the can, looked at the red aerosol nozzle beneath, then replaced the cap. “Good Christ, woman, why would I want to lug around a can of this stuff?”
“Because you’ve been officially designated a Centurion,” Gretchen said.
“A what?” Ralph asked.
“A Centurion,” Helen repeated. Nat was fast asleep in her arms, and Ralph realized the auras were gone again. “It’s what The Friends of Life call their major enemies-the ringleaders of the opposition.”
“Okay,” Ralph said, “I’ve got it now. Ed talked about people he called Centurions on the day he… assaulted you. He talked about a lot of things that day, though, and all of them were crazy-”
“Yes, Ed’s at the bottom of it, and he is crazy,” Helen said. “We don’t think he’s mentioned this Centurion business except to a small inner circle-people who are almost as gonzo as he is. The rest of The Friends of Life… I don’t think they have any idea. I mean, did you? Until last month, did you have any idea that he was crazy?”
Ralph shook his head.
“Hawking Labs finally fired him,” Helen said. “Yesterday. They held onto him as long as they could-he’s great at what he does, and they had a lot invested in him-but in the end they had to let him go.
Three months’ severance pay in lieu of notice… not bad for a guy who beats up his wife and throws dolls loaded with fake blood at the windows of the local women’s clinic.” She tapped the newspaper.
“This last demonstration was the final straw. It’s the third or fourth time he’s been arrested since he got involved with The Friends of Life.”
“You have someone inside, don’t you?” Ralph said. “That’s how you know all this.”
Gretchen smiled. “We’re not the only ones who’ve got someone at least partway inside; we have a running joke that there really are no Friends of Life, just a bunch of double agents. Derry P.D.'s got someone; the State Police do, too. And those are just the ones our… our person… knows about. Hell, the FBI could be monitoring them, as well. The Friends of Life are eminently infiltratable, Ralph, because they’re convinced that, deep down, everyone is on their side.
But we believe that our person is the only one who’s gotten in toward the middle, and this person says that Dan Dalton is just the tail Ed Deepneau wags.”
“I guessed that the first time I saw them together on the TV news,” Ralph said, Gretchen got up, gathered the coffee cups, took them over to the sink, and
