False Memory

a roof sooner or later.”

“Unless we’re going to be the first to live forever.”

“If we are, then we’d better get a whole lot more serious about our retirement fund.”

Martie was terrified of losing him. Like her mother, she could not bring herself to put the fear into words, lest what she dreaded would come to pass.

New Mexico was the state where the high plains met the Rockies, the roof of the American Southwest, and Santa Fe was a city built at a high altitude, nearly one and a half miles above sea level: a long way to fall.

* * *

On the answering-machine microcassette labeled SUSAN, only one of the five messages was important, but listening to it, the doctor felt his heartbeat accelerate once more.

Another wild card.

When he had reviewed the two messages from Martie’s mother that followed Susan’s bombshell, he erased the tape.

Once it was erased, he took the cassette out of the machine, dropped it on the floor, and stomped it underfoot until the plastic casing was well crushed.

From the ruins, he extracted the narrow magnetic tape and the two tiny hubs around which it was spooled. They didn’t even fill the palm of his hand: so much danger compressed into such a small object.

Downstairs, in the living room, Ahriman opened the damper in the fireplace flue. He placed the tape and two plastic hubs atop one of the ceramic logs.

From his suit coat, he withdrew a slim Cartier cigarette lighter of elegant design and superb craftsmanship.

He had carried a lighter since he was eleven years old, first one that he had stolen from his father and then, later, this better model. The doctor didn’t smoke, but there was always the possibility that he would want to set something on fire.

When he was thirteen, already in his first year of college, he had torched his mother. If he hadn’t been carrying a lighter in his pocket when the need of one arose, his life might have changed much for the worse on that grim day thirty-five years ago.

Although his mother was supposed to be skiing — this was at their vacation house in Vail, during the Christmas holiday — she walked in on him while he was preparing a cat for live dissection. He had only just anesthetized the cat, using chloroform that he concocted from common household cleaning fluids, had used strapping tape to secure its paws to the plastic tarp that would serve as an autopsy table, had taped its mouth shut to muffle its cries when it woke, and had laid out the set of surgical tools he had acquired from the medical-supply company that offered a discount to premed students at the university. Then…hello, Mom. Often he didn’t see her for months at a time, when she was on location with a film, or when she went on one of the gunless safaris she so enjoyed, but now suddenly she felt guilty about leaving him alone while she went skiing with her girl pals, and she decided they needed to spend an afternoon in some damn bonding activity or another. What lousy timing.

He could see that his mother knew at once what had happened to his cousin Heather’s puppy at Thanksgiving, and perhaps she intuited the truth behind the disappearance of the four-year-old son of their estate manager a year previous. His mother was self-involved, the typical thirty-something actress who framed her magazine covers and decorated her bedroom with them, but she was not stupid.

As quick-thinking as always, young Ahriman plucked the stopper from the chloroform bottle and splashed her photogenic face with the contents. This gave him time to free the cat, put away the tarp and surgical kit, extinguish the pilot lights in the kitchen range, turn the gas on, set his mother ablaze while she still lay unconscious, grab the cat, and run for it.

The explosion rocked Vail and echoed like thunder through the snowy mountains, triggering a few avalanches too minor to have any entertainment value. The ten-room redwood chalet, shattered into kindling, burned furiously.

When firemen found young Ahriman sitting in the snow a hundred feet from the pyre, clutching the cat that he had saved from the blast, the boy was in such a state of shock that at first he could not speak and was even too dazed to cry. “I saved the cat,” he told them eventually, in a stricken voice that haunted them for years after, “but I couldn’t save my mom. I couldn’t save my mom.”

Later, they identified his mother’s body with the help of dental records. The small mound of remains, once cremated, didn’t even half fill the memorial jar. (He knew; he looked.) Her graveside service was attended by the royalty of Hollywood, and that noisy honor guard of celebrity funerals — press helicopters — circled overhead.

He had missed seeing new movies starring his mother, because she’d been smart about scripts and usually made only good pictures, but he had not missed his mother herself, as he knew she would not have much missed him, had their fates been reversed. She loved animals and was a staunch champion of all the causes related to them; children just didn’t resonate with her as deeply as did anything with four feet. On the big screen, she could stir your heart, plunge it into despair or fill it with joy; this talent didn’t extend to real life.

Two terrible fires, fifteen years apart, had made an orphan of the doctor (if you didn’t know about the poisoned petits fours): the first a freak accident, for which the manufacturer of the gas range paid dearly, the second set by the drunken, lust-crazed, homicidal handyman, Earl Ventnor, who had finally died in prison two years ago, stabbed by another inmate during a brawl.

Now, as Ahriman thumbed the striker wheel on the old flint-style lighter and ignited the answering-machine tape in the fireplace, he meditated upon the fact that fire had played such a central role in both his life and Martie’s, her father having been the most-decorated fireman in the history of the state. Here was yet another thing they shared.

Sad. After these latest developments, he would probably not be able to allow their relationship to evolve. He had so looked forward to the possibility that he and this lovely, game-loving woman might one day be something special to each other.

If he could locate her and her husband, he could activate them, take them down to their mind chapels, and find out what else they had learned about him, whom they might have told. More likely than not, the damage could be undone, the game resumed and played to its end.

He had their cell-phone number, but they knew he had it, and they were unlikely to answer it in their current paranoid state of mind. And he could activate only one at a time by phone, thereby immediately alerting the one who was listening. Too risky.

Finding them was the trick. They were running, alert and wary, and they would stay well hidden until they boarded the flight to New Mexico in the morning.

Approaching them in the airport, at the boarding gate, was out of the question. Even if they didn’t flee, he couldn’t activate, quiz, and instruct them in public.

Once in New Mexico, they were as good as dead.

When the audiotape began to burn, issuing a noxious stink, the doctor switched on the fireplace gas. Whoosh, and in two minutes, nothing was left of the tape but a sticky residue on the topmost of the ceramic logs.

He was in a mood, the doctor, and sadness was not the greater component of his mood.

All the fun had gone out of this game. He had put so much effort into it, so much strategy, but now it would most likely not be played out above the beaches of Malibu, as he had planned.

He wanted to burn down this house.

Spite was not his sole motivation, nor was his distaste for the decor. Without spending the better part of a day searching the place inch by inch, he couldn’t be sure that the microcassette with Susan’s accusations was the only evidence against him that Martie and Dusty had accumulated. He didn’t have a day to waste, and burning the house to the ground was the surest way to protect himself.

Granted, Susan’s message on the tape was insufficient to convict him, not even damning enough to get him indicted. He was, however, a man who never made bargains with the god of chance.

Torching the house himself was far too risky. Once the fire was set, someone might see him leaving — and be able to identify him one day in court.

He shut off the fireplace gas.

Room by room, as he left the house, he extinguished the lights.