False Memory

Brightening, Skeet said, “Mother, did you know my father’s name isn’t really Holden Caulfield? It was Sam Farner before he had it legally changed.”

Claudette’s eyes pinched. “You’re fantasizing again, Holden.”

“No, it’s true. I’ve got the proof at home. Maybe that’s what Ahriman meant, after he shot me, when he called him a fraud.”

Claudette pointed a finger at Dusty. “You encourage him to go off his medications, and this is where it leads.” To Skeet, she said, “This Ahriman person called me a whore. Am I to assume, Holden, you think that word fits me as well as you think fraud fits your father?”

Dusty’s head was filled with that ominous buzzing that usually didn’t afflict him until he had been in this house for at least half an hour. Desperate to get back to the urgent issue, he said, “Derek, why would Mark Ahriman harbor such animosity toward you?”

“Because I’ve exposed him for what he is.”

“And what is he?”

“A charlatan.”

“And when did you expose him?”

“Every chance I get,” Lampton said, his mink eyes gleaming with dark glee.

Moving to her husband’s side, slipping an arm around his waist, giving him a playful hug, Claudette said, “When foolish men like this Mark Ahriman get stung by my Derek’s wit, they don’t forget it.”

“How?” Martie pressed. “How did you expose him?”

“Analytical essays in two of the better journals,” Lampton said, “putting his empty theories and his jejune prose under a spotlight.”

“Why?”

“I was appalled by how many psychologists were beginning to take him seriously. The man’s not an intellectual. He’s the worst kind of poseur.”

“And that’s it?” Martie asked. “A couple of essays?”

Lampton’s pointy teeth flashed. The corners of his eyes crinkled. Although this was an expression of mirth, he looked as though he had just spotted a mouse that he intended to snare and rip to bits. “Oh, lawdy, Miss Claudy, they don’t understand what it means to be on the receiving end of a Lampton blitz, do they?”

“I think I do,” Skeet said, but neither his mother nor his stepfather appeared to hear him.

As if Lampton had been witty or naughty, or both, Claudette let out a brief girlish giggle, as full of genuine humor as the rattle of a diamondback.

“Oh, lawdy, Miss Claudy,” Lampton repeated, doing a jive wiggle and snapping his fingers, as if he thought he was making with the latest of street vernacular. “Essays in two journals. Some quite clever guerrilla warfare. And a parody of his style for ‘Bookend,’ the last page in The New York Times Book Review— ”

“Wickedly funny,” Claudette assured them.

“—plus I reviewed his latest for a major syndicate, and the review ended up in seventy-eight newspapers nationwide. I have all the clippings. Can you believe that dreadful book has been on the Times list for seventy-eight weeks?”

“You mean Learn to Love Yourself?” Martie asked.

“Pop-psych slush,” Lampton declared. “It’s probably done more damage to the American psyche than any book published in a decade.”

“Seventy-eight weeks,” Dusty said. “Is that a long time to be on the list?”

“For a book in this category, it’s forever,” said Lampton

“How long was your last book on the list?”

Suddenly taking the high road, Lampton said, “I really don’t count. Popular success isn’t the issue. The quality of the work is the issue, how much impact it has on society, how many people it helps.”

“Seems to me it was twelve or fourteen weeks,” Dusty said.

“Oh, no, it was more than that,” Lampton said.

“Fifteen, then.”

Squirming with the need to have his accomplishment properly reported, but now in a trap of his own devising, Lampton looked at Claudette for help, and she said, “Twenty-two weeks it was on the list. Derek never cares about these things, but I do. I’m proud of him. Twenty-two weeks is a very good run, very good indeed for a work of substance.”

“Well, there you have the problem, of course,” Lampton lamented. “Pop-psych slush will always do better than solid work. It might not help anyone worth a damn, but it’s easy to read.”

“And the American public,” Claudette said, “is as lazy and as poorly educated as it is in need of sound psychological counseling.”

Looking at Martie, Dusty said, “We’re talking about Derek’s Dare to Be Your Own Best Friend.”

“I couldn’t get through it,” Skeet said.

“You’re certainly bright enough to,” Claudette told him. “But when you don’t take your medication, your learning disability roars right back, and you can’t read your name. ‘Medicate to educate.’”

Glancing toward the living room, Dusty wondered what percentage of visitors ever made it farther than the foyer.

Skeet found a little more courage. “I don’t have any trouble reading my fantasy novels, with or without medication.”

“Your fantasy novels,” said Lampton, “are part of the problem, Holden, not part of the cure.”

“What about the guerrilla warfare?” Dusty asked.

Everyone regarded him with puzzlement.

“You said you used some clever guerrilla warfare against Mark Ahriman,” Dusty reminded Lampton.

That coop-raiding, mouse-ripping smile again. “Come on, I’ll show you!”

Lampton led them upstairs.

Valet was waiting in the second-floor hall, apparently because he had been too intimidated by the war zone in the foyer.

Martie and Dusty paused to cuddle him, to scratch under his chin, to rub behind his ears, and in return he lashed them with tongue and tail.

If he’d had a choice, Dusty would have preferred to sit on the floor and spend the rest of the day with Valet. Other than Skeet’s hug—Ouch, ouch, ouch! — the dog’s welcome was the only real and true moment Dusty had experienced since ringing the doorbell.

Lampton rapped on a door farther along the hall. Glancing back at Dusty and Martie, he said, “Come on, come on.”

Claudette and Skeet went into a room on the opposite side of the hall: Lampton’s study.

Although no one had spoken an invitation that Dusty could hear, Lampton opened the door on which he’d knocked, and when they caught up to him, they crossed the threshold after him.

This was Junior’s bedroom. Dusty hadn’t been here in about four years, since Derek Lampton Jr. was eleven. Back then, the decor had been sports-related. Posters of basketball and soccer stars.

Now all the walls and the ceiling were painted glossy black, and these surfaces soaked up the light, so the room seemed dark even with three hundred watts’ worth of lamps aglow. The iron-pipe headboard of the bed was black, and the sheets and spread on it were black, too. The desk and chair were black, as were the bookshelves. The natural-finish maple floor, so lovely through much of the rest of the house, had been painted black. The only color in the room was provided by the spines of the books on the black shelves, and by a pair of full-size flags stapled to the ceiling: the red field, white circle, and black swastika of the flag that Adolph Hitler had attempted to plant across the globe, and the hammer-and-sickle flag of the former Soviet Union. Four years ago, sports histories, sports biographies, books about archery, and science-fiction novels had crowded the shelves. Those had been replaced by books about Dachau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, the Soviet gulags, the Ku Klux Klan, Jack the Ripper, several modern real-life serial killers, and a few mad bombers.

Junior himself was dressed in white sneakers, white socks, tan chinos, and a white shirt. He was lying on the bed, reading a book that featured a pile of decomposing human bodies on the dust jacket, and because of the high