False Memory

“Nothing like that has ever showed up in my family,” she said, confirming that Ahriman must have been the target of her full fury.

Martie could contain herself no longer. “So thirty-two years ago, you humiliate him, you kill his child—”

“He was glad when he heard she was dead.”

“I’m sure he was, knowing him like I do now. But just the same, you humiliate him back then. And all these years later, the man who gave you Junior, this golden boy—”

Junior actually smiled, as if Martie were coming on to him.

“—the man who gives you this boy that Ahriman couldn’t give you, your husband, goes out of his way to mock Ahriman, to belittle him, to tear him apart in every public forum he can find, and even sabotages him with this petty crap on Amazon.com. And you didn’t put a stop to it?”

Claudette’s anger flared anew at Martie’s accusation of bad judgment. “I encouraged it. And why not. Mark Ahriman can’t make a book any better than he can make a baby. Why should he have more success than Derek? Why should he have anything at all?”

“You foolish woman.” Martie evidently chose this insult because she knew that it would sting Claudette worse than any other. “You foolish, ignorant woman.”

Skeet, alarmed by Martie’s directness, afraid for her, tried to draw her back.

Instead, Martie grasped his hand and held it tightly, just as Claudette held Junior’s. But she wasn’t taking strength from Skeet; she was giving it. “Stay cool, honey.” Pressing the attack, she said, “Claudette, you don’t have a clue what Ahriman is capable of doing. You don’t understand jack about him — his viciousness, his relentlessness.”

“I understand—”

“Like hell you do! You opened the door to him and let him into all our lives, not just your own. He wouldn’t have looked twice at me if I hadn’t had a connection to you. If not for you, none of this would have happened to me, and I wouldn’t have had to do”—she looked miserably at Dusty, and he knew she was thinking of two dead men in New Mexico—“the things I’ve had to do.”

Claudette could be cowed neither by the virulence of an argument nor by the facts of it. “You make it sound as if it’s all about you. Like they say, shit happens. I’m sure you’ve heard that kind of talk in your circles before. Shit happens, Martie. It happens to all of us. It’s my house that was shot apart, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Get used to it,” Martie countered. “Because Ahriman won’t stop with this. He’s going to send someone else, and someone else, and then ten more someone elses, people who’re strangers and people we’ve known and trusted all our lives, blindsiding us time after time, and he’s going to keep sending them until we’re all dead.”

“You aren’t even making any damn sense,” Claudette fumed.

“Enough! Shut up, shut up, all of you!” Derek stood downstairs in the foyer, near Eric’s body, shouting up at them. “Neighbors must not be home, ’cause no one called the police till I just did. Before they get here, I’m telling you how it’s going to be. This is my house, and I’m telling you. I wiped the gun off. I put it back in his hand. Dusty, Martie, if you want to go against us, you do what you have to do, but then it’s warfare between us, and I’ll smear the two of you any way I can. You said your house burned down? I’ll tell them you gamble, you have debts, and you burned it down for the insurance.”

Staggered by this grotesque threat and yet not surprised, Dusty said, “Derek, for God’s sake, what good would that do any of us now?”

“It’ll muddy the waters,” Lampton said. “Confuse the cops. This guy was your friend’s husband, Martie? So I’ll tell the cops he came here to kill Dusty because Dusty was screwing with Susan.”

“You stupid bastard,” Martie said, “Susan’s dead. She—”

Claudette embraced the conspiracy: “Then I’ll say Eric confessed to killing Susan before he started shooting up this place, killed her because she was screwing Dusty. I’m warning you two, we’ll muddy these waters until they can’t even see my boy, let alone accuse him of murder, when all he did was save our lives.”

Dusty couldn’t recall having stepped through a looking glass or being sucked into a tornado full of dark magic, but here he was in a world where everything was upside down and backward, where lies were celebrated as truths, where truth was unwelcome and unrecognized.

“Come on, Claudette,” Lampton urged, motioning her downstairs. “Come on, Derek. The kitchen. Quick. We’ve got to talk before the police get here. Our stories have to match.”

The boy smirked at Dusty as he trailed his mother, still holding her hand, to the stairs and then down.

Dusty wheeled away from them and back down the hall to Fig, who had stood motionless through the storm.

“Wow,” Fig said.

“You understand Skeet better now?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Where’s Valet?” Dusty asked, because the dog was a link to reality, his own Toto, reminding him of a world where wicked witches were not real.

“Bed,” Fig advised, pointing toward the open door of the master-bedroom suite.

The Sheraton bed stood high enough off the floor for Valet to have squeezed under it. He was betrayed by his tail, which trailed beyond the bedspread.

Dusty went around to the farther side of the bed, got down on the floor, lifted the spread, and said, “Got room in there for me?”

Valet whined as if inviting him under for a cuddle.

“They’d find us anyway,” Dusty assured him. “Come out of there, fella. Come here and let me rub your tummy.”

With coaxing, Valet crawled into the open, although he was too spooked to expose his belly even to those he trusted most.

Martie joined Dusty, sitting on the floor with the dog between them. “I’m reconsidering the whole idea of ever having a family. I think maybe this here is as good as it gets — you, me, and Valet.”

The dog seemed to agree.

Martie said, “Driving here, I didn’t think this mess could get any worse, and now look where we are. Neck deep and sinking. I’m numb, you know? I know what happened to Eric, but I don’t feel it yet.”

“Yeah. I’m beyond numb.”

“What are you going to do?”

Dusty shook his head. “I don’t know. What’s the use, though? I mean, the kid’s going to be a hero, right? No matter what I say. Or you. I can see it clear as I’ve ever seen anything. The truth won’t play well enough to be believed.”

“And what about Ahriman?”

“I’m scared, Martie.”

“Me too.”

“Who’s going to believe us? It would have been hard enough to get anyone to listen to us before…this. But now, with the Lizard and Claudette willing to make up wild stories about us just to muddy the waters…If we start talking about brainwashing and programmed suicide, programmed killers…that’ll only make their lies about us ring more true.”

“And if someone did burn down our house — Ahriman or someone he sent — it’ll be obvious arson. What’s our alibi?”

Dusty blinked in surprise. “We were in New Mexico.”

“Doing what?”

He opened his mouth to speak — but closed it without a word.

“If we mention New Mexico, we’re going to get into the Ahriman stuff. And yeah, there’s some substantiation of it — all the things that happened to people out there a long time ago. But how do we get into all that and not risk…Zachary and Kevin?”

They stroked the dog in silence for a moment, and finally Dusty said, “I could kill him. I mean, last night, you asked me could I do it, and I said I didn’t know. But now I know.”

“I could do it, too,” she said.