Although a new resident might have been admitted in the past few hours, instinct carried Noah boldly across the hall. He threw open the door and took one step past the threshold before men seized him from behind, restraining him.
Nurse Quail sat in an armchair, so petite that her feet barely touched the floor. Twinkling blue eyes, pink complexion, pert and pretty: as Noah remembered her.
Two men and one woman were with the murderess. At least one of them would be a homicide detective and at least one would be from the DAs office. The three were tough professionals, skilled at psychological manipulation, not likely to allow any suspect to hijack an interrogation.
Yet Wendy Quail clearly controlled the situation, most likely because she was too deluded to understand the real nature of her situation. Her posture and her expression weren’t those of a suspect facing a hard inquisition. She appeared to be as poised as royalty, like a queen granting an audience to admirers.
She didn’t shrink from Noah, but smiled at him in recognition. She held out a hand toward him as might a queen who saw before her a grateful subject who had come to kneel abjectly and to offer effusive appreciation for some grace that earlier she had bestowed on him.
Now he knew why he’d been required to check his pistol at the front door: just in case an unexpected encounter like this occurred.
Maybe he would have shot her if he’d had the handgun; but he didn’t think so. He had the capacity to kill her, the nerve and the ruthlessness, but he didn’t have the requisite rage.
Curiously, Wendy Quail failed to arouse his anger. In spite of the self-satisfaction that virtually oozed from her, and although her peaches-and-cream cheeks pinked with the warmth generated by a well-banked and well- tended moral superiority, she lacked the substance to excite anyone’s hatred. She was a hollow creature into whose head had been poured evil philosophies that she couldn’t have brewed in the cauldron of her own intellect; and if in her formative years she had been exposed to a gentler and humbler school of thought, she might have been the committed healer that now she only pretended to be. She was plates and platters of plights and pickles; she was ice cream therapy; but although she was worthy of being loathed and even of being abhorred, she was too pathetic to merit hatred.
Noah allowed himself to be drawn backward out of the room before the nurse could speak some witless platitude. Someone closed the door between them.
Wise enough to offer no commiseration or advice, two detectives escorted him along the corridor toward the lobby. Noah had never been a member of their department; his three years of service had been in another of the county’s many cities, which interlocked like puzzle pieces in a jigsaw of jurisdictions. Nevertheless, they were his age or older, and they knew why he no longer wore a uniform. They surely understood why he had done what he’d done, ten years ago, and they might even sympathize with him. But they had never straddled the line that he had crossed with both feet, and to them he was to be treated as politely as any citizen but with more wariness, regardless of the fact that at one time he had worn the tin and done the job just as they did. They spoke to him only to report how long the body would be held by the medical examiner and to describe the process by which it could be claimed and be transferred to a mortuary.
The care home’s residents had been asked to remain in their rooms with the doors closed, and had been issued sleep aids when they requested them. But Richard Velnod stood in his open doorway, as though waiting for Noah.
Rickster’s unnaturally sloped brow seemed to recede from his eyes at a more severe angle than previously, and gravity exerted a greater than ordinary pull on his heavy features. His mouth moved, but his thick tongue, always a barrier to clear speech, failed him entirely this time; no sound came from him. Although usually his eyes were windows to his thoughts, they were paled now by tears, and he seemed to be holding back some question that he was afraid to ask.
The detectives would have preferred that Noah leave directly, but he stopped here and said, “It’s all right, son. She didn’t have any pain.” Rickster’s hands moved restlessly, pulling at each other, at the buttons on his pajama top, at his low-set ears, at his wispy brown hair, and at the air as though he might pluck understanding from it. “Mr. Noah, wha… wha..?” His mouth went soft, twisted with anguish.
Assuming that the question had been Why? Noah could provide no answer other than a platitude worthy of Nurse Quail: “It was just Laura’s time to go.”
Rickster shook his head. He wiped at his flooded eyes, swabbed wet hands across damp cheeks, and gathered his troubled face into an expression so affectingly earnest, so miserable, so desperate that Noah could hardly bear to look at it. Rickster’s mouth firmed, and his malformed tongue found the shape of the words that had a moment ago eluded it, and he asked not Why? but a question more to the point and yet even more difficult to answer: “What’s wrong with people?”
Noah shook his head.
“What’s wrong with people?” Rickster implored.
His eyes fixed so beseechingly on Noah that it was impossible to turn away from him without responding, and yet impossible to lie even though, to this hard question, lies were the only answers that would soothe.
Noah knew that he should just put an arm around the boy and walked him back to his bed, where the framed photographs of his dead parents stood on the nightstand. He should have tucked him in and talked to him about anything that came to mind, or about nothing at all, as he had talked for so many years to his sister. More than a need to know what was wrong with people, loneliness plagued this boy, and although Noah had no insight into the source of human cruelty, he could medicate loneliness with a gift of his time and company.
He felt burnt out, however, and doubted that he had anything within him worth giving. Not anymore. Not after Laura.
He had no idea what was wrong with people, but he knew that whatever might have broken in the soul of humanity was manifestly broken in him.
“I don’t know,” he told this cast-away boy with the castaway face. “I don’t know.”
By the time that he retrieved his pistol and reached his car in the parking lot, the previously faraway roar in his head grew louder and acquired a more distinctive character. No longer like thunder, it might have been the angry chanting of the whole mad crowd of humankind — or still the rumble of water tumbling from a high cliff into an abyss.
On the way to Cielo Vista, he’d broken every law of the highway; but he exceeded no speed limits on the way home, ran no stop signs. He drove with the exaggerated care of a cautious drunk because, mile by mile, the surging sound within him was accompanied by a deepening flood of darkness, and those black torrents seemed to spill from him into the California night. Block by block, streetlamps appeared to grow dimmer, and previously well-lighted avenues seemed to be drowned in murk. By the time he parked at his apartment, the river that might have been hope finished draining entirely into the abyss, and Noah was borne to a bottle of brandy and to his bed on the currents of a bleaker emotion.
Chapter 32
Boy, dog, and grizzled grump arrive at the barn-what-ain’t-a-barn, but to Curtis it appears to be a barn and nothing more. In fact, it looks like merely the ruins of a barn.
The structure stands by itself, two hundred yards northwest of the town, past clumps of stunted sage and bristles of wild sorrel and foot-snaring tendrils of creeping sandbur. At a surprisingly sharp line of demarcation, all forms of desert scrub and weeds and cactus surrender to the saline soil, and the inhospitable desert gives way to the utterly barren salt flats — which seems to be a curious place to have built a barn.
Even in the dark-drenched night, where shadows drip off shadows, the building’s decrepit condition is obvious. Instead of describing a straight line, the steeply pitched roof swags from peak to eave. The walls are a little catawampus to the foundation, time-tweaked and weather-warped at the corners.
Unless the ramshackle barn is actually a secret armory stocked with futuristic weapons — plasma swords, laser-pulse rifles, neutron grenades — Curtis can’t imagine what hope it offers them. No shelter will be safe in this storm.
In the strife-torn town behind them, the tempest already rages. Much of the screaming and the shouting fails
