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“At least for the rest of her life, she’ll get the best care, with all that money.”
“She’s going to get well. She’ll come out of it.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Yes.”
“All that money—I hope you’re right.”
“I am.”
“She ought to have a chance to enjoy all that money.”
Stone-faced, Billy gave no slightest sign that he understood Palmer’s pointed implication.
Yawning, stretching, so relaxed and casual in his chair, Palmer probably saw himself as a cat toying with a mouse. “Well, people are going to be happy to hear that you’re not burnt out, that you’re writing a little.”
“What people?”
“People who like your writing, of course.”
“Do you know any of them?”
Palmer shrugged. “I don’t move in those circles. But I’m pretty sure about one thing…”
Because the sheriff wanted to be asked What?, Billy didn’t ask. Off Billy’s silence, Palmer said, “I’m pretty sure your mom and dad would be so proud.”
Billy walked away from him and out of the library.
After the air conditioning, the summer heat assaulted him. He felt as though he were suffocating when he inhaled, as if strangling when he exhaled. Or maybe it wasn’t the heat, but the past.
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Speeding north on Route 29, out of sun and into sun, with the famous and fertile valley narrowing imperceptibly at first and then perceptibly, Billy worried about protecting Barbara.
The trust fund could hire around-the-clock security for the duration, until Billy found the freak or until the freak finished him. Money was no issue. But this wasn’t a big city. The phone book didn’t contain page after page of ads for private-security firms.
Explaining to the guards why they were needed would be risky. The whole truth would tie Billy to three murders for which he was most likely being set up to take the fall.
If he withheld too much of the truth, the guards wouldn’t know what they were up against. He would be jeopardizing their lives.
Besides, most security guards around these parts were former police officers or current cops who were moonlighting on their off hours. Many of them had worked—or still did work—for or with John Palmer. Billy didn’t want Palmer hearing about Barbara being watched over by hired bodyguards. The sheriff would wonder. He would have questions. After a few years during which he had stayed under Palmer’s radar, he was now on the scope again. He dared not draw more attention to himself. He couldn’t ask friends to help him stand watch over Barbara. They would be at great risk.
Anyway, he didn’t have close friends whom he’d be comfortable approaching. The people in his life were largely acquaintances. He had managed things that way. There is no life that is not in community. He knew this. He knew. Yet he had done no proper sowing and now had no harvest.
The wind at the broken window spoke chaos to him.
In the hours of Barbara’s greatest danger, he alone would have to protect her. If he could.
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She deserved better than him. With his history, no one in need of a guardian would turn to him first, or second, or at all. My last killing: midnight Thursday.
If Billy read the freak correctly—and he was all but certain that he did—
Barbara’s murder would be the climax on which the curtain of this cruel
“performance” would be rung. Your suicide: soon thereafter. Tomorrow evening, long before midnight, he would station himself at her bedside.
This evening, he could not be with her. The urgent tasks on his agenda would probably keep him busy until dawn.
If he was wrong, if her murder was to be a second-act surprise, this sunny valley, for him, would become henceforth as dark as the vacant interstellar spaces.
Driving faster, borne forward by a longing for redemption, with sunlight slanting from his left and with the valley’s great monument, Mount St. Helena, ahead and seeming never to grow nearer, Billy used his cell phone to call Whispering Pines, pressing 1 and holding to speed dial.
Because Barbara had a private room with an attached half-bath, the usual visiting-hour rules did not apply. With advance approval, a family member might even stay overnight.
He hoped to stop at Whispering Pines on his way home and arrange to stay with Barbara from Thursday evening at least through Friday morning. He had conceived a cover story that might be accepted without suspicion. The receptionist who answered his call informed him that Mrs. Norlee, the manager, would be in meetings until five-thirty but would be able to see him then. He took the appointment.
Shortly before four o’clock, he arrived home, half expecting to see patrol cars, a coroner’s van, county
