Fear itself

fire, “I left Cortland when Eddie was only ten, so I never got to know him as well as I’d have liked to.”

“When was the last time you spoke with your brother?” said Bellcock, leaning back, draping his long arms over the back of the sofa, his pose of studied casualness betrayed only by a nervous twitch in his left thigh that set his heel to tapping.

“A few weeks ago-when he called me about you.” Your motor’s running, Ida wanted to tell him-that’s what Walt always said to Stan, whose leg also used to vibrate annoyingly like that when he was anxious or excited.

Almost there, thought Simon. But before he asked the only question that really mattered, he had to find out for sure whether she knew anything about Pender’s recent exploits. If, say, she’d been following the case in the news, a direct question about fear would be bound to arouse her suspicions-he’d have to find a way to fit the question within that context. “I’ve been out of touch for a few weeks. Any idea what Ed’s working on lately?”

“Now that he’s retired, you mean? His golf game, I should imagine-he told me he and his friend Sid were going to be flying out to California. He was all excited about playing Pebble Beach, as I recall.”

“Right, right.” Retired! That’s why Pender never pulled a gun on me, thought Simon-because he didn’t have one. If Pender was retired, though, then what was he doing nosing around Carmel? And what had Dorie told him that sent him to Berkeley? And what, for that matter, did it say about Simon, that he had allowed his life (and Missy’s-don’t forget about Missy) to be destroyed by some retired old poop.

But never mind all that now, Simon told himself, tamping down his growing rage as best he could. Those were all peripheral issues; the time had come to get down to the meat of the matter. He flipped through the pages of his notebook, pretending to have lost his place.

“Let’s see now, where were we? Likes, dislikes, favorite sport, blah blah blah, first girlfriend…Oh, yes, here we are. Next question is: Did Eddie have any phobias when he was a boy?”

“Phobias?”

“Yes-was there anything in particular that he feared?”

“I know what the word means, Mr. Bellcock-I was trying to remember. There was an episode, when Eddie was…let’s see, I was in my senior year at Ithaca when our mom called and told me to come right home…so Eddie would have been around eight or nine. He and his friend were fooling around with firecrackers. They dropped one down our chimney to see what would happen-it blew up in Eddie’s face. It was touch and go for a couple of weeks whether he’d even regain his sight.”

“Firecrackers, then?” asked Simon, cutting to the chase. “He’s afraid of firecrackers?”

“No, no,” said Ida. “Blindness. Terrified of it. As a boy, you could never get him to play pin the tail on the donkey. And as an adult…Let’s see, it was Stanley’s birthday, Eddie had just graduated from FBI Academy, so it must have been 1972, we had a pinata, and Eddie absolutely refused to put on the blindfold, even after Stanley begged him. And Eddie adored Stanley-he’d have done anything for him.”

But although Arthur Bellcock was busily scribbling in his notebook, Simon Childs was no longer paying any attention.

Blindness, is it? he thought. That’s a good one, that’s a juicy one-we can make a game out of that, Eddie- boy; we can definitely make a game out of that one.

And with that out of the way, there was only one more question remaining to be asked: “Just out of curiosity, Mrs. Day, as long as we’re on the subject-is there anything in particular that you’re afraid of?”

“There was,” said Ida, putting the emphasis on the past tense. And then, probably because Mr. Bellcock was such an extraordinary listener, hanging on her every word, his lips parted and his strangely naked eyes aglow with the reflected light from the fire, Ida found herself telling him what it was-or rather, what it had been.

Micrurus Fulvius Fulvius 1

The wooded hillside below Pender’s house sloped down to a narrow strip of lawn abutting the eastern bank of the C amp;O; a tall windbreak of mixed white ash, box elder, hawthorne, sycamore, and sugar maple lined the towpath along the western bank. From the porch, Linda saw the broad silver ribbon of the Potomac winding lazily in the distance through the Froot-Loopy autumn countryside.

She also saw her breath. Enjoy the view while you can, Linda told herself-in a few weeks those trees will all be bare.

Linda glanced at her watch-6:30-washed down a handful of vitamins with the dregs of her breakfast smoothie, grabbed her cane, and pushed herself up from her chair. Then it was heigh-ho, heigh-ho, down the River Road we go, to the DOJ-AOB in suburban Virginia, where she received a familiar howdy from the gate guard, who examined the backseat, trunk, and undercarriage of the Geo anyway. The daily security code for the underground garage was 1220, which also happened to be her mom’s birthday; Linda told herself that meant it would be a lucky day for her.

It was a busy one, at any rate. Two more corpses-well, skeletons-had been unearthed in Simon Childs’s basement, so Linda spent the entire morning reviewing the missing persons printouts for the western states that Thom Davies had culled from the NCIC database over the weekend. Some went back as far as 1968. Where there seemed to be at least a possibility of a match, Linda would fax the preliminary forensic data to the appropriate local authorities.

Around one o’clock, the eleven cartons of records arrived from Bobbeck, Pflueger, and Morrison-Mr. Pflueger had been as good as his word. She enlisted Pool’s help in cataloguing the contents, which took most of the afternoon. What’d you do in the FBI, Mommy? she imagined her kids asking her someday in the distant future. Darlings, I shuffled paper like nobody’s business.

Then she remembered that she wasn’t going to be having any kids-or, most likely, any distant future. And although the realization wasn’t exactly news, it did rattle her a little, sucker punching her like that. Too bad, so sad, get over it, she ordered herself, and went back to her paper shuffling.

2

With amphetamines, there comes a point where a dosage sufficient to keep you awake is also large enough to cause optical field disturbances similar to hallucinations. Flashing lights in the periphery of your vision, trails and prismatic distortions-you don’t see things that aren’t there, but you almost see things that weren’t there a second ago, and aren’t there when you look again.

Simon reached that point late Tuesday afternoon. He’d fled La Farge profoundly shaken by how deeply the old woman had gotten under his skin, and though he’d driven blindly through the night and into the dawn, he couldn’t seem to drive fast enough or far enough to get her out of his mind-the fond look in her eyes when she told him about her Down child, her Stanley; the sincere anger in her voice when she recounted how the doctors had told her the best thing she could do for all of them, Stanley, her husband, and herself, was put the child away in an institution before they all got too used to each other; the shame when she told him how close she’d come to listening to them.

“They wouldn’t let me breast-feed him-they told me I’d get too attached. When he was three weeks old, we put him in his little basket and drove him to the state home down by Madison. The papers were signed-all I had to do was turn around and walk away, but do you know what, Mr. Bellcock? It was as if my legs had turned to stone. To this day-to this day, Mr. Bellcock, I still can’t understand how any mother could do it, physically do it, is what I mean, walk away and leave her baby behind.”

There’s an old woman in Atlantic City I’d like to ask that same question, thought Simon. And suddenly, although he couldn’t have put a name to the disquieting sensation welling up inside him-it was a strange amalgam of self-pity and empathy-he realized he couldn’t stand to hear much more about how it felt to be Ida Day in