She set the picture down again and grunted as she stood up.
“So I’m wasting my time here,” I said.
She shook her head. “Oh no. None of us have ever had your resources. No one’s been able to ask a demon what they mean. The Painter is always silent.”
Meg came to the source pile, the clump of pictures I couldn’t sort. I kept returning to the pictures, sifting through them, waiting for the moment that something resonated, some synapse fired—and then I’d carry the picture to another part of the room. She frowned at the pile—perhaps thinking of all the work of putting these back in their binders—and moved on, her eyes following the horizontal exhibition on the floor.
“How is the boy?” Meg said casually. She didn’t mean the boy on the rock. “Do you still feel him straining to get out?” They couldn’t call him the Hellion anymore, and they wouldn’t stop calling me Del. So the person in my head was like an unnamed fetus: the boy, or just he, him.
“Quiet,” I said. He’d been silent and unmoving since the hypnosis session. I didn’t think time passed in there. He wasn’t conscious, stalking his cage and scheming his escape. He was like a fitful sleeper, and sometimes when his nightmares came on strong, or there was light coming into the cage from some hole I’d opened up, that’s when he got agitated. Since my car accident I’d been leaving the cage door open at night, and I hadn’t even known it.
After the session with the Waldheims, though, I had slammed the doors and tripled the locks. I clamped down on him as tightly as I had in those years when I thought he’d vanished—the years between Dr. Aaron’s “cure” and my plunge through the guardrail in Colorado. Now that I knew what I was doing, maybe I could hold him down for years. Maybe I could throw him so deep in the dungeon that he’d never come back up.
All I’d have to do then was live with myself.
“What’s the theory on the farmhouses?” I asked. I stood and led her to the twenty or so pictures. I picked up the most recent one. “This one I saw the Painter do at O’Hare Airport a couple weeks ago.” No, less than that— today was Tuesday. I’d arrived in Chicago ten days ago. The police or maybe a reporter had gotten an overhead picture of the popcorn–and-litter collage: the quaint clapboard house, the red silo and barn, the tree-edged fields. I was struck by the same sense of familiarity that I’d felt at the airport, but it wasn’t as strong as the pictures of Lew or Mom. It wasn’t anyplace I’d lived.
“Have you wondered about the smudge?” she said. She pointed to the dark blur in the sky above the house. At O’Hare the Painter had created it by scraping the heel of his shoe across the tile. “It’s in all the pictures.”
“It is?” I picked up another one of the series, then another. Each picture showed the same farm, but in winter, in summer, at night. And
she was right—the smudge was always there. In the nighttime pictures it was a faint glow.
“We could call in our experts to help you,” Meg said. “We didn’t want to bring anyone in until you were comfortable, but perhaps—”
“No. No more people.”
Meg frowned slightly. Of course they wanted to call in their experts. The entire secret society would be in a lather to meet me.
“Promise me,” I said.
She touched my shoulder. “No one else. I promise.”
I moved away from her, my neck hot, and bent to pick up another picture. “About this smudge,” I said without looking at her. “What are the theories on that one?”
“It’s never distinct enough to be a signature,” Meg said, easing gracefully back into scholar mode. “But it’s always there. It could be a bird, but because it also shows up at night, most people think it’s a plane . . .”
“Holy shit,” I said.
I stared at her. “I know where I’ve seen this,” I said. I scooped up several of the plastic-coated pictures and started for the library door.
“What is it?” Meg asked.
“There’s something I need from my mom’s—from her basement.”
I had to wake O’Connell. If she wouldn’t go with me I’d just take the keys to her truck. “I’ve got to get to Chicago.”
THE KAMIKAZE
OUTSIDE DENVER, COLORADO, 1955
A plane roared up from behind them, so low it blew off the president’s ball cap. Eisenhower was in midswing. He sliced badly, sending the ball into the trees, and jerked his head up to stare at the underbelly of the aircraft. He could make out rivets.
The plane zoomed away, disappeared over the next hill. The president cursed, something he rarely did. He turned to his golfing partner that day, George E. Allen, and said, “What the hell do those boys think they’re doing?”
“Those boys” referred to the pilots of nearby Lowry Air Force Base, where Eisenhower kept his summer White House. Planes were frequently overhead, but they’d never buzzed the golf course. Allen laughed. “You ought to say something to their commander-inchief.” Even though Allen was a former secretary of the Democratic National Committee and an advisor to Truman, the two men rarely talked politics. Eisenhower valued their friendship, as well as the fact that Allen’s handicap was larger than Eisenhower’s fourteen.
The president placed another ball on the tee, and grunted as he stood
up. The eighth tee box was on a slight rise, and he had a clear view of the green. He leaned on his club and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. It was unusually hot for late September, almost tropical. In a few days they’d have to go back to Washington, back to the political swamp. The Republicans had taken a beating in the off- year elections a year ago, and his own reelection campaign was about to begin. He’d have to figure out what to do with Nixon. His staff wanted the man off the ticket. The drone of the plane grew louder again. Allen and Eisenhower looked around, saw the plane circling back, banking around to their left. They could see its glass canopy, the tops of its wings. The plane was just a Beechcraft trainer, but the air force seals had been overpainted with large red circles. Eisenhower squinted, said, “George, is there a man on that thing?”
A figure in red clung to the outside of the plane’s canopy. A white cape, perhaps a shredded parachute, rippled behind him. One hand seemed to be flailing at the glass that covered the pilot. The two secret service agents who’d been trailing the president ran up the hill toward them. One of them said, “Mr. President—,” and grabbed Eisenhower’s arm.
The plane came out of its turn. It wobbled, then straightened, the nose aiming down at them. Eisenhower could see the pilot’s face—he wore a white scarf around his forehead—and the face of the daredevil riding the plane’s back. The glass canopy had shattered, and the red-clad man was reaching down into the cockpit.
The agents hauled Eisenhower and Allen backward and pushed them down the hill. Eisenhower ran several steps and suddenly fell to his knees. One of the agents pulled the president to his feet. The plane struck a moment later. The next morning, Vice President Richard Nixon came across a short item in the paper noting that the president had suffered an attack of indigestion. Nixon turned the page without thinking much about it; Eisenhower was prone to that sort of thing. It wasn’t until Sherman Adams, the assistant to the president and White House chief of staff, called an hour later that Nixon realized the seriousness of the situation.
“There’s been an accident,” Adams said. “The president’s had a coronary.”
Five minutes later Nixon entered a basement room of the White House already crowded with staff: Jim
