Time hitched and spun, knocked out of rhythm. Laura tasted blood. Pain throbbed through her shoulder, and her hand had lost the tire iron. When she could gather the strength to sit up, she found herself alone in Bedelia Morse's kitchen. The back door was wide open, dead leaves blowing in. Laura spat a red scrawl on the floor, and her tongue found the wound inside her cheek where her teeth had met. I'm all right, she thought. I'm all right. But she was starting to shake uncontrollably now that the man with the death's-head grin had gone, and fear and nausea hit her in tandem. She barely made it outside to throw up, next to one of the abstract sculptures. She heaved until nothing would come up, and then she sat on the ground away from her mess and breathed in lungfuls of frigid air. Between her thighs there was a pulse of pain. She felt warm wetness spreading there, and she realized with a flash of anger that the son of a bitch had torn her stitches open again.
She stood up and walked back into the kitchen. The flashlight was gone. Her tire iron remained. The urge to cry fell upon her, and she almost gave in to this brutal friend. But she couldn't trust herself to stop crying if she began, and so she stood with her hands pressed to her eyes until the urge passed. Shock lurked in the back of her mind, waiting its turn to creep over her. There was nothing to be done now but to go to her car and drive back to the Days Inn. Her right shoulder was going to be one black bruise tomorrow, and her back was aching where the man had driven her against the counter.
But she had not been killed. She had stood up against him, whoever he'd been, and she'd survived. Before all this had started, she would have crumpled into a heap and cried her heart out, but things were different now. Her heart was harder, her vision colder. Violence had suddenly and irrevocably become a part of her life.
She would have to tell Mark about this. The man with the plug in his throat, who'd been asking questions about Diane Daniells from the neighbor across the road. Who was he, and how did he fit into the puzzle?
Laura helped herself to a glass of water from the faucet, spitting blood into the sink. It was time to go. Time to leave the light and strike out into the darkness again. She retrieved the tire iron, and she waited for her trembling to subside. It wouldn't. She put out of her mind the image of the grinning man waiting for her out there somewhere. Let it be, she told herself. And then she switched off the light, closed the back door, and began walking the distance to her car. Nothing came after her, though she jumped at every sound, imagined or otherwise, and her fingers cramped around the tire iron.
Laura got into the BMW, turned on the ignition and the headlights.
That was when she saw it. Backwards letters, carved into her windshield by a glass cutter. Two words:
She sat there for a moment, stunned, looking at what she took to be a warning. Go home. Where was that? A house in Atlanta, shared by a stranger named Doug? A place where her parents lived, ready and eager to command her life?
Go home.
'Not without my son,' Laura vowed, and she pulled the car off the shoulder and drove toward Ann Arbor.
3: The Secret Thing
'Sometimes,' Mary said as Drummer slept in her arms, 'I get crazy. I don't know why. My head hurts, and I can't think straight. Maybe everybody feels like that sometimes, huh?'
'Maybe,' Didi admitted, but she didn't believe it.
'Yeah.' She smiled at her sister in arms, the storm of madness passed for now. 'I was so glad to see you, Didi. I can't tell you how much. I mean… you look so different and everything, but I've missed you. I've missed everybody. I think it was smart of you not to show up at the weeping lady. It could've been a trap, right?'
'Right.' That was why Didi had gone to Liberty Island at noon, with the binoculars she'd borrowed from her neighbor Charles Brewer. She'd positioned herself on a vantage point where she could see the passengers getting off the boat, and she'd recognized Mary but not Edward Fordyce until he'd approached Mary. She'd followed them from Liberty Island, had seen them go into the apartment building, and had buzzed the apartment belonging to Edward Lambert. Her brown Ford was rented, and her real car – a gray Honda hatchback – was at the airport parking lot in Detroit. 'What are you going to do from here?' Didi asked.
'I don't know. Make it to Canada, I guess. Go underground again. Except this time I'll have my baby.'
They hadn't yet breached the difficult subject. Didi wanted to know: 'Why'd you take him, Mary? Why didn't you just come up by yourself?'
'Because,' Mary answered, 'he's Jack's gift.'
Didi shook her head, not understanding.
'I was bringing Drummer to Jack. When I saw the message, I thought it was from him. That's why I brought Drummer. For Jack. See?'
Didi did. She sighed softly, and averted her eyes from Mary Terror. Mary's insanity was as obvious as a scab; it was true that Mary was still cunning, in the way of a hunted animal, but the trial of the years – and her solitary confinement – had eaten her down to the desperate bones. 'You brought the baby for Jack and he didn't show up.' Now the display of rage made more sense to her, but its explanation was madness enough. 'I'm sorry.'
'I don't need him!' Mary snapped. 'And don't you be sorry for me! No way! I'll be just fine now that I've got my baby!'
Didi nodded, thinking of the glowing burner. If she hadn't been here to stop it, the baby's face would have been scorched off his skull. One night – maybe not very far in the future – Mary would wake up in the throes of madness, and there would be no one to save the infant. Didi knew she'd done a lot of terrible things in her life. They were things that came back to her at night, bleeding and moaning. They haunted her dreams, and they had grinned and jabbered as she'd laid out the razor and soaked her wrists in hot water. She'd done terrible things, but she'd never hurt a baby. 'Maybe you shouldn't take him with you,' she said.
Her face like a block of stone, Mary stared at Didi.
'You can't move as fast with a baby,' Didi went on. 'He'll slow you down.'
Mary was silent, rocking the sleeping child in her arms.
'You could leave him at a church. Leave a note saying who he is. They'd get him back to his mother.'
'I am his mother,' Mary said.
Dangerous ground, Didi thought. She was walking in a minefield. 'You don't want Drummer to be hurt, do you? What'll happen if the police find you? Drummer might get hurt. Have you thought of that?'
'Sure. If the pigs find me, I shoot the baby first and I take as many of them with me as I can.' She shrugged. 'Reasonable.'
Didi blinked, startled, and at that moment she saw the darkness of Mary Terror's soul.
'I can't let them take us alive,' Mary said. Her smile returned. 'We're together now. We'll die together, if that's how it has to be.'
Didi looked at her hands clenched together in her lap. They were earth-mother hands, the palms broad and the fingers sturdy. She thought of bullets going into bodies, and one of her earth-mother hands on the gun. She thought of the newscasts on TV, the pictures of this child's mother leaving the hospital in Atlanta, her face tormented by worry, her body bent under a terrible weight. She thought of the secret thing, the thing she'd suspected for five years. Her life had been a twisted, treacherous road. She had destroyed her parents, driving her mother to drink and her father to a heart attack that had killed him in 1973. The farm was gone now, reclaimed by the bank. Her mother was in a sanitarium, babbling and wetting her bed. For Bedelia Morse the saying was viciously true: you can't go home again.
She had seen the message in January's issue of Mother Jones. At first she'd had no intention of going to the Statue of Liberty on the eighteenth of February, but the idea had kept gnawing at her. She wasn't sure exactly why she'd decided to go. Maybe it was pure curiosity, or maybe it was because the Storm Front had been her true family. She had bought a round-trip ticket on American Airlines, and left Detroit on Thursday night.
Her flight back to Detroit was at one-thirty in the afternoon. She hadn't planned on sleeping at Mary's motel, but it was cleaner than the hotel she was staying at on West 55th in Manhattan. She was glad now that she'd stayed with Mary, for the baby's sake. And much less glad that she'd seen the inner nature of Mary Terror, though the newscasts of the FBI agent being shotgunned had been a forewarning. Didi turned the secret thing over and over in her mind, working it like a Rubik's Cube.
