“What about all the others? Some of them-McNeil, for instance-would vote to do nothing, wait it out, take the psycho’s word. Have you got the right to make a decision for seventy-five people? Because if you do go, you’re going to have to do it without telling anybody else; you’re going to have to make that decision.”
“You know the answer to that as well as I do, Lew: if my going can mean saving the lives of everyone in the valley-my family’s lives-then yes, yes, I’ve got the right…”
Cain had heard enough. He moved away from the altar and stopped by the organ. Tribucci’s right, he thought, one look at that dark one’s eyes is enough to tell anybody he’s right; it has to be done, one way or another. Anger stirred inside him again, began to burn with increasing candescence. His eyes wandered the oppressively silent room, located Rebecca Hughes again, rested on her bloodless face-and she reminded him of Angie; she did not resemble Angie in any way, but she might have been Angie. The children, too, the huddling children were little boys who might have been Steve and little girls who might have been Lindy. And what if it was them sitting out there? What if they were alive and they were here now, the way Tribucci’s family was here now?
Sweat formed a thin beaded mosaic on Cain’s forehead, trickled down along his cheeks. No, he thought then. No, no.
Yes, the other half of him said.
No I’d freeze up, I’d panic, I’d We’d do what has to be done.
Before he quite realized what he was doing, he had turned and taken two steps in the direction of the vestry door. And when his foot lifted for the third step, the back of his neck prickled and a tingling sensation washed down through his groin. His mind opened, like a blossom, in epiphany.
Forward, he thought, walking forward. I’ve been walking backward for six months, and I’ve just taken my first forward steps in all that time.
Yes! the other half of him said again, and the two halves remerged spiritually at last and made a bonded whole. Without hesitation, he kept on walking forward.
Nine
Tribucci and Coopersmith, still debating in low, taut voices, lapsed into immediate silence when Zachary Cain came into the vestry. He stood in front of them, arms slack at his sides, bearded face and gray eyes animate with not quite definable emotions.
He said, “Can I talk to both of you for a minute?”
Tribucci frowned, the cords in his neck bulging like elongated ribs. Coopersmith had to be on his side, to handle things here in the church once he set out on the recon, to help him plan out a course of action, and he was close to convincing the old man now; Cain’s surprising instrusion — the man had never spoken directly to anyone, except to make a purchase, in all the time he’d been in the valley — could not have been more ill-timed.
And Cain said to him, “I overheard you talking a couple of minutes ago-about the belfry, about what you want to try to do. No one else heard it; I was alone by the altar.”
Tribucci exchanged a quick look with Coopersmith. He said then, “Well?”
Cain held a breath, released it slowly. “I want to go with you.”
They stared at him-and a kind of low-key electrical tension developed among the three men. None of them moved for a long moment.
“I mean it,” Cain said finally. “I want to go with you.”
Unlike some of his neighbors, Tribucci had never resented or disliked or mistrusted Cain; although he was an odd sort in a lot of ways, there had always seemed to be a gentleness and a basic decency beneath his eccentric taciturnity. But now he was immediately suspicious. How could Cain possibly care enough about the people of Hidden Valley to want to risk his life for them? Did he have some idea of pretending to join forces just so he could get out of the church and save himself? And yet-that didn’t make sense either. If he wanted to escape in order to run away, coming to them as he had just done was pointless; all he would have had to do, now that he knew about the belfry, was to wait until he, Tribucci, was gone and then sneak in here and leave in the same fashion…
Coopersmith, studying Cain probingly, said, “Why? Why do you want to go?”
“Because I think Tribucci’s right, I think that madman wouldn’t hesitate to commit mass butchery, I think the only alternative is to go after him and the other two. Tribucci might be able to pull it off alone, but his chances are twice as good if there are two of us.”
“That doesn’t exactly explain why you’re volunteering.”
“You said it yourself: there isn’t anybody else.”
“Not what I meant. Look Cain, we don’t know a thing about you. Since you came to the valley, you’ve taken pains to keep to yourself. I respect a man’s right to live his life the way he sees fit, as long as he doesn’t hurt anybody else, but in a crisis like this, where the lives of so many people are in jeopardy, we’ve got to know you before we can put any trust in you.”
“That’s right,” Tribucci agreed grimly. “Who are you, Cain? Why do you want to put your life on the line for people you hardly know, people you’ve shunned?”
A long, still hesitation. Then, staring at the wall to one side of them, Cain said very softly, “The reason I came to Hidden Valley, the reason I’ve lived here as I have, is that I was responsible for the deaths of my wife and two children this past June.”
Tribucci winced faintly; Coopersmith’s hand lifted, as if to rumple his dusty hair, and then fell across and down his shirt front. But there was nothing for either of them to say just yet.
Still talking to the wall, Cain went on, “I was one of these do-it-yourself people, don’t waste money on plumbers and electricians and repairmen when I could take care of what needed to be done with my own hands and enjoyed the work besides. We had a fairly old house with a fairly new gas stove in the kitchen, and it developed a minor gas leak and I fixed it one night-thought I’d fixed it okay, there didn’t seem to be any more problems. The following Saturday I went bowling in a tournament, and when I got home there were… there…”
His voice had grown heavy and liquid, and he broke off and swallowed audibly. When he was able to go on with it: “I came back and there were fire trucks and police cars and an ambulance and a hundred or more people on the street, and the house… it was burning, there had been an explosion, one wall was blown out. My wife and son and daughter were… they were inside when it happened and there was nothing anyone could do, they never even knew what hit them, and their bodies… I saw their bodies…”
A shudder went through him; he shook his head a single time as though to erase the mental picture of that scene. “When I’d fixed the stove leak,” he said, “I unknowingly twisted or bent the gas line fitting at the baseboard somehow and caused another leak, one of those slow ones that you can’t smell because it all builds in the walls; that was the official verdict, and that’s the way it had to have been. It was my fault, my carelessness, that caused the deaths of the only three people in the world I loved. I didn’t want to go on living either, not then. Committing suicide was… impossible, and yet I thought staying in San Francisco was impossible, too. So I quit my job, I’m an architect, and made arrangements with our bank to send me a small allotment every month-we’d saved more than twenty thousand dollars toward a new home-and I came here because it was a place I knew, I’d done some fishing and hunting in this area.
“For six months I’ve been in a kind of coma, drinking too much to numb the pain and guilt, never really numbing it at all. I didn’t care about anything, I didn’t want contact with you people, I thought I could exist in that coma forever because I thought it was what I wanted. But it wasn’t and it isn’t, I’ve come to realize that now; I’m lonely, I’m terribly lonely, I need to start living again. If I go out there to face those men, I might die, but if I do nothing in here I might die too; and if I’m killed out there, it will be in a cause worth dying for. I want you people to live too, caring for myself has made me start caring for others again and I don’t want to see women and children die as helplessly as my family died. There was nothing I could do to save them, but maybe I can help to save your wives and your children. That’s why I want to go, that’s why I need to go….”
Cain fell silent but continued to stare unseeingly at the wall. Tribucci moved his head slightly and once more looked at Coopersmith.
Do you believe him? Coopersmith’s eyes asked.
I believe him, Tribucci’s eyes answered, and Coopersmith dipped his head almost imperceptibly. They had just witnessed the laying bare of a man’s heart and soul, and the sincerity of his confession was to both of them
