Colin, and fuming, left the room.
'Waldo, wait,' Colin called.
'Let the prick go.'
'Jesus, Mark.'
'What?' he asked innocently.
'Did you have to imply that he was immoral? Don't you know what kind of a man he is?'
'Listen, Colin, don't try to lay a guilt trip on me because you're in bed with Waldo Hallock. The man was trying to get me to suppress a story. You heard him.'
'What I heard was a frightened man who was trying to get you to downplay a story, not suppress it.'
'Same thing.'
'No, it isn't,' Colin contradicted. 'It really isn't.'
'Well, fuck it. Who cares?'
'I do. You should. We need the chief of police on our side.'
'Before you got here I managed very well without the chief of police on my side.'
Was he jealous? Colin wondered.
'So where's the story?' Griffing asked suddenly.
'I was working on it when Waldo came in.'
Griffing looked at his watch. 'You'll have it by three?'
'I think you should apologize to the chief.'
'You've gotta be kidding, pal.'
'I'm not. You maligned his character. He's not going to forget that so easily.'
Griffing sat behind his desk and picked up his pen. 'I want the story by three.'
'Mark, don't you realize what you've done? We've got murder cases here, and you've cut off our best source of information for the future.'
'You sound like there's going to be more murders, pal.' He smiled wryly. 'Do you know something I don't know?'
Colin stepped back as if he'd been shot. 'What's that supposed to mean?'
'Take it the way you want.' He shuffled the papers on his desk. 'The story, Colin. By three.'
Colin felt his limbs beginning to tremble. He wanted to know what Mark had meant but he needed to get away more. He couldn't afford a full-blown panic attack in front of Mark. Quickly he moved to the door and hurried down the stairs. Judy, the bookkeeper, called to him as he rushed by her.
'Not now,' he snapped and ran for his office. Slamming the door shut, he hurled himself into a chair. His mouth was dry, as if he'd been in the sun for hours, but his body was clammy with cold sweat. The noise in the room was deafening. He realized then that it was his own shallow breathing coming in quick gulps.
He closed his eyes, afraid to see the walls crumbling, the floor buckling, as he had so many times before. Desperately, he tried to remember what Dr. Safier had told him to do, but no constructive thoughts would come. Only the sickening, ruinous ones: He was going to vomit, become insane, die.
It's not really happening, he told himself. I only think I feel these things. I won't go insane. I won't die. He tried to open his eyes. Hundred-pound weights pressed down on his lids. He was alone, lost, a minute particle swirling in the universe, growing smaller and smaller, ready to disappear, evaporate.
A roll of nausea eddied through him, and he dropped his head between his knees. When that had passed he sat up slowly, only to have dizziness overtake him. His mind whirled round and round like a dancer gone mad. Then the pains began. First in his elbows, sharp and piercing, then moving on down his arms, jumping to his thighs, knees, calves, shooting through his feet, exiting from his toes.
It was subsiding. His breathing slowed, began to come more regularly. The dizziness had narrowed, the nausea gone. He had to open his eyes, see that he existed. Slowly he pushed up his lids, the long lashes forming a scrim. He opened them further, until his eyes took in the room. His desk, chair, typewriter were all in place. The walls were straight.
Holding out his hand, he saw that there was only a slight tremor now. He felt as if the attack had gone on for hours, but experience told him this wasn't true. Looking at his watch he saw that only seven minutes had elapsed. Mark had never witnessed one of his panic attacks, and Colin was grateful he'd been able to get out of his office before it was too late.
In comparison to others, this attack had been fairly mild. He'd had the first one when he was twenty-seven, following his father's hideous death. Edward Maguire had been a doctor. At the age of fifty-two, when he developed cancer, he refused treatment. Instead, he stayed at home and slowly disintegrated.
Both Colin and his brother, Brian, had been summoned home for the last week of their father's life. It had been a nightmare. Edward's screams precluded sleep. They tried to get him into a hospital, but he refused. None of them dared defy him, even in his weakened, pitiful state.
'It's my punishment,' he'd said.' God's punishment.'
But when Colin tried to pursue it, Edward looked at him with glazed eyes and declined to answer. After he was dead, Colin asked his mother what his father had meant.
'Ask Robin,' she'd advised.
Colin did ask her. Robin Wise had been his father's nurse for twenty years and his mistress for seventeen.
It was after the funeral and he'd spoken to Robin that he'd had his first attack. Although it frightened him, he thought it was understandable considering the strain of that final week and the revelation of his father's affair. He dismissed it from his mind. Nothing like it happened again until after the murders of his family. Then the attacks became constant and relentless. When he'd finally faced that he couldn't go on that way, he'd left Chicago and gone to live with his mother. It was there he'd found Dr. Safier. The first six months he had his sessions on the telephone, afraid to leave his mother's house for fear of an attack. Eventually he was able to travel to Safier's office by car.
Here in Seaville he felt safe almost anywhere. If panic seized him he could always leave a room, a restaurant, a party. He was able to travel up and down the Fork, but the fear of becoming hysterical and causing a scene kept him from riding in a car with another person. Safier was in New Jersey, so he was back to having phone sessions; fortunately, he had one tonight.
But before that he had to write the goddamn story. The goddamn fucking story about murder.
He had forty-seven minutes.
LOOKING BACK-75 YEARS AGO
Jimmie Hand of Seaville and a young lady-it wouldn't be nice to mention her name-were thrown from their carriage while driving one night this week, by being run into by another vehicle. If the young man had looked after the ribbons instead of the waist, things might have been different. But then maybe it was worth it.
THIRTEEN
He couldn't believe how stupid and gullible they were. Or how easy this whole thing was going to be. He had nine more to go in this grouping. Then he'd start again.
He remembered all those years when he'd been planning it; he'd been scared. Now it just made him laugh. What the hell had he been afraid of, anyway? There was nothing to fear. I'm a steamroller, baby. And speaking of babies-that was a good one. He couldn't stop laughing. Laugh and laugh and laugh. It felt good to laugh. Some people didn't think so. Some people punished you if you laughed too much. Or too loud. Some damn people hit you if you laughed. But not Mommy and Daddy. They never hit.
So two down, nine to go! What a holiday weekend he was going to give them. One they wouldn't forget, for sure, for sure.
Damn fucks. Always asking him what he was thinking. Which ones were the worst? Maybe the ones when he
