In one clip a white-dressed figure dashed through the shot, screaming, “Schlo, you don’t have to die!” No one in the surrounding seats gave the figure a glance. A woman, her white dress billowed around her, the wide skirts filled the aisle. She shouted, “Schlo, take my hand!”
In a different clip the deranged woman forced her way past seated guests and yanked at the wrist of a man. Unseen by her, two uniformed security guards came down the aisle from behind. One leveled something, not a gun, but something like a gun, and pulled the trigger. A wire jetted through the air and lanced the back of the lunatic’s neck.
In a third clip the woman shrieked. Clearly tasered, she thrashed and screamed as the guards carried her twitching body away. The video clip followed along until they disappeared through a fire exit. That, that’s how Mitzi had found herself dressed in ragged white satin, sitting in a Hollywood alley the morning after the disaster.
Watching now, her neck ached. The Taser explained the mark she’d found. Here was everything that she couldn’t remember.
She hunched with her nose almost touching the screen. Besides the network cameras, cell phones had recorded the final moments from every angle. Never had so many people documented their own demise.
To know the pecking order helped. In effect, to know where the VIPs among the VIPs were seated. Scanning through the center of the main floor, Mitzi paused. She backtracked a moment, and there he sat. The gardenia fresh in his lapel. His hand held his phone to his face as he spoke, as he left the voicemail. There were the malachite cuff links. There was the Timex watch. Here the walls and ceiling weren’t crashing down. Instead, the floor buckled. A sinkhole opened, swallowing seated movie stars near Schlo. The fissure yawned and more A-listers tumbled in, screaming. They poured down into whatever basements or parking garages lay below the auditorium. Schlo continued to talk on his phone. Even as his own seat tipped sideways and tumbled toward the void, he was still talking, trying to leave something of himself for her benefit in the physical world.
Here she touched her phone to start the voicemail. Schlo’s voice shouted, “Glad I am that you’re safe, that my family is safe.” He was shouting because of the roar around him or because he’d plugged his ears. Or shouting maybe just because Schlo always shouted on the phone, but he told her, “Now’s the time we should talk turkey, Mitz. And by that I’m telling you—destroy your damn tape!”
The end looked fast. Fast and painless. Painless and complete.
The tiny figure on the video shouted into his phone, “If our deaths are to mean anything, you should destroy what you’ve brought into this world!”
That was Schlo. That was Schlo all over, still yelling into his phone even while his entire world tilted sideways and he was tossed into oblivion.
Foster tried the knob, but it wouldn’t turn. Through the basement windows he could see inside. Dust coated the floor of the room where they usually met, a thin layer of dust unmarked by footprints. Gone was the usual circle of folding chairs. Gone was the sign in the window that welcomed the parents of missing or deceased children. To stand at the bottom of the concrete steps leading down from the sidewalk, this felt too much like standing in a grave, so Foster walked up to street level. There his beater Dodge sat at the curb, the only car on the block. Traffic passed a couple streets away on the avenue. Footsteps grew from that direction.
A figure moved along the brick walls, becoming a man, becoming Robb. Robb calling, “It’s too late, you know.” At such a distance he had to yell, “You can’t stop anything.”
Foster guessed his name wasn’t actually Robb. Nobody he’d met at this support group had been anybody. This place wasn’t a place, and it never had been. He took his best shot. “It was just me, wasn’t it?” He called out, “Why me?”
Robb, no longer the leader of a group that had never existed, he stopped out of reach. “You showed up is all.” Patronizing, his smile smug and guilty at the same time, he said, “We set a trap, and one day you stepped into it.”
They’d all been actors or mercenaries. There to stage the kind of a scam called a Big Store. A long con. They’d each faked a dead child, rehearsing their stories together. On the first evening when Foster had come down the stairs from the sidewalk and read the sign and opened that door, they’d all looked up as someone among them had been recounting a death that had never taken place. Someone had waved him inside. Whoever had been telling their story began to fake weeping, and Foster had been completely suckered. He asked, “There had to be other grieving parents, so why me?”
Robb, not-Robb, the voice on the tape complaining about too much blood and too many knives to clean, he shrugged. “You’re a man. We needed someone of your size.”
Foster felt the gun in his jacket pocket.
“And we needed someone who was angry,” said not-Robb. “We could channel your anger.”
The funeral is what he referred to. The mob scene, it had all been arranged to drive Foster into action. Something besides Lucinda had been steering his course, these people, but for their own purpose.
“Don’t take any of this personally,” not-Robb said. His smugness fell away. He ducked his head and scratched at the back of his scalp.
