controlled the Speaker. They needed each other. And they hated each other.
When Sally recognized Merryman for whatever or whoever he really was, she'd run to kindly old Hubert Wilburforce, who had promptly sold her to Brooks for $100,000 and the dismissal of a suit the Church had pending against the Congregation. Brooks, I would have thought, would have put her in a safe-deposit box as a piece of highly negotiable currency if she really knew something heinous about the good doctor. Instead, she'd been killed.
I was very anxious to have another talk with Brooks.
Eleanor's place seemed secure. The door was locked, none of the windows had been broken, and when I got inside, things were in their usual obsessive state of Eleanor neatness. It took me maybe forty-five minutes to pack everything she'd listed. I threw in a few things she'd forgotten, too. Shoes, for example. Eleanor belonged to the Bernie school of packing.
When I left, it was barely noon. Jessica Fram lived in the Valley, so I took the Santa Monica freeway to the 405 and pointed my awful, rattling little Camaro due north. It was a depressing shade of battleship gray that laughed at dirt. That's probably why they paint battleships that color. All that swabbing for nothing.
Jessica's house was in Reseda. It sat in the center of a flat little tract block that managed to stay brown even after all that rain. What lawns there were seemed to be made largely of mud. Dogs of indeterminate breed sprouted from it.
The only difference between the Fram house and the ones flanking it was an eight-foot-high chain-link fence with an extra foot of barbed wire on top. One of those boxes with a button and a microphone sat perched on a pole next to the driveway, looking like a forlorn transplant from Bel Air.
For about fifteen minutes I sat in the Camaro at the end of the block and studied the house. Nothing moved. The curtains were drawn against the day's new sunlight, and two cars, washed by the rain, sparkled in the driveway on the other side of the fence. They were the only sign that anyone was home.
At twenty minutes to one the front door of the house opened and a middle-aged woman with short steel-gray hair came briskly out. The gate slid open. The woman gave the neighborhood a practiced once-over, pausing only for an instant at my car, and then hopped into a butch black Land Rover and backed out into the street. She ignored me completely as she passed. Maybe there was something to be said for the Camaro's color.
I pulled the Camaro up to the black speaker box and pressed the button. After what seemed like weeks a woman's voice bellowed, 'Hermia?'
'No, it's not Hermia,' I said. 'I'm here to see Jessica.'
There was a pause you could have driven a motor home through.
'For what?' the woman said. 'She's in bed.'
I looked at my watch again. Twelve-forty-five. Jessica certainly led a difficult life. I mentally flipped another coin.
'Dick sent me,' I said.
After a long moment the gate rolled crankily open. I drove in.
Chapter 22
Her hair was long and straight and bleached and deader than the Dead Sea Scrolls. She lay on the living-room couch under a handmade quilt with her arms stretched out on top of it, palms up, like an ascetic nun waiting to receive the stigmata. She couldn't have been more than seventeen.
A vague, frayed lady who had to be Mrs. Fram had ushered me into a tiny Formica dining room and asked me to wait. Unwatered house plants languished despondently in a window box. Mrs. Fram was either the most laid- back woman I'd ever met or the most heavily sedated.
'Sit,' she'd said blearily. 'There's four chairs.' There were six. On the wall was an absolutely enormous color photograph of her and Jessica. It might have been taken before World War I for all the resemblance it bore to Mrs. Fram.
'Pretty picture,' I said conversationally.
'Uh,' she said, looking at it as though she'd never seen it before.
'Spontaneous generation,' I suggested. 'Pictures are always appearing on my walls too.'
She watched my mouth as I talked, looking like a lip-reader trying to follow a silent movie. Then she took a woozy look at the picture.
'Me and Baby,' she said. 'Sit. You just missed Hermia. She'll be back.'
Since I was already sitting, there wasn't much for me to do. 'I'm not here to see Hermia,' I reminded her.
'Dick sent you,' she said with an effort. She might have been pretty once-the picture certainly suggested that she had-but now the flesh hung slack and heavy on her face, and deep circles had worn themselves darkly and permanently into the pouchy area beneath her eyes. The creases around her eyes and mouth, even the creases in her forehead, all pulled downward. It was a face created by erosion. 'Dick,' she said again in a harsh tone. 'He was here. Just a couple days, I think.'
'Well,' I said brightly, 'he's sent me this time. I think you said Jessica was in bed.' I wiggled my eyebrows encouragingly. It was like talking to someone a hundred yards away; I found myself using body language to get the point across.
And a lot of good it did, too. She looked at me as I talked, and then, when I finished, she went on looking at me. I had a feeling she'd forgotten what I'd said. Then she said, 'Tuesday. It was Tuesday.' Satisfied with her feat of memory, she scratched her forearm absently for a moment. Then she told me to sit down again, pivoted uncertainly, and left the room. She dragged her feet when she walked, and her shoes slapped against the floor. 'Baby?' I heard her call. 'Baby. Time to get up.'
I spent the next ten minutes or so watering plants and snooping through the mail on the dining-room table. Quite a lot of it was from the Church: invitations to Revealings, an announcement of a retreat to be held up in Ojai, a strong suggestion that members consider establishing a system of annual tithing, a sort of pre-Christmas sale on certain advanced levels of Listening. Most of it was bulk stuff; ex-Speaker or not, Jessica didn't seem to be on any special mailing list.
At the bottom of the pile was a color photo of Angel and Mary Claire, the new one with the kitten in it. At first glance it looked like the kind of thing a junior-high-school kid might do-blacking out front teeth or drawing in a mustache. But it was more spiteful than that.
Holes had been poked through Mary Claire's eyes. A bullet-entrance wound had been painstakingly drawn into the center of her forehead, and vivid red ink poured from it. Her bosom had been slashed raggedly with a razor blade.
Nothing had been done to Angel.
The picture was an unsettling combination of immature malice and adult hatred. It looked like the kind of thing the cops found hanging in David Berkowitz's bedroom when they finally nailed him as the Son of Sam. The person who'd done it wasn't all there, but she had her hatred down cold. And, of course, it had to be Mrs. Fram.
I heard her shoes slapping against the hallway floor and shoved the picture back under the pile of mail. She pushed the door leading to the hallway closed from the other side before she passed by it. Apparently I wasn't to see Baby until Baby was ready. 'There, Baby,' she said from the living room. 'Right there. Right there.'
There was some muffled moving around. 'Cover up, now,' Mrs. Fram said in her slurred, mannish voice. ' 'Tsa man, you know. A man from Dick.'
'Dick,' said a small voice. 'Dick's not coming?'
'I don't know,' Mrs. Fram said curtly. 'Scoot up a little.'
'But I need him to come. He has to come.' The voice was thin and querulous, like that of a young actress trying to play an old woman.
'Hush. You hush. How do we know why this man's here?'
I stepped back from the door just as Mrs. Fram came through it. 'Okay now,' she said, concentrating her gaze in my general direction. 'Baby's in there.' She waved a hand behind her, in toward the living room. She went to the
