Firestarter (22 page)

He stood by the chain for a moment, looking at the leather tab, then at the keys themselves. There were almost two dozen of them. Keys were funny things; you could index a life by the keys that had a way of collecting on your keyring. He supposed that some people, undoubtedly people who had realized a higher degree of organization than he had, simply threw their old keys away, just as those same organizational types made a habit of cleaning their wallets out every six months or so. Andy had never done either.

Here was the key that opened the east-wing door of Prince Hall back in Harrison, where his office had been. His key to the office itself. To the English Department office. Here was the key to the house in Harrison that he had seen for the last time on the day the Shop killed his wife and kidnapped his daughter. Two or three more he couldn't even identify. Keys were funny things, all right.

His vision blurred. Suddenly he missed Vicky, and needed her as he hadn't needed her since those first black weeks on the road with Charlie. He was so tired, so scared, and so full of anger. In that moment, if he'd had every employee of the Shop lined up in front of him along Granther's road, and if someone had handed him a Thompson submachine gun …

“Daddy?” It was Charlie's voice, anxious. “Can't you find the key?”

“Yes, I've got it,” he said. It was among the rest, a small
Yale key on which he had scratched
T.P.
for Tashmore Pond with his jackknife. The last time they had been here was the year Charlie was born, and now Andy had to wiggle the key a little before the stiff tumblers would turn. Then the lock popped open and he laid the chain down on the carpet of fall leaves.

He drove the Willys through and then repadlocked the chain.

The road was in bad shape, Andy was glad to see. When they came up regularly every summer, they would stay three or four weeks and he would always find a couple of days to work on the road—get a load of gravel from Sam Moore's gravel pit and put it down in the worst of the ruts, cut back the brush, and get Sam himself to come down with his old dragger and even it out. The camp road's other, broader fork led down to almost two dozen camp homes and cottages strung along the shorefront, and those folks had their Road Association, annual dues, August business meeting and all (although the business meeting was really only an excuse to get really loaded before Labor Day came and put an end to another summer), but Granther's place was the only one down this way, because Granther himself had bought all the land for a song back in the depths of the Depression.

In the old days they'd had a family car, a Ford wagon. He doubted if the old wagon would have made it down here now, and even the Willys, with its high axles, bottomed out once or twice. Andy didn't mind at all. It meant that no one had been down here.

“Will there be electricity, Daddy?” Charlie asked.

“No,” he said, “and no phone, either. We don't dare get the electricity turned on, kiddo. It'd be like holding up a sign saying HERE WE ARE. But there are kerosene lamps and two range-oil drums. If the stuff hasn't been ripped off, that is.” That worried him a little. Since the last time they'd been down here, the price of range oil had gone up enough to make the theft worthwhile, he supposed.

“Will there be—” Charlie began.

“Holy shit,” Andy said. He jammed on the brakes. A tree had fallen across the road up ahead, a big old birch pushed down by some winter storm. “I guess we walk from here. It's only a mile or so anyway. We'll hike it.” Later he would have to come back with Granther's one-handed buck and cut the tree up. He didn't want to leave Irv's Willys parked here. It was too open.

He ruffled her hair. “Come on.”

They got out of the Willys, and Charlie scooted effortlessly under the birch while Andy clambered carefully over, trying not to skewer himself anywhere important. The leaves crunched agreeably under their feet as they walked on, and the woods were aromatic with fall. A squirrel looked down at them from a tree, watching their progress closely. And now they began to see bright slashes of blue again through the trees.

“What did you start to say back there when we came to the tree?” Andy asked her.

“If there would be enough oil for a long time. In case we stay the winter.”

“No, but there's enough to start with. And I'm going to cut a lot of wood. You'll haul plenty of it, too.”

Ten minutes later the road widened into a clearing on the shore of Tashmore Pond and they were there. They both stood quietly for a moment. Andy didn't know what Charlie was feeling, but for him there was a rush of remembrance too total to be called anything so mild as nostalgia. Mixed up in the memories was his dream of three mornings ago—the boat, the squirming nightcrawler, even the tire patches on Granther's boots.

The cottage was five rooms, wood over a fieldstone base. A deck jutted out toward the lake, and a stone pier poked out into the water itself. Except for the drifts of leaves and the blowdowns of three winters, the place hadn't changed a bit. He almost expected Granther himself to come strolling out, wearing one of those green and black checked shirts, waving and bellowing for him to come on up, asking him if he'd got his fishing license yet, because the brown trout were still biting good around dusk.

It had been a good place, a safe place. Far across Tashmore Pond, the pines glimmered gray-green in the sunshine.
Stupid trees,
Granther had said once,
don't even know the difference between summer and winter.
The only sign of civilization on the far side was still the Bradford Town Landing. No one had put up a shopping center or an amusement park. The wind still talked in the trees here. The green shingles still had a mossy, woodsy look, and pine needles still drifted in the roof angles and in the cup of the wooden gutter. He had been a boy here, and Granther had shown him how to bait a hook. He had had his own bedroom here, paneled in good maple, and he had dreamed a boy's dreams in a narrow bed
and had awakened to the sound of water lapping the pier. He had been a man here as well, making love to his wife in the double bed that had once belonged to Granther and his wife—that silent and somehow baleful woman who was a member of the American Society of Atheists and would explain to you, should you ask, the Thirty Greatest Inconsistencies in the King James Bible, or, should you prefer, the Laughable Fallacy of the Clockspring Theory of the Universe, all with the thudding, irrevocable logic of a dedicated preacher.

“You miss Mom, don't you?” Charlie said in a forlorn voice.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I do.”

“Me too,” Charlie said. “You had fun here, didn't you?”

“We did,” he agreed. “Come on, Charlie.”

She held back, looking at him.

“Daddy, will things ever be all right for us again? Will I be able to go to school and things?”

He considered a lie, but a lie was a poor answer. “I don't know,” he said. He tried to smile, but it wouldn't come; he found he could not even stretch his lips convincingly. “I don't know, Charlie.”

Granther's tools were all still neatly racked in the toolshed portion of the boathouse, and Andy found a bonus he had hoped for but had told himself not to hope for too much: nearly two cords of wood, neatly split and time-seasoned in the bay beneath the boathouse. Most of it he had split himself, and it was still under the sheet of ragged, dirty canvas he had thrown over it. Two cords wouldn't take them through the winter, but by the time he finished carving up the blowdowns around the camp and the birth back on the road, they would be well set.

He took the bucksaw back up to the fallen tree and cut it up enough to get the Willys through. By then it was nearly dark, and he was tired and hungry. No one had bothered to rip off the well-stocked pantry, either; if there had been vandals or thieves on snowmobiles over the last six winters, they had stuck to the more populous southern end of the lake. There were five shelves packed with Campbell's soups and
Wyman's sardines and Dinty Moore beef stew and all sorts of canned vegetables. There was also still half a case of Rival dog food on the floor—a legacy of Granther's good old dog Bimbo—but Andy didn't think it would come to that.

While Charlie looked at the books on the shelves in the big living room, Andy went into the small root cellar that was three steps down from the pantry, scratched a wooden match on one of the beams, stuck his finger into the knothole in one of the boards that lined the sides of the little dirt-floored room, and pulled. The board came out and Andy looked inside. After a moment he grinned. Inside the cobweb-festooned little bolt-hole were four mason jars filled with a clear, slightly oily-looking liquid that was one-hundred-percent-pure white lightning—what Granther called “father's mule-kick.”

The match burned Andy's fingers. He shook it out and lit a second. Like the dour New England preachers of old (from whom she had been a direct descendant), Hulda McGee had no liking, understanding, or tolerance for the simple and slightly stupid male pleasures. She had been a Puritan atheist, and this had been Granther's little secret, which he had shared with Andy the year before he died.

Besides the white lightning, there was a caddy for poker chips. Andy pulled it out and felt in the slot at the top. There was a crackling sound, and he pulled out a thin sheaf of bills—a few tens and fives and some ones. Maybe eighty dollars all told. Granther's weakness had been seven-card stud, and this was what he called his “struttin money.”

The second match burned his fingers, and Andy shook it out. Working in the dark, he put the poker chips back, money and all. It was good to know it was there. He replaced the board and went back through the pantry.

“Tomato soup do you?” he asked Charlie. Wonder of wonders, she had found all the Pooh books on one of the shelves and was currently somewhere in the Hundred Acre Wood with Pooh and Eeyore.

“Sure,” she said, not looking up.

He made a big pot of tomato soup and opened them each a tin of sardines. He lit one of the kerosene lamps after carefully drawing the drapes and put it in the middle of the dining table. They sat down and ate, neither of them talking much. Afterward he smoked a cigarette, lighting it over the chimney of the lamp. Charlie discovered the card drawer in Grandma's Welsh dresser; there were eight or nine decks in there, each of them missing a jack or a deuce or something,
and she spent the rest of the evening sorting them and playing with them while Andy prowled through the camp.

Later, tucking her into bed, he asked her how she felt.

“Safe,” she said with no hesitation at all. “Goodnight, Daddy.”

If it was good enough for Charlie, it was good enough for him. He sat with her awhile, but she dropped off to sleep quickly and with no trouble, and he left after propping her door open so he would hear her if she became restless in the night.

Before turning in, Andy went back down to the root cellar, got one of the jars of white lightning, poured himself a small knock in a juice glass, and went out through the sliding door and onto the deck. He sat in one of the canvas director's chairs (mildewy smell; he wondered briefly if something could be done about that) and looked out at the dark, moving bulk of the lake. It was a trifle chilly, but a couple of small sips at Granther's mule-kick took care of the chill quite nicely. For the first time since that terrible chase up Third Avenue, he too felt safe and at rest.

He smoked and looked out across Tashmore Pond.

Safe and at rest, but not for the first time since New York City. For the first time since the Shop had come back into their lives on that terrible August day fourteen months ago. Since then they had either been running or hunkering down, and either way there was no rest.

He remembered talking to Quincey on the telephone with the smell of burned carpeting in his nostrils. He in Ohio, Quincey out there in California, which in his few letters he always called the Magic Earthquake Kingdom.
Yes, it's a good thing,
Quincey had said.
Or they might put them in two little rooms where they could work full-time to keep two hundred and twenty million Americans safe and free.… I bet they'd just want to take that child and put it in a little room and see if it could help make the world safe for democracy. And I think that's all I want to say, old buddy, except … keep your head down.

He thought he had been scared then. He hadn't known what scared was. Scared was coming home and finding your
wife dead with her fingernails pulled out. They had pulled out her nails to find out where Charlie was. Charlie had been spending two days and two nights at her friend Terri Dugan's house. A month or so later they had been planning to have Terri over to their house for a similar length of time. Vicky had called it the Great Swap of 1980.

Now, sitting on the deck and smoking, Andy could reconstruct what had happened, although then he had existed in nothing but a blur of grief and panic and rage: it had been the blindest good luck (or perhaps a little more than luck) that had enabled him to catch up with them at all.

They had been under surveillance, the whole family. Must have been for some time. And when Charlie hadn't come home from summer daycamp that Wednesday afternoon, and didn't show up on Thursday or Thursday evening either, they must have decided that Andy and Vicky had tumbled to the surveillance. Instead of discovering that Charlie was doing no more than staying at a friend's house not two miles away, they must have decided that they had taken their daughter and gone underground.

It was a crazy, stupid mistake, but it hadn't been the first such on the Shop's part—according to an article Andy had read in
Rolling Stone,
the Shop had been involved and heavily influential in precipitating a bloodbath over an airplane hijacking by Red Army terrorists (the hijack had been aborted—at the cost of sixty lives), in selling heroin to the Organization in return for information on mostly harmless Cuban-American groups in Miami, and in the communist takeover of a Caribbean island that had once been known for its multimillion-dollar beachfront hotels and its voodoo-practicing population.