Firestarter (23 page)

With such a series of colossal gaffes under the Shop's belt, it became less difficult to understand how the agents employed to keep watch on the McGee family could mistake a child's two nights at a friend's house as a run for the tall timber. As Quincey would have said (and maybe he had), if the most efficient of the Shop's thousand or more employees had to go to work in the private sector, they would have been drawing unemployment benefits before their probationary periods were up.

But there had been crazy mistakes on both sides, Andy reflected—and if the bitterness in that thought had become slightly vague and diffuse with the passage of time, it had once been sharp enough to draw blood, a many-tined bitterness,
with each sharp point tipped with the curare of guilt. He had been scared by the things Quincey implied on the phone that day Charlie tripped and fell down the stairs, but apparently he hadn't been scared enough. If he had been, perhaps they
would
have gone underground.

He had discovered too late that the human mind can become hypnotized when a life, or the life of a family, begins to drift out of the normal range of things and into a fervid fantasy-land that you are usually asked to accept only in sixty-minute bursts on TV or maybe for one-hundred-ten-minute sittings in the local Cinema I.

In the wake of his conversation with Quincey, a peculiar feeling had gradually crept over him: it began to seem that he was constantly stoned. A tap on his phone? People watching them? A possibility that they might all be scooped up and dropped into the basement rooms of some government complex? There was such a tendency to smile a silly smile and just watch these things loom up, such a tendency to do the civilized thing and pooh-pooh your own instincts.…

Out on Tashmore Pond there was a sudden dark flurry and a number of ducks took off into the night, headed west. A half-moon was rising, casting a dull silver glow across their wings as they went. Andy lit another cigarette. He was smoking too much, but he would get a chance to go cold turkey soon enough; he had only four or five left.

Yes, he had suspected there was a tap on the phone. Sometimes there would be an odd double click after you picked it up and said hello. Once or twice, when he had been talking to a student who had called to ask about an assignment or to one of his colleagues, the connection had been mysteriously broken. He had suspected that there might be bugs in the house, but he had never torn the place apart looking for them (had he suspected he might find them?). And several times he had suspected—no, had been almost sure—that they were being watched.

They had lived in the Lakeland district of Harrison, and Lakeland was the sublime archetype of suburbia. On a drunk night you could circle six or eight blocks for hours, just looking for your own house. The people who were their neighbors worked for the IBM plant outside town, Ohio Semi-Conductor in town, or taught at the college. You could have drawn two ruler-straight lines across an average-family-income sheet, the lower line at eighteen and a half thousand and the upper
one at maybe thirty thousand, and almost everyone in Lakeland would have fallen in the area between.

You got to know people. You nodded on the street to Mrs. Bacon, who had lost her husband and had since been remarried to vodka—and she looked it; the honeymoon with that particular gentleman was playing hell with her face and figure. You tipped a V at the two girls with the white Jag who were renting the house on the corner of Jasmine Street and Lakeland Avenue—and wondered what spending the night with the two of them would be like. You talked baseball with Mr. Hammond on Laurel Lane as he everlastingly trimmed his hedges. Mr. Hammond was with IBM (“Which stands for I've Been Moved,” he would tell you endlessly as the electric clippers hummed and buzzed), originally from Atlanta and a rabid Atlanta Braves fan. He loathed Cincinnati's Big Red Machine, which did not exactly endear him to the neighborhood. Not that Hammond gave a shit. He was just waiting for IBM to hand him a fresh set of walking papers.

But Mr. Hammond was not the point. Mrs. Bacon wasn't the point, nor were those two luscious peaches in their white Jag with the dull red primer paint around the headlights. The point was that after a while your brain formed its own subconscious subset: people who belong in Lakeland.

But in the months before Vicky was killed and Charlie snatched from the Dugans' house, there had been people around who didn't belong to that subset. Andy had dismissed them, telling himself it would be foolish to alarm Vicky just because talking to Quincey had made him paranoid.

The people in the light-gray van. The man with the red hair that he had seen slouched behind the wheel of an AMC Matador one night and then behind the wheel of a Plymouth Arrow one night about two weeks later and then in the shotgun seat of the gray van about ten days after that. Too many salesmen came to call. There had been evenings when they had come home from a day out or from taking Charlie to see the latest Disney epic when he had got the feeling that someone had been in the house, that things had been moved around the tiniest bit.

That feeling of being watched.

But he hadn't believed it would go any further than watching. That had been
his
crazy mistake. He was still not entirely convinced that it had been a case of panic on their part. They might have been planning to snatch Charlie and himself, killing Vicky because she was relatively useless—who
really needed a low-grade psychic whose big trick for the week was closing the refrigerator door from across the room?

Nevertheless, the job had a reckless, hurry-up quality to it that made him think that Charlie's surprise disappearance had made them move more quickly than they had intended. They might have waited if it had been Andy who dropped out of sight, but it hadn't been. It had been Charlie, and she was the one they were really interested in. Andy was sure of that now.

He got up and stretched, listening to the bones in his spine crackle. Time he went to bed, time he stopped hashing over these old, hurtful memories. He was not going to spend the rest of his life blaming himself for Vicky's death. He had only been an accessory before the fact, after all. And the rest of his life might not be that long, either. The action on Irv Manders's porch hadn't been lost on Andy McGee. They had meant to waste him. It was only Charlie they wanted now.

He went to bed, and after a while he slept. His dreams were not easy ones. Over and over he saw that trench of fire running across the beaten dirt of the dooryard, saw it divide to make a fairy-ring around the chopping block, saw the chickens going up like living incendiaries. In the dream, he felt the heat capsule around him, building and building.

She said she wasn't going to make fires anymore.

And maybe that was best.

Outside, the cold October moon shone down on Tashmore Pond on Bradford, New Hampshire, across the water, and on the rest of New England. To the south, it shone down on Longmont, Virginia.

Sometimes Andy McGee had feelings—hunches of extraordinary vividness. Ever since the experiment in Jason Gearneigh Hall. He didn't know if the hunches were a low-grade sort of precognition or not, but he had learned to trust them when he got them.

Around noon on that August day in 1980, he got a bad one.

It began during lunch in the Buckeye Room, the faculty lounge on the top floor of the Union building. He could even pinpoint the exact moment. He had been having creamed
chicken on rice with Ev O'Brian, Bill Wallace, and Don Grabowski, all in the English Department. Good friends, all of them. And as usual, someone had brought along a Polish joke for Don, who collected them. It had been Ev's joke, something about being able to tell a Polish ladder from a regular one because the Polish ladder had the word
STOP
lettered on the top rung. All of them were laughing when a small, very calm voice spoke up in Andy's mind.

(something's wrong at home)

That was all. That was enough. It began to build up almost the same way that his headaches built up when he overused the push and tipped himself over. Only this wasn't a head thing; all his emotions seemed to be tangling themselves up, almost lazily, as if they were yarn and some bad-tempered cat had been let loose along the runs of his nervous system to play with them and snarl them up.

He stopped feeling good. The creamed chicken lost whatever marginal appeal it had had to begin with. His stomach began to flutter, and his heart was beating rapidly, as if he had just had a bad scare. And then the fingers of his right hand began abruptly to throb, as if he had got them jammed in a door.

Abruptly he stood up. Cold sweat was breaking on his forehead.

“Look, I don't feel so good,” he said. “Can you take my one o'clock, Bill?”

“Those aspiring poets? Sure. No problem. What's wrong?”

“I don't know. Something I ate, maybe.”

“You look sort of pale,” Don Grabowski said. “You ought to cruise over to the infirmary, Andy.”

“I may do that,” Andy said.

He left, but with no intention whatever of going to the infirmary. It was quarter past twelve, the late-summer campus drowsing through the last week of the final summer session. He raised a hand to Ev, Bill, and Don as he hurried out. He had not seen any of them since that day.

He stopped on the Union's lower level, let himself into a telephone booth, and called home. There was no answer. No real reason why there should have been; with Charlie at the Dugans, Vicky could have been out shopping, having her hair done, she could have been over at Tammy Upmore's house or even having lunch with Eileen Bacon. Nevertheless, his nerves cranked up another notch. They were nearly screaming now.

He left the Union building and half walked, half ran to the station wagon, which was in the Prince Hall parking lot. He drove across town to Lakeland. His driving was jerky and poor. He jumped lights, tailgated, and came close to knocking a hippie off his ten-speed Olympia. The hippie gave him the finger. Andy barely noticed. His heart was triphammering now. He felt as if he had taken a hit of speed.

They lived on Conifer Place—in Lakeland, as in so many suburban developments built in the fifties, most of the streets seemed named for trees or shrubs. In the midday August heat, the street seemed queerly deserted. It only added to his feeling that something bad had happened. The street looked wider with so few cars parked along the curbs. Even the few kids playing here and there could not dispel that strange feeling of desertion; most of them were eating lunch or over at the playground. Mrs. Flynn from Laurel Lane walked past with a bag of groceries in a wheeled caddy, her paunch as round and tight as a soccer ball under her avocado-colored stretch pants. All up and down the street, lawn sprinklers twirled lazily, fanning water onto the grass and rainbows into the air.

Andy drove the offside wheels of the wagon up over the curb and then slammed on the brakes hard enough to lock his seatbelt momentarily and make the wagon's nose dip toward the pavement. He turned off the engine with the gearshift still in Drive, something he never did, and went up the cracked cement walk that he kept meaning to patch and somehow never seemed to get around to. His heels clacked meaninglessly. He noticed that the Venetian blind over the big living-room picture window (
mural window,
the realtor who had sold them the house called it,
here ya gotcha basic mural window
) was drawn, giving the house a closed, secretive aspect he didn't like. Did she usually pull the blind? To keep as much of the summer heat out as possible, maybe? He didn't know. He realized there were a great many things he didn't know about her life when he was away.

He reached for the doorknob, but it didn't turn; it only slipped through his fingers. Did she lock the door when he was gone? He didn't believe it. That wasn't Vicky. His worry—no, it was terror now—increased. And yet there was one moment (which he would never admit to himself later), one small moment when he felt nothing but an urge to turn away from that locked door. Just hightail it. Never mind
Vicky, or Charlie, or the weak justifications that would come later.

Just run.

Instead, he groped in his pocket for his keys.

In his nervousness he dropped them and had to bend to pick them up—car keys, the key to the east wing of Prince Hall, the blackish key that unlocked the chain he put across Granther's road at the end of each summer visit. Keys had a funny way of accumulating.

He plucked his housekey from the bunch and unlocked the door. He went in and shut it behind him. The light in the living room was a low, sick yellow. It was hot. And still. Oh God it was so still.

“Vicky?”

No answer. And all that no answer meant was that she wasn't here. She had put on her boogie shoes, as she liked to say, and had gone marketing or visiting. Except that she wasn't doing either of those things. He felt sure of it. And his hand, his right hand … why were the fingers throbbing so?

“Vicky!”

He went into the kitchen. There was a small Formica table out there with three chairs. He and Vicky and Charlie usually ate their breakfast in the kitchen. One of the chairs now lay on its side like a dead dog. The salt shaker had overturned and salt was spilled across the table's surface. Without thinking about what he was doing, Andy pinched some of it between the thumb and first finger of his left hand and tossed it back over his shoulder, muttering under his breath, as both his father and his Granther had done before him, “Salt salt malt malt bad luck stay away.”

There was a pot of soup on the Hotpoint. It was cold. The empty soup can stood on the counter. Lunch for one. But where was she?

“Vicky!” he hollered down the stairs. Dark down there. The laundry room and the family room, which ran the length of the house.

No answer.

He looked around the kitchen again. Neat and tidy. Two of Charlie's drawings, made at the Vacation Bible School she had attended in July, held on the refrigerator with small plastic vegetables that had magnetic bases. An electric bill and a phone bill stuck on the spike with the motto
PAY THESE LAST
written across the base. Everything in its place and a place for everything.