"
There
you are," Betts called out. She was on a chaise with a plaid throw tucked in across her lap. Edmund Ruddy faithfully at her side, sipping a Coke; he stood quickly when Eden approached. She favored Ruddy with a polite smile, gesturing for him to take his seat again, then bent to kiss Betts's cheek. Sunlight flashed and receded on the terrace according to the wind-driven flourishes of arborvitae chockablock in planters along the outer wall. Betts still had very little color, Eden noted, except for the healing abrasions on her throat and neck.
"How's Megan?" Betts asked.
"Dying to see you. I told her another day or two, Mom, we'll all have dinner someplace nice. Mr. Ruddy, how are
you
today?"
He was a man to give considered answers to the most casual questions. "The transmission in the Z3 I seduced myself into buying is acting balky again. I had it to the dealer's only last week. I'm not entirely satisfied with the service I've been getting. When I owned my S-type Jag I must say it never gave me a moment's—"
Betts silenced him by playfully flicking fingers at his sheepdog bangs; he flinched, then smiled ruefully as if the gesture was an old but familiar signal.
"Betts always used to complain that I have a tendency to explain too much," he said to Eden. Explaining further, "I guess you'd call it a nervous habit."
"Relax, relax, please" Eden urged him with a bigger smile, but then she had to ask, "Are the feds still giving you a hard time, Mr. Ruddy?"
"Ed, please. Not at all. I suppose everything about Betts's… captivity by that psychotic bird was just so
bizarre
that they've had to conclude we are both telling the truth, and I had nothing whatsoever to do with it."
"You did have something to do with it," Betts said, her voice lowering to a hoarse growl, "after he dumped me on your doorstep. You acted fast and saved my life, Ed."
"Well, I've always been good in an emergency, I like to think." He rolled his shoulders uncomfortably. "But why did he—"
"The feds have found a great deal to interest them," Betts said to Eden, "at the farmhouse near Coldstream Bridge. His theatrical makeup kits and costumes, catalogues of electronic devices, actual explosives—stuff the average citizen can't get his hands on. That should be all they will need, although of course they'd like to know his true identity. A motive, too, which I don't feel obligated to help them with."
It had been Danny Cheng's idea to check all Bay Area hospitals after Eden's futile search for the remains of the Assassin's knife by the fountain in Ghirardelli Square. Minutes later they were speeding across the Bay bridge to the hospital in Concord where Betts had been received following Edmund Ruddy's call for an ambulance.
"But he was a complete stranger to you," Ruddy said, anxiety rising in his eyes.
"That's right," Betts said with a level look at him, reaching up again to fondly muss his hair in another direction. "Complete. Stranger."
"Well, I'm certain I've never been acquainted with anyone who had such a perverted, diseased mind. That's the part I simply can't understand. How could he have possibly known about me and our relationship while we were at USF?"
"I've been thinking about that too," Betts said, very serious. "It might well have been someone we were in school with, and just never noticed. Maybe nobody noticed him. A studious loner type. Silently watching us together. Envious. Obsessed. I've had cases like that."
"Obsessed," Ed repeated dismally. "And he's still at large."
"They'll catch up to him," Betts promised, with the merest glance at Eden's stony face. "He will have left clues. I doubt that we need to worry. After all, it was his intention to bring us together again after all these years. That was in his note to you, wasn't it, Ed?"
"More or less. It's just so damned
creepy
."
"But in spite of his psychosis, there was a streak of humanity in him, somewhere." Betts looked at the shopping bags Vicky had left on a glass-topped table nearby. "Are those for me?" she asked Eden with a gleam of pleasure in her eyes.
"Mostly," Eden said, and confessed, "I think I went a little haywire." She flinched at a fresh twinge and put a hand to her neck. Time to get off an E-mail to Bertie. "Megan took me to some fabulous shops."
"Show me!"
Ed Ruddy, possibly beginning to feel excluded by the prospect of ecstatic clothes talk, got to his feet again.
"I think it's about time that I—you see, I've a four o'clock squash date. Long-running rivalry with my insurance agent."
"Ed," Betts said, sunlight playing over her face so that she batted her eyelashes in a way that seemed coquettish, "I can't thank you enough for the gorgeous flowers. You're being too good to me."
"Oh, no,
no
—my pleasure."
"Did you get a look at that beautiful jade and onyx backgammon table in the library?"
"No, I missed that."
"Have a gander on your way out," Betts said, her voice still stuck in a raw lower register. "And tomorrow if you're not too busy we'll find out if your skills have improved during the past twenty-eight years."
He stood a little straighter, delighted by her challenge. "I wouldn't want to brag, but."
"Give you every chance to prove yourself, Ed. How about three tomorrow afternoon? We'll have supper after I take you to the cleaners. Room service is excellent here."
"Or we could call Tommy Toy's," he suggested, his color high; Edmund Ruddy clearly was ravished by her interest in adding impetus to their resurrected friendship.
"
Now
you're talking."
When she and Betts were alone Eden said, hands on hips, "
Well
, Betts."
"Don't get smart. And nobody said you have to like him right away."
"I don't
dis
like him. Were the two of you really, I mean, back then?"
"Hot and heavy, sugar. That's the second time you've grabbed your neck. What's wrong?"
"Muscle spasm. I think. The mattress on my bed is too hard, or something."
"Did you sleep at all? It must have been after four when I heard you come in."
"No," Eden said, avoiding Betts's eyes. "I didn't sleep."
"Too much on your mind?"
"I suppose."
"You're not going to tell me why you stayed out most of the night, are you?"
"Better that you don't know."
"Oh, God," Betts said, with an invalid's tremulous mouth. "This dodging around and using a phony name like a fugitive, what sort of life do you have now?"
"Shh, I'm fine."
"I should have done a better job of protecting you. This mess I got into—"
"Was never any fault of yours. We won't talk about what happened. What almost happened."
"I was terrified, every minute of the day and night. Now I can't turn it off, even with the tranqs; get
him
out of my mind. And when I'm awake, every face I see could be his face."
"Mom, that evil bastard is gone for good." It was a cold surprise to still feel so shockingly vengeful. "For your sake and mine, I had to make completely sure." Betts stirred uneasily. "No, I didn't touch him. There were others who—do that sort of thing. I really can't tell you any more."
"Those strange friends you've told me about? And that sweet-faced girl with the English butler's name, she couldn't be—"
"I've trusted all of them with my life. Strange? No more than I am."
Eden sat on the side of the chaise, her melancholy face giving way to raw anguish, and put her arms around Betts. She took long shuddering breaths.
"You're safe, Mom. You're
safe
. Nothing matters to me more."
Betts stiffened slightly. Her lips touched Eden's wet cheek.
"You're not leaving again! Oh, but it's too soon."
"Have to," Eden said, feeling like a skunk in the face of Betts's unhappiness and renewed anxiety.
Betts took a fresh purchase on Eden, fingers tightening fiercely. "When you first came into the ER—I was half out of it, but I could see right away. You've aged ten years in just a few months."
"Is that all?" Eden said with a weak smile. Edmund Ruddy's selection of pricey flowers—air-freighted, exotic blooms from Brazilian hothouses—were causing her nose to run. As she had done in childhood, she unthinkingly wiped her nose on the sleeve of the cardigan sweater Betts wore.
"We'll be able to talk again someday," Betts said, "like we used to talk. Won't we?"
"Yes, darling." And now she was mothering Betts, which made her feel desperately sad. "I'll be in touch every day," Eden promised, getting up slowly, swallowing until she forced down her sorrow. She reached for a tissue in the box on the low table beside the chaise. Blotted her wet lashes.
"Betts? Do something for me?"
"Well, of course."
"Talk Ed Ruddy out of those tweedy jackets with lapel tabs and leather at the elbows."
"That's definitely a priority," Betts agreed with a good laugh that her heart didn't feel. The Filipino nurse appeared on the terrace carrying a little tray and several pills in a glass dish, orange juice in a goblet. Betts pounced on her with sudden ferocity. "At least let me have a glass of red wine with those!"
"Cheerio, dear one," Eden said.
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
OCTOBER 21
9:20 P.M. PDT
L
ourdes, Lewis Gruvver's sister-in-law, put their rambunctious kids to bed (too many kids, Lewis thought, wondering if he had it in him ever to be a daddy) with Charmaine's easygoing assistance. Lewis gave his half brother Cornell a hand clearing the soak-proof foam plates, empty one-liter plastic soda bottles, and other trash from the patio where they'd feasted on West Texas barbecue and some Honduran specialities from Lourdes's kitchen. Los Lobos on the speakers concealed in low shrubbery around the stake-fenced backyard and pool. Big black western sky with a gaunt moon and field of stars thick as crusty sugar on a doughnut.
While the women wrangled the youngsters with good-natured threats about their prospects for longevity if they didn't cooperate, Lewis and Cornell lit up two of the El Sublimados from the box of cigars Gruvver had brought along with a gift bottle of golden tequila, and they settled down on redwood gliders padded with fiesta cushions. A radiant heater on a pole nearby cut the gathering chill of high desert night.
Sports talk, then technical, aficionado car talk that aroused in both men the lust of pornography without the dirty words.
Cornell was ten years older than Lewis, just into his forties and with the gut of a settled-in family man, half a head of red-toned hair. He had a serious way of cocking his head to listen or observe. A slow-talking man with a deep voice, he only stuttered occasionally, having worked hard to overcome that blight in his life.
"So what's your interest in luh-Lincoln Grayle?" he asked, after their passion for hot wheels neither of them could afford had been talked to death.
"I heard he puts on a damn fine show. You seen it?"
"No. I'll go to hear Gladys Knight or Lou Rawls anytime. Lourdes can get me to Gloria Estefan without too much fuss. But magic shows're not my thing. There's a glut of 'em here anyhow. The Grayle Theatre's an expensive ticket, I know that, but they still sell out even though plenty of the hotel shows got rigor moths from the fuckin' economy." He looked in admiration at the cigar between his fingers. "Man, this here is a
smoke
. That cuh-cognac flavor comes right through, don't it?"
"Best smoke for the money I know of. By the way, Mama said to deliver you a message. E-mails are fine, and she knows you're a busy man, but she'd like for you to put the kids on the phone once in a while so she can hear their voices again before she's gone stone deaf."
"Her hearing's got that bad?"
"She hears what she wants to. Don't have any trouble singin' in the choir, Rascalla tells me."
"I invited her out to visit twice this year already" Cornell said with a defensive shrug. "Said I'd gladly put up the fare."
"You bring up the subject of manned flight, Mama says ain't no way, I'm not ready to be wait-listed for Eternity."
Cornell laughed. "Heard Peabo's latest fiancée bailed on him short of the altar. Too bad he couldn't hang on to this one. What I saw of her, she had auspicious ways."
"Yeah, Peabo. If love was golf, he'd be a do-over." Cornell cocked his head. "You hear that?"
"What, coyote?"
"It's quiet in the house. Mercy! We got through another day without a trip to the ER." He exhaled a perfect smoke ring in the direction of the moon. "And Lourdes is already talkin' up number five, if you can believe that."
"Well, Cornell, reckon you own the faucet, you can ration the water."
"It's a superstitious thing with Lourdes; or, you know, the Catholic influence that is in her blood, even though she don't practice. Those half-crazed priests they get in the deep buh-back country down there in Central America? Tell a woman that if she deliberately blocks a child from bein' conceived, then the Lord will surely smite her for it, take away one she's already got."