Stacey had let go of James’s hand and now walked to the opposite end, and he was so enchanted with all the floppy ears and strange, twitching and toggling eyes that followed his every movement, James forgot about her for a moment.
‘Eleven hundred seventy-seven by last count,’ Gerald said. ‘But that was this morning.’ He laughed. James laughed.
Stacey laughed too, harder, and her laughter went on longer than either of theirs, echoing back. She laughed and laughed and Gerald stopped and at stared at her. She was standing sideways facing the cages as Kyle rounded the corner at her end with Bronco in his arms. By the time she turned and saw that Flemish Giant out of his cage, her laughter had gone straight into hysterical screaming.
34
I woke to her screaming.
My first sense was one of being safer indoors, that I had found a haven from the monsters lurking in the desert. I had been dreaming, except that the dream had been a continuation of something we had shared, a single pearl set in a necklace of memories stringing back toward the lake house - and something beyond it that Stacey wanted to show me. Something to do with the rabbits. But I couldn’t remember what happened - in either the dream or the real memories - and it was driving me insane that I couldn’t remember, driving me out of sleep in a depleted panic.
The world I awoke to was gray, a dim room, still blurry and soft but taking shape, hardening over a period of minutes. For a moment - before I saw the wood paneling and the bar off to my left - I thought I was back in the hospital. I was very weak, as if I had been sleeping for days without food. I was warm, supine, thirsty.
No, not the hospital. I was on the tiger couch. In the Rick Room.
I felt no pain, and even my dream-state panic was fading quickly. Surely Detective Bergen would arrive any minute now to comfort me, tell me to keep my chin up and send me home.
He drugged me. He drugged me good. Well, at least he didn’t kill me.
I looked down to find myself enveloped in a bright red blanket, velveteen. I squirmed, just to get a feel for my body again, and the blanket slipped against my skin. I was naked - no, just stripped to my shorts, I realized, feeling the waistband. My vision sharpened.
No, not a blanket.
I was wearing a red tracksuit. So shiny it seemed wet, a skin of blood. Ghost’s signature threads, available in limited editions for nineteen hundred and eighty-eight dollars at Neiman Marcus, smoother than satin panties.
This is going somewhere bad. To a place we might not come back from.
I wasn’t confined or bound, but my body felt as though it weighed six hundred pounds. Small patches of my arms and face burned coolly, not unpleasantly, the scent of menthol wafting from the collar of my zipped jacket. My feet were bare except for the smaller bandages around my toes. After prodding around for another minute, the first tendrils of pain radiated out of my shoulder, and from my lower back, and I stopped fussing. It didn’t hurt as long as I remained very still.
A clinking noise directed my attention to the left, across the room. Rick was behind the bar, mixing something in a tall glass of bobbing ice. He stirred the concoction with a glass swizzle and carried it to me. He appeared nine feet tall.
‘Drink this.’
My mouth was dry. The fluid was milky yellow with little white crystals eddying to the bottom. Rick was pale and showered, his curly red hair wet swept back. He was dressed in all black, the shirt something of a mock turtle-neck, black jeans, a black leather belt with rows of holes and a buckle of silver nails. He seemed uninterested in me as he lowered the glass. I accepted it and sat forward to sip it, which took a long time. It was marvelously cold and bittersweet.
‘Whazzit?’
He made a little ‘up’ motion with his hand. I guzzled the rest, spilling around the corners of my mouth. I wanted more.
Rick took the empty glass. ‘Lemonade, vodka and valium. Best thing in the world for pain.’
I took a long look around the room. His display case of knives and Kung Fu weapons and guns had been emptied, of course. He had taken necessary precautions.
Rick pulled an ottoman over from the rest of the wild kingdom and sat facing me, elbows on his knees. In the dim light his red hair and mustache shined like amber and his eyes were dilated, the corneas thin rings of green around swamps of black. His rage had been sheared away, revealing something slow and dangerously resolved. He must have gone through a lot for her, I knew then. She was all he had.
‘You love her,’ I said.
He studied me for a moment. ‘She’s my sister.’
‘Annette Butterfield,’ I said, testing it out.
‘Mmm-hmm, at first,’ Rick said. ‘Later, Salvaggio. Annette, Arthur and Aaron Salvaggio.’
Salvaggio
. Even in my haze, the name sounded an alarm in my memory. Salvaggio, Salvaggio, where had I heard that recently?
News headlines swam up from the depths. The scrapbook. The Ghost headlines.
Salvaggio death ruled a suicide, wife blames housing bubble for husband’s depression.
I had been scanning the article when the noises in the hall began, just before Aaron, or something in his bedroom, cut my wrist.
‘Copeland is her maiden name?’ I said.
Rick smiled. ‘Ask your friend on the LAPD to sort it out.’
Detective Bergen would have known her maiden name. Copeland was a fake. An alias. Is that why he didn’t know about Aaron? What else had she faked?
‘’Nettie wanted to be a nurse. She ever tell you that?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘She would have been a good one. She has a real touch. She should never have taken up with Arthur. Hotshot made her drop out. She kept her supplies, though. She gave me all this medicine and the little doctor’s kit. Told me to hold onto it, we might need it someday. Yes, sir, she has real vision.’
Rick’s eyes sparkled.
‘Okay, you got me,’ I said. ‘Roll out the karaoke and I will turn up the flow.’
‘Maybe later,’ he said, as if he had been seriously considering just that.
Keep him talking.
‘What happened to Aaron?’
Rick’s mustache flattened and then began a slow bristling dance, an urchin moving across the ocean floor. He stared at me, waiting for me to answer my own question.
‘You think Ghost is responsible for . . . whatever happened, ’ I said.
‘What I think doesn’t matter. The change you instigate in others is undeniable. You destabilize the impressionable. You’ve seen the evidence. The ones that made the news.’
The ‘news’ being the album in Aaron’s bedroom. ‘That’s ridiculous. You can’t blame an entertainer—’
‘Aaron’s story is the one that did not make the news,’ he said. ‘I made sure of that. To protect her. To protect us. And so you would never see us coming.’
We stared at each other for a full minute without speaking. I didn’t understand what had happened. I only understood that Rick’s temper was rising, filling the room, and soon would blow.
‘He was a good boy. And you infected him.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Rick, no. I’m not Ghost. You can’t - it doesn’t work this way.’
‘What else would make a ten-year-old boy creep into the bedroom in the middle of the night and shoot his father in the head? And then turn the gun on himself? What kind of boy is capable of that?’
I tried to think of an answer that would not further anger him. I couldn’t.
Not quite singing, Rick began to recite a poem, employing the voice of a child in a cereal commercial.
There’s a monster in my father and he makes
Me cry
There’s a gun in the closet and it’s just
My size
Daddy why’d you beat her with your boots?
Why do you do the things the things you do?
There’s a creature inside me and it looks just
Like you
Daddy why’d you leave us all alone you make
Me cry
Daddy should never have come back here
To-night
I found the magic silver bullets you left
Be-hind
Daddy why do you do the things the things you do?
There’s a werewolf inside me and it looks just
Like you
Kiss me good night one more time, Daddy, tonight you’re
Going to die
Going to die
Watch me pull this trigger I got silver bullets now
Say bye bye
Say bye bye
The song was ‘Silver Bullet’. The fictional one Ghost had written about shooting his own father, after witnessing the old man beat his mother on Christmas Eve. That little domestic abuse ditty reached #1 on the
Billboard
singles and stayed in the Top 20 for eighteen weeks.
‘Your words,’ Rick said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s not true.’
‘In the form of a nursery rhyme. So that the children can understand. So they will follow you like the Pied Piper.’
‘I didn’t write that. I didn’t write any of his music. Will you listen to me for—’
‘Where is she!’ he shouted, his face shaking, clenching his fists in a way that would have been comical if he were not deadly serious. ‘What did you do with her?’
‘Nothing. I told you, I don’t know where—’
‘She’s not your wife! She’s not Arthur’s wife! You treated her like trash—’
Something in me snapped. I sat up and screamed in his face. ‘It’s just a song, you fucking animal! Jesus Christ, if you want him so bad I can find him for you! I’ll give you his home address, his agent’s number, we can arrange a meeting. All it will take is one phone call to prove I’m right. Think! Use your head!
You have the wrong man!
’
Rick closed his eyes as if meditating. He rocked back and forth until his breathing returned to normal. I swallowed a sour lump of something medicinal that had built up at the back of my throat.
‘All right,’ Rick said. ‘All right. Since you refuse to accept responsibility, we’ll just see. We’ll just have to see about this.’
He stood and walked to the smallest of his three large antique safes. He spun the brass arms left, then right, left again, then right, running the combination. The safe door groaned and clunked open. He reached in and removed an unmarked disc in a clear jewel case. His back blocked the open safe. I wondered what else he was storing in there. He shut the safe, spun the wheel and returned to his cabinet of audio components in the corner. There was a click and hiss as he inserted the disc. The big plasma television mounted to the wall facing the couch came to life with a hum, but the screen was still flat gray.
‘The windows are sealed,’ Rick said, facing me. ‘And there’s a grate welded into the top of the concrete wells. Everything behind these walls is cement foundation, and the door will be braced with a steel rod and two deadbolts. Your back’s probably broken. You’re cut up. I saved a few stuck cons on the shithouse, but I’m not a doctor and I don’t do stitches. Trying to bust out, running, these are not recommended. I’m telling you this to save you some trouble. I’m going to lock you in here now, and until I come back and open the door you won’t be able to leave. You will hurt yourself trying, and I can’t make you better. I won’t make you better. Think about that before you decide to go Shawshank on me.’
He handed me a remote control and walked toward the stairs.
‘What happens after?’ I said. ‘When you find her, can I go home?’
He watched me for a moment. ‘I know who you are, and soon you will, too. So I suggest you forget about home. There is no more home for you.’
Rick shut the door to the basement. The doorknob clicked and latched, then something heavy slammed against the door, bracing it, I assumed. I listened to his big footsteps receding up the stairs until I was alone. The panic expanded in me until I thought I would scream and then expanded some more.