Unhinged (17 page)

“Let him go, Jake. You’ve got to
let him go
.”

Besides, setting bombs off underwater was starting to look safer than hanging around here. Now, with a possible contretemps averted, Sam settled into his nest of pillows on the sofa. His new wristwatch said it was 2030 hours.

After a while: “Sam,” I ventured. “About Maggie.”

I wanted to tell him to look over his shoulder, that someone was gaining on him; if not Tim Rutherford, then someone else. But if things turned out wrong, I didn’t want it to be on account of my meddling. So all I said was, “She’s not going to be happy playing word games forever, you know.”

“Yeah.” Eyes on screen, avoiding mine. He knew the gist of my thought if not the details; we’d talked about this before. “I know, Mom. And it’s not that I don’t love her.”

On the TV, a crew of youngsters sallied forth into a haunted woods. “But every time I get close, it’s like it’s too close, and then I’ve got to push her away, sort of.”

The youngsters had video cameras, their generation’s method of keeping things under control. That the control was illusory they had yet to learn; thus the plot of
The Blair Witch Project.

“Or?” I probed. On the TV screen, a girl told the rest that she knew the way through the forest. Famous last words.

“Dad says don’t give yourself away,” Sam responded. “You might want yourself back.”

Sudden fury at my ex-husband threatened to consume me, turn me to ash right there in my chair. But I controlled it; Victor is Sam’s father and Sam has worked to keep, as Sam puts it, a decent scene going with him.

“I see,” I replied carefully. Back when I was married to Victor, I used to believe there was a magic word, and if I could only think of it and say it, everything would be all right. I guess in the end the other thing Victor taught me is that there is no magic word.

And I guess I have never forgiven him for it. “Sam. I’m not trying to rush you. Maybe Maggie just isn’t the one for you. And you’re young, you don’t need to—”

His eyes glazed; I was turning into Lecture-Mom. On the TV, tiny stick figures dangled hideously from haunted tree branches, and looking at Sam’s face I knew just how the stick figures felt: dry and vaguely threatening. Still, I had to say it.

“But if when you’re ready, you make your choice wisely,” I finished, “then not being able to get yourself back is what you want to have happen.” Like George and Ellie. Or Wade and me, as different from one another as floor varnish is from floors, and in all the important ways as near-inseparable.

A beat, while Sam absorbed this. “Yeah, huh?” Then:

“Mom? Do you hate him? I mean, after everything that happened between you and Dad, do you, like, wish he was dead?”

“Sometimes,” I replied jokingly. But then I stopped, because the answer to his question was no joke. Not to me:

When Sam was a toddler, he fell and smashed his forehead on the corner of a coffee table. Blood was everywhere and he was howling as if his eye had been put out. And of course I couldn’t
see
that his eye hadn’t been put out, because blood was . . .

Well, you get the idea. Victor scooped him up, thrust his head under running water, snapped out a diagnosis—scalp wound, superficial—and had Sam’s head shaved, the split closed with butterfly bandages, and a big smile back on the kid’s face before I could even finish having my acute nervous breakdown.

The next night, Victor took a surgical nurse to a ball game at Yankee Stadium. Bottom of the fifth, two on and two out, I was watching it on TV when I saw them sitting behind home plate. I threw the coffee table off our balcony. Fortunately, I didn’t kill anyone in the courtyard of our apartment building.

“No, Sam,” I answered now. “I don’t hate your dad. And I don’t wish him dead, either. That’s in the past.”

“And the past is provolone,” he murmured drowsily.

He meant prologue. It’s the dyslexia-thing; when he’s tired, sick, or stressed, it pops out in his speech.

On the TV an ancient curse came back to life, wanting new victims. “Provolone,” I agreed softly. It was better than the alternative and anyway, he was asleep.

Outside fog billowed morosely, mounds of it lumbering like huge animals in the dark, empty streets. Ellie called to see that I was all right, and Wade called again.

But finally I was alone, Monday snoring while the TV showed
Mars Attacks!
I turned the sound down, oddly comforted by the special-effects TV aliens with their jerky, aggressive movements and ridiculously exaggerated facial features. At least on TV, you could see right away who the villains were.

But when you’ve seen one alien’s day-glo head explode you’ve seen them all. So at length I went to the back parlor and sat at Sam’s computer. There in the bluish glimmer of the screen, with the Bisley in my sweater pocket, I fired up the e-mail software and tried to think of what to say to my old friend, Jemmy Wechsler.

I had no notion of Jemmy’s location, nor did anyone else; it was why somewhere he sat at his computer tonight, too, instead of reposing in an oil drum at the bottom of the East River. To me he was just a collection of pixels, now, my memories of him—

—snatching me off the street when the numbers-running gig turned into a death trap due to a feud between two hard guys with me as the stalking goat; getting me into the dormitory, safe and quiet, of a Dominican girls’ school, and later into the school itself—

—by turns funny and sad. Jemmy made those killers look like a collection of B-movie extras; he was the real thing, which was how he had survived. Even I couldn’t have found him, which was well-known and why no one showed up to put bull’s-eyes on my kneecaps about it.

But I had an e-mail drop for him. Now I waited for high-tech relays to bounce my message to him via the equivalent of some mad scientist’s Rube Goldberg apparatus, so the message and his reply couldn’t be traced. The latter arrived quickly.

Although when I read it there was a moment when I profoundly wished it hadn’t arrived. Short and sweet, it made no specific reference to the names I’d listed: Harry Markle, Roy McCall, Fran Hanson, and Wyatt Evert. Instead, it said:

“
If you think there’s a target on your back there probably is
.”

Outside, the foghorns’ honking grew louder as the wee hours approached. I read the message again, my thoughts wandering to the scrapbook I’d kept for a while on my parents’ deaths: tabloid newspaper clips, mostly. Among the many details about my father, my mother seemed to disappear. But he was the one who had vanished: blown to bits, his body consumed by the fire.

Or so the investigators said when I’d tried to learn exactly what happened. Over the years, though: a few unsigned cards, each mailed from a different city. A hundred bucks in an envelope once when I was living on ketchup soup.

Nothing more. But now I knew the investigators had been lying in case I was in touch with him and might tip him off.

Are you alive?
I wondered again as I pondered Jemmy’s note.
Are you?
But to that message, there came no reply at all.

I got up to check again that the house doors were locked. Trust Jemmy to come out swinging the big anxiety stick. He used to say nerves were God’s way of putting eyes in the back of your head. Maybe that was why I saw it.
Something . . .

Gripping the Bisley, I rushed to the kitchen in time to catch another glimpse of someone’s hasty departure. The screen door slammed behind it as Monday scrambled in, barking. A shape darted past the window, vanished in the fog as I snapped the light on.

Sam appeared, puffy-eyed, Cat Dancing twining around his ankles. “What happened?” He squinted owlishly at the clock. “It’s two in the morning.”

On the table lay a knife clotted with red. Under it was a sheet of paper. Two words were scrawled crimsonly on it:
HA HA
.

When the sound came from the porch I was in firing stance in a heartbeat: feet braced, body relaxed, my head full of the clear unshakable notion that this had better not be a midnight-riding contingent of religious persons bent on converting me. I was about to convert something too: to smithereens. “Sam, back away.”

When you opened that porch door from inside, as the intruder had in order to exit, the lock stayed open until it was locked deliberately again. So it was open now. And in about two seconds, I was going to turn whatever came through it into so many pieces that even Victor wouldn’t be able to reassemble them.

But I didn’t, because it was Harry Markle.

I lowered the gun, let my breath out as he spread his hands helplessly. I had to give him credit; at the sight of the Bisley he hadn’t even flinched.

“Harry, what the
hell
are you doing here?”

“Couldn’t sleep. Thinking. Decided to take a walk, clear my head,” he said.

“And?” Even in Eastport, people out on walks don’t generally just stroll in my back door at two
A
.
M
.

“I saw someone. From the corner I saw someone come out and run around behind your house. It looked suspicious. So I ran too, trying to head them off.”

Monday sniffed him interestedly. Harry said, “Whoever it was got away in the fog. Chased ’em to the corner but after that, it was no good. You can’t see ten feet.”

I sighed and dropped the Bisley back in my sweater pocket. Like Harry, Sam hadn’t turned a hair at the sight of the weapon, which made me think my thumbs weren’t the only ones prickling tonight.

“That stuff.” I waved at the knife and the red-smeared missive on the table. “If we slide it into a plastic bag we can preserve whatever might be on it, give it to Bob Arnold in the morning.”

Harry scowled. “You mean you’re not going to call him now?”

“No,” I retorted in exasperation. “What’s Bob going to do, drive around in this pea soup looking for somebody when we don’t even have a description?” I opened a plastic bag, sliding the bag’s edge under the knife before lifting it and sealing it. If Harry had tried to give instructions, I’d probably have smacked him.

But he didn’t. I put the bag in the vegetable crisper next to a white carton marked in Wade’s handwriting:
Fishing Worms! Do Not Open!!!
Then I slammed the refrigerator door, to give feeble emphasis to the notion that I was the one giving the instructions tonight.

“Right now,” I went on, “
you
should go to bed.” I pointed to Sam, who, for a wonder, turned away obediently.

“And
you
should go home before some other nervous housewife really does blow your head off,” I told Harry.

Tomorrow when it was light, we would talk all this over with Bob. But at present I was battening down the hatches; don’t let the aft one hit you in the backside on your way out.

“All right,” Harry said, with unconcealed reluctance. “But I’m going to look around some more. Maybe it
is
a waste of time, but maybe it’s not.”

He looked so troubled that I relented: “Okay. Thanks, Harry. We’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

“Yeah.” Brief, sad grin. Outside, his shape blurred, vanished into the streaming darkness.

After that there was silence, way too much of it after Sam had gone to bed; when the animals followed me upstairs I was glad for their company. As Ellie always says, It’s not the ghosts in the house that’ll get you, it’s the ghosts in your head. And that night my head was full of apparitions shaped like question marks.

I laid the Bisley on the bedside table by the phone with the caller ID box perched atop it. The box had originally been Wade’s idea; he liked to know who was calling, especially at night when it might be somebody from down at the freighter terminal. He said it helped him work on a fast answer if he knew in advance who was going to be at the other end, asking the question.

Now I closed my eyes to the ready-light on the box. I needed sleep. My face ached and my ears rang in the silence. But with the light off I kept seeing Jemmy’s message, and the note:

HA HA
. Which was probably why, lying there in the dark, I remembered one of the first things Jemmy ever taught me, back in the days when I still thought Jemmy pretty much walked on water.

He’d been teaching me to play poker, the kind with big-money stakes that other people conspire at, ganging up on an unwary new player to raise their own haul. The victim in that game, or in any con, actually, is called the pigeon. And what Jemmy said was that if you’re sitting at a poker table wondering who the pigeon is, the pigeon is you.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t have found this realization the least bit pleasant. But it helped me keep my head a little later, when the phone rang and a voice told me that Wade Sorenson had just died unexpectedly in Calais Hospital.

The numerals on the caller ID were glowing redly at me and I was still thinking of what Jemmy had said:
Don’t be a pigeon
. Which was how it came to me so fast, that the dialing exchange on the ID box didn’t belong to Calais Hospital at all.

In fact I happened to know, having had a teenaged son for what felt like all of my own life plus several other similarly eventful lives, that the number belonged to the pay phone on the breakwater across from Rosie’s hot dog stand. Sam used to call me from there if he wanted to stay out later than we’d agreed.

Now, if the fog weren’t socked in so thickly I could look out the window and almost see . . .

“Who is this?” I demanded.

But the merry prankster had hung up.

Some of the
things Wade does for me are obvious, like those gutters. And others aren’t. For instance:

Immediately after the prank call, I phoned Calais Hospital to make sure Wade really was okay, and he was. But that wasn’t enough; I wanted him
home
. So the next morning, I hotfooted it out to Wade’s truck as soon as Mr. Ash had arrived, and headed for the hospital. On Route 1 the fog had begun clearing as the wind shifted, branches overhanging the road shaking droplets onto the windshield.

George, who despite Wade’s impatience had returned to guard duty, looked up from his coffee and
Bangor Daily News
as I hurried down the hospital corridor toward him.